"The Trump administration has urged professional football’s leaders to induct Theodore Roosevelt into the sport’s hall of fame..."

"... with one top official predicting it will happen within the year.... [Historians and sports experts have said [Theodore] Roosevelt played a crucial role by forcing a national conversation around football safety, rather than leaving it to factions that could not agree on next steps. Edward O’Keefe, the CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library pointed to some of the specific changes to football that resulted from Roosevelt’s interventions. 'He helped invent the forward pass,' said O'Keefe. 'He made some of the first safety measures that continue to make the game possible today.'"

From "Trump officials push Theodore Roosevelt for Pro Football Hall of Fame/'I think we’re going to see Theodore Roosevelt inducted,' Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said at an event on Thursday" (WaPo).

I went looking in Edmund Morris's "Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" for some meatier material about TR and football. I found this on page 598:

“What matters a few broken bones to the glories of inter-collegiate sport?” he cried at a Harvard Club dinner. (Meanwhile, not far away in hospital, the latest victim of football savagery lay paralyzed for life.) He declared publicly that he would “disinherit” any son of his who refused to play college games. And in private, through clenched teeth: “I would rather one of them should die than have them grow up as weaklings.”

"When you finally get to the phrase that needs improving, you have to rotate the platen downward in order to squeeze fresh words above it...."

"Because of this awkwardness, the tendency of the typer, as opposed to the writer (in Truman Capote’s famous distinction), is to move ever forward, ever faster. Why waste thirty seconds revising an obscure clause, when you can tack on an explanatory sentence in five? Hence paragraphs come out longer than they should be, and an accretion of verbal debris weighs the typescript down. Such debris, of course, can be cleared away in revision. But the tolerance that permitted it in the first place tends to lower critical standards the second time around. The pen, on the other hand, is an instrument of thrilling mobility. Its ink flows as readily as the writer’s imagination. Its nib flickers back and forth with the speed of a snake’s tongue, deleting a cliché here, an adjective there, then rearing up suddenly into white space and emitting a spray of new words.... Unlike the electric typewriter, it does not buzz irritatedly when motionless, as if to say, Hurry up, I’m overheating. It sits quietly in the hand, comforting the fingers with acquired warmth, assuring you that the sentence you are searching for lies somewhere in its liquid reservoir...."

From the essay "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Smith-Corona" — written in 1981, before writers used word processors.

The essay, by Edmund Morris, is collected in "This Living Hand: And Other Essays" (commission earned). 

I added the link on "Truman Capote's famous distinction." My link goes to Quote Investigator, which looks into whether Capote really said — about "On the Road" — "That’s not writing, that’s typing."

"It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions... to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own businesses."

Said Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in "Theodore Rex" by Edmund Morris (commission earned). 

Context:

"Petitioners visiting the Executive Office learned to keep talking, because the President usually had an open book on his desk, and was quite capable of snatching it up when the conversation flagged."

I'm reading page 108 of "Theodore Rex (Theodore Roosevelt Series Book 2)," by Edmund Morris (Amazon link, commission earned).

Also, on page 126:

Having created a new tag and added it to 7 posts in this blog's archive, I list the 7 posts in an order other than chronological.

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

The list:

1. September 4, 2004 — Studying the recent spike in the phrase "barking mad," I quote Edmund Morris's reaction to Maureen Dowd's calling him "barking mad" — "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal."

2. November 28, 2010 — That time Edmund Morris reamed Bob Shieffer on "Face the Nation," and I compared him to Peter Finch in "Network" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny."

3. December 4, 2023 — President Theodore Roosevelt waded naked in Rock Creek in full view of onlookers, described by Edmund Morris.

4. November 16, 2023 — TR's smelling of arsenic, as described by Edmund Morris

5. June 24, 2004 — Edmund Morris has a theory about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did: "Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy."

6. December 1, 2023 — TR's "cyclonic" personality, as described by Edmund Morris.

7. April 25, 2004 — "Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"

"On winter evenings in Rock Creek Park, strollers may observe the President of the United States wading pale and naked into the ice-clogged stream, followed by shivering members of his Cabinet."

From "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris (Amazon commission earned).

I finished reading this 1,162-page book yesterday. The last 2 sentences are fantastic: "As he ate his sandwiches he saw below him in the trees a ranger approaching, running, clutching the yellow slip of a telegram. Instinctively, he knew what message the man was bringing." Teddy, with sandwiches, ranger with telegram.

I was going to say "The last 2 sentences are perfect," but the "As" suggests a precise moment in time and so "sandwiches" — in the plural — is hard to picture/believe, even if Teddy did have multiple sandwiches for lunch. "Below him in the trees" is understood. He's in the mountains. (Here's the drop pin on Google maps).

