The Evangelical Long March

What else do conservatives need? An evangelical long march through the institutions and into the prosperous classes. I've written before about how conservatives need to get themselves into academia, but what we need is a strong evangelical presence in the elites. What counters secular drift? Evangelicism--everything else crumbles before it. Why is the Republican party outspent? The defection of the prosperous classes to the Democratic party. Either the Republican party has significantly to de-evangelicize itself--not my preferred solution--or the evangelicals need to redouble their ambitions, follow up on their rise from poverty to the middle classes over the last two generations with a further rise into Wall Street, medical schools, business schools, law, journalism, academia--everything that pays well and has influence. They need to do this, without ceasing to be evangelical in their concerns (always a trick), so as to provide money as well as votes for political conservatism 1) against the Democrats; and 2) against the other factions of the Republic party, particularly the business wing.

All this in the context of a certain ambivalence about evangelicals in the middle of the country, the non-evangelical Christians who are declining in numbers, drifting to the polarized camps of evangelicism and secularism. I don't think liberal seculars, to whom evangelicals are bogey-men, understand that you can be not evangelical yourself, yet have more sympathy for them than for seculars, and not be particularly frightened by their intensity. On the other hand, a lot of non-evangelical Christians are frightened/turned off by evangelical intensity, and that is a political fact which can't be ignored. I think a fair bit of the fright would dissipate once there was a sizeable evangelical minority in every elite workplace, and they became human beings rather than bogeymen. On the other hand, the further rise of the evangelicals to power might also further frighten and alienate the mild Christians of the middle. Difficult to tell how exactly it would play out--but I think evangelicals ought to be ambitious. Aim to succeed in all secular spheres, preserve their faith, and change the world.

Or watch as the secular, liberal tide triumphs over everything.

What is the matter with Phoebe Maltz?

With apologies to A. A. Milne:

What is the matter with Phoebe Maltz?
She ought to vote with us, for all of our faults.
How could she be lured by the liberal waltz?
What is the matter with Phoebe Maltz?

Aside from the pleasure of committing doggerel, this poem is meant to reiterate what conservatives shouldn't do after the election, whoever wins--that is, to mirror-image Thomas Franks' What's the Matter with Kansas?, and say there is something the matter with people who don't vote our way, rather than look first to see if there is something the matter with us. The Democrats, I think, have not engaged in this process, and hence are doing far worse in this election than they would have otherwise--might even lose it, although that remains unlikely. Perhaps Republicans can win back a majority without changing much--do as the Democrats did, and wait for the opposing party to alienate the middle of the country--but I think they would be wiser to try to change themselves so as to appeal to, oh, a solid 52% of the country at the minimum, rather than a solid 45%. I choose Phoebe as my icon of the Persuadable--not because I think all the Persuadable share her particular policy preferences* (although I suspect a fair number do), but since, because Persuadable, she's the sort of voter to whom Republicans ought to listen if they want to regain their majority. I don't know where Republicans end up when they finish listening, but it's where they need to start. And, yes, making arguments that are conservative, and not just pandering, is part of what needs to be done--but listen first, argue later. And continuing to listen to the most conservative Republicans too--don't abandon the other end of the coalition--but at this moment, listen especially hard to the Phoebes.**

* Dachshund subsidies for the masses.

** Unless they speak in Flemish, in which case it is permissible to bat them with baguettes. But in a welcoming fashion.

Thursday Happy

This video of sixth- and seventh-graders from Atlanta is getting a lot of play on conservative web sites as a nice contrast to the creepy children's sing-a-longs for Obama (which are no longer available for general viewing on YouTube). It's probably even better to watch this one, where some of the kids from the first video are interviewed on CNN and then perform their song, the lyrics to which can be read by clicking the "more information" tab next to either video.

The song, which they wrote themselves, is a celebration of democracy, debate, and ideological diversity. There's something incredibly cool about seeing young people -- mostly Obama supporters, it turns out -- who have been taught to relish the free and fair play of opposing ideas, to express political views forthrightly and without malice, and to concede virtue and a hearing to those who disagree with them. As Rick Sanchez says in the second video, "Nothing is better than that!"

I hate using the cliché, but we can all learn from these kids. However disastrous the outcomes of the democratic process can sometimes be, the process and its attendant ideals should be a cause for rejoicing.

Pew on Fox

One of the most annoying Leftist shibboleths -- now there's a biblical reference for Withywindle's students -- is Fox News bashing. Almost everybody on the Left assumes that the network isn't even trustworthy, let alone "fair and balanced." "Faux News," they like to call it. A not uncommon response to some piece of information a really committed partisan of the Left didn't know and doesn't want to believe is the smirking query, "Did you hear that on Fox?"

For myself, I don't see the problem with Fox News. At least, I don't see the problem with the parts of it that are news. Brit Hume, for example, is one of the best newsmen in the business, and Special Report with Brit Hume is more informative than any other news program on TV except maybe PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Fox's evening news show with Shephard Smith is less information-packed, but it's extraordinarily evenhanded. In general, I've never been able to see how the news coverage on Fox News leans any further to the right than most major news outlets do to the left.

So it didn't surprise me to see this snippet from the results of the latest Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study of coverage of the 2008 election. (Pew, for those who don't know, is about as unimpeachably non-partisan as a media watchdog organization gets.)

On Fox News, in contrast, coverage of Obama was more negative than the norm (40% of stories vs. 29% overall) and less positive (25% of stories vs. 36% generally). For McCain, the news channel was somewhat more positive (22% vs. 14% in the press overall) and substantially less negative (40% vs. 57% in the press overall). Yet even here, his negative stories outweighed positive ones by almost 2 to 1.

Pew is pointing out that Fox news is less favorable to Obama and more favorable to McCain than most of the media. But the proportion of negative stories on Fox was the same for both Obama and McCain, at 40% each. And the proportion of positive stories for the two candidates was almost the same: 25% for Obama and 22% for McCain.

How much more "fair and balanced" can you get? It seems to be the rest of the media, whose McCain stories Pew found to be 57% negative and 14% positive, are the ones whose objectivity deserves to be called into question.

Of course, there's a lot this study doesn't capture. Maybe most of Fox's positive stories about McCain were wildly positive while their positive coverage of Obama was only slightly positive. Maybe the negative stories about Obama tended to be longer than the negative stories about McCain. I'd like to see Pew try to measure variables like these. On the whole, though, these numbers ought to at least call into question the assumption that the reporters on Fox are nothing but Republican shills.

Western Civ

My students (even the practicing Christians) seem never to have taken a Sunday school class, and are utterly ignorant of what is within the Bible. This makes teaching Western Civ difficult. On the other hand, my own knowledge of the Bible, Church history, and the Greek and Latin classics is also paper thin, so I am at best the one-eyed leading the blind. Sometimes I feel that we have not improved since the monks taught one another mangled Latin and copied texts they could not read.

On The World Changing From Under You

It is so difficult for me to argue against Obama. It just seems self-evident to me that 60% of Americans would never vote for him, that he should naturally go down in flames like McGovern--how can a voting majority consider him? But that 60% of Americans isn't around anymore--dead, dying, or just somehow changed inside when I looked away. And these new Americans, these youngsters, they think in strange ways.

I begin to feel like a Catholic in Elizabethan England. The world you know slips away, and by the time you're an old man, your childhood is as strange to your grandchildren as Cathay. Or perhaps I should say I feel like everyone who grows old. My dad grew up when FDR was president; that world is gone. (Although he does also say it hasn't changed all that much since 1968; the world turned upside down then, quoth he, and no change since then is comparable.)

Pre-advice

So if McCain loses, I will have all sorts of posts contemplating the political situation, and doubtless it will clog up the blog, competing with Alpheus' analyses too, so let me get out a few in advance ... and gracefully forget about them should providence favor the United States, and McCain eke out a victory. I will put to the side the fear & lamentation about the effect of the Obama victory--I take it for granted he will do short-term and long-term harm to the United States and to the world; the question is the magnitude of the harm. But how should conservatives react to political defeat?

1) Act better than the Democrats and liberals have for the last eight years. I take their behavior since November 2000 to have been terrible, and gravely damaging to the country. We must be better than they have been. Above all, we must be measured in our opposition to Obama's foreign-policy--as much as possible, support him; make our critiques in measured tones; try not to lend aid and comfort to our enemies abroad by our criticism of our president; wish him well in his service of the interests and the ideals of the United States.

2) Consider how to change ourselves so as to attract whatever margin of the voters shifted to Obama this year. Some humility is called for. And, yes, I note that the overwhelming reason people have rejected Republicans is precisely the muscular foreign policy that I prize above all other strands in Republican policy, that I am unlikely to change my belief that a muscular foreign policy is necessary for the survival of America and the West, and therefore that I am not precisely the best example of such humility. But still, it is called for.

3) As a priority, the Republicans need to attract back those Americans who have voted with their wallets for Obama. Money is a legitimate expression of political belief; the Republican loss of the wealthy classes is both tactically crippling (note how badly Obama has outspent McCain) and an expression that they have the confidence of the interests of the country. This must be regained. I am afraid that many of these voters are essentially soft libertarians--nearsighted isolationists who desire a maximum of personal license in their personal lives, essentially selfish and amoral--people whose policy preferences are diametrically opposed to mine. Nevertheless, they must be wooed back to the Republican party.

4) Remember that life is not a prison, but a challenge; take whatever fortune brings and make that the material from which to invent a better future, and so display our virtu and virtue.

Something I Didn't Know (UPDATED)

Without thinking very hard about it, I always assumed that the margin of error reported for political polls reflected a 95% confidence interval for the spread between the two candidates -- in other words, a 95% probability that the population spread would be greater or less than the reported spread from the sample by no more than the reported margin of error. (I vaguely realized that this would mean constructing a separate probability distribution for the spread but I figured, hey, pollsters are smart guys with big computers and nothing better to do.)

Now I learn, quite by chance (from this very interesting discussion of polls in the current presidential race) that the margin of error is, in fact, the margin of error for individual outcomes in the poll. In other words, if Barack Obama is leading John McCain in a particular poll by 49% to 44%, and the margin of error is reported as 3.1 percentage points, then the 3.1 refers only to the Obama percentage which, as the larger of the two percentages, will have the greater variability. McCain's number has its own (smaller) margin of error. A quick search of web sites, including Wikipedia, confirms this.

This means that pollsters aren't doing all the math that I thought they were doing, but of course the real fault belongs with the journalists who routinely check the spread against the reported margin of error and then declare either that the spread is "outside the margin of error" or that the numbers represent "a statistical tie." In fact, the spread will be less likely to reflect the true spread than that kind of thinking suggests. Since both candidates' numbers could be off by as much as the margin of error, and since there's obviously a rough inverse correlation between the two candidates' numbers, a poll could reflect a "statistical tie" even if the spread is greater than the reported margin of error.

