The short prologue to my novel is now available for download on the fiction page.

The ubiquitous black and white photos from the depression have a tendency to make one perceive that everyone wore clothing in drab shades of gray, and that life was a bleak visage of darkness. The accompanying downtrodden motif of the time usually reinforces that idea as a contemporary psychological construct — why wouldn’t people dress in ugly, depressing colors when the world was collapsing?— and further skews our received interpretation of the era.

Of course, in reality that’s nothing but pure nonsense, as shown in these glorious color photos from the 30’s. People dressed in vivid color, street signs exploded with pastels, and buckets of peaches were, in fact, not gray. But then again, the depression-as-uncolorful-time construct is perhaps squarely wrong as a theoretical matter: ex ante, we might presume that people would dress more colorfully in hard times, as a psychological weapon against the hardship.

In any case, it’s almost shocking to look at the photo collection. Dont’ be surprised if your initial reaction is why are those people from the 70’s wearing clothes from the 30’s and driving around in old-fashioned cars?

A lot of people are talking about George Packer’s article on the Senate in the current issue of the New Yorker. I think it’s an ok article; George seems to have a better handle on Senate procedure than most of the DC press corp, although he still doesn’t seem to understand how the filibuster, holds, and unanimous consent are structurally all the same issue, and therefore his reformist position seems a little shaky to anyone who does fundamentally understand the issues. (Case and point: an obsession with “secret holds,” which also plagues the DC press corp, is a pretty good sign that you’re not quite wearing the right glasses yet). On a couple of occasions, he also mistakes the changing shape of partisanship for an increase in partisanship, for instance when he talks about how in the 60’s, the minority leader and majority leader often worked together to break filibusters. Well, that’s because the minority obstructionists were southern democrats hostile to civil rights, members of the majority party. The majority coalition in most filibuster situations was the northern democrats and the GOP. Amazingly, he writes several paragraphs later about how most of the civil rights act of 1964 was written in minority leader Dirksen’s office, but fails to see how the notion of party didn’t really apply in the case of 60’s civil rights battles. It wasn’t a partisan issue.

But leaving all that aside, the thing that irked me most about the article was Packer’s understanding of deliberation. Continue reading →