I asked seven anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians if they would rather have been a typical Indian or a typical European in 1491. None was delighted by the question, because it required judging the past by the standards of today—a fallacy disparaged as “presentism” by social scientists. But every one chose to be an Indian. Some early colonists gave the same answer. Horrifying the leaders of Jamestown and Plymouth, scores of English ran off to live with the Indians. My ancestor shared their desire, which is what led to the trumped-up murder charges against him—or that’s what my grandfather told me, anyway.

As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed “little intelligence in comparison to themselves.” Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.) A Jesuit reported that the “Savages” were disgusted by handkerchiefs: “They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground.” The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”

Quoted from the essay “1941” written by Charles C. Mann, about the major impact that Native Americans had on the Americas (ecologically and culturally) before white people invaded, bringing their diseases and shoving Christianity down the Indians’ throats and murdering them and banning their cultures.

Check out the whole piece (which is rather long). (P.S thanks to @cazalis for sending me this great link)

another excerpt:

Human history, in Crosby’s interpretation, is marked by two world-altering centers of invention: the Middle East and central Mexico, where Indian groups independently created nearly all of the Neolithic innovations, writing included. The Neolithic Revolution began in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. In the next few millennia humankind invented the wheel, the metal tool, and agriculture. The Sumerians eventually put these inventions together, added writing, and became the world’s first civilization. Afterward Sumeria’s heirs in Europe and Asia frantically copied one another’s happiest discoveries; innovations ricocheted from one corner of Eurasia to another, stimulating technological progress. Native Americans, who had crossed to Alaska before Sumeria, missed out on the bounty. “They had to do everything on their own,” Crosby says. Remarkably, they succeeded.

When Columbus appeared in the Caribbean, the descendants of the world’s two Neolithic civilizations collided, with overwhelming consequences for both. American Neolithic development occurred later than that of the Middle East, possibly because the Indians needed more time to build up the requisite population density. Without beasts of burden they could not capitalize on the wheel (for individual workers on uneven terrain skids are nearly as effective as carts for hauling), and they never developed steel. But in agriculture they handily outstripped the children of Sumeria. Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas.

Maize, as corn is called in the rest of the world, was a triumph with global implications. Indians developed an extraordinary number of maize varieties for different growing conditions, which meant that the crop could and did spread throughout the planet. Central and Southern Europeans became particularly dependent on it; maize was the staple of Serbia, Romania, and Moldavia by the nineteenth century. Indian crops dramatically reduced hunger, Crosby says, which led to an Old World population boom.

Along with peanuts and manioc, maize came to Africa and transformed agriculture there, too. “The probability is that the population of Africa was greatly increased because of maize and other American Indian crops,” Crosby says. “Those extra people helped make the slave trade possible.” Maize conquered Africa at the time when introduced diseases were leveling Indian societies. The Spanish, the Portuguese, and the British were alarmed by the death rate among Indians, because they wanted to exploit them as workers. Faced with a labor shortage, the Europeans turned their eyes to Africa. The continent’s quarrelsome societies helped slave traders to siphon off millions of people. The maize-fed population boom, Crosby believes, let the awful trade continue without pumping the well dry.

Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world’s largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe’s greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren’t ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was “so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people … [that] I would rather live here than any where.”

and another excerpt:

In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like “wow” and “gosh.” Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

(via badass-bharat-deafmuslim-artista)

1491 is decent. Read it, then continue to Cronon’s Changes in the Land.

Pretty much every country that fought in WWII used it as a crucible in which to reforge their respective nations, and so it’s understandable that what we know now of the war is basically mythological. Not in terms of like, dates and names and locations, the who/what/when/where is mostly accurate, but in terms of meaning - the why.

In the last decade it’s becoming more and more of a mainstream understanding that America didn’t beat Germany in WWII, the fighting on the Western Front wasn’t nearly as important as the Soviet effort on the Eastern Front. Yes, yes, correct. More than that though, America barely even fought on the Western Front. Our contribution wasn’t in frontline combat but in logistics. Logistics is the least sexy (but most important) part of any war, and America was to the British Empire what the Urals were to the Soviet Union - an industrial base located beyond German bombing range.

Without American food, and the ability to build cargo ships with which to deliver food (including from the rest of the Empire - the British homeland hadn’t fed itself since the 18th century) faster than U-Boats could sink them, the British population would have starved, revolted, and deposed any government that refused to sue for peace. The idea that American wartime food rationing was necessary to feed “our boys fighting overseas” was a polite fiction, better for morale than the truth that it was to free up food for export to essentially bribe allied civilians to stay on-side.

Remember that one of the sore points of interwar Germany was that the German surrender came with the field armies in decent and even advancing strategic position, under pressure from hunger-stoked socialist rebellion on the homefront - the “stab-in-the-back” or Dolchstoß. Of course today you see that often dismissed as a myth, the “Dolchstoßlegende”. Dismissed, of course, by the mainstream historiographers aligned with the regimes which legitimized themselves against the regime that legitimized itself on it. (Let’s call it the “Dolchstoßlegendelegende”, and then call it a day.)

To the extent the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s was deliberately induced and targeted by Stalin, I think it would have to have been a prophylactic against a Soviet equivalent - preemptively liquidating potential fifth columnists, cutting the numbers of mouths to be fed, and denying any German occupation a source of recruits or agricultural workers.

(Of course, the notion that Ukrainians might turn against Russia and in favor of Western Europe, under the influence of fascist sentiment stoked by local elites for personal gain is properly considered just another of those legenden, no less ridiculous than the notion that Japanese-Americans might hold loyalty to the former portion of their hyphenation over the latter.)

