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.)