The Long View

The 1920 US Census marked a historic milestone in American social history: For the first time a majority of Americans lived in urban metropolitan areas rather than in rural or small-town regions. That was nearly 100 years ago, and in the interim the migration to cities and suburbs has continued undiminished.

So why are we still allowing a demographic anomaly — people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire — to kidnap and hold for ransom our political process? Most Americans are not employed in corn manufacturing or dairy production, so why do we allow those who are to set the economic agenda in presidential elections? Iowa and New Hampshire also are not representative of America’s complex racial, ethnic and cultural diversity, so why are we allowing their interests to create the grounds for our national debate?

Instead, as Frank Bruni pointed out recently in the New York Times (“Iowa’s Harvest”), the Iowas caucus serves as a distillery of extreme right wing activism, and the pandering politicians who love them:

AS the hour of actual caucusing drew closer, Ron Paul’s campaign trumpeted his endorsement by a pastor who, as it happens, has spoken of executing homosexuals. Rick Perry pledged to devote predator drones and thousands of troops to the protection of the Mexican border, making the mission to keep every last illegal immigrant from crossing sound as urgent as rooting out terrorists in Pakistan.

And Rick Santorum, bringing his “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour to this eastern Iowa town on Thursday, promised never to be cowed by all those craven secularists who believe that a stable, healthy household needn’t be headed by a God-fearing mom and dad.

None of these three men is likely to win the Republican nomination. But before they exit stage right — stage far right, that is — they and a few of their similarly quixotic, similarly strident competitors will do no small measure of damage to the Republican Party and no great favors to the country as a whole. What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa: it befouls Republicans’ image nationally, becomes a millstone around the eventual nominee’s neck and legitimizes debate about some matters that shouldn’t be debatable.

The run-up to the Iowa caucuses, like the rest of the primary season thus far, has underscored just how much general nuttiness and moral extremism the party has come to accommodate, with Iowa serving as a theater of the conservative absurd. The state’s unrepresentative caucuses — in which a mere 100,000 or so of the most fervent voters, almost all of them white, are expected to participate — coax a Bible-thumping, border-militarizing harshness from candidates that’s a tonal turnoff to the swing voters who will probably decide the general election.

As Bruni observes, Americans generally and Democrats specifically would benefit from a reasonable, intelligent, and sane Republican party able to provide a healthy dialectic in our current moment. It’s too bad that our agrarian romanticism and small-town nostalgia, now almost a century out of touch with reality, continue to set the agenda for the national political campaign.

‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

The 2012 Republicon presidential primary campaign debuts Republicons’ new family values: Marrying the mistress with whom you were unfaithful to your previous wife.

Pictured here, serial adulterer Newt and his latest wife Callista Gingrich. (Is that necklace from Tiffany’s?)

Twenty years ago I drew the ire of the governor of Virginia.

I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. The Great Wilder, testing his presidential prospects, was traveling around the country making “policy” appearances using travel resources of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I wrote to the governor from my home address telling him that I had voted for him and that I looked to him for fiscal leadership when the state treasury was strapped, but that his travel for personal political purposes did not strike me as leading by example. A few weeks later I received the usual and accustomed letter thanking me for sharing my views.

But then several months later at a college picnic, the college’s president, a man of integrity and courage, chatting with me said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, your letter to the governor caused a bit of a stir in Richmond.” He went on to explain that the secretary of education for the commonwealth, James W. Dyke, Jr., called him to ask, What are you going to do about this employee?

My college’s president asked the secretary of education if I had written on college stationery (I hadn’t) and asked if I had written anything threatening (I hadn’t). So the president said, It sounds to me as though Mr. Long is exercising his constitutional right to free speech, and there is nothing that I am going to do about him.

I learned an important lesson: that speech, though free, may have a cost, as well as about the difference between one executive’s courage and integrity on the one hand, and another’s thin-skinned vindictiveness on the other hand.

I’m reminded of this event in my own life two decades ago (but under very similar circumstances as today) by the story of Emma Sullivan. Ms Sullivan, a high school student in Kansas, infamously tweeted on her Twitter account after a field trip to the state capital of Kansas. It is phrased in the usual vulgarly snarky idioms of adolescents and young adults: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (I don’t know what she actually said to him or if she said anything to him at all; this tweet may just be the usual trash talk to impress friends.)

