Nobel Peace Price, 2009 vs 1905

Interesting read in HuffPost today from James Bradley (Flags of Our Fathers, and the new The Imperial Cruise), using Obama's Prize receipt yesterday as a bridge to talk about Teddy Roosevelt's long-ago win.

Article has good comments about modernity, Japanese-American affinities in this period:

Roosevelt viewed Asia through strict ideological lenses. One of his theories was that the Chinese and Koreans were declining "impotent" races. In contrast, Roosevelt believed that the Japanese were a rising "potent" race, "a wonderful and civilized people ... entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world." About the Russians, Roosevelt wrote, "No human beings, black, yellow or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant -- in short, as untrustworthy in every way -- as the Russians."

By supporting Japan, Roosevelt believed he was championing America's long-term interests in North Asia. When the Japanese military ignited the Russo-Japanese War with a surprise attack (which would resemble their later attack on Pearl Harbor) on the Russian navy at Port Arthur without a declaration of war, the Russians naturally condemned the action as a shameful violation of international norms. Not so Roosevelt, who wrote privately to his son, "I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game."

The crux of much of the article is that TR was actually working with Japan throughout the negotiations - and therefore kind of scummy, if you think about it. Even worse, actually criminal and impeachable:

Three weeks later in a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, Roosevelt approved the Japanese takeover of Korea and agreed to "an understanding or alliance . . . among Japan, the United States and Great Britain . . . as if a treaty had been signed." The "as if" was key, because by making this secret treaty without Senate approval, Roosevelt was committing an unconstitutional act.

Bradley says TR encouraged the Japanese to think in Monroe Doctrine terms about Asia. Wonder how that turned out?

Article would make good link in 002, 132.

The Left at War

Tapped has a review of Berube's new book, The Left at War. Review begins with the closure of the Birmingham School:

In June of 2002, a British university dissolved one of its smaller departments. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was shuttered, and students eager to research the culture of soccer hooliganism or the effect of teen-rag advice columns on adolescents' burgeoning sexuality were effectively cast adrift. Officials at the University of Birmingham cited low marks on research evaluations as reason for the closure. The centre's defenders cried foul, speculating it was punishment for the department's history of radicalism. Nine months later, the United States would lead an invasion of Iraq, setting in motion a war still not over. Could the prevention of the former have helped stop the latter -- save the cultural theorists, save the world?

Liberal blogger and "dangerous" academic Michael Bérubé would like us to at least consider it. In The Left at War, Bérubé links progressives' inability to control the conversation on national security during the Bush administration to cultural studies' failure to deliver on its promise of a vibrant New Left. And in the process, he also tries to imagine a newer and better one -- a left that both knows what is worth fighting for and how to fight for it.

Possible good last reading for CP, since it gets to some of the problems with cultural studies, and the possibility of creating anything in the real world.

Professionalism and PhDs

Ugh. Great article though. Louis Menand in Harvard Magazine: "The PhD Problem. On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy's self-renewal."

The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well.

Very interesting observation that CP kids would really like this - systems of knowledge, power-knowledge, its production, and the like.

Crusades

Final link of the morning: Harper's scaring the shit out of me with another analysis of the Christianization of the military. The most horrifying example in this story lends it its title: "Jesus Killed Mohammad" -- taken from an incident when these young fucks thought it would be hilarious to paint that on the front of their Bradley, then ride through the holy city of Samara yelling that from their bullhorns. Both print and voice in Arabic, so the people would know they're being insulted and provoked. And what do you know, a massive battle begins against "a city full of terrorists." It's just too depressing.

signposts

Acephalous writes with sarcastic hilarity about signposting. ("In what follows I will write about signposts.") Might be good for students to see - but they might also miss the point. Hopefully though the end would make it clear:

In the previous paragraphs I have defended the usefulness of the signpost in academic prose. The inclusion of that headline demonstrates that signposts are both useful and awesome. Now I will transition to the conclusion of this post by telling you that I am transitioning to the conclusion of this post.

And here I am at the conclusion like I told you I would be. In this conclusion I will recapitulate what I have I already proven in the paragraphs above. The words I wrote in the above paragraphs prove that people who use signposts are perverse old chestnuts who are so hot shit they can include articles about whores in anything they write and that they are awesome. I will now conclude my conclusion with the period I place at the end of this sentence.

Over the top! But might be good to show them that they need to combine signposting with real content - it's a mix.

