Wouldn't you think...

...given the demographic trends and their acknowledged-by-all need to attract non-whites to the party, the Republicans would know better than to instinctively pile on a latina nominee?

There's a Future for You, Willie Pete...

...on yet another topsy-turvy day in the Obama administration, I'm thinking of white phosphorus, what it does, what it means, what it makes us do.

In response to local outrage over recent civilian casualties, among which are wounds inflicted by white phosphorus shells, on May 10 we issued a flat denial with a suggestion that it must have been somebody else burning little children, not us. Next day the Pentagon released summaries of incidents in which Taliban/Al Qaeda forces used white phosphorus against NATO/ISAF, rolling with the previous day's hypothesis. The release consists of one-line Pentagon accounts, without a timeline, eyewitnesses, photos, video or local Afghan government corroboration. Human Rights Watch isn't buying it.

This response is interesting to me: the pattern of denial is craven, where the Bush pattern was merely brazen. When confronted about WP use in Fallujah, the Bush DoD said first that it didn't happen, contradicting soldiers' accounts, then acknowledged use of white phosphorus but stressed that such use was legal. Sure we fired incendiary devices into civilian areas, devices whose contents chemically bind to adipose and burn until fuel or oxygen is removed, and it was legal.

The deny-and-shrug was also used in last winter's war in Gaza. The IDF's first response to charges that it had fired white phosphorus into densely populated areas in Gaza was a flat denial, followed by a promise of investigation. When the investigation concluded, Israel determined that any such use was legal.

The NYT piece covering the investigation's release called the dispute over the use of white phosphorus a "proxy" for larger discussions of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, Israeli fears about Iran, usw.

Which is funny because civilian casualties are the whole ballgame. The "larger issues" boil down to civilian casualties. Israel's vision of itself as a willing partner in peace is put into question by its own perpetration of war crimes. (And that's not me, that's HRW again.) The threat that Hamas-Iran pose is mooted by white phosphorus. White phosphorus is a battlefield illuminator. What interested parties then need is their own paper trail, a counterargument, any counterargument.

Debate, no matter how absurd, excuses the main issue from our concern. As soon as two sides can set up camp -- HRW vs. NATO, UN vs. IDF -- the issue is up for grabs. It is only at the level of debate that discussion of things like war on innocents can be taken up neutrally. No one can be pro the execution of civilians; there has to be some other thing to talk about. Only then can writers point to "the broader picture," revealing brutally burned children to be part of a "proxy argument."

SO, congratulations to the Obama administration -- the "blame the other guy" response creates a much more interesting debate than the Bush administration's "when we do it it's not illegal" response. Now, instead of asking Is Hamid Karzai governing anything?, or Can we begin finally to distinguish friend from foe?, or How do we get reconstruction aid / hearts-and-minds work going?, or Why are we making Afghanistan safe for a bunch of opium barons?, or What the Christ are we doing in a place that crippled Alexander the Great?, we're busy figuring out whose WP shells those were, what size the Russians used thirty fucking years ago, etc., etc. And there's definitely a future in that...
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The Plan Cannot Fail!

Are those men at an Olive Garden?

Mitt, to praise the android, gave off the odor of introspection in that interview: Republicans lost because they behaved like Washington insiders, spending heedlessly. It was an answer that absorbed Jeb Bush's point of attack and had the added benefit of steering the conversation back to taxes and spending, away from culture, ideology and region.

Does the current crisis of American conservatism run deeper than being the by-product of rampant success? Doesn't this look a lot like the Althusserians-vs-Student-Radicals of Les Evenements? Rush Limbaugh is calling for a "teaching tour"? That's pure Althusser, just from another political pole! The people have been duped, bamboozled! Educate the ignorant masses so that they can take control of / comprehend the means of their subjection! Then, depending on your political cup of tea, the newly-enlightened former plebes will take control of the means of production / reduce marginal tax rates and capital gains to zero. Same paternalism, different face.

My concern, dude, is that Democrats need the same kind of introspection. Sure, their nominal adversaries appear doomed to become a regional party; now would seem to be the time to gloat. But the gloating disguises how the Party made its gains. It's funny to bust out GOP Survivor and imagine Cantor and Steele fighting over the party's corpse. But Democrats don't have anything to say about Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter, Jim Webb (Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, thanks), Tim Kaine (pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, pro-business), Rick Boucher (pro-coal for the love of God)...when, really, was the last time a liberal democrat won a close race?

Yeah, Mitt is funny, but he's smiling because he won: he purged the yellowbellies from his party and watched as his enemies bit off more identities than they could chew; watched while this incoherent behemoth staggered from crisis to crisis, inarticulately blathering about fiscal restraint one day and limitless bailouts the next; watched the liberal wing bank on massive turnout in black and brown precincts countrywide...in short, banking on massive turnout _forever_ from groups of Americans who vote at 3/5 the rate of white voters -- the political equivalent of subprime lending. The conservative wing of the party, of course, thinks that pandering to "downscale whites" will preserve its majority, when all it constitutes is further rightstreaming...

Either way, the Android wins. Perhaps it's time for a teaching tour for Democrats. A lesson from that famous android fighter, John Connor...wherever you are, you are the resistance...
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If this is the republican repair steering committee...

...these guys are dead in the water. I don't know what it is about Mittens, but he continues to hold onto some godforsaken idea that he can be president. That this sort of thing is not just possible in a just world, but likely within the next eight years. It's the sort of lunacy one usually sees reserved to the guy on the National Mall yammering on about how JFK steals water from his bathtub. And Cantor's no better. If these guys can't admit in the media that they screwed up, if they just shift the blame onto the economy/big spending/neutrinos, then they've got no shot for a -long- time.

...again... if a major American political party was mortally wounded or dead, would we recognize it?

Still Baffled...

If, like David Brooks said, Arlen Specter got Ed Rendell to clear a seat for him at the PA-Dem table, basically by showing up at Congresspeople's homes and saying, "Y'know, I'm term-limited. Gonna have no job in 2010. Looking for something to do,"...

...then that means he also got Rendell, Biden and Casey to own up to lobbying Specter to flip; Specter not only got himself a seat at the table, he got people to make it look like it wasn't his idea, and...

...IF, as HuffPo thought out loud once when running down all possible candidates for PA Senate, a GOP crackup makes it worth PA Dems' while to nominate the most liberal candidate possible, why would PA-Dems go along with Specter?

Does Ed Rendell owe the man money? Is Specter really going to vote for cloture on health care reform, a giant energy package, and nationalization of the banks, and is he going to do it this Congress? Why take his word for it when in 2010 we've got Judd Gregg's seat, George Voinovich...and, until the other day, Ed Rendell? Why, o why?

Little Arlen Wants to Run...

...and knows that in 2010, if he survives the GOP primary, he will be destroyed in the general election. The brand he's associated with is tarnished, and he's the least disciplined brand rep. Q: What you're selling is no good, and you're bad at selling it; what to do?

A: Hop on the Dem bandwagon.

This should not happen. I beg of you, Pennsylvania Democrats, end this man's career. Do you need one more Senator in favor of limitless wiretapping, unfettered use of national security letters, coercive interrogations? Do you want a man so paranoid that when the NFL commissioner's office refused him Giants-Pats Super Bowl tickets, he held hearings into Bill Belichik's spying and Roger Goodell's complicity in same?

Do you want the guy who stonewalled the stimulus package, flummoxed every attempt to start a withdrawal from Iraq from 2006 to present and who talks like Nixon? Have you seen film of this man? He authored the single bullet theory. He's still telling Polak jokes, in public, at luncheons. Plus, God cannot kill him, so there you are...an apparently-immortal paranoid powertripping underachiever as the new face of the party...Seriously, look at that face...look at the pictures of him with Walnuts and Palin...that will be your party.

60 votes isn't worth it people...

Young Adjunct Friction

Cloning himself a new mathematician, no doubt.

Bousquet in the Chronicle is dead on in his riposte to Mark Taylor in the NYT. Taylor's estimate of adjunct pay at "5000 a class" has to be a typo. He means 5000 a year, right? How did this pass the copy-editor?

The two men seem to be arguing at cross purposes. Both lament the graduate student / young adjunct condition. Taylor's 1990s-esque call for "cross-disciplinarity" is actually something the University has long implemented in order to clear some space for its young professors. More such would actually provide the jobs for young docs that Bousquet so pines for. Clearly everyone can get along.

