Yeah it's not so funny when it's happens to you, huh?

This is rich. Blogger Jamelle Bouie has called out Chris Hedges for being self-righteous. To appreciate the (polite word) irony of this, you need to know that besides writing on his own blog, Bouie also contributes to a group project called the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Go read the blog. Now, consider that someone who writes for that thing has the balls to accuse anyone else of sanctimony.

The strange circumlocutions our politics force upon us

I don't really have much of an opinion about Microsort technology except to say that it seems like a pretty fucking stupid idea to me, and also totally predictable. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether I would have wanted a little baby boy or a little girl I would have gone with the former, almost certainly: carry on the family name, teaching the little feller how to do a cross-over dribble, etc. I am today the father of two girls, and I can't imagine them being anything other than their completely wonderful, occasionally infuriating, selves. (Listen: yuppies. Life happens. It's better that way.)

It's this quote from Matthew Yglesias's blog, where he compares Microsort to "the crude and taboo method of selective abortion," that got to me, though.

What a weaselly way of putting things. Really Mr. Yglesias. Using ultrasound to test the sex of a baby, and then deciding to abort if the fetus is a female, a decision which, I can pretty much guarantee, is not the mother's alone (and probably not even primarily) in most of the societies where it is carried out: you find that practice to be crude? Sounds like the only problem we have here is an aesthetic one. As for "taboo," it suggests that our discomfort is merely a product of our social environment, and neatly avoids describing the thing with its proper adjective. Next time try something a little more robust: like, the "evil," or "repugnant," or "morally abhorrent" method of selective abortion.

Ronald Reagan and the wages of stupidity

The idea for this blog post arose as I was listening to Cokie Roberts comment on Sarah Palin's upcoming book tour (transcript here: the Palin comments are at the end of the interview). Roberts notes that lots of Republicans--all the sane ones, I guess--are pretty dubious about Palin, and that David Brooks even went so far as to call her a joke, which is about as polite a way of putting the matter as I can think of, off the top of my head. But then she adds a quote from Newt Gingrich: that lots of people thought that Ronald Reagan was a joke too, at first.

Which got me to thinkin': one of the things that a lot of liberals probably won't admit to anyone anymore, not even to themselves, was just how much of a joke they thought Reagan was. All my professors at Harvard in the mid-80s did, and all my clever classmates at Harvard did, and because I was not ever brave enough to challenge that strong of a consensus I did, too. We thought he was a scary joke, to be sure: stupid, but also stupid enough to start a nuclear war. The other thing to point out is that, of course, we were correct--in this instance at least. The man was an idiot, and it wasn't just liberals and Democrats who knew it. Republicans knew it, too, but for them was a useful idiot. He was genial, and therefore popular with the people, and therefore able to sell the policies and ideas of people much smarter than him. Also, as stupid as was, he was right about the weakness of the Soviet-bloc states, and most of the smart guys, who had spent their careers in the Cold War, assuming that it would continue for a long, long while, just didn't see the Fall of Communism coming. So whether out of some sort of idiot-savant prescience or just pure dumb luck, he came out looking very good on that one question, and it turns out that it was a very big question.

The shear amount of damage that Reagan did to the United States and the rest of the world is so vast that it is hard to pinpoint any single, worst example of his influence, but in the long run this may be this: he made being stupid an acceptable quality for President of the United States, provided that the candidate is malleable and personally agreeable. George Bush Jr. should never have gotten anywhere near the levers of power. But Reagan allowed Republicans--and enough of the general public--to consider the possibility that, with a competent enough staff, the intelligence of the Commander in Chief really wasn't all that important. America was so powerful, economically and militarily, that it could muddle through.

I am certainly not the person who is going to make the argument that IQ has much if anything to do with excellence in politics. George Bush is by some accounts a quite intelligent man: by conventional measures. He's just not very wise. He lacked the judgment that was so desperately needed after that 9/11 attacks, and this country and its citizens have paid a very high price for that. But no one talks about Bush much now. Too embarrassing, maybe. They talk about Reagan.

