Weekend Bookchat

When the Great Depression sank its claws into American society, the jobless men wandering the countryside in search of work used slang to pay tribute to Herbert Hoover, the president who oversaw their slide into ruin:  hobo villages along railroad tracks were dubbed Hoovervilles and  jackrabbits caught for food were called Hoover Hogs. How will the venacular of the Next Great Depression pay tribute to  George W. Bush?  Will subdivisions full of foreclosed McMansions be known as Bushvilles? Will toxic foodstuffs prepared in unsanitary factories be known as Bush bait? The Boy Emperor may be out of power, but we’ll be feeling the effects of his reign for years to come, so it will be interesting to see if the New Hoover is commemorated as cuttingly as Hoover Classic.

To see if the old Depression has any lessons to teach the new Depression, check out this Firedoglake discussion with Enis Carter about his new book  Posters for the People: Art of the WPA, a collection of  posters produced by the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s and 1940s, using the efforts of  hundreds of out-of-work artists. The posters remain wonderful examples of pioneering graphic design, such as the one above advertising “Victory Concerts” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Meanwhile, here’s a good, concise new biography of Hoover himself by William Leuchtenburg. Ezra Klein hosts a discussion of Dean Baker’s Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.  James K. Galbraith reviews Robert Samuelson’s The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath and finds that recent events have made its free-market dogmatism seem rather quaint, and more than a bit ridiculous.  

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 Ann Coulter’s new book, Liberals Are Poopyheads Who Make Ka-ka in Their Pants, has been out for a few weeks now but the bulk-order bimbo has yet to say anything truly, remarkable hateful in order to promote it. Oh, she’s made the usual winger noises about liberals loving terrorists, but so far there’s been nothing to compare with her accusing the 9/11 widows of enjoying the deaths of their husbands, and while the book is loaded with the usual Coulter combo of lies, distortions and confabulated nonsense, it all sounds like the same swill already ladled out in her previous books. Liberals Are Poopyheads remains stalled at the second tier spot on the Times nonfiction list, held back by Malcolm Gladwell’s two-month-old book and hard pressed by another cute animal book on the third rung. Meanwhile, Barack’s Obama’s two books have re-entered the list and will probably rise in the coming weeks. I’m betting it’s only a matter of time before Coulter feels the need to stir things up with some truly deranged utterances. Think she’s going to use the N-bomb on the Obamas? You know it’s there behind those vacant eyes, straining to get out.          

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Editor & Publisher columnist Greg Mitchell is one of the good guys, and he has a good new book out about Obama’s presidential victory: Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008. Every copy sold will make Ann  Coulter cry.

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Plenty of  people piled on Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Day poem, so here’s a couple of eloquent defenses: one from Moira Weigel, the other from Nordette Adams.

Happy Birthday

An obvious choice, sure, but whatever. Without this man, I’m convinced the American South would currently resemble Belfast in the Seventies.

Hiatus

My blogging in this space has been very spotty, for which I apologize. I’m suffering a stronger than usual case of post-election political exhaustion, made worse by the feeling that the Democrats, instead of moving into the next decade with renewed purpose and effectiveness, are getting ready to march back 10 years and resume cowering in terror whenever some Republican knuckledragger grunts at them.

Joe Lieberman, who called the party’s candidate a Marxist and campaigned on behalf of the GOP during the election, gets a free pass from the Democrats. Meanwhile, Howard Dean, whose 50-state strategy laid the groundwork for the Democratic sweep, is being treated like a idiot cousin by the people who kept the party wallowing in failure. Tom Daschle, who is supposed to lead the legislative campaign for healthcare reform, is already raising the white flag with Republicans, and Obama’s financial stimulus package is being prepped for failure by notions of “bipartisanship” and appealing to the Republican tax cuts uber alles mentality.

Maybe I’m just depressed. After all, Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet. But circumstances are forcing me to double-down on the job and the search for paying freelance work, which means I’ll be on hiatus through the rest of January. Until Feb. 1, my thanks to all who keep visiting. Any blogging activity from me before then will be at my other site, which reflects the things that I want to concentrate on for the time being.

In Search of Soul-Searching

In the aftermath of the multiple conservative-engineered disasters on the financial, moral, military and electoral fronts that we are now struggling with, there was a great deal of talk about “soul searching” among “thoughtful” conservatives, who would try to find ways to bring right-wingers back to “true” conservatism.

