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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