Why don't liberals "get" disability rights?

Great question-- and a great new essay by Mary Johnson, available at Ragged Edge Online. I'm (liberally) quoted in it, but that's not what makes it worth anyone's time. It really is a vexing question-- and a crucial one for anyone who takes seriously the possibility of thinking in terms of universal rights.

As you'll see (if you click the link, of course), I think there are many things that liberals just don't understand about disability when it comes to civil rights-- it's like it's not even on the radar until it affects their lives or the lives of someone close to them. This was certainly the case with me-- as I admitted some years ago in the introduction to Simi Linton's book, Claiming Disability:

"I now believe that my resistance to disability studies is of a piece with a larger and more insidious cultural form of resistance whereby nondisabled people find it difficult or undesirable to imagine that disability law is central to civil rights legislation. Here's what I mean. Just as I was 'liberal' with regard to disability, so was I 'liberal' with regard to gender and race: I supported (and I continue to support) equal pay for equal work and initiatives such as affirmative action regardless of whether those initiatives would ever benefit me. I did not fear that I would become black or Hispanic someday; I was not reserving the right to a sex-change operation; I simply supported civil rights with regard to race and gender because I regarded these as long overdue attempts to make good on the promise of universal human rights. It is for the same reason that I support gay and lesbian rights today, with regard to marriage, housing, childrearing, and employment. But for some reason, even though disability law might someday pertain to me, I could not imagine it as central to the project of establishing
egalitarian civil rights in a social democracy. Gender, race, sexual orientation--these seemed to me to be potentially universal categories even if I myself wound up on the privileged side of each; disability, by contrast, seemed too specific, too . . . special a category of human experience.

"The irony, of course, is precisely this: even though I knew that gender, race, and sexual orientation were unstable designations, subject to all manner of social and historical vicissitudes, I had yet to learn--or to be taught--that disability is perhaps the most unstable designation of them all."

At the same time, there are some issues on which liberals and disability-rights activists will not agree, particularly with regard to what's sometimes called "death with dignity" and (at the other end of the life course) the "ethics of selective abortion for fetuses with disabilities." (Again, Mary Johnson's essay is terrific on this.) And that's because on such issues, the question of autonomy is a genuine conundrum. Which is another way of saying that I do not know what to think about it. And I'm willing to bet that if you consider seriously questions like:

--how do we proceed when confronted with a conscious incompetent patient who has previously expressed the wish not to be sustained in such a condition, but who might very well have "changed her mind" about living (with "changed her mind" in scare quotes because mindedness is precisely what's at issue)? (this was a question for one of the plenary sessions of the 2002 meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities, in which I participated)

or

--is it right and just to compel a person to take medication against his will if the effect of the medication is to render him competent to determine whether he should take his medication? (this came up in two papers presented at the "Disability and Democracy" panel I chaired at the 2001 MLA convention)

or

--what is the best course of action for a pregnant woman whose amniocentesis suggests that her fetus, upon coming to term, will have significant disabilities that her husband is unwilling to care for? (you might want to look here or here for examples of how people have handled this one),

you'll wind up thinking more deeply and more confusedly about the liberal ideal of autonomy, too. In the meantime, check out Mary Johnson's essay.

Literary theory is dead and I feel fine

Literary "theory" was pronounced dead today by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics' Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of Interpretation. "The news should come as no surprise," said longtime theory-critic John Hollander at yesterday’s CSI press conference. "Theory has been dying for years– the only problem is that the 'theorists' themselves have been in a state of profound denial about the fact." In a separate statement, eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom added, "alas."

Hollander pointed to the infamous 1997 "Paris video" in which postmodernist-deconstructionist-nihilist literary theorist Jacques Derrida is seen swimming in the Seine, but in which only his head is visible above water. "The members of the Branch Derridean cult managed to convince themselves that they could keep blathering on about the contradictions between the 'literal' and 'rhetorical' meanings of words, even though their leader was obviously unable to distinguish fantasy from reality," said Hollander. "But now that even Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton has renounced 'theory,' it’s time for Derrida's acolytes to give up the ghost– so to speak."

Speaking from beyond the grave, deconstructionist and former Nazi collaborator Paul de Man agreed with Hollander. "I was wrong from the start," said de Man. "And I want to give you all an example of precisely how wrong I was. Remember that reading of Yeats's 'Among School Children' I did many years ago? The one that took the closing couplet of the poem–

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

– and suggested that 'It is equally possible to read the last line literally rather than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question . . . how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what cannot be identified?' Then I went on to say, as you might recall, that 'the figural reading, which assumes the question to be rhetorical, is perhaps naive, whereas the literal reading leads to greater complication of theme and statement.' Well, I must have been high," de Man admitted. "Frankly, there's no way to read that line literally. The whole premise of my argument was flawed, because, in the end, language just isn't that ambiguous. Obviously, Yeats's point is that you can't tell the dancer from the dance, because– if you'll pardon the analogy– there's no difference between the words on a page and the way they might be read, or 'performed,' by any given reader."

Responding to reporters who found this "confession" too damn confusing, de Man tried again to simplify matters. "OK, I understand that rhetorical questions in Yeats's poetry might be a bad place to start if you're looking for interpretive certainty. Very well, then, take the simple question 'what’s the difference?' For a long time, I convinced people that you could read this utterance in two different ways– as a question that asserted a 'difference' when taken literally, and as a question that denied that very difference, or insisted on its irrelevance, when read rhetorically. But that's so much horseshit. I mean, come on. Words aren't all that hard to understand, are they? Really, we all know how to distinguish real from rhetorical questions, especially when they occur in written texts, don't we?"

British Marxist theorist Raymond Williams, dead since 1988, concurred with de Man. "I didn’t care all that much for deconstruction when I was alive," said Williams. "But I agree with Paul now– most of what we theorists were doing was bunk. Take for example my book Keywords, where I provided a series of historical analyses of words like art, class, criticism, culture, experience, literature, masses, society, and work. I predicated that book on the claim that 'some important social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate how integral the problems of meanings and of relationships really are.' And I insisted on understanding these words not in terms of their origins or their current usages, but as records and palimpsests of social change; I really thought that I was undertaking 'an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, which has been inherited within precise historical and social conditions and which has to be made at once conscious and critical– subject to change as well as to continuity– if the millions of people in whom it is active are to see it as active.' But who was I kidding, really? Words like 'culture,' 'class,' and 'original' have never changed their meanings, and most reasonable people know that those meanings have always been pretty clear. I know it, you know it, everybody in the English-speaking world knows it. I was just blowing smoke, and I’m sorry."

Perhaps most strikingly, Eve Sedgwick has come forward to second the confessions of Williams and de Man. "Queer theory is hogwash," Sedgwick insisted at a recent conference, "Queer Theory: Nonsense or Hogwash?" "If you think about it seriously for a second, the homo/hetero divide isn't an important conceptual division for contemporary thought in any sense of the term. I know I made a big deal out of this in Epistemology of the Closet, but between you and me, I was just out of my bird. Every sane person knows that gender and sexuality are pretty straightforward affairs– that is, I mean, we all know that people are pretty rational about these things. They know what they want, and they work to maximize their interests, sexually speaking. Cognitive science proves this. And listen, while I have you here," Sedgwick added, "I have to say that the literature of the past two centuries offers a pretty clear record of the facts. Please don’t listen to these people who go on about the 'homosocial-homoerotic' dynamics in Victorian fiction, and please don't read too much into poets like Walt Whitman or Hart Crane, either. If there's one thing I've learned since leaving Duke University, it's that words and things generally are just what they seem to be."

Blogging from a remote undisclosed location, literary critic and cultural studies theorist Michael Bérubé testified to his sense of relief at the news of theory’s demise. "Irony died a few years ago," he said, without "apparent" "irony." "So it's about time that these bizarre, elaborate queer-Marxist-deconstructionist theories about 'meaning' died too. From here on in, things will mean just what people say they mean– and they better mean it this time."

Primary identifications

With 87% in, New Hampshire looks like this:

Kerry 71,536 39%
Dean 47,847 26%
Clark 23,153 13%
Edwards 22,357 12%
Lieberman 16,179 9%

My prediction was, let me see now,

Kerry 36
Dean 22
Edwards 20
Clark 15
Lieberman 6

All right, so I was skeptical of the "Edwards surge" in Iowa but I believed it here. Oops. Otherwise, I'm within 3-4 percent on everybody. Including the Reverend and Dennis K, who should now think of themselves as free to develop their many other talents. (Apparently Lieberman thinks he has enough Joe-mentum to keep going, but why can't he take that Joe-mentum someplace else? Like, say, the NBA's Atlantic Division: it's Joe-tastic!)

