Humanities and Sciences

There's an interesting discussion over in the comments at Phoebe's on the comparative skills of humanities majors and science majors. I would generally associate myself with Andrew Stevens' comments. He provides statistics about the relative skills of people in different majors; the one thing that really surprises me is how well philosophy majors do. Yes, I can see that the ability to analyze abstractions does you well - but I always had this stereotype in my head that philosophy was a refuge for turtlenecked dilletantes who babbled fluffily. Knowing few if any philosophy majors, now that I think of it. Assuming I'm not alone in this stereotype, I wonder how it comes that the stereotype wanders so much from the reality - when by contrast, my stereotype that education majors are dimbulbs seems to be born out by the statistical evidence. Does philosophy have effective filter courses to get rid of the stumblebums? How did that happen? - I don't think the inner content of philosophy makes it more high powered than, say, sociology, but philosophy majors do much better than sociology majors. Does the dominance of analytical philosophy in the US have something to do with this?

I also wonder what the international comparisons are. Science majors do better in Andrew's statistics than humanities majors - but would this be true in Japan, Britain, Germany? Would this have been true of Britain in 1900? - when the humanities had far higher prestige, and presumably attracted brighter people, ceteris paribus. I'm wary of using modern America as some sort of default for humanity, and I want cross-cultural, historical comparisons.

In terms of general intelligence, g, I wonder if one could simply put it that "language acquisition" is the best predictor - where mathematics is defined as a particularly rigorous sort of language for these purposes. The collapse of the humanities is therefore a collapse of the demand for rigorous language acquisition - and the criticism of America as a monoglot country gains purchase, not because we can't communicate with foreigners, but because, after learning English properly, there's no better training for the mind than learning a foreign language, whether Latin, Fortran, or transfinite matrices.

On Universalizing History

Some philosophers of history endorse the idea that we seek a universal history - both the history we make and the history we record - seeking ever larger historical units, as we progress toward utopia, seeking ever larger comprehension of the past. (National history is either a stepping stone toward universal history or an impedance to the progression toward universal history, depending on context and on the philosopher's mood.) Other philosophers note this tendency more critically, seeing the preference for the universal as arbitrary - indeed, as an inheritance of Christian anti-Jewish polemic, where Christianity = universal history, Judaism = particular history. Yet others speak of history as something each individual makes for himself, where this individualism is in constant (perhaps productive) tension with the universalizing impulse.

I'd add to this framework the idea that the debate between advocates of popular history and scholarly history can be seen as a debate as to which sort of history best forwards universal history. The phrase "of general interest" is a variant of "larger audience, tending toward universal"; the ability to communicate to a universal audience is taken as an attribute of universal(izing) history. Against that, scholarly history argues that the conversation of scholars, living and dead, is a larger and more comprehensive view of the truth; that the universal(izing) community of writers and researchers is the more significant attribute of universality. Some sort of dialectical synthesis - a constant back and forth between scholarly community and general audience - would be the middle ground in this debate.

The disdain historians feel toward genealogists I think also is the disdain of universalizing historians towards what is avowedly private history, not intended to be of general interest. But if one is skeptical of the universalizing impulse, committed to plural histories and fused horizons rather than to monist consensus, than genealogy, any history of narrow focus, without aspiration toward universalizing transcendence, should be taken as of equal historical value. The universal is as valuable as a handmaiden for the particular as the particular is valuable as a handmaiden for the universal.

On Prettifying History

Many years ago, Gowanus convinced a gullible freshman that there were no such things as proteins; that they were a simplifying lie meant as placeholders for younger biology students, until they learned the complicated truth in upper-level college courses. Said freshman was crushed when Gowanus revealed the awful truth; that he has a great poker face when he lies.

I've been reading up on medieval history, as part of my new quest to actually know something about the Development of Europe before 1500. It turns out (some modern historians argue) that this Feudal Revolution from 900 to 1100 is far more unpleasant than I had thought. The way I learned it -- the way it's taught in the textbook I use - is that there was a breakdown of order after the collapse of the Carolingian empire, not least because of the invasions of the Vikings, Muslims, and Magyars, and that the feudal system - local knights, local castles, fiefs and vassals - emerged to compensate for the breakdown of order; that the European peasantry contracted themselves into serfdom to the knightly class so as to get some minimal level of protection from the knights. But it seems this is wrong: the external invasions were relatively unimportant; the "breakdown of order" was the result of the new knightly class deliberately wrecking what state order was left and forcing the peasantry into serfdom by the naked exercise of violence. The castles that mark the spread of the new system actually start in the inland highlands of France, Germany, and Italy, as far as you can get from the external invaders, and spread out from there. The thugs, the terrorists, won; they conquered the European heartland, and their descendants went out to conquer the world.

There is a certain amount of lefty slant in the textbook I use - not so bad; it's pretty solid - but though you can get this story from the books they include in their "Further Reading" recommendations, it doesn't appear in the text itself. Perhaps it's hard to teach this narrative, but I think it's too depressing even for people critical of Europe to include in their history. In some ways, to talk of Racism, Nationalism, Religious Hatred, is still euphemizing - somehow ennobling violence by giving it a cause. This is just - to repeat a phrase - the naked exercise of violence. I suppose this narrative wouldn't surprise a Marxist, or even Tom Paine. And I don't want to teach it either - and I'm as pro-violence a history professor as you're likely to find this side of Imperial Japan. I love Europe, and I don't want to think of it born this way. I wonder if it will turn students off from being history majors, or taking another history class.

I want to read another book that tells me that the traditional interpretation of those centuries was correct after all.

More on Soros

1) Why did I bristle at Alpheus' post? Because the language (not Alpheus' intention, I am sure) seemed to me to fall into that horrendously wide zone of "let's use the Holocaust as some sort of blunt weapon in our conversation." Soros is a Holocaust survivor, therefore he ought to be nice - where nice somehow picks up the meaning of "not follow his interests as he sees fit," and not nice means "immoral." I think the same sort of argument is used about Israel writ large - Israel is the Holocaust Survivor nation, therefore it must be nice and not pursue its interests (=survival), and if ever it's Not Nice, the usual ghouls around the world say "How Not Nice of You! How immoral of you, precisely because you Survived the Holocaust!" A nasty sort of blunt weapon; and any language even close, no matter how well intentioned, makes me bristle.

