Nino Rota
December 3, 1911--April 10, 1979
Sunday, December 3
Friday, December 1
Sermonette
Peggy Noonan, "Grace Under Pressure:
Difficult times call for less-contentious politics." OJ, December 1
The cynical middle-aged guy I sometimes talk to mentioned that there are two times you hear calls for civility in politics: immediately after Republicans have finished sliming someone, and then again after they've fucked things up as his replacement.
And the cynical middle-aged guy turns to me and says, "Remember the backhand slaps at Clinton in Bush's first inaugural address? Remember that it took him nearly two months--and the exhaustion of the news cycle--to allow as how Air Force One hadn't been trashed, and that meanwhile the six weeks' tubthumping about Vandalgate, Giftgate, and Pardongate, all led by his press secretary, all complete bullshit, got a "we're putting that behind us. My administration is all about being positive? Remember? Republicans deserve exactly the same Grace they exhibit."
I am thinking about getting him a hack license.
Reading Peggers this AM I was suddenly reminded of what Mailer said in The White Negro, something about how actual Negroes, because they'd been forced to suppress the tiniest emotional response for generations for fear of being unexpectedly gifted with a new necktie, had achieved a curious reversal: their deepest thoughts played on the surface, while their surface emotions remained buried. And after the last couple weeks of viewing or listening to reporters playing Ring Around the Rosy with the corpse of US politics--breathlessly awaiting the withered foregone conclusion that is the Baker-Hamilton commission, reporting one-time President George W. Bush's pre-response as though the man still has a gauntlet to throw down, trying to inflate the House Majority Leader vote into something big enough to qualify as a story--it occurred to me that Nooners is the Hipster Reporter. She can't help blurting out her deepest fears as everyday banter. Angels, or the Elect, or a guy in a big white hat are always coming to her rescue. But all the surface stuff, like "George W. is a bonehead", "all that Reaganaut stuff has been reduced to ashes while I stood by and cheered", or "despite my faith, my brain still feels like there's something crawling around in there", all those things remain out of sight though, unfortunately for Peggy, far from hidden.
Difficult times call for less-contentious politics." OJ, December 1
We're going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months.
The cynical middle-aged guy I sometimes talk to mentioned that there are two times you hear calls for civility in politics: immediately after Republicans have finished sliming someone, and then again after they've fucked things up as his replacement.
And the cynical middle-aged guy turns to me and says, "Remember the backhand slaps at Clinton in Bush's first inaugural address? Remember that it took him nearly two months--and the exhaustion of the news cycle--to allow as how Air Force One hadn't been trashed, and that meanwhile the six weeks' tubthumping about Vandalgate, Giftgate, and Pardongate, all led by his press secretary, all complete bullshit, got a "we're putting that behind us. My administration is all about being positive? Remember? Republicans deserve exactly the same Grace they exhibit."
I am thinking about getting him a hack license.
Much has been strained. We were all concussed by 9/11--we reeled--and came down where we came down. For the administration, extreme events prompted radical thinking. American exceptionalism was yesterday. They would be universalists, their operating style at once dreamy and aggressive: All men want the same thing, and we're giving it to them whether they want it or not. Now the dreamers hope to be saved by men--James Baker, Vernon Jordan--they once dismissed as cynics.
Reading Peggers this AM I was suddenly reminded of what Mailer said in The White Negro, something about how actual Negroes, because they'd been forced to suppress the tiniest emotional response for generations for fear of being unexpectedly gifted with a new necktie, had achieved a curious reversal: their deepest thoughts played on the surface, while their surface emotions remained buried. And after the last couple weeks of viewing or listening to reporters playing Ring Around the Rosy with the corpse of US politics--breathlessly awaiting the withered foregone conclusion that is the Baker-Hamilton commission, reporting one-time President George W. Bush's pre-response as though the man still has a gauntlet to throw down, trying to inflate the House Majority Leader vote into something big enough to qualify as a story--it occurred to me that Nooners is the Hipster Reporter. She can't help blurting out her deepest fears as everyday banter. Angels, or the Elect, or a guy in a big white hat are always coming to her rescue. But all the surface stuff, like "George W. is a bonehead", "all that Reaganaut stuff has been reduced to ashes while I stood by and cheered", or "despite my faith, my brain still feels like there's something crawling around in there", all those things remain out of sight though, unfortunately for Peggy, far from hidden.
Thursday, November 30
Sold A Quart Of Blood And Bought A Half A Pint Of Scotch
Indy Star:
That "rezoning challenge" there was an attempt by neighbors to beat back the proposed bulldozing of the last thirteen wooded acres within a mile of the place (more if you discount the nearby White River floodplain on which the city is rapidly issuing building permits) so what the Star calls the "earthy, yet upscale" retailer can build a 60,000 sq. ft. store.
Which store will be an enormous benefit to local nature lovers who don't want to drive the mile and a quarter to Wild Oats, or 2-1/2 miles to Trader Joe's, or the four miles to that place in the Village whose name I refuse to remember since they installed four self-service checkout lines two weeks after they opened. And it'll be just the other side of the overpass from Saks, Crate & Barrel, and the new Nordstrom, so you can get you couture and your cuisine while it's haute.
There's a good two miles of solid asphalt in either direction from that site. Just five miles away, ten blocks south of the 465/I-69 exchange, the only southern exit from the development insanity that is the town of Fishers, there's an entire three-block shopping center that's been distressed for several years, but sits in the same $80K annual household income bullseye. They're just beginning to revitalize it. The neighbors would have killed for it. They would even have paid earthy yet upscale mark-ups.