Apart from that, Taylor sounds like he needs a transfer out of the Religion dept.. If you think a "dissertation on Duns Scotus' use of citations" is inane, I entreat you to see what graduate programs in Fine Art are capable of. Every year we disgorge a new lot of self-absorbed, disengaged careerists bent on deskilling everything they touch, showing on the cheap, or visually fellating their professors, right?

And my argument is that's OK. Graduate school is supposed to be tangent to the world. It is an outburst of free time that we pay for with debt, in order to clear some space for our minds to work. Because Lord knows you can't get that kind of time working on the line. We detach from the world, loose our moorings a little, and plummet back to earth.

How did Duns Scotus cite prior writers, and what does that mean? I have no idea. Maybe someone should spend a couple years looking into that. No one really gives a rat's ass about the specifics of an overly-specific dissertation or journal article because we will use it for our own (larger, philosophical?) ends. Taylor sounds like he's pissed that Foucault got to spend all those years having graduate students write about punishment in early modern Europe, as though advances in one path of research were inherently reflexive, as though research were its own end. As though we didn't cull material from divers sources already, nor speak in tongues...

This Is What I Get for Reading Georgie Anne Geyer

Pakistan is doomed because some bearded men want to run madrassas and cut off the hands of thieves? Note to Geyer and the people who clean up her first drafts: our nominal friends cut off the hands of thieves, keep women off the road, even get cops to beat the shit out of people who owe them money. It's evil; we tolerate it because we benefit. There was an open insurrection in Swat, with de facto rule by the Pakistani Taliban, before the cease-fire -- there were beheadings before the cease-fire. There is calm now. What do you want?

That said, Pakistan is not going to fall. Anywhere but the Pakistani equivalent of Winnetka there is civil society and the rule of law. (It's funny how the right loves the American outback, is all about self-rule, and can't stomach the sight of Islamic self-rule.) Pakistanis themselves are pissed about the truce, because they, like you and I, Georgie, have television. Also, the Pakistani army is going to pick its battles -- they won't let the bomb walk into the hands of bearded men.

Calm down. Swat was not destroyed by the February cease-fire. The Taliban cannot convert by force a nation of 200 million people...this would be like a violent insurgency of Jehovah's Witnesses getting self-rule in South Dakota and suddenly, within six months, taking over New York. Sufi Muhammad knows he'd be laughed out of town...

Parsin Parsons

Updates to the Parsons situation at The Notion and at Runnin Scared. Updates, but no real news. We still don't know, beyond taking New York mag at its word, how many adjuncts were non-tendered, because we don't have names. Or, we have one: Dale Emmart, a 22-year veteran. Who are the other eleven?

If Parsons makes good on its assertion that half of the newly-displaced profs will be tendered offers in other departments, then we're dealing with six fired teachers. If it is true that Parsons' bottom line is OK -- and that seems unlikely, given the New School's run of acquisitions and infrastructure improvements this decade -- then to fire people just because there's a recession going on is not ethically sound. Businesses across the board are taking advantage of the recession to take cost-cutting measures that would otherwise be unpalatable. It's bullshit; it's also happening on a massive scale in government, non-profits, and the private sector.

This makes the logic of protest difficult to grasp. Adjuncts are fired for any number of reasons. This is the nature of adjunct employment, union or no union. Parsons' only mistake seems to be sending out a form letter that implies that the recipient is one of many; that there was a mass firing. Their current PR gambit is exactly this, and it might be a winner: Firings are just another day in the life of adjunct professors, and to protest them is like protesting rain.

So, this is a protest with a material end-point -- unlike the student occupation -- only it's possible that it lacks a prime mover. It is a protest against everyday conditions, not against extraordinary abuses. Violation is here understood to be intrinsic to adjunct employment.

This is difficult for me to parse. Is this a protest built on survivor's guilt? Is this not that big a deal for the people who got canned? I've been non-tendered before. It was okay; I had other plans. Not good plans or anything. No money in those plans...so inform me Parsonsites! I need information...

New New School Brou-Ha-Ha

Never thought I would root for "occupiers," but this New School crew changed all that. A protest at Parsons W. 12th St entrance is scheduled for more or less right now, in solidarity with the dismissed Parsons adjuncts.

You'll remember that I asked more than a week ago "Where are the Parsons adjuncts?" Presumably here. What I meant, in sum, was that it's not enough to agitate for the dismissal of people you simply don't like very much, a la the "occupation" against Bob Kerrey. A protest with a material end, I'm postulating, has a better chance at success.

And the Parsons press release seems to prove it, chalking up the pink slips to failed communication, in the manner of: We didn't fire more than a dozen adjuncts, it was six, and we offered them teaching posts in other areas. Already the institution is running damage control, rather than just calling the NYPD.

It still amazes me how little real information has come out about the Parsons firings. Has anyone been non-tendered for next year? Really and officially? Who and how many? One-third of faculty? One-half? 20? Six? What does teaching another area mean? What saith ye, Parsons Pink Slips?

Also, how come Lawrence Hegarty and Peter Drake are the only two dudes willing to be photographed for the cause? Viz.,this in the NYT and this on the Parsons blog:
Has the university -- to concoct an example, since none exists -- offered printmakers jobs in 3-D digital rendering or suchlike, knowing full-well that the current crop of printmakers lacks that skillset, and that shifting a current instructor's area is tantamount to reopening the position to outside applicants, i.e. firing?

Finally, as an example to us all, Columbia faculty are meeting to support academic freedom in Palestine; this is a protest without fashionable accessories, built to redress tangible grievances, namely, Israel will not let Palestinian academics attend conferences in their fields. A simple thing like the right to a comp'ed lunch calls into question borders, sovereignty, rights of movement and return, usw, all the giant problems in miniature...
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Modestly...

You need each other, gentlemen.

David Carr's best line in his NYT piece is the last line: cable anchors trying to harness teabagger rage sound like candidates, but all they're running for is "first place in the demo."

With that in mind, a modest proposal to teabaggers: do you really want to throw off the yoke of government bailouts and corporate welfare, only to remain slave to the bottom line at NewsCorp? Trade a banking devil for a media devil?

Aren't you concerned that maybe other Americans actually like the "Kenyan Who's Destroying America"? That you might be alone?

You need an ally, Dear Teabagger. You need to broaden the demo. Allow me to introduce to you the Iranian Street! Back in October, when Mahmoud tried to enforce a sales tax on bazaar dealers, they called a general strike. When he delayed the sales tax, they expanded the strike! These are people you want on your side, Teabagger!

And the Iranian Street has a long history of restiveness. Every time the government reduces the gas subsidy, like in 1991 and 1999, blood is shed. Happened summer 2007, too.

What's more, every time there are price or tax riots in Teheran, we 'Merkins get all breathless about a coup. And it never happens. More often, the reaction is stronger than the protest. But with an army of kindred souls in relaxed fit jeans, egging them on across the ocean, perhaps real revolution can come to Persia Iran. Did I say that out loud?
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Watch Out: I Can Always Bring This Back to Stanley Fish

[Photo: Jay Bybee and family / Meridian]

NYT editorializes for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, torture memo author, current federal appeals court judge, on the grounds of a warped understanding of the President's constitutional powers. All this re: his writing torture into the law.

NYT linked to the new documents, which cover warrantless wiretapping, use of the US military to pursue terrorists domestically, pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, detention of American citizens charged with terrorism, and extraordinary rendition. They skip the torture memo because it's long been released, Bybee has long been on the bench, and John Yoo is the only person out there vociferously defending his crimes.

We'll leave aside the contradiction inherent NYT's romantic prose and pragmatic posture, suing for Bybee's dismissal six years after his nomination and at a time of Democratic ascendancy. In 2004, he was a footnote to an opinion denouncing Thomas Griffith; NYT hasn't always demanded his impeachment/resignation. They just got on the boat today.

Again, leaving all that aside, the real problem is in the perceived boundary between academic behavior and political behavior. Bybee is a judge and can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. John Yoo is a professor and is, apparently, exempt from such calumny. Both men issued legal opinions that rationalized all manner of weirdo executive branch usurpations of power. One is in the Academy, so he's clear. It's as if Stanley Fish were on the editorial board, and you can say and do whatever wack shit you feel (Ward Churchill) so long as you don't try to problematize the Academy itself (Denis Rancourt).

Conspiracy theorists, people who want Iran bombed yesterday, people who want Israel pushed into the sea, war criminals and ordinary street freaks -- all their actions are OK so long as they 1) stay in the Academy 2) keep the Academy away from "ordinary life". This is how we get into Bybee-not-Yoo, Rancourt-not-Churchill hair-splitting.

