If and when the Tehran regime falls, what will happen to the ayatollah’s apologists? Will they suffer amnesia and insist they were on the people’s side all along? Time to take those screenshots—the reckoning can’t come soon enough.
From one reckoning to another, Christine Rosen reviews David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
“Zweig mentions how some teachers ‘piled body bags and placed fake tombstones’ outside school administration offices in D.C. to protest having to go back to classrooms to teach. Those were my sons’ teachers, and this childish stunt came after parents like me became reluctant activists, organizing and demanding answers from school officials about why schools remained closed for months on end. Teachers and school administrators frequently failed to show up to teach their online classes, grade students’ assignments, or respond to parents’ requests for information about students’ progress. The more outspoken parents among us were often kicked out of Zoom calls when we asked tough questions, or ‘accidentally’ given incorrect meeting times or login credentials when such meetings were held. Meanwhile, teachers’ unions demanded and received preferential treatment for vaccination, ahead of high-risk groups like the elderly and the immunocompromised—and then still refused to teach in-person. The contempt many of us feel toward those teachers and administrators will never fade, and it is to Zweig’s great credit that he refuses to indulge in resentfulness or score-settling in his book.
“Instead, Zweig explores the decision-making process and its many failures, most notably among public health ‘experts,’ media outlets, and political leaders, as well as the influence of tribal partisan politics during the first Donald Trump administration. This last point is crucial for understanding our cultural memory of the pandemic because it challenges the comforting narrative many on the left still nurture. It is the story of ‘how many progressives, professedly representing the party of science, completely disregarded overwhelming evidence about the safety of schools from around the world, in significant part, as a reaction to Trump and Trumpism.’
“One of the great services Zweig performs is establishing a timeline that follows actions and reactions among public health experts, public officials, and the media. This serves as an antidote to the spontaneous amnesia all three groups experienced once the pandemic ended, and they claimed they simply did the best they could with the available evidence. Zweig notes how the evidence ‘from China, then Italy, and then throughout Europe, was remarkably consistent: children were largely unaffected by COVID-19.’ As well, ‘in regard to the risks they posed to teachers, children likely were less contagious than adults. This information was known even well before the March shutdowns.'”
From a failure to communicate to the Great Communicator, Philip Terzian reviews Inside the Reagan White House: A Front-Row Seat to Presidential Leadership with Lessons for Today by Frank Lavin.
“In the whole life of the GOP, only two Republican presidents (Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower) had successfully served two full terms in office—and Reagan, for all his virtues, had neither saved the Union nor defeated Nazi Germany. How did he do it?
“Frank Lavin, a onetime presidential aide, senior public official, banker, and diplomat, is now approximately the same age as Reagan when his subject entered the White House, and in this charming, disarming, sometimes comic but always discerning memoir of the Reagan presidency, he has assigned himself the task of parachuting backward into the 1980s to understand what made Reagan tick, what energies fueled the machinery of his presidency, and how Reagan’s successes (and occasional failures) may help to define leadership in our fractious age and, in the words of his subtitle, offer ‘lessons for today.'”
“Lavin’s admiration for Reagan’s qualities of leadership … is fully justified, which is no small matter. The president’s famous distance from the minor distractions and details of office was sometimes harmful in the short term but, on the whole, advantageous. He concentrated on the basic principles that mattered to him, and by extension to the country, and was faithful to those principles. He chose his battles with care, was eager to attend to the less glamorous but essential tasks of smart politics, and had a genuine gift for expressing himself in terms both stirring and accessible.
“Second, his subordinates were a mixed bunch (as such hasty assemblages tend to be), but Reagan not only supplied his staff with an overriding sense of purpose but seemed also to possess a sixth sense about the latitude he accorded the most senior among them. The famous ‘troika’ of James Baker, Edwin Meese, and Michael Deaver worked well in tandem, approached their assignments with complementary skills, and, above all, were faithful to the higher calling issued by their boss. All prospered, in their own way, but Reagan deserves the credit. Loyalty was earned, if not always rewarded.”