Clearly, most of the media are afraid of criticizing Palin because they are worried about playing into her narrative of the snarky East Coast elites. But they forget one thing. The country is not in the position it was in 1985, and it can't afford someone like Ronald Reagan again. That Sarah Palin reminds anybody of the 40th President of the United States should not be an argument for her political relevance, but an argument against it. It's really time that someone had the balls to pull the Teflon off that guy.

Books as technology

We'll start today's lecture off with card catalogues. At some point in the past fifteen years, electronic catalogues more or less replaced card catalogues. I don't think my university library even has a card catalogue anymore. If it does, they've hidden it pretty well.

So, why did card catalogues disappear? I doubt anyone knows for sure, and since the modern study of communication is more or less designed to move us away from interesting questions, it is unlikely that some bright grad student will be giving us a definitive answer any time soon. But I would bet the given reasons went something like this: electronic catalogues were a) cheaper, in the end; b) easier to use; c) better at doing what they were made for (ie., searching for printed or other types of materials).

I can't speak to the first point, but on the other two, I would say this. If you simply have the title of a book, and want to get a call number, the electronic catalogue will be easier than the card catalogue. But if you have a kind of an idea of what the name of the author is, or the subject area for your study, the card catalogue is probably going to work better for you. For one thing, it's more forgiving. Some of the more sophisticated search engines may now make allowances for misspellings. The University of Tulsa's does not. So if I switch a single letter around when looking for Habermas's Structural transformation of the public sphere, it's going to come up empty, whereas I would certainly find that book were I to go to the card catalogue and search under "Habermas." And I'd probably find it fairly quickly (maybe 30 seconds).

The other thing that the card catalogue gives you that the electronic one doesn't is a serendipity built right into the technology. I look up "Structural transformation," but while I'm flipping through the cards I find lots of other books with similar titles or on similar subject matter or by the same author. Back in the day, I would go to the card catalogue to look for one title and walk away it with about four or five different call numbers: one of these other books often ended up being more useful than my original source. Electronic catalogues can do this too, but not in the natural way that the card catalogue does. Essentially, they're built for very specific searches. To cast the kind of wide net that I'm talking about here, with any degree of confidence, you need a specialized set of skills (a basic understanding of search strategies, for example), that you didn't need with the card catalogue.

The card catalogue is superior to the electronic catalogue for some sorts of searches, inferior for others. What this means, probably, is that electronic catalogues produce a different kind of scholarship than a card catalogue, certainly for non-specialists (like students).

Which gets us to books. I hear a great deal about the fact that ebooks are superior to paper books. For example, the claim is that ebooks allow for easy searching of terms. Also, the ebook allows you to keep multiple books on a single device. You get bored of one you can switch to another. Can't do that with a book.

Let's look at the first claim. What is the English translation of the French word "décapotable"? You're going to find the answer much more quickly in any basic French-English dictionary than you would through an electronic source (if that source even has the term: babel fish does, my electronic dictionary doesn't. And if it doesn't, you can't try figuring it out through words that are related to it, in the way that a dictionary would let you do. The thing just gives you a "?")

Okay, second experiment. You have in one hand the book Violence and the Sacred by René Girard. In the other you have a copy of the same book on Kindle (this is just a thought experiment. Kindle does not have that book. Nor, are we likely to see these kinds of scholarly works on Kindle any time soon. And it has nothing to do with the newness of the technology. Kindle will never have that book. For reasons that we will shortly see.) You remember that at some point Girard compares animal violence to human violence, suggesting that animals have an automatic barrier (or words to that effect) which keeps violence from getting out of hand. Humans have no such barrier (which is why, says Girard, we need sacrificial rituals). Where's the passage?

