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ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (August 2010): After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World by A.N. Wilson

Before we get to England: I wrote about the Victorian-era goings-on in my own hometown, Norwich, CT, in last month’s Book Selection entry — and I’m still learning things about the Norwich of that era, thanks to Mom.  She informs me that Teddy Roosevelt’s second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, was born in Norwich and moved to New York, becoming childhood friends with Roosevelt and eventually bearing him many pillow-fighting, rollerskating children, as well as tending to the White House’s menagerie of pets, which included a badger, a bear, a hyena, snakes, dogs, and more.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, though, an era was ending, with the death of Queen Victoria.  Back around the time her era began, incidentally, the old British standards of length and mass were altered — by a fire, oddly enough, since an 1834 conflagration destroyed the Houses of Parliament and took the official physical units used to define length and mass with them, which is not a topic covered in After the Victorians but is so odd I had to mention it.

(Interestingly, though the U.S. has never converted to the metric system, we began defining our units by reference to the metric system in 1893, which means that since that time we’ve unwittingly been using Progressive measurements.  Ha ho!  But more about the Progressives in next month’s Book Selection entry, which will be about Martin Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism — and maybe something by one Judge Andrew Napolitano while I’m at it.)

And now, seriously, or at least half-seriously, on to After the Victorians: The book is a fun blend of serious, detailed history and utterly trashy, vaguely self-loathing tabloid anecdotes, a tone well suited to looking back upon the wreckage of the British Empire from the perspective of a cynical twenty-first century writer.  An important point Wilson makes is one I mentioned in my closing comments after last week’s debate on imperialism at Lolita Bar: The British Empire was primarily an Asian rather than a European empire, if we take the sheer demographic weight of India seriously (on a similar but more petty note, it’s often struck me that with so many speakers of English living in India, it’s not clear that any nation besides India has a right to define what constitutes standard English).

The artificial construct that was the Empire was bound to come apart sooner or later — and the early twentieth century was enamored of trying new things, as Wilson reminds us in sometimes-odd passages like this one: “The flying machines and motor cars of the Edwardian era look like toys built for the amusement of Mr. Toad, but they are harbingers of a new world order.  Moreover, the Mr. Toad at the wheel would be unlikely to have owned Toad Hall for more than a generation.”  (This passage also reminds me a bit of the poem I wrote in college that enabled me to come in third at a Nuyorican Poets Cafe slam once, a poem that began with the lines “Stork!  Stork in a gyrocopter!/ Grim harbinger of the coming age.”  Ah, great minds, etc.)

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In the process of depicting the Empire unraveling, Wilson treats us to such telling oddities as the despicable D.H. Lawrence writing about his fantasies of gassing to death all of the sick, Read the rest of this entry »

The August 14-20 issue of The Economist tackles the topics of Australian coalitional politics, government-shrinking UK politics as something akin to punk rock, literal “hive minds” (artificial intelligence programs based on insect colonies), and offices that have resident dogs.  Combine all those phenomena and you get…well, something not remotely human.  Best just to look away.

But it does somehow remind me that I was excited recently to see that possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitch Daniels’ list of five favorite books was a perfect libertarian box set: society-analyzing works by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Charles Murray (not The Bell Curve), Mancur Olson, and Virginia Postrel.  This alone (quietly, cautiously) raises the possibility that he would be the best president the U.S. has ever had, something worth thinking about.  Or that he has a libertarian staff member answering questionnaires, but that’s better than nothing.

And he was busted for pot circa 1970 while at Princeton (where at least three libertarians for whom I’ve done work got their start), which in itself seems like a good sign that he would not just turn into an authoritarian social conservative once elected.  If he and anti-drug-war Gary Johnson were a ticket, what on Earth would the hipness-seeking Democrats do?  Lose, I suspect.

•Well, “Freedom Week” on Fox Business Network has reached its climax, and in addition to the six episodes of Freedom Watch that ran this week, there’s the swell five-part online series about “The History of Liberty” on the Fox Nation site.

•But if you need a shorter, simpler summary of how American politics (and indeed all politics — and religion) works, you could do far worse than watch this three-minute music video about the Space Robots who want to save humans from the Terrible Secret of Space by pushing and shoving (h/t Bretigne Shaffer, who recently wrote about Afghanistan).

