Apparently some television show called “The Sopranos,” which apparently is not about four blue-haired ladies in a small town church choir as I had originally assumed, has reached some sort of remarkable denouement that has generated much buzzulation on the Internets.

I josh, of course. Although I have seen only a small handful of episodes because (A) I don’t subscribe to HBO or other premium movie channels and (B) even if I did, the ratio of F-Bombs to nouns and verbs is much too high for me to allow it into my living room.

I know that will sound like I’m Mrs. Prudence McUptight to the average Internet denizen. And I know with even greater certitude that I do not care. If James Gandolfini himself walked into my house carrying a gift Rolex and the keys to a new Mercedez and started talking like that, I’d toss him out on his ear.

I have no doubt that the show is brilliantly written and acted. In fact, one of the cable channels has recently started running episodes will all the F-bombs dub-replaced with “freakin’.” And I’ve enjoyed watching it. Of course, the purists are surely rolling their eyes so hard they’re in danger of popping out and flying across the room at the desecration of the original script.

Whatever.

Here’s James Lileks this morning offering, mid-Bleat, his thoughts about the final episode. He liked it.

In this post, I responded to an op-ed column in which (usually) conservative columnist, Linda Chavez, pretty much labeled anyone who opposed the immigration bill, a racist.

Her assertions were so outrageous and malicious, and rightly sparked such widespread shock and awe, I’ve been wondering if some sort of apology was going to be forthcoming from Ms. Chavez. Well it has. In a way.

In this very long essay on National Review Online, Linda begins well enough:

“On reflection, I went too far. I blew off some steam and in the process offended some erstwhile allies. I should have been more careful in my wording and not tarred with such a broad brush. I should have been clearer that not everyone who opposes the Senate bill does so for illegitimate reasons.”

Fair enough. But do you sense a “but” or a “however” coming? Oh yeah. . .

“But I’m not altogether unhappy I wrote the column, or a subsequent one describing the reaction it provoked.”

The fact is, Linda expends precisely 128 words on the apology, and then another 4779 words following that “But” undermining it. For example, early on she writes:

“The immigration debate has stirred up some pretty ugly sentiments and conservatives need to be especially careful in this regard.”

Come on. Everyone, and I mean everyone, expressing opinions in an online forum gets a measure of hateful, ugly, mindless spewage. Citing it, as Linda does, as evidence of anything meaningful is shoddy argumentation. It gives off the same vibe as the Dixie Chicks positioning themselves as brave defenders of truth because they received some death threats. Please. Is there a public person in America that hasn’t received a death threat? Chris Sligh, a contestant on American Idol got death-related hate email for sassing Simon Cowell,  for crying out loud.

Of course, it’s the views expressed by responsible, influential people that really matter. And Linda’s fellow pro-immigration reform bill advocates have a been a rich source ugly smearage the last few weeks, starting with Linda’s original column for which she is now apologizing, and moving on to President Bush’s comment that oppenents of the bill don’t want “what’s best for America.”

Deep into her response Chavez writes: “I’m not asking for politically correct censorship of ideas; I am asking for civility and a commitment to true colorblindness in all public policies.”

But earlier in the piece she crtiizes NRO contributors and vocal immigration bill opponents John Derbyshire and Mark Krikorian precisely on politically correct grounds. For example, she points out that Derbyshire has, on occaision, referred to Hispanic day laborers of unknown national origin as “Aztecs.” One gets the impression she would have preferred, “Hispanics of unknown national origin.” Except that someone in the PC crowd would have cried foul and said the correct term is “Latino.”

She also quotes Derbyshire as admitting that he’s a racist. He did indeed, in addition to admitting that he’s a homophobe and a sexist. But if you follow the links she provides you learn what Derbyshire means. Namely, paraphrasing, “If believing that different races generally have differing charateristics that make them better at some things than other races generally, makes me a racist in today’s PC environment, then I guess ‘I’m a racist.’ And if believing that men and women are different and that those differences result in them generally being better and worse respectively at certain things makes me a sexist in today’s PC environment, then I guess “I’m a sexist.”

Clearly, Chavez is trying to have it both ways. She wants to deny that she is calling for PC college campus-ish speech codes, while criticizing people who don’t adhere to them. It doesn’t track.

Finally, Chavez makes a clever attempt at guilt, or at least shame, by association for those who oppose the bill:

I will not appear with or allow myself or my organizations to be in any way associated with David Duke, Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, or others in the fringe “white identity” movement, as they sometimes call themselves. I’ve never hesitated to call such people racists; they are. It doesn’t matter that they share my opposition to racial preferences; we do so for very different reasons. But racists are not the only problematic allies conservatives encounter when it comes to the immigration issue.