I can't wait for Missouri, personally. Other than that, all I can say is that I have no idea how these results will play out when we head south and west in the next two weeks-- but I do think the next two weeks will tell us most of what we need to know, and one thing we need to know is whether Clark or Edwards will win one of these things outright.

In the meantime, one quick suggestion: maybe we can't win in November with Dean voters alone, but there's no way we take back the White House without them. (I've given the man $$$ on a number of occasions but will be happy to support any of the Plausible Four against Bush.) So let's remember that Dean supporters-- partly by themselves, and partly by way of the response they've generated among nonsupporters getting out there in the cold to vote for somebody else-- are largely responsible for these record turnouts in the early states, for the emergency spine implant in Kerry (let's hope the body doesn't reject it!), for the decline of the DLC as a rightward force in the party (after all, you can't even spell decline without DLC), and for Edwards the Happy Populist. If you're a Democrat, say something nice to (or about) a Dean voter today! You'll be glad you did.

Blog about blog

I've updated the blogroll to reflect more accurately my current reading habits, and the "books" page of this site now includes pix of book jackets. (That should boost sales by infinity percent or more! Though Verso never gave me credit for designing the cover of Public Access, for some reason.) And I'm informed that we're up from 37 visitors on January 7 to 600 per day since January 12, with over 50,000 hits for the month. I think that's the power of the mighty Altercation at work. Thanks, Eric!

In February: more improvements to come, and overdue updates to the "essays" page. Sorry to say we still don't have coffee mugs and T-shirts available.

Update: Kurt Nelson says, "you do know the 'hits' number is a meaningless statistic, right? The important thing is the number of visitors-- 13,700 and climbing." My response: don't talk to me about "meaningless statistics." The important thing is that Iraq is better off without Saddam.

Title VI update

In this post: three recent essays on H.R. 3077, the bill that would create a federal Advisory Board to oversee international studies programs that are funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, and its prospects in the Senate. The board in question would consist of seven people: two members would be appointed by the president pro tem of the Senate and two by the Speaker of the House, on recommendations from the majority and minority leaders. The other three would be appointed by the Secretary of Education, two of whom would represent agencies with national security responsibilities. That's right-- a board determined mostly by Bill Frist, Rod Paige, and Tom DeLay, with Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle getting one recommendation each. No reason for concern here, folks.

As a recent memo from the National Humanities Alliance puts it: "The House bill creates what it calls an 'advisory board' that in fact is much more. This board has the power to 'investigate' individual faculty members and specific classes on campus and it can issue reports. An advisory board ought to be truly advisory. It shouldn't have broad, nearly unlimited powers and it should not be free of reasonable supervision by the Department of Education. What's more, the composition of the board is too narrow to reflect the broad range of needs in international education."

And as you might guess, the culture warriors behind this bill-- people such as Stanley Kurtz, Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes-- couldn't care less about the vast majority of work done by international-studies programs in the United States. For them there's only one issue: Israel and the Arab world. (Sad to say, the American Jewish Committee released a six-page single-spaced memo last week strongly supporting H.R. 3077.) But you can read the arguments for yourselves: Martin Kramer's, Zachary Lochman's, and Todd Gitlin's.

My earlier posting on Title VI, reproducing the National Humanities Alliance's memo in full, is right here.

Wait a minute— there's a presidential candidate who plays hockey?

Holy Mother of the Shorthanded Goal, this changes everything. Why didn't anyone tell me this? Could it be that it's completely irrelevant to the question of who takes the White House back from George Bush and his cronies on the Supreme Court who installed him there-- or could it be the result of the right-wing domination of American mass media?

So far the evidence points to the latter. Apparently the transcript of John Kerry's Sunday interview with Fox News's Chris Wallace reads as follows:

KERRY: And yesterday, I got to be out of the ice with guys like Ray Bork (ph) and Cam Neely (ph) and Kenny Hodge (ph)...
WALLACE: We should point out (inaudible) Boston Bruins...
KERRY: I'm telling you, for a kid like me, who grew up with those guys as our heroes, I'm in seventh heaven still. I'm on a high.
WALLACE: You scored two goals. Did they let you score them, sir?
KERRY: If you play with the Bruins, they make you look good.

Over at Counterspin Central, Hesiod calmly points out (in comments) that this "means that whoever did the transcript has no idea who Ray Bourque is. Nor did the person who edited it." To which another commenter replied, "'Borque' is kinda French, so I'm guessing that Fox misspelled it on purpose to annoy his fans. Which will lead to the widespread use of this tactic, henceforth known as 'Borqueing.'" Very clever (OK, I wish I'd said it first), but I think it's obvious that the folks at Fox only know one Bork.

But seriously-- Kerry scored two goals in a charity hockey game? I think that's all I need to hear. Never mind Iraq, universal health care, civil unions, the Bush Tax and the Bush Deficit. I've found my issue. I want the guy who can put the puck in the net.

For the VP slot, obviously, we will need an enforcer. I'm open to suggestions, but remember, he has to be (a) born in the US and (b) not currently a resident of Massachusetts. So Bruins toughguy Sandy McCarthy is out on both counts.

All right, enough of this. Here's a more sane and sober analysis of the Four Remaining Plausibles from one of my favorite journalists, David Corn.

One-stop prognostication center, part II

Following on my spectacular success in predicting Carolina over the Eagles 14-3 and New England over the Colts 24-14 (only kidding-- my real picks were somewhat less accurate), here are the results of tomorrow's New Hampshire primary (and yes, I did pick Kerry in Iowa):

Kerry 36 Dean 22 Edwards 20 Clark 15 Lieberman 6 H. Stassen 1

Dean stops sliding, stays in good shape for the next couple of rounds. Clark fading. Edwards looking increasingly plausible. The only question is, will someone let three of these guys know that it really is a four-man race now? I've already asked Lieberman to bow out, so now it's time to suggest that the Reverend get himself a half-hour slot on Comedy Central (after the Daily Show?) and that Dennis K devote himself full-time to finding that dream date.

This Inter-net is an amazing thing, part XII

Today's pleasant surprise: Martha Stoddard Holmes has a bunch of very nice things to say about my 1996 book, Life as We Know It, on something called the "Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database." Just fyi. And it only took me two years to come across the book review. The course report appears to be new. Anyway, a loud and emphatic thank you to Professor Holmes. . . .

New York Times op-ed page infiltrated by contrarian Marxist-feminist anti-marriage radicals

And about time, too! My friend Laura Kipnis, author of Against Love and contributor to (among many other things) the forthcoming volume The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies, edited by me, dissects the Bush administration's $1.5 billion boost for state-sanctioned heterosexual coupling right here.

Also check out Tom Burka's January 14 news flash, "White House to Promote Marriage of Neil Bush and Britney Spears."

What I want to know is, does this plan give us married people any way of enhancing still further all the benefits the state already bestows on us? For example, if I confess to the Bush administration-- or maybe just to John Derbyshire of the National Review-- that the sight of all these attractive gay men in American popular culture has been causing me to . . . well, waver . . . do I become eligible for some of this cash?

Cleanup detail behind the world's biggest elephant

Wow! I didn't think it could be done, but somebody went through the entire SOTU, lie by lie. You can enjoy the fruits of their labor by clicking on this handy hyperlink right here.

Taking care of business

On Tuesday of this past week, one of my senators, Arlen Specter (that is, not the guy who fantasizes about man-on-dog sex), in his capacity as chairman of the labor appropriations subcommittee, called Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to a hearing to review the Department of Labor’s proposed changes in the rules governing overtime pay.

Perhaps you’ve heard about these new rules. By changing the definitions of "professional," "executive," and "administrative" employees, the Department of Labor will– by its own estimate– render 644,000 American workers ineligible for overtime. But that number, like all numbers that come out of this administration, is utter garbage. In fact, the proposal itself says that another 1.5 to 2.7 million workers "will be more readily identified as exempt."

Yet even that doesn’t tell the story, because the Labor Department estimate only counts workers who are currently paid overtime– not all workers covered by overtime protections. The Economic Policy Institute puts that number at 8 million.