Just come out and tell us which sorts of academic freedom are legitimate and which are not, and stop pussyfooting...by which I mean Fish's position on Columbia's bringing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak: the University administrator is beyond politics.

This is a total fallacy. Academic positions are already constructed as political, whether you like it or not. Teach engineering? To what end? To build more and better highway off-ramps? OK, or statistics -- you know how much blood has been shed over sampling methods and the census? What about the relationship of calculus to ballistic missiles? Or the complicity of art in legitimating a culture of plunder consumption? See how quickly we hit the "minefield" of ethical decision-making -- which is, in a democracy, politics itself?

See also, and I'm speaking to you Stanley, how deferring the ethical point of contact onto the decision to act ethically in opposition to academic standards negates the difference between good and bad acts? If the standard for a person's actions is not "Does this promote the good life?" but "Is this covered in the provost's integrity manual?" one can act inethically and legally at the same time.

Impeach Bybee, but fire John Yoo too.
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Ain't Skeert of Rick Perry...

...nickel's worth for the Governor of Texas: don't listen to the voice of reason. Tea parties are the way of the future; stick with it! Nothing says "capable of governing" like a mob of rusticated yuppies frothing at the mouth, overusing the word "fascist," painting signs, demanding to pay zero taxes for their sewer system, their electrical grid, their roads and highways and their overseas adventures (for the record, I'm essentially in agreement with the teabaggers: I'd like the 40 cents out of every dollar of my taxes that goes to Defense cut in half. And since DoD has been operating at or near 739 billion the past two years, halving that is easy to do). I want more! Perry-Palin 2012!

There is no plan. There is no Prop 13. This is self-entitled bourgeois nonsense. Laughable. I entreat every Republican running for anything, dog-catcher, in 2010 to hew ever closer to the fringe. Jefferson Davis was talking about "States' Rights, States Rights', States Rights'" and did it better ("That we transmit unshorn to our posterity..."), and lost a war over these artificial rights, possessed by no one, asserted by everyone.

Please, everyone, tell me more. I want to hear more. Because every time some exurban arriviste starts complaining about rights and responsibilities, I get all tingly, anticipating the huge left-wing majorities in America's explosively-growing, majority brown cities we're going to rack up in the next decade. Bring it on, cornpone.

Notes On Teabagging. Really.

[Photo: Teabagging in Charlottesville VA, 15 April 2009]

Who gave this tax revolt the catchy name? Is she demanding royalties? Is she paying them to John Waters?

Where were the teabaggers when the last guy in office was bloating defense spending beyond reason or proportion and initiating the most expensive entitlement program in American history?

Teabagger is not an epithet I would self-apply. Anything-bagger is generally derogatory, e.g. "carpetbagger". Note to teabaggers: I vote for "Sons of Liberty," or "Mohawks".

Capitalism, like the sign says, is supposed to rock. If you believe that, you may console your bruised ego with the knowledge that you, and all of us, now own huge chunks of the American financial sector, theoretically valuable chunks, and that we bought them at closeout prices. If capitalism works, these chunks will, at some point in the future, be worth much more than 3 dollars a share. At that time, Treasury will be able to unload its stakes in the banks at a profit. Parti-nationalization would be good capitalism. Something any conservative worth his salt would applaud; buy low, sell high. This frisson between "defense of capitalism" and hatred of Tim Geithner's faith in that same "capitalism" is really the most interesting thing about teabagging, beyond the ballskin.

Of course, we don't have nearly enough nationalization, or the right kind, to recoup, much less profit from our national investment. Per the Geithner Put, the FDIC guarantees a profit for anyone who bids on bundles of troubled assets; barring unnatural occurrences -- such as every homeowner tied to a subprime mortgage suddenly winning the lottery -- the FDIC has no opportunity to profit. We are -- all together now -- privatizing profit and socializing loss.

I like the teabaggers' equation of fiscal dumbfuckery with treason. I especially like to see the advocates of less-to-no government espousing a penal ethic that would punish spendthrifts with beheading. I like the contradiction inherent therein.

I like the idea that Newt Gingrich will run in 2012. I see the teabaggers as his plutonium: there lieth power and radiation poisoning. I can see a future wherein the Republican Party boots its (presumed) Pawlenty-Steele-Romney wing, its paleo-conservative technocrats, in favor of sexier, wildfire hillbilly demi-movements. After all, Limp Bizkit is getting back together, so impotent white male rage might actually be a thing.

Pretty sure we'll all be speaking Chinese before we learn Teabagger.
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Leaders of the New School Count the Receipts

Reading about the occupation of a disused building at the New School by a group demanding the resignation of the president and some trustees, some questions about politics and representation:

After the protest, why is the most interesting dispute about the authenticity and meaning of the video of NYPD "spraying" inside the building? Nearly everyone in the building was dressed to get maced. Say the protest ended without any pepper spray or tear gas fired in anger; scarves, keffiyehs etc. become fashion accessories rather than real-world precautions. With spray, we can continue discussions about the relationship of free speech to security, civil liberties and civil rights within the University usw. Without spray, there's less to talk about.

Doesn't this defer the meaning of the protest onto its means? Clearly, this is not a direct form of communication, as in "Meet our demands, or we will not leave." The occupation didn't last long enough to have been conducted on those terms. It appears, rather, to be an attempt to bait the University and the police into committing violence, thereby delegitimizing their power, and broadening the base for future protests.

Even the original meaning of the protests (the first in December) is hazily concocted. Kerrey and James Murtha are, respectively, a proponent of the Iraq War and a man related to a war profiteer. This is the least charitable view. Probably, by temperament, they should not be running the New School. Is this like Paul Wolfowitz running Oberlin? No, not really. But I understand and share the desire to punish absolutely everyone who thought it might be a good idea to chase down Saddam Hussein. Fair or not. The University is a place where the unsettled debts of history come to roost. If you don't like it, you can walk right back into the corporate world.

So pushing these men out for one political choice I see as legitimate. Why then combine the issue with some vague allegations of academic malfeasance? Is Kerrey failing to "safeguard the values" of the New School just by being square? Hasn't the New School been on a corporate tear in the past decade, expanding into business and fashion, veering from its foundation in pure soft sciences? Isn't Kerrey the culmination of a long-running corporatization of the school? So where was senior faculty outrage ten or fifteen years ago? Too busy getting tenure to get arrested?

Why occupy an unused building? In what way does that disrupt the functioning of the School? What happened to shutting down classes? Where are the Parsons adjuncts? (Forget Bob Kerrey's job, let's compromise: Kerrey gets to keep his job as long as Parsons adjuncts get to keep theirs.) Why does the iconic photo in the Times show a banner that says "Occupy," in a classy font, with a demure black star? Why do photos of the actors look like an Urban Outfitters spread? The more we look at the images of the April protest, the more purely performative it appears.

Back to fashion: More frequently mentioned than his Iraq stance or his assumption of the Provost position is Kerrey's pure "incompatibility" with the New School's "radical character". As if to prove this character, students wave the red-and-black flag and demand the president's ouster. Of course, it's the radicalism of the School that drives enrollment. Showy, cop-baiting demonstrations serve to ratify the thing they profess to vilify: counting the day's receipts.
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Here's How to Lose in Iraq...

As if we hadn't figured it out, Nouri shows us how to lose in Iraq.

First, raid the offices of your political enemies. It worked on Sadr, ha? In 2004 and 2008, ha? Awakening Councils acting up, ha? Shut em down. The resultant street riot will, you know, give Americans an opportunity to earn the Bronze Star. Can't get that sitting on a base. Besides this, raiding your nominal allies has the added bonus of confusing the hell out of the Sun Young Moon falange. "A new boldness" among the armed groups is okay, right? We paid them to be bold...

All good, until someone starts blowing up children in Shiite neighborhoods. Then we're back to square one, only with fewer boots on the ground.
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Future Star, Dead Giant

On the GOP Nova tip: today's NYT has a piece on a massive rise in viewership for Glenn Beck. This would be scary, if it mattered. NYT paints Beck as a Utah cryptofascist, hyping his talk of "surrounding" his "enemies," usw, which is not even the scariest genre of Beckism. That would go to his cri-de-coeur to the Salt Lake Tribune, May 11, 2007: "God stalked me! He had a baptismal rifle!"

Q: What's a baptismal rifle?

