The airship as floating signifier

I'm been thinking about airships today, after I finished Jean-Christophe Valtat's Aurorama. The book itself is decent but a bit disappointing. An absolutely killer set-up--alternative history that takes place in an Art Deco, steam-punk pastiche of about seven or eight different European cities (dubbed New Venice) located near the North Pole, with anarchist revolution, police in top hats and capes, and garbagemen wearing Carnival-style bird masks--that is somewhat marred by Valtat's decision to wear his politics on his sleeve (I'm starting to think that this is near-universal prediliction of modern French male writers, particularly when they decide to go "slumming" into genre fiction) and a plot that doesn't really get going until about 200 pages into the thing. Also, Valtat is French but wrote this in English, which means that the dialogue is pretty stilted at times. But the cover says this is the first in a series, so I have hopes.

Anyhow. The story features an airship, which reminded me a number of other books/stories that have airships (short story by M. Chabon in a McSweeney's collection, that huge thing by Pynchon a couple of years ago, Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy). And then I did some (very cursory) research at the local Borders and online, and realized that steam-punk is rife with airships or zeppelins or whatnot. Which in turn provoked the question: what it is that is so appealing about airships? I mean, they seem to touch a chord with so many readers of these books, and they certainly do so with me, but maybe in a manner that makes me distrust myself: that nostalgic, romanticizing part of me that wants to remember all the beautiful aspects of a world I never lived in and to ignore the day to day drudgeries and evils of that world.

Airships are a part of modern technology that we have passed by, mostly because we found something that does what they do, but only better. Thus they appeal to folks like me, who are conflicted about modernity: they flatter our conservative side, the idea that once things were more elegant, more civilized, more interesting, but also celebrate some of the fundamental aspects of the modern human being. They speak to a breaking of barriers, a lifting of ourselves out of the ordinary--or the seemingly necessary--that technology makes possible. They take us off our earth-bound lives, let us seen things anew. This is what modernity promises. But then it gives us lots of other things too--pollution, a rat race that seems it can only get faster, crazy new ways to kill ourselves. Airships seem to signify a moment that we have lost, when we could have put a stop to some of the really pathological elements of the modern world. They are all things good about technology and none bad. Crystal goblets, jazz music, urbane and witty dinner companions. They don't emit exhuast, or don't seem to. Like luxury liners, or the Orient Express, they allow us the image of cosmopolitan travel, but at a sane pace, and for the right reasons. It is significant that villains almost never come from airships. Indeed, in both the Pynchon and Valtat works, they allow for a kind of utopian vision of democracy as joyful and only slightly dangerous anarchy.

The lie of the steam-punk zeppelin is that the brake on innovation was ever possible. Modernity doesn't respect the kinds of limits that the airship represents. The whole point of the modern world-view is that limits are intolerable: that is its demonic genius, both what is wonderful and horrifying about it. The airship suggests, pleasantly, that our world and that our technology didn't have to be like this. But of course it did, once we accepted that world's, and its technology's, basic premise: things can always be better. It was not inevitable that the airplane would supplant the airship, but it was inevitable that something would. Which is why trains and steamships, despite their similarities to the airship, do not feature so prominently in these alternative universes. We know why they've largely disappeared as travel technologies. Not because of some dramatic disaster in New Jersey 80 years ago, but just because they were too damned slow. They are, to use some Barthean terminology, history, and not myth.

Egypt, social media, and democracy

At a certain point, the protests in Egypt provoked the same question that almost all popular uprisings in the past five or so years have provoked, which is whether, or how much, their success is due to the use of the new media. This idea goes back to 2001 protests in the Philippines, in which the role of the cell phone has been much commented upon. These protests resulted in the resignation of the sitting president. Social media were credited for promoting political protests in Belarus, in Madrid, and the election protests in Iran in 2009. Tunisia's recent regime change has created the same sort of debate, this time in regards to wikipedia. Claims about the importance of Twitter, and Facebook, and text messaging, in spreading the word and in coordinating massive public actions have also produced push back, most notably in an essay by The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell, who dismissed the idea that social media played much of a role in the Iranian protests. In fact, both he and the Net's most famous skeptic, Evgeny Morozov, have even suggested that the social media may have helped police track down and arrest protest leaders.

It's a silly argument, in a way. Of course social media play a role in any modern political mobilization, just as the mass media play a role, and also traditional media, and of course also interpersonal communication (also cars, and various other forms of technology). Social media play a role in modern life. The question is, what sort of role do they play? That seems to be obvious, but the problem at this point is that so many people are so invested--emotionally and professionally--in the idea that new media have created a fundamental break with how things worked in the past (the past defined as about 2001). So we don't ask specific, answerable questions that could be asked by some solid empirical research: say, a series of interviews among opposition leaders about how social media were used to create public meetings, whether media networks overlap with interpersonal networks, and to what extent, etc. The legwork involved would take time, of course, and effort, and would probably come out sounding not nearly so dramatic as the claim that new media are the best tool for controlling a population ever invented, or the tools for constructing a brand new, democratic universe.

But revolutions happened before Twitter. There were democratic possibilities before smart mobs and texting. So the first, fundamental issue has to be not whether Twitter or Facebook are decisive for creating popular opposition: they obviously are not. The question now has to be: now that they are playing role, what character do they give to the new political movements. But as long as we have the evangelists and the dystopians making large claims and counter-claims about the Direction of History, we're never going to figure that out.

The theology of net neutrality

This past semester I advised a student on an independent project concerning net neutrality. This was maybe not the best arrangement for the student, since I didn't really know all that much about net neutrality (we don't have a new media currently on the faculty, which is why I had to do). It was great for me, though, as it allowed me to learn a little more about a subject that seems to be generating a great deal of discussion and debate recently.

