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Dispatches from the asylum

2012-01-11T02:11:00.001-05:00

As expected, New Hampshire went solidly for Romney, with two libertarians placing and showing. The race's social conservatives didn't fare to well (although if you count Ron Paul's racism as social conservatism, you could say that certain types of social conservatism are still acceptable to the New Hampshire electorate). The tenor of the race will change considerably when the candidates head into traditionally backwards South Carolina, where clear thought is generally seen as anti-American, and who better to know anti-American than the state that started a war with America.

You have to wonder how Ron Paul's flavor of politics will play in South Carolina. On the one hand, he hates the government that he's served in for about half his life, so that's a plus. On the other hand, he's a staunch isolationist who doesn't believe in crusading American Empire, which won't play well with those who think we're in a clash of civilizations.

A few months ago, Rick Perry may have done well in South Carolina, but his campaign is such a painful thing to watch that even his base surely must have weighed their options and realized that Santorum is actually a more coherent candidate. You know you're in trouble when you make Rick Santorum seem like the better candidate.

Speaking of Santorum, I think it's good that he and the others stay in the race as long as possible, bruising Romney and letting the general public see the wackiness that passes for Republican thought. It's a narrow rainbow, but it's very vibrant, from Santorum's musings on "man on dog" sex to Ron Paul's cloud cuckoo land dreaming.

2012. Can you smell it yet?

2012-01-04T01:25:00.000-05:00

I am so absolutely delighted in the opening of Primary Season with the wacky Iowa Caucuses. Iowa is the heartland, which is more a concept than a reality, since Iowa is more cornfield than courthouse, whose demographics hardly reflect the United States. Yet Iowa occupies all the pre-game maneuvering of the party out of power, as candidate after candidate traipses through as many crossroads towns as he or she can in order to folksy it up in diners, hotels, and auditoriums. At the end of the election season, in November's general election, Iowa will give its victor a scant 6 electoral votes out of the necessary 270. To paraphrase Mark Twain, Iowa maintains its political importance in our nation due to a fiction of law and custom.

In 2008, Iowa voters enthused over Mike Huckabee, whose main charm seemed to be that he was a Christian, which in American politics is hardly a shocker, even if many holier than thou professing Christians like to believe they're an oppressed minority. So Huckabee left Iowa voters enthused that the 44th President of the United States could possibly be a Christian, unlike the 42 others before him (Grover Cleveland, as the only President to server two non-consecutive terms, gets counted twice). Republican primary voters -- primary voters of political parties being the standard-bearers of the party's ideology -- have been clamoring for a return to what they call basic American values since a bunch of race traitors in Washington signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Iowans are good people, but we are talking about Republican primary voters here, so we're naturally talking of people who have a natural distrust of reason and a basic belief that we are all one America and if your vision of America is different than theirs, then you are at best a fool and at worst a treasonous dog.

In 2012, Iowa's Republicans seem to have handed the winner's cup to both Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, with Ron Paul finishing a very close third. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened had Paul and Santorum not split the nutcase vote, or Michele Bachmann not claimed the better portion of the raging nutcase vote. Romney, the only candidate in the Republican field who resembles an earth creature, managed to use Iowa as a platform to look Presidential, rarely descending into the fray generated by his competitors. The big surprise is Santorum, a truly clueless oaf whose charisma kept him in the race. In fact, if you could combine Romney's relative moderation with Santorum's fervent yet personable approach, the Republicans would probably have a clear frontrunner and a viable challenger to Obama. Santorum, as co-winner of the Iowa Caucuses, gives his campaign a huge boost, but now he must leave homogenous Iowa behind for the meaner streets of a slightly less homogenous New Hampshire, where social conservatism doesn't play as strong a role among primary voters.

If one thing is clear after tonight's vote it's that no viable Republican candidate has connected with the voters, because Santorum is as unelectable as Paul and his strong showing -- along with Paul's -- might keep the campaign offices going in the other states, but will be nothing but a godsend to Barack Obama. Rick Santorum -- a candidate so dogmatic that Pennsylvania voters unceremoniously dumped him by 18 percentage points in favor of Bob Casey, Jr. (himself a true marvel for his ability to walk and talk without appearing to have a frontal lobe) -- may be a homophobe, an intolerant zealot, and a punchline to a Google search, but Iowa has propelled him to the front page and validated his campaign.

Iowa does love Santorum.

The uncanny.

2011-11-10T12:02:00.001-05:00

This Saturday Penn State takes the field for the first time since 1949 without Paterno as a member of the coaching staff. The trustees made the right decision in removing him immediately from the team. However, for any Penn Stater under 50, the sight of a Paterno-less sideline (or press box recently...Jay doesn't count) will be a melancholy curiosity.

I grew up in the heart of Penn State country and remember the epic battles between Pitt's Jackie Sherrill and Penn State's Paterno. Between Alabama's Bear Bryant and Penn State's Joe Paterno. Between Notre Dame's Faust (sorry) and Penn State's Paterno. Since those coaches were at their respective schools, Pitt has had 7 coaches (not counting interim or hired but never coached), Alabama has had 7 coaches (again, not counting hired but never coached), and Notre Dame has had 5 coaches (again, not counting hired but never coached).

It's going to be a very odd experience.

Sad.

2011-11-08T14:35:00.000-05:00

Busy dealing with the Penn State scandal right now.

Eight victims in the indictment and a possible ninth coming forward. There will be more. What a horrific experience for them.

Absolutely devastated. It's going to be a clean sweep in the football program, and one hell of a sad way for Joe Paterno to go, but there's no arguing he bears moral responsibility for not seeing that his longtime coach -- although retired when Paterno allegedly first heard of the issue -- face criminal charges sooner. Absolutely inexcusable.

There's no way you can do any less knowing the leadership allowed a predator to continue his abuse for at least a decade after knowing what he was up to.

LaVar Arrington has said it most clearly in terms of the shock, dismay, and anger many PSU alums must feel.

Recapping college football gameday.

2011-10-29T23:57:00.004-04:00

I went 7-3 on my predictions. I'm particularly proud of picking the Georgia Tech upset of Clemson, although I got dogged on a few of my Big 10 picks...Michigan State must have sent the squad that played Notre Dame to play Nebraska, because they got skunked in Lincoln. It was a solid performance by the Huskers. In an incredible back and forth finish, Ohio State got the better of Wisconsin. I'm not sure what's happened to Wisconsin, who now seem to have lost their way.

Penn State won ugly over Illinois. Neither team seemed particularly interested in winning that game, with Penn State turning the ball over 3 times and Illinois giving it up 4 times. The anemic Penn State offense could not capitalize on those turnovers or a blocked punt that gave Penn State the ball deep in Illinois territory. Then, after nearly four quarters of impotence, Penn State's offense put together an 80 yard drive for the game winner. Hard to believe, really.

I thought Ole Miss would beat Auburn, because even though Ole Miss isn't exactly good, Auburn isn't exactly as good as their ranking would indicate.

In a bizarre result in a game I didn't even bother noting, Iowa State beat up on Texas Tech, the team that took out Oklahoma last weekend. I mean, Iowa State was 3-4 heading into that game, with their only decent win coming in overtime against Iowa. Since starting the season 3-0, Iowa State had lost four straight to Texas, Baylor, Missouri, and Texas A&M. And none of those games were even close. So their decisive 41-7 thrashing of Texas Tech was fairly surprising.

Getting back to the Big 10, Penn State is the only team undefeated in league play, and in their division, the Leaders, the next closest teams are Wisconsin and Ohio State, both at 2-2 in league play, and both on Penn State's schedule. Penn State's three remaining games are all big challenges: Nebraska, @Ohio State, and @Wisconsin.

It looks to be an interesting end to the season.

It only gets better...

2011-10-29T07:54:00.000-04:00

David Stern has announced that NBA games are now cancelled through the end of November.

Sure we've endured floods, hurricanes, bizarre snowstorms, and Fox News, but this news makes up for all of that.

Now there's something to give thanks for this Thanksgiving!

College football preview for this Halloween weekend.

2011-10-28T22:45:00.002-04:00

Let's take a quick look at the Big 10 matchups this weekend.

The marquee matchup is probably #11 Michigan State v. #14 Nebraska. After Michigan State's win over Wisconsin last week, they may be in for a let down in Lincoln. However, I think Michigan State wins this one.

Purdue is at #18 Michigan. I don't know, but Purdue has been surging. I still think that in an offensive shootout, Michigan wins. Especially at the Big House.

#15 Wisconsin at Ohio State. Ohio State has been struggling. Wisconsin looked unbeatable (at least in the Big 10) until last week. Ohio State's most impressive victory was a 17-7 victory over a flagging Illinois. I think Wisconsin routs Ohio State in the Horseshoe.

Illinois at #19 Penn State. Illinois had a great season going, but have lost their last two games. Their season is collapsing, and I think Penn State will put another dent in their bowl status.

In less, exciting games, Iowa v. Minnesota...Minnesota is so unbelievably bad that Iowa will appear to have a well-oiled offense. Look for Minnesota to have incredible difficulty scoring. Iowa in a rout.

Likewise, Northwestern at Indiana should see a bit more of a high scoring affair by both sides, but Northwestern will outscore Indiana comfortably.

That does it for the Big 10.

#9 Oklahoma at #8 Kansas State should be one of the best games of the weekend. I'm thinking Oklahoma rebounds from last week's loss to Texas Tech and hands K-State a real whooping.

Other than that, the only game of any real interest might be #5 Clemson v. Georgia Tech. G-Tech at home has a chance of toppling Clemson, and I think they'll do it.

Navy has owned Notre Dame recently, but I think this year Notre Dame clamps down on a team that has yet to win any significant games (Delaware and Western Kentucky are Navy's two wins).

I also see Ole Miss taking down #23 Auburn.

I'd like to improve on my record from last week, which shouldn't be too hard.

Still no excuses.

2011-10-27T10:30:00.000-04:00

I'm sure the right-wing readers of the Washington Post -- and there are a surprising many of them, judging from the racist comments on the article discussion boards -- will be wailing about today's article about Black fans embracing the nearly local NFL franchise, the Laurel Redskins.

The Post leads by noting the team's racist past, being the last NFL franchise to accept Black players, which essentially means they were forced to integrate because they could no longer afford to exclude a growing pool of skilled players from consideration, and also because the federal government threatened to ban George Preston Marshall's racist ass from using D.C. stadium. Theirs was no crisis of consciousness.

Missing of course in the Post's celebration of Black fans coming to love the franchise that excluded them the longest is the fact that the Redskins today maintain the most racist name in professional sports (although the Cleveland Indian's Indian mascot and emblem is easily a far more racist graphic).

Seriously. The Redskins.

Why not the Darkies?

On grading.

2011-10-24T02:41:00.002-04:00

I am wading through student assignments, trying to finalize grades for a half-semester course I've been teaching. It's not my favorite thing in the world, but it's necessary, since apparently students expect grades back for the work they've submitted and the university demands it.

Who knew?

I have moved over the years toward rubrics, in part to keep my sanity, but also in part because they give students a fairly clear overview of the areas of emphasis for the paper. No rubric, I've decided, is perfect, but a good rubric can speed the grading process while allowing for reliable grades. Trust me, looking at thirty papers on the same topic without a rubric can be a deadly experience.

I think many teachers dread grading because the nature of one assignment given to the entire class lends itself to repetitive papers, many of which are close to unreadable. I offer as a perverse proof of this thesis the fact that when you do happen upon a well-constructed paper that has a clear argument and uses direct specific support that actually relates to the argument, you are so overjoyed that you want to tell your colleagues and close family members about it.

Not too many teachers get into the profession because they love grading or love the idea of being able to assess individuals and control their futures via the power of the letter grade. I know I initially got into the profession through a love of my subject and a desire to talk about it with other people, both colleagues and students.

Grading is the price we pay to get to do stand in front of a class and ask them what they thought e.e. cummings was up to when he wrote "next to of course god america i."

As predictions go...

2011-10-23T11:18:00.001-04:00

My NCAA football predictions yesterday were less than stellar. Let's see what I predicted:

1. PSU v. Northwestern. I weaseled around this game and didn't make a prediction. PSU won.

2. Wisconsin v. Michigan State. I picked Wisconsin. I picked a solid Wisconsin win. I was wrong. Michigan State was in control most of the game, with Wisconsin mounting a late comeback and nearly getting to overtime. Michigan State's win raises the question, how in the hell did this team lose to Notre Dame?

3. Speaking of which, I thought Notre Dame would win by two touchdowns over USC. Again, I was wrong. USC won by two touchdowns. I probably should have noted that Syracuse beat #15 West Virginia on Friday, but I didn't actually pay attention to that and seriously undervalued USC's victory over Syracuse. Still, I would have picked ND to beat USC even with that information.

4. Auburn v. USC. I predicted a major kill by the LSU Tigers, and I at least got that one right.

5. Texas Tech v. Oklahoma. I thought the Oklahoma offense would keep pace with Texas Tech and the Oklahoma defense would clamp down on the Texas Tech offense. Wrong on both counts, at least until midway through the third quarter, where the Oklahoma defense finally showed a little resistance.

6. I thought Stanford would stomp Washington, and they did.

7. I picked FSU to beat Maryland, even though I wish they wouldn't. FSU beat Maryland.

So I went 3-3, but I'm really puzzling over the games I missed, not so much because I missed them as because it's very difficult to figure these teams out. Notre Dame had looked to be putting together a decent season from the shambles of their first two games, and Oklahoma looked like a machine. As for Michigan State, they're utterly unpredictable, but Wisconsin had been steadily steamrolling opponents.

In a really bizarre turn, Illinois looks to be in freefall, following up last week's loss to Ohio State with a loss yesterday to Purdue. I can only hope that freefall continues next weekend in Happy Valley, where the Nittany Lions play host to the Illini.

Penn State and Michigan State are the only two Big 10 teams unbeaten in league play, but I like MSU's victories (Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio State) more than Penn State's (Indiana, Iowa, Purdue, Northwestern).

Penn State has a tough final four games: Illinois, Nebraska, @Ohio State, and @Wisconsin.

I'm predicting a 9-3 regular season.

And now a post about NCAA football.

2011-10-22T06:48:00.000-04:00

Today looks to be an interesting day in college football.

In the most important game of the day, Penn State travels to Northwestern in only their third road game of the season. They've beaten Temple and Indiana on the road, but both wins were lackluster performances that resulted in very close games (14-10 and 16-10 respectively) against some very weak opponents (I'll grant that Temple is having a good year at 5-2, but it's still Temple...and Indiana, well, they're 1-6).

Northwestern is not having a good year at 2-4, but their offense puts up some numbers, whereas Penn State's doesn't. Penn State's defense will have to be on its best behavior, since Penn State's offense is unable to put up numbers against even weak defenses such as Indiana (95th in the nation in defense).

Penn State has a very good chance of losing four of its next five games. It also has a realistic chance of winning four of its next five games, though, with the one exception being Wisconsin. However, if they drop the game to Northwestern, their odds of winning any of the remaining games goes way down, because of the remaining teams, the weakest is Ohio State, and despite the Buckeyes' woes this year, PSU has a bad habit of crumbling against even mediocre teams from Columbus.

Also playing this weekend:

In the Big 10, the only marquee matchup, aside from PSU, is the Wisconsin v. Michigan State game. It'll be played in East Lansing, which I think is really the Spartans' only hope. You have to remember that Michigan State lost to Notre Dame. Big time, 31-13. I don't know if all the MSU players were smoking crack the night before the game, or simply thought the game was later in the day, but somehow they lost to a Notre Dame team that hasn't beaten any other team with a winning record. I predict a dominating Wisconsin performance. Wiscy is the class of the Big 10 this year, the only team that I would say is really ready for a New Years Day bowl.

In the SEC, Auburn v. LSU could be interesting, but it would be much more interesting if it were being held at Auburn. Auburn was convincingly stomped by Arkansas, and they haven't been impressive in any win. The only hope for Auburn is that LSU is looking past them to Alabama. I predict a major pounding by the Tigers. The LSU Tigers, that is.

In the Big 12, or what's left of it, Oklahoma v. Texas Tech is the only interesting game, but it's being played in Norman, and Oklahoma is simply a better team. Texas Tech has hung tough against ranked opponents, but it's lost to them, and it's also allowed crappy teams like Kansas and Nevada to hang around, so I'm again predicting a monster stomping by the Sooners.

In the PAC-10, Washington is at Stanford. Stanford has encountered absolutely no resistance in its 2011 campaign thus far, but then again it hasn't played a single good team (their victims sport a combined 15-25 record), with none of them having a winning record. Washington at least has a winning record at 5-1, their one loss coming to a very respectable Nebraska team. However, Washington can't point to any respectable victories, and I'm going with Stanford in a comfortable blowout.

In other games, I'd love to see Maryland beat Florida State. I don't think it will happen though, even if Maryland pulls out all stops and wears even more unimaginably hideous uniforms than in previous games this year.

The USC v. Notre Dame game, which in many years has major bowl implications, is really an afterthought this year. Neither team is ranked, and USC's seemingly impressive 5-1 record is built upon punching bags such as Minnesota (1-5) and Arizona (2-5). Their most impressive win came against Syracuse, whose 4-2 record will most likely be 5-7 by season's end. As for Notre Dame, I've already noted their convincing win against Michigan State and the fact that MSU was the only opponent they've beaten who has a winning record. However, the two teams they've lost to, Michigan and South Florida, are better than any team that USC has beaten. Or even played for that matter. I'm handing this game to Notre Dame, probably by two touchdowns.

Still not missing you at all...

2011-10-21T20:00:00.000-04:00

I love the NBA lockout.

If any sport could disappear from the American landscape, the one that would do the most good simply to go away would be professional basketball.

Remember, I'm talking sports here. While it would certainly do our nation a favor to dispense with such activities as auto racing, professional wrestling, MMA, etc., we're talking about sports now.

The NBA is still deadlocked between greedy-ass owners and pampered athletes, with neither side having any sort of justification for the outrageous sums of money they command. Of course, that fact alone doesn't set them apart from any other professional league. What sets the NBA apart from other leagues is the amount of damage the league does to the sport it supposedly plays.

Basketball is a beautiful game when played in high school and college. However, in the NBA, the game has been diluted in the interests of "watchability" to the extent that it is substantially different than its feeder system games. In the NFL, the game becomes harder -- two feet must be in bounds on a catch, rather than one, for instance -- but in the NBA it becomes easier: walking is redefined to allow more steps (2) and then is rarely enforced.

The NBA court should be, if not longer, then wider than NCAA courts. Already the NBA game resembles a pick up game in converted church basement or school cafeteria, with the players too big for the court.

However, the major problem with the NBA is the awful effect it has upon its viewers, who seem compelled to leave their sofas and migrate to gyms once the season rolls around. Note to all of you: watching the NBA doesn't make you a better player. You don't jump higher, shoot straighter, or play better defense. All the NBA does is teach you bad habits.

Grabbing my shirt is not defense.

Sticking your elbows out like you're an old electronic football lineman is not good defense.

Turning the ball over while you dribble is, believe it or not, a violation.

While deliberately attempting to draw a charge is bad form in a pickup game, that doesn't give you the right to drive to the basket as if no one is in your way.

----

I can only hope the NBA stays off the air.

Storytime.

2011-10-21T08:37:00.001-04:00

The Republican Party certainly has no monopoly on scoundrels and liars, but it's always nice to be reminded that they do seem to have the most shameless scoundrels and liars. Now Marco Rubio's family story of his parents fleeing Cuba in the wake of Castro's liberation of the island from decades of U.S.-backed business friendly dicatatorship (alas, only to see it founder into a state with about as much freedom of expression, if a more equitable distribution of income, than the one it replaced) turns out to be a big fat lie.

Apparently, Rubio's parents have immigration papers from 2.5 years before Castro's takeover of Cuba.

Not terribly concerned about having been caught in a lie, Rubio retreated into the "family lore" and "I didn't carry around their passports" weaseling that's so familiar to anyone who follows political liars. In other words, he built pathos for his campaign and solidarity with his community around a story he simply made up. The defense that perhaps his parents didn't remember correctly would appear incredibly unconvincing to all but the most stalwart ignoramus. We aren't talking about what day you dropped off your dry cleaning here; we're talking about perhaps the single most important event in Cuba's 20th century history coupled with a relatively major decision to leave the land of your birth for another country. To put it in perspective, I may not remember whether I bought a pair of shoes before or after September 11, 2001, but I can sure as hell tell you where I was living.

He took advantage of the Cuban exile community's trust in his origin story and duped them into thinking he, too, was a product of forced exile, rather than choice. Hell, Castro wasn't even in Cuba when Rubio's parents bid farewell to the island that he cynically claims they were forced to leave.

An even uglier side to this story appears to be the cropping up of yet more "birther" bullshit from those who want to make hay of the fact that Rubio's parents weren't officially U.S. citizens when Marco Rubio was born. So what? He was born in the U.S. and that's good enough to make him a citizen. Rubio may be an opportunistic liar, but he's one of ours still.

The Washington Post: If you don't get it, sometimes you write for it.

