Doctor Cleveland

Prime Time Persecution

2012-02-14T22:50:00.003-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Anyone on television talking about how they're being persecuted for their religion is not being persecuted. How do I know this?

Because they are on television.

Birth Control Makes Catholicism Work

2012-02-08T23:00:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

My brilliant co-bloggers Ramona and Destor have been especially brilliant this week on the Catholic bishops' outrage at having to pay for full employee health insurance. Destor is so smart about the church and state principles involved, and Ramona so good on the women's-health issues, that I have nothing left to add but my own personal experience. I am a former employee of the Catholic Church. I used to have a health-insurance card with the Archdiocese of Boston's seal printed on it. That wasn't an experience of religious liberty. That was an employer exercising its muscle to impose on employees' religious consciences. And it involved the hypocritical pretense that the Archdiocese and its good works did not fundamentally depend on careful family planning by its employees, as every American diocese did and does.

I was in no personal need of the contraceptive pills that my health card wouldn't get me, because I was a dude and because I had a romantic life which rendered family planning moot. But one of my co-workers explained what our health-insurance card meant for her. Prescriptions for contraceptives weren't covered, and had to be paid for out-of-pocket at the exorbitant rate reserved for the uninsured. And any doctor's appointment where contraceptives were discussed or prescribed was also not covered, even if the appointment was primarily to treat something else. (And obviously, it didn't matter why contraceptives were being prescribed. If, like many women, my co-worker needed the pill for medical reasons unrelated to family planning, then she would simply have an uninsured medical problem.) That isn't just refusing to be "forced to buy contraceptives." That is an employer using its muscle to put obstacles in its employees' way, to press its own agenda upon employees no matter their own religious beliefs. In this case, my Jewish co-worker had her employer's religious convictions forced upon her. That is not freedom of conscience.

This is what "freedom of religion" has come to mean to today's religious right: the privilege to push your religion on others, and to play the victim when your bullying is interrupted. The official leadership of the Catholic Church has utterly failed to convince even its own followers of its position on contraception:

in recent polls, about 95 percent of Catholics have said they use contraceptives, and 89 percent say the decision to use them should be theirs, not the church’s,

and another recent poll shows Catholics favoring the Obama administration's ruling by a 58-37 margin. So the "religious principle" being discussed here is a recent teaching embraced mainly by the Church's hierarchy, but not actually part of most believers' practice of the faith. But having failed to persuade rank-and-file Catholics of the Church's novel and ill-thought-out position, the leader of my Archdiocese, Bernard Cardinal Law, resorted to bullying employees with his economic power, interfering with their medical decisions because he was The Boss.

The claim that Cardinal Law's conscience would have been violated if the organization he led had been "forced to buy contraceptives" is nonsense. The Church does not buy contraceptives, penicillin, X-rays, or any other medical good. It buys a premium for a health plan for its employees, and that plan pays for medical goods and services. But isn't that just buying contraceptives with the Cardinal's money? No. Because the premium on my health plan was not the Cardinal's money, even if his little stamp was on the card. It was my money. It was part of my pay. I had earned it, through the work specified in my contract, and what I did with the benefits I was owed was no more the Cardinal's business than what I did with my paycheck. Employees' medical decisions and religious beliefs are their own. (If I bought a hamburger on Good Friday, I wasn't forcing the Cardinal to "buy meat" against his religious beliefs. Once someone pays you, the money is yours.) Even if the employer pays the insurer directly, that doesn't entitle it to dictate the way medical insurance was used. If it did, the Christian Science Monitor couldn't be required to provide health insurance at all.

And let me be very blunt here. Almost all of the employees covered by the new ruling are working in the non-profit sector at non-profit salaries. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, and social workers in the Catholic Church's schools, hospitals, charities, and colleges. They are not paid unfairly, but the Church does not pay them, and could not afford to pay them, well enough that they don't need to worry about when and how they start their families. The first year I worked for the Boston Church, I was paid the princely sum of fifteen thousand dollars plus health insurance. My co-workers who had more experience and credentials than I did were paid better than that, at least, but they were still paid much less than people in similar jobs outside the Church. I didn't think my salary was unfair, considering the original skill level I brought with me, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do the work I was doing and to get better at it. But that decision was only possible for me because I was not going to be starting a family. I could not have taken that job if I were responsible for a child. If I'd had a child on the way, I would have had to look for other work. And the idea that I would "let God decide" when children would come, and in what numbers, while I was working for a salary that wouldn't cover day care, is the height of irresponsibility. Catholic schools and Catholic charities and Catholic hospitals are only economically possible because of contraception. Without family planning, they would have to close.

The sisters and brothers who once staffed those institutions no longer exist in anything close to the numbers needed to keep them open. You cannot run a school or hospital with American nuns any more, because there aren't any. They have been replaced by lay employees who have not taken vows of poverty, and so need to be paid. The schools and hospitals stay open because those lay workers are willing to work for below-market wages. But since those educated below-market-wage professionals have also not taken vows of chastity, they have to make decisions about starting families, and about the size of their families. They cannot afford to let children come on their own schedule, in whatever numbers. They have to make the same decisions that most middle-class families make about when they can afford to have a baby, except they have to make them even more carefully. If everyone who worked for the Catholic Church in this country had the large, unplanned families the Church recommends, then the schools and hospitals and charities would not be able to pay the parents well enough to support their children. Those schools and hospitals would either go broke or lose most of their workers to more profitable jobs. This is the reality underlying the Church's good works.

It isn't wrong; those schools and charities and hospitals need to be low-cost to serve the Church's mission. I've never been sorry I worked for them, or served the people I served while I was on the Church's payroll. But to pay people a wage which will not allow them to start a family and then make them go into their underpaid pockets for the birth-control pills that allow them to keep working for you is wrong. It is unworthy of any of the values the Church stands for. And making a grand pious show of it only makes the bishops' behavior more sinful.

The GOP's Drunk-Dad Primary

2012-02-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

There's been a lot of punditty chatter about what the Romney vs. Gingrich struggles means: insiders vs. outsiders, establishment vs. Tea Party, elite vs. non-elite, whatever. But listening to that clip of Gingrich attacking John King, listening the open, undiluted pleasure that Gingrich takes in his own rage, made it clear to me what this is really about. The Republican primary voters are electing their political family a new Drunk Dad. And they want to be sure they get the right kind.

Of course, none of the Republican contenders are alcoholics. (Romney abstains from alcohol completely.) They're not literal drunks. But the Republican Party is now like a family headed by an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional parent. There are huge problems that no one can bring themselves to face. And although the parent figure actively prevents the real problems from getting better, they also lead the family in the crucial effort to deny those problems. The Drunk Dad sets the tone and direction for family's most important shared effort: covering over the fact that dad's a drunk.

Make no mistake: the Republican Party's current approach to this nation's problems is stone-cold denial. This is true whether they end up nominating Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul or the Man in the Moon. And in policy terms, the differences between Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, Perry, etc., are trivial. The two Republican plans for dealing with America's serious economic problems are to stick with the policies that created the problems or to make them worse. Republican energy policy is to drill for more domestic oil, ignoring the basic fact that the don't have even half as much oil as we use, and to cut research on renewable energy so that when the oil does run out we won't have any other options. Republican military policy is Not To Do Things Like Obama Does, meaning effectively and with minimal American casualties, but to go back to the way George W. Bush did it, meaning colossal failed military adventures that leave the country weaker. The only question is whether to try to get back into the quicksand of Iraq, or to stake out a new quagmire in Iran, or both. In every case, for every Republican candidate, the plan is to do things more like George W. Bush, although no one says that because doing things that way was a colossal failure.

And that's the Republican plan in a nutshell: to go back to the Bush Era while simultaneously disowning it because every knows Bush was a big failure. Doing that takes mighty acts of denial. The leader of their party needs to be the Denier in Chief, and lead the faithful through the minefield of cognitive dissonance to the Promised Land, where you do everything the way you always do but everything is somehow better. This kind of profound group self-deception requires a dysfunctional father figure for the faithful to believe in, someone to be the voice of rationalization and convenient self-delusion: a Drunk Dad.

Romney is like the Nice Drunk Dad, the kind that holds his liquor well and speaks politely and can only be recognized as an alcoholic if you know him. Generally, this kind of Drunk Dad seems like the best of the bad deals: he looks basically respectable, he doesn't fly into drunken rages, and he can even find socially-acceptable excuses for all the drinking, so that to casual visitors he just seems to be enjoying a few social cocktails instead of ruthlessly pickling his own brain. When the Nice Drunk Dad lies to you he sounds all calm and easy-going and sincere. He's actually excellent at selling the lie, even when circumstances make it implausible. He'll look you right in the eye and tell you everything's going to be better, and the family's just had a bit of inexplicable bad luck, and he's starting tomorrow he's going to turn over a new leaf because you kids are the most important thing in his life. And it all sounds really believable when he says it, especially the first time. He might, out of prevaricator's necessity, have to throw some personal slanders in with his lies, blaming the supervisor who fired him or the electric company that keeps "losing his checks," but that's not his strong suit, and even then he often affects a kind of more-in-sorrow-than-anger vibe about it.

Gingrich, however, is like the Angry Drunk Dad, who powers his denial with deep, quick-rising rage. The Angry Drunk Dad will often insult you and hurt your feelings, but he has an easy explanation for why things keep going wrong for the family: those no-good bastards are out to get him. He's surrounded by enemies wherever he goes, enemies who steal his job or cut off his electricity, and the family's task is to make common cause against those enemies. The enemies, of course, are out to get him because he's better then they are, because he's a bigger person and better at things and because he's got principles and they can't deal with that. And you can trust the Angry Drunk Dad not to back down. Whenever he feels wronged, which is nearly always, he goes on the attack: after all, those bastards have it coming.

(Rick Santorum, of course, is the Magical Thinking Drunk Dad, who tries basically the same bullshit on you that he used when you were three years old. And Ron Paul isn't so much a Drunk Dad as a Crank Uncle, who tells quirkily entertaining stories, warns you at length about the dangers of fluoridation and Freemasonry, and spends most of his time in the basement working on his perpetual-motion machine.)

On the face of it, the Nice Drunk Dad seems like the obvious go-to choice; for those of us who grew up with functional parents, the obvious move is to pick the one who seems closer to functional. That is basically the rationale for the Romney candidacy: he's less obviously embarrassing, and he looks like someone who could hold onto a job. But this turns out to be a mistake. The Nice Drunk Dad is still a drunk. There's no real benefit to the fact that he looks functional, and the fact that he looks so much like better dads whose families live better, more stable lives only drives home the fact that your family doesn't get to live like that. Candidate Romney doesn't have any actual programs to sell in the general election. He might not embarrass himself right out of the gate by talking about poor people on food stamps or raving about building a moon base, but anyone who's around him for longer than it takes to have two drinks is still going to figure out that he's got nothing. And President Romney has no plan to stop things in this country from going further and further into hell. If elected, he's just going to have a series of heart-to-heart talks with us about how things aren't really as bad as they seem and everything will get better, because he has our best interests at heart. Meanwhile, things are going to get worse and worse.

It's those heart-to-heart talks that are excruciating, and make the Nice Drunk Dad much worse, in lots of ways, than the Angry Drunk Dad. All he's got is bullshit, after all, and once you've heard the same bullshit a few times the fact that he sounds like he believes it doesn't make it better. In fact, it makes it worse. And you're forced to pretend that you don't see through him. It's terrible. The Angry Drunk Dad, on the other hand, doesn't ask you to believe his lies. He commands you to believe him, and attacks you the instant your faith wavers. You're not allowed to think for yourself, which is a relief; it keeps you from being able to notice how bad everything is. And the Angry Drunk Dad's talent for hate, his furious scapegoating and blame-shifting, not only helps you participate in the denial but actually gives you an outlet for all the hurt and rage and shame that comes from being in such a messed-up family. The Angry Drunk Dad has a convenient, consistent explanation for every setback, an explanation that helps you get through the day, and he offers you a place to unload all those terrible feelings you're carrying around, onto those convenient enemies. All these things that are going wrong aren't Dad's fault! ACORN did it! Saul Alinsky! Black people on food stamps! The liberal media!

Sure, your objective reality will be at least as bad as it would be with the Nice Drunk Dad, but face it: your objective reality was going to suck anyway. Things won't get better in the real world until/unless you break away from the family (the party) completely and start over. If you're not willing or able to do that, and lots of Republican primary voters aren't, the only question is how well you can keep your awareness of the ugly realities at bay. And at that game, the aggressively anti-reality Angry Drunk Dad beats the genteel, reasonable-sounding Nice Drunk Dad hands down. The Angry Drunk Dad helps you seal off the unpleasant truths that are always seeping through the Nice Drunk Dad's jive. And he gives you something to do when those truths unexpectedly confront you: get angry. In the Nice-Dad system of denial, the truth is something uncomfortable and embarrassing. In the Angry-Dad system, the truth is an enemy to be destroyed. It's not healthier than the Nice-Dad system, but it's a lot more emotionally satisfying. And it's what Newt Gingrich has to offer the voters.

Gingrich and "Protecting Barack Obama"

2012-01-20T19:33:00.001-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Newt Gingrich is getting all kinds of media love after blasting the media in Thursday's debate, and saying that he's "tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," for example by reporting on things that Republicans running for President have actually said and done. I mean, the "elite media" hasn't fact-checked anything Barack Obama has said in a Presidential debate
since before he was elected! How can that be fair?

And the elite media has been attacking Mitt Romney, too, just as Gingrich said. For example, the media keep running those anti-Romney attack ads from Newt's SuperPAC. That's how far they're willing to go to protect Barack Obama.

But it isn't just the media protecting Barack Obama. Think of all the women who are protecting Obama from a damaging sex scandal right now by not having sex with him! Is it fair that Gingrich has to take heat for cheating on his first two wives, while Barack Obama doesn't have to take heat for cheating on his wife at all? He's obviously being protected by a conspiracy of radical feminists who have decided to tilt the so-called "character issue" in Obama's favor by not offering him sexual favors. Thuggery, plain and simple. Sure, you can try to make it look like Obama's somehow responsible, because he's more "faithful to his marriage" or something like that, but why should we presume that a man should be able to control his own sexual impulses around attractive women? Is that presumption fair to Herman Cain? Obviously, Obama is being protected by an elitist cabal of non-mistresses.

Then think of all the people who've protected Barack Obama from embarrassment by not paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby on Capitol Hill. Newt Gingrich is unfairly handicapped by having to come up with awkward misleading explanations for all the lobbying money he's paid, like his claim he got paid $300,000 to be "a historian." Can Obama come up with a better cover story than that? We don't know; he keeps evading the questions by not having fat stacks of lobbyist money to explain. Dirty Chicago politics, plain and simple.

As if that isn't bad enough, think of the way Obama is being unfairly protected by his tax forms, which get ruthlessly disclosed every single year. Is it right that a Democrat doesn't get picked on about his tax forms because he annually releases them and lets everyone see how much he makes and how much he gives to charity and what tax rate he pays, while a Republican like Mitt Romney gets hammered for not revealing those things? Is it fair that Obama's dirty tax-form-release trick gets backed up by every single major Presidential candidate for the last forty years, all doing it so it looks like something you're "supposed to" do? That's an elitist conspiracy if I've ever heard of one. And even liberal Republicans like George Romney are in on it! What a low blow!

Then think of all the people who are protecting Barack Obama, who have been protecting him for decades now, by inviting him to come and make speeches where he doesn't say anything silly, racist, or flagrantly untrue. Why is it fair that Obama never has to explain talking about man-on-dog sex, or trafficking in crude racial stereotypes, or flat-out lying? Why should he get away with not making racist appeals or forgetting what Syria is? Who are these people who keep letting him make speeches without saying anything crass or shameful? I'll tell you who they are: a conspiracy.

And don't just blame the elites. Some of the blame goes to humble, ordinary multimillionaire office-holders like the current Republican candidates. They're clearly attempting to protect Obama. Every Republican debate is an obvious attempt to undermine the eventual Republican nominee's viability in the general election. And now that they're down to only one candidate, Mitt Romney, who stands a fighting chance against Obama, they're all doing their damnedest to protect Barack Obama by making Mitt Romney look bad. That includes Mitt Romney.

And worst of all, Newt Gingrich is trying to protect Barack Obama by nominating a Republican with only a 27% approval rating to run against him. Clearly, Gingrich is terrified by the prospect of Obama facing a serious and plausible Republican opponent, and he's bending heaven and earth to make sure that doesn't happen.

Stop protecting Barack Obama, Newt. And remember what the conservative movement is about: personal responsibility.

Why Tenure Exists, Part 1

2012-01-14T14:05:00.001-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Zandar, at Balloon Juice, points out that Missouri's new Creationism-in-the-schools bill, HB 1227, applies not only to K-12 schools but to the state's public colleges and universities as well. According to the bill,

Notwithstanding any other law, any introductory science course taughtat any public institution of higher education in this state, including material concerningphysics, chemistry, biology, health, physiology, genetics, astronomy, cosmology, geology,paleontology, anthropology, ecology, climatology, or other science topics,

will be regulated by the requirements of the law, which means equal time for the "intelligent design" theory.

If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a course of study,biological evolution and biological intelligent design shall be taught. ... If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a textbook, thetextbook shall give equal treatment to biological evolution and biological intelligent design.

Now, this bill will probably never become law. But I find it simultaneously disgusting and amusing that only "introductory" classes are regulated, meaning that University of Missouri faculty would still be free to teach actual science to their majors (who would only be misled in Biology/Geology/Physics 101 but hipped to what's really what in the next class) while all the non-majors filling distribution requirements would get a set of deliberately dishonest courses designed to insulate them from any scientific knowledge that would challenge their faith-based misconceptions.

That pretty much sums up the religious right approach to science. They want a small group of actual scientists and engineers who know how things really work, and a much larger class of scientific illiterates who are left free to believe anything that makes them feel good about themselves. Scientists are meant to be a special caste, given the privilege of pursuing knowledge at the price of keeping it to themselves.

What's merely disgusting, and not amusing, is that the proposed law applies not just to biology but to physics, astrophysics, and geology, and outlaws anything but "empirical fact," meaning in practice that which conservative Missouri lawmakers consider to be an empirical fact. Millions of years of fossil records are clearly not "empirical" enough. The Big Bang Theory, and with it the rest of the Standard Model in physics, surely does not make the cut; the Big Bang is just someone's interpretation of some radio hiss, right? String theory, likewise, cannot yet be confirmed. Nor, if we come down to it, would Special Relativity or Hubble's constant make the lawmaker's cut, since like so much of science these ideas are largely demonstrated through mathematics. If you take out the parts of contemporary science that rest on abstruse mathematical proof, you leave pretty large holes in our understanding of the world.

The only saving grace, of course, is that tenured science professors, even at state universities, could not be forced to to do this, and more importantly could not be fired for teaching their students real science. This is the first and most important reason for academic tenure: to insulate the pursuit and transmission of knowledge from the worst outside pressures. Tenure is the reason that "intelligent design" is NOT taught in public colleges and universities, even in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Tenured college teachers are free from political pressure in a way that high school teachers have never been. Without tenure, the facts about science, about history, about the world we live in, became subject to the whims of the State Legislature, or the Board of Trustees, or the college's biggest donor, rather than being subject to the actual facts.

Tenure is often imagined as a personal job perk, and it's true that there have been occasions when tenure has been abused at this college or that. But it's not just part of an employment package, like a dental plan or a 401(k), because it is not designed as a reward for an individual but as a privilege for an activity. Tenure is designed to enable and to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It keeps scientists who study climate change from being fired for studying climate change, or for finding out things that some influential person doesn't want to be true. Tenure operates, in effect, as one of the academy's quality control guarantees. It offers a base-line reassurance that the information produced by academic research is on the level, and has not been cooked up in some bigwig's office.

In order to do this, tenure does offer individual scholars real and valuable privileges. But the core of the privilege is the freedom to do your job right. It does not protect anyone's right to do their job poorly, although that is how it is frequently portrayed. Tenure has sometimes been turned into a cover for shoddy work habits, but that's not in keeping with even the letter, let alone the spirit, of the law; no one's university bylaws allow the tenured to skip their duties. If I decided never to show up for the classes I teach, tenure should not and would not protect me. If, on the other hand, two-thirds of my Board of Trustees became enthusiastic converts to the idea that the Earl of Oxford wrote the works of William Shakespeare, and ordered me to give "Oxfordian thinking" equal time in my classroom, tenure would allow me to politely tell them no and go back to teaching reality-based literary history. They couldn't do a thing about it. That's what tenure is for. It keeps the job of spreading knowledge in the hands of people who actually know what they're teaching.

Of course, if a bill like Missouri's ever became law, the problem would be that many introductory classes, the ones that the Missouri legislature feels free to meddle with, are largely taught by untenured and untenurable "part-time" instructors, who are employed at will. The advanced classes are taught by the tenured faculty, who cannot be punished for teaching actual science, but most of the lower-level classes are given to poorly-paid adjunct teachers who can be fired without even giving a reason. Under HB 1227, those people would have to give equal time to "intelligent design," or to global cooling, or to astrology, as the Missouri State Legislature saw fit, or else be replaced by someone who would. Lots of people who call themselves educational "reformers" talk about the need to have fewer tenured faculty members; this is what they're talking about.

"Meh" Is for Mitt

2012-01-11T15:04:00.004-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary last night with 39% of the vote. The media is counting it as a big win, which is fair enough. 39% is a perfectly good win in New Hampshire, and very much in line with what many past winners have received. But there are two things that should worry the Mittster.

1) Voter turnout was basically flat from 2008, even though there wasn't a contested Deomcratic primary this time.

That's significant because in New Hampshire, Independents can vote in either primary. In 2008, the Democrats had a barn-burner of a contest with a record voter turnout. This year they had a perfunctory vote for an unopposed incumbent President, which dropped their turnout by about two hundred thousand. That should have freed up many tens of thousands of Independent voters to participate in this year's Republican race, but participation on the Republican side didn't really budge. That suggests either a problem with Republican enthusiasm, a lack of appeal to swing voters, or both.

2) 39% in New Hampshire isn't really that good for a politician from Massachusetts. I'm not saying that it shouldn't count as a win. But it does suggest that Romney's not really breaking through to the voters.

For someone who's held statewide office in Massachusetts, New Hampshire in basically a home game. Almost everyone in New Hampshire gets their TV, and their TV news, from Boston. Most of the state's population lives near the Massachusetts border, many voters are originally from Massachusetts, and a large number go to Massachusetts every day for work. (I used to wake up in New Hampshire and go to high school in Massachusetts. This isn't unusual.) So anyone who's held major office in Massachusetts is someone that New Hampshire voters already know pretty well.

Let me put this in perspective:

- Massachusetts candidates have now won New Hampshire in four of the last seven primaries (1988, 1992, 2004 and now 2012).

-Only two Massachusetts candidates have ever lost New Hampshire: Ted Kennedy in 1980, who was challenging an incumbent President of his own party, and, well, Mitt Romney last time around.

-Every one of those Massachusetts candidates over the last thirty years, winners and losers, have polled somewhere in the 30s on election night. Mitt Romney now has the distinction of having the highest and lowest vote percentage from that group, 39% last night and 31% four years ago. But he's not much ahead of previous high-score holder John Kerry at 38%. Even Ted Kennedy got 37% when he lost.

Last night's win puts Mitt in the august company of John Kerry, Mike Dukakis, and Paul Tsongas. You'll notice something about these men: none of them became President of the United States. They were perfectly plausible nominees. On the other hand, they were not great campaigners. Dukakis and Kerry, who actually won the nomination in years when they had a very legitimate shot, managed to fall short in part because they were not terribly effective on the trail. You couldn't call either of them electrifying.

By contrast, the last Massachusetts politician to win the Presidency, John F. Kennedy, won New Hampshire with an eye-popping 85% of the vote. That win isn't directly comparable to results from the last thirty years. The primary system as we know it was still evolving in 1960, and New Hampshire was not contested in anything like the way it is now. Still, 85% is a long way from 39%.

Romney should feel pleased by his victory. But he was Governor of Massachusetts for four years, he has quite literally moved to New Hampshire, and even with that state's voters knowing him as well as they know their own elected officials, he couldn't break 40% of the vote in his own party. That isn't exactly an overwhelming rush of love. 39% is great, but John Kerry could get 38% and Mike Dukakis could get between 36 and 37%. Paul Tsongas, who was like Dukakis's more sedate cousin, could break 33%. Ted Kennedy could get 37% of the vote in that state after Chappaquiddick. 39% is nobody's landslide.

Mitt Romney has an increasingly secure hold on the nomination. Mitt Romney also has a problem on the campaign trail. And it's probably him.

No Love in Iowa, No Hope in Iowa

2012-01-04T14:13:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

The obvious stories from the Iowa caucuses are that 1) Mitt Romney ended up tied with the long-long-long-shot Rick Santorum, with Ron Paul hot on their heels and 2) Romney still has exactly the same crappy vote totals he had four years ago. But there's an even more important story: the Republican turnout was pretty much exactly what it was four years ago, when the Republican electorate was depressed and demoralized. In fact, when you factor out the independents and caucus-night party-switchers, fewer Republicans showed up to vote last night than in 2008, when their enthusiasm was at its lowest ebb.

All the drama and mayhem of the GOP campaign didn't bring more people to the polls. And the closeness of the race isn't helping. When Clinton and Obama went neck-and-neck for months in 2008, it hurt a lot of feelings in the blogosphere but it ended up helping the party, not only because the winning candidate had to build a serious ground organization during the primaries, but because it brought a lot of people to the polls. But Clinton and Obama were in a tight race because they were two strong candidates, with passionate followers. It was like a Celtics-Lakers championship match. The 2012 Republican candidates are a bunch of folks who can't get to 30% against each other's weak opposition. That doesn't help anything.

The Republicans have been counting on an enthusiasm gap to beat Obama. But you don't enthusiasm-gap your opponent without any enthusiasm. Not only are the Republicans saddled with Romney's curiously damp anti-charisma and the off-putting antics of his rivals, but they're on the verge of running the most purely negative primary campaign in modern history. The main rationale for every contender's candidacy is that he's not one of the other guys. It's Not Romney vs. Not Romney vs. Admittedly Romney for the chance to run as Not Obama. No one's got a strong positive case to make. At least, no one's making it.

Two bonus factors will make the negativity worse. One is Newt Gingrich, who is one of the great spite-driven mudslingers of our day and who, wait for it, feels he has been hit too hard by Mitt Romney and wants revenge. That's a recipe for trouble right there. An even bigger factor is that this is the first primary to come after Citizens United opened the door for unlimited outside money, and that money is primarily going to come in carpet-bombing waves of attack ads. An unprecedented amount of money is about to be poured into knocking the Republican candidates down, in a scorched-earth, last-creep-standing electoral scenario. The winner gets the scorched earth, a bunch of voters who've had their enthusiasm relentlessly squeezed out of them, and the lead of a party that's never liked him. Welcome to the enthusiasm gap.

Your New Year Public Domain Report: 2012

2012-01-01T17:08:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Happy New Year, all. My spouse and I spent part of yesterday evening at our local revival house, watching a classic New Year's Eve double-feature of The Thin Man and After the Thin Man. Then we adjourned to a favorite bar for midnight; after all, that's what Nick and Nora would do.

By coincidence, midnight last night was the moment when After the Thin Man was once set to enter the public domain. But of course, it didn't. For the 34rd year in a row, nothing new entered the public domain, which has been basically frozen in place since 1978. Under the original copyright laws in force when it was made, After The Thin Man should have entered public domain 19 New Year's Eves ago, during the first second of 1993. (Obviously, the earlier Thin Man movie would have become public domain even earlier.) A major copyright extension act in 1976 pushed that particular date back until the wee hours of this morning. And then, of course, another copyright extension law in 1998 (the Millennium Copyright Act or Sonny Bono Act), pushed that back for another twenty years. So After the Thin Man will cease to be private property on New Year's Day, 2032, 96 years after its theatrical release, under the current schedule. Look for that date to be pushed back again in five or six years, when Congress comes under pressure from the big media companies to extend the copyright term another 20 or 25 years.

So there's nothing new under the public domain's tree this year, but I'd like to list some of the movies, books, and recordings that would have become public today, under earlier versions of the law:

If not for the Millennium Copyright Act:

Porky Pig would enter the public domain today, as would Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times would enter in the public domain today, as would Mae West's Go West, Young Man, Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and a host of others: My Man Godfrey, Tarzan Escapes, Ballots or Bullets, Swing Time, Intermezzo, Charlie Chan at the Opera, Reefer Madness, Hitchcock's original Secret Agent and the original Anything Goes.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was set to exit copyright today, as was Double Indemnity, Dos Passos's The Big Money, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes!, Ayn Rand's We, the Living and of course Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

The songs "Good Night, Irene" and "Pennies from Heaven" should have entered public domain today, as should a bunch of other classics from the American songbook: "A Fine Romance," "The Way You Look Tonight," "It's De-Lovely," "Easy to Love" and "I've Got You Under My Skin." (The last three by Cole Porter, who was on an especially hot streak.) The public domain should also include classical music by Bartok, Barber, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev, whose ballet Romeo and Juliet appeared in the same year as his Peter and the Wolf.

According to the Sony Bono Act, all of these works are too new to enter the public domain until 2032. People need a chance to make a little money off them before that happens.

If not for the Copyright Act of 1976:

Under the copyright laws in force when they were made, Rebel Without a Cause, Marty, The Seven-Year Itch, The Blackboard Jungle, Lady and the Tramp, and To Catch a Thief would all have entered public domain today. So would Davy Crockett, Guys and Dolls (with Brando and Sinatra), Oklahoma!, Kiss Me Deadly, The Man with the Golden Arm, East of Eden, Godzilla Raids Again and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

Also entering public domain today would be The Lord of the Rings (whose final volume would be leaving copyright), Moonraker, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Waiting for Godot, Notes of a Native Son, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, William Golding's The Inheritors and Nabokov's Lolita. (The last book was not published in an English-speaking country until three years after the others on this list, but was published in France, in English, in 1955.)

The musical public domain would be enriched today by "Rock Around the Clock," "Folsom Prison Blues," "Unchained Melody," "Blue Suede Shoes,""Charlie Brown," "Tutti Frutti" and "Maybelline." If early rock and roll isn't your speed, they'd be joined by a batch of Sinatra classics: "Love and Marriage," "The Tender Trap," "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning," and an old Doctor Cleveland favorite, "Learning the Blues."

However, federal law has subsequently determined that none of these works count as oldies yet. Under the current schedule, they are all slated to enter the public domain in 2051. And of course, it might take much, much longer. All that's certain is that next New Year's Day there will again be nothing else in the public domain, the same way it's been since January 1, 1979. And as we approach January 1, 2019, there will be a major campaign to keep anything from entering public domain ever again.

The Romney Paradox (and the Crybaby Bishops)

2011-12-30T23:00:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Mitt Romney used to be Governor of Massachusetts, a commonwealth which has at various times been A) the closest thing to a theocracy America has ever had and B) the poster child for tolerant secular liberalism. Many vocal religious conservatives now insist that the tolerant secular liberalism is an infringement on their religious liberty, and that they can only fully exercise their religion when the state actively endorses and promotes their religious values for them.

Back in the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, of course, the government did actively promote religious values, and the official magistrates were under the indirect supervision of the ministers. (Massachusetts was never such a theocracy that the ministers were directly in control, but the religious leaders could make and break the politicians; they weren't officeholders, but they were political bosses). This is the closest resemblance that any historical fact bears to the Christian Nation narrative popular with today's religious right.

Here's the thing, though: none of the people currently demanding a Christian Nation would have been able to exercise their religion under that system. Virtually without exception, today's right-wing religious activists belong to denominations that were banned in colonial Massachusetts (or would have been, had they been founded in time). Mitt Romney, likewise, would not have been allowed to practice his faith or even to remain in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The Massachusetts authorities in the 17th century were given to expelling members of dissident religious groups, such as the Baptists, with an instructive public whipping to hasten them on their way. They executed people for the crime of being Quakers. (Those executions led the English government to tyrannically curtail Massachusetts' religious freedom by forbidding the colonists to hang people for being a different flavor of Protestant Christian.) After the King outlawed religious executions, the God-fearing colonists had to content themselves with whippings, expulsions, and breaking into to private homes to see if anyone was holding a Quaker service inside.

Baptists were outlaws; the Pentecostalists and other later evangelical denominations would surely have been outlawed too. Practicing Catholicism was out of the question; Massachusetts Puritans looked on the Catholic Church as a diabolic organization headed by the Anti-Christ. The Catholics didn't enjoy religious toleration in England, let alone Puritan New England, and as late as the 1830s a mob burned down a convent in greater Boston, because it was full of, you know, nuns.

And as for being a Mormon, if there had been any Mormons yet, forget it. Groups that got driven out of 19th-century Illinois wouldn't have stood a chance in theocratic Boston. If Mitt Romney had shown up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony he would have been immediately thrown in jail, publicly flogged, and (if he caught a few bad breaks) hanged. In fact, every single Republican candidate for the presidential nomination, including Herman Cain and Tim Pawlenty, belongs to a church that would have been criminalized in early colonial Boston.

On the other hand, "Godless" liberal Massachusetts, that terrible threat to religious freedom, has treated Mitt Romney remarkably well. Not only did he get two degrees from Harvard (whose Puritan founders would have never admitted anyone of his faith), and he was actually elected to John Winthrop's old job as Governor! (We're still trying to harness the original colonists spinning in their graves to make green electricity.) He didn't do any of that on a wave of religious support from his fellow Mormons, of whom Massachusetts has approximately none. He did it with the votes of people who don't believe in his religion and have no particular sympathy for it, even some people who view Mormonism as slightly crazy. Those voters disagree with Romney's personal religious choices, but respected his right to make them and did not penalize him for them. Tolerant liberal values gave Mitt Romney the maximum freedom to practice his faith.

The people of Massachusetts did expect Romney to live up to the traditional separation-of-church-and-state deal, in which the elected magistrate represents the interests of the whole commonwealth and not his private religious convictions. If Mormon Governor Romney felt that, as a Latter-Day Saint, he had to close down all of the state's bars, liquor stores, and coffee shops, he wouldn't have been Governor Romney for even a week. In fact, Romney signed the repeal of the old Puritan-inspired Blue Law against selling alcohol on Sundays. He acted on behalf of the voters who had delegated him his authority, rather than using that authority to express his own religious concerns or impose them upon the public.