Remember remember 11 November

LGM argues that 11/11 shouldn't just be a day for veterans, but for WWI. But that will never happen.

Uses the post as an excuse to link Robert Bourne's 1918 essay that gave us the famous quote "War is the health of the state." I had not read that in a long time - would make a fantastic pairing with Weber for week 2 of CP.

The gist: In republics, the state fades - or at least we think that it does. In reality it lies dormant waiting for war to allow it to take over again.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

LGM commentary reminds us of Bourne's own situation when he wrote this - destitute, because he was driven from opinion journalism by the Wilsonian insanity of WWI.

1989: End or Beginning?

Financial Times: "Victory in the Cold War was a Start as well as an Ending."

Anniversaries are a good time for taking stock. The collapse of Soviet communism was a glorious moment. It remains so, despite mistakes and disappointments along the way. But today’s crisis tells us of the failings of a euphoric capitalism. Capitalism will not now perish, as communism did. But the signal ability of liberal democracy is to learn and adapt. We learnt from the 1930s. We must now learn the lessons of the 2000s.

Good assignment for the final WC week, when matched to other thoughts about periodization.

Multicause!

Too many reasons that this happened. From TampaBay.com:

TAMPA — Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe approached him.

That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis, speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.

What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a terrorist.

Police say Bruce offered several reasons to explain his actions:

The man tried to rob him.

The man grabbed Bruce's crotch and made an overt sexual advance in perfect English.

The man yelled "Allahu Akbar," Arabic for "God is great," the same words some witnesses said the Fort Hood shooting suspect uttered last week.

"That's what they tell you right before they blow you up," police say Bruce told them.

So he may be gay, have roid rage, and be worked up by right-wing rhetoric in the wake of Ft. Hood.

feminism, gender, masculinity, etc

TAP gives a double dose of gender this morning, dovetailing nicely with Joan Scott et al for today's class.

First up: "What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?", with descriptions of cute activist college kids trying to brainstorm alternative masculinities. Makes the good point that most feminist masculinities have so far defined themselves negatively, and not offered programs of their own.

While it's thrilling that there is also a movement of young men all who want to tear down the patriarchy right alongside women, it's dangerous that they don't have a clear picture of what they want to build in its place. At the conference, one young man spoke up against the notion of a new "feminist masculinity," explaining that he feared it would be one more box that young men felt they had to fit into. There's a lot of validity to his argument, but I fear that the old adage is true: We can't be what we can't see. Models help us try on various identities and find one that is truly authentic. The more publicly feminist-aligned men we have, the more opportunities the next generation has to find a positive, masculine gender identity that actually fits.

Many young men, it seems, are stuck in stage one of gender consciousness. They want to prove that they are one of the "good ones" and separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive. That, or they wallow in guilt. (This is not unlike the stage many white kids get stuck in upon fully realizing their role in perpetuating racism.) At worst, this point of view is paralyzing. At best, it leads to burnout. It's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable.

Also a story about Kathleen Parker ("Constant Comment: How Kathleen Parker became America's most-read woman columnist"), which points out some ironies in her rise. First, it tracks all the traditional gender stuff she's put out over the years - a very strong theme in her work. Then, the story presents her deviation from other aspects of Republican orthodoxy. Yet she took off because she fit the "Republican woman" checkbox - and because her strong position on traditional gender was enough to trump:

One would be hard-pressed under these circumstances to label Parker a loyal Republican. Indeed, she maintains that she is not and has never registered as such. It was in 1995, when Parker's column was picked up for syndication, that she became a designated voice of the right. "The way the market is set up," Parker says, "there has to be a left, there has to be a right, there has to be a conservative, there has to be a liberal, there has to be a man, a woman, a black, an Asian. Blah blah blah blah."

This political packaging came as a surprise to some. About six years ago, Keyes, Parker's former editor, was managing editor of a paper in Hawaii and searching for a right-leaning columnist to round off the op-ed page. "I called a friend of mine who's an editorial-page editor and said, 'I'm looking for a good conservative columnist,'" Keyes says. "And this person said, 'Oh, Kathleen Parker!' I said, 'What?' I thought, 'Oh, that must be another Kathleen Parker.'"

But Parker's focus on traditional gender roles and impatience with political correctness were enough to sell her as a conservative in a market where a right-leaning woman was an appropriately diversifying oddity. (Which is not to say being a woman was an advantage. "When my syndicate tried to sell me," Parker recalls, "they often heard: 'We don't need Parker, we have [Ellen] Goodman.' Meaning, we already have a woman.")

