Harry Potter and narrative

Article from Michael Berube on how Harry Potter has helped his kid (who has Down's Syndrome) to understand narrative. (pdf) Some interesting reflections on the orphan/dead father factor, as well as on why we as people tell stories.

Could also assign this early on with Gilgamesh - some of the themes are similar: "we tell stories partially because we know we are going to die." (Reference here to Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 1967)

Another reference to check out: EM Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927), which states something along the lines of: "'The King died and then the queen died.' is a story. 'The King died and then the Queen died of grief.' is a plot."

from military mouthpiece to Al Jazeera correspondant

This guy's got his propaganda bases covered! j/k -- the point is that Al Jazeera may be more of a traditional and legitimate news organization than the current state of the US media.

Another big point is how enmeshed the US military has gotten with Hollywood and the media. They had a $200,000 set for the generals to give briefings from.

As with many other things, the Bush administration broke with tradition and made the military a branch of civilian propaganda. This had not been done before, and had consequences:

[A]s a military spokesperson, you don’t talk about policy. You talk about the way you’re going to conduct an action, not why you’re going to conduct an action. So if someone were to ask me before the war, “Why are you going to invade Iraq?” -- and reporters did -- the only honest answer I could give is, “We’ll invade Iraq if the President orders us to. And we won’t if he doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose our battles.” That way, it’s left to a politician in a suit behind a podium at the White House to explain why they made that decision.

But instead, what we did, we had a Republican operative who was put in charge of our office, displacing a colonel that had started doing media liaison when this Republican operative was about probably five years old. And what this guy knew how to do was run a campaign, and so we were run like a political campaign. And the first step in that political campaign was to sell the product, and that was sell the invasion. So they gave the reasons down to the young troops, guys like me, to go out to reporters and give the reasons we’re going to invade a sovereign nation.

Here’s the problem: the reporters in no way had the latitude to ask someone in uniform a critical question. I mean, on MSNBC their coverage was actually packaged with a banner that said, “Our hearts are with you.” So when I’m the young troop in uniform on screen, and the viewer sees “Our hearts are with you,” do you think the reporter’s going to ask me a critical question? Of course not. But I’m out there giving political answers. I’m out there saying, “We’re going to invade Iraq” -- and this was the real catch: they would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up.

So it was part and parcel of selling the war to the public, using a media it knew would be deferential to uniformed troops. Use the troops as your salesmen, and the media will bend over backwards to be nice to them, even if it means uncritically reporting administration propaganda. As brilliant as it is antidemocratic and evil. And sad.

The Way of the Warrior

Article from the Spectator about how the US military is reinventing its self-image -- not as soldiers, but as "warriors." This is more than a semantic change, it is a change in role and in meaning.

US soldiers were to be pure war-fighters. Achilles was resurrected as the model.

And it has consequences for the place of the military in our society:

The result is that in many Western militaries what anthropologists call the ‘honour group’, those people whose opinion really matters to you, has narrowed dramatically over the past 100 years. Read the letters of American Civil War soldiers, and you find that what counted was what the folks back home thought of them; read the letters of first world war soldiers, and you find that what they harped on about was their sense of duty towards their country. Now what soldiers are primarily concerned with is fitting in with their mates. This helps to explain the conclusion of the report above that a third of soldiers ‘believed torture was acceptable if it helped save the life of a fellow soldier’. Nonsoldiers lie outside the military honour group; as such they are felt to deserve no respect.

This attitude is retrograde, primitive -- at best, the reactionary modernism of fascist warrior bands. It is antithetical to democracy, as the Iliad itself shows. Achilles' rage threatened the social and political fabric of Greek democracy; the poem describes the problem of integrating warriors into a democratic society.

More comments on this from Wolcott, here.

