To ask the hard question is simple

I've been thinking (like Bill Bennett)

2005-10-02T11:24:00.000-05:00

What would happen if the girls were all transported far beyond the northern sea?

No more abortions.

Reduction in the crime-of-passion rate.

~~Chick flix~~

Gay marriage the only option.

Possible further deterioration of family values.

That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your ~~crime~~ abortion rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.

President calls...

2005-09-27T02:38:00.000-05:00

...for less driving.

Story here.

Liberal flip-floppers

2005-09-23T16:40:00.000-05:00

Spectacular car accidents aren't that unusual in a city the size of Chicago. As I sit here, the radio news just announced an accident site where a car is lodged in a building, somewhere. So I wasn't that awestruck, last night, when I left a gathering with some of my colleagues and saw a late-model four door compact automobile sitting on its side in the middle of the intersection of 58th Street and Woodlawn Avenue.

This was around 9:30 pm, and there were no ambulances, so I knew the driver had already been taken from the wreck. The scene was mostly amusing. Police cars with flashing lights were blocking access to a two-block stretch of Woodlawn, but 58th street (which is usually less busy) was wide-open right up to the accident site. While I was passing, a cab drove up from 58th, and the cops began shouting "Back up." They were shouting, but it's unlikely the cabby heard them, which seemed to infuriate the cops. Natural enough, given that cops believe they should be obeyed at all times, even when their orders are unclear or inaudible (or, in the case of the 1999 WTO protests, retrospectively fabricated). And this was a strange sight, too. Flipping an SUV on its side is no problem. Accomplishing this with a small car on a quiet, neighborhood street takes some doing.

Anyway, the driver turned out to be my very own representative to the Illinois Legislature and House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie. Chicago Tribune story here. She wasn't seriously hurt. Apparently, she hit a parked car, and flipped. No word from toxicology just yet, but I have to say: I doubt she was driving defensively.

My Summer vacation

2005-09-18T23:57:00.000-05:00

I hope to post something substantial here in the not-too-distant future, but for now, some anecdotes.

First, on the always amusing topic of my hair, it has developed the extraordinary ability, of late, to find virtually every spider living in the vicinity of Harper Avenue in Chicago.

Second, and related, is my year-long and decidedly unfriendly relationship with urban wildlife. My cat has caught two mice in my apartment. And when I say "caught," I mean that she picked them up with her mouth. Her habit is to then release them and have further playtime. Since my cat is decidedly tame and, sorry to say, a total dumbass, she loses them. This, as you probably imagine, doesn't cause me any anxiety at all. The first one lost the Great Hunter by hiding in my shoe, bleeding to death. The second one got more humane treatment: I caught it with tongs and put it outside.

There's more. A couple weeks ago, one of Hyde Park's snooty European squirrels (there's a story here that says the local squirrels were imported from England--I don't know if it's true) walked right up to my back window and put its nose in my cat's face. I can only conclude that the damn mouse I released is spreading stories.

And, lastly in the urban wildlife category, I haven't found many cockroaches in my apartment. I've only seen three, in a year and a half, so haven't felt the need to set out poison. But: those three were all, in my opinion, escaped zoo cockroaches. The final one, in fact, was so large that I actually had to buzz it in. I know, in retrospect, that I ought to have been suspicious when it claimed to be a traveling salesman (first of all, that's no longer really a profession; second, it's just a bad idea to let people--or bugs claiming to be people--you don't know into your building). But I learned my lesson. It took me well into the night and several quickly drained beers to work up the courage to come close enough to catch it. In all seriousness, this thing's body was nearly two inches long. Moreover, roaches have long legs and even longer antenna, making their presence much larger than their actual size. I'm not one to be altruistic: I would wish this on my worst enemy.

Third. The Federal District Court jury summons I mentioned earlier turned out to be for the trial of former Governor George Ryan. (Read all about it.) I was given a deferral upon request, so didn't have to show up for the selection process, but seriously doubt I would have been considered a suitable juror for this trial. While my knowledge of Gov. Ryan's "position on the death penalty" would not "affect my ability to be impartial at the trial," I do admire the actions he took to save innocent lives. If I were the prosecution, I wouldn't want me on the jury. Or on the prosecution, for that matter.

Finally, I was recently told that the "named storm" following Katrina was called Hurricane Lee. It never threatened any land mass and--okay--was never actually a hurricane (it was barely a tropical storm). I just think "Hurricane Lee" has a nice ring to it.

Padilla v. Hanft

2005-09-14T15:57:00.000-05:00

First of all, a thank you to Jett for pointing me to the opinion written by Judge Michael Luttig for the 4th District Court of Appeals. The court overturned an earlier decision made by the Federal District Court of South Carolina, which held that the United States executive branch lacked the authority to detain Padilla indefinitely without charge.

Jett goes on to point out--and I agree--that the language of the opinion itself seems sound. Of course, neither Jett nor I have any actual legal expertise. I am, nonetheless, completely willing to retained as your attorney, providing you offer fair compensation. But I think he's right to say that the issue here seems to hinge entirely on whether or not we consider ourselves to be "at war" with Al Qaeda and whether or not this "war" has the same legal status as other, more conventional wars.

Jett then pointed out that, in this case, Congress never actually declared "war" on Al Qaeda per se, and that it's moreover a different matter to wage war on a loose organization of radicals than to wage war on a national entity.

This, of course, is precisely the issue, and plenty of editorials and blog entries have already been written about this. My basic position is that the detention of enemy combatants during a conventional war is necessary. As "enemies," they are not necessarily engaged in criminal activity. At the same time, they want to kill you. You can't prosecute them for merely being on the other side of the war, but you certainly can't release them while the fighting is still going on.

Padilla, as Jett points out, can be charged with a crime: multiple counts of attempted murder, property destruction, aiding and abetting the enemy, terrorism, and probably racketeering and conspiracy. Furthermore, he is a U.S. citizen. The suspension of his right to due process, in this case, doesn't seem to offer any tangible strategic advantage in the "war" against Al Qaeda. The idea that he's going to have much to tell the authorities about Al Qaeda's plans at this point--after 3-1/2 years in detention--seems far fetched. Moreover, the conditions for declaring an end to this "war" (and thereby requiring that Padilla be charged or released) have never been laid out. Nothing new about any of this, I know.

The sticky point here, though, is that while Congress did not declare "war" against Al Qaeda, it did give the President the power to do so. The "Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution," passed shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and quoted in Luttig's opinion, says:

[T]he President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

This, from what I can tell, is the primary basis of the 4th Circuit court's opinion.

That said, I'm not convinced it's a good opinion. The court seems to see the Congressional resolution as a valid basis for declaring Padilla's detention to be legal, but I would argue that the court has the responsibility to limit the power of legislative resolutions to accord with the rights supposedly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Earlier I said that things aren't looking good for due process. Let me add, now, that things aren't looking good for the separation of powers. This decision, if upheld, essentially grants judicial powers to the executive branch of the federal government. By interpreting the Joint Resolution as allowing the President to "determine" that U.S. citizens can be subjected to "all necessary and appropriate force," this court essentially undermines its own ability and responsibility to check the authority of the executive and legislative branches.

Gulf Coast news

2005-09-10T17:13:00.000-05:00

If you've only been listening to the wire stories and thirty-second commentaries, you're missing some of the most important stuff. My favorite sources:

Amygdala

AmericaBlog

Michael Bérubé

Also, this week's episode of "This American Life" successfully made me even more angry. It should be available for online listening in a few days.

A few notes

2005-09-10T15:09:00.000-05:00

I'm back, for now. We'll see what happens.

I noticed a couple things in the news, today, that I couldn't pass up.

First, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Virginia, ruled that the U.S. can hold Jose Padilla--and by extension other U.S. citizens suspected of terrorist plots--indefinitely, without trial. The case isn't over, since Padilla's lawyers can still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but things are looking bad for due process. Lest you think this is some sort of "judicial activism," though, don't worry. The case was decided strictly on its own merits, without any extraneous political considerations. According to Tribune Newspapers, Judge Michael Luttig, who wrote the decision, is seen as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court Associate Justice position left vacant by Sandra Day O'Connor's pending retirement.

Second, NOLA police chief Eddie Compass wishes to combat the popular notion that his men and women lost control of the city during the aftermath of Katrina. From an AP article about the cleanup:

Despite missing 300 officers from his 1,750-strong force, Police Chief Eddie Compass was upbeat as he reported that 200 arrests had been made since the hurricane.

"We are definitely in control of this city," Compass said. "We've been almost crime free for the last four days."

From what I've heard, there are about 5,000 civilians left in New Orleans. Aside from the cops, there are thousands of National Guards in the city. The lesson is clear: a 2:1 ratio of armed law enforcement personnel to civilians--along with a declaration of martial law--will virtually eliminate crime. I see a trend.

One more thing

2005-08-21T22:44:00.000-05:00

I got a response, yesterday, from the Federal District Court in Chicago regarding my request to defer my jury service. They approved the request, kind of, telling me my service was delayed until December 27. Not exactly what I'd hoped for given that A) due to upcoming graduate student-related deadlines, I requested a deferral until March, and B) I'm usually 2,200 miles away from Chicago, visiting my folks, on 12/27. If anyone has any advice, it will certainly be appreciated and possibly heeded.

See you when I see you.

Signs of life

2005-08-20T16:54:00.000-05:00

As you can glean from the spans of time between recent posts, I've lost most of the momentum needed to update this thing regularly, and don't know when I'll have the time to come up with something really grand and brilliant to defibrillate it. That said, just wanted to let both of my regular readers know that they shouldn't expect anything any time soon. I'll try to let people know when we're back up and running.

Cheers.

Yuck

2005-08-06T21:49:00.000-05:00

Or, Why I Am Not a Graphic Designer

I've finally come to my senses, and decided to ditch this ugly banner that I designed all by myself. At first, I was impressed with the fact that I accomplished this on my own, using only my meager graphics software and my even more meager ability to use graphics software. But it gradually dawned on me that this was one ugly banner. Sorry, folks.

I do, however, like the idea of having a fancy banner at the top of the page, so plan to continue to work on designing one. But I will endeavor to design something I can be happy with before publishing it.

In other news, a couple folks have joined in the Auden conversation. Bob Archambeau points to The Orators as something eminently important to this conversation, and rightly says that this is precisely the kind of work that Silliman would go to bat for if Auden were on the "post-avant" team. Mark Scroggins says he envies my hair (which I prefer vastly to being told that I look like Clay Aiken, or that it looks like my head is on fire; true stories), and notes that the criticisms Silliman applies to Auden would allow one to dismiss such undisputed notables as Whitman and Oppen. I have more to say about both posts, but in due time.

Finally, I received a lovely letter from my friendly Federal District Court yesterday, indicating that I was to report to jury duty in mid-September. The letter indicates that I will not be part of a general pool of jurors, but a prospective juror for a specific case that is expected to last for four months. Hooray. Now, I actually welcome the opportunity to sit on a jury, and imagine that this case, whatever it is, would be an interesting one (it's in Federal Court, expected to last four months--probably not a property dispute). But I'm teaching my own course this Fall (which is a rare opportunity for U of Chicago grad students), so it would be rather disastrous for me if I'm not able to get a deferral. Will they understand? Stay tuned and find out.

Auden, Part III

2005-07-29T22:04:00.000-05:00

This morning I went to Ron Silliman's blog to look at the generally positive, two part review he gave to the most recent issue of the Chicago Review (he notes that the new issue wasn't on the web site when he wrote, but it is now). In any case, we all appreciate the publicity. But anyone who knows me well shouldn't have much trouble identifying what, in Ron's post, chapped my hide. More...

In the first part of the review, the one regarding the section on the British poet Christopher Middleton, Ron discusses his spotty familiarity with this poet, and quotes a poem to demonstrate (I gather) what he does know and think of Middleton:

Somehow this emanates from the man who wrote these first two stanzas of “Hearing Elgar Again,” one of two selections in the Tuma, both of which are dated 1980, nine years after the TriQuarterly:

Not crocked exactly, but in a doze,
There I was, before supper time: Elgar,
Stop your meteoric noise, the glory
Leaves me cold; then it was
I woke to the melody –

Back, a place, 1939, and people
Singing, little me among them,
Fresh from a holiday
Summer, beside the Cornish sea, I sang
In chorus with a hundred English people.

Not free verse exactly (hear the off-rhyme in melody & holiday, the reiteration of people), but close enough. Absolutely normative narrative figuration – my take on this piece is that it reminds me of what Auden might have been had he actually been a good writer.

The "Tuma" he refers to, by the way, is Keith Tuma's invaluable Oxford Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry, which is well worth obtaining if you're into this sort of thing.

Now, obviously and clearly, my objection is to this flippant dismissal of W.H. Auden's writing abilities. I'm not the first person to raise such an objection, and several of Ron's readers came to Auden's defense in possibly overzealous and counterproductive ways (one person went so far as to ask Ron: "[D]o you think you're a better writer than Auden? Just curious"). And I'm not particularly offended by the idea that an obviously well read and intelligent critic such as Silliman would find Auden boring or not to his taste. While he is a good critic, his interests are also rather programmatically-oriented. Mine are much less so. In that sense, I'm perfectly willing to disagree with him, without having any burning need to defend my own tastes. So, after the initial flash of anger, it didn't bother me.

But I do think, however, that it's useful to consider why Silliman's particular interests would specifically exclude Auden. There's a bunch of obvious stuff: Auden's writing is very pretty. Some of it is (yes) awful. He himself acknowledged that, early in his career, he would try to force off-rhymes that sounded to his later self "barbaric" (I believe is the word he used). At one point in "A Letter to Lord Byron," he rhymes the word "long" with "continong." In context, it's evident that this is a phonetic spelling of the French word "continent" (it's contrasted, specifically, with the British Isles)--but this context makes the rhyme not a bit less painful. Now, if this was all Auden ever accomplished, I myself would advocate a strict policy of punching in the mouth anyone who ever mentioned his name in a positive light. The problem, I think, is that where Auden is most successful, he accomplishes something which is particularly anathema to a lot of "experimental" or "post-avant" (choose your term) American poetics.

Auden was a really good critic of poets. He was an okay reader of poetry itself, but he was a great reader of poets and poetic activity, and he's awfully skeptical about the purity of its motives. In his best poems, I think, he identifies the consolatory effects of art, and is both accepting of these effects as well as aware of the borderline cowardliness of accepting this kind of consolation. One I came across, by chance, today, is as good an example as any:

Detective Story

For who is ever quite without his landscape,
The straggling village street, the house in trees,
All near the church, or else the gloomy town house,
The one with the Corinthian pillars, or
The tiny workmanlike flat: in any case
A home, the centre where the three or four things
That happen to a man happen? Yes,
Who cannot draw the map of his life, shade in
The little station where he meets his loves
And says good-bye continually, and mark the spot
Where the body of his happiness was first discovered?

An unknown tramp? A rich man? An enigma always
And with a buried past--but when the truth,
The truth about our happiness comes out
How much it owed to blackmail and philandering.

The rest's traditional. All goes to plan:
The feud between the local common sense
And that exasperating brilliant intuition
That's always on the spot by chance before us;
All goes to plan, both lying and confession,
Down to the thrilling final chase, the kill.

Yet on the last page just a lingering doubt
That verdict, was it just? The judge's nerves,
That clue, that protestation from the gallows,
And our own smile... why yes...
But time is always killed. Someone must pay for
Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself. (1936)

The "enigma" is--it seems obvious to me--what poetry tries to make of our existences. "But when the truth"--it turns out that the truth is a bit breezier than we might like. At least that's the fear: that really, we were in much more control of things right from the start, there wasn't so much mystery as there was lassitude. We just weren't that good at being in control. Poetry--and here you thought it was high art!--becomes something like a detective story, a thrilling but obviously fabricated diversion. And "diversion" not a pejorative sense: as something which diverts our attention.

Now, of course, I'm not saying that this is true. I don't think Auden, either, is necessarily claiming that the poem and the detective story are the same thing, but he's certainly expressing the fear that the highest forms of artistic achievement may come from the same impulse that makes us want to live vicariously the lives of private detectives, students of wizardry and starship captains. I think this attitude comes through in a lot of his work, and certainly in his best-known works, such as "Musée des Beaux Arts," or "In Memory: W.B Yeats." It shows in his reason's for excising "September 1, 1939," from his collected works: that poem, he thought, made too large a claim for the wisdom of a mere poet. The common idea, I think, is that Auden wants to identify and gently critique the great claims that artistic endeavors sometimes make for themselves. His definition of poetry--"memorable speech"--seems to suggest the same thing.

My hypothesis, then, is that this doesn't mesh with some of Silliman's aims. He associates with a circle that makes some pretty big claims about poetry. This is tricky, because these claims tend to regard things like "mastery" and "wisdom" with suspicion, but they remain big claims, because they are wed to the belief that poetry is a good place to provide really devastating critiques and/or really useful alternatives to things like "mastery" and "wisdom." Auden is modest about the power of poetry--it "survives in the valley of its saying." Silliman, too, wants a self-critical type of poetry, but not a modest poetry.

In any case, I suppose this is probably more of an impertinent guess than a really solid hypothesis. But, indeed, Silliman provided no real critique of Auden, so I can't do much more than guess.

Here's a little gem from another (better) part of "A Letter to Lord Byron," wherein he justifies his decision to write this "letter" to Byron, rather than to Jane Austen:

Then she's a novelist. I don't know whether
You will agree, but novel writing is
A higher art than poetry altogether
In my opinion, and success implies
Both finer character and faculties.
Perhaps that's why real novels are as rare
As winter thunder or a polar bear.

The average poet by comparison
Is unobservant, immature and lazy.
You must admit, when all is said and done,
His sense of other people's very hazy,
His moral judgments are too often crazy,
A slick and easy generalisation
Appeals too well to his imagination.

National security

2005-07-28T11:26:00.000-05:00

I think everyone agrees that the recent killing of Jean Charles de Menezes (Reuters story) is, at best, unfortunate. That agreement breaks down quickly, though, when you ask people how it could have been prevented, or whether the bulk of the blame belongs with London's police or with the victim. After all, he may have been innocent, but he was also running from the police, and was otherwise behaving in ways that caused suspicion (e.g., wearing a heavy coat on a relatively warm day). More...

A few days ago, my colleague Blythe--whom you may remember from way back when--posted a response to my post about Sen. Durbin. Read our exchange if you like, but this post is meant to respond to a pair of questions she posed. The questions were, as she points out, related to Durbin's comments, but indirectly enough that I decided they should get their reply in a new post. Blythe asks (and I should note that I rarely get asked my opinion on such weighty philosophical issues):

Two important politico-ethical questions are raised by your post and our discussion. First, can individual rights ever be overridden for the sake of the common good? Second, what should we do when a nation's right to protect its citizens' right to life comes into conflict with an individual's right to due process? What do you think about these 2 issues?

To the first question, my response is an unequivocal "yes." There are circumstances in which certain rights that we would ordinarily wish to grant to all human beings need to be attenuated. This is, in fact, the basis of our legal system. We prohibit convicted felons, in most cases, from exercising their rights to vote or carry firearms. I'm completely okay with this.

But the second question is a tougher one. My gut reaction is that it's dangerous to waive anyone's right to a fair trial. It's one thing to deprive a person of certain rights because they've been convicted of abusing those rights, but it's another thing entirely to deny them the right to be convicted. In a sense, I believe that one could understand our legal system as based on the premise that the right to due process is actually more important than the right to life. After all, the murderer is supposed to get a fair trial, while the victim is denied any kind of consideration of his/her inalienable rights.

Nonetheless, we can't treat this fact as though it answered the question. That would be arguing from precedent, and we all know where that leads: it would justify slavery, wars of conquest, torture, debtor's prisons, female circumcision, the use of napalm, and virtually every other evil committed by any human being anywhere. Part of Blythe's point is that the moral status of torture isn't as easy to evaluate as we might like to think.

According to the principle of utility, when asking whether it would be morally justified to torture the terrorist in order to get information to prevent the attack, we should add up the pleasure and pain that would result. If the resulting pleasure outweighed the resulting pain (i.e. 100 units of pleasure from saving the 5000 lives versus 35 units of pain for torturing the terrorist), the torture would be justified. In one sense, such a calculus seems cynical and dangerous. In another sense, utilitarianism aims at achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, which allows the utilitarian to prevent the actions of an aggressive few from harming the majority.

Now, for those who didn't read the comment in its entirety, Blythe is not endorsing a vulgarly utilitarian philosophy, but merely pointing out that it raises some serious questions that classical liberalism (which more or less says "thou shalt not torture") cannot answer. And, I think, any absolute prohibition against torture becomes dogmatic and hence not really a very useful contribution to political practice. If we go with the "thou shalt not" type commandment, we just condemn ourselves to irrelevance.

That said, my response is an emotional one. Torturing and killing innocent people isn't right. The question I ask is: how would I feel if I were tortured? Would I be able to accept that pain as part of a plan "for the sake of the common good"? What if it were someone I loved? Would any argument about the greater benefit to civilization alter my stance once something like this affected me at a personal and direct level? I seriously doubt it.

My other response has to do with moral culpability: I don't want innocent Brazilian electricians shot to death in my name. The shitheads who bombed the London tube were not acting in the name of civilization, reason, "utility" or "public safety." The bobbies who killed de Menezes were allegedly acting on behalf of all of these things. When innocent people are killed in the name of some pseudo-religious fanaticism, my trust in civilization and reason is not affected at all. When innocent people are killed in order to protect civilization and reason, I begin to wonder how valuable those things are, or whether we really all agree what those things mean in the first place.

And, of course, I know that emotional arguments usually don't count as good ones, but I think there's a real point here. It's possible to be very calculating about these issues when one considers them abstractly, asking how many will benefit and how many will suffer. But most people, I believe, would not want their own children to be mistakenly tortured for information they don't have. The value of this emotional argument is precisely in that it gives a counterpoint to the abstraction of the cost-benefit analysis. If we're actually out to defend individual liberty and democracy, then it's necessary to consider how individuals would react to their own right to due process being taken from them.

