I also had two boxes of VHS tapes, containing the Joel years of _Mystery Science Theater 3000_. If anyone wants them, I'll hand'em over, and they're probably better quality than the downloads available on the Net. 

I've been busy.

My two new housemates, R and C, are firmly established on the third floor. The house now looks like the piles of crap they pull out of Charles Foster Kane's house. We're slowly going through everything, but I guess my new housemates were both hoarders and substantially less stringent with the housecleaning. I hope that L and I shall set an example of how to ruthlessly cull the unused Krapp from our homes.

In the day of release, I bought Robert Caro's latest volume on Lyndon Johnson, _The Passage of Power_. It's excellent, but the reviews have been telling you that (including the NY Times's guest reviewer, Bill Clinton). I finished it this morning. The overall thrust of this volume goes like this:

In the 1960 election, Johnson runs a primary campaign that's both halfhearted and misinformed. He vacillates on whether to _really_ run or not. He thinks that his pull in the Senate will get him the nomination, not realizing that governors, not Senators, hold the power in primaries. He also underestimated Jack Kennedy as a playboy rich kid, but so did a lot of people.

The result is that Kennedy gets the nomination, and he pragmatically asks Johnson to run as VP because he needs support from the South. Johnson reasons that using the VP spot as a stepping stone is about the only way he can become President-- he even runs the numbers on the chance that Kennedy might die in office. He also figures that, as VP, he's not as bound to the Southern Democrats, so he has more leeway to act on civil rights.

Johnson's tenure as VP is pretty much hell for him. Without power, he's got nothing to do, everyone's making jokes about how he's disappeared from public life, and the Kennedy people regard him as "Rufus Cornpone." Bobby Kennedy hates his guts, and this was when Bobby was still the miserable shit from Joe McCarthy's staff. Three years in, things are looking horrible for LBJ: his assistant Bobby Baker's being investigated for bribery, his finances are being investigated by _Life_ magazine, and since he can't even broker a deal to deliver Texas for Kennedy for the 1964 elections, it's looking as though he might be dumped from the ticket. So JFK's trip to Dallas started out as another ordeal of humiliation and misery for LBJ.

Er... spoilers?

So all of a sudden, Lyndon's the President. He takes command almost immediately, lining up a judge to swear himself in, ensuring that he doesn't leave Dallas without Jackie and JFK's body, and even phoning Bobby to square a few details here and there... and it's not clear whether or not those phone calls were intended to rub Bobby's face in his own sudden loss of power. Johnson spends the next two weeks effecting a Presidential transition under the most impossible of conditions-- no prep time, after a national tragedy, and with Washington regarding him with mistrust and contempt.

And this period may well have been the apogee of Lyndon Johnson as a man and as a political figure. Kennedy had been trying to pass a civil rights law (the Act of 1964), but the South had buried it pretty effectively. Johnson had tried to explain to Kennedy how they operated, but Kennedy had dismissed his expertise. But Johnson knew how the Senate worked, and he knew every stalling tactic used by the Southern bloc... and even Richard Russell, the arch-segregationist (and one of the Senate's smartest tacticians) admitted to friends that Johnson would probably win. The result was that, within a few months, Johnson had enacted the first civil rights bill with _real force_ in it since Reconstruction.

I have only one criticism. I may be wrong on this, but I can't find anything in this book that describes what the 1964 Civil Rights Act actually did. I may have missed it. Caro went into considerable detail on the horse-trading on the 1957 Act, but here, it seems to be an Act without details. I read through the book in a few days, and I think I read it carefully, but I wound up looking the act up on Wikipedia so I could understand the stakes better.

But anyway, I'm back to waiting for the next volume. Caro said it'll be another three years, but I'll figure on seven.

Ted Nugent says, "If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will be dead or in jail."

First of all, regardless of the election, Barack Obama _will be President in November_. Barring extraordinary events, he'll be in office at least until next January.

Second, I take Nugent's comment to mean that, come November, he expects to murder his entire family in a fit of rage and despair. The question being, whether the cops will arrest him before he puts his crossbow in his own mouth or not.

Before I put the sanding sealer down:


And after:


Here's the other room.

... we have pictures.

This is the hallway on my third floor.


This is the front room before we sanded the floor.


And this is the floor AFTER we sanded it.

Yeah, it's a commercial, but it's funny.

I forget when I actually wrote this, since the book came out in 2002 and I started on LJ in 2005. I wasn't trying for terrific style, either: I just wanted to share my enthusiasm for the book. But since Caro's got the next volume coming out in three weeks, here's a refresher on his Lyndon Johnson project. 