With the book, you look at the back, see "animals" in the index. Under "animals" there is a phrase "instinctive limits of, toward violence." Two different page numbers: the first is not what you are looking for, the second is. Took you about, again, half a minute to do this.

Now, how would you go about doing this on the Kindle? Search for "animals"? That will give you probably several hundred hits. You should get to the passage you are looking for in about half an hour. What about "barriers to violence?" or just "barriers?" Oh, I'm sorry, Girard doesn't actually use that term: his is "breaking mechanism." So "barriers" isn't going to give you the passage that you need, ever.

Like card catalogues, books are better search technologies than their electronic counterparts for some kinds of searches, and for some sorts of people. Unlike the card catalogue, the book does reward a certain level of knowledge and expertise. In the Girard example, someone unfamiliar with the book (or for that matter, with how indexes work) would probably have to read through the whole damned thing to find the passage. Moreover, lots of books that people read don't require this kind of search. Specifically, most fiction doesn't, unless you're a university English teacher. It is not a coincidence, I think, that almost all of the discussion around Kindle right now, both pro and con, uses fiction as a reference. Kindle, or something like it, may mean the end of paperback novels. (Eventually. For at least about the next 50 years, there will probably be a market for people like me, who just like to turn pages, and look at pretty covers, and don't need to take seventeen different stories with them on an airplane.) But unless the technology changes significantly, I don't see the ebook replacing scholarly books on paper. The codex is a more effective method of information storage and retrieval than Jeff Bezos realizes.

The infantilization of modern political life

In keeping with my ongoing policy of commenting upon Internet events that have occurred eons ago (in New Media time), I’m going to take apart a conversation that James Poulos, of the blog Postmodern Conservative, had with Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network lo’ these several months ago on Bloggingheads.tv. The discussion that I’m interested in happens near the end of the broadcast, when Poulos starts to complain that modern political discourse often focuses too much on our emotional, subjective responses to policy matters (the war in Afghanistan, in this case), and not enough on attempts to wrestle with what is actually going on. At that point, Hurlburt interrupts Poulos and claims that it was ever thus, that this is just how human beings reason. Says some stuff about the pre-frontal cortex and so forth and then: “I would disagree with the idea that we were somehow, colder, better, more rational actors in the past.”

It’s here that Poulos loses the argument, because rather than saying, “well, that’s not quite what I was arguing,” he takes up Hurlburt’s point and then tries to refute it. Goes off about deliberative rationality and all that stuff and ends up sounding a little like Roderick Hart or Jürgen Habermas, wagging his finger at the rest of us for not performing our democratic duties sufficiently well. You can tell that his heart’s not really in it though, possibly because he knows that Hurlburt’s got it all over him if it comes down to the historical facts. Not only is the decline of the rational public sphere a pretty worn argument by now, it’s just not true. It’s hard to look at any point in modern history and argue that political discussion was somehow dominated by cool, rational discussion. Didn’t happen in the nineteenth century. Didn’t happen in the eighteenth century, sure as hell didn’t happen in the seventeenth century.

The thing is, Poulos actually had a much more interesting argument, but he let Hurlburt sidetrack him into a debate that she could win and he couldn’t. That has to do with his initial point about subjective responses to policy (and to polling questions about that policy). This other argument, which does not refer to the tired distinction between emotionality and rationality, can be traced back at least as far as Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man. Sennett’s point, which is also Poulos’s at the beginning, I think, is that modern politics has become increasingly less focused on what politics was once centrally about--ie., the distribution of power and resources--and more and more about subjective feelings about policy, political figures, public events. What is Sarah Palin going to do for the white working class? Who cares? How does it make them feel? So we (and by "we," I mean both supporters and opponents) spend a lot of time talking about her daughters, and her pregnancy, and her son, and Levi, and the shopping trips, and almost no time on her actual performance as Alaska's governor.