The natural thing for me to do at that point was to go back to the beginning of the book. Is it wonderful or dismaying to see how many things surprise you when you reread a book you've just read? But there's the President, wading naked into Rock Creek — in winter, to be seen by casual passersby — on page 24. (Here's the drop pin for Rock Creek Park.)

Bob Dylan sang "But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked." But I've always thought of as meaning that the President must, like anyone else, need to get naked to take a shower. Or it's all metaphor, expressing an imperative that the President be fully exposed. But it will never be required that the President strip naked for winter river wading in full view of onlookers. 

"The man’s personality was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of low pressure."

"The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity, while a core of stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure Roosevelt was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear.”

I'm reading "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris (Amazon Associates link/commission earned).

That passage jumped out at me, because I'd just heard Elon Musk say about himself "My mind often feels like a very wild storm."

"The slight stench of arsenic that emanated from his clothes; the tickly whiskers and glittering glasses..."

"... the manic bursts of energy which left him white and sick with exhaustion; his geyser-like garrulousness, choked by stammers which would inevitably explode under the pressure of more words boiling up inside him; his exuberant hopping on the dance-floor, so perilous to lace pantaloons; the bloodcurdling stories of wolves and bears; the black eyes from boxing, the nervous diarrhea, the alarming hiss of asthma in his lungs—these were not the things a girl of polite background dreamed about, except perhaps in nightmares. Yet Alice could not help being intrigued by him...."

I'm reading "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" by Edmund Morris (Amazon Associates link/commission earned).

Presidential biographer Edmund Morris to Bob Schieffer on "Face the Nation": "That's a fucked up question." [UPDATED: "That’s a bullshit question!"]

Schieffer's question was: "What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics?"

“You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian. 

Kenyan-born...

“As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in 'My Cousin Vinny,' ‘That’s a f----- up question!'” Morris said, relishing over the word as network censors bleeped him out.

“You cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today,” he continued. 

Yeah, it's a fucked up question, but I bet Doris Kearns Goodwin would answer it. I mean, she'd whip out a juicy anecdote that would seem to answer it. Come on, Edmund, cast off your Kenyan-born, British-accented attitude and play the media game.

“I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we hope for in our presidents now, what we look for in our presidents now and what we’re increasingly disappointed by. He understood foreign culture, recognized the dignity of the United States. He was forceful yet dignified. And what I really feel these days is, we’ve become such an insular people.”

Bullshit... as the immortal Peter Finch said in "Network."

Good evening... this is my last broadcast. Yesterday, I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God Bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decay, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God Bullshit. And then, there's the noble man bullshit — that man is a noble creature that can order his own world. Who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me, that man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for 33 years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.

More from Morris the Cat Kenyan:

Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”

So... like... the terrorists?  They do maintain more slim and toned bodies. Man, he just came out and called us fat! He ran out of bullshit!

UPDATE: My original link goes to Politico, which records Morris as saying "That’s a f----- up question!" But here's the video and, although the bleep is there, it seems that Morris said "That’s a bullshit question!"

That would correspond to what Marisa Tomei said:



Strangely, I was motivated to call bullshit on Morris and go on to discuss "bullshit" in that other movie ("Network").

"Barking mad."

I've been trying to chase down the "barking mad" meme. 

Wonkette has a post a couple days ago about Googling "Zell Miller" and "barking mad": only 16 hits at the time, but it was still early. It's up to 74 now. But it's not just a reaction to Zell Miller. 

On "The Daily Show" in mid-August, Maureen Dowd called Dick Cheney "barking mad." Since then, I've been noticing the phrase, which I think is funny, because I have a literal mind, and I picture the person actually barking.

There's a great section of Spalding Gray's "Monster in a Box" where he describes going a bit mad and literally barking. But it seems to have become the standard way to call someone crazy. When did that happen?

I used Nexis to try to trace the meme down, but unfortunately I was using a newsgroup file that included British and Australian newspapers. I could barely see the American examples!

Clearly, the phrase has a British origin. But why the sudden outbreak here? And it's not just that people have gotten crazier lately, so don't try to sidetrack me. I know everyone likes to call people crazy in this election season, especially since "he's crazy" worked to down the most promising of the Democratic candidates in the primaries. Maybe it will work again: Cheney's crazy! Bush is crazy! Wolfowitz! And they're not just crazy, they're barking mad!

I'm going with the suspicion that Maureen Dowd is the American infection point. (Email me if you have another suspect.) Here's the Google result for "barking mad" and "Maureen Dowd." 213 results.

