I don’t really have time to write at length about my visit to the Museum and Library, but here’s some historical joy.
above – Richard Nixon’s bowling ball. Nixon was our only president to to be a serious bowler, a player of the sport of kings. He’s my personal bowling tiki-totem. According to legend, Nixon once bowled a 300 on the lanes he had installed in the White House basement. Maybe this was the ball…
above – one of Jackie O’s pillbox hats. Not the one from Dallas, but one nonetheless. Post-assassination, perhaps, there’s no more loaded fashion symbol to be found in the 20th Century, save for swastika armbands and Mao suits.
above – “Ethnics for Reagan/Bush ‘84″ Wow. Was this not seen as disparaging and racist at the time? If you put out a button like this today, you’d get YouTubed into Gary Hart land. Oh, and there’s a whole set of more specific “ethnic buttons” – see if you can spot the puppet states!
above – How To Spot a Jap, courtesy of Terry and the Pirates. It was a lot easier to immolate 60+ Japanese cities in firebombings and then to top it off with a pair of A-bombs after we had suitably de-humanized them now, wasn’t it? A point of history – there are anecdotes of Japanese soldiers in mainland China cutting off their feet or toes at the close of the war so as to avoid being slaughtered by very angry, “who gives a shit for the rules of warfare” Chinese Nationalists.
All of my HSTPLM pics are in their special Flickr set. I’ll go on about the Library at length in a later post.
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