There are other issues here, too, of course, but I'm pressed for time, so can't really respond as fully as I'd like.

Negotiation

2005-07-23T23:14:00.000-05:00

"British police hunting London bombers admitted killing a Brazilian electrician by mistake -- a blunder that dealt a blow to their efforts to track down militants they fear could strike again.
[...]
"London's Mayor Ken Livingstone argued that terrorism was an international scourge that could strike anywhere and he was dismissive of the decision by Italian soccer club Inter Milan to cancel a pre-season tour of England.

" 'I think that it is a very silly thing to do because it is playing the terrorists' game. They want to change the way we live. The terrorists, I am sure, will be celebrating their decision,' he said."

Meanwhile:

" 'To give license to people to shoot to kill just like that, on the basis of suspicion, is very frightening,' Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain said."

But, Mr. Tamimi, it would be silly -- I'd go so far as to say downright hilarious -- to change the way we live because of a few terrorists.

I beg your question?

2005-07-18T18:42:00.000-05:00

Normally, I'm pretty easy going. That is, it's kinda difficult to find something short of bloody mayhem on my front doorstep that's going to really upset me. So few things, in fact, disturb my normal, even-tempered disposition that I can't even think of a good example of something that does upset me. What? There's something wrong with my logic, you say? Oddly enough, this brings me to my next point. More...

Among the handful of things that really do piss me off is the misuse of language. And I'm not talking about casual or colloquial usage, like saying "ain't" for "is not" or "am not." That's fine, and I use that all the time. No, you can be as colloquial as you want. If Dr. Johnson rolls over in his grave, fine. If you've seen pictures of him, you know he could use the exercise. What I'm talking about is a much more grievous abuse of the protocols of English-language meaning-making: trying to sound smart (when you "ain't"). One case of this has been really sticking in my craw for the last three years or so. I keep thinking someone powerful will notice this trend, and use their power to crack down on it, but so far the problem has only gotten worse.

"That begs the question." This phrase is a complete sentence. It does not require the speaker or writer to elaborate upon what question is being begged, for one can only "beg" one question. It is not acceptable to use this phrase to mean "leads one to ask," or "ignores this other question." If you say, "But that begs the question, does anyone really know what time it is?", I will cringe, and I will cringe not because of the obtuse pseudo-existentialism of the question itself, but because no one who understands the (very useful) concept of "question-begging" would be caught dead employing this travesty of usage.

Just yesterday, I heard this improper syntax being used by a radio journalist in a pre-recorded documentary program. I can understand, even, that someone may be improvising, and just slip up and fall into an improper but popular usage. But this was pre-recorded, otherwise very polished, and was broadcast on National Public Radio. This incorrect usage is becoming so pervasive that professional communicators seem to view it as a perfectly acceptable thing to inflict upon their audiences.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that this usage were (subjunctive, jackass!) correct. Wouldn't it still be just a very wordy and ultimately smarmy way of saying "That makes me wonder..."? Do you seriously believe that the American public is so in love with Oxonian affectations that you should contort your syntax away from active voice direct statement and toward Gladstonian oratory? If you do, you are very much mistaken.

Also, normally one "asks" a question, and "begs" forgiveness or for change.

"Begging the question" is the name of a logical fallacy. The fallacy is the same in every legitimate instance of question-begging, so there is no need to elaborate the nature of the question being begged. The question, in fact, is always the question that is already on the table, whatever that may be. By "begging" this question, the guilty party is surreptitiously asking his or her listeners to accept the point in question as though it were already proven to be true. In other words, if I say that you are "begging the question," that means that I accuse you of treating your conclusion as though it were evidence (for that same conclusion). Since you don't prove the truth of something by merely insisting that it is true, the form of argument called "begging the question" is considered by most rational people to be an invalid one.

I'd like to leave you with a tangible example of this fallacy, but I'm having a little trouble thinking of a clear-cut case. So here's a textbook example: "Huckleberry Finn should be banned from school libraries as obscene because it uses obscene language" (from Rosenwasser & Stephen, Writing Analytically, 2nd ed.). You can see how this syllogistic statement fails to make sense because it misrepresents its own conclusion. The real conclusion is that we should ban obscene material from school libraries, but this conclusion is concealed as a mere modifier ("as obscene"). It then convinces you that the conclusion is that Huck should specifically be banned, and supports this with the statement that it "uses obscene language" (which is demonstrably true). In order for the statement as a whole to be true, however, everyone one need to agree that obscene material should be banned from school libraries, but no case is made for this. Of course, most instances of question-begging are a little more subtle.

Well, I feel better.

UPDATE (7:49 PM): An even better, and far more humorous, example here.

Now you know.

2005-07-16T19:41:00.000-05:00

Which VD are you?

It's funny because it's true.

Run like a villain, part II

2005-07-16T12:37:00.000-05:00

It's probably fair to say that most people have a poor theoretical understanding of the modes in which domestic governmental power operates. I don't mean to be condescending. I just mean that the vast majority of people living under the sway of late capitalist bureaucratic governments probably haven't read books like Nikolas Rose's Powers of Freedom or Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and don't intend to do so. This is just a demographic fact. At the same time, most people have a good practical understanding of the ways in which governmental power affects their individual lives on a day-to-day basis. Most people know that parking in a fire lane will get their cars towed away. We know we can be fined, and in some cases jailed, for violating traffic laws. Virtually no one pays rent out of the goodness of their heart: we know that failure to do so gives the landlord the grounds to call the police. And, generally speaking, most of us understand that this governmental power enhances our liberty as well as restricting it. We would probably rather be evicted by the cops than by the landlord's drunken goons. More...

My point is simply that we don't need advanced degrees or pie charts to have a generally good and practically useful understanding of how the powers vested in the state both restrict and enhance the range of permissible behavior available to individual persons. Most of us also realize that state power distributes these restrictions and enhancements of liberty in unequal ways. Some people get a much better deal than others. In some cases, the inequality is retributive: convicted felons, in the United States, lose their rights to vote and carry firearms. In other ways, the inequality is borne of prejudice and bigotry.

The racial profiling practiced by law enforcement agencies is, of course, one of the big, publically visible cases of inequality borne out of prejudice and bigotry. We know how it works: racial minorities frequently identified with economic poverty (blacks and latinos) or religious zealoutry (Arabs and middle-easterners) are identified as suspects on the basis of their appearance alone. Law enforcement operates largely by routinely intervening in situations which "look suspicious," and many agents of law enforcement decide that people of certain races "look suspicious," irrespective of whether or not they are doing something which "looks suspicious."

It's precisely the slipperiness of the idea that something "looks suspicious" which makes police racial profiling so difficult to prevent. We live in a racist society, which means that a lot of our judgements about people involve judgements about race. Law enforcement relies on the judgements of individuals (officers) about other individuals (potential suspects). Because of that, law enforcement is likely to be just as racist as the society which it polices.

Still, there are things that can be done to protect the victims of racial profiling, and many people in various levels of government have been working on it for a while. Of course, these measures aren't likely to be effective if we mis-identify the problem itself. And in order to correctly identify the problem, we do need to think about how state power should affect the individual person.

State Senator James Meeks, I think, has mis-identified the problem (from the Tribune:

As Chicago police were investigating what state Sen. James Meeks called a racial-profiling incident, Meeks' supporters called for calm Friday so the community could concentrate on moving forward.

"We are not seeking to polarize our community," said U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) at a news conference at the office of Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.). "We want to work with our law-enforcement officials."

Meeks, who is black, told reporters Thursday that during a traffic stop about 9 p.m. Wednesday at 116th Street and Kensington Avenue, a white police officer cursed at him and drew his gun after the independent legislator from Calumet City and pastor stepped out of the car.

Local officials have virtually all come to Meeks's support. In addition the Davis and Jackson, Mayor Daley has denounced the officer's handling of the traffic stop, and Police Superintendent Phil Cline has announced that he will attend the services at Meeks's church this Sunday. A lot of support.

This was most likely racial profiling. Nothing has been said about why the car carrying Senator Meeks was pulled over, but it may well have been "driving while black." But there is another element involved in this situation which makes it a disastrously poor poster case. Sen. Meeks, of all people, should know better than to get out of his car during a nighttime traffic stop. I know better than this, and I am not employed by any local or national government entity. According to one report, Meeks exited the vehicle because he wanted to identify himself (as a state senator) to the officer.

Now, I'm not saying that the officer was correct to draw his gun at this point (although, I have to say, I would remain in my car precisely because getting out might provoke the officer to draw his gun). And I'm definitely not saying the officer was right to use vulgar language to order the Senator back into the vehicle. What I am saying, though, is that it strikes me as fairly obvious that Meeks was in a hurry, knew that the cop would let them go after he identified himself, and was anxious to "clear the matter up."

If we look at this incident only as a case of racial profiling, we are ignoring the way in which it is also a case of another, equally pernicious, kind of corruption. In other words, Meeks was attempting to take advantage of the kind of privilege that routinely places elected officials above the law.

What I want to stress here is that I will not argue that the cop is a good cop, or that he acted wisely. When I say that Meeks should have known better, I don't mean that he deserved what he got. What I am saying is that this is a poor case to use as an example of the pervasiveness of racial profiling. We all know that the Chicago Police Department treats minorities more roughly, on average, than it does whites. We know that black and latino drivers are significantly more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. The problem here is that Meeks apparently thinks he should have been exempt from racial profiling because of his political clout. This, ultimately, is just another example of the way in which the American political system is deeply invested in a system of privilege. State senators get free passes for precisely the same reasons that minority drivers are targeted by traffic cops: law enforcement agents stand to gain more by protecting those with power from those without power.

It's pretty simple, actually. Racial profiling really divides up into two categories. The first is the targeting of those potential criminals who "look out of place." This is really a separate issue from the other category, the way in which heavier police presence and rougher police tactics is sometimes deployed in heavily minority-populated neighborhoods. The first category of racial profiling is transparently meant to deter the rabble from frightening away the property values of wealthy neighborhoods. The effect of this is to keep crime and poverty at a distance from those already living in relatively good circumstances. Breaking this down to the elemental level, this means that the wealthy and well-mannered benefit more from law enforcement than anyone else. Law enforcement, in turn, benefits from this because, well, the wealthy people can pay them more for their trouble.

I don't think it's hard to see how the privilege granted to government officials--the kind of privilege that Sen. Meeks was seeking--is exactly the same thing. If we're going to oppose racial profiling and other forms of police injustice--as we ought--then we also need to oppose a system of privilege whereby those with certain kinds of authority (whether legislative or police) are allowed to use the power granted by that authority to escape the penalties that would be handed down to those without that authority. The flip side of unfair persecution is privileged immunity.

Run like a villain, part I

The history of personal hygiene

2005-07-14T12:57:00.000-05:00

I hate to be the sour grapes guy, but I do occasionally take pleasure in other people's misfortune. According to last week's Reader, the entirely unfunny WBEZ "experimental comedy" program Schadenfreude will be cancelled at the end of August. But this is a fairly small blessing. Far more important, to my mind, than the fact that our Saturday afternoons will be free of inept sketch comedy is the fact that our lunch hour will no longer be subjected to painfully earnest discussions of things like the meaning of inept sketch comedy. More...

That's right: Odyssey is going away. Production will end on September 30 of this year. According to the Reader article (warning: link is to a large .PDF file):

WBEZ sank half a million dollars a year and a chunk of its prestige into Odyssey, a daily talk show hosted by Gretchen Helfrich whose selling points were thoughtfulness and civility. Less than four years after it was launched nationally, 30 stations around the country were carrying Odyssey, and just the other day the show was picked up in Washington, D.C.

But on June 30 the executive committee of the WBEZ board met, and later that day Helfrich was notified that WBEZ had decided to pull the plug. The board felt that the station could find something better to do with its money.

Now, I'm well aware that this show has a lot of fans, and that quite a few people I know and like actually listen to this festival of glib intellectual-sounding chatter. More than that, since the program frequently culls guests from the University of Chicago's faculty, I know a few people who have made appearances on the show, and who have actually participated in the festival of glib chatter. So I should probably defend my dislike of the show.

Basically, it's like this: The host is an over-caffeinated chatterbox whose only qualification as an academic is her capacity to speak the language of rote social constructivism. This, in turn, allows her to have little or no actual expertise on the topics she discusses, while nonetheless sounding to many listeners as though she were on the cutting edge of theoretical understanding of that topic. Let's say the topic is deodorant. Helfrich would then introduce the show by describing the "history of personal hygiene" as "something that many people take for granted," but should not, because the "meanings" of such things as cleanliness, personal space, socially acceptable levels of body odor, and smells in general have "changed over time," and are moreover intimately intertwined with social history and such categories as class difference and gender.

Rote social constructivism. I'm sure fans of the show will decry my little fictional example as awfully unfair, but it seems to me like a pretty good description of how the show operates. And my dislike of the show comes from this predictability. I, who know nothing about the history of personal hygiene, can guess beforehand what would likely be said about this history on this program.

Anyway, I found the show bearable for a while, but soon found that I had to shut the radio off at noon, every week day. So my own Schadenfreude, in this case, is a result of having heard the show's theme music (by the rote pop song-writing Chicago band OK Go) one too many times.

Out to lunch

2005-07-07T08:54:00.000-05:00

My so-far unplanned and unannounced hiatus will extend for another week, until next Thursday. I hadn't realized until recently how much of my good source material was dependent on school being in session. I need to re-think my approach to this little blague, and find new sources.

Talk to you soon.

International credibility

2005-06-30T12:24:00.000-05:00

Last week, a commenter claimed that he/she was "not at all sure why a liberal/democrat would want to defend Durbin." Another agreed that Senator Durbin's comments were taken wildly out of context by right-wing critics, but argued that the particular words used in his speech were easy fuel for patriotic posturers: "[C]ouldn't he have found a different way to say it? Especially given the Amnesty Int.'s recent comparison and retraction." And now, courtesy of the New York Times, we have answers to both these questions. More...

Guantánamo Thorny Issue for Democrats on Committee:

WASHINGTON, June 29 - A hearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday provided a stark display of how Democrats and Republicans are reacting in different ways to accusations about abuse at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

For Republicans, the mission was simple and direct: defend the military's detention center at Guantánamo as humane and deserving of admiration throughout the world.

For some Democrats, the task was more complicated: to praise the patriotism and work of the vast majority of military personnel at Guantánamo, while raising questions about abuse of detainees.

Complicated indeed. By collapsing under the pressure exerted by right-wing politicians and pundits, and by finding "a different way to say it," House Democrats are actually becoming the mealy-mouthed finks that Rush Limbaugh always told us they are:

Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel's ranking Democrat, said that Guantánamo was in many ways better than state and federal penitentiaries and that he "applauds every American service member who serves honorably at that facility."

But, Mr. Skelton continued, focusing on issues of food and medical treatment missed the point, which he identified as the accusations of unfair treatment of detainees "noted by those who would recruit terrorists to fight against us and by people throughout the Muslim world."

This is, without question, far less compelling than Durbin's fiery denunciation of the torture and humiliation of prisoners reported by an FBI investigator. Skelton, here, is going through the motions of criticism, but avoiding anything that might gain attention from the public.

So, in short, that's why I--and opponents of torture in general--should defend Durbin's now-retracted remarks. What he said was, or least could have been, an effective ultimatum. His remarks meant, essentially, that those who are aware of torture and are in a position to intervene must do something to stop it. Otherwise they are not living up to the standards of conduct which this nation purports to hold itself to. The responses of those who denounced Durbin for his remarks never acknowledged this ultimatum, never denied the FBI man's report, and never disputed the logic of Durbin's claim. Instead, they misrepresented his argument as a "comparison," and then scolded him for comparing honorable American soldiers to communist scumbags.

By caving to this preposterous criticism, Durbin and the Democrats have effectively lost an important rhetorical tool, and made it difficult for themselves to do much more than whine about abstract things like "conditions" and "abuses." In apologizing for a compelling and visceral denunciation and ultimatum, the Democratic Party has opted to settle for the type of "political language" that "has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" (George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946). Later in the same paragraph, by the way, Orwell writes:

People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Whether they like it or not, Skelton and other Democratic leaders who cave into this kind of pressure are, sure enough, defending the indefensible.

For the Record, House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Cal.) pointed out that Gauntánamo is "a world-class detention facility."

Weldon Kees

2005-06-28T13:51:00.000-05:00

I recently picked up a copy of Weldon Kees's Collected Poems, reprinted a couple years ago with a new introduction by David Wojahn. I was curious in part because his name is familiar, but he doesn't seem to be that widely read. Wojahn's introduction insists Kees's "reputation has steadily grown" since the initial 1960 publication of this collection, and that "his work has influenced several generations of American poets," but I feel it's safe to dismiss this as Scholar-Lite ad copy. No one I know reads, thinks about, or discusses Kees, and I know more than a small number of people who are happy to talk about Poets You Haven't Heard Of. More...

I haven't decided just yet what I think of him, but his poems raise enough interesting questions for me that I know that I will continue to spend some time with them. The thing is, these are very dark poems, full of largely unmitigated despair. As Donald Justice says in his 1960 preface, "Kees is one of the bitterest poets in history." He goes on to say:

The bitterness may be traced to a profound hatred for a botched civilization, Whitman's America come to a dead end on the shores of the Pacific. On the last three decades of American culture, and especially on whatever is pretentious and phony, Kees turns the eye of a satirist. His eye for the satiric detail is one of his most remarkable talents, and the texture of many poems whose purpose is not satiric depends on this special type of Keesian ornament. The merely satiric poems, however, seem to me nost his best. His satire is best when it is mixed, when the scorn is mingled with pity, as in the series concerning Robinson, his typical man.

At one level, this account strikes me as mighty generous. I mean, scorn mingled with pity doesn't account, in my mind, for a very broad range of human emotions.

I find this interesting because the events of recent history have, I believe, turned a lot of people with high hopes and high ideals into fairly bitter, cynical, even apocalyptic, thinkers. Certainly, this was true of Kees's time as well: his adult life led him through the Depression onto the second World War and finally into the early days of the Cold War. The danger, of course, of becoming a bitter, cynical, or even apocalyptic thinker is that it provides one with few recourses other than dead ends. The appeal, on the other hand, of thinking in those ways is precisely that it purports to allow one to live without illusions, to see right through the phony quietistic optimism of those who foresee a stable democracy in Iraq or swift economic renewal in the US. In other words, it allows one to see the dead end that everyone else is desperately trying to pretend isn't there.

On the other hand, it's really easy to exaggerate one's own despair. A couple years ago, I was discussing another poet, and a particular poem, with a certain prominent poetry critic. He thought the poem was needlessly apocalyptic, denouncing the impersonality of modern conveniences even as the poet benefitted immensely from them. I responded, and I think convinced the prominent critic, that this was a misreading, that the poem wasn't denouncing impersonality so much as standing before it with a kind of sublime awe. But the point was a good one. There's a level of emotional dishonesty in carping about the impersonality of mass culture, in declaring expressways to be blights upon our freeborn souls, in decrying the political indifference of everyone else while, oneself, merely writing a poem about it. So that's more or less why I approach Kees with a bit of hesitation. He's definitely that kind of poet.

Subtitle

......We present for you this evening
..........A movie of death: observe
......These scenes chipped celluloid
...Reveals unsponsored and tax-free.

......We request these things only:
All gum must be placed beneath the seats
.Or swallowed quickly, all popcorn sacks
...Must be left in the foyer. The doors
.....Will remain closed throughout
....The performance. Kindly consult
.......Yours programs: observe that
.........There are no exits. This is
...........A necessary precaution.

......Look for no dialogue, or for the
Sound of any human voice: we have seen fit
........To synchronize this play with
....Squealings of pigs, slow sound of guns,
..............The sharp dead click
.......Of empty chocolatebar machines.
............We say again: there are
......No exits here, no guards to bribe,
............No washroom windows.

...........No finis to the film unless
............The ending is your own.
.........Turn off the lights, remind
.......The operator of his union card:
.......Sit forward, let the screen reveal
..Your heritage, the logic of your destiny.

(1936)

This is about as doom-and-gloom as you can get without eschewing coherent syntax for a series of moans and screams. All the same, it manages to be smart in certain ways, and I can't help but like it. First, and most obviously, this suggests that "all the world's an odeon," a proposition that snarkily implies a decay of English-language letters into a dark and phantasmatic present-day state. Instead of the great stage tragedies of before, we have shadows on a projection screen, and the new fatal flaw is the audience's hypnotized attention to whatever diversion these shadows offer.

Then, of course, we have the Platonic idea of knowledge and truth. The cinema is a cave, and, sure enough, the forms we see are merely shadows of reality, made visible by a light that merely imitates the sun. In the movie palace, it seems, we find the best metaphor yet for the gulf between empirical perception and contemplative understanding. What's more it's a "movie of death." Hysterical hyperbole, sure, but really kind of funny while it's at it.

What really strikes me here, though, is the continuation of this Platonic theme. In the absence "any human voice" or "dialogue" we have the "Squealing of pigs, slow sound of guns," and the "sharp dead click / Of empty chocolatebar machines." A perfect catalog of all the low and vile things that poets are uniquely able to imitate, and the reasons that poets were to be banned from the ideal state. So, there's no small amount of self-accusation at work here. The shadowy consolation offered by the silent film is, in fact, no big step down from the entertainments offered by the Classical poets, no real sign of decadence. The big difference is that the same illusion, the one we've always sought, now looks so real--the mimesis is so accomplished--that we are no longer under the other illusion that we want anything better than entertaining illusions.

Here's another sample:

Xantha Street

I close my eyes and all I see is rain
And bruised mouths lined above the silverware.
But rooms are empty as the country now:
The angels rise to Heaven splendidly
On page 289, but the evening still comes on.