I think that Poulos was on much stronger ground with this first point, and I would bet that part of the reason that Hurlburt moved him away from it was that it made her uncomfortable. After all, Palin is not the only recent political figure for whom symbolism is arguably more important than policy. As an Obama supporter from the very beginning, I have to say that one of the most noticeable features of his Presidency so far has been the way he allows liberals to feel good about ourselves--good about the country, good about the world. But now that he’s actually taking steps to govern, this imaginary mirror that he provides us no longer works so well, and many liberals are starting to abandon him.

In the end, it’s all tied up with what I would argue is the infantilization of modern political life: a desire for the world to look how we want it to look rather than how it is, and an intense focus on matters relating to self, on what I want. It's an intensely inward-looking, egotistical pathology, especially noticeable on the right, but certainly not limited to that side of the spectrum. It has infected all of us, and it is everywhere in the public culture.

Wow: and look, they really drink Chardonnay, too

Nobody is sticking up for Roman Polanski anymore. At least, I haven't read anything written on his behalf for the past week or so, and once Conor Friedersdorf has decided to opine on a subject, I think that we can all assume that conventional wisdom has definitively made its stand on the matter.

Since a cultural scandal has once again passed me by, then, allowing me no chance to demonstrate my populist bona fides by expressing my outrage at the outrage (I was properly outraged, though, let me assure you), I've decided to engage in my little academic strategy of meta-commentary: that is, commenting on the controversy itself.

Michael Kinsley has famously described a gaffe as when a politician accidently tells the truth. Seems to me that we've got to have a similar sort of term for when a group, or some subset thereof, in a moment of communal indiscretion, reveals that what a generous soul would have taken to be an unfair characterization or stereotype is pretty close to the actual case. An example here would be when a few tea-baggers out on the Washington Mall hold up cartoons of Barack Obama as a monkey, or crazy-ass anti-abortionists assassinate a doctor, or when employees of ACORN provide tax guidance to apparent prostitutes and their apparent pimps.

In the case of Polanski, the defenders played into a common prejudice regarding the bicoastal "cultural elite" (at least, it's common out here in flyover country): that they are over-educated moral idiots who have convinced themselves that artistic talent allows one to dispense with any obligation to treat other human beings with decency or respect. Which is, in fact, often true. Our clue here is, no one who lives in Hollywood seems all that surprised that many of the people there are assholes and hypocrites who apparently believe pedophilia is an outrage when practiced by some loser unknown Catholic priest but Not Such A Big Deal if you've done some good work on edgy historical mysteries and horror films (and been forced to live in the 14th arrondissement for the past 25 years, for God's sake, and were not even allowed to come pick up your Oscar trophy!)

The more interesting issue now is a political one. Because of the tendency of so many in Hollywood to adopt fashionable liberal political stances (probably because they associate this with being "artistic"), the question is whether their obtusteness could infect the whole left side of the spectrum among general public opinion. And this is why the most angry and eloquent screeds against Polanski and his cultured defenders are coming from people like Katha Pollit, Gene Robinson, and Kate Harding in the liberal webzine Salon. They're well aware of the long-term damage this could do. I doubt that Limbaugh and Beck are really paying much attention right now, knowing that they can feast on this little nugget (Woody Allen sticking up for a child rapist, Haw!) for the next ten years or so. They can trot it out every time they want to rail against fancy-pants east coast liberals and their cultural nihilism.

The rough equivalent would be the sort of damage control that comes up from the conservative commentariat every time Sarah Palin says something stupid or when some cracker Republican congressman gets caught making a racist joke. Except, of course, that never happens: the folks in places like The National Review and The Weekly Standard mostly just plough on through. Nothing embarrasses them, not even the birthers. This is because conservative intellectuals (and maybe, also, Hollywood film directors) realize something that liberal journalists like Robinson and Harding haven't figured out yet: there are no longer consensus, middle-of-the-road, default positions in this country about issues of common decency and public decorum. We're all just defending the tribe now.

I watched "The Seventh Continent" so that you don't have to

Summary: the modern bourgeoisie live lives of quiet desperation, layered over with meaningless daily ritual and endless consumption of commodities. But the children aren't fooled.

