Monday Scramble: How To
New at Portico: Last week, we finished a very meaty and thought-provoking book of American history, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, by Jackson Lears. Among other things, Rebirth is a meditation on the noxious potential of “good ideas.”
As the historian Richard Slotkin has brilliantly shown, since the early colonial era a faith in regeneration through violence underlay the mythos of the American frontier. With the closing of the frontier (announced by the US census in 1890), violence turned outward, toward empire. But there was more going on than the refashioning of frontier myth0logy. American longings for renewal continued to be shaped by persistent evangelical traditions, and overshadowed by the shattering experience of the Civil War. American seekers merged Protestant dreams of spirtual rebirth with secular projects of purification — cleansing the body politic os secessionist treason during the war and political corruption afterward, reasserting elite power against restive farmers and workers, taming capital in the name of the public good, reviving individual and national vitality by banning the use of alcohol, granting women the right to vote, disenfranchising African-Americans, restricting the flow of immigrants, and acquiring an overseas empire.
The must-read book in this week’s Book Review is The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson’s book about his grandfather, Paul Nitze’s, and Nitze’s colleague and sparring partner, George Kennan. But the must-read review is Leon Wieseltier’s estocada of Norman Podhoretz’s cranky new book. For a link, turn to the Book Review review.
This week’s New Yorker story, “The Lower River,” poses all the usual needling challenges that we have come to expect from Paul Theroux, whom, even though you didn’t ask, we want you to know that we think of as one of the unhappiest writers ever to draw a breath. Perhaps the unhappiness is reserved for the writing. “The Lower River” is a good story withal, and we recommend reading it.
This week, we went to see Mike Judge’s Extract, and we’d like to share a little souvenir of the film that we nicked from IMDb. Until you’ve seen Extract, you may think that this photo of Dustin Milligan is a slice of light beefcake, but afterward, if you file the image away as “How to Clean a Pool,” it’ll make you giggle.