Poorly cast in an eighth-rate Grand Guignol
Where every agonist proclaims his purity,
One's sight grows sharper in the glass:
The climate of murder hastens newer weeds,
And crippled neighbors wear divergent frowns
That no one saw before.--Nailed up in a box,
Nailed up in a pen, nailed up in a room
That once enclosed you amiably, you write,
"Finished. No more. The end," signing your name,
Frantic, but proud of penmanship. Beasts howl outside;
Authorities, however, keep the pavements clean.

It is to them that every face is turned,
Who steady rooms this earthquake rocks,
Graphing some future, indistinct, already frayed.
These rooms of ours are those that rock the worst.
Cold in the heart and colder in the brain,
We blink in darkened rooms toward exits that are gone.

(1943)

As I said, I'm still making up my mind about this. My suspicion, though, is that this is doing some work that is genuinely important for those who care about both poetry and the state of the world today. I'll freely acknowledge that this is bilious stuff, ready to see the worst in things, even exaggerate about them. But this is an impulse which afflicts many of us today, as well, and it is an impulse which requires serious and diligent examination if we want to avoid falling into one of the two traps (bitter complacency; optimistic quietism) which the impulse lays for us. What I like about this is that, I think, it is more concerned to investigate this impulse (to bitterly denounce, to lament the killed ideal) than to simply express it. What I haven't decided is whether it does so usefully.

The lesser if still odious offense

2005-06-23T11:14:00.000-05:00

"The second highest ranking Democrat in the Senate has compared American servicemen and women to Nazis on the floor of that body. Has political debate sunk so low that a comment that hideous can be made by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) without repercussions?

"Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) lost his leadership position for the lesser if still odious offense of praising Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign which had taken place decades earlier."

This came from a Boston Herald staff editorial printed last Friday, and was the first instance of this comparison, which is now popular among right-wing commentators on the internet, on talk radio and in print. The idea here, apparently, is that Lott was forced by his own party to apologize and resign from his seat as Majority Leader, and, therefore, any suggestion that Durbin is being unfairly attacked is just wimpy liberal whining. More...

This whole controversy is starting to die down, now. If you haven't been keeping up with this, here's a brief synopsis. It began on June 14, when the Senate was discussing an FBI report on their investigation of complaints from prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Durbin made the following speech (link):

When you read some of the graphic descriptions of what has occurred here -- I almost hesitate to put them in the record, and yet they have to be added to this debate. Let me read to you what one FBI agent saw. And I quote from his report:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold....On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

The last paragraph is the controversial part. Most of this, in fact, doesn't get quoted in purported synopses of the scandal. As in this Tribune article, the story is usually summarized by saying that Durbin "compared the treatment of Gitmo prisoners to the actions of Nazis, Soviets and the Khmer Rouge." As you can see, this is not precisely what he said. And, you know, it's one thing for a lunatic-fringe organization like Amnesty International to suggest such a comparison, but quite another for such filthy, filthy lies to be spoken on the floor of the United States Senate.

At first, I had no intention of talking about this situation on this site, but what really brought this home for me--literally and figuratively--was Mayor Daley's demand for an apology from Durbin. Particularly befuddling was Daley's assertion that "I think it's a disgrace to say that any man or woman in the military act like that." I mean, I can agree that it's disgraceful to "act like that," but I really can't stomach the idea that Durbin disgraced himself by reporting and denouncing these actions.

Others have already said this, and better than I can, but I want to reiterate: What Durbin said was a denunciation of the actions of certain prison-guards as immoral, as "mad," as specifically not in keeping with America's own ideals about itself. He did not say "America is guilty of all of the crimes committed under Josef Stalin's rule of the USSR." He did not say "George Bush is just like Pol Pot." What he said was perfectly reasonable as a critique: One would not expect American soldiers to treat their prisoners in these dehumanizing fashions. Frankly, my own expectations are a bit more pessimistic than Durbin's. Durbin, however, was very clearly attempting to demonstrate a particular case wherein the standards this nation claims to hold itself to were not met.

That said, I want Daley out of office. He's up for re-election in 2007, and his fate will probably be decided in the Democratic primary. Daley's popularity has taken some big hits recently, due to various corruption scandals, and it looks like there may be a serious Democratic challenger for the first time in a while. I'll get off my high horse in a minute, but I want to say first that I sincerely believe that local politics are the place where intelligent individuals have a chance at making themselves heard. Durbin had to apologize, in the end, because that comment could have very easily plagued him when his next campaign comes around. The right's misreprentations of his speech do, after all, play in Peoria. But Daley was under no such pressure. As Michael Bérubé puts it, "Richard Daley is a fool. A craven, cowardly fool, at that."

Lastly, I'd like to say something about comparisons. Durbin made a point about the divide between the moral standards to which the United States purports to hold itself and the reality of conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Trent Lott, on the other hand, declared that the U.S. would be a better place today if it had elected a president who ran on a pro-Jim Crow platform in 1948. The Boston Herald, then, is comparing a critique of torture with what amounts to a critique of equal civil rights for all Americans. And it calls the former more "odious" than the latter.

Whiter than ever

2005-06-20T22:40:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the incessant design changes, folks. The last design--which I spent a lot of time on and really liked--turned out to be really unstable on a lot of my most faithful readers' machines. It looked good on my screen, but other people--with other browsers and other operating systems--were having trouble with the color scheme. One person couldn't distinguish the text from the background (that's a bit of problem, you got to admit), and another had trouble telling the plaintext from the links (even though, on my screen, the former were silver, and the latter were bright blue). My theory is that many of the colors I was using were not "safe" for the web.

Anyway, I may tinker with this a bit in more coming weeks, to get something that I'm a little more happy with. In any event, please tell me here (and now) if you have any trouble reading this as it is.

Subterranean mysteries revealed!

2005-06-18T15:59:00.000-05:00

Academia, taken as a whole, has become dominated by freeze-dried 1960s radicals and their intellectual progeny, who have turned much of the humanities and social sciences into a backwater.

You heard it here first, kids. Unless, that is, you've heard this before. I wouldn't know anything about that. I don't get out that much, what with the amount of work it takes to secure the left's domination of the freeze-dried backwater that is the English department.

A couple weeks ago, a participant in the discussion of this post suggested that I read a recent article written for the American Enterprise Institute, and published on the web site of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). The quote above is from this article, and represents the usual inarticulate assertiveness with which arguments about the moribund orthodoxy of people in "academia" are approached. Still, though, there are a handful of points which deserve a thoughtful response. More...

The article is essentially a report on a panel presentation that was given at the American Enterprise Institute, and also includes a redacted version of an essay by Fred Seigel, originally published in the New York Observer. The quote at the top is from Seigel, who also indicates that "[c]redulous undergraduates fall prey to priestly performers who claim to be initiating them into the subterranean mysteries." Needless to say, Seigel's mommy loved his little brother better than him.

FIRE president David French makes a slightly better case. He attempts to outline the specific manner in which the alleged systematic suppression of certain kinds of dissent, and makes a case for viewing this as a serious civil liberties issue:

First, ideological uniformity has led to the suppression of dissenting speech. I'm not talking about extreme expressions of dissent; I'm talking about things such as an "affirmative action" bake sale sponsored by that notorious radical organization, the College Republicans. I'm talking about students who question whether an academic department should show Fahrenheit 9/11 in all classes before the election to persuade students to vote for Kerry.

These aren't isolated cases. In 2004, FIRE received more than 500 credible complaints of deprivation of civil liberties on campus. We surveyed the speech policies of the 200 leading universities and found freedom-squelching speech codes at 70 percent of those schools. In the last four years, as many as 50 universities have made attempts to eject evangelical student organizations, or to restrict them so thoroughly as to effectively rob them of their distinct religious voices. At many campuses, students are subjected from the moment they arrive to mandatory "orientations" and diversity training designed to shock many of them out of the views they bring from home.

Now, of course, the evidence employed in this argument is poorly used. I'm perfectly willing to believe that the anecdotes he mentions were cases of authority overreaching itself, but he isn't specific enough to convince me of this. And then we have this vague "500 credible complaints." We don't know how credible they were, or what kinds of civil liberties were deprived in those cases. In most cases, I think it's safe to assume that people know that they're supposed to be as specific as they can in describing the evidence that supports their claim. Consequently, I tend to also assume that people evade this kind of specificity for very specific reasons.

The specific reason, here, is that French is trying to sneak some awfully wacky stuff into an argument that pretends to be a relatively neutral defense of free speech rights. Look closely, and one sees that he implies that "diversity training" is a "deprivation of civil liberties." French anticipates my objection, though:

Universities say it's people like me, red staters who grew up in middle-class suburbs, who need their views challenged. In my experience, the exact reverse is true. I went to a Christian undergraduate school and then went to law school at Harvard, and I can tell you that the professors at my Christian college were more open to challenges to campus orthodoxy than my professors at Harvard Law School.

You know, he might be right about this. Knee-jerk liberals like myself probably do need to have our ideas challenged. One commenter on the previous post suggested that more time be given to "capitalist literary criticism," and I embrace that wholeheartedly. Perhaps those of us who grew up in Democrat-voting states need to go to tiny Christian colleges and learn to rebel against our permissive "anything goes" upbringings. I can get behind all of this.

One thing, however, which I will not concede is the idea that mandatory "diversity training" can legitimately be described as "brainwashing" or seen as a violation of anyone's actual civil liberties. Not at all. An 18-year old white guy from central Illinois is a racial incident waiting to happen. Not necessarily because he's a bad person, or because he's some kind of neo-Nazi nut, but because everything he knows about people who aren't white comes from television. And even though everything television says is true, this is not adequate preparation for dealing with "diversity" in a mature and responsible way. Making this kid sensitive to the real life issues that come up when people from different cultures, regions and worldviews have to talk to each other is not "indoctrination," it's common sense. Explaining to him that harassing those "queers" in the cafeteria harms the capacity of said "queers" to participate in meaningful public discussion (about anything) is not the same thing as robbing him of his constitionally guaranteed right to believe that what Leviticus says about butt-sex is far, far more important than what Leviticus says about pork and shellfish. No. "Diversity training" is merely instruction in the art of being polite. And those who deny that this training has positive practical consequences are further from the moral center of this country and its traditions of thought than they probably realize.

It's this equation--that "diversity training"="PC brainwashing"="a threat to our civil liberties"--that I see as the dirty little secret that causes French to be discreet in his presentation of details and specifics. This discretion, then, allows him to present big numbers (500 well-documented, rock solid cases of authoritarian abuse!) and conflate them with a few anecdotal incidents which everyone, including myself, would find objectionable (i.e., his story of the Christian student who was nearly kept out of law school because the admissions committee didn't want some Bible-thumper). But the evidence used to establish the scale of the problem involves, I'm guessing, complaints that come from really reactionary and anti-social individuals. They become "civil liberties" issues because these complaints try to conflate criticism with actual suppression. I don't know that for certain, but that's the impression one gets from the pattern of omissions.

Another presenter on the panel, Anne Neal, discussed the findings of a study done by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut. It details and elaborates the familiar idea that the top echelon of American universities and colleges are composed of a solid brick wall of liberal think-alikes. One of the more surprising discoveries: "Fully 68 percent of all students heard their professors make negative classroom comments about George Bush, versus 17 percent who were exposed to criticisms of John Kerry." Wow. That's a lot.

Neal draws a an awfully big conclusion from her evidence, though:

One simply cannot deny, after these findings, that faculty are importing politics into their teaching in a way that affects a student's ability to learn. This should trouble us all. Responsible academic freedom involves not only the professors' prerogatives, but also the freedom of students to learn free of political indoctrination.

Now, I don't want to make a big deal out of "warrants" and "logic" here, but how do we get from the idea that Psychology professors make fun of Bush more often than Kerry to the idea that campus lefties are negatively affecting "a student's ability to learn"? Alcohol affects a student's ability to learn. A professor's stupid comments about politics merely irritate the student. And those comments would be just as irritating even if there were less "ideological uniformity."

Neal sets out to rebut the claim that there are no consequences to this "ideological uniformity." And that's what she proves: that there are consequences. "Hello, there!" What she doesn't do, however, is provide any evidence that universities and colleges are "indoctrinating" their students, much less that they are accomplishing this brain-washing with any kind of regular success. Her strongest point seems to be that conservatives just can't go to college without encountering a greater number of annoying leftists than they're used to back home. Folks, I just can't say this enough: Life isn't fair.

So the big question is, why am I bothering to point out the gaping holes in the cases these folks are making? Why not just let them yammer on amongst themselves? I have two reasons.

1. There are problems with the ways in which many colleges and universities are operated. I have no doubt that there are legitimate instances of serious and unlawful prejudice that affect decisions made about hiring and admissions. People like French should not be given reign over those legitimate problems, because we know that they wish to conflate those problems with things that are not really problems (like "diversity training"). It's necessary, I think, to point out that these sorts of arguments are using things we should care about as bait to suck us into reactionary politicking.

2. Organizations like FIRE and SAF (Students for Academic Freedom) have America's institutions of higher learning on the defensive. They are accomplishing this by using, again, arguments that conflate serious issues with a reactionary agenda. State legislatures are seriously considering SAF's proposal to make its "Academic Bill of Rights" into law. While the text of this document is largely just innocuous repetition of the First Amendment, there are aspects of it that could seriously harm the "academic freedom" of university and college instructors. A legal requirement that a professor provide "students with dissenting sources and viewpoints where appropriate" opens a big, ugly, crawly can of worms. It would mean that my student could sue me for violating his academic freedom because I didn't include Hayek and Rand in my course on Marxist criticism. And it would mean that the decision about "where" a "dissenting source" is "appropriate" would be left to judges and juries rather than to experts in the relevant fields.

FIRE and SAF want to make knowledge democratic. I argue with them because I don't think truth, knowledge and logic are up for a show of hands.

Auden, Part II

2005-06-15T12:18:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago now I promised to talk about W.H. Auden's 1938 sonnet "Rimbaud." The discussion of "Musée des Beaux Arts" was meant as a kind of preface to this. It clarifed--I hope--certain assumptions I tend to make when reading Auden's work. In some ways these are similar poems, too: Both are about the artistic endeavor, identify a type of vanity inherent in that endeavor, and, moreover, they both wearily attenuate the distinctions they seem to set up. Art is seen as a kind of absolute truth-telling, but it tells a truth that is dangerous to civilization, a truth which is dangerous to believe too ardently. In "Musée," this truth is about salvation, about a kind of utopian narrative in which we imagine that the quotidian boredom of civilized activity can finally come to an end, giving life a final, immutable shape and redeeming the dullness and drudgery of our lives. As it turns out, though, this narrative is itself an escapist fantasy: most of us do not live the lives we imagine as needing a utopian salvation. In other words, art does not offer any sincere possibility of revelation: it offers us instead an imagined life in which we can see ourselves as needing and deserving salvation. At another level, this is the desire for desire. The thought that our lives would be more exciting, if only we actually wanted them to be. More...

Rimbaud

The nights, the railway-arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetorician's lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.

Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend
His senses systematically deranged,
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from the lyre and weakness was estranged.

Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed
Of a new self, the son, the engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men.

This is a strange poem. It has moments of brilliance, some characteristically masterful turns of phrases, but on the whole it weirdly threatens to become an adolescent tribute to an adolescent poet. The phrase "special illness of the ear" could be a little off-putting, a sentimental--almost self-pitying--version of "mad Ireland hurt you into poetry" (from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats"). And "the rhetorician's lie"? Why not just stand on the corner with a sandwich-board? But I love what he does with this: it "Burst like a pipe." That's another thing entirely. The lie doesn't oppress, it doesn't just hide the "truth," it protects the individual, it is a container and a guideway.

And then, "the cold had made a poet." Here we are in the territory of the metaphysical conceit. The likeness between the "rhetorician's lie" and the burst waterpipe is extended. The lie "burst" because the weather was cold, and the contents of the lie/pipe were frozen, expanded, and could no longer be contained. We are reminded of an old idea: the Platonic, beneficent lie: the lie which structures experience and gives meaning and form to life. The lie bursts like a pipe, and the contents to which it once gave form are now flooding your kitchen and ruining the carpet. Like a can of worms, it's hard to close once you've opened it.

I could say more here about the snazzy little paradoxes ("systematically deranged"; "from...weakness was estranged") the poem deploys, but I'm more interested in this poem as an attempt to encapsulate, in 14 lines, the vocation of a poet. In many ways, this is a poem about Auden himself. Auden, like Rimbaud, emerged as a mature and important poet at a very early age (Rimbaud was 16 when he wrote his first important book; Auden was 20). Rimbaud's homosexuality was considerably more out in the open than was Auden's, but the difference there is that between a Parisian street urchin and an Oxford boy. Neither could feel exactly at home in a conventional world, with that sort of predilection. Auden's early poetry (from 1927 to 1932, especially) shows the clear influence of Rimbaud's disjunctive and anti-syntactic style. The point, though, is that Rimbaud went nuts, gave up poetry and lived out his short life as a rather unsavvy and perpetually broke trader of goods in North Africa. Auden, on the other hand, became more conservative, more conventional, more interested in wit and fine expression than in some elusive final truth.

But the persistence of this elusive final truth, both in this poem and in "Musée des Beaux Arts," is what I find interesting. It persists because Auden manages to somehow attenuate his belief in this truth. There is a great deal of skepticism about the value and validity of this kind of truth, but it survives as a cautionary tale in a poem like this one. In other words, Auden is skeptical more because of the consequences of such a dangerous truth--spilling one's life all over the floor, becoming disillusioned and good for nothing and no one--than because he ever doubts the truth of this elusive final truth. Both of these poems, I think, are suggestions: they attempt to keep a utopian or salvational idea of the truth alive, but are set against any suggestion that one ought to pursue the immediate realization of utopia and salvation. Seeking these things only leads to madness, chaos and anarchy. The medicine is worse than the illness.

In any case, this implies a kind of quietism that makes me uncomfortable, and that I think ought to make most people uncomfortable. This discomfort, of course, probably arises from the fact that most of us believe we could have a better world, but don't trust ourselves to make it, or don't want it badly enough to put the energy into it. I really appreciate the way Auden expresses precisely this dilemma. But that sounds a bit glib. "Appreciation." "Expression." What I appreciate here is the way in which this dilemma is "expressed" not as a dilemma, but as a choice that has implicitly already been made. The dilemma materializes within the poem, but the poem knows which side it is on, and asks whether you too--in the act of reading this poem--have not already made the same choice.

"I'm retro and I'm cool and I'm chic"

2005-06-14T11:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's edition of the Chicago Tribune printed what is easily one of the most irritating articles I've read in some time. Yes, the news itself is irritating, the people in the news are irritating, and, generally speaking, I'm an uncommonly irritable person. But in this case, the article itself is irritating. More...

The story details how certain "retro beers"--such as Pabst Blue Ribbon, Rainier and Utica Club--are enjoying rapid sales growth, even as beers in general are losing market share to hard liquors. The article explains this with reference to consumer nostalgia:

Just as young consumers might wear `70s-look sneakers, sip `50s cocktails or download `80s hair band tunes, many are bellying up to the bar for the beers grandpa drank--maybe a Pabst Blue Ribbon, a Leinenkugel's.

They're sometimes called "retro beers," brands that might bring to mind old men in ribbed undershirts, and that are finding a new audience with the young.

That's right, folks: old men in ribbed undershirts. This is such a perfectly un-marketable image that the young and "unconventional" are lovin' it. And these ironic young boozers can't be reached by advertising. Pabst (to a great extent) and Utica Club (to a much lesser extent) have both experienced these sales booms thanks to word-of-mouth.

Here's why I find this irritating: they're right. The marketing experts--despite the fact that they are almost all undead monsters who hunger for the sweet, sweet taste of our eyeball juices--have successfully encapsulated what's going on with the "unconventional young people" who reach for that can of retro-licious PBR. At first, I objected to the objects of comparison (i.e., what in the world are "'70s-look sneakers"? and where can I get me a '50s cocktail?). But they're right. They might have the decade wrong, and their idea of the past may be quite vaguely conceptualized, but it doesn't matter. They are selling the vague past, and they're selling it to people who hate marketing experts. You can hate them all you want: that's part of their plan.

For the record, I myself am a Pabst-drinker. I like it because it's cheap as dirt, and because it tastes (to me) better than comparably-priced beers like Budweiser and Coors. But if I were to look deep inside myself--if I were to contemplate the deepest and darkest reasons for which I think the things I think, and do the things I do--I would probably be forced to acknowledge that I think Pabst is "cooler" than those damn yuppie beers. Stare too long into the abyss, and an advertisement stares back at you.

The point is, it's too late for me. Like everyone else, I am now the property of the eyeball suckers. And there's no such thing as a free lunch, so I think I should do my part to begin some new "retro" fashions. Spread it around, people. Word-of-mouth doesn't happen by itself.

Retro-queer: Far too cool for the club scene, and too with it to be "out," this guy marries a conventionally beautiful and extremely naive woman ten years his junior and has a couple kids. He works at an insurance firm, lives in the suburbs and throws lots of barbecues. He tortures himself about his clandestine affair with the caddy, and consequently drinks too much and pours emotional abuse on his family, often in public.
Retro-protester: Opposing the occupation of Iraq is so commercial. These young people get together to burn their retro-draft cards, move to Canada, and go to seminary school.
Retro-gangsta: Forget the colors, this guy's got a tailored, double-breasted pin-striped suit and a bowler hat. He still runs with the same crew, but he's got a different angle on the action. If you can find him, he'll be happy to hook you up with some home-brewed gin or bootleg bourbon.
Retro-editor: He wouldn't be caught dead printing an article on "retro" beers. He's too busy running editorials that consider, in a balanced and fair-minded way, the Woman Question.
Retro-advertiser: "I got two words for ya, buddy: Jingle."

