John McCain and the Tea Party

John McCain took issue with the Tea Partiers and others holding to fantasies with strong language on the Senate floor earlier today.

The End of Borders

Patriots and Peoples began with a shopping trip to Borders books. Soon, Borders will be no more. This blog will go on, but how will other brick and mortar stores fare? It seems that I rarely visit Auntie's Bookstore, my local independent. Instead I carry a feed from Amazon in the column highlighting books that I've mentioned recently in this blog. The best bookstore between Seattle and Denver, Bookpeople of Moscow, has an uncertain future now that Bob Greene is retired. Bob often seemed as though he was one of my professors in graduate school in the sense that he frequently recommended books that would illuminate some aspect of problems that I was exploring. His recommendations were usually spot-on, and he was rewarded with a large share of my discretionary income.

Big Box stores do not offer this personal touch. Of course the employees can recommend books, but how often are their recommendations built on knowledge both broad and deep of me as a reader and scholar, and of the worlds of scholarship I tend to inhabit. It helped that Bob's partner was the director of the graduate program in which I was enrolled. But, I get the sense that many of his regular customers in other fields far different had similar experiences. Bob is a man of the world, and a man of books. Barnes & Noble employees seem to be book lovers, but their tastes run to genre literature more often that belles lettres; their knowledge of history seems grounded more in the History Channel than the output of Cornell University Press.

The largest selection of books available for browsing and purchase in Spokane is found at Barnes & Noble near the Spokane Valley Mall, but Barnes & Noble at Northtown Mall is nearer my house. Hastings has a better selection of Culture studies, including historic works by and about American Indians. Trips to Seattle, Bellevue (a Seattle suburb), or to the Tri-Cities usually permit a stop at one of the Barnes & Nobles there, and I'm always pleased to see that Big Box does not always mean the sort of homogenized junk that fills Spokane's stores. Of course, Seattle has much better choices: University Bookstore near the University of Washington (AKA Purple Puppy Pound from the point of view of this Cougar), and Elliott Bay Book Company. David Ishii Bookseller closed in 2005, a loss to the region.

The nearest Borders was handy because it was near the path between home and work. Its selection when it first opened exceeded Barnes & Noble Northtown, but that changed in the recent past. In the first year of its operation, I bought a couple of William Faulkner's texts from this store, but as they sold they were not replaced. Someone else also bought some Faulkner and the selection diminished. The opportunity to browse among a nearly full collection of inexpensive paperbacks by America's best novelist vanished, presumably because the sales were slow.

Borders never had the selection of chess books stocked by Auntie's (thanks to a chess enthusiast working at Auntie's many years), but it was better than Barnes & Noble for awhile. However, the last time I visited Borders, there were two chess books that were not worthless junk, and I reduced their inventory by one-half. I won't miss the absence, nor the time I wasted going in hoping that something had changed.

I'm gonna miss Borders' history section, and their new book tables in the front, and some of the bargain books. I'm gonna miss them a lot less than I would have had they closed four years ago when they had an impressive selection of literature (including Proust and Faulkner), U.S. history that is not military history (including Zinn and Schweikart), chess, and Pacific Northwest history, AKA regional that is not travel guides.


The End of Browsing

Browsing has changed. These days I'm more likely to browse by downloading a Kindle sample. I spent decades developing the ability to pick up a book in a library or bookstore, read the table of contents, examine the notes and bibliography, read the beginnings of a few paragraphs, and make my assessment. Does the work contribute something new? Does the author demonstrate sufficient mastery of his or her topic to warrant the elimination of trees that went into publication? Kindle samples do not permit this sort of analysis, but Google Books previews often do.

I can still browse at Costco, but their selection has deteriorated in the past two years. Before Senator Obama became President Obama, they carried his Dreams from My Father, and John McCain, Faith of My Fathers. Now they seem to have piles of screeds by Glenn Beck and a host of others pushing similar nonsense, but nothing on the other side.

Browsing is one form of reading that often leads to more time in a chair turning pages, growing, learning, thinking. Ebooks take away, or alter, the process of turning pages. But, some fear that ebooks are part an resistible trend away from reading itself. Hundreds of writers are musing over the meaning of the closing of Borders as though the failure of this behemoth is symptomatic of disturbing trends. "Electronic Book: The End for Borders" looks to have been published a few months ago. "Borders Closure and the End of the Book" appeared early this week. Google "borders books end of reading" as I did, and you can find many more.

Reagan Mythology

Paul Rosenberg offers an assessment of President Reagan's legacy far more realistic than the one driving Tea Partiers and even President Obama, whom Rosenberg opines, "is as drunk on Reagan's kool-aid as anyone else in Washington today."

He explains,

Reagan was a disaster for the American economy in at least four fundamental ways:

... Under Ronald Reagan, the US went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years

... the number of unionised jobs and the number of jobs with American companies declined even further.