Was this a limitation of his religious freedom? No. It was a recognition that an elected leader is a representative of the public. If Romney had insisted that his freedom of religion entitled him to use his office to promote his specific values, he would have been barred from that office, because under that system no reasonable voter would ever choose to empower any candidate whose religion differed from their own. If we all agree that the President of the United States will keep his religious practice separate from his public duties, then anyone can be President. But if we considered the President of the United States free to use the powers of office to promote his or her own faith, then no one who doesn't share my particular faith, or yours, would be acceptable to me or to you. We can have, say, a Quaker president (like Nixon), because we know that the president won't simply disband the armed forces to keep with his Quaker faith. If Nixon had undergone a (spectacularly unlikely) crisis of conscience and decided that he had to be true to his religious upbringing he had to abolish the army and navy, he would have been impeached faster than he could resign.

Today's religious right complain about the separation of church and state as a hindrance to their religious freedom. Most recently, some Catholic bishops have complained that they can now longer receive taxpayer funding for adoption-placement services that exclude gay couples from adopting. They are free to run a Catholic adoption agency, and free to turn away gay couples if they choose, on the principle that children are better off orphans than raised by two men or two women. What they view as "government-backed persecution" is that the taxpayer will no longer underwrite this. Apparently, the bishops feel the government is obligated to fund an adoption service that deliberately limits the pool of adoptive parents, rather than giving its money to adoption services that accept more potential parents and therefore place more kids. “In the name of tolerance, we’re not being tolerated,” one of the bishops has told the New York Times, which reports that these bishops fear "an escalating campaign by the government to trample on their religious freedom."

To those bishops, I can only say: get over it. If you feel that it is important to keep orphans from being adopted by gay couples, and want to run a heterosexual-only adoption service, you can do it with donations from like-minded donors. You're not being "persecuted" because the government won't fund it for you. Taxpayers don't want their money spent to keep orphans from being adopted. Keeping orphans from being adopted because your religion currently teaches certain ideas about gayness is also not a public benefit. And as far as intolerance for the Catholic faith goes: baby, if this feels like persecution to you, you have clearly arrived. Nobody's set fire to a nunnery in this town for a long, long time.

Today's religious right defines "freedom of religion" as the freedom to use public resources, and public authority, in order to further the goals of their own specific religion. But almost without exception, the groups who feel "persecuted" by the government's religious neutrality are the groups who would never have been tolerated in the United States under the kind of arrangement they're currently agitating for. The Catholics, evangelicals, and Latter-Day Saints, for example are all traditionally disfavored religious groups who have only managed to thrive in this country because the Establishment Clause defends their religious freedom through tolerant neutrality. Their attacks on "tolerance" and "liberalism" as a kind of persecution is an attack on the very things that have shielded them from persecution in this country. It's like watching people trying to tear the roof off their own house. They might succeed in leading this country into a new period of deep religious intolerance. What they won't succeed in doing is escaping that intolerance themselves. It wouldn't just be the people that the religious right dislikes who would become targets if they ever got their way. And God forbid that they ever do.

The Other Shoe Dropping

2011-12-28T13:35:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted from Dagblog

Last night, thanks to Annie Laurie from Balloon Juice, I finally understood what the Republicans are about to do to themselves.

I've been thinking of primary voters choosing whether to run Mitt Romney or to run an undisciplined crazy person.

Of course, they will end up running Mitt Romney and an undisciplined crazy person. Of course they will. They're just working out which one.

Now I don't feel well.

Nostalgia for Hypocrisy (and the War on Christmas)

2011-12-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's Christmas time, which means "War on Christmas" time, which means a whole bunch of bizarre complaints about persecution by members of an overwhelmingly privileged religious majority group. This bad behavior is often understood as part of the most intense and fire-breathing American Christianists' fire-breathing intensity. But that's only half the story, or maybe less. The support for more public displays of Christianity comes from two very distinct groups: one group of very intense church-goers and another group that spends little or no time in any kind of formal worship. (Flavia got me thinking about this second group with a great post about Rick Perry's appeal to the people who aren't "in the pew every Sunday" but who nonetheless feel uncomfortable with gays.) If that seems paradoxical, the thing to understand is that the second group wants more public religiosity precisely because they have no particular religious practice of their own.

The familiar Christianist groups take the position that they can't exercise their freedom of religion unless they can exercise it everywhere, and for them exercising their religion means constantly attempting to spread it by any means necessary. Those believers cannot tolerate any religiously neutral public square, because they feel obligated to claim everything they can for their particular version of Christ. That's a coherent but wrong-headed position, which basically insists on the bitter sectarian struggles that the Establishment Clause is designed to prevent (struggles that the Founders could picture all too clearly). These groups want school prayer, public Nativity displays, and monuments to the Ten Commandments because they want to establish their (very, very specific) version of Christianity and disestablish the rest. As part of that process, they want to turn every inch of the public square into a site of red-hot theological controversy.

But the other group who's interested in public displays of religion is interested in an extremely bland and unobjectionable Christianity, with no religious controversy or debate at all. They want religious displays that are specifically Christian, but not specific to any group of Christians; the goal is something that 90%-95% of self-identified Christians can sign off on without feeling bothered. Yes, that excludes and marginalizes all of the Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and so forth. But it turns out that excluding only the Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and Jews without also excluding more than 5 or 10% of the Christians is a very complicated proposition. It demands minimal content and superficial symbolism; since Christian groups agree on so little, you can absolutely not afford to get into even a limited discussion of what any of this means. The question of how to be a good Christian, of how to put Christian moral values into action, is right off the table. There's a reason that so much Christmas and Easter symbolism is not actually religious; Christians don't have centuries-old disagreements about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But we can't talk about Mary for more than five minutes before hitting some deep-seated differences. Santa Claus is a much safer topic of conversation. The need to avoid controversy makes America's public Christianity so watered-down and superficial that it's really religion in name only, symbolism without content.

Now, taking away those nominal and minimal expressions of Christianity, the Nativity scenes in front of Town Hall or the little rote prayer in home room, doesn't change anything if you actually, you know, go to church, or read the Bible, or pray. If you have an active faith life, you're going to get plenty of chances for devotion without needing to have a cross displayed in the airport around certain holidays. I don't need a big Nativity diorama in the public square.There's one in my church. My spouse and I own one. If I needed to see one on my block, I'd buy an outdoor version and put it in front of the house. I have no need for little gestures of public piety because I actually go to services, which (unlike the little gestures), involve genuine religious content and require genuine religious thought. But you really miss those empty and trivial religious gestures if the empty and trivial gestures are all you have. It's not a blow to me if the staff at Target don't say "Merry Christmas," because Target is not my primary place of worship.

There are plenty of Americans who like to think of themselves as Christians without actually doing anything about that, who don't go to services, don't read or think about any religious writings, and certainly don't do anything so outrageous as to give to the poor or follow any of Jesus's directives about mercy or compassion. But they like to think of themselves as Christians, and taking away the token gestures makes them face the reality that they don't even have a church to go to. The "War on Christmas" bothers them because it impinges on their no-cost, no-effort religious identity.

What many of these Christians-in-their-own-minds miss is the sense of an established national religion that those lame and superficial Christian gestures helped to create. They're not longing for America as a Christian Nation, in the current idiomatic sense: they don't want a society where religious hard-liners set the agenda for the rest of us. They want a strictly notional but national "Christianity," a shared recognition for a lukewarm and nearly content-free faith. They want Christianity as a badge of social cohesion and a symbol of tradition. In fact, they like public expressions of Christianity precisely because it excludes Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. But they don't actually want any public practice of Christianity. The actual teachings of Christianity are irrelevant, because they're not using Christianity as a religion per se; they're using it as a way to promote social solidarity and in-group identity and other goals that are not religious in nature. It's very common for national religions to become more national than religious. That's another reason that the Founders didn't like them. National churches bury the genuine believers inside a crowd of conformists and hypocrites who are there to get along or get ahead instead of getting to heaven. (You may have heard a claim that no one can serve two masters at once. That never gets mentioned in those vague and nominal expressions of public Christianity.)

When you read conservative pundits, especially "moderate" or "centrist" pundits bemoaning our secular age and the loss of our civic religion, etc. etc. etc., remember what they're pining for is an era of meaningless lip service to a vague and denuded parody of Christianity. In essence, those pundits are feeling nostalgia for hypocrisy. And I suppose that hypocritical expressions of loyalty to a lukewarm religion have their uses, but I don't want any part of them. National and civic goals should be pursued by national and civic means. Religions, on the other hand, should be left to their own goals, thinking about their followers' spiritual and moral development rather than serving sociological cohesion. It's a pretty simple principle really: give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and give to God's what is God's. And no, that's not from the Federalist.

Season's greetings, all. May you each keep the winter holidays in your own ways, and prosper in the New Year.

Free Advice for Hate-Mongers (About Those Gay Troops)

2011-12-13T11:52:00.000-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Hey there, conservatives. I know a bunch of you have had a good ride bashing on gays in the military for most of the last twenty years. (If you're a conservative who hasn't, good for you. You can ignore the following advice, with my hearty compliments.) And I know those of you who've been doing the public hating also hate to give up a good thing. Now that gays are openly serving in the military, I understand that it feels like time to double down. The issue's always been a winner for you before. Why wouldn't it be a winner now?

Here's your problem. For the last twenty years, you've been arguing against the idea of gays serving our country in the military. And since no one could be in uniform and out of the closet at the same time, you could serve up all the scary fantasies you could imagine; you do have a talent for serving up those fantasies. But now that our gay soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are openly gay, you aren't arguing against a hypothetical policy any more. Now you are publicly attacking real people. And the people you're attacking are American soldiers and marines during a war.

When you were attacking imaginary gay soldiers for doing vague imaginary bad things, you could pass yourself off as guardians of tradition. But when you are attack American servicemen and women who are serving in a war zone, it makes you look crazy, unpatriotic, and mean. That's not a coincidence. It really is a crazy, mean, and unpatriotic thing to do. And that's what it looks like.

If you want to make this a central campaign issue, that's fine with me. You'll get pummeled, and I'll enjoy watching. If that seems impossible to believe, let's put it this way: there have always been gays in our military, but they could not admit it. That allowed you to say whatever vile thing you liked about them without being contradicted by inconvenient facts. Now those same gay soldiers and Marines can speak up for themselves, and even more importantly, they can let their service to our country do the talking. Some of those people have served three or four tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, your main contribution to the war effort has been attacking the character of the guy who served those three tours. I wouldn't call attention to that if I were you.

Merry Christmas. It's a good time for kindness and decency. And it's never too late to start.

Kevin Hogan Is a Great Teacher; Mike Beaudet's a Pornographer

2011-11-30T21:32:00.001-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Twenty years ago I got my first teaching job, as one of two young English teachers hired by a little high school in greater Boston. The other new teacher was a guy named Kevin Hogan. Kevin was already a much better teacher than I was, assured while I was struggling, deft where I was stumbling, natural in the classroom in a way I wouldn't be until years later. The kids loved him. I liked and admired him. I certainly didn't feel any shame in being the second-best rookie English teacher in the building (and I was a very distant second); I was just figuring things out, and Kevin was obviously and enormously talented.

We each left that school after a couple of years, and lost touch. I eventually went to graduate school and became a college teacher. Kevin ultimately remained a high school teacher, and a coach, becoming chair of the English department at a highly regarded charter school. The last time I saw him was on his wedding day.

Over the last two days Kevin has been been publicly dragged through the mud by a scandal-monging Boston TV reporter named Mike Beaudet, who ambushed him in a parking lot during Thanksgiving week. If you want the details of the scandal, you can already find them spread humiliatingly across the internet; I'm not going to collude in Kevin's humiliation. Kevin has been suspended from his job. He is in real danger of being fired. And he will likely never find another job as a teacher. That is a sad thing, and not just for Kevin. Teaching may be the single best thing he does for the world, and the world will be much the poorer if he leaves the classroom.

Many of Kevin's students, past and present, have rallied to support him. So have some of the parents, and many readers and viewers, who are angry at Beaudet's voyeurism and at his TV station's low journalistic standards. Setting out to ruin a person is not investigative reporting, and it's not a public service. Beaudet does not pretend that Kevin has done anything remotely illegal, or that he did the things he's being shamed for while employed at the school where he teaches now. And no one pretends that it did any harm to his students or, indeed, affected them in any way. Like most students, they didn't know anything about their high school teacher's private life. But then that private life was put on TV.

Watching Beaudet ambush Kevin is sickening. There is no goal except to confront an unsuspecting person with humiliating information, on camera. They don't need an interview to report the story. What Beaudet really wants is to make some pornography: he wants to degrade another human being on camera, inviting his viewers to take pleasure from that spectacle of degradation, and to make money from it. Like porn, Beaudet's little scene dehumanizes the person on camera, strips away his dignity and invites us to see him not as a person but as an object whose sufferings we can enjoy. But at least a pornographic movie is made with the performers' consent; Beaudet doesn't do that. He has gone out to degrade and dehumanize a person who has not agreed, someone he does not allow to say no. He's just going to violate someone on camera. If it were actual pornography, it would be illegal.

It's a very hard thing to watch done to someone you like and admire. But liking and admiring them isn't even what makes it hard; the hard part is just watching it done to someone you know. The process demands that you imagine the victim as someone not quite real, someone who makes no demands on your sympathy or your shared humanity. TV wants to turn us all into sideshow freaks and sideshow gawkers, jeering and staring. But when you see that happen to someone whom you cannot forget is an actual person, it's like a kick in the stomach.

If you must watch the clip, let me say that the Kevin I know appears only for a split second, just at the start. For the rest of the ambush, once he's realized what's happening, he can only try to escape or hide. But in the instant that Beaudet approaches him, asking something that Kevin initially doesn't understand, Kevin turns toward him slightly with a warm laugh, not because Beaudet's said anything funny but because Kevin uses the laugh to put people at ease and create rapport. He's begun doing that so fast that you could miss it. Some stranger has asked Kevin a strange question; his instinct is to draw that person into a friendly exchange, and before you notice he's already started doing it. A second or two later Kevin realizes that he's being attacked, and he shuts down. But that quick initial flash of warmth is pure Kevin; it took me back twenty years. It's what makes him so easy to like. It's what makes him so good in the classroom. That's the talent that Mike Beaudet wants to push out of the schools. That's the person he doesn't want you to see at all.

Let's Not Have a Revolution

2011-11-23T12:09:00.001-05:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Dear Authorities:

I would like very much not to have a revolution. I know that you don't want one either. I prefer my change peaceful and democratic. You, I suspect, prefer any changes to be strictly top-down, decided upon by the existing power structure. But neither of us want lawless, spasmodic change. So please take my advice: leave the protestors the hell alone.

I know like the Occupy Protests seem like too much to you, that they're going on too long and spreading too far. There is a reason that you think this. You are completely out of your minds. You have lost all sense of perspective.

We have real problems in this country, problems that long since became unacceptable. And he have a power structure that declares even the most modest, common-sense solutions to those problems unacceptable. Limiting the pay of bankers whose banks were being propped up with tax dollars? Impossible! Raise the taxes of the super-wealthy by a small increment! Unthinkable! Use the Federal Reserve to reduce the unemployment rate, as the Federal Reserve is officially charged to do? Too radical! Fine. But don't tell us that being angry about these things is unacceptable, too. Something's got to give. And if you can't deal with peaceful protests, you're essentially demanding less peaceful protests somewhere down the line.

It's been nine percent unemployment for years now. The miracle is that the protests didn't start earlier. If you ignore the suffering of large groups of citizens over long periods of time, this is what happens. Now, it's obvious that Washington, Wall Street, and the mainstream media have no interest in taking the concerns of average Americans into account. At the moment, the big kerfuffle in Washington is a fight between the party that wants to pass some counter-productive budget cuts in the middle of a long recession and the party that wants to pass massive counter-productive budget cuts. And the hand-wringing is that the bipartisan "supercommittee" failed to reach a collegial consensus on how much to hurt the economy. That's madness.

Mass protests serve an important political function. They give the people in power a reality check. When angry people are in the street, it's time to figure out what's not working. A healthy and sane government tries to figure out the underlying problem and fix it, so that the anger diminishes. A rigid and unhealthy regime commits to ignoring those problems, and tries to shut down the protests so it can go back to ignoring them. That is an invitation for the public anger to grow, and for the public to give up on the regime. And that, bizarrely, is what we've seen in America over the last weeks. I never thought that I would see it in this country. And it is very disheartening to see this foolish and counter-productive police response to such manageable and reasonably-sized protests. The overreaction suggests that many of our ruling class are much more frightened, and much less practical, than I ever dreamed. It's amazing that they would draw the line this early.

It's shocking to find that America's current rulers are stupid enough to go to what is essentially the Hosni Mubarak playbook, especially when they just saw how that works out. It's even more disturbing to think that centrist American politicians have been looking at the Arab Spring and identifying with the dictators. That they've drawn exactly the wrong conclusion, trying to crack down harder on protests. Here's the lesson: you can't crack down hard enough, ever. Sooner or later, you have to give people what they want. If you don't, they'll get it without you.

America has survived because it's been flexible; the system has changed over time to keep from breaking down completely. We haven't had a revolution for the last two centuries because we've always managed to reform the system enough to maintain order; maybe not to reform it as much as we should have, but enough that we didn't completely break down.

This is one of those times that demand big changes, the kind that have seemed out of the question to the people in charge. But those changes have to come, one way or another. They are no longer out of the question. If the people in charge want to stay in charge, they need to do the reforming. It that seems impossible to them, sooner or later it will happen without them. It looks today like it will happen without them. My only hope is to get rid of those people through our existing political process, before something worse happens. Revolutions are messy and people get hurt. Bad decisions get made. I'd like to live the rest of my life without one. But if the voters' welfare doesn't matter any more, there's going to be a change. Resisting change with violence is the surest way to make that change violent. So, please, authorities: call off the cops, take a deep breath, and let's figure this out at the ballot box.

The Cain Scrutiny

2011-11-08T01:33:00.001-05:00

Cross-posted from Dagblog.com
Hello, GOP primary voters. I know you're feeling upset about the new and graphic charges against Herman Cain. And I know that many of you blame white liberals, like myself, for allegedly drumming up these allegations to keep Cain from winning your nomination. But let me say on behalf of my fellow honky pinkos that this one really, really wasn't us. Because, you see, we would love for Herman Cain to win your nomination. Oh please, please, please vote for him anyway. There's no one we'd rather see run against Barack Obama in the fall. We're willing to beg here.
I won't lie to you. If Herman Cain became the nominee and then terrible and scandalous new information came out about him just before Columbus Day weekend, that probably would be us. We have no problem letting people know about ugly things your candidates have done. But what we would really never do is mess with your primaries so that your weak candidates give your strong candidates less trouble. And, brother, is Herman Cain a lousy candidate: much, much weaker than Mitt Romney, whom we probably dislike more than you do. If there's any way that you can keep Romney from getting the nomination, we'd be grateful. And we'd certainly never do anything that gets in the way of that. Go Herman!
I know that many of you have this theory that if you nominate an "American Black Conservative" then black voters will flock to the GOP and abandon Obama. Last night, as I drove through our country trying to find Monday Night Football on AM, I heard many people discussing this theory as established fact. But sinister white liberals like me are not so worried about what will happen if Obama ever faces a black conservative at the polls because, try to follow along now, that has already happened. It was 2004. It was Alan Keyes. It was not suspenseful.
Yes, I know that you're deeply committed to not remembering anything that happened in that time period, and even more committed to not drawing obvious, common-sense conclusions from the events of those days. But liberals like me have this weird bias toward evidence. If you want to know what would happen if you tried something (such as banning handguns, or investing in railroads, or running an eccentric black conservative against Barack Obama), we suggest looking at what actually did happen when that was tried before. I know this approach sounds odd to you. Treating it as a pure thought experiment that happens to give the result you want is probably more accurate. But even so, if you want to make Mr. Keyes Herman's running mate, we'd be cool with that.
Barack Obama has lost an election to another African-American candidate. That candidate is Mr. Bobby Rush. Now, we know you don't have a huge supply of former Black Panther Party members in your candidate pool. But if you want to take a big slice of the African-American vote away from Obama, we'd suggest you find someone like Rush: someone more, and not less, outspoken about white racism than Obama is, someone more warmly disposed to old-school social welfare than Obama is, someone who is further to the traditional left than Obama is. If you have anyone like that, we'd be happy for you to nominate that person, too.

Shakespeare, Oxford, and the 1%

2011-11-03T17:44:00.002-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last weekend, Hollywood released Anonymous, a costume drama whose promotional materials ask "Was Shakespeare a Fraud?" They're not really asking the question; the movie clearly promotes the argument that it was "really" Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who wrote the plays. The studio has also sent out course materials to schools, so that teachers can teach students to ~~think critically about~~ embrace the idea that Oxford wrote Shakespeare.

If you followed media coverage of the movie, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the "authorship controversy" is a lively and interesting debate. If you looked at the documentary record from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, you'd find that actually it's pretty boring. We have a large stack of historical documents that explicitly name William Shakespeare, the actor from Warwickshire, as the author of those plays and poems. No one from the time shows any doubt about this. We have lots of witnesses who identify Shakespeare, by name, as the writer. We have no witnesses who name Oxford, or Bacon, or anybody else. The math isn't hard.

Now, some Oxfordians will tell you that when a historical document from the sixteenth century says "William Shakespeare" that actually means "Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford," because "William Shakespeare" was his pseudonym. (I'm not making that up. That is a standard Oxfordian claim.) Why do they believe this? Because they really, really want to.

(I'm not going to go further into this issue, but if you wish to hear fuller arguments you might go here, here, here, or here; the comment thread in the last link features screenwriter John Orloff's angry and not-thoroughly-competent attempts to argue back. And the best book on this subject is James Shapiro's superb Contested Will.)

Why does this matter? Because ultimately, this conspiracy theory is about the desire to claim that Shakespeare is in the 1%. Only an aristocrat, the conspiracy theorists say, someone in a tiny elite on top of the social and economic pyramid, could have created such art. The stakes here are to make William Shakespeare's works the property of the inherited elite.

The Oxfordian argument is, in short, a crasser and crazier version of a process that is going on all the time, in which the small elite of the super-wealthy are given credit for the achievements of the rest of society. Not only are they allowed to hog the fruits of everyone else's industry and ingenuity, but they demand to be given credit for that intelligence and labor as well. (See, for example, the "job creators" meme, which imagines wealth creation in a capitalist marketplace as the gracious gift of Lord Bountiful.) The claim, ultimately, is that we NEED to coddle the 1%, because that 1% creates everything good, such as the works of Shakespeare. All those middle-class actors, poets, and audience members were just obstacles to aristocratic genius.

And the Oxfordians' campaign displays a lot of the standard features that we see in pro-elitist propaganda campaigns:

There's the fake populism, that poses as an attack on the smug "elite" of university professors, although the actual point of the whole enterprise is to take credit away from William Shakespeare and give it to someone more elite. (And for the record, I'm not asking you to take my word for any of this because I have a Ph.D. I'm simply pointing out that there's a whole pile of evidence that you could check out yourself.) Part of the point, as always, is that middle-class professionals are to be attacked when they don't serve the super-elite agenda, like those greedy, lying climate scientists.

There's the false-equivalence press coverage, with the "on-the-one-hand" lead-in, which makes each "side" of any controversy sound equally plausible even when one of those sides has, basically, nothing.

There's the paranoid shifting of the burden of proof, so that questioners demand proof that there is not a conspiracy instead of offering any proof that there might be. Can you prove that when people said "William Shakespeare" they didn't mean someone else? Can you prove that George Soros isn't behind this?

And, of course, there's the character assassination. The historical William Shakespeare can't just be presented as a middle-class man of middling education. He has to be a completely illiterate and unprincipled buffoon. (It always blows my mind that these conspiracy theories portray Elizabethan actors, who typically performed six different plays a week and tended to have two or three dozen roles in their head at a time, as unable to read. How the hell would they learn their parts?) Anyone who's not in the 1% must be lazy, stupid, and so forth. Because meritocracy, of course, is for the lazy.

Because of that, the historical inaccuracy that most enraged me about Anonymous had nothing to do with Shakespeare. It had to do with the Essex Rebellion, an actual (documented) historical event that took place in 1601. The glamorous Earl of Essex, the Earl of Southampton, and a bunch of other aristos decided to have a coup against Elizabeth. They paid Shakespeare's acting company to put on his Richard II, which is about deposing an English monarch, before the balloon went up. (Emmerich's movie gets the play wrong, but never mind.) The idea was that the people of London would rally to Essex's cause.

And in Emmerich's movie, that's what happens. The common people get so moved by watching a Shakespeare play that they charge across London bridge as a mob, hoping to put the Earl of Essex on the English throne. (In Emmerich's movie Essex is secretly Elizabeth's son, as are Southampton, Oxford, and heaven knows who else. Can you prove they weren't?) And then Elizabeth's soldiers massacre them with cannon, on London Bridge.

That is a lie. No one rallied to Essex. No force was used against the citizens who rallied to Essex's side, because none of them did. Angry crowds had formed in London before, and they would again, but no one ran into the streets to fight for the right of an over-entitled aristocrat to get even more of his way. Essex was in fact counting on the public to rally behind him. They did not. His revolt was over before the afternoon was.

So whatever else you choose to believe, let's amend that historical lie. Essex, the entitled aristocrat, was not the hero, and the people of London did not see his botched revolution as heroic.

Some of the wealthy and privileged have done great things with their wealth. Others have not. But there's no need to rewrite history to suit the fantasies of the uppermost class.

No Plan on Wall Street

2011-10-07T16:27:00.001-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's become disturbingly clear that the people occupying Wall Street, and the centers of several other major American cities, have no plan for the future. No vision. No coherent ideas. No sense at all of what to do next.

I'm not talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Expecting a protest movement to have a shovel-ready legislative agenda is silly. If there were a bill in Congress or an existing major-party platform that would make these people happy, they wouldn't be a protest movement. They'd be a lobbying movement. I'm talking about the people who occupy Wall Street on normal days. They have been entrusted with a huge influence over our national economy, and heavily subsidized by our taxes. And three years into our economic crisis, they're just plugging along as if nothing had happened, doing the same things they used to do in the boom times. They have no plan at all.

The people occupying the Federal Reserve have no coherent plan. Most of them realize that something is badly wrong with the economy, but they have no actionable agenda for fixing it, and a few of them actually worry that workers' incomes will grow too high. That's just fantasy land.

The people occupying the Treasury Department are callow idlers, more dedicated to maintaining a certain kind of lifestyle than to addressing our structural economic problems. Timothy Geithner expresses his desires for the economy, but has no plan that could actually be put into practice. Geithner apparently has no idea of what to do.

The people occupying Washington, DC have no practical grasp of the situation. They have some incoherent sound bites, they have a grab-bag of small-bore proposals that don't address the big problems, and they have deeply impractical ideological commitments to ideas that would make things worse. They have allowed their encampments to generate into chaotic, directionless debates between people who want to do too little about our problems and people who want to do nothing about our problems. They are not putting forward any sensible or workable program.

The people occupying major newspapers and news channels have an unrealistic and immature grasp of basic realities. They are incapable of articulating solutions to our national problems, or of talking about them in anything but the most emotional and incoherent terms. They don't even know what it is they're asking for.

The people who occupy positions of our power in our society do not have a coherent plan for the nation's future or any idea how to address our economic woes. They have emotional attachments to a certain way of doing things, but no serious or concrete plan for making things better. Some of the people who occupy those positions of power, wealth and privilege fault the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators for not providing the kinds of workable proposals that the leadership class has failed to provide. But the obligation to provide those plans is on the people who occupy the positions of leadership. Angry crowds without a specific plan are understandable. A leadership class without a specific plan is an abdication of duty. And the angry crowds are the natural result of leaders who offer no solutions.

The message of Occupy Wall Street is messy and multivocal and muddled. Different protestors say different things. Of course. But when you step back a little from all those angry voices, you can hear a pretty clear set of demands:

THIS IS NOT WORKING.

STOP PRETENDING THAT THIS IS OKAY.

WE CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE OF THIS.

DO SOMETHING.

If you occupy a place of power or influence in our country, if you want to preserve that place for yourself, then you would do well to start your to-do list with those items. Nothing else is going to work.

Farewell, Little Phone

2011-10-06T23:06:00.004-04:00

I recently changed cellphones, for only the second time in my life. I held onto my first cellphone for five dented, dinged and battered years, and did not replace it until it vanished on me entirely -- possibly because it had at long last dissolved into its constituent atoms -- while I was traveling.

I bought my second phone on that trip, because I couldn't afford to be out of touch until I got home, and because on the last leg of the trip I was supposed to stop off for a brief visit with someone whom I was not dating exactly, but very tentatively exploring the possibility of dating. Standing said person up with the "lost my cell phone" excuse seemed like it would be an admission that I wasn't really an adult. So I got a new phone and programmed the tentatively-possibly-almost date's number into it.

It felt a bit odd to make such an iffy romantic prospect, if "romantic" was even the right word, the first number in my address book, especially because I temporarily entered her as one of the five close friends that I got to call for free. I wouldn't have anyone else's number until I got home, and there seemed to be no point in paying for cell minutes when I didn't have to. I certainly wasn't going to tell her that she was "in my five", even for a day, because that would have seemed creepy. And I was planning on switching her out when I got back and dug through my address book.

As it turned out, she stayed in the five for the rest of that phone's life. Five days ago, I married her.

Our marriage involves a lot of travel back and forth between the city where I work and the city where my spouse lives. I traded in that second phone, the one that I bought in order to keep our maybe/maybe-not coffee date, for a smartphone that helps make the weekly travel possible. A small part of what it takes to keep my specific marriage healthy is GPS capability, hardcore weather applications, and the ability to cope with my work e-mail (and open attachments) from highway rest areas and truck stops. The new phone also has a handy traffic widget that calculates the length of the commute back to my spouse, so that I can sit in my office late in the afternoon and watch the end of my weekly drive slip further and further away. In an odd way, I recommend it.

The phone I just replaced had one special feature: years of text messages, which I had left unerased, starting from shortly before we began our relationship until a few weeks before our wedding. They started with updates from the road the night before the coffee date, my side of the conversation full of oddities as I fumbled with a new autocorrect system, and then came weeks of flirtatious banter and jokes, gradually settling down into a snapshots from a maturing relationship. By the end, the text messages were mostly prosaic, bits of literal and figurative housekeeping between domestic partners coordinating their errands: picking up dinner, picking up cat litter, picking up the car from the shop. The messages told a story, and eventually that story got dull, because the happy ending had already come by.

I'll miss that little phone, and those hundreds of little messages, much as I occasionally miss our old apartments and our months of courtship. By that I mean: only a little bit, when I'm feeling wistful, with no sense that anything's really missing. The texts that I send these days tend to be simple and boring. Mostly they just say, I am coming home. That's all I want to say.

Forgetting September 11

2011-09-11T00:07:00.001-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's strange to be cajoled, everywhere you turn, to "remember" September 11. It's not like we've forgotten it. Who needs a reminder of this? It's like being told "Remember gravity!"or "Remember oxygen!" I am reminded every day, thanks. It's all around us.

I used to think very specifically about the September 11th attacks at least twice a day, for the simple reason that I owned a clock. Every day, morning and evening, one digital display or another would flash that 9:11 at me and I would notice. I would also be reminded when working out at the gym, nine minutes and eleven seconds after I had started on each particular machine; since I often used two or three on indoor-cardio days, I could count on my heart rate spiking two or three times every session. On September 11, 2006, I think I did exactly nine minutes and eleven seconds, as fast and as hard as I could, on five machines. I didn't need a reminder about the fifth anniversary, either.

Sometimes, these days, I look at my watch and it's nine thirteen, or nine seventeen. When I'm doing penance on the exercise bike I no longer tend to notice when the 551st second of the workout goes past. And I no longer look at all the big flat-screens at the gym with that dreadful apprehension I used to feel, thinking of what a horrible place that room would be the next time we were attacked, how it would be to have all those TVs playing the next September 11th footage at once. These days I can go two weeks, sometimes three, without experiencing a visual memory of people falling to their deaths. Is that forgetting September 11? Hell no. I'll remember the attacks until I'm put in the ground myself. There's no forgetting. It's too late.

It's true that I now remember September 11th differently than I did two or five years after the attacks. It no longer feels as if I am reliving the experience of the original day. I no longer feel the full emotion of that day seizing my body, the shock and numbed fury and stomach-churning grief. Or perhaps I should say that memory brings me those emotions less often, and less fully. I can think of that day without locking myself in an instant replay. I can remember it as part of a whole. But that is not forgetting. It's only in the last five years or so that it has become a genuine memory. Before that it was a flashback.

Sometimes, when I hear people saying "Never forget," what I hear them trying to say is "Do not change the way you remember those events. Do not gain distance from the feelings that you experienced that day. Do not allow the passage of time to change your perspective. Do not let September 11th diminish in significance. Make sure it looms across your awareness the way it did that morning, blocking out everything else, as if there would never be any other, newer day. Do not move your heart from that day." Maybe not everyone who says it means that, and probably not all of them mean all of it. But it's hard for me to know what else they could be saying, when they're talking about not forgetting things that are impossible to forget.

There are people who remember events in the past as clearly as if they are living them, every single day. They're called trauma victims. Many of our veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq can remember the traumas of battle there as if they had never left, as if the most terrible eighty seconds of their lives had never stopped happening. In fact, they can't not remember those horrible events, so they really will be in Afghanistan or Iraq until those memories become less vivid and intense, until they become painful memories instead of return tickets to hell.

Part of the response to a terrible event such as September 11th is to attach importance to it. The pain and horror you felt on that day can only make sense if it is somehow for a reason, if that event that cost you so unbearably much is monumental and unforgettable. That's an understandable reaction. But making that bargain means giving the terrible event power over you forever. Refusing to move on, because you need to honor the original pain, someday becomes a way to increase the pain. And you let the trauma take over your life.

I understand that many, many people need to find a meaning in the terrible events. But I cannot bring myself to. The things that happened that day were only bad, unbearably bad. They achieved nothing good. They had no reason. The were fully and entirely wrong. We did not become a better or stronger country because three thousand of us were murdered. We were a good country already, and we did not deserve to be attacked that way. No one who was killed, no one who lost anyone, deserved that loss. And we did not learn any lesson. Osama bin Ladin had nothing to teach us. He never could have. I will not give the terrorists or their murders credit that they do not deserve. I will not make September 11th the most important day in our history. It was only one of the worst.

And I will confess that it has always been my hope, since even a few days after the attacks, that September 11th would be forgotten over time. Not for me, or by me. It's too late for anyone of my generation. But I want, have always wanted, for those days to become a distant, historical memory for the next generation to be born, and the generation after that. I want September 11th to become a boring fact in a history book, no sadder and no more important than Antietam or Little Big Horn or the Battle of Long Island. Because it won't be until the memory of September 11th fades that we have won.

