"The
Atlantic" and "Harper's" are both iconic magazines that are responsible
for promoting the careers of many prominent writers. I have been reading
them for years. They also both have a profile of John Kerry in their
December issue. David Rohde did a individualist profile of Kerry,
lauding him as an "activist" diplomat shaking up the stuffy old foreign
policy establishment in "The Atlantic." In "Harper's,"
Andrew Cockburn rejects this sort on analysis completely and challenges
the idea that there is such a thing as foreign policy at all. Kerry
comes off as a power hungry but powerless hack who owes his position to
back room politics much more than shrewd determination. Cockburn was
actually communicating original thoughts and I turned each page with a
new morsel of knowledge. Rohde's fluff would have fit nicely after a top
ten vacation spot list on Delta's in-flight magazine. Reading the whole
thing felt like choking down sugarless oatmeal. With a few notable
exceptions, this is a good representation of the current trajectory of
each magazine.
I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo
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