And get this: In keeping with my earlier theory about how the Bush administration treats military veterans, the new regulations would render everyone ineligible for overtime who learned their trade while serving in the armed forces. You know, every time I’ve thought that these plutocrats and their toadies can’t get any scummier or more vile, I’ve been wrong. Last summer, Greg Palast had a few choice words on the subject:

Nevertheless, workers getting their pay snipped shouldn't complain, because they will all be receiving promotions. These employees will be re-classified as managers exempt from the law. The change is promoted by the National Council of Chain Restaurants. You've met these "managers" - they're the ones in the beanies and aprons whose management decisions are, "Hold the lettuce on that."

My favorite of Chao's little amendments would re-classify as "exempt professionals" anyone who learned their skill in the military. In other words, thousands of veterans will now lose overtime pay. I just can't understand why Bush didn't announce that one when he landed on the aircraft carrier.

OK, so on Tuesday Secretary Chao appeared before this Senate subcommittee, and here’s what she said:

Really:

"Our intent is not to take away overtime– not at all. Our purpose is to protect workers."

My sources tell me that Chao later elaborated on this remark: "We have no intention of taking away overtime! Seriously! Why would you think that?" she said. "Taking away overtime is the last thing on our minds. We would never dream of taking away overtime. We have always been opposed to taking away overtime, and these new regulations will ensure that no one’s overtime is taken away. You can trust me on that." Asked about the regulation’s explicit language "exempting" workers from overtime, Secretary Chao replied, "We will not take away overtime. We are merely protecting workers– from, er– ah, from– from overtime."

Now, professors don’t get paid overtime, so of course I have no direct stake in this one. But back in the day, my weekly overtime pay was the only reason I made enough money to afford the expenses of graduate school. For many people, it’s what makes all the difference, month by month. All those people could do themselves a big favor later this year by firing Chao and this whole nasty, cruel, greedy, disgusting crew she works with. And over the longer term, folks, let’s try to establish a general consensus in this country that people who want to eliminate taxes on unearned wealth while slashing pay for ordinary workers are simply morally unfit for public office.

Debate postmortem

I couldn’t believe the Democrats’ debate last night– I mean, the Reverend Al Sharpton is asked to name someone as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, and he completely misses the chance to say "Brad DeLong, of course" or "Max Sawicky, without a doubt"? Well, all I can say is that he lost my vote right there. What a disappointment, too-- I’d had such hope for the Sharpton Administration.

Now, as for whether I would name DeLong or Sawicky, it’s hard to say. They’re both smart, savvy, witty and reliable. One of them should definitely be the Fed chair, and the other Secretary of the Treasury. Brad’s masterful analyses of Paul O’Neill’s tenure at Treasury probably give him the edge for that job, whereas Max’s laugh-out-loud headline in re Grover Norquist a few weeks ago makes him clearly the best replacement for Greenspan.

P.S. Yes, I know that it wasn't quite fair of Max to liken lovable furry old Grover to the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, even in jest. In fact, I believe Norquist has repeatedly and emphatically argued that proponents of the estate tax are the real serial killers, because taxing estates over $2 million is just like slaughtering a number of women and draping yourself in their skins. Or something like that. Still, Max for Fed chair nonetheless.

Not a blog, but a blog-related program activity

It appears that Saddam did not possess weapons of mass destruction, and may not have had a weapons program, but was nonetheless engaged in "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." Or that he had seen people doing things that appeared, from a distance, to be related to weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. Or that he had been apprised of the possibility of creating weapons-of-near-mass-quasi-destruction-related program activities.

I miss the days of moral clarity--

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
Dick Cheney
Speech to VFW National Convention
August 26, 2002
Simply stated. As opposed, say, to "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
George W. Bush
State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003
Or as little as, um, zero tons. We're not sure.

"We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more."
Colin Powell
Remarks to UN Security Council
February 5, 2003
Or we might have misheard him. Hard to say-- he was in his bunker and his cell phone kept cutting out.

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
George W. Bush
Radio Address
February 8, 2003
One of them, Laurie Mylroie, has also informed us that Saddam masterminded the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and may have been involved in the mysterious death of Bruce Lee twenty years earlier.

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
George W. Bush
Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003
Leave no doubt behind!

"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."
Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman
Washington Post, p. A27
March 23, 2003
And you can trust me, because, after all, I'm the guy who argued that you could survive a nuclear attack by covering yourself with dirt.

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."
Donald Rumsfeld
ABC Interview
March 30, 2003
Also they may be up or down. But right around here. Did you look over there? East, I mean. No, a little further west, or south. Right there. No, colder. Try south again. Or north.

"Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty."
Robert Kagan
Washington Post op-ed
April 9, 2003
Unless the administration is reduced to doubletalk about weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. But that will never happen, I assure you. If you look at my author's photo, you'll find that I have a steely glare. That comes from looking reality in the face without blinking, my friend.


"I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now."
Colin Powell
Remarks to Reporters
May 4, 2003
Secretary Powell then said, "hold on, the evidence is almost here-- I just have to put it in a box for you. I'll be right back." Secretary Powell has not been seen since.

And though I shouldn't have to add this: yes, of course, I'm glad Saddam Hussein is in custody. He's a mass murderer and war criminal of exceptional viciousness and cruelty, even when matched with some of the twentieth century's worst; I thought so when Rumsfeld shook hands with him twenty years ago, and I think so now. But if only Bush and company hadn't lied so sloppily and so egregiously for two solid years, alienating just about everyone who had come to our aid after September 11, we could have ousted Saddam with the help of the UN or NATO; we could have legitimately spread the burden of rebuilding Iraq among a host of allies, instead of insulting them on Monday, barring them from contracts on Tuesday, and then asking for their assistance on Wednesday; and we could have avoided embarrassing and undermining our intelligence agencies so thoroughly. It doesn't seem too much to ask.

Update: A tip of the hat to Eric Alterman, who was clearly thinking along the same lines yesterday, while I was teaching. . . .

New essay out

From The Common Review, the magazine of the Great Books Foundation, an essay on Western Civ courses. Not available online, though-- you'll have to subscribe or keep an eye out for TCR in your local bookstore. I'll make a .pdf of it available in a few weeks. But that reminds me that I still haven't updated my essays page, which means, among other things, that last month's essay (on trying to deal with a conservative student who often disrupted class) has disappeared from this site even though it generated so much commentary and metacommentary in the blogosphere. For any of you who are already nostalgic for 2003, that essay is back-- and here it is. A blast from the past.

Coming soon: a very short essay of mine in a magazine where . . . hmm, let's just say where neither you nor I would expect to see such a thing.

Raymond Williams interlude

I’m spending the day prepping my graduate seminar (W 3:30-6:30), titled "What Was Cultural Studies?" – and I don’t have time for further commentary on Iowa or the upcoming State of the Union, but two things suddenly occurred to me while I was rereading the opening chapters of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society. One: there seem to be very few commentators on academe who have any idea that the field of "cultural studies" begins with analyses of the meanings of the term "culture" over the past two centuries. It’s not just books about Madonna, people. It’s an inquiry into the functions of the idea of culture in modernity, where "modernity" means, roughly, "the development of plural and secular forms of political organization together with the rise of industrial capitalism and its successors." For Williams, the changes in the "structure of meanings" of words such as industry, democracy, class, art, and culture "bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life: about our social, political, and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education and the arts."

Two: every once in a while someone complains that literature professors like me are attending to contemporary politics instead of spending all our time studying literature. I have no idea where these people get their bizarre notion that professors of literature have, by their choice of profession, signed over their other rights as citizens. But perhaps it’s worth suggesting to a couple of these addled souls that their blinkered idea of "literature" owes much to one of the central paradoxes of Romanticism. In Williams’ deservedly famous words:

"Than the poets from Blake and Wordsworth to Shelley and Keats there have been few generations of creative writers more deeply interested and more involved in study and criticism of the society of their day. Yet a fact so evident, and so easily capable of confirmation, accords uneasily in our own time with that popular and general conception of the ‘romantic artist’ which, paradoxically, has been primarily derived from study of these same poets. In this conception, the Poet, the Artist, is by nature indifferent to the crude worldliness and materialism of politics and social affairs; he is devoted, rather, to the more substantial spheres of natural beauty and personal feeling. The elements of this paradox can be seen in the work of the Romantic poets themselves, but the supposed opposition between attention to natural beauty and attention to government, or between personal feeling and the nature of man in society, is on the whole a later development. What were seen at the end of the nineteenth century as disparate interests, between which a man must choose and in the act of choice declare himself poet or sociologist, were, normally, at the beginning of the century, seen as interlocking interests: a conclusion about personal feeling became a conclusion about society, and an observation of natural beauty carried a necessary moral reference to the whole and unified life of man. The subsequent dissociation of interests certainly prevents us from seeing the full significance of this remarkable period, but we must add also that the dissociation is itself in part a product of the nature of the Romantic attempt. Meanwhile, as some sort of security against the vestiges of the dissociation, we may usefully remind ourselves that Wordsworth wrote political pamphlets, that Blake was a friend of Tom Paine and was tried for sedition, that Coleridge wrote political journalism and social philosophy, that Shelley, in addition to this, distributed pamphlets in the streets, that Southey was a constant political commentator, that Byron spoke on the frame-riots and died as a volunteer in a political war; and, further, as must surely be obvious from the poetry of all the men named, that these activities were neither marginal nor incidental, but were essentially related to a large part of the experience from which the poetry itself was made."