I’m wandering a bit afield but I also want to say, when you hear said that Stalin’s purges of the military were so stupid, didn’t he know he was purging some of the best soldiers Soviet Russia had? Well, soldiers Russia had maybe, the question is in that counterfactual where they stuck around would, would Russia stay Soviet? The Russian Revolution was deliberately incited by Germany to knock Russia out of a World War.

Career army types - a lot of times, their loyalty is to the army. Maybe to the nation, but the government? Eh. A lot of the higher-ups purged had started off in the Imperial Army and had made one transition already. And lower ranks, well, their loyalty is to their superiors, as it should be, right? (The Russian Navy, by contrast, spent the early 1900s occasionally rebelling against everyone because their institutional continuity had been shattered by the near-total wipeout of the Russo-Japanese war.) Governments change, but any state needs an Army, after all. Vladimir Putin started off serving the Soviets.

Okay enough digression. Without American food, and Britain thus pressured to make peace, Germany not only could have shifted the resources, ground and air forces defending the Atlantic coast to the Eastern front but would have freedom of the seas, and thus access to supplies from the overseas colonies of Axis powers (including France and the Netherlands), and from the neutral countries of South America (which had considerable economic ties with Germany). It also would have been able to open fronts and supply troops from the Black and Levantine Seas, Persian Gulf, and Pacific coast of Russia.

Without American industrial production, the other Allies wouldn’t have enjoyed nearly as much functional range from their resource bases. This would suck in general, most particularly it would limit the British ability to sustain their Northern African forces, and of the Soviets to operate in Azerbaijan, Iran, and the ’stans. With these forces weakened, it was concievable that Axis forces could gain control of the Suez Canal (greatly degrading Britain’s connections with its colonies in India, Africa, and Oceania) and middle eastern oil fields (a huge coup, hydrocarbon shortages were the major limitation on German capabilities, resolving them would have allowed for significant gains in production and much improved ability to advance and supply forces eastward into Russia.)

So yes, to say that America’s role in the European theater of WWII was really about making and shipping, not fighting isn’t to short its contribution - it truly did provide the margin of victory. The Normandy landings and opening of a Western front of ground combat were dramatic, made for great stories, but they didn’t change the outcome of the war. At least not in the sense of “will Germany win” - that had already been decided in the negative. It just changed the details of who they lost to. And what difference did that make? Well…


People say WWII should be considered as a continuation of WWI. There’s something to that, there’s something to that.

Here’s another idea, though - WWII was continuous with the Cold War, and before even V-E Day, America had switched sides to fight with the Germans, and specifically the German right, against the Russians, and to a lesser extent France and the UK. It was a brilliant betrayal, the maneuver by which America came to rule the world.

I mean, we didn’t side with the Nazis, per se, except to the extent that under Gleichschaltung everything in Germany not specifically anti-Nazi was officially Nazi. Rather, their coalition partners - the Christian democrats, the Junkers, the Heer, the industrial capitalists who had allied with the volkisch streetfighters to fight socialism and were perfectly willing to switch allegiance to the American strong horse for the same purpose.

That explains why long after it was obvious the war was a loss the German forces kept fighting on the eastern front - to hold off the Russians long enough for the Americans to reinforce Germany, or to fight westward to link up with (“surrender to”) American armies.

That explains why America never really pulled the trigger on “denazification”, the attempt to purge German government and society of fascists and fellow travelers, and instead turned around and purged its own government and society of communists and fellow travelers in the Second Red Scare.

That explains the Marshall Plan - America rebuilt western Europe, because America had conquered it.

That explains Bretton Woods, pegging European currencies to the dollar, and thus subordinating their economies to the American economy. (and the “Eurozone” as successor, subordinating European economies to Germany). How do you know Germany lost WWI? Because the Treaty of Versailles imposed punishing reparations on Germany, redirecting its economic output to Britain and France. The result of WWII was the redirection of Britain and France’s economic output to America and Germany.

That explains American support for decolonization in Africa and Asia, most glaringly in the Suez Canal Crisis, where America used the whip hand on Britain and France to support Nasser’s move to pry the canal - and Egypt generally - from their hands. By choking off their colonial empires, America blocked their ability to return to parity through primitive accumulation.

This explains de Gaulle - pulling out from NATO, fighting to hold on to Algeria and Vietnam, pursuing French nuclearization for energy independence and military sovereignty - he was pushing back, and since the Soviet collapse France has been subtly reassembling its African empire - in any potential American/Chinese/Islamic struggle for Africa, they’re the wild card.

That explains the postwar American development of a conceptual vocabulary - “totalitarianism”, “authoritarianism”, “statism”, “central planning”, horseshoe theory, “human rights” - by which communism and fascism were positioned as varieties of a broader unitary category and America assured itself that it had always been at war with Eurasia.

(The “Cultural Marxist” meme, that the Frankfurt School and their ideas represented a communist attempt to subvert America, is particularly ironic. The Frankfurt School and their ideas were embraced and actively promoted by the core of mainstream America - the government, businesses, universities, the Protestant churches - because at core their ideology was - liberal, yes - anti-communism.)

This doesn’t, as far as I know, explain the (at the time, surprise) death of Franklin Roosevelt, and replacement by Harry Truman, a man whom power brokers had installed for the express purpose of lining up an anti-leftist succession. But wouldn’t it be wild if it did?

This doesn’t explain much about the Pacific theater - that was America and Japan competing over who would inherit the European imperial holdings in Asia. Japan did fight to the last, America did conquer it outright, and did purge it in the aftermath.