I doubt that most conservatives know the roots of the modern immigration-restriction movement.

 Thus, a very-much warranted apology starts so well and goes very wrong. And then it just goes on and on. Thus, her closing paragraph begins: “It is also dangerous to win the immigration debate by stirring up racial or ethnic animosities by playing to the prejudices of that small group of Americans who are motivated by racism and nativism.”

I would respond by pointing out that it is much more dangerous to try to stifle debate by browbeating those on one side of it with a club of political correctness and assmuptions of bad faith. There’s little evidence that the first danger is actually happning. While each Chavez pronouncement is an indication that the latter actually is. 

Now that the charging bull elephant known as the McCain-Kennedy-Kyl-Bush amnesty (the operative word in that description being “bull”) has been stunned by a two-by-four between the eyes in form of a populist/conservative uprising and, for now, is staggering backwards with stars and little bluebirds circling its head. . .

. . .it would seem a good time to see what might actually need to be done where immigration is concerned.

For my money, David Frum pretty much nails it in this op-ed in the L.A. Times. Read it! That bull elephant may be preparing to charge again.

Here are a few other miscellaneous items from that old issue of R.D. [Cover Image] (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here. And Parts 1, 2 and 3 below.)

• The positioning statement on the cover says, “Articles of Lasting Interest.” Well, I would say so. Forty-six years later I’m reading them and writing about them. Now that’s truth in advertising!

• There is a profile of the amazing black female athlete, Wilma Rudolph, recounting her performance at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. The article originally appeared in The Rotarian magazine and was written by some fellow named Alex Haley. Of course, Haley was never heard from again.

• Turn a page and suddenly you encounter this, vaguely unsettling apparition . . .

A woman with a cupcake on her head and, if the copy is to be believed, egg in her hair.

• And this—the answer to a question that had plagued mankind and thwarted our most brilliant scientists for decades. [The Question]. I can hear the shame-soaked taunts now: “Pore smotherer!”

• There is also a profile of JFK’s newly installed Secretary of Defense, a man who, at 44, had only recently been appointed President of Ford Motor Company.  “A close-up of the tireless, incisive management expert who gave up millions as newly-elected president of Ford to take on ‘the most thankless $25,000-a-year job in the world.'”

His name—Robert McNamara. Of course, he didn’t know just how thankless it would be. By the time of his departure from Defense in 1968, McNamara would become the focal point for seething, irrational anti-war rage that was fashionable among hippies, campus radicals and young lefty Hollywood types like Jane Fonda.

On November 2, 1965, protestor Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of McNamara’s Pentagon office, after dousing himself in gasoline. When people are doing that, that’s pretty much the definition of a thankless job.

On page after page I found the beginning threads of stories that can be followed right into our headlines this morning. Threads like the article about the new Cuban refugees fleeing the tinhorn revolutionary that had recently taken over Cuba—”Castro Betrayed Our Country!” Or the one about the bright hopes for peace and harmony in barely-12-year-old Israel—”Sound of Singing in Israel.”

And thus  I wonder. . . What innocuous stories in this month’s Reader’s Digest are the opening scenes of a drama (comedy, tragedy or farce) that will still be playing out four or five decades from now?

Snapped at a airport in Japan. . .

From the very amusing Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness (Note: some mildly off-color commentary), where you will also find. . .

This is probably my favorite item in the entire issue. The writer is Harland Manchester (a name, by the way, that shouts “fictional character in a bad romance novel) and his article is pretty much an expansion of the subtitle; or to paraphrase, “Space is scary and we have better things to do with our money than try to keep up with shoe-waving Soviet dictators.”

If there is a whiff of geezerism or fogeyosity wafting from his complaints, you should know that Mr. Manchester was born in 1898.

In May of 1961, the Mercury Space program was well underway. In fact a couple of monkeys had already been shot into suborbital space. And a few months before this issue went to press, a chimpanzee named Ham had shown that he had “the right stuff” in Mercury Redstone 2.

Harland Manchester wrote a couple of books in the 1940s about science and technology and even has an IMDB listing for writing a 10-minute short starring Chill Wills—1944’s “The Immortal Blacksmith.

A coffee table not likely to flow with my wife’s decorating plans.

On page 37 we find the above declaration over an article by Hanson W. Baldwin. It’s easy to forget that Muslim radicals didn’t invent the use of hostage taking as a instrument of low-instensity warfare.