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate
By Robert Caro. Knopf, 2002.
<lj-cut>
Thanks to Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson has become a fixture of my life since
I was nineteen years old. When Caro published The Years of Lyndon Johnson:
The Path to Power in 1982, the reviewers promptly recognized it as the beginning
of a great work, a model of the historian’s and biographer’s art,
and an accomplishment to rank alongside those of Gibbon and Boswell. One felt
privileged to be living in an age when Caro’s Lyndon Johnson was a work-in-progress,
and every new volume would reward a decade’s waiting. I think I joined
the Book of the Month club just to get it at a good price.

Caro had a lot going for him in those early reviews. He’d made his reputation
with the masterful biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, which
remains one of the great nonfiction works of the century. He’d spent eight
years researching Johnson to a degree that most writers wouldn’t; he’d
relocated to the Hill Country of Texas to learn first-hand what that grindingly
desolate region does to people. (Reviewers in New York City seemed to be more
impressed by this than even Caro’s research and prose.) And Caro’s
revelations about the young Lyndon—his ambition, his ruthlessness, his
willingness to do anything for a bit of power or prestige, even stacking
a student election at the University of Texas—went against nearly every
word previously written about his early years.

Caro’s portrait of the young Lyndon Johnson highlighted the aspects that
some people might call “contradictions.” The great achievements of
Johnson’s career—rural electrification, the Great Society, the Civil
Rights acts, and much more—were the work of a man who’d known poverty
first-hand, and with a genius for marshalling resources to help those in need.
(Caro’s passages on Johnson’s teaching Mexican children are especially
moving.) But, Caro notes, the other thread of Johnson’s life was his ambition
and need for power. This made Johnson an especially willing crony of powerful
Texas interests, like the oil industry and the firm of Brown and Root, and a
politician willing to do anything to get elected. 

The Path to Power climaxed with Johnson’s loss in a 1941 race for
the Senate—a race in which a short respite in campaigning cost Johnson
his victory. The second book, Means of Ascent, covered Johnson’s
fallow 1940’s in such detail that Caro had to expand his project to a projected
four volumes. In that volume, the loss of the 1941 Senate race had taught Johnson
a lesson—if he wanted to get anywhere, he couldn’t afford to compromise
his ruthlessness and ambition one bit. So, when he did mount a campaign for
the Senate in 1948, he allied himself with as much of the various Texas political
machines as he could, and ran a campaign of astounding ruthlessness.

Caro’s portrait of Johnson’s opponent, Governor Coke Stevenson, seemed
almost impossibly idealized. In his youth, Stevenson spent brutal years delivering
supplies across the Texas plains, camping out under his cart and reading law
texts by candlelight to educate himself. He’d grown into “Mr. Texas,”
so much an icon of the Texan self-image that it was nearly impossible to imagine
anyone else as a Governor, or a Senator. Caro didn’t spent much time on
Stevenson’s reactionary politics—instead, he focused on Johnson’s
campaign, with its media exposure, helicopter whistlestops, and finally, the
massive vote fraud which gave Lyndon the victory by a mere 87 votes. (Caro even
found a photo of the men responsible, posing with the infamous ballot box, taken
the night of the election. Such discoveries are the envy of any historian.)
I suspect that a lot of reviewers had forgotten about the bitter lessons of
the 1941 election, because reviewers slammed Caro’s apotheosized Stevenson
and irredeemably corrupt Johnson.  And given that the books, when finished,
will show the entire sweep of Johnson’s career, one must look at Means
of Ascent as the valley before the pinnacles of Johnson’s later life.

Now, twenty years after The Path to Power, we have Master of the
Senate, an account of Johnson’s spectacular 1950’s. These were
the years when Johnson’s gifts came to truly national prominence—and
the results, both in Johnson’s career and in Caro’s account, are astonishing.
Every promise that The Path to Power made, of a truly great political
biography in the making, has been fulfilled. Even if Caro doesn’t complete
this life’s work—the final volume, covering Johnson’s Presidency,
may not see print for another fifteen years— what he has accomplished will
stand as one of the great, indispensable historical works.

The Path to Power opened with a long history of the Hill Country, to
show us what shaped Lyndon Johnson. Master of the Senate opens with a
hundred-page history of the Senate, which shows us what Johnson was walking
into. The Senate was one of the least responsive deliberative bodies in the
world. It was designed to mediate the vagaries of “mob rule,” but
it also militated against even the most clearly desirable changes. Every one
of its procedures was designed to slow the progress of lawmaking, resist change,
and enforce a constancy of deliberation. Seniority could keep the most talented
men from their most useful positions, even when the most senior were too infirm
to attend a vote.

Within his first term, Johnson changed all of that. He latched onto
one of the most prominent senators, Richard Russell of Georgia, as a willing
student and defender of the South. By taking on the duties that most senators
didn’t want, Johnson was soon setting the agenda for the Senate. The position
of Party Leader was, frankly, a joke— Leaders really had no power, but
they got all the blame when their party failed to pass or block legislation.
But when Johnson took that position, he was able to strategize bills through
the Senate to a degree previously believed impossible. And he managed to do
this even when the hopelessly-divided Democrats were the minority party.