Without delay

2005-06-10T20:38:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've weighed in on emergency contraception--

--but I came across a story this afternoon which reports that an Illinois pharmacist is suing the state over it's temporary order requiring pharmacies to dispense the Plan B pill regardless of employees' personal objections. Luke Vander Bleek, the plaintiff, is challenging the order on the grounds that it violates the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act. The governor's order, as I understand it, requires any pharmacy which stocks any form of prescription contraception to make the emergency "morning after" pill available to patients "without delay." More... Vander Bleek's lawyer explains:

"He sells normal oral contraceptives, but he draws the line at the morning after pill," said Daniel McConchie of Americans United for Life, a Chicago-based law firm that takes on cases around the United States that have a socially conservative slant and represents Vander Bleek.

Vander Bleek, 42, a Roman Catholic, told Reuters on Friday his scientific training led him to believe the morning after pill is different from other contraceptives because it prevents a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.

"The risk is that it is going to take a human life, and I don't think an individual should be allowed by law to draw me in to that activity," Vander Bleek said.

One must, indeed, draw the line somewhere. And for some people, that means drawing the line at "killing" a fertilized egg. Of course, some doctors might tell you that "conception" doesn't occur until the fertilized egg has been implanted in the uterus. And then you might say that this Vander Bleek guy apparently thinks that life begins before conception. And then you might point out that, technically speaking, all forms of contraception are condemned by the Catholic church, and therefore Vander Bleek is violating his own religious morality by dispensing ordinary birth control pills. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and who are we to point out that this particular "line" is based neither on scientific knowledge nor religious teachings? We're arrogant bastards, we are.

In any case, the claim that "the morning after pill is different from other contraceptives" is actually a pretty strange one. Like virtually all prescription contraceptives, Plan B is a progesterone-based drug. The main difference is the dosage, which is much higher than that contained in other forms of birth-control. This higher dosage works more quickly than the Pill, but is somewhat less effective. But the point here is that it works exactly the same way:

Levonorgestrel [the technical name for Plan B] is a form of progesterone, which is a female hormone involved in conception.

Levonorgestrel is used in this product as an emergency contraceptive (EC) to prevent pregnancy after contraceptive failure or unprotected intercourse. Levonorgestrel prevents ovulation (the release of an egg from an ovary), disrupts fertilization (joining of the egg and sperm), and inhibits implantation (attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterus).

Levonorgestrel (EC) may also be used for purposes other than those listed in this medication guide.

Now, admittedly, I'm getting my information from an internet healthcare site, and don't have any "scientific training." But it does seem to me that this is a case of "walks like a duck, quacks like a duck." Not only is there no substantial difference between the ingredients of routine and emergency contraceptives, but they appear to work in precisely the same three ways, as listed above. If Vander Bleek really loses sleep over the possibility that he may have paved the way for the destruction of an innocent single-cell proto-fetus, he really ought to think about not selling the Pill. It would just make things so much easier. And it might make it look like he actually does have that fancy "scientific training."

Music

2005-06-10T14:04:00.000-05:00

Summer just started her own music meme, based on the book one I responded to a couple days ago. I'm responding to this partly because I need to repair my name (the books post made me look like the hugest dork in the history of civlization) and partly because I drunkenly promised to respond. I may be a drunk, but I am no liar. Dammit. More...

1. total number of albums/cds i own: About 200 or so.

2. the last album/cd i bought: Subhumans, From the Cradle to the Grave

3. currently listening to: A mixtape from Jim B.: A Celebration of Hate (all songs with lyrics to the effect of "I hate you")

4. lyrics or beats: Lyrics. No question.

5. first album you fell in love with: The Jimi Hendrix collection I got when I was 14. Hardly ever listen to it these days.

6. album with the largest impact: Not sure. Probably Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around. The last full album that he finished recording.

7. favorite album: Ever? Tough question, but I'm saying Crass's Penis Envy. Go get it, listen to it, let it sink in. Not easy listening.

8. most listened to album: Social Distortion's self-titled album from 1990.

9. sexiest album: I'm gonna declare a three-way tie: Patti Smith's Horses, Iggy & the Stooges' Raw Power, and Gram Parsons' Grievous Angel.

10. biggest disappointment: Whatever it is, I didn't buy it.

11. five albums that mean the most to you: (1) Social D's self-titled; (2) Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around; (3) Iggy's Raw Power; (4) Howlin' Wolf's 2-volume Best of; (5) Mekons' Rock & Roll.

12. album tag, you're it: I'm gonna have to go with Jett and (again) Moacir.

Hmm. I still look like a nerd.

Books

2005-06-06T20:27:00.000-05:00

Jett tagged me for this latest book meme, qualifying this buck-passing with the disclaimer "if you're into this sort of thing." If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that. But hey, I'll give it a shot. More...

1. Total number of books I own: Shit. 900? I don't have an exact number, but that's a reasonable guess.

2. The last book I bought: Right now is actually the longest I've ever gone without buying new books. The last ones, I believe, were James Martel's Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory and Niklas Luhmann's Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy.

3. Last book I read: Last one I finished was Richard Bozorth's Auden's Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality. Last one I actually picked up and looked at: too many to count and/or think of.

4. Current book reading: The Luhmann thing I mentioned in 2.

5. Fiction or non-fiction: Where am I, Walden Books?

6. First book ever read: C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Yes, this whole nerd thing starts early.

7. Largest impact: That's really hard to narrow down. Recently, Jed Esty's A Shrinking Island impressed me a lot and gave me a more defined sense of what really good scholarship can do. Further back, I really loved Iris Murdoch's novels, especially The Book and the Brotherhood, or The Accidental Man. And they had an "impact" in the sense that they changed my thinking about a lot of things.

8. Most read book: Well, there are individual poems that I've read far more often than any entire book. But books: Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point, and that one guy's Julius Caesar.

9. Favorite scholarly book: There's no good answer to this, but I'll say Raymond Williams' The Politics of Modernism. Not my favorite, but the favorite of those I can think of off the top of my head.

10. Sexiest book: Also Raymond Williams' The Politics of Modernism, followed shortly by Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.

11. Biggest disappointment: Whatever it was, I didn't finish it.

12. Five books that mean something to me: --in no particular order-- (1) Again, Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (the topic of my B.A. thesis); (2) Williams, Paterson; (3) John Guillory, Cultural Capital (shut up); (4) Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams; (5) my as-yet-unwritten dissertation.

13. Who's next: I'm gonna go with Moacir and Steph. And Katie, since I have no idea what's up with her these days.

"Absurd"

2005-06-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

Once again, the President and his crew are pointing an accusing finger at the media. It seems to that the big to-do over just a teensy, tiny number of Guantánamo prison guards who allegedly mistreated prisoners or prisoners' property is entirely the fault of a sensationalistic, left-wing, journalistic elite who are just out to make a buck and maybe smear America's good name if it's convenient. More...
Soviet-sponsored news agency Reuters reports today:

"It is unfortunate that some have chosen to take out of context a few isolated incidents by a few individuals without making clear the policies and practices of the overwhelming vast majority, the 99.9 percent, of our military personnel," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
McClellan said he was referring to "some media coverage and some commentary."

"There were three times as many confirmed incidents of (Koran) abuse by detainees, a number which were far worse than the few isolated incidents of mishandling by a few individuals that violated military policies and practices," McClellan added.

In other words, beyond the mere insult of "exaggerating" the (very teensy, tiny) number of bad apples in the U.S. military, the media completely failed to point out that "they" started it. McLellan went on to say that the fact that the Pentagon itself released the information regarding the abuses was evidence that the U.S. had "very high standards" and did not tolerate violations of any kind.

You see, this is kind of like a pick-up basketball game (the War on Terror, that is). If the U.S. doesn't call its own fouls, it'll get a bad reputation, and the other countries won't want to play it. Even if they do get to play, under those circumstances, the U.S. can expect to get some nasty shoulder-checks and stray elbows, and will probably leave the court (this is a basketball court, of course, not some sort of "international criminal" court) with a split lip and a black eye. Those are the rules. The last thing we need is some sort of referee (the media) making it look like we don't call our own fouls.

The White House's stance on this has been pretty consistent in recent months. As the Reuters story puts it:

The White House's harsh response followed President George W. Bush's blunt dismissal last week of an Amnesty International report which described the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo as a gulag and said the United States was responsible for an upsurge in human rights violations around the world. Bush called the allegations "absurd."

Last month, the White House blamed Newsweek magazine for damaging America's image in the Muslim world with a report that interrogators had flushed at least one copy of the Muslim holy book down a toilet to try to make detainees talk.

I'm hardly the first person to point out what's wrong with all this, and I know that repeating those points will amount either to preaching to the choir or to crying in the wilderness, depending on who's reading today. But I would like to make a couple quick points.

First, Newsweek did not damage America's reputation in the Muslim world. This is obvious to anyone who is not a 7th Century Provençal peasant who was mysteriously transported to the present by an anomaly in the space-time continuum. And it wouldn't be very difficult to explain it to him, once we found the local specialist in mediaeval Romance languages. Whether rightly or wrongly, justified or not, the people who rioted in southern Asia following the Newsweek report already thought poorly of the United States. The report was an excuse to vent that anger, not itself the cause of the anger.

Second, I'd like to point out exactly what the President referred to as "absurd." He was responding directly to a letter in which Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, says: "The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process." Prior to this comparison, Khan lays out the basis on which this comparison is made (disappearances, "ghost" detainees, allegations of torture, detention without charges, denial of due process, and so on). So far as I know, the White House hasn't actually responded to the charges that form the basis of the comparison. It's just "absurd" to compare a detention center with an undisclosed number of unidentified and uncharged "enemy combatants" with the gulag. In any case, Amnesty International's exhaustive report on human rights violations that occurred in the United States between January and December, 2004, can be found here. This lays out in much greater detail precisely the charges that led Khan to make this comparison.

Auden, Part I

2005-06-01T10:05:00.000-05:00

I understand that no one in the academy these days ever bothers to do a close reading any more. That's a shame. So I thought, "Why not take a break from my usual constant sneering at Cleanth Brooks and try my hand at the type of criticism that doesn't require me to sacrifice a goat beneath a portrait of Judith Butler?" This immediately struck me as a brilliant idea. Not only would it be fun, but I would save a goat. And (what's more), I wouldn't even have to start with the assumption that one somehow performs gender (I never really understood what that meant anyway. You?). More...

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
.......................................dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-W.H. Auden (December 1938)

This is a pretty familiar poem, included in virtually every anthology that contains 20th century British poetry. I think it's for exactly that reason that this poem eluded me for so long. At one level, it first strikes the reader as the kind of poem that Robert Graves and Laura (Riding) Jackson called the "anthology poem," the sort of thing that's sentimental, not particularly challenging, but has some kernel of sagesse that the common reader can take away, and perhaps quote at some future cocktail party: "Good old Wystan. Didn't he say something about 'how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster'? That's the truth for our times, I say. Now, where's that wife of mine."

But this is not that kind of poem. Right from the beginning, we are told that this poem (or, perhaps, art more generally) holds little or no wisdom for us. Whatever kind of wisdom it might have is going to be of little use. This strange negation--"never wrong"--implicates the poem itself in the same kind of failure which the poem identifies in the works of the Old Masters. We are not told that the Old Masters were right (or, at least, completely right) "about suffering." "Never wrong" also functions, simultaneously, as the kind of technical manipulation or misdirection that the Old Masters themselves rely upon in order to be "never wrong."

I can see, though, where this interpretation--based on a measly phrase--might seem unfair to Auden. Certainly, he was attempting to talk about the limits of artistic representation, to point out that the greatest works of art can do no more than observe the way in which art is limited. We imagine art to be bound, in some way, to great emotions, which usually means great suffering (imagine an epic poem about Odysseus's post-voyage domestic life). At the same time, suffering itself is difficult to represent. The more directly one presents it, the more ludicrous and maudlin the work of art is bound to be. Hence the way in which a true master like Pieter Brueghel paints "the disaster" into the background of the painting. Auden's point--my hypothetical interlocutor says--is that this is an accurate representation of the way someone else's suffering usually affects our lives. To call it an artistic "trick" would be uncharitable.

Perhaps, then, "trick" is a strong word. After all, what Auden is saying here is that the inner life is a lonely one. We can talk about so many things that happen to us, things that we do, things that we think about. But there remains a category of experience--which this poem calls "suffering"--that metamorphoses into something comical and pitiful when we attempt this kind of direct representation. This difficulty--the way in which pathos turns maudlin when it takes over the entire field of vision--forces the good artist to place "suffering" in its proper "human position." That is to say, the artist must represent it indirectly, must allude to it, imply its presence, or place it in the background.

What I would add to this--and this is why I used the word "trick"--is that any indirect representation always risks being a misrepresentation as well. This poem very subtly and gently implies that the relationship between art and suffering--in particular the idea of art about suffering as "cathartic"--relies upon an indirect representation which is also a misrepresentation. As most of us know, catharsis can be a very effective thing, and usually works just the way we think it ought to. Crying during a movie can help us feel a little better about our own troubles. But this cathartically charged representation, for Auden, is never quite the same thing as real suffering.

In other words, when art tries to present us with suffering, the suffering cannot be maudlin or boring. The maudlin drunk at the bar is boring. This poem, even as it admires the way the Old Masters portrayed the "human position" of suffering, hints at the more boring kinds of suffering. The "miraculous birth"--which at one level implies an end to suffering--threatens to cause more suffering for the "Children who did not specially want it to happen." Martyrdom itself--the giving of one's life for a cause--eventually gives way to the boredom of everyday life. The Old Masters, we are told, "never forgot" this, but this doesn't mean they ever tried to show us just how boring most suffering actually is. Or how most suffering is boredom. This knowledge is only implied.

In the same way, Auden's final eight lines carefully and systematically direct our understanding of the painting in question: "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster." But there is no leisure in this picture. The ploughman, while he "may / Have heard the splash," keeps at his labor. The sailing ship, though it "must have seen / Something amazing," somehow "sailed calmly on." These adverbs ("leisurely," "calmly") describe the movements of the figures in the painting, but are not depictions of their motives or feelings. After all, a farmworker is no man of leisure, and a sailor with "somewhere to get to" is not calm. This, then, is a misrepresentation of these figures. By implying that their inattention to "the disaster" is due to the fact that they don't really care, the ploughman and the ship magnify Icarus's tragedy. Not only does Icarus manage a truly spectacular failure, but no one really cares enough to be that bothered by it. By placing Icarus in the background, Brueghel brings the boy's suffering to the thematic foreground.

Not "wrong," then, but I think Auden's point is that it's not exactly "right" either. That said, the other point is that it's very difficult to be "right" about this sort of thing. What the painting does accomplish--at least according to Auden's poem--is a demonstration of the impossibility of directly representing real, boring, human suffering. The fact that the ploughman is too busy to look up from his work says more about him than would a painting of the ploughman himself. He is engaged in an occupation that is both tedious and overwhelming, with the consequence that he has no time or patience for anything "amazing."

This is the most we can say about the ploughman: he is too busy. What we can't know (and this is why the Old Masters are "never wrong" rather than "absolutely right") is whether or not he's suffering from this. I mean, we could ask the ploughman, but we can't know from the work of art (either the painting or the poem). This poem is a work of art in the moment of doubting itself. It argues itself into a corner: it imagines that art, at its best, has great powers to reveal truths about human existence. And then it points to precisely what it is incapable of knowing: Do those who are too busy for these truths suffer? Or are they too busy to suffer, as well? If so, doesn't that mean that the "suffering" which the work of art portrays is an invention of the artist? And then, wouldn't that further imply that artists seek suffering? If that's the case, then the kind of suffering they seek is probably nothing like starvation or mourning. It seeks some kind of imaginary, romanticized suffering, and so invents rather than reveals the supposed truths of human existence. In this poem, this invention becomes a self-conscious misrepresentation, circumscribed by an artistic "trick" which attempts to deemphasize the questions of suffering which the artist cannot answer.

Sugar-free chocolate mousse in a can

2005-05-27T16:28:00.000-05:00

One more item in the "male virility" category. I discovered this in the Seattle weekly paper The Stranger. Here's a link to the press release itself. Easily one of the most mind-boggling headlines I've ever seen.

What vision is left? And is anyone asking?

2005-05-27T10:35:00.000-05:00

Someone is, in fact, asking. As my faithful readers know, this blague experiences occasional bouts of topical obsession. First it was crime, then it was birth-control, and now: male virility. But I don't make this stuff up, my friends. It knocks at my door, and I choose to let it in. Take that how you will.

It seems that some men with "performance" issues may need to choose between one eye and two: FDA Looking Into Blindness-Viagra Link. More... If this link does, indeed, turn out to be a causal one, this will take a place high on the list of ironic, Hades-inspired pharmaceutical side effects. Right after the link between a certain social anxiety medication whose television advertisements warned that it may cause spontaneous, uncontrollable bowel movements. From the AP story:

The FDA has 42 reports of the blindness, 38 among users of Viagra and four among users of Cialis. There were no cases reported among users of Levitra, the third impotence drug.

"We take this seriously," said FDA's [Susan] Cruzan.

As Cruzan said this, she was visibly attempting to conceal a smile, and then mouthed the words "stop it" to another FDA official sitting beside her.

This blindness may not, after all, be a side effect. The AP reports that the specific type of blindness reported in these 42 cases can be caused by the same factors that can lead to impotence, such as diabetes and heart disease. All the same, any causal connection between a miracle-drug which cures erectile dysfunction and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) strikes me as good, solid evidence for the existence of higher beings. Not the all-powerful deities of the monotheistic religions, though. We're talking whimsical Greek gods here.

In other news: you all might have noticed I haven't posted in a while. Sorry. Been busy with the small, maddening details of life and dissertation-writing. And nothing is forthcoming this weekend, as I'm hosting some friends from out of town, and will feel obligated to entertain my guests. Next week, though, I plan to give you all a taste of My Thoughts of Poetry, beginning with some stuff about W.H. Auden's 1938 poem "Rimbaud."

I can just feel the jittery anticipation.

Blow, wind, blow

2005-05-22T15:17:00.000-05:00

Well, this is what happens when you try to provide a reasoned, point-by-point response to thinking which relies upon clichés. The task was twofold: I wanted both to take seriously the scattered legitimate points that the authors make, and to point out the inadequacies of argumentation which ultimately underwrite the conclusions they draw. Hence the 4,300 word essay below. I really ought to edit it down to a more reasonable blog-post size, but I won't, because I've already spent too much time on it. If you get through it, please let me know what you think.

UPDATE (5/23/05): The U of C Student Committee on the Middle East has just invited their readers to discuss the issue of "academic bias." Since they provide a link to my site, I thought I would do the same for them.

Big words and small ideas

2005-05-22T14:54:00.000-05:00

Here, finally, is my relatively unabridged, fair & balanced, untenured-radical response to the Maroon opinion pieces I mentioned on Tuesday. I'm composing this in three parts: First, my general position on the issue, followed by separate responses targeted to the specific arguments made by both Rita Koganzon and Yael Levin.

Goddamn Liberal Professors

It's probably true that a significant majority of persons employed as educators in college and university humanities and social sciences programs are politically left-leaning. No one really seems to want to argue with this. Experience--for those of us who have received higher education in the American system--appears to bear this out. Sure, there's usually the departmental oddball who baits his colleagues by plastering Republican campaign posters on his office door, who prefaces his seminar contributions with quotes from Edmund Burke, or who lectures his students about the dangers of grade inflation at the top of every academic term. This is the exception that proves the rule, as they say. What's more, at least one (dubiously scientific) survey of American college and university faculty indicates that "lean further to the left than even the most conspiracy-minded conservatives might have imagined." You can also see Michael Bérubé's "semi-facetious" response here.

It's probably true, yes. It's probably also true that a number of faculty members make their political views known, during class time, in ways that may annoy people who don't hold the same views. And I can certainly see how a student may be left feeling as though her toes had been stepped upon. The professor offers a comment, as an aside, about "that clown Bush," the student raises her hand to object, but is told that her objection is off-topic. Yes, I can see how that might be a little deflating, and might lead that student to believe the professor is a smug liberal jerk who doesn't value dissenting opinions. Why is his stupid little opinion worth the class's time when everyone else just has to sit on their hands and keep their beliefs to themselves? It's not fair!

I agree: it's not fair. But, as so many people who call themselves "conservatives" have told me, "life isn't fair." In fact, I've had this little kernel of wisdom thrown at me so many times that I could easily believe that this premise is, in fact, the a priori warrant of contemporary American economically conservative beliefs. It tacitly underwrites such statememts as "equal opportunity does not mean equal outcome" and "in an ideal world, yes, but we need to be realistic." However, I should advise my readers that the fact that self-identified conservatives say "life isn't fair" a whole lot more frequently than any other type of person should not lead us to conclude that they own sole rights to this maxim. In the spirit of subversive recuperation, I say: "Life isn't fair."

In fact, a student's relationship to his or her college instructors is likely to involve the sort of unfairness that one would otherwise encounter only in his or her relationships to parents, employers, state and federal taxation agencies, and God. It's not an equal relationship. As in any other unequal relationship, the more powerful person is capable of abusing the authority granted by that relationship. This abuse of power can be due to ignorance, arrogance, sheer stupidity or absent-minded eccentricity. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to legislate against such things as ignorance, arrogance, sheer stupidity or absent-minded eccentricity. Whenever people have attempted such legislation, it usually winds up suppressing valid dissent and free intellectual inquiry, and actually encourages ignorance, arrogance and sheer stupidity (absent-minded eccentrics, however, can be more easily carted off to institutions).

But I understand that this "unfairness" is only part of the grouse. Those who lament the "liberal monopoly" in American higher education are not concerned merely with unfairness, but with the unfairness of the distribution of this unfairness. The problem isn't just that professors (and adjunct faculty, grad student teachers, etc.) are in a position to abuse the authority granted to them, but that they are, in the aggregate, far too like-minded on political issues. This like-mindedness leads to insularity. Liberal academics support and reinforce each other's political opinions--worthless as those opinions may be--and pretty soon it becomes simply outrageous to step out of line on issues that everyone in academia agrees about. If someone says that they support the war in Iraq, for instance, they become immediately suspect: this person doesn't agree with us, the liberal academics say, so how can we possibly trust him? It's like the cop who rats on his partner's illegal interrogation techniques. Sure, he might be right, but he's violated the code.

