Month: August 2014

by Dish Staff

The big non-fiction book of the moment for political junkies is Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the third volume in a series that began with Barry Goldwater’s insurgent 1964 presidential campaign, charted Nixon’s rise to power, and promises to take readers through Ronald Reagan’s winning the White House. George Packer offers a taste of Perlstein’s approach in this latest installment:

“The Invisible Bridge” covers the three years between the return of the P.O.W.s and the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1976—years in which “America suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history”: a criminal Presidency; oil shock; inflation, followed by stagflation; America’s first military defeat, with the ignominious fall of Saigon; congressional revelations of dark deeds by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.; violent, bankrupt cities; failed leaders; and on and on. Perlstein has looked under every rock. He has dug up the long-buried meat-inflation crisis from the spring of 1973, and he knows what the Birmingham News editorial page had to say about the bicentennial. The barrage of artifacts is arranged to convey a sense of panic, nervous breakdown, “a world gone mad.” At one point, Perlstein riffles through the March 15, 1975, issue of the Milwaukee Journal and finds “a cabinet of horrors”: a Purdue coed kidnapped by a professor, devastating tornadoes in the South, a bribery conviction in Oklahoma, a French journalist murdered in Saigon, new leads in the search for Patty Hearst, an attempted hijacking in Ethiopia, purse snatching in Milwaukee. “Horrors, of course, drench the news in any decade,” Perlstein admits. “By the middle of the 1970s, however, the perception of the density of horrors was so much worse.”

Emmitt Rensin, following Perlstein, connects these conditions to Reagan’s ascendency:

Reagan offered the easy way out: the story of America that had never lost its innocence, where all the apparent upheavals of our trauma were not rooted in our national character, but in forces outside of it.

“Carter’s appeal at the time was that he spoke to this mood in the dominant political culture that something was deeply wrong,” Perlstein told me, “but for Reagan, the idea was that the things that were wrong were foreign forces, things that weren’t really America at all. All our troubles with race, with violence, with corruption: they had somehow invaded America like a bacillus.”

“What Reagan was saying was that there is nothing in Watergate, for example, that’s essential to the American character. That it can be wished away because America is fundamentally decent and good. He just kept on saying it. And the fact that he said with such confidence gave people a kind of psychological permission to believe the same thing.”

This is what Perlstein calls the “liturgy of absolution”: Ronald Reagan’s capacity to cleanse America of its transgressions without the pain of self-reflection. For those who saw the heroic hometown lifeguard, this liturgy was the salve that put their troubled minds at ease. But for those who saw the man in search of a medal, it was the essence of Reagan’s sin, the moment we surrendered our last, best chance to heal ourselves. The fairy tale was more appealing. The division of a people, laid bare by their reaction to a leader: in exposing this, at least, The Invisible Bridge achieves Perlstein’s stated goal.

While praising Perlstein for being upfront about his “left-liberal commitments,” Damon Linker questions how fairly he portrayed conservatism:

Perlstein’s subject is conservative ideas and their impact on political reality. But he is so utterly unsympathetic to those ideas that he finds it impossible to see them as anything other than expressions of animus and anxiety, and an outgrowth of a childish refusal to face and accept the moral and historical complexity of the world.

Sure, that’s part of the story. But does he really think that’s the whole of it? In implying that he does, Perlstein ends up wandering at least partway down the same gloomy path that Corey Robin exhaustively charted in his thoroughly unhelpful history of conservative ideas, The Reactionary Mind. Neither author finds anything particularly insightful or useful in the ideas they’ve devoted themselves to exploring and examining.

That would be fine if it didn’t result at times in tendentious, one-sided history. Take Perlstein’s treatment of the neoconservative intellectuals who (unbeknownst to them, of course) were in just these years laying the groundwork for what would become the Reagan Revolution’s domestic policy agenda. Perlstein mentions the crucially important neocon quarterly journal The Public Interest on just two pages of his book, and he has little to say about it beyond noting that it was “inaugurated in 1965 and financed by a former CIA agent who was now a stockbroker.”