But that wouldn't have been as much fun as knocking down trees, I guess.
Wasting little time after learning its site developer beat back a rezoning challenge, the gourmet organic grocer said it has signed a lease to open its first Indianapolis store at 86th Street and Keystone Avenue.
That "rezoning challenge" there was an attempt by neighbors to beat back the proposed bulldozing of the last thirteen wooded acres within a mile of the place (more if you discount the nearby White River floodplain on which the city is rapidly issuing building permits) so what the Star calls the "earthy, yet upscale" retailer can build a 60,000 sq. ft. store.
Which store will be an enormous benefit to local nature lovers who don't want to drive the mile and a quarter to Wild Oats, or 2-1/2 miles to Trader Joe's, or the four miles to that place in the Village whose name I refuse to remember since they installed four self-service checkout lines two weeks after they opened. And it'll be just the other side of the overpass from Saks, Crate & Barrel, and the new Nordstrom, so you can get you couture and your cuisine while it's haute.
There's a good two miles of solid asphalt in either direction from that site. Just five miles away, ten blocks south of the 465/I-69 exchange, the only southern exit from the development insanity that is the town of Fishers, there's an entire three-block shopping center that's been distressed for several years, but sits in the same $80K annual household income bullseye. They're just beginning to revitalize it. The neighbors would have killed for it. They would even have paid earthy yet upscale mark-ups.
But that wouldn't have been as much fun as knocking down trees, I guess.
Go To Hell
This:
"Atheists Agonistes," by Richard Shweder, NY Times November 27
is what I'd been working on when my wife's blasted civic-mindedness interrupted. The logic had already been demolished by PZ and his commenters; I'd like to take a different tack. Namely, just where th' fuck did these numbers come from?
There are 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims? To whom did they declare themselves?
A quibble? Perhaps, but if nothing else it's a sloppy way for an anthropologist to conduct himself, and "self-declared" carries an undeniable weight that the more accurate "claimed by the religion industry" does not.
And then it's one of those quibbles where belatedly asking the question leads us to a hidden lake of unknown depth we were supposed to cross dry-shod. Who is a Christian? If I'm supposed to acknowledge a system of thought strictly on the number of its adherents I think I can reasonably demand something like an accurate accounting first.
Damned if that water hasn't started turning murky. We can be reasonably certain that the Gallup numbers which get trotted out in support of America's Christianity, Sincere Monotheism, Regular Church Attendance and Habit of Tithing are inflated, the latter two, at least, by a factor of 2 or greater. So what about the rest? When Barna looks a little closer, as opposed to relying on "self-description", the argument begins to get a little odd:
• 9% of Americans meet the criteria to be called Evangelical; 14% of Americans do not follow any organized religion. 10% are atheist or agnostic. 10% follow some religion other than Christianity. (So who gets all the press?)
• 36% of Americans qualify as "Born Again" but not Evangelical. 50% of Southern adults do.
• Roughly 40% of adults never attend church.
• The fastest growing religion in the US is Wicca. The biggest trend in Christianity is the shift of aging Boomers toward born-again Christianity.
• 52% of Americans say they believe the Bible is inerrant truth.
• 58% describe themselves as "skeptical".
And this doesn't begin to approach the doctrinal differences which account for eight divisions of Christianity in the world or 2000 Protestant denominations in the USA alone.
If due respect requires atheists to help foot the bill for C.B. Demillesque Ten Commandment momuments aren't they at least permitted to wonder aloud if it'll be the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish versions? Or if we need all three? Whose version of the Virgin Birth are they supposed to respect? Whose concept of heaven? Shouldn't we at least ask that all Baptists believe the same thing before we ask non-believers to pay homage?
Back in the last century they used to tell us about something called the esoteric/exoteric function of small groups, that is, that they have collections of narratives about themselves (generally positive) and about The Others (usually negative) which serve to increase group coherence. I haven't checked in a while, but I'm guessing it still works that way, and that this:
amounts to a call for non-believers to accept the by-laws of those Christian sects which have to scream the loudest to keep their flock intact. Atheism, on the other hand, is not generally a team sport.
Frankly, if you hang around with "ordinary" Americans, as opposed to taking the occasional faculty dinner at the U. of Chicago, you'll discover that a big reason why over half of American Protestants aren't in the Born Again/Evangelical demo is they actively reject religious extremism. The rational, secular, pluralist cabal which so bedevils the religious right isn't atheist; it's mainstream America, outside Dixie.
Addendum: I didn't engage Shweder's argument, which, as I say, was handled quite nicely by PZ's bunch, but I would like to add that as much damage is done the literalist position by books from within the Christian tradition (e.g. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version) as by anything Richard Dawkins has to say.
"Atheists Agonistes," by Richard Shweder, NY Times November 27
is what I'd been working on when my wife's blasted civic-mindedness interrupted. The logic had already been demolished by PZ and his commenters; I'd like to take a different tack. Namely, just where th' fuck did these numbers come from?
Books dictated or co-written by God sell quite well among the 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims of the world.
There are 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims? To whom did they declare themselves?
A quibble? Perhaps, but if nothing else it's a sloppy way for an anthropologist to conduct himself, and "self-declared" carries an undeniable weight that the more accurate "claimed by the religion industry" does not.
