08.22.16
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Saleh Blesses Russian Intervention, Confirms Russia’s Lack of Strategy

 

I like what this Putin guy is doing. He’s got the right ideas! 

 

A big argument, popular among the right, but also among serious foreign policy thinkers, is how effective Russia’s effective new foreign policy is. After all, they seem to be doing very well in Syria, bending the civil war to their will, and have all of Europe on high alert after annexing Crimea. Military exercises near the border are making people tense about the possibility of further assaults on Ukranian sovereignty. An alliance with Iran makes for a powerful new axis.

While it is clear there is serious danger in a belligerent and over-confident Russia, I argued last week that this was more a sign of weakness, a desperate attempt to project strength, because in international relations, if you’re perceived as strong, in a way you actually are strong. I argued, as have many others, that “(i)t’s a series of moves, not a coherent strategy to make the country stronger in the long term. It’ll catch up.” Here’s a few data points to back that up.

  1. Iran is already angry at Russia for announcing their use of Iranian air force bases, and now that privilege has been revoked. Russia is like the high schooler who brags about getting to second base with Suzy Cheerleader, the confusingly-named captain of the volleyball team, and so never gets to get near her again.
  2. Crimeans aren’t exactly happy with the lack of resources that Russia is putting into the region, as they are plagued with blackouts and a lack of infrastructure. Russia was more interested in taking it over to get that victory that in doing anything with it. This is how discontent forms. Russia “saved” the people of Crimea from a government that neglected them (which was a legitimate complaint), only to neglect them even more. This isn’t how a country that has its act together actually does things.

But the most telling sign comes from Yemen, where former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who hasn’t quite left the scene, and it still maneuvering, has said that he’d welcome Russian help in “fighting terrorism.”

A newly-formed governing council in Yemen could work with Russia to “fight terrorism” by allowing Moscow use of the war-torn country’s military bases, Yemen’s former president said on Sunday.

Ali Abdullah Saleh, a former counter-terrorism ally of the U.S. who was toppled by mass protests in 2011, told state-owned channel Russia 24 that Yemen was ready to grant Moscow access to air and naval bases.

“In the fight against terrorism we reach out and offer all facilities. Our airports, our ports… We are ready to provide this to the Russian Federation,” Saleh said in an interview in Sanaa.

The ex-strongman may lack the clout to implement such an offer. But officials from the party he heads now run a political council that controls much of the country along with the Houthi movement allied to Iran.

This is actually pretty perfect. It’s a scary thought– that would put Russia directly against the Saudis, and in turn, the US– but it is a perfect wedding of like-minds. Saleh is the king of short-term strategy, playing sides to buy time, making a series of desperate moves to stave off the nearest enemy, kicking the can down the road and hoping to make things better then. By necessity, and by temperament, he’s always been a “live today no matter what, and deal with the ramifications of today’s actions some other time.” He’s a genius at it, and is genuinely talented at survival, but not at solving any problems except the ones immediately in front of him. He never seemed to grasp that doing so creates even bigger monsters.

So his seeming approval of Russian strategy and desire for their help kind of confirms that they are playing the same game.

 

08.22.16
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A Quick Followup on Unskewing

 

Not pictured: a lot of human voters. 

 

So, last post was mostly talking about Trump’s own brand of imagined reality, but there are also a lot of people who clearly believe that the polls can’t be right, because: rallies and signs, man. Ceca, in his Salon article, points out how this can take place, in the doughy form of Eric Bolling at FOX.

Interrupting a discussion about the hiring of Breitbart overlord Steve Bannon to run the Trump campaign, Bolling complained, “These polls, Dana, honestly, we have to stop with these polls.” Bolling continued, “They’re insane with these polls. Just look at what’s going on. You look at a Trump rally, and there’s 12, 15, 10,000 people.” In addition to demanding that “we have to stop with these polls,” Bolling compared his inflated estimates of Trump’s crowd sizes to Hillary’s lesser-than crowd sizes, insisting that rally attendance is an accurate predictor of election outcomes. It’s not.

He’s right! It really, really, isn’t. We went through this with Mitt Romney in 2012. Don’t forget– don’t ever forget– Peggy Noonan’s list of yard signs and vibrations for why all the polls were wrong. When people are vested in an outcome, they will believe anything.