2011-10-18T10:18:00.000-04:00

Anne Applebaum has a piece in today's Post that goes a long way toward highlighting the real problem of the supposed "liberal media": they stop at corporate liberalism and think that they represent the limits of rational thinking.

In her critique of the protests, which utilizes the now dominant trope of mainstream media both right and center (there is no left mainstream media) that the protesters "don't have a program/don't know what they want," Applebaum believes the protesters, by exercising their rights under our democracy, are in fact undermining democracy. It's a profoundly conservative argument that usually comes from knee-jerk reactionaries and those who think that anyone who protests inequality in America should "see what it's like in [name your third world dictatorship]," as though those are models we really aspire to.

It's essentially a lack of vision. Applebaum cannot see around her belief in theoretical democracy to understand the critique is leveled at a gamed system, a democracy that unfortunately has come to resemble more and more, as V.I. Lenin put it a century ago, a "political shell for capitalism" (State and Revolution 14). Applebaum actually -- and in proof of what many a deconstructionist might argue -- admits what she can't admit, recognizing in the Occupy movement a coherent message that the process is broken: "national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world," she writes, but she simply can't sustain the critique, because that would call into question all the "economic and spiritual benefits" of globalization (I assume she alludes to her ability to purchase cheaply the products of child/slave/prison labor and her ability to take those products with her to a spiritual retreat in some ancient ruins).

Unable to think beyond the boundaries of our corporatized democracy, Applebaum retreats, after throwing a gratuitous dig at the Occupy movement's claims of solidarity with and affinity to Arab Spring, into a laughable conclusion:

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

One could have said as much about the American colonists. They also "already had a process," it it also was called the "British political system." The fact of a process's existence isn't the point. Serial killers "have a process." The issue is whether the process works.

____

Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution.1917. New York: International Publishers, 1932. Lenin does a fairly good job of describing our current situation: "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and therefore, once capital has gained control [...] of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly that no change, either of persons, or institutions, or parties in the bourgeois republic can shake it" (14).

No harm, no foul.

2011-10-11T07:07:00.001-04:00

The cancelation of the first two weeks of the NBA season is great news, because it will keep armchair athletes off the courts for at least that long. You can always tell when the NBA starts up by the sudden influx of no-talent ballers, looking like little caricatures of their NBA counterparts, wearing replica jerseys and sporting two inch verticals.

Let's save basketball by canceling the rest if the season as well.

Proving that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.

2011-10-03T11:32:00.000-04:00

So Michelle Obama went to the Alexandria Target over the weekend.

Big whoop.

Outside of the usual complaints you'd expect to hear from the right wing (or really the left if a Republican first lady were to make a shopping trip) about taxpayer money being spent on security and how the money saved at Target was wasted on the security detail etc., I wouldn't think the trip would garner much attention.

However, because Michelle Obama dresses elegantly on many occasions (apparently unlike previous first ladies, who to infer from the right wing's frothing all wore off the rack stuff from the Kathy Ireland Collection at K-Mart or did all their shopping at Frumps-R-Us), she shouldn't be seen in Target.

What really has the right wing press machine in an uproar though is the fact that someone from AP got a photo of her shopping. Apparently, this fact amounts to a conspiracy nearly as deep as the CIA/Mafia/KGB assassination of JFK. Rush Limbaugh, himself no stranger to fraud, had this gem to contribute:

“What a phony-baloney plastic banana good-time rock-and-roller optic photo op.”

Coming from one of the most powerful men in media who constantly pretends he's outside that whole machine, those words seem a bit hollow.

Of course, Limbaugh is also the guy who had the gall to claim Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox was "acting" when he shot an ad for stem cell research in which he very noticeably twitched and rocked. Limbaugh, who accused Fox of skipping medication so that he would appear more damaged than he was, was perhaps thinking of his own experience with withdrawal from Oxycontin. However, Fox's medicinal intake was not recreational, but rather legally prescribed, unlike Rush's.

When being correct should show you how wrong you are.

2011-09-30T11:36:00.000-04:00

Catholic University's president, John Garvey, is absolutely right in his column in today's Washington Post: the new Health and Human Services birth control rules do intrude on Catholic values.

He's as right about that as any segregationist was when arguing that Brown v. Board of Education intruded on white supremacist values.

In which I take a look at a candidate who's gone from an afterthought to this week's cause célèbre.

2011-09-28T10:07:00.001-04:00

Why in the hell is anyone taking Herman Cain seriously?

I suppose I ask that question as a subset of the question "why is anyone taking any of the Republican Presidential candidates seriously?"

This guy's website is a riot, unless you take him seriously. At that point it becomes downright frightening.

His "999 Plan" -- and by the way I can guarantee you that if he were a Democrat, the religious right would immediately note that it's really a "666 Plan" turned upside down to fool you...who knows, they're probably saying that about Mr. Cain as well...seriously...Cain, the Bible's first murderer...the "999">"666"...c'mon, it could only be more obvious if he had horns on his head and carried a pitchfork -- oh yeah, but back to the plan.

Anyway, his "999 Plan" combines the regressive elements of a flat tax on income with the even more regressive 9% national sales tax. Proponents of the 9% sales tax suggest that it will encourage saving and thrift, but they apparently don't understand that Joe Jones who earns $22,000 a year and Chauncey Witherspoon who earns $250,000 a year both have to fill their cars with gas and eat food to stay alive and that both of them will pay the same new 9% on those everyday expenses (no details on the website as to whether food is taxable under his plan...currently some states tax food and some don't). Additionally, does Cain intend to put his 9% national sales tax on top of the existing state (and in some cases municipal) sales taxes?

For example, California has the highest state sales tax at 7.25% (before you California haters start hating, understand that with municipal taxes added in, some regions of Alabama, Arizona, and Illinois actually have higher sales taxes than California's maximum local + state sales taxes). So let's imagine that state sales taxes remain in place (after all, sales tax is currently a significant chunk of state revenue in states that have sales taxes) and Mr. Cain manages to pass his 9% national sales tax. That gives us a whopping 16.25% tax on most items purchased in California. In some parts of Illinois, your sales tax would be 20% once local, state, and federal sales taxes were applied.

His corporate policies are even friendlier, with corporations being allowed to avoid most of the taxation by hiding income as "investment" and as an added kicker, dividends paid to shareholders are exempted from the corporate tax. The interesting thing would be to see how Mr. Cain would treat dividends on the shareholder's end...currently they're taxed in most cases around the same rate as capital gains, and Mr. Cain would eliminate capital gains. Would he treat dividends as capital gains, or would they be lumped into general income? If he treats them as capital gains, then he could pull off the amazing feat of taking these items from the conservative talking point of "double-taxation" to the la la land of tax-free income.

Aside from the general regressiveness of his policies toward individuals, and the friendliness of them toward corporations, his website is full of meaningless platitudes, which I suppose many politicians' websites are. This little gem, however, is a real keeper:

A dollar must always be a dollar just as an hour is always 60 minutes.

Last I checked, a dollar always was a dollar. It's the exchange rate that varies. Is he proposing to eliminate inflation? To set exchange rates? I'm not sure what the hell he means.

Which of course brings me back to my initial question: why the hell is anyone taking this joker seriously?

One day you wake up and you wonder where everyone went.

2011-09-27T06:39:00.000-04:00

I was noting how sad my blogroll was, sitting over there on the right with only two or three of the current inhabitants regularly updating their blogs.

I decided to do some pruning, so I removed a few that hadn't updated in over a year. In some cases close to four years. It's probably a safe bet that leaving the blog unattended for over a year indicates you've abandoned it for one reason or another.

I know I've gone through some dry spells when I didn't update for several months....I think years 2009 and 2010 were pretty pathetic in terms of writing output.

Anyway, as I went through my blogroll I tried to think of bloggers -- even those that I didn't put on the blogroll -- that I read back in the halcyon days, when there were always some good blog wars to follow and there seemed to be a fairly active blogger meetup social scene (which I didn't participate in, but I did follow the blog recaps). Many of those folks are gone or have changed blogging identities/sites so I don't know where they are anymore.

A few remain.

Reya had a very nice post yesterday on writing. It made me think more deeply about why we write, and that also made me think about why it is we stop writing. I stopped for a time because I was finding writing outlets in different places, and part of that also had to do with my feeling of disconnection from the scene of writing that gave birth to this blog.

There's a lot of good writing still going on. I need to pay more attention.

The Code of Silence.

2011-09-26T13:38:00.000-04:00

It's been an interesting day of reading the paper. If you checked the Post today, you'd see a big story about people putting their pets to sleep at home. You'd see a story about another Tea Party Kool Aid Drinking induced Government Shutdown that's on the horizon.

Speaking of which, how in the hell did the Tea Party get to wield so much influence? Their rallies tend to be small affairs (I can tell you that more people marched on May Day from Malcolm X Park a few years back than have attended most Teabagger rallies...but the PLP marches get zero coverage), but I suppose they make good media with their frequently misspelled vaguely or outright racist placards that often threaten some form of violence. I suppose having deep pocket puppet masters is also handy, since they can funnel money to their brain-dead candidates who would have little reach if not for the complicit media.

So I'm looking through the paper, seeing these stories, reading a little bit about the protests in Greece, the possibility that a dissident army is forming in Syria.

Not a peep about another protest happening much closer to home in what you might call a major U.S. city. Apparently, NYPD has been entirely successful in cordoning off the area and preventing out-of-state media from entering to cover the story. Luckily we have foreign media, whose correspondents must have been trapped in the city and can now cover the story...until NYPD manages to discover their means of transmitting stories. Whatever the reason, the Post apparently is unaware of these protests.

I myself have recently discovered this amazing underground site called "youtube.com." It's pretty revolutionary because you can upload your own videos and other people can see them. Technology like this could be used to get information past the censors. If the Post and other outlets ever find out about this phenomenon, they may be able to cover stories even if their correspondents can't get through the intense police security apparatus.

Here's a sample from You Tube of the NYPD putting down a group of extremely dangerous and obviously threatening women. It's a good thing the cops had mace...I'm sure those women were about to charge:

Yet again, there's no free lunch.

2011-09-23T12:09:00.001-04:00

On The Guardian's website, Dan Gillmoor raises a very good point about our increased reliance on and desire for technological interfaces in everyday life. We love the convenience of mobile phones, GPS, and the like. We enjoy the "free" services provided by facebook and, well, blogger.

At facebook, we go apoplectic when they make changes to the interface, acting as if we've paid dearly for a product that the company won't keep as we want it, when really we've paid absolutely nothing...at least in material compensation (we have paid quite a bit in privacy and provided companies like facebook with valuable marketing information, so in essence, they're the ones getting something for next to nothing).

Gillmoor argues, though, that facebook is really only the tip of the iceberg. As our devices get smarter and more interconnected, they and we become reliant and visible to the global network of data exchanges and that exposes us to ever more present surveillance. Speaking of the GM OnStar service, Gillmoor paints a rather dystopian future:

We're only at the beginning of this trend, I fear. Someday soon – count on it – governments will order car makers to install software and communications "services" that give government not just the power to know where you are, but also to govern your top speed or, should it decide it needs to do this, stop your car, dead, on the highway.

I submit it's not terribly far-fetched to speculate in this manner.

Moreover, it raises the point, uncomfortable to many, that Marx was more right than even he knew about the long-term effects of Capitalism. Capitalism created the modern consumer and through the mechanism of commodity fetishism we are being drawn ever deeper culturally into a world in which we become the objects we consume; our identities are no longer even ours, but are rather pieces of data shared around the world and marketed back to us.

Concurrent with the market infiltration of our everyday life, we have the rise of the surveillance state that grows, through our own desire for consumer objects, in its ability to track us and our activities.

Which is not to say that technology is bad. However, we do grow closer to those dystopian imaginings of the 1980s and 1990s in which the only people who can effectively resist the state are those who can re-program or disable the surveillance, like Neo in The Matrix or the Gene Hackman character in Enemy of the State, who exists completely disconnected from the grid and whose most dangerous moments occur when he must reconnect for brief periods.

Once again, the piper gets paid one way or another.

One of the last and greatest holdouts from the eighties succumbs.

2011-09-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

I'm sure the cynics will say "they should have done this around the time of Automatic for the People," but haters are gonna hate, aren't they?

R.E.M. has announced they are breaking up.

I had no idea who they were in the fall of 1987 when a friend of mine who was still in high school called and asked me if I could get tickets to their show on campus. Tickets were something like 15 bucks and a cd was something like 12, and as I didn't know any of their songs, I decided to get him tickets (2) and myself a CD (it was Fables of the Reconstruction -- not one of the band's favorites, but I think it's one of their best). As it turns out, it was a stupid decision, because they weren't playing college shows after that tour, which was in support of Document.

Not soon after, some local band named -- wait for it -- Driver 8 provided live entertainment at an Amnesty International letter writing event that I attended, which was a welcome break from the steady diet of pop and classic rock (and I have no problem with classic rock per se: I do have a problem with its radio format) that was all you could hear on the local radio stations.

R.E.M was essential listening in those days, and I would argue up through the release of Monster they were really at their peak.

I know I was late to the R.E.M. party, but they'll always bring me back to 1987.

Oedipus Complex.

2011-09-20T09:00:00.000-04:00

If you want to close the budget gap really quickly, you return capital gains taxes to Reagan-era levels, say 28%.

So let's go back to Reagan...if it was good enough for the Gipper, it ought to be good enough for those who claim him as an ideological father...

...except they would most likely burn him at the stake as a heretic if they got their hands on him.

In this age, an old decision haunts the U.S.

2011-09-19T22:24:00.000-04:00

When Thomas Paine wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls," he wasn't working to protect the vested interests of the powerful. Certainly, you could argue that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution and the government that we arrived at was a democracy that still kept the real levers of power at the last turn safely in the hands of a relatively small elite, and maybe that's why Paine went on to the more violently revolutionary fields of France, but it still was a revolution that benefited the common people more than it hurt them.

What we have today is an erstwhile revolution that is all about solidifying the powerful's position over the powerless. Adopting the rhetoric of political freedom to the business arena, the Republicans act as though American democracy is founded upon the notion that corporations -- entities wholly unaccountable to the people -- should be free from oversight by the people through the mechanism of government regulation. Republicans, who have no qualms about regulating the individual body (especially if female), think it a great sin to regulate the corporate body, which is considered a body only, as Twain would say, through "a fiction of law and custom."

Honestly, must we be bound by one of the poorest interpretations of a Supreme Court decision?

The 1886 decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, as has been widely noted (even on Wikipedia!), didn't actually rule on the issue of applying the 14th Amendment to corporations, yet it has been widely cited as precedent for ensuing cases. This miscarriage, which following the Citizens United ruling, has effectively decimated the role of actual people in promoting candidates and put our elections (which everyone knows cost plenty of money to run) in the hands of corporations and the most wealthy of our citizens.

Tom Paine would not approve, which helps highlight all the more the differences between those who really defend individual rights and those who, in the name of individual rights, defend only corporate bullying. Mitch McConnell, whose hypocrisy is only heightened by his deadpan delivery, somehow manages to get elected time and again by citizens whose interests he very actively legislates against. He's a senator from Kentucky, for Christ's sake, and outside the blue bloods of Lexington and Louisville, the state is full of nothing but ordinary people whose health and welfare have been either ignored or undercut by the Honorable Mitch McConnell.

However, one can't get elected if one's so obtuse as to state the truth. So despite his constant legislating for the rights of corporations to shutter factories, avoid paying taxes, and shield themselves from damage to the environment, McConnell must still pretend he is "defending freedom" or arguing for "liberty," both cornerstones of the American mythology. Understanding that postmodern war is a war of language and information (a la Lyotard) -- and politics has for most if not all of its history been postmodern in that sense -- McConnell and his predecessors have argued insistently for the freedom of corporations to monopolize our airwaves and print outlets among other things. A grand perpetrator of class warfare, McConnell pretends it only exists when someone sticks up for the little guy.

He is at root the playground apologist for the bully who claims that the bullied have victimized the bully by getting their blood on his hands.

And the Court's reliance on a court reporter's cynical insertion into an 1886 decision only makes it more certain that McConnell's brand of class warfare will carry the day.

Reader's Report: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

2011-09-19T00:28:00.000-04:00

I don't know why but it took me forever to get around to reading Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. You'd think I would have come across it in high school, or maybe have picked it up in one of those undergraduate kicks you can get on where you read everything you can by one author. Alas, the author I chose for that kick was Faulkner. Very rewarding, that. Less rewarding was when I went on the same kick with Kerouac.

In my teaching of Hemingway, I've stayed pretty close to the In Our Time or The Sun Also Rises texts. I like the angle of Hemingway as representative of post-Great War alienation, and by the time The Old Man and the Sea rolls around in 1952, well, we've got another major war to deal with and I'm not sure -- although correct me if I'm wrong -- that Hemingway deals with WWII in any of his work. Maybe a short story. I don't know.

So one of the nice things my wife bought me this year was an old library copy of The Old Man and the Sea. She gave it to me in June. I read it in September. It's very striking for how isolated it is. It's pretty much the old man, Santiago, and the big fish, and since Santiago is all alone out on the sea, the entire text is pretty much what we'd call Man v. Nature, although you could also argue that Man v. Himself is also pretty heavily involved. When Santiago interacts with his village, if you can call it interaction, it mainly establishes his position as an outsider who follows his own way, which makes him a perfect Hemingway code hero.

I also find it interesting that Santiago's great success is in a way only fleeting; while the fishermen in the village may marvel at the remains of the fish he brings home, he himself is upset that it is only remains. There's a certain mythological quality to the tale because his obsession with the fish -- his knowledge of proper pursuit and landing of the fish -- requires him to be carried so far beyond so many limits. You could argue that even with Santiago being left with nothing but bones, he regains his reputation among the villagers and attains a certain peace in doing things the proper way, much like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

At some point, I'll get to the next book my wife gave me in June, Hemingway's Islands in the Stream.

The days are dark ahead I fear.

2011-09-16T09:38:00.001-04:00

As a society we used to believe that education was an important component to maintaining the republic. Thomas Jefferson certainly believed that when he wrote to Charles Yancey, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." [1] The push for compulsory education in the U.S. arose from a belief that some education -- at least at the elementary level -- was necessary to secure the continued survival of the nation. The establishment of compulsory education has been maintained, despite the wailings of the right wing, through court decisions resting on the right of the state to secure the general welfare of its citizens.

In so far as schooling creates docile bodies, the right wing has come around to accepting universal compulsory education. However, the right wing has never been interested in the emancipatory power of education, bemoaning (a la Glenn Beck) the supposedly horrible fact that education does not seem to to reinforce their narrow definitions of patriotism, nationalism, or "American ideals." Despite their insistence on individual rights, the right wing has a great fear of individualistic thinking; theirs is the individualism of make-believe atomistic production and consumption, a fantasy land in which you or I simply float in isolating ether until we enter into contracts with one another.

Education at every level has been under assault by the right wing for at least thirty years (dated from the landmark scare tract A Nation at Risk which yeah I know is only 28 years ago but I'm rounding up), and while most of these scary myths have been promulgated ignorantly or dishonestly by those who fail to understand that the US tests every child while many other countries test only those who have already tested into rigorous academic-tracked schools, we as a nation still seem to swallow those lies hook, line, and sinker.

We have allowed the penny wise and pound foolish to control the national imagination where it comes to education, substituting job training for critical thinking. As we advance memorization of rules and procedures and denigrate problem solving, we train students for the next five years and leave them more or less on their own for the following thirty or forty. Or fewer if they happened to have been trained in a field that is easily shipped offshore in service of capital.

At the same time the right wing has sought to dismantle education, they have been aided and abetted (sometimes actively and sometimes simply by lucky chance) by the transformation of (visual) news providers into entertainment centers. Whereas the depth and breadth of your news organization used to signal prestige if not profit, now entire cable channels are built around nothing other than the presentation of news as the sole profit generator. The era of infotainment has been particularly destructive to our nation's ability to think critically, as the lives of the Kardashians assumes preeminence over the upheavals in the Middle East. Even when world events are presented in death, they are given the infotainment treatment with slick graphics and theme songs that transform them into Baudrillardian events. The emphasis is not on informing viewers, but on keeping viewers.

Recognizing that most people get their news from television and that the format doesn't allow for deep analysis or even a moment's reflection, and understanding that the media's ostensible commitment to objectivity has for the last few decades most often meant that even outright lies will be reported unchallenged, demagogues such as House Speaker John Boehner can spout off factually incorrect statements knowing they'll reach their target audience who either don't have the background, time, or desire to question the factual content of Boehner's lies.

This post is already incredibly long, and it would take another five paragraphs to analyze the ludicrous vomit that spewed from Boehner's mouth yesterday and was given an airing even on NPR, who would certainly have challenged the Speaker had he argued that Blacks or Jews were responsible for our current economic woes. However, what he did say was just as empirically incorrect and blindly bigoted as those statements, suggesting that businesses (or to use the preferred Republican nomenclature, "job creators") were shackled by onerous taxes...when businesses currently enjoy their most favorable conditions since the gilded age.