Closing polemical lit-crit point. Read next to Williams, Harold Bloom’s early work on the Romantics looks like the learned but whimsical work of a garrulous poetaster. (This would be before Bloom decided that he was the contemporary incarnation of Falstaff– even though he has no sense of humor whatsoever.)

Enjoy the holiday

Washington, D.C., January 19 (Pox News) – Sidestepping a two-year congressional battle, President Bush is planning to name former Confederate President Jefferson Davis to a federal appeals court, in a slap at filibustering Senate Democrats who have questioned the civil rights records of the President’s judicial nominees.

Bush will appoint Davis to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under authority granted him during periods when Congress is in recess. Such appointments, which need no Senate confirmation, are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.

Following by only a few days Bush’s controversial appointment of U.S. District Court judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit, the installation of Davis sends a signal to Democrats that the President is willing and ready to make the judiciary a key issue for voters in 2004. Pushing for Davis's confirmation last year, Bush said, "He was a good, fair-minded man while he was alive, and the treatment he has recently received from a handful of senators is a disgrace. He has wide bipartisan support from those who know him best." Senior White House officials added that Davis was a longtime Democrat, and that the President originally nominated him in an attempt to "change the tone" of partisan political debate in Washington.

Nevertheless, Senate Democrats and civil rights groups reacted with outrage to the announcement, noting that it is highly unusual for the President to appoint someone who was not only an elected official of the Confederate States of America, but who has been dead for 115 years as well.

"The president's recess appointment of this long-dead secessionist and Confederate leader on the very day of the federal observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday is an insult to Dr. King, an insult to every African-American, and an insult to all Americans who share Dr. King's great goals," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "It serves only to emphasize again this administration's shameful opposition to civil rights."

Republicans in turn have accused Democrats of being biased against Bush's states-rights nominees. They also have accused the Democrats of being biased against Southerners.

Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, fired back by saying that Kennedy’s reply "would be disgraceful if it were not so sad." DeLay called the President’s critics "racists," claiming that if Jefferson Davis had been black and an abolitionist, the "loony left would no doubt be calling for a holiday in his name instead of impugning the honor of one of the finest sons of the South." Senate majority leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn, concurred in more measured language, saying in a prepared statement that "Davis served his country honorably and well, even if it wasn’t the United States but rather some other country that seceded from and then went to war against the United States. In the spirit of Dr. King, I truly believe we need to come together as Americans and put these petty 'who-fought-who' quarrels behind us. Former Confederate President Davis will help us do just that. He is a good man and an excellent nominee."

Jefferson Davis could not be reached for comment.

Ed.: Won't news junkies realize how much of this posting is cribbed from actual wire reports on Pickering? MB: Yep. Amazing, isn’t it?

Your one-stop prognostication center

For the record (and because this blog doesn't record posting times), it's early afternoon here-- just shy of 1:30. Now, this is what will happen later today:

Eagles 20 Panthers 10
Colts 27 Patriots 23 (it won't really be that close, but at least the Colts will have to punt at some point in the game, for the first time in the postseason)

And this is what will happen tomorrow:

Kerry 26 Gephardt 22 Dean 22 Edwards 19 Colts 5 Kucinich 4 Sharpton 2

These predictions do not reflect my desires. They are simply what will happen. And yes, I'll leave these up for a few days even if I find them terribly embarrassing.

Update, midnight: Well, I didn't have to wait a few days, did I? It, um, it appears that my picks for the Super Bowl simply couldn't have been, er, any worse. I completely forgot to factor in the statistic that teams who play in domes and go on the road to snowy northeastern stadiums and proceed to throw four interceptions, three to the same guy, in conference championship games have a cumulative winning percentage of .000. As for the Eagles vs. the Visitors, I now owe Nick five bucks. But Nick's not the only one who took me today. According to Google ("conference championship" + "chimpanzees" + "predictions"), I was beaten by 83.3 percent of all primates who were hooked up to laptops and asked to predict the NFC and AFC championship games on their blogs.

On to Iowa!

Iowa update, midnight January 19: My prediction, I believe, was Kerry 26 Gephardt 22 Dean 22 Edwards 18 Colts 5 Kucinich 4 Sharpton 2

Actual Iowa results: Kerry 38 Edwards 32 Dean 18 Gephardt 11 Kucinich 1.

So yes, I had Kerry winning, but that’s a little like saying I was right about the Colts needing to punt in Foxboro. And OK, I was only four points off on Dean’s total, too. But otherwise, I’m as stunned as anyone. I thought Gephardt would be around for another two weeks; I thought Edwards’ late run was being oversold; I thought the Colts would show some more offense.

It appears that my man Dean will have to win convincingly in New Hampshire, and now I’m not at all sure he will (though, to repeat the mantra, I’d also be reasonably happy with Clark or Kerry, and I will have to think again about this Edwards). Also: what does this mean for Clark? Nothing good, I imagine. And will Lieberman have the good sense to follow Gephardt’s lead, and bow out after he tanks in New Hampshire?

And now for that endorsement

It has become increasingly clear to serious observers of American politics that the Democratic Party will have no hope of renewal if it nominates a Democrat for president in 2004. And the clearest, bravest alternative is Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman.

To have any prospect of winning back the hearts and minds of the professional political class in Washington, Maryland, and northern Virginia, the Democrats must make a final, decisive break with the demotic populism and so-called "grass-roots" organizing that has long entranced those among the party’s liberals who make a specialty of self-righteous delusion. That means, among other things:

– the Democratic nominee must have a strong record of creating innovative forms of corporate accounting that allow stock options to be treated dynamically, rather than being classed under the hidebound and antiquated heading of "expenses." Only Lieberman has this kind of record, for only Lieberman has had the courage to break with paleoliberal tradition and allow companies such as Enron and WorldCom to reimagine the corporation so as to unlock shareholder value. Yes, it is true that a few bad apples walked off with tens of millions of dollars while ordinary people lost their life’s savings. But alone among the Democratic contenders, Lieberman knows that this is no time to play class warfare with the nation’s future. Indeed, where Lieberman diverges most from his competitors on domestic policy is in his willingness to challenge entrenched party interest groups, the better to court the other party’s entrenched interest groups.

– the Democratic nominee must be able to continue the important work of the Project for the New American Century even after the Bush administration has passed the torch. When others chose obstructionism, appeasement, and demagoguery, only Senator Lieberman had the mettle to declare that there was "not one inch" of difference between himself and President Bush on Iraq– and there is the hope that a President Lieberman, likewise, would have the exceptional vision necessary to see Ariel Sharon as a man of peace. The tradition Lieberman represents is an honorable one, of supporting democracy or something more or less like it in some ways by whatever means are closest to hand, without hamstringing the moral authority of the United States with pettifogging questions about whether Iraq had "weapons" or a "weapons program."

– the Democratic nominee must be able to bond with Dick Cheney over the latter’s substantial success with Halliburton. Lieberman’s honest and forthright debate with Cheney in October 2000 gave every indication that his admiration for the Cheneys goes well beyond his merely tactical alliance with Lynne Cheney in the fight to restore values to American culture.

– finally, last but not least, the Democratic nominee must demonstrate a willingness to cite a wide array of sources, including the work of cyberjournalist Matt Drudge, in order to attack his Democratic rivals on Iraq. Senator Lieberman’s recent criticism of Wesley Clark demonstrates that he has the intestinal fortitude to cross party lines and make new friends, just as it shows that he has the determination necessary to endure the scorn of Old Democrats calling his reliance on Drudge "opportunistic," "misguided," or "completely out to lunch."

I further suggest that because Senator Lieberman looks and sounds so much like the unctuous, lugubrious Senator Palpatine in Star Wars, that we grant him emergency powers to marshal a Grand Army of the Republic, secure in the knowledge that he will lay aside those powers once the immediate crisis has passed.