Debates about the book, however, haven’t been confined wrangling over history – claims about plagiarism already have been made (NYT):

The most serious accusations come from a fellow Reagan historian, Craig Shirley, who said that Mr. Perlstein plagiarized several passages from Mr. Shirley’s 2004 book, “Reagan’s Revolution,” and used Mr. Shirley’s research numerous times without proper attribution. In two letters to Mr. Perlstein’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, Mr. Shirley’s lawyer, Chris Ashby, cited 19 instances of duplicated language and inadequate attribution, and demanded $25 million in damages, a public apology, revised digital editions and the destruction of all physical copies of the book. Mr. Shirley said he has since tallied close to 50 instances where his work was used without credit.

Mr. Perlstein and his publisher said the charges are unfounded and noted that Mr. Perlstein cited Mr. Shirley’s book 125 times on his website, rickperlstein.net, where he posted his endnotes, which include thousands of citations and links to sources.

Weigel sees political motives behind the charges:

This just isn’t what happens when Rick Perlstein releases a book. The first in his series, 2001’s Before the Storm, was praised by William F. Buckley. George Will called it “the best book yet on the social ferments that produced Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy”—in a largely positive review of Perlstein’s second book, Nixonland, which became a best-seller. What changed? This time Perlstein is writing about Ronald Reagan.

Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan—Perlstein has moved from covering a minor saint, to a martyr, to God.

(Image: Ronald Reagan on the podium with Gerald Ford at the 1976 Republican National Convention after narrowly losing the presidential nomination, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Dish Staff

Just because Andrew is gone doesn’t mean the hair has to go with him:

Time was, I could sympathize with your reader who complained of the casual mockery his back hair engenders. I’ve been blessed with a thick mane over my upper back and shoulders, and I used to be self-conscious about it. But then one day I tried to tabulate everyone who’d ever made fun of it, and I had a stunning realization: it was all men. Specifically, men without much body hair. As a straight dude, no woman I’ve ever been with (honestly, no woman ever) has uttered one word of complaint and most seemed to like it. It would only come other straight dudes, who obviously envied my luxuriant pelt. Now, whenever anyone ribs me about it, I reply with a superior smirk, “Men have body hair. Boys do not.” I’ve yet to hear a quality comeback.

Also, straight as I am, Aaron looks fantastic. Damn.

Another reader:

This is my first time emailing.  It took the nexus of “End of Gay Culture Watch” and “Back Hair is Beautiful” to spur me to action.  First, let me thank you for your site and all the insights and discussions you provide.  I renewed my subscription in February (founding signer-upper here) and I will continue to do so.  I have been reading along with the Book Club, too.

There are some of us out here who prefer to live in “straight” suburbia and always have.  My first lover and I bought a house together in Riverside in 1981 (before it was “cool”).  We both felt that it was important not to live in gay enclaves so that straights would have to deal with us and experience us face to face.  It is true of any prejudice that individual contact is what sways deeply held beliefs.

On a recent trip we made to San Francisco it struck me just how much the Castro District has changed.  Definitely not Gay Central like it used to be.  But yet, when I think back, on my first visit up there my lover and I stayed with a straight couple who lived a block off of Castro.  In 1978.  Even then it was not monolithic. Sure, something has been lost.  But something has been gained, too. Acceptance.

Now to back hair.

I am a hairy guy.  Really hairy.  I am fortunate that my boyfriend of twelve years doesn’t mind it.  (He loves the chest hair!) In decades past, when the hair was less extensive and grew more in “socially acceptable” places, I used to shave it off my back.  Miserable to do.  Now I just let it go.  (Cue the music from “Frozen”.)  I still tend to keep my shirt on in public, but the visit my boyfriend and I made a few weeks ago to Provincetown and the last day of Bear Week gave me a chance to see much luxuriant growth.  Now Mark Joseph Stern puts in print what I have thought for years: What is the big fuss about back hair?  And my boyfriend said Stern looks totally hot in that photo.

