Osama bin Hitler Bonaparte Boothe

Uh-oh.

Is not being stupid not enough?

There is a fascinating discussion over at Intellectual History "How Should Intellectual Historians Deal with Erroneous, Foolish, or Vicious Thought?" As Ben writes in the post, historians generally don't have a problem taking seriously egregiously wrong[1] ideas from the past and applying a more detached and objective approach to these ideas in order to establish their context, learn more about their adherents, and investigate their causes and effects.

However, what is the historian's role in shedding light on egregiously wrong ideas in the present?

In his brief post, Ben provides three things to think about as historians work to identify or otherwise confront wrong ideas in the present:

1) "People do express opinions about the past that are simply wrong. And as historians, we have a responsibility, perhaps even a duty, to point out when people use bad history to bolster their arguments in public debate."

2) "significant ideas that we happen to believe are wrong, inane, or even deeply evil should still be taken seriously."

3) "Of course how we do this . . . is a more complicated question."

I certainly struggle with this stuff. In some of my own posts, I've grappled with similar issues: trying to understand the relationship of deistic beliefs to historical inquiry and the scientific process and recoiling at the kind of asinine ideas that historical ignorance can foster, among others.

I also have a long list of posts-in-process that I may never finish but that share the theme of "what the f#*k?!?!?! Do (Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin/Newt Gingrich/insert your favorite blowhard here) actually believe what they're spewing, or are they blatantly & cynically manipulating the historical record on purpose?"

I like what Tim Lacy has to say in response to Ben's post, as it's relevant to the question I continue to reflect upon -- namely "what is history?":

Our job is to help tease through the hierarchy of causes and sort out the probability of relevance. We're experts on the probability of relevance.

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[1] By "wrong" Ben seems to be suggesting both ideas that are "deeply incorrect" in an objective sense (an example from my own area of study would be the miasmatic theory of disease etiology) and ideas that are wrong in a moral sense (i.e., slavery).

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Peer attentively into the bubbles . . .

History and statistics are both fun and educational!



Dr. Hans Rosling has also presented at a TED conference:

The End Times are Upon Us!

Uh-oh:

If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she'll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here.

Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011. (source).

I thought that the End Times were coming on December 21, 2012?

Before this, I thought that the End Times were coming at Y2K?[1]

Oh, wait. The End Times were supposed to come even earlier than Y2K: some time between 1500 and 1800,[2] or even earlier[3].

Silly me. Of course, this time the End Timers are correct.

p.s., let's revisit this on May 22, 2011, and we'll have a good chuckle. If I'm wrong, I'll by you a beer.

Noteworthy website: Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project

We at the Northwest History Network recently featured historians Trevor Griffey and Felicia Williams and union leader Keith Edwards at our quarterly public event. The event provided some comparisons-&-contrasts between Portland's and Seattle's labor and civil rights history in the second half of the twentieth century.

Trevor is a Seattle-based historian, finishing his PhD at the University of Washington. He co-edited a recently-published book, Black Power at Work, and he serves as the Project Coordinator of a highly informative website, the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project (SCRLHP).

The SCRLHP contributes to our knowledge in the following ways:

Perhaps it's time to allow Texas to secede?

We awoke late last week to Texas governor Rick Perry's words coming through the radio. It was one of those mornings where I was waking slowly, so the first bit of his segment was incorporated into my dream. Here is what I thought I heard him say:

If you want to live in a state that has high taxes, high regulations — that is favorable to smoking marijuana and gay marriage — then move to California . . . [In Texas,] we still believe in freedom,freedom from over-taxation, over-regulation, over-litigation.

This is what he actually said:

Eat more cheese! No, wait: Eat less cheese! Like we said: Eat more cheese!