But it is easy to believe, honestly, and very tempting. It’s especially easy for some reporters who often have to drive long distances, because when you do so, you spend a lot of time on the highway. An example: last week, when my bride and I were driving home from the Adirondacks, we went through upper New York, near the Canadian border and rounding around Fort Drum before heading south to 90 near Rochester. Coming out of the highlands, we pavered off into flat country, flat and poor country, where each little town, dotted sparsely with ramshackle houses, broke-down cars, and dying businesses, blended together.

We saw dozens, if not more, Trump signs. In one town there was an (at least) 15-foot-high sign blaring “TRUMP” in enormous, hand-painted letters. One upholstery place had two signs. The first was a two parter, in which the proclimation of “Jesus is Lord” was above  the nature of the business, and next to it was a “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” sign. This was real Trump country. Hundreds of miles of Trump’s America.

We also went through the Lake Erie tip of Pennsylvania, as well as across Ohio. Most of that was interstate, but not all (we took a few detours). Throughout that, we saw exactly 1 Hillary sign that I can remember, and that was in Erie, PA. I would conservatively put the estimate of total Trump-to-Hillary signs at 100-1.

Donald Trump is not going to win New York, nor Pennsylvania, and probably not Ohio. So when people are tallying up signs, remember, it is meaningless. The vast stretches where not many people live, but those who do live difficult lives, can be distorting.

The important thing, for Democrats, and the media, is to remember these places exist between elections.

08.22.16
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“Unskewed Polls” and the Violent Endgame of Trump’s Unreality


 Musical accompainment.

In Salon yesterday, Bob Cesca reminded us of Dean Chambers, the non-entity whose candle burned brightly but briefly by making Republicans think that Mitt Romney was going to win. He did this by “unskewing” the polls, which, he believed were tilted unfairly in the direction of Barack Obama. The scientific method with which he managed this unskewing was to say “eh, I’ll just subtract seven, I guess.” In doing so, a 4-point Obama lead magically became a 3-point Romney lead. It was based on essentially nothing except feelings, but for the people who wanted to listen to him, that was a feature, not a bug.

This was very different from normal spin and cheerleading. Every pro says that the polls may say one thing, but we think as our message gets out, as we get closer to the election day, as our terribly unfair coverage changes, etc, we’re for sure going to win. Saying so keeps money flowing in and keeps supporters from getting too demoralized. It’s normal.

But this is a different beast. It’s not saying that the polls would be wrong, or that they will turn eventually: it’s saying that they are deliberately tilting the field. Chambers’s main target was media sweetheart Nate Silver, but the real target was, essentially, reality. It was saying that this new Democratic/progressive coalition couldn’t possibly be real, and that Americans couldn’t possibly like this hated Kenyan Muslim autocratic weak and feckless usurper. After all, we don’t like him, and no one we listen to on the radio or read on the internet likes him, so any media that says differently is clearly lying. They just want to protect Obama and trick Americans into voting for him.

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08.18.16
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#AmericasMerkel: Trump Talks White Nationalism

 

Pictured: Trump Towers

 

Confused by Trump’s insistence that Hillary Clinton will be “America’s Merkel”, someone who is generally considered a pretty strong and resolute leader, easily the most powerful in all of Europe? It’s not just because her and Putin don’t get along (although it’s probably a bit of that), and it isn’t just because of rank misogyny (though it’s also very much that). It’s because he gets his talking points directly from white nationalist sites like Stormfront and VDare.com!

Think Progress has the scoop.

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” “Anti-White Traitor,” and “patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked in articles about her, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

This is not a coincidence. You don’t hire the Breitbart guy and parrot an obscure line of attack about a leader Americans generally like, if they even know at all, without being intimately linked to white nationalism. Trump’s campaign grows more and more openly and flagrantly racist. What he’s stirred up won’t go away for a long, long time, and will deeply poison our politics for many years, but a unified front against him and a huge election defeat will help to tamp it down. It is literally the only moral duty we have as voters.

08.18.16
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This is Neat: Early Lake Ontario Shipwreck Discovered

 

 

Starboard side of Lady Washington. Image from Roger Pawlowski

 

A team of amateur- but still really damn good- underwater archeologists have discovered the incredibly-intact remains of an 1803 shipwreck in Lake Ontario, one of the earliest shipwrecks in the vast lake system. From their website:

Oswego, NY –  A rare 18th century built sloop, Washington (also known as Lady Washington), has been discovered in Lake Ontario off the shores of Oswego, New York by a team of shipwreck explorers.   Jim Kennard, Roger Pawlowski, and Roland Stevens located the sloop in late June utilizing high resolution side scan sonar equipment.

