Readers and writers blog

This weblog is too new to have many rules, but I’m breaking one — that is, the one about keeping our blogroll as diverse as possible — by adding Axis of Evel Knievel to it.

First a warning: Don’t visit this site if you believe that traditional versions of history are true, that traditional values of religion are meritorious and that the war on terror has hurt the terrorists more than us.

In fact, even if you don’t believe all those things, you will probably come out of Axis a little twisted. But you will admire the writing of its author, a history professor at the University of Alaska Southeast. His site enters our blogroll immediately after another professor’s blog, A Gentleman’s C, on whose blogroll in fact we found Axis.

The writing on Axis is well-informed, well-expressed and, well, strange. Other than the pun on our president’s famed axis, I’m not sure Evel Knievel has much to do with it, except the crash-prone motorcyclist may have inspired the blog’s subtitle, ‘Another Day, Another Pointless Atrocity.’

For about the past year, the professor’s writings have focused on the history of the date — June 4, a riot by beer-sotted fans at a Cleveland Indians-Texas Rangers baseball game in 1974; June 1, the 1660 hanging of Mary Dyer by Puritans in Massachusetts for her Quaker beliefs; May 31, George Washington’s 1779 order unleashing destruction on Iroquois settlements.

Aside from the subject choice, it’s pretty straight history, but the professor does get in a personal shot or two:

On April 15, Ken Lay’s birthday, the professor notes that the once-avuncular leader is now remembered by Enron’s 20,000 employees “as the man who urged them to sink their pensions into Enron’s company stock . . ., many of (them now forced) to work until they quite literally drop dead.” Now dead himself, “Ken Lay now rotates slowly and eternally on a greasy, barbed grate in the nether reaches of Hell.”

Jan. 17, the anniversary of the first Gulf War:

Sixteen years ago tonight, the United States led a coalition of nations into war to liberate a tiny, undemocratic emirate from the temporary clutches of a somewhat larger, undemocratic dictatorship located along its northern border . . .

At the end of the war, President George Herbert Walker Bush jovially remarked that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” adding that the United States had at last fought a war without “one hand tied behind [its] back.”

April 20, 2006:

Those who yodel endlessly and ahistorically about the spectre of ‘Islamofascism’ will no doubt be thrilled to learn that today marks the birthdays of both Adolf Hitler and the prophet Mohammed.

The professor’s earlier entries are less date-oriented. On March 14, 2005, he writes about the latest Bush administration’s tax incentive for small business owners to write off vehicle purchases:

As near as I can tell, my chiropractor purchased the Hummer while the cap was set at $100,000. This is, I remind you, a small town in Alaska. We have a mere 40 miles of roads and nothing to justify the purchase of a vehicle that symbolizes the worst hybrid of arrogant militarism, loathsome status-consumerism, and appalling disregard for the future of everything.

Aug. 3, 2005, in an entry titled ‘Evolution and its Discontents’:

When I teach the 1920s in my history survey course, the Scopes Trial usually makes an appearance. At that point, I sometimes ask whether it matters that we live in a nation whose president doesn’t understand the concept of evolution. For the most part, my students don’t seem to have a problem with that. As the saying goes, “mission accomplished.”

At several places, the professor wonders if it’s wise to go public with his opinions. On Feb. 3, 2006, he talks about being nominated for a blogging award:

Thanks to whoever nominated me. I owe you a shiny new nickel and a signed copy of my (as yet unwritten) memoir about working at Subway in 1993, a project that I will pursue with renewed devotion after my university administrators discover this blog and fire me.

– Sid Leavitt