2) But of course this bristling is its own form of using the Holocaust as a blunt weapon. Withywindle is (partly) Jewish, and Alpheus is not, and therefore when Withywindle bristles, Alpheus is politer than he really needs to be, because Withywindle can bring his Unique Jewish Had-A-Third-Cousin-Survive-The-Holocaust Moral Authority to bear, and therefore implicitly bludgeons Alpheus with that. Ugh. It's one of the more minor results of the Holocaust, all things considered, but it adds little conversational landmines even to friendly co-blogs in 2009. It is perhaps more important that all this back and forth has something to do with the existence of Israel, for which the Holocaust was the ultimate blunt-weapon-argument in its favor, but which (as I argued above) is also threatened by the counter-use of blunt-weapon-argument against pro-survival Israeli policies-which, fittingly for this blog, has the ring of Greek tragedy. But if it is a matter of Israel's survival, it is also, if much less importantly, a subtle warper of conversations hither and yon around the globe.

3) In a parallel way, I really do think the long traditions of anti-Semitism make a dispassionate analysis of Soros' career almost impossible. Phoebe has noted how various critiques of Jews fit into long-running anti-Semitic discourses; it is impossible to talk directly about Soros - international financial wizard, financier of lefty political groups - without falling into the discourse of anti-Semitic stereotypes. (As Soros himself appears to know.) But not to talk about Soros directly - to say he is the above, and also Jewish - is to distort the truth. The paleocons and the open Jew-haters have no problem with all this; but places like the National Review, for example, have a very muffled critique of Soros - muffled precisely because they want to avoid anti-Semitic discourse. And all this is in my own reactions to him too: I am very uncomfortable criticizing Soros with any acuity, because I am aware how impossible it is to do so without using anti-Semitic discourses.

4) By-the-by, I suspect that his Esperanto-ism is not casually related to his hostility to Israel. The invention of Esperanto by Zamenhof does seem to be a deliberate crazy-mirror to the revival of Hebrew; Zamenhof moved toward hostility to Zionism later in life; I think (but cannot find data to support this thought) that Esperanto had disproportionate support among Jews, as an alternate project to Zionism. I suspect that Soros imbibed distance to Zionism along with Esperanto in his mother's milk.

Indescribable Rage

The Spaniards irk me. Come the Moorish Reconquista, I shan't be in a hurry to save them.

Imagine a post on the subject, lengthy, vitriolic, eloquent, and witty. Alas, I am sleepy, and so this will remain but a beautiful dream. However, the phrase "airstrikes on the Escorial" would have figured in it. Also, "Remember the Maine." And, "Those green-crescent ants were bad news. They weren't good for anybody."

How Does That Nirvana Song Go? (UPDATED x2)

Remember when the Bushes were horrible parents because their college-age daughters liked to have a drink now and then? Remember when somebody saw them drinking in a bar in Austin and called 911?

I can't wait to see where this story's going. But the guy shopping the videotape had better be careful. After all...nobody messes with Joe Biden.

UPDATE: Arethusa got there first.

UPDATE #2: Ed Morrissey says the Right should just leave this story alone, even if the person on the tape does turn out to be Biden's daughter. Some of his commenters agree, some don't. Those who don't tend to mention not the Bush girls but the treament of Bristol Palin by the media and the Left.

What's Esperanto for "Callous"?

George Soros is enjoying the financial collapse. I wouldn't have doubted it for a second. I was, however, mildly surprised by his description of his experiences in World War II:

George Soros was 13 when the Nazis invaded his homeland of Hungary. As a Jew, he was forced to adopt a false identity and live separately from his parents in Budapest. Instead of being traumatised by the experience, though, he found the danger exhilarating. “It was high adventure,” he says, “like living through Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Well, sure, sure. So exciting. And, come to think of it, Mr. Soros has said before* that his close-up view of other Jews' being subjected to deportation and confiscation of property (in the latter of which the young Soros was forced to assist) created "no sense of guilt" and "no problem at all." In fact, it was "just like in markets" -- i.e., one isn't responsible if other people lose their shirt. Or their gold fillings.

"Just like in markets"? Really? It's the same if you're trying to survive the Nazis as if you're a billionaire trying to make additional billions by deliberately sinking the pound? Or conducting insider trading? I would not have thought so.

Let me make the obvious but essential point that if Soros were a supporter of right-wing causes instead of left-wing ones, we'd hear a lot less about his "philanthropy" and a lot more about how much and how often he's gleefully reaped gigantic profits while others suffered. Instead of being portrayed as a bleeding heart determined to use his fortune to fight the twilight struggle against evil Halliburton Republicans (and for the occasional pro-terrorist lawyer), he'd be pictured as a Magneto-like villain warped by his Holocaust-era experiences into someone whose personal commitment to morality is questionable at best.

Would that hypothetical picture be entirely fair? Probably not. But there is something a little weird about someone who openly says, essentially, that the current financial collapse is fun and who compares assisting in the confiscation of his co-religionists' property during the Holocaust to Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Couldn't he at least have picked some other Steven Spielberg movie? I dunno...Hook?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*Lest anyone think that I or other right-wing sources are making this stuff up, my source will be the unimpeachably left-wing Media Matters, an operation funded in part -- albeit indirectly -- by Soros! And, as a free bonus, there's a little more Martin Peretz-bashing from the Left!]

Huh.

Wow. So this is what they talk about on JournoList.

Just to review, here's how the list's organizer, Ezra Klein, describes it:

The idea, then as now, was to foster a safe space where policy experts, academics, and journalists could freely talk through issues, bringing up the questions they considered urgent and the information they thought important, with the result being a more informed commentariat. It's been of immense value to me, and through that, of value to my readers.

As for sinister implications, is it "secret?" No. Is it off-the-record? Yes. The point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable offering informal analysis and testing out ideas.

Well, the reality was bound to fall short, wasn't it?...

From: Alyssa Rosenberg Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:06:27 -0400 Local: Tues, Mar 24 2009 3:06 pm Subject: Re: [JournoList] Re: BREAKING: Marty Peretz is a Crazy-Ass Racist I'm not about to speak to the question of who should or shouldn't be on this list. But I agree with Jon that the tendency to lapse into name-calling, or making broad assumptions about people who aren't on this list, seems at minimum like it's not the best use of our time, and at worst, unworthy of this very smart, very funny community. It bothered me when folks where making totally unsubstantiated comments about [REDACTED!--mk]'s sex life, and it bothers me when folks make [REDACTED] jokes. To be clear, I'm totally open to legitimate commentary on the substance of anyone's argument, and people should get smacked down if they lie, if they get things wrong, etc. I think analyzing Peretz's writing about Mexicans, or Palestinians, or whoever, is totally fair game. But saying that [REDACTED] clearly must not have a girlfriend, or speculating about who [REDACTED] gets turned down by sexually are not arguments. We wouldn't take similar statements remotely seriously if they were made by conservatives about anyone on this list.