For whose unfamiliar with the phrase, net neutrality refers to a policy proposal that would forbid internet providers to charge different rates to different customers. The providers want to do this based on the reasonable market principle that some people or companies (Google, ABC news, Youtube) use a lot more bandwidth than others (ie., me). It just makes sense, so goes this reasoning, to charge the former a higher rate than the latter. But defenders of the status quo argue that this sort of pricing policy would lead to tiered service--so that some users, like wealthy and large corporations--would be able to buy extra-speedy access, while the rest of us would be left with a more slower and degraded system. They argue that the government should step in and ensure that providers can't differentiate service between haves and have-nots. Network neutrality proposals would also ensure that providers couldn't use their control over service to block ideas, or sites, or content that they don't like.

To anyone of my political persuasion, net neutrality seems like a no-brainer. Of course you want to keep the internet free of censorship, whether by governments or corporations. Of course you want to keep access to, and transmission of, information on the internet as equal as possible. It is one of the major selling points of new media culture that it more closely resembles a truly democratic public sphere than anything we've had for a long time, maybe ever. Opponents of net neutrality must be either crazy, then, or in the pay of the only people who would appear to profit from a hierarchical net: internet providers and maybe, other large corporations. That's the sort of attitude that the folks at the Daily Show are taking here.

It's one thing to point out that one's opponent's views are colored by the economic interests, and also maybe certain social contexts that make them blind to some aspects of a problem. That is only to observe that they are human. It's another thing to use that observation to excuse oneself from the necessity of having to engage in those arguments. One of the things I found out in the course of looking into the debate a little more closely is that the opponents of net neutrality can't simply be dismissed as dupes of neo-liberal orthodoxy or Big Media lackeys. There are some good arguments against the government creating the sort of regime that net neutrality proponents support. First, many NN opponents point out that when governments involve themselves in regulating markets, they introduce biases that stifle competition, hamper innovation, create massive and often highly ineffective government bureaucracies, and ultimately work against consumers and precisely those market outsiders that otherwise would have challenged the powers of entrenched interests. Significantly, this is what happened in the nineteenth century, say NN opponents, when government intervened in the railroads because of very similar worries to what neutrality advocates are worrying about now. Then too, the opponents point out, given the rapid and dramatic changes in new media culture over the past twenty years, any potential regulatory regime might be addressing a world that now longer exists by the time that it will be implemented. Remember when the danger seemed to be that Microsoft was going to take over the world? And then it was AOL-Time Warner? And then Google? And now Facebook? There is a reasonable worry that by creating a set of rules designed for a specific media environment, the government locks us into that environment, and the sort of dynamic culture that we've seen through new media will calcify. Moreover, given that things seem to be changing so radically, and so unpredictably, whose to say that the dangers of the current media world won't be solved by a simple shift in direction or emphasis, or simply the introduction of new technologies?

But then here's the thing. For every piece of history that the opponents of NN can pull up, defenders of the idea have a corresponding example of how monopolies or oligopolistic situations create market failure. Or they interpret the lessons of the past in a different light. Their historical lessons also seem pretty plausible. And because it is so difficult, or impossible, to predict what we are going to see in the next decade, even the next several years, its really a matter of faith as to which side you are going to believe. If you go into this debate suspicious of modern corporate capitalism, then the faith in technology and the market to solve any and all problems seems naive, at best. If you approach it with a distrust of government intervention, then the desire to create legislation to address that problem that does not even seem to exist, at this point, can feel like just another example of the left trying to control the creative forces of humanity. It is this clash of theological positions--belief in the goodness of the market on the one side, and belief in its ultimate destructive nature on the other--that makes the debate so unedifying. People are predicting futures that they don't really have much of a handle on, and they use past events simply as ideological justification for their position (notably, there are few if any historians involved in the argument, from what I can tell. That's probably because most historians, of whatever political persuasion, realize that whatever its value, history makes for a poor predictive device.)

All of which would just be another example of intellectual follies if not for the fact that this decision--either for or against net neutrality--probably will have a fairly major impact on our culture. And it is very possible that one of the two sides is correct: we could end up stifling one of the great instances of communal creative energy in modern history, either through action or inaction. And there does not seem to be a way for us to reliably and reasonably justify which path to take, at least not based on any clear empirical evidence.

The real point of wikileaks

At our Christmas party, a good friend pointed out that one of the most important things that establishment media has managed to do in the whole wikileaks story is to make Julian Assange the major character. In this way, we spend our time debating a) whether he is a vile rapist or an heroic destroyer of state and corporate hierarchies, or: b) whether he should have released all of the information that he did, only one some of it (ie., the stuff that we would want released.)

But arguing over what Assange should have done, versus what he did do, rather misses the bigger point, which is that whether we like this or not, the future that we see in terms of information is going to look a lot more like the wikileaks world than what preceeded it, absent some sort of radical (and frankly unlikely, because ultimately unworkable) regime of censorship. It doesn't depend on the moral code of a single computer hacker from Australia, no matter how brilliant he might be. To that point, the point needs to be emphasized that young Bradley Manning (An Oklahoma Boy! A gay, Oklahoma atheist who is now an international celebrity for attacking American global power! You would have to live here to know how weird it is to write those words) is at least as important to the story as Assange. Think about this: Manning was a Private. He told people he was downloading some Lady Gaga music. They patted him on the head and let him walk out the door. But then, what were they supposed to do? I'm guessing that he's not the only disaffected young person currently in the employ of the American government. They can't possibly keep tabs on all of them. They can reduce the ability of such people to access important information, and that in turn will also hamper their responsiveness and their ability to draw on the resources of everyone who is not planning to send classified information to international whistle-blowers.

