David > Recent Status Updates

ALEC goes back to the '70s.

I remember when Hank Aaron beat Babe Ruth's record but I didn't know that the Reds had refused his request to honor the anniversary of MLK's assassination with a moment of silence.

America was always crazy. The Posse Comitatus movement was active even in the early '70s. (I like how Perlstein fills in lots of details to build up a context for the significant historical events.)

"What about the fact that George McGovern kept on defending Nixon? A man named Bernie responded: 'That's the tip-off!'"

Blitheness in the face of chaos: that's how Reagan made so many Americans feel good.

Oh, boy. This is painfully accurate.

The union is the workers. Wrong answer, says Chavez. The union is Cesar Chavez!

Chavez was batshit crazy and the staffers who played along were pathetic. This is disgusting.

Heavy into crazy: Chavez wants the UFW staff to play the Synanon "Game." One staff member wonders, "How's this going to help with the citrus campaign?"

Paranoid, autocratic, egomaniacal, Machiavellian: Chavez grew into a twisted cult leader at the expense of farm workers and supporters. Actually, even from the beginning his aims were not well aligned with those of farm workers. Chavez wanted a movement, and some vague spiritual, religious condition; workers wanted improved lives and aspired to material well-being. He had little interest in contracts.

Chavez was a peculiar person. A significant leader is bound to be an outlier, unless he or she somehow accidentally ends up in a position of power. Was Chavez narcissistic? Seems like it. He was focused on power but at least so far in this narrative the benefits are flowing to the people he represents.

Symptoms of paranoia and megalomania? Something changed in Cesar Chavez but so far this author hasn't put her finger on it.

"He wants to make the babies," Helen would say about Cesar, "but he doesn't want to take care of them."

It was RFK, not Nixon, who was hanging out with the UFW in '66. Is there any doubt that the US and the world would have been better off with Bobby than with Tricky Dick in the White House in '68 and beyond?

How about that? I think my parents were living on the same street as Cesar Chavez just at the time he got started as an organizer. I never knew before that the neighborhood was known as Sal Si Puedes (Get Out If You Can).

You're living in Egypt with your philandering freedom-fighting South African husband and your teenaged son from another son. You decide to divorce -- only to face an intervention by representatives from 6 African nations. Pretty weird -- but the conclusion is inevitable: you have to leave the arrogant, patronizing SOB. In any case, he only puts on airs, with repossessing creditors always on his heels.

"Shit, all we got to do is die. And we gonna do that any goddam way."

"...many people think that growth ought to be at least 3 or 4 percent per year. As noted, both history and logic show this to be illusory."

Insanely comprehensive.

How did top managers in large US firms become more able to set their own remuneration starting in the 1980s? Piketty gives this as a possible explanation for the big increase in the top decile's share of national income. (The answer is somewhere in the next 600 pages.)

This isn't a subject I normally like to read about but Michael Lewis really does tell a story well -- even when it happens to be a very bad true story about rigged financial markets.

"Intelligence always had a pornographic influence on me."

"We were not only not in love and just slightly in like, our weekly ferocious rendezvous stopped just short of doing each other bodily harm."

"She said I was restful to be around because I was so goddamn square." That's Billie Holiday hanging around with Maya Angelou and her 12-year-old son. Amazing.

Gloria Swanson helping Jewish engineers and scientists escape Hitler and come to the US: that's an unexpected development!

What a tale about her visit to Cuba and having the ex-president treat her like a prostitute (an expensive one, for sure) and trying to abduct her.

"In America, it is always a paranoid time." (How is it in other nations?)

Warren meets Rep. Grimm, who doesn't believe in government -- except for the FBI. What a freak.