The sloop was enroute from Kingston, Ontario to Niagara, Ontario, Canada with a full cargo when it foundered during a gale on Lake Ontario in 1803.  The Washington is believed to be the oldest confirmed commercial sailing ship to exist in the Great Lakes.  It was the first sloop built on Lake Erie and the first to sail in both Lakes Erie and Ontario.  Sloops only existed for a limited period of time on the Great Lakes as they were replaced by schooners which had two or more masts and were much more efficient to operate.

It’s a thrilling find on a historical level. It’s also incredible to think about the enormous differences a scant 200 years can make. For settlers, in 1803, Erie and Ontario were on the edge of the West, that teeter-point between a barely-born nation that had just pushed itself away from the coast into the fearful forests and the wild lands outside. (The story was a little different for the natives, of course.) The fur trade, while declining, was still incredibly important, and a continuous link to the early days of colonization and exploitation, a direct line between the toddling American nation and the days of trappers and Jesuits.

And the Lakes were wild and fearsome beasts, capable of rising up and swallowing a ship whole, never to be seen again. It’s only in the last few decades, really, that we’ve gotten to the point where a Great Lakes shipwreck would be due to massive error, rather than the cruel and unforgiving coldness and brutality of the whipping winds and exploding waves.

But you can still see it when you walk past any of them, on a summer storm or during a winter gale. You can see the contained fury stir up into a frenzy, and from a safe and warm window you can imagine being out there, in a creaking wooden ship, eeking out a living bringing the dissected remnants of nature back to the cities in exchange for the meagerest goods of survival, and know the fear that must have gripped them when this implacable and wild land struck back. When Ontario, the smallest of the Lakes, but still terrifyingly larger than three of the original 13 states, roared up, and swallowed you whole, your bones never to wash up, lost forever, lost in the country, lost in the water, lost in a new America. You can still feel that vastness, sometimes, a chill up your spine, as you wonder what we’ve gained, and think of all that was lost doing so.

08.18.16
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Best Correction: 2016 Olympics

From the Times: 

Correction: August 17, 2016

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misstated the given name of an American swimmer. He is Townley Haas, not Tommy.

Come on, Times. Think for one second before printing. The hell kind of name for a swimmer is “Tommy”?

(Note: this is probably unfair, as I couldn’t identify Townley from Adam, except that the former is probably in way better shape and has dedicated his life to something impressive. But it just seems perfect)

08.17.16
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Is Russia Winning In The Middle East?

 

Never quite as strategic as people think. 

 

So, Russia is now using Iranian air bases to launch pro-Asad strikes in Syria, creating a triangle within which I can’t imagine Turkey is particularly pleased to be. This seems to be a solidification of an ad hoc alliance that has been growing tighter, even as Russia agreed to be part of the Obama-led sanctions which crumpled Iranian nuclear resistance. Russia is now firmly part of the Iran/Syria axis, which could be extended to include the Houthis in Yemen and of course Hezbollah in Iraq. This is like every nightmare enemy of the last 50 years, even if they are opposed to our other nightmare enemies of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

There is a lot to discuss about the Middle East, and the ramifications in that, but I think there is an important question to ask. The Soufan Group’s IntelBrief hints at it: “While there is clear military value in the use of an Iranian airbase to launch strikes in Syria, the real gain for Russia is further solidifying its increasing role in the region.”

This is cause, in some circles, for palpitations and hyperventilations. Russia is playing maybe the leading role in the region now, certainly in Syria, and is forcing the action in favor of Asad. So are they winning? And what does winning mean?

I think this is lunacy, honestly. This is madness for Russia. What is going to happen if they “win”? What does that even look like? Asad in power, and what, all the rebel groups agreeing to lay down arms? A stable and secure Syria where both ISIS and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham are gone? Is that even possible?

There can be no long-term good for Russia to get deeper and deeper into Syria, and into its endless war, and into the collapse of the modern Middle East. This transformation is just starting. Russia, which wanted to show strength to cover up fundamental weaknesses, has had success, but it is of the short-term variety. It is expanding its war involvement against any and all of the enemies of its new allies, which are literally everyone else in the region, in some combination or another. This is not going to play well within its own Muslim population. The borders of Russia are not settled and secure either. It could have dozens of its own little Syrias.