In short, wikileaks needs to seen within a wider cultural moment, one that includes both a set of understandings about our relation to power and the current tools available to those who wish to challenge that power. A good place to start with this is Assange's own argument:

"Where details are known as to the inner workings of authoritarian regimes,
we see conspiratorial interactions among the political elite not merely for prefer-
ment or favor within the regime but as the primary planning methodology be-
hind maintaining or strengthening authoritarian power."

Let's drop the pejorative terms for a moment and recast this. Modern bureaucratic institutions operate under a certain degree of secrecy as a general operating procedure. Within an information economy, power will often accrue to those who are able to get information about other people or groups, while minimizing the amount of information that they allow others to gather about them. If I know something about you (for example, a "tell" that you give off when you are trying to lie), and you don't know that I know it, then that information may prove valuable to me at some point. So a premium is put upon gaining information, and keeping from others what information you have. This is true of individuals (as Erving Goffman long ago realized) and is it true of institutions: all institutions, note, and not simply authoritarian ones. All other things being equal, secrecy is a rational communicative strategy.

What complicates the picture is that in some cases openness is also a good strategy, both for individuals and for organizations. (To be sure, this is something that new media prophets have trumpeted since the early 1990s, but after all they can't be wrong about everything.) Openness allows information from the environment to enter into the organization, which can then respond to it. Completely closed systems are notoriously short-lived because they cannot adapt to inevitable changes in the environment which, unlike their internal workings, they cannot control.

This push and pull between secrecy and openness is part of the communication dynamics of any person or group. To the extent that the entity opts for greater secrecy, then it can increasingly be described by Assange's description of "authoritarian." This gives it certain strengths vis-a-vis competitors but also creates certain weaknesses (witness the fate of the old Soviet Union).

What wikileaks seems to portend is an information environment in which the secrecy option is impossible. If pressed to its logical limits, wikileaks presents two options for the state or corporation that wishes to keep secrets. One, clamp down on information flows so tightly that nothing gets out, which means clamping down on them so severely that the organization itself cannot operate. Two, give up the strategy of secrecy. Acknowledge that the war of information--in which you try to get information on others and keep them from getting anything from you--is simply impossible. You will lose that power, of course, but because everyone is playing by the same rules you also don't have to worry about the power of others. It is a frankly utopian scheme, of course, but utopias can be influential as ideals rather than actual destinations.

The October wikileaks releases were interesting primarily because so many of them had so little practical impact: they were essentially diplomatic gossip. They embarrassed the US government but little more than that. Compare this to the video released of the helicopter attack on civilians in April: documentary evidence of what seemed to be an actual war crime. Yet in the long run, the former will be more important than the latter. Governments can always deal with isolated scandals. First, so few of the population actually pays attention. Second, precisely because it is a localized incident, it can be declared an "issue," solutions can be created. But think about the position of an American diplomat now. Is anyone every going to write memos as frank and revealing as those? I think that this sort of communication will, at best, be severely curtailed. Defenders of the diplomatic core say this is precisely the problem, but again, I don't know that simply decrying the event will actually solve anything. Now everyone nows this is a possibility: that some pissed-off little weasel working in some low-level bureaucratic job will get her hands on the snarky note you wrote about David Cameron and then it's on the front page of the New York Times. And this will still be true even if the feds manage to shut down wikileaks. You can't shut down the whole web.

Assange clearly believes that this sort of world is, when all is said and down, going to be a better world than the one we live in now. He doesn't buy the idea that they are good secrets and bad ones, and that we only need to be about exposing the latter. Any time that you keep information hidden, you are in the end not doing it for anyone's benefit but your own, and even if you don't end up using it for nefarious ends, you could. The best thing is to shine a light on it all. That ideology, obviously, is not his alone. A variation of it comes through in almost every public announcement that Zuckerberg, or any of the Facebook people, make. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it is mirrored in many of my students' attitudes to privacy, which seem lackadasical at best. If they are not actually proponents of information sharing, they are remarkably unconcerned about businesses or states gathering information on them. They seem to think that it will be done anyhow, so why worry?

The question is whether the idea of identifying secrecy with power is correct. After all, power was able to use many of the techniques and ideologies of freedom in the early modern period to exercise new forms of control over populations. It is not clear at all that it cannot use the craze for openness to similar purposes. I am reminded of something from Eugene Zamyatin's dystopian novel We. In Zamyatin's new world, all of the houses in the city are built of glass, the better to allow the police to look in and check on what you are doing. But of course, we may not need the state, or even the corporation, to do that. We may end up policing ourselves.

Politics and marriage (third part)

When I argue that the debate over gay marriage is a political question, what I mean to say is that our arguments about marriage need to be centered on how we think we ought to live, and how we ought to use our public resources to promote those ways of life (to any liberal reading this: I understand that you think that the genius of the modern liberal state is precisely that it keeps those kinds of questions outside of public debate. You're wrong about that. To explain why is going to take another, much different, post.) I can point to at least four different arguments about gay marriage that seem persuasive, or at least, reasonable, to me. Two would argue for gay marriage, two would argue against. Two I would classify as progressive, two as conservative.

[Note that for the purposes of the following I am going to ignore the question of the morality of homosexuality. This is for a number of reasons, the simplest being that I don't think that homosexual behavior as such is immoral.]

The conservative argument for gay marriage derives from the claim that marriage creates a different kind of relationship with another human being: a deeper, more difficult but in the end more rewarding relationship. To quote the priest who counseled my wife and me before we got married, "it is an adventure in becoming an adult." This way of thinking about oneself and other people runs counter to much of the information we receive from modern consumer society, which focuses on personal and immediate gratifications. If a life as a married person is in fact this sort of long-running moral education, then surely we would want to expand it to a many people in our society as possible. I am all for having more adults and fewer 45-year-old children running things. The argument gets even stronger if the couple in question has children, since the current literature seems to support, pretty clearly, the idea that stable, two parent households are better for children than single parent families.