Of course, I think it is rather silly of women to shave as well.  If you’ve got it, flaunt it. Which dovetails with the thought that whoever you are and whatever you look like, someone is looking for just that kind of person.  Own it and be proud of who you are. Again, thank you for airing these topics alongside your other more political and world-impacting threads.

And again, here’s that link to the related Dish thread, “Why Should Women Shave?”. Another reader takes a religious turn:

I was raised in a deeply religious home and among other members of a fundamentalist sect of protestant Christians. They were sincere, good people but they were convinced that everything sexual outside of traditional marriage was evil. Homosexuality was almost never mentioned but to this young man, who struggled with same sex feelings, I just knew that my unspoken impulses would be topmost on the pile of sins that were forbidden.

Three magazines were permitted in our home aside from the daily newspaper and a variety of religious journals. Dad always bought Look, Life and the Saturday Evening Post, but each issue was carefully scanned before it came into the home. Any picture of a scantily clad woman was torn out lest my older brother and I would be tempted to have impure thoughts. Dad never knew that the very pages he tore out sparked our interest and sent us off to Billy’s home where the same magazines could be read sans his censorship.

What Dad didn’t know was that to me, the most exotic temptations were easily available in the Bible story book I was encouraged to read. The book was wonderfully well illustrated and the illustrator must have had a keen appreciation of male body hair because the images of Biblical men were of men covered in beautiful body hair. I’ve always thought that my very strong preference for men with lots of body hair stemmed from those splendid illustrations. I love male body hair; beards, chests, legs, backs, butts, pubes and arm pits. The more hair the better.

Now at 85, I don’t read that Bible story book any more but I follow six different blogs that feature hairy men in all their naked glory.

Another lodges a small dissent:

I grow weary of your constantly equating hairiness with masculinity.  Sure, a man’s level of testosterone can relate to the amount of body hair (or lack of head hair) they display, but there are many other genetic and hormonal factors at play too – it isn’t as simple a formula as more body hair = more masculinity, as you seem to believe.  (If you give extra testosterone to a not-naturally-hairy guy, he isn’t suddenly coated in fur, you know?)

Certainly if you look at paintings and sculptures of the ultra-masculine heroic male body ideal throughout history, you rarely if ever see your extremely hairy male body type depicted.  This is not due to a prejudice against the hairier male, it is because there are as many (if not more) extremely masculine men who are not heavily coated in fur.

Their are genetic pockets (Turks, Spanish, and others) who tend more toward hairiness as a group and others (Asian, Islanders, some Africans) who do not – with lots of exceptions, due to natural variation.  I would assume that Tiny Tim was hairier than George Clooney is, but I doubt may would think this would make him the more masculine of the two.  So, could you do me a favor and simply say you are turned on by lots of body hair and leave it at that, rather than also implying that the only truly masculine men are the hairy ones?

One more:

I have no personal story to contribute on the issue of back hair (my Italian father was as hairy as a shag rug, but my Native American mother’s genes mean I’m smoother than a baby’s bottom). However, my obsession with pop/rock music might be able to bring something to the table. I know of two indie rock bands who have used hairy backs for shock effect on their album covers: Pixies – Come On Pilgrim and Fabulous Diamonds – Fabulous Diamonds [seen at the top of the post].

Does this mean it will be Bear Culture and rock musicians who will strip away the stigma of having a hairy back? Only time will tell.

Hannah Black talks to historian Thomas Laqueur about his book The Work of the Dead, which describes how the development of the cemetery changed cultural attitudes toward death:

Before the Enlightenment, the only place you could get buried without ignominy was the churchyard. With the development of the cemetery, the dead make new kinds of communities. In churchyards, the graves were all oriented east-west. In the English churchyard, there’s a particular botany: The yew tree is the tree of the churchyard. There’s only one kind of person in the churchyard: a Christian. There’s no private property in the churchyard, everything belongs to the community. Every monument has to have the approval of the parish priest, so you can’t build what you want there. The churchyard is a communal space, and it’s a space that belongs to the parish. Others can come in, but only by paying extra.