It does explain the later takeback of that purge in the name of anti-communism, and Truman’s decision to use nuclear weapons. Not only as a demonstration and warning to Russia, but to hasten its surrender. You hear it said it was to pre-empt the need for a costly and painful invasion, that’s not really true. America had total naval and air superiority and could have just starved Japan into submission - its infrastructure shattered, even with peace it was essentially in a state of famine until the late 1950s. America wanted Japan to surrender while they were still the only ones around to surrender to, rather than face a division with the Soviets like Korea and Vietnam.


So. All those teenagers from around the world who follow me for god only knows what, next time in History class you’re asked how WWII ended, now you know. Falling back in the face of Soviet advances, Germany peeled off America from the Allies, decisively sewing up the Western Front. After negotiating a tense decades-long armistice, they eventually starved (and subverted) Russia into submission in the early 1990s. This completed, they realized their long-held dream of eastward expansion and hegemony over continental Europe.

The Monroe Doctrine is nominally an American guarantee of sovereignty to the independent nations of the Americas, but really from the get go it was a claim to hemispheric dominion (all “guarantees of sovereignty” basically are, true sovereignty guarantees itself) as the successor to Spain.

It was originally proclaimed in the context of the ultimately successful independence movements of Spain’s various continental possessions, as local elites took advantage of Spain’s Napoleonic-era vulnerability to carve out their own feifdoms.

This doctrine effectively claimed the Americas as part of the US economy and sphere of influence without the necessity of formal annexation (as direct integration of the Catholic, Hispanophone, feudal, indigenous and hybridized, cultures of South America into America was too big an ask for a United States that was still struggling to reconcile its own northern mercantile republicanism and southern extractive feudalism.)

The young empire of America got away with it mostly because it wasn’t worth the bother for anyone else to contest the claim - inland South and Central America were largely too malarial or, on the Pacific side, mountainous for intensive development; extractable or already extracted precious metals had largely been exported to Europe already (prompting inflation which reduced the value of further extraction); the railroad, steamship, and refrigeration infrastructure that would enable the later perishable fruit trade was yet to be developed.

This is absolutely true. Back before the (mostly German) petrochemical/pharmaceutical industries developed cost-efficient ways of processing hydrocarbons, guano was a major source of chemical stocks. 

Before the widespread employment of synthetic fertilizers (indirectly converting hydrocarbons to calories), guano was a major agricultural input and the ability to boost food production (and thus feed population, and thus raise armies) gave a significant advantage to powers which controlled it (and thus naval powers vs. land powers generally).

Also as a pretext, the Guano Islands Act allowed America to claim outposts that were vital for fueling/restocking purposes to extend naval power far enough to defend the Asian/Pacific possessions inherited from victory in the Spanish-American War.

Jaimes Aitken, 18th century British homegrown terrorist, radicalized on a trip to America

I mean, let’s not get too misty-eyed about the good old days here, when I say that with civic pacification through militia callups carrying heavier political costs there was pressure for authorities to defuse or preempt conflict in other ways, yeah, “other ways” could mean civil negotiation and yielding to public pressure, but it could also mean the preemptive deportation, framing, or targeted assassination of potential protest leaders.

And how, before the development of SWAT teams, did police handle things that fell under “significantly more intense than normal operations, but not pacification of public unrest”, like say an outlaw gang holed up in their hideout and willing to fight off the authorities?

Well, a lot of times they would just deputize a lot of citizens, which is to say basically create an official armed mob, and just go at it with the understanding that their side would likely take casualties.

I see people complaining about the violence of modern society and it’s like what? You have no idea.

So everyone’s talking about the militarization of police. Now Radley Balko’s been on this beat for years, but the ironic thing about everyone suddenly bringing it up keying off the Ferguson stuff is that that’s actually the least radically unprecedented manifestation of this tendency.

Historically speaking, it’s completely typical for American governments to respond to mass protest and civic unrest (esp. racialized unrest) by invading and conquering affected areas by main force, employing forces trained for that purpose and equipped with weapons and vehicles acquired by the regular Army for its last war and then passed on as surplus.

It’s just that up until the 1970s (and the National Guard’s post-Vietnam integration with the regular Army) state militias filled this role. Civil unrest and its pacification isn’t so much a matter of law but meta-law, which is to say war - conflict between two forces to determine which shall hold authority in the affected territory. And maintaining distinct forces for law enforcement and domestic war had several advantages over the present system.

For one, this precluded the use of militarized force for situations like serving warrants that couldn’t plausibly be counted as “civic unrest” even if you squint at them hard.

For two, militia are less likely than police to be involved in the inciting incidents behind civil unrest. This distance meant the militia didn’t take unrest personally and in turn their pacification activities were regarded as more legitimate - this is why even in the post-Vietnam era, the National Guard was used to pacify the 1992 LA riots, the LAPD being poorly suited to calm an anti-LAPD action. (Also after Iraq War I, the real modern overseas Guard debut, the domestically oriented elements of the Guard wanted to reassert themselves, and the Guard as a whole wanted to prove their utility in the face of post-Cold War drawdowns).

For three, this raised the costs of resolution by force - “militia conducts operation locally” was big news and to happen at all, let alone regularly, indicated a failure of normal processes, creating pressure for local authorities to resolve situations by other means. By contrast, “police conduct operation locally” is pretty dog-bites-man as news goes.

So, going forward, if you want to do something to reduce government violence against the public, you should seriously consider reestablishing a military force devoted to the sole purpose of conducting domestic war against American citizens.

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.

Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.

And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain sovereigns through internal political pressure.

That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.

Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.

The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

The Scotsman asked what was up with “African-American” as distinct from incidentally African “American” and I was like, “Ah, you want to understand race in America? First, you must learn everything.”