The progressive political argument for gay marriage, which I also briefly mentioned in an earlier post, is that it would substantially change the way in which gay people were understood within the wider culture. By allowing gay men and women to participate in this most conventional of institutions, modern society would essentially be saying that gay behavior is no big deal, that our gay neighbors and friends and family members are the same as the rest of us. They may act in morally reprehensible ways, but these would be the same kinds of sins the rest of us commit, like cheating on your taxes or bullying underlings at work or beating your kid. This attitude has already begun to move through much of modern society, but the act of legalizing same-sex marriage could help speed it up. And if that happened, maybe in turn we would have fewer confused teenagers hanging themselves in bedroom closets or jumping off of bridges.

The conservative case against gay marriage would go back to the idea of what words mean, and how they mean anything at all. From this perspective, the word "marriage" has a meaning precisely because it labels a human relationship that differs from being friends, or lovers, or life partners. It may involve one or even in some cases all of these other elements, but it cannot be equated to them. If it could, we wouldn't need the idea of marriage in the first place. Like redefining God or justice or democracy, expanding the concept of marriage might like a good idea at first, because it is more inclusive. But as with these other terms, if you expand the word so that it includes everything, in the end it means nothing. And this could happen, arguably, with the idea of marriage. We could make it so inclusive that within several generations no one would bother with it.

The progressive argument against gay marriage is probably better made by people like Michael Bronski or Michael Warner, but my take on it is that by using gay marriage as a method of bringing gay people into the mainstream of American society, the whole gay rights movement is essentially ceding a great deal of political territory that it may eventually regret having given up. Was a time, folks, when the fight for gay rights was linked to much bigger, even revolutionary goals, like: fundamentally changing how western society thought about not just sexuality but desire, human relationships, our position within a market economy, etc. The reason that someone like Harvey Milk was not in favor of gay marriage is that he wanted to build an alternative to that monogamous, state-sponsored ideal of love. Now, I've already gone on record here as saying that I think that for many people, including myself, the marriage model is a worthy ideal. That's not the same as saying that it needs to be the ideal for everyone. This universalistic, cookie-cutter approach to human politics, in which we all pretend that underneath, we're all the same, and everyone really wants the same things: love and peace and food and shelter. I'll go on record as saying I pretty much hate that conception of the human condition. There are a lot of people, both gay and straight, who are quite a bit different from me, thank God. A gay relationship is fundamentally different from a straight one. Not better or worse, just different. I don't know that we need to force all the various configurations of love into one model. And sure, you can say, yes, but all gay people are asking for is the right to get married. No one is saying that they have to. But once marriage is part of the gay community it will almost certainly become the norm, and the expected outcome of any serious romantic relationship, as has happened with the straight community.

We are all God's children. We are all blessed in his sight, and equally loved. The diversity of human personalities is what makes us so fascinating: it is proof of the divine spark that we carry within us. A variety of different human institutions celebrating that diversity is what we truly need, not some phony-baloney attempt at conjuring up a kind of bland, uninteresting sameness that could never be achieved in any case.

All right. That's it. I'm done with this subject for a good long while.

Politics and marriage (second part)

My first post on this subject was not meant to argue (all appearances, I now realize, to the contrary) that marriages with children are morally superior to marriages without children. It's just that Gallagher's position was attractive to me insofar as it reminded the potential groom or bride that "it's not all about you." And I think that to the extent that we can keep that sentiment alive in a consumer society constantly focused on arguing otherwise, it would be just dandy. But kids are actually not the central issue. Whether a marriage produces children or not, there is something morally valuable and noble (sorry to get all 19th-century on your postmodern ass*) about choosing to make a life-long commitment, to forgo certain guaranteed but momentary pleasures and joys on behalf of a deeper, more profound understanding of, and attachment to, another person. This is the sort of relationship that I saw my maternal grandfather and grandmother live through to the end of their lives. It is an inspiring life choice. There is no reason that I can plausibly entertain as to why this kind of relationship need be restricted to a heterosexual couple.

Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.

So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.

But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.

It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.

All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.

*Or not, actually.

Politics and marriage (first part)

In the early years of this century, my wife, my oldest daughter and I lived in a tony neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia near a little city park called Fitler Square. It was not very diverse economically. Almost all of the people who lived in the area were "upper middle-class" (or as we used to say back in my hometown of Taber, Alberta, "wealthy"). Even those who weren't, like my wife and I (MD and future PhD respectively), were probable future members of the club. But it was diverse in other ways--ways that might seem pretty predictable if you know much about educated, well-to-do East Coast Americans in the 21st century. Almost every day my wife would take one-year-old, Zoe, to Fitler, or the small playground about two blocks to the west, right next to the Schuylkill. Her best friends were Margaret, a little girl from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whose parents were living in Philadelphia for year while the father was on sabbatical; a little girl from Japan whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it; and Spencer, who had two dads. I didn't really know much about any of the parents because it was generally Jane and not me who took Zoe to the park, but from what I could tell from her conversations with them they all seemed like normal, more or less well-adjusted folk. One day, when my Dad was visiting from Canada, I mentioned something about Spencer, and he said that he didn't think that gay parents were the best thing for a child (Dad is pretty conservative). At the time, Jane was working as a child psychiatrist in a clinic in West Philly, and also doing some work in a juvenile offenders "home" (ie., prison) near the art museum. Many of her patients, unsurprisingly, came from broken households: parents who were drug addicts, and/or drunks, and/or prostitutes, and/or criminals. One five year-old had been stabbed by his Mom a week after she was released from prison; another was dealing with a father who was undergoing a sex-change. At the age of 14, she had already been raped once. I compared their lot to that of Spencer's, a young man being raised by two sane adults who loved him and had enough money to make sure, at least, that he would have some stability at home, and likely a decent education. I told my Dad that I didn't really think the sexuality of one's parents was the decisive element in the upbringing of a child in the modern world.