The idea that Russia is somehow winning in the Middle East is absurd. It’s flying right into turbulence, possibly of the historic, country-reshaping kind.  The “great power” conflict between the US and Russia in the Middle East should be between who can do the most good without tying themselves in too much. You can argue that Obama has steered too close to the latter benchmark while largely avoiding the first one. I think it is silly to say that is weakness, or that it has cost us esteem, especially when there is just loss of esteem within the very same region from which he is trying to extricate us from. (It’s like being kicked out of a bar toward whose exit you’re strolling.) Russia isn’t playing that game at all: neither doing good, nor staying out of getting involved. It’s a series of moves, not a coherent strategy to make the country stronger in the long term. It’ll catch up. Russia, a country whose internal contradictions have never been resolved, is tying itself up in a century-long process of dissolution, one that could easily spread to that most impossible of nations.

 

08.17.16
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The Duties of the Press in a Truthless Campaign

epimenides-poet

You don’t actually need a paradox to understand Trump’s lies.

In an essay yesterday for The Atlantic, Connor Friedersdorf tackles the question of media bias against Trump, particularly in light of his “Obama founded ISIS” claims. The thrust is that some people are upset that the media was deliberately twisting his words to be their most literal, and therefore their most easily disprovable. I’ll readily admit that when I saw the headline last week during a brief moment of internet connectivity, I rolled my eyes a bit, assuming (oddly, I know) that this was an obvious bit of rhetoric and the palpitations were of the clickbait variety.

Friedersdorf does a good job demolishing that, showing how Trump doubled and tripled down on it, and, most importantly, how he’ll say anything at any given time, to inflame some audiences and then claim he was doing no such thing, and it’s frankly disgusting of you to think otherwise, ok? The basic thrust is that Trump says so many outrageous and insane things (Ted Cruz’s loathsome father killed JFK) that the media has to evaluate everything like a policy statement, and debunk it as such.

It’s an interesting question about the role of the press, and to dig into it, I think it is helpful to look at Chicago politics in the 60s and 70s, at another straight-shooting authoritarian who frequently made no sense: Da Mare, Richard Daley.

Earl Bush, the long-serving press secretary for Richard J. Daley, wasn’t like most of the people surrounding the old man. He wasn’t a Bridgeport crony brought up in the rough-and-tumble world of South Side Irish politics, where loyalty and cunning were prized over book smarts. He was well-educated, and was considered to be “Daley’s translator.” He’s probably best remembered for chiding reporters who covered the mayor to play fair, in a way: “Don’t print what he said. Print what he meant.”

It is a line that’s easy to mock, but it actually raises some interesting questions. Daley was far from dumb, and was himself educated (putting himself through law school while climbing the machine ranks and raising a brood), but he had a tortured relationship with the language. What he meant to say often came out garbled, and nonsensical. So, for reporters covering him, what was there to do? On the one hand, they had a duty to convey the policies and politics of City Hall, and not just get a cheap laugh over a syntactical slip, the kind we all make when speaking, some more so than others. Reading the unedited transcript of nearly anyone can be cringeworthy. On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service.

On the other hand, seeing the unvarnished mind of our political leaders is a service. We get to see how their minds work, or don’t, and how much they struggle to connect their talking points with any actual thought (think Marco Rubio here). Sometimes, you get a great quote out of it, one that seems more Freudian than Kinseyian. The best example of this is when Daley said of reports of police brutality in the city: “The policeman is not here to create disorder; he’s here to preserve disorder.” That seemed to encapsulate the role of the police in the racial powderkegs of the 1960s.

On the other hand…you know what he meant. Should reporters gleefully transcribe something that is the opposite of what he meant? The above quote seems to reveal a hidden truth, but that is metaphorical, and not legalistic. If Daley had said “I ordered the police to beat the hell out of the Negro” and then Earl Bush said “no no- he clearly meant to say ‘treat them well, the Negro'”, you print the former, for sure. But when it is just a slipup?  Is making it clear what a subject means a distortion, or is it observance of the truth?

I personally think it is the duty of any reporter to make sure that they print what is meant, even if they report what is said. But what happens when you have a man like Trump? To say he’s a liar is far too faint. All politicians lie (especially when they say they will never lie to you). It’s part of the job. By definition, you have to please far too many competing constituencies to always tell the truth 100% of the time. It’s impossible. And to an extent, we all know that’s acceptable.