There are three classic topics in American history and they go

1. Race, huh?

2. Why no socialism?

3. The frontier, huh?

and basically the answer to any of those is the other two

I noticed this shit in the ’90s, the habilitation of the Gadsden flag in place of the Stars and Bars as an *incidentally* white banner of resistance against the government, and one that maintained continuity with the Founding Fathers mythology. Then the Tea Party claimed it but I mean it was just sitting there and it’s not like they aren’t legitimate heirs of both traditions.

It’s been nice to live up in Cascadia where we have a respected yet virgin imaginary of secessionism. It’s been fingerbanged a few times, though, and pretty curious about the next step.

Anyway the Cascadian flag, the Gadsden flag, the Rebel banner, the ACAB graffiti, it all says the same thing - “we identify with violent opposition to the official order, so you can trust us”.

It’s Easter, let’s talk Scientology.

So, one thing you should first understand is that historically, Southern California is the second-richest wellspring of new religious enthusiasm in America, after the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York. Other prominent religious movements to come out of LA include Pentecostalism and the Foursquare Church, and there’s a ton less famous.

If you loosen up your definition of religion, throw out the requirement of a cosmological mythology (and Scientology’s cosmological mythology was kind of an afterthought), and accept things that present as philosophies or best practices for life, you can add in stuff like Objectivism.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that when it started out Scientology was more of a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. The… okay, wait, that’s maybe the third thing.

The second thing it’s worth understanding is that the founder of Scientology, pulp author L. Ron Hubbard, was part of the Los Angeles literary scene. Yes, LA had a literary scene, and yes, it was pulp authors and screenwriters, because obviously. This being before the internet, they had salons and cocktail parties, ideas passed around and people trying to top each other. Raymond Chandler used to be part of this scene.

Yes, this is kind of ridiculous, yes, now is your time to bring out the (accurate) line about how no one reads in LA (though they do have a very good book fair). But those hack writers managed to create Scientology and Objectivism and and a bunch of good movies, which is at least on a level with the rival and ~better accredited~ New York novelists and critics of the time who gave us neoconservatism (by way of Trotskyism + Zionism + resentment of uppity Negroes), a bunch of boring books about academic politics and adultery, and a bunch of little magazines with an increasingly tedious Holocaust obsession. Meanwhile you, reader, have given us jack shit so show some respect.

Anyway, back in the ‘50s some of the bigger hobbyhorses on this scene were Freudian psychology and Huxleyite psychedelic mysticism. The ‘50s LA intelligentsia was basically the first place LSD came into regular use, which actually explains a *lot* of things.

(Ayn Rand, who had been a screenwriter, was more oriented towards the more practical drug vogue of the time, amphetamines, which accounts both for her disinterest in mystical nature-of-reality-and-consciousness stuff and for the thousand-page books with hundred-page speeches about how everyone else in the world should just shut the fuck up and defer completely to your obvious innate superiority.)

Okay so that brings us to the third thing it’s worth understanding, that when it started out it was more a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. That it was conceived towards the same end as Freudian analysis - a method to enable people to overcome internal limitations and achieve full potential - but in opposition to its premises and methods. The funny thing is that if Hubbard thought “I’ve got a better way of doing psychology”, most modern psychologists would agree with him. You hear stories about Scientology practices that involve a mentor identifying trauma in their mentee and directing them “Focus on a thing. Touch a thing. Repeat. For hours.” as a way to overcome it?

Haha what bunk right? Except that’s basically cognitive behavioral therapy, which since then has almost completely eclipsed analysis as the standard practice of mainstream psychology, because it has a track record of producing results. It works by basically exploiting bugs in human mental processing

(Actually maybe I shouldn’t wander too far into the programming metaphor, under the frame of cybernetics that was actually an active and competing (Northern) Californian theory/praxis of mind - Lily’s “human biocomputer” model, Leary’s 8-circuit model. Basically, later on Silicon Valley techies also decided to drop acid and investigate the nature of human consciousness, with programming rather than psychiatry as their lexifier. A lot of stuff that today seems aligned with “hard science” materialist atheism - stuff like artificial intelligence, SETI, transhumanism - used to be linked with this ‘70s technomysticism, with the ’80s-‘90s Mondo 2000/WIRED/Web 1.0 cyberpunk technoshamanism as the intermediate link.)

And the “thetan” thing, well, I’ll get into mentioning the mythology, but the concept - that “you” are not actually an integrated whole, the coherency of your sense of self is actually a narrative wrapper around a set of scattered drives and aversions that are only in coincidental proximity if not active tension - well, in addition to bearing some similarities to the Freudian id/ego/superego model, I mean, if you’ve never done psychedelic drugs, well. I’ve tripped out for maybe 50 hours in my life, spent maybe 10 minutes dealing with visual hallucinations, and the rest of it was just grappling with this realization and trying to figure out what to do with it.

Deconstruction and continental literary postmodernism also incorporates a lot of psychedelic insight. It’s very true what they say, that most avant-garde stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s makes a lot more sense if you’ve ever used psychedelics, and that gets treated as a knock on said avant-garde stuff when it’s really a strong argument for the psychedelic experience.

This - psychology as the core of Scientology - is why the biggest bete noire of Scientologists is psychiatry, because Freudian analysis having fallen, it’s mental pharmacology, not, say, Christianity, that’s their real major rival.

