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We’ve got another Happy Hour show this week! (If you haven’t heard, we like Happy Hour.) And who better to spend it with than our very own members? Rob, Peter and James field questions from the men and women who make Ricochet the best “place” for civil conversation and debate. So grab your favorite cocktail, beer or wine and enjoy another episode from the website whose biggest problem is that we get too many good questions and not enough time to field them all. No Lileks Post of the Week, but hats off to Full Size Tabby for a compliment so fine it made James blush (and rendered him nearly speechless). Cheers!
Music from this week’s show: Never Been To Spain by Three Dog Night
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We can track the inflection point even earlier, to William Jennings Bryan. He could be called the father of American progressivism.
But he liked Jesus and the common man. He doesn’t seem all that progressive to me.
‘Twas good to hear poetry mentioned…I have reached the age at which I must go looking for my spectacles, though I am still able to reel off lines of verse and recite all the verses of familiar hymns–and they all come from some half a dozen languages and more, including Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. (Long ago I once charmed a young lady first with Chaucer, then with Baudelaire, but then I made the mistake of pressing my luck with Goethe–and with a Japanese frog jumping into a pond. And that was the end of that.)
Goethe would have worked on me.
Never Been to Spain
😂😂😂
Very cute.
Several years ago I saw a comment by a Tim Minear on Ricochet. I asked him if he were the Firefly Tim Minear, and he said yes. I’ve not seen him since.
Being a bit older than the Magnificent Three, I remember when Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” was first released: I cheerfully sneered along with the lyrics, as did the “sophisticates” of my parents’ generation. It was worse than ingratitude; it was all too typical leftist snobbism. MR had a UC Berkeley PhD and was thus vastly superior to, say, a life insurance salesman who simply wanted a pleasant backyard for his children.
I would slightly alter Peter Robinson’s argument about JFK.
A few weeks before JFK’s death, I was among those picketing Madame Nhu at UC Berkeley. Many of my fellow demonstrators were red-diaper babies, but there were also “new left” elements. We are not given to know what might have happened, but I would speculate that if JFK had lived, his popularity (especially in the media) would have put a damper on such, as his presence made anti-Communism not only respectable but also almost entirely non-controversial, the leftist views of myself and my comrades being quite rightly loathed. In 1964, LBJ trounced Barry Goldwater, but he was nonetheless someone who made of himself an easy target for the left, with JFK being conveniently mythologized: “He freed a lot of people, but it seems the good die young.” Uhuh…And then along came Richard Nixon…I was in America, watching TV one evening, when I turned to those with me and remarked: “If I were a conservative, I would be outraged. I can’t believe it! The capitalist media are on our side!” Alas, they were, even back then.
Cool. If I’d known that I could have tagged him when I wrote my question.