And I have to admit that I wrote this endorsement with help. All the italicized passages above were taken from The New Republic’s endorsement of Lieberman earlier this month.

Hockey update

Self-indulgent blog entry on my hockey season. Of interest only to hockey fans, and only a very small subset of those. More...

Book club recommendation # 2

Just arrived at my doorstep yesterday: Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, edited by Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr. I’ve only flipped through it so far, but it looks terrific. Noll and Trent are two of the best historians in the field (see Noll’s Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940 and Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States), and anyone interested in the history of citizenship and state policy in the United States– that’s the history of citizenship, not just the history of the "mentally retarded," for any of you who might not consider the history of mental retardation sufficiently interesting or important in and of itself– should give this thing a look.

Full disclosure: I have a brief, chatty, inconsequential essay in the volume, a lightly revised version of "Family Values," also available here. But I assure you that (a) I’m not recommending the book for that reason and (b) I have no pecuniary interest in promoting the book. Personally, I’d much rather have submitted a later and more substantial essay for inclusion in the book, my Dissent essay on "Disability and Citizenship" (also available right here), since that would’ve been more in keeping with the quality and the direction of the rest of the contributions, but I didn’t have that option, because . . . well, because I didn’t write that essay until late 2002, a year or two too late for this collection. So tell NYU Press that you’d like to have your very own copy of Noll and Trent, and tell ‘em I told you, and also tell ‘em I told you that you could skip my essay and read everything else instead.

Conservatives denounce gay marriage, Mars mission

From "Bush's Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives," David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, January 15, 2004: "Some major conservative Christian groups said yesterday that they were pleased but not satisfied by a new White House initiative to promote marriage, and they stepped up pressure on President Bush to champion a constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage in his State of the Union speech next week.

"'This is like lobbing a snowball at a forest fire,' said Sandy Rios, president of Concerned Women of America, one of the largest conservative Christian advocacy groups. 'This administration is dancing dangerously around the issue of homosexual marriage.'"

Responding to conservative critics of the Bush administration, the Mixed Metaphor Association of America suggested that Rios’s remarks left Americans with a "thoroughly unclear" image of the threat posed by homosexuals. "Gay marriage is like a forest fire, right, we got that part," said Buster Poindexter, general secretary of the association. "But then the administration is 'dancing around' it? Exactly how big is this forest fire, anyway? Is it one of those 'raging' things, or is it maybe just a campfire? And where does the snow come from? Did gays and lesbians build a campfire in the snow? These are not idle questions. Ordinary Americans need to know whether gays and lesbians are raging or just camping."

In a related development, a spokesman for the Family Research Council today denounced President Bush’s plans for a manned mission to Mars later in this century. Reginald Dwight, associate vice chair of the Council, said at a news conference that manned space exploration of the kind proposed by Bush would contribute to the deterioration of the American family. "Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids," said Dwight. "In fact, it’s cold as hell. And there’s no one there to raise them, if you did." Asked whether the Council would eventually support civil unions on Mars or perhaps one of the gaseous outer planets, Dwight replied, "I think it’s gonna be a long long time" before Christian conservatives would be willing to consider gay and lesbian rights anywhere in the known solar system.

Finally, a place for us

The online emporium for members of the latte-drinking, sushi-eating, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show is right here. I can't endorse it fully-- for one thing, it didn't offer me the option of identifying with a double skim cappuccino instead of a latte, and surely any self-respecting left-wing freak show should reject the Club for Growth's charge that we are "Hollywood-loving" (I don't know about you, but I will only watch films directed by John Sayles or François Truffaut)-- but on the whole, it seems OK to me. And of course no update on the freak show would be complete without a shout out to our Left Coast goddess, Arianna, whose contribution to the growing Paul O'Neill discussion is over here.

As for that endorsement I promised: still working on it. I'm trying to make it worthy of a certain once-influential Beltway weekly.

On Paul O'Neill

Two quick takes: one from economist Brad DeLong, who's just devastating on the subject, and one from a presidential candidate I'm occasionally impressed by, especially when he utters things like this takedown of the Bushies' curious eagerness to investigate O'Neill (thanks to Nick Confessore of the American Prospect).

Coming soon: this site endorses somebody or something. Stay tuned.

The great emancipator

Why is everyone on the left so outraged by George Bush's recent claim that he's done more for human rights than any other President in history? Really, people, do the math. As Grover Norquist pointed out in his NPR interview with Terry Gross last fall, the estate tax is just like the Holocaust. And George Bush has worked like no other President to abolish the estate tax.

Never mind Lincoln and FDR-- they were pikers. George Bush is preventing future Holocausts for generations to come. Come, brothers and sisters, all you multimillionaires, billionaires, trillionaires and quadrillionaires-to-be, lift every voice and sing. Free at last. . . .

A fascinating Haaretz article on Judith Butler. . .

is right here. Gets a great deal of intellectual work done in a very small space, and is eminently fair, too. Note to Butler-bashers everywhere: this is what responsible, intelligent journalistic coverage of Butler-- and her critics-- actually looks like.

On the Mayberry machiavellis: a theory (cough, cough) by me

Critics of the Bush administration have thus far been flummoxed by two things that just don’t seem to make sense in the context of the administration’s aggressive hawkishness: one, why have Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz gone out of their way to disregard and alienate the US intelligence community, even going so far as to blow the cover of a CIA agent who was working on WMD proliferation (of all things), especially when CIA/DIA intelligence is so critical to fighting against a stateless entity like al-Qaeda? and two, how in the world can the Bush administration keep cutting services and benefits for veterans of the armed forces, while so drastically downplaying deaths and casualties in Iraq and refusing to acknowledge or attend funerals of servicemen and women?

I’m as flummoxed as anyone else, but I do have a suggestion. Perhaps, for the architects of Bush military and intelligence policy, it’s all just another political campaign, full of the usual leaks and dirty tricks and backstabbing– except that these people, from the borderline-Strangelove Cheney to the evil-boy-genius Rove, don’t actually realize the consequences of conducting military/intelligence policy like a political campaign. Take the Valerie Plame scandal, for instance: if we were talking about Bush v. McCain in the South Carolina primaries in 2000, maybe this kind of thing would make sense. Let’s say Joseph Wilson pisses off the Bush team by endorsing McCain– OK, then, the long knives come out, and they go to a compliant press apparatchik like Robert Novak with some hot dope on Wilson’s wife, leaking the fact that she just happens to be a McCain staffer. (Then, of course, they follow it up by spreading the word that McCain himself is really a gay priest with a history of sexual abuse.) But them’s the primaries-- you just don’t do this sort of thing in the real world where there are real consequences involving real weapons. And yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Cheney or whomever– or, at least, it doesn’t seem to have bothered them– that Plame was working on extremely sensitive matters involving the spread of nuclear weapons; no, the important thing was “sending a message” to Wilson and to anyone else in the intelligence community who might consider speaking out about the administration’s abuse of WMD intelligence in re Iraq, regardless of whether this actually damages our national security interests. It’s just payback, the ordinary kind of retribution meted out by ruthless political machine hacks.

Likewise, with Iraq itself, I have to believe that the whole Project for the New American Century crew think of regional war as a large-scale version of board games like Risk or Diplomacy. (Well, never mind Diplomacy– that would involve dealing with Gerhard Schroeder.) That’s why no one in the Bush administration did any serious planning for the postwar scenario in Iraq: in the board version of the game (the only kind most of these warlike fellows have ever played), you don’t need to secure the energy grid (or the museums!) or put together a police force or deal with massive unemployment, restive Islamist clerics, and guerrillas and their recruits sabotaging international agencies from the UN to the Red Cross. All you have to do is roll the dice, move your pieces into the territory, and move the other guy’s pieces off the board. In fact, I’m sure there’s an internal PNAC memo somewhere that says, "after we sweep through Baghdad and secure the Sunni triangle, we’ll move in those little pieces with the horses on them and a bunch of those cannon-things that equal ten units. Then we can use our next turn to declare war on Syria." (And so much for all the useful info Syrian intelligence has given us on al-Qaeda.)

