As you well know, one does not have to go far at all into the newspapers of the time to find very prominent Americans siding with Hitler. Charles fucking Lindberg was a prominent Nazi supporter, as was Father Coughlin. Plenty of Republicans in Congress were pro-Hitler as well.
Hell, there was the McCormick/Patterson newspaper family. Robert R McCormick's Chicago Tribune published "FDR's War Plans!" (War Plan Orange, handed off to him by a sympathetic Army general) the week before Pearl Harbor. His cousins, Joe Patterson's New York Daily News and Cissy Patterson's Washington Times-Herald (that she ran under Hearst) regularly ran anti-FDR screeds even during the war.
Brilliant stuff, Roy. Your grasp of the '40s vernacular is sterling -- I heard it in my head being read in Humphrey Bogart's voice, which made it pure perfection. Yeah, Bogie was a bit of a commie, but it still worked, LOL
I especially liked the eternal rightwing schtick of goalpost moving: first they tell you the bad thing will never happen, then they tell you the bad thing might happen but it isn't *really* so bad, and when it does happen they tell you the bad thing is really a GOOD thing, actually. Today, Ross Douthat is a master of that grift.
Just remember that you can't disprove a counterfactual, and you'll have a rewarding career in the right-wing grifting industry. If Trump had been President, this never would have happened!
Walter Winchell for me, though politically that'd be exactly wrong.
The 'Hitler isnʼt bugging the Yids' stuff would've had more 'not that he shouldnʼt be!'—few American anti-Semutes were at all shy about it back then. Similarly, they might have brought-up the Nuremberg Laws' great debt to all-American Jim Crow. (Though I guess R.E. may be transposing _exactly_ our current crowd of fascists to then, rather than thinking of their equivalents…in which case the Left would shun _me_ for my support of sexual libertinism, women not keeping to their natural rôles after the war, and Inverts' Rights.)
'Sister-boys' or 'pansies' rather than 'lady-boys'.
Where's the suddenly-discovered anti-racism of 'Why are you suddenly so mad at the Japs?'? (It has that bit of truth that makes propaganda work better—I doubt so many isolationists and Fursters would have 180d so quickly if it hadn't been what they thought were brown sub-men attacking).
I was expecting a 'fight the real enemy' for June of '41,something on the order of now feeling better about Hitler.
Top drawer stuff, my friend. In the contemporary vernacular I think they call this 'relatable content', at least it is if you're up on your world history. Trebles all around!
If you’re not familiar with it, you might enjoy the Pet Shop Boys’ “I’m With Stupid”—ostensibly about a relationship, but clearly about Dubya and Blair. It includes the line, “Do we even have a relationship so special in your heart?”
Having grown up with the Depression and WWII generation, I can say that there were many Americans who thought like your characters before and during the war. They hated Roosevelt, blamed him for the Depression (I know, I know), thought he provoked the Japanese to get the US into the war, was a Jew who was only against Hitler because Hitler exposed the Jewish Rothschild banking conspiracy. They thought America should join with Hitler in attacking the Soviet Union, shouldn't do anything about Japan and should expel all the Japanese and Chinese in the US. Some hoarded ration stamps, some hoarded gasoline and fuel oil (a friend's back yard had to be removed a few years ago because the WWII owner had stored illegal fuel oil in an underground brick cistern that leaked), some had secret deals with farmers for rationed food items. I could go on. Some of these things various family members believed but more were tales they told on their neighbors. The Greatest Generation had a lot of weasels, fascists and sociopaths, and don't you forget it, buddy! We sanitize all parts of American history, not just slavery and the Civil War, but the genocide of indigenous people, our imperialism, our anti-intellectualism, and our phemomenally dysfunctional, illogical and corrupt system of justice. The true history of America during the Depression and WWII is much darker than we are led to believe.
The weird thing about that era is that in rural South Dakota there were lots of staunch FDR Democrats who never forgot that his government programs saved them during the Great Depression. Alas, now they’re all gone and we’re left with their ungrateful, resentful, Fox-watching, Trump-humping descendants.