I suppose I'll stop here. I sense my blood pressure rising, and as disgusted as I am with the cynical content of Speaker Boehner's lies and the media's lapdog consumption of them, I am even more disgusted that a significant portion of Americans are unable to see this venomous fraud for what he is.

Spiting the face.

2011-09-14T09:03:00.000-04:00

The Democrats are in a real bind, losing a solidly Democratic district in Queens to a political unknown, Bob Turner. The district is heavily Jewish, and most speculation is that the Democrats lost the seat because American Jews are displeased with Obama's stance on Israel.

Which, if nothing else, should show the Democrats the foolishness of taking lukewarm stances in theory and doing absolutely nothing on the ground.

Contrary to popular belief, Obama has not abandoned Israel. He has steadfastly refused to lend any sort of actual support to humanitarian relief efforts in the Palestinian territories (occupied territory, Gaza, West Bank, Greater Israel...whatever your preferred nomenclature) and the US continues to work in the UN to block any resolutions or activities that would harm Israel.

What he has done, and this of course is his great crime, is suggest that Israel is not as pure as the driven snow.

For some, this position is tantamount to declaring that Hamas is full of goody-two shoes whose main objective is to make streets safe for the elderly to cross.

Some otherwise educated people have difficulty distinguishing these two positions.

Israel bills itself as a democracy, and it pretty much is. There's no question Israel is a freer society than its neighbors. That's a red herring. Criticism of Israel does not amount to support for the criminal regimes of Syria's Assad and Egypt's (recently deposed) Mubarak, or the relatively more legitimately elected Iranian government (let's face it: Ahmadinejad isn't the real power in Iran, so the "legitimate" part is only relative).

Israel is not alone in its inability to face its own abuses. The "land of the free" long into the 20th century saw no problem with billing itself as a champion of democracy and liberty, which of course it was...so long as you weren't Black (and to a lesser extent so long as you weren't Jewish, Asian, Indian, Catholic, etc.). Those who worked for justice and pointed out US hypocrisy were reviled by the power structure and significant chunks of the US population.

The Democrats lost the South when they decided to support equality for all American citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity. To even declare that white supremacy wasn't the natural order of things, that the white racial power structure wasn't pure as the driven snow, was grounds for landslide defeat in most regions of the South. So these politicians and activists who were called enemies of the South and enemies of America and enemies of Christianity figured there was no use in going half way...you weren't going to win the bigot vote by suggesting that bigotry was wrong anymore than you would by taking a strong stand and enacting legislation guaranteeing full citizenship to Blacks.

What the Democrats have lacked since the early 1970's is the backbone to take those stands domestically or internationally.

9/12/2011

2011-09-12T10:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of 9/11/2001. It was certainly a significant day in our history, and it was horrible. However, I remember more the damage of what came after, when the Democrats lost all backbone and caved into every ridiculous assertion that the Bush Administration made in curtailing civil liberties and pursuing personal family vendettas that embroiled us in a costly war against Saddam Hussein's regime.

I do not agree with those who find 9/11 to be the worst day in our nation's history. I'd say the outbreak of the Civil War probably beats it. Pearl Harbor is undoubtedly a contender for the title, but at least in the wake of that attack, we had a clear enemy. The tragedy of 9/11 didn't stop when the towers fell; it continued through years of mismanagement, as Bush first squandered the world's good will prosecuting an illegal war against an essentially powerless target unrelated to the 9/11 attacks and as he continued to bankrupt our nation fighting two wars while ignoring the economic crises at home.

Our greater tragedy is that Barack Obama, elected to remove us from these wars and restore economic stability, has refused to make the hard choices to do either. True, we have left Iraq, but we have escalated Afghanistan, propping up a hopelessly corrupt regime that has as much chance of standing as any of the South Vietnamese puppet governments we supported in Viet Nam.

In one sense, we have won the war on terror: Al Qaeda is a shell of itself, its leader dead and its leadership decimated. So for the first time, we mark the anniversary of 9/11 with a sense that some measure of justice has been done to the perpetrator. However, we have allowed this pursuit of external enemies blind us to the ongoing and accelerating damage done by domestic policies inimical to our nation's long-term interests. Most of these principles are on display in the Republican primary fights, but Obama has offered only moderate resistance to the continued assault on the American middle class and working poor, and our nation faces the prospect of extended recession.

The result of the Great Depression was a system of government regulation and labor activism that saw the United States become the most prosperous nation in the world, with a solid middle class. Capital has chipped away at those gains, beginning in the 1970's, and in a time of terror we need to look not only at the enemies who build the bombs and point the guns, but also at those who seek to gut government oversight, consumer protection, and labor power.

Both these enemies seek the collapse of the American ideal.

Reading Report: The Conjure-Man Dies

2011-09-11T18:18:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading Rudolph Fisher's The Conjure-Man Dies. It's subtitled "a mystery tale of dark Harlem," and Fisher wrote it in 1932. Fisher had two short stories collected in Alain Locke's The New Negro, which was essentially a who's who of Harlem Renaissance writers published in 1925. Fisher was also a trained physician, and the central character of The Conjure-Man Dies is John Archer, a physician who lives across the street from the conjure man's place of business.

The novel is notable in being the first known mystery novel written by an African American. The writing style is very engaging, although the central mystery of how the conjure man, N. Frimbo, is capable of seeing into the future rather accurately is not dealt with. Frimbo is a former African king, educated at Harvard, who collects sex glands, although where they all came from isn't very well explained. At least one comes from a fellow tribesman, an assistant who dies an untimely death. Frimbo explains to Archer the necessity of the removal of the sex glands for proper tribal ritual, but the several jars he keeps in his office seem a tad too numerous for the number of fellow tribesmen likely to live and die in NYC in the early 1930's.

The story is very much in the style of the parlor mystery, a bit of a twist on the locked-room plot: the suspects are for the most part assembled in the place of business when the doctor arrives on the scene, and he along with the police detective, Perry Dart, sort through the events and the evidence trying to figure out who did it.

My overall impression was that Fisher's novel is not nearly so well-crafted as his short stories, but it has several factors that make it an attractive text for study, not least of which is its status as the first example of African American mystery writing. Fisher perhaps doesn't resolve the mystery of Frimbo's prognostication because Fisher is reserving a bit of mystery that the doctor, who is very much a believer in reason, can't resolve. Therefore, you have a nice rational/irrational or science/magic dichotomy to explore. Further, there's the question of class. Against Dr. Archer and N. Frimbo's patrician bearing and speech you have the unpolished but professional Perry Dart and a cast of working class and low-life buffoons, one of whom, Bubber Brown, supplies a good deal of comic relief.

The novel was reprinted in 1992 by Ann Arbor Press, and I think that's the only version available, which could make it dicey for course adoptions, unless A-A Press still has it in print. I picked my copy up from abebooks.com.

Brief impressions of the first weekend of college football.

2011-09-06T15:36:00.002-04:00

Week 1 of the college football season brought a few sweet moments. Opening weekend is usually a wasteland of cupcakes being creamed, with embarrassing matchups like Penn State v. Indiana State, a non-division I -- or excuse me, a non FBS opponent. Honestly, scheduling FCS teams should count for automatic losses in the computer polls.

I didn't care much about the LSU v. Oregon game, given that neither of those teams should interest anyone who's even remotely human.

I was absolutely delighted to see the unranked University of South Florida knock of #16 Notre Dame (how'd they get that ranking?) in South Bend. There's a real possibility that ND can start the season 0-3, a plight that may keep them out of the BCS.

It was also very enjoyable to see the criminal program at Miami handed a defeat by Maryland, who are wearing perhaps the ugliest outfits I've ever seen outside of a Vegas show. They're so ugly they make the Oregon Ducks look traditional. However, I am nothing but glad that they sent the outlaws back to Miami 0-1.

Next week I may be more dour. I don't have high hopes for a Nittany Lion victory over the Alabama Crimson Bribe.

Coaching.

2011-09-03T05:58:00.000-04:00

I'm coaching my son's soccer team this year. It's the first time I've ever been head coach of anything my son's been involved in. I was assistant coach for a few years, sure, but that's very different. I ran a chess club in my son's school, but we didn't compete against other schools, so I was more a teacher than coach in that capacity. The only other time I was ever a coach for anything was in my first two years out of undergrad, when I was teaching in slower lower Delaware and I coached the middle school track and field team. You could tell it was a high pressure job, because my previous experience with track and field was that I had dated someone who ran track and cross country.

She didn't really like the way I coached, either.

However, I'm no longer 23 years old and I know more about soccer than I ever did about track and field, despite the fact that my own high school didn't have a soccer team until three years after I left and the first time outside of gym class I ever touched a soccer ball was to play intramural soccer in college. I do, however, understand how the game should be played. I can talk about defensive position and dribbling far more than I could ever tell someone about how to clear a hurdle.

Besides, it's recreational soccer.

The most difficult task I have is making the line-up to ensure equal playing time. I'm committed to giving the players equal time, no matter how much their skill levels differ, and playing them in every position so they can learn the game, unless of course they're absolutely averse to one position or another. For instance, I won't make everyone play keeper. I have a few players who only want to play in the backline. I have a few players who simply can't keep up with the running in midfield.

We're 3-2 or 4-2. I can't remember how many games we've played. Interestingly, I remember the losses.

It's odd coaching my son, because I'm very cognizant of playing favorites. My son plays baseball, and it's not a big shock to see all the coaches' kids playing the infield and playing all game, while my son (among others) is relegated to the outfield and spending a few innings on the bench.

Sure, I could play my best players all game, putting two very good travel players in forward positions and two others in midfield and reserve two others for backs, then shuffle the weaker players in as need be, but let me repeat...it's recreational soccer. The travel players get their time on their travel teams. Even my son, who is not a travel player, would play more often than not, because he's quick and he clears the ball out decisively when he plays back.

It's been great watching some of the kids develop from the first practice. We have a game today and we'll be missing four of our top players. I think it'll be good for the other players to have to step up.

We'll see what happens.

I wonder how many people have used the title "Goodnight, Irene" for blog posts this week?

2011-09-02T08:31:00.003-04:00

Last weekend was the hurricane weekend, and I figured in NEPA there wouldn't be much of a problem. Some rain, sure. Lots of it, I thought. So Saturday night we rented a movie from Redbox and watched it, or more accurately our son watched it, while I put our daughter to bed and fell asleep doing so and my wife fell asleep supposedly watching the movie. When my wife and I woke up in the middle of the night, the wind was up. I remembered to tie down the patio umbrella and shuffled off to bed.

Sunday when we woke up, we had no power. Not the biggest deal, as we've been there before, but something of an inconvenience. Maybe more so than you'd think.

No power at our country abode means no water after a few flushes of toilets and brushes of teeth -- forget a shower -- because we're on well water. No electricity means no well pump. So we were quickly following the "if it's yellow..." rule.

One of the trees that had contributed to the power outage happened to be lying across our driveway, so that was impassable, which wasn't actually a problem for us. In fact, we didn't fret much over it, since we couldn't get to our cars anyway. They were in the detached garage that has no entry point except the automatic garage doors.

It was all so brilliant.

One of the doors has a keyhole that supposedly would detach the door from the automatic opener chain, but I'm not very confident in that device given how much slack is in the line and the force I know it requires to detach the doors from the chains. Anyway, I couldn't find the key. I know it was in a little dish, the sort of thing you're supposed to use to put peanuts or cashews in if you're having friends over for bridge, or maybe the sort of thing you throw hardly used keys, safety pins, random buttons, and pennies into.

Couldn't find it. Still haven't found it.

So the cars were trapped. All rechargeable devices were losing power, but luckily we still have a land line. We called the power company who weren't overly impressed with the fact that one of their lines was stretched tight under one of the downed trees in our yard, or that we weren't only without power but also without water and with no means to go out and get some. When they did finally show up Sunday night, after we'd used the land line to call Domino's Pizza (all other pizza establishments nearby having lost power as well), they restored power without checking the line to our house.

It's too bad, really, since the ground had snapped on the line to our house. The resulting power surge fried anything we had connected to 220 or 240 volt plugs: clothes dryer, wall oven, and range. It also fried all of our clock radios, several power strips, and oddly enough nearly every lamp we had purchased at Ikea.

We didn't find out these items were fried until an electrician came out on Monday to fix the line, and I won't go into the details of how the power company claimed they were killing the line and how the electrician found out the line wasn't dead at all, but needless to say even though power has been restored to the house, without an oven or a clothes dryer, you're still not in great shape. Also the refrigerator appears to have been damaged by the surge: it's cooling off the food that remains, but its exterior is extremely hot to the touch.

The garage, meanwhile, remains without power, since a tree had actually taken out the electrical mast. However, the electrician hooked a generator up to the panel long enough for us to operate the garage doors and get the cars out. I also took the opportunity to release a door from the chain so we can access the garage until electricity is restored. Another friend brought over a gas powered chainsaw (mine is electric), and it didn't take long to clear the driveway.

In one year I'm going to have plenty of firewood.

A new semester brings new challenges.

2011-09-01T11:31:00.003-04:00

I have a fairly big semester in front of me. I'm teaching a new class on modern and contemporary poetry. After a few preliminaries with background information on poetry and the modern era and some tales about steel cages in Pisa and epic poems about industrial cities in New Jersey, as well as a scheduled trip to the library next week, we will be ready to launch into Walt Whitman, the sturdy first poet of any anthology of modern poetry.

I love Whitman's encyclopedic lists, his complete commitment to inclusiveness. Of course, we follow him directly with Dickinson, who couldn't be more different in style. Two very different souls throwing open the gates of modern poetry.

Let's see what happens.

Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, well why not?

2011-08-31T09:07:00.002-04:00

Only someone who knows how dysfunctional the DC government is would have the wherewithal to try to pull this one off.

Allegedly, convicted (but now released) "drug kingpin" Cornell Jones landed a sweet deal -- via a non-profit he started called Miracle Hands -- with the city to renovate a warehouse into a job training center. The WaPo has the details. Sort of. The salient points are as follows:

According to the suit, Miracle Hands submitted false invoices to “wrongfully obtain” $329,653 in grant funds in its agreement to renovate a 14,000-square-foot warehouse at 2127 Queens Chapel Road NE into a job training facility.

The claim is that Mr. Jones received HIV/AIDS funding to build the training center, but instead it became a strip club. Let's leave aside the status of the property and try to figure out what the hell the DC government is doing giving grant money to convicted drug dealers. This guy was sent away for 27 years...he served 9 years of his sentence, then promptly started a non-profit because there are so few worthy non-profits out there that the District was falling over itself to distribute buckets of cash to a convicted drug dealer.

But it gets better. Miracle Hands obtained the grant money most likely because Mr. Jones was a close chum of a D.C. official:

The series also exposed the unopened job training site and the conflict of interest between Jones and Debra Rowe, interim housing chief of the city’s HIV/AIDS program from 2004 through 2008. Three of Rowe’s relatives worked at D.C. Tunnel, a nightclub operated at that time by Jones.

Four years as "interim" housing chief of the HIV/AIDS program? Was the job so crappy that no one would take it? I suppose it has its benefits if you can steer several hundred thousands of dollars to cronies who in turn employ your relatives.

And by the way, this didn't happen under Vincent Gray's watch (corrupt though he may be) or our former Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry. This cavalier attitude toward oversight occurred under notorious bean counter Anthony Williams and his successor, Adrian Fenty, who billed himself as a modernizer who would bring new transparency to District government.

Of course, Fenty was too busy bringing in new untested idiots like Michelle Rhee to worry about corrupt officials already working for the District.

Reader's report: Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown

2011-08-09T15:26:00.001-04:00

Looking forward to the spring 2012 semester, I have set a task to revisit or acquaint myself with some early American literature. So I read Wieland, a text I'd only glanced through before as part of my graduate work.

Brown was a pioneer of the novel set in the New World, where such fanciful pursuits as fiction were deemed less than honorable. The tale would be well paired with Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, both texts dealing with unreal circumstances and dreadful crimes.

Wieland leaves a major event unresolved, and that is the mysterious death/disappearance of the elder Wieland, whose maniacal religious devotion seems in the end to descend upon his son.

The text is a tremendous study in the power of superstition over even those who feel themselves educated, rational beings. It's also, I think, in the tenor of our age, a useful meditation on religious certainty and willingness to commit horrendous acts in service of one deity or another.

I finished the text this morning, after plowing through the bulk of it with the sound of waves hitting the sand. I am now starting a very different novel, Rudolf Fisher's The Conjure Man Dies.

Still devoted to the printed word.

2011-08-05T11:29:00.003-04:00

I'm getting ready to depart for a week of (hopefully) sun, sand, and surf in that lovely summer oasis known as Ocean City, MD. My bag is packed, and aside from getting together the necessities such as beach chairs and towels, as well as assembling the bike rack, my major concern is with beach reading.

I've decided already that I'm not going to haul the current tome I'm reading, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, for two reasons: first, it's really thick and, second, I'm not sure that I want to commit to that book just yet. I'm about fifty pages deep in it, and it's intriguing but not absorbing.

So what to take.

One of the books I will be packing will be Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland. I'm teaching early American in the spring, and I have to get up to speed on that book. For that same reason I may bring the Franklin's Autobiography, although I just taught it earlier this summer.

However, I also have some newer books I want to read before the semester begins and my dreams of leisure reading are dashed. I want to read the Patti Smith memoir Just Kids. I want to read Brock Clarke's Exley. I'd like to read Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic.

Of course, it being the beach, I'll probably pick up some books at the discount book dealers down there, and so add to my deficit of books purchased v. books read.

In which I imply yet another way to lower federal spending on unproductive areas...

2011-08-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

The Post has an article today on Texas Governor Rick Perry's desire to destroy what remains of education in the state of Texas. Perry's argument, which is really couched in economic terms, is more of the same lament coming from cultural conservatives for at least the last thirty years and going back even further if you really care to dig around.

The complaint, in cultural terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who hate America.

The complaint, in more economic terms: humanities and social science programs are turning out people who don't agree with global corporations' priorities.

However, it's always useful if you can make this a purely economic issue, and therefore claim that ideology has nothing to do with it. So Rick Perry has determined that universities cost too much because they're filled with unproductive majors and programs (e.g. humanities and social sciences) and really the place needs to be run like a business.

Perry, who at Texas A&M was a "yell leader," which is what the insecure-in-their-masculinity powers that be at Texas A&M call what most people in the country call a cheer leader (if, albeit, a specialized one), is taking direct aim at one of the few institutions in Texas with any credibility, the University of Texas.

Look, I can understand his envy. He went to a third-rate school and, like many Americans, doesn't like "high falutin' thinking." So what better way to exact revenge than to turn Texas higher education into glorified trade school? The University of Texas is in fact the only thing that makes Texas bearable. It is, if you will, a flower growing in an otherwise barren and inhospitable landscape.

Take away the University of Texas and most Americans wouldn't give a rat's ass if Texas left the Union, aside of course from those people trying to get from Louisiana to New Mexico who would now have to go around the third world country.

Decline and fall.

2011-08-03T23:21:00.002-04:00

It was 30 years ago this week that MTV started broadcasting. For those who don't remember, MTV stood for Music Television and it broadcast these things called music videos. It did this all day and all night. There were hosts called "VJs," for "video jockeys," who told viewers about the videos and the artists before or after the station played them. The whole thing was modeled on music-format radio.

Back in those days, MTV played a variety of artists, which didn't include rap or country. Once videos as a concept became more acceptable, videos became more sophisticated. Some of them received preambles to set the mood before the music actually began. Videos that consisted simply of live footage of a band became less frequent or developed a storyline of sorts (see Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark"). Finally, we arrived at the overblown production of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," a founding moment in which videos aspired to be something other than a visual rendering of a song. "Thriller" was a mini-movie, made all the more unbearable because its popularity meant it was on several times a day, eating up a good sixth of an hour every time it aired.

With no serious rivals, MTV consolidated its grip by offering niche shows, such as Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes and the Headbangers Ball. In my opinion, 120 minutes soon became the only time it was worth it to watch MTV.

Then MTV started offering original programming such as game shows, expanded news, and cartoons. Reality shows soon followed. Music became less and less a part of the so-called Music Television's programming.

I have to admit that I rarely watched MTV after I was in high school/college, and when in high school I never watched it home because we didn't have that cable package, so my depth of personal knowledge and experience with MTV ends about a decade into its existence, with the last two decades of its life being categorized as occasional viewing. I know for instance that in the first Real World (I think) there was that annoying bike messenger named Puck and some guy with AIDS and some brunette who wore stupid clothes. However, I can't tell you how many Real Worlds there were.

The channel is clearly aimed at the young, and to an extent it's hilarious to hear people like me, people in their forties and/or late thirties, complaining about the format of a channel that's so clearly geared toward teenagers to early twenty-somethings. No one is stopping a rival from coming in to fill the gap left by MTV's abandoning of music videos.

Most of the people complaining about MTV's decline are probably people like me who complained bitterly back in the day about the crappy quality of the music that MTV did play. I hated almost all of the artists we associate with MTV-friendliness: Michael Jackson and Madonna first and foremost. MTV in its music phase was essentially a top 40 station that deigned to play outside its format on occasion.