The Plague Generation

Andrew Sullivan writes in the Stranger about how 1996 was a turning point for AIDS - that it was no longer plague, and merely disease. Interesting thoughts about how this affects generations, how gay men today who came of age in the late 90s are disconnected from the AIDS-as-plague experience. The paragraph that caught my eye:

I meet young gay guys today and they don't know what it's like to watch your best friend pound the floor with his fist in agony because the pain won't stop; to pick up a buddy off the carpet when you drop by after work, and see his brittle bones covered in fresh gray diarrhea; to see a friend wake up one day and be unable to tie his shoelaces because toxoplasmosis had eaten half his brain away; to have your shirt cuff brush past a friend's skin and have him scream in agony because of neuropathy; to dance on a disco floor next to a rail-thin guy covered in KS lesions who knows this is the last time he'll dance to anything; to open up the local gay rag and find 10 pages of obits where the real estate ads now sit; to hear a friend speak of watching as a needle is pushed into his open eyeball to alleviate the threat of CMV; to see your date consume two handfuls of toxic drugs twice a day to do something about a virus that would nevertheless kill him at the age of 29; to hear of couples torn apart and bereaved lovers thrown out of their homes because their in-laws hate them and their husbands just died; to scan the eyes of a doctor to see if he's lying to you about your prognosis; to catch the face of an old man on the street and realize seconds later that he was a friend who looked 25 only a few months before; to attend more funeral services than happy hours; to feel shame because of an illness; and to endure sickness knowing that there is no end or future except pain and death.

And it's true. We really don't. This could be useful during the Black Plague week in first semester. If AIDS was that traumatic over the course of 15 years, among one urban subculture, then think about what a recurring pandemic across all sectors of society would do to a culture.

maps and democracy

Maps have always been elitist and controlling. But now thanks to google, peoples around the world can fill in Conrad's "white spaces" with their own information, rather than waiting for the (colonial? imperial? elitist?) mapmakers to do it for them. AS comments on this development here, citing a Wired story here.

Assign this!

Perfect new book for the second semester: "The Global Cold War". Table of Contents:

Introduction
1. The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions
2. The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions
3. The revolutionaries: anti-colonial politics and transformations
4. Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution
5. The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges
6. The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa
7. The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn
8. The Islamist defiance
9. The 1980s: the Reagan offensive
10. The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War
Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse.

Concerning Hobbits

More debate (via Panda's Thumb) on what exactly the deal was with Homo floresiensis - aka, the Hobbits discovered in Malaysia. Are they a different species, or just microcephalic humans (humans with small brain sizes)?

Professor Colin Groves of the Australian National University thinks the former, and has a 7-part YouTube series on the details. (Part 1 here) Panda's Thumb reports from a conference on the subject that the microcephalic theory seems to be failing, and most paleontologists are starting to come around to the separate species view.

internal war over Cheney story

I wasn't the only one to notice how some paragraphs in that Cheney story don't match up.

Laura Rozen relays some comments from a newspaper editor friend. The gist:

A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite....

That in turn suggests that this piece has been ready to run for some time. Insertions like the one about the veep's office not being part of the executive branch and seriatim "softenings" show that jamming it into the paper at the end of June, when only cats and the homeless are around the read the paper, was made at the last minute.

in the beginning, there was labor...

Also from Digby (in Update 2 to this post), the Engels article "The Party Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man", 1876. (available at Marxists.org, here)

Good for use either in early man section 1st semester, or in labor unit in 2nd semester.

Bush vs Osama

No, not in a fight you silly person. Bush doesn't care about finding Osama. But aren't they just the greatest pair of ideological soul mates? Digby mashups two speeches from the boys to show how similar their rhetoric can be.

"I have helped to create a truly fascist organization"

Came across this old gem of antigay literature -- a supposed quote from an Eric Pollard, claiming to have helped found ACT UP /DC and that it was all motivated by their reading of Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda/brownshirt tactics.

This quote has always bothered me. Would be worth looking into its accuracy... in the service of that here are some links to save for future use:

ACT UP wikipedia page
(general info on history of the group)

ACT UP Oral History Project
(currently no mention of Pollard; would be good source for those involved in DC chapter)

Traditional Values Coalition pamphlet using the quote at issue:

Eric M. Pollard, a founder of ACT UP/D.C., says that ACT UP's philosophy was built upon the writings of Hitler in Mein Kampf. Pollard admitted this in an unusually candid article in the Washington Blade on January 31, 1991.