There might be some truth to this, though in fairness I think it's a fairly inaccurate characterization of the ways in which academic departments in the social sciences and humanities actually function. Yes, I imagine there is a certain amount of peer pressure that would encourage people with "unpopular views" to keep quiet and go along with the Kerry-voting, pro-choicing, secular humanizing crowd. But there's a fairly good reason for this, actually. That fact is, most things that academics research, study and teach have relatively little or no direct bearing on presidential politics, abortion, or the existence of God. That said, my primary response to both Koganzon and Levin will focus on clarifying the actual, objective relevance of political views (in the narrow sense of "political," i.e., questions of governmental policy) to the contemporary college classroom.

Politics in the Classroom

Rita Koganzon's opinion piece, "The debate over academic bias is an ethical one" (May 12), makes a number of points about which I agree with her entirely. Her primary argument is that the goal of academic fairness would not be aided by greater legislative oversight of faculty conduct, which is what people such as David Horowitz and groups such as Students for Academic Freedom have proposed. However, "the recurrence of the issue" she says, suggests that "while the national face of the debate might look foolish, there really may be something important at stake." She goes on to characterize the liberal defense of the academic status quo as equally idiotic, pointing to those who suggest that "conservatives are inherently too stupid or greedy to make meaningful contributions to scholarship" and those who defensively claim that "there is in fact no skew at all in the political composition of campuses."

After dismissing the claims made on "both sides" of the debate (though I, obviously, don't agree that the issue is nearly this two-dimensional) she identifies some of the more troubling consequences implied by any legal rectification of the political imbalance of American college and university faculty composition. By legislating "affirmative action" for conservative academics, we would find ourselves in a situation where, just to be fair, institutions of higher learning would also be forced to hire anarchists, communists, fascists and monarchists, and they would have to be hired "for who they are, not what they know." This reductio ad absurdum is meant to demonstrate the silliness of any kind of quota system for hiring academics of differing political views. I agree. Whatever its limitations, the current procedures for hiring academic personnel are far better than a procedure that had to account for proportional representation of the entire "political spectrum" in all its sloganeering vainglory.

But it's from this point on--where Koganzon tries to establish the "problem" of political bias as one best addressed by ethical, rather than political, considerations--that this argument begins to suffer more seriously from its initial suggestion that there are primarily "two sides" to this debate. She suggests, first, that college instructors make a genuine effort to keep politically divisive topics away from the classroom, particularly when the topic is emotional for most people (i.e., abortion) and when the topic has relatively little bearing on the course material. She acknowledges, however, that many contemporary political questions are, in fact, relevant to some course materials, and that in many instances the politically divisive topic cannot be easily avoided: "And when contemporary issues are unavoidable," she says, "professors should keep their own opinions out of discussions, serving as moderators rather than participants in the debate." Now, I imagine that Koganzon believes that this suggestion constitutes some sort of fair, reasonable solution that keeps everyone happy. Students with unpopular views are allowed to express themselves, and while they may encounter resistance from their peers, they don't have to deal with the more intimidating resistance of the instructor, whose access to Institutional Authority and The Grade Book allows him to rig the "debate" before it begins.

Moderating class discussion, in fact, is a very useful pedagogical tool. I use it often. But a college course is not a debate team, and neither is it merely a place for smart young people to hash out their opinions. If we agree that the college classroom has, fundamentally, an educational mission, then it is impossible for a professor or instructor to cede his or her intellectual and institutional authority to students. What you're suggesting, Ms. Koganzon, implies that professors ought not challenge students with whom they differ, and that's preposterous. I, for one, am perfectly willing to respect legitimate disagreement. In other words, I'm not out to force anyone to pledge themselves to my principles and viewpoints. At the same time, my respect for honest difference does not extend itself to respecting another person's poor articulation of their beliefs. A good teacher challenges their students' assertions. I frequently, in fact, challenge assertions that I agree with. My assumption is that no serious student is in college merely to enjoy the opportunity to express their views. Rather, they are there to learn, and a good part of the learning that goes on in a college classroom is learning how to express oneself. Preventing faculty from challenging their students only hampers this goal. This, Ms. Koganzon, whatever it is, is not an "ethical" proposition.

Koganzon makes one more statement that deserves rebuttal, and which I believe constitutes the central confusion from which her argument suffers:

For a professor to admit that his views on texts are based in political ideologies rather than the texts themselves discredits the value of his teaching; he is merely giving some prescribed dogma rather than attempting to grapple with the text on its own terms. Those students who agree with his politics have little incentive to challenge any of his ideas, and those who disagree have little incentive to take any of them seriously. Who stands to gain from this kind of education?

I agree that "prescribed dogma" is bad. But "prescribed dogma" is a separate issue from whether or not the instructor's "views on texts" are derived from "political ideologies" or "the texts themselves." First of all, not all political views are dogmatic. A particular political view may itself be dogmatic, but that is a quality of the articulation of the view and not of the view itself. Second, any viewpoint "on" the text that is derived solely from "the text itself" would have to be nothing other than complacent acceptance of everything that text articulates. Even this complacency, though, would be rather difficult to arrive at. Various individuals, in reading the text, may find themselves holding slightly different conceptions of exactly what the text says. And yet, because they would not be able to articulate these differences by reference to ideas or views that they bring in from "outside" the text, they would find themselves unable even to arrive at an initial agreement about which interpretion of the text to complacently accept. Frankly, I think we all "stand to gain" from a class discussion which avoids this particular logical loop-the-loop.

Now, of course, I know that Koganzon didn't actually mean to restrict discussion to the degree that her argument implies. I don't accuse her of owning any such belief. Rather, I point to this merely to show the limits and contradictions of her argument as she articulates it. And this is precisely why it is valuable and ethically good for college instructors to challenge the views of their students, even on controversial, emotional issues such as "political bias in the classroom." Yes: some liberal college professors are dogmatic, intellectually moribund nitwits. This fact, though, cannot be used as a basis for restricting the capacity of college instructors to perform their jobs.

The Pursuit of Truth

Yael Levin's piece, "The liberal academic bias is a problem in our universities" (May 16), rehearses a few of the arguments made by Koganzon (the classroom ought to be "depoliticized"; we should understand the text "on its own terms"), but ultimately rests her argument on a different set of terms, most notably a kind of expansive version of the doctrine of freedom of speech. The gist of the argument, as I take it, is that because of the homogeneity of political viewpoints held by liberal arts faculty, certain ideas, research projects and methodologies are declared "politically incorrect," and therefore invalid, before they are given the fair shot at genuine peer review that they deserve. This strikes me as, yes, paranoid, but I'm willing to accept the possibility that this happens, for the sake of argument. Unfortunately, Levin's pet examples of these kinds of ideologically-tempered exclusions are Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) and Daniel Pipes (director of the Middle East Forum, which operates the controversial Campus Watch web site). While I don't agree that my own objections to Murray and Pipes are founded merely on baseless intellectual prejudice, it's enough for now to point out that neither of these guys are wrestling with "censorship." Seriously, these guys have been heard!

Right now I want to deal with what I take to be the substance of Levin's argument. She begins with the premise that the purpose of academic study--its immanent goal--is the "pursuit of truth" or the discovery of "the truest account" of the way in which the parts of our world works. This premise, of course, is both broadly acceptable (who would object to truth?) as well as essentially lacking in content (for the same reason). But okay: I'll accept the premise. From here she goes on to describe the way in which this pursuit of truth, if all were right with the world, would work. First, we need an "unsympathetic marketplace of ideas" in which all ideas--good, bad, strong and weak--are given equal and fair hearing.

Ideas will combat each other, proponents of ideas will battle with all their metaphorical blood, sweat, and tears, and ultimately the best ideas will win out. Fostering an atmosphere in which ideas can battle in this way ought to be the goal of the academy.

At this point she returns to the examples of Murray and Pipes in order to demonstrate that this marketplace, as it actually exists today, is corrupted by the fact that those currently in positions of power in liberal arts institutions are prejudiced against these ideas. Murray and Pipes may have their own web sites, and they may have far larger audiences than the academic power players, but because their ideas are not considered "politically correct" within institutions of higher learning, they remain unfairly stigmatized, are wrongly convicted without trial in the intellectual big leagues.

My problem with this argument is that it strikes me as fundamentally incoherent, "nonsense," as I called it earlier. What is this arguing? If Levin is really proposing an "unsympathetic marketplace of ideas," then surely she must realize that this marketplace's lack of sympathy will eventually and necessarily exclude certain ideas as "bad" or "weak." As in a financial marketplace, not every venture can or will make it to the top. The argument, then, would seem to be analogous to claiming that (a)"the stock market is corrupt" because (b)"venture x went bankrupt shortly after its initial public offering." This relies on the tacit and unsupported claim that "venture x" is in fact a strong venture, even though the financial marketplace did not think so. This is what rhetoricians call "begging the question": it tries to introduce its own conclusion (a) as evidence for that conclusion.

Having done with that, of course, I realize that this is not Levin's claim (although it is the form which her argument takes). Rather, she is saying that, in fact, Pipes and Murray do have good ideas which deserve more recognition in the academy that they are currently given. Again, I disagree with that claim, but take Levin's point that my disagreement is not reason enough to exclude these ideas. It's just that, the way I see it, the "unsympathetic marketplace of ideas" that Levin wants would (again) eventually and necessarily exclude ideas on precisely the grounds that certain people disagree with those ideas, even though this is not reason enough to exclude them. Beyond mere question-begging, we are now presented with contradictory claims. We are not to bring our own prejudicial opinions to the "marketplace of ideas," but at the same time, the marketplace cannot operate without the "proponents of ideas" shedding "metaphorical blood, sweat, and tears" on behalf of their prejudicial opinions.

And yet, to be fair, there is one more step in Levin's argument, one which threatens to bring the whole thing together and throw a logically-coherent egg at academia's front door: Pipes and Murray, despite the fact that their arguments are unpopular, "have empirical data to support their arguments." Empirical evidence, for Levin, can and ought to be seen as a touchstone for deciding which ideas and arguments are granted entry into the "unsympathetic marketplace of ideas." She points to the once-unpopular ideas of Milton Friedman as a case-in-point: they defied common-sense and prejudice, but they were well-founded in hard, exhaustive research. This research, constituting empirical data in support of his ideas, eventually led to a widespread, if certainly not universal, acceptance of those ideas as valid.

Empirical data: that's what separates the winners from the losers in the "unsympathetic marketplace of ideas," or it ought to, at least. The problem is that the academy has been taken over by a bunch of liberal feel-gooders who are perfectly happy to see no, hear no, speak no evil. As Levin puts:

There is an enormous amount of pressure on students and scholars in the humanities, for example, to study literature and works of art from points of view that are tied to left-leaning ideologies. In English departments, Marxist and feminist theory, New Historicism, deconstruction, and methodologies involving race, class, and gender are paramount. In the empirical realm, a politically correct band of arbiters now decides which scientific explanations of the differences between genders and races are acceptable and which are too insensitive to be considered; it is OK to blame society for a group’s shortcomings or tendencies, but you’d better not point the finger at mother nature.

The humanities, that is, have been taken over by theory-heads with big words and small ideas, while the more empirically-driven social sciences are too committed to egalitarian ideas about race and gender to be able to see the raw truth before their very eyes.

Yes, my readers, this is a gross mischaracterization of fact. And yes, we've heard the "it's all right to say x, but boy you're in trouble if you say y" phrase so many times and with so little basis that we probably all feel the urge to laugh. I can laugh on my own time. Here I'm going to argue with this. To begin, the characterization of the humanities as "tied to left-leaning ideologies" just doesn't hold up. In making this point, we can even ignore the so-called "rebirth of the aesthetic" (which Levin has probably not heard of, but which would no doubt make her happy). While Marxism and feminism, are, in the world of politics, "left-leaning ideologies," their role in the humanities consists of the way in which they offer certain interpretive possibilities that are occluded by other systems of thought. In that sense, they have both done a huge amount of work in terms of expanding our understanding of "empirical evidence." And, yes, empirical evidence needs to be interpreted. This is axiomatic for anyone who understands the kind of work that educated inquiry does. There is no sense in which the "truth" ever presents itself in an unmediated and self-evident way. This is why, for instance, Ptolemaic astronomers could deduce a theory of the movement and nature of stars that was wholly at odds with actual fact. They had the empirical data to support their claims, but they had an interpretive system that was not capable of showing them the ways in which their data was incomplete. A play by Shakespeare can present the same problems: we may know the words of the play (the empirical evidence of which it is made), but by looking at it with additional interpretive tools (such as feminist critical theory), we may learn new and true things about that play which were not available to us earlier. Furthermore, the idea that "deconstruction" is a "left-leaning" approach to textual analysis is fairly inadequate. I will content myself to point out that one of its major precursors (Heidegger) and one of its most influential proponents (De Man) were both, at one time, Nazi sympathizers. I don't say this to discredit their works, but simply to point out that the intellectual history of deconstruction has hardly been one of staunch left-wing cheerleading.

That is to say, there is no easily-apprehended or direct relationship between the interpretive strategies used in the humanities and the positions one takes on contemporary American political debates. A Marxist critic such as Frederic Jameson can discover some very interesting, useful and valid things about a novel. His work on that novel may allow you to recognize something of which you were previously unaware. His work may even be based on his own far-from-center political beliefs. But his interpretation of Lord Jim isn't going to convince anyone to join the Communist Party. If anyone were convinced, by Fred Jameson alone, to join the CPUSA, I would feel perfectly confident in my ability to call that person a simpering moron. The relationship between theories of interpretation and politics is in no way simple enough to allow us to equate Marxist literary criticism with an international proletarian seizure of the means of production.

As for the social sciences and their politically-correct guardians, this is where Levin and I truly part ways. The tacit assumption, here, is that this so-called political correctness is in no way informed by evidence of any kind. If the Anthropology department isn't interested in having a seminar on the work of Charles Murray, it can only be because his ideas are "unpleasant" and not because there is any legitimate reason to reject those ideas. But this isn't true. If you were to ask a faculty member of the Anthropology department what they thought of Murray's work, they would more than likely be able to give you several real reasons for viewing it as counterproductive. My guess--though I'm not an anthropologist--is that they would first explain the fact that genetic differences between aggregates of large racial populations (that is, if you compared the aggregate genetic makeup of all "white" people to the aggregate genetic makeup of all "Asians") are in fact tiny. The difference between my individual genetic makeup and the genetic makeup of any random non-familial individual is likely to be much greater. In light of this, large claims about genetically-determined traits among entire racial groups become fairly useless. My point about this response (and I'm not in a position to vouch for its truth-value, I know) is that it is a good reason to leave Murray out of the discussion. There are other good reasons, too.

This is the fundamental problem with both of these opinion pieces, as well as with the general public climate which is trying to claim that conservative ideas are being unfairly ignored by a complacently like-minded and illiberally liberal academy. The unspoken first premise is that professors reject unpleasant ideas because they are unpleasant, and not because there are legitimate reasons for disagreeing with them. The second premise, of course, is that certain ideas are good ideas (i.e., those espoused by Murray and Pipes) and are being suppressed for bad reasons. If this second premise were true, the complaint about "liberal academic bias" would be a valid one. But this second premise is difficult to support, both because the people who invoke it tend not themselves to be expert in the areas of study they lament (e.g., Marxist theory, deconstruction, genetics), and because actual expertise cannot be recognized as an underpinning for the ability to make distinctions between good and bad reasons. We already know that the experts are hampered by their prejudicial beliefs, hence their entire field of expertise must be as partial and incomplete, and therefore incapable of producing good reasons. The fact that this second premise is, then, incompatible with the first makes it far easier to focus on the first, even though the real motive is to allow specific "unpleasant ideas" a more visible presence within academic inquiry.

The central error here, is the way in which this position equates reasons that are motivated by political leanings with reasons that have no basis apart from the political leanings of the person offering them. Where those reasons in fact have no basis, I agree: they should not be used to keep controversial ideas out of the academy. But no attempt has been made to establish the truth of this claim regarding the ideas that Levin wants to invite to the party.

There you have it, folks. I do have more to say on this, but this post has already gotten much longer than I'd imagined it would be when I first promised to respond to Koganzon and Levin, so I will leave it at this, for now.

More opinions

2005-05-17T11:21:00.000-05:00

The Chicago Maroon has run a couple of editorials over the past week decrying the alleged problem of "political bias" in today's college classrooms. On Thursday, Rita Koganzon wrote a piece that argued for the removal of political opinionating from courses in which politics are not directly relevant to the main topic of study (say, English Lit, for example). Today, Yael Levin seconds this, but argues that merely removing politics from the classroom itself does not address the underlying problems that facilitate the more general "problem" of faculty leftist groupthink.

I want to respond to these editorials in a way that is fair and well-grounded in logic and fact (even as the editorials themselves mostly fail at this). I also want to give both writers a chance to see my responses to their claims, and to respond to my responses. I'm taking this approach because I don't want this to be just another leftist, academic rant against naive young students who think their freedom of speech is being threatened by the uncritical liberal consensus. That's easier to do, and that's why I'm not doing it. Also because I'm an instructor at the institution where both writers are students, and so they are potentially my students at some point. I think they're wrong, but I don't want to just mock them in the way I want to mock Big Rod.

For now, I just wanted to post links to both opinion pieces. Anyone who wants to comment or to provide information which might be useful in responding to these pieces is welcome and encouraged to do so. One of my favorite responses, so far, to this kind of nonsense can be found here.

Rod 'n' balls

2005-05-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

No, folks, you can't make stuff like this up. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, in a press conference tonight, addressed reporters' questions regarding the numerous subpoenas issued to the Governor's office since Chicago Alderman Dick Mell began levelling charges of corruption. Mell, who is also Blagojevich's father-in-law, began accusing his daughter's husband of handing out favors to campaign contributors shortly after Blagojevich shut down an illegally operating landfill in a Will County suburb of Chicago.

The Governor, today, responded to a reporter's question by asserting that he knew, when he gave the order to close the landfill, that there would be political fallout: "That's the real test of leadership," he said, "whether you're man enough, whether or not you have the testicular virility to go ahead with it when you know what's going to happen." This statement was, as you can easily infer, accompanied by a rather arch smirk.

Yes, sir, this man's got cajones, and he's not afraid to use 'em. One day you're running a dump that illegally accepts materials it's not licensed for, and wham! Along comes a governor with testicular virility. "I'll fill your land," says the heroic leader. "How you like them apples!"

I think that should be quite enough. This will be all over the papers tomorrow, I'm sure, but I wanted to be among the first to comment in print. And, you know, I doubt the papers will print a headline like "Rod 'n' balls." Just a guess.

That said, it looks like Blagojevich is jockeying for the coveted "most masculine governor" title, currently held by California Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. While Arnold certainly has more muscle mass, and doesn't go on about Elvis nearly as much, his excessive steroid use during the Mr. Universe days has probably left him with diminished testicular virility. It's gonna be a close call.

CORRECTION (5/17/05): I posted this knowing full well that I wouldn't get the quote, from memory, exactly right, but here it is verbatim from the Chicago Sun-Times:

"This is the kind of thing that I think frankly separates the men from the boys in leadership. Do you have the testicular virility to make a decision like that knowing what's coming you're way?" Blagojevich said. "I say I do."

I apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused by this error.

Ain't no lyre

2005-05-14T12:27:00.000-05:00

As some of you are probably aware, long-time fugitive and convicted killer Norman Porter was arrested in late March. Since his escape from a Massachusetts prison in 1985, he had been living in Chicago under the alias J.J. Jameson*, and became a fairly well-respected member of Chicago's slam poetry scene. His involvement with poetry earned him, after his arrest, the titles "killer poet" and "fugitive poet," printed in headlines around the world.

The Chicago Tribune printed an update on this story today, reporting that Porter/Jameson continues to proclaim his innocence: Fugitive poet offers to take lie test. From the Tribune article:

BOSTON -- The fugitive turned poet who was brought back to Massachusetts from Chicago earlier this year is offering to take a lie detector test to prove he did not commit the murder that landed him in prison.

Norman Porter Jr. was serving a sentence for the 1960 killing of John "Jackie" Pigott when he walked away from a Massachusetts prison in 1985. He headed for Chicago, where he assumed a new identity, Jacob "J.J." Jameson, and became a well-known poet before his capture in March.

The story goes on to tell us that Porter initially confessed to the killing, but shortly after doing so claimed that the confession had been coerced by investigators. Nonetheless, he was convicted of shooting Pigott, on the basis of two witness accounts, and was handed a life sentence for that. Lest you believe there may be a real question of guilt here, however, he was also involved in the killing of a prison guard. This occurred during a much earlier escape, which he and another man carried out while Porter was awaiting trial for the first murder.

Porter, now, faces an additional charge related to the prison escape. I'm guessing this new proclamation of innocence has less to do with getting free than with setting the record straight. In addition to asking to take a lie-detector test, Porter has also offered meet with the victim's family to "apologize for his role" in the killing (but insists he didn't fire the deadly shot). Family members, according to the report, welcomed the idea of such a meeting.

It appears, however, that a state-administered lie-detector test is unlikely to happen:

Porter's lawyer, Gordon Walker, said he plans to ask Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett to administer a lie detector test, though a spokesman said Blodgett is not inclined to honor such a request.

If Blodgett indeed declines the request, though, Walker said he intends to have the test administered privately.

