Reviews for MeXicana encounters

The average rating for MeXicana encounters based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-01 00:00:00 Shane Goggin Tip O'Neill (1912-1994) retired from public life 30 years ago, but his shadow looms large over the bygone era when the American political system was still functional. The gradual degradation of government institutions and the outlawing of bipartisanship that accelerated under Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America"—a deal so lopsidedly negative that only the Yanks have a signed worse one since when they squandered $317 million on A-Rod—has, in 2017, reduced American government to a rotting, debilitated state. By comparison, the bribery, cronyism, and kickbacks of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s that O'Neill candidly recounts in Man of the House seem quaint. American politics was almost comically corrupt in the first half of the twentieth century, but for all its graft, the street corner nepotism that characterized machine politics of the Progressive Era also kindled the fires of labor-friendly, growth-enhancing programs that finally smashed the Gilded Age. While O'Neill's political instincts were forged in these early battles, we remember him most during those years just after the elites staged their comeback with the so-called "Reagan Revolution," when he rose to the occasion and embraced his role as the nation's greatest defender of its beleaguered social welfare system. Even with the aid of ghost writer William Novak, Man of the House is not particularly well written. But it does succeed in capturing the gregarious demeanor and avuncular style for which O'Neill was renowned. Nicknames accumulate rapidly in the early Boston chapters: John "Up-Up" Kelly, "Beef Stew" McDonough, Jimmy "the Whore" Horihan—to name just a few. O'Neill also seizes the opportunity to plumb his tome of outrageous anecdotes. Most entertaining of all are his various run-ins with Boston's infamous Mayor James Michael Curley. Relations with Curley came to a head in 1948 when the mayor, fresh out of jail and back in city hall, chose to include only two members from the state house in the 1948 delegation to the DNC. O'Neill was then minority leader of the house democrats, and he and his colleagues ran their own slate of delegates against Curley's, thus provoking the Mayor's ire: Then Curley himself called me. "Get out of the fight," he said. "I'm sorry, Governor," I replied, "but there's no way I can do that." "All right, you fat bastard," he said. "I'm taking you and Crowley off my slate. I'm going to put on a nigger and a Chinaman, and we're going to beat your ass off." The next day, Crowley and O'Neill were replaced with Shag Taylor, a black, and Frank Goon from Chinatown. There's a candidness about the former Speaker that's contrary to the television age, and which I suspect we'll never see again in politics. O'Neill doesn't bat an eye at stories involving judicial appointments in exchange for campaign contributions, "repeater" voting, hiring candidates to challenge opponents, phone tapping, or even threats of violence (when a fellow democrat in the Massachusetts House sided with lobbyists in a vote on mattress materials, O'Neill called him to the rostrum: "You see this gavel? If you ever louse up this house again while I'm Speaker, I'm going to break this thing right over your head.") Early 20th century politics was outrageously unethical but effective, and O'Neill always enthusiastically embraced his image as a working class, street corner pol. There's a lull in the middle part of the book, as O'Neill recounts his experiences with the Kennedys, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Not even his version of the Watergate events is all that intriguing (aside from his assertion that he knew Nixon was taping conversations in the White House when, during a dinner, the president addressed grandiloquent remarks in the direction of a chandelier overhead). It's in his final chapter on Reagan that O'Neill gets fired up again. He lambasts Reagan's supply-side economic agenda, and lays into the "real weirdos" of the Republican Party who were swept into Congress in 1981—including the man who would serve as the next GOP Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. During the early 80s the GOP turned O'Neill into a caricatured villain (later the same model they would use to rev up their base's vitriol against Nancy Pelosi), and he recalls a surge in hate mail, death threats, verbal harassment, and even physical confrontations during this period. In May 1981, Time Magazine wrote an early obit after the House passed the disastrous Gramm-Latta budget: "At that moment, it was clear that the nation's most powerful Democrat had been badly, perhaps even fatally wounded." But O'Neill fought like the cagey Irish bastard he was for another six years, and even managed to extend his majorities in the House. In the end, no leader of the opposition, no matter how skilled, could have done a better job of blunting the cruelty of Reagan's war on the poor. O'Neill sums it up nicely when it writes that, despite all of his Hollywood charm, "it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president." In an epilogue, O'Neill doubles down on his conviction that "every family deserves the opportunity to earn an income, own a home, educate their children, and afford medical care." These words take on an almost grandfatherly quality in this second age of plundering corporate overlords. With any hope, the Democratic Party might rediscover this missive and finally stop acting like Republicans-Lite. They have a perfect role model, as in hindsight we can see Tip O'Neill for what he was: the last great "bread-and-butter liberal" pol.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-03-30 00:00:00 Benedict Santos From the Epilogue to the book: "I'm still a bread-and-butter liberal who believes that every family deserves the opportunity to earn an income, own a home, educate their children, and afford medical care. That is the American dream, and it's still worth fighting for.In my view, the federal government has an obligation to help you along the line until you achieve that dream. And when you do, you have an obligation to help out the next group that comes along." I believe it too. If you want to understand the sausage making process that brought the United States from the fifty percent poverty rate and horrible working conditions of 1936, when O'neill started in politics, to a ten percent poverty rate where it stood just before the "Reagan Revolution", read this memoir. Read what he says about Reagan. That's what I remember, not this pap fed to us by Rupert Murdoch and his hired hands. Then go out and elect people who think like Tip.