Brownback’s official court minions, ever vigilant, monitor Twitter, and finding this tweet, contacted Ms. Sullivan’s Shawnee Mission East High School Principal Karl Krawitz, who called her into his office to reprimand her. According to Ms. Sullivan in the Huffington Post, the principal ”laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment . . . He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.” She also told NBC Action News that she was asked to write the governor a formal apology. Subsequent reports indicate that she has been the object of bullying by fellow students.

The Kansas governor’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, is charged with the daily monitoring of any negative comments about Brownback on social-media websites. Having rid the high schools of science, this is where Kansans spend their education time and energy.

I imagine that Ms. Sullivan has learned an important lesson about adults: We are often feckless, and will devour our young to save our skins.

My hope is that “brownback” will become a common noun as “santorum” has done: brownback, (noun): the liquified fecal discharge of the gutless , usually when scared (see colostomy, colostomy bag).

The Vatican claims that this ad is “damaging not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church but also to the feelings of believers.” I can think of some things that the Vatican and its minions have done that have already done this damage. The Vatican is threatening suit to prevent the image’s circulation.

Circulate.

The Spielberg Generation–by which I do not mean Steven Spielberg’s own Baby Boomer Generation (he was born in 1946), but the generation that grew up on Spielberg films and whose fractured families are often represented in Spielberg films–is now suffering separation anxiety as still another “Daddy” has abandoned them.

Generation Kewl’s surrogate father, Steve Jobs, is leaving home. . . again. The media frenzy about Jobs’s departure from Apple is equaled by the blog, tweet, and Facebook chatter about Daddy Kewl, and about what Gen Kewl feels about Dad’s leaving: There will never be anything kewl for us again.

Who’s going to keep giving us kewl stuff?

What I don’t hear is any solicitude for Mr. Jobs, who has been for some time , and is apparently more precipitously now, dying. Dying. Dying from cancer. Death. Death is not kewl (unless it’s in one of the scores of movies available on iTunes). Cancer is not kewl. Instead, it’s about how I feel about Daddy Kewl’s abandoning me.

I’m old enough to remember the first divorce, when Daddy Kewl was thrown out of the house and shacked up with NeXT. Then there was the reconciliation.

I’m also old enough to remember the poignantly failed Apple computer project, The Lisa, which according to the official version was the acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, but was also the name of Jobs’s daughter from a relationship and a daughter whose paternity he initially denied. Daddy Kewl’s been leaving for a long time.

When his time comes, may flights of angels speed Steve Jobs to his rest. In the meantime, I hope he has the opportunity to reflect on the rich, complex life he has lived and the ways that he has given joy. And sorrow.

Readers of a certain age will recall George H. W. Bush’s (i.e. George I, not his idiot boy, George II) characterization of Ronald Raygun’s proposed economic policies when they both were running for the Republicon presidential nomination in 1980: “voodoo economics.” Laurie Essig has a better metaphor for it: “zombie economics.”

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Essig observes:

The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like [George] Romero’s zombies [in the movie Night of the Living Dead], continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn’t work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains. . .

But it’s 2011. Surely we should be able see neoliberal economic policies that give to the rich with the claim that it will help all of us as the monsters they are? But instead we stumble toward them, begging them to eat our brains, take our money, and make sure the super rich among us don’t pay taxes so they can continue shopping.

Republicon governor Rick Perry has declared a public day of prayer and is organizing a major national public prayer event, using the typical language of the 17th-century jeremiad: America in crisis . . . facing doom . . . must act now . . .

But what would Jesus do? Fortunately, we know without any biblical ambiguity, the ipsissima vox of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Messiah, whose Second Coming in glory Christians eagerly await:

5And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6: 5-6 [KJV])

According to Dallas News reporter Wayne Slater:

Video clips of the event’s sponsors and official endorsers cover the waterfront — claims that the Statue of Liberty is a “demonic idol,” that Oprah is the precursor of the Antichrist, that Hitler was God’s plan to get the Jews to go to Israel and that the decline in the Japanese stock market was the result of the Emperor having sex with the sun goddess. Perry has dismissed questions about the religious views of his prayer partners, saying the focus ought to be on the day of prayer and fasting, not the sponsors.

This stuff makes Glen Beck look like an Enlightenment philosophe.