And it was as a nominal conservative, not as a Palin-bashing would-be liberal, that The Washington Post hired her -- just weeks before she wrote the column advising the vice-presidential nominee to step down.

Goes to show how central traditional gender concepts are to the whole array of rightist politics - even when she deviates in other areas, she covers herself through traditional gender. (Not that she is as crassly opportunistic as that phrasing implies - she writes her thoughts, and others place her work in the larger politico-social gender framework.)

Nazi history of HH

From book blog "Tatty Jackets". Doesn't give the title unfortunately. His translation of an interesting passage:

The historical development of our city could easily create the impression that Hamburg had placed her own interests over those of Germany. However, we must not overlook the fact that it was only through this political independence that the Hamburg’s inner strength of purpose, enterprising courage, tenacity in the face of set-backs, and flexibility in the conquering of new markets could develop, and could blossom among Germany’s ranks. The successful utilisation of these qualities for the city simultaneous meant service to the interests of Germany; Hamburg’s profile in the world was Germany’s vindication, Hamburg’s economy was the German economy. The fact that Hamburg, despite all her international connections and despite the various points of contact with foreign ways and customs, remained truly German at heart, is proven by the inscription on the memorial columns in Adolf Hitler Square: “40 000 sons of this city gave up their lives for you!” (p.62-3)

Has original German too. Would be nice to get a real copy and check it out.

come on, IL

Illinois English teacher suspended for assigning his students an article from Seed Magazine -- "The Gay Animal Kingdom," which describes homosexuality in animal species. The problem (besides just the fact that it's downstate Illinois), is that the article starts out really... sexy:

Male big horn sheep live in what are often called “homosexual societies.” They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males “effeminate.”

Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in “penis fencing,” which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.

So some parents freaked, and he is now suspended (with pay). Article on the story from Psychology Today has some good summaries of the state of play regarding homo- and heterosexuality. Apparently this teacher is straight, but very into showing his students how heteronormativity works. Can't have that!

the latest from The Family

Rep. Bart Sustak is trying to make the Dems choose: abortion rights or health care. From a Kos diary ("Health Care in House Held Hostage by 'Christian Mafia' member"):

Stupak has threatened to block the House health care bill unless he can add an amendment that according to a Media Matters report would restrict, perhaps dramatically, the availability of abortion services in the US - which according to the Guttmacher Institute are currently unavailable in 87% of US counties. As one Daily Kos member put it, "If this [Stupak's amendment] goes through, then ANY clinic who takes funds from the public option will be prohibited from performing abortions even if they are privately paid for..."

So, Bart Stupak is holding health care hostage to his agenda of further restricting access to abortion services. Mafia imagery is very appropriate here :

Stupak is a member of "The Family" whose members sometimes refer jokingly to their shadowy, cultic influence peddling group as a "mafia". Representative Stupak lives in the rent-subsidized "C Street House" that's registered as a church, which became notorious over the summer when three Republicans associated with the C Street House became embroiled in sex scandals.

They pretty much are a mafia, and if not certainly spooky quasi-fascist cult. According to a story in Harper's, which the above diary linked ("Jesus plus nothing: Undercover Among America's Secret Theocrats"):

The brothers of Ivanwald are the Family's next generation, its high priests in training. I had been recommended for membership by a banker acquaintance, a recent Ivanwald alumnus, who had mistaken my interest in Jesus for belief. Sometimes the brothers would ask me why I was there. They knew that I was “half Jewish,” that I was a writer, and that I was from New York City, which most of them considered to be only slightly less wicked than Baghdad or Amsterdam. I told my brothers that I was there to meet Jesus, and I was: the new ruling Jesus, whose ways are secret.

A good "thick description" maybe. His book, The Family is available. Scary stuff.

grammar police!

Good for a writing week attachment. From Salon: "Memo to Grammar cops: Back off! A new book on the history of proper English says you're just stuck up."

According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing -- and, especially, the growth of general literacy -- led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as "the 18th-century grammarians" have, in some accounts of the language's history, been set up as "dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons," who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.

Will work great for history courses especially - the linguistic forms I'm imposing on them have specific origins.

The Rise of Gingrich

Digby points out a Frontline story about Gingrich:

I think people should read this piece about the rise of Gingrich. He was a malevolent figure whose political philosophy nearly destroyed this country. But he changed the course of history, and dominated American politics for more than a decade by being brash enough to go at the power structure --- and winning. His is a classic case of someone moving the Overton Window.