All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."

What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.

The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.

This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.

My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.

This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.

This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.

Tony Judt

The British-born, American historian of French culture, Tony Judt, died over the weekend. Right now, Judt is perhaps most famous for a series of essays he has written over the past year or so detailing his struggles with Lou Gehrig's disease. They are unflinching in their honesty about the condition. As difficult as they are to read, I can only imagine how hard they most have been to write. Just prior to this, Judt had attained some level of controversy over his articles on Israel and the Middle East. A former Zionist, he came to a strongly critical position of the Israeli state late in his life. This contributed to a cancellation of a scheduled 2006 speech at the Polish Embassy in New York, prompted by pressure from the Anti-Defamation League.

But in fact Judt's speciality was intellectual history, and this is how I first became aware of him, especially around the publication of Past Imperfect, which indicted a number of Marxist and Left-wing intellectuals in post-War France, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, for their moral obtuseness. At the time, I was falling out of love a bit with Western left-wing thinking myself, so I rather enjoyed Judt's elegant polemics. Now I think that it could also be seen as a bit of piling on: hitting the Left when it was in disarray and demoralized following the collapse of Soviet Communism and the seeming triumphant rise of free-market capitalism as solution to the human condition. But Judt was, to his credit, never a neo-liberal. As far as I can tell he remained a social democrat throughout his life, and his political positions were always a bit unpredictable, which is about as safe a guarantee of an original and honest mind as I can imagine. To get some idea of what we have lost, read this, one of the last essays he wrote for NYRB.

Americans will destroy beer if we let them

I'm been meaning to write this post for some time now. About a year and half, to be more precise, dating from the moment when I first tried Sam Adams Imperial Stout. I note for the record that I am a big fan of Samuel Adams and of Jim Koch. Sam Adams Boston Lager was the beer that got me interested in drinking outside the pilsner style that had dominated North American brewing for so long, and I still think that it's a solid beer: a good example of how you can move from niche market to mass market and not totally lose your soul. Also, I think that Koch has done more than any other single person to bring interesting beer back to the American public. I don't remember ever really disliking a Samuel Adams beer with the possible exception of that cherry-flavored crap that they called a lambic, and which they now, Thank God, seem to have discontinued. So I was excited to see that they had produced these "speciality" beers, what they called the Brewmasters Collection. If their regular beers are that good, my thinking went, their speciality beers will be even better.

Well, no. The Imperial Stout, first of all, did not taste like a stout. It tasted like a watery, slightly beery flavored molasses. So bad that for perhaps the first time in my life I was tempted to toss out beer that I had paid good money for into the garbage (I didn't. I used it in recipes instead, where the food could help mask the taste). The last time I remembered hating a beer this bad was when I was at a tasting sponsored by Tulsa's resident beer expert, Elliot Nelson (owner/operator of the always-reliable McNellie's pub in the downtown portion of our city), and we were given a sample of what Nelson called "extreme beer:" which are not really defined by anything other than the desire to push the envelope. Extreme hoppy taste, or extremely high alcohol content, or extremely strange flavors (often, in the last case, inspired by beers of past ages). And then I remembered that Nelson had mentioned Koch being somewhat impressed by the whole idea of extreme beer.

So, who to blame for what I think is this extremely bad idea? Well, maybe Koch himself, who may have coined the phrase. But I think the better candidate might be one Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Brewery in Delaware and the subject of this 2008 New Yorker profile by Burkhard Bilger. Calagione seems to have been a slightly fucked-up scion of American wealth (he got kicked out of his East Coast prep school for shenanigans)--a Holden Caulfield type, a bit of a lost soul, until he discovered his true calling in his twenties: which was to screw up American craft brewing by making really, really hoppy beers. As soon as I started to read about Calagione I recalled Dogfish from my days in Philly. It was one of those beers that I wanted to enjoy but just couldn't. Everything about it was funky and cool, right down to its name and its labels. The only problem was I didn't like the actual taste of the beer. Bilger's story is mostly hagiographic, but for me, the key quote is a negative one from Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery (which makes some good beers):

"When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’"

It's important that beer, like any other sort of food, taste interesting. But actually, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that it taste good. Extreme beer seems to be the product of two different forces. The first is the inherent American tendency to think that bigger is better. The same attitude that gave us the Lincoln Navigator and Golden Corral has produced beer with an alcohol content upwards of 20 percent. The second is the need of the modern beer aficianado to prove cultural capital through drinking beer with "complex" or "interesting" tastes (or sometimes, "notes," as though we were describing wine.) When I was at the beer festival in Montreal earlier this summer, there were a lot of beers that were aiming for this palate: most notably, Dieu de Ciel, whose Péché Mortel has achieved international recognition. But for my money Unibroue--as much as it has turned into a corporation--still has the best of the Quebec brews. Unibroue generally follows older styles, particularly from Belgium and France, and doesn't try to get too fancy.

Innovation is not bad per se (nor, for that matter, is excess), but there's problem, I think, when we start to value these things for their own sake, rather than establishing some other, competing standard for quality. Surrender that more rigorous standard, you end up with some asshole in Scotland making beer that's 55 per cent alcohol, stuck inside a Dead Squirrel. (Why not just drink some whisky? I guarantee it will taste better than that shit.)

We can't let this happen to beer. As Belgian monks have always known, beer is too important.

The uses of bad literature

The idea for this post came when I was reading a Salon column several months ago (which I no longer find unfortunately, and therefore cannot link to) about what books not to bring to the beach with you this summer. It was titled "Worst Books Ever," or something like that, and it naturally got me to thinking about books that I've really, really hated. Which naturally got me to thinking about Olivier Pauvert's Noir. Now, it may be the case that I have hated a book more that Noir, but if so, that happened some time in my distant past, perhaps during my undergraduate years, and I must have blocked the moment from my memory. I hated Noir so much that about half of the way through I seriously considered just throwing it away, which is something I almost never do with a novel, both because I am almost pathologically addicted to plot, of almost any sort, and because I'm such a lazy bastard that when I put a sufficient amount of energy into a book (like, say, reading past the first page) I don't want to think that its all been wasted by not finishing it off. So I kept reading to the end, which fulfilled by expectations by being both as repulsive and banal as I thought it would be.