OK, American; you’ve had a taste of what life under Republicons would be, and you don’t like it. As reported today, “Disapproval of Congress at Historic Level,” in the New York Times:

The debate over raising the debt ceiling, which brought the nation to the brink of default, has sent disapproval of Congress to its highest level on record and left most Americans saying that creating jobs should now take priority over cutting spending, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

A record 82 percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job — the most since The Times first began asking the question in 1977, and even more than after another political stalemate led to a shutdown of the federal government in 1995. More than four out of five people surveyed said that the recent debt ceiling debate was more about gaining political advantage than about doing what is best for the country. Nearly three-quarters said that the debate had harmed the image of the United States in the world.

Republicans in Congress shoulder more of the blame for the difficulties in reaching a debt ceiling agreement than President Obama and the Democrats, the poll found.

The Republicans compromised too little, a majority of those polled said. All told, 72 percent disapproved of the way Republicans in Congress handled the negotiations, while 66 percent disapproved of the way Democrats in Congress handled negotiations. The public was more evenly divided about how President Obama handled the debt ceiling negotiations: 47 percent disapproved and 46 percent approved.

The public’s opinion of the Tea Party movement has soured in the wake of the debt ceiling debate. The Tea Party is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll. In mid-April only 29 percent of those polled viewed the movement unfavorably, while 26 percent viewed it favorably. And 43 percent of Americans now think the Tea Party has too much influence on the Republican Party, up from 27 percent in mid-April.

Buyers’ remorse.

Now, please remember this in November 2012.

George Packer, writing in the 25 July 2011 New Yorker:

The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”–between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two On its own, the ethic of responsibility can become a devotion to technically correct procedure, while the ethic of ultimate ends can become fanaticism. Weber’s terms perfectly capture the toxic dynamic between the President, who takes responsibility as an end in itself, and the Republicans in Congress, who are destructively consumed with their dogma. Neither side can be said to possess what Weber calls a “leader’s personality.” Responsibility without conviction is weak, but it is sane. Conviction without responsibility, in the current incarnation of the Republican Party, is raving mad.

Denizens of erotic culture and aficionados of American slang will know that “tea bagging” is the term of art for the practice of a man’s inserting his scrotum into the mouth of a sexual partner for the purpose of deriving pleasure. This sexual feat is sometimes performed (and photographically documented) while the passive party is asleep or unconscious as a result of drugs or alcohol. It serves as an apposite metaphor of the politics of so-called tea-party Republicons.

The Republicon-controlled House of Representatives has just passed a pointless piece of self-pleasuring legislation (that will not be endorsed by the Senate or signed the President), which further brings the “full faith and credit” of the US into jeopardy. This legislative scrotum shoved into the mouth of the Senate will soon be spat out, leaving the rest of us with its pubic hairs lodged between our teeth.

The Weeper of the House, who discovered his cojones before dandling them over the Senate, is fond of pontificating about “the American People,” whose will he claims to hear and to heed. What he has neither heard nor heeded is that the vast majority of Americans are concerned about the recession, jobs, and improving the federal balance sheet by increasing revenues (restoring Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy). They are not as concerned about the deficit in principle, at least at this time, when economic growth has slowed and joblessness persists, and they are absolutely opposed to assaults on the safety nets of Social Security and Medicare.

Meanwhile, Republicrats on the other side of the aisle and the Republicrat in the White House, have been drooling and wetting their panties to get some action in the deficit-reduction gang bang. But, like most virgins, they were diffident and ambivalent. “Yes, but, no, but, maybe. . . ” Mr. Obama, we needed you to convene a Blue Ribbon Jobs Taskforce, not a deficit reduction circle jerk.

Washington’s onanism deafens its politicians to the voices of the rest of us, who are too tired or too busy to get it up. One begins to understand the despair and rage of the alienated.

James Fallows, writing on the Atlantic Monthly Web site, “Another Chart for Your Debt Ceiling Discussions,” graphically displays our current debt crisis:

“. . . the Bush-era tax cuts, extended last year under Obama, were the biggest single policy source of deficit increase over the past ten years. Therefore you can be for reducing deficits, or you can be for preserving the tax cuts, but you cannot rationally be for both. . . . insisting on both is the current House Republican view.”

When my credit card debt has gotten uncomfortably high, I have done two things: 1. Taken on part-time work (increased revenues); and 2. Scrutinized my budget to establish more strict management of expenses (cut spending). Why does the Weeper of the House have a hard time understanding this formula?

