From Fashion to Foucault.

If I were to continue writing about fashion, I suppose I would have to bring in Roland Barthes as opposed to Michel Foucault, since Barthes' work, especially Mythologies, would be so useful. However, I'm not really following that thread, preferring right now to stumble very very slowly through Foucault's lectures from 1976, Society Must Be Defended. In his 21 January 1976 lecture, Foucault asserts that in the investigation of sovereignty he'd prefer to investigate the "operators of domination," and that

We should not, therefore, be asking subjects how, why, and by what right they can agree to being subjugated, but showing how actual relations of subjugation manufacture subjects. [45]

So his analysis of sovereignty is going to have little to do with things like compacts, charters, constitutions, etc. -- or at least as we consciously perceive them -- and more to do with the role of power relations in creating subjects. To that extent, there's a remarkable similarity to Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, though Foucault is quick to criticize the totalizing aspect of Althusser's theory ("I think we can analyze them effectively only if we do not see them as an overall unity, only if we do not try to derive them from something like the Statist unity of sovereignty" [45]. -- a pretty clear critique of the Althusserian ISA).


Working backward, we can also attribute Foucault's methodology to Marx's famous dictum from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." However, Foucault would still see the prevailing Marxist interpretations of culture as too totalizing, as he preferred the play of systems against one another and the power relations that came out of competing systems, or as by-products of those systems -- or I suppose more to the point, the interplay of forces that throught their interplay create systems. In the end, though, I don't see much difference, because his mapping out of the regimes of surveillance, from the panopticon to the clinic, could all contribute to the logic of capitalism -- as opposed to the logic of the ruling class.


Anyway, before I get too far afield, Foucault takes "sovereignty" as his ostensible topic, but the exploration of sovereignty, while interesting in itself, also moves him toward a more general goal of establishing historical discourse as a battlefield: historical interpretation, historical representation, inclusion or exclusion as "world historical" are the ground where an eternal war is fought and never completely won or lost.

Perhaps that sounds simple, and maybe it is. Nietzsche more or less argues the same thing in the 19th century, but Foucault is making a much more sustained analysis than Nietzsche ever did, and in the end his point isn't simply that historical discourse is the location of interpretive battles, but also that it can only be so. There is no fixed finality. The battle is never ever over.

Time for a Rhee-Call.

Continuing her efforts to destroy public education in the District as quickly as possible, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has pulled the rug out from under students and teachers district-wide by cancelling the contract DCPS had with Teachers Institute to implement and provide continuous training for the Columbia University Reading and Writing Workshop.

Her ostensible reason is that the contract was not competetively bid and was not written up properly. Perhaps that's true, and Teachers Institute founder Sheila Ford seems like a bit of scoundrel -- OK, make that a full-fledged scoundrel -- by securing funding from DCPS for Teachers Institute before she resigned her DCPS principal's job, but the program itself is incredible. My son has had the opportunity to work with this program all year and I was extremely satisfied with the progress he made and the materials and methods used in the process.

One of the concepts behind the Columbia Reading and Writing Workshop is that teachers receive ongoing training in teaching reading and writing, and many DCPS teachers will tell you that previous to programs like this one, they have received little or no instructional training from DCPS. Another concept behind the program is differentiated learning, allowing students to move through "leveled libraries" as they progress in their abilities.

I'm disgusted by this action on Rhee's part. She seems to have no regard for student learning or the stability of learning communities that are working -- and from what I've seen, the reading and writing instruction in DCPS is far better under this program begun under Clifford Janey than in previous years.

I won't be surprised to find in a month or two that Rhee has identified a new partner to continue the program...perhaps an organization headed up by one of her old cronies. After all, she's been working hard to put her version of the "old boy network" in place throughout DCPS -- qualifications be damned, you'd better be a friend.

Delusions of Grandeur.

Our idiot king is at it again, playing dress-up in his mind as he seeks a way to absolve himself from the guilt of killings thousands of civilians and costing over 4000 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen their lives for his vanity play in Iraq.