It's really hard to measure decline when you're constantly running into references to its latter day output, from Jackass to Jersey Shore.

So MTV isn't what it was 30 years ago. So what?

Chugging through the summer with literature.

2011-08-01T12:46:00.000-04:00

For a summer course I'm teaching I just finished reading Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. It's an interesting text and like its predecessor, The Kite Runner, this novel is a real page turner. Hosseini knows how to pace a story and how to build suspense. His chapter breaks are impeccable.

Let me continue.

His character development is very good where it concerns the two main women of the novel, Mariam and Laila. It's not as good as developing the male characters in the text, but in part you could argue it's because the male characters do not develop at least as far as the women are concerned. Rasheed, who is probably the central male figure, is simply nasty. He enjoys his position as absolute lord over first Mariam and later Laila and Mariam. Since the story is told from the perspectives of the women, Rasheed essentially presents himself to them as an unquestionable overseer: he gives orders and they obey.

It's a harrowing story and I think an important one for us to understand U.S. cultural consumption of the last decade of the Afghanistan conflict. Both Hosseini's novels have been bestsellers; one has been turned into a film, while the other is in development. They certainly contain a narrative that American audiences (both liberal and conservative) can identify with: the Taliban were bad.

Of course the texts are more complex than that, but one theme they reinforce is the absolute tyranny of the Taliban rule. In The Kite Runner, the main problem one might have with the story is that its sympathies lie with a ruling elite that has lost power and been exiled...yes the Taliban are bad, but lingering at the back of the mind is that perhaps it was the excesses or blindness of the wealthy that made the Taliban possible.

A Thousand Splendid Suns brings us much closer to what you might call "everyday experience," in that the two women come from markedly different backgrounds but neither is of the ruling elite. Mariam, the daughter of one of her father's servants, is born an outcast near Herat. Laila is the daughter of middle class parents in Kabul. When the middle-aged Rasheed marries the teenaged Mariam and brings her back to Kabul, it is to Laila's family's neighborhood that they move. Years later, when Laila's remaining family is killed in fighting between warring factions of warlords, Rasheed marries her, uniting both women under his oppressive rule.

You could argue with the ending, as things fall in place a bit too neatly and quickly, but the main interest I have in this novel is its place in our cultural memory. One thing that propelled these novels to best-seller status was their subject matter: the U.S. was and continues to be intimately involved in the affairs of Afghanistan. However, Hosseini does not offer easy solutions and no one comes out of his books unscarred.

Changed my clothes ten times before I take up my template...

2011-08-01T09:50:00.006-04:00

Some of you may have noticed that my blog changed its look for the first time ever. That was something of an accident. All I wanted to do was get my charts to fit. They used to fit. No matter how inept I was, blogger always fixed the size of my pictures and charts so they fit in the main window.

No longer.

Apparently, some template change has my charts etc spilling over the margins into my housekeeping column. I am not happy about this feature.

I am also having difficulty returning to my original template without returning to some god-awful version of my blog layout and blogroll from 2006. All I want is Rounders 3 back.

It should be simple.

It probably is.

And no, I do not have the time to sit around coding this crap myself and I'm not at the moment interested in moving to a more professional self-publishing tool such as wordpress. I'm actually pretty happy with the crap I can do with blogger.

Solving crises in under an hour.

2011-07-28T11:30:00.002-04:00

I have a modest proposal to solve this debt ceiling crisis.

Here's a chart from the most modern of sources, Wikipedia, showing federal spending in 2010:

I'd like to take that big blue slice that's being hogged up by the military and cut it in half, but I know that's not very realistic. First of all, a good chunk of the money is spent on paying salaries to soldiers. A very small amount is spent on paying for veterans, and you can't cut that either -- and in fact as a percentage of military spending it's so scrooge-like it wouldn't make much of a difference to the overall problem of the deficit. So let's propose to cut a modest 20% from the military's chunk of the pie. Let's do it by forcing the military to adhere to the same austerity programs we force on education.

Beyond that, let's take a look at that big orange slice of pie called "discretionary spending." I would propose to eliminate every program currently in place in one of our free-loading states. The free-loading states are the ones that hog up more federal resources than they put in. Remember, we're talking states, so DC doesn't count in that equation. However, the major drains on our economy, such as Mississippi and New Mexico, can stop feeding at the federal trough.

Mississippi and New Mexico get two dollars back from the feds for every dollar they put in. Alabama gets 1.66 back. Alaska gets 1.84 back. Most of these states who are getting fat off the feds are the same ones who routinely elect people who are the most hostile toward Washington.

They're like house guests who invite themselves over then harangue you over how poor your cooking is and how uncomfortable your beds are, but they don't ever feel like doing the cooking or cleaning the house.

Seriously, if we could take these scroungers and make them pay their own way (ah, the irony of applying conservative rhetoric to "conservative" states), we'd save a hell of a lot of money. Do you know that outside of Texas and Florida, every state in the old Confederacy -- that bastion of anti-federal government politicians -- takes more money than they give? Do you know who foots the bill? Primarily the Northeast, upper Midwest, and California.

Let's stop paying their way.

2011-07-27T05:51:00.000-04:00

One of the great things about issuing yourself a challenge is that you can periodically review your progress or simply think a little bit about the past, present, and future.

I've challenged myself to post seventy times between Tuesday, July 26th, and December 31, 2011.

I see the high point of my blogging activity was 2006. I had 238 posts that year. That's nearly a post every weekday. The low point was 2010, where I managed a paltry 39 posts. That's fewer than one post a week.

I can see that my decline really began in the late spring of 2008. If it hadn't been for the election in the fall of 2008, I'd have struggled to distance myself from 100 posts. Outside of October and November 2008, which accounted for 56 of my posts that year, I had trouble breaking single digits for most of the year. Except for Oct and Nov, I didn't break 20 for any other single month in 2008.

The major reason for my decline, I think, is that I -- hopefully, temporarily -- moved from DC in fall of 2008. I knew I was moving in the spring of 2008, and so I had some trouble keeping my mind in the business of blogging. Although I don't write often about DC-specific topics, I have always viewed my blog as part of the DC blogosphere and linked very closely to that aspect of my life.

I'm still connected to the District. I'm still looking to return physically as well as mentally to our little inland colony.

Maybe I'm keeping this blog alive because it keeps me looking at other DC blogs.

Of course, it might also be that I'm just fed up again with all the BS the right wing and corporatist politicians are disseminating through the all-too-acquiescent media.

The always classy Glenn Beck...

2011-07-26T11:04:00.003-04:00

Apparently not understanding just how irrelevant he is beyond the reason-addled adherents of the Tea Party and white supremacist fringes, Glenn Beck decided that the Norway killings would be a good excuse to bring up Hitler yet again.

However, it wasn't the white supremacist killer that Beck had in mind when making his comparison. No, it was the murdered children whom Beck compared to adherents of Adolf Hitler, likening them to a sort of "Hitler Youth."

Sure, it's disgusting to anyone who can think straight, and sure, Beck's idiotic ramblings eventually got him kicked off Fox News (now there's some food for thought: the home of Sean Hannity couldn't stomach the Beck hate parade...well, more accurately they couldn't stomach the falling ratings and loss of advertising revenue), but Glenn Beck still draws a significant population of under-educated voters, who are very visible reminders that the US education system has a long way to go to develop critical thinking skills in its curriculum. Unfortunately, with the high-stakes testing regime ushered in by George W. Bush and enthusiastically nurtured by Barack Obama, we are going in the opposite direction.

I just noticed...

2011-07-26T05:43:00.001-04:00

I posted as much during the month of July as I did for the entire first six months of the year! Sure, fifteen posts from January - June wasn't exactly a hard mark to beat, but now I can set my sights even higher.

I'm looking to eclipse my 39 post total from 2010. To sweeten the pot, I'll throw in the fifteen from January to June, and the fifteen from July so far, and this post as well, so the number to beat will be 70.

Seventy posts from now until December 31, 2011.

Five months to post seventy times.

Easy as cake, some of you might say. Circa 2008 I would agree with you, but lately I've had a habit of stopping for long periods of time.

Let's see what happens.

It's hard to break old habits...

2011-07-25T10:57:00.003-04:00

It might be Pavlovian, but then again it might be that dull simplicity that you see in cows as they move on the paths they've been shown and come to a dead halt when confronted with something new.

Here's the front page of Rupert Murdoch's Sun on Saturday, July 23, the day after the Norway killings:

Now why the hell would The Sun, Murdoch's popular British rag, print such a ridiculous headline? Probably for the same reason that the racist Right in the US immediately jumps to blame Muslims (or Latinos or unions, etc.) for tragedies. For examples of which, simply read the comments section of Washington Post articles on the killings -- preferably the articles from Friday, when no one was sure who had done it. Or maybe I should say, when no one actually knew who had done it -- because these racist yahoos were pretty damn sure they knew who had done it, just as Murdoch's tabloid was certain.

And of course, you have the "experts" called in by the various television media, such as Cliff May, the president of the "Foundation for the Defense of Democracies," which despite its nice name often aligns itself with police-state reactions to unrest and overall has a xenophobic attitude. On Bloomberg/Washington Post, May immediately responds with a list of Norway's "enemies," all of which are connected in some way to so-called Islamic interests, and after giving that some expansion, he finishes up with "it may not be any of that, of course." Why was this idiot given air time?

We really don't need the sort of "analysis" that either May or Conley provides. Anyone can sit in a chair and speculate without providing any evidence. It's called fanning the flames of ignorance.

It isn't helpful.

Couldn't stand the weather.

2011-07-21T15:16:00.002-04:00

Who's blogging about the heat?

Yeah, I know. It's hot out there. End of story.

Closed Borders (a follow up)

2011-07-20T11:36:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote about the demise of the Borders Books and Music chain, but I mainly concentrated on my first encounter with what became, for a brief time, a behemoth of books.

As amazed as I was by that first encounter and the idea that it was possible to go into a huge bookstore, sit down in the philosophy section, and browse around for hours without anyone bothering you, I actually tried my best to support local booksellers.

So many of those booksellers are gone. Chapters, which had been on K Street before moving to 11th Street, had tried appealing to its customers for donations of a sort and clung to life for a few years before it had to close up. They had a tremendous selection of poetry, and every April you could I believe buy two poetry collections and get one free. Plus, I saw Brock Clarke read from his first novel, The Ordinary White Boy, one winter night in Chapters.

I mentioned Vertigo Books yesterday. They were in Dupont Circle, just south of the Circle on Connecticut Avenue before relocating to College Park, MD, in 2001. In 2009, they closed for good. Great cultural studies section and interesting authors coming to speak.

How many others? Sisterspace and Books as well as Prometheus Books on U Street. Sidney Kramer Books on I Street (Sidney's son opened up Kramerbooks and Afterwards in Dupont -- still a vibrant place...mainly because of the food and hooking up opportunities).

It's true that DC hasn't been all loss; Busboys and Poets is an addition, but I don't think anyone would argue that the bookstore component could stand on its own...the wait time for a table alone provides an impetus to purchase a book or magazine so you have something to do for the next hour.

Run for the Borders.

2011-07-19T13:41:00.003-04:00

What a short, strange trip it's been.

When I was a young lad, oh let's say 19 or 20, I had never heard of this bookstore called Borders. I was from a little town in Pennsylvania, went to a not so little school in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, and was pretty happy with the little bookshop that had recently expanded in the downtown area.

However, visiting friends in Washington, DC, one year in either the late 1980's or early 1990's, sometime between 1989 and 1991 let's say, my one friend told me I had to visit this place called Borders.

There was only one in the area, I think. If I recall correctly it was out in Bethesda or Friendship Heights. Back then, my knowledge of DC geography was very spotty.

I was amazed that a supermarket of books existed.

I think the largest bookstore I'd ever been in to that date was the Ollsson's on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, one of the first casualties in that ill-fated local chain's demise.

Fast forward a few years, and I've moved to DC. I was a graduate student at a school in Foggy Bottom and a Borders opened up on 19th and L. It was a great place to go to kill time before or after class, and of course to buy books, although once I discovered the great local bookstores, I spent less and less time buying books at Borders.

Many of those local bookstores were done in not so much by Borders -- although they played a part -- as by Barnes and Noble, which aggressively moved into DC, and the pressures everyone faced from online retailers like Amazon. Vertigo Books in Dupont Circle was one of my favorites.

I'm pleased that Bridge Street Books in Georgetown -- my personal favorite -- continues.

So now all the Borders will be shuttered. What do we do with these hulking beasts on the periphery of our cities and towns?

The dominoes are falling...

2011-07-18T09:56:00.004-04:00

On Friday it was Rebekah Brooks.

Shortly afterward, down went Les Hinton.

Over the weekend, the head of Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson resigned.

This morning, Scotland Yard's John Yates resigned.

And if you parse Paul Stephenson's resignation statement, we're talking about issues that could touch the Prime Minister.

However, in the US, the Murdoch-controlled media refuses to acknowledge that anything important has happened or is happening.

We're beyond talking about Murdoch's minions resigning from their media perches. We're talking about top law officials in a relatively respected foreign country having to relinquish their posts. Although analogies always limp, Stephenson's resignation would be akin to the head of the FBI stepping down in the U.S.

Still, the Murdoch lie machine churns on Stateside, with the Wall Street Journal, a relatively recent Murdoch acquisition trying to deflect attention from their owner's criminal activity and instead arguing that this event -- the event that has caused two top law officials to step down, been the subject of hearings in Parliament, and has even caused an ostensibly contrite Murdoch to apologize to some of his victims -- is really about circulation numbers and ideological distaste for Murdoch's right wing media conglomerate.

Americans by and large will probably pay little attention to this mess. Fox News is hardly covering it, and when they do, it's mainly to dismiss it as overblown media hype, a minor incident that isn't really important, which is much how they would likely have reported on Watergate had they been around then: a minor burglary, committed by a few rogue operatives, who are being punished...what's the fuss?

NewsCorp's most damaging problem in the US will most likely be the bribing of foreign officials. It's not good enough for the WSJ, whose editorial team has always been ideological hacks whose ethical brain zones either never developed properly or were killed off years ago, to argue that "everyone pays for stories...so who cares" when that argument won't even get you out of a speeding ticket. Besides, we aren't talking about paying some celebrity for a scoop (or better yet paying a friend of the celebrity for a scoop); we're talking about paying bribes to the police. We're talking about official corruption.

We're talking, in short, of criminal activities and criminals.

Fox News, predictably carrying water for Murdoch, Inc.

2011-07-15T15:05:00.003-04:00

Fox News, Murdoch's heavy hitter, has come out swinging in defense of the embattled criminal who heads their parent corporation. This coverage from the Guardian:

On the Fox and Friends show[*], Fox journalist Steve Doocy wondered just what the fuss was all about: "The company has come forward and said: 'look, this happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, somebody did something really bad,' and the company reacted. They closed that newspaper, all the people got fired, even though 99 percent of them had nothing to do with it."
Doocy's guest, public relations consultant Robert Dilenschneider, was in agreement:
"If I am not mistaken, Murdoch, who owns it, has apologised but for some reason, the public, the media keeps on going over this, again and again. It's a little bit too much."
"The bigger issue is hacking and how we as a public are going to protect outselves," said Dilenschneider, who earlier listed a number of US companies which had recently become the targets of hacking.
Doocy added later: "One of the things about the media, you look at some sites and you would think that martians had landed in New Jersey - again"

Right. Because hacking over an extended period of time into the voice mail of celebrities, royalty, politicians, crime victims, and dead soldiers really isn't a big deal. Forget the fact that the people responsible for these crimes were rewarded with promotion within their criminal organization. Let's focus on the fact that we're all in danger from hacking...not that Murdoch's minions are the ones who have been caught doing the hacking.

And what the hell does he mean by "a long time ago"? For most people, "a long time ago" is in a "galaxy far far away." We're talking last decade.

And "somebody did something really bad"? Is he explaining this event to a five year old (well, given the IQ of the Fox audience, maybe)? And it wasn't "somebody": it was "somebodies," including but not limited to the head of Murdoch's UK News International. We aren't talking about the secretary stealing office supplies. We're talking about corporate criminals engaged in ongoing illegal invasions of privacy and electronic eavesdropping.

Absolute scum.

Seriously, Steve Doocy can't be called anything resembling a journalist. Dog shit is actually too noble to be muddied by association with that scumbag's name.

How stupid are Americans that Fox News can continue to dominate news ratings?

[*following long-standing policy, I tend not to link to hate groups]

I've been out of the life for a while now...

2011-07-15T06:00:00.002-04:00

I've been married for something like fourteen years now (and when I say something like 14, what I mean is 14 years and nearly one month), and I've had kids for 11 years, so I don't live the glamorous life of the single on the dating circuit. In fact, when I was single, I still didn't live the glamorous life of the single on the dating circuit.

However, a lot of people do live those lives -- at least the dating part of it -- and they like to blog about it. I mean, why not? It's a central part of being human.

I don't habitually read these blogs, but I do read them on occasion, at least the more well-written ones. I do read DC Blogs, which is a tremendous resource. And on DC Blogs I found a link to Date Me, DC! and a really, I think, important topic: Figuring out just what the hell "No" means. Apparently for some it's a difficult lesson.

To read some relatively popular blogs that have been around a while, "No" is more or less the start of negotiations. Not their preferred start, but still a start and not an ending. Those who disagree either "don't have game" or are "betas." Perhaps.

However, to read Date Me, DC!, it seems like some people might not find it much of a fun game.

Who listens to you?

2011-07-14T08:58:00.003-04:00

This morning I was thinking about the power of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which in the US is most noted for Fox News. Back in the 1990's, the upstart Fox News positioned itself as a "fair and balanced" alternative to the supposedly liberal CNN. It was clever positioning, especially as CNN's "liberalness" basically consisted of having actual foreign news bureaus and professional journalists. CNN was a network who, after all, came to prominence due to their incessant drum beats for the First Gulf War, which they slickly branded and marketed.

Nevertheless, Fox News claimed to be the center and cast CNN as the left, when in reality it was CNN running a corporate journalist center while Fox allowed themselves a very partisan voice on the right. That much is old news and goes many times over to show that most people can't tell naked partisan reporting from reporting that, while still implicated in all sorts of biases, attempts to tell the story honestly, i.e. traditional journalism as taught in schools and the old school news rooms.

Fox News didn't invent such distortions, of course. William Randolph Hearst famously (perhaps apocryphally) said, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." And Hearst had enormous influence through his media empire, just as Murdoch does today. I imagine Hearst may have been capable of tapping phone lines of not only celebrities, but also of crime victims, dead soldiers' families, and politicians. Hearst may also have been capable of bribing police for inside information.

We know Murdoch is capable of such things.

Murdoch will predictably argue that he had no idea what his underlings were doing. He will predictably point the finger at "rogue" elements within his empire. That was the strategy during the first fall out from the News of the World phone tapping scandals, when most of the UK thought only celebrities and footballers were targeted. Rogue elements, acting without authorization, Murdoch et al argued, were responsible for these criminal activities. However, this latest scandal directly implicates Rupert Murdoch's son James and the head of his UK branch, Rebekah Brooks. The Guardian has a great timeline here.

Let me give you a little weekend recap.

2011-07-11T14:39:00.004-04:00

I was doing two things all weekend long (really three, but the third is connected to the first, so we'll let it go at that): baking and grading.

The third thing was volunteering, but I was volunteering to sell the baked goods that I was baking. That's the connection I was talking about.

I graded three sets of papers, one set of annotated bibliographies, and about seven sets of discussions over the weekend, beginning on Thursday. I was in that situation because I am something of a procrastinator when it comes to grading, so although I was giving feedback on projects throughout, I hadn't exactly sat down to assign formal grades to things.

And yes, I know I posted on both the grading and the baking earlier on. I'm now providing the post mortem.

The grading was miserable. I hate it. However, I dutifully plugged along and took the punishment for those weeknights during the semester that I decided sleeping was more important than grading a bit here and there (it also didn't help that I went to Seattle toward the end of the first summer session to attend a wedding...traveling is not good for my grading motivation).

The baking on the other hand, while exhausting, was a joy. It was so enjoyable in fact that following Friday night, when my pies and cookies sold at a brisk clip, I went home and baked two more pies and a few more dozen cookies. This time I rose to the challenge of a friend and produced a vegan apple pie, which essentially meant I didn't use any butter or margarine, as that's the only animal product in a fruit pie. Instead of butter/margarine (margarine contains whey, which is made of milk, so it's not vegan...something I learned this weekend), I used Crisco baking sticks with "buttery" taste.

Mm-Hmm. If they say so.

Although I didn't like it nearly so much as the butter-laden regular dough, the all vegetable shortening dough was not bad (may I never say that loud enough for Julia Child to overhear me in the Hall of the Kitchen Gods). The filling is absolutely the same: apples, flour, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and cinnamon.

I feel a great sense of accomplishment today, having both turned in my grades and sold off the baked goods, and look forward to turning my eye to more important matters such as John Boehner's tan and Michele Bachmann's pledge to oligarchy.

Baking.