Question for Mickey Kaus: How many guesses are we allowed for each REDACTED?

Democracy in Athens and America (Yes, Again)

At NRO yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson wrote that "in the last three months, [the American people has] been reduced to something like the Athenian mob." My sense is that Hanson was merely giving his complaints about the Obama administration a nice classical gloss. Nevertheless, I think he was being unfair to both Athenian democracy and the American republic.

The Athenian dēmos was never as ignorant or fickle as its critics, ancient and modern, have made it out to be. The example of Athenian democracy's vices offered by Hanson -- the decision to slaughter the rebellious citizens of Mytilene -- is a rather bad one. For one thing, the Athenians -- as Hanson points out -- listened to reason and reversed their decision on the very next day. (They did not say that "the time for talking is over.") For another thing, Hanson's hero Thucydides makes it clear that the Spartan aristocracy was capable of equal brutality: he follows the story of Athens' ultimate decision to spare the Mytileneans with the account of how the Spartans chose to massacre the people of Plataea who had resisted Theban aggression. In the case of the Plataeans, there was no reprieve.

In fact, almost none of the standard examples of the irresponsibility of the Athenian dēmos stands up very well to scrutiny. (The best one is probably the decision to execute the generals after the Battle of Arginusai in 406 B.C.*) Like the left-wingers who find fault with the whole history of the West, the critics of Athenian democracy seldom really compare the object of their criticism to any of the alternatives. It's not as if monarchies and oligarchies never behave stupidly.

More to the point, the average Athenian citizen was vastly more knowledgeable about his country's government and the political issues of the day than is the modern citizen of America. As I've argued before, Athenian democracy meant that committed citizens carried more weight than uncommitted ones; it also meant that the citizens who made decisions about state policy were generally much better informed about those policies than the Americans who simply step up to a voting machine once every couple of years. In classical Athens, you wouldn't see too much of the sort of ignorance demonstrated here or elsewhere.

And Hanson isn't just wrong about the "Athenian mob." His comparison between Athens and America suggests a misunderstanding of what's wrong with American democracy today. We weren't designed to be Athens. Our founders distrusted pure democracy, especially on a large scale. They also distrusted big government. The system they created, and the system that worked pretty well for a long time, was one in which the elites largely controlled a weak central government and the people had more direct control the closer you got to the local level.

This system has broken down in several ways. The power of the central government has grown dramatically, the population has become less rooted geographically, and in most places the vibrancy of local democracy has declined. In the village -- and it was literally a village -- where I grew up, I got to see a bit of this decline with my own eyes. With the collapse of federalism and local involvement in politics, people's sense of connection to their democracy has diminished. Even in ancient Athens -- with perhaps one-thousandth the population and one-2500th the land area of the U.S. today -- the connection of the dēmos to their individual villages, or demes, was a crucial feature of the democracy.

Meanwhile, large swathes of the elites who still run the federal government have ceased to feel much sense of noblesse oblige. In addition, they've also been infected by a set of ideologies that I can only describe as anti-American, in the sense that they run counter to the values that have traditionally defined our American civilization. And, because the elites have such complete control of the polity, the economy, and the media, there's little the average American can do reimpose traditional values -- including democratic values -- from the bottom up. Moses Finley -- an even greater classicist than Victor Davis Hanson! -- identified part of the problem in his 1973 lectures on Democracy Ancient and Modern. I quote at length:

Profound institutional changes have occurred since de Tocqueville and Mill wrote a century and more ago. The first is the radical transformation of the economy, dominated by supernational conglomerates to an extent not even imaginable to our forefathers. The new technology with which the economy works has placed an equally unprecedented power in the hands of whoever holds it, unprecedented both in its magnitude and its sophistication. In that category I include the mass media, both for their power to create and reinforce values and for the intellectual passivity they generate, which seems to me to be a denial of the "educational" goal of classical democratic theory.

Then there are significant new factors in the political field itself, above all, the conversion of politics into an occupation, in the narrow sense of that word and on a very large scale. There have, of course, been other societies in which politicians or courtiers devoted themselves more or less fully to government -- the late Roman Republic and the Roman Empire or modern autocracies -- but these were not politicians in the strict sense and certainly not in the democratic sense, and anyway their numbers were always small, their interests either individual or as representatives of an aristocratic elite, not those of an occupational group. One contemporary consequence is the close link between political occupation and money-making, with or without corruption, but I consider that a minor consequence compared with the creation of a new and powerful interest-group in society, the politicians.

"The reputation, indeed the political survival of most leaders," wrote Henry Kissinger, "depends on their ability to realize their goals, however these may have been arrived at. Whether these goals are desirable is relatively less crucial. Leaders "reveal an almost compulsive desire to avoid a temporary setback." Long-range interests are bound to be neglected "because the future has no administrative constituency." This new interest-group, furthermore, is drawn from a narrow sector of the population; in the United States, so exclusively from lawyers and businessmen that we find it hard to grasp the fact that as late as the end of the nineteenth century, a proportion of not only white-collar but also blue-collar workers participated actively in party leadership and public office, at least on the municipal level....

Finally there is the staggering growth of the bureaucracy (in private institutions as in government). They are the experts, without whom modern society cannot possibly function, but the point has now been reached, in the size and hierarchical ramification of the bureaucracy, "where the stability of the internal 'political' system is preferred to the achievement of the functional goals of the organization."..." (London: The Hogarth Press [1985] pp. 33-35)

And here, I think, are the real causes of the AIG mess denounced by Hanson in his NRO piece -- the politicians first cozying up to Wall Street and then hypocritically denouncing it in an effort to avoid a temporary setback, or the loss of elite "stability." Let me emphasize that Finley's lectures were delivered almost 36 years ago. The process of American democratic decline has been going on for a while now.

More Finley:

The presence today of an ideological consensus, of agreement with abstract, general statements of democratic belief, is certainly not to be denied. The question, however, is the extent to which the "symbolic satisfaction" it appears to reflect overrides the deep frustration, accurately registered by the widespread political apathy, which arises from a feeling of impotence, of the impossibility of counteracting those interest-groups whose voices prevail in the decisions of government. "The costs of consensus are paid by those excluded from it."

