You Can't Put Nothing Past William Howard Taft: A Review of Jason Heller's "Taft 2012"

Those of you that know me could tell a lot of anecdotes relating to how much I like free stuff. It’s a bit of an obsession, really. But better than your everyday tradeshow swag (Stuff We All Get) is the free stuff I have to work a little for – answering a trivia question, or giving my opinion, or playing a game of bingo. One of my new favorite free things is the books I receive from Quirk Books when they nicely ask for internet denizens to review them. Two things occur when I get those emails – one, I get to help the enterprising and creative people at Quirk sell more product, and two, free book!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not as in-tune with the political process as I should be. As a self-identified Democrat living with a very conservative Republican father, it’s probably safer for me this way. That said, I was a little leery of any book identifying itself as a satire of the political process. However, I figured that any book about the guy who inspired this song was worth looking into:

Yup. The Two Man Gentleman Band got me to read “Taft 2012” and strongly encourage friends, family, and co-workers to DRAFT TAFT. In my defense, I’ve read more serious books for sillier reasons, but in the long run, I’m glad I read this quirky and surprisingly insightful look at the American political process and the absolute circus it inspires every four years.

The premise of Jason Heller’s novel is fairly simple – William Howard Taft disappears from the past without any reason whatever and re-appears in the future – our future – just as election season is beginning. After reacquainting himself with the world, getting in touch with his great-granddaughter and her family, and doing a few rounds of the talk show circuit, Taft finds himself in the middle of a grassroots movement focused on getting him re-elected as president, a movement that forces him (and the reader) to examine what the American political process has become.

At a volunteer dinner several weeks ago,  one of my dining companions turned to me and said, “Now, I know we’re not supposed to talk about politics at dinner, but who are you thinking of voting for in the next election?” This was a hard question for me to answer, since the place where I am volunteering was founded by a very staunch Republican and I am, as mentioned above, of the Democratic persuasion. I told her the honest truth – “Well, I voted Democrat in the last election, but I really don’t know. It seems to me that politicians promise a lot of things during campaign season and never follow up on them, so is it fair to say, ‘He promised this and didn’t deliver’ when we know that always happens?”

My dining companion seemed to view this as an acceptable answer, and the matter was dropped, but the same situation came up in “Taft 2012.” Throughout the book, Heller uses a mixed media format, drawing in poll numbers, twitter conversations, and plain old prose to tell his story, and one of those ‘mixed media’ pieces is a transcript of a political analyst’s TV coverage of Taft. The  excerpt explains that the groundswell of Taft support is because he’s an ideal candidate who will bring us back to the good old days of yore, as this campaign advertisement will attest.

Taft is billed, in the beginning of the book and the marketing campaign for the candidate/book, as the candidate who always delivered on his promises and stuck to his morals, two things modern political candidates seem to lack.  Yet as the story progresses, he finds himself being sucked into the circus just like the rest of us, giving up on things he values to help his cause.

John Cass, an op-ed writer for the Chicago Tribune (a strongly Republican leaning newspaper, interestingly enough, run  way back when by the same man whose house I was volunteering at for that volunteer dinner) wrote a piece about a week ago about why he thinks Obama will win the election. Simply put, Cass says that Obama knows who he is and what he stands for, and the Republican candidates running against him are so busy infighting amongst themselves that they’ve forgotten to show the American public who  they are and what they’re about. Heller suggests at the end of his book that this is the only way candidates can win in politics – when Taft realizes that he’s forgotten who he was, he begins to work as a force for real change in society.

If you, like I do, come from a family of mixed political views, I think that “Taft 2012” is a great piece of writing to share with your family. It provides a (somewhat surreal) way to talk about how crazy the political process is, and it’s pretty amusing to boot. And even if you don’t, Taft 2012 is still an amazing piece of literature, and one I’m grateful to have read.

So, gentle citizens, get out and vote this November – and remember, DRAFT TAFT.

You can buy Taft 2012 directly from Quirk Books, from your local independent bookstore, or  from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or, if you’re lucky, you can try getting a copy from a site like PaperbackSwap.

Downton Recommends: An Edwardian Trip back in Time

This will probably be very obvious to anyone who knows me, but it bears putting down on paper: I am a very plugged in person. I read a lot of books, I follow a lot of blogs, I keep up with a number of news outlets, and I watch a lot – A LOT – of television and movies. I do this because I think it makes me a more interesting person, and also because I love having things to recommend to other people. Lately at my house the focus has been on – what else? – Downton Abbey.