2011-07-08T11:21:00.002-04:00

One of the things I did in grad school to procrastinate was bake. If I had a paper due in a few days, the best thing I could do was back a pie or two. I've got grades due in four days, so I decided last night to bake three pies and six dozen cookies.

OK, I'm not being terribly honest.

I knew for a few weeks that I was going to be baking last night. I volunteered to supply a few baked goods to a charity sale for the local library, and so my baking wasn't this time a reaction to the impending doom of turning in my grades.

Sorry I don't have pictures.

However, I baked three apple pies. Two are double crust and one is crumb-top. The apples are braeburn and I dice them up pretty well, although I always leave a few larger chunks. I was planning on one double crust and two crumb-tops, but I had so much dough that I went with the two double-crusts. Good dough. I use the Julia Child recipe from The Way to Cook. I highly recommend it.

There's something nice and simple about flour, butter, vegetable shortening, sugar, salt, and water.

Between making the pie dough and actually filling and baking the pies, I made cookies. Three dozen are chocolate chip and three dozen are chocolate chip with walnuts. My cookies come out flat and crispy. They come out exactly like my grandmother's in fact, a point that mystifies my mother and aunt. I don't do anything special; I use The Joy of Cooking recipe.

The kids are a bit upset right now because they're not allowed to have any of the cookies.

Confessions, perhaps.

2011-07-07T11:17:00.003-04:00

I despise grading papers.

I understand that's probably not a novel confession. I think it's universally reviled as the most annoying thing about teaching. It must, however, get done.

I have a whole slew of grades due on July 11, as the first summer session has ended, and I am not really interested in getting through the grades. I'm five days out (sort of), so you think it's no big deal. Yeah, I hear that voice, too. It drowns out the more reasonable voice that knows my schedule and what happens to time on weekends and realizes that today and tomorrow are probably the best chances I have to get these grades done.

The main problem I have with grading is coming up with concise comments. I tend to overwrite my comments, and that kills my efficiency. According to research, comments are not as helpful as teachers intend them to be (at least on my typical assignments, which don't allow revision). The typical student apparently glances through the comments and gets to the grade and that's that. I wasn't a typical student, I suppose, because I loved to read the comments if they were good and I felt a significant sense of discomfort if they were bad.

And when possible, I took them to heart and strove to fix problems the next time around.

Comments are to an extent important, even if they don't improve the student in the way we intend; comments indicate to the student that you actually did reflect on their work and in the case of the few who do see their academic work -- even in core classes a world away from their majors -- as important to their future as "college educated adults," then it makes a difference for their next paper. The research jury, as with so many things in social sciences, is still out.

You know, it's a lot more fun to write about grading than to grade.

Uninspiring.

2011-07-06T16:36:00.002-04:00

The US Women's Soccer team looked completely uninspired today in their 1-2 loss to Sweden. Flat flat flat. And when it got down to the last ten minutes plus stoppage time, they looked like a team content to allow the game to go down as a loss; there was no sense of urgency in turning to the attack, and they were out of position so that when they got the ball deep in Sweden's end, no one covered the top corners to prevent Sweden from clearing.

If we don't see better in the quarters, it's going to be one and done.

Our freedom means we can shop whenever we want to!

2011-07-05T10:50:00.003-04:00

Yesterday was Independence Day, and to celebrate I pretty much sat around for half the day, spent a little time catching up on an online class I'm teaching, and then went shopping so we could have some fireworks (the type that are legal in Pennsylvania, that is) and dinner.

When I was a kid if you tried to go anywhere on the 4th of July and buy stuff, you would be, as they say in Virginia, SOL. We had respect for holidays. However, we've managed to turn most of our holidays into excuses to consume, so it makes sense that the day off (for office workers and government employees) is pretty much nothing more than an extra day to shop.

The summer is marked by the three major holidays devoted to grilling: Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. The gods of charred meat are honored on these days.

We didn't char any meat yesterday, mainly because on the 2nd I'd charred about 50 burgers (beef and turkey) and a dozen chicken legs and that I think was enough of an offering. Yesterday we grilled veggie burgers and corn.

But I digress.

Just about everything is open on the 4th these days. True, many mom and pop joints close down, but even one of the local guitar shops was open like it was any other day. There's a sad feel in these big box stores (for instance Target) on holidays, because the aisles are full of holiday related material that didn't sell and will soon be on clearance, and the workers are already setting up the next big shopping event.

In Target's case, that event is back to school. The backpacks, notebooks, pens, pencils, and glue are all positioned for maximum visibility at the end of the long wide aisle (a bit like a major Parisian boulevard) that divides the housewares from the groceries/junk food. We turned the corner from the toothpaste and laxatives and our son looked down that long gleaming aisle and let out a very audible "ugh" as he spied the huge "back to school" banner and the backpacks hung high over the aforementioned orderly rows of school supplies.

Talk about killing the holiday spirit.

Let's talk literature.

2011-07-02T06:32:00.001-04:00

So part of my professional duties is to teach literature. I recently completed a course in American literature in which I asked the students to read Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. It's an amazingly simple story in that it takes place aboard a Mississippi steam boat and involves nothing more than conversations between characters. However, it's also an amazingly intricate story in that it involves shifting roles with one character constantly reappearing in the guise of someone else: in other words, a confidence man.

The story is based on trust, or confidence, and the necessity as well as danger of confidence.

It is, I have decided, not a text to be served up to freshmen in an introductory literature course.

Introductory lit students seem to think the text is plotless, and to an extent it is, and they view that as a great fault, which it can be but isn't always, and I would say that by and large they are not fans of the book.

One of my students, however, did me the great honor of giving me her copy of the book after class: it was the Norton Critical Edition, whereas the official book was the Penguin edition. Now for those of you who aren't in the know, the NCE is a series that includes not only the text of the book with explanatory notes, but also several essays about the author and/or the text. They're very nice scholarly editions, so I appreciated that gift, even though it also told me that the student didn't see much value in keeping the book.

I have a few books that I've decided need to be reserved for more advanced students. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! are among those books. I also don't think I would surprise them with anything of Toni Morrison's beyond Beloved (although I might think about Jazz). Sula, on the other hand, is a great introduction to Morrison.

I will continue to teach Melville in the introduction to American lit, but it will most likely be my favorite, "Benito Cereno," or "Billy Budd." Maybe Typee.

Endgame?

2011-07-01T11:30:00.000-04:00

Here's an outcome I actually didn't expect. The Guardian (among others) reports that the criminal case against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn is about to go belly up. The surprising thing isn't that he's going to beat the charges; after all, he's a global power broker and she's an immigrant maid. The main surprise is how spectacularly colossal the collapse appears to be.

Strauss-Kahn, if you recall, never denied having sex with the maid. He never said "I did not have sex with that woman" as some other famous leaders have been known to say. However, he alleged the sex was consensual. The maid alleged rape.

It looked pretty dark for the DSK, and the story had all the makings of a TV or movie crime drama: wealthy privileged man takes advantage of lowly support staff on the margins of society. Surely in most crime dramas, the man would be convicted after having used his wealth and power to try to escape, only to find justice prevail in the end...cue courtroom steps scene of victorious lawyers wearily asking each other if they'd like a drink.

Our dear recently departed Peter Falk could have made mincemeat of the DSK stand-in during another installment of the best detective show ever, Columbo.

And of course, even in the cop shows where the good guys don't always win, such as Law and Order, the audience would still be left with the impression that the bad guy got away with something, that he's still guilty as sin but that money and power can sometimes buy the verdict, a message hammered home in so many Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett tales.

Alas, we don't even have the luxury of moral if not judicial superiority, as the case appears to be so completely done for that DSK's story may in fact be the true one. Certainly the report that she consulted a jailed drug dealer friend on the financial windfall that could occur should she press charges makes her look, um, a bit unreliable.

So we still have the story of the power broker and the maid, but that's about it.

The Perpetual Campaign.

2011-06-29T12:45:00.000-04:00

I was listening to NPR this morning as they covered the potential Presidential candidates' descent on Iowa. First there was Michele "John Wayne Gacy" Bachmann, who sounded as if she were speaking to a crowd of about ten based on the background clapping, but I think it was probably hundreds.

However, that crowd will have to be entertained by someone other than Tom Petty, who has told Bachmann to stop using his song "American Girl" in her campaign promos. It's an interesting song for a fear-mongering hate-filled xenophobe to use, since the song's lyrics basically depict a young woman trying to figure things out and looking for new experiences. Interestingly, Republicans have historically been tone deaf to a song's lyrical content, as when Reagan tried to use Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A" during his campaign, until the Boss told him to knock it off. As jingoistic as some Republicans may have thought the song was -- and the steady strong beat certainly adds to this sense -- the lyrics are anything but upbeat, even from the first line of "born down in a dead man's town."

Bachmann might want to find an artist more in tune with her politics, perhaps Ted Nugent. Or if she wants a song that's more a statement of her politics, she could try to call up the people at Resistance Records for a suitable act (OK, that might be going a bit too far, but I could seriously see her using some white supremacist record because it's "pro USA" and not understand the larger connections).

But wait, there's more! Bachmann wasn't the only hopeful in Iowa. Current President and 2012 hopeful Barack Obama was also out on the stump, although as President he can pass off certain visits as "part of his President business" and not as direct campaign stops. On the bits I heard from the NPR report, you can see why he'll be a tougher candidate to beat than the poll numbers might indicate right now: he knows how to connect to people (he's not as good as Bill Clinton, though: Clinton remains for me the top campaigner in the personal meet and greet in my lifetime). Marion Barry was also a hell of a campaigner. A shit executive, but a hell of a campaigner. Hmm.

And lest I forget, Sarah Palin, the undecided non-candidate whose on-and-off bus tour may be on again, was also in Iowa. Her ship has sailed, to bring in another transport metaphor, although I can only imagine Democrats salivating over their dream ticket of Palin-Bachmann.

But it's Iowa and it's June 2011. That's close to a year and a half from the election, and it's a sad thing when political campaigns have to start so early, because then we have to hear about political candidates for so long. I pity the fools. In the 24 hour news cycle, the media have nothing better to do than spend time trying to think of something new to say (or some new way to say something old) about the candidates.

In the age of the perpetual campaign, I suppose you could argue we're only six months and some spare change away from the start of the primaries, but what is Bachmann's shelf life on the national stage? I don't think the US has moved far enough right for her to win a general election, and I don't even think the Republican Party has moved far enough right for her to win the nomination.

The media.

2011-06-29T07:18:00.000-04:00

What the hell is the Media anyway?

The most obvious answer is that it's anything the speaker wants it to be. The Pew Research Center released a report in fall 2010 on media consumption among Americans. I think it's important to talk about the survey in terms of consumption, even if the report is titled "Americans Spending More Time Following the News: Ideological News Sources: Who Watches and Why."

As I read the report (it's eight long internet pages with all sorts of charts), I started thinking that it really revealed the way in which the media has become an ideological sparring ground. News outlets have never been clear of ideology, but what gets me is the question of "news organization believability." Pew asked respondents to rate news organizations on a scale of 1-4, with 4 labeled "Believe all or most" and 1 labeled "Believe almost nothing."

I want to see the people who scored anything a 4. I want to do business with them.

Now if you asked me if I believed "all or most" of something a pundit said, like a Bill O'Reilly or a Keith Olbermann, I'd be a moron to say yes. If I had to believe "all or most" of what was printed in the Post, then I'd have to believe crap-dealers like Krauthammer, Gerson, Will, etc. Sorry.

Besides, "belief" is hardly the right word. The question itself is too cut and dry. Do I "believe" there's been a tsunami that caused a nuclear accident? Do I "believe" the Congressperson/President talking points from a press conference reported in the paper? These are very different things.

Perhaps the nearest sign that I'm growing crotchety and old.

2011-06-28T09:46:00.003-04:00

I like newspapers.

I like holding one and reading the columns. I think there's an entire ritual that's passing away centered around sofas, coffee tables, and bulky Sunday papers with all those sections and circulars and supplements.

I don't know the economics of it, but I wonder if -- counter to all our amazement at the joys of the internet and the economic engine we believe it to be -- the internet hasn't killed not only the newspapers but also the entire economic system around it, from advertising artists and salespeople to printers and shippers and paper suppliers. Like I said, I don't know if there's a net gain or loss economically, and since I'm not Michael Gerson, I'm not going to write some utterly uninformed piece about it.

Besides, I like the internet, too.

Now it used to be that if I wanted a copy of the Post, I plunked down my coins and picked up the daily (OK, I actually subscribed when I lived in DC, and would be subscribing still if I weren't in PA). You paid for it. And advertisers paid for it. Then the internet came along and we all thought news was free. Newspapers were caught in a bind: they had to get onto the internet or become irrelevant, but the moment they got on the internet they undercut their print editions. People won't pay for internet content...or so the theory goes.

Even papers you never had to pay for are struggling in the internet age.

One of my particular joys in living in DC, especially when I was in my twenties, was reading the CityPaper's matches section. I especially liked the "none of the above" category, because it had the potential to supply in three or four very short lines astounding humor. Pair those ads with the ludicrous porn shop ads and there was great clipping material to send to friends in faraway places.

Then Craigslist came along.

I like Craigslist, too, but it's too easy. The trolls aren't terribly inventive, and the potential for surprising humor just isn't there, except in the area where musicians try to form bands...that can still be comedy gold.

Ben Franklin got his start printing papers. When papers close, old Ben sheds a tear.

Homecoming

2011-06-13T14:31:00.003-04:00

This weekend was extremely busy. I was meeting up with friends I hadn't seen in over a year and trying to pack so many activities into the two and a half days that I really didn't have much of a weekend. I was at the museums a little bit on Saturday (NatHist) and a lot bit on Sunday (NMAI and NGA and, briefly, Air and Space). The museums have to be one of the greatest things about the District, especially in the off-season when you aren't competing with busloads of school kids.

For some reason Natural History wasn't as crowded as I expected for a Saturday in June. I was very efficiently able to steer my daughter around the dinosaurs, the Hope Diamond, the Hall of Mammals, and the insect exhibit. She loves the bugs. She especially liked the honey bees and was fascinated by the fact that they could get outside the museum through a little access tube. She decided to tell everyone who came near about the guard bees and that the bees were going out to get nectar and pollen and that they'd come back to make honey.

On Sunday, we ate lunch at the NMAI. The food there is easily the best, but prices have always been high and they seem to be even higher than I remember. It's absolutely criminal to charge $3.15 for a fountain drink.

We had four adults and four kids dining and the bill came to $99. I think MoMA is cheaper.

I love the design of the NMAI, but I find the exhibition space really minimal. There's not much there -- a lot of empty space. That's a design choice, of course, and the immense central atrium is wonderful when there's a live demonstration occurring, but when you look at the first floor, there's very little on it beside the cafeteria and the atrium -- they've even taken out the little shop they had and consolidated everything in the second floor shop (which we didn't visit).

Between the NMAI and the NGA, we lingered a long while in the shade of the trees lining the mall and watched the young adults sweat away at their kickball games in the unshaded heat of Sunday afternoon. I don't know if the ball is really deflated or what, but it seemed to me that none of the players could kick it ten feet beyond the infield. And seriously, how the hell do you miss a huge blue ball with your foot?

And to top it all off, I missed the Gauguin show.

It's all about the Benjamin.

2011-06-02T00:12:00.003-04:00

My summer reading has hit a major snag.

I am currently teaching one summer class and I am swamped. Swamped in work to grade. Apparently, when you assign work for students, you also have to grade it. OK, I knew that, and I knew I would lose my leisure reading time, but seriously, I didn't expect to lose it so quickly.

Let's look at the assigned reading so far: Ben Franklin's Autobiography, Paine's Common Sense, Winthrop's Model of Christian Charity, and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer. I've read them all, so a little light re-reading was in order. However, I got sucked in to the Autobiography again. Franklin is a very seductive writer. And fascinating on so many levels.

Part One of the Autobiography is addressed to his son, William, and is written prior to the American Revolution. Franklin is already 65 years old at this point. Then comes the Revolution, William remains loyal to the British, and Franklin basically cuts all ties. However, he never bothers revising Part One to eliminate the few pages that cast the Autobiography as a letter to his son.

At the close of the Revolution, Franklin returns to writing the Autobiography and he's still working on it when he dies in 1790 at the age of 84.

A self-promoter, a businessman with sometimes shady practices, a thoroughly creative inventor, and a tremendous diplomat. We could do worse for a founding father.

Meanwhile, in a serious crackdown on violent crime....

2011-05-25T08:47:00.003-04:00

The DC Metro Police have made sure we're all safe from thin men in wheelchairs. Thank God for that. Here's the story from the Post:

In a statement issued Sunday, Metro said the man was spotted Thursday by Metro officers patrolling at the U Street NW Metro station. The statement said the man declined to leave the area and refused to have a citation issued to him, whereupon he was told that he would be arrested.
In that statement Metro said the man resisted arrest, resulting in a fall from his wheelchair. The man was charged with assault on a police officer and drinking in public, Metro said.

Well, that's one perspective. I don't know...I might decline to leave an area if I hang out there often. You see people hanging out around the Dupont Circle Metro all the time. What turns this from everyday police harassment to police brutality is what happens next, despite Metro's obnoxious and ridiculous claim that the man "fell from his wheelchair."

Here's the video from You Tube. The man "fell" from his wheelchair if Metro defines "fell" as "forcibly picked up then shoved to the ground," which isn't exactly the standard definition:

I've talked before about how poisonous the comments sections of most internet media outlets are. This article's comments are no different, with many people -- notably those who self-identify as Virginians (although I have trouble taking seriously the moniker "VATrailerTrash" as an honest self-description) -- acting as though the guy in the wheelchair deserved this treatment or was a symptom of the District's rule by Democrats (apparently because assault on a wheelchair-bound intoxicated man would be a badge of honor if Republicans were in charge?? No, it doesn't make sense to me, either).

The Post of course tiptoes around the evidence in describing the video this way:

At one point in the video, the officers appear to be lifting the man from the wheelchair, and shortly afterward, the officers and the man are prone on the sidewalk. The video shows blood near the man’s head.

Um, it's a continuous motion...there's no "shortly afterward." There's also no "appear," unless you think the whole thing was a staged Pro-Wrestling Affair, with the Metro Police and the man in a wheelchair acting out some street drama. Let's at least report what the video says, and if you are so chickenshit scared of the cops ticketing your double-parked cars on 15th Street, then preface the entire thing with "the video appears to show" -- don't sprinkle the weasel words throughout the description.

It remains to be seen if anyone will give a rat's ass about this thuggery. If nothing else, advocates for the handicapped ought to be putting the heat on the scumbags from Metro. Maybe Jim Graham should take note.

Oh Noes It's The New Woild Order!

2011-05-24T10:20:00.004-04:00

So I began this morning looking for something quick to celebrate Bob Dylan's 70th, and no I wasn't checking under the couch for a half-smoked joint. I was up on You Tube looking for a decent video to share with my good friends on facebook. However, having found said video, I became trapped in the You Tube Maelstrom, that whirling vortex of connectivity that drags you in and holds you for an hour or two.

I noted first how many links there were to Bob Dylan covers. OK, great, but not what I was seeking out. Then there were several links to Bob Dylan selling his soul. Interesting stuff from a whacko standpoint, so I made a note to come back to the link, which I did after I found a great video from the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.

Bob Dylan selling his soul led me to all sorts of selling one's soul and all sorts of anti-christ musings, which are very interesting given our recent brush with the Rapture on May 21. What impresses me most is the seamless way in which anti-government hysteria is linked with apocalyptic religious readings.

Apparently, in addition to the evil that the UN represents, and especially because the UN has turned out to be more bumbling idiot than despotic overlord, we need a more scary adversary in the area of New World Orders. The UN, admittedly, has failed miserably as a frightening force for world unity. Enter the North American Union!

It's scary.

It's come to take your cars out your garages!

And best of all, since it doesn't exist, it can be all things to all people! It can cause abortions! It can turn your son gay! It acts in secret because it knows it can't get elected!

Seriously. Do a you tube search on North American Union. Apparently any sign of cooperation among the three North American nation states of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico is evidence of this nefarious collaboration. Whether it's formal agreements such as treaties or less formal photo opportunities, it's all a sign of something underhanded.

In fact, discussion "North American borders" is the same thing -- the exact same thing -- as erasing national borders. Did you know that? Well, now you do! In fact, joint military exercises and trainings are nothing more than the creation of a North American military that will overthrow out sovereign nation! Keep that in mind next time you see a smiling Canadian -- that Maple Leaf is red for a reason, Comrade!

All this mayhem would be disturbing enough if it were only national sovereignty at stake, but the real goal of the NAU -- or should I say the real purpose of the NAU -- is to prepare the way for the AntiChrist and then my friends it's not only your passport label at stake: it's your eternal soul.

Don't mind the dire predictions of all this happening under Bush's watch (Bush I as instigator and Bush II as the Realizer) -- it's still valid. Who knows, your neighbor could be a spy for the NAU. Be careful out there.

So as Bob Dylan said so many years ago, "you've got to serve somebody." But not in the clip below:

Happy Birthday, Bob.

It's Friday and I have a list.