Caro’s accounts of Johnson’s strategy are, frankly, breathtaking.

When Eisenhower was elected President in 1951, the Republicans, riding his coattails,
became the majority party in the Senate. One would figure that Lyndon Johnson,
now holding the previously-useless title of Minority Leader, would see this
as a hopeless position—especially since his own party was divided between
Dixiecrat warhorses like Russell, and younger, idealistic liberals like Paul
Douglas and Hubert Humphrey. The Republicans, led by Robert Taft, were ready
to overturn every accomplishment of Roosevelt and Truman. And they were spoiling
to limit the powers of the Chief Executive to prevent stuff like the New Deal
or the Yalta agreement from ever happening again.

Johnson, however, saw that the Republicans were divided as well, between Eisenhower
and the Taft forces. Eisenhower wasn’t about to demolish NATO or the New
Deal, or renege on Yalta; he’d spent years running NATO for Truman.
So, Johnson reasoned, if the Democrats could position themselves so that they
were the ones defending Ike from the nutjobs in his own party, they could gain
enough popular support to regain the Senate the next time around. Which is what
happened.

This also enabled Johnson to prevail upon committee chairmen to relax the customs
of seniority. Normally, freshman Senators were appointed to committees, and
rose in rank, on the basis of seniority. Johnson persuaded the chairmen in his
party to relax the rules a little, arguing that it would give freshman Democrats
some much-needed experience, as well as a leg up in seniority later on in their
careers. Thus, Johnson could place newcomers like Humphrey in key positions.
(Less compliant liberals, like Paul Douglas and Estes Kefauver, suffered at
Johnson’s hands.)

But for most of his Senate time, Johnson had to placate the ones who got him
there—the Texas oil interests. And for the most part, Johnson delivered.
He ruined the career of Leland Olds, a New Deal-era liberal whose work on the
federal Power Commission had threatened the interests of oil. He stood with
Richard Russell against every attempt at civil rights legislation, offering
the standard “states rights” arguments with the same gusto as any
other segregationist. For years, despite his extraordinary accomplishment in
turning the Senate around, there was no hope that Lyndon Johnson would ever
turn his abilities to anything beyond his interests.

This is one area where Caro falls short, I think. Caro gives the impression
that nothing got through the Senate without Johnson’s approval. This may
actually have been true. But why did Johnson pass some, and stymie others? What
were his criteria? Did he pass more legislation simply to get the job done and
bring new activity to the Senate? Apart from a passing comment on the Bricker
Amendment—a straitjacket on the President’s foreign policy powers—Caro
says very little about what values Johnson may have been following. The ruin
of Leland Olds, the defenses of segregation, these we can easily chalk up to
political necessity. But until we reach his brilliant account of the passage
of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, Caro says very little about why Johnson would
support one bill over another.

But the centerpiece of Master of the Senate is the passage of the 1957
Civil Rights Act, and this is where we get motives-a-plenty. The single greatest,
of course, was ambition. Lyndon Johnson wanted to be President. Yet he knew
that no Southerner could ever hope to be elected to that office. Richard Russell’s
failed run for the Presidential nomination, and his own attempt to secure the
nomination in 1956, had taught him how much of a taint segregation was on his
kind. In the Senate, Johnson and the segregationists were a power, and liberals
were radical “red hots” who couldn’t get anything done. But in
the rest of the country, the liberals were regarded as heroes fighting people
like him.

The imperative for the Civil Rights Act didn’t come from the Senate, of
course. These were the years of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin
Luther King. The liberals, notably Paul Douglas and Hubert Humphrey, were clamoring
for a full-blown Civil Rights Act that would rectify every major injustice of
the time. Even the Senate, and even Senators who weren’t among the northern
liberals, began to understand that something had to be done.

Johnson knew that he had to change to get elected. And getting a Civil Rights
Act passed would be an effective way of showing that he’d changed. But
Johnson couldn’t break with the segregationist wing without sacrificing
his career. He had to find some way of shedding his segregationist trappings
without losing the vast financial resources of Texas money.

And there was one other fact. Johnson, as much as he could talk the language
of the segregationists, could be moved to great gestures of sympathy and compassion.
Here, his compassion and his ambition were running in the same direction. Eventually,
these two themes would bear fruit in the Great Society and Civil Rights Acts.

But for now, Johnson had to use his considerable gifts to bring forth a half-measure.
The bill, as proposed, included a sweeping that encompassed every civil rights
grievance of the time, from segregated drinking fountains to jails and libraries
and buses. The Liberal Democrats wanted the bill without compromises. The Republicans
also wanted no compromises, if only to scuttle the bill’s chances for passage
while proclaiming their own support for civil rights. The Southerners, of course,
would never stand for those sections becoming law-- in fact, Russell scuttled
this section with an astounding cunning.