Back in the 1980s and 90s, I usually brought my home-electronics custom to Circuit City, a Richmond, Virginia, based company, a regional big-box discount retailer. The prices were right, the selection was good, and the staff were skilled. Then in a stupendously stupid move earlier in the current century, they began to lay off their veteran sales staff, hiring kewl young guys to replace them. Suddenly Circuit City became a young adults’ social club for its sales employees. I never bought anything from them again. Then Circuit City went bankrupt. Now it appears only to have an afterlife as a zombie on-line retailer.

This history came to mind when I read in the Sunday Times that Best Buy, which was successful in replacing Circuit City in some markets, has marshaled all its legal talent to object to a parody video advert by a new guy, Newegg, an on-line electronics dealer whose claim is “Take It from Geek.” Big bloated Best Buy does not like Newegg’s snarky insinuation that a Big Box store whose callow sales staff wears Blue Shirts might not offer knowledgeable service (the ghost of Circuit City coming back to haunt us).

Newegg claims that it offers extensive customer reviews of its products, many posted by genuine geeks. Best Buy doesn’t like their use of the word “geek,” which it views as the intellectual property of its “Geek Squad” franchise. Best Buy claims to own “geek.”

Best Buy lawyers sent Newegg a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that Newegg’s ad is not a parody because it “ridicules.” According to J.A. Cuddon’s classic Dictionary of Literary Terms, a “parody” consists in the “imitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a way as to make them ridiculous” [emphasis mine].

Judge for yourself:

Donald Trump, frontrunner for the Republicon presidential nomination, revealed today that his hair was designed by American architect Frank Gehry. This revelation came on the heals of Trump’s victory in forcing the hand of President Obama to make available his alleged Hawaiian birth certificate. Since then critics and bloggers had begun to question the national origin of Trump’s hair, some even claiming that his hair was of extraterrestrial origins.

Trump, pictured below, said, “Frank Gehry is big. Very, very big. He’s the biggest. Gehry is also very classy. Like Donald Trump, he is an American icon.”

Gehry, whose recent signature building is the Walt Disney Cconcert Hall in Los Angeles (seen below in exterior and interior views), could not be reached for comment.

This is my first and last comment on The Wedding. Like any queen, I am Anglophile. And I wish anyone well who makes public promises, especially given the recent connubial track record of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as they were known before tidily Anglicizing the name of “the firm” to “Windsor” during World War I), but please spare me the trite farrago of heterosexual privilege, which as frequently as not ends up at the doorstep of a divorce attorney. 

Not that I don’t envy fidelity or even some measure of romance. Twenty-five years ago, accompanied by The Man (for me, he will always be The Man, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, or Watson on Holmes) I saw Les Misérables on Broadway. All the rage at the time. But it left me cold. The image that came to my mind was someone’s singing on tip-toes at the loudest top of one’s voice as substitute for depth and nuance. Trite. Even “Bring Him Home.” Especially “Bring Him Home.”

When Bill Pfeiffer, RN, laid to rest his partner of many years, Mike Peppler, MD, “Bring Him Home” was played at the funeral. Then Bill died a year or so later. I had attended their simulacrum of a wedding (all that is allowed queers in most of the Lower Forty-Eight); the ritual was sham, only the sentiments were real.

In the current issue of the London Times Literary Supplement, Judith Flanders observes of Les Misérables:

. . . the complexities of a narrative were no longer necessary for success, a realization that leads to Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Misérables, which substitutes music-cued generic emotions for the (complicated) original story of Javert and Jean Valjean. . . . Here, via their circular return to melodrama, language was no longer a barrier to understanding . . . relying on musical cues rather than narrative to produce their emotional effects: spectacle replaces narrative and character.

Manufactured, pre-package emotion. So, too, The Wedding: Two photogenic inconsequentialities plight their troth, spectacularly. Cue anthems. Cue tears. Cue change ringing.

Weddings should be private affairs, with public celebrations for the 25th and 50th anniversaries (if at all). I prefer love’s alchemy, especially now, having misplaced my Philosopher’s Stone. So my romantic hero is John Donne: marrying a woman against her father’s and his patron’s wishes, landing him in jail, and costing him a diplomatic career. Reluctantly he became a priest. After the death of his wife, Anne More, he did not remarry. Surviving is the celebration of that most frail of loves, the marital, in the poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by’a love so much refined

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assuréd of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

I wish the young Windsor couple banked fires.

This news item comes under the “kulcha” category.

Reported today, Rutgers University (chartered in 1766 as Queens College, opening in 1771) is bringing to its campus this week Nicole Polizzi, someone who is otherwise known as “Snooki.”