From the story itself (Vanity Fair, 1989):

Gingrich... has been practicing what he calls "confrontational activism," a standard theme of which is the defeatist psychology of the Soviet-appeasing Chamberlains on the other side of the aisle.

But even this is not why Newt Gingrich stands at center stage in the political theater just now. To many in Washington, both those who admire and those who loathe the Georgia representative, Newt Gingrich is the future of American politics, arrived; a hope, or a nightmare, come true.

And of course that came even more true once he took over in 94. A useful pairing with the GOPAC memos and other Overton type readings for political culture classes.

Rand reviews

Some reviews of the new Ayn Rand bios, one of which I'm thinking of assigning next semester. If I do, these links might be useful to contextualize her present-day popularity.

First up, Andrew Leonard presents "Scary Fantasy Alert", which relays a hagiographic book review from Bloomberg news. The reporter tries to show Rand's relevance as a consequence of her ficitonal world coming true. An obvious crock. Leonard:

The idea that Ayn Rand's renewed popularity is a result of some kind of life-imitates-art recapitulation of the themes of her novels is ridiculous. What's really happening is much easier to explain. When world events conspired to destroy the myth that an unregulated free market is the best way to organize society, the true believers retreated into a shell made from their own hardened ideology. That's why Fox News has higher ratings, and Ayn Rand is selling more books -- because fantasy is more appealing than the real world, when the real world is telling you that what you believe is wrong.

And that of course is why fiction was such a better vehicle through which to create and defend this ideology: when refuted by the real world, it can persist in fantasy.

Next, Leonard relays an equally scary fact: that Newsweek hired Mark Stanford to review the two new bios. ("Hiking the Appalachian Trail With Ayn Rand")

Give Newsweek some credit. The magazine's choice of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford to review two recent biographies of Ayn Rand is an inspired act of editorial genius. Lest we forget, before Sanford became famous for (not) hiking the Appalachian Trail, he was much beloved by the Republican base for his (ultimately failed) attempt to reject stimulus money from Washington. That is what "going Galt" is all about. His proud stance bore a clear resemblance to architect Howard Roark's decision in "The Fountainhead" to blow up his own building after dastardly bureaucrats dared alter his design. Mark Sanford -- so committed to limited government he was willing to blow up South Carolina.

Add in to the mix the psychological truth that few Americans are better suited to laud Ayn Rand's cult of the individual than a man who betrayed his responsibilities to an entire state out of an undeniable passion to tango in Argentina, and you've got a clear winner. And since, as my colleague Alex Koppelman observes, no one in South Carolina is paying any attention to what Sanford says or does anymore, the governor obviously had plenty of time to read the two hefty biographies.

fuck freakonomics

HA! Glad to see a takedown... now I have a more eloquent way of explaining what people didn't like hearing as we watched that dumb 20/20 ad job for their new book.

Pandagon: Maybe prostitution isn't so cute.

Ahhhh, there we go. Women may “give away” sex for free, but if you want someone to act like a subservient sexbot, then you have to pay for the pleasure. Wives are so disappointing! They do things like listen to the music they like, or refuse to indulge you when you’re being an asshat. As Allie discovered, the longer she did this, and the more she charged, the more men wanted to go on long dates. Sex wasn’t all she was doing! She was being paid by the hour to pretend that morons were smart, that assholes were delightful, and that weird thing he does is orgasmic. The thrill is less renting someone’s vagina, but buying someone’s submission.

Panda points to Sady Doyle in The Guardian, "Prostitution, for fun and profit." A devastating takedown of the Freakonomics duo.

Freakonomics, of course, is the science of choosing an appropriately wacky or controversial subject (sumo wrestlers, abortion), applying a little economic analysis to it and coming up with a shocking conclusion that will make people blog about you. In that respect, the how-to-charge-for-sex piece was a no-brainer. Expressing any opinion about prostitution will bring on outrage (and attention) from one corner or another, no matter what your opinion turns out to be. Of course, if you are aiming for maximum impact, it helps to be – as Levitt and Dubner are – really, stunningly, remarkably wrong.

Part of the problem is that they base themselves around two prostitutes - a high-end one and a slum one. They become "the Goofus and Gallant of sex work." But their contexts are never described -- one is white, one black. One rich, one poor. Does that have anything to do with it? They don't say.

