7 ms·
From "Debt, The First 5000 years": L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populi
by rabidrat 7y ago
From "Debt, The First 5000 years":
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.”
- EGreg 7y agoI always thought Oz was a reference to Australia. How did Aus come to be called Oz, the land down under?
- davidw 7y ago"Oz-tray-lee-ah" Edited to reflect a pronunciation, not necessarily a correct or accurate one, from which it's easy to derive 'oz'.
- jaredlightman 7y agoNobody says it with a z sound, always an s.
- Supermancho 7y ago...and nobody says "oz" when they mean to say "ounce". These are literal liberties, which fit either way, I think.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoThey do say it with a /z/ sound. That's why it gets spelled Oz. Compare Aussie, which is also pronounced with a /z/.
- jaredlightman 7y agoI've never heard anyone pronounce 'Australia' as 'Auztralia'. 'Aussie' as 'ozzie' yes, but never Australia.
- msclrhd 7y agoVoicing s as /z/ is widely variational. For example, I voice the s in "us", and "Muslim", while others don't. While I don't voice the s in Australia (/ɒ.ˈstreɪ̯.li.jə/ ~ /ə.ˈstreɪ̯.li.jə/), I do in Oslo (pronouncing it /ˈɒz.loʊ̯/).
- jaredlightman 7y agoPronouncing 'Oslo' with a z sound doesn't mean 'Australia' is pronounced with a z sound, you're comparing the... you know, I don't care.
- goatinaboat 7y agoThey actually pronounce it “straya”.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoIt's almost impossible to produce "oz-tr" because the t is unvoiced. But as I mention sidethread, the term for a person, Aussie, is pronounced with a /z/, and the Oz pronunciation is probably related to that.
- dekhn 7y agoBecause oz sounds like "aus"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- saghm 7y agoI'm not sure where exactly I heard this, but some time when I was young, I either was told or read somewhere that the author came up with the name "Oz" when looking at a filing cabinet; the top was labeled "A-N", and the bottom was labeled "O-Z"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rjkennedy98 7y agoWorth noting: the slippers were originally Silver (as a parable for the silver standard), but changed to Ruby for the movie
- philwelch 7y agoMainly because silver doesn't look nearly as cool on color film :)
- pvg 7y agoIf you follow up this claim even very superficially you'll find it's not really 'widely recognized' but rather the oft-mentioned, curious theory of one person.
- klenwell 7y agoI thought this interpretation was pretty widely recognized. I had encountered it before I read Graeber's Debt. (Don't remember where. It had been years earlier.) His treatment was just a recap of what I already knew or at least was familiar with.
- pvg 7y agoThere’s a Wikipedia link downthread, the one person in question is not the author of ‘Debt’
- jackhack 7y agoHow far we've drifted as a nation. People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored. Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money. President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea. Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents. What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?
- airstrike 7y ago> President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. He also voiced a million other things that you might as well pin his assassination on, if you're so willing to jump to conclusions.
- ssully 7y agoThe Netflix movie The Irishman is about a labor union organizer/mob hitman [1] who claims to have assisted in JFKs assassination at the behest of the mob/ Jimmy Hoffa. You can literally spin a wheel of different motivations for groups who wanted JFK dead and they all have their own convincing reasons. Except hackjack's little conspiracy here, which seems to be missing a final paragraph about why we need to switch to using Bitcoin as our standard currency. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sheeran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sheeran
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoIf anyone hasn't read the book... It seriously is one of the best kids books ever written. It's short. You can read it in like 2 hours or less. It will take you right back to childhood. 100% worth it. Cannot recommend it enough.
- thordenmark 7y agoI have to second this. While overshadowed by the first, all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum are excellent reads full of imagination and compelling characters.
- 1auralynn 7y agoNot to mention amazing illustrations.
- Frondo 7y agoJack Snow was an absolutely brilliant illustrator -- he did every book after the first one, for a very, very long time. After L Frank Baum wrote the original 14, a few other authors picked up the mantle (Ruth Plumbly Thompson being the most prolific by far) and Jack Snow did all of those, until he authored a few books himself. Sadly, none of the other authors quite captured the surrealism, magic, and originality of the original 14, but many of them were still fun to read.