But with Trump is is a different thing altogether. He isn’t so much lying as running an entirely 100% truthless campaign. The entire campaign is a fake, of course, an attempt to make someone who couldn’t pass a basic civics test and who can’t be bothered to learn anything about the world into a President. He himself is entirely truthless, as he sees everything in the world in relationship to himself, and interprets it to how it will benefit him and how he can use it as self-aggrandizement. That’s why he can’t go two sentences without bringing it back to himself; his own empty ego is the sole basis of his knowledge.

So the media should do what Connor was getting at: print what he says, and ignore what he pretends to mean. Or, report that too, and show how it is in direct contradiction with what he just said, and repeated. Trump is a man who thinks that being rich alchemizes his idiot proclamations into truth, so run with that. If he says “Obama probably killed MLK”, investigate it, and show how wrong and idiotic Donald Trump is. Don’t let him get away with saying “I never said that, and anyway, when I said it, it was a joke, ok, but I never said it.”  He thinks his off-the-cuff lies are correct when he says them (because he says them) as much as he believes it is correct when he later claims to have never said anything. He gets away with this because he’s been surrounded by flunkies his entire adult life. Every statement is timeless and unalterable truth, until he decides to alter it, and then it was never said. Evaluate them like that. Don’t give him any room. Don’t treat this like normal. Print everything the way it was meant.

 

 

 

08.16.16
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The Wall Street Journal’s Brazen Trump Cynicism

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You know what makes for the best vacation? Not seeing this guy’s face for a solid week.

Getting back into the swing of things with some low-hanging fruit….

One of the most maddening aspects of our politics is the “style over substance” component; roughly, the “who is saying things better”, as opposed to the “what are they saying” aspect of elections. This dovetails with the obsessive Politico-style horse-race coverage that people have been denouncing for decades, with limited (though not entirely nonexistent) success.

This has ben magnified in the age of Trump, where you have a candidate who spouts wildly-contradictory mumbo-jumbo, and has a relationship with the truth about as solid as one of his marriages. He is someone who feels truth is what he wants it to be, because he’s a spoiled fancylad who surrounds himself with family and grubbing sycophants. So what to do when covering him? For the Wall Street Journal, as with every grasping Republican pol who has tied themselves to him (Paul Ryan), it’s to double down on the style issue, a breathtakingly cynical admission that this is a man completely unqualified to be President.

A Sunday editorial in the Wall Street Journal is the perfect example of this. In what is being praised as a sober and serious consideration of his candidacy, the Journal outlines the problem many supporters have.

They think he should make the election a referendum on Hillary Clinton, not on himself. And they’d like him to spend a little time each day—a half hour even—studying the issues he’ll need to understand if he becomes President.

Is that so hard? Apparently so. Mr. Trump prefers to watch the cable shows rather than read a briefing paper. He thinks the same shoot-from-the-lip style that won over a plurality of GOP primary voters can persuade other Republicans and independents who worry if he has the temperament to be Commander in Chief.

There’s more in this vein, but that’s enough. The Journal then goes on to say this is a winnable race, using math from a political scientist with a great track record, to show that Trump should be winning.

No model is perfect, but Mr. Abramowitz’s has predicted the winner of the major-party popular vote in every presidential election since 1988. His model predicts that Mr. Trump should win a narrow victory with 51.4%. A mainstream GOP candidate who runs a reasonably competent campaign would have about a 66% chance of victory.

(It unfortunately forgets to ask who that mainstream candidate would be: Ted Cruz?)

Then comes the big ask:

If they can’t get Mr. Trump to change his act by Labor Day, the GOP will have no choice but to write off the nominee as hopeless and focus on salvaging the Senate and House and other down-ballot races. As for Mr. Trump, he needs to stop blaming everyone else and decide if he wants to behave like someone who wants to be President—or turn the nomination over to Mike Pence.

There’s a major tell buried in here, a desperate and craven one, and it’s the word “behave”. You see it in every politician, from Mitch to Paul, who have pegged their dreams of a right-wing walkover on this wildly unqualified man. They don’t think he will be a good President. By their own reckoning, as the Journal points out, he’s a shallow, ill-informed, narcissistic disaster, a walking calamity. They aren’t asking him to change; they recognize that’s an impossibility. The man is 70 years old: you think he’s going to suddenly now start being mature?