The things that your country remembers forever are the defeats it did not come back from. The scars. The wounds. If our grandchildren think of September 11th the way we do, with shock and fear, if they are still angry about September 11 fifty years from today, it will be because we failed, because we never returned to being the country we once were. The point of fighting terrorism is for our grandchildren to live in a world where they are not in fear of terrorism. If they are still furious, and still fighting, fifty years from today, then we will have lost. I hope, I pray, for September 11th to become a faded and forgotten memory, a footnote written by violent men whose violence could not change the main course of history.

Comic-Con and the GOP Primaries

2011-09-07T21:18:00.004-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

I spent a lot of the summer driving U-Haul trucks instead of blogging, so I didn't keep up with the early Republican jostling. Tonight, I'm going to do something useful with my time, so watching the Republican debate is out of the question. But the New York Times published a great piece about the Republican's political situation three months back. It simply didn't use the words "republican" or politics. It was a piece about movie studios and Comic Con.

Comic-Con, of course, is the country's biggest comic book convention, held in every summer in San Diego. It's an annual Mecca for fans of superheroes, science fiction movie franchises, and fantasy mass media. It's a place for people who can discuss Boba Fett's family history in detail, who have turned their smartphones into startlingly detailed replicas of Captain Kirk's communicator device, and people who not only come dressed as little-known comic book heroes but can sustain detailed arguments about the best alternate version of that character. (In other words, these are my people.) And media companies long ago realized that Comic Con was the best place to roll out new computer games and to promote big summer movies. The relatively small group of hard-core fans (and by "relatively small" I mean a hundred thousand and change) can build enthusiasm and word of mouth for upcoming science-fiction movies and video games, and they turn out to be the classic influential subgroup. Get those hundred-plus-thousand fans revved up, and they will go out and rev up millions of more casual fans across the country. They are the grass-roots activists for mass-media science fiction. They are Hollywood's base.

But it turns out that there can be misfires. The base is not simply a more intense version of the general population; they are, inevitably, distinct from that population. So sometimes movies that seem like perfectly good bets are in fact ruined by a poor reception at Comic-Con, often for reasons that movie executives didn't see coming and that the general movie-going public won't care about. (The Comic-Con fans might have very strong opinions, for example, about which version of the Green Lantern story gets filmed.) So they can kill things that might otherwise be viable. At the same time they can become rapturously excited about movies that ultimately appeal only to very hard-core fans, leading studios to invest tens of millions of dollars in films that then make, say, threes of millions of dollars. The base doesn't just like things more than the average person does. They like different things.

So it is with either political party that becomes enthralled to its activist base. Viable wide-release candidates can get killed off because they have no niche appeal. Niche candidates can be treated like the Next Big Thing by a base that cannot believe that everyone has not been waiting forever for someone Exactly. Like. This! And sooner or later the parties,, like the studios, have to check their guts and ask how big a bet they want to lay on the convention crowd's sense of the world.

Fixing College Football: Pay the Kids, or Don't

2011-09-05T13:31:00.003-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

It's college football season, and that means corruption and scandal. (Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about that corruption.) We've actually gotten to the point where Sports Illustrated, not the Chronicle of Higher Education but Sports Illustrated, has called for a major university football team to be disbanded. But the moral conversation about college sports remains so focused on abstractions like tradition and idealism that the "moral" conversation itself is corrupt, and corrupting. Arguing about ideals is fine. Mistreating actual human beings in the service of your ideals is depraved. By that standard, few institutions in America are more fundamentally depraved than the NCAA. The ideal of the scholar-athlete is not a bad thing. But it becomes a bad thing when it is used to exploit and mistreat people and to promote dishonesty. The NCAA, which is essentially a group of college athletic directors, doesn't protect the kids who actually play college football and basketball, or allow them to behave honestly. It is actually focused on punishing the exploited kids even more, and on forcing them into hypocrisy. (One of the big football scandals this year centers on some players who traded their autographs for discounted tattoos. The NCAA views that as major wrongdoing.)

Let me propose two simple principles for college athletics: 1) the powerful should not abuse or exploit the powerless, and 2) lying is bad. That still leaves some room for things like school tradition, nostalgia, and the romance of the scholar-athlete, but those things have to operate inside the framework of the two principles. If your hallowed college traditions really can't survive without lying, exploitation and abuse, then something is wrong with your traditions and your school.

How should college football (and college basketball) continue without lying, cheating, and mistreating the players? Three steps.

1. Let colleges pay athletes openly. And make them pay.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with running a minor-league professional sports franchise. There is nothing wrong with an 18-year-old kid signing up with a minor-league sports team, getting a chance to develop as an athlete and hoping for a shot at the big leagues. And there is nothing wrong with that athlete getting paid. It's strenuous work, that involves both specialized skills and significant personal risk. When your enterprise is making millions of dollars off people who are risking concussions, spinal injuries, and damage to their ACLs, you should not be asking yourself if it would be wrong to pay them.

Nothing is wrong with a high school graduate who signs up with a minor league ball team. People who want to be professional baseball players but don't want to go to college have an avenue to do that. They get a job, and people pay them. Baseball players who do want to go to college are free to do so, and college baseball doesn't have the kinds of scandals that college football and basketball have. Kids who want to get paid in the pros do, and kids who would rather go to college do that instead. No one's confused. Nobody's lying. Neither minor-league baseball nor college baseball are hotbeds of corruption. And the most important reason for that is that the athletes are allowed to choose, and to pursue the rewards they actually value. A baseball player with no interest in a college education can just get a job, and those who want a degree can get one.

In football, and with a handful of exceptions in men's basketball, there is no choice. If you want to be an NFL player, you must first pretend to be a college student. You are not allowed to just train for your sport. Aspiring NFL and NBA players are forced to play for free, even when the colleges and coaches make many, many millions of dollars. (The sports media whines and moans when basketball stars get paying jobs after only a year or two of unpaid labor.) Talking about "amateurism" in this context is a lie, because the players do not choose to be amateurs. Rather, they are forced into unpaid labor by an unofficial but very effective cartel. The NCAA is, in effect, the price-fixing arm of the NFL and NBA.

If football players could choose between working as professional athletes or forgoing that in order to play college ball, then we could talk seriously about amateurism and scholar-athletes. In fact, many of the "amateurs" are indentured servants, and the education they are given in exchange for their labor is often a sham. The sheer demands of training in a pre-professional league such as, say, the Big Ten don't really leave the time, let alone the energy, for a serious full-time degree program. Pre-NFL football and pre-NBA basketball are consuming, round-the-clock pursuits. And when a player enters college ill-prepared as a student, which is pretty frequent, the intensity of the sports training program guarantees that they will never catch up. In fact, they'll keep falling further behind.

Colleges that wish to conduct pre-professional sports programs, with the big TV and ticket revenue, should be allowed to operate their professional teams openly and legally, dispensing with the fiction that the players are full-time students. The usual proposal that some new football minor league be created is unrealistic; that league would quickly be killed off by the existing college franchises, with their advanced development, capitalization, brand recognition and market share. A startup league could not compete with the professional-except-in-name-league. The solution is to rename the existing leagues and admit what they are.

Colleges who wish to do so should be allowed a charter or license to operate professional football and basketball franchises. They might be allowed some special tax exemption, so that the sports revenue can be used to run their non-profit. And they should be allowed to pursue different approaches. Some schools will want to operate their teams themselves. Others might outsource the sports franchise to professionals for a fixed annual revenue, essentially licensing the team's history and brand. (This should make schools conscious of the value of their brand.) Teams that go pro should be allowed to play teams that stay amateur, and vice versa. If Notre Dame wants to stay an amateur school, but keep playing teams that have become pro, they should be allowed. Whether or not this is a good idea will become clear in time.

Some schools, of course, will simply stay amateur, just as many have kept from having truly pre-professional teams. The Dartmouth Big Green is going to remain a team full of future surgeons and bond traders. Some schools will field a mix of amateurs and young pros, just as they do now, and that is also perfectly fine. Pro teams who want to add a college scholarship to their pay package should be permitted to do that, but not to stipulate that the scholarship be taken while the athlete is playing. (If you want to pay a kid to play tight end for three to six years, and give him the option of going to the sponsoring college for his BA when his playing days are over, that's a good thing.)

But if you're not going to educate a kid, pay him. If what he wants is playing time and a shot at the bigs, give him a salary and benefits. The market will work out the price for that. The economics of big-time college sports might change a bit. The coaches might not be able to demand seven-figure salaries when the players are no longer free. But an enterprise generating tens of millions of dollars, the way televised college football does, should be able to budget reasonable five-figure salaries for the kids whose bodies are out there on the field. And if big-time college sports can only make money by making the kids play for free, then it is morally indefensible.

2. Set up legal penalties for pretending to field amateurs

What you shouldn't be allowed to do is have a professional team and call them amateurs. This should not be policed by the NCAA, which has compromised morals and a ludicrous idea of what constitutes a penalty. Having a "high-minded" outside arbiter come in to "void" previous championships doesn't stop anything. Allowing people who have been wronged to sue on their own behalf, in court, can curb misbehavior quite effectively at times.

If a college sets up a professional team, or a team with a number of professionals on it, and then presents them as amateurs, then they are committing fraud. They are falsely pretending amateur status in order to increase fan interest, and they are defrauding the real amateur teams they play, who get made to look bad and whose student-players are put at physical risk. If a team full of pre-meds who train twenty hours a week wants to play a team full of young pros who train for eighty hours a week, that's one thing. But the amateurs, and their coaches, should know that they are playing the eighty-hour pros.

A team that falsely claims amateur status should be liable for all their football-based revenue, plus penalties, to the team they have played. If you want to get a prime holiday matchup against Notre Dame by claiming to be a bunch of scholar-athletes, and then use your under-the-table pros to beat up Notre Dame on TV, Notre Dame should be able to sue you for your share of the TV money, the ticket fees, the concessions and souvenir sales, the whole megillah. And the US Attorney should be able to come after you for fraud, including tax fraud. (Those who pay kids under the table do not pay employment taxes. QED.) The penalties have to be substantial, to make the financial risk of cheating prohibitive.

If boosters or assistant coaches have done the paying, the team should be held liable but allowed to recover their costs from the booster or assistant.

3. Set up legal penalties for infringing on the education provided to student-athletes.

If you're going to give a kid an education instead of cash, you should be required to give him the education. Telling a kid that his reward for playing football is a college education, but then making the demands of football so intense that he can't avail himself of that education, is the cruelest exploitation imaginable. If you're not going to give the athlete a salary, give him time to learn organic chemistry.

Don't let the NCAA set the rules for how many hours students can be made to train or practice every week, or how many classes they can miss for road games. Those rules and that policing have been completely ineffective. Give players who want the option of full-time sports training a chance to play in pro leagues, and allow scholarship athletes to sue if they are deprived of the value of their scholarship. This isn't about ideals or noble traditions. It's about contract law. Athletic scholarships offer a consideration in exchange for a service; you can get four years of tuition if you'll play on this specific team. If the student leaves the team, they give up the scholarship. But that has to cut both ways; if you're holding the eighteen-year-old to the requirement for athletic service, you have to let them get a real education. If you don't, they should be able to sue the school, and there should be potential criminal penalties as well. This of course will sound scandalous to many American sports fans, because it treats student athletics as real work, and the athletes as real people. It's considered terrible when a student athlete looks after his own interests. But if people are not allowed to take care of their own interests, or to be rewarded for their work, we aren't really having a moral conversation.

Palin's Goal: Looking for the DQ

2011-08-22T23:00:00.006-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Although it's been crowded out by actual news, there's been another uptick of interest in whether or not Sarah Palin will attempt to run for president. Palin herself is being even more inscrutable than usual these days. Her mixed messages seem baffling until you realize that Palin does not want what most people considering a presidential run want.

Most politicians considering a presidential campaign want to become President of the United States. They balance that desire against the grinding misery of actually running for the job: the endless daily schedule, the constant petty humiliation of raising funds, the life in a fishbowl. The usual question is whether you want the job so badly that you will sacrifice the rest of your life for a shot at it, and how realistic you believe that shot to be.

But Palin is facing a different question with different incentives. She doesn't want the job, and knows she can't win, but she wants to keep the campaign-mode freakshow going as long as she can. Most politicians try to sacrifice as little family privacy as they can while still getting elected governor. Palin quit her job as governor and put her family on reality TV. What other politicians see as the cost, Palin sees as the benefit, and she has no interest in holding office, which is what other politicians consider the prize.

I've argued before that Palin's profession has become potential presidential contender. She has stopped being a politician in order to play one on TV. The catch is that her media career is founded on the public's belief that she might make a serious run for the Oval Office. Once the general public understands that Palin will never get the Republican nomination, her A-list career will end and she will become a B- or C-list media figure. She'll still make very good money and be on TV, but she will make much less money and get much less attention than she does now.

The end of Palin's run on the A-list, if she sticks to the conventional choices a candidate faces, is roughly six months away. If she runs in the primaries, she will likely suffer a major defeat in New Hampshire and lose several other primaries pretty badly, and it will become obvious that she will never be a viable national candidate again. If she tries to avoid that defeat by sitting out, it will become clear that she is never running. Her core audience hates Obama, and will never accept that Palin sat out the 2012 campaign. Either way, Sarah Palin will stop being a hot commodity and become just another celebrity has-been.

I have always thought that Palin would use Obama's first term to rake in all the money she could, while she could, and then make her choice between the two conventional options. I no longer believe this is true. Palin does not want to relinquish her A-list status, and she is not willing to let the circus move on without her. Her strange behavior (the bus tour, the cancellation of the bus tour, staying out of the Iowa Straw Poll, showing up near the Iowa Straw Poll with her bus) only makes sense for a person who is trying to extend her political celebrity by not choosing. Palin wants to find a way to run and not to run at the same time. She can't get the 2012 nomination, and doesn't want it, but she also needs to keep people talking about her as a possible contender for 2016. She's looking to stay out of the race but stay around it.

Palin's perfect outcome would be to lose the race, but to lose in some way that does not seem like a real test of her political strength. If she loses a normal head-to-head matchup, she's finished. What she'd like to do is lose some strange, irregular contest that makes it look like she lost because of the freaky circumstances. Ideally, she would like to scapegoat someone else, like the Republican Party Establishment or Mitt Romney, and act the martyr. In Palin's perfect world, she would lose but people would walk away saying that she was robbed. Her goal is to create the impression that she has has not yet been given a fair shot.

Years ago, a Boston Globe columnist named Ron Borges predicted that Mike Tyson would either beat Evander Holyfield in the first three rounds or find a way to lose by disqualification. Tyson was no longer in shape to go the distance with another serious heavyweight, so if he couldn't knock out Holyfield in the first ten minutes, he would try to find a way to bail out by making the referees stop the fight. Tyson didn't want his weaknesses as a boxer to be exposed, Borges argued, so he would look for the DQ. That way, people wouldn't know for sure that he couldn't beat Holyfield. He didn't lose. He was disqualified.

Sure enough, in round three Tyson bit off a chunk of Holyfield's ear. And he had his DQ. That deepened Tyson's reputation as a freak, but it concealed the fact that he was no longer a real contender. It allowed Tyson (and others) to pretend that Tyson might have won if the match had gone all fifteen rounds. And more importantly, it allowed Tyson's managers to get him more big-money fights on pay-per-view, because he was still considered a contender.

Sarah Palin is cruising for some version of the political DQ. She wants to lose but somehow pin that loss on the refs, so that she can avoid having her weakness as a candidate exposed and continue pulling down big paydays at contender prices. This is not easy to do, and she may very well mismanage it, but I'm convinced that it is her goal.

I don't expect Palin to be in the primaries throughout the nominating season. I expect her to jump in midway through the primaries, or to bail out before Iowa and New Hampshire, or even both. She may well attempt to create some kind of drama at the convention, although Republican party rules no longer leave much room for that. (I think her dream would be to have herself put forward at a divided convention, and then lose and blame her loss on some back-room deal.) She might well try a write-in campaign in certain states, which insulates her from the loss because she wasn't even on the ballot. I think Palin herself is improvising, based on political events that are hard to predict. She's close to being displaced by other candidates at the moment, which was surely not in her plans, and she's certainly going to try something to get some media oxygen back.

What I don't expect Palin to do if she can help it is to risk a big loss in a straightforward primary or caucus. She lost Iowa, which was once a real opportunity for her, about eighteen months ago; there's no way to win that caucus without major campaign infrastructure on the ground, and Palin hasn't built it. She can't catch up with the other candidates now. New Hampshire has always been out of her reach, unless its Republican electorate has changed radically over the last few years. I don't expect Palin to allow herself to be on the ballot in either state, or really in Nevada. She might try to make a stand in South Carolina, if she sees a chance, but the chance might not be there. What's more likely is that Palin jumps into the campaign after the first primaries and caucuses are finished, and does some strange version of a campaign that gets a lot of attention, goes nowhere, and provides a built-in excuse for defeat. ("She wasn't even on the ballot in twenty-three states! Half the delegates had been chosen before she even declared!" Whatever.)

And if Palin seems likely to be exposed at the ballot box, I expect her to quit the campaign with whatever half-baked excuse seems handy. If she can't find a way to make her claim sound convincing, she'll just spew some paranoid accusations around. Sure, that will only make her look crazier. But Palin would rather be considered crazy than lose an election with the whole world watching. If she runs and loses like a sane person, her market value will plummet. Crazy she can take to the bank.

Libya: That Was Quick

2011-08-22T14:16:00.004-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

The Libyan revolution is coming to a rapid end, although there is fighting left to do. Twenty-seven weeks ago, Muammar Qadhafi's armed forces fired on peaceful protestors across Libya. Today, he's in hiding, and a rebel army that didn't exist six months ago, combined with NATO's air power, has managed to take control of most of the country.

Let me point out a basic truth: that was really fast.

It doesn't seem particularly fast to Westerners, because the rapid developments in other places and the Ritalin-addict speed of our news cycle makes a six-month war seem long. We're used to having the conventional phase of a war over within weeks. It took much longer than the Egyptian Revolution (or the part of the ongoing Egyptian Revolution that was covered on American cable), because the regime decided to fight. It took much too long for Obama to justify his actions under the War Powers Act. But it was still very fast. In fact, one of the problems that NATO policymakers face is that the rebels are winning faster than expected, and the Western policymakers haven't put any transition plans together. (This, of course, presumes that the Libyans need and will gladly accept a Western transition plan.)

A lot of complaints you hear from Westerners are, in one way or another, grounded in impatience. There was the now-discredited argument that the rebels could not win without Western ground troops, an argument that implies that it is unreasonable to wait 180 days for an army of irregulars to defeat well-equipped professional troops. There is the surreal and scurrilous complaint by Senators McCain and Graham this morning, who insist that President Obama should have taken a larger role in backing the rebels (because apparently success is not enough, and success without American casualties is, from McCain and Graham's pathological perspective, somehow unpatriotic). And of course, there are the realistic worries about the future of Libya which are expressed as an unrealistic concern that the Transitional Council doesn't have a plan yet.

The future of Libya really is worrying. But if they had a plan already, that would be even more worrying. The transition Libya is about to begin may succeed or fail, but it certainly won't succeed with a plan put together hastily.

This morning I came across a complaint that the rebels don't have any clear leader. That's true. But having a clear individual leader, before they've put together any kind of governance or power-sharing plan, is not at all a good thing. What was the Qadhafi regime but an individual leader who took precedence over any other governmental principle? The quickest transition is always a coup by a strong man, who doesn't worry about process but simply grabs operational control and keeps it. That's also the most inefficient and undemocratic transition; strong men don't deal with the country's real problems and needs. They don't fix underlying tensions or nagging dysfunctions. They just grab a country with all its flaws and hold on as long as they can.

Working out a sane political future for Libya is only possible if it happens slowly and peaceably, with the Libyans themselves working out an arrangement that includes all of the necessary political constituencies and ensures a functional administration. You can't achieve that in a minute. It requires a set of complicated negotiations and compromises. And you can't plan it from London or Paris or DC, because the people who need to compromise and negotiate and share power are not in those places. In fact, the nature of Qadhafi's regime, which suppressed most public political expression, ensures that Western policymakers don't have any idea who the real constituencies are or what concerns they have.

Actual nation-building, working out a viable set of political arrangements and building a functioning national administration, takes time. It took the United States something like a decade and a half, if you include the Revolutionary War years, to work out a practical and effective set of basic governing institutions, and the work continued well after that. The Transitional National Council hasn't even been on the job for six months.

The Libyans, acting on their own and dealing with their own internal political realities, could still make a mess of their country. That would be all too easy. And taking more time won't ensure success. But haste, in this case, ensures failure.

What the Libyans need, when the last shooting is over, is time to work out a plan that they can live with for the next 20 to 200 years. During that time, they need to keep domestic peace and to keep basic government services like water, energy and transportation working uninterrupted. They may not get that time. They may not manage to use it. But if they don't, they will have a new set of problems that will haunt them for decades.

Dividing My Books

2011-08-17T19:04:00.002-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

This summer I've moved house three times. My job and my partner are in two different states, a common problem for my generation of college professors. I count myself lucky that our jobs are only a few hundred miles apart, which means the highway and not the airport. But keeping a one-person apartment in each place has stopped making sense, so we've bought a house in one city and rented a professional's bachelor pad, a short walk from my office, in the other. Voila! Three moves: from my partner's old place to the new house, from my old apartment to my new one, and from my old apartment to the house. If anyone needs some spare boxes, I'll leave them in the comments section.

And yes, I have the carbon footprint of a brontosaurus. Any time someone wants to put some money into high-speed rail, or simply stop beating up on Amtrak, that would help me turn the guilt into something practical.

Although it's definitely a first-world, luxury-box problem, packing for more than one destination turns out to be slow and complicated. The two great questions of moving, "Should I keep this?" and "How do I fit it in the box?" have picked up a dilatory and nagging third, "Which place should this go?" Should this pot or pan go to the kitchen I share with my partner, or become part of the bachelor-pad cooking set? Which umbrella goes where? You can't simply stow it all in boxes and load it into a truck; every individual object needs to be considered. Again, this complication, like so many other wastes of energy and time, grows from luxury. Could there be a more privileged question than "How do I divide my overly numerous possessions between my multiple homes?" (Except of course, "How do I get this done before my trip to Europe?")

The big problem for me, as always, is my books. I have far too many and, of course, not nearly enough. Even after I part with some, there are hundreds and hundreds to sort. Faced with so many books, and so many different places to keep them, I'm forced to consider why, specifically, I keep each book, what I'm likely to do with it, and why I find myself in the various places I keep them. At the very least the problems of privilege should make you think about your privilege. Why have I amassed all of these objects?

Some I need for work, which usually passes as a bullet-proof excuse in our culture. I couldn't do my teaching, my research, or my professional writing without a whole lot of books. In fact, my job requires more books than I could ever personally own. No one can teach college literature without a college library, and no one can write a scholarly book without a serious library AND inter-library loan. But there are plenty of books that I either use all the time or am likely to need unexpectedly. I want to be able to check them when I need them, and I don't want to hog the library's copies for months or years. A few are old and relatively valuable, things I've tracked down on the used-book market over the years, and I've often been grateful for those purchases. Those books have helped me out of more two-in-the-morning research puzzles than I should be having at this age, and saved the day when I needed to fact-check something right before a deadline.

Some books I have for personal and sentimental reasons. Some are beloved favorites, which I've read and reread over the years and expect to read again. Some are by friends or members of my family. A few are autographed by someone famous, or soon to be famous. A few others are collectible for one reason or another, and a bunch of old science-fiction paperbacks are collectible in the sense that I collected them because those particular books have gotten hard to find. Some I have because, frankly, I feel like should have them. (Yes, Moby Dick is surely available in the public library and no, I won't reread it over the next two years, but I have it in the house for the same reason I have a copy of The Federalist: I'm an American.) And of course, there's a pile of books that I have because I'd like to read them.

Some of the division is easy. The personal keepsakes and collectibles, the books by friends, and the inscribed gifts almost all go to the house. Who knows what my autographed copy of Blowing Smoke will be worth some day?

Other books obviously go to my campus office: textbooks and student anthologies, books I often consult while planning lessons, works about teaching methods and about academia itself. The "advice for new faculty" books are no longer for me to read but to lend out to new colleagues, and belong close at hand in my office.

But things get complicated fast. I occasionally use those expensive old reference works to plan lessons, but mostly use them for research and writing, so they stay at the house in my study. I almost never get much writing done in my campus office, where I'm generally busy with teaching tasks or committee work. And I expect to do more of my writing at the house than I get done in the new apartment, where I will probably only manage to get one solid block of writing time a week. So every book in my academic field has to be examined. Is this a teaching book, or a writing book? If it's both, how often do I use it for one and how often for the other? In the meantime, dividing the books involves planning my weeks, plotting out which of my tools will be in this or that place at this day or that hour. This collection of essays will be in my office, which means using it while I am on campus. This invaluable research tool is shelved in my house, which means using it for research early on weekend mornings, or on Sunday afternoons. This is what I hope or expect to get done in my apartment near campus, and these are the books I need to leave there in order to accomplish that.

The new working week apartment is the part I don't quite have in focus yet, the place where I can't quite imagine myself. I have very few work-related books there, since I will almost always be just coming from or about to go to one of the other two places. It holds several books that I can read one section at a time (essay collections, back issues of McSweeney's, superbly organized works of non-fiction). It has enough fuller-bodied works to keep me from being bored when I eventually, inevitably, get snowed in for an extra night or over a weekend. (In some ways, the bookshelf there is like the bookshelves in summer homes, except that it's the winter non-vacation home.) And since almost all the bookshelves there are in the living room, where visitors can see them, those books need to look minimally respectable. Although I hate to admit it, one of the reasons I own books is to display them, and thereby to display certain things about myself: education level, personal tastes and interests, things like generation and background. So the books in my living room don't necessarily need to be impressive (because the most impressive ones are in another living room), but they can't make me look like a mess either. It's a truth that I don't like, but books are partly about the face I show to others, and the face I show myself.

My books feel to me, on some deep and irrational level, like my most important possession, my patrimony. "Books constitute capital," as Jefferson said. Some people own land, and I own a library. They are the visible embodiment of the educational and cultural privileges I've been given, which can otherwise seem evanescent. Degrees are abstractions; books are solid. Slowly mastering the particular intellectual training demanded by my field is a much less tangible achievement than amassing hundreds of well-chosen volumes. It's not so much that I have the books to show other people what a scholar I am. It's that I have them to remind myself. Years ago, when I drove across the country to start Ph.D. work, I left behind all of my books except the ones I would actually need for my specific academic work (just a milk crate or two loaded into the car). And that was a reasonable decision, but a depressing one in the long run. After a while I slightly felt cut off from the world of reading and writing that my work was allegedly about. Why study English lit if it means not having your favorite novels with you, and not owning any poetry that you wouldn't write an essay about? I don't have that problem today, with a dozen boxes still left to unpack. But the sorry truth is that I only feel at home when I've put books on the shelves. They are a physical connection to my chosen work, and to all the reasons that I chose it.

The California Preview

2011-08-15T23:11:00.001-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, the Iowa Straw Poll went overwhelmingly to candidates who would have been considered fringe last time around, with Michelle Bachmann and Ron Paul combining for something like 55% of the vote. Some Democrats are taking this as consolation, on the theory that even if Obama is vulnerable the Republicans will nominate someone too extreme to beat him. Meanwhile, we have the usual "centrist" columnists indulging the the usual "centrist" fantasies about some miraculous "centrist" third-party candidate who will solve all of our intractable problems by being, um, "bold." (Because who loves bold solutions more than someone who considers both the mainstream party platforms too extreme?)

All I can say to that is: whatever. I've been here before, dude. Last time it was called "California," and it didn't go well. In fact, it's still not going well. And now we're repeating the California debacle on a grand scale.

In California, where one can have a long and very successful political career inside a single red red red or blue blue blue district, the Republican Party has long resisted nominating moderates for statewide office: only truly true conservatives are pure enough to get the nod for Senator or Governor. This, of course, is a great plan for losing, in a gigantic state with plenty of very blue districts in it. But compromise is for wimps.

This often tempted the Democrats into nominating dull and uninspired candidates who had paid up their party dues and who would not always set the world on fire, but could step back while the Republicans doused themselves with gasoline. About ten years back, a steady and reliable centrist Democratic Governor, the aptly named Gray Davis, was in real political trouble, with his popularity diving from the high fifties to the low forties. Privatizing the electrical grid had turned into a debacle with sky-high prices and occasional rolling blackouts, Davis was unable to fix the problems or to rally the voters to his side. Since he was so vulnerable, and the governor's mansion was in the Republicans' grasp, they nominated a good ideologically pure conservative to make sure they got full value after they won the election. And that's why they didn't win the election. The guy they put up couldn't even beat Gray Davis.

This is what set up the recall election that made Schwarzenegger governor. The Democrats were hoping to stagger through because the Republicans were even more unpopular than they were. And the Republicans were too ideologically rigid to do the sensible thing. It was only through the strange recall process, which sidestepped the Republican nominating process, that a moderate Republican (exactly the candidate the political situation most favored, and the kind of candidate the GOP should have put up to begin with) got on the gubernatorial ballot at all.

There's your Obama-will-get-through-this-because-they're crazy strategy, right there. And I'm not eager for a repeat with higher stakes. Sure, Obama might stagger to a 47%-42% victory, the way Davis did in his re-election campaign, but what's he going to do after that? It's a recipe for a mess.

And for the Friedmans of the world, longing for an independently wealthy centrist to arrive on a big white horse, Schwarzenegger's governorship should provide an illustration of how well that goes, which is not well at all. I despised Schwarzenegger's first campaign, but his attempt to govern was basically sensible and reasonable, and it got him absolutely nowhere. Difficult financial problems don't respond to personal charisma. And entrenched political difficulties don't magically fix themselves when you elect an "outsider." In fact, the problems were worse because Schwarzenegger was basically a governor without a party. His fellow Republicans in the legislature were too ideologically pure to listen to him, and the Democrats didn't owe a Republican governor anything. Neither party had really backed him, and neither had any stake in helping him. Arnold couldn't pass a budget. By the second term, he couldn't pass a slow U-Haul on I-5. Nothing makes legislative partisanship worse than taking the party leadership away. The rank and file legislators just revert to their base political instincts.

If our current Senators and Representatives won't reliably listen to Obama and Boehner, why on earth would they listen to someone with whom they have no political relationship or alliance? If Beltway columnists managed to make enough animal sacrifices to the gods and get, say, Michael Bloomberg elected, that would not be the end of Washington gridlock. That would initiate a new era of much deeper Washington gridlock, as the President of the United States would find himself with no one who would cast a vote, let alone a difficult vote, to help him out.

California is still a political basket case, and it's in real trouble. And lately I've been hearing the same allegedly clever ideas that made California's problems worse passed around as possible "solutions" for the whole country. It's a little like proposing that we put the whole country on the San Andreas fault. It worked badly before, and it will only be worse on a larger scale.

What Tools Does Obama Have Left?

2011-08-08T14:20:00.005-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog, with discussion thread here.

I've thrown away the woe-unto-ye-Barack-Obama post that I started after the debt ceiling debacle, because lots of other people have written it, and truth be told I've written it already myself. Let's take for granted that Obama needs to put up more of a fight against the Republicans, and that compromise and sweet reason aren't working. Here's the question: what to do now?

Let's skip "use the bully pulpit!" and "talk to the American people!" We've all heard those, and to be frank I don't see the weekly radio address turning this mess around. I'm interested in the question of what he can actually get done, rather than what message he should send. Let's also rule out "be tougher" and "don't compromise" as too vague; what would "being tough" actually entail? And let's save the argument about how he'll never do the right thing, because he doesn't want to for the next thousand and six discussions about that.

Let's imagine that the ghosts of Lincoln, Kennedy and FDR appear to Barack Obama tonight, tell him it's time to save the Republic, and put a ramrod up his spine. He wakes up tomorrow determined to stop those conservative maniacs and take the country back, just the way people with blogs are always saying he should. My question is this:

When he wakes up tomorrow, all fiery and determined, what specific steps are available to him? What can he do?

He's not going to be able to get anything through the Legislature, with an angry opposition party controlling the House and a bunch of "centrist" Democratic Senators focused on appeasement. No matter how much he wants to, he can't get laws passed, because it turns out that the executive branch is not in charge of legislating.

And he's still going to have the problem of his appointees being locked up in confirmation limbo, with a huge pile of judicial and sub-cabinet-level appointees stuck in the Senate after two and a half years. He can't make that problem go away just by wishing.

So what can the President of the United States do in this ugly position with the powers that the Constitution grants him: the power to make recess appointments, the oversight of the justice department, supervision of the federal bureaucracy (including all of the regulatory agencies), and the power to veto legislation? What can Obama do with the powers specifically invested in him as President, rather than in his unofficial Presidential roles as party leader and bully-pulpiteer?

God Bless the National Debt

2011-08-02T13:12:00.006-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Let's get one thing straight: without a national debt, there is no national defense. This has always been true.

We can all sputter righteously about the evils of borrowing and debt, but a United States government that did not borrow would either have to do without any military at all or else make do with a tiny, ill-equipped military with troops who almost never got their pay, which is what we had before the Washington Administration. Access to credit has always been central to effective government operations, and especially to effective military operations. Gimmicks like "debt ceilings" and "balanced budget amendments" not only threaten the effectiveness of basic, everyday governance but make the government completely incapable of responding to an emergency.

Alexander Hamilton, our first Treasury Secretary, understood how important it was to finance government operations, because he had served at Valley Forge, where American soldiers went without food, without blankets, and without shoes. Hamilton did not blame the British for that suffering; he blamed the Continental Congress and he was right. (Congress was also to blame, after the Revolution, for refusing to pay the veterans of Valley Forge the pensions they had been promised. Next time you hear a "principled conservative" rhapsodizing over the Articles of Confederation, that's what they're rhapsodizing over.)

Hamilton (and Washington) understood that this was no way to run an army or a country, which is why they supported the Constitution, and why Washington backed Hamilton's program to put the nation on a sound financial footing. That footing required America to pay its debts, but also to contract them; nationalizing the debt, assuming the individual war debts run up by the thirteen states, was a key element in the program. God bless the national debt; it is part of the legacy of the Founders, and we'd be in trouble without it.

Of course, our national debt has grown much larger since FDR's presidency, an increase which is generally associated with New Deal social programs. But the largest New Deal program still kicking, Social Security, has taken in $2.6 trillion dollars more than it's paid out. (Social Security only "contributes to the deficit" to the extent that the trillions that have been taken from it for other purposes will need to be repaid.) But it was also under FDR that the United States went from having a fairly small standing army to having a huge, permanent military establishment. We did not demobilize after World War II as we did after previous wars. Instead, we built a global military bent on maintaining a significant technological edge over the rest of the world. That takes money. More than money, it takes financing. You don't maintain a fleet of superb fighter planes, or train people for Seal Team Six, by waiting for next month's withholding taxes to come in. The Army, Navy, and Air Force that we've had since the Forties are only possible because we undertake public debt.