His little hometown still has a billboard that they’re his birthplace, and DWU in Mitchell still proudly claims him, but most people—if they remember him at all—know him as a dirty hippie from their Conservative Catechism.
Well, it's certainly arguable that the government DOES need to save these people every generation, but to assume gratitude as a response is not evidence-based.
It also helps to take credit for Doing Good Things. Our neighborhood still has sidewalks with WPA printed in them. When you do something good for people, let them know it was *your* Big Government that helped them out!
That was my maternal grandfather, he was a staunch Democrat as is my mother. My paternal grandfather hated Roosevelt and worked for Francis Case and Karl Mundt. I think Case employed him to be a land caretaker during the depression after my grandfather's hardware store went under. My father's family ended up out in Igloo where the uranium for the nuclear bombs was mined during WW2, probably again due to Mundt and Chase
Sadly, today we all say "The French" or "The Irish" or "The Italians" like we're all middle school geography teachers. This is what the Goddamn Political Correctness has done to us.
Roy, are you a prophet? Or a wizard or something? I just can’t fathom how you continually marry biting, clever satire with an uncomplicated, entertaining prose that frankly embarrasses my own modest efforts. Like I managed not to spill soup on my keyboard today, and that’s a win
Sometimes I think about the sheer effort involved in creating even one of these works of art that Roy just dashes off 5 days a week, right on schedule. And then I have to go lie down and have a rest.
We're absolutely headed towards a "Plot Against America" scenario. It seems pretty unlikely that Ukraine will win their war with Russia by themselves, or that the US, NATO, and the EU will intervene in the only way that will win that war in time for Ukraine to survive, by getting involved in the fighting. That will leave the recriminations over this lost war to sour and divide our politics for the 2024 election. "We should have been more involved and maybe Ukraine would have survived." some of us will say. The response will be, "All your do-gooder interventionism managed to do was to sucker Ukraine into the mass pointless deaths in Kyiv after it was encircled and starved out. Better to have never gotten involved at all someplace we weren't going to really start a war with Russia over, and really, what place should the US risk nuclear holocaust to defend, other than the US itself?". Of course the latter argument is going to have to cover its inherent cowardice by blaming it all on the Jews or some other scapegoat. It was really Zelensky's fault, him and Soros, for unnecessarily provoking the Russians.
Be wary of those who'd be happy to fight this war down to the last Ukrainian. Or the Brzezinski wannabe's who would flood the zone with Stingers and Javelins, hoping to give the Russians a bloody nose like we did in Afghanistan. And how did that turn out for Afghanistan?
Hell, I don't know what to do. If I was in Zelensky's place, I would have surrendered on the first day, just because I can't handle being responsible for mass death. So it's a very, very good thing I'm not in Zelensky's place.
All right, Roy, what doucments described in what obscure doctoral dissertation from an Ivy League school did you dig that text out of?
none, but this is an interesting source: https://www-jstor-org.dclibrary.idm.oclc.org/stable/1901419?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Here's another jstor link outside the DC library system:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1901419
I really like jstor for all sorts of reasons...
As you well know, one does not have to go far at all into the newspapers of the time to find very prominent Americans siding with Hitler. Charles fucking Lindberg was a prominent Nazi supporter, as was Father Coughlin. Plenty of Republicans in Congress were pro-Hitler as well.
Hell, there was the McCormick/Patterson newspaper family. Robert R McCormick's Chicago Tribune published "FDR's War Plans!" (War Plan Orange, handed off to him by a sympathetic Army general) the week before Pearl Harbor. His cousins, Joe Patterson's New York Daily News and Cissy Patterson's Washington Times-Herald (that she ran under Hearst) regularly ran anti-FDR screeds even during the war.
Brilliant. Just... brilliant.
Brilliant stuff, Roy. Your grasp of the '40s vernacular is sterling -- I heard it in my head being read in Humphrey Bogart's voice, which made it pure perfection. Yeah, Bogie was a bit of a commie, but it still worked, LOL
I especially liked the eternal rightwing schtick of goalpost moving: first they tell you the bad thing will never happen, then they tell you the bad thing might happen but it isn't *really* so bad, and when it does happen they tell you the bad thing is really a GOOD thing, actually. Today, Ross Douthat is a master of that grift.