Eventually, these fools come to see through the bitter shallowness that is their existence under global corporate capitalism, and kill themselves.

Amen brother

I'm now assuming that most people who comment on blogs at this point are idiots. That said,this guy Sorn (you'll probably need to scroll down), referring to a recent posting on Ta-Nehisi Coates' Atlantic site (about a letter written to Andrew Sullivan), strikes me as very sane, despite the spelling mistakes.

P.S. Although all the commenters are too polite to point it out, the careful reader will note how Sorn's rebuke to the letter-writer is a subtle criticism not only of Sullivan, but of Coates himself, since both men seemed more or less seemed to confirm the initial argument.

Kindle and Orwell

I have to admit that I don't get Kindle, and I don't get ebooks in general. I don't understand why anyone bothered to invent such things. It wasn't as though there was a huge outcry for reading Pride and Prejudice off of a LCD screen (or whatever sort of surface they've come up with to replace it).

Books remain, I think, a superior technology for most of what we use them for, and because of that are not likely to disappear any time soon. But that is a topic for another day. This entry is about the fact that we seem to criticize ebooks for the wrong reasons. For example, Nicholson Baker doesn't like ebooks because...well, uh...here, you tell me. Many other writers have started up an anti-Kindle effort because of what happened with some users' copies of Nineteen Eighty Four several weeks ago. Briefly, the story is this. Amazon had some issue over copyright on the book, so they pulled it, not just off of its shelves (so to speak) but also from customers who had already purchased the title. The book disappeared into thin air: as not a few commentators have noted, the resonances with Orwell's story were just too resonant for the media to ignore.

Aha, said the critics, you see the problem now. Unlike a paper book, you don't actually own an ebook. It doesn't exist on your Kindle--it exists up in "the cloud", and all you have paid for is the right to access it. On the seller's terms. If you had actually bought the book, Amazon couldn't have taken it from you. Their copyright problems would have remained that: their copyright problems. You still would have your copy. And extrapolating from this particular incident, Kindle seems to make for a very convenient method of censorship. Any time that there is a problem with a book--any kind of problem--Amazon can just pull it. The users may wail and cry, but as long as Amazon refunds their fees, there's not much they can do.

So, yeah. Censorship. Which is a bad thing, for sure. But also not a new thing. There are lots of ways of censoring information. The publishing industry does a pretty good job of keeping about 90 per cent of what is written from most of us. It can do this because of economies in scales in terms of printing books, distributing books, getting some books displayed in book stores and not others. You already knew that. But the thing is that Kindle allows authors to bypass a lot of this crap. Theoretically, at least, the same kind of long tail economics could work for Kindle as for other sorts of new media. But it also has new, different ways of keeping books away from us; or even taking them away.

Because of the way we talk about communication, and more specifically because of the way that we have always talked about the impact of the printing press, we tend to think about media forms in terms of all or nothing: they are precursors to a new democratic revolution, or they're going to lead to the ultimate panopticon. But in terms of the freedoms allowed, most media forms give on some fronts, and they take on other fronts. The Kindle is probably going to be like that. At least, if it's anything like any other form of media introduced into the Western World in the past 2,000 years.

Let us now praise journalists who are not nearly so famous as they deserve to be

It is in the nature of modern journalism (as with so much in our world) that sounding intelligent and interesting is more important than actually being intelligent and interesting. Examples of mediocrities who play the game well: Andrew Sullivan, Ron Rosenbaum, Christopher Hitchens (Yah, you want me to add Gladwell, too. Well to hell with that: everyone's on him right now. And he's not the worst offender by a long shot.) An counter-example would be David Cayley, who I am almost certain you have never heard of. Much of this could be attributed to the fact that he's Canadian, except that I doubt most Canadians have heard of him, either. They might know who Gwynne Dyer is: they have almost certainly heard of names like Barbara Frum or David Suzuki. But Cayley is not a household name anywhere except maybe his own house; he barely has a Wikipedia page.