A recent report found that the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture designed and implemented a $12 million marketing campaign last year to help Domino's Pizza recover from a period of sagging sales and declining customer satisfaction. The campaign that the USDA's subsidiary organization Dairy Management designed centered on increasing the amount of cheese on Domino's pizzas. Dairy Management is one of eighteen USDA programs that exist to market agricultural products, including beef and pork; the "Got Milk?" campaign is one of Dairy Management's most well-known and successful initiatives.

Meanwhile, other USDA initiatives continued to fund research and marketing campaigns to try to convince Americans to eat less cheese as a way to sustain a more healthy diet and lower saturated fat consumption. The USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion runs on an annual budget nearly half that of the single campaign for Domino's Pizza, $6.5 million.

As part of its campaigns to increase cheese consumption generally, Dairy Management funded research to look into claims put forth in 2003 that intake of calcium would help people lose weight. By 2004, this research contradicted the weight loss claims, but Dairy Management ignored the findings and persisted for three more years with their campaign correlating calcium intake with weight loss. They only stopped their disingenuous campaign on the order of the Federal Trade Commission, which itself was finally acting on a petition brought by a physicians advocacy group two years prior.[1]

The dynamic described above seems rather contradictory and self-defeating: One USDA team is urging Americans to eat more cheese, while another, at the same time, is urging Americans to eat less cheese. To me, it's illustrative of some unfortunate aspects of American society:

Bamboozeled by sports franchises

There was a fascinating thread recently on H-Urban in response to a question about the true costs of professional sports franchises. This is a topic I've long wondered about. Over the years I've heard some critiques about hidden or externalized costs of sports facilities & stadia. I've also witnessed—usually from afar and with only part of my attention—sports team owners playing one city against others every few years when local subsidy agreements are nearing an end, or when they perceive that it's time to build a new stadium. Some examples of this include when team owner Art Model moved the NFL's Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore (where they became the Ravens) in 1995, and when chairperson Clay Bennett moved the NBA's Supersonics from Seattle to Oklahoma (where they became the Thunder) in 2008.

Professional sports are really big business in this country (as are certain college sports, claims to the contrary notwithstanding), and team owners generally treat their franchises as revenue-generating businesses. Owners threaten to relocate their businesses when they don't wring from municipal governments the public subsidy agreements they feel are their due; "free market" adherents would claim this is as it should be.

Many fans of professional sports, however, invest in teams the kind of emotional attachment that in some ways can only be described as religious.

The problem arises as a result of the difference between the pragmatic, capitalist perspective of the sports franchise owner and the emotional, religious perspective of many sports fans. As the discussion and sources below allude, the economic returns on sports team investments tend not to meet initial projections, which means that taxpayers pay much more in subsidies than they originally bargained for. Owners generate their original business plans and subsidy packages with threats—variously implied or expressed, as needed—to municipal government and city residents that they will move the franchise if their proposal is not approved. City residents—the voters—then face the decision without full knowledge of the amount they're about to subsidize millionaire (sometimes billionaire) sports franchise owners; many of these citizens also carry with them their emotional, religious attachment to the team & the team's history, potentially clouding rational judgment.

This is where the bamboozling comes in: owners take advantage of sports fans by obscuring economics behind a shroud of emotional manipulation.

Key parts of H-Net discussion & sources below.

Noteworthy website: "Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City"

This is a fascinating web-based project, showcasing the decline of St. Louis in the twentieth century using interactive visuals and selected documents. The site combines interactive maps, primary source documents, and explanatory text that make this source a valuable graphical representation of racism at work in the United States.

The image above is a screenshot from Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the American City. This project accompanies Colin Gordon's book Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (PennPress, 2008) and presents an interactive series of four maps that help illustrate key themes of the book. The colored patches on the map above show where race-restrictive covenants, regulations, and real estate ratings of one kind or another existed during the first half of the twentieth century.

Ignorance by any other name would still smell as foul . . .

I've recently been alerted to the escalating bigotry associated with the possibility of having a mosque constructed at/near the former site of the Twin Towers in NYC (here and here). The most shrill voices in opposition to this project include people we have already come to know as ideologically-motivated blowhards who select and manipulate data in any way that will further their political agenda: Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

Just imagine what could have been: Oil-soaked Oregon beaches!