And as for Bush’s treatment of our veterans and our wounded and dead in Iraq, well, here I have only a fanciful guess. What if, just what if, Rove were conducting a kind of evil-genius (bwah hah hah hah) electoral experiment for 2004 and beyond– to see just how shabbily a Republican administration could treat US servicemen and women and still pick up 90 percent of the military vote? I know, it sounds loopy– but then, I look back on the campaign the GOP ran for Senate in Georgia, and I have to think maybe it’s plausible after all. Imagine that they’d said in early 2002, "Look at this Georgia thing– now, let’s just see if we can run a Republican-who-avoided-the-draft against a triple-amputee Vietnam war vet, and challenge the vet on his patriotism. Hey, if we lose, no harm done– it’s a completely crazy-ass idea anyway. But if we win– well, holy hypocrisy, Batman, if we win that one there’s nothing we can’t pull off in ‘04." On that line of thinking, if a Republican White House can turn its back so callously to wounded vets who need long-term medical care and still win the military vote overwhelmingly, they obviously have that constituency locked up regardless of the facts on the ground, and they need never worry about it again.

Just a thought.

Book club recommendation

I just finished the last academic obligation I was supposed to fulfill in 2002 (and can now move on to the couple of things I was supposed to finish in 2003). It’s a review of John McGowan’s remarkable and compelling (but, alas, no-longer-new) book, Democracy’s Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics, and when I first read it, fourteen months ago, it spoke to so many of my frustrations, desires, and obsessions that I simply wasn’t able to review it. I had way too much to say. I reread it this fall, and it still speaks to my frustrations, desires, and obsessions, but this time I managed to squeeze my response down to 1100 words for the good people at the South Atlantic Review, where the review will appear later this year.

My review describes Democracy’s Children as an "array of theoretically informed dissents from some of the salient projects of the current theoretical scene" (that’s a neutral form of praise, by the way), and suggests that McGowan "take[s] the relative autonomy of intellectuals as an opportunity to voice some serious skepticism about the idea of relative autonomy– and even more serious skepticism about the cogency of recent critiques of autonomy." What I like most about the book, though, is its principled pragmatist insistence on a symmetrical account of belief (that is, an account of belief in which those who do not agree with us are presumed to be as reasonable or at least as self-reflexive as ourselves). Two of my favorite passages:

"Sometimes I think my stance just reflects a sense that the cultural left is too subtle by half. Injustice and the indignities that attend it are just not that complex. In particular, I find any reliance on intricate accounts of psychological mechanisms implausible– and politically troubling when attached to claims about unconscious processes. Democratic interaction depends, I believe, on a faith that people generally know what they are about and that rhetorical efforts to shift their self-understandings can be direct. After all, the intellectual will resent attempts at indirect manipulation and will believe herself able to see through this. Why not accord the same ability to our audiences? Once we have to rely on strategies that by-pass conscious beliefs in order to transform those beliefs’ unconscious underpinnings, we have entered a realm of discourse that renders autonomy, consent and equality problematic. That this trinity cannot be assumed is an important truth; that the attempt to achieve it is to be abandoned is far less evident. Doubtless, the cultural left (of which I am indubitably a member) shares my political commitment to democracy, which is why I feel it important to indicate the undemocratic flavor of some work in cultural politics." (25)

"The pragmatist must be hostile to theories of ideology that posit motivations and intentions unavailable to consciousness as the determinants of action. Pragmatism depends on agents who can, for the most part, know what they are doing. The pragmatist need not deny systemic relations and/or effects, just as he hardly ignores inherited social codings, but must deny that agents are systematically and incorrigibly unable to perceive and take into account these relations, effects, and codings. The strongest argument here is that the theorist of ideology has achieved a conscious understanding of these matters. What, in principle, could refute the possibility of all other agents’ attaining a similar understanding?" (214-15)

All of which is to say– as we ordinarily don’t say in academic book reviews– buy this book now. No, not later this month. Right now. You can ask Cornell University Press to send it to you, if you visit their website and promise to give them $17.95 plus the usuals.

Unsafe at any speed

Malcolm Gladwell has a fine essay about S.U.V.s in this week’s New Yorker. It’s always fun to hear, once again, just how much contempt automobile engineers and manufacturers have for the people who buy these stupid metal boxes, but what’s interesting about Gladwell’s essay is that he doesn’t simply cite the standard industry market research that shows that “S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.” (David Brooks once did a column mocking this finding as a form of S.U.V. envy, neglecting to note that the finding came not from some Volvo-driving, latte-drinking left-wing freak show but from the auto industry itself.) Instead, Gladwell finds that people buy S.U.V.s because they think that big vehicles are safe, and they employ bizarre rationales like “if the vehicle is up high, it’s easier to see if something is hiding underneath or lurking under it.” (There's an online New Yorker interview with Gladwell here).

But here’s the really telling thing: the things that people like most about S.U.V.s, and that lead them to associate S.U.V.s with safety, are what make the vehicles so unsafe. They’re basically big hunks of inflexible steel-frame construction, they don’t maneuver well, and they’re so heavy that they require an extra two car lengths to come to a stop from 60 mph.

All right, let me think. So there’s this thing that people associate with safety, and the very features they associate with safety are the features that make the thing so unsafe. I’ve been waiting all week for someone to make the obvious point, namely, that the S.U.V. couldn’t be a better metaphor for the Bush-Cheney response to 9/11, but the week’s nearly over, so I might as well make it myself.

More Dean news

Following yesterday’s news that various far-left fringe groups had united behind Howard Dean as the Democratic candidate most likely to advance the cause of revolutionary socialism, readers have written in to this site to ask why the Socialist Workers Party has withheld its endorsement of Dean. One reader suggests that the SWP must be holding out for a Nader/neo-Trotskyite ticket, trying to play “spoiler” in the last weeks of the campaign by throwing its support further left in key states like Michigan, Florida, and Missouri where the question of “council communism” is likely to determine the eventual outcome. I happen to have it on good authority, however (and this is an exclusive– I’ve been talking to Washington insiders that Josh Marshall doesn’t know about), that the SWP intends to endorse Wesley Clark in a surprise “all is forgiven in Kosovo” announcement sometime later this month. Sounds to me like the SWPers are looking to become power players in the primaries this time. . . .

And over on the premier listserv of Dissent-style worshippers of American power, DemocraticLeft, DLer Mike Hirsch writes in to say,

What did you expect? If Dr. Dean sees a contradiction between workers councils and a revolutionary vanguard, I say he doesn't deserve to be president. Those idiot sects can stump for Herr Doktor, but I'm sticking with Kucinich. The son of workers from west Cleveland, he knows you need both a cadre party and factory organs of workers power. It is dialectical, dontcha know? Lenin said that when you are sick, never go to doctor comrades, and this is– I believe– exactly what he was talking about. If we can't get single-payer health care out of Dean, what hope is there he will recognize a revolutionary situation when it is staring him down or deliver a democracy based on soviets?

Well, yes, this is exactly what Lenin was talking about (though in liberal circles there are still some who insist that he was warning us about Bill Frist), but it dodges the critical issue by awarding the palm to Lenin when Leninism is precisely what’s at stake in this primary season. As if there were no contradictions between the vanguardism of Lenin and Karl Kautsky and the workers’s councils advocated by Anton Pannekoek! Leaving aside the whole Kucinich question, it's this kind of faux-"dialectical" thinking that cost Dukakis dearly in 1988 when he said, "this election is not about ideology, it's about building a party in which all power rests in the soviets." Remember that by the time Dukakis finally stopped running away from the “c-word,” he was down 17 points to Bush. Yes, he closed the gap by half, but he’d opened it in the first place because of his attachment to vanguardism. Let's not go down that road again, comrades.

It's not just GOP lies and nonsense— Dean really is the candidate of the far left!

After seeing that "Club for Growth" attack ad on Howard Dean, I began to wonder: am I living in a right-wingnut fantasy world where George Bush is a "compassionate conservative" and liberal-centrists like Dean are part of a "left-wing freak show"? Then I came across the following news item, and I realized, no, the Club for Growth has it right. So OK, I can admit it when I'm mistaken. Check it out:


Muscatine, Iowa (Rooters)-- Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean today accepted the endorsement of the Workers World Party, declaring that the time had come “for black and white to unite and fight for a Worker’s World.” Together with his endorsements by the International Socialist Organization, the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the WWP announcement appeared to solidify Dean’s standing as the candidate of the far left. “It is not enough to roll back George Bush’s tax cuts and take back America,” Dean said at a campaign stop in Ames, Iowa. “These petty-bourgeois reform measures serve ultimately to legitimate the regime of global capital and US imperialism. Rather, we must work at the very roots themselves, until the system of private property is abolished and the left’s long march through the institutions is completed.” When pressed on the critical question of “worker’s councils” as opposed to the formation of a “revolutionary vanguard,” however, Dean seemed to waffle, and his hesitation was immediately criticized by his Democratic rivals, especially Joseph Lieberman, who accused Dean of having “gone down the spider hole of crypto-anarcho-syndicalism,” and John Kerry, who insisted that a Democratic candidate who refused to endorse revolutionary worker’s councils would be “unelectable” against George Bush in November.

