David > Recent Status Updates

Not yet 30 years old, Hamilton helps found the Bank of New York.

Amazing what this 22-year-old -- _22_! -- had already accomplished and was now accomplishing as a colonel and aide to George Washington.

"Love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, which would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit." I.e., not fame for fame's sake, which is the way of our own time.

Not even Dickens could conjure up a childhood as fraught with misfortune as the real childhood of Alexander Hamilton.

"This is the genius of totalitarian movements. They convince the masses to agitate for their own incarceration."

"They thought we were on television because God put us there." So says the former co-host of Pat Robertson's The 700 Club.

Now I know about the technique of "love-bombing," essential to master if you want your cult to succeed.

"The split in America... is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who... now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic."

The answer is... very stupid.

"One's mind reels at the possibility that national policy about slavery might have been determined by the viewers' reaction to Lincoln's high-pitched voice or Douglas's short stature."

Says his journalism students were motivated but had to compel them with quizzes to read the newspaper daily. That doesn't sound motivated!

What, then, are people's minds full of? No, seriously: What are people knowledgable about if not politics, civics, history, current events, or science? (Other studies show religious people don't even know about religion!)

A marvelous biography. You get to know Washington as a real, albeit extraordinary, man. Chernow gives special attention to the role of slaves in Washington's life -- his dilemmas as a slave master who believed slavery not only morally wrong but also disadvantageous.

In his farewell address Washington foreshadows groups such as the Tea Party: they "may now and then answer popular ends, [but] they are likely... to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people."

Jefferson is trapped in the classic dilemma of the political populist: the people disagree with him. They love Washington.

Obama has his Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, George Washington his Madison and Jefferson-backed Freneau and National Gazette: political enemies in whose eyes a president can do no right because they are exactly that -- political enemies.

The U.S. was founded on debt, and maintaining a government deficit was essential to the formation of credit markets. Something to keep in mind.

How do you like that? George Washington, the father of our country, was a disappointment to his mother. Gives a person perspective....

A revolution indeed. General Washington, a slave owner, receives slave poet Phillis Wheatley almost as an equal.

Washington "never wanted to make a spectacle of his faith or trade on it as a politician."

Consider this: Washington's two young step-children already each owned a slave, as inherited property. The slaves were themselves children.

Meg Whitman should have spent her $ buying booze for voters, as George Washington did when running for local office.

"At [JFK's] White House the dialogue of scholars was the atmosphere of political decision."

Among the things Nixon has in common with George W. Bush: an extreme, irrational hostility towards psychiatrists and psychiatry.

Len Garment's advice to Nixon for a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers: call for social consciousness. I don't know whether Nixon took the advice but I can't imagine a Republican even _giving_ that advice today!

The book was written in 1968 and published 1969 and already those who know and work for Nixon are cynical about him!

Ah, so this is why Jones is leaving. Seems like he wasn't given the direct access to the president that a national security advisor is supposed to have.

Bush neglected Afghanistan and, confirming what I already knew about him, had no contingency plans -- or any kind of plans -- for anything. Obama is Bush's polar opposite: absolutely not a "gut" man.

We almost lost Richard Rodgers's brilliance in musical composition to the business of peddling children's underwear. He was about to give up on music when, at last, his and Hart's magical "Manhattan" and other songs found an audience and changed musical theater forever.

Lorenz Hart is the one I'm more curious about but there's bound to be a lot about him in this biography of his partner, Richard Rodgers.