Anyway, NYT quotes David Frum on Beck's success: "a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force, and the rise of conservatism as an alienated cultural sensibility.”

This is nice and succinct. It's not news. Check David Foster Wallace's Host for a chronicle of the rise of "cultural" conservatism on the radio. Beck is one in a never-ending stream of, put kindly, popularizers of the Goldwater movement. If I were a movement conservative, I'd be pissed too.

This officially conceded difference between "cultural" and "ideological" conservatism is phony, to my mind. Reagan was never so ideological as to totally sacrifice the welfare of the country: right after his tax cuts, he issued the largest tax increase in American history. The need to draw votes, or eyeballs, thereby cultivating a "sensibility," is just another way of saying "democracy."

So Q: How does Mitt Romney deal with it? What star emerges from the current cloud of gas and dust?

Ghost in the TV

My TV turns on of its own accord overnight, unless I cut it off at the source. Not a metaphor. This happens. So I walked downstairs to see Eric Cantor on the Today show. And I only caught a bit of it, but it sounded like he was striking a tone of Reason Without a Plan, that is, "We're all for lower health care costs, but we're for fiscal responsibility first." This is a nice thought, but it doesn't mean anything. I'll get a transcript later in order to see the next ten words.

So he sounded anodyne. He also sounded gay. Perhaps I've been away from the Old Dominion for too long, but he sounded real gay. And I think that could be a coup. If his party becomes about governing government rather than about governing identities, he wins. BHO beat him to this idea. And I don't remember Cantor as being Log Cabin Friendly, shit, even LC-Curious...but he's putting those kids (are those his? Larger question, Do I Know Anything?) conspicuously front-and-center on his YouTube channel...

Quick pause to note the jabs at Mary Jo Kilroy and Chris Carney, and why them you might ask? They're vulnerable. Arguably the two most vulnerable Dem seats in the House. Carney won in 2006 on the heels of an incumbent Republican's sex scandal, and Kilroy I can hardly believe made it to DC at all, after a never-ending court battle with GOP bank lobbyist Steve Stivers. NE PA is going to be too far gone by 2010 for Cantor to hope to reclaim it...boy, unless Scranton no longer appeals to people working in the City. Columbus could be taken. This is fascist country...

Point being, Cantor is a tactics man, not a strategy man. So he probably found a way to turn on my TV; he didn't say anything that made me watch.
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More Quad Panic

The only thing college professors and professor-wanna-bes (is professors-in-waiting the preferred nomenclature?) have to fear is one another. It wasn't the cruel vicissitudes of market funding for education that sacked Denis Rancourt for instance. I suspect it is the stultifying effect of tenure that increases unemployment in the Academy. Same way the UAW kills Detroit.

Anyway, prompted by a recent NYT piece on the impending doom of the humanities, I've grown more interested in market effects on academic employment. For one thing, I suspect (I keep saying this because I want to stress that I have no statistics for these theories) that the target of a manufactured panic about the future of the humanities is not the Provost, but the Department Chair.

I ignored this last time, but the Times' headline said it all. Disciplines must make themselves useful, say the disciples. The point is not to concoct a panic in order to force the Provost to pay attention to humanities when the budget ax falls; the point is to cram a utilitarian model onto disciplines that are ethical, in the sense that they help us determine what the good life is. Whether this is wise or pernicious depends I suppose on the degree to which a department is removed from the currents of History, and you'll pardon the archae-Marxist flavor there.

I suspect this, in part, because the crisis in academic hiring and promotion seems to have been ever thus. This is a 1977 American Philosophical Society statement on how to get young Philosophy grads into the Academy on a provisional, unpaid basis. The salient line, I think, is the first one: "The academic community has a responsibility to do what it can to help scholars who are suffering a period of academic unemployment because of the continuing academic job crisis."

Or, we could take for example the panic that created the Mellon Fellows program, without which, declining humanities enrollment would make, "entire academic departments an endangered species in 10 years." That was 1982. Clearly, there are complex threads here, and I don't know a lot about the 1977-1982 academic jobs panic. But I think I see a pattern.

It is possible to construct a story; in this story, humanities people expand their empire by threatening its demise, repeat, its utter nonexistence. As a good-faith gesture, Deans and Provosts give departments permission for new concentrations, then majors, then whole new departments. The exchange, I think, for this expansion/dilution of talent is a diminution of the importance of so-called pure study.

New departments -- like Cultural Studies, begat of English; or American Studies, begat of History -- then face a pressure to demonstrate the dollar-value of wealth created by their degrees; since there is no apparent academic justification for their existence, Why not major in English?, there must be a market-based one.

Tieing the existence of a department to the market is a mistake. When enrollments in your major decline, the budget declines and jobs disappear. Saying you need therefore to make your major more attractive is supply-side; it merely reinforces the justification-by-demand that doomed your major in the first place.

That's a thought anyway. Much much more to discover here, though. Peace
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We Are a Bunch of Rubes

Make no mistake. I am pleased that the American people saw fit to elect President the only responsible actor still running for office. I like BHO. I'm a fan. But I have principles that were operative during Bush, and to suspend their operation for a guy I like can only be done for so long before it is unjustified. So, you know, put that in your Situation Ethics and smoke it.

I'm tired of getting played for a fairy; I hope the left does boot Democrat moderates out of the party. There deserves to be an all-do-nothing party, an American Kadima, the USA Patriot Waterheads. Or the Know-Nothings.

And I understand why BHO's situation in Afghanistan is different from GWB's in Iraq. A surge is necessary to stop the bloodletting. We cannot afford to lose in Afghanistan. Unfriendly regional powers, read Iran, will be emboldened by our failure, which I repeat is imminent without the surge. It's going to be hairy.

Wait, those are all the same rationalizations for Bush's surge...my mistake. Will the Afghan Surge work? In Afghanistan, the other key elements of quelling civil war -- paying off militants to form US-legitimized gangs, and the major militant group's discovery that politics is more lucrative than assassination -- are absent.

So let's repeat, 15,000 more US troops are moving into the world's worst country, with an illiterate population of poppy growers, entirely cowed by terror, to hunt an entrenched guerrilla force with a cross-border safe zone, no natural enemies, and no interest in the political process?

Got it. This sort of thing was not OK in 2006. And it's OK now. I totally understand. It's called triangulatin', and I did not just fall off the turnip truck.

But the idea doesn't look ripe for success, and it may not be necessary. 2200 Afghan civilians died in violence last year. That's a bad month in Iraq ca. 2006. Die-hard Al Qaeda members might number 300. We have drones in Pakistan that are both wasting dudes who need to be wasted (let's bracket the why-questions, shall we) and killing some innocents. How does this add up to imperative?

Pakistan thinks enough of itself that it can sign peace deals with militants and pay attention to real threats, you know, like India, or Baluch separatists. I haven't bought the "bomb slips out of Pakistan's hands" theory, largely because I think the Pakistani military establishment sees its long term, existential struggle as being with India. And India has the bomb. You think career men are gonna let some dudes with beards walk off with nuculur weapons? Nope. Then why do we have to shore up Pakistan, crumbling Pakistan? And even if we did need to do so, what good are 15,000 soldiers going to do for a nation of, holy shit, 200 million people?

What good will 52,000 Americans do for an Afghanistan still ruled by Hamid Karzai? Same amount of good 37,000 did.

But I'm not trying to player-hate. BHO is right to have different opinions about different surges. This surge is, it turns out, different from Bush's: it's even worse.
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First, a Note from the Future President

On 28 December 2006, Barry Hussein wrote:

Escalation Is Not The Answer

As the New Year approaches, we are told that the President is considering the deployment of tens of thousands of additional troops to Iraq in the desperate hope of subduing the burgeoning civil war there.

This is a chilling prospect that threatens to compound the tragic mistakes he has already made over the last four years.

In 2002, I strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq because I felt it was an ill-conceived venture which I warned would "require a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undermined cost, with undetermined consequences." I said then that an invasion without strong international support could drain our military, distract us from the war with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and further destabilize the Middle East.

Sadly, all of those concerns have been borne out.

Today, nearly three thousand brave young Americans are dead, and tens of thousands more have been wounded. Rather than welcomed "liberators," our troops have become targets of the exploding sectarian violence in Iraq. Our military has been strained to the limits. The cost to American taxpayers is approaching $400 billion.

Now we are faced with a quagmire to which there are no good answers. But the one that makes very little sense is to put tens of thousands more young Americans in harm's way without changing a strategy that has failed by almost every imaginable account.