The public's power to borrow is most important in emergencies, when there are pressing needs that simply can't wait. If we are ever attacked by a foreign power, we need to win the war first and pay for it later, just as we did during the Revolution. You don't wait to repel an invader until you've saved up for ammunition; if you do, it will be the invader collecting next year's taxes anyway. The same goes for responses to terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Cleaning up September 11 could not wait until the next April 15. Hurricane relief can't wait until we've moved other things around in the budget. And when the Mississippi floods, you have to stop the waters while they're rising, not when you've saved enough in this or that government account.

If politicians feel that the government debt has grown too high, they should consider raising revenues to pay for the programs they've voted for, rather than playing shenanigans with arbitrary "debt ceilings." (The debt ceiling doesn't prevent Congress from putting the government into debt; it just prevents the Treasury from issuing the bonds that keep the country running. It's like sending your kids to the market for a hundred dollars of groceries, handing them forty dollars, and forbidding them to let the store put the rest on account.) What the "debt ceiling" does is prevent the government from responding appropriately to emergencies when it's too close to whatever the artificial magical number is. What would we have done if, God forbid, there had been an earthquake and tsunami in California last month, when the Treasury had officially "exceeded its borrowing authority" and Congress was dithering around? Making it illegal to borrow for present needs, no matter the severity of those needs, is reckless and irrational.

And what would a federal balanced budget amendment do, except render the federal government permanently unable to respond to any event that hadn't been explicitly written into the budget eighteen months in advance? Surely, no one can believe that a "balanced" annual budget would not have every possible penny of the year's revenue spent in advance. The political process would demand that all of the year's revenue be spent, either directly or in tax rebates; if it would really take a Constitutional amendment to keep lawmakers from spending more than that, we should always expect that they will spend every cent that they are able. And how then would a "Budget-Balancing" United States respond to an unexpected military threat, or natural disasters, or any other crisis? How would it be able to respond even to a sudden economic downturn, which would unexpectedly lower the government's incoming tax revenue and throw the budget out of balance in the middle of the year. Imagine, for example, that the country underwent a massive financial crisis followed by a long economic slump while we had two separate armies fighting overseas. I know you can picture it if you try.

If the Republicans had passed a balanced-budget amendment back in 2005, when they had the White House and both Houses of Congress, our nation would likely have gone bankrupt in 2008, unable to deal with the banking crisis or to pay and supply our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are lucky that no such suicidally absurd provision appears in our Constitution. And we are lucky that Alexander Hamilton long ago set us on a wiser and sounder path.

God bless the national debt, I say. I am grateful for its role in keeping our country healthy, safe, and sound. And may the credit of the United States extend without blemish for a thousand years.

Capitalism for Customers

2011-07-17T17:47:00.001-04:00

At the moment I'm in Prague for a conference. It's my first time back in almost two decades, since just after the Wall fell and the Czechs broke up with the Slovaks. I used to walk around this place with old Czechoslovak bills, still in circulation, which had been stamped in one corner with a "C" (or an "S") to indicate whether these were now Czech or Slovak crowns.

When I was last here, I was occasionally amused by the flamboyantly gruff and rude service you sometimes encountered here, which I took to be largely about the previous decades of dysfunctional command economy. I remember showing up at movie theater on a deserted street one night, with no other customers in sight and only a handful inside, only to have the old woman behind the counter refuse to serve us until she had very very deliberately (indeed, increasingly slowly and deliberately) finished tacking up some flyer inside the ticket booth. My education had provided me with a handy explanation beforehand: in a non-market economy, where there's no profit, there's no reason to try to be more profitable, and no reason to please the customer. If they want a movie ticket, they can wait, and show you a little respect.

I expected that two decades would make the Czech Republic more like the United States in this regard, with certain minimal standards of polite and reasonably efficient service when you're dealing with businesses. But over the last ten years, I've noticed that American customer service more and more often resembles the way Czech used to be about six days after they stopped being Communists. Perhaps I'm simply older and crankier, and more used to deference, but that seems not to be it, and I've had some downright surreal interactions when I was with someone else who could confirm that I was a) treated remarkably rudely by someone I was giving money and b) carefully polite myself. Over the last few months especially, I've had several experiences in the States that went beyond post-Communist Czech all the way to full blown Kafka.

In theory, customer service in a capitalist economy should be good, since everything is driven by the desire for profit. Customer service should be especially good in a consumer-based service economy, because that's where most of the profit is. Yet, as the United States has increasingly become that kind of consumer economy, and simultaneously become more and more of a capitalist's paradise, customer service seems to be much worse than it was in, say, the 1980s. How could this be?

The answer, I think, is that service jobs are worse in the States than they were twenty-five years ago: lower-paying, more demanding, less likely to carry benefits. And those jobs are no longer so much a stepping stone to better jobs as they are a whole sector of the economy. Service is bad because the people performing the service are paid badly and treated badly, and there's no profit motive to make them keep the customer satisfied, because they're not going to make any of that profit, even indirectly. A Communist-era waiter or ticket seller or bus driver had no economic reason to be efficient or friendly, because no matter how well they did their job it wasn't going to benefit them; nobody was making any money off this. An American working in a low-end service job today is in the same boat, or a worse one: someone is making money off their work, but doing it well doesn't get them anywhere. Doing a job well doesn't lead to a better job; there's just an endless series of crappy jobs. And the profit it all for investors: we've had decades now of hearing how overpaid workers cut into profits. If that's your mindset, you can't expect workers to be motivated by pay or profit. They don't get any.

The Czechs are better at customer service now, some of the time. (The rest of the time, well, they're still a Slavic culture and dealing with tourists is a pain in the ass.) But things aren't looking up for us in the States.

Happy Fourth of July (Boston Iced Tea Edition)

2011-07-04T11:39:00.005-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

I'm enjoying the Glorious Fourth from my front porch, with Old Glory flying and a whole fridgeful of red and blue berries just waiting for some patriotic whipped cream to make them a virtuous Yankee dessert. Later today, my Red Sox will be taking on the British Commonwealth's only big-league baseball team, Toronto. I hope they do the Sons of Liberty proud.

In honor of the day, a recipe and a bit of historical trivia. First, the recipe:

Boston Harbor Iced Tea
1. Brew Darjeeling tea and ice it.
2. Rim drinking glasses with sea salt.
3. Pour iced tea into glasses. Sweeten each glass with two spoonfuls of molasses at the bottom.
4. Scoff at the British East India Company.

A bit of trivia, then. Although we talk about the Boston Tea Party as a revolt against taxes, that was only part of the problem. It was actually a revolt against a government-sponsored monopoly. In fact, the British cut the tax on tea.

There had been a tax on tea in the colonies for years. And the colonists did object to it, but not nearly as much as the Stamp Act, which taxed every paper document in the colonies. The Stamp Act led to a bitter series of protests, reprisals and confrontations between the colonists and parliament. At the end, Parliament essentially backed down but left the tax on tea in effect, just to save face. The colonists didn't like it, but sometimes you have to compromise. The Americans were willing to let Parliament walk away from the table with something. And then, of course, to drink black-market tea rather than pay the tax.

Then Parliament decided to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which gave the British East India Company an exclusive monopoly on importing tea to America. (Modern conservatives claim the government should not break up monopolies, but 18th-century Britain created monopolies by fiat.) To sweeten the deal, Parliament lowered the tea tax. But Parliament's goal was to help a powerful, well-connected corporation make more money.

So, in an ongoing slow-burn confrontation over who had the right to levy taxes, you have Parliament going back to undo a compromise. And you had them doing that in order to favor a gigantic, politically-connected business concern over consumers and smaller merchants. (They actually made it illegal for any of the Americans to sell tea, and anyone who bought it had to pay the monopolists' price, not the market's.) Reminds me of something, but I can't say what. Happy Fourth, everybody!

The Last White Gangster

2011-06-24T14:26:00.016-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

The FBI has caught Whitey Bulger, after a mere sixteen years. The arrest made national news because of the FBI's well-earned embarrassment and because of the mythology around Bulger. As a crime boss, Bulger was not nationally significant. He was a formidable gang leader with firm control over one slice of Boston's organized crime, but it was only a slice. He was the scariest gang leader in Boston, but not necessarily the biggest or richest. You'll hear a lot in the papers about what a criminal genius he is, and he really is smarter than any hoodlum should get, but what it's really about is this: Jimmy Bulger is the Last Great White Gangster.

Bulger is the last Irish-American mob leader who's likely to control even a slice of the underworld in a major American city. He is ethnically similar to many of the journalists and editors covering him, and they obviously love writing about him. He's the last gangster who looks like Jimmy Cagney, so even very good coverage of him gets tinged with sympathy and sentimentality that Bulger has never come close to deserving. It's a nostalgia trip. Reporters call Bulger "colorful," but it's only because he's so very pale.

Some of the Bulger myth is based on fact. He corrupted cops and FBI agents, who helped him murder and helped him escape. His brother was President of the Massachusetts State Senate for eighteen years, with Jimmy a notorious criminal the whole time. He is the primary model for Nicholson's character in The Departed, although even that bleak movie pulled its punches about Bulger's depravity and Boston's corruption. He did inform on the Boston Mafia, enabling the FBI to tape one of the Mafia's hokey (but, surprisingly, real) initiation ceremonies. And some people in South Boston, where Whitey did his crimes, did and do talk about him as a Robin Hood figure. But all of that was possible because Bulger was, well, Whitey. The open political connections, the wrongheaded sympathy from cops and deluded loyalty from the neighborhood all come down to ethnic solidarity and Boston's shameful history of race relations. Race isn't the whole story. It's only forty or sixty percent. But it's the forty-to-sixty percent that the media will leave out, and the part that explains all the rest.

The biggest break that the Bulgers ever got was the court order that desegregated the Boston schools by mandating busing in 1974. Back then Whitey was working for a gangster named Howie Winter and his brother Billy was South Boston's state senator. When busing happened, Southie flew into a frothing rage. It took the neighborhood at least twenty-five years to get over it. And while people (including William Bulger) will tell you with a straight face that all the anger wasn't about race (it was really about local control and neighborhood schools and yadda yadda yadda), that's just whitewash. People screamed racial slurs in the streets. They wrote them on public walls. Black people, including kids and unlucky bystanders, got intimidated and physically attacked. (Other Irish-American neighborhoods were also angry, but South Boston and Charleston were the worst, and Southie was ground zero.) Was every last single opponent of busing a dyed-in-the-wool racist? No. But plenty of them voiced the most toxic racism you can imagine, loudly and proudly. Twenty years later, you could still hear some people from those neighborhoods saying vile, hateful things in a matter-of-fact tone. And the fury wasn't even about the quality of white kids' education: South Boston High was a lousy school, at the bottom of the state rankings. What the angry mobs wanted was to make sure their kids went to a failing and dysfunctional school with other white kids.

Billy Bulger became a leader of the anti-busing movement, and it made him. Four years later he was President of the State Senate. Whitey was fighting busing, too, in his own way: the pro-busing Mayor of Boston actually worried at one point that Bulger might have him killed so the anti-busing Deputy Mayor could take his place. If you think of William Bulger as a segregationist Southern governor and his brother as Grand Dragon of the local KKK, you have the basic picture. And the deference they've received from Boston's press and politicians should be seen through that lens; they were the devils that liberals had to deal with, and too many locals had sympathy for.

Cops, including federal cops, liked Jimmy Bulger because he was an Irish neighborhood guy just like many of them were. (His FBI handler was a guy named Connolly who'd grown up in the same Southie housing project.) And the busing crisis turned that garden-variety ethnic bond into something deeper and more tribal as places like Southie and Charleston grew more defensive and aggrieved. Some of those cops felt that their ethnic group was losing ground in the city, and they weren't in any special hurry to see Boston Irish losing power in the underworld. In fact, the FBI was happy to help Whitey expand by undermining Italian mobsters. Whitey got stronger in the 1980s as the Mafia got weaker. The Last White Gangster basically got endangered-species protection.

People were willing to tolerate, even to celebrate, the Bulger brothers because they were a bulwark of Irish political influence that was otherwise in danger of eroding. At least they were Irish, and you couldn't be sure the next guys would be. William Bulger ran an old-school political patronage machine; if you backed him, he could help this or that nephew find a public job. Whitey was an old-school ethnic racketeer. He might have robbed South Boston blind and helped keep it poor, but at least the neighborhood got exploited by one of the tribe.

The "Robin Hood" myth about Whitey is partly the usual dysfunctional ghetto Stockholm Syndrome bullshit, and partly about the belief that Whitey kept African-Americans at bay. People will actually say that Whitey "kept drugs out of the neighborhood." That's not just a lie but a self-delusion. Whitey Bulger kept drugs out of Southie the way that Santa Claus keeps toys out of the living room on Christmas morning: he didn't deliver the packages himself, but everyone who did was acting in his name. The "keeping drugs out of the neighborhood" story demands (or allows) whoever believes it not to notice that Southie was totally full of drugs.

But if you read "keeping out drugs" as "keeping out blacks," it makes a lot of sense. That was the thing about Southie: the kids were on drugs, but all the drug dealers were white. Some people in Southie and Charlestown were willing to fight bitterly for the right to have their own all-white drug traffic and all-white extortion rackets and failing all-white schools where white kids could get a rotten education among their own kind. South Boston's love for Whitey Bulger is about the desire to be abused and exploited by a fellow member of the tribe; you can only have a Last White Gangster if you have a Last White Ghetto for him to rule over.

The Bulger brothers are masters of South Boston's greatest art: playing the victim. Whitey has the balls to complain that the FBI confiscated the $800,000 in his apartment and ask for a court-ordered lawyer. Billy Bulger complains that he was forced to resign as president of the University of Massachusetts in 2003 just because his brother had been a federal fugitive for nine years and Billy admitted having contacted him during that time. (Give Mitt Romney his due for making that happen.) That's the same Billy Bulger who used to complain that anti-busing protestors were being unfairly painted as racists just because they stood around screaming "Nigger!" at teenagers. Whitey's girlfriend, Catherine Grieg, excused his explosive temper by telling the neighbors that he had Alzheimer's, and serious media outlets gullibly repeated that. In fact, Whitey is just a terrible person. If his violent anger is a symptom of Alzheimer's, then Alzheimer's set in while he was in the womb. The Bulger brothers' Southie, the Southie they exploited and preserved, was just the same way: loudly declaring victimhood at the hands of any outsider handy, while reserving the right to do all the actual victimizing themselves. But don't let the martyr act fool you: neither South Boston nor Jimmy Bulger are victims. They're simply hoods.

No Privacy, Only Privilege

2011-06-09T10:41:00.006-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

The media can't resist talking about Congressman Weiner's penis. That's no surprise. The American entertainment industry exists to talk about penises and the things various penises like. And our news media is only a minor subsidiary of that entertainment empire.

On the other hand, the news media has no interest, zero, in the fact that Clarence Thomas leaves his wife's income off his financial disclosure forms, despite the, ahem, plain reading and original intent of those forms. Bor-ing! So technical! No one wants to hear a story about financial technicalities and legal loopholes. Blah, blah, blah, some loophole exists somewhere that allows people to funnel large sums of money to a Supreme Court Justice when they have a case in front of the Court. Who cares about loopholes?

Of course, Weiner's misadventures are tied to an overwhelming public interest: voyeurism. He's an exhibitionist, we're voyeurs, there's no point interfering in the course of nature. But no other "public interest" is involved. No crime. No public policy, no public funds, no harassment of employees and no harm done to anyone over whom Weiner had power. (Dave Letterman really isn't allowed to scold.) Weiner didn't even flirt with his own constituents. And any annoyance he was causing unwilling recipients could have been stopped easily. Creeps are easy to block.

So what's the crucial news angle here? Nothing. Weiner's behavior is creepy and compulsive and sad, but it has nothing to do with the public welfare. We just want to talk more about penises, and he's obliging us.

The important thing is that no one has any privacy anymore. Privacy is so 20th century. It's boring, like talking about checks and balances or public integrity or the right to a fair hearing before the Supreme Court. Privacy is for old farts. And so is observing other people's privacy.

You can argue that Weiner violated his own privacy by texting and tweeting his private business. But he texted and tweeted to private citizens, in private. And various third parties published them, with no justification whatsoever.

If a politician were writing racy letters, longhand, to women he met on bars along the campaign trail, and enclosing a naughty Polaroid or two, that would be creepy and bizarre. But if one of those women went to a newspaper or television station with those letters and photos, the appropriate question would be, "What public interest is served by publishing these?" The only rational answer is "None." That the illicit blathering took place through digital technology doesn't change that. The press has no right to publish people's letters or transcripts of their phone calls, unless there's a reason. If the FBI is a wiretapping a criminal and he begins to indulge in phone sex, they're legally obliged to stop taping and come back later.

But we now live in a society where major news organizations will publish embarrassing sexual material on no pretext at all. We have a British tabloid, and perhaps other newspapers, wiretapping private citizen's phones in order to publish details of their private lives. We have creeps like Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe hacking and snooping and secretly taping, answerable to nothing but their own slender consciences.

Back in the Iron Curtain days, Communist secret police would wiretap dissidents and then publish whatever dirty laundry they overheard. (Milan Kundera writes about the Czech secret police taping the dissident Jan Prochazka kvetching about his friends over a few drinks, and then playing his back-biting gossip on the radio.) That's what a police state aspires to: a world without privacy.

Now we're approaching that secret policeman's dream world, except we've outsourced the secret policing into private hands. Everyone is allowed to wiretap everyone else. Everyone can publish each other's e-mails, pass along each other's pictures. We've chosen a world where the freedom to humiliate each other, and to stare at others' humiliation, is treated as the bedrock right, and freedom from humiliation is a privilege that can be revoked on a whim. Anybody's whim.

Sure, you can say that Weiner had it coming, that he got himself into trouble. But that's what they'll say about you, too. You should have known better than to send that e-mail or that text message. You should have known better than to pay for that with a card. You should have known better than to go to that website. You should have known better than to write that down. And you can say that Weiner is a public figure, and so has no private life at all. But when it's your turn to be humiliated, there will be some colorable excuse: you're a schoolteacher. You have a blog. You commented on the internet, or a gave a quote to your local paper. There will always be a convenient excuse. But the real reason is this: the rest of us want to dig through your business, and we've decided that it's our business, too.

Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, has decided that his wife's income is no one's business, the letter of the law notwithstanding. Justice Thomas doesn't want to tell us who his wife's clients are, or how much she's paid. And if he doesn't have to, anyone who wants to pay off Justice Thomas simply has to hire Ginny Thomas and pay her more than she knows it's worth. Sure, they won't be paying the Justice. He'll just have access to the money and the things it buys.

I'm not accusing Justice Thomas of being on the take. He has revealed enough of his joint finances to support any such accusation. But what he is doing is creating a precedent (which any Supreme Court Justice should surely understand), by which a federal justice can be bribed with impunity. In fact, his behavior creates a clear road map to bribing a Supreme Court Justice and getting away with it. And that is a shameful precedent to set.

There's no privacy for private citizens in 21st century America. There's just privilege, and secrecy, for the privileged few.

When Clarence Thomas was the guy who allegedly chatted about porn movies in the office, we were utterly fascinated with him. Now that he's subverting the basic integrity of the highest court in the land, no one's interested. And this scandal, unlike the salacious twittering, is very literally our business. Clarence Thomas is sworn to do the people's business. He is not allowed to contract himself out while he does it. But evidently, these are the new rules. Big Money is going to be allowed to funnel all the money it likes to Supreme Court Justices. As long as the Justice taking the cash doesn't spend it on hookers, he'll be fine. And the rest of us won't notice how our world has changed. We'll all be looking at someone's crotch, twittering about what a scandal it is.

Revisiting LeBron (and Retaining Employees)

2011-05-31T15:09:00.002-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, last summer LeBron James decided to leave Cleveland, leading to a massive outburst of Clevesentment and a widespread belief that Cleveland had burned down among my friends and family who don't live there (and not just among them, judging from the search terms that old post collected). A year later, he's gotten himself to the NBA Finals for the first time in his career. So, I would say his career decision is going much the way he planned.

I won't defend the gross narcissism that LeBron displayed while announcing his decision, or while taking his arrival victory lap around Miami. But the decision itself was perfectly legitimate and reasonable. It's America; you're allowed to change jobs when your contract is up. And let's review what LeBron did:

He gave up millions of dollars (that only his old team was allowed to pay him) in order to be on a team that had a better chance of success, and where some of his teammates were paid as well as he was. (And yes, LeBron makes an obscene amount of money with the Miami Heat. But that obscene amount is exactly what Miami pays Chris Bosh, and not quite 4 percent more money than the Cavs currently pay Baron Davis.)

This goes against the teachings of modern American business, which says that the most important thing is to pay the best (or "best") employees as much as possible, and to keep other salaries low. Think about corporate CEOs, who are now paid ludicrous sums on the grounds that you need to pay for the vision and leadership, while the wages of ordinary workers in those companies stagnate. The current handbook of American business is to pay the "stars" lavishly and make the gap between those "stars" and their peers as great as possible. Part of this is penny-pinching, because it is cheaper to give one person a $20,000 dollar raise than it is to give ten people $2500 apiece. But another part is the ideology of our post-capitalist business class, which believes in income inequality as a good in itself. If they have $20,0000 to spend on raises, they would rather give it all to one person rather than split it up four or five ways, because by paying someone a lot of money they convince themselves that they have created "excellence."

LeBron's definition of "excellence" is apparently different. Rather than making $3 million a year (or $8 million a year) more than any of his teammates and losing to the Celtics every year, he preferred to be on a team where other, comparably-paid stars would help him beat the Celtics and the Bulls and go to the Finals. The man's motivated by money, but not just by money. He wants to succeed.

The same day LeBron played his first game in the Finals, Inside Higher Ed ran a piece about public universities losing star faculty during the current recession. Private universities have always poached public university professors, and increasingly so over the last twenty or thirty years. In the current downturn, it's gotten manic.

The IHE piece starts with the basic presumption that it all comes down to money, which is certainly a factor. A few years of pay freeze will cool employee loyalty right down. Then it shifts to saying that many such decisions are "idiosyncratic." But gradually, as the IHE goes through typical cases, another pattern emerges: top faculty often abandon schools where the quality of their department or college is being undermined, and are more loyal to places where their department seems to be growing and getting stronger. One professor mentioned in the article fled the University of Wisconsin because he was tired of having the university attacked by state politicians, and because year after year of budget cuts made it harder and harder for him to fund his doctoral students. Sometimes, IHE quotes Brian Leiter saying, it's a chain reaction:

Sometimes, he said, one or two stars in a top department at a prestigious institution can move elsewhere and trigger a larger-scale migration of talent. A herd mentality then sets in. "If too many of your good colleagues leave, then people start to think the boat is sinking," he said. "That’s probably the most common reason."

But on the other hand, this can be turned around by hiring more people:

Diehl [the Dean of UT-Austin's College of Liberal Arts] said he knows what it's like to be on the other side of a migration. Not long ago, he said, two top economics professors left for, of all places, Madison. Diehl said that one of them had told him that the then still-emerging issues with the regents played a role in his decision to leave.

Diehl feared the departures signaled that the economics department was at risk of imploding. "A department needs a certain critical mass," he said, not just in numbers but also in quality. "If the feeling is it’s a sinking ship, the talent will go elsewhere, especially in economics where there's a robust job market. We had to act decisively to stanch the bleeding."

He set about persuading Sandra E. Black, who was then a visiting professor from the University of California at Los Angeles, to stay. She agreed and, as a top labor economist, created enough of a buzz, Diehl said, that Austin was able to hire six more junior faculty. It was, he said, a case of a good offense serving as the best defense against a migration.

Now, hiring six new colleagues is fantastically expensive, much more than giving your top two or three economists fat raises. And neo-liberal economics would suggest that it's precisely the wrong approach, since you spend much more money and the people you're trying to keep get none of it. The standard MBA playbook would be to throw five-figure raises at the stars. But it's like LeBron and the extra $3 mil he doesn't really need. Employees who are competitive and attractive on the job market want personal rewards, but also want to be part of a successful enterprise. Econ-1 neoliberalism would tell you that it's much smarter to give one person a $25,000 raise than it is to give that person a $5,000 raise and then spend $250,000 hiring junior colleagues for her and $20,000 increasing her funds to pay grad students. But that is often the better way to go. Many ambitious and talented people would rather be paid handsomely to succeed than be paid obscenely well to be mediocre.

Scientists love a nice raise, but they also want lab budgets and funding for grad students and money to hire post-docs. Humanities professors want to be able to fund good grad students, and want good colleagues to talk with. (The highest-end endowed chairs, the apex of the professor track, often come larded with special funds and other goodies, some of which (like research funds) directly benefit the holder but many of which are designed to keep the holder happy by directing money to other people: money to fund a prize doctoral student, or to give to colleagues for their research.) Everybody wants to be in a department that feels like it's moving forward. It's the same with us as it is with LeBron, although the salary numbers are two or three decimal places off: it's about winning. It's about teammates.

And almost everybody wants to be in a place where they feel that the students are learning successfully, where there are enough resources to fulfill the educational mission. Administrators can save money by crowding classrooms with too many students, and off-loading lots of teaching onto ill-paid part-timers who get little instructional support, and then spend a fraction of those savings on one or two fat raises for "star" professors. But most faculty would rather have a modest raise and thriving students than a massive raise and a huge crowd of struggling students. Of course, there are a few who don't care whether students succeed or fail, and who would rather just take the money. But those aren't the people that you want to keep.

Jared Loughner Is Insane (And We Just Noticed)

2011-05-27T11:39:00.004-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Jared Loughner, who tried to murder Gabby Giffords, has been found unfit to stand trial because he is too mentally ill to assist his defense. Loughner, among other things, is apparently loudly insisting that Giffords is actually dead, because he succeeded in murdering her. That's pretty much the definition of "unable to assist in your defense" right there.

I don't think anyone's surprised that Loughner is very ill, or that two independent psychiatrists would suggest a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But it's also clear that Loughner has been schizophrenic (and symptomatic) for a good long while, and he's just being given an initial diagnosis now. The American health system has left that important work, in this case, to the criminal justice system. Loughner had to shoot people before anyone noticed how much help he needed. That doesn't excuse him, but it sure as hell indicts the rest of us.

Because we have no real public health system for people in their late teens and early twenties (the ages during which schizophrenia tends to emerge), we don't have anyone to diagnose, let alone treat, these ailments. And in the last thirty years we've cut back our commitment to mental health, "deinstitutionalizing" very, very ill people so they can wander the streets and suffer their symptoms.

Jared Loughner was thrown into the care of institutions, like Pima County Community College, which have no resources or expertise in treating such profound and terrible illnesses. They knew something was wrong with him. They tried talking to him about it. And when the standard college counseling got no results, they expelled him for the safety of the other students. Every part of that process makes perfect sense, from their point of view, and I don't think they deserve even a shred of blame. College math teachers are not equipped to treat the seriously mentally ill. Nor should they be trained to do so. And Pima County Community College doesn't quite have the budget to do their normal job now; they can't afford to take responsibility for severe mental health problems.

The issue is that America as a whole does not take responsibility for the mentally ill. We turn mental health into a game of hot potato, seeing who will step up and pay for the expensive care and treatment patients need and take responsibility for the patient actually complying with treatment. Will the college do it? Are you still on your parents' insurance, which may or may not have coverage for this kind of thing? In this case, the hot potato landed with the court system, now that the damage is done. The criminal justice system gets to care for the mentally ill because it's the one system that the mentally ill can't simply fail their way out of because of their symptoms. This country is full of very sick people who could actually be helped if anyone would actually help them, but those people are left either to the prisons or the streets.

Do you know what's really not effective for dealing with major mental health issues? An employer-based insurance system. The mentally ill often have trouble holding onto jobs, and often have trouble accepting treatment until they've faced serious consequences. There are people who have been prescribed meds and don't take them, because they claim to be doing fine, and then they lose their jobs. But once they face an event that might persuade them to take their medication, there is no medication, because when the patient lost the job the patient lost the insurance. And preaching about individual responsibility to stay healthy, when we're talking about major mental illness, is laughably cruel. The nature of the illness is that the ill person is not fully responsible. Someone else needs to step up and make sure they get help. In our patchwork health system, the mentally ill are always someone else's problem; only when they commit a felony are they understood as everybody's problem.

Jared Loughner walked around with full-blown schizophrenia for years. There are plenty of other people walking around with his symptoms right now, untreated, drifting between convenience stores and parking lots and subway cars, nobody's problem but their own. And unless they hurt someone, they'll stay out there in the agonies of their own madness until they die. In our current system, that is considered the happy ending.

Longing for the End of the World

2011-05-26T13:30:00.007-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, for most of May Christianity has been in the news. Or rather, a tiny splinter of Christianity has. The leader of a tiny religious organization predicted the Rapture on May 21, and there was lots of news coverage.

It was all actually very standard: a strange fringe belief held by a small minority of Christians dominated the news, mainstream Christians were left out of the discussion entirely, there was a lot of joking and teasing about the strangeness of the strange belief (I'll admit to doing some), and then there was the inevitable complaint that the teasing amounted to persecuting of Christians. To this I say: no one likes being teased but, hey, it's not the end of the world.

The belief in the Rapture, which holds that a tiny minority of God's favorites will be taken directly to Heaven before the difficulties of the End Times (presumably so they don't have to suffer for their faith or do anything to help other people during a time of terrible suffering) is a new idea that's emerged over the past century or so. It was entirely unknown to any Christians for eighteen or nineteen centuries and is still completely foreign to the beliefs of most Christian groups. And yes, the people who espouse this belief all claim to derive it directly from the Bible, in a plain-and-open reading which somehow no one else (including St. Jerome) was smart enough to see for nearly two thousand years. I guess the rest of us must not be reading the text, um, directly enough.

If I seem grouchy, it's not so much the belief in the Rapture that's annoying me but the habit that many small, divisive and extremist groups have of referring to themselves simply as "Christian" as though they were the main body of believers rather than a very, very small sub-group with thirty parishioners in Wichita. When you're that small and special, you need a special name. At least the Branch Davidians admitted they were a branch, and not the whole tree. On the other hand, the fringe preacher in Minnesota who denounced Barack Obama as an unbeliever while giving the legislature's daily prayer had built up to his attack by talking about universal Christianity that went beyond denominations. One minute he's talking about not being divided up into Lutherans and Calivinists and "Wesleyans," and then, BAM! he's throwing the President of the United States out of the universal body of Christianity. It's an old move by now, and I'm tired of it.

My branch of Christianity isn't expecting or predicting the end of the world, let alone trying to hurry it along. And the truth is, I'm not hoping for it. It's a flawed and problematic world, full of suffering, but it's God's world too and I like it. I'm more than happy to let God set the schedule for Armageddon, and I'm in no rush.

But I understand why some of my fellow-Christians feel differently. One of the tough things for American Christians in the 21st century is that we have a very marginal place in Christianity's grand narrative. We're much, much too late to have been there at the beginning, or any of the beginnings. We're not the founders, or the forerunners; that part of the story is taken. And we don't play the role of the persecuted martyrs, who became heroes and heroines by suffering for their faith. Some of us actually stoop to making up imaginary affronts, trying to share some of those martyrs' glory. But really, we have it incredibly soft in this country. We're not going to have to face the lions, ever. None of us are famous and glorious Christians.

Longing for the end of the world, waiting impatiently for it to arrive, is longing for a better, more prominent role in the Christian story. If you can't be there at the beginning, you can be there at the end. A big part in the last chapter is like having a big part in the first. Some Americans hope for the world to end so that Jesus will save them, not simply from their sins, but from their ordinariness. It's not enough to be an ordinary Christian, somewhere in the long middle of a millennia-long history. Some people want, need, a special role in the main story.

I understand exactly how they feel; the people waiting for the world to end are wrestling with one of the subtlest and most daunting challenges of Christianity itself: the excruciating humility it takes to accept God's love. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that God loves you, whatever your flaws. What's appalling about that is what makes you special is your membership in the human race, your identity as God's child. God doesn't love you because you're smart or pretty or funny, because you can jump especially high or are extra good at carrying a tune. God loves you because God loves you, and loves every one else for the same reason. That is very hard to take.

So we see a lot of people who profess themselves Christians, loudly, but who are driven by a need to be more than merely God's beloved. They need to be God's special beloved, the favorites, loved and chosen above others. You see this need expressed in many different ways: in the longing for the End Times, and opportunity it holds to take center stage; in the insistent declarations of persecution and tribulation by people who get religious holidays off with pay; in the Washington "Family" and its obsession with divine "anointment" of leaders; and by the belief in a very selective company of the saved (something that does come from traditional mainstream Calvinism), while the vast majority of the human race is damned. The Rapture belief combines the first and last of these; only a tiny minority get Raptured, while the rest are left behind for punishment by a God who only loves a few very special children.

In short, they believe in Nightclub Heaven, with a guest list and a velvet rope. I believe in festival-seating heaven. It's an old split among Christianity.

If I ever go to Heaven, that will be terrific. Eternal life with God is more than enough. I don't need VIP seating. I'll gratefully take standing room, the 600-millionth-odd saved soul from the left. And I hope everyone else gets in, too. I don't need God to love me more than other people. How can you love your fellow human beings without wanting what is best for them?

I'm all too competitive and ambitious in my daily secular life; I spend approximately forty percent of my working hours trying to distinguish myself from others and further my personal career. But I don't see the life of faith as a continuation of those secular values. Christianity is not about pride. And jockeying to be the brightest light in heaven, Christian tradition tells us, is a very, very bad idea.

In the end, the division between big-tent-heaven Christians like myself and VIP Room Christians is a question of how we imagine God. For me, believing in God and salvation cannot be separated from believing in that God's unique talent for wooing us to the right path. You gotta have faith in the shepherd. And a shepherd this good doesn't lose much of the flock.

Nor do I have any interest in serving a God who wants to elevate me and cast down most of the rest of the human race for punishment. That plan is not worthy of the God I was raised to believe in, and it doesn't much resemble the teachings in the Gospel.

I'm not so different from the people longing for the Rapture. I also hear whispers in my heart, too often, telling me that I am better than other people, or that I should be rewarded and those people should be punished. I've heard that. But I also know one thing: that ain't Jesus talking.

What Pakistan Knows

2011-05-19T17:21:00.003-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Since Pakistan's recent double embarrassment in the Osama bin Laden affair, in which they proved unable to detect either bin Ladin living half a mile from their chief military academy or an American helicopter raid deep in the Pakistani interior (i.e. half a mile from their military academy), angry American legislators have been asking What Pakistan Knew about OBL's presence in their country.

Let me try to reframe that question with another one:

Does the President of Pakistan know who had his wife killed?

