Good morning. Hello. How are you? #715
The 70's, Jimmy Carter is committed to a 45 year-long bit, Ken Burns is freaking Barack Obama out, weird childhood memories.
Good morning, friend. How’s your week going? Getting any rain? I hope so. Unless you’re in one of those places getting a thousand year flood. Then I hope things are drying out. There’s this YouTube guy I watch — the guy trying to resurrect an abandoned silver mining town in the mountains above Death Valley. A month or so ago he got a thousand year flood. The main road to his town got wiped out and he had to repair the road with an excavator. It was a fairly inspiring video. But then at the end of the video, it started raining again, and he said something like “oh no.” And now it’s been, gosh, three… four weeks since his last video? And he usually posts weekly. In the immortal words of Han and Leia, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Lotta flooding going around. And a lot of drouts. Really can feel the climate change if you just know where to look. Or to feel. Mixed my metaphor a bit there sorry. There's something happening here / But what it is ain't exactly clear / I think it's time we stop / Children, what's that sound? / Everybody look what's going down etc etc.
Programming Note: I said yesterday that Seth Meyers was involved in The End is Nye and has been working with former Star Trek: The Next Generation producer Brannon Braga for the last decade or so. I misspoke. I meant Seth MacFarlane. I apologize.
We are humming along in our history of conservatism books. We’re in 1976 so we are to a part I very dimly remember, because I was four. Jane is four. So I assume she very dimly remembers now. I remember the bicentennial, though of course not the crass commercialism of it. Mostly just my dad’s bicentennial Franklin Mint and stamps sets, though those are crassly commercial in their own weird way.
(Aside: Much later in life, but before he passed, my dad had me sell all that Franklin Mint stuff off on eBay. We made a… well, a mint. Which was ironic because for, like, twenty years everyone in the family, including him, assumed he got taken for a ride buying all these worthless collectibles. But man, there are still a ton of Franklin Mint collectors out there. Weird experience.)
It’s funny how so much of the 70’s rhymes with now. Lost nulcear material, everyone freaking out about villians getting nuclear material and making dirty bombs. In the 70’s they were more worried about the Weatherman than the Iranians, though. It’s funny how as soon as all the domestic terrorists turned conservative we stopped talking about them as much, but boy, people sure were scared of the Weatherman. West Point had, like, five cheating scandals. Is there ever a decade West Point does not have a cheating scandal? Jerry Brown proposed solar credits while running for president and the crowds in Oregon went wild.
Lots of high-profile congressional committees exploring governmental malfeasance, but by this point in the 70’s it’s the Church Committee and the Pike Committee telling Americans how awful the intelligence community was and all the criming they did, and Republicans studiously not caring about it and saying it was un-American to get mad at the CIA for spying on Americans or overthrowing dictators. The public discovering the NSA had been spying on Americans since it’s inception. That one, man. I mean, is there any point to the NSA except spying on Americans? They have literally done it the entire time they’ve existed.
Someone bombed Plymouth Rock!
Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts in nineteen days. Both of them were by women who stepped in front of him, with a gun, and pulled the trigger, and something went wrong. Both were in the Bay Area. Only one was a Mansonite. I heard about that one when I was a kid, well, in High School, my government teacher taught me about it. I am sort of stunned, now, after all these years, he didn’t mention there was a second one less than three weeks later.
Two of Ford’s ambassadors — one to Lebanon and one to Cyprus — were murdered.
So now we’re into Carter just clinching the Democratic nomination and I thought it would be this nice pallette cleanser, this sort of lovely idyllic interregunum before I have to read all about Reagan in the next book and get my blood boiling. But it turns out… that Carter was kind of an asshole? Well, not an asshole but… just another lying politician. Like he would just flat-out lie when caught saying something embarrassing. He literally had all references to him saying nice things about George Wallace removed from the Georgia state archives. Like every other conservastive presidential candidate, he said he would not bail New York City out of its bankruptcy. He’s the only one that then went to New York and told them how much he loved them, though. And they ate it up! Really charismatic, that guy. He did a lot of issue straddling. He said homosexuality was bad but it should be legal. Same for abortion. Same for “ethnically pure” neighborhoods (that one got his black voters especially upset). His press secretary quit after only a few days on the job because he was shocked how much Jimmy Carter dissembled and lied.
And get this shit: Jimmy Carter wasn’t even a peanut farmer! He was a peanut warehouser, wholesaler and distributor. What. The. Hell.
I’m sitting here reading this, trying to square it with the saintly old man that is Jimmy Carter today and I can come up with only one conclusion: For forty-five years, Jimmy Carter has been committing to a bit. He is an asshole who realized people loved his kindly, saintly facade, so he’s just been faking it for forty-five years. Jimmy Carter is an asshole who has been faking being kind so well that he won the Nobel Peace Price thirty years after he left office. Only possible explanation.
My old friend Andy Shea would have really loved that explanation.