•Slate asks: “Is It Legal to Eat Your Cat?” after the strange story of the New York State man caught marinating his cat in his car trunk (h/t Diana Fleischman).

•Speaking of the thin line between predator and food, I noticed after writing about my old hometown of Norwich, CT in last month’s Book Selection entry that there is at least one famous son of Norwich besides Benedict Arnold and my novelist English teacher Wally Lamb: There is Costa Dillon, producer of the horror comedy film Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and later a park ranger (I mentioned this at our swell Thursday debate/poetry reading on imperialism, and someone claimed that it’s almost as difficult to get a park ranger job as it is to become president, which I do not believe).

•As if Norwich weren’t Victorian enough, I’ll post this month’s Book Selection entry soon, on A.N. Wilson’s After the Victorians.

•My fellow Freedom Week survivor Austin Petersen notes a few amusing items, which should distract and entertain those suffering from serious-politics overload or post-traumatic stress disorder, or even the sometimes-analogized condition of borderline personality disorder, not to mention people who are just vexed by the humidity: Read the rest of this entry »

Much has changed since 1992 when I was, I believe, the first person to interview the MTV VJ Kennedy about what it was like to be the sole Republican VJ at MTV — not to mention what it was like to be the girl with the Republican elephant tattoo and a crush on Dan Quayle (I saw her make an appearance at a record store once, and it took me a while to figure out that the thousands of people outside the store were there not to see her but to see Green Day, who I was not interested in meeting).

Back then, she was a passage in an article I wrote for Chronicles (the paleoconservative magazine that I believe David Boaz pronounced “unsavory” the very first time I met him) — and Kennedy was also the quirky, bespectacled, alternative rock-playing proof that hip conservatives were possible, albeit rare.  Tonight, long since turned into a full-blown libertarian and famous person, she was the delightful final guest on the hump-day edition of Freedom Watch, in its special week of daily broadcasts (today’s also featuring Thomas Sowell, author, among other things, of Knowledge and Decisions, which is a marvelous, Hayekian look at libertarianism as the best way of coping with the decentralization of information in society).

Even then, I was fascinated by the tension between the benefits of global pop culture and the benefits of local tradition — and were it not for that rationalistic, somewhat detached admiration for the latter might well have been some sort of across-the-board imperialist-capitalist (to get back to the underblogged theme of this month) bent on turning all the world into a spaceage mall like something out of an MTV video.

P.S. Instead, I remain torn on matters of foreign policy and globalization — and so make a fitting organizer of tomorrow night’s (Thur.) epic Debate at  Lolita Bar about whether there can be benign imperialism.  Be there and help resolve the fate of the world.

You may by now have heard the story of the Jet Blue flight attendant at a New York airport who, after being bumped on the head by luggage, unleashed an angry tirade on the P.A. system, said he was leaving the job after decades, grabbed a beer, and exited the plane down an emergency slide, causing helicopters and police to appear, apprehending him.  If a stylish exit is a crime, surely he is guilty.

Thur., August 12th (International Youth Day, fun for all ages and nations), 8pm, at Lolita Bar (266 Broome St. at Allen St., one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop).

Arguing yes: Byrne Hobart, Internet marketing consultant

Arguing no: Guy Vantresca, U.S. Army veteran and IT specialist

Moderating: Michel Evanchik

Sharing two of his poems: Gregg Glory

Sharing one of Rudyard Kipling’s poems: Alex Antonova

The idea of attempting benign imperialism has, despite the antiwar sentiments of the past decade, been picking up some stream. Conor Friedersdorf wrote for The Atlantic about the (vaguely racist?) idea of “charter cities” in Africa functioning as Western-run models for battle-plagued and starving parts of that continent. Ron Bailey once mused aloud about a similar idea. By contrast, NYU econ prof William Easterly wrote the book The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

(Easterly, by the way, also wrote a review for the New York Times in June on libertarian Matt Ridley’s book The Rational Optimist, about the benefits of capitalism, which I plan to make one of my November Book Selections on this blog, in a year of rather British Book Selections, including this month’s, which will be After the Victorians by A.N. Wilson, about the decline of the British Empire, augmenting my “Month of Imperialism” and completing my Victorian summer.)