I'm a long way from being an expert on Pakistan. But I do remember some very basic things. The current President, Asif Ali Zardari, came to power as the widower of his far more charismatic wife, Benazir Bhutto. Zardari is a proxy President for Bhutto's voters, a tender of the slain hero's legacy. He is Mr. Bhutto, basically a corrupt male version of Coretta Scott King. (Zardari's love of graft helped drive Bhutto from power, and even into exile, at various points of her career. His actual nickname is not "Mr. Bhutto" but "Mister Ten Percent," for the kickbacks he demanded while his wife was in power.)

Benazir Bhutto is not President of Pakistan because she was murdered in public. And before she was murdered, she accused the regime at the time, including specific members of the regime, of scheming to have her assassinated. Then they pulled some of her security, and she was murdered while out on campaign. But in the end, the military regime had to accept elections and Bhutto's party, the PPP, which meant that her widower had to keep the flame alive as President.

Does Ali Asif Zardari know exactly which members of the regime colluded in his wife's murder? Does he know which conspirators are still part of Pakistan's security establishment? If he does, he can't do a thing about it.

The military regime had to give way to civilian leadership, but there was no clean-up of the Army or the ISI. The people who'd done Musharraf's dirty work didn't leave, let alone get punished. They're still there. And if the President of Pakistan wants to know who gave the orders that widowed him, he either can't find out or can't do anything about it. Think for a second what that means about how power is distributed in Pakistan, and how much control the official government has over the Army and the ISI.

Pakistan does not seem, from my distant layman's perspective, to be have a fully accountable chain of command. Clearly, there are groups in the military and intelligence apparatus who conspire and freelance and simply don't let the higher-ups into the loop, and those people are wired to enough factional influence that they cannot easily be brought to heel. Some people have sufficient resources to assist al-Qaeda or the Taliban, or to conspire in other ways, and they do. Those people don't let their superiors know, and their superiors either can't find out or are afraid of the consequences if they do. Imagine a situation where Iran-Contra happened and Reagan actually didn't know about it, where some lieutenant colonel felt free to put that together without letting the President or his people know. That's what we're talking about.

The people who hid bin Laden didn't tell Zardari, or anyone near Zardari, for the same reason they don't tell Zardari that they had his wife shot. They don't consider it his business.

Is this appalling? You bet. How do you deal with a country where the military and the spooks aren't accountable to the official leadership? I don't know. But not dealing with Pakistan isn't an option. And putting the hammer down on the official leadership, the people being kept out of the loop by the entrenched military conspirators, is not going to help. All that will do is weaken the civilians and give them even less control over their insubordinate military. The military and intelligence hierarchies have always planned to outwait and outlast their nominal masters in the civilian leadership. There's no reason to speed up We're stuck with the same crappy deal that Zardari is; he became President without having full control over his army, because that was better than having no control over them at all. And now we're in the same boat. We could refuse to deal with Zardari, or his successors, because they don't have the power to hold up their side of their bargains, but all we'd be doing is sacrificing whatever control of the Pakistani military that the civilians do have.

And before we start kicking Pakistan for being all Eastern and barbaric, remember that the West colludes in Pakistan's distribution of power. After the bin Laden raid, I saw one of the players that Bhutto accused of wanting her dead quoted in the New York Times: just another knowledgeable source.

Torture Is for Liars

2011-05-08T22:40:00.005-04:00

cross-posted from http://dagblog.com/users/doctor-cleveland

A week ago, with barely a pause for breath, advocates of torture began claiming that torturing prisoners had been the key to finding Osama bin Laden. Indeed, some complained that the Obama Administration had been insufficiently deferential to the torturers from the last regime.

They made this assertion with no real evidence and no solid facts. This should surprise no one. If they were interested in facts or evidence, they would not advocate torture.

Here's the thing to remember:

Torture is not about discovering the truth.

Torture is about imposing the torturer's version of reality on others.

Torture is a technique for making people say what you want them to say. As a technique for getting people to reveal their secrets, it's wildly unreliable. As a technique for dictating heavily fictionalized confessions, it's as reliable as they come.

The specific techniques used during the Bush Administration were taken from the military's SERE program, which teaches military personnel like fighter pilots or Navy SEALs how to evade capture and resist torture by enemies. And the tortures people were being trained to resist were taken from regimes, such as the former Soviet Union, which excelled at extracting false confessions from victims. (Lt. John McCain did not confess to being a war criminal and "air pirate" because he was a war criminal; he confessed to being a war criminal because his captors were.) It's not that the torture methods used by the last Administration sometimes lead the victim to lie under duress. It's that they were designed to make the victim lie, in whichever way the torturer dictated. These are facts.

The torture regime of the last decade was not designed to make the United States safer or to learn anything about al-Qaeda. It was designed to impose the regime's own fantasies upon the real world, making prisoners "confess" what the torturers wanted to hear and using those confessions to support the Bush Administration's alternate version of reality. (For example, those reporting to George W. Bush came to want, very badly, to find a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, especially a connection involving weapons of mass destruction. And because they needed to hear their prisoners confess such a connection, they kept torturing certain prisoners until those prisoners "confessed" the things that the torturers wanted to be true.)

Now that reality, once again, has proved uncongenial to the pro-torture crowd, they are resorting to their standard tactics: baseless assertions, polemical fantasies, and the promotion of alternate realities through assiduous lies. These lies are not simply a defense of the torture policy. They are the essence of the torture policy.

The torture crowd, despite their swagger, are the very opposite of tough. Toughness requires one to cope with the world as it is. Because they cannot cope with this world, the partisans of torture deny this reality and assert another that they find easier to deal with. That's why they're torturers: they can't handle the truth.

Run, Donald, Run!

2011-04-27T11:36:00.007-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Barack Obama has given in to the birther lunatics -- or rather, to their enablers in the national press -- and released his long-form birth certificate. Which of course, won't stop the lunatic birthers. But it's not clear that Obama actually intends it to. This is in many ways a classic Obama move. Obama does seem justly and genuinely exasperated with the press corps, but he also likes to position himself as the reasonable alternative to unreasonable opponents.

More vexingly, at least on the surface, the timing of the release gives aid and comfort to Donal Trump, who is already taking credit for the release. That's very annoying, in that it feeds the national media's silly obsession with Trump and prolongs The Donald's free-media "campaign" for the presidency. It even makes it more likely that Trump will actually put his big money where is bigger mouth is, and attempt to get on primary ballots. He's riding high, and the media is stoking his already-formidable self-regard. If Trump's grandiosity is sufficiently cultivated, he may decide that the White House is his for the spending, and start staffing up.

That result, as I say, would very annoying. But that doesn't mean Obama would be displeased. If the White House just released a document that seems to validate Donald Trump's candidacy, we might consider that the Obama people want to validate Donald Trump's candidacy.

There's a saying that Obama's been extremely lucky in his opponents. And that's true. But it hasn't always been luck. He's shown a talent for attracting such opponents, and for subtly goading them into self-immolation. And he's certainly developed an appreciation for the pleasures of campaigning against a turbulent freakshow of an opponent.

Donald Trump is the media freakshow personified. He's been doing reality TV since before reality TV was invented. He's spent decades making himself ridiculous on camera, and his special gift as a media star is his utter inability to realize how silly he is. The joke is on Donald, and the funny part is that he isn't in on it. He is not a serious candidate. He's not a serious anything. And if someone decided to run negative ads on Trump, the sheer wealth of material boggles of mind. Only another narcissistic buffoon could believe, even for a second, that people would vote for someone like Trump. That any media figures floated the idea only shows that they are doing entertainment and not news.

Trump would be a dream opponent for Obama, a kind of white Alan Keyes. But more interestingly, he could be a monumental headache for Republican hopefuls in the primaries. If he actually took even a half-serious run in the primaries, he could make advertising in the earlier states crazy expensive. He's certainly capable of wasting a hundred million dollars, even if he doesn't actually have that much money to waste. And even if he doesn't run, he sucks up media oxygen that other candidates need, and he makes it even harder to placate the crazy part of the base by pandering to them so shamelessly. (Maybe you could say that The Donald is giving cover to the other Republicans by keeping them from press scrutiny. But the press doesn't do serious scrutiny any more. And if they do find a mini-scandal about a candidate not named Trump, the later it breaks the more it hurts.) Good luck trying to build name recognition when the TV is obsessing about Trump like he's a royal bride. And good luck trying to get past the crazy conspiracy theories in the primaries when Trump and the cable news hover over them like flies on a horse apple.

Obama's deepest political instinct is to pose as the reasonable centrist, so that the other side has to either make a deal with him or risk looking crazy. This can be frustrating because it leads him to make deals again, and again, in order to perform his "reasonableness," even when the question should be out of doubt. Releasing yet another form of his birth certificate is like his various compromises over health care and the budget: splitting a difference that he long ago split. But where this should pay dividends is when the other side refuses to take the deal. Barack Obama didn't release his long-form birth certificate to prove that he was born in Hawaii. He released it to prove that the doubters are too insane to care about proof.

What messes with this strategy is a press corps which is fundamentally unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality any more, a group that takes both reasonable and insane positions as equally valid, and presents them as equivalent. They can't tell a serious budget position from a cooked one. They can't bring themselves to cover national news instead of conspiracy theories. Almost nine percent of the country is out of work, at a minimum, and they want to talk about birth certificates. They have absolutely no idea how crazy they sound. Obama isn't just fighting the Republicans. He's fighting the press. What he needs to do is communicate past them to the American people, who actually care about actual things.

The question for the next two years is this. Will the real world pop the media bubble at last? Or will they manage to distort the debate so much that the voters lose touch with reality?

Codes of Silence

2011-04-22T08:27:00.012-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

There's sad news from Princeton where a lecturer who was apparently in danger of losing his job has taken his own life. That's a terrible thing.

A number of his students (and other supporters) are campaigning to make Princeton explain more about the events preceding his death, and especially about the danger that he was about to lose his job. That is a very understandable desire. On the other hand, Princeton is very unlikely to do any such thing unless it's in response to a subpoena, and they're right. That will make Princeton look secretive and authoritarian and inhumane, but Princeton will just have to take it.

Nothing could be less humane than Princeton defending itself at the dead man's expense. If Princeton did wrong here, it's not going to fix that by smearing the man in the newspapers. And if they were in the process of firing poor Antonio Calvo for some legitimate cause, they won't comfort his mourners by announcing that cause at his funeral. Whatever the facts, he deserves a better elegy than that.

When I was a doctoral student, a brilliant and well-liked assistant professor was turned down for tenure in the department. (Actually, that happened more than once, but this time was particularly unfortunate and surprising.) So the graduate students asked for a meeting with the department chair and graduate chair, to get an explanation. Why did N not get tenure?

That was an awkward meeting, of course, and also a frustrating one, because the department chair and graduate chair could not tell us. And I, like many of my classmates, saw pretty quickly that they really couldn't. What were they going to say? Were they going to run N down to the grad students, adding insult to injury? Were they going to publicize the reasons for denial while N was trying to find another job, and thereby add real injury to injury? That's the kind of thing that gets you sued, because it's unnecessary and wrong. Whether the department had been right or wrong about the tenure case, N deserved at least a fair shot at a continued career, which definitely couldn't happen if the old school was talking about N's shortcomings in public. And there was no good to be achieved by trying to talk graduate students out of their respect and affection for N. Who would stoop so low?

Now, it's easy to view closed deliberations as secretive and opaque. Some people call for greater transparency in things like the tenure process, arguing that confidentiality leads to abuses without accountability. It's definitely true that there have been some injustices done behind closed doors in the academy (some of which, although done in secret, became notorious), and decisions without any accountability at all really would invite abuses. But there is a crucial distinction between transparency and publicity. The reason behind N's tenure decision was not a secret. It was confidential. The difference is that N knew the reasons, and knew who had made the decision; the process was transparent to the party concerned. The general public did not need to know the grisly details. Making everything public, including every slighting word said during the process, would have left N without any protection of confidentiality at all and caused material damage to N's subsequent career.

(For the record, N swiftly got an excellent new job, published a new book, and won a big prize for it. So I still hold that we were right about N and that the people who made that tenure decision blew it. But then, I didn't read N's file.)

The one thing the department and grad chair were never, ever going to do, although some of us might have been hoping for this deep in our hearts, was to say that they had done him wrong. They weren't going to sit there with their graduate students and say, "We confess! We railroaded N out of the job! We did it because we're evil!" Of course not. They didn't think that they had railroaded him, and certainly didn't consider their own motives wicked. (And if they had, would they confess?) "Tell us why N did not get tenure," is not just one unanswerable question, but two. It asks for reasons that cannot be shared (in part for N's sake), and it also asks for consolation and validation. When we asked that question, part of what we meant was absolutely, "We want you to admit that N has been done wrong." We were upset, and we wanted to hear someone sufficiently powerful tell us that what had happened was not right.

Something similar, I think, is behind the insistence that Dr. Calvo's death be "explained." His friends and students need to hear a valediction for him, to hear that he was done wrong. That Calvo lost his life, rather than merely suffering a brief career setback like N's, makes his friends' and students' needs much greater. On some level, I suspect many of them want to hear a public statement that says, "Princeton treated Antonio Calvo unfairly, and we hounded him to his death." And Princeton will never say that. No one would.

Something clearly went very, very wrong, although I'm not eager to know what it was. Calvo was undergoing a routine reappointment review, but it seems clear that Dr. Calvo was removed from his duties with a few weeks left in the semester, in a way that suggests that Princeton had not adequately prepared for someone to take over his courses. That is very peculiar. Clearly, that was not the outcome of the performance review. No matter whether Calvo was getting a new contract or not, he wasn't going to be fired two weeks before classes ended, with all of his final grading left to do. No one at a college gets fired two weeks before exams if anyone can possibly help it.

So something very unfortunate happened. If the sudden relief from duty was a result of Calvo's behavior, or perhaps his health, then there are excellent reasons for Princeton to offer him all the tactful decency they can manage. If such a sudden suspension was unwarranted, it was outrageous, since the step was so extreme and since it came at a clear cost to students' education. But if someone actually committed any misconduct, no lobbying campaign will reveal it. If someone was trying to terminate Dr. Calvo wrongly, the only way to discover that will be through the discovery process in a lawsuit. Universities don't become "accountable" for their misdeeds by voluntarily admitting them; they are actively held accountable through due process. And if the truth of Dr. Calvo's untimely death does not reflect badly on anyone else, it should be forgotten with his burial. The evil that men do lives after them, and the good is oft interred with their bones, but shouldn't it be the other way?

Dedicated Teachers Hurting American Education

2011-04-18T23:06:00.013-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog.com

Tenured Radical links to Nick Parker's Boston Globe piece about the life of adjunct college faculty, and adds some advice of her own to people entering the adjunct life. Both pieces are worth a read.

The two most important changes in American higher education over the last twenty years (neither of which rate much mention in the endless media jeremiads about higher education) are the gutting of funding for public universities (which now get only a fraction of their funding from public sources) and the switch (by every college, public and private, rich and poor) to a reliance on badly-paid part-time adjunct teachers for most basic instruction. Tenured and tenure-line faculty are now less than a quarter of all college teachers; fifteen percent are non-tenure-track but full-time, and twenty percent are grad students. The largest group of college teachers, at more than forty percent, are part-time adjuncts, with no tenure, no benefits, and no job security. They typically make between two and four thousand dollars per class; many scrape a living together by teaching at two, three, or even four schools at a time. As Parker points out, the number of adjuncts has more than tripled over the past thirty years. Everywhere in American colleges and universities, the full-time faculty is shrinking, and the number of adjuncts is growing.

(For those of you doing the math: the cost of a college education keeps growing well in excess of inflation, the salaries of tenure-line faculty grow at just above or sometimes just below the inflation rate, and the tenure-line faculty keep being replaced with cheaper part-timers who make a pittance. That result may be puzzling, but the arithmetic isn't.)

Now, if you favor Values and Character as an approach to complex social problems, and feel what higher education needs most is more dedicated professors who Truly Love Teaching, then all of these adjuncts are the answers to your prayers. Nearly half the college teachers in our country love teaching so much that they do it for poverty wages. That's not to say that tenured faculty don't love teaching (although the Values and Character crowd do sometimes imply that anyone getting dental benefits must be a burnt-out mercenary), but adjunct teachers' dedication and love of teaching is beyond question. The sacrifices they make to keep teaching are astounding.

Yet we keep hearing that higher education is in crisis and that students don't learn anything in college. But most students are being taught elementary and even mid-level classes by the most selfless and dedicated teachers you could hope for. How could this be?

It's not because the adjuncts, or part-timers, or contingent faculty are bad teachers. Most adjuncts are very, very good. It's extremely common to find adjuncts who are better classroom teachers than many of the full-time faculty: better at holding students' attention in class, better at managing time in the classroom, better at generating enthusiasm. Sure, many of my tenured colleagues are terrific at these things, too, and yes, not every single adjunct is a gifted teacher. But lots of them are.

So, dedicated good teachers, working cheap, and focused on nothing but teaching. If you're in the camp that says that higher education needs to be reformed by abolishing tenure, controlling costs, giving management more "flexibility," and keeping faculty from wasting their time on research, then replacing half the faculty with adjuncts should already have us well on the road to Paradise. They have no tenure, they are not paid or rewarded for research, they cost very very little, and they can be fired so easily it's not even officially firing them. A school can simply stop giving them classes one semester, because they don't even have a year-long contract. All of the reforms that the anti-tenure crowd say will fix everything have already happened to a large extent. So why aren't things fixed?

It turns out that having a large contingent of overworked and poorly paid teachers undertake a huge chunk of university teaching does not help students learn. (There have been studies done that prove this, but do you really need them?)

Most of those teachers are excellent; all of them are dedicated. Individually, each of them is an enormous asset. One or two of them in every department would be a godsend. But in large numbers, through no fault of their own, they become part of the problem. It doesn't matter how good they are, either as professionals or as people, because lack of individual virtue is not the problem. The problems of American higher education are the problems of a badly-designed system. That system not only abuses adjunct teachers but wastes their considerable talent and labor. Sacrificing so many gifted teachers' working lives to make undergraduate education better would be a crime. Sacrificing those people's working lives to make undergraduate education worse is unforgivable.

Here are just a few of the major problems that you get when so much teaching is done by part-timers, no matter how talented those part-timers are:

Disconnection from the curriculum. A good college education means classes that meaningfully build on each other, especially within a major. Students learn certain intellectual tools in introductory classes, build on that base and add new skills in intermediate classes, and start doing more advanced work in the advanced courses. Some departments structure the learning experience better than others, but there has to be some kind of structure. It works best when the faculty in a department have ongoing conversations about what's supposed to be happening in which class, even if a lot of those conversations feel like arguments.

When one group of faculty teaches all the courses, up and down the line, those teachers develop a natural feel for what's supposed to happen when and for how well it's happening. If you teach both the advanced classes and the intro classes and a bunch of things in between, you're going to know what your intro students need to learn before they move on to the next class, and you're going to know what your advanced students have learned before they get to you. And if the sequence doesn't work, you're going to know that, too, and be able to do something about it.

But when a department is basically split into two faculties, with one group doing the advanced work and another, less powerful, group doing all of the basics and some of the intermediate classes, the course sequence will naturally tend to break up and be less effective. The people who are teaching the basics don't know how their students do later on; the people teaching the advanced stuff often feel that they can't actually teach it, because they have to catch their students up on the basics.

This problem looks different from each side of the tenure/adjunct divide. The permanent faculty often feel that students aren't learning enough in the introductory courses, and sometimes even feel that the students have been steered in an unproductive direction. (If you're a history professor who expects students to come to your class knowing how to use primary historical documents, but a lot of the intro teachers haven't been teaching them to do that, there's going to be trouble.) But there's little way to communicate that to the adjunct faculty, except as unproductive hostility. Getting hostile with badly overworked and underpaid teachers doesn't exactly get them in line with shared teaching goals. From the part-timers' perspective, the full-time faculty often seem to have unreasonable expectations about what the students should be doing in 100- and 200-level courses, and about entering students' preparation to do that work. It's a very natural thing to quietly pocket-veto the "unreasonable" parts of the curriculum, and teach the students as much as you feel they can absorb in a semester. But even if the expectations are really unreasonable, the faculty who set those expectations don't hear about it, so problems in the course sequence don't get fixed. Students just get passed along to courses they aren't quite ready for.

Dependence on student evaluations. When you teach semester to semester with no security, you need the department to view you as a good teacher. And most departments using large numbers of adjuncts don't have the resources to evaluate them except through the end-of-semester student evaluations.

Those evaluations are notoriously unreliable, especially as a measure of student learning. (If students learn a lot more or less than they would in a similar class elsewhere, how would the students know?)Evaluations are much more closely correlated with the easiness of a course's workload and grading.

It's much more useful to combine student feedback with other forms of teacher evaluation, such as classroom observations. None of the existing teacher-evaluation methods are perfect, but combining a few of them helps create at least a good-enough sense of what's going on. But observing dozens of part-timers is expensive and time consuming, and most places that are using a lot of part-timers are trying to save both on money and full-time employees. And student evaluation forms may be inaccurate, but they're dirt cheap.

This shifts an enormous amount of power to the students, who turn out to be interested (as a group) in easier workloads and higher grades. It's a basic fact of human nature that you feel smarter when you get an A than when you get a B-; if you get better grades, you feel like you've learned more, even if your class only covered two-thirds of the material it was supposed to. But part-timers don't get rewarded for how well prepared their students are in the next class; no one tracks that. They get rewarded for how happy the students are in the current class. If you're worried about getting another class next semester, you might feel like you need to have evaluation scores at least as high as the other part-timers'. And no matter how conscientious any particular teacher is about keeping standards high, that creates a general and powerful pressure to make standards increasingly easier.

Overwork. Introductory classes are especially labor-intensive. They squeeze as many students as possible considering the amount of grading that will be required for each student, and usually push the envelope of the possible. Full-time faculty, if they teach intro classes at all, generally have a balanced load of introductory and more advanced classes, which make different kinds of demands. But adjuncts teach a full and more than full load of intro courses, each of which maximizes the sheer amount of heavy lifting the teacher does. Teaching five of those at once doesn't magically create more hours in the week to do all that grading and preparation.

Most adjuncts deal with this by working insanely hard. But even so, it's impossible to grade 150 papers a week as well as you would grade 50 papers a week. Something has to give. The teacher can become more, ah, efficient in grading, and give each student a bit less, or the teacher can make a heroic effort to comment on each of those 150 papers as thoroughly as s/he would comment on twelve advanced seminar papers, have a physical breakdown in the middle of the semester, and have no energy left for student feedback for the rest of the term. Either way, the students are going to get less attention than they might, although they will almost always get more than the university is actually paying for. (Part-timers often make somewhere between $100 and $150 dollars per student per semester in the most demanding classes.)

The courses in which part-time teachers get spread thinnest, of course, are the building-block courses which are supposed to provide the foundation for later work. It's exactly in the foundational courses that schools try to save money, and teachers' working conditions make it hardest for them to teach effectively.

So these three major problems combine to reinforce each other. Part-time professors are charged with teaching the building blocks for later courses, but they are given insufficient resources to teach those basic skills, are cut off from feedback about how their students do later on in college, and face constant pressure to loosen standards in order to keep their student evaluations high. This is a system designed to produce bad results, no matter how good the individual teachers in the system are. Our current adjunct system is much like hiring a bunch of expert drivers for a fleet of buses with bad transmissions and suspect brakes. You can put great people behind the wheel, but the passengers still won't all get where they should.

Research (and common sense) suggests that most of these problems go away when you convert adjuncts to full-time faculty, even without tenure. You can do fine if part of the faculty are full-time teachers who don't do research, and who take on more of the lower-level courses. But they need to be people with full-time jobs, with a real salary and benefits, working at one college.

If you're working non-tenure track for only one school, and being paid a living wage, you will have a course load that allows you to actually give each student the effort that they need. You will be part of the department's conversation about what students need to learn in which class and how students are doing. (And if you're at the same place every semester for a few years, you'll be able to see how well your old students do.) And you won't be dependent upon your popularity in student evaluations for next semester's rent money; most likely, you'll be able to have teaching observations and feedback from peers and supervisors in your department. You may even be given a chance for ongoing training and professional development. You'll have a chance to be exactly as effective as tenure-track full-timers are, or more, because your working conditions will support your teaching effectiveness instead of undermining it.

That's a good solution, but too expensive for most colleges to actually follow, if by "too expensive" we mean only 20% or 30% cheaper than tenure-line faculty. Full-time salaries and benefits cost money, and the point of hiring adjuncts is to spend as little money as humanly possible, reducing costs to something in the low three figures for every three credit hours a student pays for. Every college and university could effectively assemble a very good pool of steady non-tenure-track teachers who would make something like 80% of what new assistant professors make. But they don't feel able or willing to spend that money. Those are the hard facts.

Local Scrip and Hard Currency: The Academic Life

2011-04-16T16:14:00.003-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

I spent last weekend at the major annual conference in my field -- a national, nay international nerdapalooza of the highest order, and one of the major events on my yearly work calendar. Sunday night I caught a red-eye home and went straight from the airport to work. (This means that I have now grown up to be like Clark Kent in the sense that I have changed my clothes at the workplace.) After teaching, prepping, and meeting with students for five hours or so, I had a long department meeting and then a little committee work to take care of. It pretty much defined the split that runs down the middle of the typical professor's career. Between the beginning and end of my teaching day, I had moved from one group of colleagues to another (with no overlap, since like many academics today I am my university's only professor in my field), and at the same time moved between two different sets of ongoing conversations, two different sets of professional demands, and two different sets of professional rewards.

One of the evergreen questions for academics and academic bloggers is how to balance research and writing with service obligations like committee work. The question can only be answered by recognizing that service and research are rewarded very differently. It is not simply that one activity is rewarded more than the other. The rewards are of fundamentally different kinds. In either case, professors are rewarded down the line for their track records instead of immediately for single acts, but the kinds of reward given for a record of strong research are very different than those given for a strong record of university service.

Successful research is the easiest part of a professor's record to evaluate from the outside. Books, articles, grants, and awards are fairly easy things to point to, and the nature of peer-reviewed scholarship means that professors bring those things to their universities from outside. The faculty member's research abilities are constantly being judged and confirmed by third-party experts: federal grant agencies, editorial boards, academic presses, professional associations, and the outside reviewers who are asked to evaluate a professor's research in tenure or promotion cases. There is a measure of subjectivity in all of this, but it still involves multiple evaluations from independent experts. That gives the deans something that feels solid and reliable when it's time to make personnel decisions. And because your scholarly record and reputation are judged from outside, they are things that you can take to other universities; another dean will see pretty much the same things your dean sees and your scholarship goes with you if you take another job. If you have an NSF grant, you can take it to another school. If you've published a book, anyone can read it. This means that your reputation and track record as a researcher constitute a kind of professional hard currency. It has a value that can be independently confirmed and that stays relatively stable from place to place.

On the other hand, the labor that professors put in making their departments and universities run better can not be transferred to another employer; all that work you did to reorganize the undergraduate curriculum is only valuable to the school where you did it. Moreover, those efforts are not evaluated or confirmed by any neutral observers, so no one at another college will ever feel as certain about your skills as an organizer or conciliator or departmental advocate as they feel certain about your research productivity. People will say what a great colleague you are, sure, but people at another school would be fools to bank too much on that. They won't really know how you are to work with until they're working with you. Therefore, the reputation and goodwill you build up within your college or university through your efforts to make it run more smoothly is a kind of local scrip, a currency that can only be spent in the place where it was issued; it's like having an account at the company store.

(Now, the obvious thing that I've been leaving out is teaching, which needs at least one post of its own. Teaching is at once the most important part of a professor's work and the hardest to measure. The best existing measurements can do is suggest whether a teacher is generally succeeding in the classroom or not; you can tell struggling teachers from popular teachers, but not pretty good teachers from very good ones, or the merely unpopular from the genuinely incompetent. This has profound effects on academia works, but for now I'll stick to three points. 1) Everyone is expected to teach well; 2) contrary to popular mythology, teachers who cannot demonstrate competence (wherever their school sets that bar) get denied tenure or blocked from promotion: and 3) teaching excellence by itself can't advance your career. You're in trouble if you can't teach, but to get ahead you need to teach well and show strength in another area.)

The obvious conclusion that some people draw from the hard currency/local scrip distinction, although it's seldom expressed in the terms I'm using, is that you should amass all the research-based bullion you can and not bother with the local store credit. Weasel out of all the committees and meetings you can so you can spend more time in your lab or study and at high-profile conferences in your field. Certainly, there are plenty of people who have taken that advice to heart. Every faculty member knows them. But it's more complicated, because it's very hard to do your job without at least a little local scrip to spend.

Local scrip and hard currency buy different things, at different rates. Big things take hard currency, and sometimes lots of it. If you want to get tenure, you need research in the bank. If you want a promotion, or a year of research leave, or a job somewhere else, you need to be publishing. But hard currency won't buy a lot of the little everyday things you need, or will only buy it at a drastic discount and anger the barista who you've just forced to accept your out-of-town check. Want to get a new class approved by the curriculum committee? Need a teaching schedule that works around your child's day care? Hoping to recommend an excellent student for a departmental prize? A little local scrip buys those things much more cheaply than hard currency will, and sometimes to use your hard currency at all you have to be a huge jerk, making demands because you're a star who has this grant and that honor and blah blah blah. You need hard currency to buy the equivalent of a house or a car, and certainly to move to another town, but you need local scrip at the dry cleaner and the corner store. It's hard to get much done without it, and if you move to another town you'll just have to start piling up the new local scrip there.

I spent last weekend banking all the hard currency I could, which is what national conferences are for. But in the meeting Monday afternoon, that counted for the grand sum of diddly plus squat. How much I had impressed this and that scholar in my field with whatever piece of evidence didn't matter. When I wanted to win a point in discussion, what mattered (beside the persuasiveness of my point itself) was the amount of local scrip I've saved up at my workplace: my reputation for being reasonable, the work I've put in on the department's behalf in various ways, and the degree to which my home-team colleagues have come to trust my professional judgment.

By the same token, none of those things mattered in the least the day before; the fact that I do a lot of committee work back home doesn't change how other people in my field respond to my scholarship. And how those colleagues from other universities think about my work will eventually matter for me back home. The next time I go up for promotion, my university will ask outside referees about my reputation and the quality of my work.

I got a semester's research leave, about a year ago, which was especially important because it allowed me to live with my partner (who works elsewhere) for that semester. That took hard currency: evidence that I had been a productive researcher and would use the leave to keep producing. But then I had to ask, at the last minute, to change which semester I would be on leave, because my partner had also gotten a semester's leave and we were now hoping to put together a whole year of full-time close-distance relationship. Making that switch inconvenienced various people and required switching around my teaching assignments pretty thoroughly. But people were very helpful, and my chair cobbled together the best and sanest new schedule he could for me. My chair and the deans were being very reasonable, but it didn't hurt that I'd been saving up my local scrip for a while; it's a lot easier to do favors for people who put effort into making the place run. It's also easier for my chair to accommodate my long-distance partnership, and help me make that manageable, because he trusts me to put in a good amount of service work.

Hard currency without local scrip makes life much harder. But local scrip without hard currency doesn't get you anywhere. There's only so much of it you can spend, and some things simply aren't for sale in that currency. Local scrip might help you get a piece of lab equipment sooner rather than later, or give you more influence over what books in your field the library orders. But if there's no budget for equipment or library purchases, there isn't. Local scrip might increase your say in which job candidate gets hired during your next search, but if your school doesn't have the money to hire anyone, that's that. Local scrip might help your campaign to become department chair, if that's what you want, but if what you want is an endowed chair as the [Donor's Name] Professor of [Your Discipline], with the salary and perks that brings, it's all about hard currency.

And, in the final analysis, local scrip only has as much value as the other locals give it. It can be arbitrarily devalued by new leadership. People can decide not to honor it, especially if one of you has been around much longer than the other. And it really never gains interest. You don't have to use it immediately, but you can't save it for long. You always need to be earning more through one service or another, or you won't have much left. Hard currency also loses value if you don't keep at it, but at a much slower rate. A patent is a patent. A book that's out of print stays in university libraries and keeps getting cited. And every once in a while, you might be lucky enough to produce a piece of research that actually gains in value over the years, something that influences the next generation of scholars and continues adding to your reputation. That kind of success isn't everything. It isn't even everything you need to get through Wednesday afternoon at work. But they can't take it away from you.

Ever Notice That The Birthers ...

2011-04-14T18:26:00.004-04:00

never talk about Biden becoming President?

If you really didn't believe that Barack Obama was Consitutionally eligible for office, wouldn't that make Biden (who shared Obama's fat majority in the Electoral College) President? Yet that never comes up.

Even if you were magical thinker enough to believe that Biden, by running on an ineligible man's ticket were ALSO somehow disqualified from office, wouldn't that make the Speaker of the House President? I can see how that notion might be unpalatable to Republican activists when Pelosi was Speaker, but now that there's a Republican Speaker you hear exactly the same amount of nothing about it.

Where's the Birther movement demanding that Boehner be sworn in as President?

Even the Birthers aren't interested in their own theory as something that might be real. They're interested in it as a tool to reject reality completely.

Let me translate the demand to "see the birth certificate":

Obama shouldn't have been President, so none of this should happen! I will not eat my peas! No laws that I don't want can ever ever ever ever pass! And it is NOT bedtime, Mommy! Not not not!

Birtherism is not an attempt to follow a legal or Constitutional principle. It shows no interest in what the Constitutional ramification of an ineligible POTUS might be. It's simply a way of shutting out cognitive dissonance, and refusing to believe that more than half the country voted for Obama.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Mad Men Economics (or, Why We Have a Depression and the Sixties Didn't)

2011-03-30T20:46:00.007-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

The New York Times takes a look at the contract disputes that have been delaying production of Mad Men. (Although Deadline Hollywood suggests that the show is now a go, even though the fight with series creator Matt Weiner is not over.)

What's enlightening is the nature of the dispute. The network is ready to make Weiner very, very rich. But they demand that he turn in a slightly shittier product. From the Times:

AMC, which has showcased “Mad Men” for the last four summers and has benefited mightily from it, has offered Mr. Weiner a three-season deal that would be worth $30 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. But Mr. Weiner is bristling at the channel’s proposal to shorten each episode by two minutes (to add commercial time) and to cut the cast budget (to save money). He says the changes would fundamentally make “Mad Men” a “different show.”

Some sources report that the cuts to the cast involve eliminating two regular characters, but it seems the key demand is that the show cut $1.5 million from the acting budget. That might make things more cost-effective, but there is no way that a show that's two minutes shorter and has $1.5 million less to spend paying performers is going to be better because of that. Those cuts will show up in the quality of the product and the enjoyment of the viewers, whether or not they can put their finger on why. (AMC apparently also demands more product placement, which all too many viewers can put their finger on.)

