Category Archives: don’t be a fool

August 20, 2012, 4:34 pm

Winston Churchill thinks Paul Ryan says stupid things.

For historians, the fun of presidential election season comes when candidates start playing games with history. Often this takes the form of “you don’t know me, but remember that great guy? I’m like that guy.” The thing is, politicians generally don’t know squat about that guy; they’re just looting the iconography of civilization for their own momentary convenience.

Case in point: Paul Ryan tries to get voters to understand him by saying,

“You know what I’m a big fan of Winston Churchill. I have a bust of Winston Churchill in my office right now,” Ryan said. “Winston Churchill probably got it right when he said the Americans can be counted upon to do the right thing only after they’ve exhausted all the other possibilities, so I think we’re at that point. This is an inflection point, this is a choice of two futures.”

Winston Churchill, of course, did not have politics anything like…

April 18, 2012, 8:56 am

Why Historians Never Trust Their “Sources”

By David Silbey

I couldn’t resist the scare quotes, sorry. A source may be a source, or it might be a practical joke:

The portrait of “Ensign Chuck Hord,” framed in the heavy gilt typical of government offices, may be the greatest—or perhaps only—prank in Pentagon art history. “Chuck Hord” can’t be found in Navy records of the day. It isn’t even a real painting. The textured, 30-year-old photo is actually of Capt. Eldridge Hord III, 53 years old, known to friends as “Tuck,” a military retiree with a beer belly and graying hair who lives in Burke, Va.

Even as I write, someone’s dissertation on the semiotics of paintings in the Pentagon is having a chapter revised, I’m sure.

September 16, 2010, 8:39 am

Oy

By Neddy Merrill

By Mark D. Fefer of the Seattle Weekly:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

The gifted artist is alive and well, thankfully. But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

Norris views the situation with her customary sense of the world’s complexity, and absurdity. When FBI agents, on a recent visit,…

September 2, 2010, 8:14 am

Couldn't you be hunting down some war criminals or something?

By Neddy Merrill

Latest internet outrage is a video of some girl throwing puppies into a river. Daily Mail. Gawker.

Hilarity: 4chan users on the case, other commenters complaining about how the site is overrun by “justicefags.” (Just the interest of the stronger, no homo.) Bonus hilarity: she’s from Bosnia. There’s something that really bothers me about the outrage being so out of proportion to the wrongness, but no one’s in the mood for a round of the Peter Singer game; just cut-n-paste from the Michael Vick discussions.