Scrapbook
Scrapbook "Celebrities" Aren't What They Used To Be Over the years, liberals of our acquaintance have sometimes snickered about conservatives' gaping celebrity deficit. Indeed, The Scrap-BOOK...
...this latest decision puts to rest any doubts about the academic consensus on whether Arming America ever deserved to be called "a myth-busting tour de force" or a "classic work of significant scholarship with inescapable policy implications," as Bellesiles's now much-embarrassed champions once claimed...
...the establishment within the FBI of a special unit of investigators and a police state in a totalitarian, centralized, bureaucratic government...
...We are not experts in this field," Greenwald warned, perhaps superfluously...
...After insisting that accusations of fraud in his work were a garden-variety scholarly dispute, Columbia University has finally rescinded the award given to Bellesiles for his now discredited 2000 book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture...
...By implication, the idea that firearms were widely owned in early America was a concoction of modern day gun-rights ideologues...
...100 Celebrities to Speak Out," Fenton had promised...
...That didn't seem to be a problem for too many of the others...
...Although some of the Bancroft jurors had been loath to reconsider their decision (how do you like the book now, Arthur Goren, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Mary P Ryan...
...But most of the others are now on the infomercial circuit—if they're lucky...
...in the operation of public and private health facilities...
...Clearly, though, the term "celebrity" was being used remarkably loosely...
...Brought to us by Fen-ton Communications, the same PR people who flacked for the Sandinistas, the roster was less a Who's Who than a Who's That...
...What's more, Columbia is asking for the return of the $4,000 in prize money...
...Ehr-lich on St...
...Elsewhere, explaining that we "need to win the war on terrorism," and that the best way to curtail Saddam would be to follow Begley's example of driving electric vehicles...
...THE SCRAPBOOK dusted off a copy of the "declaration of principles" from the States' Rights convention in Birmingham, and—get this—there's not a word in it about defense policy...
...Sure, some of the 100 or so names attached to the antiwar letter are recognizable, A-list signatories: Anjelica Huston, Matt Damon, Kim Basinger, and Martin Sheen (the last of whom shouldn't count, since he signs everything...
...Or Ed Begley Jr., who is best remembered—on the rare occasions he is remembered—for playing Dr...
...Strom Thurmond, the Man and the Myth Trent Lott said a lot of unconvincing things last week, but this one, in his interview with Sean Hannity, takes the cake: "When I think of Strom Thurmond, I'm talking about defense issues...
...This infamous and iniquitous program calls for the reorganization of the civil rights section of the Department of Justice with a substantial increase in a bureaucratic staff to be devoted exclusively to the enforcement of the civil rights program...
...Arming America, for the uninitiated, argued that before the Civil War, Americans didn't really own many guns, and if they did, the guns were probably broken, and if the guns weren't broken, the owners probably didn't know how to use them anyway...
...The Scrapbook suggests Sharon Clar-idge, who played the unseen dispatcher on Adam-12...
...The retraction of the Bancroft brings to a close the last interesting controversy of the Bellesiles affair...
...The cavalcade of "stars" included a former regular from the now-cancelled Coach, the wife of The Practice's Dylan McDermott (he couldn't make it), and former Hill Street Blues star Barbara Bosson, who's been off the air so long that even an organizer had to ask about her credits...
...Here, though, is its warning about totalitarianism: The 1948 Democratic convention, the Dixiecrats complained, had "called for a civil-rights law that would eliminate segregation of every kind from all American life, prohibit all forms of discrimination in private employment, in public and private instruction and administration and treatment of students...
...What irks us is the inference that one's ideas are bankrupt because some room-temperature-IQ'd celebrity isn't espousing them...
...She has an excellent speaking voice, and if she's still alive, she could probably use the work...
...So okay, maybe there was a "defense issue" in their platform, after all...
...The problem with this argument was that Bellesiles lacked evidence...
...Consider the statement of David Clennon (Miles Drentell on thirtysome-thing, a popular show fifteensomething years ago), which read, almost in its entirety: "We have achieved our objective...
...Co-organized by Robert Greenwald, perhaps best known as director of the 1984 television movie The Burning Bed, and Mike Farrell, who knows all about the horrors of war from his stint as B.J...
...We were coming out of the war, of course, but we also were dealing with communism...
...If you look back at that time, which was 1948, defense was a big issue...
...Yes, Wendie Malick, star of Just Shoot Me, is close to A-listish, but she had to leave almost immediately since, as one organizer said, "she has to go to work...
...Perhaps, in the interest of generating some, they could go a little deeper into the B-list celebrity bench...
...To translate: The liberty to lynch was under attack, and the Dixiecrats were riding to the defense...
...This week, The Scrapbook had occasion to teleconference into an anti-Bush celebrity press conference (bearing the cumbersome title "Win Without War to Resist Bush Preemption of Peace Process...
...Are those who oppose war with Iraq really supposed to be emboldened because Rene Auberjonois (Clayton from Benson) or Ken Howard (Coach Reeves from The White Shadow) says they should be...
...Among actual attendees, the obscurity problem was even worse...
...For Thurmond's Dixiecrats, the Cold War that mattered was the one they were fighting with their fellow Democrats, and while they agreed that there was a totalitarian threat, they thought its headquarters was in Washington...
...This convention would strengthen the grip of a police state upon a liberty-loving people by the imposition of penalties upon local public officers who failed or refused to act in accordance with its ideas in suppressing mob violence...
...He misrepresented sources, distorted data, and cited historical documents that no one could prove existed...
...This convention hypocritically denounced totalitarianism abroad but unblushingly proposed and approved it at home...
...in all transportation, and require equal access to all places of public accommodation for persons of all races, colors, creeds and national origin...
...Indeed, The Scrap-BOOK would be the first to admit that when Republicans go sniffing after an endorsement from Hollywood, they have few names on their call sheet: There's Charlton Heston, Kennedy-conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger, maybe Shannen Doherty, who led the pledge at the 1992 GOP convention, and even we'd be embarrassed to mention the names lower on the list...
...What do you mean "we," white man...
...Or at least it did, until now...
...The war is over, and we have won...
...Hunnicut on M*A*S*H, the celebrity press conference was unusually self-effacing...
...we do not need to go to war...
...After his employer, Emory University, investigated the claims against him, Bellesiles resigned his tenured professorship...
...Looking at it closely and going over and over it," said Greenwald, "one comes back to the same feeling that there aren't any ideal solutions...
...Thank you...
...Any antiwar types hoping for an infusion of celebrity energy had to have been disappointed...
...Shot Down Michael Bellesiles is no longer the winner of the prestigious Bancroft prize...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 15