"...being read in Humphrey Bogart's voice"
It was James Cagney for me...
Sheldon Leonard would have been pretty good, too.
I heard Edward G. Robinson, or Steve Brodie from Out of the Past.
What was that line of Brodie's? "A dame with a gun is like..." I love how it just falls completely flat. What a loser.
“A dame with a rod is like a guy with a knitting needle”
“He worked with a sort of stupid, oily gent by the name of Jack Fisher. We called ourselves detectives.”
I was hearing Allen Jenkins.
Just remember that you can't disprove a counterfactual, and you'll have a rewarding career in the right-wing grifting industry. If Trump had been President, this never would have happened!
I read that as "Trump, has-been President", which for many reasons feels both good and horrible to read back...
Trump was a has-been before he ever was.
And yes, Trump has been President. To our everlasting shame as a nation.
Walter Winchell for me, though politically that'd be exactly wrong.
The 'Hitler isnʼt bugging the Yids' stuff would've had more 'not that he shouldnʼt be!'—few American anti-Semutes were at all shy about it back then. Similarly, they might have brought-up the Nuremberg Laws' great debt to all-American Jim Crow. (Though I guess R.E. may be transposing _exactly_ our current crowd of fascists to then, rather than thinking of their equivalents…in which case the Left would shun _me_ for my support of sexual libertinism, women not keeping to their natural rôles after the war, and Inverts' Rights.)
'Sister-boys' or 'pansies' rather than 'lady-boys'.
Where's the suddenly-discovered anti-racism of 'Why are you suddenly so mad at the Japs?'? (It has that bit of truth that makes propaganda work better—I doubt so many isolationists and Fursters would have 180d so quickly if it hadn't been what they thought were brown sub-men attacking).
I was expecting a 'fight the real enemy' for June of '41,something on the order of now feeling better about Hitler.
But yes, very good.
Is Ross Douthat a master at anything but bating?
My kind of column! Full of Mugs and Good time Charlies. Hobos and Bunko Artists.
Chumps and their floy-floy need a one-way ticket to Palookaville is what I'm sayin'.
This guy needs to say "See?" more, like at the end of every single sentence, see?
Ya git me?
Walter, you’re all washed up.
Top drawer stuff, my friend. In the contemporary vernacular I think they call this 'relatable content', at least it is if you're up on your world history. Trebles all around!
And this from a historian! Very touched.
The Special Relationship is a major part of my gig.
If you’re not familiar with it, you might enjoy the Pet Shop Boys’ “I’m With Stupid”—ostensibly about a relationship, but clearly about Dubya and Blair. It includes the line, “Do we even have a relationship so special in your heart?”
#ClivedenSet
That gave me chills, and not in a good way.
"...the place was a mess — plenty of crime and inflation, and full of Bolsheviks and fancy-pants artistes and fallen women and lady-boys..."
Oh, come on. You stole that from the latest RNC talking points, didn't you?
*looks for the meme of the stork in the toilet stall = liberal world vision*
I'm holding out for a world where every subway car is filled with drag queens and women in burkas. And a taco truck on every corner, of course.
Fancy-pants is such a great phrase.
Having grown up with the Depression and WWII generation, I can say that there were many Americans who thought like your characters before and during the war. They hated Roosevelt, blamed him for the Depression (I know, I know), thought he provoked the Japanese to get the US into the war, was a Jew who was only against Hitler because Hitler exposed the Jewish Rothschild banking conspiracy. They thought America should join with Hitler in attacking the Soviet Union, shouldn't do anything about Japan and should expel all the Japanese and Chinese in the US. Some hoarded ration stamps, some hoarded gasoline and fuel oil (a friend's back yard had to be removed a few years ago because the WWII owner had stored illegal fuel oil in an underground brick cistern that leaked), some had secret deals with farmers for rationed food items. I could go on. Some of these things various family members believed but more were tales they told on their neighbors. The Greatest Generation had a lot of weasels, fascists and sociopaths, and don't you forget it, buddy! We sanitize all parts of American history, not just slavery and the Civil War, but the genocide of indigenous people, our imperialism, our anti-intellectualism, and our phemomenally dysfunctional, illogical and corrupt system of justice. The true history of America during the Depression and WWII is much darker than we are led to believe.