Hey, here's an interesting thought: Maybe LaSheena doesn't like men because she's trapped in a cycle of poverty, and one of the only ways for her to stay alive is to have sex with men, whether or not she really wants to. Maybe that's enough to make LaSheena dislike men. We'll never know, however, because Dubner and Levitt don't ask. They don't care to humanise her. She's the Goofus in the scenario. Her poverty – which is assumed to be entirely her fault – is only there to provide a counterpoint to Allie's shining example.

And as for Allie:

And as for how much Allie loves to be a prostitute ... well, we don't have her direct testimony, do we? What we have is the word of two best-selling authors, which has been edited into book form. Allie's story is so romanticised that it seems unlikely the authors bore no agenda in their interviews – or that Allie, a woman whose job is to figure out what men want from her, was unaware of it.

It's entirely possible that, faced with a couple of men who very clearly wanted one specific version of her story, she sized them up and did the same thing for them that she did for all her other clients. That is to say, she told them what they wanted to hear.

Da-aaamn. Fuck these two.

capitalist fatigue

Here's a scary reading to pair with the capitalism week: after you finish telling them about horrible hours and working conditions in the last Gilded Age, you can give them this on the current one: Describes how pilots are falling asleep at the wheel, police and doctors and firemen and nurses are all working such long shifts that they are losing it. And people are dying. But that's the logic of capitalism, so too bad!!

You’d think that business might understand that overly tired employees are hurting their bottom line. But times are tough, jobs are scarce, and big business is not in the business of seeing human beings as anything more than interchangeable cogs in a machine to be used and discarded at will. Worker protections hard-won by unions – minimum wages, maximum hours, health and safety on the job – have been systematically dismantled, from Reagan breaking the spirit of air traffic controllers in the 1970s to WalMart breaking the backs of workers not allowed to unionize today. So while I have the greatest sympathy for the growing number of those with no jobs, it’s possibly more critical that we recognize there’s a lethal cancer invading the vast majority of those who do have jobs, as the top 1% of the Have Mores wring more and more blood out of those Americans who actually make things and make things work. And that’s not just making us tired.

It’s making us dead tired.

("Dead Tired," C&L)

origins of "the Villiage"

Greg Sargent at PlumLine : traces the origins of "the Village" or "Villagers" as shorthand for inside-the-beltway media elites. Finds it in a 1998 article by Sally Quinn discussing Lewinsky... similar to Broder's "he trashed the place."

From this description of the Beltway the term “Village” was born. It is believed to have first been used in this fashion by Digby, though I have not yet confirmed this. It was popularized, and is still frequently used, by the blogger Duncan Black, a.k.a. Atrios, as well as other bloggers such as Jane Hamsher, Markos Moulitsas, Glenn Greenwald, and many others.

To these bloggers, Quinn’s description of Washington as a “town” gripped with prudish outrage over the behavior of the rude and common impostor Bill Clinton seemed to capture a larger truth about the Beltway. Thus, to the bloggers, the term “Villagers” refers to the Beltway elite and the kind of small-town insularity, prudishness, clubbiness, status anxiety and addiction to catty gossip that D.C.’s elites are prone to on occasion.

And of course, it has political effects in cementing a center-right consensus.

Habitus? ;)

"A speech stuck on repeat"

Dana Milbank comments in the Post on Mitch McConnell's epic run of anti-health care speeches:

These speeches, about 44,000 words in all, test the outer limits of human stamina. Ninety-four times he warned of the evils of a "government-run" system, according to a Washington Post analysis. Forty-seven times he warned of a "government takeover" of the same. Fourteen times he railed against the Democrats' nefarious "experiment." Thirty-seven times he spoke the phrases "higher taxes" or "raise taxes," and at least 19 times he used the words "slash Medicare" or "Medicare cuts."

Perhaps more accurate than saying that McConnell gave 50 health-care speeches would be saying that McConnell gave the same health-care speech 50 times, with minor changes. And this in itself is a major achievement: Only a disciplined and well-conditioned public orator could repeat himself so often without injury.

Of course, it's part of the longstanding GOPAC strategy of framing and message discipline. Includes the following tag cloud:

Good to assign for the framing week.

wiki DC

Post article about the self-appointed guardian of DC's wikipedia page. Some 24 year old kid, who delivers some good comments on how the site allows distributed, collective discussion of historical methods.

