a nation of intellectuals - gasp!

Thomas Sowell in a National Review TV thing, when asked if the US is becoming a nation of intellectuals: "It's a chilling thought."

Possible use in habitus week - the conservatives' problem with higher education is that it places people in an open-minded, tolerant, questioning environment that can re-shape people's political outlooks through their everyday living context. They become intellectuals, and then intellectuals don't vote for reactionary, reality-ignoring policies.

culture industry - Ailes edition

1. NYT article on Roger Ailes and his pernicious influence. ("Fox chief at the pinnacle of news and politics") Good Perlstein quote that provides good hook to use in culture war II week.

2. Also, Digby writes about the Post ombudsman finally addressing the paper's outsourcing of content to the right-wing Peterson group Fiscal Times. Opening section:

The Washington Post ombudsman finally responded to the complaints about the paper's inappropriate relationship with Pete Peterson and his new "news" operation the Fiscal Times. He says there's nothing wrong with it because Peterson has hired good reporters and the stories will be edited by the paper's staff.

Dean Baker wonders if he would say the same thing if the paper contacted with the NRAs "Firearms Gazette" or the tobacco industry's "Smoking Today." After all, he seems to think that theFiscal (End) Times can be trusted, with safeguards, to write unbiased copy. But here's the rub:

Can anyone imagine the Peterson Foundation putting a story showing how much the failure of the Fed to combat the housing bubble added to country's debt? How about a piece that showed that the U.S. deficit problem is driven entirely by our broken health care system?

No, these pieces, or many others like them, are not going to run in the Fiscal Times, because that is not what Peter Peterson wants to buy with his millions. And, the very good reporters who have signed up to work for the Fiscal Times know very well what the boss wants, even if he does not intervene directly in their reporting.

Culture industry meets culture war! Good for the last weeks.

3. Glen Greenwald on the new court gossip book that's dominated news the last few days. First two grafs suffice:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book,Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is pouring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent littleVersailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting howintensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

As he notes in closing: The people who brought you two years of Bill Clinton's penis haven't gone anywhere. They've only gotten stronger.

Avatar links

Some really perspective critiques of Avatar. Apparently while I was offline there was a lot of criticism of it as racist - which I didn't understand at first. Starting out with LGM:

Annalee Newitz writes that "[w]hether Avatar is racist is a matter of debate," but it isn't: the film is racist. Its fundamental narrative logic is racist: it transposes the cultural politics of Westerns (in which the Native Americans are animists who belong to a more primitive race) onto an interplanetary conflict and then assuages the white guilt that accompanies acts of racial and cultural genocide by having a white man save the noble savages (who are also racists). Unlike King Kong—which wrestled with the racial logic of the original—Avatar reproduces the racist logic of its source material. This is not to say the film is not also a condemnation of American imperialism or disastrous environmental policies, because it's that too.

Makes sense when you read the whole thing.

I like zunguzungu's thoughts on the childlike racism/primitivism of a particularly American type ("Avatar and the American Man-Child"). It's not necessarily racist, in the sense of being negative. But it is patronizing, beause the quality of the natives that Sully admires is their infantalism, their habitus of a pastoral adventureland that he wants to join:

This is why, for example, Jake Sully is such a spoiled brat. To note that he is the worst stereotype of the ugly American isn’t nearly enough; he’s profoundly satisfied with his ignorance and his self-absorption is so awesomely complete and all-encompassing that it seems perfectly natural when other people make huge investments in him, to the point that he makes saying “thank you” all about him. He isn’t surprised or humbled when it turns out that the entire world revolves around him – who else could it possibly revolve around? – and when he first puts on his Na’vi avatar, he thinks nothing of ignoring the advice of people that know better and doing exactly as feels like doing. A shameless and shallow asshole, the only thing that makes him even slightly uneasy is his intermittent “video log” because it forces him to confront how thoughtless he is. But while people will excuse the shallowness of his character on the basis of it being just a popcorn movie or a kid’s movie, or whatever, that shallowness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, just as George Bush’s mask of ignorance was precisely what made him appealing to so many Americans.

Jake Sully, in other words, is a Western fantasy of spoiled childhood: pure id, he revels in the toys that the world has provided for him without understanding that someone had to make them, without ever questioning his own right to have them. I think that’s why I don’t feel contempt for him, but visceral, gut-level, and troubling disgust. I recognize his desires, because we not only have to get past them to be adults, but because they stay with us. Perhaps we still are, on some level, the sociopaths we were when we were children (that I type this while home for the holidays, in the bedroom I occupied when I was seven, only seems appropriate). Yet it’s also one of the worst aspects of the American cultural tradition that going back to childhood is somehow the fountainhead of political virtue (see, for example, Jefferson, Thomas and Roosevelt, Theodore) because it’s so rarely the childhood of curiosity, games, and sociality that the tradition extols, but rather its reverse, a very particular fantasy of careless anti-social boyishness that tends into misogyny so easily because, to again refer us to Nina Baym, it feminizes the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” that we American boys must seek to be free of by lighting out for the territories.

Interesting connection to the frontier thesis (as he notes).

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.