2011-05-20T12:11:00.003-04:00

I just finished Don Delillo's Point Omega. It's a thin little book, so it wouldn't take anyone too long to read, but it's one of the more beautiful books I've read in a while. It's a novel about narrative, language, the truth, and alienation. These are all connected to one another. The visual narrative , the use of language to create narratives that obscure the truth, our alienation depending on narrative perspective and the stories we tell ourselves. It's a good candidate for inclusion in a future course.

Delillo's book was the first one on my list of post-semester reading. The second one will be to finish (finally) a novel I started last year but had to shelve because I was buried in reading and writing. That novel is Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. I'm halfway through it. Sure it was written in this century, but it goes back to the antebellum years to investigate one of the points of slavery that often gets lost in either a focus on the physical brutality and dehumanization of the system at large or the courageous stories of resistance and rebellion, which isn't to say that Wench is devoid of these events or issues. However, the focus is on the practice of well-to-do slavers to maintain slave mistresses and to take them on "vacation" as it were. As the resort in question is in a northern "free" state, the novel also raises the issue of the polite collusion of the North in the continuation of slavery. This novel is not a "see how well some slaves were treated" apology such as you would get from Margaret Mitchell; it's a serious depiction of the compromises, sacrifices, and dehumanization that attends even the "favored" slaves.

Behind that book, I have Brock Clarke's latest queued up: Exley. I'm looking forward to reading this one mainly because I find Clarke's voice so intriguing. He writes unlikeable characters in very compelling ways. Sam Pulsifer, the narrator of An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, is a perfect example of his ability to create the unlikeable but still interesting character that you continue to listen to despite your dislike.

So my list so far:
1. Wench by Perkins-Valdez
2. Exley by Clarke

With any luck, I'll get through these before summer classes start and/or inundate me, and then I'll be able to squeeze in another novel between grading and reading for the summer course.

Googling around and finding the internet is fueled by stupidity.

2011-05-17T10:49:00.006-04:00

I spent a little time this morning following the google links from one place to the next. I eventually ended up on a relatively poorly thought out blog named "Western Hero" or something like that. Like most right-wing blogs (and right-wing pundits on mainstream outlets), critical methodology isn't WH's strong point, including such risible jems as describing links to stories in such ways as the descriptions bear little resemblance to the story itself. A good example of this mistake can be seen if you want to search for "debunk Iraq death count Lancet" + "Western Hero" -- you'll get a piece from 2009 (don't ask me how I got there...I was looking for information on Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift) linking to a BBC article that, WH claims, "debunks" the Lancet report.

Unfortunately for WH, the article does no such thing. What it does do is discuss how the lead researcher refused to give research information to the American Association for Public Opinion Research, leading that body to censure him. It says nothing about the validity of the claims made in the Lancet, and in fact makes a point of noting that AAPOR doesn't comment on the accuracy of the research...only that the researcher has not been forthcoming in providing material. The BBC article, by the way, is here. There are plenty of other examples on the site, if you care to dredge through some of the most poorly supported writing and self-congratulatory echo-chamber comments you can find concentrated in one place.

In a way, the results of that search did connect to Arum and Roksa's work, because it's clear -- or perhaps more accurately I should say that it appears from anecdotal evidence of googling serious issues -- that colleges and universities are producing a large amount of fools who can't evaluate evidence or engage in much critical thinking. If a student of mine had linked that BBC article as an attempt to prove anything about the Lancet's Iraq War civilian deaths, he or she would get a nice note about support needing to do what you claim it does. If the paper were about questions raised concerning research methodology and transparency in statistics gathering, the article has relevance; as a debunking of the research, it is silent.

Later today, I'll be listening to Arum at a luncheon keynote. It'll be interesting to hear what he has to say, but I haven't read through the book -- I've only digested the digested version available on the Chronicle of Higher Education site. I have questions about what's being measured as learning -- questions I'm willing to bet the book (which is as of this morning sitting on my desk) goes some way to answer -- and more importantly how do we quantify something I find to be inherently unquantifiable: the co-curricular and extra-curricular (intentional and more often unintentional by the way) components of those four years spent in college? As a recent Pew survey has found, 84% of college graduates are satisfied with the cost of their education relative to the benefits. While that survey question doesn't speak to learning (I can be plenty satisfied without having learned anything if I achieve a favorable outcome like getting a good job), the survey as a whole seems to ask about some of those "unquantifiables."

The internet flattens distinction.

2011-02-14T12:29:00.004-05:00

If you ever want to get depressed about the state of the world, spend some time reading comments on articles on the internet. Now on your regular sites like CNN, you expect a certain amount of stupidity, because most of the people commenting there are stupid. Sorry, but they are. They couldn't think through anything more complicated than a value-meal menu at a drive-thru.

You can call it smug elitism if you want, but when Glenn Beck is a highly-rated talk show host and best-selling author, I'd call it something closer to the truth.

On your more esoteric sites, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, you might expect the comments to be more thought-through. However, you'd be horribly, horribly wrong. The magic of the internet is that a mere link can join us together, and so it takes only a small piece of html code to direct knuckle-dragging half-literate asshats, whose main connection to higher education is that they once went to a party at the college where their second cousin was enrolled, to the Chronicle of Higher Education articles and comments.

Take the recent article on Francis Fox Piven, the professor of political science and sociology whose currently in Glenn Beck's rhetorical doghouse. The article went up on February 10th and comments are now closed, I suspect in part because of the absolutely useless nature of the "dialogue" that the 75 comments represent.

From these comments, I have "learned" the following:

1. Piven is really the bad person here, because she advocates violence. Apparently, calling for mass mobilization is advocating violence because her examples, like the Greek anti-austerity protests, have resulted in violence. In other words, if violence is a possibility, or if violence has ever occurred as the result of mass mobilization and civil disobedience, then you are an advocate for violence, which pretty much makes every single mass movement a violent movement.

2. If someone uses a word in their organization's name, then they must adhere to the meaning of that word. Since Beck is so prone to bringing up Hitler, it was only a matter of time before the name of the Great Evil One was evoked in the comment section, which led to the incredible claim that Hitler was in fact of the Left. Here, "physicsprof" supplies the analogy, while throwing in a little dig at the social sciences:

The difference between Newtonian mechanics and political science is that the former is an exact science while the latter is open to interpretation (=BS). Surely the left would like to disown Lenin and Hitler and would readily twist the evidence, but the facts are simple, both parties had exactly the same name (NSDRP vs NSDAP, with R and A standing for the same word, labor, written in Russian and German) and carbon-copied programs. [comment 36]

Ah, so their acronyms are very similar and in fact the words based on the acronyms are similar. I see. Apparently, to disown Hitler, the Left has to twist evidence. Evidence like Hitler taking over the NSDAP and removing or killing any of the actual socialists involved in the party or maybe evidence like Hitler imprisoning or killing leaders of socialist and communist parties. But it's all in the name...you see, the Nazis really were Leftists because they used "Socialist" and "Workers" in their name. In much the same way, the German Democratic Republic was in fact a democratic republic.

3. It's often best simply to repeat what someone says and act like you've made a point:

Beck lacks much in the way of common sense, but acknowledging his past and background it makes sense. He can be thankful that he lives in a democracy that allows him to spout off his stupidity. [comment 67]

(followed by...)

Fox Piven lacks much in the way of common sense, but acknowledging her past and background it make sense. She can be thankful that she lives in a democracy that allows her to spout off her stupidity.

Too easy. [comment 69]

Well, of course it's too easy to let someone else do your thinking for you. We call it plagiarism in my freshman English courses. However, I'm not blind to the underlying point #69 was trying to make, but trying to make a point and actually making one are two different things. Beck is a moron with very little understanding of history, and what he does know proves the maxim that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. He consistently fails to account for changing contexts, cannot understand that a multitude of factors impact events and actions, and is prone to equating nearly everything with Hitler. It's easy to make #67's statement about Beck; it's not so easy to see it applicable to Piven.

Besides, repetition is a tactic often employed by my five year old against my ten year old. It's effective largely because it posits no position and is irritating much in the same way that a poorly wiped anus becomes irritating.

Now one of the real lessons that should come out of all of this perusing the comment board at CHE is that many commenters have no actual association or familiarity with higher education. They may have graduated from college, but they certainly don't know anything about the professional culture of universities or the academic culture of departments and disciplines. One moron even spoke of the "simple French philosophers." I'd like him or her to point me to that one, because I have yet to read a French philosopher who was "simple" in any use of the word (although right wing -- and even analytic philosophy's -- caricatures of figures such as Derrida for instance would make his work appear simple-headed...but that comes from not reading very carefully or not at all).

So they are trolls. They have no interest in higher education other than to see it cohere to a lockstep point of view (something they accuse the Left of doing...because the Left apparently is so well organized) in which their history of America is the only valid history. It can be summed up in a statement made by Rick Santorum at the recent CPAC get-together that America is perfect (which if you think about it is quite a proud statement from one who supposedly believes in the concept of Original Sin and we are all sinners etc.). To point out areas where the U.S. perhaps made errors or didn't live up to its promises is to of course hate America. Although, the best response to Santorum's statement might be to ask, "If America is so perfect, why are you so angry with it?"

For these souls, history was given. It wasn't a site of contestation, but sprung fully-formed from the head of Reagan. Or Goldwater. At any rate, for these people living in the eternal present, America is perfect because we no longer have slavery and we no longer allow children to work the mills, etc., and forty years from now, these same hate-filled bigots -- having learned the same lesson their present day counterparts have learned about race -- will stand in front of crowds and talk about how perfect America is because we no longer condone the lynching of homosexuals.

This post is already very long, but just imagine another few paragraphs on the interesting rhetorical moves that the Right employs to turn their hatred and intolerance back at the Left. It generally goes along the lines of "every voice is equal," thereby employing the rhetoric of equality to suggest for instance that repeated studies and the considered weight of scientific research and opinion is equal to Glenn Beck saying "no it's not" on the subject of climate change, or in this case to suggest that somehow there's a level of equality between the academic and intellectual credentials of Noam Chomsky and Rush Limbaugh. Where do you even start with such ridiculous assertions?

Conundrum.

2011-02-11T08:35:00.003-05:00

What's a conservative to do? He or she despises the federal government and all those wasteful agencies like the United States Postal Service, but damn the USPS is going to issue a stamp of the greatest President who ever walked this earth, Ronald Reagan.

Shudder. Do you rush out and buy as many of these stamps as you can, knowing that you can use them "forever," regardless of postal rate increases, or do you resist the USPS's shrewd attempt to co-opt conservatives into propping up this socialist organization?

It's a nice portrait. My only complaint is that the background should have more to do with his Presidency, like maybe showing his administration officials shaking hands and exchanging gifts and reconnaissance photos with Saddam Hussein, or American factories closing, or his beloved Contras blowing up hospitals and schools. Or at least a set of faces in the background, in Mount Rushmore style, of Pinochet, Hussein, and P.W. Botha.

Is it a bad sign to fall asleep ten minutes after you start reading?

2011-02-10T00:09:00.002-05:00

I have been having trouble lately staying awake -- whether afternoon or night -- when trying to read. In my profession, that's a very bad thing. I'm hoping it's mostly because I have been conditioned over the last few years to view reading as a bedtime activity -- as of late I've been reading The Magic Tree House series to our daughter.

Then I'm digging through Emerson.

Tomorrow, or rather later today, I will teach Emerson to a group of students and I'm not exactly sure where the class will go. That's a fairly enjoyable thing for me. I have more examples and points of emphasis than will fit into 1 hour and 15 minutes, but they're simply markers to connect to the class's direction.

I do know we will talk about foolish consistencies and Emerson's very interesting observation that the discontent of the multitude, while easily manipulated, is more consequential than the discontent of the "cultivated classes," whose opposition he belittles as "feminine rage."

So I've been traveling.

2011-01-31T09:28:00.002-05:00

Just when I was getting going again, other things got in the way.

Like having to leave the frozen east for the more enjoyable climate of San Francisco.

San Francisco was hosting one of those academic conferences in one of those big non-descript hotels that occupy the areas around the business districts of American cities. This one happened to be down around Market Street, within an easy walk of the Ferry Terminal, which has a nice farmers market on the weekend.

There was also a storefront from some boutique olive oil manufacturer that sold rather expensive olive oil and olive trees to boot. I'd love to have an olive tree, but I'm not sure it would grow in my current location. I'd love even more to have an avocado tree, but again I doubt the climate would suit it around here.

We didn't stay at the conference hotel or anywhere near Market, really. It's sort of expensive and again sort of generic. There are times when it's very convenient to stay at or near the conference hotel (MLA in LA earlier this month being one of those times), but sometimes it's extremely enjoyable to distance yourself physically and mentally from the conference. We stayed at a place that played a bit role in one of my favorite films. They claim to be a Nob Hill hotel, and in some ways they are, but really it's the edge of Nob Hill and they could be as easily the upper Tenderloin as lower Nob Hill, and besides it's only three blocks from their door to Polk Street, a particularly gritty nightlife area that recalls Adams Morgan but with more menace.

However, I wouldn't characterize the neighborhood as run down or dangerous. Neither the Tenderloin nor Polk are what they were in the mid-1990's, which is to say they're considerably more mundane, although not gentrified. As for the hotel, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who asks. Just get a renovated room, because that's half the kick.

The conference went well, because I know you were waiting for me to get around to it. Fortunately, the panel I was on was one of the first panels and in addition to having a nearly full room with some good exchanges during the question and answer, I knew that by Thursday afternoon, I was finished worrying about the presentation and could relax for the remainder, which I did. I took a few panels off to visit Coit Tower in particular and North Beach in general, and while the Coit Tower elevator was closed for repairs, I hadn't planned on going up the tower anyway; I just like the murals and views from the grounds are great. We even saw a few of the parrots that make Telegraph Hill their home.

Food: House of Nanking (a favorite of ours on Kearny). The food is excellent, but if you are someone who thinks you should be pampered as a customer, I'd give it a miss. They're pretty brusque. The last time I was there, the place looked like a total dive. This time, the interior had been remodeled and the menu prices reflected that capital investment. I liked the dive look better.

Food: North Beach Pizza (another favorite). Since we'd been there last, the joint had moved across the street. The old location was a bit cramped, always crowded, and not exactly suited to efficient movement. The new place has a really high ceiling and an open design, as well as significantly higher capacity. The pizza is still excellent, especially with a bottle of straw basket chianti.

Food: Gamine (a new one for us). We were walking around Union Street looking for food and came upon this gem. It's tiny and owner-operated, which is a definite plus in my book. It was also stocked with several regulars, as evidenced by the owner's personal attention and setting up of complimentary dessert wines. While we didn't receive such attention, the atmosphere was enjoyable, except for the drunk twenty-something who was hitting on the co-owner, who was the wife of the other owner. I had moules mariniere and pomme frittes, both of which were very very very good -- the sauce had a nice amount of garlic and pepper in it. It was a bit overpriced ($15 for the mussels and $5 for the frittes -- they didn't come as a package as I believe they do at Bistrot du Coin), but not horrifically out of line.

We had some other meals, but I'll leave those to your imagination. Not that I've described these meals in particular.

Air travel is a pain.

It's not a resolution, but I'll give it a try.

2011-01-17T22:00:00.004-05:00

I've been missing since the start of the fall semester 2010.

Sorry about that.

Or for some of you, sorry about coming back.

You might be curious as to what I've been doing in the intervening five months. Yeah, me too. The short story is that I was taking on too many projects at work and dedicating too much time to my hobbies such as playing guitar and wasting time on the internet.

I've been reading a lot of James Baldwin.

I've been living in exile from DC for over two years now, and it's really getting on my nerves. I am getting sick of pizza and wings and having to drive everywhere. I'm sick of oil furnaces. I'm sick of Confederate flags in this Union state. I'm sick of County governments and school boards that make DC officials look like Honest Abe.

I'm sick of Sarah Palin's bullshit and John Boehner's tan. I'm tired of the Tea Party. I want to believe our society has advanced somewhat in the last fifty years and I don't want to believe that the education system is so utterly broken that Fox News can fuel a mass movement.

I'm ready to scream in my little corner of cyberspace again.

Question to Ponder.

2011-01-16T16:49:00.002-05:00

Is the USA still largely racist, or is it more likely that a predominant number of racists post comments on the Washington Post website?

It's that late summer smell of an impending fall semester.

2010-08-01T07:32:00.000-04:00

I'm moving back to American literature. The jaunt into French and Australian work was fun, but it's August, and it's time to get serious.

First thing I'm reading, or actually first two things I'm reading, are Dolen Perkins-Valdez's Wench and William Kennedy's Ironweed. The first one I'm already reading, but since it's a nice first edition hardcover and I want it to stay nice, I don't feel like soiling it with sunscreen and dragging it around to the beach. It's strictly for apartment reading. The Kennedy book is a used copy that I picked up a few weeks ago because I expect to teach it either this fall or this spring. I've read Legs, but other than that, I haven't read any William Kennedy, which is a travesty.

I'd pack more, but I always buy a book or two at the beach, so there's no sense in weighing down my luggage any more.

Friday thought.

2010-07-30T17:36:00.001-04:00

Just a quick one for a Friday before I head to the beautiful Maryland shore for vacation:

Is there a dumber pundit that smart people take seriously than David Brooks?

Discuss.

Thanks for the hindsight, Prez.

2010-07-29T13:21:00.003-04:00

So on that most hardhitting of "news shows," "The View," President Obama has declared that the Sherrod Snafu was nothing more than a "bogus controversy." He's right to an extent, but it was his administration's blind kowtowing to right wing race-baiting media, of which Fox News is the most prominent example, that raised its level from a minor incident to a monstrous ethical and PR blunder.

By this time the Obama Administration, and in fact any Democratic administration, should recognize Fox News as the public relations branch of the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party and the further right.

The Obama Administration appears to forget that it received the most votes in the last election and has substantial support, even if that support doesn't have a massive media organization that panders to it (the few talking heads on MSNBC don't make up in either their own numbers or in national ratings any sort of credible resistance to the Fox machine, which is running constantly during both news and "talk" programs). However, since taking office, Obama has backpedaled on or simply shelved his more daring initiatives, a strategy that Democrats seem to think leads to success.

Democrats would be wise to remember that they were elected not on the basis of their similarities to what used to be the now non-existent moderate wing of the Republican Party, but on a promise that they were returning to the bold initiatives that saw them offer true alternatives to the bankrupt laissez-faire, "winner take all," "kick 'em to the curb" mentality of the Republicans.

Unfortunately, the Sherrod scandal indicates that Democrats have learned little to nothing about the current state of politics and the media. Instead of sniffing out a brilliant opportunity to demonstrate Fox News' shoddy fact-checking and ideologically driven huff-n-puff, they scrambled as fast as they could to accede to the hate-mongers' demands.

It shouldn't be this way.

No stone unturned.

2010-07-26T10:28:00.003-04:00

During the Vietnam War, it became increasingly evident that television had changed the war. Not only did television speed up the home front's access to information about the war, but it also brought it vividly into everyone's evening news. Unlike the newsreels of World War II that were highlight clips available in movie theaters, the news reports from Vietnam showed reporters in the midst of firefights; the chaos of the war entered the living room.

Compared to nightly news reports, newsreel footage is quaint, sterile, distant, and downright naive:

In the decade and a half between the fall of Saigon and the opening of Gulf War I, the government and the televised news media learned some important lessons. For the government's part, they learned they had to control the message, so they released footage of "smart bombs" and held press conferences explaining exactly what was happening (or at least what they said was happening), and that information was dutifully lapped up and disseminated by the various news organizations.

News organizations, in particular CNN, had learned that war was not an event to be reported but a bankable commodity to be exploited. War coverage could be branded and developed: panels of experts could convene, pre-packaged pros and cons could be aired as if they were open debate, and occasionally an overview of the war, complete with military supplied footage and analysis, could occur. CNN saw the war as an incredible visibility boost, and of course marketed their coverage and references to their coverage to convince viewers that they were a reliable source for information:

More importantly, though, they branded the war. It became a show, complete with recognizable graphics and theme music:

But you don't have to take my word for it; you can read Baudrillard's excellent The Gulf War Did Not Take Place for a more lucid analysis of the media victory in the Gulf War I. While some illiterate morons believed Baudrillard was arguing that the Gulf War was a hoax (much like conspiracy theorists argue about the moon landing), Baudrillard's points consisted of a critique of the mediated nature of the event and whether the action actually satisfied the definition of war as opposed to massacre.

The advance of the First Gulf War was live 24 hour coverage and the development of stations devoted to nothing but news (which of course meant nothing but infotainment, since hard analysis doesn't sell and there's not enough news to fill 24 hours unless you repeat it, extend it, manipulate it, and turn it into an event). The advance of the Second Gulf War and the Afghanistan War (perhaps we could label both neatly as "Bush's Boondoggle" or "Middle East Adventurism") is the advent of the internet.

Digital recording has made (to use CNN's term) "iReporters" out of nearly everyone. Cheap cell phone images have fueled the cable channels' speculation shows, while higher quality hand held recording devices and widespread internet connectivity have allowed nearly anyone to produce and disseminate footage (and the accompanying phenomenon of "viral video" simply drives home the point that the production, dissemination, and consumption of images cannot be contained or controlled by the traditional media infrastructure).