In escalating this war with a so-called "surge" of troops, the President would be overriding the expressed concerns of Generals on the ground, Secretary Powell, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group and the American people. Colin Powell has said that placing more troops in the crossfire of a civil war simply will not work. General John Abizaid, our top commander in the Middle East, said just last month that, "I believe that more American forces prevent the Iraqis from doing more, from taking more responsibility for their own future." Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff have expressed concern, saying that a surge in troop levels "could lead to more attacks by al-Qaeda" and "provide more targets for Sunni insurgents." Once again, the President is defying good counsel and common sense.

As I said more than a month ago, while some have proposed escalating this war by adding thousands of more troops, there is little reason to believe that this will achieve these results either. It's not clear that these troop levels are sustainable for a significant period of time, and according to our commanders on the ground, adding American forces will only relieve the Iraqis from doing more on their own. Moreover, without a coherent strategy or better cooperation from the Iraqis, we would only be putting more of our soldiers in the crossfire of a civil war.

There is no military solution to this war. Our troops can help suppress the violence, but they cannot solve its root causes. And all the troops in the world won't be able to force Shia, Sunni, and Kurd to sit down at a table, resolve their differences, and forge a lasting peace. In fact, adding more troops will only push this political settlement further and further into the future, as it tells the Iraqis that no matter how much of a mess they make, the American military will always be there to clean it up.

That is why I believe we must begin a phased redeployment of American troops to signal to the government and people of Iraq, and others who have a stake in stabilizing the country - that ours is not an open-ended commitment. They must step up. The status quo cannot hold.

In November, the American people sent a resounding message of change to the President. But apparently that message wasn't clear enough.

I urge all Americans who share my grave concerns over this looming decision to call, write or email the President, and make your voices heard. I urge you to tell them that our soldiers are not numbers to add just because someone couldn't think of a better idea, they are our sons and daughters, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors and friends who are willing to wave goodbye to everything they've ever known just for the chance to serve their country. Our men and women in uniform are doing a terrific job under extremely difficult conditions. But our government has failed them so many times over the last few years, and we simply cannot afford to do it again. We must not multiply the mistakes of yesterday, we must end them today.

May this New Year bring a turn in our policy away from the stubborn repetition of our mistakes, so we can begin to chart a conclusion to this painful chapter in our history and bring our troops home.

Sincerely,

U.S. Senator Barack Obama

Quick Thoughts...

...hammer the message home in the media: install Rush as the Pope of the Republican Party.
...count on Rush relishing this and continuing to press his advantage as Repub politico after politico slips up, says something non-canon, and has to kiss Rush's oxycontin-dusted ring.
...count on the moderates being absolutely sick of this and edging closer to the Democrats as a result.
...pick up extra seats in 2010 as the Repubs have retreated further into the echo hall of chamber mirrors.

But what don't they count on?

I still say the moderates join the Dems, as is planned. The Repubs continue to become a regionalized party geared toward disaffected whites and the rich. Fine. But the moderates won't like the Left wing of the Dem party too terribly much either. They form like Voltron with the more middlish Dems... split before you know it.

...and America has three parties in a two-party system. Then the fun begins.

Peu Biship, Tim.

Tim Noah, in a piece otherwise devoted to realism vis-a-vis Terrism, passes along the DoJ shibboleth about Aafia Siddiqui, the Bostonian neuroscientist accused of working with Al Qaeda, who was picked up delirious somewhere in Afghanistan with vials of goo in her purse, even when a really quick search brings up evidence that the government's accusations against Siddiqui are "surprising" and "vague."

Noah's calm, measured paragraphs, it turns out, are where hyperbolic media distortions become settled facts.

This has been biship since August, when her face ran on page 1 of the the NY tabloids: Terror Queen! 5 August 2008, DoJ announced the capture of a Pakistani neuroscientist wanted for questioning since 2004. She had been found wandering around the provincial governor's house in Ghazni, Afghanistan. When detained, she just happened to be carrying "liquids and gels" and instructions from the "Anarchist's Arsenal." She then grabbed an M-4, shouted some shit, and was in turn shot.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'd like to make clear: Aafia Siddiqui was picked up by ISI in 2003 and handed over to us. She was accused of being "ready to strike in the next few months," in May 2004. She has now, therefore, in two separate presidential elections, been bandied about as an emblem of the Threat We All Face. She is also married to the guy we're really interested in; she is therefore, a hostage.

My services as a research aide are available, Mr. Noah.
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Panic on the quad?

What panic? The NYT has just revealed that people who teach in the humanities are concerned that no one wants to major in the humanities. And this is more than one more round of paranoid academic turf-war: it is an existential crisis. The fields are "irrelevant," fears Delbanco of Columbia. The NYT itself says, "the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents."

I would love more insight into the threats facing the humanities, but I'm not going to get it from one paranoid academic and one reporter making things up. Is it possible that the humanities appear so easy to ax because the fruits of our labor are impossible to describe to our audience? What is it that you get from the Creative Writing MFA? Isn't cultural studies just an alloy of low-grade lit crit, art theory and 20th c. French philosophy? Seriously, these dudes look like Early Christianity.

It's not time for the humanities to rethink their relationship to the job sphere: that's my task. Employers clearly want excellent written and oral communication skills, which every English major had better have. Employers want an ability to reason, a capacity for drudgery, the ability to summarize discoveries, powers of analysis, etc. The humanities is where you get that.

What the disciplines have to reassess is whether what they're doing actually qualifies as humanities-work. Students in the humanities are leaving with no frame of reference beyond their own lifespans, no history of Europe, horrific, genuinely hilarious "communication skills." I've sat in on art classes that boiled down to nothing more than "I think that idea, it's interesting." We're at the dead end of interest; no accountant cares what you're interested in, unless you make it important to him that he be interested.

Or, you know, in other words, if you play the shit that they like, then the people would come, simple as that.
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First Art Post Ever. Beware.

A quick hit, Kevin, and I'll try to make you aware of how totally fucked up the appearance in town of Christian Tomaszewski was. He's a Pole who works in video and installation. His main body of work is cardboard constructions derived from scenes in cult movies. Devoid of human actors, spare and clean, they are meant to delineate the "cold space" of film, said the man himself.

CT is tall and blond, in typical gear, black pleather jacket, black pants, etc., with an annoying habit of sucking on his face as he watches his own work. I couldn't tell from a distance if this was a smile or an uncontrollable tic. His English is probably as good as mine, and the proof lay in that in his answers to questions he always took the last two words of what you said and just riffed on them, without regard for the meaning of the rest of the sentence. It's possible that that was a coping mechanism for not having functional English, but selah. In either case, it made getting an answer a labrynthine process, full of hedges and diversions.

The work is about the space of film made real; except by CT's own admission, the particularities of the films don't matter, the filmic qualities might as well come from YouTube, and I'm pretty sure he's never seen all of Blue Velvet because his "clip representative of his working material" was an iMovie-edited montage of song sequences from BV.

In the original release, that we all saw in high school, we don't flashback to the scene at "Pussy Heaven," we just watch Hopper beat the crap out of McLachlan. CT was like, "I watched this film 138 times when I was making this." Really. I'm confused: is there a cult investment here, or does he just pick shit up off of YouTube and install it somewhere? Will we soon see a Christian Tomaszewski "Nora, the Piano Playing Cat"?

So that's just one beef: laziness masquerading as intellectual investment. It's bad enough when you do all this work and yet have nothing to say. It's worse when you front like you did all this work, and still have nothing to say.

To continue, in Tomaszewski's words, the work is a lot of effort for no purpose (except the filmic purpose stated above). It is practically about narrative (except no one knows what you mean when you say that; it's a scare phrase). There are no humans in the work (except that there are always humans in the work). There is just nothing at the center of this whirlwind.

So for all you other rubes out there who, like me, heard the words "European" and "Design" and saw visions of an upper-middle-class future and a subscription to Dwell, there's always the very classy Indianapolis Museum of Art...with a fantastically bad flash animation...

Also, check out CT at the Sculpture Center. This was to a word what he said last night in Columbus.

How is the title "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" anything other than kitsch? This could be some meta-joke about the vaingloriousness of art-making, its empty pomposity, but I fear Tomaszewski is serious, and that "Erotic Misery" is an actual, meaningful phrase for him, not something plucked from a random text generator.