And then it's one of those quibbles where belatedly asking the question leads us to a hidden lake of unknown depth we were supposed to cross dry-shod. Who is a Christian? If I'm supposed to acknowledge a system of thought strictly on the number of its adherents I think I can reasonably demand something like an accurate accounting first.
Damned if that water hasn't started turning murky. We can be reasonably certain that the Gallup numbers which get trotted out in support of America's Christianity, Sincere Monotheism, Regular Church Attendance and Habit of Tithing are inflated, the latter two, at least, by a factor of 2 or greater. So what about the rest? When Barna looks a little closer, as opposed to relying on "self-description", the argument begins to get a little odd:
• 9% of Americans meet the criteria to be called Evangelical; 14% of Americans do not follow any organized religion. 10% are atheist or agnostic. 10% follow some religion other than Christianity. (So who gets all the press?)
• 36% of Americans qualify as "Born Again" but not Evangelical. 50% of Southern adults do.
• Roughly 40% of adults never attend church.
• The fastest growing religion in the US is Wicca. The biggest trend in Christianity is the shift of aging Boomers toward born-again Christianity.
• 52% of Americans say they believe the Bible is inerrant truth.
• 58% describe themselves as "skeptical".
And this doesn't begin to approach the doctrinal differences which account for eight divisions of Christianity in the world or 2000 Protestant denominations in the USA alone.
If due respect requires atheists to help foot the bill for C.B. Demillesque Ten Commandment momuments aren't they at least permitted to wonder aloud if it'll be the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish versions? Or if we need all three? Whose version of the Virgin Birth are they supposed to respect? Whose concept of heaven? Shouldn't we at least ask that all Baptists believe the same thing before we ask non-believers to pay homage?
Back in the last century they used to tell us about something called the esoteric/exoteric function of small groups, that is, that they have collections of narratives about themselves (generally positive) and about The Others (usually negative) which serve to increase group coherence. I haven't checked in a while, but I'm guessing it still works that way, and that this:
Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others and by trying very hard to understand how it is possible for John Locke and our many atheist friends to continue to gaze at each other in such a state of mutual misunderstanding.
amounts to a call for non-believers to accept the by-laws of those Christian sects which have to scream the loudest to keep their flock intact. Atheism, on the other hand, is not generally a team sport.
Frankly, if you hang around with "ordinary" Americans, as opposed to taking the occasional faculty dinner at the U. of Chicago, you'll discover that a big reason why over half of American Protestants aren't in the Born Again/Evangelical demo is they actively reject religious extremism. The rational, secular, pluralist cabal which so bedevils the religious right isn't atheist; it's mainstream America, outside Dixie.
Addendum: I didn't engage Shweder's argument, which, as I say, was handled quite nicely by PZ's bunch, but I would like to add that as much damage is done the literalist position by books from within the Christian tradition (e.g. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version) as by anything Richard Dawkins has to say.
Wednesday, November 29
I Should Have Taken The Other Car. Its Radio Is Broken.
My Poor Wife got called for jury duty yesterday, and since I was available to ferry her and avoid parking fees I did so, and scheduled that responsibility around some household chores and finishing a post which isn't this one. The phone rang a scant hour and a half later. She was free (she had a personal connection to the case she was called for, and they kicked her back to the pool, where she was told she could go home). So I drove back downtown and saw my schedule disrupted enough that I tossed it out altogether and went Christmas shopping.
I had stuck the new Yo La Tengo CD in my sweatshirt pocket, or at least I thought I had, until I opened it at the end of the block and learned the actual CD, the part with the music on it, was back on the turntable at home. So I switched on NPR in time for Terry Gross to tell me her guest would be our old friend Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, now in paperback. For someone whose ideas are so ill-formed, Levy is remarkably poorly-spoken. That may be unfair; she was extemporizing on radio, after all, and it's not her medium. Still, as if the early holiday shopping traffic wasn't maddening enough (following two rush-hour-esque trips downtown and back) Levy has her lubricated and latex-safe finger poised just close enough to the rim of truth to be excruciating without any promise of a payoff. People's Exhibit A:
And B:
Well, yes, if I can put it so simply. Is there any possibility we can start connecting the dots sometime in the near future?
Let us take the first comment first. I do not and cannot understand this. Levy is in her early 30s. She buttressed that comment with a note that pre-feminism women could not get checking accounts without a husband or father co-signing, let alone access to safe and legal contraception or abortions. She says this as though we are to accept it as the most natural thing in the world that any thirty-year-old would be completely ignorant of the world as it existed fifteen years before her birth without a specialized course of study. Someone my height and coloring might suggest that this is, instead, a measure of the sheer lack of intellectual curiosity in American life, and if we need some way to understand Wildness and the Girls Who Go There it would be a more fruitful place to start.
Let us pause for a couple pieces of salient information. Levy describes her parents as 60s vintage boho feminists, which makes her former cluelessness about the entire history of her own gender in her own country prior to her own giving a shit that much more mysterious. The second is her admission that she sees "raunch culture" as a reaction to the "PC tightness that was big in the 80s and early 90s".
So I'm listening to this, and it's really difficult to decide what qualifies as Thought and what is simply rearranging scraps of newspaper found on the floor of your cage. "PC tightness"? I don't understand how a label convinces you to stop thinking about something, and I'm fairly convinced, having lived through it, that the war on so-called political correctness was in full swing by that time, as evinced by the very existence of the term. In other words, even had one found oneself in a college hotbed of PC in the 80s or early 90s one needn't have felt windlashed and helpless. (Levy, by the way, reports the opposite: she was even tempted to throw away her leg razor for a time.)