The Tribune, however, fails to note the precedent upon which the courts will likely side with Blodgett in denying the defendant's request. While, as I've said before, I'm no legal expert, I am fairly certain that Blodgett is counting on the clear language of the ruling in Shelley v. Republic of Plato. While that ruling leaves a few open-ends, the court very clearly sides with the prosecution's argument which defined a "poet" as anyone who "through clever training can become anything and imitate anything." The court recognized this clever training as a public safety issue, and included in their decision the prosecution's position that

the more inferior he [the poet] is, the more willing he'll be to narrate anything and to consider nothing unworthy of himself. As a result, he'll undertake to imitate seriously and before a large audience all the things we just mentioned--thunder, the sounds of wind, hail, axles, pulleys, trumpets, flutes, pipes, and all the other instruments, even the cries of dogs, sheep, and birds.

While the imitation of such things may not immediately seem like cause for concern, the problem with this capacity for imitation, the decision tells us, is that the poet may imitate false and unworthy things as though they were true and good. The poet, that is, has an inordinate capacity to tell lies in a convincing manner. Pigott's one-time fiancée Claire Wilcox, in announcing that she welcomed the meeting with Porter, stated: "My eyes have brought up four kids. I can tell when you're lying." But she may be fooling herself: Norman Porter is no kid. He is the poet J.J. Jameson.

But if she were to believe Porter, I think, she might wish to do so on the grounds of the "emotional truth" argument set forth by the defense in the case mentioned above. This position claims that it is in the very "nature" of "language" to be the most "direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being." While she would be wise to be skeptical of the empirical truth-value of the claim itself, she might accept the claim as poetry, defined as "a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

*You can generate your very own "fugitive name" by simply using your favorite beverage as your surname, and using the first letter of that beverage as initials for your first- and middle-names. For instance, if you enjoy cheap vodka, your name could be "S.S. Svedka."

"Not anything but an oxymoron"

2005-05-13T18:55:00.000-05:00

Normally I'm perfectly confident in the absolute and unarguable veracity of everything I say. Even if it's something that's blatantly untrue, like my insisting that it is grammatically correct to use the word "lead" as a past participle. I believe so much in having the courage of my convictions that one might, if one wanted, even call me "arrogant."

At times, however, my maniacal disregard for the truth value of my own beliefs is shaken to the core. This occurs when I realize that a group of people whom I don't really consider my "friends" find their way over to my side of the fence on an issue I care about. An example of this is the "issue" of the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban regime. I had been aware for some time -- certainly before Sept. 11, 2001 -- that women in Afghanistan were being subjected to some pretty brutal treatment under the fundamentalist Islamic government that had come to power during the Cold War. And I daydreamed about the idea of our government doing something about it.

After Sept. 11, though, everyone cared about this. Including people I didn't consider my friends. And they all seemed to focus on the fact that women in Afghanistan were forced to wear burkas. This seemed to occupy more attention, among these born-again suburban white guy "feminists," than the fact that Afghan women could be executed for adultery. And by "adultery," of course, we mean "speaking to a man you're not married to." But that wasn't the issue: the real crime was forcing women to cover themselves from head-to-toe (in addition to all those other bad things, of course). Yes sir. A law preventing women from exposing their skin is, when you think about it, pretty much ten times worse than all the other bad things people have done throughout history put together. And it takes the All-American Guy to point this out, naturally. Another case of what the postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak once called "white men protecting brown women from brown men."

That's just one example. As I said, I get confused when a cause I care about is taken up by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. And, you guessed it, today spits up another fantastic example of this: Bears try to block Costco store. That's right. The Chicago Bears football team, and the retail mutant super-monster Costco. And no, this is not a Japanese monster movie.

It would seem that a bunch of wealthy people in Lake Forest (an expensive north shore suburb of Chicago) are firmly against the arrival of a new Costco store currently planned for the western part of the village. The Bears, who own a practice facility near the proposed store site, joined this elite protest group out of fear that, as spokesman Cliff Stein puts it, "Overzealous fans, autograph-seekers, memorabilia collectors, photographers, curious onlookers and trespassers will . . . invade the privacy and security of the athletes on our team." (For the record, my own opposition to Costco is also based on my distaste for curious onlookers invading my privacy). The Bears, in protesting the proposal, are in good company:

The proposal, which was introduced last summer, generated concern about traffic congestion along the Illinois Highway 60 corridor and the environmental impact on the adjacent Middlefork Savanna nature preserve.

Opponents at the standing-room-only meeting said the store would hurt the community's character.

"Costco in Lake Forest is certainly not anything but an oxymoron," said Richard Phelan, former Cook County Board president and a seven-year resident of Conway Farms, a nearby subdivision on Illinois 60.

You said it, Richard. If they put a Costco in your neighborhood, why, people's heads will explode just trying to conceive of the thing. And traffic congestion? Well, you might just as well try to breed a rhinoceros with a cobra!

I think I've made my point. But just to recapitulate, there are good reasons, and there are bad reasons. Good reason to overthrow the Taliban: They were a bunch of religious zealots who beat, tortured and murdered anyone who didn't follow their repressive, narrow interpretations of Islamic law. Bad reason: No Afghan bikini models. Good reasons to oppose new Costcos: They're one of those gigantic chain mega-retailers that set up shop in your town and proceed to undercut local small businesses, turn downtowns into abandoned waste lands, and pay their employees barely enough to feed themselves, let alone pay for the zoloft they will need if they work there. Bad reason: "I'm Brian Urlacher."

Children hitting children

2005-05-12T15:01:00.000-05:00

Some time ago I predicted that I would return to the topic of teen violence in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. What I did not predict, however, was that this crime trend would take a turn toward what the Hyde Park Herald describes as "~~teen-on-teen attacks~~." Once again, the Herald does not keep archives, so this link will expire in a week. I will quote the relevant bits this time, though.

The pattern of unprovoked attacks, which usually involved several teenagers ganging up on a single adult male victim, appears to have ceased around the beginning of April 5. It wasn't, according to police statements, an organized conspiracy, and wasn't evidently related to street gang activities. It was, apparently, just the cool thing to do for a while. Now, however, it looks like the "thing to do" is to beat up people in your own age bracket:

In five out of six incidents since April 16, teens aged 13 to 17 have been robbed and battered. Three teens were arrested, including two Kenwood Academy students who were caught after beating and robbing a fellow student.

The other "one" (out of six) was an attempted robbery of a 43-year-old man by two Kenwood Academy students. This was witnessed by a University of Chicago police officer, who caught and arrested the fleeing students.

Officials at Kenwood, of course, have been at pains to defend the general quality of their students since this whole thing began. They have repeatedly pointed out that the majority of teens arrested in these cases were not, in fact, Kenwood students.

But paranoia and fear offered, in separate statements Wednesday, a different account. While they differed on particulars, both felt that teenagers are all probably criminals. Specific teenagers might not be Kenwood Academy students, but that doesn't really matter. The real point is that nearly all Kenwood students are, don't you know, teenagers. Besides, even if the vast majority of local high school students would never amuse themselves by punching us in the face, it's still a good idea to cross the street whenever you see teens (in a grouping of three or more) approaching you. The possible exception to this rule, according to fear, was the detection of markers indicating that the teenagers were students at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (known to locals as "labbies"). Indicators such as small size (a sign of an academic pedigree) and heated discussion of Aristotle's Ethics should signal a decreased cause for worry. Paranoia felt that you could never be too careful.

On a serious note, however, I think it's necessary to point out that these six recent attacks do not constitute a "crime pattern" in the way that the frighteningly frequent beatings and robberies of February and March did. This "increase in teen-on-teen attacks" probably wouldn't have been a story, though, if it hadn't been for that earlier "pattern."

In other words, keep your pants on. And, you over there, please put them back on. The problem is, when a crime pattern does occur, it does some strange things to people. Paranoia really does take over, and Kenwood Academy, it would appear, has taken some hits (in the face) over this, even though their students had very little to do with the pattern. The Herald's other story this week: ~~School aims to improve tarnished image after assault spree, arrests~~:

Students and faculty of Kenwood Academy high school are preparing to reconstruct the school’s negative image—which they say was caused by the community’s incorrect perception that only Kenwood students were responsible for a recent spree of unprovoked attacks.

The story quotes Kenwood Principal Arthur Slater as reiterating that most of the teenagers arrested during the "spree" were not students at his school, and that the ten kids who were Kenwood students are a tiny, tiny portion of the high school's 1,700 students. One parent of Kenwood students, Sheila Wesonga, reported being told that "You need to get them out of there." The press coverage of the crime spree, it appears, has painted Kenwood as a "troubled school," when it fact it is a relatively successful Magnet School in the Chicago Public Schools system.

The main point I want to make here, though, is about consequences. You see, it's more or less understandable that Hyde Park residents would make the mistake of assuming that most teenagers hanging out in the northeast quadrant of the neighborhood are students at Kenwood. Most people probably don't think about it at all, and would have no reason to know that, as Wesonga tells the Herald, "youngsters from around Chicago hang out at Kenwood High School because of its social environment and its location in a safe and 'relatively gang-free' neighborhood." People don't know this, and assume that the kids are connected with the school. Not a big deal, until something bad happens, and then the school itself gets a bad name.

And bad names have consequences:

In another event in late May, the Kenwood Brotherhood Male Student Leadership group will lead Kenwood students in a march around Hyde Park with signs showing their GPAs, future colleges and extracurricular activities.

Now, I'm sure that no one meant, by merely making a false assumption, to force high school students to repair their "bad names" by walking around the neighborhood with stereotype-defying placards. No, no one intended for it to come to this. But, good intentions or not, this is what happens when you "just assume."

I'm joking, of course. I actually do hope that this march will change people's perceptions for the better. I also feel that undergraduate students at the University of Chicago ought to do something similar, in order to combat the dreadful stereotypes that have been placed on them. They should march around the neighborhood with signs that list the concerts they've been to, their number of sexual partners, and their experience with illegal drugs. I think people would really be surprised.

"I'll blaze your ass"

2005-05-07T17:11:00.001-05:00

I'd like to thank A.T. (also known as the "best goddamn bartender in the Near North") for calling the tip-line and directing me to the following: 2 Northwestern students are mugged at gunpoint. Yes, this story was indeed reported in the Chicago Tribune, the city's largest newspaper, and a newspaper that is, strangely enough, described by Wikipedia as one of "[s]everal powerful and influential media outlets with an international reach [...] based in the world cities." If this description is true, it must be the case that people in Windsor, Ontario, are now aware that:

The students, both male and 19, were in the back yard of a friend's home in the 2100 block of Dewey Avenue around 2 a.m. when two men wearing ski masks told them to put their wallets on the hood of a nearby car, police said.

Windsor, of course, is just across the border from Detroit, Michigan, so I'm guessing they'd be none too impressed with this tale, the Trib's "international reach" be damned.

I, however, am impressed. The Chicago Tribune, here, seems to have successfully re-theorized the status of "news." Instead of printing a story that is merely "newsworthy" (a term that we may now recognize as a relic of the journalistic Dark Ages), they opted to publish a piece of écriture that can only be described as "meta-newsworthy."

What I mean by this -- and I do mean something -- is that this story demonstrates what I have been yammering about for years: that crime becomes a whole lot more "newsworthy" when it occurs in a wealthy neighborhood. In fact, it becomes most newsworthy when it happens not only in a wealthy neighborhood, but when it happens to someone who could not possibly have thought that something like that would ever happen to them:

Authorities said this is the first robbery of a Northwestern student reported in Evanston this year.

There they are, just being Northwestern students, when along comes a man with a gun, and they are dragged violently into the realities of contemporary urban America.

By way of contrast, University of Chicago students are frequently robbed at gunpoint. I know several people to whom this has happened. It's not that big of a deal. For many of us here in Hyde Park, it's considered a kind of informal greeting, just another way of getting to know folks. The movement to legalize armed robbery has so far been met with little interest among officials, but the simple act of pointing a gun at someone and demanding their wallet is, by and large, considered de facto okay, even if not technically "legal."

But to be all "serious," here, I want to point out that while violent crime is fairly infrequent in Hyde Park, people do get mugged from time to time. It hasn't happened to me, but I have tried to prepare myself, mentally, for the time when I get a loaded firearm pointed at me. When these robberies occur, they are usually mentioned in the "Police Beat" reports in local papers such as the Hyde Park Herald or the Chicago Maroon. When a crime "pattern" develops, it usually warrants a feature story. Or, when a funny crime takes place, it might even get a front-page photo in the Maroon. I'm unaware of such things getting attention from the Tribune, though.

Which brings me back around to the Northwestern students. Now, I'm sorry they got mugged. But why is this more newsworthy than the two aggrevated robberies that occurred in Hyde Park early this week? Or, why is it more newsworthy than the other muggings that take place in Evanston? Are they not newsworthy merely because they happen in bad neighborhoods? Or because they happen to people who are not naive 19-year olds who were hanging out in a back alley at 2 o'clock in the morning?

Finally, I would like to point out that the Tribune omitted the best part of this story, which I quote from the Daily Northwestern:

Carter and Ogletree both said they didn't take the men seriously until they saw the gun.

"I was hesitant and thinking about throwing the wallet under the car but he said, 'I'll blaze your ass,'" Carter said. "I was thinking, 'I still got homework to do tonight.'"

How can you write a story about such a non-newsworthy event and manage to make the story more boring than it actually is? I suspect that this quote was omitted largely because it calls into doubt the credibility of the person reporting the crime. While the Tribune may stoop to reporting on a non-story, they wouldn't want to provide evidence that the non-story didn't actually occur in the first place. And, as we know, someone who says "I'll blaze your ass" is obviously only impersonating a criminal, or perhaps playing one on television. It would be silly to suggest that anyone would actually say that.

Candy: OTC

2005-05-04T14:01:00.000-05:00

Senators Patty Murray (D., Wash.) and Hilary Rodham Clinton (D., NY) state in a recent press release that "Science should never take a back seat to politics and ideology." Agreed. First of all, science is a nervous wreck, and is a really annoying backseat driver. And ideology's a terrible driver: all over the road, talking on his cell, eating White Castle takeout on a busy expressway. It makes for a bad situation for all involved.

Clinton and Murray issued the press release to inform the public about the reasoning behind their decision to block discussion of President Bush's nominee for commisioner of the FDA, Lester Crawford. See the Chicago Tribune's article here.

Essentially, Crawford's nomination was blocked as a way of sending a message to the FDA. Both senators are upset about the agency's foot-dragging in approving the Plan-B "morning after" contraceptive pill for sale over the counter in drug stores. They figure that Crawford, as a Bush nominee, won't be pushing the issue any time soon, if appointed, so they want the agency to get that taken care of before he is put in power.

The objections, in the views of many, to approving Plan-B for over the counter sale are entirely ideological. It is viewed by many pro-life organizations as an "abortion pill" (even though it prevents pregnancy, and doesn't actually "abort" it), and others feel that it just encourages kids to have lots of unprotected sex (like candy). However, one doctor on the FDA advisory board, Joseph Stanford, did raise scientific objections: The "effectiveness statistics quoted on the draft package labeling were outdated and overstated," he said. But he's at the University of Utah. That said, I was under the impression that the Church of Latter Day Saints encouraged lots of procreation, so I don't see why he would object to the pill's potential ineffectivenes.

Anyway, I don't have much to say about this. But it is nice to know that someone in the government is actually fighting a fight worth fighting. Kudos to both senators.

Opinions

2005-05-04T13:34:00.000-05:00

Naturally, I found this story, from the University of Chicago student newspaper the Maroon, a bit disturbing: Swastikas defile CFI posters in Ex Libris. Now, I'd like to see a show of hands: how many of you think it's all right to draw swastikas on posters put up by a pro-Israel student group? No one? At all? I didn't think so. I imagine that you will all recognize that this sort of vandalism suggests a murderous brand of anti-Semitism that is nauseating to any reasonable human being. The idiots who did this are not reasonable human beings. This is completely obvious.

So why'd the Maroon run two (2) editorials decrying the actions of these vandals? Links here and here. Read them if you like, but I assure you it's a waste of time. The unsigned staff editorial informs us that "This poor attempt at communicating disagreement with a political perspective seriously is not the kind of discussion this University [sic] seeks to promote." The other editorial, written by two student members of CFI (the student group Chicago Friends of Israel), reveals that "Those who would use racist, anti-Semitic symbols to avoid an open discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are cowards." Oh, so you mean those racist, murderous symbols were not drawn by rebel heroes who were attempting to promote the kind of discussion this university seeks? Well, I'll be.

I will, of course, forgive the Maroon's staff for being young, ambitious, and for perhaps admiring the sounds of their own moral indignation a bit too much. At the same time, this sort of thing bugs me for a couple reasons. By measuring the actions of these bastards against the standards of reasonable intellectual discourse, you are actually elevating those actions. At best, these editorials are nonsensical responses. They're analogous to a police officer politely requesting that a maniac please stop shooting at people randomly from that bell-tower.

It also just reinforces a lot of dumb ideas people seem to have about free speech. The idea, here, always seem to be that instead of vandalizing things and tearing down posters, people with dissenting viewpoints should come to the table and express their ideas in a calm and reasonable manner. But do you really want to discuss anything, in any manner, with someone who thinks it's okay to draw swastikas on posters announcing a lecture by a Jewish man? Why? For God's sake, why?

On the other hand, I think it's completely reasonable and even good to tear down posters announcing a talk entitled, say, "Smart Black People: Debunking the Myth." Or, "The Gay Agenda: A Jewish Conspiracy?" No, we don't want to hear "what they have to say," and it's probably better that anyone impressionable enough to buy that kind of garbage not get the chance to hear "what they have to say."

I know there are people who will disagree with me, who think that all speech (including posters in public spaces) ought to be protected from suppression. I will agree that no one ought to be punished for saying offensive things. At the same time, I believe there is a distinction to be made between reasonable and unreasonable speech. One responds to unreasonable speech not by arguing with it, but by denigrating it and drowning it out. Otherwise one dignifies unreason as a "point" on the vast scale of reasonability.

I am saying that one ought not listen to people who draw swastikas. Don't try to appeal to their sense of judgment and decency. Don't write editorials about how they are harming the free exchange of intellectual ideas. Just call them names. Suggestions for specific names are welcome in the "comments" section of this post.

POSTSCRIPT: The one point in the staff editorial that I find useful is that people on campus should be on the lookout for this sort of vandalism. I agree. And you don't want me to catch you drawing swastikas. I'm a damn good name-caller.

The moral gumball machine

2005-05-02T11:21:00.000-05:00

This quote from a story in the Daily Illini, the University of Illinois-Urbana student newspaper:

"On Monday mornings outside McKinley [Student Health Center], (Plan B) is given out like candy," [senior Suhail] Alhreish said.

And who doesn't like candy? I know I do. As many of you know, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich last month signed an emergency order that requires state pharmacists to fill emergency contraceptive prescriptions on demand, irrespective of the pharmacists personal feelings about contraception. This stemmed from a case, this February, in which a pharmacist at an Osco Drug store in downtown Chicago declined, on personal grounds, to fill "Plan B" prescriptions for two women. Planned Parenthood's press release on this is here.

As one would expect, this emergency order has a lot of people upset. The order, signed on April 1, is effective for 150 days from that date. After that, according to the Tribune, the administration is expected to seek a permanent law.

Among those upset are some pro-life pharmacists who believe that the governor's injunction conflicts with the Illinois Health Care Right of Conscience Act, which allows medical professionals to refuse services that conflict with their "conscience," defined by the Act as "a sincerely held set of moral convictions arising from belief in and relation to God, or which, though not so derived, arises from a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by God among adherents to religious faiths." The Governor's Office, along with various organizations supporting Blagojevich's emergency order, claim that pharmacists are not covered under this Act. Based on my own reading of the text, it would appear that pharmacists are in fact covered under its broad language:

"Health care personnel" means any nurse, nurses' aide, medical school student, professional, paraprofessional or any other person who furnishes, or assists in the furnishing of, health care services.

On the other hand, the Act also quite explicitly states that it is not to be construed as relieving any health care worker from "obligations under the law of providing emergency medical care." Were I a legal expert I might feel qualified to comment at more length on this, but I'm not, so I point to these passages to show that the law appears to be ambiguous on the particular issue of "emergency" contraceptives.

I do, however, feel well qualifed to talk about my feelings. If a liberal can do anything, after all, it's blather on at length about his/her emotional responses to political events. And that's why Jesse Helms isn't a liberal. His emotional responses to attractive males bother him, but he can't blather about that, per se. Instead, he blathers about how wrong other people are to have those emotional responses. That's just one example.

My feeling, here, is that this Conscience Act is quite a can of worms. I mean, people derive all sorts of strange beliefs from religious faiths. The easy reductio ad absurdum argument here would merely involve imagining a pharmacist who subscribed to the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ, Scientist. This person, naturally, would be protected from having to dispense any pharmaceutical, except in cases where they were intended for "emergency medical care." And he or she would be protected, under the Act, from "discrimination" by the employer. But let's put that kind of slippery-slope argument aside. We can merely look at the fact that there are many licensed medical professionals who disagree with the use of psychiatric medications for the treatment of merely emotional disorders. We might even find this person amenable to the idea of using drugs to temper schizophrenia or other severe psychoses, but when it comes to something like depression or anxiety -- well, that's just mental stuff. There are people who believe this, and I worry that they, too, may be allowed to refuse to fill a prescription.

Of course, this isn't a big problem in a city like Chicago. Nor even in a college town like Champaign-Urbana. The patient can just go elsewhere, and more likely than not find a pharmacist who is not a self-righteous fuckhead. But it's easy to imagine a very serious problem in a small, rural town, where the patient has to drive twenty miles just to get to the nearest Wal-Mart. As a matter of fact, I know someone who was faced with an emergency contraception crisis, and who had to fight a bit of a fight to obtain it. And this happened in a not-very-small town, just a town that happened to be very conservative. The "medical professional" who relented in that case was, in fact, more concerned about getting a "reputation" for prescribing morning-after pills (like candy) than about religious principles.

So, yes, this is a serious issue. Whatever the legality of Blagojevich's order, and whatever the issues to be faced in discussing permanent legislation, pharmacists should have a legal (and moral!) obligation to fill the prescriptions given by doctors to their patients.