The Annotated Pink Swastika
(PS is the source cited when antigay pamphleteers use the quote. no comment from the annotator on the passage itself, which is in "The Cauldron Begins to Boil", p169 of the original book.)

Otherwise, it's a circular firing squad of attribution, which usually ends up at Lively/Abrams.

Goals for future research:

• contact Blade, get copy of paper for Jan 31, 1991 and 1992
• contact reporter of that story, or if "First Person" the editor who ran it
  
• contact ACT UP Oral History project for information about DC chapter - is Pollard real? any independent confirmation of his story, or aspects of it? Possible that the site is New York only... if so, any equivalent for DC?
  

Cheney in Charge

Turns out Cheney's been running the show all along. Big time. Not that the idea is exactly news, but this WaPo series (Chapter 1) has some great details on just how that played out. Nut graf:

Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.

Some highlights at Sadly, No! include how Cheney basically wrote executive and military orders himself (with his own secretive staff) and then gave them over to Bush to sign, with nobody else even allowed to see what they were. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice found out that all captured "terrorists" would be stripped of legal rights -- by seeing the announcement on CNN. Powell's reaction: "What the hell just happened?" When Ashcroft - whose Justice Department was cut out of decisions regarding who got what kind of treatment - tried to meet with Bush to complain, it was Cheney at the conference table instead. Ashcroft was never able to get a meeting with Bush on this subject.

The Post tries to minimize that Cheney is a "shadow president" -- they want the buck to stop with Bush. After all, if Cheney wasn't doing what Bush wanted, Bush would check his power. But we have to understand the limits of Bush's actual decision-making power when, as so well documented in this story, all his information and advice are vetted through Cheney first. As the Post put it:

Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.

Additionally, Cheney is far more involved in the daily and detailed workings of Cabinets and other agencies than Bush:

Other recent vice presidents have enjoyed a standing invitation to join the president at "policy time." But Cheney's interventions have also come in the president's absence, at Cabinet and sub-Cabinet levels where his predecessors were seldom seen. He found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down," a phrase that recurs often in interviews with current and former aides.

So Cheney not only overshadows Bush during their joint briefings, he "reaches down" to make sure the sub-levels are operating the way he wants. Like with the creation of the Office of Special Plans -- he wasn't satisfied with how the intelligence agencies were operating so he created his own.

If that's the case, then Bush really has little independence at all.

Interestingly, Cheney himself warned against the type of secrecy and manipulation he now practices. In interviews and speeches before 2000, he cautioned that all decisions had to be made with open information flow, because that protects the President from making ill-considered choices. You don't want policy to be made as 'oh, by the way.' As he said at a 1999 conference of White House historians:

"The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical. It has to be managed in such a way that it has integrity."

He knew this, and once he became VP abused it for his own power.

The final example of the detainee memo (the "Gonzales memo" as it came to be known) illustrates all this in horrifying detail. Cheney used his position not only to secure the result he wanted, but to further estrange from influence people not under his control, specifically Powell and his allies at State. It's a very scary thing to contemplate, how he was able to have so much influence so secretively. We may never find out much of what he did or how, given his thus-far successful resistance to any kind of disclosure. Of course, as everyone (even Instapundit, of all people!) is mocking this week, he considers his office not part of the executive branch. So the rules don't apply. This is a scary and evil man.

real life superheroes

Cool thread on the SA forums discussing real-life superheroes/villains:

Eric Prince, founder of Blackwater
Vietnam soldier who was about as unkillable as Ahhnold
the guy who invented the bear suit
etc

Could be useful registry of people for a final 'into the future' lecture at the end of second semester.

the nature of fascism

Via Sadly, No! an essay by AJP Taylor on the nature of fascism, from 1957. Evidently it was a whole series on the -isms. Good reading, possible assignment.

Strange Maps

Title of a blog I newly discovered. Very cool collection of maps historical, fictional, and analytical. Examples include:

The Jirecek line - cultural spheres of Greek and Roman influence

also:
Poland in 12th century
US states as labeled by what country's GDP they match
projected European climate in 2060
first map of "the true north"

"You and your report will be investigated"

Realized I never archived the Hersh story about Tagube's report - the straight dope, so to speak.

raw materials and Soviet collapse

Cool post on the Soviet collapse, tracking various agricultural and raw materials production. Gives good details of the 'long-term structural flaws of the Soviet system' I'm always talking about. As well as some good glimpses into the Politburo mentality on how to fix the system (or not, as it turned out).