It would not have been easy for an ancient Athenian to draw the sharp line between "we," the ordinary people and "they," the governmental elite, which has been so frequently noted in the responses of the present-day apathetic. The difference in attitude follows from the fundamental difference not only between a direct, participatory democracy and a representative, nonparticipatory one, but also from the difference in the interest-group structures of the two worlds and in the degree to which the various interest-groups have an opportunity to impinge on the decision-making authorities. (pp. 101-102)

The danger, pace Hanson, is not that we're beginning to reproduce the worst aspects of Athenian democracy. The danger is that we're losing those qualities of popular engagement and true civic-mindedness that are essential to any democracy whatsoever. The public is alienated from its government. More and more, the elites become insular, arrogant, and out of control in their indifference to the public good.

So what do we do about it? Finley once more:

Under such conditions, it would be absurd to make any direct comparison with a small, homogeneous, face-to-face society such as ancient Athens; absurd to suggest, even to dream, that we might reinstate an Assembly of citizens as the paramount decision-making body in a modern city or nation. That is not the choice I have been considering, but an altogether different one, arising from political apathy and its evaluation. Public apathy and political ignorance are a fundamental fact today, beyond any possible dispute; decisions are made by political leaders, not by popular vote, which at best has only an occasional veto power after the fact. The issue is whether this state of affairs is, under modern conditions, a necessary and desirable one, or whether new forms of popular participation, in the Athenian spirit though not in the Athenian substance, if I may phrase it that way, need to be invented.... (p. 36)

What should these new forms look like? The $64,000 question. And a subject, I hope, for future posts....

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*Before you bring up Socrates' death sentence, keep in mind that our available evidence suggests Socrates didn't give his jurors much of a choice.]

A Small Nibble

A university making a late decision asked for more material from me. Not an interview, but at least a minorly encouraging nibble.

However, here is why one shouldn't go into academia, particularly in the humanities.

Hobbesian Reportage

The AP has a wonderfully Hobbesian headline:

It's fear that keeps Baghdad's peace

Sounds good, I think. But it turns out they mean something slightly more specific:

Only an estimated 16 percent of the mainly Sunni families forced by Shiite militiamen and death squads to flee their homes [in Baghdad] have dared to return.

So, Sunni fear of the Sh'ia is at issue. Does bring to mind a question: does a stable Iraq depend on the permanent exile of some large portion of the Sunni population?

Cinéma Fausseté

I recently saw the 2006 movie The Hoax, which is about the 1971 Clifford Irving scandal. If you're unfamiliar with this fascinating episode, you can find a long version here and a shorter version here. The very short version is that Irving, a moderately successful writer, convinced McGraw-Hill publishers that he had been contacted by Howard Hughes and asked to write and publish an "autobiography" of the reclusive billionaire. This was not true, and many people were skeptical of Irving's story from the outset. Nevertheless, Irving managed to secure big advances from McGraw-Hill both for himself and for "Hughes," and it wasn't until Irving's manuscript was about to be published that the real Howard Hughes intervened to make it clear that he had had nothing to do with the so-called autobiography.

That's the very short version, and the full story has more than enough twists and turns to fill a feature-length film. Even so, the movie produced by Miramax is highly fictionalized, and presents a bizarre narrative in which Howard Hughes successfully uses Irving to blackmail Richard Nixon, which leads directly to the Watergate break-in. In short, The Hoax is the Clifford Irving case as Oliver Stone would have written it. Even Clifford Irving, on whose memoir (also titled The Hoax) the movie was supposedly based, was unhappy with the distortions.*

Memo to Miramax: if Clifford Irving thinks you've gone overboard in making stuff up, you ought to pay heed.

I suppose all this wouldn't bother me so much if the movie didn't insist on its own accuracy. The film opens with the words "based upon the actual events," which in this case hides even more sins than usual, and concludes with a montage purporting to show what happened to various characters. This montage includes a particularly dishonest reference to the Watergate break-in as unquestionably the result of Nixon's involvement with Howard Hughes. Even by Hollywood standards, this seems pretty lousy.

And it made me wonder: isn't there anything that can be done to prevent movies from deliberately obscuring the line between historical fact and made-up "history"? There are always the courts, of course: in 2004, a group of Athenian lawyers filed a lawsuit that ultimately forced Oliver Stone's Alexander the Great to carry a disclaimer at the beginning of the film, at least in Greece. But it's ridiculous to expect guardians of historical fidelity to mount a legal challenge to every movie that takes liberties with the truth.

I suppose it might be possible to push for a rating system that would impose particular disclaimers on films with historical content. I understand that such a system would necessarily be subjective, but so is the ratings system for sex and violence. It seems to me that it should be possible to discriminate between movies that dramatize documented fact with (for example) made-up conversations, and movies that fabricate major historical events. A movie like Patton is clearly distinguishable from a movie like Gladiator or The Hoax.**

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[*Despite what that Wikipedia article claims, however, it is simply not true that "the major events portrayed in the film actually occurred." I think being thrown several stories off a hotel balcony by thugs in the pay of Howard Hughes qualifies as a major event, and it happens to Richard Gere in the film -- but it never happened to Clifford Irving.]

[**Not that I object to Gladiator, mind you -- it doesn't pretend to accuracy in the way that The Hoax does, and it distorts for the sake of telling a fun story. If anything, The Hoax sucks most of the fun out of the story in order to introduce the political element: Irving's actual exploits were fueled by a certain joie de vivre, a fact made clear in Orson Welles's underrated last masterpiece, F for Fake, which contains an account of the Irving case. In The Hoax, Irving is mostly just a bitter, narcissistic hack who becomes a terrified pawn.]

This Link is for FLG

It doesn't have pirates or object sex, but the tonal qualities scream FLG.

On What's Wrong With Last Days of Disco

I've just been watching the Whit Stillman trilogy again, plus reading the book of Last Days of Disco. And the problem with Last Days--a good movie, but not as good as the other two--is still the same as when I saw it the first time around: too damn many male characters with brown hair! If you can't tell them apart by the way the speak--and, as Goldberry notes, they all speak in the same mannered monotone--than you need a visual cue. In Metropolitan, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) has bright red hair, and Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina) has a distinctive face. In Barcelona, Taylor Nichols and Chris Eigeman are distinctive enough acting presences that the double-brown-hair isn't a problem, and the two lead female roles are blonde and brunette. In Last Days, however, all the bloody men are brown haired! You can tell Chloe Sevigny apart from Kate Beckinsale because, thank God, blonde and brunette. The book includes a telling note: the Tom Platt character was supposed to be blond, which would have helped an awful lot. Moral: get actors who don't look like each other.

