Shakespeare "Authorship Debates" and Amateur Scholarship

So, just in time to ruin my New Year's celebrations, Newsweek has seen fit to publish a credulous article trumpeting the old who-wrote-Shakespeare conspiracy theories. I won't give Newsweek a link, but you can click through Amanda Marcotte's smart takedown at Rawstory if you're curious. The original piece is full of breathless non-facts like "Nobody ever recognised Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime" [except for at least three dozen separate individuals, writing both in print and manuscript, because Shakespeare was famous]  "and when he died, in 1616, no one seemed to notice" [except the six different poets who wrote memorial verses for him]. Apparently you can always say, "there's no evidence" even when there is evidence.

Now, I'm on record about this question on this blog, and under my professional name, and I've been quoted about it in a major newspaper, so I don't want to belabor the key facts here. As the above example suggests, this isn't really a debate about facts anyway. But this phony debate often gets cast as insiders vs. outsiders, the stuffy Shakespeare establishment, with all the PhDs and whatever vs. the free-thinking, imaginative amateur scholars. So I'd like to clarify a few things about how academic and amateur Shakespeareans work.

1. Professional Shakespeareans constantly argue with each other and are rewarded for new ideas.

The standard position of the Francis Bacon/Earl of Oxford/etc./etc. fans is that "orthodox" Shakespeareans are all sticking together because we are afraid of new ideas. This ignores the fact that academic Shakespeare scholars argue with each other constantly about any question that can reasonably be disputed. Winning arguments with each other is how we get ahead in our careers. And winning an argument that brings in a big new idea, or overturns an important old idea, is the gold standard. The academic Shakespeare establishment isn't a conspiracy. It's a boxing ring.

This is one of the reasons that academic writing can be hard for general readers to enjoy: it focuses on highlighting the new idea that the writer is putting forward, rather than the ideas that the reader might find most interesting. Something that's interesting to you as a reader but that every scholar's agreed on for the last fifty years won't get much attention, while today's new idea, even if it's quite small, will get the most attention. And because every argument a scholar puts forward is liable to being torn apart by other scholars, scholarly writing tends to be carefully hedged and to carefully shore up even pretty small issues so that they don't give another critic an opening. That's another reason academese is hard to read.

I don't write my scholarship to highlight how much I agree with more established Shakespeareans. It's just the reverse. I once criticized something written by the then-head of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (whom many Oxfordians especially dislike) so, ah, energetically that I was publicly accused, in print, of having been "unfair" to him. (Of course, I don't think that I was unfair, but hey, to offend and judge are distinct offices.) Scholarly writing demands pointing out where other scholars are wrong.

A member of the "Shakespeare establishment" who could make a strong case that Shakespeare's works had been written by someone else would stand to benefit enormously. Even if it weren't a completely bullet-proof case, the rewards for making a reasonably strong case, opening room for legitimate doubt, would be huge. You'd immediately become a major player in the field. If I thought I had the evidence to back up a case like that, you'd better believe that I would make it. And so would a lot of other people like me. Yes, that would mean publicly disagreeing with many important senior scholars; that would only make it sweeter.

(On the other hand, the reward for believing Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is nothing, just like the reward for believing that the sky is blue and water is wet is nothing. No one beats someone else out for a job because they both believe the same thing that no one else doubts. One of the frustrations many literary scholars have teaching beginning undergraduates is those students' deep commitment to arguing things that are so obviously true that they're not worth bringing up; making arguments like that is not what professional academics value at all.)

The reason I don't make a case for someone else writing Shakespeare is that I can't. The reason that a large group of other people inside the academic world haven't done it is that they can't either. If there were evidence to make a good case, someone would certainly be ambitious enough to make it. But it never happens.

2. Amateur scholars are welcome in academic debates.

One of my generation's two greatest historians of Shakespeare's theater is an independent scholar named Dave Kathman, who doesn't have a university job or a PhD in literature. Dave works as a financial analyst in Chicago, and does the Shakespeare-theater-history thing as a hobby. But he's enormously productive and valuable as a scholar. There's only one PhD-holder in my generation who's more important to that specific field than Dave is. (That scholar is an Oxford professor, very much part of the establishment.) Dave has found original documents that we had not known about, because he looked in archives people had not thought about trying. So suddenly, thanks to Dave, we have apprenticeship records for Shakespeare's boy actors. We can prove when they joined the company, and we can closely estimate their ages. It used to be we knew very little about the boys who played female parts, but now we know more about them than we know about some of the adult actors.