Lewis has been on the other side of such criticism. Zachary Schrag, a George Mason University historian who studies the District, reviewed the page and found a blunder: the assertion that building heights in the city were limited to the height of the Capitol. Wrong, Schrag said. (The information was attributed to a Washington Post article. Oops.)

Lewis, alerted to the error, quickly made a fix. "That's the problem/success with Wikipedia," he said in an e-mail. "You may have a reliable source that's still wrong. It's hard to weed that stuff out until you have an expert (like Dr. Schrag) take a look at it. But, unfortunately, there are many like him who don't bother with Wikipedia."

Assign for a "use and abuse of history" unit.

german mythmaking

From The National, "They Need A Hero":

For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.

VDS on 300

Missed this review at the time, but it is pretty interesting in its defense of the film. ("Last Night at the 300" - at *shudder* National Review) Of course, he was involved in its making, but still he makes some good points about stylization. Matches my own sense that, despite the historical inaccuracies, it actually matches pretty well the mythic significance of the battle for Greek and later western culture. Of course, he has to take his shots at political rivals, and keep up his anti-gay biases. Also loved this part:

Oliver Stone's mega-production Alexander spent tens of millions in an effort to recapture the actual career of Alexander the Great, with top actors like Collin Farrel, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Joilie. But because this was a realist endeavor, we immediately were bothered by the Transylvanian accent of Olympias, Stone's predictable brushing aside of facts, along with the distortions, and the inordinate attention given to Alexander's supposed proclivities. But the "300" dispenses with realism at the very beginning, and thus shoulders no such burdens.

Thank you, George Sorel... myths don't have to be true so long as they are useful.

Waving the bloody shirt

Fascists never change -- the Klan, the Nazis, Rush Limbaugh. Oops, did I say that?

The indispensable Dave provides a post called: Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning bullies into victims

Starts with discussion about Rush's failed NFL bid, proceeds to explain a few cases of conservatives turning their attacks into attacks on them:

To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.

Very good source cited: Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, (excerpted in the New York Times). Describes the origin of the phrase in the Reconstruction era -- and it turns out to be a myth!!!

financial cycles

In The Atlantic, article "The Quiet Coup" does a good job contextualizing the US's current crisis as the same one the IMF has dealt with in many emerging economies over the past decades. Basically, oligarchs gamble during a boom, get bailed out by the government, and the costs are pushed onto the lower classes until the whole system breaks down. Once the government is willing to cut loose at least some of its oligarchs (it's a game of musical chairs, really), then the IMF steps in with loans.

Other aspects that are well explained:

the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

Plus, of course, the fact that everyone in charge of the Treasury is or was on the Goldman payroll.

digfighting and football

Something to possibly link along with the Geertz cockfight: "Offensive Play. How different are dogfighting and football?" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

It references "a description of a dogfight given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans and Craig Forsyth in “The Social Milieu of Dogmen and Dogfights,” an article they published some years ago in the journal Deviant Behavior." Get that one too.

How to be a man!

Salon provides news of a new DVD set, which collects educational films from the 40s-70s on how to Be a Man (and Woman).

As Skip Elsheimer, the man responsible for archiving these films (and whose online collection of vintage television commercials will make your day), explains in a couple of fascinating interviews on the discs, “[These films] seem conservative … but they’re talking about very forward-thinking things. They realized … the parents are not responsibly teaching the kids about these issues.”

Viewed this way, these educational shorts are more than a campy throwback to a time when sex ed videos featured silhouettes of women with bobs and men in fedoras. They are historical documents, insights into the fears and hopes of earlier generations. "Let’s Make a Sandwich" isn’t just a film about how to make an open-faced tuna melt; it's an illustration of the belief that a woman who couldn’t make a sandwich in 1950 would never find a husband. Now that’s educational.

Good use for courses.

two in one

second one today - via TPM, RedState's chief moran sends out an ill-advised tweet. (God I hate even typing tweet...)

"Linda Douglass really is the Joseph Goebbels of the White House Health Care shop," Erickson tweeted this afternoon. He echoed the sentiment on RedState's homepage, wondering if Douglass "likes" being the Goebbels of the Health Reform Office.

fascism of the day

Via ThinkProgress, some republican activist fucktard gives the latest inappropriate analogy:

Rather than cite any specific crime, Brown is demanding Obama’s removal for pursuing progressive agenda items like health and clean energy reform. His website blares: “Are you willing to let [Obama] construct a totalitarian regime… fascism, socialism, Obamaism… take your pick?”