No maven of pop kulcha, I even know that “Snooki” is a celebrity du jour  on one of the myriad of “reality” television shows. In other words she is a vacuous and talentless entity who has produced nothing of lasting value or worth, but is famous for being famous.

Presumably, student activity fees at Rutgers are paying for the privilege. New Jerseyites must be proud. Which says something about New Jersey.

Much in the news au courant, the “singularity” when wetware merges with hardware and software. Not exactly a new preoccupation, as Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler in the final scene of Dinner at Eight will attest.

The reason that I bought the Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-book reader was that it seemed to provide an ample catalog of the kinds of books that I read (including scholarly books) and more important, that it seemed, in comparison to another reader that I’d used and other readers that I’d reviewed, more facile in allowing highlights and notes and providing accurate page numbers (essential for a scholar).

I got took by the Nook. In at least one significant case, an expensive book that I’d downloaded, highlighted and notated fairly extensively, suddenly stopped working (it would open at the page on which I’d been last reading and then immediately close, refusing to remain open). Email exchanges with Nook “tech support” (Zach, Benoni, James, Paul, usually taking several days to respond my queries) were time wasting and fruitless. They recommended several complicated and time consuming fixes, the final one requiring me to find where the digital file of the book was located on my computer, then tethering the Nook to my computer (using their–of course–proprietary USB lead), and moving the book file from my computer to the Nook.

Didn’t I buy a Nook so I could use WiFi to purchase and download books?

This “fix” seems to have worked except for one big problem: All of my highlights and notes are gone. It’s a new book. So what was the point of my buying the more expensive Nook Color? And will this happen to other Nook books that I purchase?

Remember when right-wingnuts did a sting on Acorn (Andrew Breitbart’s agents posing as a pimp and ‘ho)? Remember when they tried the same sting recently on Planned Parenthood? Well, turnabout is fair play. Or, to quote the Bard: Hoist on their own petard. Ian Murphy of Buffalo Beast called up Gov. Scott Walker, posing as wealthy industrialist and campaign donor David Koch. They had a 20-minute chat, which included this exchange:

“Koch”: We’ll back you any way we can. What we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.

Walker: You know, well, the only problem with that —because we thought about that. The problem—the, my only gut reaction to that is right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them, the public is not really fond of this […]

Walker: [...] I went on “Morning Joe” this morning. I like it because I just like being combative with those guys, but, uh. You know they’re off the deep end.

“Koch”: Joe—Joe’s a good guy. He’s one of us.

Walker: Yeah, he’s all right. He was fair to me…[bashes NY Senator Chuck Schumer, who was also on the program.]

“Koch”: Beautiful; beautiful. You gotta love that Mika Brzezinski; she’s a real piece of ass.

Walker: Oh yeah

Walker’s office, by the way, has confirmed that the phone call occured.

Walker also revealed this strategem:

An interesting idea that was brought up to me by my chief of staff, we won’t do it until tomorrow, is putting out an appeal to the Democratic leader. I would be willing to sit down and talk to him, the assembly Democrat leader, plus the other two Republican leaders—talk, not negotiate and listen to what they have to say if they will in turn—but I’ll only do it if all 14 of them will come back and sit down in the state assembly. They can recess it… the reason for that, we’re verifying it this afternoon, legally, we believe, once they’ve gone into session, they don’t physically have to be there. If they’re actually in session for that day, and they take a recess, the 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and they’d have quorum because it’s turned out that way. So we’re double checking that. If you heard I was going to talk to them that’s the only reason why. We’d only do it if they came back to the capitol with all 14 of them. My sense is, hell. I’ll talk. If they want to yell at me for an hour, I’m used to that. I can deal with that. But I’m not negotiating.

As of this posting, the Buffalo Beast Web site is down (you get the message: ”The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable”).

Several years ago at a gay writers conference, Dorothy Allison suggested that no one under 35 should publish a memoir, to which Jim Grimsley added: “Yeah, and only then if they’ve actually done something.” I found that amusing because a young acquaintance of mine had recently published a memoir of his early queer years, and he was in his mid-twenties.

Neil Genzlinger writing in the NY Times Book Reviewsuggests that it is time to “restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre” and offers four axioms for citizens of the People’s Republic of Self Esteemia before they put pen (or ink jet) to paper:

1. “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir . . .”
2. “No one wants to relive your misery.”
3. “If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it.”
4. “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.”