Dave doesn't get turned away because he doesn't have a PhD in our field, or because he doesn't teach college. He's been welcomed and valued, because he makes important contributions. He has also made a strong argument that changed the way we think about an important primary document from theater history, a piece of old paper that's obscure to outsiders but which turns out to underwrite a lot of other theories about what was going on in the 1590s. Dave made strong case for that document being from a different year than we thought, and belonging to a different acting company. This, of course, led to a debate. Shakespeareans debate things. And Dave was opposed by some very high-profile senior scholars who were committed to the old way of looking at that document. But they didn't pull rank on him. No one said, "I teach at an Ivy and you don't have a PhD in English, so you're wrong." They had to meet him on the facts, and some eventually had to concede that he was right.

We don't turn amateurs away because they're amateurs. An amateur who makes a strong case can win the day.

3. Shakespeare "authorship disputes" are actually OLDER than professional Shakespeare scholarship. 

In fact, the "authorship controversy" started in the days when every Shakespearean was an amateur. It didn't start until the 19th century, which is long enough after Shakespeare's death to raise difficult questions. (No one in the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries expressed any doubts. But sometime after Shakespeare had been dead for 200 years a few people suddenly decided that it was impossible that he wrote his works.) But university courses on Shakespeare come even later still, as do doctoral degrees in English literature. Those don't get underway until the second half of the 19th century.

So this didn't start as an argument between professors and outsiders. There were no professors of Shakespeare. Everyone was an amateur (and that includes some of the greatest Shakespeare scholars who have ever lived).

But when literature departments got organized and people started writing research dissertations on Shakespeare, none of the maybe-someone-else-wrote-it stuff got used by the new group of pros. It wasn't because people conspired to exclude it. Someone who could prove that case in 1865 or 1915 would have been highly rewarded, the same way someone would for proving it in 2015. But the evidence for other candidates has never been there. And you can't get away telling your PhD adviser bullshit like "No one ever mentioned Shakespeare as a writer during his lifetime." Your adviser will know that's a lie.

The "Shakespeare authorship" arguments are like astrology: an old idea that professionals working in the field have outgrown but that stays popular with a slice of the general public. Like astrology, the Shakespeare-authorship game has trouble generating new hypotheses that can stand up to a rigorous test. And so authorship debates, like astrology, tend to recycle old claims over and over again, giving them a certain time-in-a-bottle quality. I'm having trouble finding anything in that Newsweek story that you couldn't find somewhere else by, say, 1940. In the academic world, a piece that just repeats things from decades ago is completely unpublishable. But the authorship hobbyists are more than happy to dish out the same old cabbage, no matter how many times it's been served before.

Journalists writing "news" stories about these conspiracy theories need to spin the Shakespeare-not-Shakespeare idea as somehow, well, new. But it's not new. It's a very old idea, nearly two hundred years old at this point, and it hasn't made any progress in a long time.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

My Neighborhood, Times Two

I was back in my old neighborhood a couple of weekends ago, walking toward the farmer's market, when I passed a little knot of people who were looking up and gesturing toward the dignified brick apartment buildings that line one of the boulevards. They were all clearly from somewhere else, and one of them was explaining the handsome buildings, which apparently struck them as odd, to the others:

"I think they're pretty dumpy on the inside, but they look good from out here," he said.

I thought that was pretty remarkable, because the guy wasn't actually claiming to have been inside any of the buildings he was talking about. He just thought they were run-down dumps inside. All he could actually see were the buildings' admittedly-impressive outsides, but he he didn't or couldn't permit himself to be impressed by them. So he assumed that the handsome buildings were all squalid inside.

He was dead wrong. I should know. He was pointing at my old building.

I lived in that place for seven years, in a big pre-war apartment with hardwood floors, and the only thing that was ever remotely squalid in that place was my bachelor housekeeping. It was a nicer place than I really should have rented right out of graduate school; my excuse is that I'd come straight from California, where the rent on even a shabby studio was always basically all the money you had, and so my big beautiful apartment with the fancy view seemed like a steal. And having an apartment like that made feel like I was finally, after so many years of school, a middle-class grownup. I only left that building when I got married and began my weekly interstate commute, because I needed a place closer to my office when I was in town.

Now, there may theoretically be an apartment building on that street that isn't well maintained on the inside. Maybe they weren't all as nice as mine. But I've been in lots of those buildings, either as a prospective renter or while visiting a friend, and I've never seen any of the dumpy apartments this guy was talking about.

The guy explaining how terrible the apartments on that street were (don't let the fancy outsides fool you!) wasn't saying that because he knew it to be so. He apparently believed that those buildings were all concealing slum conditions because he wanted (or needed) to believe that. I don't know about you, but when I'm in a place I haven't been before I generally assume that the houses I'm looking at are pretty much the way they look, with the insides roughly as shabby, shiny, or well-kept as the outsides. I would never look at a house with its paint peeling off and say, "I bet it's an absolute palace inside," or presume that a fancy-looking house on the lake is secretly a dump. But for whatever reason, these strangers were not ready to accept that my neighborhood actually was the way it looked. So they had to invent facts not in evidence, the dumpy apartments secretly hidden inside impressive buildings, rather than deal with the reality staring them in the face. Those nice-looking buildings just couldn't be what they looked like, because they weren't supposed to be there.