- 1auralynn 7y agoOh I was talking about John R. Neill, who was a big influence on me :) I hadn't heard of Jack Snow!
- peteey 7y agoWhat does the good witch of the North represent?
- jdsully 7y agoCanada
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoShakira
- Stronico 7y agoSupposedly Northern populists, the more hard working type of populism (again supposedly). The good witch of the South represents the more welfare-statists strain of populism of the era - or so said my econ history professor.
- msla 7y agoThat thesis has been ably challenged: http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm I'll just quote a bit from the end: > Thomas A. Bailey once suggested that we set up a computer network to keep track of misinformation that has been corrected--sort of a national clearinghouse for discredited myths. Is it time to move Littlefield to the computer trashpile of misinformation? Given the mounting evidence against it--given that Littlefield himself has admitted that it has "no basis in fact"--should we forget the whole notion of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable on Populism? That would be a big mistake. Perhaps we can no longer say that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "as an allegory of the silver movement," but we can still read it as an allegory of the silver movement--or, as Henry Littlefield noted just two years ago, "we can bring our own symbolism to it." Recent scholarship might have taken away Baum's intent, but the images are still there, vivid as ever.
- samstave 7y agoYEP! Its so sad how few people are aware of this and the fact that we were FUCKED when 1913 Fed Reserve happened.... and after the fact Woodrow Wilson the scumbag wrote a letter regretting the decision and signing of the act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
- thaumasiotes 7y ago> The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized". > the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene) This, on the other hand, doesn't even meet that standard. If you read the book, the joke about those three characters is very clear -- the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group. It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need.
- Cpoll 7y ago> It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need. But that still fits the message. They needed to learn that they have what they're looking for. (which isn't to say I have any opinion about whether it's a crackpot theory or not)
- WalterBright 7y ago> the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group. I saw that once a year on TV in the 60's, but didn't notice this until much, much later. Heck, I didn't even notice the poppies on the wallpaper on the farm until someone pointed it out to me. (Hangs head in shame)
- anti-cognitive 7y agoIt's funny to me how you seem to grasp at arguing with such a soft fluffy denial. I mean this is less contradiction or refutation and more sulking and pouting about ideas you don't like. First, you just ad hominem with a blundering crackpot label. Then you try to dismiss detailed insights with completely compatible interpretations of the subject matter. It's like you didn't even notice that your perspective and opinion of the symbolism and characterization can interoperate and simultaneously work alongside the version you replied to. They aren't mutually exclusive. But for whatever reason, you've got this smug derision woven into your comment, like you've handily picked apart the ideas you saw fit to quote. It's very obvious that The Wizard of Oz fits an allegory for the dust bowl and great depression. All the pieces easily snap together when you recognize them for what they are. You seem to harbor some deep resentment of a truth that terrifies you. But why?
- SilasX 7y agoAbout as reliable a theory as this part: >Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages. https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years.html https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-dav...
- user982 7y agoThis book is on my reading list and that sentence is causing me to consider removing it.
- povertyworld 7y agoI stopped reading Debt when he described the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin as "made of a copper-nickel alloy designed to look vaguely like gold". The Susan B. Anthony dollar is the same color as all the other circulating coinage of the time excluding pennies obviously. Did he seriously confuse Susan B. Anthony dollars from the early 80s with the currently circulating Sacagawea dollars? I know numismatics is only tangentially related to the history of finance, but it's related enough that he could have taken five minutes to check. I remember when he got denied tenure by Yale he went on Charlie Rose and had all these conspiracy theories about union organizing. Maybe his research was just shoddy.
- LyndsySimon 7y agoThat's interesting - that composition certainly isn't correct, and I can't find reference to the US Mint ever planning on having the Susan B. Anthony dollar be composed of anything other than what it is. That seems like a really glaring oversight on the part of the author.
- andrepd 7y agoHow can you pack so many wrong things in one sentence...
- sk5t 7y ago