In a review of four recently published memoirs, only one in Genzlinger’s view successfully meets these criteria, Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love.

Thanks to Anderson Cooper of CNN for deconstructing Michelle Bachmann’s destruction of the historical record. Those who forget history are doomed to rewrite it to suit their own agendas.

Ronald Reagan is sometimes praised by both sides of the political house for his concern that nuclear arms proliferation endangered world security. Contrary to ideologues on the Right, he understood that no limits on nuclear arms did not make the world a safer or more secure place. We were reminded of his legacy (and of the Republicon’s hypocrisy concerning it) when the “lame duck” Congress late last year passed a new strategic arms treaty, over the objections of many Republicons.

Too bad this understanding does extend to domestic arms. If you want a barometer of how successfully the Right has redefined the “center” of politics, consider how mute the voices supporting gun control in light of the recent assassination of a federal judge, attempted assasination of a congresswoman, and the assualt and murder of  others in Tucson, Arizona.

As Mark Shields recently observed in a commentary on the PBS evening news program, the News Hour, in Arizona in order to cut toe nails or shampoo hair, you need a background check and a license; to sell minnows and live bait, you have to have a background check and a license; to be a pest control applicator, you have to have a license. But in Arizona to buy a Glock 9 mm gun with a 31-round magazine (shooting 31 bullets in 7 seconds)? Nothing.

The claim by gun fetishists is that guns make you safer. But as Timoth Egan recently noted:

At least two recent studies show that more guns equals more carnage to innocents. One survey by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that guns did not protect those who had them from being shot in an assault — just the opposite. Epidemiologists at Penn looked at hundreds of muggings and assaults. What they found was that those with guns were four times more likely to be shot when confronted by an armed assailant than those without guns. The unarmed person, in other words, is safer.

Other studies have found that states with the highest rates of gun ownership have much greater gun death rates than those where only a small percentage of the population is armed. So, Hawaii, where only 9.7 percent of residents own guns, has the lowest gun death rate in the country, while Louisiana, where 45 percent of the public is armed, has the highest.

So our common good continues to be held at gunpoint by dogma, rather than being freed by facts.

Let’s call it what it is: right-wing terrorism. For well over a century, Americans have witnessed (though often with eyes closed and mouths shut) a countless number of right-wing terrorists, from “lone gunmen” (usually dismissed as pathological in order for Americans to evade the political implications of their violence) to organized hate groups (starting with the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century). The Southern Poverty Law Center has monitored, documented, and successfully brought suit against many of these groups and individuals (and to their credit, without excluding left-wing hate groups, though they are in far smaller supply). They identify 16 active hate groups in Arizona alone.

As Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC wrote recently:

Tea Party darlings like Sharron Angle talk about using “second amendment remedies” to change the course of the country. The shameless Glenn Beck feeds the lunatic fringe with talk of the government herding Americans into FEMA concentration camps and of imminent violence from mysterious forces “from the left.” Sarah Palin uses phrases like “don’t retreat, reload” and shows the districts of various Democrats in Congress, including that of Tucson’s Gabrielle Giffords, in the crosshairs.

The recent assassination of a federal judge and attempted assassination of a congresswoman in Arizona, as well as the murders of and assaults on others,  is another chapter in this sorry history, though right-wing politicians and pundits quickly demonstrated their understanding that the best defence is a good offence. One Arizona congressman interviewed on NPR suggested that federal inaction on immigration created a climate of hostility in that state. Another suggested that one could just as easily explain the attacks as the result of a government that has failed to listen to the “American people.” That defence is curiously similar to one that Republicons excoriated after September 11, 2001, namely that somehow our government’s foreign policy might have incited (but not excused) the terrorist attacks.

Sarah Palin, political pageant contestant, offered what to some observers seemed the most bizarre commentary: To claim that the alleged Arizona shooter was fueled by right-wing rhetoric is a “blood libel,” thus identifying herself with the long-suffering Jewish people who for centuries were accused of the murder of Jesus Christ (the original “blood libel”). The governor manquée, whose benefit to the Republican Party is to make George W. Bush seem like an erudite statesman (I looked at and tried reading her recent book but it was largely an unreadable pastiche of quotations from others, which is a hopeful sign that post-Katie-Couric-interview Palin is reading something, or at least has hired a ghost writer who reads), was simply taking a recent page from the playbook of the Roman Catholic Pope who likened his critics to the persecutors of the Jews (including, one hopes, his own predecessors) and himself to God’s Oppressed But Chosen People.