So we wind up with the same old conundrum. If you were delusional to some extent in those days, why should your testimony be trusted now?
Which brings us to implants and underpants and bikini waxing, and the real puzzlement to me: what is it that's so difficult to understand here? Yes, indeedy, the reduction of sex to a plastic commodity costs us a great deal, and it saddles a following generation with Paris and Brittany disease one can only hope they'll be able to climb up out of right side up. But it is the abiding faith in Consumerism which is the problem, not some generational response to torments of PC humorlessness. If a 32-year-old who's published a book on the subject is only recently aware of the accomplishments of mid-20th century Feminism, I have my doubts that drunken nubiles are flashing their tits at the camera as an act of political defiance.
* This one is news to me. Sic transit.
I had stuck the new Yo La Tengo CD in my sweatshirt pocket, or at least I thought I had, until I opened it at the end of the block and learned the actual CD, the part with the music on it, was back on the turntable at home. So I switched on NPR in time for Terry Gross to tell me her guest would be our old friend Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, now in paperback. For someone whose ideas are so ill-formed, Levy is remarkably poorly-spoken. That may be unfair; she was extemporizing on radio, after all, and it's not her medium. Still, as if the early holiday shopping traffic wasn't maddening enough (following two rush-hour-esque trips downtown and back) Levy has her lubricated and latex-safe finger poised just close enough to the rim of truth to be excruciating without any promise of a payoff. People's Exhibit A:
When I was doing this research I was constantly struck by all (the accomplishments of feminism) that I take for granted.
And B:
We've sort of reduced [sex] down to implants, polyester underpants*, and Brazilian bikini waxes, all these things that can be bought and sold. And it strikes me that once you make sex not about weird complicated things and you make it about that...stuff...then it's just another thing to buy and sell.
Well, yes, if I can put it so simply. Is there any possibility we can start connecting the dots sometime in the near future?
Let us take the first comment first. I do not and cannot understand this. Levy is in her early 30s. She buttressed that comment with a note that pre-feminism women could not get checking accounts without a husband or father co-signing, let alone access to safe and legal contraception or abortions. She says this as though we are to accept it as the most natural thing in the world that any thirty-year-old would be completely ignorant of the world as it existed fifteen years before her birth without a specialized course of study. Someone my height and coloring might suggest that this is, instead, a measure of the sheer lack of intellectual curiosity in American life, and if we need some way to understand Wildness and the Girls Who Go There it would be a more fruitful place to start.
Let us pause for a couple pieces of salient information. Levy describes her parents as 60s vintage boho feminists, which makes her former cluelessness about the entire history of her own gender in her own country prior to her own giving a shit that much more mysterious. The second is her admission that she sees "raunch culture" as a reaction to the "PC tightness that was big in the 80s and early 90s".
So I'm listening to this, and it's really difficult to decide what qualifies as Thought and what is simply rearranging scraps of newspaper found on the floor of your cage. "PC tightness"? I don't understand how a label convinces you to stop thinking about something, and I'm fairly convinced, having lived through it, that the war on so-called political correctness was in full swing by that time, as evinced by the very existence of the term. In other words, even had one found oneself in a college hotbed of PC in the 80s or early 90s one needn't have felt windlashed and helpless. (Levy, by the way, reports the opposite: she was even tempted to throw away her leg razor for a time.)
So we wind up with the same old conundrum. If you were delusional to some extent in those days, why should your testimony be trusted now?
Which brings us to implants and underpants and bikini waxing, and the real puzzlement to me: what is it that's so difficult to understand here? Yes, indeedy, the reduction of sex to a plastic commodity costs us a great deal, and it saddles a following generation with Paris and Brittany disease one can only hope they'll be able to climb up out of right side up. But it is the abiding faith in Consumerism which is the problem, not some generational response to torments of PC humorlessness. If a 32-year-old who's published a book on the subject is only recently aware of the accomplishments of mid-20th century Feminism, I have my doubts that drunken nubiles are flashing their tits at the camera as an act of political defiance.
* This one is news to me. Sic transit.
Monday, November 27
Who Left the Ouzo Unlocked?
David Brooks, "The Education of Robert Kennedy", New York Times, November 27
Summary: After his brother's cranium exploded in public, Bobby Kennedy reportedly found surcease in Edith Hamilton's lightly regarded version of Greek Classics Illustrated. If you find three different ways to say this it will fill up a Times Op-Ed column. And if you throw in a wholly gratuitous reference to Winston Churchill, the most casual 5% of your readers might imagine you had a point.
Question from the floor: If Brooks and his ilk are so enamored of the Dead Kennedys and ML King, how is it they never saw fit to emulate them in the slightest? When it could have made a difference they threw in with Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.
On the other hand: "Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless 'all the glory that was Greece' mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy's life." Y'know, passive-aggressiveness is not all that attractive in a supposed pundit in the the first place, and Brooks really manages to take it to a You Wanna Trip Him In The Hallway While He's Got An Armload Of Books level. Supposing that classical scholars have nothing better to do than feel superior to 70-year-old popularizations of their subject matter, I'm guessin' they could find a lot more to be critical of than Hamilton's prose stylings.