So that’s the thing. No one thinks that Donald Trump can become a different person. They are saying “Your behavior shows that you are 100% incapable of being the President, but can you, for three months, pretend to be someone different to trick people into voting for you?”  That’s far beyond normal political image-burnishing, and a huge step beyond pandering. This isn’t lipstick on a pig. It’s not even making a Potemkin village. A pig has lips (maybe?), and even a Potemkin village has real people. They are distortions of reality, to hide something ugly. But at their heart, they acknowledge reality, at least enough to try to hide it.

The cynicism behind the “behave better” push is of a different stripe. It’s trying to create a new reality altogether. It isn’t putting lipstick on a pig; it’s saying “here’s a good dinner” while holding up a tray laden only with air. It’s pushing a car full of screaming passengers off a cliff while claiming you are building a new city of the future, right on this spot. This is trying to scrawl out the words “real water” into the rock of the barrenest desert and hope people try to drink it.

The only solace here is that their incredible cynicism is rooted in a laughable and pathetic stupidity. Many (including the WSJ) pin their hopes on something he said in April, a variant on a theme he’s been spinning the whole campaign.

However, they insisted that once voters got to know the real Trump, as opposed to the public face he has presented while campaigning and while hosting the NBC reality show The Apprentice, they will warm to him. He said that person was just an act.

Or, as the Journal quoted:

“At some point I’ll be so presidential that you people will be so bored, and I’ll come back as a presidential person, and instead of 10,000 people I’ll have about 150 people and they’ll say, boy, he really looks presidential,”

This has always been the strategy in everything Trump has done: pretend that he can be someone else and hope people fall for it. “I’m a great businessman”; “I can run the casino business so good”; “I can be Presidential when I want to be.”  For his whole life, he’s convinced people that the obnoxious idiot was an act. It isn’t: the attempt to convince people is the whole act itself, it’s literally all he is good at. It’s worked breathtakingly well, and the desperate in the GOP and its media wing are its latest marks. They don’t believe he’s actually Presidential. They just think that he can fool other people into thinking he is. In doing that, in trying to perpetuate his con, they are its most foolish-looking victims.

08.12.16
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Good Books Friday: The Rivers of America Series

Note: I’ll be out of town between the 4th and the 15th, in a wilderness repast, with little to absolutely zero connection to the internet or my phone. Posts during this time, written in advance, will be bigger-picture, or more idiosyncratic, rather than directly pegged to the news. If events happen that supersede or negate anything I say, think of these as a more innocent time capsule. Try not to let the country burn down while I’m gone.

A few years ago I was doing a periodic dive into Chicago history, as will frequently happen, and was perusing the relevant section at the local library. Over the preceding few years, I had gotten more and more interested in Chicago as a city built on a lake and river, which we all know, but tend to take for granted. While Chicago is a major port city, for most residents, that takes places completely out of sight. The river and the jawdropping lakefront are for recreation and beauty; they are no longer the economic engine.

So an old book called “The Chicago” caught my eye. It was plain blue, no jacket, but you could tell it was going to have that musty and delicious old book smell, with pages that hadn’t taken a breath in years, if not decades. It was by an author named Harry Hansen, and not knowing too much about it, I put it on the pile. How bad could it be?

It turned out to be a thing of wonder. Hansen was an old-time Chicago journalist, originally from Iowa, who loved the city but looked at it skeptically. The book blended history and the present- or, rather, Hansen’s present, as it came out in 1942, but was clearly written before the outbreak of war. He took us up and down the still dirty and gritty river, which still had grimy industrial buildings and warehouses and factories on most of its grim banks.

But he also took the reader through time. He had the history of exploration, the Kinzies and Du Sable, and the earlier French explorers who found the portage. It was amazing to read, as he’d talk about a place at, say the 31st and Western, on the south branch, and talk about what was there when he had come to the city some 40 years beforehand, when the smoke from the fire could still be detected in memory and the city had yet to celebrate its first century. And, reading it some 80 years later, both waves of history have been lapped, but both are still present in any given spot.

This journey, it turned out, was part of the Rivers of America series, a huge, sprawling, ambitious piece of Americana that spanned nearly 40 years and three publishers. The idea was to tell the history of America through its rivers, those first highways, along which all cities were built. It is a 50-book series, with the first being The Kennebec in 1937, and the final one The American  in 1974. It’s also instructive to think of how much America itself changed over the years. The series takes you from Panama to Alaska, and from Maine to California. It is, fully, American. (Towns End Books and Wikipedia have complete lists)

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