Matt Love wrote an interesting piece in the Sunday Oregonian on the topic of proposed offshore oil drilling along the Oregon coast in the late 1970s.[1]

He begins his article with reference to a 1978 pamphlet "Oregon and offshore oil," written by a body identified as the "Governor's Task Force on Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Development." The year prior, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had determined that prospects for discovering oil off the Oregon and Washington coasts was lowest in the country and, therefore, not worth the hassle.

However, Governor Bob Straub lobbied the BLM to reconsider this conclusion in the hopes that offshore drilling might, after all, be proven feasible.

"The way we remember the past shapes the way we understand the present and prepare for the future"

The conclusion to Jay Taylor's 1999 book Making Salmon provides some insights into the purpose and practice of history that resonate with me, so I wanted to bring some of these insights to your attention.

Those pesky shape-shifting political parties of ours!

Jennifer asked me a few weeks ago how the current national political system had evolved. I explained my understanding of this process by concentrating on the movement of conservative Democrats in the South into the Republican party after World War II. Opposition to civil rights and perceived threats to state's rights propelled these "Dixiecrats" to change their party affiliation from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Strom Thurmond's unsuccessful 1948 presidential run as part of the State's Rights party was an expression of racist and socially conservative sentiments* centered in the South; Thurmond's efforts to craft Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" helped the latter win the presidency in 1968 [Source]. This realignment helped bring into the Republican party some core constituencies that we find currently, such as the religious fundamentalists and social conservatives with varying shades of implicit and explicit racism.

Over at Edge of the American West, Eric has recently written an excellent post about how the ideologies of our present political parties evolved. His post (and the comment thread) is much more illuminating and thorough than my cursory overview.** Yet another reason to love EotAW and benefit from the hard work of others!

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* Though often correlated, I'm not insinuating there that these two things are always the same thing.

** Which is just one reason why, I suppose, he gets the awards and earns the big bucks.

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Whites vs. peoples of color in the Pac NW

Before Euro Americans in the Pac NW interred Japanese Americans during World War II, but after they shunted Indians off to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations and at about the same time that they were parading down Oregon's city streets wearing white pointy hoods, some white folks in Toledo, Oregon, ran Japanese people out of town. This is the "Toledo Incident of 1925."

"Tokyo Slough" in Toledo is named for the residential area where Japanese, Korean, and Filippino workers and families lived (red "A" in map below):

The event in 1925 occurred forty-three years after Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, thirty-eight years after a massacre of Chinese miners at Deep Creek, near the confluence of the Snake and Imhaha rivers in eastern Oregon, and about twenty years after a series of "anti-Hindu" riots in Bellingham, Washington and other cities in the region.

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On sports & media-manufactured role models

Tim Keown has written a thought-provoking piece about one of the most recent big-time sports stars who got caught acting like a sociopath. In this case, it's Ben Rothlisberger, star quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers.*

Keown includes a fascinating take on this topic that did not occur to me until I read it (most fascinating part for me in italics):

The whole role-model thing might be the most ludicrous idea ever imagined. The concept of our coddled and impressionable youth drawing life lessons from a guy with a big curveball or an ability to move in the pocket is solely a construct of the industry and its mouthpieces. It was born on the back of myth: the slugger promising the ailing boy a homer, the fearsome defensive tackle tossing his jersey in exchange for a soda. In real life, a kid might model his seven-step drop after Roethlisberger, but beyond that they're both on their own.

I don't specialize in this field of history, but identification of the source of the myth of the sports role model seems accurate. To add to this, consider other corporate- and media-manufactured "role models": Babe Ruth and Red Grange. I don't have time to list them all.

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* Who have two very lucky Super Bowl victories to their credit over the past few years to add to their amazing run in the 1970s. Did I mention the part about them being very very lucky? Particularly against those plucky Arizona Cardinals. Lucky bastards.