... The income stagnation that began under Reagan has had a devastating impact on personal savings.

... Before Reagan, debt really wasn't a problem for America.

The article begins:

As things stand today, the US is hurtling toward a budget showdown in less than a month. Either President Obama will once again capitulate to extreme Republican budget-slashing demands, making Democrats seem as much of a threat to Medicare as Republicans, and virtually ensuring a GOP electoral sweep in 2012, or the US will default on its debt for the first time in its history, most likely plunging the world economy back into another five-continent recession, also costing Democrats the 2012 elections.

Read the rest at Reagan mythology is leading US off a cliff - Opinion - Al Jazeera English


Hat tip to Millard Fillmore's Bathtub for bringing this editorial to my attention.

Johnny Appleseed

Long, long after,
When settlers put up beam and rafter,
They asked of the birds: "Who gave this fruit?
Who watched this fence till the seeds took root?
Who gave these boughs?" They asked the sky,
And there was no reply.
But the robin might have said,
"To the farthest West he has followed the sun,
His life and his empire just begun."
Vachel Lindsey, "In Praise of Johnny Appleseed" (1923)

In my pre-teen and early teen years, I read every book presenting American folktales and legends that was available in our little Air Force base library. Some of my favorites included stories of deforestation (Paul Bunyan), the futile battle against mechanization (John Henry), and the introduction of alien plant species (Johnny Appleseed). The books that pulled me into these stories were fanciful and aimed at young readers. The stories were uprooted from their origins as descriptions of actual lives, exaggerated the known facts, and worked into the realm of myth.

The real Johnny Appleseed died in Indiana in 1845, according to an obituary printed in the Fort Wayne Sentinel (22 March 1845). He was tall, a preacher taken with Emanuel Swedenborg's writings, and planted nurseries rather than spreading seeds willy-nilly. A recent book delves into the myth and known history, making a strong effort to separate the two. Howard Means, Johnny Appleseed: The Man, the Myth, the American Story (2011) offers a detailed biography of the life, activities, and beliefs of John Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseed.

As I remember the stories, I was free to imagine that his seed sowing enterprise took him further west, and that he might have ended his days near present-day Wenatchee. My memory is almost certainly faulty and found its freedom in confusion between the Northwest of early American history--the Ohio Country--and the far Northwest, or Pacific Northwest--a term created by railroad publicists in the late nineteenth century. Even the Disney short, Johnny Appleseed (1948), which I almost certainly watched sometime in the 1960s or early 1970s, places Johnny Appleseed in the Ohio country.

The heart of the Disney film pits cultivation of orchards and promotion of religion against a vast wilderness of dangerous animals. Indians appear on the margins, part of the crowd singing and dancing during the harvest festival. The wary animals first believed the human who moved into a clearing and began to plant seeds was a curious intruder who needed to leave. But, none could tell him so. Finally a skunk went out to investigate and was on the verge of attacking, when Johnny began to stroke its fur. The hero of the story wins over the animals. The narrator emphasizes that he is the first human they had seen without knife or gun. Johnny Appleseed thus fits into the mythic structure of humanity's shift from hunting to cultivation, a reflection of the Neolithic revolution and the rise of civilization. The human story of the beginnings of civilization as long ago as ten millennia ago gets repeated in the New Eden, the American wilderness. See "Neolithic Revolution and American Indians" for another episode in this mythic story.


Apples and Cherries in the Pacific Northwest

Today, Washington state leads the United States in apple production. New York City might be the "big apple," but the apple is more a symbol of the far Northwest than of anywhere else. The apple has become as much a symbol of Pacific Northwest regional culture as the salmon and the seemingly endless evergreen forests. But, while salmon have all but disappeared from every region outside Alaska (and even there the proposed Pebble Mine threatens the last watersheds in full health), and while timber jobs in Washington have become scarce, the apple thrives.

John Chapman never made it this far west. The origins of apples in the Pacific Northwest begin in the Willamette Valley and just over the Columbia River at Fort Vancouver. In the 1820s, the Hudson's Bay Company cultivated many food growing plants from seeds. From these plants, Joseph Garvais cultivated the first substantial apple orchards. Contemporaneous with John Chapman in the Ohio Country, Garvais and other retired Hudson Bay Company employees developed agriculture in Oregon Country.

But it was the introduction of grafted fruit trees that caused the region's agriculture to blossom. These first arrived via wagon along the Oregon Trail courtesy of an Iowa farmer who headed west. In 1847, Henderson Lewelling crossed the country with his family and three wagons. Two of the wagons transported some seven hundred small trees. Once in Oregon, Lewelling went into the nursery business with William Meek. When the gold rush lured Lewelling and Meek to California, where they saw opportunity for more profits developing agriculture, they sold their nursery in Milwaukie, Oregon to Henderson's younger brother, Seth. According to Ronald Irvine, The Wine Project (1997), Meek won an award for wine at the California State Fair in 1859.

