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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