 I love PBS and the work they put on TV, because it is usually fun to watch and also because, unlike much of mainstream television, their shows can usually be counted on to be something I can watch with my parents. (A lessening commodity, let me assure you.) My parents – my mother in particular – are very selective about what they will and won’t watch, and in an era where swearing and sex are becoming more commonplace on broadcast television, PBS usually pulls through for me with something that has no swearing, no sex, and no dubious scenes in dubious places like dark allies, strip clubs or seedy bars. It helps that my mom likes period dramas, too. So, after I dragged my sister through the first season of Downton Abbey (which I think she likes – she could just be putting up with me) and declared that I would have the TV Sunday night to watch the second season or perish without, my mom came down and watched the season opener with us. And, in a fashion true to my mother, when the whole thing was over, she asked, “So, when’s the next one?”

 Picture me at this point beaming in joy.

Of course, when the second season is over and we have to go back to our lives without the shenanigans of Matthew, Mary, and the rest of the Crawleys, I will have to find something else for my mother to watch. (She and my father complained at the end of the first season of Cranford, and the second season couldn’t come fast enough for them.) And being the plugged-in person I am, I’m compiling a list of (PBS approved) shows that I’ve watched in the past and wouldn’t mind watching again. So, without further ado, the list!

1. (The Original) Upstairs Downstairs (ITV/PBS, 1971-1975)

There has been much dirt thrown between the Upstairs Downstairs reboot people and the Downton Abbey folks, but it does bear saying that Downton Abbey is cast from the same clay as the 1970s PBS series. That fact cannot be denied. I still maintain that Downton is much more interesting that the recent remake of this beloved show, but the original is definitely worth watching at least once, if not two or three times. Upstairs Downstairs follows the adventures of the Bellamy family upstairs at 165 Eaton Place, London, and the lives of their servants downstairs as they deal with the turn of the century, the end of Victorian England and the beginning of the Edwardian age. (Interestingly enough, the Earl of Grantham’s sister Lady Rosamund Painswick is said to have a house in Eaton Square. I smell an imminent crossover fanfic.)

My mother claims that when this show was first on in the 70s her mother refused to let her watch it on the grounds that it held some scenes of a dubious nature. I watched it all several summers ago and was not at all fazed by the plot, but I am not my grandmother, and a servant getting with child out of wedlock, broken engagements, the first World War, and shell shock do not shake me. The cast was wonderful, the stories were alive and engaging, and there were some really first rate performances throughoutthe show’s run. I shall forever love David Langton’s Richard Bellamy, who gave a new meaning to the idea of the silver fox and who deserves a lot of really ravishing fanfiction, and Gordon Jackson’s Mr. Hudson, the loveable and peppery butler, was the type of character I should have loved to have spent time under as a housemaid, a demanding taskmaster but truly compassionate besides.

 2. The Duchess of Duke Street (BBC/PBS, 1976-77)

When it first came out, this series was accused of trying to ride on the success of Upstairs Downstairs, and to be sure, both shows feature a similar format – a house with servants below and a family of sorts upstairs, trying to deal with life in the Edwardian period. The title character, Louisa Leyton, enters the series as a lowly assistant cook with high ambitions – to become the best chef in London. A big goal in an era when it is universally acknowledged that while women can be cooks, only men have the artistic flair and panache required to be chefs. Through a series of complicated events, she becomes the proprietor of a hotel with its own ménage of interesting guests, servants, and family. The series was based on the life of Rosa Lewis, the proprietor of the famous Cavendish Hotel, a woman who was sometimes titled ‘the Duchess of Jermyn Street’ for the way she held court over the men who came to admire her cooking (and her good looks). I watched this before seeing Upstairs Downstairs, and the memories of it are a bit hazy, but I do remember liking the passionate and spunky performance put in by Gemma Jones as Louisa.

 3. To Serve Them All My Days (BBC/PBS, 1980)

If the end of World War One does for Matthew Crawley what it does for David Powlett-Jones, the protagonist of To Serve Them All My Days, I will be a happy fangirl indeed. I watched this miniseries several years ago and loved it so much I went and found the book by R.L. Delderfield upon which it was based. My copy, interestingly enough, is the tie-in version published for the series on “Mobil Masterpiece” as it was then called. (My, how times have changed.) TSTAMD follows the life of young Mr. Powlett-Jones as he returns from World War One a shell-shocked wreck of a twenty-two year old whose doctor has recommended fresh air and an enclosed community as the best hope for recovery. He begins teaching at a public school in Devon called Bamfylde under the auspices of a wonderfully jolly headmaster, Herries, and shepherds several generations of troublemakers and brownnosers alike through the joys of studying and examining history.