The moral obligation, here, I derive from the fact that a democratic society has a responsibility to protect an individual's right to dissent. The Conscience Act relies on a bogus idea of "community standards," which posits that local standards of value are to be protected, to a certain degree, from outside interference. In other words, if a particular small town believes that a naked statue in the public square falls under the category of pornography, the naked statue can get toppled on the basis that it exposes children to indecent material. Part of our current legal system, as I understand it, is based on the idea that local values play a determinate role in evaluating the legal status of certain actions.

The Conscience Act, as I see it, is a case of this. Even if it's not specifically based on that principle, it certainly works to enforce it. In effect, it would allow a rural county's community of medical personnel to decide that all forms of prescription contraceptives are effectively illegal, even though they are very much legal -- in strictly "legal" terms, of course. And this is the problem with the "community standards" position: the entire "community" doesn't make this decision, just those members of the community who are in professional or political positions to affect certain issues. If the entire community were in unison about something like birth-control, the issue would never be an issue: no one would ever ask for the morning-after pill, much less for a late-term abortion.

As we know, humanitarians like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay believe that the law ought to, first and foremost, protect those among us who are weakest, most vulnerable, least able to take care of themselves. It follows from this, in a fairly obvious way, that our legal system must start paying attention to residents of small, conservative, rural towns who, miraculously, find themselves at odds with community standards of value. Especially if this kind of moral dissent is so uncommon in small, conservative, rural towns. Instead of the forced conformity which "community standards" imply, we need to protect the right of individuals to choose their course of action from among the entire range of safe and legal options.

Karen Brauer, of the pro-life group Pharmacists for Life International, tells us that women living in rural areas know that they may have trouble getting a prescription, either because of "conscience"-based objections or because of sparse medical services (this is from the Daily Illini story). They knew this when they chose to live in the rural area, so, Brauer believes, they shouldn't complain (no mention is made of people who, in fact, don't choose to live there: children, adults who can't afford to move, people who are just scared of big cities):

"We don't need Planned Parenthood to think for us," Brauer said. "Planned Parenthood is behind the governor's actions to remove the human right to avoid killing."

She predicts that if Blagojevich's rule is enforced, pharmacists who oppose the law will quietly look for another position.

"They are forced to choose between their job and something they know is harmful to women," she said.

Harmful to women? Now, I know that I may think the pro-life movement is insane, but you really ought to stick to the line that says abortion and contraception is harmful to unborn children (or zygotes, or wherever life begins now). But if you say that contraceptives are harmful to women, I predict that even a lot of tentatively pro-life types are going to think you're insane. I mean, preventing an unwanted pregnancy might even piss God off, but it really does not cause any serious form of injury to the woman who didn't want to get pregnant.

In addition to being insane, Ms. Brauer, you are also simply wrong. You do need Planned Parenthood to tell you how to think. You see, a lot of people who work at Planned Parenthood are doctors, and you're just a pharmacist. When your patient's doctor writes him or her a legal prescription for a legal drug, you are being told to think that you should fill that prescription. That's why you are there. What we don't need, on the other hand, are people such as yourself telling us how to think. The legal system, if and when it catches up, should conclusively deny your ability to use your pharmacist's license to stifle legally protected dissent.

Several Love Poems

2005-04-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

My friend Steph, over at MeatCheeseBun, reminded us that April is nearly over, and since May is not National Poetry Month, its arrival will prevent thousands of bloggers everywhere from gratuitously posting their favorite poems. Unless it's April, we will need a reason to do something like that.

Steph posted Sidney's wonderful opening sonnet from the Astrophil and Stella sequence, which you can see by going over there. She concluded with the following:

(I was going to follow this up with a fitting contemporary poem, but I can't think of anything appropriate. God, I'm such a dork.)

Well, Steph, you may be a dork, but if anyone's such a dork, it's me. Everyone knows that. Anyway, since I'm writing a dissertation on "modernist love poetry" I read this bit about a "fitting contemporary poem" as a challenge. So here goes.

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To hear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Not exactly a "love" poem in the sense of Sidney's. What I like about this poem, though, is its aloof awareness of the love poem tradition. Millay is, at one level, the eminent Modern Woman. She forged a poetic voice that broke down familiar Victorian dichotomies about women, and she became one of the best-selling poets of the 20th century in doing so. At another level, Millay is able to use this sonnet to look back at the entire English and Italian sonneteering tradition: this, she seems to imply, is how the difficult ladies immortalized by Petrarch, Spenser and Sidney would answer, if given the chance.

I'll leave you with a poem in a different key, this one by the British poet Laura (Riding) Jackson, entitled "Several Love Stories":

The formulas of recognition
Apply themselves to memories.
There's where,
There's when,
There's there.

Yes, a nice time.
I met three fishermen out on the bay
Who couldn't understand language.
I found a mercadon--
What's a mercadon?--
And dined with native nobility,
But there's no place like home!

Yes, true-love--not travel.
It was a sky
Not just to look at
But prove--
If possible,
If possible.

I went up of love,
I fell down of loves.
There's no place like home!

Townsfolk, untwirl these casings
From Paris and Heaven.

Move to the extreme left

2005-04-29T23:32:00.000-05:00

As many of us were no doubt delighted to hear, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the way for the return of Allendale Pharmaceuticals' "Today Sponge" contraceptive to U.S. drug stores. What many people may not have realized, however, is that Allendale has already been manufacturing the device for two years. According to this USA Today story, Allendale has been selling it online through two Canadian Web sites since March, 2003. The story indicates that at least some of their customers lived in the U.S. Kind of odd, perhaps, that so few people seem to have known this. Must... resist... obvious... joke.

In any case, this became a big story at least in part due to the cultural currency lent to the Sponge by the now-ubiquitously syndicated television series Seinfeld. "Sponge-worthy," hoarding, and so on. According to USA Today, 250-million Today Sponges were sold between its introduction in 1983 and its removal from the market in 1995. I think we can safely predict a greater sales-rate now, ten years later.

But what really kicked me in the jaw -- and you know I love strange coincidences -- was seeing a story, today, announcing that Al Yeganeh (of "Al's Soup Kitchen, International," 259-a W. 55th St., NY, NY) is opening a chain of franchised takeout restaurants under the name "The Original Soup Man." Now, if you don't know this, you've guessed it: Al Yeganeh is the "soup nazi," caricatured in another episode of Seinfeld. If you didn't guess this, or have never seen an episode of Seinfeld, or simply have no clue what I'm talking about -- then you probably won't find this interesting.

In the Seinfeld episode, the "soup nazi" was a chef with astounding abilities in the kitchen and virtually no regard for the norms of social interaction. To dawdlers who did not follow his clearly posted "rules" for ordering soup, he shouted "no soup for you!", at which point the customer's order would be denied and their money returned by the cashier.

According to the venture's operations manager, Linda Gavin, the episode portrayed Yeganeh "pretty accurately."

The Soup Kitchen's web site is worth viewing. It's a bizarre admixture of Yeganeh's personal skills and desperate attempts to massage his cranky attitude into something cute and marketable. By clicking on the section entitled "Rules," one is presented with two columns. The first has the famous rules for "Customers": "Have your money ready!"; "Move to the extreme left after ordering!" These rules are couched in terms of ensuring "the most efficient and fastest service" for all customers. On the right, we are greeted with a second column, this one with rules for "Media":

1. No "N" word

2. No personal ?

3. No followup questions

4. Only questions emailed will be answered

5. Method & timing of interviews by my discretion.

And, may I add, "[sic]." The syntax and word choice (i.e., "?") leave something to be desired, sure, but the real hoot is the idea that "Al" has the gall to say "No 'N' word." Now, obviously, he means he doesn't want you to ask him about being the "soup nazi," but I have to admit, I scratched my head for a few moments there. It's one thing to have no sense of humor, but quite another to have no idea what most people will think when you refer to "the 'n' word."

That aside, I do wish the "Original Soup Man" chain success, and can't wait for it to show up at an airport near me. Stay tuned next week for announcements regarding "Paisano's Frozen Calzones" and "Calvin Klein's Beach."

Public faces in private places

2005-04-27T13:11:00.001-05:00

As many of you have already heard by now, HarperCollins has signed a deal with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation to publish the 40th President's handwritten diaries, written between 1981 and 1989. For some reason, I have received an extremely-advance galley copy. I don't specifically recall receiving this in the mail, but hey! I'm getting older, you know. Anyway, here's a sneak preview, special for my readers:

10 October, 1986

Don't have a lot of time to write, but just skimmed this month's Reader's Digest and there was a great article on how AIDS might get at straight people, too. Probably a rumor, but should warn the kids. Also half-finished the cross-word (I had to ask Nancy about the five-letter word for "specter," though -- I was afraid it was dirty!). Hilarious cartoon with Santa Claus, too, but forgot the punchline.

Meeting with Gorby in a couple days. Not looking forward. Every time I fly to scandanavia they try to give you those pickled fish, and I hate that. We'll be discussing Return of the Jedi. Haha! Just kidding. Star Wars, actually.

George tried to tell me a few things to think about for the summit, but I just said "there you go again!" Really got him. Darn I'm funny.

The new waiter asked me how I wanted my eggs this morning. I don't have time for that, right now. They need to communicate with each other and know my habits. Otherwise I have to go bother Nancy. I just don't have time.

Oh! Saw Crocodile Dundee last night. Very funny.

More when I get back from Iceland.

I'd post more, but I'm concerned about violating fair use, so you'll just have to buy the book. In stores next year.

He had it comin'

2005-04-25T20:12:00.000-05:00

Hot on the heels of their historic indictment of 8 White Sox baseball players for "throwing" the 1919 World Series, Illinois authorities have now turned their attention to cracking down on Chicago's infamous "Outfit," the organized crime operation made famous in such movies as The Untouchables, Dillinger and Casino. From today's Reuters story:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Fourteen reputed mob figures were charged on Monday with murders and other crimes spanning four decades, in what authorities called the most sweeping organized-crime bust in Chicago's rich gangland history.

Among the charges brought against these old-timey criminals are 18 previously unsolved murders (including those depicted in Casino), and a whole bunch of smaller charges, including assault, extortion, and gambling. All the defendants were charged with racketeering, which carries a prison sentence of up to twenty years. Move over Ness, the Cold Case Unit's in town.

I, for one, am more or less abso-tively sure that this will be coming to a screen near you. There isn't usually a lot of interest in Chicago-based films among Hollywood types, but when it comes to crime dramas that are safely distant from the realities of contemporary life and involve characters who wear bowler hats and pronounce the "a" in "Chicago" as though it were a sound a duck would make, it's their kinda town.

And, as you may have noticed, my blague has now clearly exposed its unnatural obsession with crime. You may also have noticed that I don't have many kind words to say for those who make or enforce the laws. For any law enforcement officials who might be reading this: please don't hurt me. I really don't like criminals that much.

Commit a crime

2005-04-24T23:38:00.000-05:00

Just when everyone thought it was safe to be self-righteously horrified about all that judicial activism, it turns out that Tom DeLay was wrong to have suggested that we take whatever measures necessary to force the Federal judges who declined to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case to "answer for their behavior."

Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist suggested, today, that while we have the right and responsibility to criticize decisions we don't agree with, the judiciary deserves respect and autonomy:

"When we think judicial decisions are outside mainstream American values, we will say so. But we must also be clear that the balance of power among all three branches requires respect — not retaliation. I won't go along with that," Frist said.

This and other recent comments made by Frist suggest that he may be trying to distance himself from the more "unartful" remarks of DeLay. Well-done, I say. It's high time that someone on the right make a serious attempt to distinguish themselves from packs of rabid hyenas. But who cares what I say? Is it not true, as the saying goes, that "not being eaten by a pack of rabid hyenas is its own reward"?

But, more to the point, these comments were delivered in the context of a meeting called "Justice Sunday," which was held today to allow conservative Christians to discuss such pressing matters as activist judges and democratic filibusters of White House judicial nominees (stories here and here). Now, you might think that opposition to "judicial legislation" would involve a philosophy very much at odds with support for a Republican effort to pass a bill that would effectively end the ability of the minority party to filibuster judicial candidates. But you would be wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! And you would be even more wrong to suggest that the ten (10) judicial nominees filibustered by Democrats during President Bush's first term would be "activist judges" just because they opposed abortion and supported things like racial segregation. I can't tell you how wrong you are. Furthermore, if you were to tell me that it wasn't true that the Senate had never ever used procedural tactics to block Presidential nominees before, I would simply have to place my fingers firmly in my ears and say, to you, "La la la la la la LA!"

But let's let that go. That political blaguing is much better handled by someone smart like Roxanne Cooper. What I want to point out here is simply the fact that I noticed another story today that might cause some people to raise an eyebrow, especially if it were put together with the foregoing. I speak of the story, released today, that tells us that the U.S. prison population is steadily rising. As of the middle of last year, more than 2.1 million persons were housed in American penitentiaries, an all-time high for a nation that has consistently had the highest population, percentage-wise, of prisoners anywhere in the world.

Now, as a panty-waist liberal, my first reaction to this story was "Good. Now there are less of those scary violent mean people on the streets, and that means they can't kill my buzz. Damn that's good shit. Wanna have pre-marital sex?"

Casual sex, though, is not the issue here. Upon reading this article in its entirety, I discovered that a big factor in this dramatic rise in the U.S. prison population was not people who are (necessarily) scary, violent, and mean, but people who get busted for what I just referred to as "good shit":

Criminologists attribute the growth in the prison population to "get tough on crime" policies that have subjected hundreds of thousands of nonviolent drug and property offenders to long mandatory sentences.

In other words, the big problem here is those "three strikes and yer out" laws that were instituted by popular votes through the ballot initiative process, in states such as California and Washington. Back when these laws were being pushed, I lived in Washington state, and I distinctly remember every single quiche-brained liberal and their emotionally-healthy cat warning us that something like this might happen. They said that by approving these initiatives, we would be taking sentencing decisions out of the hands of judges (who might be able to tailor the sentence to the crime) and consequently re-paving the Expressway-of-Justice with various offramps to unpopular destinations like Cruel-and-Unusual-Punishment (Exit 23A) and Life-Sentences-for-Stealing-a-Bike (Exit 78).

To summarize, I really don't think it's possible to over-emphasize the irony here. The same forces of conservative populism that are currently decrying those judges who "legislate from the bench" were, but a few years ago, responsible for another kind of judicial activism which is perpetuating America's role as a world-leader in incarcerating non-violent criminals.

What the diddly?

2005-04-24T15:07:00.000-05:00

Those of you who know me well have been promised that this blague will not indulge in the kind of navel-gazing, experience-reifying, "what I did today and how it makes me feel" personal updates that permeate the internet. If I were Samuel Pepys, I might have the powers to make this sort of daily accounting of my life interesting to others, but I am not Samuel Pepys, and I moreover have no intention of experiencing such things as any sort of Great Fire or Great Plague, both of which events are key to the lasting interest of those diaries. No, gentle reader, I will not do that, for that way the emoticon for madness lies.

I will make an exception, though, today, because I, in the past four days, have received what can only be described as exceedingly strange compliments on two separate occasions. If there had been only one of these exceedingly strange compliments, you would never have known about it. But I believe that this "repitition with a difference" has something important to say about not just me, but about the human condition writ large. My experience becomes a sort of exemplary or paradigmatic case of the estrangement and alienation that we denizens of the late-capitalist global economy feel and struggle with so often.

What's more -- and I cannot account this as a mere accident or coincidence -- both of these occurrences took place in or directly outside of a particular drugstore, the name and location of which will not be revealed. I don't want people going there to seek this same kind of phenomenon for themselves.

First incident: Thursday afternoon, I am waiting in line to turn in a prescription order for a hay-fever medication. I realize that I am blocking the lane through which a customer pushing a cart is trying to maneuver. I say, apologetically, "let me get out of your way" and move my person in such a way as to create an open space for the cart and for the customer pushing it. The response I get -- and at first I thought I had imagined or misheard this -- was "Okay... Clay." I beg this person's pardon, and my suspicions are confirmed. She calls me "Clay Aiken." As she moves away, she adds, "I really like your hair." I thanked her, of course, notwithstanding my suspicion that she was making fun of me. What gets me about this, though, is that while my hair may bear some superficial resemblance to Mr. Aiken's, the leather biker-jacket, combat boots and the t-shirt with a skull on it should probably suggest to one that I'm not really going for the "Clay Aiken look." Besides, I am much nicer to my fans than he is. In any case, my hair is the same color as Sharon Osbourne's. Normally, I would not be concerned about strangers calling me "Sharon" on the basis of that superficial resemblance. But this little incident has really made me wonder.

Second incident: Today. This time, outside the drugstore. I am walking past it, on the way to another destination, when I become aware that a voice out of the buzzing aural background of the city is addressing me. I think it said something about "walking," and possibly something about my butt. I turn around, and see a woman in a motorized wheelchair, and realize that she's attempting to get around me. Those electric babies can book, certainly faster than my normal walking pace, so I make way. Again, though, what I'd initially only thought I'd heard turns out not to be merely my own overactive imagination. She repeats herself: "You have such a beautiful walk!" Ever polite, I thank her, and then proceed to my destination, now immoderately self-conscious.

As of right now, I do not feel that I can draw any hard-and-fast conclusions about the ontological or eschatological implications to be derived from this strange coordination of events in time and space. I am merely perplexed at having become, seemingly, a target for the random appraisals of strangers. I do not know if, in fact, I should be happy about having Clay Aiken's hair, or about having a swagger that's the envy of those who have lost full use of their legs. All I can say, for now, is that I -- like anyone who keeps a "blog" or blague -- am happy for the attention.

Run like a villain

2005-04-21T22:02:00.000-05:00

The Warning

For love--I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

-Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

I post this in memory of Creeley, one of my favorite poets, who died late last month from complications of pneumonia. Not merely a great poet, but by most accounts a great person, a great teacher, and a generous contributor to the various poetry communities to which he attached himself throughout his six decades as a writer. Read Robert Adamson's tribute in Jacket.

But I am also sensitive to those who would like to "get" contemporary poetry but feel that, for whatever reason, they are out of the loop, don't quite see how something like this is relevant. In the spirit of Creeley's generosity, I want to make this poem relevant.

'split open your head'

When I said "relevant," maybe I meant "topical." Whatever. In any case, most of my known readers live here in middle-west, and have spent most of their lives either in this region or in those dens of sin and liberal elitism known collectively as the East Coast. So I'll have to explain, first, how things work on the Pacific side of this great land.

I'm from Seattle. Seattle is known to visitors as a place where people are polite, courteous, somewhat cold (but polite!) to strangers, and very concerned about following rules. Now, this may come as a surprise to many of you, a fact of which I am well aware. The vast majority of people, when they learn I'm from Seattle, say (direct quote) "Oh! Grunge!" A few years ago, this response had to compete with "Oh! Coffee!", but as Starbucks has made its way onto nearly every street corner in the known universe, it has progressively come to be less identified with Seattle and more and more with Corporate America. So, to the "Oh! Grunge!" people, I want to inform you that Seattle is actually an obsessively neat and orderly city.

One of the first things I had to adjust to upon moving to Illinois is the fact that crosswalks are viewed as suggestions here, rather than hard-and-fast rules. I quickly became aware that, unless there was a stop-sign or traffic signal, a "crosswalk" does not guarantee the pedestrian any kind of priority. In Seattle, a driver who doesn't stop for a foot-traveller in (or waiting for) a crosswalk gets a ticket, plain and simple. After a bit of grumbling, however, I came to accept the Way of my new home, on the grounds that the benefits (to pedestrians) outweigh the hazards. In stark contrast to my hometown, people out this-a-way cross the street wherever they please. Again, in Seattle, that's a ticket. Not kidding. You set foot in a road-way where there's no designated crosswalk, and you're going down. I once sat for ten minutes on a bus that was blocked behind a cop car, the driver having left his vehicle to ticket a hapless jaywalker who had looked both ways and realized that it was without any doubt safe to cross (except for the fact that there was a cop there -- "Hmph. Tourists"). Friends of mine who've moved there got ticketed for the same reason in their first month of residence. My middle-west-enlightened perspective, today, tells me that I'd much rather be able to cross in the middle of the block when no traffic's coming than to force drivers to stop at the intersection. My new Way, I believe, is better, more efficient, and, for God's sake, friendlier!

To make a long preface short, Seattle has a big night-stick up its law-abidin' behind.

'I know you didn't just litter in front of me'

I like to keep up with what's going on in places I used to live, so I regularly read papers from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, as well as from Seattle. This story, from Seattle's weekly paper The Stranger upset me, but also struck me as pretty damned predictable. In addition to having the previously mentioned symbol of Prussian orderliness jammed into said orifice, Seattle also has a long history of poor relations between the City's Finest and the less fair-skinned among us. Now, this should be less surprising than the cross-walk stuff, because it's pretty true in any medium- to large-sized American city. But Seattle's had its fair share of high-profile cases involving police brutality and wrongful-death lawsuits in recent years, nearly all of them involving black victims. In fact, Seattle brought racial profiling to a glorious new height when, during the 1999 WTO protests, Seattle's po-po violently dragged City Councilman Richard McIver (who is black) out of his car and cuffed him. He was, of course, on his way to a WTO meeting (Counterpunch has a long-ish account here; McIver's story is near the end of "Wednesday"; a shorter but less informative account is here).

But that was nearly six years ago, so let's let bygones be bygones. For those who didn't link to the Stranger story, here's the best part:

On Tuesday night, [victim Maikoiyo] Alley-Barnes walked out of the club with two friends. The friends say that as one of them, Thomas Gray, discarded a cigarette butt, someone said, "I know you didn't just litter in front of me." The friends turned to see Sgt. George Sackman standing on the sidewalk. Sackman, they say, asked Gray to walk with him to the driver's side of his car, where he requested Gray's identification.

