As regular readers of mine know, I have long been a big fan of The Rest Is History podcast: I joined the Club as a Friend of the Show within weeks of its inception. But in the last year or so the show has, or so it seems to me anyway, been declining in quality. Earlier episodes were typically informed either by the hosts’ own expertise or by their thoughtful assessment of the work of excellent historians. Lately, though, I’ve sometimes felt that I am listening to Dominic and Tom working their way through notes prepared by ChatGPT on the basis of Wikipedia pages — sometimes, not always, but often enough that I find myself not finishing series, something that would have been unthinkable for me, say, two years ago. But there’s just not sufficient value-added in such episodes.
I also have a sense that when they’re less intellectually engaged with the material, both hosts lean into the parts they play, Tom doing his (I hope intentionally) terrible accents, Dominic performing his crusty semi-posh scoffer from the era of Stanley Baldwin.
That kind of thing comes and goes, but what has come to stay, I fear, is a kind of compulsive mocking of anything and everything American. Perhaps this is the result of frustration with the current U.S. government that can’t be directly expressed — “We’re not a politics podcast,” as Dominic often says — but that is difficult to suppress. Such frustration is understandable, and if T & D did occasionally shout with anger at the latest imbecility emerging from the White House I would not only forgive them, I would cheer them on. But that doesn’t happen.
What does happen is a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude — it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits — but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.
I could cite a number of examples along these lines, all from episodes on U.S. history, of which there are many; and those might have worn me down eventually. But what has really alienated me from the show is the way such sneers make their way into episodes that have nothing to do with the United States. The breaking point came for me just a few days ago, when I was listening to the first episode of a series on Samurai culture in Japan. A passing reference to a group of Samurai visiting San Francisco prompted, for reasons unknown and indeed unimaginable to me, a digression on how terrible cheese is in America. Yes, that is correct: a seething hatred of my country’s cheeses found its way into a story about Samurai.*
When I heard that I recalled several other examples — though none quite as absurd — of sniggering at things American in episodes unconnected to this country. And it occurred to me that such commentary, while it is probably delightful to many listeners, is a kind of toll that I have to pay to keep up with The Rest Is History. If the show were as consistently good as it used to be I might — maybe — pay that toll, but it’s not. So I canceled my membership and deleted the show from my podcast feed.
* In this they did what cultural chauvinists always do: treat the best form of X in their culture as their standard and the worst form of X in another culture as that culture’s standard. Thus what their culture does is always, amazingly, better than what any other culture does.