The most telling thing last night was when CT alluded to "different narratives" in the US and Eastern Europe. He couldn't or wouldn't clarify, though he made certain to say he wasn't judging. (Seriously, my people are killing Pakistanis with space robots, and you think I care what you think about American narratology? Please.) But clearly, the things he finds serious (footage of contortionists, cut with drip torture, cut with a guy screwing in a light-bulb, like first year film school) other people have found hilarious.

I'm pretty sure this rules out the meta-joke possibility. Which means he's essentially remaking another montage of pilfered classics, "L'artiste est morte" by Jay Sherman...



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Revenge Via GoogleEarth

(photo: Wally Herger (R-CA) with a local beauty, as it were.) All blessings upon GoogleEarth's Congressional Districts layer for making sweet the meet assignation of blame...

Here are all the House Republicans whose districts contain MSAs with unemployment higher than 10 percent. Note the multiple nominations for California's Herger and Radanovich, and for New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo:

Connie Mack IV, FL-14, Fort Myers FL, 10% unemployment

Fred Upton, MI-6, Benton Harbor MI, 10.1%

Cliff Stearns, FL-6, Ocala FL, 10.1%

Ken Calvert, CA-44, Riverside-San Bernardino CA, 10.1%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Chico CA, 10.3%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, Vineland NJ, 10.4%

Adam Putnam, FL-12, Bradley FL, 10.5%

Thaddeus McCotter, MI-11, Livonia MI, 10.6%

Patrick T. McHenry, NC-10, Lenoir NC, 10.9%

Nathan Deal, GA-9, Dalton GA, 11.2

Greg Walden, OR-2, Bend OR, 11.3

Peter Hoekstra, MI-2, Muskegon MI, 11.5%

Harry Brown, SC-1, Myrtle Beach SC, 11.5%

Jon Mica, FL-7, Palm Coast FL, 11.7%

Kevin McCarthy, CA-22, Bakersfield CA, 11.8%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Madera CA, 11.9%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Redding CA, 12.2%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, OCean City NJ, 12.4%

Don Manzullo, IL-16, Rockford IL, 12.5%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Fresno CA, 13.2%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Modesto CA, 13.9%

Devin Nunes, CA-21, Visalia CA, 14.3%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Yuba City CA, 14.9%

You may, dear reader, assign asterisks, forgiving those Congressmen whose districts are historically depressed (Bakersfield), or which are beachfront communities during winter (Vineland, Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers), or which are economically OK until they get lumped into the MSA of a big derelict city (Livonia-Detroit-Warren).

I of course choose not to issue exceptions. The MSA is a great indicator of city fabric. To isolate statistically Narberth from Philadelphia would be to ignore the real economic ties between the poor city and its rich suburb. Also, as to beaches and other exceptionally depressed zones, you'd think apathy toward his constituents' employment prospects would get a guy fired, period.

Make the dream real...
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No Title, Just Revenge Via Mathematics

Quick backfill: the other day I wondered how Eric Cantor got House Republicans, some of whom must come from depressed districts, to vote in lockstep against the stimulus. I wondered, specifically, whose would be the heads to roll in 2010.

An Ohio blogger has a list of local 'Pubs who voted nay, along with the December 2008 county figures for each. So the Ohio Up Against the Wall List runs as follows, with a national average unemployment rate of 7.1, the winners are:

Robert Latta, 9.8

Steven LaTourette, 9.4

Jean Schmidt, 9.0

Jim Jordan, 8.5

...with special mention to the most outspoken Ohioan, Minority Leader John Boehner, whose district sports a national-average-beating 7.7 percent unemployment rate. Congratulations, Mr. Leader!

I'm slowly processing names and numbers for the National Up Against the Wall list, using the available numbers from BLS, broken down by MSA instead of county. By and large, it appears safe for Republicans to oppose the stimulus. Think for a second about the states conservative Republicans come from now. Utah, Idaho, Wyoming -- these places all have terrific employment rates, 97 or 98 percent.

But the numbers don't lie. And I don't care what your Cook PVI rating is. Come 2010, we will ice you. That means you:

Wally Herger, California-2, 14.9% unemployment.

Devin Nunes, California-21, 14.2%

George Radanovich, California-19, 13.6%,

et alia. You are Republicans from districts with higher unemployment than Detroit. You have something like 21 percent underemployment. To sit about like the Pasha in grand decline, while your people agitate, this is the peak of foolishness...

Just a warning. Republicans, don't be a statistic...

Hang on to Your Tenure, Stanley

Stanley Fish channels Brian Wilson in today's NYT, hanging on to his ego in the face of reason, public disapprobation and I can only presume his own conscience.

His original target was a University of Ottawa professor who is alleged to have turned his physics class into a primer on political activism. Apart from the usual complaints, which Fish caricatures but never really addresses (Fish takes one example of excess to damn a group; Fish doesn't believe in freedom of thought; Academics don't have normal, mortals' jobs), let's remind everyone first that this is Canada, where the whole point of going to college is to become politically active. Insisting that academics act in line with "professional norms and standards," is not only repressive, but totally beside the point. Whose norms? Applied how? Where will we hold the conclave, Stanley?

More to the point, it turns out there are no "academic excesses" present for Fish to complain about, nor any for proto-Romantic critics of Fish to defend. There is no titanic struggle between liberal idealists and revanchist conservatives. Freedom, it turns out, is about careful, diligent, daily work.

Denis Rancourt, tenured professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, and avowed gadfly to the Institution, asked to change one of his classes from A-F grading to Pass/Fail. There are entire universities that do this in the states, in part to treat the perceived ill of grade inflation, but also to disassemble the edifice of classification/tracking in education, whereby, as Jacques Ranciere has explained, everyone has someone to look down on, A thru F. "We are creating obedient employees, but not people who think," says the prof.

The University denied the request, whereupon Rancourt gave out straight A's. The University then banned him from campus. He broke the ban to host a film screening on campus about political organizing tactics (forgive me if this is an oversimplification) and was arrested. Here he is, in a show of solidarity with one of his students, arrested for trying to film the University Senate.

So, in short answer to Stanley Fish, the facts you start with greatly influence the conclusions you draw. Surely Mr. Pop-PoMo knows this. Denis Rancourt does not see his freedom as anything other than, and certainly not better than, ours. Grading is a form of stultification. Even the idea that professors exist to "create" better thinkers -- a phrase Rancourt, I hope, was using as shorthand -- is pretty orthodox. Rancourt's whole point is to guarantee that the University is a functioning democracy, which is what the University itself avows. Academic freedom is a misnomer. Freedom is indivisible; we all have it by nature.

Now can we talk about responsibility? Fish argues that employees of the University are duty-bound to adhere to its rules and regulations. Let's leave aside the frequently proffered saw about "higher obligations." All Rancourt has done is throw UofO's regulations back at it.

Professors, to take one example, have to be permitted to grade independently; for the institution to lean on a professor, for instance, by banning him from issuing all A's, to "grade appropriately" renders grading meaningless. The institution could just as easily pick out students in advance, look at the normal curve, and parcel out grades irrespective of coursework. This is, again, to say nothing of the rank hypocrisy of an institution devoted to creativity, independent thought, etc., enforcing outcomes from above.

Rancourt goes to speak to his union rep. Having done that UofO police escort him off campus. This, in the States, would be a violation of NLRA; you can't punish workers for any speech related to collective agreements. Rancourt merely links to the standards and norms ratified 50 years ago by the American Association of University Professors. Police escort is to protect professors from possible violence, not to protect the University from its professors.

Rancourt self-evidently respects the responsibility he owes the University better than the University does. Academe is a calling, as all the proto-Romantics on Stanley's blog have said; it is also, for most of us, contract work. Rancourt is the only person in this whole debacle upholding the terms of his contract.

Finally, it's easy for Fish to paint Rancourt as some Bolshevik banging down the gates of the University, bent on nationalizing the "A-plus." Fish is at the pinnacle of a system that distributes greater rewards for seniority than for brilliance; that forces young professors into a period of indentured servitude known as tenure-track; that forces everyone else into a frantic competition for wage-slave adjunct jobs; that reinforces the stultification we all receive from our decade-plus of grade school, bringing the dictatorial power of the Great Master that we've all internalized back out into the open.

The inequity of the system is in-built. Young ones know this. You can either be for us, or against us. Hang on to your tenure, Stanley...
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Cantor / Gingrich

NYT today has a profile of new minority whip Eric Cantor, flush from his first victory, i.e. convincing House Republicans in tight districts not to vote for middle-class tax cuts, rebuilding schools, refubishing dilapidated bridges, etc.