It probably goes without saying that those of us praying for an electoral upset this year shouldn't take any solace from this. The 95% confidence interval built into all these polls is quite generous, so the expression "statistical tie" grossly overstates the likelihood that the underdog isn't really the underdog. Furthermore, a lot of polls show Obama with a decent lead; almost none show any kind of lead for McCain. If McCain is secretly ahead, it's because of some fundamental failure in the pollsters' sampling methods: bad voter turnout models, response bias, or the like.

So I'm not one of those conservatives whistling past the graveyard. (The proper thing to do when passing a graveyard, after all, is to hold one's breath.) My point is really about the ease with which even relatively simple statistical concepts get misrepresented by the press and thus are misunderstood by the public in general and yours truly in particular.

UPDATE: Iowahawk presents the mathematics of the margin of error in a characteristically entertaining fashion. Reading his post, I realize I was probably wrong again: the margin of error for polls probably is calculated not based on the highest sampled percentage for a candidate, but on p = .5 or 50% -- a conservative assumption that will generate the largest possible margin of error. This doesn't change my fundamental point about the way journalists treat margin of error, but it does help explain why only one margin of error is reported for any given poll.

Free at Last, Free at Last

So Barack Obama is quoted as saying that it's "one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement" that the Warren Court "didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted...."

Essential constraints? On what?

Oh, yeah: on the powers of the state. On the tyranny of majorities and elites. On the liberties that can be taken with liberty.

Maybe Obama's campaign theme should have been "Hold On" by Wilson Philips?

Break free, break from the chains, Big Government. And that goes for you too, King Kong.

I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Blogs

Sullivan on Blogging

Occasionally even Andrew Sullivan writes something well worth reading (hat tip to Exit Cave Right). There's a lot of good stuff there, including a swipe at an interesting perspective on our recent Plato vs. Aristotle discussion and an affirmation of Withywindle's belief that Montaigne was a blogger avant la lettre (as he himself might have said).

Depressingly, though, Sullivan's essay brings home to me the problems inherent in being a blogger concerned with anonymity. So much of the experience of my daily life, so much of my character, simply can't make it onto this blog. Withy takes greater risks and the pleasing result is that he imparts more of his personality to his on-line writing. I suppose I need to think harder about how to find ways around this.

Linguistically Lush British Literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century

Wouldn't it be fun to teach a class including Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning, and ... what else? Eliot and Sayers? Some of the other Inklings? Would this be more than enough material for a semester anyway? Anyway, ideally not just fantasy, although Peake and Tolkien would give it a heavy spin in that direction.

I am, by the by, reading Montaigne's Essays and Peake's Gormenghast books simultaneously. Either alone was clearly too long for me to read at one go, so I'm switching back and forth, one book at my nightstand, one in my backpack.

On Cross-Border Raids

We've just been conducting cross-border raids in Pakistan and Syria. They don't just happen. There must be a considered policy change in Washington, where both states are no longer considered to have mailing addresses to address our concerns. In Syria, this might simply be a case of running out of patience with them--but I think we should take seriously the idea that our cross-border raid there indicates a genuine belief in Washington that Syria no longer controls its eastern border. For Pakistan, the "no mailing address" seems far more likely, given that we did in point of fact respect the border rather scrupulously for so many years--it's not just the Northwest Provinces being out of control, but that the [putatively, temporarily, corruptly] democratic government doesn't have control over the military. And speaking of the Pakistani military ... one of the reasons we didn't raid into Pakistan was so as not to provoke a nuclear-armed Pakistan. I very strongly suspect that we have an unofficial understanding with whatever elements of the Pakistani government actually control the nuclear weapons that our cross-border raids will not provoke itchy trigger fingers on their nukes.

So, Syria and Pakistan, one step closer to being acknowledged as failed states. And then there's Iran ...

By-the-by, I notice how the Democrats and their minions among the punditocracy talk about how the Republicans are "fixated" on "state actors." I myself am "fixated" on "oxygen" and "breathing." I am also "obsessed" with "food" and "drink." I also have an "ideological belief" that "clothing" is good to keep "warm" in "winter."

Schadenfreude

The price of oil is falling! The price of oil is falling! Oh, how I hope those psychopathic thugs in Moscow, Teheran, and Caracas get tossed out on their ears, as they go bankrupt. Even if Obama got the credit for it ...

Halloween Parade

We took Shirebourn to a local Halloween Parade for children today--more of a Halloween Vague Wander. Shirebourn was a very cute elf. Other good costumes we saw included a giraffe, a girl dressed up in a wooden box carved to show on each side the word "NO", and a pudgy Viking, amiably chewing his shield. A bad costume was a father dressed as Robin The Boy Wonder--fathers, don't do this. You will look like you are wanting in good taste and/or a pedophile, which is not the best look for a toddlers' Halloween Parade. The neighborhood committee sold baked goods and gave away free coffee; the coffee was not worth the price. Marty Markowitz, the borough president, showed up, saying such things as, "I don't have children. I don't like children, except twice a year. Here, have some chocolate, little boy." [Mother: "He's too young!" Marty: "Oh."] Question: What sort of politician peppers his baby-kissing routine by saying how he doesn't really like babies? Answer: The sort who will never rise higher than Borough President of Brooklyn. Markowitz, incidentally, is remarkably short--it's not apparent in his campaign literature.

On Being a Suck-Up

I'm teaching a syllabus assembled by the guy who hired me; I like it, and wrote him to tell him so. A university I applied to wrote me a very detailed letter saying when they would be doing what in the application process; I am grateful, and wrote again to say so. Difficult situations--expressing admiration or gratitude can't help but be obseqious in the circumstances, but I do really feel admiration and gratitude. So, wrote the letters.

History Plays

Arethusa alerted me to an NRO posting about how the lady running the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is looking for American history plays, even conservative ones. I confess that this is too tempting for words. Instead of noodling about the net in my spare time last evening and today at campus, I started writing dialogue for a play. (Subject undisclosable of course.) Doubtless it won't get anywhere--I have too many projects academic, fictive, and personal as is--but this is great fun for the moment, and who knows, perhaps I might even finish a draft or two. Hat tip to Arethusa for giving me a much more profitable lunch hour; if ever I get a play produced, she'll be prominently in the acknowledgments. Pseudonymously, of course.

The Mikado

Greatest of the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, not just for splendid music and witty lyrics, but because the stakes are somehow higher here than in most of the other plays. The jokes, after all, revolve about who will be executed, who will commit suicide, how to escape the everpresent threat of death. And where does the threat of death come from? Why, the whimsical Mikado, a psychopath whose whims are law, and laughs at the torments of his subjects. It's rather a bleak view of the world--a bit of Kafka, or Marat/Sade, somehow popping out from the Victorian music hall. And then in the middle of the laughs, we suddenly get an astonishingly serious madrigal:

Brightly dawns our wedding day;
Joyous hour, we give thee greeting!
Whither, whither art thou fleeting?
Fickle moment, prithee stay!
What though mortal joys be hollow?
Pleasures come, if sorrows follow:
Though the tocsin sound, ere long,
Ding dong! Ding dong!
Yet until the shadows fall
Over one and over all,
Sing a merry madrigal--
A madrigal!

Fal-la--fal-la! etc. (Ending in tears.)

Let us dry the ready tear,
Though the hours are surely creeping
Little need for woeful weeping,
Till the sad sundown is near.
All must sip the cup of sorrow--
I to-day and thou to-morrow;
This the close of every song--
Ding dong! Ding dong!
What, though solemn shadows fall,
Sooner, later, over all?
Sing a merry madrigal--
A madrigal!

Fal-la--fal-la! etc. (Ending in tears.)

This is something more than light opera.

P.S. The movie Topsy-Turvy, a dramatization of the making of The Mikado, is very good.

After the Fall

I wrote a few posts back that my world-view really starts with the barbarians in the fallen Roman Empire, looking with wonder at the ruined temples:

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng-noise;
these many mead-halls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Weird changed that.

Not Rome and Greece and Israel themselves, but the barbarians reshuffling the fragments of lost learning, and slowly making something new of them, slowly making something new of themselves, is what fascinates me. (Rampant speculation: Alpheus studies Rome and Greece themselves, I the Roman and Greek traditions. Is this why Alpheus is an originalist in judicial philosophy, and I'm a precedentialist?) Why? Well, I feel quite barbaric myself as I slowly assimilate the texts of Western Civilization, rising painstakingly slowly from comic books to Homer-off-center, an outsider in love, as I sometimes feel toward America. Then, I did benefit from the last generation of a traditional American education--learning as my history that We Pilgrim Pioneers settled a New Land, and reading backward, that Our Saxon Forebears likewise settled a new land. (I do think there was a more genuine rupture in England than in France, Italy, Spain; it's not just a retrospective imagined history.) I'm part of an Anglo-American tradition that stops in Wessex, among the ruins of Rome, and for which Rome itself, and Athens and Jerusalem, are alien elements consciously assimilated.

Tolkien, I think, must have been central in giving me this consciousness. I read the Lord of the Rings so much, and of course this attitude is central in this book--the viewpoint of hobbits who know that Elvish is good, but must learn it as an alien tongue. And what I admired was not so much Elvish itself, as Elvish in the mouths of hobbits--A Elbereth Gilthoniel--admired Samwise and Faramir, who yearned for elvish lore, rather than the lore itself. Or saw the value of the lore in the actions of hobbits and men.

So now, even as I pretend I know something about Aristotle. I do know a little--though not as much as I should--but I think I care more about the Aristotelian tradition, the living use made of Aristotle, than just the writings themselves.

A religious parallel here, of course: I care about the Word Incarnate.

On Immigrants

I'm generally on the immigration-restriction bandwagon. But you can't read an article like this (second page especially) and not get a lump in your throat, and a little voice in your head that says, Never shut the door that gives us Americans like these.

Willie O' Winsbury

I'm listening to the Anne Briggs version of Willie O' Winsbury, a song I find moving. The story: the king comes home to find his daughter is pregnant. He is annoyed.

The king’s called on his merry men all,
By thirty and by three:
‘Go fetch me William of Winsbury,
For hanged he shall be.’

But:

But when he cam the king before,
He was clad o the red silk;
His hair was like to threeds o gold.
And his skin was as white as milk.

‘It is nae wonder,’ said the king,
‘That my daughter’s love ye did win;
Had I been a woman, as I am a man,
My bedfellow ye should hae been.

‘Will ye marry my daughter Janet,
By the truth of thy right hand?
I’ll gie ye gold, I’ll gie ye money,
And I’ll gie ye an earldom o land.’

Now, I'm as fond of medieval gender-bending as the next pseudonymous blogger, but it's something else that I like. The act of imagination, of compassion, that overrides the bloody imperatives of honor--that makes this ballad, unlike so many others, end with the young man alive, to speak nothing of married and rich, and not slain in horrible fashion. (Lady Diamond, Matty Groves, etc.) Had I been a woman, as I am a man, My bedfellow ye should hae been. And suddenly tragedy becomes comedy, the ogre becomes a loving father, sin becomes human frailty and is forgiven.

I like The Deserter for similar reasons.

What Obama Owes Clinton

The entire Democratic Party stood up for a president who lied under oath; how on earth can they condemn a man merely for hanging out with ex-terrorists and anti-American preachers?