Brooks didn't even have to mention this--we're talking about Bobby Kennedy's tastes, not his own--or he might have stated it as simple fact. Hamilton wasn't working as a scholar. She wrote popular books on scholarly subjects. There was more than a hint of fust about her books back when Bobby read The Greek Way. But Brooks means to uncork that Bowtied Right manqué classicism, and so is required to blame everything he doesn't like about contemporary scholarship on a few arbitrary eggheads.
The Money: "And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country [and who appear here, in the penultimate sentence, for the first time -ed.] were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance."
Funny thing about that. I happen to do volunteer work in the public schools, and in these parts, at least, the math and language requirements are double what they were thirty years ago when I was in school, and probably twenty some years ago when Brooks was. I am, frankly, astonished at the work load placed on kids and I sometimes wonder how I would have reacted, being that I was always more interested in what I found than what they were trying to teach me, and the pace back then allowed me to indulge that. These workloads are mandated by public officials tasked with--or taking an immense amateur interest in--"improving" education. They are, in these parts, largely Republican and/or disproportionately solicitous of Republican chamber-of-commerce type concerns, and there seems to be very little demand for an entire section of Aeschylus on the graduation qualifying exam.
Then again, Indianapolis parents now have the opportunity to send their students to a charter school with a classics-based curriculum, or, baring that, of buying a copy of Mythology for a buck fifty at Half Price Books and having their kids read it. Though that takes all of the fun out of being a scold.
Summary: After his brother's cranium exploded in public, Bobby Kennedy reportedly found surcease in Edith Hamilton's lightly regarded version of Greek Classics Illustrated. If you find three different ways to say this it will fill up a Times Op-Ed column. And if you throw in a wholly gratuitous reference to Winston Churchill, the most casual 5% of your readers might imagine you had a point.
Question from the floor: If Brooks and his ilk are so enamored of the Dead Kennedys and ML King, how is it they never saw fit to emulate them in the slightest? When it could have made a difference they threw in with Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.
On the other hand: "Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless 'all the glory that was Greece' mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy's life." Y'know, passive-aggressiveness is not all that attractive in a supposed pundit in the the first place, and Brooks really manages to take it to a You Wanna Trip Him In The Hallway While He's Got An Armload Of Books level. Supposing that classical scholars have nothing better to do than feel superior to 70-year-old popularizations of their subject matter, I'm guessin' they could find a lot more to be critical of than Hamilton's prose stylings.
Brooks didn't even have to mention this--we're talking about Bobby Kennedy's tastes, not his own--or he might have stated it as simple fact. Hamilton wasn't working as a scholar. She wrote popular books on scholarly subjects. There was more than a hint of fust about her books back when Bobby read The Greek Way. But Brooks means to uncork that Bowtied Right manqué classicism, and so is required to blame everything he doesn't like about contemporary scholarship on a few arbitrary eggheads.
The Money: "And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country [and who appear here, in the penultimate sentence, for the first time -ed.] were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance."
Funny thing about that. I happen to do volunteer work in the public schools, and in these parts, at least, the math and language requirements are double what they were thirty years ago when I was in school, and probably twenty some years ago when Brooks was. I am, frankly, astonished at the work load placed on kids and I sometimes wonder how I would have reacted, being that I was always more interested in what I found than what they were trying to teach me, and the pace back then allowed me to indulge that. These workloads are mandated by public officials tasked with--or taking an immense amateur interest in--"improving" education. They are, in these parts, largely Republican and/or disproportionately solicitous of Republican chamber-of-commerce type concerns, and there seems to be very little demand for an entire section of Aeschylus on the graduation qualifying exam.
Then again, Indianapolis parents now have the opportunity to send their students to a charter school with a classics-based curriculum, or, baring that, of buying a copy of Mythology for a buck fifty at Half Price Books and having their kids read it. Though that takes all of the fun out of being a scold.
Sunday, November 26
He's Not Compensated By Wal-Mart. Say, That Has A Familiar Ring To It.
Sheesh, even their black people are white.
There's hope on the horizon, what with the Democrats regaining power an' all. Indy Star:
He just loves Wal-Mart
City-County Council member Ron Gibson has joined some state legislators in a group called Working Families for Wal-Mart Indiana.Their mission: to get the word out on the positive side of the story about the behemoth retail company, which has been dogged by critics who say its wages and benefits are so low they compel workers to seek taxpayer-funded public aid.Gibson said he loves Wal-Mart. In fact, he was shopping at the Wal-Mart at 38th Street and Franklin Road when The Indianapolis Star reached him on his cell phone last week.He said Wal-Mart offers jobs to those who might not otherwise have them and sells retail goods at good prices in areas where people need more choices.Gibson, a Democrat, said he was asked by the Baker & Daniels law firm to join the group to support Wal-Mart.There is no compensation for his work, he said. State Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, is among others in the group.
Now, I don't know if you share my opinion about Wal-Mart (humanitarians among you might feel the execution of the Walton family should be quick and painless, for example), but I'd like to know why this business, or any business, needs a government cheerleading squad. I say you get to choose one: either celebrate the glorious efficiency of amorality and the miraculous ability of free markets to turn shit into silver, or let's make everything a debate about morality and have at it on a level playing field. If the former, then certainly the virtual cottage industry of turning over rocks and watching Wal-Mart ooze out deserves to breathe free as well. Heaping praise on Wal-Mart because it actually pays its employees for most of the hours they work seems like setting the bar a little low, even for volunteer work.