Delderfield was criticized for his flat characterizations in the novel, but I’ve never found any of his cast wanting in any respect of character. The miniseries was excellent, with top-notch performances by Alan MacNaughton as Mr. Howarth, the crusty and proud English professor and Frank Middlemass as Mr. Herries, as well as a particularly good bit of casting for the parts of several of the students who make up PJ’s cadre at school. (My favorite is always Boyer, a scoundrel with a good deal of charm who, just missing the action of World War One at the beginning of the series as a troublemaker in the 4th form, ends up enlisting at the end of the series in World War Two as a well-rounded young man of nearly 30.) This show also introduced me to the sound of spoken Welsh. Watch it for nothing else than that, if you must. John Duttine’s simple, scared young PJ is absolutely adorable rambling on in Welsh cadence. As is the terribly British and schoolmastery Carter, played by Neil Stacy.

Many of these shows are Edwardian in word and deed, but PBS has a treasure trove more set in the 1920s that I intend to preview for you! Any suggestions from the peanut gallery would be appreciated as well!

Resolved -- Excelsior!

Excelsior -- From Latin excelsior, comparative of excelsus (“high”) (archaic) (1) Loftier, yet higher; ever upward.  (2) title of poem by H.W. Longfellow, which reads 

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
"Excelsior!"

Today we are eleven days into the new year. Eleven days. Today I had a job interview, and in order to prepare for that interview, I cleaned out my portfolio. I printed out a new copy of my resume, and threw out the ten copies that were still in my portfolio from the Education Job fair I attended in Minneapolis last April. And my, what a lot has changed since then! My old resumes bear witness to a distinct shift in goals – the objective on the old ones reads “To obtain a position as a mid-level language arts teacher.” The new one no longer has an objective on it, because I needed space to list my many myriad qualifications for being a museum tour guide.

It turns out I didn’t need the resume – the job I was interviewing for is at a museum where I’ve been training as a volunteer since August, so my meeting today was less of an interview and more of a pre-hire meeting where they offer you the job and you fill out paperwork. I just need to get clearance and name badges and a drug test done, and I will officially have a second job, for which I am very grateful.

If you had told me at this time last year that in twelve months I’d have two jobs, I probably would have kicked you. But a lot changes in twelve months. In the last year, I’ve taught five classes of middle school students, four classes of high school students, and written I don’t even want to remember how many lesson plans. I dealt with workplace bullying drama and the sudden death of a mentor. I graduated from college with honors. I moved home and read a lot of articles about how this seems to be the new normal of my generation. I taught camp for the second summer and learned I’m much better at dealing with crisis and crying children than I ever gave myself credit for before.

 I decided (probably before the screaming children) that I wasn’t going to become a teacher. I interviewed at a number of different places, and found out I was not unemployable. I received my first real job offer, and gave my first job refusal. I entered the work force. I began volunteering at two different museums and learned a great deal about the nature of the museum visitor and the direction of museums in general. I tried to handle all three of my living grandparents having serious health problems throughout the year. I celebrated the birth of two new cousins (once removed.)

I look at that list, and I can’t believe that all those things happened in twelve short months. I managed to pack, intentionally or unintentionally, a lot of meaningful, life-changing experiences into twelve months, and I’m not sure that another year of my life will ever be so filled again. Some of them were wonderful experiences, and some of them were very far from wonderful, but all of them, I hope, have made me a better, brighter, stronger person.

In the last four years, I’ve seen the amount of writing I do for this blog slowly taper off, and for all that I know not too many people are reading this, that dwindling number still saddens me. At the beginning of a new year, it is customary to make a resolution regarding these sorts of things, but try as I might, I can’t bring myself to promise that I’ll write on this blog more. My resolutions are different – broader, in some ways. I resolve to make better use of my time. I resolve to be kinder and more welcoming with everyone. I resolve to care for my body more. I resolve to be a good steward of my money. I resolve to move myself higher as a human being. 

Perhaps a better resolution than ‘write more’ would be ‘be a better steward of my talents.’ In addition to invoking the Roman meaning of talent as a unit of money, this phrase brings together everything I want to strive for in the coming year. Use my time better by finding causes, places and people that need my help or my skills as a teacher, as a speaker, as a mover of boxes or a purveyor of useless facts. Become healthier, happier and more content with my life and my place in the world by helping others and enjoying the natural world around me.

It’s a lofty list of goals, to be sure, but I think that I can do it. After all, I’m writing another blog post, aren’t I?