It's a Conspiracy!

Probably the most popular reaction of folks on the committed left to conservative charges of media bias is to make fun of the idea that there could be a "conspiracy" of liberals in the press to systematically demonize conservative or Republican candidates and institutions. "It's a conspiracy!" a liberal will say, with gentle or ungentle sarcasm, when some instance of bias in the media is pointed out. (This, from the end of the political spectrum where most conspiracy theories are hatched nowadays.)

Like most of the left's canards, the use of the "conspiracy" label for charges of media bias should be well past its "sell by" date. If people didn't absorb the prejudices and mental impulses of those around them, then human society as we know it wouldn't exist. Likewise, is it possible to imagine a group within society -- a class, a profession, an ethnicity -- not displaying notable markers of in-group identity, some of which are conceptual or ideological?

Imagine the following exchanges:

Black Person: "I get followed by store security a lot, and cab drivers sometimes don't stop for me."
Interlocutor (sarcastically): "It must be a conspiracy."

Asian Person: "Lots of white Americans assume I must be good at math but can't speak English or drive very well."
Interlocutor (sarcastically): "Sounds like a conspiracy."

Fat Southerner: "On TV, fat people and people with strong Southern accents always seem to be less intelligent."
Interlocutor (sarcastically): "Definitely a big conspiracy."

Professor of Gender Studies: "I find that most working-class people don't take what I do very seriously."
Interlocutor (sarcastically): "Oh yeah: has to be a conspiracy."

Male Interior Decorator: "In the last week, I've had three people assume that I'm gay."
Interlocutor (sarcastically): "Riiiight. Gotta be a conspiracy."

And so on. I'm sure readers can offer even better, more pertinent and funnier examples. The point is, we live in a world of in-group prejudices and double standards. Sure, in some cases, prejudices may have some justification. A male interior decorator probably is more likely to be gay than a male auto mechanic. But that's not the result of a conspiracy by gays to take over interior decorating or of interior decorators to date their own sex: it's one of the many contingencies of history that define our attitudes and relationships.

There's nothing inherently absurd about the claim that the people in a profession like journalism have come to be strongly biased to the Left (especially when surveys of political affiliations and voting patterns show that reporters are overwhelmingly more likely to be Democrats). Identifying conservative charges of media bias with a conspiracy theory is only a way for liberals to avoid confronting the facts.

Republican Party, Sect or Church

Civil War among the conservative punditocracy! Much of it turning on the age-old question, sect or church? Say the truth and keep the pure faith among the few, who will be very zealous on its behalf, or be wise as serpents, soft-pedal and compromise, and get the Nicodemites within the Church. I will be very Swarthmorean: You must pursue Both Strategies at Once! The trick is in the execution.

On Buying Campaigns

So long as it's American, money is a legitimate expression of free speech, an expression of interest--in all senses--in the outcome of the vote. Obama's fundraising advantage registers real support from Americans. Let the money roll in: it was good when the Republicans had the money advantage, it is good when the Democrats have the money advantage.

This, by the by, is a corollary of part of my research. Habermas et al take money to distort rational choice; I take money to be a congealed form of prudential choice; Habermasians want to banish the effects of money from the public sphere; I take the public sphere to be formed in good part by the private commitments of money.

But on a personal note: OMIGOD! OBAMA RAISED 150M DOLLARS IN SEPTEMBER! O GOOD LORDY!

October 18th, 1699-1708: Vico's Inaugural Orations

Once, many years ago, I found myself alone and nearly broke in the city of Naples. It sounds romantic now; at the time, not so much. I was hungry and the hotel I could afford (in the seedy area by the main train station) was remarkably bad: the mattress of the little bed in my narrow room was worse than the floor. From sunup to sundown, I wandered the city feeling slightly ill and dazed with the intense heat.

From that brief sojourn in sunny Napoli, a few memories stand out in vivid focus, with an almost hallucinatory clarity. In one of these, I come suddenly upon a large statue in a stone pavilion: a statue of a man I have only heard of, and do not know anything about: Giambattista Vico, who in the late 17th and early 18th centuries held the chair Latin Rhetoric at the University of Naples. I do not remember in any detail the inscription on the base of the statue, but I do remember thinking: I must learn more about this man; he was very special.

But one thing led to another, and years passed before I opened a volume of Vico's writings. In the meantime I read thinkers who were influenced by his writings, like R.G. Collingwood, the 20th century English philosopher. Collingwood too seemed to think that Vico was one of history's most unique and important minds. And when I did, at last, begin to read Vico for myself, he did not disappoint. What Hume was for Kant, Vico was for me. He awakened me from my dogmatic slumbers. But that's a story less interesting than Vico himself.

What's so special about il signor Vico? Simply that he thought tremendously important things that hardly anyone had thought of before. The idea of spiritual progress in human history? Vico. The idea that language evolves through myth and metaphor? Vico. The idea that the poems of Homer represent the synthesis of an aristocratic poetic tradition rather than the inspiration of one man? Vico. The idea that the human mind creates its own truth rather than merely apprehending the reality outside itself? Vico again.

But to state his contributions so flatly is to mischaracterize them. In the twentieth century, once many of Vico's more extraordinary notions had gained wide currency, his reputation revived and flourished after nearly two centuries of obscurity. (Joyce's Finngeans Wake is full of references to Vico.) But in recent years, Vico has suffered the fate of all great thinkers: he has been reduced to a few catchphrases -- verum est factum, corsi e ricorsi -- which utterly fail to do justice to the scope of his genius.

One generally underappreciated aspect of Vico as a thinker is his deep interest in pedagogy and the academy. Vico swam in the great intellectual currents of antiquity and those of his own age. Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism (ancient and modern), Platonism (original and neo-) and Cartesianism all made a profound impact on him: he embraced them all and quarreled with them all. Vico plumbed the educational tradition of the West and synthesized it in his own terms. His ideas about the place of education in human life were passionate and profound. In his magnum opus, La Scienza Nuova he would go so far as to argue that all history was a process by which Providence had educated Man.

But for practical purposes, the best understanding of Vico's ideas of education can be found in his seven inaugural orations at the University of Naples delivered between 1699 and 1708, always on October 18th. The last of these, delivered 300 years ago today, was expanded and published separately in a pamphlet called De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione, "On the Study Methods of Our Time." If you care about education, and if you have not read this work, take my advice and do so at the earliest opportunity. It has those two quintessential Viconian qualities of being astoundingly deep and startlingly ahead of its time. You may not entirely agree with it: I don't (Withywindle would probably agree with more than I do). But it can hardly fail to stimulate and enrich.

I would close this post by quoting from De Studiorum Ratione, but I don't have a copy handy. All the inaugural orations, however, are well worth the short time it takes to read them. So to give the reader a flavor of what Vico has to say, an excerpt (as translated by Pinton and Shippee) from the Third Inaugural Oration (October 18, 1701). It is directed against the proponents of critical theory in literature, almost three hundred years before the era of their ascendancy:

It is these studies [humane letters] that are intended primarily for overcoming the harm brought about by the corrupted free will. Thus the one who misuses these studies would change that which is the sustenance and pleasure of the spirit into a detestable and deadly venom. By his evil will he would infect, as with a contagion, these very studies that are intended, either alone or with other disciplines, to bring about a peace to the spirit and to instruct in the most worthwhile manners of society. But, on the contrary, they will turn out to be a source of anxiety and care.

Nostradamus had nothing on Vico.

What's Wrong with ACORN's Phony Votes?

Gowanus makes the argument (versions of which have been on the Left for a few years now) that phony voter registrations are not a significant threat to the integrity of the electoral process. After all, Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck aren't really going to show up and vote, right? In all likelihood, the phony registrations will get thrown out and Mickey and Daffy won't even make it onto the rolls.

That's all true, but beside the point. Not all phony registrations are easy to catch. Some phony registrations bear perfectly normal-sounding names and perfectly valid addresses. Some are registrations for people who are already registered at a different address. Many such registrations do make it onto the voter rolls. Meanwhile, the voter rolls are already padded with the dear departed -- departed, that is, either for the next life or for other locales where they're also registered to vote. This is how it's possible for Indianapolis to have more registered voters than its total population of people over 18.

But we can catch bad registrations, right? We can purge the rolls of the dead and those who have moved away? In theory, yes. But in practice the resources of the electoral apparatus are limited. (By electoral apparatus, we're talking about ordinary underpaid government employees of average intelligence, sitting at cheap desks in front of outdated computer systems under overly bright fluorescent lights in dingy offices.) And the tens of thousands of phony registrations fed into the system by operations like ACORN make it much harder for the system to keep fake or duplicate voters off the rolls. After weeding out a few Disney characters and NFL starting quarterbacks (and they election officials cannot just roll their eyes and toss the offending registration into the trash -- they have to document the rejection), a worker at the bureau of elections is going to be a lot more inclined to let a possibly-fake-but-hard-to-reject registration slide. Likewise, all that time spent dealing with phony ACORN registrations in the months before a major election is time that can't be spent weeding out voters who are deceased or disqualified felons or who have recently relocated.

Gowanus says he's not talking about a situation where "the party machine registers dead people and then stuffs the ballots after polls close with those names." But ACORN is the party machine. With ACORN out there, it's not necessary to create lots of fake entries on the voter rolls: that sort of thing would be easy to catch and punish someone for. ACORN can provide deniability for crooked election workers. And then once there are lots of voters on the rolls who don't actually vote, it's easier to commit fraud at individual polling stations -- or via mail -- by casting votes in the names of people who haven't voted. Contrary to what one sometimes hears, fake voters do vote. And there's plenty of evidence for people having voted more than once.

Are ACORN's phony registrations going to have much of an impact on election outcomes in the absence of other shenanigans at the polls? Probably not (although remember how few votes decided the 2000 presidential election?) but they certainly make such shenanigans easier to pull off. There's a reason why submitting phony registrations is a crime, one for which ACORN employees have already been indicted in several states.

On Grading Student Midterms

Students have a marvelous power to come up with a vague answer, not at all what I intended, which is true enough to force me to give them credit.

On Not Despairing About McCain

A Democratic-leaning friend who reads this blog says not to despair: "If McCain can capture the toss-ups, he will only need one more state to win, with Virginia looking awfully tempting, and OH and FL possibly trending McCain's way. .... It is not over. Dont give up on your candidate." So, I am not despairing. But the secret confidence I felt through early September that the country couldn't elect Obama is now gone. A once-in-a-generation/once-in-a-century economic crisis makes steep odds even for a fighter pilot. I will be very happy if Obama loses, and moderately pleased if McCain wins, but right now I don't expect it.

On Pontification

FLG writes about professors tendency to pontificate. I would say, from the inside, that it may be less pontification based on research knowledge, and more pontification based on teaching experience. That is, you have to talk about something you know very shakily at best for eighty minutes, or something you knew perfectly the minute before you entered the classroom but not at all the next minute, terrified of silence or being exposed as a fool and a fraud--and at the end of the day, you mostly get away with palming yourself off as an instant expert. After a while, the temptation to think you actually are an instant expert must grow.