Meanwhile, they're kicking Weiner's already-extravagant $4.5 million a season (his last contract was $9 million for two seasons, rich by any TV standards but totally off the scale for a basic cable show) to a ludicrously lucrative $10 million a season. So the plan is to pay the head writer an extra five and a half million, but stiff the actors for one and a half. Third grade math suggests that this makes the show more expensive for the network while it makes the product shoddier.

This is bizarre and irrational. It's also typical of the way American business now thinks. It seems totally normal to large corporations that a major deal should make a single executive obscenely wealthy but "control costs" by putting out a lower-quality product. This is not how business, or capitalism, or rational self-interest, is supposed to work. The point, unless it is on top of your head, is to make sure the money you actually spend on your product maximizes the product's value. That way, you can sell your product to more people for a higher price. Also you can "build your brand" and "enhance word-of-mouth" and do all the other tertiary things that sound so smart and important in business school, but which are only refinements on the basic sell more product at higher prices game plan. Low cost products should be as high-quality as you can make them. High cost products should really, really be as high-quality as you can make them. There is no point to spending millions of extra dollars to put out things that your customers will like less.

This only makes sense in our current parody of capitalism, where the point of business is to create massive piles of individual capital, rather than to actually run a business well. This is fundamentally irrational behavior, but it can be seen throughout our society. People at the top of large enterprises make much, much more than ever before, even while workers in those enterprises make less and less and customers get crappier and crappier goods and services. To the people making the decisions, who identify with the bazillionaire head honcho, this seems right, just, and natural. Instead of putting the money into the business and building customer loyalty, the goal is to take money out of your business by heaping large piles of it on one or two star upper managers. This is how our huge banks now work. This is how our large corporations work. It makes no sense as business. It only makes sense on the levels of myth, ideology and dream.

But myths, ideologies, and dreams are what's running our economy, which explains why it's so terrible. The people making important decisions imagine the point of capitalism as the accumulation of vast personal fortunes, and so a system that's broken but makes a very few people very, very rich does not seem broken to them. A national economy that's fueled by consumer purchases but also progressively weakens average consumers' buying power sounds like a paradise. Even obviously stupid business decisions look reasonable, as long as they're foolishly enriching a multi-millionaire.

This particular example of American business's consensual folly is especially jarring because it deals with a television program set in the economic boom times of the early 1960s. What created that economic boom? High taxes, high wages, strong unions, and a generally equitable distribution of wealth which allowed the middle classes especially to grow rich as fast as the rich did. In other words, Ayn Rand's dystopian nightmare. It worked great. It is absolutely the opposite of the way economies are supposed to work, according to the Very Serious People who are now in charge. One of the things that interests me about Mad Men is the way that the show portrays a Golden Age (and it is committed to its era's nostalgic glamor) that contradicts our current economic wisdom, and the way the show equivocates between giving Alan Greenspan the lie and pretending that actually, the 1960s was the deregulated market-libertarian paradise of Greenspan's fever dreams.

It's also clear to me that Made Men operates as a fantasy about work ... a fantasy of being able to rise through one's own talents (as Don and Peggy do), in a way that no longer seems easy or even possible. Mad Men focuses on the Eisenhower/Kennedy/Johnson years as the last good years of the creative middle class, who could grow affluent through their own gifts and labor. Sterling Cooper was a place where a talented hustler could come in off the street and become a partner, a place where a secretary with a flair for writing might (might) actually get a chance at the upper-middle class. But AMC does not believe in that world. It believes in a world where one guy gets all the money, and where highly-skilled, highly-paid workers (such as television actors) get shown the door. It's a bad day when the bean-counters' fantasies are less rational and sustainable than the fantasies being put on screen.

"Only 1,000 Soldiers"

2011-03-27T11:47:00.001-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

One of the frequent talking points about the Libyan rebels is that they only have about a thousand trained soldiers in their ranks. As the meme went around, it sometimes turned into only 1000 soldiers, period, which is clearly not true. And the "1000 men" meme has been used to shore up certain anti-intervention talking points, even though it undermines others.

The most obvious use of the "only 1000 soldiers" point was to imply that intervention was hopeless, because there was no way the rebels could win. That argument doesn't look as good this morning, after the rebels have taken Ajdabiya and pushed onward, but things might swing against the rebels again in a few days or weeks.

On the other hand, the "only 1000 soldiers" talking point doesn't go entirely well with the argument that the rebels are just another bunch of bastards for Qaddafi's own security forces. In fact, I'm sure that plenty of people in the emerging rebel leadership are bastards, of one kind or another. I don't expect that Libya is about to produce any leaders that I would vote for myself. But on the other hand, it's also pretty clear that the rebels aren't just a breakaway faction from the Libyan army and police. If this were a bunch of Qaddafi's generals going out on their own, they would have a lot more of their old troops with them, or they wouldn't do it at all. If only 1000 veterans are in this mix, that fits with a genuine ground-up popular revolt. (That doesn't mean that the revolutionaries are completely right and noble. But it might mean they represent a big chunk of Libyan society.)

That said, I don't doubt that a lot of those 1000 trained people got their training in the Libyan army or other parts of the regime. That's where the training happens. If the rebels didn't have anybody who'd ever worn one of Qaddafi's uniforms, they wouldn't have anyone trained at all, or anyone who could train the others. We may not be happy with those guys when the dust clears, but there's no way any of this could happen without some people who've worked for Qaddafi at some point.

In one way (and only this one), the Libyan army resembles the Continental Army circa 1776. Almost none of the American Revolutionary soldiers had much military training, and it was years before Washington could build up a small nucleus of trained soldiers. The rest knew how to fire their weapons, but that was mostly it. They had trouble moving as a group on the battlefield without breaking up (which is an easy way to get killed); they didn't have the tactical skills or the discipline that the British had. Washington's artillery commander was a guy who had owned a bookshop before the Revolution and read all the military science books he could find. (He did okay in the end; they named Fort Knox after him.) And the few people with military training or experience that the rebels had were people who had put in time fighting for one King George or another ... guys like Washington, who'd been a militia colonel in the Seven Years' War, or Horatio Gates, who had been a major in the British Army and who some people originally considered the Americans' best potential general. (He didn't live up to the hype. Don't try putting your gold in Fort Gates.) That's your basic profile of a revolutionary army: a bunch of recruits who need to be shown where their elbow is, and a few people who have military experience but used to work for the regime.

I'm not saying that the Libyan rebels are the American rebels, or that we should view them as morally equivalent to the Continental Army. All I'm saying is that they look pretty much the way you expect an emerging revolutionary army to look.

Libya, Obama, and the Just War Theory

2011-03-21T20:06:00.008-04:00

cross-posted from Dagblog

Barack Obama's decision to join the attack on Libya is very much of a piece with his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. There are various grounds on which a reasonable person could object to the Libya strikes (diplomatic reasons, military reasons, pragmatic reasons, reasons of consistency, even Constitutional reasons). But the decision absolutely fits within a coherent and very traditional moral philosophy. Obama walked through most of the key points of that position in his Nobel Prize speech, with one important omission. That omission is perhaps the key to understanding his conduct as a war leader.

The "just war" position is a theoretical framework dating back to the Roman Empire and elaborated by early Christian thinkers, based on the "necessary evil" or "lesser evil" principle. If choosing the lesser evil sounds like a bad thing to you, let me propose that choosing the greater evil is worse, and that choosing a randomly selected evil is an abdication of morality. (There are those who feel that such an abdication relieves them of responsibility for whatever consequences follow, because they did not positively assent to such consequences. I could not disagree more.) Most Western medicine works on the lesser evil principle: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments all cause you real harm in the best-case scenario and kill you in the worst; they are only worthwhile if they eliminate, or offer a reasonable hope of eliminating, a much worse danger to your health. On the same reasoning, just war views violence as acceptable, under sometimes perhaps obligatory, in order to prevent much worse violence. If someone walks into a workplace with an automatic weapon, a police officer is allowed to shoot that person, and should. If there were a way to disarm the shooter non-violently, that would be preferable, but if there is not, and often there is not, it is better for the shooter to be killed than for many other people to be killed.

The just-war idea should not be confused with the idea of a holy war, which suggests that violence can be redeemed, or even redemptive, if done in the service of one's god or of some other "transcendent" or "noble" belief. Violence is never imagined as a good in itself; it can only ever be an attempt to lessen the overall violence. Neither does just-war theory suggest that violence can be justified by the wickedness of one's opponents. No one can be killed because they are bad people who deserve it. They might justifiably be killed as a last resort attempt to prevent them from doing a very, very bad thing. Muammar Qaddafi was an evil person last year, but that was not a justification for murdering him. He is currently killing and poised to kill many, many people, and if killing him would prevent that it would be extremely defensible from the just-war position. On the other hand, if Qaddafi managed to kill hundreds of thousands of his countrymen and then flee to Geneva and live peacefully, there would no longer be a necessary-evil justification for killing him. (Obviously, there would be reasons to try him, and there might even be coherent moral reasons proposed for executing him, but those are not lesser-evil reasons, because Qaddafi would no longer be a threat to others' lives.)

The Crusades were never imagined or seriously defended as just wars. They were Holy Wars. They were justified not as attempts to prevent worse evils, but as tributes to the glory of God. (Also, they were imagined as good things because Muslims were infidels and therefore The Bad Guys.) These two basic Christian conceptions of war, the Just War and the Crusade, have coexisted in Christian thought for the last thousand years, and occasionally borrowed each other's favorite metaphors, but they are profoundly different. In a crusade model, you commit acts of terrible bloodshed and tell yourself that they are acts of virtue, because your enemies are godless and because you have such good values. In a just war model, you remember that there's no such thing as a good war. There are only bad wars and even worse wars, and the only reason to fight a bad one is to stave off a worse one. War is like amputating a limb to save a patient's life: something to be done in extremis, when other options are gone.

George W. Bush is a Crusader, deep in his bones. His Iraq war flunks every test of a just war, six ways to Sunday. Bush operates out of the Crusade model where violence is absolved and redeemed by its lofty spiritual purpose. Barack Obama operates, mostly, from a Just War position, which is aimed at achieving as much good as practically possible and salvaging what can be salvaged from terrible situations. His Nobel acceptance speech walks through most of the basic conditions of the Just War theory, which follow logically from the underlying "necessary evil" principle.

The first condition of a just war is the magnitude of the evil being prevented. If you're going to fight a war, costing tens and potentially hundreds of thousands of lives, as the lesser evil, the threat of a greater evil has to be pretty huge. You don't amputate a broken arm; you only amputate an arm that will cost the patient his or her life. You don't attack another country over any bad act they've committed; it has to be an attempt to prevent massive bloodshed. There's a traditional self-defense clause here (you can fight an invading army rather than permitting them to kill your fellow citizens), but for third-party interventions there should be a reasonable certainty that many, many, many lives will be lost if you do not intervene. Clinton's interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo followed basically just-war rationales; they were fought to prevent large-scale deaths of civilians in "ethnic cleansing."

In the Libya case, it's very clear that Qaddafi intends to massacre large numbers of civilians for resisting his rule. That's a very reasonable justification for the rebels' armed resistance to him, and by extension for assisting those rebels.

The second condition is that the violence used be proportionate. You don't stop bloodshed by committing vastly more bloodshed. If they only way you can prevent the deaths of thousands of innocents is killing millions of innocents, there's really no way to say that you're choosing the lesser evil. You can't destroy the village in order to save it. You might be able to destroy a few houses in order to save it, but if you're going to do more damage than you prevent, you've lost your way. A related concept should be that the military conduct must discriminate between the enemy soldiers and the civilians who the war is meant to protect. A just war can only be just if it kills as few civilians as possible. Disproportionate and indiscriminate violence takes away any rationalization for a just war. There is no moral point to killing a bunch of unarmed civilians. You can't say they're better off. You can't justify killing them as an attempt to minimize bloodshed.

How Obama passes this test in Libya will be seen on the field, and it can be murky. But leveling Tripoli would be completely unjustifiable. And the American habit of using guided ordinance shows a simultaneous embrace of the "proportionate and discriminate" principle and failure to execute it. It's true that many of our weapons can be guided fairly precisely, but our dependence upon air power, cruise missiles, and predator drones also leads to inevitable civilian casualties.

Perhaps most importantly, a just war is a last resort. It's not okay to kill a lot of people because you're preventing even more death and violence. It's only acceptable to kill a lot of people because it is the only possible way to prevent even more death and violence. If you have another option for averting the violence, you should take it. You must take it.

Part of the last resort condition of imminence. War can only be justified if there is genuinely no time for any other kind of interference. You can't attack a country to stop them from massacring an ethnic minority someday. You can only attack a country to stop a massacre that's already getting underway. This is also logical ... the longer the time scale, the more chances you have to prevent the violence by peaceful means. This is why a police officer is authorized to kill a person who is committing a crime, and not someone who is merely likely to commit a felony someday. It's also why the "weapons of mass destruction" argument for the Iraq war, even if the weapons program had been underway, was not legitimate in just-war theory; even if Saddam Hussein had a weapons program, it was very clear that he was nowhere near completing, say, an atomic bomb, and therefore there were many different options for forestalling and preventing any such bomb. You don't get to bomb a country because you don't have the patience for sanctions and inspections. You only have a legitimate cause to bomb when it is genuinely now or never.

Whatever else is happening in Libya, it's happening in real time, and any intervention had to be timely. The regime is killing people right now. You can't save those people with six months of patient diplomacy; they will be dead by then.

The final major condition for a just war is realistic likelihood of success. This sounds like a practical rather than a moral reason, but we are discussing practical morality. If we're going to commit one evil to avert a greater evil, we need to have a realistic chance of actually averting that greater evil. And the more force we use, the better hope we need to have that it will pay off.

This is the condition that Barack Obama did not mention at the Nobel ceremony, and the one he apparently doesn't like to talk about. If you are going to fight a war to prevent even greater violence, you need to be able to prevent that violence.

Even the most scrupulous just war means committing a guaranteed evil, the violence that you will commit, for a chance of averting a larger one. Success in war can only ever be a probability, not a certainty, and if you fail to avert the greater evil you set out to fight, you will have only added more bodies to the pile. So you need to be damned sure of your chances.

If this sounds abstract, let me phrase it as a question: Why didn't Luxembourg try to stop Hitler? The answer is obvious: they could not. If they had attacked the German army in 1939, they would have been destroyed and the Germans would have gone right back to their destruction. They would not have lessened the evil that the Germans were doing; they would have added to it.

It is flatly immoral, in the just-war framework, to attack without any hope of success. Only success, or a good-faith expectation of success, can justify a war fought on the grounds that it is the lesser evil. In the same way, a just war must be planned in a way that permits success. If you send an expeditionary force to stop a genocide in a foreign country, but you send only a handful of troops, you are no longer fighting a just war. You're simply killing more people. And if the goal of your war is fundamentally unachievable, then there is no way to justify it. George H. W. Bush's intervention in Somalia was purely humanitarian and generous; the goal of distributing food and aid to the starving is fundamentally just. But there quickly turned out to be no way to achieve that honorable goal in that place by force of arms. And just wars are not about good intentions. They are about relieving suffering and deterring bloodshed.

Obama does not wish to discuss the expectation of success condition, because he is bogged down in two wars where success can no longer be achieved. Iraq is obviously something he has been saddled with, and it's clear to the whole world why he's there; he's there because his troops are hard to extricate. Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a war that Obama explicitly defends as a just war, fought for an appropriate cause. And one could certainly argue that the initial invasion of Afghanistan was a perfectly orthodox just war: the United States was responding to an actual threat to its citizens' safety, and the goals of driving al-Qaeda out of Iraq and disrupting their terrorist operations were eminently feasible. But there are no longer any obviously feasible goals in Afghanistan. What we hope to achieve by remaining, or reasonably can believe we might achieve by remaining, has become a mystery. Obama can't justify the continuation of his "good war" in the just-war framework, and he knows it. So he doesn't try.

The question is not whether we should use our military to protect Libyan civilians from wholesale murder. I think that goal, taken just on its own terms, is unimpeachable. The question, which has yet to be answered, is whether our military power can protect those civilians from violence. That's the most important question of all.

Get Ready for the Martyrdom of Roger Ailes

2011-02-28T15:40:00.012-05:00

Barry Ritholtz reports that Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, may soon be indicted on federal charges. Judith Regan has alleged in civil court filings that Ailes pressured her to lie to federal agents who were doing a background check on her ex-boyfriend, Bernard Kerik. (That's Kerik who was once nominated to be head of Homeland Security and who is now in prison. That Kerik.) Allegedly, Reagan has audiotape of Ailes pressuring her.

I have no idea if Regan's allegations are true, or if Ritholtz's source is right about a criminal indictment. But I do wonder how Fox News would respond if such an indictment is handed down. At other news operations it would be simple: the network president facing criminal charges would resign as quietly as possible, and the network would try to live it down. But the heart of Fox's business model is that it doesn't play by the rules that everyone else does.

This is a news organization that has cultivated a highly oppositional and combative style. It encourages its viewers to imagine themselves as besieged and persecuted, and some of its on air-talent openly traffics in conspiracy theorizing, tracing out the alleged hidden connections and patterns "behind" totally non-mysterious events. And Fox has no shyness about using the news to drive its own agendas.

There's a real possibility that Roger Ailes could decide not to step down, but to remain president of Fox News throughout a criminal trial. (All of this would be up to Rupert Murdoch, of course.) Even if Ailes did step down, his replacement would likely be highly sympathetic to him.

Should Ailes go to trial, Fox might simply go into stonewall denial mode, and essentially refuse to cover the story. But that's not really their style. There's a real chance that Fox would respond to an indictment of Ailes with an all-out offensive by some or all of its on-air personalities. I can easily imagine some of the major players, like O'Reilly and Beck, being given the green light to say whatever they like on the topic. And it's not impossible that Fox's management could simply give marching orders to the whole network, telling them to beat the drum for Roger and make defending him a priority.

They already have the required narrative firmly in place. They've been building it for years: liberals are out to get conservatives, and the biased mainstream media distorts the truth. They're trying to silence Fox News! A trial of Roger Ailes would not only fit neatly into that narrative, but it would serve as confirmation of that narrative. Fox has been telling its viewers that there's a conspiracy against the truth and they would be able to offer a prosecution of Ailes as "proof" of the conspiracy. He doesn't make a very plausible martyr from a third-party perspective, but it will sound plausible to Fox viewers because Fox has spent years predicting that it will happen.

There's a small chance, but a real one, that Fox could go all in and make the martyrdom of Roger Ailes a central talking point. It only sounds crazy because it is. But that hasn't stopped them before. And it's crazy in precisely the way that bonds Fox's loyal viewers to the network: it creates a sense of shared viewpoint and shared persecution. Ailes on trial would actually increase Fox's value: it would make them the sole source of news its viewers can trust and it would make the whole conspiracy theory about Fox News itself. It would be a golden opportunity.

There's also a small but real chance that an Ailes trial, backed with the alleged hard evidence of audiotape, would push Fox into its final journalistic break from reality. If they've committed hard enough to Ailes's martyrdom (and since they seem to think a few news cycles at a time, they could do that without worrying about their endgame) and Ailes is being convicted on hard evidence, they might feel the temptation to just declare that evidence faked. And then we would have a major news outlet explicitly committed to paranoia.

Should any of this happen, we'd see a few things. First we would find out how much Fox can steer other conservative outlets' agendas. If they're beating the drum for Roger, does Limbaugh pick it up the beat? Do the right-wing blogs? Can they get respectable conservatives in mainstream publications to equivocate?

More interesting is the question of whether Fox could make Ailes's martyrdom a central article of conservative faith for the true believers, just in time for the presidential primaries. If we get to the point where primary hopefuls feel the pressure to take a public stand for Ailes, we'll know whether Fox is an arm of the Republican Party or the other way around.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Dear Oscar: The Depression Was Not That Pretty

2011-02-25T11:18:00.041-05:00

I went to see The King's Speech, because it was nominated for all those awards and because Monday is Five Dollar Night. I like the actors in it a lot, but I'm glad I didn't spend more than five dollars. The King's Speech may well win the Oscar for Best Picture, but that just goes to show that you don't need originality, drama, artistic perception or a compelling story to win an Oscar.

From the opening moments of that film I was forced to think, once again, a thought that's been building up slowly and irresistibly over the past several years of movie-going:

I am really, really tired of the Great Depression looking so goddamned pretty.

You know how the Thirties look in the movies: all those lovingly restored cars, polished to a deep black-mirror gleam, all those beautifully tailored vintage clothes, all those hats. At the movies, it seems completely inexplicable that hats ever went out of style: every hat looks so good! Everyone looks so good in hats! How could anyone not wear one? You have to watch a movie actually filmed in the Thirties, rather than merely set in the Thirties, to see what people actually looked like in those hats. You also need to watch a movie made during the Depression, instead of set during the Depression, to have any chance that the movie will acknowledge the Depression itself or the tens of millions of people mired in desperate poverty.

Some of the Hollywood movies from the Thirties are entertainments designed to ignore the tough times happening in the real world, while others make those tough times into the story. But nearly every high-end art-house movie set in the Thirties, the kind of movie that prides itself on being "serious", ignores the tough times that were happening in the real world. Low-brow moviemakers used to offer up escape from the Thirties. Now high-brow moviemakers offer the Thirties as a place to escape to.

Some of this is just the Costume Drama Effect, which invests props and costumes with fetishistic glamor. In old Warner Brothers pictures, people drive cars. In a costume dramas they drive carefully restored antique cars, which is a very different thing. The same thing goes for clothes and hats; there's a difference between wearing a wool jacket and wearing an obsessively recreated wool jacket. The camera treats them differently, too. When you've spent that much time and effort and money getting the cars and hats and silver trays just right, you focus (literally and figuratively) on the cars and hats and silver in a way you wouldn't if you were filming a contemporary setting on a normal costume budget. The same phenomenon is at work when the camera in The Social Network lingers repeatedly over that movie's detailed recreation of the Harvard campus. (No one has been allowed to film on Harvard's campus since the makers of Love Story, another craptastic Oscar nominee, allegedly trashed the joint.) The film makers worked so hard to make its Harvard look real that they need you to notice and admire it. And of course, when you're focusing on the nice clothes and cars and silver, it's natural to focus your costume dramas on the people with the nicest clothes and cars and antique silver. Costume drama has always favored the upper classes.

But just because something has become a cliche doesn't make it less hackneyed or dishonest. There will always be some historical dramas about people with country houses and butlers and really cool cigarette holders. They have their place; there are many that I enjoy. But how many do we need, and why are so many allegedly ambitious and "serious" film makers willing to accept the severely limited view of the world that those country houses afforded? At this point Brideshead has been revisited, and re-revisted, and re-re-re-re-revisited. What makes film makers think there's anything else to see there? In the actual Thirties, most artists knew (or at least suspected) that the world of the aristocracy was not the whole world, and even when the story was about aristocrats there was a healthy understanding that they were not the whole story.

The King's Speech, on the other hand, lazily assumes the Duke of York's view of the world. The speech therapist, Lionel Logue, may be from a much lower class and live in much less comfortable circumstances, but the movie has no real interest in those circumstances or that class. Logue's character exists to serve the Duke of York's, both formally and on the level of plot. The movie is perfectly happy with that; it is convinced that both men belong exactly where the British class system has put them. Any exceptions to protocol made in the speech therapist's consulting room are daring enough; everywhere else they are iron-clad. This is a movie that, entirely without irony, depicts Wallis Simpson's failure to greet the Duchess of York with the proper etiquette as an important character flaw. The only way to be entirely unironic about something like that is to be at least a little bit stupid.

The Depression is nowhere to be seen in this movie. The distant rumblings of World War II are to be heard from far off, but only because they provide context for the movie's great challenge: Albert Windsor's speech impediment. This is a movie that seriously proposes that George VI's speech therapy was a major front in World War II. Worse yet, it doesn't even try to sell the viewer on that proposition. It takes for granted that the viewers buy it.

I foolishly thought World War II was won by millions of factory workers working night and day to build weapons and equipment for millions of soldiers who risked (and often lost) their lives over years of grinding, grueling battle. Silly me. Now I understand that was won by a member of the British royal family keeping his appointments with his speech therapist, except when he didn't. Because, after all, if the King of England weren't able to make a good speech into a microphone, the British would have needed to fall back on the speech-making talents of Winston Churchill.

I'm okay with building up a central character as the prime mover in events that were much more complicated and beyond any individual's full control. Lawrence of Arabia is not a piece of hack work. The Social Network tells another not-terribly-plausible tale of a privileged individual almost single-handedly changing things, but it sells that story, and allows its account to be challenged in the movie itself. (Facebook is obviously not a ground-breakingly original invention, but the winner in a market competition between a bunch of remarkably similar social-networking sites. The question of where Mark Zuckerberg's personal genius comes from isn't rooted in the real world, but at least the movie works hard to root it into cinematic reality for two hours.) Protagonists who can be put forward as world-shakers tend to be very privileged, for reasons both of literary tradition and of real-world opportunity. But a film needs to sell its version. It needs, at the very least, to make it plausible. The makers of The King's Speech don't seem to have entertained an instant's doubt that George VI and his diction exercises were of world-shaking importance. Worse yet, they don't seem to have entertained even an instant's suspicion that anyone else could doubt that either. That makes the film more than a little stupid.

The saddest thing about The King's Speech is how very ordinary its type of badness has become. It's favored for major awards, despite its stupidity, because so many other allegedly thoughtful art movies are stupid in exactly the same ways. It doesn't sell its silly ideas because it expects it audience, the well-educated upscale audience that goes to see historical dramas, to believe them already.

That audience now takes it for granted that a comfortable and privileged figure can meaningfully combat a major political evil (Nazism, Communism, apartheid) simply by espousing a little symbolic opposition. That goes down well with an audience that would like believing the right things (whether left, right, or center) to be all that it takes. The audience has also grown quite comfortable identifying with Very Important People, and doesn't bother to ask why they are important. (At one point in The King's Speech, Colin Firth laments how pointless it is to be a 20th-century king, a lament that this movie couldn't afford if it didn't count on its audience to believe that Firth's character is Very Important and to thrill to the way he Shoulders His Heavy Responsibilities.) This is an audience that doesn't relate to the little guy. They're more than happy to identify with those born into privilege. And for that audience part of the point of historical drama is to gape at the luxury of the aristocrats' lives, and to enjoy all the really wonderful bespoke hats.

Furthermore, although this may simply be my own eroding patience, it seems to me that over the last twenty years or so historical films headed for art theaters have been set more and more often, with less and less nuance, in exactly the times and places where economic inequality was greatest: in the period between the two World Wars, in the Gilded Age, during the British Raj. Maybe I've only begun to notice it more. But either way, these movies seductively and relentlessly present their audience, a highly educated and relatively privileged section of the moviegoing public, a vision of history as seen through the eyes of unearned privilege. In that vision the periods of grossest inequality, the decades marred by needless poverty and rank injustice, are shown as a series of golden ages. As the income distribution curve of our own economy has come to look more and more like that of a third world nation, our most educated and self-consciously intellectual filmgoers have been seeing film after film that makes such retrograde social arrangements look elegant and appealing. Those movies say that it's good to live in such an unequal society, that inequality creates luxury and refinement and charm. Historical drama does for those eras what those eras struggled and failed to do for themselves: hide all the work, and the sweat, and the unpleasant, undeniable truths.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Your Neighbor's Paycheck Is Your Paycheck

2011-02-23T20:20:00.009-05:00

Here's the deal: how much money you get paid is based on how much other people get paid. This is a fact of life. Your paycheck is based on what other people get in other jobs like yours, and what other people in your area make, and what other people with your qualifications make. The price of those people's work sets the price of replacing you if you quit your job. If you make less than they make, it can only be so much less. If you make more than they make, it's only realistically going to be so much more. If you're making too much less than similar workers, it will be cheaper to give you a raise than to replace you. If you're making too much more, it will be cheaper to hire someone else. You may feel like your paycheck is just between you and your boss. But you will always, always be in an important economic relationship with other workers who have other bosses. This basic truth about the world is called "the labor market."

If other people make more money than you do for more or less equivalent jobs, or if they get some benefits that you don't get, you have two ways of thinking about it. You can think of their pay as a reflection on you, and make everything of a question of self-esteem, or you can think of their pay as a market indicator and make it about money.

People who look at it as a comparison end up resenting the other workers and wanting to see them lose their jobs, or have their pay and benefits cut. That way the person doing the comparison can feel good because they're making more, or not as much less, than other people, so they can feel like winners. From this viewpoint, it's not about making more money than you're making now, but making more than other people. If you make five hundred dollars a week and other people make five hundred fifty, and they get two paid sick days a month, this mindset says that the someone else should have their pay cut seventy-five dollars and lose the sick days, because they shouldn't be treated better than you.

People who look at other people's pay as a market indicator, on the other hand, want the people who are making more money to be paid even more. If you are making five hundred dollars a week and get no sick days, but someone down the street with basically the same job makes five-fifty and gets to call in sick two days a month, you should want that person to get another raise, so they make five-seventy-five or even six hundred dollars a week. If they get that much, your boss will eventually have to give you five fifty, and maybe one paid sick day a month, to keep you from quitting and getting a job at the other place. If your boss won't give you a raise, but other bosses keep giving raises to their workers, eventually you will be able to quit and make more money at another job. The point isn't to make more money than someone else. The point is to make more money than you're getting.

If people at some other company get their pay cut, you get to feel better about yourself. If people at that company get a raise, sooner or later you get more money. In fact, the way it generally works in the second case is that you get more money and that makes you feel a little better about yourself.

The Republican position is that you should want other people to lose what they have. Why should they get health care? Why should they have a union? Why should they get a pension someday if you don't? The Republican position is that they will take things away from other people, to show those people that they are not better than you. Then, later, they will take things away from you, because they can. What are you going to do about it? Get another job? All the other jobs you qualify for are worse than yours ... wasn't that what you wanted?

The liberal position is that you should want other people to have good jobs, and for their job to get better, so that yours will get better. If someone gets health benefits and you don't, you should hope that everyone gets health benefits, so that your boss will have to give them to you. If someone else is in a union and you are not, you should hope their union get them a really good deal, because that will raise the market price for your work, too.

This is a basic fact of life. Workers are in it together, like it or not. Bosses are in it together, even if they never hold a meeting. If someone else's boss cuts their pay, your boss will be able to pay you less. If some else's boss gives them raises, yours will eventually have to give you one, too. This is called "the free market."

One of the many freakish oddities of our current political life is that most of the people shrieking about the evils of socialism take an essentially socialist position to questions of wages and benefits. The Tea Party doesn't want workers, and especially public workers, to make what the market demands. They want them to make what they deserve, in the particular Tea Partier's opinion, which is always less than the free market price. The Tea Party may worship "capitalism" when "capitalism" means a very small group of people getting obscenely wealthy, but when it comes to everybody else, everybody who works for a living, the Tea Party is just a pack of raging pinkos.

Remember, any time you hear someone complaining about this or that group being "overpaid," they mean you.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Lois Lane, My Love

2011-02-16T21:45:00.025-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

Joanne Siegel has passed away. She was the model for the first sketches of Lois Lane and the wife of Superman's co-creator, Jerry Siegel. That gives her the best claim to being Lois Lane that any real person has ever had. In her later years, she was a fierce advocate for her husband's intellectual property claims. I've thought a lot about the Superman creators over the years, and part of me is tempted only to blog about intellectual property. But the truth is that Lois Lane has probably shaped the course of my adult life more than any other fictional character has, without me thinking about it.

All the years I spent reading comic books, before I was old enough to think critically or to act on the messages I was being given, I was picking up a bunch of basic lessons about how adults were supposed to live and what they were supposed to want. You were supposed to live in a big city. You were supposed to have a job. (Even if you could fly and squeeze diamonds out of coal, you were supposed to have a job. It wasn't about the money.) And when you fell in love, you were supposed to fall in love with a poised, confident, and whip-smart brunette, someone who was at least as good at her job as you were and at least as smart as you were: a woman like Lois Lane.

I have Lois and her creators to thank for an adulthood full of smart, interesting women. Women with careers and style, women who appreciate good prose and smart remarks, women who are nearly impossible to intimidate. Some only gave me a bout of spring heartsickness or an autumn of giddy smiles, some became my partners for as long as we could make our partnerships work, and one has redefined my notions of happiness, but they've all been bright and self-possessed and ambitious, and my life has been incalculably richer for it. I grew up presuming that if a straight man were able to do nearly anything he wanted and could pursue anyone he liked, he would choose a woman who was undeniably his equal. With more experience behind me, I still feel this is true. I would like to thank Clark Kent for the tip.

I'm not going to pretend that Superman comics were feminist documents, or that Superman is a good role model when it comes to romance. Everyone knows you shouldn't lie to your beloved, let alone systematically deceive her about who you are; you'd have to be from another planet to think otherwise. And it takes neurosis beyond the scope of mortal man to start a love triangle where you are your own rival, let alone to keep that phantom rivalry going for more than half a century. By the time I discovered Superman, Lois, and Clark's triangular mishegas, the comics had toned down most of the overt snickering at Lois for not figuring out that she was being lied to on a daily basis. In the 1950s, Superman would collude with the readers by literally winking to them out of the panel frame, sharing a joke on silly Lois who couldn't figure out the secret that every schoolboy with a spare dime already knew, and who was moreover a girl. But when I started reading, thirty-six years back, the wink had stopped being part of the monthly formula. And while Lois surely needed rescuing on steady schedule, even as a schoolboy I knew that this was about genre and not gender. Lois had to get herself in regular jams to keep the plot machinery from jamming, and I knew that. But the premise, after all, was that Superman was not like other men, so I naturally chalked up the rescuing to the super part, not the man part. Being rescued by that guy was nothing to be ashamed about; it could happen to anyone.

And it mattered, although I could not have articulated this, that Lois really did get herself in those jams, that it was her fearless sense of enterprise that got her in trouble. In fact, she's much more adventurous than Superman is; she takes more risks. Inevitably, one of her daring gambles would lead to a bad break and she would need to be bailed out by her bulletproof admirer. Lois didn't need rescuing twice a month because she was too stereotypically girly. She needed rescuing because she was too brave.

Lois Lane worked for me precisely because I encountered her in the middle of an extremely male fantasy, a fantasy where she was placed at the core. And in many ways she set a better example than characters like Wonder Woman, who represent a male fantasy about powerful women; you won't catch Lois wearing a pair of slave bracelets. An adolescent fantasy about the strongest woman in the world ends up with her dressed like some kind of harem girl. But with Superman, it's a fantasy of unchallengeable male power. And the lesson was that a strong, confident man wants a strong, confident woman. Made sense to me.