Bush seeks to put himself in a pantheon of heroic figures, despite all signs to the contrary. The Post send-up is mocking, which I'm sure will raise the ire of the right wing, but I've got my own problems with the Post, beginning with their pandering story about New Orleans' charter school smoke and mirrors show (but I don't have time right now to talk about that...). Anyway, the Post's Dan Eggen describes Bush's grasping at historical straws this way:

He's in Poland in 1939 as Nazi tanks advance on Warsaw, then flying with his Navy-pilot father to battle imperial Japan. He's alongside Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, William McKinley on his deathbed and Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day. He lingers with Harry S. Truman, another U.S. president deeply unpopular in his time.

Indeed. Bush is looking for ways to excuse his poor performance in office, so he's running here and there, taking a little of this and a little of that, trying to show he's not a sham (oh, man, the parallels to the New Orleans charter school story are scary...). The main problem, though, is that his anecdotes are so pathetic. Check this one out, in which he tries to draw some parallel to fighting the Japanese in World War II and being allies with them today:

He talked about the World War II service of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, and how the elder Bush fought against a nation, Japan, that is now a key U.S. ally. Referring to the 1940s, President Bush said: "If you'd have thought an American president would stand up and say, 'My close buddy in dealing with the threats to our countries would be the prime minister of Japan,' they'd say, 'Man, you're nuts, hopelessly idealistic.' . . . I have found that to be one of the ironic twists of history."

And what point does that prove, other than the fact that George Bush doesn't know much about history? In its short history, the United States has fought wars against England, Spain, Mexico, Germany, Italy, and Japan (plus some others). You'd be hard pressed to find any of these countries missing from a "US Allies" list. Only a moron who assumes static relations of power and interests would be amazed. The fact that Bush majored in history at Yale should call into question the scholarly credentials of Yale, by the way.

Of course, beyond being simply an example of Bush not understanding history or politics, the above example also shows that his specific mission of recuperating his failures through appeal to historical record are, well, Forrest Gumpian at best. Who is this historical figure who claimed that in the future the US and Japan would be close allies? Oh...it's speculative...I get it.

Except it isn't. There was a concerted effort at top government levels to re-create Germany and Japan as allies because we were already turning our eyes toward containing the Soviet Union. So it's hardly "nuts, hopelessly idealistic" as Bush would have it, for a figure in the 1940's to suggest that enemies could be turned to allies, especially since that was the ostensible goal of the postwar rebuilding plans the US spearheaded. The response of historians to Bush's attempted hijackings has been relatively critical:

Some historians are particularly critical of Bush's frequent references to Truman, who had an even lower approval rating than Bush amid opposition to the Korean War. They say Truman's place in history is elevated by his roles in leading the victory in World War II, creating institutions such as the United Nations and implementing the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe.

Bush on the other hand seems more interested in failing in Iraq and Afghanistan, crippling the United Nations, and destroying rather than rebuilding nations.

Bush's legacy, I'm afraid, will be closer to that of Buchanan or Harding than to any other whose name resonates with history's approval. If Bush is lucky, he could hope for the partial recuperation that finally awaited the disgraced Richard Nixon, but I see nothing even remotely akin to Nixon's overtures to China in Bush's repertoire.

See the Phillips Collection Free on Saturday and Sunday.

The Phillips Collection -- one of those museums in DC you generally have to pay to see -- is opening its doors this weekend for a "Jacob Lawrence Family Free Festival" that will include great activities including a children's shadow puppetry re-enactment of Lawrence's Migration Series.

You can see the entire Migration Series -- which is normally split evenly between the Phillips and MOMA assembled in one place until October 26th...then they'll most likely be split up again or maybe they'll go somewhere else...MOMA doesn't list a Lawrence exhibit in its upcoming shows, so I don't know...

Here's what the Phillips Collection says about the Family Free Festival:

Jacob Lawrence Family Free Festival The museum will be filled with activities and entertainment during a weekend-long celebration of Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series, including shadow-puppetry, interactive dance performances by The DanceFusion Jazz Project, a Lawrence-inspired play written and acted byMississippi students, 1940s jazz performed by The Potomac Jazz Project, collage making, gallery tours, and films.

Dying by degrees.

Listen up, kids, and I'm going to show you how democracy disappears little by little in increments so small you don't realize it's gone until it's too late.