So political discourse doesn’t motivate people, and doesn’t motivate people to do evil things? This moment adds another artifact to the archive of Republicon mendacity and hypocrisy. This is the party that in recent memory tried to ban pornography (during the Reagan administration) claiming that viewing pornography caused people to perform sexual violence, and attacked rap lyricists (during the Bush administration) claiming that listening to hip hop caused people to attack police. And of course the advertising that keeps Rush and Bill and Beck and Sarah on the air, that doesn’t motivate people to buy products?

Many a kerfuffle among the punditocracy and in the blogosphere about “tenured radicals” corrupting the minds of our young people in college, with tenure as a guarantee of lifelong employment without conditions. Well, since only about a quarter of faculty are tenured or working for tenure (and the rest of us contingent labor), let’s dismiss that last claim out of hand.

Now a right-wing certified “tenured radical,” Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois (one of my maters alma) and president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has written in Inside Higher Ed a concise multi-point primer of academic freedom, what it is and what it isn’t, which deserves quoting verbatim:

PART 1: What it does do

1. Academic freedom means that both faculty members and students can engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation.

2. Academic freedom establishes a faculty member’s right to remain true to his or her pedagogical philosophy and intellectual commitments. It preserves the intellectual integrity of our educational system and thus serves the public good.

3. Academic freedom in teaching means that both faculty members and students can make comparisons and contrasts between subjects taught in a course and any field of human knowledge or period of history.

4. Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.

5. Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to study and do research on the topics they choose and to draw what conclusions they find consistent with their research, though it does not prevent others from judging whether their work is valuable and their conclusions sound. To protect academic freedom, universities should oppose efforts by corporate or government sponsors to block dissemination of any research findings.

6. Academic freedom means that the political, religious, or philosophical beliefs of politicians, administrators, and members of the public cannot be imposed on students or faculty.

7. Academic freedom gives faculty members and students the right to seek redress or request a hearing if they believe their rights have been violated.

8. Academic freedom protects faculty members and students from reprisals for disagreeing with administrative policies or proposals.

9. Academic freedom gives faculty members and students the right to challenge one another’s views, but not to penalize them for holding them.

10. Academic freedom protects a faculty member’s authority to assign grades to students, so long as the grades are not capricious or unjustly punitive. More broadly, academic freedom encompasses both the individual and institutional right to maintain academic standards.

11. Academic freedom gives faculty members substantial latitude in deciding how to teach the courses for which they are responsible.

12. Academic freedom guarantees that serious charges against a faculty member will be heard before a committee of his or her peers. It provides faculty members the right to due process, including the assumption that the burden of proof lies with those who brought the charges, that faculty have the right to present counter-evidence and confront their accusers, and be assisted by an attorney in serious cases if they choose.

 

PART 2: What It Doesn’t Do

1. Academic freedom does not mean a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.

2. Student academic freedom does not deny faculty members the right to require students to master course material and the fundamentals of the disciplines that faculty teach.

3. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects an incompetent teacher from losing his or her job. Academic freedom thus does not grant an unqualified guarantee of lifetime employment.

4. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from colleague or student challenges to or disagreement with their educational philosophy and practices.

5. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from non-university penalties if they break the law.

6. Academic freedom does not give students or faculty the right to ignore college or university regulations, though it does give faculty and students the right to criticize regulations they believe are unfair.

7. Academic freedom does not protect students or faculty from disciplinary action, but it does require that they receive fair treatment and due process.

8. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from sanctions for professional misconduct, though sanctions require clear proof established through due process.

9. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects a faculty member from various sanctions — from denial of merit raises, to denial of sabbatical requests, to the loss of desirable teaching and committee assignments — for poor performance, though such sanctions are regulated by local agreements and by faculty handbooks. If minor, sanctions should be grievable; if major, they must be preceded by an appropriate hearing.

10. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects a faculty member who repeatedly skips class or refuses to teach the classes or subject matter assigned.

11. Though briefly interrupting an invited speaker may be compatible with academic freedom, actually preventing a talk or a performance from continuing is not.

12. Academic freedom does not protect a faculty member from investigations into allegations of scientific misconduct or violations of sound university policies, nor from appropriate penalties should such charges be sustained in a hearing of record before an elected faculty body.