I see she made a big impression a year ago, after the Supreme Court issued its opinion in the University of Michigan affirmative action case, Grutter v. Bollinger. She wrote:

The dissent is a clinical study of a man [Clarence Thomas] who has been driven barking mad by the beneficial treatment he has received. It's poignant, really. It drives him crazy that people think he is where he is because of his race, but he is where he is because of his race. Other justices rely on clerks and legal footnotes to help with their opinions; Thomas relies on his id, turning an opinion on race into a therapeutic outburst. In his dissent, he snidely dismisses the University of Michigan Law School's desire to see minority faces in the mix as "racial aesthetics," giving the effort to balance bigotry in society the moral weight of a Benetton ad. The phrase "racial aesthetics" would be more appropriately applied to President George W. Bush's nominating convention in Philadelphia, when the Republicans put on a minstrel show for the white fat cats in the audience.

Ah! But the Maureen Dowd "barking mad" infection point could be traced even farther back, as a Nexis search revealed. I found an October 14, 1999, piece in The San Francisco Chronicle interviewing the writer Edmund Morris (author of the Reagan biography "Dutch") about what he thought about Dowd calling him "barking mad." (He said "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal.")

Well, I don't claim to have solved the mystery of the "barking mad" meme. My sketchy research leads me to think Dowd has only labeled three persons "barking mad": Morris, Thomas, and Cheney.

And she's already dealt with Zell Miller's speech, and she did not call him "barking mad" or even "mad." She said:

Zell Miller, playing Cotton Mather behind the cross-like lectern, made Mr. Cheney seem rational, with a maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country: B-1 and B-2 bombers, F-14A Tomcats, F-15 Eagles, Patriot and Trident missiles, and Aegis cruisers.

She did imply Miller was way beyond "barking mad" though, if he made the "barking mad" Dick Cheney seem rational. I guess Miller was so crazy, in her view, that one cannot speak directly of that craziness but can only indirectly approach the topic with a comparison to another person already established--in Dowdworld--as "barking mad."

And speaking of memes, is it Dowd who got the lectern-looked-like-a-cross meme going? "The Daily Show" used it later the same day. No, here's an earlier reference (in the NYT). I wrote about the lectern on the second day of the Convention, and, though I said it reminded me of a pulpit, I didn't see the cross. But clearly we can't blame Dowd or the NYT for setting off the observation that the lectern looked like a cross. How do I know? Because a Google search using the word "lectern" produced 409 hits, and a Google search trying the misnomer "podium" produced 7,350 hits.

How Reagan and Clinton learned to think.

Edmund Morris spins a theory in this week's New Yorker about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did. It all started with nearsightedness:

As a boy, “Dutch” Reagan assumed that nature was a blur. Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy. He did not find it disorienting, as somebody who had been blind from birth might. Perhaps his later, Rothko-like preference for large, luminous policy blocks (as opposed to, say, Bill Clinton’s fly’s-eye view of government as a multifacetted montage, endlessly adjustable) derived from his unfocussed childhood.

Clinton didn't somehow have fly eyes to correspond to Reagan's myopia, and both men are described as suffering from a lack of focus as a child, but somehow their ways of thinking came out completely different because of something having to do with their eyesight. I don't even get it as a silly, fake theory. I note that Reagan solved his eyesight problem by putting on his mother's glasses. You'd think the boy would from that develop a belief in taking steps to improve vision and see intricacy, not prefer the fuzziness. Or are we not to think of Rothko's paintings as fuzzy-edged? (But they completely are.)

Speaking of Presidents learning thinking patterns from their mothers, I was struck by this passage in historian Paul Johnson's essay about Bill Clinton on Best of the Web today:

Clinton's family background was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and there is no more to be said about it other than to applaud his strength in rising above it. His mother, Virginia Kelley, provided a clue in explaining how she survived her rackety life: "I construct an airtight box. I keep inside it what I want to think about, and everything else stays beyond the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. . . . Inside is love and friends and optimism. Outside is negativity, can't-doism, and any criticism of me and mine." Bill Clinton would not have been able to describe his defensive technique so clearly. But that is what he did, with great success. As a result, while never arrogant, he was always secure.

At least there, I can understand the theory. Whether any of this historian psychoanalyzing is true, I'm in no position to say. It can be pretty amusing to read.

Stylish punctuation. Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

Memorable observation from Morris: "The greatest stylists -- those who 'hear' as they write -- punctuate sparingly and subtly." This observation is followed by some wonderful examples of subtle punctuation by great writers and a dig at editors bound to present-day style manuals:

I just reread ''Middlemarch,'' alternating between old (1891) and new (Modern Library, 1992) editions, and was disconcerted by the latter's willingness to alter Eliot's original marks. For instance, Dorothea Brooke, in 1891, was ''troublesome -- to herself, chiefly.'' A hundred years later, that long, corrective dash is gone, and so is the comma emphasis. Qualification is now changed to consequence. This is not editing: it's rewriting.