"Now," you say, "I see why that rambling old-timer preface was needed." That's right, folks. Only in Seattle, where the pigeons use toilets, would tossing a cigarette butt on the pavement lead to a serious police-brutality incident. From here, of course, it gets really predictable. All of Alley-Barnes's friends say they were calm and reasonable with the cops, and that the victim's greatest offense was simply asking the officer why Gray was being harrassed for such a banal offense. They claim he was assaulted when he politely refused (the nerve o' some people) to sprawl himself on the hood of Officer Sackman's Achtung-mobile. They point out that calmly questioning the copper's motives isn't exactly (strictly speaking) the same thing as obstructing justice.

The Seattle Police Department, in an unusual twist of events, has a different story. They say Alley-Barnes was belligerent, that there was a crowd of people accusing them of racial harassment, and that when the officer humbly tried to restrain the belligerent dude, he attempted to assault the officer. Now, I really don't know who to believe, so I'll let you all make up your own minds.

In other news, a friend of mine (we'll call her, let's say, Rory Cussmore) has recently been through her very own sumptuous tale of over-reaching, ass-backward, law-enforcement ineptitude. For now I'll say that this involves a little paperwork mistake which left a felony conviction on her record, despite the fact that she was not only never charged or tried with said felony, but the fact that this felony never even occurred in the first place. Yes, folks, that's a mighty big banana peel. And as we know, the bigger the banana peel, the harder they pratfall. When the dust settles and such matters as libel and hearsay are out of the way, I will tell the whole story. With names. With Rory's permission, of course.

Everything's bigger in Texas

2005-04-20T10:38:00.000-05:00

Reading the satirical newspaper The Onion has some strange side effects. I read it, and then go on to read stories from the real news, and I find, more often than not, that the next story I read will seem like a satire, even though it isn't. I explain this to myself in two ways. First of all, our ability to read satirical language is a specialized mode of reception, and it probably just sticks around for a few minutes until you become conscious that the specialized mode of reception is more hindering than enabling your understanding of a text. The other reason, maybe more obvious, is that the news is frequently really absurd.

For instance:

Texas may have put innocent man to death, panel told

This is the kind of headline that screams "Just kidding!" I mean, who would believe that the nation's leading executioners would need a panel to decide that they might have killed a wrongly-convicted fellow or ten. Most Texans, the rational ones anyway, understand that being executed for a crime they didn't commit is just one of the risks of living in Texas. It's a trade-off, sure, but they knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed up.

But this is, indeed, a real story, and I will treat it as such:

Fourteen months after Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in the nation's busiest death chamber, a renowned arson expert and Willingham's lawyer told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee that they believed Willingham might have been innocent but found nobody willing to listen to their claim in the days before the execution in February 2004.

This is really awful. Willingham, according to the story, declared his innocence to the very end. He was executed for causing a death in the arson he was convicted of setting. The problem is, the theories upon which the fire was ruled to be arson are now considered by forensic investigators to be scientifically invalid. There's probably no way to establish that the fire wasn't set deliberately, but arson experts seem to think the doubt cast by advances in their field would at least provide reasonable doubt.

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir if I say we should get rid of the death penalty. But I think this is an important case. The inadequacies of the judicial system which led to this possible wrongful-conviction are exactly the same as what some people pointed to in the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. The difference is that, if these new forensic theories are valid, this is a much more clear-cut case: there was reasonable doubt, and therefore he should not have been convicted of a crime. Whatever one may think about the decisions made by the courts in Schiavo's case, they were decisions about much murkier dilemmas.

My point is that the courts, in this case, were uninterested in expert testimony after their initial decision had been made. In a life-and-death situation, the Texas courts erred on the side of death, not life. Admittedly, it would be a little histrionic to accuse the judges here of being "activist judges," "legislating from the bench." All the same, that's what Tom DeLay's been doing with respect to the other case. The Texas judges probably don't need "to pay" for their mistakes in this case, but I would suggest that the anti-death penalty left might be able to use some of the pro-death penalty, pro-"Culture of Life" GOP's own rhetoric to advance the abolition of state-sponsored revenge killings.

UPDATE: For the interested, here are a couple of anti-death penalty resources. The ICADP has been actively involved in Illinois's moratorium on and investigation of its death row. Also, the Chicago-based band Pine Valley Cosmonauts have recorded three discs of anti-hangin' songs on Bloodshot: The Executioner's Last Songs. Highly recommended.

White smoke

2005-04-19T12:53:00.000-05:00

No folks, that wasn't me.

Seems the Catholics have a new pontiff, Benedict XVI, the cardinal formerly known as Josef Ratzinger. Read all about it at Reuters.

Meanwhile, the Vatican's neighbors are having a bit more trouble getting this straight.

But what does it mean? What are we going to do?

2005-04-18T22:38:00.000-05:00

This has been a slow day pour faire blagant, and I apologize. In my defense, the kind of day today was is not the sort of event that happens often in Illinois. I have a hard time imagining a more perfect day ever happening in the greater mid-west. And I have a very active imagination (case in point, I was just thinking about Scrappy Doo discussing vodka brands with Roger Ebert and the Wife of Bath before sitting down to do this; seriously). We had a high of 82 degrees (recorded at O'Hare), the sky was sunny, and none of that Ready-to-Wear sweat that usually hangs around in the summer months. Moreover, Spring is here, and one of the few really great things about the climate here in the Heartland is how, in the Spring, everything turns this intense shade of green after months and months of grey and greyer. It's really elating. For me, it charges everything I see with an immanent sexiness that... well, prevents me from thinking about What I'm Going to Blague About Today.

So we'll settle for a review of stuff that might interest:

1) Abortion- and tobacco abuse-opponent Rep. Henry Hyde (R. - Ill.) announced his retirement today, which will take effect next year, at the end of his current term.

2) A Norwegian medical study released today indicates that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (like ibuprofren and naproxen) may carry the same risks to heart health as "cox-2" pain medications like Bextra and Celebrex.

3) Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley was picked by Time Magazine as one of the nation's top five mayors of cities with populations over 500,000. The Trib also reports on this. I'm skeptical, myself, but love the fact that Daley was placed on a list with a person named John Hickenlooper, who apparently leads the citizens of Denver, Colorado.

4) My home-state, Washington, may not have quite finished picking their governor.

5) Finally, an end to terrorism... statistics. I first learned about this from Michael Bérubé's excellent commentary on this report.

Eliza Doolittle and the NEA

2005-04-16T19:38:00.000-05:00

First of all, congratulations to Hyde Park teenager Devin Kenny. The 18-year-old Payton Prep student won first place in this Monday's Chicago Poetry Recitation Contest Pilot at Navy Pier, as reported in today's Chicago Tribune. Kenny recited Gertrude Stein's "Susie Asado," which the Trib lamely describes as "a little 'tray sure' of teasing wordplay and swirling sounds." Kenwood Academy student Patrick Smith was a runner-up. The Trib massacres the entire topic (headlining it at as an "American Idyll" contest), but I think the contestants all ought to be proud of themselves, and I thank Kenny and Smith for providing a little counterweight to the current trends among Hyde Park's teenage population.

But, in case you were wondering what Dana Gioia is up to these days, this is it. The thing is, I'm all for teaching poetry to high school students, but I sorta really don't like Mr. Gioia. I'm also sort of suspicious of this kind of approach to teaching literature. I can't imagine it doing any real harm, but I suspect that the motives behind such a project are, if not exactly opposed to mine, at least significantly different from what I imagine to be the goals of teaching and reading poetry.

Essentially, the Poetry Recitation Contest is a joint venture of the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A similar contest will be held this Tuesday at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. These organizations will evaluate the programs soon, and plan to make the curriculum available nationally. As the Tribune puts it:

The sponsors -- the Poetry Foundation and After School Matters, both Chicago non-profit organizations, and the federal National Endowment for the Arts -- want to revive an educational tradition, the memorization and recitation of great poetry in classrooms, while also improving the reading and public-speaking skills of students.

Upon reading this little mission statement, I immediately thought of Mark Morrisson's fantastic study The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905-1920. In particular, I thought of the chapter on the verse-recitation movement in Edwardian England. By his account, this period saw a significant attempt to expand and democratize the audience for poetry. It also saw a widespread rejection of Victorian ideals of recitation and dramatic acting. Where the Victorians favored an intentionally stilted and mannered style of speaking verse (so as to help make the important distinction between text and reciter), the early part of the 20th century began to favor a more "natural" speaking style, one that encouraged the full flavor of the poem's language to express itself through the person speaking the poem. At the same time, the "natural" speaking style was itself coded in class terms. Middle- and upper-class diction was the "natural," "pure" way of speaking English.

The arc of Morrisson's argument is that the push for more democratically accessible venues for the reading and recitation of poetry had as much to do with preventing the corruption of "pure" English as it did with enjoyment or the exchange of ideas. Shaw's Pygmalion, he argues, was popular in large part because it seemed to audiences to confirm and laud the burgeoning belief that class identity could be based upon diction. This at a time when other notions of what underwrote class identity were coming into doubt. Reading poetry in public became a way of ensuring that good English would survive, prosper and perhaps even elevate.

After looking into this National Poetry Recitation Contest program a bit more, it became apparent to me that it does, indeed, mirror this Edwardian movement in much of its self-conception. Having said that, I should add that one must emphasize the vast differences in historical and national contexts between pre-WWI England and post-9/11 America. Nonetheless, it is striking how much of the rhetoric attached to this Contest looks to be borrowed directly from the London-based Poetry Society.

The NPRC Program Guide is led off by "letters of welcome" from the heads of both sponsoring organizations. NEA Chairman Gioia sort of puts his cards on the table when he states that:

Although many students may initially be nervous about reciting in front of their peers, the experience will prove valuable--not only in school but also in life. Much of the future success of students will depend on how well they present themselves in public. Whether talking to one person or many, public speaking is a skill people use every day in both the workplace and the community.

In other words, we don't have to believe that literature is a valuable pursuit in itself in order to get behind this program. Instead, it has a definite social and educational use-value. By rewarding those who learn to modulate their speech and diction according to contemporary standards of verse recitation, we are encouraging students to value this kind of speech and diction, as well as the good "self-presentation" it entails.

A little further into the document, we find directions for how teachers may "model" good recitation skills for their students:

The teacher should model both effective and ineffective recitation practices, asking students to point out which elements of the performance are successful and which are not. On the board, develop a list of bad habits that distract the audience or take away from the performance, such as fidgeting, monotone voice, inaudible volume, mispronunciations, and (the most common problem) speaking too quickly. Now develop a list of elements that a successful recitation performance should contain: eye contact with audience, voice inflection, sufficient volume, evidence of understanding, pronunciation, and appropriate speed with the proper pauses.

Now, I agree that this is probably a fair account of what distinguishes, for me, a good reading of a poem from a bad reading of a poem. It's hard to argue with things like "inaudible volume" or "fidgeting." But it does seem to me that the inclusion of standards of "voice inflection" and "pronunciation" cannot be accomplished without some naturalized notion of "standard English." And that's what bothers me. Good self-presentation, the requisite attribute, according to Gioia, for "the future success of students," is tacitly grounded in standardizing one's inflections and pronunciations.

Now, of course, we're getting into well-trod territory. And I want to skip over arguments about whether or not "standard English" is a racist, classist construct (though I think it is), or whether educators ought to respect and foster a variety of English speech styles (probably a pipe dream, and the No Child Left Behind act is a much more pressing educational issue). Rather, I want to return to the vast differences between Edwardian England and contemporary America.

In addition to repeating much of the language-standardization ideology of Edwardian verse-recitation societies, this program also locates itself firmly in the contemporary American educational politics context. Near the end of the pamphlet, we are informed that this curriculum fulfills a number of NCTE English Language Arts standards. Among those it purports to fulfill are Standard #1:

Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.

and Standard #9:

Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.

In imaging this program to fulfill these requirements, I think, we run into trouble. Granted, a number of students participating in the Chicago contest read poems by prominent minority writers, some of whom inflect their poetry with the speech styles of their communities. One of the runners-up, for instance, read Langston Hughes' "A Dream Deferred." But I think we're kidding ourselves if we call this an "understanding of and respect for diversity in language use" if at the same time we call for correct inflection and pronuciation.

For me, this gets back to John Guillory's insightful arguments about literary representationality. Hughes was a well-educated and well-read man. When he wrote poems with the "inflections" of the Blues, he did so by writing those rhythms into a standardized version of written English. When Sterling Browne wrote his dialect poems, he did so by mis-spelling words so that those who read and spoke standardized English would be able to reproduce the sounds of the dialect. In other words, the way in which Hughes and Browne are "representative" of minority communities depends on their first transcending those communities. They "represent" these communities in the narrow sense that they portray them in literature. As Guillory argues, though, literature and literary literacy are strongly attached to a fairly elite social position. An author's portrayal of a minority community through a literary medium is not the same as that community's democratic, political self-representation. On the other hand, a goal like "understanding of and respect for diversity in language use" implies a strongly political sense of language-diversity.

Of course, I recognize that the political intent behind this educational standard is itself a kind of canard. Many people have pointed out that pluralistic notions of participatory democracy tend to pay a lot of lip-service to diversity while simultaneously consolidating the power of the dominant classes. I have tried to point out these various internal tensions and contradictions to get at why I feel that this sort of program is a misuse of literary education. Myself, I find that great literature has the potential to challenge all sorts of assumptions and beliefs. It ought to, more often than not, upset us. It can show us that reasonable, persuasive people hold beliefs that we might find offensive or frightening. It can be used, in an educational setting, as the basis for discussion of how those offensive or frightening ideas might seem appealing to others, why they might (at second thought) be better than our own safe and secure ideas, or how they might be dangerous and destructive even if they are appealing at some level. The best reading of a John Donne poem, I think, is one that recognizes how misogynistic it is, how foreign his conceptions of the world are to our own. Reading it simply to appreciate it ("Donne is a master of wit, a master I tell you") is a moribund intellectual exercise.

But the NEA and the Poetry Foundation, I think, want kids to appreciate poetry in just this sense. "In the hands of the poet," says Poetry Foundation President John Barr, "our everyday speech is a musical instrument. The meaning of the poem, we find, lies as much in the sound of its words as in their sense." Poetry teaches us, he says, "that we are not alone." Here, all poetry is more or less the same poem. They all teach us the same thing. We can learn to grasp this delightful homogeneity by calibrating everyone's speech and diction in such a way that we can all hear the "meaning" in the musical sounds of poetry.

This does two things. First, by emphasizing poetry as an occasion for correct diction and musical speech, we deemphasize the potentially radical and discomforting elements that might be involved in understanding it in its historical and intellectual contexts (I wonder how many people in the audience knew that "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day," recited by one contestant, was written to a young Master W.H.). Second, by emphasizing diction, musicality and self-presentation, we get an answer to the question on every philistine's mind: "What's the point of poetry?" Turns out, it's an essential part of every young person's vocational diet. This, in turn, allows us to ignore any nagging questions about how these works of literature may challenge or upset us. If it's teaching the kids how to be better public speakers, that's good enough for us.

One more note with respect to the "diversity" of language. At one point, the pamphlet gives instructions for how students ought to approach their recitals. Before reading, they identify the title and author: "They should say, for example, 'This is "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," by William Butler Yeats.'" No mention is made, of course, of whether or not they should try to imitate the mannered brogue of Yeats's own famous recording of that poem. Clearly, the idea here is to learn how to recite poems in middle-class "standard" American English, and not in the styles of "inflection" and "pronunciation" in which their authors composed them. This, even though I would imagine that would be more in keeping with the goals both of understanding the diversity of languages and cultures and of grasping the musical qualities of poems.

Enough. I shall arise and go now.

A thing to do

2005-04-15T19:57:00.000-05:00

The latest on Hyde Park's surging crime rate.

Girls 'n' Guns!

2005-04-15T09:04:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, elements of the right-wing are currently pressing to eliminate the intimidation, blacklisting and ideological indoctrination of conservative college students. With our Marxist agendas and anti-American beliefs, we mainstream academics are apparently working hard to suppress right-wing kids.

Apparently, to paraphrase Flannery O'Connor, "it doesn't suppress enough of them."

I ran across a report this morning in my Alma Mater's daily paper which tells of a conservative student group's raffle of three Star Super 9mm pistols, and the ensuing protest held by anti-gun radicals.

The dialogue at the protest site soon turned to the issue of "whether or not guns prevent rape." Naturally, this sort of argument can lead to some pretty, shall I say, "funny" quotes, and this one doesn't disappoint. According to Leo Buchignani, editor of conservative student paper The Orange & Blue Observer:

God made man and woman. Smith & Wesson made them equal. For the first time in history, handguns neutralize the male strength advantage over women. I don't understand why all feminists don't arm themselves.

Is there much to say about this? Only that it's a little less stupid than Buchignani's quote on page 3 of the article.

In any case, guns can be taken away from you. It's also a little risky to draw your piece when your friendly neighborhood rapist has a knife to your throat. I'm all for self-defense training. As a nation, we ought to do all we can to curb our disastrous sexual assault rates. But legalizing the carriage of concealed weapons is not going to help. Any smart and determined criminal will quickly and easily learn how to negate that kind of defense measure (you know, like "Hey! Maybe I should carry a gun.... Now, if only I can figure out how to get the jump on these newly-armed potential victims. Eureka! A dark alley!").

Anyway, I'll discuss the Academic Bill of Rights soon, along with my contention that I will someday be sued for teaching Shakespeare's sonnets without "balancing" them with a book like this one.

Teen Menace

2005-04-14T14:54:00.000-05:00

Those of you following the discussion I started over at Jett's blog may be interested in these news items from this week's Hyde Park Herald:

~~10 Kenwood students arrested after attacks~~

~~Business policies for students under fire~~

Unfortunately, the HP Herald doesn't have any permanent links to these stories, so read 'em while you can.

The first story, especially, is a little bit more clear about the number of people involved in this string of attacks. If it's true that the various attacks have all been "unconnected," it really does seem like an odd and frightening trend.

Still: I'm very much against clamping down on kids with more rules and restrictions. I think Melissa Harris-Lacewell has it right when she says that teenagers ought to have a right to be "outgoing young people." I gather that many adults feel threatened when a large group of teenagers are simply being loud and playful. But it should be obvious that loud and playful groups of kids are not criminals.

More on this later. Maybe.

An Indianapolis Motor Speedway of the Mind

2005-04-13T15:30:00.000-05:00

This past weekend I bused myself down to Bloomington, Indiana, to visit my wonderful and gracious friends Jim and Nicole B. They were kind enough to agree to meet me in Indianapolis (about an hour away from Hoosiertown), and to send me off by dropping me there at the end of the weekend.

And here's why I'm never taking a Greyhound bus again:

When I got there, Sunday, about half an hour before my bus was supposed to leave, I learned that my ride had been delayed by an hour. Not a disaster in the grand scheme of things, but a bit frustrating. I was hungover from the previous night's shenanigans, I wanted to be in bed, and it's a long bus ride as it is, without the extra waiting. So I got busy waiting around for my new 6:30 departure time.

I got bumped. The bus was full. Because I, in my post-intoxicated state, decided to wait around on one of the slightly-more-comfortable-than-standing-at-attention bus station benches and didn't get in line really early, I got bumped. You see, Greyhound (whose motto, incidentally, is "When It Comes to Customer Service, 'Good Enough' Is Never Good Enough") sells as many tickets as they like, with no regard whatsoever to the actual capacity of their coaches. They tell you this, but I've never had a problem before, so have never worried about it. But the point is, I got bumped.

Which meant that I had to wait around for the next scheduled departure for Chicago, which would be rolling out at the friendly and convenient hour of 12:55 Monday morning. Now, I'm willing to acknowledge that there are worse things than waiting around hungover with nothing to do for eight hours in a bus depot in downtown Indianapolis. It's just that those things don't happen to me very often.

So I waited. I talked to a few people here and there (including a nice enough African guy who spoke English, but a significantly different enough version of it that we couldn't understand each other without repeating ourselves several times; and the man who announced that he was headed to the day labor agency -- at 11:00 in the evening; "Good luck, sir!"). Finally, after what not only seemed but in fact was literally forever, I got on a bus (it was close, though: the people four back from me in line got bumped). The driver introduced herself as Laverne. She is, I'm sure of it, a Catholic nun who teaches elementary school latin by day and drives a bus by night. Before we left, she went looking for "the person who didn't give me their ticket," saying that "it would be a shame if I had to make everyone get their tickets out." Yes it would. Shortly after this, she scolded a woman for putting her shoes in the aisle, saying that someone might trip on them, and that she was positive that "once I start the coach you're just going to take them back off." I think this woman, whom I'd heard speaking Korean on her cell-phone, understood the word "shoes" but had no idea why this Laverne character was yelling at her. Finally, as we got underway, Laverne asked us all to "make this a non-drinking, non-smoking, and non-profanity coach, please." All that waiting and I didn't even get the "profanity coach" that I had specifically requested. That's a boatload of gull-spit if you ask me.

When I got back to Chicago, it was 4:15 Monday morning. Not the time of day I really want to be walking around in the area near the Greyhound depot (and my normal bus route home wouldn't start running for another hour), so I took a cab and was home safely around 4:40 am. So ended my Odyssey.

Naturally, this destroyed the possibility of getting any work done on Monday. Ah well. Such is the price of a little fun.

Envy

2005-04-13T13:55:00.000-05:00

Envy is the primary motivation behind this little experiment. I resisted the blog craze for quite a while, I think, but eventually got sucked into reading a few that I really enjoy (which I will link to soon), and began to feel left out. This, even though I think the word "blog" is one of the most monstrous abbreviations I have ever encountered in my 27 years on this planet. Right up there with "nal" for "journal." And I don't know anyone who's ever used that. That said, and following the suggestion of an acquaintance, I will refer to this as my blague.

So. To whomever is reading this, welcome. I can't promise this will be very interesting, but in general I will post stuff about dissertation-writing, journal editing, poetry reading, Funny Things That Happen To Me, and, when I'm feelin' punchy, politics.