Seth Lewelling thrived in the nursery business. His foreman for the orchards, Ah Bing, has been immortalized in the name of a popular fruit that he helped originate. Today, Washington state not only leads the nation in sweet cherry production, but accounts for more than half of the nation's total production.

In the world of legend and myth, everyone knows of Johnny Appleseed. The story of agriculture in the far Northwest, however, offers many less well-known, but every bit as compelling stories of such men as Joseph Garvais, Henderson Lewelling, and Ah Bing.

Thomas Jefferson: Oenophile

During his first term as President, Jefferson spent seventy-five hundred dollars—roughly a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency—on wine, and he is generally regarded as America’s first great wine connoisseur.
Patrick Radden Keefe, "The Jefferson Bottles"

Thomas Jefferson has long been one of the most interesting American leaders. He wrote the Declaration of Independence with a small amount of editing help from his colleagues. He designed his own home, a marvel of architecture. He argued persuasively with Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, perhaps the leading theorist concerning evolution a century prior to Charles Darwin, but who made some astounding statements concerning the deficiency of North American air and its lack of large fauna. Jefferson gathered specimens of fauna that dwarfed those in Europe to prove Buffon wrong. Jefferson played the violin, studied languages, experimented with agriculture, and maintained a life-long correspondence with his rival in the most fiercely contested election in the early national period of United States politics, John Adams.

Thomas Jefferson also loved wine.

In keeping with the focus of Patriots and Peoples, I scanned the indices of A Patriot's History of the United States and of A People's History of the United States for references to Jefferson's oenophilia. The term wine is not indexed in either book, but both contain ample references to Jefferson. Howard Zinn focuses on Jefferson's contribution to politics, saying nothing about his architecture, science, or social views with two exceptions: he credits the spirit of the times rather than personal views of the man for the fact that Jefferson remained a slave owner to his death (see "Thomas Jefferson: Abolitionist?"). The second reference to his cultural values comes in a section concerned with the "cult of domesticity," where Zinn notes Emma Willard contradicting Jefferson's views that women's education should emphasize "the amusements of life ... dancing, drawing, and music" (as quoted in A People's History, 118).

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen offer a thumbnail sketch of Jefferson the man in A Patriot's History. They mention his interest in wine in a single sentence: "After the war, as American ambassador to France, he developed a pronounced taste for French food, wine, and radical French politics" (133). For much of the targeted audience of the ultra-conservative Patriot's History, this sentence is sufficient to damn Jefferson.

My interest in Jefferson and wine was provoked last week when I started reading The Billionaire's Vinegar (2008) by Benjamin Wallace. There are indications scattered around the web that a film based on Wallace's book is in development. Reports of the movie rights being optioned were released in January 2008 before the book's release. Movie Insider gives 2012 as the tentative date for the movie's release. There's certainly plenty of drama in the story as William Koch spends more than a million dollars hiring former FBI investigators and similar sleuths to build evidence against Hardy Rodenstock, the man behind the sale of dozens of bottles reputedly once owned by Jefferson. Kip Forbes bid 106,000 pounds for the alleged 1787 Château Lafite Bordeaux that instantly became the most expensive bottle of wine in history. Koch spent many thousands less for the bottles that he bought.

The Billionaire's Vinegar opens with a description of the auction where Forbes set a record bid. Much of the story of the auction itself derives from "A Piece of History" in The New Yorker, 20 January 1986. This opening chapter narrates the development of the wine expertise of auctioneer Michael Broadbent, whose opposition to his portrayal later in the book led to a lawsuit that led to Random House agreeing not to distribute the book in the United Kingdom (one wonders whether the film will suffer similar barriers).

The second chapter focuses on Jefferson. I started this book as one of several Kindle samples dealing with history and culture of vitas vinifera cultivation, wine production, and consumption of the beverage that led to Benjamin Franklin's frequently corrupted line, "Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!" Freakonomics has a brief entry by the editor of The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, concerning the origins of Franklin's quote, the process of authenticating this little detail of the past, and the corruption of Franklin's expression by beer-swilling enthusiasts.

The Kindle sample offers a few pages of this chapter, just enough to hook this angler. I shelled out the $12 needed to get to the end of the chapter and gain access to the notes. Having done so, I read the rest of the book. I learned more about the world of rare wines and forgeries than I had anticipated as among my interests. Having read this book, there's a lot more that I'll be attentive to when the next issue of Wine Spectator arrives in the mail box. Meanwhile, I'm now attending to more Kindle samples:


John Hailman, Thomas Jefferson on Wine (2006)
Charles A. Cerami, Dinner at Mr. Jefferson's: Three Men, Five Great Wines, and the vening that Changed America (2011)
Tyler Colman, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink (2008)

Another book of interest is not available as an ebook, but may arrive via the mail in hardcover sometime in the near future.

James Gabler, The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson (1995)