Okay that’s a treatment of Scientology as an ideology. As an institution - well, people say it’s a cult and obviously they’re right. “Cult” is the infant stage of religion, a bunch of people gathering around and giving control of their lives over to a charismatic figure with radical new teachings. The Twelve Apostles were a cult. As Hubbard’s following grew, I mean, he liked it. Who wouldn’t. And as it grew past Dunbar’s number he realized he had to create some sort of structure, and so he kind of slapped one together ad-hoc. Dude was in fact a science fiction author and the whole worldbuilding aspect of “what are some plausible alternate social structures humans could arrange themselves in” was something he’d spent time thinking about, and reading other people’s ideas, but in a pinch he drew heavily on the one top-down functional hierarchy he’d had extensive personal experience with - the U.S. Navy. Which is why the ecclesiarchy is called “Sea Org” and wears uniforms rather than robes.

And then, as it goes with cults, the founder dies and maybe a charismatic successor can step in, and that chain can go for a while if the successors are competent enough, but if the cult survives it eventually switches its power source from personal charisma for institutional charisma and settles as a stable(ish) church. From what I hear, people are realizing the current head figure Miscavige is kind of an incompetent jackass and trying to figure out how to edge him out or route around him or practice Scientology outside of the structures he dominates, so I’d say we’re in that process now.

Now finally the mythology - Xenu and the volcano and all that - is dumb. I’m not going to pretend it’s not dumb. It’s batshit stupid. It was kind of an afterthought - like I said, Scientology is first of all a theory and practice of mind, and the cosmology is exactly what it looks like - a halfassed effort by a SF hack made to make the whole thing more closely fit the expectation of what a religion looks like, mostly so it could claim the tax exemption and general shielding from government oversight traditionally granted to American religions. And it worked well enough I guess, backed up with an admirable dedication to lawfare on behalf of the Scientologists that basically made it not worth the effort for the government to deny them.

(The legal system likes to put on airs of majesty and absolutism and meaning, but anyone who’s been in contact with it long enough realizes its just an organization of finite resources and internal politics same as anything else, and like feudal succession crises you need a plausible enough claim to legitimate a campaign, but past that success really comes down to how much resources each side is willing to spend.)

Scientologists as individuals - not lying they can be a little weird, though I think a lot of that is that converts to any religion are a little off-puttingly intense, and as a young religion that puts a lot of energy into recruitment (also like the law, evangelism likes to pretend that it’s a matter of having a more correct understanding but in practice mostly comes down to how much time and money and effort you’re willing to put into it), they’ve got a pretty high share of first-generation converts in their ranks. In LA I knew a few Scientologists who were born into the church, and they were actually some of the chillest bros I’ve ever met.

And while we’re talking about the conquest of frontier land from aboriginal inhabitants:

People deploring the Trail of Tears, Indian Removal and all that - I don’t think the national government really had a choice on that one. Or rather, to the extent they had a choice, it wasn’t between ethnic cleansing and peaceful coexistence; it was between ethnic cleansing by expulsion by the federal government and ethnic cleansing by extermination by independent settler warlords, who would have then established their own sovereign states, shattering federal unity and leaving Anglo-America vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics from European powers. (Remember, in 1812 the British fielded a successful expeditionary force, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight - and federal unity - clear that they wouldn’t come back to finish the job.)

The American founders were thoroughly bourgeois, in both the sense of “well-off merchants” and the more literal one of inhabiting and drawing power from the developed coastal cities. As soon as the revolution ended and the federal government was established, tensions between the mercantile coasts and agricultural interior came to the fore, most prominently in Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellions.

(The whiskey tax at the heart of the latter was considered on the urban coast as a sin tax to be passed on to consumers, but in the interior where a lack of transport options made bulky unrefined grain an uneconomical commodity and a lack of specie prompted a turn to liquor as an alternate store of value, it was effectively an income tax and a drag on every aspect of the economy.)

A policy of coexistence with natives seems noble and honorable to moderns, and indeed it was the noble and honorable policy of the coastal elite of the time, who preferred a policy continuous with the Proclamation of 1763, disfavoring Anglo settlement of native-inhabited lands. To frontier settlers, however, this policy, by cutting off the possibility of further homesteading, meant that with the natural growth of the settler population, family holdings would either have to be further subdivided or surplus population shunted into unlanded migrant labor, reducing the agricultural population to a state of European-style peasant immiseration for the benefit of natives who were even at the most charitable not their fellow countrymen.

Settlers chafed at this and before Indian removal became a federal policy local militias in Georgia and Florida - militia being, of course, a fancy term for “whoever shows up with guns” - were of their own initiative conducting extermination campaigns against local tribes. The Creek and Seminole wars were basically a nationalization of these campaigns, as a reactive attempt by the federal government to keep control of the southeast from being wrested away by either the tribes and their escaped slave allies on one hand, or by independent settler armies on the other. “There go the people. We must follow them, for we are their leaders.”

In the end Andrew Jackson, hero of these wars, was elected President, broke the coastal mercantile hold on the federal government, and pursued a federal policy of Indian Removal. But he was elected President, with emphasis on “elected” and “President”. By coopting settler genocide the United States remained intact under the aegis of the federal government (well, for a generation). The notion of some alternate history in which the federal government holds firm and the settler militias just slink away saying “sorry” is inane. We aren’t Canadians, after all. (And even the Canadians, so proud of their First Nations relations, are changing spots now those relations are getting in the way of their petrochemical economy.) The only possible timeline that would leave the natives in control of their lands is one in which the coastal merchant classes allied with the tribes to militarily suppress their own countrymen (and even then, I’m not sure they would have had the money and manpower to pull it off).