Digitized material spreads beyond the control of its producer or its original broadcaster. Derrida argued that all text is "always already" beyond the control of its creator and especially so if it becomes public discourse (and you have to have a sense that Emily Dickinson understood that as well when she wrote that "publication is the auction of the mind"), and in the internet age the avenues of dissemination are simply multiplied and accelerated. They approach "real time," the "real" being more of a tease, a promise of revelation that often doesn't materialize or disappoints. Much like the CNN reporters of the 1990's (and present) who often stand around desperately trying to fill time in order to fulfill the promise of presence, the internet as entity promises everything -- unmediated access to information without respect to broadcast schedules, as well as an unfillable archive of everything that has ever happened.

Into this medium springs wikileaks, a site whose visibility depends upon its access to formerly secretive information; like most news sites, it's raw material is information, but unlike other news sites, it doesn't do anything with the raw material: it simply dumps it on the internet, making it freely available to anyone with an internet connection. Wikileaks represents the next watershed in the public relations of warfare, which is to say in warfare. Prior to the Vietnam War, the military and government could rely on a distance between the war zone and the home front; prior to the First Gulf War, the military and government could rely upon the dominant model of infotainment to spin their messages (and the embedded reporters of Gulf War II simply represented a tremendous advance, both in terms of control and in terms of PR victory, in the military's response to that model); however, the internet age represents a challenge that Lyotard first identified back in 1979 in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: control of information will be the dominant field of warfare or interstate rivalry:

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major --perhaps the major --stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.

In other words, knowledge as commodity has always served traditional interests. Wikileaks represents a denial of knowledge as commodity, or at least in the traditional sense. However, the news outlets who have always made information their stock in trade will find no real challenge from wikileaks -- they have simply been given immense raw material with which to work; the real challenge is to the government and the military, who are now finding that just as battlefield television cameras brought their combat actions under intense scrutiny, wikileaks (and the internet in general) will now bring their internal discourse on war into the light and under the same intense scrutiny.

Endlessly.

I didn't think this guy was even alive, politically speaking.

2010-07-17T00:48:00.002-04:00

Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, apparently has Presidential aspirations.

Who knew?

Since they guy couldn't get elected in his own state, I'm guessing he's not really looking to take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania, but would like to toss his shoe close enough to the stake to come up on cabinet shortlists, which is a scary enough thought.

For those who don't remember him from his first turn in the spotlight, Santorum was a mean-spirited, pretentious, hate-filled prig, whose foolishness got Pennsylvania voters to toss him out of office after two terms by a 59% to 41% margin. And Pennsylvania, whose most famous senator right now is Arlen Spector, doesn't have a reputation for tossing senators out -- Santorum narrowly defeated Harris Wofford, who was only in office because he won a special election in 1991 to replace John Heinz, a man who'd probably still be a senator if he weren't dead.

I'm all for Santorum getting a little closer to the spotlight, because it can't help but scare the living daylights out of rational people, and I still maintain the belief that the majority of Americans are, in the main, rational people.

It should be interesting to watch the primary season unfold, because I'm not sure how the Republicans are going to finesse the inevitable schism between the anti-government, pro-business rationalists and the anti-government, pro-business fantasists like Palin, Huckabee, and Santorum, who not only think the last word on science, morality, and the law comes from the Bible, but also think everyone else should have to accept that, too.

Obvious Department: Tea Party is racist.

2010-07-15T14:34:00.003-04:00

Why does it take the NAACP to tell everyone that the Tea Party is a bastion of racists?

Well, actually it doesn't, but I applaud the NAACP for taking off the kid gloves and calling out the baggers for what, as a movement, they are. Sure there are probably a few teabaggers who actually aren't racists, but as they say, even a clock that doesn't run is right twice a day.

Predictably, politicians whose national ambitions rely on racism, have cried foul. Showing her astute grasp of history, Sarah Palin argues on facebook (and no I'm not supplying a link to her idiotic meanderings) that racism is "in the past" and that anyone who doesn't believe so is actually part of the problem. It's perfectly logical, in the same way that arguing that someone noticing that it's raining outside is actually conjuring up the rain themselves.

However, middle of the road columnists like the Post's E.J. Dionne are trying to ameliorate the hard truth that the Tea Partiers are racists in really thin disguises. Here's Dionne explaining his position:

So let's dispense with the obvious: Most of the opposition to President Obama comes from people who are against his policies, not his race. The Tea Party is motivated primarily by right-wing ideology, not by racism.

I think Dionne meant "most of the opposition to Pres. Obama within the Tea Party..." and if he didn't, then he's putting two sentences together that shouldn't be together. Taking a look only at his second sentence, Dionne has done semantically in one sentence what the right-wing hasn't been able to do practically since...um, forever. He's separated "right-wing ideology" from "racism."

The Tea Party Movement is a great reminder that those two items are so closely linked that they are, to borrow an analogy from chemistry, like reactants and catalysts. Racism has been used to bolster all sorts of reactionary movements, from union-busting to the Republican's "Southern Strategy."

Like a box of cracker jacks, not everything inside is a nut, but it's the nuts that give it the distinctive flavor...

Why?

2010-07-10T22:46:00.002-04:00

Why would the Post give this proto-fascist column space?

I blame the publication of the Unabomber's manifesto for such lapses in journalistic integrity as to print the rantings of unhinged antisocial assholes.

Yet, at least the Unabomber had claim to intelligence, even if put to evil use, sort of like a Lex Luthor but without the minions, money, and working plumbing.

However, Rick Barber doesn't have that claim, and his ignorant, insensitive, and downright insulting "slavery" ad should be proof enough of that. Agreeing to release such a tawdry and misguided ad demonstrates both a lack of judgment and a proud disdain for facts, neither of which qualities should be terribly attractive in a candidate, but we are talking about Alabama.

If I'm exceedingly kind to the Post, I can believe that they printed Barber's response to the criticism he's taking over his stupid ad as a way of handing him a shovel the better to dig a deeper hole, and he's certainly risen to that task, proclaiming:

Over the past 18 months, the federal government has sought to seize or has seized control of the health-care industry, the financial industry, the mortgage industry, the automobile industry, student loans, broadband Internet and the energy sector through cap-and-trade legislation. With never a crisis going to waste, each new seizure is rationalized by some new emergency.

Sure, the federal government has done all of those things...if you're either too damn stupid to understand what any of that legislation actually did or your definition of "sought to seize or has seized" is so uselessly broad as to include nearly any government regulation or oversight.

Of course, that's where Barber is coming from: the realm of cloud-cuckoo land, where things work magically by themselves and humans involved in business are naturally honest and honorable, seeking nothing but the best for their customers, yet this innate goodness in human nature doesn't extend too far beyond the world of the beleaguered businessman, given that Barber and his ilk seem to fear and distrust nearly all humanity.

Barber, for his part, embraces this fear, arguing that

Those on my side of the aisle seek to move the argument through fear of deficits, inflation, terrorism, socialism and the loss of individual liberty; those on the left through fears of global warming, poverty, racism, depression.

Whose side of the aisle? He's running as a Republican, yet he claims to be afraid of deficits. I suppose he missed the years 2000-2008, where the Bush regime not only dismantled the Clinton era surpluses, but also ballooned the deficit through its illegal war in Iraq and its nebulous and Orwellian call to an undefined and never ending "war on terror." Inflation hasn't been an issue since, well, since the 1980's, so I'm starting to guess that Barber's side of the aisle is the outside, as in outside of reality.

We could get deeper into Barber's rhetoric, but really, what's the point? Barber's arguments, if you can call them such, wouldn't rate a passing grade on a freshman essay in American government, economics, or comparative political systems. In fact, if a student of mine turned in this claptrap, I'd ask for a rewrite, noting that assertions are nothing without support.

Barber fears we're "well on our way" down a "road to serfdom," but he can't actually explain why. Apparently it has something to do with government preventing the good-hearted insurance companies from dropping sick clients for "pre-existing conditions" or minor and irrelevant paperwork errors.

Rather stereotypically, he repeats the time-worn canard that "liberals ... despise freedom of speech when the speech is conservative." I suppose he means liberals like the ACLU, who has consistently fought for the Constitutional rights of obnoxious groups like the KKK. Like most conservatives, Barber confuses two things about free speech: the right to free speech does not mean you can demand to be published in respected circles, and free speech does not mean you don't have to face criticism for your idiocy.

In other words, free speech means a newspaper can print what it wants (although libel law does put some reins on that horse), but it has never meant that a paper has to print the rantings of a lunatic like Barber -- yet they do. By the same token, criticizing your position, pointing out the fundamental inaccuracy of your arguments, and arguing that your speech reveals you to be a complete moron is not the same thing as "despising" freedom of speech.

It's the height of arrogance and blindness for Barber to be complaining about a violation of his freedom of speech rights in a column published not only in a national newspaper, but also in one of conservatism's favorite examples of the "liberal media."

Reconsiderations.

2010-07-08T16:53:00.003-04:00

I'm changing my mind about A Fraction of the Whole. It's starting to become, as the Wall Street Journal review on the front cover would have it, "riotously funny." One of two things is happening. Either the book is actually getting much better or I'm paying better mind to it and being a more consistent attentive reader. Either way, it's been very enjoyable lately. Here's an excerpt:

Let's not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace's underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade. At blackjack tables and sitting in front of poker machines were tense and desperate men and women looking like droids, who didn't seem to be gambling for pleasure. As I watched them, I remembered the casino was famous for having its patrons lock their children in their cars while they gambled. I had read a news story about it, and I hoped all those sad, desperate people rolled the windows down a little while they put their rent money in the pockets of the state government, which rakes in huge profits and then puts half a percent of it back into the community for counseling services for gamblers.

There are numerous gems like the first sentence of this excerpt, one liners that are truly hilarious and odd juxtapositions of images.

Let's see how it goes.

Dragging one out of the waiting room.

2010-07-07T09:54:00.004-04:00

I was wondering where to go with my summer reading, and out of sheer laziness and a lack of decent book stores in my undisclosed current location, I decided to take up a book I'd abandoned last year (which I'd abandoned once before as well). The book is called A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz, and it was shortlisted for the Booker way back in 2008 I believe. That's when I bought it and originally started it.

I abandoned it the first time because the semester got in the way.

I abandoned it the second time because another semester got in the way.

On both occasions, I wasn't exactly displeased that I had to abandon the book. It's not that it's bad (otherwise I would have abandoned it completely); it's just that the story doesn't grip me. It is funny, I'll give it that. I don't know if it's "riotously funny," the way the front cover blurb, purportedly from the Wall Street Journal, claims it is, but it is funny. I also think that on page 329, I'm finally into the thick of things and the rewards are starting to fall my way. The novel itself is 561 pages, so I'm over halfway through, and I damn well better finish it this time.

However, the story doesn't hang on me the way that other books do, where you find yourself thinking about the characters or the plot in the middle of doing something else. These characters and the plot, such as it is, remain between the covers of the book. Jasper Dean is humorous enough, but not very lively at this point, and his father, Martin...well, for all his wackiness he really comes across as dull.

Well, here goes nothing...

Coming in from the cold.

2010-07-06T10:40:00.000-04:00

Everyone's acting like this Russian spy story is outdated, so 1970's. Like spying began and ended with the Cold War.

Of course, in today's news cycle, everyone's already forgotten about the Russian spy story. In fact, the news has so skewed towards entertainment, that the predominant reactions to the story has been to focus on the "beauty queen" spy, Anna Chapman, as if it's the first time an attractive individual has been a spy.

Great concern has been voiced over the possible boost this story will give to Angelina Jolie's latest vehicle, Salt.

Other than that, no one seems to care.

Now, it's true that these spies were pretty poor. I'm not even sure you can call them spies, really, at least in the classical sense. This point is being made by the Guardian's Alexander Chancellor:

One reason for this must be the complete futility of the alleged Russian operation. The FBI had not only been watching the suspects closely for up to a decade, but it had found no evidence that any of them had furnished Moscow with even a scrap of useful information during that time.

Perhaps, though, the mission was to discover the allure of suburbia, with its backyard barbecues, its well-manicured lawns, and its quiet desperation behind a privacy fence in a subdivision cul-de-sac.

But the time for the story has come and gone. Sure, it will crop up later, probably in two weeks when Angelina Jolie's movie opens, but it will sink below the surface rather quickly. Anna Chapman may find herself in a few years -- or as soon as her anticipated sentence will allow -- hitting the talk show couch circuit, flogging her story for a book or a movie, because one of the great secrets of American life is that we don't know how to handle anything as a culture anymore except through the tropes provided by the media.

Andy Warhol's laconic statement has proven not only to be true, but also to be descriptive of our attention spans and indicative of the triumph of the culture industry.

Didn't feel like putting much effort into it today, so I go for low hanging fruit: Charles Krauthammer

2010-07-02T13:01:00.003-04:00

You have to love Charles Krauthammer for writing bitter diatribes that are great for rousing the rabble, but particularly useless for understanding issues. Krauthammer's latest sally from moronville takes issue with the Obama Administration's reticence to use the term "Islamic fundamentalist" in describing the terrorists involved in recent actions here and abroad. The bitter windbag writes:

Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century -- from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali.

Of course, on a literal level, he's right. These attackers did share a belief that they were waging a holy war, a crusade even, against the infidels, the Great Satan, what have you. Western civilization.

And, as usual, here's where Krauthammer's hard rhetoric reveals the simplistic, hateful mind that crafts the words. In Krauthammer's world, it's always going to be us v. them, an unending conflict of cultures between the civilized West and the barbaric Orient; the only thing different between now and the late 19th century is that it's no longer the "yellow peril" we need worry about (although without Islam, Krauthammer would most likely be focused on the "rising tide of color" led by China), but rather this amorphous blob called the Islamic World. But don't take my word for it. Krauthammer actually deploys these terms in his column:

It trivializes the war between jihadi barbarism and Western decency, and diminishes the memory of those (including thousands of brave Muslims -- Iraqi, Pakistani, Afghan and Western) who have died fighting it.

Ah, note how clever the great deceiver is...he includes the "brave Muslims" fighting the "jihadi barbarism" that elsewhere he simply wants to call "Islamic fundamentalism." And that's where he fails and is perhaps too blind to see his own argument unraveling in front of him.

Let's play a little language game. Let's switch "Islamic" for "Christian." Forget about linking any Christian fundamentalists to terrorist acts like assassinating doctors or planning to take out police officers, but just consider the amount of people covered by the term "Christian fundamentalist." Now, let's imagine further that certain sects that identified themselves as Christian armed themselves, preached death to the government, carried out assassinations and other crimes, and the government started to talk about the scourge of "Christian fundamentalism."

How would that fly?

Now imagine you had to deal with countries, and in fact included some among your allies, that called or considered themselves Islamic. It might put you in a bit of a delicate situation to explain to them why you were impugning a rather broad segment of their population with such sloppy rhetoric.

I really can't overemphasize that enough. Krauthammer suggests sloppy rhetoric as a positive. It's not a positive and would only serve to impede cooperation between governments in Muslim dominated nations. And it's not as if there isn't precedent for this sort of linguistic sensitivity. It may seem decades ago (because it largely is), but the U.S. never referred to the Irish Republican Army as "Catholic terrorists" or consider it motivated by "Catholic fundamentalism." Oh, certainly some more radical members of the Unionist movement made that connection and used that language, but those are the same groups, along with the Republican splinter groups, who assuage their being shut out in the cold with occasional outbreaks of violence (thankfully usually only rhetorical).

Now with this analogy, I accept that there's no perfect correspondence, but as they say, all analogies limp. However, the point is that language is much more complex than Krauthammer gives it credit for. Even his closing argument is a pathetic bait and switch, infinitely worse than my analogy, because he manages to bring the Nazis into the equation:

Churchill famously mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. But his greatness lay not in mere eloquence. It was his appeal to the moral core of a decent people to rise against an ideology the nature of which Churchill never hesitated to define and describe -- and to pronounce ("Nahhhhzzzzi") in an accent dripping with loathing and contempt.

Yes, the Nazis. An actual defined organized group in charge of a country. What Krauthammer forgets is that we do have an equivalent today, and it's called "Al Qaeda." Sure, they don't have their own country that we can invade and occupy, but they are a real group with a fairly clear mission statement. Krauthammer's example should also give us another reason to understand the counterproductive nature of his demands: especially in the post-war years, it was crucial to de-link the larger signifier of "Germans" from specific crimes of the Nazi regime. Therefore, one doesn't really talk of "German fascism" or "German war crimes": one talks of "Nazi war crimes."

Out of the ordinary.

2010-07-01T22:33:00.002-04:00

Today I did something that's unfortunately becoming rarer and rarer: I spent an hour lying on my back next to a pool feeling the sun go in and out through the clouds that were so big and fluffy my daughter was sure they'd burst.

She's in camp and my wife's a counselor there, but this afternoon she had to be elsewhere. Schedules being what they were and with the camp making a field trip to the nearby state park, I decided I'd go early, hang out a bit, and take her home from the park.

She swam for about twenty minutes, but it was a little cold and she's only five years old and she decided it was time to get out and wrap a towel around herself. In order to accomplish that last task, she lay the towel carefully out on the ground, making sure to get each corner stretched straight. then she lay down in the middle of the towel and pulled the sides around her.

And I put my hat down over my face, lay my head on my backpack, and just let the clouds drift.

The rare pursuit of something called leisure reading.

2010-06-30T17:23:00.001-04:00

Among the things I try to accomplish over the summer is to read some books that aren't in my area, as in books that I can't directly connect to any sort of "work reading." Since my area is American literature, I see anything written by an American as potential "work reading" -- and of course sometimes pleasure reading does double duty, such as the time I decided I wanted to read some Russell Banks.

However, more often than not, I try to go outside the United States. I'm currently reading Balzac's The Chouans. For me, at least, reading Balzac raises so many questions: I find myself taking breaks to look up information on the time (in this case, 1799) and place (Brittany), which of course leads on to biography of other figures and the French Revolution in general.

I've got several other books waiting for me, which is good, because I'm nearly done with this one. I haven't read any Jeanette Winterson in a long time (since The Powerbook, but I've read absolutely everything up to that point), so I might pick up her latest (not latest children's book -- and she's a very good children's novelist: I've read Tanglewreck), The Stone Gods, although the prospect of it possibly being science fiction doesn't excite me.

Making lists.

2010-06-30T10:37:00.004-04:00

One of the things I do in my spare time (read: instead of doing what I should be doing) is compile book lists for American literature courses.

It's not an idle process. I sometimes use them in actual American literature courses. For instance, I recently taught a course that included Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Saul Bellow, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Frank Chin. The theme was American identity, or what makes one an American.

Here's another one, themed around the road, or travel:

Kerouac, On the Road
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Silko, Ceremony
McCarthy, The Road

I could probably throw Claude McKay's Home to Harlem in there as well. Actually, there are tons of novels that would fit the bill for a theme like the road. I'm thinking very much for this fall of putting together a course based upon the city. The list would look a bit like this:

Petry, The Street
Jones, Lost in the City
Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Hammett, The Glass Key

I may go, however, with a course on immigration/migrant workers/borders:

Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain
Banks, Continental Drift
Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus
Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle
Cather, My Antonia
Kingston, China Men

I could use a good book about Italian, Irish, or Polish immigration as well, preferably from the early 20th century. Any suggestions?

This Byrd has flown.

2010-06-29T10:26:00.000-04:00

I imagine several people have devoted space in their blogs to the passing of an icon in the Senate, Robert Byrd. The main highlights of Byrd's career, and of most obituaries (although not all...), include Byrd's early membership in (and longer sympathy with) the Ku Klux Klan, his opposition to Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, his conversion to less racist ways in the 1980's, his support for higher education, his earmarks for West Virginia, and finally his status as Constitutional expert and longest serving member of the U.S. Senate.

It's quite a career, and Eugene Robinson's piece in the Washington Post argues that it's a story of redemption. As far as race goes, it is.

Byrd's early career is covered in the slime of racism, as he joined with fellow racist Strom Thurmond and other "Dixiecrats" in an effort to deny human rights and legal protection to African Americans. Thurmond, who died in 2003, switched parties in 1964 in recognition that the opposition to human rights would be based in the Republican Party, but Byrd for some reason remained a Democrat. It could be that West Virginia's Democratic vote was more influenced by union solidarity than by racist solidarity (not that the two didn't and don't overlap), whereas the deep South had more or less kept the working class in their place by enforcing statutes cynically called "right to work."

Byrd remained sympathetic to racist scum and aligned himself with them throughout the 1960's (although he did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1968). The parallels with Strom Thurmond go beyond their early camaraderie in opposition to federal Civil Rights legislation, and I'm certain that comparing and contrasting the two will be an exercise for columnists and school kids alike (if they even teach civics or government in schools anymore...we are really a nation that doesn't like to understand our government). Both Thurmond and Byrd voted for the federal holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., but only Byrd renounced his earlier racist views (a renunciation that seemed heartfelt and at the same time a struggle, much like a recovering alcoholic struggles daily with the disease), while Thurmond hid behind the smoke screen of "states rights," a bullshit argument in the arena of equal protection under the law if ever there was one.