It’s a laudable goal, but from where I stand, most conservatives seem less interested in coming to grips with their failures than in redefining them so that actions undertaken by Dubya with the enthusiastic support of conservatives suddenly become examples of liberalism, the sort of thing the sainted Ronald Reagan would never have dreamed of doing.

On the local front, Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine has been forlornly trying to redefine Bush’s invasion of Iraq as “liberal do-gooder internationalism,” while railing against ”the essentially left-wing views of Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz and the Fox News crowd,” thereby giving us a taste of what might have resulted if George Orwell had offered Groucho Marx a chance to rewrite Nineteen Eighty-Four.   

Now I see that one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has decided to see Mulshine on the Iraq War and raise him:

A reflexive abhorrence of violence of all kinds (war, torture, even the death penalty and abortion) is inherently conservative – part of any meaningful definition of conservatism. 

Having spent the last couple of decades hearing conservatives grunt about liberals being a bunch of pacifist hippies, and the last few years being called all kinds of nasty things by drive-by wingers with “Whack Iraq” and “Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas” bumper stickers, I can only laugh at this attempt to retrofit conservatism with dove’s wings, much less the notion that Bush has somehow degraded the Reagan legacy.

For the overwhelming majority of conservatives, and middle-of-the-roaders who never offered more than token objections, Bush’s invasion of Iraq was going to be Reagan’s invasion of Grenada writ large — a little dodgy in moral terms, sure, but hey it was all going to be over quickly and once the smoke cleared we’d have loads of oil to burn.

When it came to running up huge deficits, undermining public safety through deregulation, packing government positions with cynical operators and using American might to stomp on ninety-pound weaklings, Bush and Reagan were and are more alike than different.

Face it, wingers: When you got Bush, you got everything you’d ever dreamed of having, and the result was poison. Now be a bunch of dears and go play your word while the rest of us try to restore a measure of sanity and stability. Hey, why don’t you check in with Jonah Goldberg? He’s been redefining words in all kinds of interesting ways.

Weekend Bookchat

We begin the new year with an overwhelmingly important piece of old business to address: What should — and can — be done about the Bush torture cabal? This is the subject of three recent books: Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands; The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book by Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. Writing about them in the New York Review of Books, David Cole reminds us that the Bush torture program has, along with fouling America’s moral standing in the world, created the first great challenge for the Obama administration:

In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong—as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form. We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, officially apologizing for the Japanese internment and paying reparations to the internees and their survivors. That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again. There has been nothing of its kind with respect to torture.

We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past. The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States’ adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment — our own federal government — the healing cannot begin.

This is not an issue that can be fobbed off with Broder-level banalities about “national healing” and “putting the past behind us.” Healing cannot take place until the source of the infection has been cleansed. There will probably never be a full reckoning for the crimes committed in America’s name under George W. Bush, but at the very least there should be a full accounting of what was done and who did it.

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Marcia Angell reviews three books about the overlooked and ongoing problem of the cozy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the research physicians whose work certifies and promotes the value and safety of different drugs:

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”

In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital’s physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”

The potentially disastrous consequences of drug companies influencing and funding research into the safety of their own products should be obvious, but as Angell notes, even many medical schools hold equity stakes in the very companies that help fund their research.

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Will the prestigious Man Booker Prize be one of the literary victims of Bernie Madoff’s disastrous Ponzi scheme. The Man Group, a hedge fund that has supported the award since 2002, was heavily invested in funds linked to Madoff, but the word so far is that funding for the award — and its big cash prize — will not be affected. We’ll see.

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Upcoming book discussions at the TPM Cafe: Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Jan. 5-9); Randall Stross’s Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know (Jan. 12-16).

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Science writer Chris Mooney reviews two new books about climate change and muses on the problem of explaining a long-term tragedy to a country (and journalists) preoccupied with short-term concerns. Axl Rose’s literary influences.  Wanted: Volunteers to help proofread over 30,000 titles in the Project Gutenberg digital library. Karl Rove reveals George W. Bush’s reading lists, which Mark Tran finds unexpectedly revealing. And a master crime novelist is mourned by his fans.

Top Ten Iraq Myths

From “Iraqis are safer because of Bush’s war” to “Bush invaded Iraq because of bad intelligence” and beyond, here’s your clip’n'save hit parade of lies and their corrections.