Rumsfeld and torture

He personally authorized it, or at least explicitly told his subordinates to step it up. In Germany they called it "Working toward the Fuehrer..."

More on Rummy and torture, and the Tagube report, from Andrew Sullivan. Who as usual is all over this stuff - check his posts for a few days surrounding these dates. He links to an online collection of documents concerning interrogation here.

80,000 year old beads

New find: old beads in Morocco that put first signs of culture at all three points of the homo sapiens triangle circa 100k ya. (This in Morocco; we also have for Israel and S.Africa. Europe around 35,000 ya.)

(Article itself is actually not that great... short, plus uses the weasel "some say" a lot.)

The Commissar Vanishes

Cool site from the Newseum with a bunch of different examples of Soviet photo editing. Mostly Trotsky of course. Somewhat marred by the use of present tense... makes it read like a freshman paper. But oh well, the photos are good.

Last paragraph has some ideas on a thing I've wondered: why the doctoring is sometimes so obvious:

Why do the communists do such a rough job retouching Soviet books and journals? Did they hope such eliminations will be noticed, and thus send an ominous warning?

Hmmm, could be!

Gestpo defense of "enhanced interrogation"

AS provides material from the Nuremberg trials regarding the Gestapo's views on, and defense of verschaerfte Vernehmung.

for comparison's sake...

...the GI guide to Iraq, 2003 edition. Thanks, Wired!

dealing with ideology in the classroom

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber muses on Michael Berube's latest book on the Horowitz problem. Includes a discussion of three kinds of conservatives that come up in the classroom (briefly: obstinate ones who seek not to be confronted, dishonest partisan manipulators, and intellectually honest thinkers).

Also includes thoughts on Weber's Politics as a Vocation, and some thoughts on the differences between a professor and a politician. Put simply:

The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly.

vs the politician:

The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

There is a difference between the way these two worlds look at debate. Here Henry puts some good words to a problem I've experienced firsthand when debating friends with political jobs. It is not just about expressing yourself, but in exploring which aspects of your views are flawed. Not in trying to cover them up or distract from their flaws, but to expose their flaws to your own analysis. Politics avoids that altogether, understandably so.

The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

Very interesting!

And to make a point directly to Horowitz and those of his ilk:

His main line of attack is that of the standard political hack, concocting a farrago of innuendoes, half-truths and out-and-out lies in order to beat down those whom he sees as his political opponents. However, when he’s attacked in the same terms as those he himself engages in, he’s perfectly happy to appeal to academic norms of reasoned debate in order to accuse his accusers of themselves being politicized.

This is something that's annoyed me about the current incarnation of conservatism -- they don't believe in politeness, diversity, respect for others.... except that they've learned to use these as cudgels against people who do believe in them!

Bonus: a commentator links Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance from 1965.

Here be links

Via Obsidian Wings, two papers on piracy. D'ARRR!! They seem to be a combination of history and economic (rational choice) theory. May be useful to beef up the pirate lecture.

An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization
Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices

Both by Peter Leeson of GMU.

wow!

People with a History -- fucking fantastic.

People with a History presents the history of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people [=LGBT]. It includes hundreds of original texts, discussions, and [soon] images, and addresses LGBT history in all periods, and in all regions of the world.

This will be a gold mine for primary and secondary sources.

Bollywood in Africa

Andrew Leonard posts at Salon about the growing popularity of Indian films in Africa, where postcolonial themes resonate:

The style of the movies and plots deal with the problem of how to modernize while preserving traditional values -- not usually a narrative theme in a Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Spielberg movie. Characters choose between wearing Indian or Western-style clothes; following religious or secular values; living with the masses or in rich, western style bungalows. Women often decide whether they should speak shyly to their lover or stand up, look him in the face and declare their love forcefully. Male stars are often presented with the choice between a "traditional" lover, who respects family and dresses modestly, and a modern woman who lives a rich, fast, life hanging around discos and hotels. The use of English by arrogant upper-class characters or by imperious bureaucrats; and even the endemic corruption of police and state officials, all present familiar situations for postcolonial Indian and African viewers.