Aside from the hair, the other trouble with Last Days is that Jimmy Steinway, really the central male character, is dull and unsympathetic -- none of the wit or humor the best Stillman characters have. He's also the narrator of the book, and no more interesting there. Why would our female leads be interested in him? -- unclear. Heck, why would any of the male characters be his friend? -- equally unclear. The actor, Mackenzie Astin, wasn't particularly good, but the script didn't give him anything to work on. If Stillman had done better by Jimmy Steinway, Last Days could have matched the first two movies.

Oh, and the plot twist of Last Day,, the closure of the Club for tax fraud, really doesn't connect with anything central to the characters of most of the protagonists. The first two movies integrated plot and character better; here, Something Happens to affect them, but it's out of the blue.

I still love Stillman's movies, but Last Days continues to disappoint -- only good, not great. This is my current articulation of what went wrong with it.

"The False Maturity of One's Middle Twenties"

A phrase from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim - not quite those words, but close. The context is more about sexual relationships, but it works for just about everything. In my case, about the terrible urge to be highbrow and serious about everything. Not that I was ever completely so, but I did feel a strong compulsion to go to art-house flicks and take pride in not watching TV and so on. Now, I won't say that compulsion has gone away, but ever since I read Lucky Jim, I could think to myself, It's all pretentious nonsense--go and enjoy yourself. And so I do, more and more. So, gentle reader, if I read Montaigne, I also watch Kings and Psych and Heroes, and I feel pretty relaxed about the whole thing. And this, if you are under the age of 25, gentle reader, is why you should go now and read Lucky Jim--it'll cure you of your hang-ups, man.

On Kings

I just saw the first episode, downloaded. I rather like it - this whole pretentious "let's riff on the Bible" project can fail spectacularly, (=Battlestar Galactica, which failed for all sorts of other reasons too, I must admit,) but there's a certain style to the first hour. Yeah, if you're going to modernize Saul and David, I like the idea of there being Goliath tanks. Now, the obligatory Paranoia About Evil Corporations is like a root canal without anaesthesia, but a TV viewer can't expect miracles.

And the corridors of the royal palace are the New York Public Library; nifty location shot.

On Blogger Bromance

When they make the movie of Athens and Jerusalem, I dibs Paul Rudd. Alpheus can have Seth Rogen or Tom Cruise, depending on his mood.

On Baby-Kissing

Jim Geraghty at NRO sends in a political missive from upstate New York with the following quotation:

[I] was at a coffee clatch last night and one of the moms mentioned that she accompanied her daughter's grade school class to a Tedisco speech at a local elementary school. She was very impressed with his kindness and affability. She said he approached each child, asked their name, shook their hand and chatted with them. Each child received an autographed photo in the mail afterwards.

This makes me reconsider baby-kissing, that much-mocked political art. Maybe it is a real qualification to condescend (in the old, non-pejorative sense) to the powerless and the ignorant, a sign that a man can be trusted by voters (who must themselves be relatively powerless and ignorant) with political office. Yes, for a politician to speechify to children blurs the line between voting citizens and children, and perhaps infantilizes citizens; yes, a Bill Clinton can pander with equal facility to child and adult alike; but all other things being equal, perhaps a politician who can be kind and respectful to children is superior to one who cannot.

Alpheus, Seer

Remember when Alpheus said, apropos of Obama's gift of 25 classic American DVDs to Gordon Brown,

"I say, what's this? Requires Region 1 only NTSC-compatible player?"

"Oh, bloody hell...!"

Well, it turns out that Alpheus had a prophetic soul:

While not exactly a film buff, Gordon Brown was touched when Barack Obama gave him a set of 25 classic American movies – including Psycho, starring Anthony Perkins on his recent visit to Washington. Alas, when the PM settled down to begin watching them the other night, he found there was a problem. The films only worked in DVD players made in North America and the words "wrong region" came up on his screen.

Hat tip to Powerline.

Reading the Latest New Republic

* The Editors, "Heavy Vetting": The editors bemoan the grueling vetting process, which deters the nation's finest from serving lest they be crucified for "a small, innocent miscalculation in a tax filing"; the editors suggest a streamlined vetting process. I demur at "nation's finest"; also, in Geithner's case at least, "innocent miscalculation." But let me channel Mike Huckabee: why not streamline the tax code instead of streamlining the vetting process?

* Jonathan Chait, "Stock Answer," argues that Obama hasn't really tanked the stock market. The weak points; Chait discovers, shock, that passions inform the stock market; he takes this to mean that we should ignore it; whereas (see FLG, Withywindle, et al) passions always do, and should, inform our reason; to ignore the stock market for its dependence on the passions indicates a disastrous political philosophy. Chait also says the US stock market has declined the same amount as foreign stock markets, therefore Obama has had no effect. But what if -- as a fair number of news stories indicate -- the US economy is in better shape than most foreign ones? We would then expect the stock market to fall proportionately less than foreign ones; an equal fall would indicate an Obama Effect depressing the American stock market.

* Walter Shapiro, "Long Shadow": "Tough times can create irrational politics." And here an omen of a Democratic collapse, if they cannot account for the reasons behind popular rage and terror. Just remember: anyone who talks about "irrational politics" has the words POLITICAL LOSER stamped on his forehead.

* Noam Scheiber, "Free Larry Summers": "Summers had assumed Harvard was a pure meritocracy--where ideas win out on the basis of their strength and little else. .... But, as Summers told ProPublica's Paul Steiger early last year, "I just didn't fully appreciate the extent to which the university ... was a political kind of institution." Um, Larry-boy is a mite slow on the uptake, ain't he? And this is the man who's going to save the economy?

* Leon Wieseltier, "In Which We Engage": "I worry that liberal realists are mentally unprepared for certain eventualities. Liberal realism is either a betrayal of liberalism or a betrayal of realism." Duh. God, what a world, where a pompous twit like Leon Wieseltier is the most perceptive liberal on the block.

On Dying Well

Montaigne says somewhere that the point of philosophy is to learn how to die well. Timothy Burke considers the advantages of a "life skills" class for college, but doesn't include anything about how to die. (Though one of his commenters includes a Heinlein quote that includes "dying gallantly" in the set of necessary skills.) How well do people die nowadays? Better or worse than they used to? Would it be remotely useful to include a "How to Die Well" class in college? - I can just imagine the five-page essays that would be forgotten in a trice, when the semester ended. Death certainly isn't uppermost in the minds of college students; but perhaps it shouldn't be.