Speaking of which, check out the website those volunteers maintain. It's sorta like Disney World without the exciting rides an' stuff. They wish you a Merry Christmas right at the top, use "holiday shop" as a verb, and explain with the sort of earnestness usually seen only in bepamphleted religious zealots on your doorstep that "Wal-Mart is also bringing "Christmas" back into its marketing." (Is that the greatest use of the floating random quotation marks ever, or what?) You can click the links to read real stories from actual working stiffs about how Wal-Mart has changed their lives despite the continued existence of trade unions, meet the Steering Committee (the first guy is a economics professor who's changed his last name to "Ph.D"; the second is Pat Boone) or check out the Mission Statement:
Interesting that they're not wasting any time explaining the positive contributions Wal-Mart makes to working families to the actual working families themselves, presumably since those families already know the value of Looking the Other Way when there's a buck involved.
PS Baker & Daniels? Yeah, it's that Daniels.
Speaking of which, check out the website those volunteers maintain. It's sorta like Disney World without the exciting rides an' stuff. They wish you a Merry Christmas right at the top, use "holiday shop" as a verb, and explain with the sort of earnestness usually seen only in bepamphleted religious zealots on your doorstep that "Wal-Mart is also bringing "Christmas" back into its marketing." (Is that the greatest use of the floating random quotation marks ever, or what?) You can click the links to read real stories from actual working stiffs about how Wal-Mart has changed their lives despite the continued existence of trade unions, meet the Steering Committee (the first guy is a economics professor who's changed his last name to "Ph.D"; the second is Pat Boone) or check out the Mission Statement:
OUR MISSION
Working Families for Wal-Mart is committed to fostering open and honest dialogue with elected officials, opinion makers and community leaders that conveys the positive contributions of Wal-Mart to working families.
Interesting that they're not wasting any time explaining the positive contributions Wal-Mart makes to working families to the actual working families themselves, presumably since those families already know the value of Looking the Other Way when there's a buck involved.
PS Baker & Daniels? Yeah, it's that Daniels.
Saturday, November 25
Tuesday, November 21
False Modesty
Slate: "James Baker is the last guy we should listen to about Iraq"
by Christopher Hitchens
Not while you're alive, Hitch. Not while you're alive.
by Christopher Hitchens
Not while you're alive, Hitch. Not while you're alive.
Conventional Wisdom Tuesday I: Phoning It In
Monday morning I was making the bed and gathering up all the pieces of laundry which had been flung around the bedroom over the weekend, and I had the radio on NPR, whence it had migrated during a recent electrical storm from the other PBS station, the one that plays classical music and the BBC. This meant--what's the opposite of serendipity?--that I got to listen to Cokie Roberts analyze of Our Current State of Affairs. Question: does Cokie Roberts actually do anything anymore? I don't mean to be cruel--she's a cancer survivor, godspeed an' all--but what exactly is her job description? Pundit without portfolio? Even if she hadn't figured prominently in the Press' lapdog response to George W. Bush I'd be hard-pressed to think of a reason to listen to anything she had to say, other than the fact of my arms being full and the radio being tuned to her.
So here's what I got from the Cokester: One--John McCain has called for increasing the number of troops in Iraq, which Cokie is sure he actually believes in, but which is "somewhat convenient" given that he's running for President and this allows him to say his idea wasn't tried (especially if he's interviewed about it by Cokie Roberts or the Cokiesque). And Senny Hoyer says besides, we don't have any troops, which was an interesting way of turning a factual question, with a straightforward and rather vital answer into a partisan toss-up.
Point two--of two; I hope Cokie is paid by the piece and not the minute--was about Charlie Rangel calling for a draft, which Cokie says won't happen, but Rangel is making a point about the conduct of the war. Fair enough, perhaps, but I'd like to suggest that since the last time he "made" the identical "point" it was widely disparaged as an anti-Bush stunt that he might be given some credit for bringing it back up when he has the power to get it a hearing and the authority to get blamed if it goes anywhere. But such a commendation was not forthcoming, not that I expected it; Cokie had gotten in her equal-opportunity skepticism. (No mention of McCain's new frame for his abortion views: the Sunday talk-fests probably air too late for Cokie to take note of by Monday. (By all means see Scott Lemieux' takedown of McCain at Tapped.)
And aside from her reading me 2/3 of last Friday's below-the-fold front page, I had to ask myself what I'd gotten for the time I'd invested other than a full hamper. Are those stories really equivalent? McCain, running for something, proposes to send troops we don't have* to a lost cause as a publicity stunt, in contradistinction to his Straight Shootin' image, while Rangel, about to be in charge of something after years in the wilderness makes the same unpopular proposal (which may be simply making a point) he did two years ago sans juice. The "cynical gesture" or "playing politics" rubric doesn't seem to fit them both. But maybe I just lack Cokie's studied impartiality.
* Mr. Riley does not suggest that 20,000 troops could not be rounded up under any circumstances and sent to Mesopotamia. The Bush administration has been more creative about numbers than a stretch Hummer full of Hollywood accountants. But we can no longer sustain more than about 60,000 troops for full tours without massive reorganization of our worldwide military commitments. This much has been known since 2002 at the least; the number comes from the CBO report from November of that year. And that doesn't count what's happened to our equipment in the interim.