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Industry threats in the face of environmental regulation: Crying wolf, or worth heeding?

A few preliminary thoughts on the most recent discussion related to the Portland River Plan (sources cited below):

T. Alan Sprott wrote an OpEd on March 26. He's the vice president of Vigor Industrial LLC in Portland and chair of the Working Waterfront Coalition. Reflecting on a lack of consensus with the Portland River Plan, he argues that

Swimming in the Willamette River in and near Portland

For quite a number of weeks now I've intended to finalize this post about swimming in the Willamette River in and near Portland Harbor. Two discussions about swimming in the river can be found at this Portland Mercury Blogtown post, and at this archived "Think Out Loud" program from Oregon Public Radio.

Now, for some historical context . . .

My very own Avatar review!

Preface

I just recently (and finally) watched Avatar, and I've been trying to craft this commentary for weeks now. Rather than dilly-dally any longer, I've incorporated some final thoughts and present it in all it's imperfections:

Introduction

There are many fascinating threads of analysis that course through the movie. I've read a small portion of reviews and analyses found in my not-at-all-systematic Internet meanderings. A conclusion I've drawn from this research is that I haven't been able to find much written about what seems to me two very important points that connect Avatar with its other relatives in the blockbuster fantasy and sci-fi categories: 1) Why is it (nearly) always the white guy who saves the day? 2) Why is violence so often the solution to violence?

When lived experience expands intellectual understanding

Jennifer and I attended the History Pub event at McMenamins Kennedy School on Monday, Feb. 22. The topic on this evening was “Renewal and Removal in North/Northeast Portland.” Presenters included PSU professor Carl Abbott, Thomas Robinson of Historic Photo Archives, and long-time residents of the area Harvey Rice and Donna Maxey.

This event focused on the drastic changes in the social and built environments of the Albina area of North Portland beginning in the 1950s, particularly in the area bounded by Interstate (west), MLK (east), Alberta (north), and Broadway (south).

I knew some of the basics of this narrative before the presentation -- the general pattern of wide-scale infrastructure changes initiated by white urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s in which working-class and ethnic neighborhoods in a great many American cities were reduced and divided in the name of "urban renewal." However, this presentation has helped me see the area in a much different way, and I'll never again look at this area as I did before.

Portland's "20-minute neighborhoods" and public health

Andy Dworkin wrote an article in the Oregonian, published Feb. 10, 2010, on the topic of public health and the urban landscape.

The article discusses elements of the Portland Plan focused on specific areas of the city where dysfunctional infrastructure tends to contribute to public health problems:

By redesigning the area where people live, they hope to change how they live, making it so simple to move and eat good foods that people start leading a healthier life. Advocates call the concept "working upstream," tackling diseases on a social level instead of an individual one.

As Dworkin outlines, urban plans and infrastructure development projects from the late nineteenth through the 1970s or so often centered on separating areas zoned for industry, commerce, and residences. This separation of land uses came about for very real public health reasons and, later, because of the mobility offered by widespread use of the automobile. However,

the separation of homes and business also wound up fueling some of today's biggest health problems. Sprawling cities that force people to drive long distances to work, school or shopping reduced the amount of exercise people got by replacing walking with increased driving. Diseases linked to sprawl include heat stroke, road rage, obesity, asthma and diabetes.

Whereas the kind of urban changes represented by the "20-minute neighborhood" may have a range of beneficial results, one thing to be mindful of is the impact that this development will likely have on real estate prices in a given neighborhood. That is, creating walkable neighborhoods often raises real estate prices in the area, which, in turn, often leads to gentrification, and gentrification often pushes long-time residents out of a given neighborhood because these residents can't afford to rent or own their homes anymore, and/or these residents lose their connection to the community as their neighbors and community institutions change.

Public health of a privileged class at the cost of diversity, equity, and community cohesion is likely not a productive long-term outcome.

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