On Cancer

Goldberry was just watching a PBS documentary on Betty Ford, which mentioned her work on making people willing to talk about breast cancer, get check-ups, etc. It occurred to me that this is one of those changes so total that even Credentialed Historians like yours truly forget there was ever a time when we Didn't Speak of the Malignancy. Unlike, say, the sexual revolution, this isn't a change I feel particularly ambivalent about - Talking to Your Doctor About How You Hurt in a Funny Way seems like an unambiguous good thing. I suppose I could say that this part of the wholesale shift in culture whereby nothing is private any longer, and that perhaps something is lost when people can't die without talking about the symptoms to the world - but I'm not sure that actually describes modern-day America. So, setting Default Nostalgia to one side, a query to my readers. Older ones, do you remember the changing mores of how one talks about cancer? Younger ones, when did you learn (if ever) that cancer used to be a taboo subject? I'm just old enough that I remember it as being something of a fading taboo when I was growing up - not a taboo in my family, but I think I got the sense one shouldn't discuss it too lightly, and that if you knew someone had cancer, you should never talk about it with them unless they mentioned it first. And even then, it would be a subject of great discomfort for me. Maybe that hasn't changed.

President Bush, Class Act

At a speech at Calgary:

The 43rd president of the United States ... took time to wish his successor, Barack Obama, good luck.

"He was not my first choice for president, but, when he won, I thought it was good for the United States of America," Mr. Bush said.

"I want the President to succeed," he added, "I love my country a lot more than I love politics."

"I'm not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in that arena," he continued.

....

"[Mr. Obama] deserves my silence and if he wants my help he can pick up the phone and call me," Mr. Bush said.

Welcome to Psycholist!

Welcome to Psycholist! If you are reading this, you are already a member of an exclusive community of opinion-formers, who now get to form people's opinion in this private nook of the internet, where no-one else is watching. Here we will discuss Palestinians, Prada, pirates, postmodern babies, the Pogues, Plato, photons, and the evil world conspiracy that connects them all. However, with great power comes great responsibility. No-one may mention this site to anyone else, and if any of you talk about this in public, the rest of must say that it was all perfectly innocuous. Thank you so much!

Collective Characterizations; Collective Guilt

Two things appear to be at issue here; one, the validity of collective characterizations (="a nation of bloody criminals"), the other the validity of collective guilt (="the Palestinian nation is responsible for the death of every Palestinian in this war"). These are related, but distinct, issues. They are sufficiently self-evident to me that I'm afraid I'm no longer capable, if I ever was, of arguing the issues particularly well. They're also issues which I suspect people aren't usually willing to be persuaded about. However:

1) Collective Characterization: e.g., Japanese are conformists, preppies are smug, evangelicals are ill-educated and easily led, French are cheese-eating surrender-monkeys. Or, the splitter/lumper debate. Can one say anything about any group of people? Can one talk of a collective culture? Can one use a normative descriptor? - e.g., "unaccustomed to the rhythms of factory labor" or "lazy"? Must one always predicate what one says by a qualifier, a nuance, "only true of some"? Obviously I take the negative. There is such a thing as English culture, French culture - English character, French character - and to think of England and Englishmen as several million individuals of whom one can say nothing about their commonalities is not only to miss historical truth but also to distort it. Nations exist, and individuals are part of them. (To talk of "society" is something of a euphemism; societies are the creations of individuals, not something separate from them.) An individual is both himself and a member of his nation; what is true of the nation may not apply in all particulars to him, but still it is true of his nation, and so true of him as a member of his nation. Nations - all collectivities - are defined by characteristic truths, characteristic descriptors, not universal truths or universal descriptors; one may argue the correctness of a given characteristic descriptor in a number of ways, but not by saying that an individual is an exception. "Scotsmen are parsimonious" is not disproved by saying "Angus MacCheddarwort spent his inheritance at age thirteen"; it is disproved by coming up with another, more persuasive characterization of Scotsmen. At some point, the endless throat-clearing "I don't mean this about every single individual" becomes needless repetition; indeed, it is vaguely possible that the people who object to the discourse of nations are simply imperceptive as to its characteristic nature, whereas those who use it both know how it works and need no reminders that it can be abused.

I think I've said something similar to this in a variety of other discussion groups before, if not on this blog; I confess that at this point I find it a little tedious. Either you believe that groups exist, nations exist, and have perceptible characteristics, or, in the impoverished vocabulary of the day, you think such characterizations are "racist" - or "classist," or whatever. While I haven't studied the matter in great detail, I suppose the Enlightenment idolatry of the individual, and rejection of tradition, culture, etc., lies somewhere behind the unwillingness to conceive of people as parts of groups, nations, etc. On the other hand, it also seems to be a fashion of recent decades, and one which doesn't stop the impeccably non-generalizing from generalizing about various hate-figures such as Republicans, evangelicals, etc. I take the urge to generalize about human beings to be both ineradicable and a clear perception of reality. Someone who characterizes a group wrongly sees better than someone who refuses to generalize.

2) Collective Guilt: If people are part of collectivities, than they can share in collective guilt. Generally, in Adam's fall we sinned all. Specifically there are sinful nations - "Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD, they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone away backward." (Isaiah 1:4) Or: "If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."" (Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address) Clearly this starts with a sense of self-critique, but this is fuzzy: the "self-critique" here involves Northerners subduing the South by fire and sword, shooting hundreds of thousands of Southerners in the name of a "collective guilt" when the Southerners have renounced the collectivity and feel no guilt for slavery. The guilty nation is clearly quite often the enemy who must be punished for his guilt.

So, reasons that both right and left are uncomfortable with this concept. The idea that law is a matter of individual guilt, not of family guilt, is taken as applicable beyond the narrowly legal concept. The Protestant switch toward the individual alone before God, with no possible intercession by the community, must strengthen this presupposition. For the (philo-Semitic) left, this: "Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children." (Matthew 27:25) I.e., the central proof-text for anti-Semitism is built on a sense of collective guilt; getting rid of collective guilt seems essential as a way of ridding European culture of anti-Semitism. More weakly, objections to things such as the war-guilt clause in the Treaty of Versailles matter, but I think this is central to the story. On the right, objections to how "white guilt" is taken in recent decades to justify a number of coercive and noxious "reparations" measures. In general, guilt has been decaying in the culture; if people can't feel guilty themselves, how can they feel collectively guilty? Modern pacifism clearly has opposed the idea of collective guilt, because the operation of war can only punish collectively and indiscriminately, and so must rely on some theory of collective guilt.

I take nations to exist, and I take nations to be guilty. Sufficient numbers of Germans committed crimes against humanity, in the name of the German nation, that all members of the German nation justly suffered retribution for the crimes committed in their names. Likewise the Japanese. The existence of the odd "Good German" is irrelevant to the evil of the German nation.