(And actually, it was a little bit worse than that. As my spouse pointed out to me later, that guy had to actively ignore evidence he could see, namely the carefully-maintained landscaping around the buildings he was calling dumpy. In his world, the landlords have let those beautiful old buildings run to complete ruin but also meticulously landscaped them.)

Why not just accept the evidence in front of their eyes? One possible explanation is what I'll call suburbanite bias: the conviction that life in the Big Dirty City is just one long squalid nightmare. I don't just mean preferring to live outside the city yourself. I mean the insistence that living anywhere in the city is so hopelessly awful that anybody would count themselves blessed to "escape" to the suburbs. I should admit that I've never viewed the suburbs as a place to which I would eagerly escape; there's a reason that my blog name isn't "Doctor Pepper Pike, OH." But I see that some people might like a suburb better than the city. What I'm talking about is the belief that everyone in the city, except maybe a handful in luxury high-rises, must be living in a horrifying slum. Call it Urban Derangement Syndrome.

It could also have been about the specific part of the city my neighborhood is in. The skeptical visitors might simply have been unable to believe the sight of lovely vintage buildings in the black part of town. The neighborhood is actually mixed-race; I've spent years there, and I'm so white I'm nearly translucent. African-Americans are a plurality rather than a majority. And it's also a mixed-income neighborhood, with a healthy share of working-class homeowners but a bunch of doctors and classical musicians too. But the neighborhood has enough African-Americans that visitors from a racially unmixed area might view it as a "black neighborhood." (In this case, that which is not all-but-completely white becomes "black.") They may have refused to believe in the impressive apartment buildings they were seeing because they were under the impression that they were in The Ghetto, where all African-Americans live in miserable tenements and have The Blues. If you can buy decent soul food, it must be a slum. The Ghetto, in this case, is positively full of endocrinologists and cellists, but this isn't about the details. It's about the Big Picture, where all black people live in Bad Neighborhoods. How can there be nice apartments in a Bad Neighborhood? It makes no sense.

A slightly different version of this problem would be that the visitors viewed an entire side of town, the stereotypically "black" side, as one vast undifferentiated expanse of The Ghetto, and could not process that the "black" portion of a city actually has all kinds of neighborhoods, good, bad, and in-between. One way or another, the outsiders' refusal to accept what they were seeing as real is about a refusal to accept complexity. It's refusal to accept the variety that messes with easy simplifications. The "black side of town" is no more one single place than a city or a neighborhood is one place: they contain multitudes.

My other neighborhood, in the city where I own a home with my spouse, is also probably misunderstood by some outsiders. That neighborhood too is economically and ethnically mixed, and also viewed as the scary desperate city by surbanites with Urban Derangement Syndrome. Our house was built in the 1920s, and has no room for a huge lawn or huge attached garage. And it's only a few blocks from a high school with a large proportion of African-American students. ZOMG! Black teenagers! It are an urban jungle! Every night, my spouse and I lock our vintage leaded-glass windows and huddle by the working fireplace in terror.

Neither neighborhood is an exclusive bougie enclave. They have petty crime; you need to lock your doors, you shouldn't leave valuables in the car, and you shouldn't believe that everyone buttonholing you on the street is telling you their real story. When I first moved in to my old apartment my morning newspaper would get stolen in the morning. In other words, they are neighborhoods in cities, where you should take basic sensible precautions and generally not be an idiot. Does that make them "high crime" neighborhoods? Depends on how you're counting. Are they "dangerous" neighborhoods, where random pedestrians will be waylaid by a bunch of extras from The Wire? No. The scary thugs only live in the secret slum apartments hidden inside nice buildings. They never come out.

The thing about a city is that no neighborhood is very far from a different neighborhood; a good city doesn't sprawl. A city that does is a collection of suburbs on steroids. That boulevard of brick pre-war apartment buildings is only a block or two in one direction from a street full of blue-collar single-family homes. Half a mile in another direction is a shady street lined with what I can only call minor mansions. One nearby street is a depressed and dispiriting commercial strip. Another nearby street is filled with antiques dealers. Half a mile's run in yet another direction takes you to a park filled with live deer. It's a neighborhood. It neighbors other things. That's the point.