P.S. If the topic of imperialism’s got you down, though, maybe you’ll be cheered up by watching Freedom Week — a special week of daily broadcasts of Fox Business Network’s Freedom Watch, for which I work and which bears no responsibility for stuff like the debate above. Just check out this link for a hint of what’ll likely be on, including Wednesday’s property-themed episode with Thomas Sowell, and there’ll be related online and Fox News Channel material:

P.P.S. And if you come away from this week liking intervention in foreign lands, or by contrast simply preferring small bands of mercenaries to conventional armies, you can celebrate the weekend either way by seeing The Expendables (or by contrast the Taoist-anarchist animated fantasy film Tales from Earthsea, or the less ambitious but more boldly-titled Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, all three of those films debuting this weekend, giving us lonely nerds options).

A commenter on my August 1 entry noted sarcastically that some of the Tea Party protesters are inconsistent in their defense of property rights and oppose letting a mosque be built at Ground Zero.  The Tea Party folk I’ve dealt with have been pretty consistent, but I think most people recognize it’s a coalition, with the healthy thing merely being that its unifying focus is opposing government spending.  It’s not synonymous with libertarianism but is more libertarian a phenomenon than either major political party or much else of significance going on in American politics.

Coincidentally, though, the Tea Party-attending illegal immigration foe being targeted for sarcasm has just posted a piece on American-Rattlesnake explaining why he thinks even protests themselves are something the defenders of illegal immigration can’t get right.

In a way, I’m more interested in populist protest itself than in immigration, and I am well aware that populism can sometimes go too far, as this campaign ad from Tennessee may demonstrate (it was pointed out to me by a lawyer friend from the Hill, the heart of empire, who is visiting New York in a couple weeks but clearly is keeping on top of the important political developments during the August recess).

A book of DIY plush monster toys and puppets called Beasties has its release party tomorrow night (Thur., Aug. 5) at DUMBO’s hip and spatially-odd book-and-arts venue PowerHouse Arena, on 37 Main Street (corner of Water St.), close to the Brooklyn end of the Brooklyn Bridge and the York St. F stop, as I discovered the very first time I walked all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge, mere months ago. (PowerHouse has striking stairs/bleachers, not so unlike the swell new façade of the northern Lincoln Center block, which my architect friend Dave Whitney tells me has been much praised, so I am not alone in admiring it.) What better borough for the Beasties than Brooklyn, after all?

There will be drinks, snacks, and lovely music by members of the Debutante Hour. I’m going.

The Beasties author is the talented and whimsical artist Diana Schoenbrun, who we were lucky enough to have lead a puppet show prior to one of our Debates at Lolita Bar. I jokingly — but sincerely — likened the performance to the Muppets at the time, and I have always thought all good-hearted, open-minded people can appreciate good things — like The Muppet Movie — across “age appropriate” divisions, without feeling any more anxiety about whether they “ought” to than about whether they are being sufficiently hip, another pointless anxiety. We’re all in the quest for good things together, from the purchaser of well-crafted G.I. Joe figures to the collector of the works of Macaulay.

And if you’d like to be part of our proud debate tradition yourself, without necessarily using puppets, please e-mail me today (per the address on my About/CONTACT page) and volunteer to argue “no” on the question “Can There Be Benign Imperialism?” (our topic next week, Thur., August 12, 8pm, amidst this blog’s “Month of Imperialism”).

I will add an “UPDATE” note to this very blog entry tonight or tomorrow revealing whether we have our volunteer.  [UPDATE: Not yet!  Watch for an all-new entry with the official announcement Monday, I promise.]

If even my mother calls to say that the editor in chief of Wikileaks looks like me, there must be some truth to it (and since that organization once used a double to help a member elude the authorities, perhaps they’ll call upon me one day).

I hope he’s popular with the ladies, too, since I am told that I am single again, after what was basically a roughly one-year relationship followed by a roughly one-year breakup. My apologies to everyone peripherally affected, most of whom know I generally try to avoid “drama.” Perhaps I can address romantic conquest as a subsidiary theme during this blog’s “Month of Imperialism” entries. In any case, for all the ladies out there who might get me mixed up with the Wikileaks editor, just remember this rule of thumb: I am not the one with the Australian accent.

