Not only have I ignored writing my columns for the Reader I have only rarely and half heartedly attempted to write anything in this blog for a very long time. I have made new attempts to write a book or perhaps it would be more accurate to say compile a book from old columns. But as with my political career I am inclined to postpone it because there is so much more I feel I should know about. That mostly means knowing just how far American winners have fall short throughout our history of being a beacon to the world in being paragons of virtue. That should not come as a surprise to any American who has taken the time to seriously study the founder of the nation’s predominant religion Christianity. That founder made it clear that we humans are sinners. But like so many other things he is reported to have said Americans don’t really like his message. Today’s self proclaimed “republicans” particularly are offended by the story of the wealthy young man who objected to the advice to give all his wealth away.
Two books are missing from this photo. I’m waiting for a book American Aurora about the newspaper at Thomas Jefferson’s beck and call who helped him found Jefferson’s Democratic Republican Party. Yes, That was its name. Jefferson was the founder of both parties. He’s on my mind because my very Republican Grandfather did now share a very high opinion of our third President. I read the reviews of this book thirty years ago and kept it on my mind to read. UPS should have it on my doorstep in a day or two.
The book on the left was written in about 2007. I read its review as well but only now bought it at Barnes and Noble’s this morning as Claudia and I shopped for tour books of Washington DC where we will take our grandsons in August for a week of social studies. I read the introduction which explained it was a reprint that was restating the author’s opions from almost twenty years earlier. Affirmative Action has always been for white people until LBJ attempted to dismantle the official political persecution of Black Americans. I thought it would be a good read as I consider writing a chapter called something like “The journey of a nigger lover.”
The small book about the Kansas Missouri border I found after reading a wonderful book for junior high school kids that the State of Kansas was having them read in 1952 when I was a baby. I left Kansas for Minnesota in 1963 and have never visited a lot of the state that I know so much about. Someday I would like to visit the state and get a better look at it.
The book about the California Gold Rush is one I bought at a used book store ten years ago when I began reading its introduction about how a pro-slave Democrat shot an anti slavery Republican to death in a duel. The murderer was a judge and the victim had been a US Senator or something like that. This was before the Civil War and while I’d never opened the book after buying it I was reminded of it by the other book in the photo. I’d read the review of Jean Pfaelzer’s book a long before our trip to China. I read a chapter of it to Claudia in preparation for our China trip but didn’t get far. Now I’m almost half way through the book which I felt I should read after reading a half dozen books recently about our miserable treatment of the American Indian. The Chinese who left a crowded Onion soaked nation for many gold mountains in the US and Australia before and after our Civil War were not quite slaughtered like the California Indians but their situation mirrored the treatment of newly freed slaves. This should not be surprising considering the vast numbers of southerners who had journeyed to California from the lands of the South they stripped from Choctaw, Chickasaw and Creeks to mine for Cotton with free black labor.
The Pfaelzer book is a depressing litany of lynchings, murders and Chinatown burnings from California to Washington State. I imagine that’s why I didn’t get very far reading it to Claudia before our trip to the Yangtze River.
There is another book I looked for the other day at a used book store. I could order it on line but have yet to do so. That’s one of the Rush Limbaugh Children’s books about the American revolution that I’m expecting to be as shallow as the book of his I bought thirty years ago that was so bone headed. The Rush Revere series seems to have been co-authored by his third or fourth wife the one who inherited his half billion dollar estate from the bullshit business.
If I ever do order it I expect it to be as appetizing as one of those fast food hamburgers some resentful cook has spit in.
I cranked out part of a chapter about my use of marijuana an hour ago. I haven’t edited it yet either. I probably won’t edit this either.
