Category Archive: USA History
“Magnificent Distances”
Washington DC, April 2018 – TVC arrived in time for the lovely pink and white cherry blossoms and a balmy, breezy day, which turned sharply wintry again (must be that global warming). Washington is a strange mix of Adelaide and Canberra (the latter was designed by American Walter Burley Griffin, with D.C. in mind), the massive edifices a meld of strong Neo-Classical (White House, old Treasury, National Archives, Supreme Court) and New Brutalism* (new Treasury, State Department, FBI Building). In Burr, Gore Vidal quotes a visiting English diplomat in the early 1800s, tactfully referring to the city’s “magnificent distances.” But the place has filled-up…
Continue Reading →Let’s Improve on Gilbert!
Gilbert Stuart helped deify that most carnal of Gods, George Washington
This artist at the Met in NYC on Wednesday 4 April, 2018, was having a darn good try:
Continue Reading →911 Memorial
April 2018 At Ground Zero, after much hand-wringing and kvetching, the powers that be have achieved a pretty decent edifice to commemorate the infamous acts of 11 September 2001. Conspiracy theorists aside, for most attendees there is balance in the museum exhibits and an overly pious attitude has thankfully been stowed. The most powerful aspects are the remembrance wall, containing the names of those who perished, in clear graven font, and two enormous infinity pools, cut deep into the sites of the twin towers, oddly recalling the gashed landscape of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC. While the Pentagon and…
Continue Reading →Playing With Fire
(by Lawrence O’Donnell) (2017) Our favourite book on the incredible 1968 Presidential election remains the superb and impartial work by visiting British journalists, An American Melodrama. But this work by leftie Lawrence is a terrific read, once you learn to shut-out the partisan noise swirling about every chapter. There’s nothing new here except the charge of treason by Nixon over the Anna Chennault affair, which O’Donnell mines from a book by the almost equally, but less noisily, partial John A. Farrell. [For his Book Richard Nixon: The Life, Farrell has read Haldeman’s notes of conversations with Tricky Dick and implies…
Continue Reading →Not For All the Money in the World
December 15: John Paul Getty III, kidnapped and ransomed, turned up alive near Naples on this day in 1973. He’d been missing for months. A letter had arrived the previous month with an accompanying parcel and the curt message: “This is Paul’s ear. If we don’t get some money within 10 days, then the other ear will arrive. In other words, he will arrive in little bits.” His grandfather, J Paul Getty Snr., who was worth over $2 billion US, was a tad parsimonious about paying the ransom (although with 14 other grandchildren and a loathing of appeasement, he must have thought…
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