After all, it was always Lois who made the Superman concept work. She was Siegel and Shuster's great stroke of genius: Superman is absolutely invincible in adventure-plot terms, but love lays him low every time. The relationship with Lois, not the nonsense with gangsters and mad scientists and goofy-looking monsters, is the problem to be overcome. Lois, not Kryptonite, is his weak spot. What's great about this is that the adventure-story plot, where any suspense is artificial, becomes openly unsuspenseful, and the characters' relationship, which is potentially interesting, remains complicated and unresolved. Superman always saves the day (as you expected) and he never fixes his personal life (or didn't, until 58 years into the game). Of course, it was part of the formula that Clark and Lois never resolved their issues, but leaving them unresolved again and again focuses the narrative suspense toward what is real and human. Radioactive green rocks from outer space are not a real problem, not for us and not really, when it comes down to it, for Superman either. Love, on the other hand, will kick your ass all the way back to Krypton.

Lois was Superman's key difficulty from the very first episode: she's at the core of his character and the heart of the entire story concept. Before there was Kryptonite, there was Lois. Before there was Lex Luthor, there was Lois. When and if Superman is ever allowed to enter the public domain, Lois will go with him, because she was with him in his very first appearance. And he needs her. Without her, he has no story. Nothing can hurt him. Nothing can keep him from doing whatever he pleases. There's no suspense of any kind. (Put another way, Superman is an enormously boring character, but Clark Kent is fascinating.)

Jerry Siegel's central insight was that superhero comics, which he and Joe Shuster were inventing, are all about girl trouble. All of Superman's superhero descendants are about girl trouble, too, both the reader's and their own. (Bruce Wayne has been in his basement putting on a clinic on How Not to Date Successfully since May, 1939.) When you see a superhero whose relationship troubles aren't actually featured in the plot, the stench of Girl Trouble hangs over the whole enterprise. For Superman, the founder of the species, it's right out there in front. Did I mention I used to read a lot of these things?

Of course, if you buy a Superman comic today, you'll find Clark and Lois happily married and domesticated. That happened in 1996, about two years after Lois, Clark, and Clark's special pajamas would have gone into the public domain but for copyright-extension laws. And that provides an object lesson in what our current perpetual-copyright regime does to very old properties.

Under the terms of the bad deal that Siegel and Shuster made in the 1930s, DC Comics and later its corporate parents gained complete rights to the character for a measly $130. (Later, when Siegel and Shuster complained that DC was creating spin-off characters like Superboy without giving them a cut, they were fired from their jobs writing and drawing the character they'd created.) In 1938, that $130 bought DC exclusive rights for a maximum of 56 years, but since then Congress has extended the terms of copyright repeatedly. This is notionally for the benefit of creators, and more directly creators' heirs (extending the term from fifty years after the creator's death to seventy-five years after the creator's death can really only be about the heirs, and about the publishing company). To some extent this is true, and after one of the later extensions Joanne Siegel and the rest of Jerry's heirs did actually get half of the Superman copyright back. But of course, they get nowhere close to half of the revenue from that copyright. Creators and their families do get thrown the occasional bone, because they're the big media companies' official excuse for extending copyright again and again; you've got to at least hand out a few bucks to maintain the pretense. But the real profits of the extension go to companies like, say, Time Warner. It's nice that Siegel's family finally saw a piece of the money, but it's only a piece.

Meanwhile, Superman and Lois remain in the exclusive custody of DC comics, 73 years after they were invented. That means DC Comics gets to define the characters and shape their portrayal. Some fans of perpetual copyright actually cheer for this exclusivity on the grounds that the corporate owner looks after the characters and guards the core of the tradition. But in fact, DC Comics (a subsidiary of Time Warner) drastically reinvented Lois and Superman and removed the core of their storyline. Characters who were defined by not getting together are now blandly married. (Actual married life is not blander, simpler, or less interesting than single life is, but married life in Action Comics is just one long snore.) And with that half-smart re-thinking, the only legitimately interesting thing about Superman vanishes. (It's a bit like deciding that Romeo and Juliet's families should get along better. If one company still had a monopoly on Romeo and Juliet and decided that, it would just be a story about two good-looking kids and a bedroom window.)

This is what happens when fictional characters outlive their original creators but are kept from the free market. The official custodians are now too far from the moment of creation to have any intuitive sense of how and why the characters originally worked, but rival creators who might have a better or smarter grasp of the characters are barred from competing. Over time the writers and editors at DC forgot that Lois was supposed to be the humanizing weakness and started to wonder why their perfect superhuman leading man had this puzzling and "uncharacteristic" weakness. How could the Greatest Superhero of All Time be such a loser in his personal life? It made no sense! They had to make the character more consistent!

It wasn't enough that Clark Kent was immune to bullets, gravity, and abdominal fat. No, he had to have a perfect love life, too. And so he became perfectly boring. Now I have to root for Luthor.

If you're one of the fifty thousand people or so who reads a Superman comic this month (what remains from the old audience of millions), you'll find that the focus is on just how perfect Superman's conduct and values are, and on how much all of the minor DC Comics characters admire him. (What's interesting about the world-famous character is sacrificed in order to make him a more effective backstop to valuable DC properties like Beast Boy and Air Wave.) And there's now a heavy emphasis on Superman's "Midwestern values." You see, he's such a good person because he was raised in Kansas. And if being from the Great Plains States isn't an interesting character hook, I don't know what else could be.

The indomitable Lois Lane of my own childhood won't be infiltrating youngsters' boyhood fantasies, alas. Her publishers gave up on selling to kids long ago, or selling to anyone but a small core of hobbyists. (When I wanted to read a Superman comic, I got thirty-five cents and a posse of friends together and walked to the variety store. These days, Superman is sold in specialty shops, like kayaking gear.) And even so, she's no longer quite the same fearless adventurer who stealthily rearranged my expectations of what adulthood and adult relationships would be like. But the deed is done; I long ago graduated to real women, smart and confident professionals like the famous Miss Lane, and discovered that a few of them actually wanted to spend their time with the nerd in the glasses, and liked me even if I couldn't fly.

Thanks, Jerry. Thanks, Joe. And rest in peace, Joan.

Being a Pseudonym

2011-02-12T15:41:00.015-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

Some of the folks who read me at Dagblog may have come to suspect over time that "Doctor Cleveland" may not be my actual name. Meanwhile, readers who have actually met me in three dimensions may have thought (but been too polite to say) that the name "Doctor Cleveland" is a pretty lame disguise.

Yes, it is. It is a ridiculously lame disguise. And while I've never blogged about why that is, I think this is as good a time as any to explain.

When I started blogging, I deliberately chose a pseudonym that would be extremely easy for anyone who knew me (or who knew of me) to see through. "Doctor Cleveland" works fairly nicely for this purpose; the moniker does not communicate my identity to those who don't know it, but doesn't hide it or even pretend to hide it effectively. I could not deny being Doctor Cleveland with a straight face; anyone who asks me has already figured it out. And that's all for the best, because I don't intend to deny anything that I publish on my blog. Retract, maybe. Reconsider, absolutely. But I will never refuse to admit that I have written something that I published on the internet. My pseudonym is not a mask. It is not meant to allow me to write things that I will not stand by. And so I chose a moniker that reminds me (should I be tempted to forget) that there is no hiding place and that I should never publish anything that I would not publicly own.

My reasons for using the pseudonym are not about secrecy or privacy. Nothing one writes on the internet could be either secret or private. I use a pseudonym for the same reason that many other bloggers who are professors in their daily lives do. In fact, I'm sure my decision was colored by the fact that so many academic bloggers I admire blog pseudonymously. Hilzoy has always been my most important role model as a blogger, both for the brilliance of her posts and for the unfailing civility and integrity she brought to them. And the blogosphere is still full of pseudonymous academics I admire, from internet institutions like Tenured Radical and Historiann to my peeps Renaissance Girl, Flavia, and Medieval Woman. But aside from emulation and peer pressure, I have two basic reasons for the pseudonym.

The first is to keep my current students free of my political and topical opinions. The best thing about the phrase "Doctor Cleveland" is that my students never google it when looking for me. The pseudonym is an extension of my policy of keeping partisan politics, or at least my own partisan politics, out of the classroom. My 1689 Rule is still very much in effect. Students doing a quick internet search on their professor shouldn't come into class feeling that I'm hostile to their politics or feeling somehow licensed to push their politics on their classmates because they expect me to sympathize. They should figure out the rules of the classroom from the way the rules are actually applied in the classroom, rather than walking in the door with preconceptions that take the first thirteen weeks of the semester to break down. I can't tell myself I'm committing to keeping current events out of class when I'm publishing editorials in the blogosphere under the same name I use to teach.

One side effect of this separation between the teacher and the blogger is that is also creates a split between my other writing, the research I do as part of my profession, and the blog. There's no way to identify myself with my academic writing on the blog without identifying myself in internet search results, so you won't see Dr. Cleveland talking about his book. But that's fine; the blog and the book don't have much to do with each other, and never did. (It's different for writers like Genghis, whose book grew out of his blogging. Have I mentioned that everybody in the world should buy Genghis's book?) The occasional person searching for my work on Shakespeare doesn't need to find my opinions on John Boehner, banking reform, and Tahrir Square, and the person who's happened across my blog while looking for general opinions on topics of general interest doesn't really need to find highly specialized nitty-gritty about Elizabethan playhouses. The difference between my blogging pseudonym and my scholarly byline provides a clarifying division between two different kinds of writing for two different audiences.

The tiny areas of overlap between those two audience's interests, the blog posts about academic life and the way American universities work, actually lead me to the second major reason for the pseudonym. When I write as "Doctor Cleveland" I am very deliberately not writing as an employee of the institution for which I teach. I have blogged occasionally about how American universities work and the challenges they face, and I suspect I will be blogging about that more often over the next several months. What I write under my own name is necessarily a public comment by a faculty member of a specific educational institution. Should I find that I need to make a public comment about the institution that employs me, I will do so using my legal name. When I write about general issues of higher education, which hold true throughout American higher education, I prefer to use the Dr. Cleveland pseudonym, which I use to for general-interest blogging rather than for expressing specific concerns.

I do not use my pseudonym to blog about my own workplace. I use my pseudonym to make it clear that I am not writing about my own workplace. When I discuss academic issues or educational policy in this space, I am not describing the particular concerns of my school or department, not am I advocating for my personal interests. If a question is not of broad concern throughout a large segment of higher education, it is not worth blogging about. Neither am I interested in advocating for policies that happen to be to my own professional advantage; my goal as an academic blogger is to think publicly about how universities work, not to argue for my own professional privileges. While I necessarily draw upon my own experiences and perspectives, my goal is not to argue only for my own place within the system but to analyze how the system functions and why. That which is true only of me, or only of my employer, is not interesting for these purposes.

I have from time to time used details from my own working life as illustrations, but in every case I have chosen details that illustrate broadly representative experiences faced by many college teachers today, rather than peculiar experiences that imply anything unusual or atypical about my employer. I am very much a typical humanities professor of my generation, and the career details I choose to share on the blog are typical ones. I was lucky enough to find a tenure-track job, for which over a hundred other new and newish PhDs in my field had applied. I went through the tenure process, with its attendant anxieties, and got tenured. I work in a department that is slightly less than half the size it was at its peak strength, and I am the only specialist in my particular field although my department once had four or five tenured faculty members in that field. None of this is unusual, or peculiar to my employer; this is what has become normal.

I am also, like almost every academic of my generation, expected to be more productive as a researcher than my predecessors were, but this says nothing about me particularly. I was hired with the basic expectation that I would publish more, and more prestigiously, than any scholar in my particular field has ever done at the college where I work. But anyone that my department hired would have been expected to do that, and if it hadn't been me it would have been one of several dozen other people. Everyone else in my department was hired with the same baseline expectation. If you're hiring a Dickens scholar today, you're hiring someone to be the best-published Dickens scholar your department has ever had. If you're hiring a medievalist, you're hiring someone to be the best-published medievalist your department has ever had. This doesn't mean my colleagues and I are smart or special in a way that our predecessors were not. It means we work under a different system with different expectations and demands. If I had been hired for a job where I had not been expected to become the most-published or at least second-most-published Shakespearean in departmental history, that would have made me special and unusual. It would mean that I had gotten one of a tiny handful of elite jobs. Instead I have a perfectly typical job at a perfectly typical school. This is the way it is everywhere.

I'll be blogging more about this in the coming weeks and months, but none of it will be about the school where I work, and none of it should be read that way. I'm not blogging about one school or one person, but about the experience of my academic generation. The writing I do under my own legal name, like every other scholar's, is dedicated to establishing an almost exhaustingly specific and individual professional identity. Everything I publish as a scholar is expected to differentiate me from all of the other scholars, to testify to my unique intellectual viewpoint and my peculiar depth of learning; that is what the publishing system, and the hiring system, demand. What I publish as Doctor Cleveland is not about me. It is not about the ways in which I differ from the rest of my profession, but about what I share with them.

About the Muslim Brotherhood

2011-02-09T11:21:00.007-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

The protest movement in Egypt has suddenly alerted many Westerners to the existence of the Muslim Brotherhood, a newish group who did not emerge in Egypt until almost the end of the Coolidge Administration. Furthermore, this fast-breaking development has alerted Western pundits, bloggers, and politicians to the urgent need to say something about the Muslim Brotherhood. And so they've starting intoning their opinions on every news medium known to man, telling us how the Muslim Brotherhood are indistinguishable from al-Qaeda, or else a group of sedate and peace-loving moderates, or else again that they "are" some other, scarier Islamist group that formed outside Egypt over the last 82 or 83 years, because that non-Egyptian group originally looked to the Brotherhood for inspiration. (By this standard, the United States "is" Liberia.)

The big question almost everybody winds up with, explicitly or implicitly, is how much we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to participate in Egyptian politics. When you're asking yourself the same policy questions that Hosni Mubarak spent the last thirty years asking, you're not paying attention to events.

Let me lay my own cards on the table: I have spent about a week and a half of my life thinking about the Muslim Brotherhood, more than twenty years ago, and haven't thought much about them since. I won't pretend that they got my undivided attention back then. I recall writing a brief undergraduate paper about a manifesto by their founder, Hasan al-Banna, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you anything that that paper said and for most of the last two decades I've been referring to al-Banna as "Hasan al-Basra," a mistake like mixing up Martin Luther and Martin Luther King but worse. (I was off by about twelve hundred years). All of which is to say that I don't know jack about the Muslim Brotherhood. I would be embarrassed to pretend that I did.

On the other hand, it's painfully obvious that many of the people opining authoritatively about the Brotherhood haven't spent even one day in their lives thinking about the Brotherhood, and that they haven't actually started now. They're just repeating whatever they've been told recently, using their most serenely confident voices, and they aren't embarrassed in the least.

I don't know what role the Muslim Brotherhood will play in post-Mubarak Egypt. No one pontificating about it on cable has any idea, either. Maybe they'll stay committed to a civil process, as they seemed committed to peaceful participation in the last parliamentary elections. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll be content to participate as one party among many. Maybe they will demand some "guardianship" role that puts them in charge for good. Maybe their moderate wing will predominate, and maybe their radical wing. I don't know, and I don't believe the Muslim Brotherhood themselves know yet how things are going to shake out.

But here's my question: if the Muslim Brotherhood ends up operating as a peaceful political party, content to win and lose like other Egyptian political parties and take its turns in and out of power, what's the problem? If an Islamist party can actually live by the rules of peace and democracy, how is that not a victory for Western values?

Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with the Muslim Brotherhood on almost anything. I don't believe any country should be governed by strict religious laws, I don't share the Brotherhood's particular religion, and I'm so far from being anti-Western that I'm an actual Westerner. If the Muslim Brotherhood participates in free and fair elections, I will root for them to lose every time. I think they are backward and wrong-headed in many different ways. I think most of their policies would stink. But that doesn't make them any different from other parties, in other countries, that I would also like to see lose. The fact that I, or you, or most North Americans who've heard of the Muslim Brotherhood want them to lose elections does not mean that they should not be permitted to run in the first place.

Some liberal and progressive bloggers like to deride Christianist voters and politicians as the "American Taliban," which is not quite fair. The Taliban is not only an Islamist party, but an authoritarian Islamist party that has no use for genuine elections and wants to impose its version of Shari'a law by force. The only people in America who could be justly compared to the Taliban are the people who commit or support violence against abortion clinics and against doctors like George Tiller. But if the Muslim Brotherhood becomes a non-violent party focused on promoting their version of Islamic values through legal and democratic means, they would become something very much like the American Christianist movement. In fact, they'd probably share some policy goals with American Christianists.

Some people run for office in the United States on a platform that involves banning the teaching of evolution in the schools, or limiting access to contraception. I absolutely oppose those candidates and their platform. But there is no question that they should be allowed to run for office. If someone runs for the House or Senate promising to help restore America as a "Christian nation," they have every right to do so, even if I happen to think they're wrong about everything. Banning Christianists from politics would obviously be the wrong thing to do.

Neither would the Muslim Brotherhood, if they submit to a democratic process, be meaningfully different from the various ultra-orthodox religious parties in the Israeli Knesset, who are explicitly dedicated to promoting their religious teachings through legislation (and who have a disproportionate influence on Israeli politics because of Israel's proportional-representation system). Those parties are every bit as stiff-necked, confrontational, and anti-modern as any parliamentary Muslim Brotherhood faction could be. Would a Muslim Brotherhood-led coalition complicate the Israeli/Palestinian peace process? Probably. But on the other hand, it's not like Shas has been especially constructive.

Now, if the Muslim Brotherhood decides to only participate in the democratic process when it wins, or if it decides to rig things so it never loses, then all of the above is moot. (Also, if the Brotherhood splits into two groups, one of them playing by the rules and one not, the above is true for the group that lives by the rules and not for the group that doesn't.) Any party that won't play by the rules of civil society has to go. The crucial thing is that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt submit to the same political process that every other Egyptian party does, in the same way that the American religious right and the Israeli religious right and the Hindu religious right do. People have the right to vote for these parties as long as they also have the right and the opportunity to vote against them.

The important distinction to make is between Islamism and jihadism. The first is a political ideology that I despise and oppose, but others might choose to support. The second is a violent version of Islamism, that relies on force and permits no choice by the people and is no therefore no different from any other flavor of authoritarian rule. Jihadism can never be acceptable, because it refuses to accept any viewpoint but its own. But if the United States decides that peaceful and democratic Islamist parties are still unacceptable to us, Egyptians will perceive that as a simple expression of bias against Islam. And the Egyptians will have a good case.

If the Muslim Brotherhood can manage to reinvent itself as a conventional right-wing political party but we try to prevent it from doing so, we will be the enemies of democracy and our moral case for opposing international jihadism will be undermined. We, and not the jihadists, would be the ones refusing to let the people choose for themselves. It would be stupid in any case: the Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in Egypt more or less since it was founded, and it hasn't gone away. Banning it again won't make it go away, or make it less popular. If we try to have it banned, or lean on third parties in Egypt to ban it for us, we will be playing the same losing game that Mubarak has just lost. I'd like to see the Muslim Brotherhood shut out of power forever. But the only people who can do that are the Egyptian voters themselves.

Staying Allied with Democracies

2011-02-02T11:59:00.010-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

There's an old chestnut that says that two democracies have never gone to war. It's not quite true, or only true if you aggressively redefine "democracy" until you've fallen into the "no-true-Scotsman" fallacy. ("No true democracy ever goes to war with another ...." ) But it is an instructive half-truth: functional democracies very rarely go to war with one another.

That general rule is important to think about this week, as the protests in Egypt bring out America's deep ambivalence toward democracy in the Middle East, or at least in the Muslim Middle East. Of course, we all officially want democracy, and most of us instinctively want it. Nobody feels entirely comfortable being against democracy. But on the other hand, many Americans are very uncomfortable with the kind of leaders and policies that Egyptians would choose if allowed to vote freely. This ambivalence is most painfully on display in the conflicting postures taken by American opposition politicians. (To be fair, the current Administration doesn't have the luxury of taking theoretical positions on this, because it actually has to figure out a practical way to cope with events as they unfold. The Administration's conflicted thinking gets expressed less directly than its critics'.) Some conservatives have been asserting that the protests in Egypt represent Bush's "democracy promotion" agenda in action, and fault President Obama for not supporting the protesters more loudly. On the other hand, some conservative critics of Obama have clearly decided that this is not a pro-democracy movement but instead "rioting" or "unrest," which we should view as a menace. Those critics are prone to muttering darkly about the Muslim Brotherhood and running down Mohammed ElBaradei's personal character. And of course, as Kevin Drum points out, a few confused conservatives do both.

Here's the core of the problem: Mubarak is in fact a tyrant, which we dislike, but he supports our general Middle East policies. The Egyptian populace finds our general Middle East policies intolerable and infuriating, and no Egyptian government that actually reflects the popular will is likely to go along with us the way Mubarak has.

Let me go back to the question of democracies avoiding wars with other democracies. I used to assume that wars between democracies were rare because it's harder to get a voting public behind a war; I figured that democratic electorates worked as a brake on belligerence, so that democratic governments were harder to provoke into war. If American politicians want to get voters sneering at France, it's pretty easy, but if they wanted to get us behind a military invasion of Marseilles, that would be a pretty hard sell. So I was thinking that democratic governments were more likely to tolerate provocations that might constitute casus belli, and allow more time for tensions to ease.

But this is clearly not the whole story. There are a few examples of patience in the face of provocation, such as South Korea's reluctance to attack North Korea, but that's mostly about military reality. And there are plenty of examples where advanced industrial democracies grab hold of a colorable pretext for war and refuse to let go. (The explosion of the USS Maine was all the reason American voters needed to get behind the Spanish-American War, and they didn't want to hear that might have been an accident. The public wanted a good reason to fight Spain.) And surely, the lower frequency of wars between democracies isn't about shared values or common dedication to democratic principles or holding hands and singing kumbaya. Advanced democracies declare wars all the time.

What you see in practice is not that democratic nations are slower to respond to military provocation, but that they're more reluctant to give provocation to another democratic country. Some of this is about the fact that other democratic countries tend to have advanced, industrialized militaries, but that's not the whole story. (You won't see the British or French hassling Belgium, and that's not because they dread the Belgian air force.) The advanced military powers treat democratic nations much more deferentially than they treat authoritarian nations. We commit military provocations against nations run by strongmen far more easily than we commit them against countries where real elections choose the leadership. Think of the various places where we've authorized air strikes over the last twenty years or so. How many of them would you consider democracies?

If you authorize predator drone strikes in a country where the voters are actually in charge, there are two very predictable results. First, the voters will hate you. Second, they will elect a government that hates you, and demand that that government actively oppose you. Nobody gets re-elected by backing foreign aerial bombardment of the homeland. Can you imagine? If Pakistan and Yemen were functioning democracies, we wouldn't be sending drones to destroy villages where jihadists might be hiding. Doing so would quickly bring the fall of any pro-American government and lead to the rise of an aggressively anti-American one, probably for a generation or two. There are jihadists lurking somewhere in Hamburg, too, but we're not sending predator drones or a Special Forces detachment after them. Everyone understands that if we did that we would be antagonizing the German people and that they would not get over it.

But when you're dealing with dictatorships, juntas, Communist oligarchies, and so on, you tend to count popular opinion out. After all, public sentiment can't replace the dictator, junta, or Politburo. Having the folks on the ground love or hate your country more than they did last year doesn't make any immediately apparent difference. It's natural to focus on how the people at the top respond to your actions. So, if you're having static with Muammar Qadhafi and you feel bombing some targets in Libya will get him in line, that seems like the logical course of action. Sure, the average Libyan might hate the US because of those strikes, maybe for a generation or so, but it's not like that changes anything in the short term. If Qadhafi takes his beating quietly and backs down, it looks like a satisfactory Libya policy. If Saddam Hussein attempts to have a former US President assassinated, you authorize an air strike on his intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. That works like a charm in terms of managing Saddam Hussein and his intelligence apparatus; they learned that specific lesson pretty well. How the rest of the citizens of Baghdad felt about having their city attacked by planes was beside the point as long as Hussein was in power. Their support wasn't any real help to us, and their resentment didn't hurt us. It wasn't like we needed them to vote for some hypothetical pro-American political party, right?

Even if your own country is a democracy, the demands of policy can easily lead you into viewing the people of a dictatorship through the dictator's eyes. He ignores what they want, so you do as well. You would never just ignore what the French or British or Canadian public wants, not completely, because the consequences of doing that are obvious. If you're dealing with a country where the people have a say, you pay attention to those people. If you're dealing with a country where only a few people have a say, you only pay attention to those few people. This approach works just fine, until it doesn't. When only Saddam Hussein made the decisions, taking out his radar installations every few weeks was a very useful tool for managing his behavior. Then one day you find you've committed yourself to free and fair elections in a country where large swaths of the public hate your guts and you're still fighting armed irregulars every day. That's when it turns out that Iraqi voters have been forming their personal opinions of the United States for a long, long time.

In the same way we feel freer to attack countries where the people can't vote, we feel freer to use military force in areas controlled by authoritarian allies. If the CIA wants to kidnap a jihadist off the street in Italy, and apparently they sometimes do, that has to be a clandestine operation because it's going to antagonize ordinary Italians. If the CIA wants to launch a missile strike at a target in Pakistan or Yemen, there's nothing clandestine about it. We make our deals with the Pakistani and Yemeni leadership, so it doesn't matter if the general population is upset. Until, of course, it does.

This is how we've gotten ourselves into this bind: decades of a Middle East policy that ignored what everyday Arabs wanted, no matter how badly they wanted it, because everyday Arabs didn't get a say. It's not that we didn't share the same views of Israel and Palestine that everyday Arabs did; you don't need absolute agreement to have a sane dialogue. It's that we utterly ignored everyone in the Arab street, because we were dealing with the guy in the palace. The various Arab sultans and generalissimos might have been willing to tolerate some of the uglier episodes in the ongoing Israel-Palestine debacle, because they were paid to tolerate it. The sultans and generalissimos might have gone along with the invasion of Iraq, because it was in their interests to go along. But the people on the street, the people who in any democracy would be the voters, weren't getting rewarded for going along with our policies. They were simply watching other Arabs die on the TV news. They didn't like it. They're not going to like it tomorrow, either.

Joe Lieberman and the Changing Vice-Presidency

2011-01-20T18:08:00.009-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

So, Joe Lieberman is leaving. Or rather, Joe Lieberman is announcing that he's going to take his ball and go home, so that there's absolutely no way to get any leverage over him for the next two years. So I expect we'll all see much more written about him on the blogs.

Lots of blogs will deal with old grudges against Lieberman or grudging praise of him, and heaven knows I have some of both. But I'm most interested in Gail Collins' column, which confirms my own suspicion that Lieberman's political behavior since 2004 has mostly been driven by his anger at not gaining the party's nomination for the Presidency:

The vice presidential race was the high point of the Joe Lieberman story, even though he allowed Dick Cheney to eviscerate him in the debate. But he left it with the idea that he should be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Nobody else had gotten that message.

Lieberman, a big supporter of the war in Iraq, expected the party’s base to nominate a candidate who disagreed with them about the critical issue of the day, had failed at the most crucial task delegated to him during the previous presidential election and was one of the most sluggish and cliché-ridden public speakers in the history of oratory.

He was shocked when they decided not to.

“It wasn’t a personal rejection, but I never saw anybody take anything so personally. He became so bitter about Democratic liberals,” said Bill Curry, a former Connecticut comptroller and gubernatorial candidate.

Lieberman's passive-aggressive not-quite-exit from the national life interestingly comes as Sarah Palin's unfavorability ratings hit new record highs, and the American media actually begins to reflect those poll ratings in its coverage of her. Palin's bad numbers aren't an actual story; her poll numbers have been weak since a month or two after she was nominated for vice-president, and outright hideous since July, 2009. Her "record lows" of 53% unfavorable in the recent Gallup poll and 56% unfavorable in the last CNN poll, for example, are statistically identical with her previous lows of 52% and 55%. She has pretty much the same rotten poll numbers that she's had for a long time. What's changed is that her core constituency, the press, has started to believe that she isn't a viable candidate.

The conjunction of Palin's flameout and Lieberman's decision to rust makes me wonder if something has changed in the American vice-presidency, or at least in the the institution of the vice-presidential nominee. Going back to the election of 2000, five people have run for vice-president on major party tickets. The two who have actually been sworn into office, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, have been senior statesmen types rather than potential successors. Biden may have previously run for the nomination, but seems to understand that any chance he might have once had has passed him by, and that he won't be at the top of the ticket in 2016. Cheney never seems to have coveted the Presidency itself. Meanwhile the three major-party running mates who have not taken office (Palin, Liberman, and John Edwards) have all campaigned poorly for the understudy job but come away expecting a shot at being president themselves. It's very peculiar.

That's a laughably small sample, and probably I shouldn't draw any conclusions, but it's interesting that we're seeing this happen as the Vice-Presidency has grown stronger during Gore's and then Cheney's terms, and after the last vice-president to gain his party's nomination for president failed to gain office in such a difficult way. Al Gore expanded the day-to-day policy muscle of the Vice-Presidency (accelerating a development that had started and stuttered in previous administrations) and was a strong addition to Clinton's ticket but had the Presidency slip through his hands and was ruthlessly second-guessed on campaign strategy afterward. Cheney consolidated even more power in the Vice-Presidency (although he seems to have lost some in his second term), but was clearly not interested in anything beyond Air Force Two.

It seems (although this might be reversed in a political eyeblink) that the "vice-president" role is gaining ascendance over the "running mate" role which had been much more dominant for many years. The last vice-presidents have been essentially Cabinet heavyweights without portfolio. There's less emphasis on the Veep's campaign-trail functions, and much much less emphasis on the Vice-President as political heir apparent. In fact, it's been ten years of veeps who are not heir apparents at all. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the last "heir apparent" nominee lost the big prize in the Florida mudfight, and the successful heir apparent before that, George H. W. Bush, lost re-election and was unpopular with his party's base. When you flesh out that list of late-twentieth-century Veeps with Walter Mondale (who lost 49 states to Reagan) and Dan Quayle (a liability who could never be nominated for president), you can see why parties might move away from the anointed-successor model.

What's strange though is that the last three running mates who've lost seem so convinced that they would do better heading the ticket next time. What's even stranger is their evident conviction that they deserve the gig, even though they all fumbled the backup job.

Martin Luther King's Civility

2011-01-17T11:55:00.011-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

We've been talking a lot lately about civility, for obvious and painful reasons. And our public conversation on that topic tends to go astray pretty quickly, because we don't all mean the same thing when we say "civility," and often aren't even sure what we mean by the word ourselves.

If we mean by "civility" that our public debates should never get heated, and that no one should ever speak angrily about politics, then we're going to be disappointed. American politics has been a rough and tumble business since Jefferson and Adams, at least, and on balance the country is better for it. Inciting violence and inflaming listeners is clearly unacceptable, but we can't rein all of the negativity and name-calling, and we shouldn't. There have always been politicians who managed to be dangerous and inflammatory without breaking any of the superficial rules of polite debate, and some of the speech that breaks those rules is valuable.

Neither should "civility" mean ceasing to disagree. There will always be disagreements, and no amount of comity or bipartisanship will make them go away. Every democracy has to make choices about serious questions, and the answers to those questions are almost never unanimous. Disagreement isn't a flaw that ruins democracy; democracy is the process of working out disagreements. People who complain that partisan politics are too partisan or too political are basically expressing a discomfort with democracy itself.

What I was planning to write, and still view as at least 90% of the truth, is that the heart of civility is participating in the civil process of resolving disagreements, and committing to abide by it. We have disagreements, and will always have disagreements, and we don't believe that any king, high priest, generalissimo or Wise and Distinguished Op-Ed Columnist can be trusted as an infallible referee. So we have this system for resolving our arguments, a system of elections, legal proceedings, and government institutions that allows us to argue and resolve arguments peacefully. Staying with that system, and binding ourselves to the outcomes even when we dislike them, is what makes us civil. "Peaceful" doesn't mean quiet or amicable or even fair. Jefferson and Adams and their partisans could sling a prodigious amount of mud. But when there was an election, they accepted the results. When a court rendered a decision, everyone abided by that decision. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans might have been enraged with each other on a regular basis, but they kept it in the courts and the voting booth and the Capitol building. The alternative, as one prominent member from each party demonstrated, was to take it outside the system like Hamilton and Burr. The rest of Jefferson's and Adams's supporters kept it vicious but not violent, and that's a pretty good result. If everybody gets their feelings hurt and nobody gets anything except their feelings hurt, I'd say the country is doing very, very well.

When someone declares that they will not be bound by the civil process, when they declare it illegitimate or announce that they will ignore outcomes that displease them, they are essentially refusing the civil peace. What they're saying is that their participation in our democracy, our justice system, and our national life is conditional on getting what they want. That's "We will honor all the laws and respect the courts, unless the courts try to integrate Ole Miss, in which case we will form a violent mob," or "We will honor the elections unless Aung San Suu Kyi does not win," or “We have a constitutional remedy here, and the framers said, if that don’t work — revolution." These are refusals to accept the social contract, refusals to renounce force. They are expressions of lawlessness ad threats of civil violence. It doesn't matter what tone of voice they're said in.

If we're calling each other ugly names but still talking, that's a good thing. As long as we agree to resolve our differences peacefully, we can call each other scoundrels and shout until we turn red (or blue). Without that agreement, we're not in a civil relationship. We're just dealing with rival gangs.

I've been worried by a lot of political rhetoric for the last few years, and it's not the name-calling that bothers me. It's the repeated claims that the other side is illegitimate or tyrannical or otherwise outside the civil process, the kind of language that suggests that the speakers and their listeners shouldn't feel bound by the process. Claiming that the President was not lawfully elected and has no authority is not civil; it is an implied threat of political violence. Calling the federal government's most banal and everyday functions "tyrannical" is not civil; if it is not a rhetorical preparation for bloodshed, it is at least an attempt to keep bloodshed open as an option. No one who says such a thing should be trusted. Raving about "Second Amendment remedies" if an election does not go one's own way is a disqualification from public life. So is showing up with a mob when you've lost an election. And peddling obviously false conspiracy stories, claiming that grandmothers will be euthanized by the health care bill or that the President of the United States is trying to destroy the economy in order to impose a socialist system, is an obvious attempt to undermine and delegitimize the very systems that preserve civil peace. This is incivility, a threat to our domestic peace.

That was where I was going to leave things, when the holiday forced me to think about Martin Luther King, Jr., and his approach to our public life. Because Dr. King was profoundly dedicated to peace and civility, but also refused a system that he viewed as manifestly unjust. He did not always abide by the laws or the courts. He did not always obey lawful orders by police officers, and he counseled others to the same eminently civil disobedience. Dr. King did not work within the system, the way someone like Thurgood Marshall did; that does nothing to diminish Marshall's staggering achievements, but makes Dr. King's even more surprising. I have to admit that King, whom I admire, refused to accept the laws and the framework for resolving disputes that I otherwise view as essential to keeping the peace, and yet he made the world a less violent place.