Leaving aside the false comparison (clearly meant to keep us liberals cautiously optimistic about Democratic power, ergo, to keep the dollars flowing next election cycle) of Cantor to Gingrich, in which no one but the NYT believes, since Cantor is "more demure," "an ideas man without ADD," etc., Cantor has a harder row to hoe that Newt did. BHO has 66% approval. More white people voted for him than did for Kerry, Gore, or Clinton. Newt, contrary to his automythopoesis, was never in the "extreme minority." Cantor is. And his solution is to lead the party further into the desert.

In 2010, we'll find out if that makes any sense, electorally. Politically, there's no reason why it shouldn't work, and this is what gives me the fear. Politics is not about meeting in the middle to get short-term work accomplished; it is about staking out the position you want, and drawing mainstream thought thither. The right has mastered the art, they've done it all my life. The tighter the quasar spins, the more gravity is gains, until it collapses on itself and starts sucking in everything...

Meanwhile, can we get a list of Republicans who voted nay on stimulus, ranked by the unemployment rate in each's district?
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Hand What Over, Exactly?

Gershom Gorenberg at Foreign Policy appeals for an end to new settlement construction in the West Bank, and an eventual evacuation. He theorizes a tipping point for the West Bank, where longtime failure to swiftly deal with the settlers dooms any future attempt.

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

I appreciate the irony of creating Palestine in order to save Israel, but Gorenberg's piece, to me, only reiterates the impossibility of a two-state solution. How much of the West Bank are Israelis to evacuate? Having -- presumably -- moved the radicals behind the wall, but still over the Green Line, and therefore having risked and overcome civil war, what are the odds of moving these same people again, this time into Israel proper?

More to the point, what exactly will Israel hand over, and to whom? If two states were mandated today, they would be Israel-behind-the-fence and a West Bank run by the PA. Gaza would be a "protectorate." Would this new Palestine have a port? Free air space? Access to water and to the ground beneath it? Without water and a port, it's a shit country.

Given that, wouldn't Palestinians do well to nix nationhood and instead to agitate for Israeli citizenship? You want to dissolve the checkpoints, the dual roadways, the fence, the settlers' compounds? Take Avigdor Lieberman up on his offer: loyalty oaths for all!

And I'm sure the hero of the Russian Street would oblige, so long as the Arab vote was, say 3/5 of the Jewish vote, and so long as Arab demands for work were confined to date-picking and goat-milking. This is the RSA. This is Muammar's One-and-a-Half-State Solution.

Still, agitating for Israeli citizenship sounds like a far better deal than trying to obtain a doomed-from-the-start nation-state. What Palestinians get at the end of any peace process is de facto rule by Israel, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid, and the final entrenchment of the corrupt political caste that got them there in the first place: in other words, the best case scenario is The Now, minus a few roadblocks and checkpoints.

And this is the parallax gap in Israel//Palestine: the only way for Palestinians to have a state is to give up on having a Palestinian state.

Mad King George

I find this weird. George Voinovich voted against the stimulus in committee, then dropped feelers like he could get on board, at the same time as he was huffing out of the negotiating room.

He's not running in 2010, he has nothing to lose for being this sort of heedless obstructionist semi-literate revanchist principled pol...well, he could lose lobbying dollars.

(Also, his need for "shovel-ready" projects? Funny. Once again, dollars spent on anything but those guys with the orange signs evidently just vanish through a wormhole. We need a way to talk about research and design in "shovel-ready" terms. Or just start calling things like first human trials of Parkinson's drugs, exercises in new math, green design, etc. all "shovel-ready." "This here is a shovel-ready algorithm, Mr. Senator.")

So who is Voinovich going to work for after his waiting period? Firms change with the tide, and, in case no one told you, Mr. Senator, being a Democrat is in. A willingness to compromise for the General Welfare would probably get you a job. Being a cantankerous old prick, not so much.
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The Shocking Toolness of Ben Nelson

Conservative Democrats have misinterpreted Barry Hussein's call to post-partisanship as surrender to the right. They do so at their peril.

Particularly the 8 or 9 Senators who hijacked the stimulus package this week, stripped 40 billion in education funding out of it, and then crowed on the floor of the Senate, with Ben Nelson (D-NE): "We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows."

Memo: this is not 1992. Big government is not over; really really big government has hardly begun. Ben Nelson will get on board now, or he will watch the unemployment lines grow.

Here's Ben on C-SPAN no longer really crowing. I can only pray that Rahm Emmanuel beat his ass with a big staff, right there in the Oval. Seriously, any money spent is money spent. Doesn't matter if you pay highway construction workers or MD's. This is Steven Pearlstein talking to Nebraska's freshman Senator, Mike Johanns:

Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus.

Democrats, we're watching you. The less you sound like Steven Pearlstein, and the more you sound like Herbert Hoover, the more shock and awe you can expect come the next election cycle.

A nation of fourteen-year-old Obama-heads will all be 18 by 2012, when Ben Nelson is up for reelection. So enjoy your breakfast, Ben, because the kids who went to the shitty public schools you vouchsafed them are going to steal your lunch.
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I Don't Need Your Sympathy

...says Bilal Khbeiz in e-flux. His points, in sum and therefore in caricature, are:

Westerners sympathize with victims in Gaza and Beirut at a mediated remove; this depersonalizes the conflict, and occludes, for example, the feelings of superiority that survivors of the shelling feel;

Sorrow, like Nietzsche says, is the crocodile tears of the mighty thanking their stars that they were not born weak. Removed from the conflict, the Western Left's compassion is worthless.

The various forms of "courage" displayed in the conflict are something the victims of the conflict never asked for. Ditto the sympathy.

Offhand, this strikes me as the kind of abstract, hair-splitting, namby-pamby, criticality-for-its-own-sake that is bound to land you a spot curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But that's not really fair, and I like the piece...

To begin, false consciousness / white left guilt / "catastrophe tourism" is the least of Gaza's concerns, isn't it? In America, as Khbeiz surely knows, sympathizers -- even we false-hearted colonialist sympathizers -- are hard to come by. Would he prefer to deal with bloodthirsty backwoods reactionaries? Perhaps; perhaps he's on a "radical honesty" therapy regimen. So, imagine a world without Left guilt checking, via the media, America's insane preoccupation with the preservation of Israel. Imagine the New York Times rooting Israel on. Would we have had Nicolas Sarkozy in country negotiating a cease-fire? Would we see George Mitchell as special envoy? I hate to sound like these measures are cure-alls; I know they're not. But imagine nothing at all happening. You don't need white guilt; fine, we'll just spend our time and money liberating something else. Zimbabwe, for instance. Or Sri Lanka.

Also, I'm waiting to see what benefit "survivor's glee" has brought to Palestinians. What is the political role of selfishness and opportunism? The man who happily clears the rubble of his neighbor's house is the one to be bombed next. What stops that? Show me the next ten words, beginning with Selfishness and Opportunism.

The false-hearted Western sorrow that Khbeiz so laments -- and which is so omnipresent in the States, or plain ubiquitous outside of Paris -- is you know a problem insofar as it exists. Khbeiz' problem here is that he caricatures the entire West as a (what, slightly more muscular, and frumpier?) version of the international art-fair jet-set. This is the same kind of myopia that obscures real people's suffering/joy from our Western eyes, and that Khbeiz is so eager to denounce. The West does not sit in committee at Art Basel Miami Beach. A joke/sham version of it does perhaps.

Returning to the point above, there are plenty of different kinds of Westerners, and lots of them would permit a completion of the Palestinian naqba as surely as the sun rises in the East.

Again, I'd like to stress that I find it hard to argue with a man who is in theater right now (I assume; maybe he's in Geneva and has mooted his own argument thereby). And the "catastrophe tourism" of the West, our occluded understanding, the scandals (in the Greek sense, lit. "a stumbling block") to our intellect, the glee of survivors, the pompous "courage" of Hamas' leadership chilling in Syria...all true, too true.

But people asked for this. Palestinians put Hamas in charge via free and fair elections. Hamas withstood Fatah storm troopers busting down people's doors in the night and regrouped in Gaza, only to find all trade blockaded, fuel held to a trickle, etc. Someone asked for an end to the siege: Hamas built tunnels; Hamas opened the border with Egypt via sledgehammers; Hamas got itself some human bargaining chips. All these things demand temerity at least. American politicians in the same circumstances would get themselves a sweet bribe from Israel and haul ass to Marseilles, on some shit like "Stopping those missiles. That's worth a lot of fuckin' money." You know, like Arafat did.