Israel and Russia

Why aren't Israel and Russia strategic partners? -- not friends, but moving in strategic sympathy at least as much as Israel does with Turkey (for now) and India? Russian Jews provide a body of intermediaries; both face significant Muslim threats on their borders; both have prickly dealings with the European Union. There are a host of reasons to militate against such a strategic understanding--Russian anti-Semitism, and Russian discounting of the Muslim/Iranian threat high among them--but I think that it is the power of the United States as much as anything that prevents the emergence of such an understanding. That is, the US is exerting influence everywhere from the Baltic States to Ukraine to the Caucasus to Central Asia, and so long as it does, Russia will be hostile to Israel simply because it is a US ally. If the US were to come to some modus vivendi with Russia--say, letting them have their evil way with the Caucasus and Central Asia, reserving the Baltic States and Eastern Europe to the Western sphere, and establishing a co-dominium of influence in Ukraine--I think a Russo-Israeli rapprochement might follow in fairly short order.

Idle speculation, of course.

Joe the Plumber

Byron York called it. Joe the Plumber is discovering that there are consequences for making Obama look bad. First, they tried to smear him as a kook because he once registered with the weird-but-hardly-scary Natural Law Party (unlike Obama, he doesn't have powerful friends to cover up his past associations and affiliations). Then, they discovered he has a small lien for some unpaid taxes, which he probably didn't even know about. Now, it turns out he doesn't have some government paperwork he needs if he's going to be allowed to do his job (and maybe pay off those back taxes).

A nice lesson in the power of Big Government. If you question one aspect of Big Government, Big Government can probably find some ways in which you've already done something wrong. And then they can harass and humiliate you to their foul little hearts' content. Too bad for Joe he didn't play ball with the Left. Then he could have gotten a virtual pass on conspiracy to commit murder, like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, or the FALN members pardoned by Bill Clinton. Maybe he could have escaped a charge of criminal negligence in the death of a young woman, like Ted Kennedy. The list, and the injustice, goes on....

My advice to the Republicans: stay with this guy. Reveal him as the middle-class martyr he's becoming. This is the best chance McCain and company have had to throw a spotlight on the Left's double standards and utter viciousness.

Final Debate

Nothing startling. Actually had some stuff on Ayers, abortion, and the Supreme Court, which has to help McCain. I'm afraid McCain has blown it--he had to win over Obama, not wait for him to lose, and I can't see that he's done that.

Maybe the age issue does matter: I remember McCain as a more fluent speaker, both in ideas and in the simple expression of words. I saw him a few years on TV speak on the torture debate much more fluently than he does now. Heck, he was better against Romney et al as I remember.

Anyway, McCain still ought to win, but I very much doubt now he will, and the responsibility for his defeat will be his as much as anyone's. Although, as someone who endorsed him just before the primary season, obviously I'll stand up for my (small) share of cudgels.

Alienated Elites

David Brooks contends that Republicans have alienated the educated professions by their disdain for education, hence the departure of lawyers, techies, doctors, bankers to the Democrats. He has been reading his Phoebe; but I am not so sure this is the entire story, or even most of it. I recollect that Gross and Simmons study on the politics of academics that I commented on a year ago, and I remember in particular the note that, among academics, "Views of the use of military force and the Mideast situation were the most robust attitudinal predictors of vote choice.” Now, doubtless I shouldn't generalize from academics to the professions at large, but I'm strongly inclined to. Economics does matter, but I think once you're at a certain comfort-level--read, professional--you begin to vote foreign policy and social issues, and then rationalize the economics. The professional classes have become allergic to at least this exercise of American military power, perhaps generically allergic, and I rather think this explains their drift to the Democrats far more than any Republican articulation of dislike of elites. Now, the Republicans articulate this dislike in part because of this trend, and their articulation may intensify the process of alienation--but I think that's relatively trivial.

And why are the professional elites allergic to Iraq, and liberal on social issues? I do think this is where the malign influence of the academy comes into play. They brainwash--sorry, influence--most effectively in these areas, and these areas do ultimately govern political choice at least, I think, for the comfortable classes. It seems a little odd to say so, given how much economics obviously matters as a gut issue for the nation, but I strongly suspect that conservative fortunes do depend significantly on persuading the American professional classes of the necessity of a muscular American foreign policy. A sine qua non.

Nothing in the Dark

I've noticed a lot of folks on blogs are writing Bildungsaufsätze these days, little essays describing their own personal intellectual development. What I often miss in such descriptions -- more because it would interesting to know than because it would be important -- is exactly when and how the authors of these essays first realized that it was possible to use the mind to make sense of the world.

Maybe not everybody remembers the moment; maybe most intelligent people simply grew gracefully into their intelligence and always took it for granted. But maybe not? Maybe lots of people have stories about their earliest memory of consciously using the mind to grapple with the problems posed by sensory data.

I remember the moment vividly. I was very young -- I don't remember how young, exactly -- and I was afraid of the dark. And my father, to quell my childish terrors, said this:

"There's nothing in the dark that's not there in the light."

And, for some reason, that sentence hit home. Of course, I thought, of course there isn't. I might not be able to see anything, but why should I believe there's anything there that wasn't there before? Why would the disappearance of light cause anything else to appear?

Granted, this argument wouldn't be very compelling on a city street in a bad neighborhood or in a jungle populated by nocturnal predators with fangs and claws, but it made a lot of sense to a kid tucked into his own cozy bedroom in a small Midwestern town. And there was an additional realization, too, one that I turned over in my head for days and even years afterward. It wasn't easy for me to formulate to myself, but it had roughly this shape: Sometimes our worst fears are nothing but mistakes, the result of thinking about things the wrong way. This was my first lesson, though not my only one, in the importance of thinking things through.

Of course, I've suffered from a thousand irrational, sometimes overpowering, fears since then. It's not as if I was suddenly a whole new person. But I remember and treasure that moment. Because I had suddenly been given a whole new way of approaching the world.

Colin Powell Flashback

Everyone's taking note of Colin Powell's getting jiggy with Olu Maintain in London (more pictures here). I haven't seen a video, but it could hardly be as embarrassing as Karl Rove's foray into the world of hip hop.

But I was reminded of another Powell performance, at the ASEAN summit in Hanoi in 2001. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a video, which is a pity, because it's one of the strangest things you'll ever see -- a few news clips were played on TV at the time. Here's a rather understated description from the New York Times:

On stage this evening, accompanied by a chorus of what were billed as ''eight unnamed senior officials,'' the secretary [Powell] sang the song ["El Paso"] again. Clad in a blue shirt and a red bandana, he played the role of the cowboy who falls in love with a Mexican girl. Keeping to the song's story line, General Powell the cowboy was challenged in his love by a wild young man who moves in on his girl, called Makiko tonight because she was played by Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka of Japan.

The show was off limits to reporters. But according to a description provided afterward by one of the unnamed senior officials, the secretary, who in real life can be a bit of a ham, did a mean job of the cowboy, wielding a gun and shooting the interloper. The unnamed officials formed a posse that stormed on stage to hunt and shoot him down. As he fell to his knees, Secretary Powell was blessed with a last kiss from the Japanese foreign minister. There was much applause, an official from the chorus said.

Actually, the performance was even weirder than this description implies because the song was rewritten so that Tanaka was playing a Vietnamese girl wearing one of those pointed straw hats. Which, in light of U.S. history in Southeast Asia, and traditional American stereotypes about Asian women (sexually alluring but dangerous, like Felina -- renamed Makiko -- in the song: her eyes, "blacker than night," are "wicked and evil while casting their spell") seemed like an iffy choice. I'm surprised there wasn't more commentary along these lines. But maybe I've just been infected with the racial and sexual obsessions of the academy.

And what I mostly remember about the "El Paso" performance in Hanoi was how much fun everyone seemed to be having with it. (There was no indication, as there unfortunately was when "MC Rove" performed for the White House correspondents, that anyone was the butt of a joke.) There's something encouraging and even exhilarating about the willingness of high officials to descend from their usual olympian milieux milieus and act silly sometimes. To the extent that the rulers of the world can laugh at themselves, there may be more hope for us all.

Somewhere in the Gulf of Aden....

Who knows how much of this is true, but the theory, and the apparent facts, are as fascinating as they come.

Hear, Hear

I'm with Neo-Neocon:

This is about more than this election, although the election is certainly a big part of it. It’s about the way people think, and how they evaluate issues and people. If critical thinking has gone out the window, this country is in deep and perhaps even permanent trouble.

As I've hinted before on this blog, I believe most political problems are fundamentally problems of epistemology and rationality. To some extent, people on Left and Right may just want different things, and this may be true especially of the spiritual cores of each of the two major parties. But for that huge mass of Americans who seem to feel that they share many of the same values, the ability to think critically and choose the best course of action to advance those values becomes vitally important. And, like other traditional "process" aspects of our political system, the open-mindedness and rationality of the American voter are under attack from elements of the Left which see a political advantage either in changing either the rules of the game or in undermining people's ability to play it.

Status Hierarchies

Following up on from a few weeks back, and on Phoebe's various meditations on Palin, I've suddenly realized the blazingly obvious (forgive me, everyone who has realized this before): that the rancor felt by Palin et al toward the educated elites is not toward their education, per se, but toward the perception, significantly corroborated by reality, that education is swiftly becoming the dominant status hierarchy in the country. That is to say: yes, formal education has always been a means toward both status and power, but traditionally it was only one element, usually an inferior one, in a rather complex status hierarchy of noble blood, race, sex, money, warrior courage and brute strength, craft knowledge, business experience, etc. More and more, the way to gain status is to graduate from a good college with good grades. (Not necessarily an A from Harvard; an A minus or a B plus from the University of Michigan also qualifies.) Engineers, lawyers, doctors, journalists, politicians, accountants, MBAs, Wall Street tycoons, military officers--in most walks of life, the frame of mind necessary to get good grades through age 22 is the essential prerequisite; that frame of mind, education, is ever more the status symbol. I was brought up to think of the professoriate, of intellectuals, as "a nobility of the mind"; the phrase only makes sense in an oppositional context, when professors have to argue for their status against actual nobles. Now, when education is the dominant status hierarchy, such a belief is redundant, as professors are part of the meritocratic nobility, full stop.

This, of course, is infuriating to most everyone who does not believe education has such status and/or is unable to compete on those terms--everyone who isn't in the overclass of the meritocracy, everyone who has risen by an alternate status hierarchy, therefore still a majority of the country. The hatred Palin expresses is not of education itself, but toward the increasing dominance education exerts in the status hierarchy, toward the way education reshapes every individual status hierarchy to genuflect toward education. Note, therefore, that athletes have to complete spurious BAs; that General David Petraeus is acclaimed as an intellectual as much as a warrior; the comedian Tina Fey is a U Virginia graduate with a BA in drama (what would Charlie Chaplin think of that BA in drama?), that the politico Earl Warren, untrained in the nuances of constitutional law, was a plausible Supreme Court appointee in the 1950s, but would not be now; and so on. And again: that those with educational status use their standards on everyone else--that Palin is ridiculed not least because she doesn't have educational status.