So here's what I got from the Cokester: One--John McCain has called for increasing the number of troops in Iraq, which Cokie is sure he actually believes in, but which is "somewhat convenient" given that he's running for President and this allows him to say his idea wasn't tried (especially if he's interviewed about it by Cokie Roberts or the Cokiesque). And Senny Hoyer says besides, we don't have any troops, which was an interesting way of turning a factual question, with a straightforward and rather vital answer into a partisan toss-up.
Point two--of two; I hope Cokie is paid by the piece and not the minute--was about Charlie Rangel calling for a draft, which Cokie says won't happen, but Rangel is making a point about the conduct of the war. Fair enough, perhaps, but I'd like to suggest that since the last time he "made" the identical "point" it was widely disparaged as an anti-Bush stunt that he might be given some credit for bringing it back up when he has the power to get it a hearing and the authority to get blamed if it goes anywhere. But such a commendation was not forthcoming, not that I expected it; Cokie had gotten in her equal-opportunity skepticism. (No mention of McCain's new frame for his abortion views: the Sunday talk-fests probably air too late for Cokie to take note of by Monday. (By all means see Scott Lemieux' takedown of McCain at Tapped.)
And aside from her reading me 2/3 of last Friday's below-the-fold front page, I had to ask myself what I'd gotten for the time I'd invested other than a full hamper. Are those stories really equivalent? McCain, running for something, proposes to send troops we don't have* to a lost cause as a publicity stunt, in contradistinction to his Straight Shootin' image, while Rangel, about to be in charge of something after years in the wilderness makes the same unpopular proposal (which may be simply making a point) he did two years ago sans juice. The "cynical gesture" or "playing politics" rubric doesn't seem to fit them both. But maybe I just lack Cokie's studied impartiality.
* Mr. Riley does not suggest that 20,000 troops could not be rounded up under any circumstances and sent to Mesopotamia. The Bush administration has been more creative about numbers than a stretch Hummer full of Hollywood accountants. But we can no longer sustain more than about 60,000 troops for full tours without massive reorganization of our worldwide military commitments. This much has been known since 2002 at the least; the number comes from the CBO report from November of that year. And that doesn't count what's happened to our equipment in the interim.
Conventional Wisdom Tuesday II: That Sounds Oddly, and Tediously, Familiar
Matt Bai, "The Way We Live Now: The Last 20th Century Election?" New York Times Magazine, November 19, 2006:
Matt Bai, "The Excluded Middle" review of Off Center, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, New York Times Book Review, December 11, 2005:
Forget that Bai bills the Times twice for the same two-hundred words; they should be glad he didn't steal 'em. But notice how nothing changes despite the intervening sea-change of an election except the frame. Formerly, the Dems were seeking comfort food; now their very success condemns their earlier words:
Both of these, by the way, were front page stories in their respective sections. Thus the liberal New York Times! And it should be noted that Hacker and Pierson fairly demolished Bai's critique the first time around, which accounts for the not-quite-identical description this time.
Bai's problem is obvious--he's too smart for either party, which requires a hard-edged sneering version of Cokie Robert's Both Sides Do It approach--but his editors' problem is a whole 'nother question. Hang on:
You know me--I can't get enough of people characterizing characterizations of things they know nothing about as if such an exercise explains something. Bai is no doubt completely unaware that he's mouthing a "conservative" argument in the guise of a history lesson.
But there's no excuse for lacking common sense, even if you won't pursue history beyond your own nose: is it reasonable to assume that liberalism "rose up" in reaction to anything? Is it too much to ask that twenty-somethings in this country show some familiarity with, say, McCarthyism? Say it again: I challenge any of you to go back and actually live under the social, cultural, and sexual repressions of the 1950s and come back and report which side you're on. The only thing that "rose up" in conservatism in response to the "domination" of our politics by liberalism--a bogus concept to begin with--is a few reactionary positions of the cultural right wing and an ever-increasing zest for tax cuts for the wealthy. Real conservatism, as opposed to the lumpy Jonah Goldberg variety which is all you seem to know, was just as impractical and mean-spirited sixty years ago, although I'd object that those are more euphemisms than descriptions.
First, to Mr. Rosenberg: when the DLC, in either its old-school or its spiffy new sci-fi version, wins elections, or when it figures out the base wins elections, or when it speaks for anyone outside one of its conference rooms, then maybe your insights will mean something. Second, if you believe that culture wars, racial politics, or the "archaic" divisions between hawks and doves is a mere blip on the electoral radar rather than real-world responses to real-world problems, then God help you and the Future, and God grant you a populace with an endless tolerance for rectal smoke receptivity, just as soon as I'm dead and buried. In the meantime:
Where are the fucking answers if you're so smart? How is it that all the DLC types--those forward-looking 21st Century Culturnauts who've managed to transcend the old dichotomies, marched in fucking lockstep with the Bush administration into Vietnam II?
Yeah, and with damned good reason, sonny boy. Give us the answers, bright boy, or shut up and learn something. This, at least: those repugnant Boomers are just entering their sixties. They're gonna be voting for another twenty-five years. And old fucking people vote, homey.
Since Bush’s disputed victory in 2000, many liberals have been increasingly brazen about their disdain for the rural and religious voters; one popular e-mail message, which landed in thousands of Democratic in-boxes in the days after the 2004 election, separated North America into “The United States of Canada” and “Jesusland.” The populist author Thomas Frank won widespread praise for his thesis that unsophisticated rural types had been manipulated into voting “against their economic self-interest,” while the celebrated linguist George Lakoff posited that conservatives had rewired the brain synapses in these unsuspecting voters. Two eminent liberal political scientists, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, wrote a more scholarly book, arguing that Bush could govern as an extremist without paying a price, because Republicans had gamed the electoral system and deceived voters.