Yes... "Take your pick." That's actually a pretty good expression of what's going on here. They want to just pick whichever criticizing term they feel like using at the time, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with anything.

because banning gays is preserving liberty...

...and preventing Nazism. Because Nazis loved gays.

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) goes on a bizzare stream of consciousness rant on the House floor. TPM links the video.

What's wrong with cultural studies?

Also from CT, Michael Berube links his article in CHE, "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" His take: From the 50s through 70s, cultural studies in Britain produced useful analyses of the relationship between culture and politics, society and government. Think Birmingham school. But

Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.

The big questions:

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party's epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn't had much of an impact at all.

True that. Need to think of ways to make CULP more rigorous and political, and less "let's look at this cultural object and politicize it." As Berube concludes:

But I still have hope that the history of cultural studies might matter to the university—and to the world beyond it. My hopes aren't quite as ambitious as they were 20 years ago. I no longer expect cultural studies to transform the disciplines. But I do think cultural studies can do a better job of complicating the political-economy model in media theory, a better job of complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and a better job of convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies' understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.

PS: This article introduced me to the name Edward Sojas, whose updating of Lefebvre might prove useful to the book. His wiki page is as good a place as any to start.

academic sins

From the Times Higher Education: Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy

Two points of interest:

1. possible use with a unit on habitus

2. one item on the list, lust, becomes a great controversy when the writer claims "The fault lies with the females." UH OH.... the folks at Crooked Timber respond here and here. Apparently the author is "a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books". Great.

Neiwert vs Goldberg continues

The Doughy One tweets: "Dave Neiwert's a very sad case who thinks that repeating the same dumb argument makes it smarter." Good god, I can't think of a better case against Twitter than how perfect a medium it is for this fool.

Dave responds at C&L:

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

Really makes me sad...

sex and the dictionary

How sexy words have a hard time getting in the dictionary (By Jesse Sheidlower, Slate.com)

female PUA

Via Pandagon, Caitlin Macrae tries to turn the tables on pick up artists. Interesting results.

link dump

"Micro-scripts" -- a few good ideas in the article but generally pretty superficial. ("Guess who's losing the great phrase face-off" in Boston.com, by Bill Schley. By an author of a new book by the same title.

Some good links from Dave Neiwert on how Liberal Fascism transmitted through the discourse. Sad sad sad. ("Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?")

Finally, an article in Columbia Journalism Review that contemplates why some protests get coverage and some don't. (Teabaggers, astroturfed town hall riots = yes. Protests at a health care CEO's house? No -- "too staged" according to the journalists.)

fascism fail

ORLY tries his hand at Nazi analogies... FAIL. KO takes him down (via Kos). From the transcript:

BILL O’REILLY, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: Churchill actually wanted to use poison gas on the Germans, in violation of the Geneva Convention, but was stopped by the British war cabinet. The Royal Air Force killed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of civilians by targeting non-military sites. And the British operated a number of interrogation centers during and after World War II, including one called the London Cage, where German prisoners were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with death.

Another center was opened in Bad Nenndorf, on German soil, after Churchill left power. It was almost like a concentration camp.

President Obama’s British example was wrong.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Nope. Sorry. If that were a high school history paper, it would have earned its author a nice round F. It makes Michele Bachmann’s Hoot Smalley spooner-ism from last week look good.

Pretty good, possible use in class for the "how to analogize with history" unit.

(recent) history of american journalism

Walter Pincus calls out colleagues/the industry on failures since Watergate. A good history.

"Newspaper Narcissism" in Columbia Journalism Review.

born to run

Evolutionary bio and marathon running, at Seed magazine.

We know that roughly 2 million years ago, Australopithecus, with its tiny brain, hefty jaw and diet of rough, fibrous plants, evolved into Homo erectus, our slim, long-legged ancestor with a big brain and small teeth suited for tearing into animal and fruit flesh. Such a transformation almost certainly involved a reliable supply of calorie-laden meat, yet according to the fossil record, spear points have been in use for 200,000 years at most, and the bow and arrow for only 50,000 years, leaving an enormous stretch of time when early humans were consuming meat without the use of tools. Lieberman believes they ran their prey to death, often called “persistence hunting.”

