After all, the Right's eagerness to exhaustively self-document their own paranoia, racism and
mind-boggling stupidly, in microscopic detail, every fucking day for the last eight years is gonna save historians a ton of work when they begin the task of figuring out which ash heap their remains should be consigned to.
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So I had a strange thing happen yesterday at work. I went in to the break room to get coffee and the TV had the History Channel on and it was some documentary about Andrew Carnegie building a bridge. And it cuts to this woman who is talking about what a genius he was, and what great people in business do. And as I wait for the first cup of the day to brew up I'm squinting at the screen, is that Carly Fiorina? It is, it says so. I almost didn't recognize her without her teeth bared. I switched it to Food Network, but somebody changed it back.
That would have been the Keystone Bridge Co., which was located in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Carnegie wasn't a genius; he just made the logical move to replace stone bridges with iron and steel bridges, which was happening elsewhere as well. Carly is just such a shallow clown although quite an amazing liar.
I assume what you saw was History Channel's "The Men Who Built America" series. It was a revisionist hand job that (surprise!) hit the street ca. 2012 during the "We Built That!" part of Romney/Obama campaign.
The inherently sexist, overtly political title aside (how many of those rivets did Carnegie set himself?)...it painted the standard conservative Heroes of the gilded age through pre-New Deal as a bunch of John Gault's who through their own brains, sweat, and money personally dragged this nation of leaches from the sewer to greatness only to have us ingrates spit in their faces.
Can't remember the last time I had medical care at a "CLINC." [sic]
You're right as always DG. Usually we have to sift through private journals and letters to extrapolate meaning for things that drive causation. With social media, so much of what used to be hidden is out in plain sight. Of course, technology has made finding documents of significance so much easier. It used to be real work to track down those sources, now so much is available online from everywhere that compiling a long list for a journal article or monograph will probably be the easiest part of the process. It will still take considerable training to weigh the relative merits for each source though. Whole graduate level seminars will be devoted to understanding what the heck breitbart is and how less visible blogs like yours actually contain the keys to deciphering the whole mess.
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