People say “violence never solves anything”, which is insane, holding only for ridiculous definitions of “solves”. And even if, for those definitions, it doesn’t solve problems, it at least makes them stop being problems. Throughout American history, there was a regularly recurring problem: “I want that land, but it’s got injuns on it.” And so each time we applied violence, and that’s not a problem anyone faces anymore. Have you ever seen the land that’s got injuns on it these days? No one wants that land.

Dashiell Hammett was one of the only pulp detective authors to have actually worked as a detective, with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, back when it was basically a countrywide mercenary police organization. The Pinkertons were actually closer to modern police than their official contemporaries in the machine politics era, who tended to fall somewhere between patronage-hire watchmen and the mayor (or sheriff)’s sanctioned gang. The establishment of the FBI was in many ways a nationalization of the Pinkertons, with key figures brought on as advisors, replicating the network of local bureaus with focuses on both investigation and the infiltration and undermining of labor radicalism. Big city police forces then remodeled themselves after the FBI - famously the LAPD under William Parker (the NYPD had professionalized already under Teddy Roosevelt, and Chicago managed to preserve its machine structure).

This process continued into the early 1970s, as the RFK/FBI-led attempt to shatter the Mafia shook out. This was part of the mid-20th century American centralization of power. If you’re ever tempted to look with contempt upon modern African states, or pre-Mao China, or pre-unification Germany, keep in mind that America was largely structured as a loose coalition of local bandit-warlords until the 1960s. At the national level, civil rights laws and the attempt to merge the two (black/white) American nations were as much a cynical front for advancing this centralization as they were an honest idealism. And not without cost - organized crime, and the permeable borders between that and urban politics, were one of the major mechanisms by which immigrant groups were integrated to and advanced within the American system, a way to translate sheer numbers and cultural affinity into structural power. American blacks largely fit the immigrant pattern, if you date “arrival” to the Great Migration, but then stall out in the ‘70s-‘80s, and a lot of that has to do with RICO laws, post-60s reformist idealism, and the nationally-sponsored “war on crime” blocking this path. In an earlier world, black local politicians and street gangs would form alliances, eventually using patronage to co-opt and take over police forces, and extract rents that would be partially redistributed down the machine ladder. As is, you still have corruption, but it accrues to politicians, pastors and other organizers, and white property developers, without trickling down to street level.

You can quote me on that - the sorry state of American blacks is because criminal gangs are too weak and police aren’t corrupt and brutally extralegal enough.

What was I saying? Dashiell Hammett. Lived in San Francisco and set his fiction there. Was an actual private investigator, and accordingly has a strong focus on tradecraft, especially with the nameless “Continental Op”, employee of a fictionalized Pinkerton, protagonist of some of his books and most of his stories. Though the climaxes could get colorful, the Op’s assignments - quietly track down a runaway heiress, locate a fled embezzler - and methods - use 3-man teams to tail people on the street, question and dig up background on the target’s acquaintances, sit around and eavesdrop on conversations - were true to actual practice. (Hammett said the major difference is that what his characters accomplished in a week would in reality take several months, while they worked multiple cases in between).

While the Op was proudly professional (a recurring theme being his contempt for hotel staff “detectives”) but otherwise opaque, Hammett pioneered detective characterization with other characters. Where the Op was based on actual detectives he worked with, Sam Spade (protagonist of The Maltese Falcon) was based on those detectives’ romantic self-image, and his stoic facade, cynical chivalry, and romantic entanglements were a *huge* influence on later writers. Nick and Nora Charles, based on Hammet and his beloved, playwright Lillian Hellman, mixed investigation with screwball banter in a more lighthearted tone, and can be considered the predecessor of Maddie and David (of Moonlighting), Mulder & Scully, and even non-(explicitly-)romantic buddy partnerships like Crockett & Tubbs.

Hammett’s real-life experience exposed him to less picturesque aspects of the private investigator’s role in society as well. He complained that employers doing background checks were interested in issues of moral character that, gambling debts aside, had no correlation to trustworthiness, and he especially disliked working to suppress labor agitation. Starting as a Pinkerton agent, Hammett ended up being blacklisted and imprisoned as an enthusiastic communist activist.


Next is Raymond Chandler, the most literary of the detective greats. Where Hammett had been an actual PI, and reflected it in his writing, Chandler was a cuttingly observant man who retreated into drink because he was way too intelligent and cynical for Los Angeles, and reflected it in his. His Phillip Marlowe inhabited a thinly-to-the-point-of-pointlessly veiled LA, and passes through it with gimlet eye and poison tongue, all backhanded compliments and sideways insults. Hard-boiled fiction’s love of brilliant turns of phrase, of meandering digressions that end with a surprise punch to the gut, largely comes from him.

While at first glance Marlowe might seem to perform the duties of a detective same as the Op, on close examination you realize that none of what transpires has anything to do with his intentions, and that the plot is moved along by coincidences he encounters while out on assignment, with the ultimate plot of a tale usually about as unrelated to the inciting incident as in golden age Simpsons. This is equally true of The Big Lebowski, which is a loving Chandler tribute, and Chandler himself parodies this (and his/Marlowe’s booziness) in one of his later stories in which the plot is advanced by the things his protagonist literally runs into while drunk driving around LA.

Chandler’s novels are usually composed of the plots of 3 or 4 of his short stories banged together, but that’s fine, because the plot was never the thing, the meat being the wonderful language, setting, and characterizations, which were crafted anew. You can still to this day drive around LA and discover most of the places he described, looking exactly as stated. And while I can’t speak to his period accuracy, I was myself once a too intelligent, cynical Angelino writer for a while, to the point I avoided leaving home sober, and I can confirm that the kind of person who inhabits LA, their nature and motivations, are exactly as he laid out back then.