Now, the irony is that the tribunes of the uneducated, and of the other status hierarchies, also qualify by the educational status hierarchy as well: Bush and Cheney, for example, both have quite significant educational status. But neither seems (genuinely, and as a matter of political calculation) to take particular pride in their achievements on the education hierarchy; both avow much greater pride from their achievements in alternate status hierarchies. McCain and Palin both score somewhat lower in the educational status hierarchy than either Bush or Cheney, and take even greater pride in their achievements in alternate status hierarchies.

The popularity of sports figures, musicians, actors, comedians, etc., can partly be explained by the fact that they succeed by alternate status hierarchies, as so few Americans do. To the extent that this is a reaction to the increasing dominance of the education status hierarchy, this is a healthy development.

Professors are particularly disliked not because they are particularly powerful within the educational status hierarchy as a whole, but because 1) they are the technicians of the machine; and 2) they value, and embody, the values of the education status hierarchy more purely than their more powerful peers.

Now, this is to explain some of the attachment of the country at large toward figures their overclass does not respect. But of course education status is quite powerful--Clinton propelled himself to power through it, (although obviously not just through it,) and Obama may as well. But this dynamic is worth exploring, whoever wins the election.

Athens and America

The democracy of ancient Athens has been much maligned, mostly because nearly all our ancient sources were men skeptical of democracy itself. But Athenian direct democracy did have certain advantages over American representative democracy, which certain events in this election cycle have made especially clear to me.

For one thing, showing up at the regular assemblies that decided the most important questions of state took a certain level of commitment. It's true that in the fifth century B.C. people standing around in the marketplace might be herded into the Pnyx (the assmebly site) by state slaves, and in the fourth century B.C. (when the democracy was either "mature" or "decadent," depending on your perspective) you could get paid for attendance if you were among the first few hundred or thousand to show up. But the fee, although thought excessive by critics, was never princely. And the meetings usually lasted for several hours, if not all day. Participation in assemblies -- and especially regular participation in assemblies -- required some level of dedication, especially for those who lived outside Athens itself. There's even some evidence that late arrivals couldn't get into the Assembly once it had filled up: the plot of Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae (a comedy about runaway socialism) hinges on women dressing as men and occupying the Pnyx before the men can arrive. Real participation in Athenian democracy meant a high level of commitment. In contrast, our system puts the most passionate participant in democracy on a level with the most desultory. All you have to do is vote every couple of years, and we keep trying to find ways to make that easier -- as if there were no advantage to having some barriers to participation to screen out the people who don't care very much.

More importantly, forcing the Athenians to show up at regular assemblies to debate the issues before voting on them meant that all voters were at least minimally informed and exposed to the full range of opinions of the issues. No doubt plenty of the men gathered in the Pnyx on assembly days simply dozed or daydreamed or joked around with their pals, but at least they had to be there while speeches were being given and legislation proposed and amended. They had to at least be present for the debate before they could make their vote count. In the U.S., it's easy to be a totally uninformed voter or -- more commonly -- a voter exposed to only one side of the issues. In Athens, there was no media to filter the debate: just contemplating that single fact makes me a little awed.

I'm not saying that our democracy has no advantages over that of Athens. We let, women vote, for instance. We don't disadvantage certain locales by making it hard for citizens in distant regions to cast ballots (unless you were one of those voters in the armed services whom Gore-Lieberman wanted to disenfranchise in 2004). We have the secret ballot for all elections so citizens can truly vote their conscience -- although apparently sometimes the poll worker marks your ballot for you and then assaults you when you ask to see it, which is a wrinkle in our system I wasn't familiar with.

But, in general, I wish there were some way to compel American voters to be more engaged and informed. I realize we can't test people's commitment and knowledge of the issues -- there's no fair way to do so, at least no one that I can imagine. But we could, for instance, stop printing party affiliations on ballots so that people have to at least know the names of candidates before they walk into the voting booth. We could make it harder to get absentee ballots unless you're demonstrably unable to get to the polls. We could even organize certain elections around town-hall style meetings, with voting for certain candidates taking place only after a debate on the issues.

I haven't mentioned the issue of election fraud. One problem with the secret ballot, despite its overwhelming virtues, is that it makes such fraud easier. The ancient Athenians were masters of political guile, but the public nature of their voting system made it harder to fix the vote count in most cases. With ACORN running wild, registering Mickey Mouse and Jive Turkey and Joe Dead Voter and all of Joe Live Voter's 72 distinct personalities, I think one of the most important tests for our democracy as we go forward is whether we're willing to put a stop to blatant vote fraud. Sadly, given that this has become a partisan issue, I very much doubt whether our democracy is going to pass this test.

An Obama Association I'd Missed

Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop blogging about politics. Also sniffing glue.

How have I not heard about this before? Apparently there's been some right-wing rumor-mongering around the connection between Barack Obama and Kenyan Muslim leader (and inciter of mass murder) Raila Odinga, but even the barest facts seem pretty unsettling.

Snopes.com debunks a viral email that hyperventilates about the relationship between Obama and Odinga -- or, rather, it doesn't quite debunk it. It's especially weak in shooting down the allegation that "friends of Senator BO" gave money to Odinga's campaign. By Snopes' usual standards, this seems to be "unproven" rather than "false." (The document in question could easily be a forgery.) More disturbing to me is that the Snopes web site describes the situation in Kenya in such a way as to understate the seriousness of the allegation that Obama is a strong supporter of Odinga. How do you obscure the fact that nearly all the 1500 dead after the 2007 election were massacred by supporters of Odinga? What possessed the Mikkelsons to make it sound like Odinga's challenge to the election results had serious legitimacy? I've always trusted Snopes, but a little googling now makes me wonder if they, too, are in the tank for Obama. MsUnderestimated made a very persuasive case for this point of view almost a month ago.

In any case, the evidence that Obama campaigned with and/or for Odinga looks pretty unimpeachable. Pamela at Atlas Shurgs has a good roundup, with links to video and everything. Obama certainly looks like he's friendly with Odinga. Was there any reason why he would have to pretend to be? Because it's in the U.S. interest to support violent extremist opponents of governments friendly to America?

Color me queasy. Sure, most of us shake hands with the devil from time to time. Rezko's just a crook with connections and Wright is a rabble-rousing phony. Ayers and Dohrn have actual blood on their hands. But none of these people is as scary as as Raila Odinga. It seems to me that the best case you can make for Obama's relationship to him is that he was really, really irresponsible.

More Unrecorded Songs

I just looked up the original Jingo song--"MacDermott's War Song" (1878)--and there is no recording of the song available that I can find. The music, yes, but not the lyrics. How can I teach my students without essential resources? The song, incidentally:

The "Dogs of War" are loose and the rugged Russian Bear,
All bent on blood and robbery has crawled out of his lair...
It seems a thrashing now and then, will never help to tame...
That brute, and so he's out upon the "same old game"...
The Lion did his best... to find him some excuse...
To crawl back to his den again. All efforts were no use...
He hunger'd for his victim. He's pleased when blood is shed...
But let us hope his crimes may all recoil on his own head...

Chorus:
We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do...
We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!
We've fought the Bear before... and while we're Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople...

The misdeeds of the Turks have been "spouted" through all lands,
But how about the Russians, can they show spotless hands?
They slaughtered well at Khiva, in Siberia icy cold.
How many subjects done to death we'll ne'er perhaps be told.
They butchered the Circassians, man, woman yes and child.
With cruelties their Generals their murderous hours beguiled,
And poor unhappy Poland their cruel yoke must bear,
While prayers for "Freedom and Revenge" go up into the air.

(Chorus)

May he who 'gan the quarrel soon have to bite the dust.
The Turk should be thrice armed for "he hath his quarrel just."
'Tis said that countless thousands should die through cruel war,
But let us hope most fervently ere long it shall be o'er.
Let them be warned: Old England is brave Old England still.
We've proved our might, we've claimed our right, and ever, ever will.
Should we have to draw the sword our way to victory we'll forge,
With the Battle cry of Britons, "Old England and St George!"

(Chorus)

Butterflies, Blogging, and Bowdlerized Body-Parts

Alpheus has found his metier: subjects that begin with B. Fortunately, Barack qualifies.

Only very scattered thoughts:

* I am angry at McCain for his incompetence these last few weeks.

* Krugman gets an economics Nobel? Is this a Swedish conspiracy to aid American dentists? (We conservatives are all grinding our teeth.) Most annoying person ever who deserves a Nobel.

* Speaking of Sweden, I'm reading Michael Roberts' Age of Liberty, about eighteenth-century Sweden, having read his Early Vasas a few years ago. I don't particularly want to teach an entire course on Swedish history, but it would be fun to teach a course on early modern Britain or early modern Europe that provides the Swedish history as an interesting counterpoint to British history. I.e, a slow Reformation directed from the top, a patchy history of constitutionalism and liberty, and, on Sweden's part, conscious meditation of the English example. A way for providing myself a niche market: who, this side of the University of Minnesota, knows anything about Swedish history?

* Finished Alfred Duggan's Three's Company, about Lepidus, the least of the Second Triumvirate, bobbing along after Marc Antony and Octavian. Not as good as Conscience of a King--not as appealing to me anyway. Partly that he's a feckless character (the point of the novel); partly that Duggan is more constrained by history than he was with Conscience, partly it just may not be as well written, and partly that Rome remains more alien to me than dark-age England.

Anatomy of an Obscenity

In an effort to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear of contemporary American politics, how about a little Indo-European linguistics? In particular, I'm interested in the linguistics of the Left's favorite word to describe Sarah Palin. It's a four-letter word that I don't have occasion to use much myself, and it rhymes with the last name of the guy who used to host Candid Camera. If you don't know what this word is, well, maybe you can ask some representative members of the activist Left (CONTENT WARNING!).

Now what's interesting about this particular term is that it's linguistically related to the words for two other body parts, the chin and the knee. In fact, some kind of relationship between chin, knees, and genitals seems to be very deeply-rooted in the Indo-European language.

The kinship is clearer in older IE languages than it is in English. For example, in Latin the word for the chin or jaw is gena, the word for knee is genu, and a whole series of words relating to birth and procreation (including genitalia for genitals) have similar forms. In Greek, chin or jaw is γένυς or γένειον, knee is γόνυ, and again a whole range of words having to do with procreation and lineage (such as γένος for for "family" or "race") have similar forms.

It's not easy to come up with a specific Greek or Latin word meaning "sex organs" which has a form that closely mirrors the forms of the words for "knee" and "chin" in those languages. Latinists should note that cunnus -- which Maureen Dowd may have wanted to call Sarah Palin -- seems to be related neither to the Latin words for chin or knee, nor to the English word so beloved of Palin's opponents (CONTENT WARNING!). and instead seems to derive from an Indo-European word for "crack." The genitals are tricky, linguistically, because they're commonly referred to, in most languages, either by euphemisms (Latin pudenda and Greek αἰδοῖα = "things to be ashamed of"; cf. the hilarious German expression weibliche Scham or "wifely shame" for the female sex organs!) or by obscenities that owe more to people's sense of humor or the risqué than to natural linguistic evolution. But without going deep into the linguistic thickets, it's fairly obvious that the words for the chin, the knee, and the sex organs were once very closely akin (note that word "kin," for people who share descent by birth!) in Indo-European.