I Can't Stop

Somewhere in Scott Rettberg's fascinating and protean hypertext novel The Unknown, there's a character named Michael Bérubé who feeds a jukebox full of Motown tunes. I just want to set the record straight on this. I know it's "fiction" and all, but Scott and I were not in the Bread Company in Urbana, Illinois, we were in a bar in downtown Cincinnati; and I was not playing Motown, I was playing a series of Al Green's early-70s hits (this was in 1996, and you couldn't find things like "Love and Happiness" and "You Ought to Be with Me" on just any old jukebox), and of course the Reverend made his recordings somewhat further to the south.

Everything else in The Unknown is true, however.

Anyway, for Xmas Janet got (among other things) Mr. Green's latest, I Can't Stop, and I've been listening to it these past few days, and it's just great. Kind of eerie, really, in that the whole thing is so thoroughly neo-70s, from the cover art to the last details of the mixing and recording. But then, I also enjoyed more than half of Al Green's other post-70s reappearance in pop, 1995's Your Heart's In Good Hands, especially "What Does It Take" (a great and still underappreciated groove).

American Studies Association plenary address

The following is the text of the talk I delivered at the 2003 American Studies Association conference in Hartford, back in October. I was on a plenary panel with Tariq Ali and Judith Butler; the moderator was Ruth Gilmore. We spoke in alphabetical order, which meant that I had the unenviable task of following Tariq Ali, not that following Judith Butler would have been any easier. As someone who supported the war in Afghanistan but strongly opposed the war in Iraq, I was in the distinct minority in a ballroom of 300-400 people-- for the former reason, not the latter, of course. More...

Title VI emergency

An immediate crisis that's of relevance to everyone who cares about academic freedom-- in this case, anyone who cares about the possibility that international studies programs might be "overseen" by a bunch of federal appointees most of whom would be, in the current dispensation, hand-picked far-right cultural warriors. As the following memo from the National Humanities Alliance puts it: "The House bill creates what it calls an 'advisory board' that in fact is much more. This board has the power to 'investigate' individual faculty members and specific classes on campus and it can issue reports. An advisory board ought to be truly advisory. It shouldn't have broad, nearly unlimited powers and it should not be free of reasonable supervision by the Department of Education. What's more, the composition of the board is too narrow to reflect the broad range of needs in international education."

The Senate will consider the House's revisions to Title VI this month. Please read the full memo (just click on "more") and get in touch with your senators' offices soon.
More...

Elsewhere in the blogosphere

Scott McLemee has a new website, which is similar to this site in that it collects tons of essays that would otherwise have disappeared into the cyberspace version of that storage warehouse in the final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and in that it's full of omnidirectional commentary. Anyway, here's the link right here and . . . hey! wait a minute! how'd he link so quickly to my "I do this, I do that" posting below? My goodness, this "inter-net" is an amazing thing.

In local news

On New Year’s Day our local paper ran the following item:

Police respond to threatening object

STATE COLLEGE– Police responded to a call about a suspicious object Thursday morning at 445 Waupelani Drive that turned out to be an empty box. Anyone who thinks an object may pose a threat should call police at 234-7150.

At the time, I suggested to my wife that the police should probably set up a separate line for anyone who thinks an empty box poses a threat, so that they can screen out those calls right there. (It was New Year’s Eve, after all, and when your blood-alcohol level is over .3, every box looks like a threat.)

OK, so I live in a small college town, and this is what our local news looks like, right? But then yesterday, we had a fifteen-minute snow squall out of nowhere (it was 2 degrees with the wind chill yesterday morning, minus 13 today), and when it hit Interstate 80 fifteen miles north of us, it created an instant whiteout and a sheet of ice that quickly resulted in a fiery fifty-car pileup that included thirty tractor trailers and has resulted in at least four deaths. The whole thing is hideous– it closed a twenty-mile stretch of the interstate and is being called Centre County’s worst accident in history– and for a while we thought there was no way we were letting Nick take the Greyhound to Illinois.

Greyhound told us that they weren’t going anywhere near that stretch of I-80, though, so off Nick went. He should arrive in Champaign today. In the meantime, our thoughts are with all the truckers and travelers who were caught in the terrible pileup. And some kind of citizens’ award should go to high school student Dan Johnson, who somehow dodged the first jack-knifing tractor trailer, parked his vehicle, and did all he could to pull people from cars and flag down trucks while they still had time to slow down. (See the full story here.)

I do this, I do that

Last year one of the profession’s newly self-appointed (and yet anonymous) watchdogs demanded to know what I do with my time. After all, he reasoned, I’d written an essay for the Village Voice in 1991, and another in 2000, when I obviously should have been studying literature, so surely I must therefore be defrauding the good people of Pennsylvania, not to speak of the Paterno family, who endowed the chair I hold. At the time, I was so amused by this fellow’s remarkable cheek (not to mention his remarkable ignorance) that I sent him MS Word versions of the last six essays I’ve written. Predictably enough, he was even more outraged by this, and posted a pissy little notice on his website saying that I was the most arrogant professor of English he’d ever encountered.

Ouch! It took me days to recover from that one. Really, mean people are one of my biggest turn-offs. But then, over the holidays, I began to think seriously about this blogging phenomenon, and whether in fact I have the time to do it responsibly. I originally thought of this website as a public place to store my academic and generalist essays, and make them accessible to Internet readers– not really as a daily journal or a site for news and notices (that’s one reason why we never adopted Moveable Type or permalinks). Over the past year, especially during the runup to the war in Iraq, I posted links to all kinds of essays, especially the work of Ian Williams, since I’m a charter member of his fan club. But I’m not sure I can do this kind of thing on a regular basis, in all honesty. Here’s why.


Ordinary professional life


Over the past ten years I’ve been asked more times than I can count (though usually politely) just how the hell I have the time to do X. Some people have assumed that I have one of those special named-chair deals where I teach courses only once during each sunspot cycle; other people assume that I hide myself away in carrels and coffeehouses, scribbling madly while my colleagues are busy running the department; still others assume that I have a phalanx of babysitters and nannies raising my children while I do the dirty work of writing about them.

The truth is that most of my life is spent in tasks so utterly mundane and banal that it would require new developments in narrative theory simply to try to relate them. This year I’m chairing the English department’s tenure and promotion committee, and we’ve had ten– count ‘em, ten– cases to adjudicate. I can say nothing about any of them except the obvious, namely, that this kind of work is excruciatingly difficult and time-consuming. I also sit on the advisory board of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, whose fall-semester workload– judging submissions and proposals for released time, graduate student research support, team-taught courses, and so forth– entailed three or four meetings and a mess of reading material that arrives in my mailbox in large manila envelopes. I also serve on the advisory board of Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute (an ethics institute founded by people named Rock, natch) and on the college’s Research and Graduate Studies Office committee. And last but not least, I chair the department’s Strategic Planning Committee. All in all, this means I’m in for more meetings this year than any three employees in Dilbert’s office. But then again, it’s important (if invisible) work, and part of the ordinary machinery of campus citizenship. I’ll be quite happy to rotate off three of those committees in May, I assure you, but still, I consider them to be part of my ordinary professional life.

I also serve on the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council, which means, among other things, that I’m a trustee of the MLA with a fiduciary duty toward the organization (there’s a whole handbook on what this means for nonprofit organizations, and my copy is right here in my home office)– and that I go to two-day EC meetings three times a year, in February, May, and October. The October meeting is actually four full days for me, because I was elected to the EC by way of the Delegate Assembly: I am, so to speak, the People’s Candidate (and the people, united, will never be defeated, as you surely know), but it also means that I serve on the Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee for my entire term (2002-2005) though I only have a DAOC vote in 2003 and 2004 (for reasons much too boring to explain), and the DAOC meets in October too.

This term I’m teaching an undergraduate survey, African American Novel II (I’m going to start with Zora Neale Hurston and end up with Colson Whitehead), and a graduate seminar entitled “What Was Cultural Studies?” (I’m going to start with Raymond Williams and end up with Thomas Frank). The undergraduate course meets MWF, so I expect I’ll be kept busy on that front, and though I’ve taught the graduate seminar before (in 2003, for the very first time, actually), I find that seminars usually require about three times as much prep time as surveys. But I’m looking forward to these courses. Compared to all that committee work, teaching is the fun stuff. It’s always intellectually challenging and it’s occasionally vexing or terrifying, but when it goes really well, there’s no question– it’s truly a pleasure.