There was a time when men hoped to be rewarded by scouring the globe in search of… rare flowers? Tunku Varadarajan explains in his review of The Lost Orchid: A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession by Sarah Bilston.
“The central protagonist of Bilston’s story is the Cattleya labiata, an orchid regarded as so exceedingly beautiful that it set off a furious race between plant-hunters—yes, that was a profession some people pursued in Victorian times—to find its native source. ‘Large, with a particularly lustrous purple-and-crimson bloom,’ Cattleya labiata came to be called Queen of the Orchids. The flower had been discovered in Brazil in 1818 by an English naturalist named William Swainson. Bilston explains how naturalists—behind their seemingly benign and nerdy exterior—were actually the foot soldiers of imperial expansion, whose job it was ‘to make sense of a vast globe.’ They found exotic species—of plant, bird, animal, or man—and carefully combed this global natural chaos into a tidy taxonomical order.
“Novelists embraced these botanical frontiersmen, featuring them in Boy’s Own-style stories that cast them as heroes who possessed the self-confidence and intrepidity of a superior civilization out to tame an unkempt and dangerous world of dark men and botanic profusion. No doubt inspired by Cattleya labiata, orchids were seen as the floral Holy Grail by these spinners of fictional yarns. … Orchids were sexualized—for the obvious reason that they could be said to resemble a woman’s most private parts. A novel by Marvin Dana, The Woman of Orchids (1901), makes explicit ‘the association of woman and orchid as objects of desire.’
“The naturalist Swainson—with whom the story of Cattleya labiata originates—shipped samples of its seeds and bulbs to England, where these bloomed to spectacular effect, yet neglected to record precisely where its habitat was. This was maddening to orchidomaniacs: Brazil is a massive country which, at the time, had a near-nonexistent infrastructure and only rudimentary security, making the job of plant-hunters fiendishly difficult. ‘Where exactly this fabulously rare orchid grew,’ writes Bilston, ‘nobody knew.’ Owing to its pulchritude and rarity, as well as the unmapped mystery of its origins, this orchid is credited as the species that ‘incited the craze that would sweep across both sides of the Atlantic’—with Britain, continental Europe, and the newly rich United States in its thrall.”
From an orchid addiction to Jane’s Addiction, Michael Warren reviews Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock’s Wildest Festival by Richard Bienstock and Tom Beaujour.
“Bienstock and Beaujour declare Lollapalooza created a moment ‘perhaps the last of this sort—where people believed that music might just have the ability to change the world.’ Some of those involved, particularly founder and Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, may have sincerely believed that a traveling rock show could affect some kind of social change, but what’s clear from Lollapalooza is that it helped changed the world of popular music and in particular the business of live performances and music festivals.
“This is hardly what Farrell could have imagined when he came up with the idea for Lollapalooza, though commercializing the alternative scene may have been more top of mind for Farrell’s ‘brain trust,’ which included Jane’s Addiction manager Ted Gardner and agents Marc Geiger and Don Muller. Originally conceived as a farewell tour for the splintering Jane’s Addiction, the 1991 Lollapalooza already had most of the pieces in place. The tour would hit most of the major media markets but would take place outside of the urban cores, at outdoor amphitheaters and parks in exurbia. Below the headliner was a collection of truly alternative acts, from the veteran Brits Siouxsie and the Banshees to the recent moderate hitmakers Living Colour to the up-and-coming industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails to the unmarketable Butthole Surfers.
“‘The perception was that none of the bands on that first Lollapalooza were supposed to be able to play to the size of crowd that we would be playing to in the sometimes tertiary places that we were going to,’ Eric Avery, the bassist for Jane’s Addiction, told the authors.
“That would begin to change as early as the second Lollapalooza in 1992, when Farrell’s friends from the L.A. rock scene, Red Hot Chili Peppers, headlined following the release of their mainstream breakout album Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But further down the bill that year was evidence of how fast alternative rock was taking over, even more quickly than the tour’s organizers could anticipate: a little band from Seattle called Pearl Jam.”
Happy Sunday.
Vic Matus
Arts & Culture Editor
Washington Free Beacon