The D.C. Council is going to be entertaining a bill that's supposedly about "homeland security." It's currently scheduled for Monday, 14 July 2008, 10:00 am, in the Council Chamber, Room 500, and the Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary will be holding the hearing on"Freedom of Information Homeland Security Amendment Act of 2007", Bill17-0355.


Very dry, right. Of course, the title is a bit of a giveaway, what with the "Freedom of Information" bit. That would be related to FOIA and various sunshine laws enacted to keep governments from hiding their dirt from the public eye. Well, DC wants to hide that dirt a little more. Ostensibly, the bill would keep "critical infrastructure" safe from FOIA requests. Interestingly enough, public education is included in the "critical infrastructure," which while I'm relieved that DC government finds public education critical, I'm curious as to why information about public education would be covered under homeland security concerns.


Is the mayor afraid the terrorists might learn the lunch menu for next Thursday?


More than likely, this request -- made in the fall of last year -- has something to do with Michelle Rhee's constantly being outfoxed by public watchdogs like Save Our Schools (DC) and Fix Our Schools, two groups that have exposed her sore lack of legal knowledge and lack of desire to be publicly accountable.


So goes the "public" in public education...

This just in: I wrote this post up before I read today's Post about the even more crazy DC Police plan to cordon off neighborhoods and ask for everyone's "papers" for access to the area...does this plan sound a little bit, um, mid-century to anyone else out there?

A post about cars. Or statistics. Or both. Maybe neither.

General Motors is looking to offload that symbol of American arrogance, obliviousness, and stupidity, the Hummer. I suppose that ship has finally sailed, now that the Housing Bust and the Credit Crunch have arrived simultaneously with the end of the Era of Cheap Gas. As always, the Washington Post obfuscates statistics for no apparent purpose other than to make clear comparisons impossible. For example, check out this sparkling paragraph:

North American sales of the Hummer family peaked at 75,939 vehicles in 2006, according to Ward's AutoInfoBank data. The drop since then has been precipitous, no doubt owing to high gas prices and social shaming. This year, only about 3,000 H2s have been sold. (At $4 per gallon, the $57,000 H2's tank costs $128 to fill.)

Let's see...the Hummer family -- which included in 2006 the H1, H2, and H3 -- sold 75,939 vehicles. But in 2008 -- a year currently underway -- one version (the H2) is down to 3K vehicles. So we have the entire line for a year compared to one model for less than half a year. Why make it so convoluted? Why not simply compare the entire line in 2006 to the entire line in 2008? Or extrapolate to say the Hummer line is on pace to sell X units in 2008.

In fact, let's make a word problem of it. If the Hummer family sold 75,939 units in 2006, and the H2 sold 3000 units in 5/12ths of 2008, how many Hummer family units have been sold so far in 2008? Um...who knows. The Post hasn't given enough information to make any sort of statistically interesting comparison. All you can really conclude is that sales are way down, especially since the H1 was discontinued after 2006, so the Hummer family only includes the H2 and H3 in 2008.

But enough of my complaining about the Washington Post's sloppy reporting. At least it's not the Washington Times. Let's celebrate the hopeful demise of one of the most ugly, asinine, wasteful, and shameful penis replacements ever invented.

Have you heard the one about....

I'm normally all for laying it on Dick Cheney, but this inbreeding joke of his is too damn good. Seriously. "I've got Cheneys on both sides of my family, and I'm not even from West Virginia." That's good humor.

I'm thinking that West Virginia needs to stop fighting this image of being inbred hillbillies and to start using it as a marketing tool.

"West Virginia -- We're all family!"

"West Virginia -- Whether you're friends or family, it's all the same!"

It's really a good time for it, what with the too-Mormon-for-regular-Mormons down in Texas getting all the sympathy for the big bad state of Texas taking away their kids (and their wives...it's all the same apparently -- reminds me of Chinatown..."my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter..."), and West Virginia could capitalize on all the excitement generated by cross-generational inbreeding.

The first task, of course, is to jettison the term "inbreeding": it's too fraught with negative connotations. Likewise "incest." These are concerned communities that practice "genetic preservation." You still have to be careful with that term, too, lest you fall into the same connotative school as the white supremacists, because even if the shoe fits, you sure don't want to look proud wearing it.

So how can WV take back the stereotype? How can they own it?