The cemetery is a place where (in theory) anyone can buy property, and you can lie next to anyone, and you can be buried in any direction you want to be buried.

You can write anything you want on the tombstone. You can be any religion. If you’re Jewish, some rabbis might not be willing to bury you, but some rabbis would. It’s an open space, and people built according to the sensibilities of the day. Just like you can choose clothes that are slightly retro, the large cemeteries provided big tombs and they provided graves that looked like Egyptian tombs and Roman-style plinths, and you could present yourself in whatever way you wanted. The colonial cemetery in Calcutta looks like an imperial cemetery, it doesn’t look like a churchyard.

In Europe, every nation starts by producing national cemeteries. The first thing the Czechs do is produce a national cemetery. So the dead can produce all kinds of communities.

(Photo of Czech national cemetery at Terezin by Scott Lowe)

A number of readers shared their stories that might help explain the decline of Catholic marriages. One suspects “the rise of interfaith marriages” has played a role:

I’m Catholic, and my wife is Hindu. Since we were both active duty military officers, I had to apply for dispensation for disparity of cult (to marry a non-Christian) from the Archdiocese of the Military. We also had to get permission from the diocese where the wedding was to be held, since the original plan was to have both a Catholic and a Hindu ceremony.

The local diocese flatly refused to grant permission for my father, a Catholic deacon, to perform the ceremony outside of a church. This had nothing to do with Church policy writ large; it was just the local bishop’s personal hangup. Permission for similar situations is granted routinely in our home diocese. Since we were unwilling to relocate the ceremony, we were formally married by the Hindu priest and my father did a short Catholic blessing afterward. My marriage is still valid according to the Church, since I obtained dispensation, but I was unable to have a Catholic wedding without relocating the ceremony.

If this all sounds bitter, it’s not intentional. I think having the ceremony in a neutral setting was the right choice, allowing both families to feel comfortable. Still, I don’t think it’s an uncommon story. Since interfaith marriages are on the rise, it’s often easier for the couple to default to the non-Catholic’s tradition for the ceremony, since the Catholic Church requires you to navigate a lot of wickets to deviate from the standard.

Another reader claims that the Church is “completely out of step with the meanings that couples seek to create in their wedding ceremonies, as well as current social trends (e.g., couples living together before marriage)”:

When my wife and I got married in 1991, we chose a younger priest because he was supposedly in tune with young couples who believed in the social justice emphasis of the church. Instead, we got a curmudgeon who was suspicious that we dated for just five months before getting engaged — never mind that we scored in the 95th percentile on the compatibility test he used, and weren’t getting married for a full year after our engagement date. He was obsessed with finding out if we were living together (technically, we were, but we still had separate apartments to keep up appearances — what a waste of money for a young couple). He forced us to go through the full weekend-long pre-cana, where we slept in separate beds (of course) and wwhich was a complete waste of our time. (It also happened to be the first weekend of the Gulf War, and we were told to not worry about the news — the leaders would keep us posted. A bunch of us snuck down at midnight to watch the news.)

We weren’t allowed to use a Peter Gabriel song during the ceremony because it’s not part of the canon. He phoned in a generic homily instead of using anything that he learned about our goals, dreams, and interests over a year of meeting. And so on.

For a young couple who led an Amnesty International chapter and who were (and still are) dedicated to working for social justice, it was the last straw for us. We left the Catholic church after our marriage and have never looked back.

As a sociologist, I know to look for patterns, and yes, this is a data point of one. But I also know from talking to dozens of friends, students, and work colleagues over the years that our experience is not the exception to the rule.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the time that a priest wouldn’t let a bagpiper inside the church during a funeral, which was my dying father-in-law’s last wish. Instead, he had to play outside of the church after the official end of the mass, in a downpour.

Screw those guys.