Why this odd relationship between three widely separated parts of the body? The most plausible theory, perhaps, is that these are all places where the body is especially angular (the Greek word for angle, γωνία, may be related somehow). But then, what about the elbows? The shoulders? And doesn't the internal angle of the groin seem different from the external angles of the knees and chin? Another theory is that the most primitive Indo-Europeans imagined some sort of line of force running through the body with chakra-like nodes in just these three places. There are other theories, too: one, a variant of the first theory, holds that the chin and knee are alike in being angular and that the word for "knee" was a common euphemism for the genitals. (As in: "Girlfriend, that guy Zok just wouldn't take no for an answer at the campfire last night. I finally had to knee him in the...knee.") I'm sure there are other respectable theories, but as I far as I know they only get odder from there.

In any case, that four-letter word that the victims of PDS keep tossing around has a little more philological interest than its status as one of English's most offensive obscenities might suggest. And Palin is pretty tough: I'm sure she's capable of taking the insults on the chin.

Insects as Metaphor

Drinking my coffee this morning, I watched two little white butterflies dancing in the sunlight beyond my patio. It seems late for butterflies, in my part of the world. They fluttered toward each other, bobbed and circled around one another charmingly for a minute or two, and then parted -- one toward the pines and the other to investigate a mound of spoil left over from the repair of an electrical line. No doubt it seemed like a long and satisfying friendship in the lifespan of butterflies. I wondered: will they be dead soon, either of old age or from the first hard frost? Or is this one of the species that performs the miracle of hibernation, sleeping through the winter to begin life again in the spring? Is there any chance, however remote, that these two will meet and dance again in the warmth and fragrance of another year?

Best Maureen Dowd Column Ever?

The good news is that Maureen Dowd is now having her column translated into a language that most people can't read. The bad news is that seeing the talentless Dowd have fun with Latin is like hearing the biggest jerk in high school announce he has a crush on the same cute, quirky girl you've mooning over for months. It's just a little creepy. And you start to wonder, is there something wrong with me for liking her too?

But no: Latin is an amazing language. Everything sounds better in Latin. Even Dowd's usual bitchiness and mediocrity actually takes on a glamour of cleverness and, I have to admit, occasionally made me smile.

Something Missing?

Okay, I know I just said I didn't find it very satisfying to blog about politics, but this is one of those "vent" situations.

Doesn't it seems like a news story like this is incomplete without the phrases "tasered her 11-year-old nephew" and "threatened to kill her father"?

Oh Lord, A Post About Blogging? What's the World Coming To?

Sometimes I go through periods -- sometimes long periods -- in which I find it hard to blog, because I'm really not sure why I'm doing it, or what blogging is all about.

For most people, I presume, blogging is a means of self-expression. I'm not sure I always find that satisfying. If I really feel the need to express myself, I can write in a journal or open my heart to a friend. Or I can just attend more energetically to other matters until the impulse passes.

For some people, blogging is a way of working out their thoughts, and of getting feedback which will further help them to refine either those thoughts themselves or their expression. I find this a far more congenial reason to post on this blog. I've always grappled with a kind of writer's block, and composing blog posts seems not to be a bad way of forcing myself to push past that blockage. In fact, I think it may be a very good way indeed.

There is then, however, the question of what to blog about. When Withywindle and I started A&J, I think we both had the idea that the major topics would be politics (broadly defined) and academia. Unfortunately, I have little patience with either topic these days. I feel like my thoughts on both of them are pretty well worked out.

In the case of politics, I've spent a lot of time over the years testing my own beliefs, questioning myself, and engaging in sincere debate, and it's been a long time since I've really found myself revising a basic belief. I find that most arguments about politics are dialogues of the deaf -- and I find this especially to be true with liberals, who are largely steeped in a media environment that systematically doesn't confront them with information or ideas that would make them uncomfortable in their beliefs or commitments. A major difference between conservative intellectuals and liberal intellectuals is the extraordinary close-mindedness of the latter. The arguments of liberals, no matter how weak or even absurd, seem to be sufficient to satisfy them. If those arguments are challenged, they tend either to repeat them like a mantra or to keep changing their ground. Not very satisfying to argue with, unless one is looking merely to pump up one's self-esteem. And I actually don't take much pleasure in seeing other people as stupid or close-minded: more often, I feel anger or disgust.

So lately, when I blog about politics, it's usually just to vent. Of course, I've found that I can diminish the need to vent by thinking and reading less about politics. (Not a terrible idea in the midst of an election season in which the manifestly less qualified, less honest, and more ideologically rigid candidate seems more or less destined to win. And even if John McCain were somehow to pull this thing out, I'm by no means convinced that he's the right man to arrest what I see as the decline of the ideals of freedom and charity around the world.)

I've been feeling much the same way about academic institutions and the academic career. It is was it is, my ideas about it are what they are, and neither are likely to change very much. I may stay in academia, I may not, but in either case I don't find that there's much for me to reflect on most of them time. At this stage in my career -- if it is to be a career -- action is much more important than reflection in any case.

So what do I think about? Mostly subjects that seem unlikely to interest the majority of people who are likely to read this blog. I think about the subjects of my research; I think a great deal about epistemology, heuristics and biases, theories of knowledge, and the ends of education. Not topics calculated to heat most folks' blood. Actually, I tend to think my posts along these lines (things like this and this) probably make people's eyes glaze over.

And yet, if I'm going to post regularly, it make make sense for my posts to have more of this character, since at least I can readily muster the enthusiasm to compose them. Maybe the trick is for me to get better at relating the technical questions with which I increasingly feel myself preoccupied to larger, more widely-shared concerns.

Miscellaneous

* I think I am becoming an eccentric professor. I pace back and forth in front of the class - I have flat feet, so have trouble standing still, and don't think sitting down is quite proper in a class. I am growing deafer, so I tilt my ears to the students when they speak, and look away--and stretch out my hand, palm upward, to motion them to speak louder when I can't hear them. I don't meet students' eyes for long--so few are interested, I'm afraid I'll gaze desperately into the eyes of those who do look up at me. I'm particularly unlikely to look female students in the eye, for fear of giving some sort of wrong message. (I also don't look black students in the eye when discussing slavery.) My vocabulary is ornate; my voice, I fear, less than prepossessing. I am an addict of Mountain Dew and Starbucks frappucinos, regularly bringing them to class. My clothes wrinkle and rumple the second I put them on--and Goldberry says I don't match colors nearly as well as I should.

* It seems to me the United States has just created a sovereign wealth fund to the tune of $700 billion, with an odd predilection toward investment in junk mortgages. And now I wonder--where precisely did Russia, Abu Dhabi, etc., invest their sovereign wealth funds? Did they also buy bad mortgages? Have all the petrodollars been flushed down the American real estate market--have we taken them for suckers? Or were they more sensible in their investments. China, at any rate, looks like it made a good call by investing so heavily in T-bills.

* I'm perfectly willing to assign large shares of culpability for the economic crisis to the Democrats. I'm perfectly willing to say that Democratic policy will be far worse than Republican policy from here on in. But it is fair to say that basic responsibility does remain with the Republicans and Pres. Bush. Did the Democrats veto Republican attempts at reform? Sure--but the Republicans had their priorities, including tax cuts and Iraq, and they chose not to prioritize reform of Freddie and Fannie and Fooie and Fudgie. And if the executive branch is far from all-powerful as a steward of the economy, neither is it powerless. The voter who knows nothing about economics save that things look very bad is perfectly justified in voting against the Republicans for that reason alone. This may be unjust, this may be mistaken, but this is what voters with limited information are supposed to do: turf out the old, bring in the new, hope for the best. The Democrats deserve to lose for all sorts of reasons, not least national security, but so far as the economy is concerned, I can't argue very hard against anyone who says the Republicans don't deserve to win.

* Shirebourn is cuter than ever, and now has five teeth. He knows how to use them too. Ouch! My poor thumb.

* Heading off for a few days.

New Republic Follies

The October 22 issue of The New Republic has a number of things about it that irk me, as they would irk all right-minded, decent people who don't wish to be condemned for vices that would make Dan Savage blanch, and make me take that fine magazine as less than an oracle of wisdom. To wit:

* Jonathan Cohn's "Health of the State" urges Obama to go ahead with the spending binge, for the good of the nation. He says, by way of saying it's safe to binge, "Today, debt relative to gross domestic product is just 37 percent; in 1993, it was 50 percent." It would have been nice if he could have taken a moment to notice that this figure casually deflates all the liberal hysterics about how The Bush Debt Is Just Awful And Will Ruin The Nation By Tuesday. Cohn ends the article by saying "Back in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt ... presided over one of the most famous federal spending binges in history. That turned out well, both for the party and the nation. There's no reason it can't happen again." I can't deny it was good for the Democrats, but for the nation? No serious historian calls the New Deal a rousing success; at best it prevented economic collapse; at worse it prolonged our nation's misery; certainly it was World War II, not the New Deal, that returned us to prosperity. The idea that this insert gross expletive is a representative opinion-maker of the left is a terrifying grotesquerie.

* Nate Silver's map of Hispanic populations by state shades Colorado in the 20%+ category, although the number given is 19.7%. A small point, but the slipshodness annoys me.

* John Judis in "Death Defying" detachedly explicates the American fondness for heroes as if it were a strange puberty ritual of an Amazonian tribe.

* Noam Scheiber's "Barracuda" is a polite hit-piece on Sarah Palin. He rather likes all of Palin's enemies; thinks her dislike of various elites says something is wrong with her; dismisses the times she is correct to think them corrupt as being stopped-watch correctness; concedes the arrogance of many of her enemies without pondering whether they might have been worse than arrogant, or whether arrogance might not be a very severe character flaw; and compares her to Nixon without contemplating the signal service rendered to the Republic by Nixon's suspicion of that man of the elite, Alger Hiss. But let us reduce it to one word: he refers to "right wing evangelicals" as "conservative hordes." The word tells you everything you need to know about Scheiber's world view, and how little you need to pay attention to him.

Vocabulary Question

A student came up to me the other day, enquiring about ways to increase his vocabulary. He says he already reads books, watches good TV shows, with this in mind. Does anyone have practical suggestions? My first thought was to find out what you need to do to become a copy-editor, and do likewise. (Grammar and vocabulary combined.)

Instant Debate Reaction

Generally another wash. I think Obama shouldn't defend his record so much; it makes him sound defensive and whiny. Failing to say directly that he wouldn't prevent a second Holocaust in Israel probably didn't help. Obama answered the questions more directly; McCain made sure to make his pitches, no matter what. I continue to think that every time Obama says Pahk-ee-stahn, he loses votes.