What makes Noir so bad? Not its prose style: since I read it in translation it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on that aspect of the book. It may be that Pauvert is a master of modern French, though I can't believe anyone this stupid could write lyrically in any language. Not its predictable politics either: progressive denunciations of corporate capitalism and racism are of course nothing new, but that particular sin certainly is not Pauvert's alone. Many other, and better, writers share it, but make up for the failing by being more subtle in their understanding of the human condition, or of interpersonal relationships, or of the nature between reality and artifice. The problem is not even in the overwrought depictions of violence that are a near constant element of the narrative. To be sure, the treatment of violence is something to make most readers queasy, because you get the same sense with Pauvert as you do in a movie like Natural Born Killers: that these depictions are consciously undertaken with an eye toward critique, but unconsciously the artist (Pauvert in one case, Stone in the other) is actually getting off on them, or at least pandering to them.

No, in the end what moves Noir past mediocre or even bad literature into truly terrible literature is the moral incoherence at the center of it. On the one hand, Pauvert clearly wants to be the next Michel Houellebecq, an enfant terrible of letters who shocks the elders but entrances the younger generation with his stylish cynicism. Only he doesn't have Houellebecq's balls, so his targets are all what one would expect of a well-read but not particularly imaginative teenager. Screeds against God, claims about the meaningless of the universe: these are not going to épater anyone at this point. If you want the cultural cachet that comes with transgression, then do something that is actually going to piss people off, like Houellebecq does: make fun of post-60 political pretensions, say something nasty about women, or non-Christian religions, or people of a darker hue. Pauvert can't make himself actually move beyond what would constitute the established boundaries of any conceivable audience for a book like this, so his "scandalous" pronouncements end up as reaffirmations of convention: he's a bourgeoisie in Nietzschean clothing, who wants to combine a 60s flower-child ethos with a nihilistic metaphysics and can't quite figure out (or maybe, can't admit) that the one position makes the other non-sensical. If nothing means anything, then the real hero of Pauvert's tale isn't the poor schlep we've been following through 200-odd pages. It's the amoral capitalist we meet at the end, the guy who's been pulling the strings all along, the one who can look on with equanimity as his wife and children are slaughtered. He's the real ubermensch, the one who's seen through the veil of human weakness (aka morality) that the rest of us use in order to avoid facing up to human existence with genuine courage.

So that's all I'm going to say about Noir (for now). The other part of this post deals with the book I was reading when I read the original essay: Porius, by the modernist Welsh poet and novelist John Cowper Powys. The first thing you should know about Porius, if you're thinking about reading it, is that it is 750 pages long. The second thing you should know is that it is filled with sentences like this: "Even without this new light the upward-spurting flame from the fire tended by the Derwydd would have been in itself sufficient illumination to reveal the pitiful contortion, like that of a child about to cry, that convulsed Llew's face; and her blow was followed by an immediate revulsion of pity, and snatching at his hand, the girl moved straight towards the dirty blanket leanding him gently with her and not forgetting, as her eyes encountered Brochvael's before the curtain closed behind them, to touch her breast with a significant smile, as if to remind her friend of the presence in that warm place of his rag-sheathed dagger." (Just curious. At what point in reading that did you start to wonder about what you were going to make for dinner tonight?)

According to the introduction to the story, Powys considered Porius--essentially a retelling of the Arthurian legend with the historical novel genre--as his magnum opus. He worked on it for over fifteen years. This explains, it does not excuse, his inability to edit either the story or his prose. The American publisher he sent it to, Simon and Shuster, mailed it back with the comment, " over-written and undicepherable," which is not an unfair description of a great deal of the book. At the beginning of the story is a Tolstoyan list of characters, in unpronounceable Welsh rather than unpronounceable Russian. Many of them--Medrawd, Gwennydd, Myrddin Wyllt--are Powys' Welsh versions of more common English names--Mordred, Guiniverre, Merlin respectively--a fact I didn't cotton onto until I was about two-thirds of the way through. Also, it was so complicated moving back and forth from the text to the initial cast of characters that I eventually just gave up. He creates a whole new word, cavorseniargize. Despite the fact that it plays a fairly important role in conveying the personality of the main character, after finishing the book I am still at a loss as to describe what the word means, or even how it might sound if spoken.

Nor are these complications the only major problem with the book. Perhaps more damaging, in the end, is Powys' anachronistic depiction of his main characters. They are not, despite the setting and plot, Romanized Britons of fifth century AD. Rather, they are twentieth-century English bohemians: intensely concerned with their personal feelings and subjective reactions to events. They are people of the text, not of an oral culture which surely would have been the actual historical context of the people who inhabited Wales in the year 499.

And yet, having said all of this, if someone were to ask me if I would recommend this book, and if that person were someone I respected, I would almost certainly say yes, for a least two reasons. First, because of the way that Powys both understands and is able to communicate a relationship between human experience and the world that it seems to me we have lost, and that is essential to regain if we are to avoid eventually destroying ourselves or our descendants. In reviews he is often compared to Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, but these comparisons seem to me to fundamentally miss the point. In Powys' history, nothing happens that, strictly speaking, could not be accepted by any modern materialist: even when characters see instances of supposed magic, it is generally conceded that there is at least the possibility they are only being fooled by their minds, or the angle of the sun on a rock. The closest I can get to labeling Powys' universe is to call it one of realistic mysticism. He does not so much accept miracles and spirits as to see through the veil of ordinary reality into something deeper, more beautiful, more wild. His "super-naturalism" is exactly that: part of the natural world but at the same time superseding it. Beyond it, more of it. His trees, his rivers, his animals, his humans: they are themselves and more than themselves. They are at one and the same time both the copies of the Idea, and the Idea itself.