Matt Bai, "The Excluded Middle" review of Off Center, by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, New York Times Book Review, December 11, 2005:
Over the last few years, in this time of Democratic despondency, there has emerged a new genre of comfort books for liberals - books that seek to expose the nefarious means by which conservatives have amassed power, while at the same time reassuring urban liberals that they bear none of the blame. Thomas Frank's best-selling "What's the Matter With Kansas?," for instance, advanced the premise that rural voters just aren't sophisticated enough to vote in their own interests. In "Don't Think of an Elephant!," the linguist George Lakoff took a slightly different angle, suggesting that these voters weren't dumb, exactly, but that their brain synapses had been rewired by the Republicans' skillful manipulation of language. Now come Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, political science professors at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, with "Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy." Hacker and Pierson offer a variation on this same theme: voters can't make the right choices, they contend, because our system of government itself has dangerously malfunctioned.
Forget that Bai bills the Times twice for the same two-hundred words; they should be glad he didn't steal 'em. But notice how nothing changes despite the intervening sea-change of an election except the frame. Formerly, the Dems were seeking comfort food; now their very success condemns their earlier words:
But this election, in which conservative incumbents in states like Kentucky and Indiana went down to defeat, should discredit such alarmist (and elitist) theories. As it happened, despite all these neurological and structural impediments, ordinary voters proved perfectly capable of recognizing failed governance when they saw it, and seemed plenty capable of defending their own interests.
Both of these, by the way, were front page stories in their respective sections. Thus the liberal New York Times! And it should be noted that Hacker and Pierson fairly demolished Bai's critique the first time around, which accounts for the not-quite-identical description this time.
Bai's problem is obvious--he's too smart for either party, which requires a hard-edged sneering version of Cokie Robert's Both Sides Do It approach--but his editors' problem is a whole 'nother question. Hang on:
After the midterms, that tidal resentment has now washed away both of our old governing philosophies: the expansive and often misguided liberalism that dominated American politics up through the 1970s, as well as the impractical, mean-spirited brand of conservatism that rose up in reaction to it.
You know me--I can't get enough of people characterizing characterizations of things they know nothing about as if such an exercise explains something. Bai is no doubt completely unaware that he's mouthing a "conservative" argument in the guise of a history lesson.
But there's no excuse for lacking common sense, even if you won't pursue history beyond your own nose: is it reasonable to assume that liberalism "rose up" in reaction to anything? Is it too much to ask that twenty-somethings in this country show some familiarity with, say, McCarthyism? Say it again: I challenge any of you to go back and actually live under the social, cultural, and sexual repressions of the 1950s and come back and report which side you're on. The only thing that "rose up" in conservatism in response to the "domination" of our politics by liberalism--a bogus concept to begin with--is a few reactionary positions of the cultural right wing and an ever-increasing zest for tax cuts for the wealthy. Real conservatism, as opposed to the lumpy Jonah Goldberg variety which is all you seem to know, was just as impractical and mean-spirited sixty years ago, although I'd object that those are more euphemisms than descriptions.
It may be, then, that we have just witnessed the last big election of the 20th century; the question now is what kind of different, more relevant ideologies might rise from the ruins. Or, as Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist, recently put it in making much the same argument, “Like two heavyweight boxers stumbling into the 15th round of a championship fight, the two great ideologies of the 20th century stumble, exhausted, tattered and weakened, into a very dynamic and challenging 21st century.” The era of baby-boomer politics — with its culture wars, its racial subtext, its archaic divisions between hawks and doves and between big government and no government at all — is coming to a merciful close. Our elections may become increasingly generational rather than ideological — and not a moment too soon.
First, to Mr. Rosenberg: when the DLC, in either its old-school or its spiffy new sci-fi version, wins elections, or when it figures out the base wins elections, or when it speaks for anyone outside one of its conference rooms, then maybe your insights will mean something. Second, if you believe that culture wars, racial politics, or the "archaic" divisions between hawks and doves is a mere blip on the electoral radar rather than real-world responses to real-world problems, then God help you and the Future, and God grant you a populace with an endless tolerance for rectal smoke receptivity, just as soon as I'm dead and buried. In the meantime:
Where are the fucking answers if you're so smart? How is it that all the DLC types--those forward-looking 21st Century Culturnauts who've managed to transcend the old dichotomies, marched in fucking lockstep with the Bush administration into Vietnam II?
[T]he new Democratic majority in Washington may fare no better in addressing the nation’s modern preoccupations than the Republican majority that preceded it. At week’s end, Democrats were preparing to name two 66-year-olds, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, as Senate majority leader and House speaker. In the House, Pelosi will be supported by new committee chairmen including longtime liberals like Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Charles Rangel of New York. They are, most of them, honorable public servants, warriors steeped in the battles of the last century. But the party remains reluctant to make room for its next generation, a pragmatic and talented group — led, perhaps, by Rahm Emanuel, the chief strategist behind the House elections
Yeah, and with damned good reason, sonny boy. Give us the answers, bright boy, or shut up and learn something. This, at least: those repugnant Boomers are just entering their sixties. They're gonna be voting for another twenty-five years. And old fucking people vote, homey.
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