On Associations

It's not just Ayers, of course, but all associations. We are all some degrees of separation from someone noxious, and politics consists in good measure how to weigh the importance of those respective degrees of separation. Al Sharpton, uncondemned, as I've said on occasion, is more than enough to discredit the entire Democratic party--never mind Ayers. Various modern Americans want to remove Jefferson or Washington from the names of schools or streets, because they once held slaves. Different condemnations condemn those Americans who failed to condemn or fight against slavery, even when they didn't own slaves themselves. Other condemnations focus on those who have profited from American slavery--all Americans, by now, black and white, and yellow and red too. I often think that our grandchildren will wonder how we shook the hands of pro-choicers, and will have little patience for our pleas that "everybody did it ... it was the temper of the times."

But the left is particularly subject to these problems of associations. There was and is more anti-Americanism on the left--more Communists, more Marxists, more radicals of the see-no-evil in furriners and see-no-good in America type; and if relatively few are Ayerses themselves, the left generally has fewer degrees of separation toward those who hate America, and toward those who have acted violently against America. (All those mainline church leaders sitting down to dinner with Ahmedinejad, say.) No wonder they are so violent to deny there is any problem with Obama and Ayers! Obama is quite ordinary in the left--a handshake or two away from terrorists, and no compunction about it, because so are all his peers.

Note that this is particularly a problem in academia, where you cannot exist without being on civil terms with at least some anti-American radicals--if you try to shun them, you will be shunned yourself by the vast majority of academics, whose sympathies are more for the radicals. This problem is even worse in the European academy, where Marxism had even deeper roots, and anti-Semitism is flourishing now--but it's bad enough in America. And note that I am a would-be academic: I cannot succeed in my chosen profession without compromising myself morally, shaking hands with some Ayers or another along the line. (I don't think I've actually shaken hands with an Ayers yet, but I've certainly shaken hands with those who would shake hands with Ayers, proudly.) Simply being an academic ought to disqualify me from the presidency, no matter what my political inclinations.

Gissing and Duggan

George Gissing, The Odd Women, which I read because it was recommended by Orwell. A good novel--impoverished gentlewomen in 1880s London; early feminists; romantic clash of personalities; lives filled with depression and despair. Something like Henry James (especially The Bostonians), something like Thomas Hardy, where the wheels of fate grind everyone down, but much more zippy and lucid than either. I had never heard of Gissing before I read about him in Orwell--I have heard of Bennett and Galsworthy, though I haven't read a word of them. Assuming my ignorance typical, I'd say he's unfairly forgotten--but I'd also grant he's not as good as Hardy or James. So I wouldn't say you should read him first of the Victorian novelists, but he ought to be somewhere on the list.

Also, at the recommendation of John Derbyshire, who mentioned him in a recent article, I read the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, Conscience of a King. About Cerdic the Saxon, founder of Wessex ca. 500 AD; a fast-paced, sardonic narrative; little dialogue; our narrator Cerdic open-eyed about his unheroic desire for power (he's a slightly braver version of Flashman in some sense); an anti-Arthur, a Roman renegade gone over to the Saxons, clawing Britain apart successfully rather than failing romantically to save it. Enjoyable.

Antigone in Afghanistan

As a classicist, I find this vignette from Afghanistan quite interesting. And every other classicist who reads it will immediately know why.

Here's Antigone, in Sophocles' play of the same name (translated by the eminent Sophoclean Richard Jebb)

Never, had I been a mother of children, or if a husband had been mouldering in death, would I have taken this task upon me in the city's despite. What law, ye ask, is my warrant for that word? The husband lost, another might have been found, and child from another, to replace the first-born: but, father and mother hidden with Hades, no brother's life could ever bloom for me again. Such was the law whereby I held thee first in honour.

There's also a very similar sentiment expressed in Book 3 of Herodotus's Histories where the wife of Intaphrenes actually chooses to save her brother's life instead of her husband's, and for the same reason. (Here's a link to a translation for the curious.)

There's been some debate about how authentic the sentiments expressed by these women are (and also about whether Sophocles influenced Herodotus or vice-versa). I'm not quite sure how to think about the inversion of gender in David Frum's Afghan anecdote, but apparently in some primitive societies very similar precepts do exist.

On Ayers

Just to clarify why Ayers matters. One question is what Ayers reveals to us about Obama's policies. I.e., lacking a long record, (or even a short one,) our knowledge of how Obama will govern is limited, and can best be inferred from his choice of political associates. (David made this point in comments, I believe.) Related to this is the question of how Obama reacts to other people's policies--not just whether Obama will govern like a Friend of Ayers, but what he will do in response to the various Ayerses of the world--our many enemies besotted with evil and hatred of America. Ayers provides disquieting omens on this front as well.

Separate, however, is the moral-political question--the lack of moral compass revealed by Obama's willingness to associate himself with an unrepentant terrorist. (Substitute "death-squadder" or "Nazi war criminal" for "Weatherman" to see how the thought-experiment works out. Consider if Reagan visiting Bitburg had any political weight as a matter of policies, or simply of moral-politics.) Set aside the political implications of a politician's moral compass: when we vote for a politician, we provide an endorsement of that president's character; when we accept the election of an opposing party's politician, we provide a yet more minimal endorsement. We need to know about Ayers, because we will take upon ourselves in significant measure the odium accruing to Obama should we vote for him, or even accept him as legitimate president of the United States. The extent of that odium ought to be properly considered by the public--they must consider whether Obama's actions are merely disgusting, or outright disgraceful. (The latter is obviously the case for conservatives; liberals seem unwilling even to admit the former; independents ought to be able to consider the case at hand.) Let us at least go into this open-eyed--lest we wake up and find we have elected, in minor key, our own Kurt Waldheim to the presidency, and that the United States' moral character, and our moral character as American citizens, as human beings, has been permanently stained by our votes.

P. S. Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three has the following bit of dialogue, or something like:

American: What did you do in Germany during the War?

German: I was in the underground.

American: That's wonderful!

German: Yes, right here in the Berlin Underground all this time, a conductor for the subway. I had no idea what was happening above ground. When I came to the surface after the war, I was shocked, horrified!

"What Kind of People are These?"

While Withywindle is being positive, talking about what he likes, I'm going to continue kvetching about the Left. I have no idea if we have any really liberal readers of this blog but, if so, maybe this will help them understand why conservatives are so fed up.

The Contentions blog at the on-line version of Commentary used to be a wonderful place. The posts, by a variety of smart folks, were always interesting and the discussion in the comments sections of the posts generally took place at an exceptionally high level. The blog was just starting to get noticed by a wider readership (I was checking it more regularly and enjoying it more when I checked it) when the thing happened that always at popular conservative blogs of an intellectual bent.

The left-wing trolls moved in.

There are only a handful of them, but they love to post. Sometimes one of them will post 3-4 times in a row. Based on the frequency of postings and the rapidity of their responses to new posts, these folks must spend an awful lot of their day checking and posting to Contentions. More time, I would estimate, than I spend checking on Athens & Jerusalem.

And what do they post? Nasty, bratty little attacks for the most part. They like to call McCain "McJerk" and imply that he's a doddering brain-dead racist ass. Of course the Republicans are the "Repugs" and they're all disgusting people in every imaginable way, don't you know. Here's a sample of their recent work -- by no means the most annoying stuff but fairly illustrative. You can see how the conservative readers have also gotten drawn into a cheap little shouting match -- not to their credit. (I admit that someone named Alpheus once posted a rather childish retort to one of the trolls.)

I keep coming back to the same question I've asked before on this blog. What kind of people are these? What kind of person decides that the mere existence of a high-level conversation (and the liberal trolls seem disproportionately to target high-level conversations) on the other side of the political divide cannot be targeted. I simply cannot imagine spending a large chunk of my life trying to disrupt and antagonize people on somebody else's blog, no matter how much I disagreed with them.

Once again, one of my big problems with the Left is that they seem willing to carry their politics so much further than folks on the Right. I know there are exceptions, of course. There are many, many liberals who are very fine human beings indeed -- and I count some of them among my friends. There are also many conservatives who are loathsome people, and no doubt plenty of conservatives out there who go in for the trolling racket themselves. But I do think there's a difference in proportions: I do think this phenomenon of trollishness is considerably more common among folks of one political persuasion.

But maybe an even better question than "what kind of people are these?" is "how long before Podhoretz & Co. start moderating the comments"? I really hope they're not willing to see the quantity of comments fall drastically just so long as their quantity keeps increasing.

Things Withywindle Likes, Part IV: Academic Technology

The various technological changes available for teaching and research, even in the humanities, are mind boggling. Now, I am not a technophile. I don't take advantage of the ability to use images in the classroom, although computerized audiovisual technology now makes this remarkably easy. I do play songs in the classroom--smart classrooms are one way to do this, bringing in a laptop another, and IPod-speaker combo and a class playlist perhaps the easiest.

But more mundanely ... cheap photocopying machines of course make handouts easy--I remember they were still using mimeograph machines in my high school, purple ink and all. Photocopy machines give you the ability to tailor a course-pack of readings for each class--and now that history departments have begun to acquire machines that automatically scan in a document and e-mail it to your home account, you can now set up the readings in electronic form, usually on college systems with access limited to the students, so you can get around copyright restrictions. I also use PDFPen to rearrange sheets in my readings for new files. Once in PDF form, you can re-use the readings for any class, rejigger the order, etc., unbelievably easily. And even without PDFs, copy shops can now print out readings for you remarkably easily--either paying the royalties themselves or (I suspect) not bothering, but taking the legal liability for themselves. Ah, the plausible deniability that comes from commercial exchange. And just being able to keep your teaching notes as computer files improves flexibility, ease of access, etc.--heck, allows you to save space at home, if you don't mind spending for more paper and ink to print them out again. E-mail allows for easier communication with students, allows them to turn in late papers more quickly, (a mixed blessing,) allows for continued discussion of an interesting topic. You can arrange matters with the administration more easily--say, providing a room and an exam copy for an ADD student who needs to take an exam in privacy. Forsooth, you can get paid by direct electronic deposit, which soothes the serves of the teacher.

As for research--just start with the enormous amount of digitized material. My dissertation/first monograph could not have been done without access to Early English Books Online. JSTOR, and other databases, also allow you to become acquainted with an extraordinary scope of the secondary literature fairly easily--and to store it without cost of money or space. Add to this the mass of microfilmed material, and your resources are enormous. Then the spread of digitized library catalogs allows you to find out what actually exists before you make your research trip--and if you're lucky as regards archival policy, you can take digital photos of manuscripts, thus maximizing your use of research time. Research grants make it possible for the American scholar to go abroad fairly painlessly--not true before the 1960s, really, maybe ceasing to be true if the economy continues to tank. Interlibrary Loan, tied with electronic library catalogs, allows you to use the collected libraries of North America from any university location--and you can even get British history dissertations from across the Atlantic, if you're willing to wait a month or two. Editing and collaboration become exponentially easier. Back-and-forth with university press editors is speeded up; so too the back and forth with journal editors. I'm sure it seems poky to the Ubergeeks in Silicon Valley, but it's an extraordinary technological revolution. And now ScholarGoogle is initiating a new technological revolution in the humanities ... ah, one day the Library of Congress will be entirely digitized and made scan-searchable, and then we'll have fun!