I have a couple of essays forthcoming in the spring, I think (depending on other people’s production schedules)– one from The Common Review on Western Civ courses, one on Colson Whitehead in a collection from the Dalkey Archive Press, one on Christianity and disability (a solicited reply to an essay by Stanley Hauerwas), and an essay on Stanley Fish and the strange fate of 1970s reader-response criticism (in a collection edited by Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham). I also have a couple of stray things in the hopper, like the seven 1000-word entries I wrote on (in alphabetical order) disability, empiricism, experience, materialism, objectivity, pragmatism, and relativism for a project called New Keywords and edited by Tony Bennett, Larry Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Those entries turned out to be some of the most difficult things I’ve done in the past few years. But my biggest item for 2004, I hope, will be the publication (finally! after a couple of years of my dithering and dallying!) of a volume I’ve edited for Blackwell, titled The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. The contributors are John Frow, Rita Felski, Jane Juffer, Jonathan Sterne, David Sanjek, David Shumway, Barry Faulk, Irene Kacandes, Steve Rubio, and Laura Kipnis– and the cover will be fabulous, too. So there’s always that to look forward to. Don’t forget to deluge Blackwell with requests for course copies.

I also have to write two talks this semester and finish one essay and one encyclopedia entry. And then this summer I can get down to some real work.


Ordinary personal life


On weekends I take Jamie swimming at the local gym after he’s watched all his morning shows on PBS Kids. He’s gotten immeasurably better at swimming in the past year: when I joined this gym (for its pool, with Jamie in mind) he started off needing a flotation belt and he was skittish about jumping into the deep end (he was 11). Now he swims unaided (albeit in an unorthodox, sea-lion-ish fashion) all around the pool with great élan. Janet and I trade off the weekday duties– dropping him off to school, picking him up from afterschool, doing his homework with him, getting him ready for bed, etc.– but he seems to have assigned to me, exclusively, the delightful task of reading chunks of the Harry Potter series to him before he goes to sleep. We’re already more than halfway through Goblet of Fire, the fourth book of the five, and he gets it, he really really gets it. Also he thinks he should be the one who takes Hermione to the Yule Ball.

The past few days have been full of petty tasks. I’ve wanted to post a new year’s announcement of some kind, and every time I think I have an hour to myself, something comes up. One day it was balancing the checkbook, then hunting around the house trying to find a new check register when I realized we’d run out, then consulting with Janet about ordering new checks because the last stash I ordered turned out to be aesthetically hideous (by all accounts, including mine), and then spending half an hour running down a spurious late fee charged by some credit card company. Then there were the innumerable nickel-and-dime details concerning the immediate family task at hand, namely, getting Nick ready to go to Champaign, Illinois to visit childhood friends and build his own computer (don’t bother asking about that one, but I will complain aloud that this little venture has accounted for some negotiating over and troubleshooting with online transactions, purchasing of Greyhound tickets, explaining to said credit card company why the merchandise isn’t being shipped to our house, and so on). Then there was Nick registering online for a couple of courses at Penn State during his year off from school while fitfully submitting applications to colleges and getting yelled at by parents who take application deadlines more seriously than he. Today my favorite time-consuming activities were: (a) trying to register for two spring conferences at which I’m a keynote presenter, for goodness’ sake, and discovering that I completely forgot to renew my MLA membership last fall and have to do it right now (hmm– could this have something to do with the fact that I bypassed the convention itself this year?) in order to register for the disability studies conference at Emory in March; (b) trying to fix the wristband of my new watch with tiny little German tools; and (c) trying to access Penn State’s inaccessible online final exam schedule so that I can complete my syllabus so that I can respond to my department’s request for a copy of my syllabus. All of this while recovering physically from having played three consecutive one-hour games of ice hockey on Sunday night– and recovering emotionally from having a wide-open backhand shot from ten feet out in the third game, on a rebound, with the score tied and two minutes left, and snapping it between the goalie’s legs only to have him get a skate on it right at the goal line. I’d played sluggishly in game one but decently in game two, and desperately wanted to contribute in game three. I didn’t, and we wound up 3-3.


What’s with the hockey, anyway?


Yes, it takes a lot of time to play two concurrent 40-game seasons during the academic year, even if the games are only an hour long. But as you might imagine, it’s a wonderful break from matters academic (I don’t know of any other faculty members who play), quite apart from being a thrilling and demanding game in and of itself. I played the game in childhood through college, but gave it up after getting mononucleosis and learning to play drums in 1979, my sophomore year (though the mono had no causal relation to the drums). In my second season at Columbia I rang up four hat tricks in four consecutive games, but we were a club sport playing in the New York-area Metro League– a very casual team by any measure. (At the time of my little streak I think we had eight regular players.) Anyway, when I left New York for graduate school I left my equipment and sticks with a friend, and didn’t even skate again for years. But then I started playing four years ago and quickly realized that it was not only an avenue to good clean fun and general mental health, but also the kind of game– unlike softball or racquetball, the usual faculty pastimes– that would require me to stay in good cardiovascular shape in order to play at a reasonably competitive level. So when hockey is going well, it means that everything else must be going well, and that I’m not overloaded with work from 9 am to 9 pm every day. But when every last second of my day is accounted for and I have no time to work out, then everything suffers– I get crabby and then I start missing backhands from ten feet out and then I get crabby. . . . So hockey, too, takes priority over blogging for me.

I’m an academic advisor to four of the Penn State Icers, actually– this means I meet with them anywhere from once to four times a semester and keep track of their academic records– and I get two free tickets to any home game I want, if I give the hockey office 24 hours notice. I go to about three or four games a year, and I take Jamie when I go to Saturday afternoon games; this past November we said hello to one of my advisees as he left the ice after the second period, and he invited Jamie down to the locker room to say hello to all the players. Jamie responded with hand-rubbing glee, and promptly introduced himself to everyone. He was a little confused at first, because he’d been in every other locker room in the rink (he sometimes comes along to my Saturday early-morning games) save for the Icers’, but he loved it and came back a second time for more VIP treatment.

And in the time it’s taken me to write this, Janet’s come back from picking up Jamie from the Y, and I have to help with dinner before we see Nick off to the Greyhound station. It’s really not at all clear that I have time for substantial blogging this spring. But we’ll see.

Updated (with handy hyperlinks) from yesterday evening.

Identification papers

I'm the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University. Born in New York City (specifically, on 2nd St and Avenue C) in September 1961, I grew up mainly in Flushing, Queens, where I lived until moving to some of the least attractive apartments in the Columbia neighborhood in 1978. I received my B.A. in English from Columbia in 1982 and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986 and 1989, respectively. In 1983, a few weeks after moving to Charlottesville, Virginia, I met Janet Lyon; we married in 1985, had our first child, Nick, in 1986, got jobs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, had our second child, Jamie, in 1991, and then moved to Penn State in July 2001.

This site carries announcements, a couple of photographs (more coming soon), and links to about 70 of my essays published in various venues--available here via links and pdfs. And when I get a raft of mail in response to an essay, then this thing really comes in handy.

The "essays" section is the most extensive and active part of the site; whenever I publish a new essay, whether it's in an academic or a general journal (American Literature, Dissent, NYTimes Magazine, etc.), I'll post a notice about it here and provide the url and full info on the "essays" page. To read some of my essays, you need to be working from a computer in the .edu domain in order to be granted access to academic journals catalogued in JSTOR or Project MUSE; for some of them you need to be a subscriber to the Chronicle of Higher Education. For many of those, however, I've provided .pdf versions that give you my original manuscript (as conformed, after editing, to the final published version).

When I'm not writing or teaching, I play ice hockey in a local league and serve as an assistant coach on Jamie's "Challenger League" baseball team (see family pix). I used to play drums in a variety of bands going back to college (when I played behind David Terhune and Larry Gallagher in a band called Normal Men-- Terhune is now, with Joe McGinty and Kris Woolsey, running a brilliant outfit known as the Kustard Kings, house band of the Losers Lounge in NYC, and Larry's great debut CD, An Endless Chain of Accidents, just came out this past summer; check out Larry’s website here). But these days the best drummer in the house is Nick. His drum teacher didn't know who Keith Moon was, but we've fixed that.

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