I left that neighborhood, but I didn't "escape" it. In fact, on the morning that I passed the guy explaining how all the apartments were actually dumps, I was in the neighborhood because I was moving back. My spouse has taken a year's leave from her job, so I gave up the bachelor pad near my office and moved with her back to another big pre-war apartment in another of those handsome buildings that the guy considered dumps in disguise. (Meanwhile, we rented the house in our other urban neighborhood to a group of classical musicians. Mostly string section. You know: animals.) So my old neighborhood is also my new neighborhood, at least for a year. And if the apartments in the neighborhood are secretly dumpy, well, I just rented another. Its dumpiness is still secret.

After I passed those confident visitors I went to the farmer's market and then back to my new apartment where my wife and my unpacked boxes were waiting. Then I stood at the counter in my newly-renovated kitchen and ate an organic peach. Just another day in the hood.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Shakespeare, Oxford, and the 1%

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.

Torture Is for Liars

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.

Violence and Political Gain

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.

Realism About the Housing Mess

cross-posted at Dagblog

Most public debates over the mortgage and housing mess have been running aground on the false-dilemma problem, framing a problem with several possible solutions as a choice between only two options. At least one of the options in false dilemmas is always completely moonbat crazy, and frequently they both are. The false dilemma I've been hearing these days goes like this:

"We either have to give mortgage lenders a free hand, and forget about the legal details, or just let borrowers keep their houses for free without paying anything!"

Obviously, this is not the actual set of choices. It's the two most extreme choices within that set. The point of this either/or formulation is to make one unreasonable course of action seem sane and necessary by pairing it with an even crazier course of action. Letting banks foreclose on people's homes with forged documents is so clearly insane (and such an attack on basic property rights) that it can only be justified by pretending that there are no other options except giving away six-bedroom homes as gifts to deadbeats.

Of course there are other options. How could there not be?

I tend not to trust people who tell me there are only two ways to, especially when both ways are extreme. The world really is not a set of choices between Galt Gulch and Soviet Communism, between repealing the Fourth Amendment and accepting Sharia law, between life in a religious commune and life in a Vegas brothel. And generally when somebody tells me that I have to make a choice like that, I presume that person is trying to hustle me. The choice between "never foreclose on any home for any reason" and "foreclose on people whether you actually have title to their home or not" is obviously a hustler's presentation of the choice. And of course, you can't take a time out to think, because we have to foreclose now! Right away! There's no time to think over the actual rights and wrongs! (This is why it's called hustling.)

Ezra Klein has a characteristically excellent post running down four practical solutions to help homeowners in realistic ways that help homeowners without simply ripping off the lenders. The whole piece is worth a read, and the options are basically sensible. They include simple things like requiring mediation before a foreclosure and changing HAMP so that banks have to opt out instead of opting in, bigger things like allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the principal on mortgages for primary residences, and practical fixes like the "right to rent," in which borrowers lose the house and their equity but can remain as tenants paying market rents for a set period.

All of those sound reasonable to me. I'm personally a big fan of cramdown, the modification of principal by bankruptcy judges. That could allow banks and borrowers to split the difference between the inflated house prices on which the original loan was based and the current market price, so that both the lender and the borrower take a haircut on their mutual bad investment. That would also help separate the borrowers who can actually pay from the ones who never could, and the borrowers who genuinely bought much more than they could afford from the homebuyers who, because of the bubble, had to spend a million dollars for what would usually be four hundred thousand dollars of house.

In other news, here's Digby recommending serious jail time for the people who actually turned fraud into something routine. I have to admit that sounds pretty reasonable, too.

No, Virginia, I Was Lying

White House Family Room (AP)-

This weekend, Scott "Daddy" McClellan announced to stunned members of the press that there is no Santa Claus.

Reaction varied. Many skeptics pointed out that as Daddy had previously claimed that there was, in fact, a Santa Claus, and even appeared to provide corroboration on the questions of Rudolph and the North Pole, he was in no position to deny Santa's existence now. "All this proves is that Daddy is a fibber," one critic said. "How can we be sure there's not a Santa if Daddy keeps changing his story?"

Others noted the suspicious similarities between Daddy's new position and the views previously expressed by various mean kids during recess. Billy expressed his disappointment that Daddy had "accepted the caricature" promulgated by these mean kids, even including extremist claims about taking deliberately misleading bites from Santa's fireside cookies. Other pundits wondered why Daddy would suddenly talk like one of the mean kids, and if that meant that he was mean himself.

Other sources theorized that Daddy was merely grumpy, did not mean it, or was not really Daddy but only pretending.

However, there was widespread agreement that Daddy's charge about big boys and girls not believing in Santa was inflammatory and ill-founded. All sources remarked that they had accepted the Santa narrative as a result of their mature and professional judgment as big kids, and were certainly not babies.

Babies, according to most authorities, are those too young to properly understand about the Easter Bunny.