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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3201 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 9, 2022

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What do you call that annoying thing where a work that self-consciously sets out to puncture that narrative of one historical figure/group goes on to quite obviously parrot the self-serving tripe of another historical figure/group? It's a sort of in-work Gell Mann Amnesia or dissonance, where an author seems to forget that the whole point of his work was to tell us the real dope, the inside story. Or like leveraging oneself so thoroughly against one figure that one ends up taking another figure's bullshit at face value. I feel like I'm not expressing my point well, so I'll give some examples.

-- In Robert Caro's monumental biographies, he often punctures legends of both Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. "Johnson often said he was a wandering farm laborer in California, but really he was angling to become a lawyer while practicing law without a license at 19 years old." That sort of thing. But then Caro will give us a quick biography of another figure, Sam Rayburn or Al Smith, and repeat absolute whoppers that they told about their lives. The "Walked fifteen miles uphill both ways to school" stuff, the "never even let a lobbyist buy him lunch" stuff.

-- In the latest season of The Crown, which goes to great lengths to reveal the inner scandals of the Royal family and paint them as absurd and self-centered, they introduced Mohammed and Dodi Fayed. When Dodi is born, his father holds him and gives the kind of soliloquy that no one has ever given in real life, but that an egotist or his biographer would claim to have given at a key moment. The speech is like something Thucydides or Plutarch would put into someone's mouth.

-- Revisionist historians who, in their quest to puncture American mythology, take the Soviets or the Nazis propaganda at face value.

Is Robert Caro where the "walked fiften miles uphill both ways through snow" thing came from?

The whole chapters on Rayburn that I'm reading right now in "the path to power." It's all stories right from Rayburn about his youth on the farm, giving speeches in barns to cows. As greyenlightenment pointed out "the power broker" is hella long so I don't want to rely on memory too hard, but I recall the sections on Al Smith and to a lesser extent la Guardia being much friendlier than the coverage of Moses.

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