The other valuable aspect of the book is Powys' critique of Christianity. Speaking as a Christian believer, it is a relief to find someone who can actually articulate an intelligent challenge to the faith, in distinction to metaphysical midgets like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. To be sure, the author loads the dice: all his Christian characters are dogmatic bullies or neurotic gits. But that's fair enough, in a way: Chesterton loads the dice too. While the main characters' briefs again Christianity are historically unconvincing, as philosophical arguments they at least make a sympathetic and persuasive case against the Christian worldview, on the only intelligent grounds, which are not epistemological but moral.

And then, finally, I came to be more sympathetic even to Powys' crazy prose style. At least, I managed to produce a hypothesis that did not simply chalk things up to incompetence. What Powys might have been trying to do, I think, is to craft a prose that paralleled the oral poetry of the original oral sources, with their overloaded physical descriptions and characterizations. It didn't work in the end because oral narrative does not really translate that well into textual narrative. What works in the one medium does not work in the other. But perhaps Powys might be given credit for an heroic, and necessarily doomed, attempt.

I once heard that Louis L'Amour had claimed never to have read a bad book, which I thought was about as dumb a thing as I would expect Louis L'Amour to say. But maybe a case can be be made that there are no worthless books. Some, like Noir, they can help illuminate just why a set of ideas (in Pauvert's case, certain fascistic tendencies on the modern left) are incoherent. Others, like Porius, have a great deal of value despite some very obvious faults, and in the end may have more of an impact upon those who read than much more skillful tales.

The Internet doesn't make you stupid: but celebrity just might

Last week, the New York Times published a op-ed contribution by Steven Pinker, dismissing the possibility that the Internet is making us dumber by the day. I have to say, that when I first heard about the idea myself I was pretty dubious. The title of Nicholas Carr's essay for The Atlantic, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" was a turn-off. Like Pinker, this way of framing the matter reminded me of many earlier panics over new media forms, including but not limited to the penny press, comic books, rock and roll, Hollywood movies, and television.

But Carr's more recent effort in Wired magazine struck me as making at least a plausible argument (maybe it's just a case of getting a better headline writer). It's seems reasonable to assume that media have some sort of impact on how we think. It may not be universally bad, or good (nor does Carr argue otherwise, at least in the new article). Still, it seems worth a look into the matter, at least.

For Pinker it's all bunkum. The idea that we might be seeing negative effects on intelligence due to modern media use is belied, he thinks, by the success of modern science. Also, other intellectual activities, like philosophy, cultural criticism, and history, are "flourishing." As to the notion that media change the way our brains work: "cognitive neuroscientists" simply "roll their eyes at such talk," since it overestimates the effect that experience can have on the functioning of our brains.

Some problems with Pinker's argument here: first, it's always a mistake to use widespread social trends--like scientific work, or crime statistics, or IQ scores, or divorce rates, or measures of political cynicism--as convincing proof of anything, pro or con. So many different factors could be at play, and it's not always clear (as in the case of IQ tests) that you are necessarily measuring what you think you are measuring. Moreover, claims such as "scientific progress is dizzying," or "philosophical work is flourishing" are so subjective that they are impossible to support in any rigorous manner. As a working social scientist, I would certainly take issue with the idea that current work in my own field or in related fields like sociology or political science is particularly impressive. Much of it is focused on answering very narrow questions, based on theories developed some time ago. It is rare any more to find a thinker of the stature of Weber or Durkheim, or even Goffman or Geertz. Indeed, the state of the field seems to fit very well with Kuhn's description of "normal science." It makes for a lot of publications, but not necessarily great scientific insights.

Even more infuriating is the fact that Pinker, a tenured professor of psychology, feels no need to cite any actual empirical work to support his argument, beyond the vague gesture towards the opinions of certain unnamed cognitive neuroscientists (in marked contrast, I would note, to Carr). At best this is sloppy, but coming from a man who uses science, and the scientific method, as rhetorical tools with which to dismiss other, competing claims to truth, the better description, I think, would be hypocrisy.

Attention all journalists. Stop with the name-dropping

This recent article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, about a new food movement in France that wants to liven up that country's cuisine, reminded me of one of the more annoying tics of modern journalism. If the technique has a name I am not aware of it, but the best way to describe, it is as "description-through-allusion."

It happens a lot in reviews, particularly of work by newer artists or ones that could be expected to be unfamiliar to readers, in which case the writer will describe the music or plot or style with reference to some older, better-known artist (though not too well-known, for reasons that we'll get to in a second). So, some clever Midwestern wordsmith with a penchant for good hooks becomes "the Elvis Costello of Ames, Iowa," or a young postmodern male novelist is described as "Borges-meets-David Byrne," or "the love child of Italo Calvino and the Rolling Stones." In Gopnik's case, he's decided to characterize every Frenchwoman he meets in the story by reference to some French actress of the past. One reminds him of Brigitte Fossey, another of Bardot, yet another of a "young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani." Also, one of the cooks is compared to Danton, and then a whole host of them to various figures in the French New Wave. By the end you get the idea even Gopnik thinks it's a little silly, and is doing a bit of a self-parody.

It's easy to see why journalists do this. It's a reliable method for describing things or people without having to sit down and really think about what this person looks like, or what this song is trying to do. Also, its a quick and dirty way of establishing a certain level of sophistication: which is why the figures need to be known well enough to get the point across but not so well known that just anyone could have thought up the comparison. But it's still lazy, and no, Gopnik doesn't get any points for realizing that he's doing it. That's another really annoying aspect to modern journalism: trying to foreclose criticism by letting the reader know that you know what's going on, and then presenting this as some kind of postmodern self-irony. Don't tell me that you know it's wrong while you're busy doing it: just don't do it.