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Before turning our attention to imperialism, though: the sometimes-related topic of immigration, on the august occasion of the launch of Gerard Perry’s anti-illegal-immigration site American-Rattlesnake. I see that my own webmaster/debate-moderator pal, Michel Evanchik, is contributing to the site as well, perhaps concerned that illegal immigrants are taking jobs from hard-working Americans. But I will have to read in the days ahead to find out.

Surveying the topic in a broader — and more imperial — context, it’s interesting to me that there are two constellations of views, neither bound together by logical necessity, that seem to be catching on in recent years, one looking something like:

•more-or-less open borders + free trade + military interventionism

and the other looking something like:

•rigid borders + less trade + opposition to military intervention

By now, neither set of views is that surprising, but it’s not a dichotomy I would have predicted, say, fifteen years ago from the textbook “right” and “left” definitions of thirty years ago, but rather is a dichotomy that now describes both a split within the right and a split within libertarianism, due to the advent of all the Ron Paul types within libertarianism (except that libertarians wouldn’t sign off on the Read the rest of this entry »

All right, one last blog entry touting Freedom Watch before I turn my attention to blogging about more personal matters — like musings about the fate of the world (and how it is decided) in my August “Month of Imperialism” blog entries. Henceforth, you can get your online Freedom Watch info, though, by clicking on the three Freedom Watch-related links in my Blogroll down below, on the right-hand side of my blog front page — the ones saying “Freedom Watch (cable show),” “Freedom Watch (old Web show),” and “Judge Nap.”

In store for you tomorrow (10am Eastern, repeated at 8pm, then again on Sunday at 7pm and 11pm), though, is a show that’s already made some headlines, featuring an interview with the man behind the military document-dumping site Wikileaks. Is he a menace, or is this sort of truth-revealing (which that site has done on many controversial topics, using info from inside several different sorts of institutions) a necessary and natural check on centralized power…like that of an empire?

•Since the past two days’ entries mentioned time travel, the Victorian British, and imperialism, it might be a fitting time to note that I stumbled across this nineteen-minute sketch featuring Rowan Atkinson (among others) as a comedic version of Doctor Who. Not bad. (The Doctor’s British-eccentric combination of wanderlust, tolerance, and very-reluctant interventionism may have contributed to my own rather moderate and Britishy attitude toward imperialism and interventionism — but we can discuss that at our August 12 debate on imperialism at Lolita Bar, especially if you e-mail me to volunteer to argue against imperialism.)

•In other geeky news — perhaps the gothiest news I’ve heard since Peter Murphy did guest vocals on a Nine Inch Nails cover of a Joy Division song (“Dead Souls”): a remake of The Crow is due out in 2012, and the screenwriter is none other than Nick Cave, dark alternative rock singer and the not-bad Faulkner-esque (via Australia) novelist who wrote And the Ass Saw the Angel, which I gave to Francis Heaney as a birthday present at some point.

As long as Cave’s Crow is better than Wim Wenders’ atrocious pseudo-sci-fi film Until the End of the World, I’ll be happy — though that film’s rock soundtrack may remain the best I’ve ever heard (with the possible exception of Natural Born Killers, from that film directed by that Hitler apologist who hates Bush). The Until the End of the World soundtrack features wonders including Nick Cave’s darkly hilarious bomb-maker-narrated drinking song “’Til the End of the World.”

•In still geekier news, I should note that reportage from last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con revealed that Joss Whedon is officially directing the ensemble Avengers movie, with more-or-less confirmed team members (or allies) Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye.

And we learned that next year’s Thor and Captain America movies will be linked, in what has become the expected way with Marvel-based movies, through the device of Read the rest of this entry »

ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2010): Victorian Norwich by Arthur Lester Lathrop

Until Helen gave me a copy, I had no idea anyone had written a book about the town I grew up in, Norwich, CT (there’s been more than one such book, apparently).

Thanks to Lathrop’s tome, which depicts the different-yet-very-familiar Norwich of the latter half of the nineteenth century, I now know about such things as Norwich’s schizoid relationship to the temperance movement (literally going back and forth between making booze illegal and legal on roughly an annual basis) and about Norwich being, yes, the croquet capital of the U.S. for a good forty years, though the town baseball players were virtually all Irish. (Similar revelations help explain why England seems almost as much like home to me as New England does.)