Chandler’s output eventually trailed off. One story, appearing years after any others, reads like absolutely terrible Chandler pastiche. Scholars disagree whether this was the product of an alcoholic wreck of a man who had known better than to try to publish anything for years but needed the money, or his wife pretending to be him because he was an alcoholic wreck of a man incapable of even writing anymore but needed the money.

If you’re only going to read one of these three, read Chandler.


Finally, a bit of a contrast in Mickey Spillane. Spillane’s famous recurring detective character was Mike Hammer. Given the name, you might not be surprised to learn he spent less time in cautiously piecing together mysteries than punching communists in the jaw, in much the same way Captain America spent a lot of time punching Nazis in the jaw. Actually, Spillane had been a writer for Captain America in the ‘40s. Actually, the character was originally written as a comic book protagonist named “Mike Danger”. Beyond communism, Hammer often found himself arrayed against such other corrupt and corrupting trappings of the decadent elite as drugs, psychotherapy, and trial by jury.

Spillane’s writing was, I’ll say, not up to the level of Hammett or Chandler, though he has been favorably cited by prominent writers like Ayn Rand and Frank Miller. If you look at pulp of the time though, he’s appreciably above average. Pulp… basically the closest parallel we have to pulp today is fanfiction, in terms of its average quality, low cost of production and consumption, sheer volume, and the rate at which it produces critical and commercial successes. And dear god, the smuttiness. Mike Hammer banged a lot of the broads he ran into. Before barefacedly honest pornography became as ubiquitous as it is, pulp filled the role of mainstream erotic product, with much detective pulp serving the same “drugstore-available erotica” role for men that romance pulp did for women. (Appreciating this makes the “Seduction of the Innocent” comic book scare about drugstore-available pulp for kids a bit more comprehensible).

This crossed over into other formats like cinema - Deep Throat, Beyond the Green Door, and The Devil in Miss Jones were all received as at least in the same ballpark as mainstream releases, and up into the ’80s, pornographic movies had plots and runtimes that roughly approximated Hollywood product, and even in the ‘90s, softcore product at least had narrative framing devices. Between gonzo and DVD nonlinearity and the internet and the collapse of obscenity prosecution against which to offer artistic content as defense that’s faded, though as the Valley studio system’s share of the industry shrinks you’re seeing them play to their strengths in production values and plot (particularly with parody content, Tijuana Bible/H-Doujinshi-style).

On the other hand you had whole parapornographic mainstream subgenres as the erotic thriller, the rape-revenge drama, the teen sex comedy - American Pie was released in 1999, which was really pushing the limit at which it was worth it to watch 90 minutes of material for the chance to briefly see a bare-chested girl masturbating. (It’s still worth it to hear Alyson Hannigan talking dirty, though.)

The one thing that pulp still has a hold on is violence. (In addition to the jaw, there are many loving passages of Hammer battering guys in the crotch.) While splatter-horror may be a flourishing niche genre, with regular DVD releases, it’s still that, a niche genre, and not the mega-industry of pornography. Video games yes, but detective pulp and “true crime” genres have mostly just migrated to another medium and become hourlong police procedurals like CSI or Law & Order, offering the same thrills of vicarious brutality masked by the fig leaf of nominal identification with the forces of law and order. (Though cable antihero dramas and serial killer procedurals like Dexter and Hannibal seem to be moving a half- to full step beyond that.)

Mickey Spillane. Ah, fuck it, I don’t have anything else to say about Mickey Spillane.

Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.

National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.

And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.

“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.

You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.

(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)

skullgreymom:

[Thomas] Culpeper was able to provide his services for free. This, and a willingness to examine patients in person rather than simply examining their urine (in his opinion, “as much piss as the Thames might hold” did not help in diagnosis), 

The colorful American nutritional reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century like Kellogg and Graham look a little quacky from today but it should be remembered that they were at the time on the cutting edge - the very concept of vitamins, nutrients, and even calories were being pioneered, and the notion of matching specific ailments to specific deficiencies - or contrariwise, health to particular - was revolutionary. Nutrition was high tech and you see echoes of this golden age in pop culture still - the notion of spinach making Popeye super-strong, or even the atompunk meal-in-a-pill.

For reasons of settlement patterns, Americans had always enjoyed a much higher share of meat - and lower of greens - in their diet than Europeans, and this high-protein, low-fiber diet did in fact contribute to widespread problems of digestion to which bran and enemas, the nutritionists’ panaceas, were actually reasonable responses.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is that when Kellogg first set up operations he had people mail him stool samples to diagnose, until the Battle Creek postmaster got tired of working in an unrefrigerated office full of human shit.

You know what media property’s due for a reboot? Birth of A Nation.

Griffiths’ movie came out in 1915, The Clansman (and the rest of Dixon’s Klan trilogy) in the 1900s, so it’s all public domain up for grabs. Maybe I should do it.

In honesty I’ve never seen/read either. The summaries I’ve read make them sound pretty damn silly, but it’s easy to make things sound silly in summary. Anyway, you don’t have to be deathly faithful to the original plot, maybe take a few touchpoints and a few character names, and tell a tale of Reconstruction and Redemption. It’s an interesting time that we don’t have many popular representations of.

I certainly don’t think a modern version would end “and then the noble Ku Klux Klan triumphed over vile mongrelization, restored the proper order of things, and they all lived happily ever after”, but it would pretty much HAVE To end “and then Southern Redeemers, including the Ku Klux Klan, did in fact defeat Republican coalitions and establish a white regime”.