When bigotry is, and when it isn't

Several weeks ago the State of Arizona passed a law aimed at illegal immigration, which has so excited the sensibilities of educated America (NB: not just liberal America) that it has provoked calls for boycotts of the state, and I think maybe even the baseball team. We're all properly outraged by those rednecks living down there in Phoenix and Tucson. They didn't celebrate MLK's birthday either, you know.

Okay, so the people of Arizona are bigots (not all of them, prolly. Just the middle-aged white Republicans.) Where it gets weird is when we pass over the ocean a few days later, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain gets caught, on what he thought was a dead mic, calling a middle-aged women from the Northern English town of Rochdale a bigot. This "gaffe," as the newspapers are now calling it, is so serious that Labour's support has cratered in the days since it was aired. "How dare you diss Mrs. Duffy? That's my aunt," reads a headline in the London Times.

Now, it was true that Gillian Duffy didn't actually tell Gordon Brown that he should make all immigrants carry their papers on them at all times, and allow police to stop anyone who they thought was in the country illegally. What she asked him, essentially, was why he wasn't doing those things. But Gillian Duffy is not a bigot. Or at least, it's wrong to accuse her of being a bigot. So why is that?

I offer three possible explanations:

1. Brown's comments fit the classic Kinsley-esque definition of a gaffe, which is when a politician accidently tells the truth. In this case, the truth would be that Duffy is a bigot, only you're not supposed to say so, and especially not during an election.

2. Arizona voters are bigots, and Duffy is not, because white Southern Americans are probably all racists, if you scratch them hard enough, whereas white northern English working class people are all salt-of-the-earth miners and miners' wives who spend their spare time singing "The Red Flag" in their rocking chairs, waiting for the tea to boil, knitting scarves for the strikers.

3. Gillian Duffy is not a bigot because she is a person. She clearly has done some good in the world. She is worried, understandably, about where the money is going to come from to pay for her living expenses now that her husband has died and she is on a pension. She's worried about crime, because she is old and feels threatened. She is worried about education for younger people and the world that her grandchildren will inherit. Whatever her views on immigration, she is more than that. The Arizona voters, on the other hand, are simply the Arizona voters. A big, amorphous bloc of people with no personality or face, with the exception of the noxious Republican governor who signed the bill into law. They can safely be demonized because we don't actually have to answer to any particular person for doing so.

I like all of my explanations but I like the last one the best because it gets to the problem that critics of racism and bigotry have when they talk about racism and bigotry. Very few racists--at least, very few of the ones that I know, and I know quite a few--wear sheriffs' hats and walk around spitting tobacca' juice and swinging baseball bats and hitting colored people over the head just for their daily exercise. They are often otherwise decent people who are afraid, or who are busy and therefore don't care to think too hard about issues like immigration policy, and so some kinds of ready-made, handy explanations appeal to them. So they create stereotypes about who the problematic people are, and what needs to be done about them.

But they're not the only ones who dream up stereotypes, I don't think.

The continued relevance of physical space in the postmodern global village

'Round about now, my sister is driving along the coast of Oregon or maybe Northern California with her new boyfriend, which is not what she is supposed to be doing. What she is supposed to be doing is recuperating from having just run the London Marathon. You already know why she's not in London. One of the many disruptions of the big ash cloud of 2010.

(As a side note: Sort of strange how the world media covered the event. At first it was all, "huh, this is kind of weird." Then increasingly it became, "MONEY IS BEING LOST HERE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!" And then, "Fucking pussies who won't go up in the fucking air with their fucking big jets. Fucking losers.")

Long time ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that the world was becoming a "Global Village." As is the case with pretty much everything that McLuhan ever wrote, the idea is both useful and also capable of leading us completely astray. To be sure, the modern media have allowed us to connect more easily with people living vast distances from us, and this has caused profound changes in how we interact with both those distant others and the not-so-distant others who share our physical space. It has changed how we think of ourselves, how we construct our social identities. And it has allowed for the near-instant transmission of some kinds of information, a feature of modern life that in turn has been essential to the rise of global markets.

But we can, and we do, take it too far. What media can't do is that they cannot transfer the large packets of information that we call human bodies. And since it is these packets that, in the end, most concern us--although we sometimes manage to forget, or ignore that--the effect of all these transmissions of electronic bytes is not exactly what we imagine it to be. Other things that cannot be sent over fiber optic cables--steaks, tulips, onions, magazines, automobiles, t-shirts, sneakers, living room sofas, video cameras, iphones. The modern world has actually not made distance disappear, or even made it irrelevant. It's just made our experience of it different. It's always good to have these sort of disruptive environmental events take place at unpredictable times to help us see that the new world we've been so busy building for the past 50 years has actually not managed to overcome certain fundamental realities of human existence. You can buy your plane ticket and reserve your hotel room and surf to find the best place to eat in Porto but if the pilots strike, or an earthquake tears up the runway, you're not going anywhere, buddy.

The continued relevance of space--and of embodied experiences--is why most people, if they have the choice, still opt to live in places like Manhattan and Paris and Prague instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Estevan, Saskatchewan. Those latter spots are wired: you could order up some genuine Chicago-style deep dish and get it delivered to your door in a day or two if you really wanted. But somehow it just wouldn't be the same.

Modern media discourse ignores this obvious point because it needs to sell us on the bogus notion that the networked world is making the world "flatter," making every place the same, thus making opportunities increasingly equal for all. The battle against the takeover of our lives by people in places far away from us requires that we periodically remind ourselves of what a crock of shit this has always been, and remains.

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.