Obviously our enemies may use the same arguments against us. If you believe America guilty of crimes in the Middle East, then the Americans killed on 9-11 were justly punished for the sins of their nation. If Israel's existence is sinful, the slaughter of infants in playgrounds is just. The counter-argument is not "oh, these individuals weren't responsible"; the counter-argument is "America and Israel are virtuous, and therefore any action against their nations on the false charge of their guilt is sinful." But our enemies' mental framework is correct, even if the substance of their charges is not.

All this I recognize is not the best possible sustained argument I could make - I blame the bloggy medium; also society. But I trust there are sufficient fragments of an argument to get the idea across.

For St. Patrick's Day, Jeff Sypeck Appreciates the Pogues

Here. Thank you, Jeff! He reminds me that Thousands Are Sailing is an excellent song. Audio here.

On Israeli Politics

I discover to my bemusement that a former commenter on this site is still so shocked about my judgment a year ago of the Palestinians that he has once again linked to my original post, such that people who read his blog have appeared on this one. I will repeat what he found so shocking:

As it so happens, I regret that the genocidal savages of Gaza have decided to set up rocket launchers aimed at Israel from their children's nurseries. The Palestinian nation--a nation of bloody criminals--is responsible for the death of every Palestinian in this war, as it is responsible for the death of every Israeli. I will be glad when the Palestinians give up their war to annihilate Israel, and so cease to incur responsibility for their children's deaths. Meanwhile, I hold for Israel as I hold for America, that it should hold the life of one of its citizens more precious than a million of its enemies, and not refrain from any needful action in self-defense.

And I should say that at this late date I have lost all sympathy for the Palestinians, those gleeful butchers. By their evil do they bring sorrow to themselves? The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

I have not altered in this judgment.

As an update: I am not sure if I would have voted for Likud or Israel Beitenu in the latest election, had I been an Israeli citizen. Probably Likud, but not certainly. I am reasonably satisfied that a Likud-Israel Beitenu coalition holds the balance of power in Israeli politics; it holds the best promise for Israel's survival in the teeth of the Jew-killing passions of its neighbors.

I don't talk about Israel all the time, but from time to time I do want to mention where I stand.

On Montaigne

I'm reading the Collected Essays very slowly. They are wonderful to read, for everyone, and make me want to teach classes centered on his essays. Indeed, I am beginning to include him in my syllabi. It would take far too long to say something insufficient about them. The Donald Frame translation is excellent.

A Song in Honor of the Employee Free Choice Act

The Blackleg Miner

It's in the evening after dark,
When the blackleg miner creeps to work,
With his moleskin pants and dirty shirt,
There goes the blackleg miner!

Well he grabs his duds and down he goes
To hew the coal that lies below,
There's not a woman in this town-row
Will look at the blackleg miner.

Oh, Delaval is a terrible place.
They rub wet clay in the blackleg's face,
And around the heaps they run a foot race,
To catch the backleg miner!

So, dinna gang near the Seghill mine.
Across the way they stretch a line,
To catch the throat and break the spine
Of the dirty backleg miner.

They grab his duds and his pick as well,
And they hoy them down the pit of hell.
Down you go, and fare you well,
You dirty blackleg miner!

Oh, it's in the evening after dark,
When the blackleg miner creeps to work,
With his moleskin pants and dirty shirt,
There goes the blackleg miner!

So join the union while you may.
Don't wait till your dying day,
For that may not be far away,
You dirty blackleg miner!

Brother, Can You Spare A Dime

I happened to hear the full song for the first time today. It's surprisingly moving.

They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob,
When there was earth to plow, or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead,
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad; now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
Once I built a tower, up to the sun, brick, and rivet, and lime;
Once I built a tower, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell,
Full of that Yankee Doodly Dum,
Half a million boots went slogging through Hell,
And I was the kid with the drum!

Say, don't you remember, they called me Al; it was Al all the time.
Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal? Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Science Education for Citizenship

In the Washington Post yesterday, Charles Krauthammer -- that's Dr. Krauthammer, M.D. (Harvard, 1975; Massachusetts General, 1975-78) -- savaged the Obama administration's "intellectual laziness" and "moral arrogance" on stem cell research. In particular, he eviscerated the persistent allegation that George Bush and conservatives have "politicized science."

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

We've talked a lot on this blog about what should be taught in schools. I think one of the very first things children need to learn, and one of the things which should most relentlessly be hammered into their brains over the years of their education, is the difference between normative and positive, between ought and is.

The confusion of these categories has caused immense damage over the years, and is, I think, the one way in which religion can fairly be said to have done great harm to mankind. By making morality equivalent to the Will of God (an objective truth), religion has entangled the question of good and evil with various irrelevant questions of fact. Thus, absurdly, when Darwin overturned the biblical account of creation, the moral precepts of Christianity also found themselves destabilized (related post on this subject here), even where those precepts had long predated Christianity and flourished far beyond its reach.

Christianity may be on the way out in modern America, but religion is not. And, especially on the left, Religion often wears the mask of Politics and even -- in a particularly brilliant masquerade -- of Science. When Barack Obama speaks of "restoring scientific integrity" and "restor[ing] science to its rightful place," I can't help being reminded of what Montoya says to Vizzini in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Krauthammer nails it: Obama is doing exactly what he implies Bush has done, i.e., sullied the integrity of science and dislodged it from its rightful place. The authority of "science" is substituted for the authority of tradition, or of God. And, in the process, the ends of science itself have been perverted.

Such fraud is facilitated by too many people not knowing enough about science, so that it's much too easy to misrepresent scientific knowledge in order to sustain a particular political point of view. I have no idea whether Bill Clinton is actually ignorant enough to think there are such things as "unfertilized embryos" but I'm afraid he just might be. And I have no doubt that millions of Americans, probably a majority of Americans, could listen to this interview without picking up on the mistake. And this argues for much better science education in this country.

The usual case for better science education in America is that we need to turn out more engineers, biochemists, and so forth if we're to maintain our competitive advantage in the international economy. That's a fine argument, I suppose, and unlike FLG, I do sort of buy it. But I'm much more concerned with the fact that citizens need a scientific education if they're not to be cowed or buffaloed by specious appeals to science-in-quotation-marks. Because embryonic stem cells are just the first of some very big ethical questions about technology that are going to come down the pike in the next couple of decades.