 

When this article was published, Hanson had already been the Naval Editor for the New York Times for almost 20 years (A Naval Editor!, that was back in the day when the Gray Lady could be taken seriously about matters of national security), and had won a Pulitzer in 1943 for his coverage of naval strategy in Pacific Theater during World War II. He first went to work for the Times in, get this, 1928. He died in 1991.

The article itemizes all the provocative incidents the Soviets and the Red Chinese had perpetrated in recent years, several of which resulted in the deaths of American servicemen. Of course, the mother of all Soviet provocations wouldn’t hit the headlines for about 17 months.

In searching for additional information on Hanson W. Baldwin, a came across this—the transcript of a talk he gave to The Empire Club of Toronto in January of 1940. The talk, supplemented by “lantern slides,” was titled “Some Strategic Aspects of the War in 1940.”

Of course in January of 1940, “The War” was the localized European spat involving Germany, France and England. Hitler had not yet invaded the Netherlands, Belgium or Denmark–not to mention France. It’s fascinating (to me anyway) to read Baldwin’s analysis of the situation and attempts to predict what will happen.

He was right about a few things. Wrong about a lot of others. But then, everybody was. Most grossly understimated the madness, aggresion and power-hunger of the enemy. They still do.

{Bonus: For amature students of Freudian imagery in vintage ads, look at the Coke ad on the opposite page and try to count the sexually-suggestive symbols and proxies. It’s like David Lynch was the art director.}

I just got the news. He was a few months shy of his 99th birthday.

Uncle Ross was not my uncle, but rather the uncle of my father-in-law. He was a fascinating, chatty presence at a few Thanksgiving dinners in recent years. I didn’t know him well. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever heard his last name.

The handful of conversations I had with him were rich with historical detail. Until very recently, he was sharp and quite active. In fact, he had grudgingly surrendured his driver’s license only a year or so ago. When I chatted with him this last Christmas, he was formulating a scheme to get it back. He was tired of sitting around. He had an itch to ramble.

Here’s just a sample of what I gleaned from one of our chats back at Christmastime:

Knowing he had been a professional baker for most of his working life, I asked him how he had gotten started in that field. He said it had started back when he was a 9-year-old kid “during the war. . .”

Of course, at first I thought he meant World War II, but after some quick mental math I realized he had to be talking about “The Great War,” World War I.  Ross would have been five years old at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and 10 at its conclusion “over there.”

He said tens of thousands of troops were moving through the U.S. Army base at “Camp Bowie” right outside Fort Worth every month. (Today, the name Camp Bowie identifies a trendy area of west of downtown in the center of “The Arts District.”)

He went on to describe how, as a nine-year-old he started buying boxes of fried pies from a local bakery and carrying them over to Camp Bowie to sell to the solders for 15 cents. This venture grew in size and scale to the point that he was able to provide significant support to his family and, as Ross described it, give himself some pretty handsome “walking around money” for a little kid.

Thus a 60-year affair with baked goods began.

Like reading a 1961 Reader’s Digest, talking to a nonagenerian is like traveling in a time machine—except a magazine can’t provide vivid additional detail or answer my questions after it’s told a story. How grateful I am for the eye-opening trip to Fort Worth in the early decades of the 20th Century. 

Uncle Ross was a book I now wish I’d started sooner. The chapters I had the privilege to read were a rewarding window into another time.

Why am I live-blogging a 46-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest? For the long answer, see the previous post. The short answer? “Because nobody has any danged historical perspective anymore.” Besides, the niche is wide open. I pretty much own the old-Reader’s-Digest-live-blogging position. So here goes.

When this copy of Reader’s Digest (“Articles of Lasting Interest” it says on the cover) hit the grocery store check out lanes in April of 1961, I was not yet 18 months old.  JFK had taken the oath of office only a few months earlier. The first ever airing of a Beatles song on American radio was still almost two years away.

Essentially, it was still the ’50s. What we think of as the ’60s wouldn’t really begin until the Kennedy assassination in the Autumn of ’63.

On page 29 we find a full-page color ad for the new Chevy Corvair Monza.

Note that the car comes equipped “with a de luxe steering wheel.” I wonder when deluxe quit being two words? Broken up like that, the modifier looks French.  

The Corvair was a very cool and innovative car design that was ultimately killed by a publicity-grubbing, fear-mongering Ralph Nader. The murder weapon was his book, Unsafe at Any Speed. Years after the Corvair had been discontinued due to plummeting sales, tests by the NHTSA and several car magazines demonstrated that a lot of Nader’s accusations against the Corvair were bogus.

Nader, Unhinged in Any Era.