Similarly, I am still working my way through Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War. It is very good, but it is waaaay too light on the North Vietnamese side. I mean, it has more of their perspective than anything else I’ve ever read or seen, but it is like 80-20, at best. I still have so many mysteries and questions about the Vietnam War. How did the North Vietnamese endure all that bombing? How did they survive? Why did they never, ever surrender? How did they keep the Ho Chi Minh trail active when the US dropped eight million tons of bombs on it? That last part, at least, got answered in the last episode, it really was remarkable. One million women and teenagers lived and worked on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Every night, they would repair, rebuild and re-route the trail around the new bomb craters. They traveled at night without lights. The whole thing was a logistical marvel on par with anything we read about in our history books. As impressive as the Panama Canal or the interstate system. Just amazing. It got maybe five minutes in the ten-hour documentary.
I also learned that Ken Burns has his next decade of projects announced. He will be putting out one of his masterpiece multi-part miniserieses for PBS once a year. The titles of the ones through 2027 are already announced: this year will be The US and the Holocaust, next year The American Buffalo. Leonardo Da Vinci in 2024, The American Revolution in 2025, LBJ & the Great Society in 2027. I don’t know what’s up with 2026 maybe he’s taking a year off. On deck but without release dates are The Emancipation to Exodus aka “The History of Reconstruction,” sounds like that one is gonna cover Isabel Wilkerson Warmth of Other Suns territory. And two more are announced but no release dates: one on Winston Churchill and… one on Barack Obama.
Now that last one is crazy! Barack Obama is still alive! Imagine being out there in the world, raking in dough with your Netflix and Spotify production deals, hob nobbing withthe hoi polloi on Branson’s island and shit knowing that at some point in the next decade Ken Burns is just gonna drop a documentary about you the way Beyoncé drops an album. That would stress me out! That would definitely keep me from cheating on my wife or being a spokesman for a defense contractor or something but, then, it would probably also keep me from signing production deals with Spotify so what do I know. Still, though, this is a problem that Barack Obama, and no other living human ever, has: Being alive while Ken Burns makes a documentary about you.
Finally, a story from my childhood I think about a lot. I had this friend. He lived up on McGrath. He shared a name with a famous football player so he is impossible to Google and we have lost touch. No idea what’s up with him. And no idea how we became friends. He didn’t go to my school, he didn’t go to my church. Maybe it was soccer. I used to go up to his house and spend the night. His guest bedroom had a waterbed.
Anyway, his dad owned a radio station and the station offices were in this little office minimall thing not far from my house growing up. His dad would let him do overnights. I think. Maybe. This is where it’s unclear. Maybe he was just fucking with me. That is the point of this whole story. I have no idea if this kid was fucking with me. Like the radio station definitely existed and his dad definitely owned it. I visited the offices and studio. But did this kid, when we were like twelve years old, actually get to DJ, unaccompanied? I don’t know. I suspect the station was transmitting a satellite feed or something. But, then, what was he doing there, at night, all alone? Weird weird weird.
So one night he’s at the station and he’s bored and I’m at home and we’re shooting the shit on the phone and he insists to me he has to make ads, like record and produce bumpers, and he wants to use my voice over on one of them and it’s an ad for a women’s feminine hygeine product and it is obviously BS but also kind of funny to twelve year olds, so he records me over the air and we make this very straight-ahead, serious ad for feminine hygeine products and he is just cracking up. Like he thinks it’s the funniest thing ever. And I think it’s kind of funny, and obviously a joke because what feminine hygeine product would hire two pre-teens in Fairbanks, Alaska to produce their radio spots. But he seems so convinced he’s pulled one over on me, and he is absolutely completely committed to this deception and he is using this station’s very expensive gear to do all of this over-the-phone recording and playback and whatnot and… Man. I still do not know exactly what was going on. Like he was my friend but he almost certainly seemed to be playing a very elaborate, somewhat cruel prank on me. I remember the confusion at the time; this is funny, and we should think this is funny together, but this kid thinks it’s funny cuz he’s fucking with me.
We weren’t friends for much longer after that. I wonder if that is a coincidence or not. But, man. I think about that story all the time. I am fifty years old and I still have no idea what was up, and it bothers me. Gives me weird embarrassment and anxiety. I do not like it one bit.
Put that one at the top of my time machine visitation list I guess.
OMG I don’t have a mix done. Okay here we go, this shoegaze one was almost done. Just add a few old classics to season and weather this young pup of a mix of new stuff. Lovely. Five oldie classics added to some new gems. Very into this Trementina band. And still so very excited about this new Breathless album, my vinyl copy just showed up yesterday so we are going to be listening to that a lot more this week. Always hard to restrain myself before an album I am very excited about comes out, but I haven’t gotten my vinyl yet. I listen to it once, maybe twice, before the vinyl comes to sate my urges but I really try and wait for the vinyl to truly dig in. Man that all sounds a bit more creepy and sensual than I meant it to.
Two more days till Emma leaves for her trip. Jane is… excited? Maybe this will go well. Fingers crossed.