A line that made me laugh out loud...

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• Richard Brody says:

  August 20, 2010 at 4:15 pm

  The one truly pro­voc­at­ive part of Roy Edroso’s ména­ger­ie is the last one, regard­ing the aes­thet­ic redemp­tion of pro­pa­ganda: com­pare to the nineteen-year-old Godard’s 1950 essay “Towards a Political Cinema.” The terms of praise over­lap only slightly, but enough to spur reflection.

• Asher Steinberg says:

  August 20, 2010 at 8:18 pm

  A funny line, but, strictly speak­ing, the first vic­tory had noth­ing to do with his per­form­ance as President as he was­n’t President yet, so say­ing four, rather than three, is a non sequit­ur, the fourth vic­tory was dur­ing war­time, and as for the second and third, they’re not neces­sar­ily incon­sist­ent with the claim that he made the Depression longer. Of course things improved from 1932 to 1936, and from 1936 to 1940, and Roosevelt was rewar­ded for that at the polls, but that does­n’t mean that things could­n’t have improved much more and much faster with dif­fer­ent eco­nom­ic policies.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  August 20, 2010 at 8:34 pm

  @Asher: Well, we’ll nev­er know wheth­er or not things “could­n’t have improved much more and much faster with dif­fer­ent eco­nom­ic policies.” Or will we? I sure as hell hope not, as I don’t think I could handle much more eco­nom­ic policy peri­od, myself. Anyway, the part of the line that cracked me up the most was “if you’re bored some­time, run this thes­is past your grand­par­ents,” which cre­ated, for me at least, a quite uproari­ous men­tal image. His sub­sequent cita­tion of Shlaes sug­ges­ted to me that I would­n’t neces­sar­ily find her a very per­suas­ive FDR debunker…

• Oliver C says:

  August 20, 2010 at 9:45 pm

  Counterfactuals are his­tor­i­ans’ equi­val­ent of the movie ‘The Butterfly Effect’, and all too often just as manip­u­lat­ive and histrionic.

• Kent Jones says:

  August 21, 2010 at 10:24 am

  This is really noth­ing new. I seem to remem­ber plenty of Rand devotees in the Nixon and Reagan admin­is­tra­tions. I think David Stockman, the trickle-down king, was a card-carrying Objectivist.
  Glenn, I’ve nev­er seen the Italian fas­cist epic adapt­a­tion of We the Living. How ’bout you?

• Glenn Kenny says:

  August 21, 2010 at 10:32 am

  @ Kent: I have not seen it. I’d cer­tainly like to. J. Hoberman writes about it very evoc­at­ively in “The Red Atlantis,” and as it hap­pens, it IS avail­able on DVD—albeit in a per­haps less-than-ideal edi­tion. I pondered its con­di­tion in this post:
  http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/10/capital-it-fails-us-now.html
  Some might cite this as an example of an, erm, free-market fail­ure. But I would­n’t want to get into an argu­ment with any­one who’d object to that characterization…

• Kent Jones says:

  August 21, 2010 at 2:14 pm

  Oh, thanks – seem to have missed that.
  I have fond memor­ies of Rand’s Phil Donahue appear­ances. Such as: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzGFytGBDN8

• Cutshaw says:

  August 24, 2010 at 8:19 am

  First of all I’m happy to have found your site Glenn. I spent way too much time read­ing it over the past two days.
  The only prob­lem I have is that when you delve into polit­ics it seems more like snip­ing fol­lowed by caveats allow­ing for a retreat.
  I am not a Rand devotee nor a big fan of FDR yet find no way to dis­cuss any of the com­plex issues based on what you pos­ted without being exposed to silly attacks. If I point out neg­at­ives regard­ing FDR and evid­ence that his policies actu­ally exacer­bated the Depression will it turn into a “Rand vs FDR” thing?
  I mean there’s noth­ing con­tro­ver­sial about ques­tion­ing con­ven­tion­al wis­dom asso­ci­ated with FDR’s stun­ning (in some senses fright­en­ing) impact, Rand or his­tor­ic­al events that reshaped the entire planet.