The proof is in the pudding, I suppose. All I can say is that my own research would be either much more difficult to do, or inconceivable, without the aid of these technological revolutions. I won't say it's better history, but it's different history--or history I couldn't have done before I was (much more) aged in years. And deeply satisfying history--what I've gotten in print, I'm very happy is out there, and I even think is a contribution to the field. So, yes, speaking as a professional, I am very fond of this Brave New World.

Speaking as Withywindle, I get a little distracted blogging and reading the blogosphere.

Oral Syntax

After watching the debate last night (well, most of it) I've been thinking about what it means for a person to speak in ungrammatical sentences.

The usual rap against folks like Bush or Palin who have a tendency to change sentences in midcourse is that sloppy speech is a sign of sloppy or incoherent thinking. And I'm sure that, sometimes, this is true. Certainly it's true in extreme cases: the disconnected babbling of schizophrenics reflects their mental impairment.

But -- replaying some of Palin's ungrammatical constructions -- I was struck once again by how often ungrammatical speech seems, upon close analysis, comprehensible as a product of the speaker's thinking more than one coherent thought at once or deciding to modify his or her emphasis or form of expression in midstream.

Is that a bad thing? It's certainly annoying to the listener. But I'm much less sure that there's anything inherently wrong with the underlying mental process, assuming it doesn't result from distraction, anxiety, or an inability to focus. If someone is thinking both about the content of his presentation to the sales reps and about how mad he is that the other guy got that big promotion and about how cute Mindy over there looks in that silk blouse, then of course that's bad.

But if someone is thinking both about the reasons we need a change in strategy in Afghanistan, and about the difference between those reasons and the reasons given by members of the opposing party, and about what the failure of our old strategy says about the kind of new strategy we should pursue, and about how to communicate all this most effectively, then to what extent can the person be accused of sloppy thinking? Or, if someone changes their idea about what they need to say while they're saying it, isn't that in some way a good thing, maybe even an indicator of ongoing reflection and self-critique?

It's easy to speak clearly and forcefully if you don't think too hard about what you say. Biden is a great example of this: he plows forward, rarely seeming to turn on much of an internal filter. Over the course of his career, this has led to not a few gaffes, and even in the debate last night, when he was far more disciplined that usual, he accumulated a fairly substantial list of factual errors ranging from the "uh...that's an odd way of putting it" kind to the more brightly-colored "that just ain't so" variety. It's fairly obvious that Biden is not a guy who asks himself "do I really know what I'm talking about?" or "am I sure I want to say this?" At least he's not a person who asks himself these questions while he's speaking.

So is there anything wrong with the fact that Sarah Palin's speaking style in the debate sometimes seemed to indicate that her CPU was trying to handle too many processes at once? Is it an indication of the limited power of the processor, which is one explanation frequently voiced by Palin's opponents? Does it result from an inadequate cache, the result of her relative inexperience debating some of these issues? Or is it because she just tends to think at the limit of her ability to think -- a phenomenon widely noted among, for example, hard-to-follow college professors?

There is another possibility, too, which may help explain why Republican politicians often seem more inarticulate than their counterparts in the other party. Due to media bias (whose significance has never been more obvious than in this election campaign) it may be that Republicans have to spend more time thinking about how they say what they say, watching for dangerous slips or phrases that could be taken out of context and misconstrued. I'd actually be a little surprised if this weren't part of the explanation for the relatively tangled syntax of someone like Palin, who knows that much of the media is going to be parsing every sentence, looking for something that can be used against her.

Vice-Presidential Debate: Premature Reaction

After the cut-and-thrust of the presidential candidates' debate last week, this format leaves me cold. I think I'm going to check out now (about twenty minutes before it's over) and say that I think Biden has won. He's said some foolish things, and some false things, but nothing so false or foolish that the Obama-Biden campaign and their allies in the media won't be able to cover for it. Also, Biden has generally looked composed: not the usual shoot-from-the-hip loudmouth.

Palin, unfortunately (from my point of view) simply hasn't come off as vice-presidential. Her tortured syntax (do I owe an apology to Kitty Burns Florey?) and breathy, overrapid speaking style are coming off pretty poorly.

Palin has also missed some opportunities to undercut Biden's points -- she's not being nearly as aggressive as she needs to be -- and she's not using the debate format to her advantage to the extent that Biden is. She needed to call him out on, for example, the allegation that McCain has refused to meet with the Prime Minister of Spain even though it was on to a new question. She needed to punch back harder when Biden challenged McCain's positions on the economy and Afghanistan. To a certain extent, Ifill has seemed to be allowing Biden responses to challenges that she hasn't allowed to Sarah Palin, but (unless I missed it) Palin has also never broken in with "Can I respond to that?" She ought to have done so: it would have made her look eager to engage.

I think to be successful, Biden needed not to be an oaf tonight. He's achieved that (although I guess things could change in the next ten minutes). But Palin needed to be sharper and more exciting than we're seeing her be. She needed to be the Sarah-cuda, and instead we're looking at an Alaskan salmon fighting her way up a waterfall.

A great pity, from my point of view. I'm just hoping America is seeing this thing differently.

The Gaffe I'd Like to See

Gwen Ifill, who recently broke her ankle, arrived in St. Louis in a wheelchair today to moderate tonight's vice-presidential debate.

What are the chances that Biden will ask her to "stand up"?

Diagram This!

I'm so tired of the liberal media and their cheap shots at Sarah Palin.

I know it's pointless to pick out one specimen from the writhing mass for the sake of revealing its hideous deformities, but...well, I guess I just need to vent after reading this piece of half-wittedness on Slate by some hack named Kitty Burns Florey. (Those who don't like the bitchy version of Alpheus -- admittedly not his best side -- may want to tune out now.)

See...some of Sarah Palin's sentences, as spoken in interviews, prove tricky to diagram, and Kitty Burns Florey knows how to diagram sentences. I suspect it's the only thing Ms. Florey is actually qualified to do (that and to give a sloppy blow job to some desperate editor at Slate).

Oh wait, my mistake: she's actually a published author. Of a book on diagramming sentences. Well, gee. I guess we don't have to feel like David Foster Wallace's death has left a void in the American literary scene, after all.

Anyway, I'm no expert on diagramming sentences. But I've picked up one or two things about prose in my years as a classicist, and I'd like to offer Ms. Florey some free insights.

Insight the First: See, Kitty -- May I call you Kitty? (It seems more appropriate than anything which signals even token respect.) -- when people speak or write, they don't always follow the formal rules of grammar. Often words are unspoken but understood. Sometimes a sentence will break off before it's technically complete, and a new one will begin. The ancient Greeks, who often wrote ungrammatical sentences and didn't tolerate vermin who gave them a hard time about it, had a word for this phenomenon: they called it anacolouthon. Can you say that, Kitty Burns Florey? An-a-col-ou-thon. It was generally considered by those same benighted ancients to be a typical feature of spoken language.

Yes, I know it makes sentences hard to diagram, and of course that means the person who spoke or wrote the sentence had the IQ of table salt. So perhaps, Kitty, you should run along and diagram a sentence from Herodotus (may I suggest the proem?) or Thucydides (may I suggest anything from Book VIII?) so you can expose them as the intellectual lightweights they really were. That and a blow job might get you an article in Slate.

No, wait! I didn't mean it! Don't run along yet! I have another insight!

Insight the Second: Another thing I've learned as a classicist is that sometimes, in order to make sense of a difficult text, one may have to ask whether all the words that are written there really belong. It might be that one of the words somehow got replaced by some other word somewhere along the line, and that if the originally intended word can be restored, everything will fall into place. For example, you really had trouble with this sentence from Sarah Palin:

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, families we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

Hm...I agree. It's a little rough. And your diagram doesn't help matters. But...wait: what if try this:

I know that John McCain will do that and I, as his vice president, if we are blessed with that vote of the American people and are elected to serve and are sworn in on January 20, that will be our top priority is to defend the American people.

Wow: that works nicely doesn't it? Still a little an-a-col-ou-thon toward the end but not really so bad. And it's sure a lot faster than drawing a lengthy diagram. Now, I don't know whether Palin misspoke or someone at ABC screwed up, and I'm not going to search for the video. Because it's perfectly obvious what was intended here. And what was intended makes perfect sense.

Okay, Kitty...I know. I'm almost done. I know a busy woman like you has lots of sentences to diagram if she's going to pay for the psychiatric help she so desperately needs put food on the table. I only have one insight left, but it's the most important of the three:

Insight the Third:

Get \ life

     \a \freakin'

Things Withywindle Likes, Part III: National Review Online II

The remaining posters all have their virtues. I like Jim Geraghty and Byron York as political reporters. Jonah Goldberg is often sensible, and I think a reasonable political philosopher manque when he's not disquisiting on the nature of Liberal Fascism. (Which is too much of the time.) But what I most enjoy about the National Review Online is the effect of the ensemble--the different opinions and characters bouncing off each other, building up together a composite portrait of a pluralistic (if not infinitely diverse) conservatism, broad in policy and thought, willing to disagree internally with respect. I don't think any other group blog I've looked at has quite that range of thought. (Mind you, they're all conservatives--but a site gets brand recognition and popularity by some essential uniformity, as Jacob Levy pointed out recently on his blog, while explaining the failure of the Open University blog over at the New Republic.) Among the conservative blogs, they're certainly more varied than the Weekly Standard, Commentary, or the American Spectator, much less the American Conservative. I very much enjoy their wide-ranging thought.

A note on what they don't have: evangelical Protestantism. The National Review is essentially secular in its argumentation--they argue in favor of religion, but generally not from theological grounding. There is, unsurprisingly, a Catholic tone to the site--and occasional, more minor Jewish and Protestant tones--but the tone is not the core of their arguments. They therefore don't represent the half of American conservatism which is unabashedly religious, unabashedly Protestant--the evangelical heart of Republicanism and conservatism. I'm not even sure they have an evangelical Protestant among their writers. Their institutional lack of sympathy for Mike Huckabee during the primary season was symptomatic. So for all their breadth of thought, for all their much-vaunted fusionism, they provide an incomplete portrait of American conservatism. I say this not as a critique, but as a characterization.

Bloomberg, Mayor for Life

Bloomberg wants to get rid of term limits so as to get a third term for Mayor--getting the City Council to suspend the relevant law. Just like Giuliani, he wants to defy the will of the people, repeatedly expressed by voting majorities. What is it about the job of New York mayor that makes people want to stick around forever? So: if Bloomberg succeeds, I presumably will vote for the Democratic opposition, assuming the candidate isn't a completely incompetent moonbat. Which I suppose is a fifty-fifty chance. I imagine I'm hoping for Rep. Anthony Wiener to get the nomination--he seems the best of the lot. But, heck, I voted for Mark Green in 2001--I'd vote for him again.

Unappreciated Line

In class yesterday, I asked the students "How do you solve a problem like Medea?" There was no reaction. I sighed inside, and moved on.