Byrd memorably opposed the abdication of Congressional power in the buildup to the Iraq War, when the rest of Congress (with few exceptions) voted to hand over a blank check to then-President Bush in prosecution of his pet war. Byrd correctly labeled it a "war of choice," but that didn't keep the majority of scared-shitless Senate Democrats and all but one Republican from eschewing their obligations to the nation to rein in an overzealous executive branch.

However, Byrd should also be remembered for his social conservatism; yes, he changed his mind on race relations and repeatedly apologized in public for his earlier racist actions. However, he continued to oppose civil rights for other groups, including his backing of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (which would be more properly called the Limitation of Marriage Act):

''The drive for same-sex marriage,'' said Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, ''is, in effect, an effort to make a sneak attack on society by encoding this aberrant behavior in legal form before society itself has decided it should be legal.

''Let us defend the oldest institution, the institution of marriage between male and female as set forth in the Holy Bible.''

So much for the separation of church and state, when the acknowledged Constitutional expert relies on a religious text and not the U.S. Constitution for legislative advice.

So let's applaud Byrd for his willingness to abandon one arena of ignorance, but let's not lionize him as a friend of equal rights for all.

Empty Terms Department: "Activist Judges"

2010-06-28T20:41:00.002-04:00

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is undergoing grilling on Capitol Hill today. As always, the nomination is contentious and sure to provide lots of thunder with no real enlightenment, the overuse of craptacularly meaningless words and phrases, and in the end, an approval of the nomination. To get us started with some meaningless rhetoric, we have Senator Jeff Sessions, a very experienced bullshitter:

But in an opening statement, the top Republican on the panel, Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.) sought to portray Kagan as a liberal with little judicial experience who has "associated herself with well-known activist judges." Sessions said Kagan has "many good qualities" but cautioned that "there are serious concerns about this nomination" among Senate Republicans.

Generalities, platitudes, keywords...in a word: "yawn."

What exactly is an "Activist Judge" anyway? It's a term conservatives are fond of throwing around, and as close as I can tell it means anyone who believes that the U.S. Constitution covers, well, everyone in the U.S. and not just a few subsets.

Even Wikipedia contains information on the problems associated with using this descriptor:

From the very beginning, the phrase was controversial. An article by Craig Green, An Intellectual History of Judicial Activism, is highly critical of Schlesinger's use of the term. "Schlesinger’s original introduction of judicial activism was doubly blurred: not only did he fail to explain what counts as activism, he also declined to say whether activism is good or bad."

So the term dates from 1947 and was proposed by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a historian that the Right Wing has little time for.

However useless it may be as an actual descriptor for a judge, it is an effective cudgel with which to bludgeon nominees and send shivers down Glenn Beck viewers' spines about the possibility of a rogue judge sealing the nation's doom by ruling that gays, Blacks, and women are people, too.

A brief google search for "activist judges" turned up what I thought it would: a host of right-wing sites that didn't have a useful definition of what an activist judge was, but had a whole host of reasons why judicial activism was bad, and many included decisions they disagreed with (with of course absolutely no context as to how those decisions were reached). For instance, the "Law Enforcement Alliance of America," a group that seems to advocate for a police state in which judges essentially rubber stamp D.A. prosecutions, provides this gem of a definition:

A restrained judge believes that the meaning of these words [e.g. "unreasonable" in "unreasonable search and seizure, but also other words in laws, statutes, etc.] already exists, that the meaning came from the legislatures or the people who enacted those words into law in the first place, and the judge’s job is to find it. Activist judges, in contrast, pursue their own agendas and believe they can give those words any meaning they choose.

Not very helpful. First, there's the obvious straw man: I doubt you would get any legal expert to argue seriously that any judge believes he or she can "give those words any meaning they choose." That demonstrably false claim leads to the reason that the entire definition and contrast between restrained and activist judges is invalid: in both cases the judges are interpreting the intention -- or unintended consequences (because laws contain both) -- behind the words. Sites such as this one I've quoted above seem to believe in a pure intelligibility of language -- that meanings are crystallized, permanent, transparent, and shared by everyone.

Oh, if it were only that simple.

Unfortunately, language is anything but transparent. You don't have to descend into Clintonian silliness with a "that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is" argument (although to be fair to the former President, his wrangling over words is part and parcel of the practice of all sorts of specialized fields in law) to understand that "unreasonable" can mean different things to different people.

I imagine that if the Supreme Court had allowed the 2000 election recount in Florida to continue the Right would have thundered on about judicial activism. It's a real interesting issue, because one of the charges conservatives level at the so-called "activist judiciary" is that they take decisions out of the hands of the people, and you'd think stopping a recount of people's votes would be seen as a fairly direct example of that infringement.

As it is, you could pretty much determine that any decision of the Supreme Court's is "activist"; that's how useless the definition is.

First - chill - then stupor - then the letting go.

2010-06-28T14:05:00.003-04:00

Well, I'm almost over the letdown suffered when the US failed to capitalize on ample opportunities and ended up crashing against Ghana 2-1 in the round of 16.

I have consistently felt Altidore was out of his league in this World Cup, and his missed chip shots in this game weren't the first of the tournament for him. That being said, he's also the player I think will be most important for the US in 2014. He's got tremendous talent and vision...it's the execution that's not there yet.

Our defense has to get better. Too much shakiness early on, too many goals conceded early in the games, and too little agility on that back line.

The good news from World Cup 2010 is that the US didn't fall flat on their faces in any of the games and survived some horrendous (but by no means the only) bad calls that took away goals. Bad calls happen, and the US can't blame bad calls for their loss to Ghana.

Is everyone comfortable?

2010-06-25T14:16:00.002-04:00

It's orientation day at the tiny university at which I'm currently employed. This year must be some sort of nautical theme -- as orientations are increasingly nothing more than marketing events shaped to draw the "customers" in, like all the agricultural detritus found on the walls of a Cracker Barrel -- because all the students working the orientation were wearing sailor caps.

No pirates were in sight, nor did I spot a cop, construction worker, Indian, cowboy, or leather man.

The campus bookstore, of course, was open, selling its collection of branded swag to prospective students and parents alike. Like many campus bookstores, this one sells very few books, with even the course textbook area being relegated to the back corner of the store. That section probably occupies about 1/6th the area of the store, with the other 5/6ths containing a large selection of clothing, coffee mugs, keychains, candy, and -- like the inedible sandwiches on the tables in Harry Hope's bar in The Iceman Cometh -- a few popular novels and magazines.

Other than the free lunch being provided to parents and incoming students alike, I didn't see any other actual activities of orientation, but I assume they involved a tour of the nicer buildings on campus: one dorm recently received new furniture and was probably showcased, the athletics center dates from the 1990's and is very nice for a school our size, the library is even more recent and again is a gem for a school our size, and a new classroom/office building sits in the center of campus.

They'll most likely avoid the building I work in, which is the original campus building and shows the haphazard upgrades that correspond to a university that for much of its life struggled to make the most of its space with less than abundant resources: mismatched carpet, cracked tile floors, classrooms with chairs packed so tightly the instructor finds him or herself pushed into a corner near exposed plumbing, etc. In other words, a building that doesn't look good in a college catalog but will in fact be the building that most of their classes are in.

Well, I wish them all success and hopefully we'll have a good enrollment and maybe they'll hire a new line in English (not holding my breath).

It's all part of my rock and roll fantasy...

2010-06-24T11:45:00.002-04:00

I wonder what sort of people show up for these fantasy camps. Fantasy camps in general are interesting phenomena, and to an extent I can understand the draw of being on the same baseball field with your childhood heroes, but this rock and roll fantasy camp is hardly my idea of a fantasy.

The big draw in 2006, apparently, was that you got to "open" for Def Leppard and Journey...as if that were some kind of fantasy. Actually, if that is your fantasy, then I probably don't know you. Nor do I wear jean shorts, drive a camaro, or drink wine coolers.

The camp has seen such rock luminaries as Roger Daltrey, Jon Anderson, Dickey Betts, Mickey Hart, George Thorogood, and Neil Schon make our campers rock dreams come true, as they learn from and jam with the world’s greatest celebrity rock musicians.

Wow. As much as I respect Daltrey, you have to admit that outside The Who, he's made some pretty poor artistic choices. Mickey Hart, I'm guessing, was searching for himself in the years after Jerry Garcia's death. Other than that, you're really looking at the County Fair circuit. But it gets better:

Audition alongside celebrity rock star counselors Simon Kirke (Bad Company/Free), Jeff “Skunk” Baxter (Doobie Brothers), Artimus Pyle (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Teddy Andreadis (Guns & Roses), Gunnar Nelson (Nelson), Spencer Davis (Spencer Davis Group), Fred Coury (Cinderella), Kelly Keagy (Night Ranger), Michael Lardie (Great White), and many others.

Nothing against these guys, because everyone has to eat, but the equivalent in a baseball fantasy camp would be to list a few platooning outfielders or middle relief pitchers with a few years of MLB experience each and baseball cards worth about 3 cents. Half of these guys I'd rather see in the County Fair dunk tank than anywhere else.

Still not convinced to shell out your $2000 for the camp? Well, here was the kicker back in 2006:

Will I actually get to open for Def Leppard/Journey?

An all day rehearsal and instruction from celebrity rock star counselors, use of top line studio quality equipment, such as: Gibson guitars, DW drums, Marshall amps, and Korg keyboards, playing in front of thousands as the opening act in the Battle of the Bands, a meet and greet with Def Leppard and Journey, two meals, merchandise, and prime pavilion seats for you and a guest for the show, all for only $2000!

So to answer the question, not really. You will open the Battle of the Bands, which takes place two hours before the Def Leppard/Journey concert...or should I say, 2 hours before the time marked on the tickets, which of course is never when the band comes on. So the likelihood of "playing in front of thousands" as an act coming on at 5:30 p.m. when most people are going to be getting to the concert at 7:30 p.m. is, well, optimistic.

Oh, and you get to play (it seems from the website) 2 songs. So you're probably offstage by 5:40 p.m.

But if you are a huge Def Leppard or Journey fan, and some of those people are out there, it might be worth $2K to play some music, meet the groups, get your t-shirt/bumper stickers etc. that are involved in "merchandise," eat your two meals, and watch the gig from your pavillion seats.

More recently, the camp has been scaled back considerably, although the price remains $2K. Now instead of playing in a battle of the bands at a concert headlined by some creaky middle-brow 80's bands, you will get to play "in a band" with a counselor and Dickey Betts will be there. While you aren't promised that you'll be on stage with Dickey Betts, you are promised that you will get to "Jam with Rock Legend Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers."

All of this fun takes place at the Trocadero in Philly in October. Start saving.

Predictions, or lack thereof.

2010-06-23T09:29:00.002-04:00

The big questions ahead of today's Group C matchups:

Can England score?
Can the US beat Algeria?

I know the answer to the second better than the first. The US should be able to score more than Algeria -- in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say they should keep a clean sheet today. However, England's inability to score is baffling. They've got some great tools, but they don't seem to play as a team.

The good news, if you're an American soccer fan that is, is that the US is clearly in a better position than England to go through. A US win puts them through no matter what, and even a draw is likely to put them through, given England's impotent offense. A loss, of course, sinks them.

In the first half against Slovenia, I thought the US looked disjointed -- they had some good chances but were always a foot or two away from connecting. In the second half they looked great, finally putting starts and finishes together. If I were betting on the match, I'd say USA 3 - 0 Algeria. Or I might hedge to 3-1.

In the England v Slovenia match up, I really don't know what to say. More than that, should England concede an early goal, I think it may break them.

But at least they'll always have the 2010 French team to save them from being the biggest dogs of the tournament.

Metapost.

2010-06-22T14:30:00.000-04:00

In looking back over my sources, I realize I'm relying far too heavily on cnn.com for my links. Now I should perhaps explain myself.

First, I don't watch cable news, or any television news for that matter. However, I am fully aware of the phenomenon of cable news: you can't escape it in doctor's offices, restaurants and bars, airports, and even some places that call themselves coffee shops. So I'm well aware of how these outlets, as money making ventures, are more about bread and circuses than they are about information, and that -- in perfect Baudrillardian fashion -- their effect is to smother an occurrence in discourse, to turn it into an event, and to take us as far away as possible from understanding it.

Second, cnn.com provides in both its content and delivery a perfect illustration of the poverty of most news organizations. Its content tends to be a mix of celebrity gossip, political chatter, human tragedy and triumph (e.g. baby falls down well, disabled man competes in marathon, young girl murdered, etc.), and general catastrophe (forest fires, oil spills, etc.). Its delivery is in breezy stories that rarely go beyond five paragraphs and quite often, especially in the case of political chatter, are three paragraphs or less.

So, let it be said that I do not link to cnn.com because I think it is a solid news source. However, as infotainment goes, it's a great example, and I won't link to foxnews.com because I don't link to right wing websites, especially ones that pander to racist elements.

Third, I actually get most of my news from NPR, The Guardian, Washington Post, and New York Times.

One of the things that tires me out, whether it's on the Washington Post, CNN, or Chronicle of Higher Education sites, is the pathetic level of commentary to be found on the "comments" section of articles. Reading the comments section, as I've noted elsewhere, can convince a person that the majority of readers are half-literate racists or simply -- and there's no other way to put it -- absolute morons. I rarely read them anymore, but sometimes I make that mistake and it often leads me to such depression that I have to step away from the computer. The stupid seem to have more time on their hands to flood comment boards.

Maybe it's time to get away from current events and popular culture, although it's the absurdity of both that often makes me write.

The age demanded...

2010-06-22T06:00:00.000-04:00

So we live in the age of twitter, which may in fact be perfect both as a communications means and a symbol of a pathetically shallow and simplistic culture. In an age where Obama's recent speech, written at a nearly tenth grade level, apparently is too difficult for most Americans to understand, Sarah Palin comes to the rescue with her twits, as reported by cnn.com:

"RahmEmanuel= as shallow/narrowminded/political/irresponsible as they come,to falsely claim Barton's BP comment is "GOP philosophy," Palin also tweeted in reply to Emanuel's comments.

Deep. Really deep. Her argument is ironclad, her support unimpeachable. Sure, you could go on and on detailing how Barton's comments, while completely at odds with the PR desires of the Republican Party, actually reflect the laissez-faire attitude of the party and its belief that corporations trump government, but I'm already beyond 140 characters and therefore way beyond the attention span of Palin's supporters.

Until I can pare that down to a series of grunts and hand signals, I'm afraid I will not be able to communicate with the right wing.

Embarrassing.

2010-06-21T11:24:00.000-04:00

After four goals, you'd think they'd pull back, but then you realize that this team contains Christiano Ronaldo, asshole par excellence. That attitude is apparently catching.

So we're winding down to ten minutes to go, you are shutting out the hapless North Koreans, and it would be 7 or 8 to zero if not for a few near misses, so you pull back, maybe kick it around midfield to kill time, right? No. You continue to pour it on, displaying your classlessness like a college football team from the state of Florida.

In fact, during stoppage time, with a 7-0 lead, Ronaldo was getting pissed off because his teammates were taking their time getting the ball upfield.

As the rout continued, I found myself feeling sorry for the North Korean team, since their nation's unstable leader may very well decide to take his embarrassment out on those players. Might be time to defect.

Clean up time.

2010-06-21T08:58:00.002-04:00

Pretty much every day you can find another story that contributes to the thesis that Florida should simply be allowed to secede. Today, it's the unhappiness of Okaloosa County, who want the federal government to stay out of the county when it comes to cleaning up the BP oil mess. I'm all for it. Aside from the dangerous precedent of allowing county supervisors to legislate above the federal government, I'm all for the plan. Cut off federal funding for the county's clean-up efforts, stipulate that no federal funds provided to the state be diverted to Okaloosa County, and give the supervisors their dear wish.

But apparently, their desire for independence only goes so far...sure they want the feds to stay out of their way, until they either screw up or run out of money (it's kind of unclear):

So far, the area on Florida's panhandle has seen only weathered oil in the form of tar balls and tar mousse, but Okaloosa County, along with the city of Destin, have agreed to move forward with a unified plan to protect their beaches and waterways. They say they'll be spending about $5 million per month to protect their land, and they have one message to the feds.

"Have our backs. Let us go out and do our jobs," Villani said.

"We've got to protect the public," he said.

Does "have our backs" mean "keep funneling your federal dollars our way and shut up," or does it mean, "after we've exhausted our resources and have had about as much success as you've had, come in and take the blame"?

It's true that the federal government often falls short of perfection. After all, it's a relatively impossible task of on the one hand permitting private corporations to endanger the life and welfare of an entire region and on the other cleaning up after their messes. Especially when the people who live in the region really really want the private corporations to keep endangering their lives, so long as they pay them for it.

To use an analogy, there are very few junkies who want the cops to bust their dealer.

So anyway, I am 100% behind the Okaloosa commissioners and look forward to visiting the county once their logic has reached its inevitable conclusion and they've become a sovereign nation, and I can stay in their third world country for something like ten bucks a day. It'll be much closer than Costa Rica.

We are clearly sinking.

2010-06-17T13:56:00.002-04:00

I love America, but I'm not so sure I like Americans. Or let me put it another way: I am not very comfortable identifying as American the vindictive, fearful, xenophobic, half-literate, and ignorant comments that seem to proliferate on this supposed messianic medium called teh internets.

I am very close to agreeing with the Right on the proposition that the United States education system has failed. Here's a headline from cnn.com:

Language guru: Obama speech too 'professorial' for his target audience

Apparently, the issue is that Obama's speech was written at a -- gasp -- 9.8 grade level. So speaking at a high school sophomore level (let's round up to 10th grade) is too "professorial." Great. Let's just chuck it all right now and go back to the tough decisions, like paper or plastic. Here's another brilliant quote from the article:

"A little less professorial, less academic and more ordinary," Payack recommended. "That's the type of phraseology that makes you (appear) aloof and out of touch."

So Obama should follow his predecessor's example and speak in a series of grunts and monosyllabic meaningless feel-good phrases.

Look, we all know the United States is an anti-intellectual nation. However, this minute analysis of exactly how stupid we are as a nation goes a long way to explaining the continued existence of an audience for the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter. In fact, it explains the continued existence of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in their current forms, and it sure as hell explains completely the Tea Party movement.

So America can't handle being talked to at a high school graduate level? I wasn't aware we were a nation of dropouts, but if that's the bar that we as a society have agreed to accept, then lots of luck to us in the future bagging lunches and making beds for whichever nation or culture actually takes education and progress seriously and decides to buy us up.

Short Term Memory Loss

2010-05-19T21:35:00.003-04:00

Much stupidity has been shuffled around following this Tuesday's primaries. First, there was that idiot Sargent who writes for the Post opining that Arlen Specter and Blanche Lincoln were facing challenges "from the left."

Puh-lease.

It's perhaps true that those two incumbents are facing challenges from the left of their own positions, but that hardly qualifies as "the left" -- or what little we have of it -- in the United States.

Then, post-election, the media are tripping over themselves to create a story of "anti-incumbent anger." I'm trying to remember where exactly I read the howler headline about the "end of the era of the incumbent advantage," but it was at that point that I realized someone had been sniffing far too much glue as he or she tried to make deadline. Let's take a closer look at a few of the races, starting in Pennsylvania.

Arlen Specter is best remembered as a Republican. He was running in the Democratic primary this year because he switched parties in the face of a strong challenge from the right wing of the Republican Party. Registered Democrats tend to be a bit more party-loyalty oriented than the general populace, so it's hardly an anti-incumbent sentiment to reject a politician who for all but the last two years of his political career was in the opposition.

Parsing Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky should take about ten seconds for anyone who doesn't have papers to sell or air time to fill. You could start with the fact that Paul wasn't running against an incumbent. That should actually end the conversation. If it doesn't, and you feel like continuing a conversation with someone who has a fragile grip on consciousness, then you may need to go to tactic b: many Republican Party activists are right wing kooks. They are electing a fringe candidate who appeals to those divorced from reality, but that's no surprise -- Rand's father, Ron Paul, has been serving, off and on, in the very organization he despises for something like thirty years. But hey, I understand, sometimes you need to try to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, but Paul has been relatively unsuccessful at doing so much as removing a loose floorboard. Yet, voters continue to send him back to his government paycheck so he can continue not to do much about it.

Sure, libertarians are easy targets, since they're the biggest freeloaders in the history of mankind, stumbling through life with blinders on, pretending they're little atomistic islands rather than part of complex interconnected systems that actually do affect one another. However, it might be useful to see how much the Tea Party can do come November. Winning your closed primary is one thing, but winning a general election full of other parties and independents is quite another. Will crazy sell to more than a niche market?

I know it's difficult in this day and age to present the news without developing a storyline -- especially a real dire one -- but these primaries have not shown that incumbents are in danger in November. What they've shown is that in a few cases -- all of which are out of the ordinary -- incumbents have had to fight to win their primaries, and some have failed to do so.