Johnson, however, noticed that the Southerners didn’t seem to object to
a later section which reiterated voting rights. Even southerners seemed to acknowledge
that the right to vote maybe, possibly, might be more important than their prejudices.
And a bill that provided only for that might get passed—at the very
lest, it wouldn’t provoke the Southerners into a filibuster. So Johnson
had to persuade the Southerners that this was an acceptable compromise, which
wouldn’t hurt segregation at all. And he had to persuade the Northerners
to accept a compromise that could actually get passed, on the possibility
that later on, it’d become easier to get the more substantive Civil Rights
issues settled.

Amazingly, Lyndon Johnson succeeded. Caro is a master at describing the kind
of complex horse-trading that went on to get even the innocuous Civil Rights
Act of 1957 passed. At best, the Act was a small crack in the dam. Few civil
rights advocates saw it as anything but a rout, where Lyndon Johnson had foiled
their plans once again. But it wouldn’t have been passed at all
if Johnson hadn’t passed it.

I’m sure a lot of readers will be paging through certain chapters, asking
themselves blinkered questions like “Was Lyndon Johnson a racist?”
Maybe—but so was Lincoln, by modern standards, and it’d be hard to
name two white men who’d done more for Black Americans. There will be others
who’ll try to excuse the spineless cavings-in of Clinton, by citing Johnson’s
compromises. And funniest of all, for me, there are even those who think of
Richard Nixon as some kind of devious political tactician. Nixon wasn’t
even in Johnson’s league.

But the genius of Robert Caro is that he shows us how power really operates,
and the complexities of the men who wield it. I can’t imagine how he’ll
treat the Vietnam debacle, beyond a confidence that that he’ll avoid the
usual clichés about “hubris.” He is as far from the Parson Weems history-as-moral-fable
tradition as can be imagined. Robert Caro writes history for adults.

I'm trying out a new GH2 patch (Sanity) that can apparently work at lower bit rates, which means I might be able to get 2 hours and 25 minutes on my data card. I've set up the cameras to shoot a couple of hours of the tulips in my back yard. 

I'm also keeping an eye on Olive while L's out of the house. Separation anxiety, y'know: if you want to meet Olive, we'll be in Clark Park from 3 to 3:30.

Metafilter tossed this one my way:http://www.socialjusticeleague.net/2011/09/how-to-be-a-fan-of-problematic-things/

I like things, and some of those things are problematic. I like Lord of the Rings even though it’s pretty fucked up with regard to women and race (any narrative that says “this whole race is evil” is fucked up, okay). I like A Song of Ice and Fire even though its portrayal of people of colour is problematic, and often I find that its in-text condemnation of patriarchy isn’t obvious enough to justify the sexism displayed. I like the movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World even though it is racist in its portrayal of Matthew Patel, panders to stereotypes in its portrayal of Wallace, and trivialises queer female sexuality in its portrayal of Ramona and Roxy’s relationship. For fuck’s sake, Ramona even says “It was a phase”! How much more cliche and offensive could this movie be? Oh wait, remember how Scott defeats Roxy, his only female adversary, by making her orgasm? Excuse me while I vomit…and then keep watching because I still like the rest of the movie.

Liking problematic things doesn’t make you an asshole. In fact, you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist (TM)! After all, most texts have some problematic elements in them, because they’re produced by humans, who are well-known to be imperfect. But it can be surprisingly difficult to own up to the problematic things in the media you like, particularly when you feel strongly about it, as many fans do. We need to find a way to enjoy the media we like without hurting other people and marginalised groups. So with that in mind, here are my suggestions for things we should try our darnedest to do as self-confessed fans of problematic stuff.

This is interesting because many of the things I love are, well, problematic. Two of my favorite writers are James Ellroy and George MacDonald Fraser. Fraser's main creation, Flashman, is a reprehensible figure, and not just because he shares most of the prejudices of a 19th century Tory; he has thrown other people into danger and certain death to save his own skin, he expresses some enjoyment as a slave driver, and in the first Flashman novel, he hits a low point when he attempts to rape his father's mistress. 

The characters who populate James Ellroy's novels are, almost uniformly, awful. They're brutal, angry, fucked-up, racist, corrupt, and murderous; Ellroy's described his own subject as "bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority." He is, also, one of our Greatest Living Writers. 

I'm also eagerly waiting for the next volume in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. Hard to beat _him_ in the world-class-asshole sweepstakes. 

But I have to admit that, when people I know recoil from this stuff, I'm actually laughing. Why? Because they read books about _vampires_. And no matter how much drama's applied, vampires are _far worse_ to human beings.

Olive now lives in my house.