Hamas is responding to its constituents' needs, as any political party must. Their constituents need not to be bombed -- thank you Mr. Khbeiz for stating the obvious as if it were a revelation; what I've heard called "flipping the script" -- this is true. But their constituents also need not to live in a permanent penal servitude, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's Isaac Babel, describing, obliquely, what it's like to be a Jew under the Czar.
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When the Whig Party was dying...

...did people say that they "needed to retool" or "find themselves" or... well, of course they wouldn't have said "reboot". But to what extent can we draw parallels between the Whigs and the Republicans of late? I've been on record for the better part of three years as thinking the Republicans were dead standing up, are we seeing the corpse begin to tilt groundward?

Back to Basics

Watching right now the McLaughlin Group: would like to read the results of Monica's push poll that shows a mere 42 percent of Americans approving of this stimulus bill, or her Fox News poll that shows that "Americans prefer tax cuts to new spending." They also disapprove of handouts for the perverted arts, I hear.

And Johnny Mac is wishing a little too hard, methinks, when he calls House passage of any Obama bill a failure. BHO reached out, people know he reached out and all GOP soundbites make them sound like petulant prep school ninnies -- I'm looking at you, Paul Ryan. So who had the better PR week? The stimulus will come back, amended in conference, and everybody can get on board, or else lose in 2010. And we will get you Mike Pence.

But the GOP "rediscovered its manhood" and "got its groove back"? Not this week. Not after a "bruising five-way fight" for the RNC chairmanship gets you a doctrinaire laissez-faire conservative who warns his enemies that they will be "toppled." Policy matters. The face you put on it matters less. Americans will look at this Hoover-retread fiscal conservatism and turn up their noses. So much for the Tim-Pawlenty-big-tent theory of a return to dominance...and back to the drawing board...
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Who's Got the One-and-a-Half?

Muammar's got the one-and-a-half state solution. Now, when the unelected leader of Libya promotes this, it doesn't have the same aura as when Eyal Weizman does. If Muammar had actually been able to say something like "Shoah and Naqba are flip sides of the same coin...there are not two catastrophes, but one shared catastrophe," then we might have believed him.

Quick read: it sounds like Qaddafi is out to sugarcoat the idea of a Palestinian majority in Israel by explaining that, don't worry folks, Arab Israelis will still be in the fields picking dates. The implicit trade for a one-state solution is some kind of political second-class citizenship, and this is because Muammar is obsessed with right-of-return. Right-of-return means Palestine becomes minority-Jewish; with voting rights for all, that puts Hamas in the Knesset, that makes the IDF defunct. Now, without voting rights for all, we're talking about a minority-rule state with an all-minority police force, like the RSA. And that's one and a half states, not one.
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...Swallowed a Bug...

NYT gets down on the kibbutz, where folks is scared:

Out in the fields abutting the Gaza border fence, Mr. Katzir, the potato grower, predicted that within two years, the Hamas rockets "will get to Tel Aviv."

Now this interested me. I understand that farmers' opinions may not be indicative of the populace at large, but this is at least one member of the populace expressing his concerns, and what politician would not listen?

It's clear that this war wasn't a response to a credible threat; it was a panic attack. The Israeli populace doesn't trust Kadima to run shit; Kadima reinforces their bloodthirst trustworthiness by means of a small war. Ehud Barak and senior Israeli military officials get to think up cool metaphors -- latest: "cutting the grass"! -- and generally do the Brando


and all is well, except that Mr. Katzir, the potato farmer is not appeased. He thinks Hamas will be able to hit Tel Aviv in two years. Is he right?

To hit Tel Aviv, 75 kilometers from Gaza, you need an Iranian Fajr-5 rocket or better, Cf. this 2006 piece on aerospaceweb.org. No one has offered more than speculation as to whether Hamas has the Fajr-5, has asked Iran for the Fajr-5, etc.

Thing is, evidence would be easy to find. See, the Fajr-5 is 2 by 3 by 10 meters long. It's mounted on a Mercedes chassis two-thirds the size of a semi-trailer, and probably comes with friends, as it started life as an MRLS. This is not the sort of thing that 6 dudes shove through a tunnel. Saying Hamas has this is like saying Osama's going to bomb our lunar colony.

Now, if by "Hamas will hit Tel Aviv" our friend on the farm meant "Palestinians will hit Tel Aviv from the West Bank," that's a whole other kettle of fish. From right across the wall, you can hit Tel Aviv with a katyusha. Of course, this hasn't happened for some time, as Palestinians in the West Bank have Fatah sturmers busting down doors in order to defend Israel. West Bankers haven't allowed upstart terrorists to shoot so much as a spitball in a couple years. And they're divided now.

So the question becomes, what happens when you give the people of the West Bank a reason?
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The Boss Has Lost It

WHEREAS we have no real notion of what the Gaza campaign has wrought in any terms other than the purely humanitarian, and since newspapers anyway are in the business of refusing to speculate on geopolitical motives for barbarity, choosing instead to project a humanitarianism-beyond-politics, with no system of beliefs beyond the overriding imperative of the lower body count,

Clearly it's time for the Process Story, whereby our crack team of researchers gets the inside story from the architects of the operation. And don't get me wrong, I'm thankful for the tidbits:

The Israeli theory of what it tried to do here is summed up in a Hebrew phrase heard across Israel and throughout the military in the past weeks: “baal habayit hishtageya,” or “the boss has lost it.” It evokes the image of a madman who cannot be controlled.

“This phrase means that if our civilians are attacked by you, we are not going to respond in proportion but will use all means we have to cause you such damage that you will think twice in the future,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser.

It is a calculated rage. The phrase comes from business and refers to a decision by a shop owner to cut prices so drastically that he appears crazy to the consumer even though he knows he has actually made a shrewd business decision.

Couple things: this is clearly a retread of Nixon's "Mad Bomber." Retribution should be feared; fear deters aggression; everyone goes back to the bargaining table. It's just not a very good retread. "Mad Bomber" threats arguably did less to maintain the balance of terror than did rapprochement with China, crumbling Soviet infrastructure, aging bureaucracy on both sides; the miracle is not that the Soviet Union ever fell, it's that it stuck around so long. Detente did not emerge fully formed from the head of "Mad Bomber" tactics.

But even if we accept that the model worked in that case, there is no analogy here. US:CCCP::Israel:Palestine does not fly. The US and USSR were fighting for spheres of influence. Neither populace was in the condition of Gaza's. Israel might see itself as fighting for influence -- thus the pompous military attache comparing the IDF to Nixon -- but it's fighting for soil. And its presumptive partner at the bargaining table is no Brezhnev: two governments, no contiguous territory, no economy, no transport, nothing that Israel wants and also nothing to lose.

"The Boss Has Lost It," in another Nixonian echo, casts foreign policy as work for a failing used-car salesman. Probably this is the kind of thing to fall on deaf ears, as, you know, there are not that many retail opportunities in the Strip.

These are, for the record, the best military metaphors I've heard in a long time. Cribbed from common folks' usage, full of connotative spurs and branches, and utterly accurate. "Cast lead" is for toys and bombs, presumably like the cluster munitions dumped on South Beirut last time around. "Crazy Boss" covers all the bases: we are your Boss, first of all, and this is the last time you'll see these prices, and you never know what's next.

But the kicker for me is that in the haste to gloat about the IDF's clever language, their spokesperson led the NYT reporter to "It is a calculated rage," which, you know, is what we said here on Day One. Forget "this is not a proportionate response," it wasn't even a response. The long Gaza blockade was not -- as the unfortunately-isolated Brian Eno would have us believe, our hearts bleeding -- an "experiment in provocation," since the assault appeared on 27 Dec 2008 to be all but unprovoked. Gazans did not respond to the bait that Eno thinks was laid. And now it's all clear, the rage was calculated.

Now what that means is anyone's guess. If the IDF has to concoct from thin air a passion for fighting, whereas Hamas has blood on the ground to motivate it, what does that mean for Israel's chances the next time around? And if the IDF knows that this is the last time in a generation that it might see deep support for actions against the Palestinians, mightn't that mean it's time to strip the Strip totally? That Gaza Redevelopment Authority is gonna need some room, after all. Doesn't a pullout at this point mean that Ehud Barak is more concerned about keeping Bibi Netanyahu out of power than he is with cleansing redeveloping Gaza? And if it turns out that the motivation for this exercise in terror was provincial Israeli politics, then the boss has lost it for real...
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