Interesting and usable.

gay agenda

Some recent stories on upcoming legislative issues:

Box Turtle Bulletin points to story in The Blade: Congress Ready to Move on Gay Rights Bills. (Hate crimes, ENDA, DADT)

speaking of falsified memoirs

Sparky the Pengiun had one too.

not-so-hidden signals

Post quoted in entirety from The Slog, since I don't have time right now to be fancy:

In this week's web-only Constant Reader, I join Barack Obama's book club and discover that there might be a secret message or two involved.

Since the election, every book that Obama has been photographed carrying has resulted in a sales boom for booksellers. The first book he was seen carrying after the election, Doris Kearns Goodwin's story of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet Team of Rivals, inspired much talk about his cabinet choices. When he was spotted with a copy of West Indies author Derek Walcott's marvelous, book-length poem Omeros, there was a (admittedly smaller) bump in the book's sales. Even people who don't generally pay much attention to the book world are scrutinizing those long-shot photographs of our president-elect disembarking from car to plane and back again, trying to read the title of whatever is tucked under his arm.

Provided that no president-elect ever has to carry his own shit around if he doesn't want to, it's enough to make one wonder whether Obama is sending codes—like those secret messages, solvable only by decoder ring that used to be included in serial movies for children. The message of Team of Rivals was pretty obvious: It was impossible to turn on a cable news network during the cabinet-selection process without hearing the title slip from one anchor or another's lips in reference to the fact that Obama wasn't going to have a cabinet of yes-men. But if this Secret Presidential Book Club theory is correct, what is Obama trying to tell us with The Defining Moment?

We learn a lot about FDR, including his weird feelings about the Irish and Catholics, too. I hope you'll give it a read.

Nice.

this is why you don't give cameras...

...to 24-year old soldiers, or inbred royal twits. Prince Harry strikes again.

you don't have to put on the red light

Tavis Smiley interviewing Frank Langella and Ron Howard on Frost/Nixon:

Langella: Well, I would think the thing I learned the most that I will now never, ever forget is that you see that little red light that's on me now? The minute it goes on, something in me changes. Some imperceptible thing in me changes, because I know I'm being recorded. I'm not exactly 100 percent myself. I am a personality, a character, a sense of self that I choose to put in front of a camera.

And what I learned on working on Nixon and watching him and slow-moing him for hours and hours and hours, is never to 100 percent totally believe the person the politician is when the red light goes on, because he wants to communicate something to us. He wants to communicate power or sensitivity or vulnerability or in Nixon's case, toughness.

Every single politician must stand in the dark a second before the light goes on, and something unconscious changes. So I've learned to watch like a hawk everybody - Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama, it doesn't matter - and all of us, too. We all know we do some things slightly different.

But when you are leading countries, when you are a politician and the red light goes on, you create a character. You have to. You couldn't possibly be yourself. And I think it's second nature. I don't think it's something - after a while, when a politician becomes skilled at it - President Kennedy knew he had charm, Nixon did whatever he thought would look strong, Lyndon Baines Johnson had a wonderful kind of shaggy Texas demeanor, Mr. McCain had a way of behaving.

That's the thing I took away from it the most, was that...

Interesting observations from someone who knows the camera and character. Audio and transcript available at Tavis Smiley's PBS site. (h/t Kos)

Burris exerts authorial agency

Ezra Klein on Burris' tomb:

A Senate seat is a prize, no doubt, but it's rather less of one if you secured it by abetting a political criminal's desire to obscure his guilt by sparking a racial showdown. Burris, however, is taking the long view. The mausoleum view. Eventually, "United States Senator" will be etched beneath "Trail Blazer." And there will be no asterisk, no explanation of the conditions. Burris will see to that. He'll write it down himself.

Might make for interesting link for week on authorship and authority.

falsified Holocaust memoir slugfest

HHN: Penguin cancels formerly-upcoming Holocaust memoir ("Angel at the Fence") that historians revealed to be false. As Ken Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies program at Mich State, writes:

This memoir was at the far end of implausibility, yet until yesterday, no one connected with packaging, promoting, and disseminating it asked questions about or investigated it. Some actively resisted such investigation and tried to shut mine down.

The story gets really interesting when you look into how the producers of a film version complained to Waltzer's dean and attacked Deborah Lipstadt for investigating the claims. (TNR stories here)

Lipstadt also adds some interesting thoughts on HBO's recent John Adams, in which they show Adams railing against Trumbull for painting the signing of the Declaration as a great assembly, which didn't happen. But the scene as shown in the miniseries is itself undocumented!