David Cayley has produced work for the Canadian radio series Ideas for the past 25 years or so. His masterpiece may be the recent 22-episode set of radio interviews on the idea of science in the modern world, although it's hard to pick a favorite because almost everything the man does is so good. When I was just out of college, Cayley's work, along with some magazine stuff that Taylor Branch did on race in modern America, were what made me want to be a journalist. People like that made journalism out to be a place where you could write about ideas and communicate to people who normally didn't think about the sorts of things that you were talking about. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that most working journalists don't get the kind of gig that Cayley got: writing hour-long docs for a government-sponsored radio program that doesn't need to make a profit. Well okay: he's made better use of that opportunity than most people would. Cayley always challenges the listeners, and he always challenges himself. A good illustration of this is his most recent piece on Ideas. It's about critics of the global warning consensus. I haven't listened to the whole piece and I don't have the scientific chops to critique it in any case, but here's the thing: Cayley is no shill for the oil companies. He's been writing about environmental issues since the 80s, and generally from a point of view sympathetic to environmentalists. The first time I ever heard about "deep ecology" was when I heard an interview that Cayley did with the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess.

Cayley doesn't do a piece on the arrogance of the scientific status quo because he wants to preen. He does it because he's genuinely curious, and always ready to concede that he might not be as smart as he thinks. He is an intellectual contrarian in a way that poseurs like Hitchens or Sullivan can only dream of being.

Bud Light?

My respect for the President of the United States has taken a serious hit.
What a wimpy choice of beer.

Last post on this topic. Ever.

Now that I've calmed down a bit, and started to think about this whole thing from the viewpoint of a media analyst, I realize that my previous post got things exactly wrong. The fact that no one knows what went down on the professor's front door-step is precisely what has made it chum for the commentariat and all the professional posters out there in blogland. There is just enough information to allow people to give their interpretation, but no so much that the interpretations could ever be refuted, only argued about.

Add to this the fact that race and class both got pulled into the discussion very quickly, which allowed folks on the one side to accuse anyone who dared to disagree with them as, at best, clueless white people intent on denying the realities of modern America, and those on the other side to don the mantle of aggrieved populist rage.

Side note. There was actually a sane op-ed to come out of this: one by Glenn Loury in the New York Times. (And for an example of how not to cover a story like this, check out Emily Bazelon and her two guests on this week's Political Gabfest.)

Didn't a Japanese film-maker do a movie about this that one time?

Here's the latest on the Henry "Skip" Gates scandale. The Cambridge police have released the police report on the arrest. The report doesn't present Dr. Gates in a very favorable light. In fact, he comes off like a very arrogant Harvard professor, desperate to play the role of a victim. Having met several Harvard professors in my four-year undergraduate career there, I have to say that I do not find this to be an entirely outlandish portrayal. The size of the egos bouncing around the Yard are comparable only to only a few other places in the United States--some parts of Hollywood, and maybe Wall Street. On other hand, as a few bloggers have pointed out, it was the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, who made out the report. So, you know, he maybe doesn't have the clearest view of the ground on this particular matter.

Dr. Gates, for his part, tells a very different story: one in which he was trying to be as reasonable as possible under the circumstances (those being, like, having to justify walking around in your own fucking house).

Who woulda thunk it, huh? Two guys, get in a fight, end up telling two different stories that make the other guy look like a jerk?

So, with all that, here's my question:

WHY TEH FUCK IS ANYBODY STILL TALKING ABOUT THIS? WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED THERE? WHO KNOWS WHAT ANYBODY'S MOTIVES WERE? YOU SURE AS HELL DON'T! I DON'T! CHRIST ALMIGHTY, I DOUBT THAT GATES AND CROWLEY EVEN KNOW AT THIS POINT!

SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!

Jesus.