The weird thing about that era is that in rural South Dakota there were lots of staunch FDR Democrats who never forgot that his government programs saved them during the Great Depression. Alas, now they’re all gone and we’re left with their ungrateful, resentful, Fox-watching, Trump-humping descendants.
Liberal. War hero, Senator, and Democratic candidate for president George McGovern would have to move to California if he was still around...
His little hometown still has a billboard that they’re his birthplace, and DWU in Mitchell still proudly claims him, but most people—if they remember him at all—know him as a dirty hippie from their Conservative Catechism.
So the government needs to save these people EVERY generation just to get some gratitude?
Well, it's certainly arguable that the government DOES need to save these people every generation, but to assume gratitude as a response is not evidence-based.
It also helps to take credit for Doing Good Things. Our neighborhood still has sidewalks with WPA printed in them. When you do something good for people, let them know it was *your* Big Government that helped them out!
That was my maternal grandfather, he was a staunch Democrat as is my mother. My paternal grandfather hated Roosevelt and worked for Francis Case and Karl Mundt. I think Case employed him to be a land caretaker during the depression after my grandfather's hardware store went under. My father's family ended up out in Igloo where the uranium for the nuclear bombs was mined during WW2, probably again due to Mundt and Chase
All true.
Of course, among the post-mature anti-fascists was our Big Business who were concerned with going to war against a market where they had subsidiaries.
Fealty to business is why sanctions that would really hurt Russia are impossible and fossil fuel addicts are financially supporting the invasion.
Propaganda is awesome.
"sexed-up snail-eaters on the Seine"
2 marks! Tho a bit too je ne sais quoi for a band name.
The photo is cherce, too. That was a flick too far for some folks...
Sadly, today we all say "The French" or "The Irish" or "The Italians" like we're all middle school geography teachers. This is what the Goddamn Political Correctness has done to us.
Roy, are you a prophet? Or a wizard or something? I just can’t fathom how you continually marry biting, clever satire with an uncomplicated, entertaining prose that frankly embarrasses my own modest efforts. Like I managed not to spill soup on my keyboard today, and that’s a win
Sometimes I think about the sheer effort involved in creating even one of these works of art that Roy just dashes off 5 days a week, right on schedule. And then I have to go lie down and have a rest.
See above
Take yer wins where ya finds 'em
Hate to click "Like" on something that's so Sad But True. Great writing is what I'm trying to applaud.
LOL a child's garden of 1940s-isms!
We're absolutely headed towards a "Plot Against America" scenario. It seems pretty unlikely that Ukraine will win their war with Russia by themselves, or that the US, NATO, and the EU will intervene in the only way that will win that war in time for Ukraine to survive, by getting involved in the fighting. That will leave the recriminations over this lost war to sour and divide our politics for the 2024 election. "We should have been more involved and maybe Ukraine would have survived." some of us will say. The response will be, "All your do-gooder interventionism managed to do was to sucker Ukraine into the mass pointless deaths in Kyiv after it was encircled and starved out. Better to have never gotten involved at all someplace we weren't going to really start a war with Russia over, and really, what place should the US risk nuclear holocaust to defend, other than the US itself?". Of course the latter argument is going to have to cover its inherent cowardice by blaming it all on the Jews or some other scapegoat. It was really Zelensky's fault, him and Soros, for unnecessarily provoking the Russians.
Reluctantly hearted. But yeah...
Be wary of those who'd be happy to fight this war down to the last Ukrainian. Or the Brzezinski wannabe's who would flood the zone with Stingers and Javelins, hoping to give the Russians a bloody nose like we did in Afghanistan. And how did that turn out for Afghanistan?
Hell, I don't know what to do. If I was in Zelensky's place, I would have surrendered on the first day, just because I can't handle being responsible for mass death. So it's a very, very good thing I'm not in Zelensky's place.
Excellent. Rendezvous with Destiny is WWI. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45077/i-have-a-rendezvous-with-death
Never heard of Lord Haw-Haw until now...thank you, Roy!