Tachyon's Birthday Rumcake

Tachyon's Birthday Rumcake
Originally uploaded by oserwise

Oh, remember months ago I made a cake for Tachyon Press's 15th birthday party? While I was still on crutches? I finally got around to looking for the photo and there (courtesy of Tachyon) it was.

Chocolate-mocha cake with rum frosting. And not a bad pass at the logo, given my gimpitude at the time...

A Different Country Altogether

Not too much about right now is all that different from back then. My father gave me a copy of American Caesars, a book he'd heard about on the radio. It's a series of essays on American presidents from Roosevelt to Bush the younger, each essay divided into "the Road to the White House," "the Presidency," and "Private Life." It's a fascinating book--and it's written by "one of Britain's most distinguished biographers," Nigel Hamilton. I'm mid-way through Eisenhower right now. The material on Roosevelt was mostly familiar to me; some of the material on Truman was new. I was born in 1953, so Eisenhower was a dimly perceived image to me, and Truman was probably less real than Roosevelt (who had already been deified, in Hamilton's terms). Anyway, one bit struck me as sadly, peculiarly familiar. It's 1951 and already Joe McCarthy is spouting lies and fouling the political waters. The Attorney General shows up at a meeting with the president with a dossier on McCarthy, "enough to blow Senator McCarthy's show sky high." And then:

The president banged the table with the flat of his hand.... 'You must not ask the president of the United States to get down in the gutter with a guttersnipe. Nobody, not even the president, can approach too close to a skunk, in skunk territory, and expect to get anything out of it except a bad smell. If you think someone is telling a lie about you, the only way to answer is with the whole truth.'

Sound like anything that goes on today? And it sounds really good--I found myself nodding. But Hamilton calls this, "Trumanian naivety of a tragic kind." Hamilton suggests that if Truman had authorized using that dossier of what, by the sound of it, was true things, to counter McCarthy's lies, the '50s would have been a very different country.

I wonder. No McCarthy means no Richard Nixon as Eisenhower's VP (maybe no Eisenhower, for that matter); which means no Watergate. Everything becomes--I'm not well enough versed in modern American history to say how different. But the country I grew up in might well be unrecognizable to the people in that universe.