The obvious difference is that King and his followers were willing to suffer, rather than to cause suffering, in order to achieve their goals. They could (and did) step outside the rules meant to prevent civil violence because when they stepped out side those rules they brought no violence and no threat with them. They could break the laws in service of a higher good because they were in a peculiar way the perfect citizens: harming no one and wishing no one harm. They didn't need the rules to preserve the peace because civil peace itself was their rule.

They were faced, all too often, with antagonists who had abandoned the framework of civil society in order to intimidate and threaten, and sometimes even to murder. That made the moral choice facing the nation very clear. And often too, King and the SPLC faced legal authorities who were so violent and coercive that they exposed the coercion and threats of violence hidden under the guise of the law. King's vision was successful in part because the radical change he advocated was in fact safer, more peaceful, and less physically threatening than the public order that the authorities decreed necessary.

Talking about revolution is cheap, and easily lapses into an expression of thuggery. Those who genuinely feel that our political system has become tyrannical could learn from Dr. King, who managed a truly revolutionary response to oppression, forcing the violent to lay down their own arms.

And perhaps the secret is that Dr. King never wrote his enemies off, never dehumanized them. Even when facing the worst of mobs, he was acutely aware that the people in that mob were human beings, with moral selves, deserving of love. In the clip below he talks about how non-violent resistance reaches out to the oppressor's conscience, even if sometimes people wrestling with their troubled conscience simply double down on their wicked behavior. But King talks about this as effective, even when its short-term results seemed counter-productive. It wasn't just about "winning" for King, but about reaching another human soul, even if he only nudged that soul on a journey it was still far, far from completing. Nothing can be less violent than that: to confront one's enemies without fear while attempting to hasten their redemption.

Martin Luther King taught us to confront our opponents' consciences, rather than our opponents, and that lesson is one wthat our country needs right now, more than we have in many years. I am grateful to Dr. King tonight.

Violence and Political Gain

2011-01-11T18:27:00.008-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

I haven't blogged about Tucson because it left me sickened and sad, and because Articleman said it all better than I could have. Anyway, I had nothing to say. Violence like this is a terrible, terrible thing. Everyone should be against civil bloodshed. What else could there be to say?

But now, apparently, many public voices are focused on how horrible it is to "gain political advantage" from violence, by which they mean gaining political advantage from violence directed against one's own side. But gaining political advantage from violence against your opponents is evidently great.

Nine or ten months ago, Republicans complained that Democratic congressmen were "exploiting" death threats against them for political gain. Now after the actual violence against one of those House members has actually come to pass, conservatives are complaining that Democrats are "exploiting" this violence. And voices in the media are echoing this charge.

Here is the new conventional wisdom: Inflammatory political speech is not wrong. Holding public figures responsible for their inflammatory political speech is wrong.

That position is insane and morally depraved, but is nonetheless considered serious, uncontroversial and even laudable. After a few days of hearing it repeated, I am even more sickened and saddened, but I'm also extremely angry.

Penalizing political movements or figures who advocate violence or who are recklessly inflammatory is not worse than advocating violence or being recklessly inflammatory. Penalizing movements or politicians for advocating violence or recklessly inflaming the violent is not "just as bad as" advocating violence or recklessly inflaming the violent. How could it be?

Blaming those who encourage violence is a good thing. One ought to blame those who encourage violence. Such blame should be proportionate and realistic, and should not demonize those who have spoken recklessly but encourage them to come over to the side of the angels. There can be too much blame, or inappropriate blame. But it is right and just to blame public figures when they abandon their responsibility to preserve our civil peace. Demanding accountability from such figures is not a game. It is necessary in any democracy.

If British troops shoot and kill civilians in Boston over a snowball fight, that should be held against George III and against his appointed Governor of Massachusetts. Their policies have led to civil bloodshed, and that is unacceptable. The Governor and the British government were obligated to step back and to become more conciliatory. Nor were Samuel Adams or Paul Revere playing some inappropriate "blame game" by holding the British government responsible for the Boston Massacre. Adams and Revere were right.

If segregationist fanatics blow up a church and kill three little girls inside it, that should be held against the segregationist position. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not wrongfully exploiting those children's deaths. Nor did the Civil Rights Movement wrongfully exploit the violence used against them in Birmingham or at Selma, or the violence of the mobs who gathered to block the integration of Ole Miss, or the inflammatory speeches of segregationist southern governors, or the murders of Medgar Evers and other civil rights volunteers. The segregationists should have been held accountable for that violence, should have been forced to renounce it, should have backed off and restricted themselves to peaceful, legal means. The side using the bombs and the guns and the firehoses should know that they will lose by using them.

It is not wrong to use Martin Luther King, Jr.'s murder to advance the cause of civil rights in this country. I defy anyone who says that it is.

Every politician, every public advocate, every speaker for a public cause should live in holy fear of causing Americans to hurt or kill their fellow-citizens. And they should know that they will pay a steep political price for any violence by those on their side. Dr. King certainly lived in such holy fear, would go to great lengths to prevent any violence by his own supporters, and publicly attempted amends when crowds did not keep to his non-violent message. Dr. King was in Memphis in April 1968 because an earlier march there had been marred by vandalism and other violence from those at the rear of the march. King was disconsolate after that earlier event and determined to return to Memphis to make sure that there was a genuinely non-violent demonstration. The Reverend King was in Memphis on the day he died because of his deep commitment to preventing any violence by his own side, and I think we could all stand to reflect on that commitment now.

If public figures pay no price for inflaming violence (whether they have inflamed it deliberately or merely through depraved indifference to the danger their words cause), then we have a system in which political violence and inflammatory speech is rewarded. If a course of action carries a benefit but no cost, then that course of action will eventually be followed. Politicians who refuse to endanger the public will sooner or later lose to those who have no such scruples. This is axiomatic. If the only price for rhetoric that leads to violence gets paid by your opponents, then the rules of the game will not only permit politicians to gamble with their voters' safety and their opponents' lives, the rules of the game will demand it.

And when violence by one's own side against the other brings gains rather than losses, we're through as a democracy. Violence, and not votes, will carry the day.

And yes, this extends to causes I believe in. John Brown's violence did not and could not make slavery right, but it did obligate abolitionists to renounce such violence unequivocally and to recommit themselves to a peaceful end to slavery. That they did not, that so many of them chose a path that helped foreclose any option but civil war, is a sorry thing, the violence and intransigence on the slaveholders' side notwithstanding. The stupid violence by some members of the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s did not make charges of continuing racism in our society less true, but it did set back attempts to deal with our problems constructively, and we would all have been better off without that violence.

If something horrible happened to Sarah Palin or John Boehner, that would lead to enormous sympathy for their positions, no matter their merits. That is human and understandable. If something horrible happened to Sarah Palin or John Boehner after a bunch of politicians and pundits had been talking about them as horrible menaces who want to kill your grandmother, then the people who had been demonizing Palin and Boehner would quite understandably be discredited in the public eye. That is not wrong. In fact, it's quite natural. And it's totally okay by me, because I don't want anything bad to happen to John Boehner or Sarah Palin. I disagree with them. I'd be pleased to see Boehner lose the Speakership and Palin's ratings drop. But I wish them every health in the world.

The way politicians should avoid blame for inciting violence is by not inciting violence. It's really that simple. If you don't enjoy people blaming you just because you used the rhetoric of violent revolution on the campaign trail, then don't use the language of violent revolution on the campaign trail. I don't want to hear about how you shouldn't be blamed and it's not your fault. I want to hear you talking like the civil peace matters to you, all the time. That is the smart and self-interested thing to do, and also the patriotic and moral thing to do. If you feel aggrieved that (for once) the smart political play is also the right thing to do, then your grievance is noted: you are unfit for office.

The Tucson Murders

2011-01-09T11:26:00.003-05:00

I don't have the heart to blog about the Arizona shootings today. But my friend and co-blogger Articleman, who knows Representative Giffords and knew Chief Judge Roll personally, has a wonderful post at Dagblog. It is a testimony to both Chief Roll and Representative Giffords' courage, personal kindness, and dedication to serving our country and their state. Give it a read.

College Football in the 21st Century

2011-01-01T15:43:00.052-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

Critics of higher education in America generally present themselves as modernizing reformers. They claim America's universities are hidebound, outmoded, and fundamentally inefficient. Maybe, maybe not. It's an easy charge to make about an institution, like the Western university, which is several centuries old, and tends to sound plausible no matter the merits of the particular case. "It's the 21st century," the standard argument goes, "so it's time to get rid of anachronisms like tenured faculty/four-year bachelor's degrees/foreign language departments/semesters/public funding for state universities." This "out with the old, in with the new" argument sounds logical when it actually is logical, but also when it's not. It can be used for genuinely necessary reform, but also to promote poorly thought-out ideas that can't stand much direct examination.

What's striking in a climate where public universities are facing massive cutbacks in the name of "modernization", and students are being asked to pay higher tuition for fewer classroom resources, is that the people talking about "reinventing" higher education almost never talk about college football.

If we're talking about starting over and reinventing the American university from scratch, big-time college football would not be an obvious thing to keep on the table. It's about as much of a frill as frills get. (This doesn't mean that I'm not personally planning to enjoy the Orange Bowl, or that you shouldn't. Frills are fun. They wouldn't exist if they weren't.) It doesn't have much obvious relationship to the core educational mission. It's expensive as all hell, and generally loses a hell of a lot of money. (There's a lot of money to be made in TV fees and bowl appearances, but very few schools actually pull down enough of that money to turn a profit, and you need to spend tens of millions on your football program even to compete for that money in the first place. Lots of schools with "BCS" Division I programs lose millions on football. Berkeley, for example, has been losing $6-8 million on football every year now for years, and raiding the academic budget to make up those losses. Seriously.) Those tens of millions of dollars go to fund an extra-curricular activity that about a hundred or so students actually participate in, on campuses that might have fifteen or thirty thousand students.

Now, the conventional wisdom is that sports programs pay for themselves, and more, by increasing enrollment and bringing in donations from happy alumni. But if we're hard-headed modernizers, we pride ourselves on not believing the conventional wisdom. We need hard data! And when it comes to big-ticket football, the conventional wisdom turns out not to be true at all. It's very hard to demonstrate any serious or enrollment gains from a winning sports program, and if you think about it honestly, you already kind of know this. There are plenty of schools whose football teams will never (and really should never) be on television, but still have to turn away more good applicants than they could take. You can think of plenty of enviable schools, the kind that proud parents and resume-writers brag about, whose sports programs are really, really, really not the draw. As for the donations that a big time football program can bring, usually all of that cash (like the TV money) goes to feeding the football program itself, and the football program is always hungry.

Now we're getting to the point where commitment to education at public universities and commitment to football at public universities don't coexist easily. Spending tens of millions on football (and $3-7 million just on a coach's salary) always annoyed some professors, but not in any way that rocked the boat. But when state budget cuts lead even a great public system like the University of California to cut back its course offerings and shrink its faculty while raising the tuition to three times what it was in 2000 and then ">raising it again, raiding Berkeley's academic budget for six or seven million dollars a year on top of the official athletics budget starts to be a very tough sell. [For the record, UC's in-state tuition and fees were about $3500 or $3600 in 2000-01. In 2010-11, they were more than $10,800. The Regents just voted another 8 percent hike, for a much diminished educational product.]

I'm not going to pretend that killing college football would fix the funding problems of American education. Nor am I going to pretend I don't enjoy a good college game myself. But I think understanding where big-time college football comes from helps us understand what's happening to higher education in general, because college football as we know it is a byproduct of an educational system that emerged in post-war America and is now passing away. They grew up together.

American football evolved on college campuses; most of the rules that we think of as basic to the sport were hashed out between students from various Ivy League and other exclusive Eastern schools in the late 1800s. Of course, it wasn't the Ivy League then, because the "Ivy League" is a sports conference, and college football wasn't officially overseen by the colleges. It was the students' thing, not the administrators', and administrations only gradually started sponsoring the games as a way to get some control over them and to reduce the injury and mayhem. Football was a form of student rebellion against universities that were too much like universities: too much about book learning and discipline and the life of the mind. The academic focus of college made a lot of students unhappy because colleges in those days were much more socially exclusive than they were intellectually exclusive. Most people were there because of who their parents were; whether they had any academic gifts or interests was a secondary question. Of course, there were some brilliant and dedicated minds at every school, and every college had its handful of extremely bright scholarship boys, but the median undergraduate at a place like Harvard or Princeton in 1880 wasn't nearly as good a student as the median undergraduates in those places would be in 1980. So a lot of those wealthy, connected and not particularly intellectual young men got so sick of declining Latin nouns and whatnot that they had to get outside in the fresh air, form up into flying wing formations, and maim each other.

(The next time someone like David Brooks gets all misty-eyed about the old-fashioned elites and how they had so much more character than today's careerist collegians, remember that this is what he's talking about. Brooks is nostalgic for anti-intellectual snobs with inherited fortunes, as opposed to middle-class kids who got into Princeton because of their grades and who will need to find a job after graduation. Brooks especially gets nostalgic for the old Ivy Leaguers when he's writing about people like Barack Obama or Elena Kagan who wouldn't have been allowed into those exclusive schools in 1890.)

So for a solid seventy or eighty years, football was the hobby and ritual of the tiny minority who went to college. A lot of its glamor came from its upper-class context. This is when Harvard and Yale were still major football powers, and while there was an NFL, you couldn't make a full year's living playing in it. The point of playing college football was not to go pro, but to network with influential alumni. This was pretty much how things stood until well after World War II.

College football was transformed into a national sports-entertainment industry during the post-war expansion of American higher education. Between the G.I. Bill and the massive growth in public education to accommodate the Baby Boom, American higher education turned into something very different from anything that had gone before. College education had become an expected middle-class privilege, and the largest, wealthiest middle class that America had ever seen sent the largest generation of youngsters in our nation's history to college. The resulting changes were wide-reaching and fundamental, both for our society and our education system. Increased spending on education both followed from and helped to drive the growing wealth of an expanding middle class, fueled booming economic growth, and weakened the relative position of the older elites. The primary driver for all of this change wasn't the private colleges, which did increase enrollments but could never have met the new demand on their own. What changed things was the state universities, funded generously by state legislatures and educating college students on a then-unprecedented scale at steeply subsidized tuition. But the private colleges were transformed as well, becoming more academic and less aristocratic; once the privilege of going to college was no longer restricted to the wealthy and connected, the only way to stay one of the top colleges in America was to have highly talented students, and Ivy League campuses became increasingly dominated by bright middle-class strivers (of the kind that David Brooks despises, and once was) rather than the old blue-blooded Philistines. The blue bloods didn't go away, but they ceased to be the majority even on elite campuses, and they stopped setting the tone.

At the same time, college football had a wider audience and more alumni, than it had ever had before. And now that huge prosperous new middle class all had TVs in the living room. The NFL began to rise to national prominence at the end of the 1950s, and the market for televised Saturday-afternoon games was suddenly quite lucrative. It was fairly easy money for colleges to begin with; they could get fat TV contracts for the amateur teams that they were already fielding, and anyway, the schools had comfortable budgets to begin with. Spending a little bit more on the football team in order to pull down some big network-TV bucks seemed like a great investment: a small expense for what could be an incommensurately large gain.

Now, of course, things have gotten far more competitive in every sense of that word, and the potential gains from TV rights have already been priced into the cost of chasing those dollars. But at the same time, the initial conditions that allowed colleges, universities, and their football teams to grow and thrive in the 1960s have ended. What we're living through at the moment is the end of the post-war education system, with its low prices, high per-student spending, and broad accessibility. We are sliding back toward an older model, educating fewer students, allowing less upward mobility, and increasingly dominated by selective private institutions, just like in the bad old days. This march toward the past is part of a larger attempt to diminish and weaken the American middle class that emerged after World War II, and move toward a less egalitarian and less mobile society vaguely resembling our social arrangements between 1870 and 1940. State funding for higher education now represents only a fraction of the cost of public colleges and universities, forcing even great public universities to cut how much they spend on teaching and charge students much, much more for it. (Think of UC Berekely and their 200%+ tuition increase over the past decade.) Some things won't change. There will still be some superb colleges in this country, a few of them likely better than American universities have ever been. A select few students will continue getting fabulous educations. But that number will be smaller, and many of their peers in less privileged colleges will get very, very different educations.

College football will survive the conditions that allowed it to become what it is. In the end it's more suited for what American education is becoming than it was for what American education was in the last half of the 20th century. The legitimately amateur programs that still remain will continue on, just as they have been since the 19th century: opportunities for educationally privileged young men to bond with each other and to please alumni. And the high-profile programs with the 100,000-seat stadiums and the television contracts will fit the new corporate model of higher education nicely. Those football programs are narrowly pre-professional; they prepare their students for NFL careers and not much else. (At many such programs, football recruits don't even learn how to fill in a college application. This is literally true.) At the same time, Big College Football is entirely unconcerned about the vast majority of its athletes who will never be able to land the only job that college has prepared them for. Students will be allowed to drop out and drift away when the program has used them up; the model is enrollment, not retention. Developing the student as a whole person is entirely out of the question. And the rewards of the students' hard work and effort are only for the fortunate few, while everyone else (no matter how hard they have worked) is labeled a failure. And a small group of privileged people will stand to make a massive profit. There's a reason that people who agitate for "modernizing" our colleges and universities don't complain about big time, pro in all but name college football. It already looks exactly the way they want college to look.

Beliefs (Or, the Ghost of Christmas Present)

2010-12-22T13:39:00.008-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

So, in my last post, I talked more specifically about my Christian beliefs than is my blogging habit. I doubt I'll do it more often; I don't think that you should believe something just because I do, and so I try to write from the assumption that you don't. But I did mention my own beliefs, and it's Christmas, so let me come clean a bit, because it's an important holiday for me, and because it's such a bitter season:

I believe in the basic dignity of human being. I believe that other people's suffering is real, and deserves our attention. I believe that everyone deserves protection from hunger, illness, and the killing December cold.

To make it more doctrinally specific, I was raised to believe that everyone is Jesus, and should be treated accordingly. Throw a homeless person off a steam grate, throw Jesus off that steam grate. Give a homeless man a blanket, give Jesus a blanket. The Gospels are very specific about this point; these are Jesus's explicit instructions to his followers.

This is a belief: it is not testable. It cannot be confirmed or debunked. It is a basic set of assumptions about the world. And it should not be vulgarized into a belief that all people are nice, or friendly and kind. That is obviously not true. But Christianity does not teach me that my fellow human beings deserve food, shelter, medicine and human comfort as a reward for good behavior. It teaches me that they deserve those things, period. The question isn't whether that homeless man is personally virtuous, any more than the question was whether the Prodigal Son was personally virtuous. The point is that he might starve or freeze in the streets. How could there be any other questions?

But I freely admit that this is simply my belief. "Everyone must be treated as if they were Jesus," is not the kind of thing you can prove. It is my starting place for every question of public policy, but I understand that not everyone else starts there, or even accepts my proposition. That's okay.

But while I'm willing to accept that my beliefs are just beliefs, I insist that other people's beliefs, whether religious or secular, be treated in the same way. There are many popular beliefs in our country that have nothing to do with reality, and obviously contradict it, but masquerade as "realism." They are not. I refuse to give them that undeserved credit, or to accept the human suffering inflicted because of them.

The belief that the free market always provides the best possible result is only a belief. It purports not to be a religious belief, because if it were actually a religion it would be mocked and reviled almost as widely as it deserves. But it does posit an implacable omnipotent god who demands sacrifices. Indeed, some its loudest proponents are publicly calling for "sacrifice," by which they mean increased human suffering by the poor. This is how the worst of religions operate. And the "free market knows best" belief has no grounding in reality.

My belief cannot be proved or disproved. The beliefs that excuse the abuse of America's poor not only cannot be proved; they persist in the face of contradictory evidence that should be obvious to every rational adult.

The idea that the poor in America are poor primarily (or, to certain narrow-minded fanatics, solely) because of their own behavior is merely a belief. It is a fairy tale that people tell themselves to reconcile themselves to the unnecessary ugliness of our world. Believing that the distribution of wealth in our scoiety is primarily correlated with merit, effort, or "hard work" requires more than an act of faith. It requires strenuous acts of self-delusion. The belief that the poor are poor because they don't work hard enough, or because they lack "character," demands that the believer work hard every day to avoid obvious facts about how the world operates. That is not realism. That is a bedtime story for mean-spirited children.

There is absolutely no reason to condone human misery out of deference to anyone's belief in the Free Market Fairy. Nor should the believers who demand such misery and sacrifice be accorded any respect. The notion that such believers somehow have the moral authority to declare someone else unworthy of food, shelter, or basic dignity is also just a belief, irrational and ugly. No one has such authority, and anyone who claims to do so should be taken seriously. Such beliefs are the rankest of superstitions: justifying real suffering in the name of imaginary entities, even when the evidence of our daily life demonstrates that those entities are not real.

If you start with a belief in Jesus, our world appears much as it is: manifestly flawed and full of flagrant injustice. From the viewpoint of the Wall Street Journal and the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs and CNBC, it looks like the best of the possible worlds. All I can say in response is: Pollyannas. Why not throw in Santa Claus, too?

My beliefs cannot be proved, but they could never be as silly as the primitive superstitions and delusions that govern the minds of the great and powerful. And my beliefs, whatever their source, attempt to move the world toward kindness and mercy. That's all I can say on my own account this December.

Merry Christmas, all. And let's try to keep it through the coming year.

The War on Christian Virtues

2010-12-16T18:06:00.008-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

Apparently, the dreaded "War on Christmas" now extends to having to work between the Christmas and New Year's holidays, at least if the taxpayers pay your salary and your job title is "Senator." According to Senator Jon Kyl, having work the week after the Christmas holiday would be "disrespectful" to Christians. Senator Jim DeMint called working the week before Christmas "sacrilegious." That's right. Sacrilegious. Just like keeping stores open for shopping on December 23.

Kyl and DeMint will obviously say anything for momentary partisan advantage. And just about everything worth saying about the right wing's bogus "War on Christmas" cries has already been said better by my co-blogger Mike Wolraich (who uses the nom de blog Genghis) in his new book Blowing Smoke (a wonderful holiday present, if you're still shopping). I can't possibly add to Mike's explanation of how dishonest and hysterical the complaints about the "War on Christmas" are. So let me add one thing:

As someone who tries to be a good Christian myself, I find the complaints about the "War on Christmas" absolutely grotesque. I really have tried to see it from the perspective of the people who complain, but try as I might, I just can't make it square with any of the virtues Jesus taught.

There are Christians being persecuted for their faith today. None of them live in America. Right now, there are people worshiping secretly in China, and in other places, and living in genuine fear of the authorities. Anyone who wants to defend Christians from persecution should think about the best ways to help those faithfal and beleaguered people. But calling yourself a victim because not all of the signs in the mall say "Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" is a terrible, terrible disrespect to all of the people who have actually suffered for their faith, and to those who continue suffering.

Christians have been stoned to death, thrown to vicious animals, tied to anchors and drowned. They have been burnt alive by other Christians. And yes, some of the earliest Christians have been crucified. St. Peter was allegedly crucified upside down, by Romans with an even nastier sense of humor than usual. And today around the globe, there are still a handful of priests who must hide their priesthoods from their governments. Being asked to put up your annual Nativity diorama in the churchyard instead of the public park does not make you one of those people. In fact, complaining about things like that is a sign of just how little you have ever been asked.

God asks everyone for different things. Some people are asked to stand up for their faith in the face of terrible danger and hardship, and become an example of persevering faith. And those people are justifiably honored by the rest of us. But if you are not called to be a martyr, you can not make yourself one. It is deeply wrong to try. Some people are asked to suffer; others are asked to be grateful. And making a display of how terribly you're "suffering" (in a country where being a Christian is as easy as any country has ever made it) is monstrous ingratitude. Last weekend I went to listen to Handel's Messiah (great concert, full house). The next morning I went up and went to church, a big unmistakably Christian building on a busy street. I did not have to hide my beliefs. I did not have to be quiet about them. Everywhere I go, I am publicly reminded of the upcoming religious holiday. And next week I, like every other American Christian, will get that holiday off work. There is no war on Christmas. There is only an attack on the Christian virtue of thankfulness.

Being a little grateful is not hard, and we have been given so much.

Other Christian virtues are under attack in the "War on Christmas": kindness, generosity, toleration. Is it so terribly wrong to occasionally vary a Christmas greeting, so that our fellow Americans who follow different religions are made to feel welcome? Is it wrong to be neighborly or kind? I can't believe that. It's such a small gesture, during a time when our religious voices are even louder and more dominant than usual. It can't be too much; it's hard really to call it enough. And I can't believe that it's right to be intemperate and angry with people who have the good manners (or who are moved by kindness) to use a holiday greeting meant to include all of their neighbors. To indulge in anger for its own sake, and worse still to indulge your anger on people who are actually practicing very basic virtues, seems to me very, very far from what is expected of us.

I know there are some Christians who feel their duty is to attempt to bring everyone they can to believe specifically in Jesus, and who feel that anything that limits their explicit religious testimony interferes with that mission. But I would suggest that no one is going to be converted to Christianity by the sight of Christians being hostile, self-pitying, and uncharitable. That's the surest way to drive people away from Christianity. The louder you are about your Christianity, and the more you urge it upon others, the more important it is to be a good example of Christian virtues. That's true this Christmas, and next, and all the year round.

Dear Barack

2010-12-08T12:47:00.003-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

Dear Mr. President-

I'm a big fan of pragmatism. And I've been a big fan of yours, defending you in the intramural arguments of Left Blogistan. I'm not even especially angry about this particular compromise with the Republicans, which was better than I'd feared it would be. But apparently you're angry. Your press conference yesterday made that very clear. And instead of being angry at the conservatives who've hobbled you, you're angry at the liberals and progressives who've phone banked for you, knocked on doors for you, and written you campaign checks. And that's not okay. So let me break some hard news to you:

You are not a pragmatist.

Don't kid yourself. If you want to put results ahead of abstract principle, that's great. I'm all for it. And most of your critics on the left would be pleased with that. We're not angry because you don't quote Howard Zinn enough. We're angry because you do not get results.

Pragmatism is about facing reality and dealing with it. Ten percent unemployment is a reality, and it needs to be dealt with. (I know, it's "only" 9.8%, up from "only" 9.6%, and next it will officially be 9.92% and then 9.9871% and then 9.999661%. Save it. Everyone who buys groceries understands what $2.98 on a price tag means.) Your economic strategy, trusting the big-money players to fix the economy from the top down, has been a colossal bust. The massive corporations you counted on to get things moving are enjoying record profits while letting the rest of the economy go to hell. This is reality. You have to deal with it.

I know, I know, you have to deal with the reality of what's practical in Washington, given the Senate rules and the Republican opposition and Ben Nelson's mood swings. You think of yourself as a pragmatist because you're dealing with the way the game is played. You're wrong. Dealing with the "realities" inside a Beltway that refuses to cope with what's actually happening to our country doesn't make you a realist, or even a political realist. Didn't that midterm election get through to you? You can't win by the old Beltway rules. You shouldn't play by them. You had a tax proposal that the voters like, and the Republicans had one the voters don't like. But they could defeat your plan in the Senate with only 36 votes. The game in Washington no longer reflects what the voters want or what our national economic crisis requires. If you play the game by the existing rules, you will not be able to fix the real problems. If you are not able to fix the real problems, you will be punished, no matter how principled your efforts were. You need to change the game.

I know this is not the presidency you wanted. Radical change was never on your agenda. But the Presidency of the United States has never been the job that the President wanted it to be. It has always been the job that history demands at that moment. John F. Kennedy had no intention of taking on civil rights, let alone becoming a civil rights president. Abraham Lincoln did not want to be a war president, let alone a civil-war president. Thomas Jefferson wanted to be a limited-government constitutionalist, until Napoleon offered him a very large piece of real estate. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was talking like a traditional laissez-faire capitalist in 1928; it took the Depression to turn him into someone else, and World War II to transform his presidency yet again. You will not be measured by the success of the agenda that you originally planned. That agenda is already out of date. You will be measured by your response to a changing world.

For you, that means taking on a major structural overhaul of our economy and a structural transformation of our politics. If that sounds like idealistic hype, it usually would be. The things that you need to do now would be folly in ordinary times, but these are not ordinary times. A surgeon who operates on patients who could be treated with aspirin commits malpractice. But so does the surgeon who prescribes aspirin to a patient who needs a triple bypass. Necessity is the heart of pragmatism, and you can not call yourself a pragmatist if you do less than is necessary.

I know you don't view yourself as the messianic figure that some voters wanted and needed you to be. I know that image strikes you as a fantasy. But the voters really wanted and needed that savior figure. They had reasons for voting for him. Those reasons aren't fantasies, but responses to the hard realities around us. We're not talking about the voters' psychological needs. We're talking about their everyday practical material needs. I know you are not that guy. I know you don't really want to be that guy, or feel equipped to be him. But the country voted for that guy because the country needs him. If it hadn't been you, it would have been somebody else. But our country really does need that guy, and you're all we've got.

Wake up, Barack. Reality is calling.

Understanding Obama via WikiLeaks

2010-12-01T13:40:00.004-05:00

cross-posted at Dagblog

The latest Wikileaks document dump, filled mostly with low-grade diplomatic communications, does lay bare one thing that should have been painfully obvious all along: President Obama's Iran strategy.

Here's part of the New York Times write-up:

... the cables ... show how President George W. Bush, hamstrung by the complexities of Iraq and suspicions that he might attack Iran, struggled to put together even modest sanctions.

They also offer new insights into how President Obama, determined to merge his promise of “engagement” with his vow to raise the pressure on the Iranians, assembled a coalition that agreed to impose an array of sanctions considerably harsher than any before attempted.

When Mr. Obama took office, many allies feared that his offers of engagement would make him appear weak to the Iranians. But the cables show how Mr. Obama’s aides quickly countered those worries by rolling out a plan to encircle Iran .... the administration expected its outreach to fail, but believed that it had to make a bona fide attempt in order to build support for tougher measures.

In other words, the Obama Administration has been approaching the Iran problem the way a sane person applying common sense would do: using every available tool, offering friendship for cooperation and punishments for backsliding, and trying to manage the public relations so that Iranian intransigence looks like what it is. In the old days, Republicans called this "speaking softly and carrying a big stick." It's a pretty good approach.

By contrast, the old George W. Bush approach to diplomacy was "shout a lot and break your stick in half to show them how tough you are." This is an optimal strategy for getting beaten up and thrown out of bars. It puts bluster ahead of getting things done, so much so that it undermines the blusterer's power. Note that Bush the Younger couldn't get much happening in the way of sanctions, but Obama could.

If you don't trust the Times reporters, here's an excerpt from a raw document, as a US Treasury official briefs the EU on the new Administration's Iran strategy (April 8, 2009):

To be sure, "engagement" would be an important aspect
of a comprehensive strategy to dissuade Iran from acquiring
nuclear weapons. However, "engagement" alone is unlikely to
succeed. Diplomacy's best chance of success requires all
elements combining pressure and incentives to work
simultaneously, not sequentially.

If that doesn't spell it out for you, here it is: Obama makes gestures of friendship and engagement toward Iran because that is part of the game. Meanwhile, he puts pressure on them from every direction he can in order to force them into accepting his "friendship" on his terms. If you still do not understand how this works, please rent The Godfather. Don Corleone knows how to make friends.

Why does Obama not say, "I am reaching out my hand to Iran as part of a larger strategy to wrestle them into a half nelson?" Because if he admits that the gesture is a pretense, the pretense doesn't work. This, too, should be obvious.

While we're on the topic of the obvious, the document dump reveals Defense Secretary Gates's common sense prediction about how a unilateral attack on Iran's weapons facilities would work:

any strike “would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker.”

See how that goes? Short-term win, long-term and permanent fail, with Iran ending up nuclear and hostile for at least a generation. As strategies go ... well, actually that isn't even a strategy. Obama has a plan to squeeze the Iranians to delay and derail their nuclear ambitions, while trying to build bridges to the Iranian people for the future. The American right wants to just attack Iran instead, which won't actually stop their nuclear program but will turn them into implacable nuclear-armed enemies by 2016 or so, in time for a possible Republican President to discover there's nothing left to do about Iran. It's genius.

Now, all of the above should have been obvious to everyone capable of reading a newspaper. But the American right has been dead-set on misunderstanding Obama. Here's a representative selection from September, 2009. The blogger is Scott Johnson of Powerline:

If any sentient person had serious doubt, last week's news that Iran has a covert uranium enrichment facility under construction at a military base outside Qom should serve to clarify Iran's intent to obtain nuclear weapons. News that Obama had been briefed on the existence of this facility during the transition makes it difficult to understand what Obama has said and done about Iran since then. [Emphasis mine] His statements and actions need to be reconsidered in light of the state of his knowledge. In the spirit of inquiry I offer the following premises and tentative theses:

1. In statements going back to the primary campaign, Obama repeatedly referred to Iran's prospective acquisition of nuclear weapons as unacceptable and stated that no option to prevent it should be taken off the table. Yet Obama accepts the legitimacy of Iran's nuclear program and will do nothing to retard it.

2. Obama has known about the second Iranian enrichment facility since the transition.

3. Obama has repeatedly demonstrated an eagerness to avoid confrontation with the Iranian regime -- to the point of fawning over the regime. He prides himself on accepting the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. [Emphasis mine]

4. Obama made nuclear disarmament the theme of his speech before the UN Security Council last week and secured the passage of a related resolution. Although Obama called for "full compliance with Security Council resolutions on Iran and North Korea," he emphasized that the resolution (which named no country) was "not about singling out individual nations."

It goes on for another eight theses, by which point Johnson has persuaded himself that Obama's goal is to pressure Israel into disarming. That's ludicrous, but it is also one of the tamer responses to Obama's Iran policy from the right blogosphere. When Obama claims that a UN resolution manifestly aimed at Iran and North Korea isn't aimed at them, Johnson is dumb enough to take that denial literally. (Luckily, the Iranian and North Korean regimes are not. Those bastards know perfectly well that the President of the United States is not their friend.) Johnson can't even recognize an indirect and understated threat as a threat, let alone understand why such threats might be more effective than loud obvious ones. When Obama speaks softly, Johnson decides that he isn't carrying a stick.

Like all neocons, Johnson prefers what I like to call the Gangster Rap School of Diplomacy: shouting a lot about how tough you are in the most public forum possible, and making threats without worrying about how to back them up. This is what the American right now understands as "toughness." They couldn't be more wrong.