Another chapter details the close ties between my high school (Norwich Free Academy) and Yale. The town saw its commercial peak, though, in the trolley car (or, if you will, steampunk) era, and the book ends with Norwich’s grandest-ever self-celebration, 101 years ago, a parade/festival overseen by (familially Norwich-linked) President William Howard Taft himself, after which it was all downhill — but still in an English-Victorian progressive sort of way — straight to late-twentieth-century economic doldrums and me.

(And herewith a flashforward to my August, September, and October Book Selection entries, which will include, respectively, After the Victorians; the Taft-related Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism; and the Jonah Goldberg-edited anthology Proud to Be Right, featuring my vaguely steampunk-like essay defending, explicitly at long last, the tradical idea of “Conservatism for Punks.” Taft is a reminder, by the way, that America is capable of producing presidents who are both fat and in favor of minimizing business regulations, so there may be a bright future for Chris Christie.)

In New York City, one is conscious of history — and newness — at every turn, but I am pleased to learn that simply by growing up in Norwich, I have walked the same streets walked by such characters as Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Levy notes J.E.H. Smith has attacked 80s music — or rather, has captured perfectly how a forty-year-old Gen Xer of a certain sort (e.g., me) feels about whether to stay hip or indulge in musical nostalgia…or both…or neither (I also really like the first comment below the article).

I will note that I am not and have never been a fan of 80s music per se but rather of alternative rock, where that means something broad like “the strain of music roughly beginning with Velvet Underground and running through glam rock, punk, New Wave, grunge, and in the narrow sense indie, along with some of the things resembling or influencing those genres, such as garage rock, some prog rock, and alt-country.”

This shows (for good or ill) greater consistency on my part — and far less interest in nostalgia — than if I regarded, say, the Dead Kennedys and Katrina and the Waves as interchangeable (and, by the way, I really think the latter should have done a benefit concert to aid victims of post-hurricane flooding in New Orleans). I was even more enthusiastic about decade-old Who songs when I was ten than I am about twenty-year-old Nirvana songs now, I swear. And I still don’t like, for example, Bon Jovi, whose songs sound like they were designed to cause people to sing off-key in karaoke decades later.

All that being said: setting aside quality for the moment, my nominee for “most quintessentially 80s song” is Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.”

P.S. Speaking of time travel, here’s what (Brown alum) Josh Friedman, who produced the tragically short-lived Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series, has been up to lately (as pointed out by Megan McArdle): confronting someone who partially stole his identity (but is probably not a robot duplicate from a decade in the future). And by the way, I correctly guessed who the writer of that blog entry was even without knowing his last name, ’cause I’m just that nerdy.

Perhaps the most surprising moment on this weekend’s Freedom Watch (for which I write) is the moment when hulking professional wrestler Kane is asked what he thinks about liberty and he gives host Judge Andrew Napolitano an erudite citation of nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat.  You can find clips from past shows here, and you can watch the new episode on Fox Business Network at 10am and 8pm Saturday, 7pm and 11pm Sunday, Eastern, so surely you’ll want to catch it at least once.  Besides Kane, it’s got Ann Coulter, Bob Barr, espionage-analyzing Washington Post reporter Dana Priest, and more.

I’m pleased to see that this clip of a pug dog who (ostensibly) sounds like he’s saying “Batman” (followed by ABC anchor-banter that reminds me oddly of some dates I’ve been on) has already gone viral…and been transformed (as my friend Paul Taylor points out) into this musically-enhanced version using the theme from the 1960s show.

In slightly more sophisticated geek-entertainment news, Ali Kokmen, who really ought to be made the head of his own nerd-oriented publishing company or division, with a simply immense salary (because he’s just that good), points out that the Libertarian Futurist Society has just given out its annual Prometheus Awards for libertarian sci-fi.

P.S. I’m not sure what it tells us about io9 readers that their comment threads contain some of the first uses I’ve seen in several months (mercifully) of the beaten-to-death nerd would-be-sophisticate humor-trope of feigning hesitation through the use of constructions such as “Um, not so much.”  I hate with a murderous passion every last living person who is still doing that, and I will not apologize for it, even if they are sad teenage girls with few other outlets for their creativity and opinions.

By contrast, I admit I have on rare occasions made use of “uh” on this blog to feign confusion, but that’s different, and when I do it, it’s cute.