Original article, "Bollywood Comes to Nigeria" here. (Samar, 1997)

Could be useful reading for a postcolonial discussion week, in combination with one or two films that demonstrate the above traits.

Everything was better when you were twelve

Cyclical history in Tom the Dancing Bug.

GI guide to Iraq...

...from 1943!

Pdf here.
Hat Tip: Wired

homobomb confirmed!

This had come up a while ago, but it's back in the news now that the Pentagon has confirmed it once sought a bomb to turn opposing soldiers gay... in 1994! And we wonder why they resist gay soldiers?

I wonder if I'd seen this first at Pandagon - one of whose posters chronicles her past posts about the subject (including a 'halitosis bomb' -- wtf were these guys smoking?) here. Or maybe BBC, who reported on this in 2005 here.

history of engagement rings

Evidently they boomed right after the time women could no longer sue for "breach of promise to marry". (in the 1930s) And so, since women's valuable commodity of being a virgin needed some kind of financial protection in such breaches, the engagement ring was born! (via Pandagon, original article in Slate)

Southern civility

FDL:

Last Thursday, a Republican punched a Democrat on the floor of the Alabama Senate:

Video.

Now it’s wrong to say that this sort of thing only happens in the South; but it is right to say that for America, its origin as a tendency is Southern. Punching someone instead of arguing with them — the instinct to use violence as the first, best answer to a threat not just against one’s person, but against one’s position or “honor”, is something very old, enduring, and ingrained in Southern culture.

“Violence as the first resort” is a basic part of Southern identity and tradition. There’s an old study of Southern psychology, The Mind of the South by W.J. Cash that, whatever its other faults, describes the tendency very well....

Goes on to talk about the southern sense of honor, social/racial hierarchy, first resort to violence as defense of honor. Good stuff.

more on black site report

Hilzoy has some good commentary on the recent reoprt on black sites. Especially interesting is his comment on why we chose Poland and Romania -- their legal systems are less developed, more easily manipulated. And even at this, the leaders of those countries who cut deals with us on black sites most likely acted illegally. But we would prefer them breaking their laws to us breaking ours.

And so we come to the ironic conclusion that our "democracy-promoting" actions have weakened the rule of law in Europe as well as the middle east.

How "24" destroys democracy

Good post from Digby (who cites FDL in his opening links) about a Heritage Foundation conference venerating 24 -- since it's popular, we can torture. Add another weight to the nipple clamps on Lady Liberty!

Verschaerfte Vernehmung in Europe

Andrew Sullivan post, on what we've done in Europe under this administration.

sick and wrong

video of American soldiers in Iraq taunting kids with bottles of clean water. one to pair with the "Humvee Traffic Driving in Baghdad"

Now let's get out there and win those hearts and minds!!

Olbermann: The Nexus of Politics and Terror

Timeline of how every half-baked terror plot that is "revealed" to great hype in the media comes at a time when the Bush administration wants to distract from a scandal or its own unpopularity. Crooks and Liars has the two part video here.

Republicans or Communists?

Hard to tell anymore -- Sullivan links a 1956 report from The Annals of Neurology and Psychology on Soviet torture methods. (NYT story on it)

economics of the AK

Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles, (pdf) by Oxford economist Phillip Killicoat, in the trendy 'freakonomics' mode.

Also discusses why the AK is the weapon of choice for revolutionaries around the world. (Soviet did not defend its copyright, so it could me mass-pirated; then path dependency) A to the motherfuckin K, homeboy! A to the motherfuckin K!

(Hat Tip: ALeonard's blog at Salon)

trouble at the "residential facility"

Broadsheet links: Conditions at the Hutton Concentration Camp Residential Facility not so good. Case of 'inappropriate relationship' between guard and inmate. Speculation that it was really an assault that is being called something less embarrassing (though still illegal - felony in Texas).