The gap between Carter’s birth and his vote today is the same as the gap between his birthday and the presidency of James Monroe in the other direction. Monroe fought in the Revolutionary War and subsequently studied law under Thomas Jefferson. Curiously, three of the first five presidents died on July 4th (Jefferson and Adams famously both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Monroe died five years later to the day).
Carter carried every state of the Old Confederacy in 1976. The past is a different country . . .
I strongly recommend Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland for a rich cultural history of the Carter presidency and the rise of the New Right.
Is the best way to understand the MAGA movement to binge-watch docuseries about charismatic leaders sending their acolytes to ruin? Tune in and find out.
A word about our new Nobel Prize for Literature. The only of her books I have read is The Vegetarian, though the others look great too. This is kind of author that people were hoping the Nobel reforms of a few years ago would lead to winning the prize. This weird little novel is about a woman who stops eating meat and then withers away after nightmares about blood and guts of that industry, but is actually rejecting the patriarchy that dominates her life. Evidently all her novels have these types of political themes. From E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, which I get by email so I don’t have a link:
In works such as “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts,” “The White Book,” and “Greek Lessons,” she applies a light, often experimental touch to heavy themes: women’s experiences under patriarchal rule; the buried histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea.
Han came to the attention of most readers outside South Korea with “The Vegetarian” (translated into English by Deborah Smith), which tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman in Seoul who responds to a series of gory nightmares (“great blood-red gashes of meat”) by giving up her carnivorous ways and rejecting her husband and extended family. I’m partial to a larger-scale novel, “Human Acts” (also translated by Smith), about a people’s uprising and U.S.-backed massacre, in 1980, in the southern city of Gwangju, where Han spent her early childhood. In an author’s note, she reflects on a grim source of inspiration: a boy, killed in the massacre, whom her father, the writer Han Seung-won, had taught in middle school. “How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?”
Han’s latest novel is “I Do Not Bid Farewell” (forthcoming in English)—a beautiful, mysterious story built around another historic tragedy, a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters. A few months after it came out, in 2021, I met her for a vegetarian meal in Seoul. (We have known each other for a while.) South Korea was trending authoritarian, increasingly steered by male grievance, which got me thinking about 2016, when Han and Smith won the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian.” That same year, a feminist movement took hold in South Korea, #MeToo avant la lettre, and made the literary world its first bit of housecleaning. Ko Un, a poet who’d long been considered South Korea’s most likely winner of a Nobel Prize, was revealed to have been an abuser; no one reads him anymore. Korea’s #MeToo uprising has since shrivelled, but Han and many other women writers—Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Jung-eun—are still in their rightful place, defining contemporary Korean literature.
As I general rule, I try to make about 1/3 or a little more than that of the novels I read from outside the US and European experience. That’s a lot to read and we all only have so much time, but sometimes it leads you to read great authors before they get this kind of international recognition, so this makes me happy. Plus The Vegetarian is just a great book.
Superintendent Ryan Walters isn’t just talking about buying Bibles for schools.
Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.
A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters.
But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement.
Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. It sells for $90.
“The RFP on its face seems fair, but with additional scrutiny, we can see there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump,” Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Colleen McCarty said.
Any Republican hack can systematically violate the First Amendment. But how many can clear this much profit from the taxpayers? God Bless the USA indeed! Roy Moore was a piker.
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