See, back when, every Black History month, George Washington Carver came up, the takeaway message was basically

1) Man that guy liked peanuts
or, at furthest
2) Black guys can do peanut science with the best of them

But the really interesting thing about Carver as a historical figure was that for a while there, it was conceivable that a black professor could be the public face of a government program in the American South. Because slavery didn’t transition directly into Jim Crow, there were three steps forward under Reconstruction, and then two back to the “nadir of American race relations”.

(The other interesting thing Carver stands in for in history was that with the shift from the plantation system to sharecropping, crop rotation with nitrogen-fixation crops became pretty imperative, so building a market for peanuts was important. An oft-overlooked advantage to slave labor was that the agricultural economy could exhaust the land and shift towards the frontier with its labor force and labor relations intact. The plantation system relied on taking soil super-rich from aeons of floods and no intensive cultivation and applying a ton of labor to extract the hell out of it. And in contrast, the extension of feudal agriculture to Eastern Europe was slow, for lack of population, and involved offering substantial incentives and concessions to fugitive peasants. Later on the region featured the rankest serfdom, but that’s a whole other worm cannery.)

Every work of fiction is of its time, though, and there’s plenty of modern resonance to be found in the Reconstruction era.

For one, nation-building. The idea that America would invade and occupy countries to rebuild them in accordance with American values… I mean, America invaded and occupied America once to rebuild it in accordance with American values. And failed. In the same way. Not because its armies were defeated in the field, but because local elites, with patience and paramilitary violence, rebuilt their position; and with a combination of weariness, expense, and electoral shifts, Washington eventually shrugged, said “good enough”, cut a deal, and turned to other priorities.

And I mean, America might not have converted the South, but it did keep control. And I expect Iraq and Afghanistan to stay in the American sphere of influence for at least a good generation or two. I suppose there are stronger competing powers in their region, that’s a difference. An independent CSA miiiight have aligned with the British Empire, but it’s not like reconstructed Florida was going to become a puppet state of the Cuban landowners (um). Though I guess Texas and the desert states weren’t firmly distinguished from Mexico until after WWI with the Border War, arguably Operation Wetback in the ‘50s.

(That’s why I don’t dismiss the Arizona anti-reconquistadors as cranks. The notion that after a relatively short period of hegemony, a major population shift could lead to irredentist conflict is… well-precedented, actually.)

So, there’s some lessons about humility in foreign policy. But really, there’s no way to read the history of Reconstruction as a modern liberal parable. (Actually I hear The Traitor, the follow-up to The Clansman, depicts the Klan degenerating into causeless violence and banditry, but ends with an optimistic message of peace and reconciliation through personal openness of the heart and mind. Among the white race, of course. Don’t be silly.) To the extent there’s inspiration to be drawn there, it’s reactionary inspiration. Just because previously subjugated groups have been making advances for a few decades doesn’t mean the worm can’t turn and they can’t be repressed. And heck, even if whites become a numerical minority, with solidarity, cleverness, and a dash of violence, it’s possible to set up a system that leaves them in absolute control.

And let’s not pretend that’d be a message without contemporary relevance or appeal.

Not to say you couldn’t find role models if your politics run the other way. There were carpetbaggers who were activisty true believers in racial equality. There were scalawags who put class before race, solidarity-wise. There were freedmen who, though uneducated and inexperienced in power, took to the democratic project in earnest, with high hopes. (And there were the incompetent and the corrupt and the obnoxious. Always and everywhere.) And in any competent retelling, they’d show up, and be taken seriously, maybe be viewpoint characters for parts. They’d just lose, in the end.

For an economic crisis (crisis? it’s at least cris-ish) that propagated by way of household debt and first manifested in evictions and foreclosures, it’s really striking - if you’ve got a background in American history - how little pushback there’s been at the county level.

Nationwide debt crises used to happen regularly, and there were inevitably a few sheriffs or judges who would refuse to go along with the liquidation, creating a point of media focus and kicking the issue up to the state level, where governors and legislatures would usually compromise to some degree (especially if the lower officials had conveniently timed their resistance to match election cycles).

Which, if you’ve ever deplored the effects of “politicizing justice” and wonder why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to subject judges and law enforcement officials to electoral pressure, there you go.

Of course there was also the option of getting a few people with rifles, besieging courthouses and blockading auctions, but that died out even earlier - mind the Grapes of Wrath “Then who do we shoot?” bit - as railroads both enabled rural delivery and thus finance beyond local store credit and the one-branch bank, and also made it practical to send nonlocal militia troops into the boonies (first in coal and iron territory, back before the Rust Belt rusted, and then further west).

Everyone knows that after WWII the federal government grew at the expense of state power, fewer appreciate just how much county power - which used to be pretty much the face of Government - receded. Today movements that aim at its restoration, like Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizens, are marginal among the marginal.

I blame the telegraph, for enabling realtime communication across distance and thus obviating the necessity of feudal hierarchies. A court, after all, comes from the term for a retinue of power with identifiable human faces. There was always power, but it used to be close enough and personal enough you could make a CHA check against it. (Or Intimidate, which is STR, iirc). Plus there’s always the tendency to go native.

(The most functional method of countering this tendency was requiring courtiers to spend about half their time accumulating power at their own courts in the field and half spending it down at their liege’s court - this was arrived at independently [as far as I know] by the Japanese bakufu, the French royalty, and the American DoD, where high ranking officers rotate back and forth from field command to the Pentagon. Probably parallels in pre-computerized large firms doing rotations between home and branch offices, but I think that was derived from DoD. Well, DoW, back then.)

Histories of the New Deal often acknowledge the federalization of power but then account for the TVA, rural electrification, Rural Telephone Service, etc. either as the political cost paid for that power, or as something that centralized power made possible, when they were in fact constitutive of that power.