I tend to trust democracy on questions of good and evil. Most people are basically decent, and they're even more basically decent in public than they are in private. But I also know that where the public is ignorant, elites even in a democracy can acquire immense power. I thought Sanjay Gupta's silence in the face of Bill Clinton's embryo oxymorons was disgusting -- and thank God the man isn't going to be Surgeon General. That silence was probably political; at best, I suppose, you could justify it as "respectful" -- but would Gupta have shown comparable "respect" to someone who was arguing against unrestricted funding for embryonic stem cell research?

The American people are fed a steady diet of misinformation not just on stem cells -- how many people understand that not all stem cells are embryonic? -- but also on subjects like global warming and the public health effects of smoking and obesity. If nothing else, really solid scientific education in the schools would give laymen the confidence to question what they hear in the newspapers and on TV. And, because the practice of science requires total objectivity within its limited sphere, it would also make people much less likely to forget the distinction between ought and is.

We Think! We're Losers!

From an anonymous commenter to Jim Geraghty's Campaign Spot:

Republicans "think" and Democrats "feel", but in times like these when people's emotions are raw, the GOP had better learn that sometimes you have to be a little touchy-feely.

LOSER! LOSER! LOSER! - Whiny little Adlai! C'mon, we've just come off of fifty years of the Democrats saying they think and Republicans feel - George Lakoff most recently - and it means "We don't get passions, we deserve to lose elections, we're stuck-up losers, yes we are." If the Republicans are going to tout themselves as thinking man's party, God help the republic, we'll be stuck with Democrats for a generation. And ya know what? We'll be better off with them.

A Corrupt and Effeminate Court

Robert Stacey McCain has some long posts denouncing both feminism and Washington culture. What I find interesting is that he is recapitulating some old modes of cultural critique in the process. To wit: virtues are (etymologically) masculine; that the corrupt court, in contradistinction to the virtuous country, is corrupt also in its sexual life, in its effeminacy and in the prominence it affords to women. He emphasizes a link (by juxtaposition; I think he doesn't make it directly) between feminism/female discourse and Washington culture. So, some thoughts.

1) The argument that women and their mode of discourse thrive well in conditions of powerlessness - the conditions of a courtier in a court, as opposed to a free man on his farm - has a respectable academic pedigree. Norbert Elias says something similar in The Civilizing Process; Erasmus' invention of the idea of individual sincerity correlates interesting with the recession of civic humanism in Renaissance culture; the idea that the novel, concerned with endless explorations of personality and personal relations, comes from both female and court culture, usually appears in analyses of The Princess of Cleves. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women takes women's personalities to be deformed, just as aristocrats, by their powerlessness. Wollstonecraft and McCain both dislike similar aspects of female culture; indeed, Wollstonecraft wants "a woman to be more like a man" - exercising her reason, not her passions.

2) But McCain (apparently) argues for a more ingrained, physical nature to female culture, where Wollstonecraft argues that it can be transcended. It's difficult to tell, since McCain wanders from "feminism" to "women" a little indiscriminately. He is, at any rate, arguing a modified Wollstonecraft: that when women enter the workforce, they affect the workforce as much as it affects them; that they make it more a place of powerlessness/emotionality/courtliness, remove masculinity and its virtues from the public sphere. This is Jurgen Habermas by way of Harvey Mansfield: the interpenetration of the private and the public spheres has a specifically gendered component as women join public life; that the decay of the late public sphere is in good part a product of its feminization.

3) But say Habermas, and one can reverse the causation: it is not women entering the public sphere that is the problem, but the corrupt economic and political system molding unfree men to serve it - and women, used to unfreedom, prosper in this new environment. One such argument would be in the Marxist stream: that capitalism and corporations deform personalities, male and female, and mold them to be slaves fit for slavery. A more libertarian-populist version (more congenial to McCain, I should imagine) would instead say that courts - government, perhaps corporations - are what corrupt personalities; that Washington, not women, is the source of the evil; that the congressman's chief-of-staff is far more effeminate by virtue of his office than any woman is merely by virtue of her sex. In either case, it is the politics and the economics that are at issue, not femininity in and of itself. I find this thesis more congenial myself.

4) And then there is the definition of virtue. McCain embraces the virtues of work - and so has embraced a latter-day version of virtue ethics, one which allows a role for the commercial virtues. The Other McCain is an Elizabethan warrior, but Stacey McCain allows that a shopkeeper has his honor too. (Turns out Stacey is a Yankee after all.) But to put economic virtue into the realm of public virtues is to begin the process by which private virtues interpenetrate with public ones - by which women enter the public sphere at all. The woman's competence as co-manager of the family enterprise - childraising, farming, marketing, etc. - was and is in good part economic virtue; competence in the private sphere could become a claim to participation in the public sphere because virtue now was also private, economic. And indeed, I suspect McCain has no trouble (less trouble, anyway) with the values and ethics of working women - such women display the virtues he prizes. It is "feminists" - which I will take to be shorthand for the leisured classes (indeed, chattering classes!) that he most dislikes. Indeed, I fancy the attitude toward work of hard-working professional women - the Hillarys of the world - he also finds admirable in itself. Or perhaps I am misinterpreting him; anyway, it's a distinction I would make, even if he wouldn't.

5) McCain endorses men being annoyed at being forced to talk about emotions with girlfriends and wives, says that it puts them at a permanent disadvantage, etc. All I can say is: eh, deal. We are sinners all, and that means in our sins as conversationalists as well. Talking about emotions can be boring; so can, oh, talking about comic books; I have bored at least as much as I've been bored. Like so much in life, this is a challenge, not an iron cage.

6) McCain also distinguishes male predilections for reason with female predilections for emotion. Discomfort at talking about emotion, and insensitivity to emotion, isn't the same thing as being emotionless; men are ruled by passions just as much as women - and should be, since a passionless world would be a horrible thing. I would recast this (along the lines of my old obsessions) as a distinction between character and personality, between passion and emotion - character and passion leading to action in the world, personality and emotion leading to mere meditation about the world; character and passion the building blocks of public virtue, personality and emotion of private virtue. Free men have character; effeminate courtiers have personality. And the relations of men and women shouldn't be public, and a free man can indulge in personality as he woos his fair lady. Maybe even should - a marriage isn't a little republic in all particulars, and would be rather hellish if it were.

Journalists & MBAs

Journalists and MBAs are both generalists who acquire superficial knowledge from professional specialists and transmit it to the wider world, whether in the form of economic decisions or explanatory words. The MBA is a latter-day yeoman farmer, turning his hand to anything, as the journalist is a latter-day engaged citizen. Nothing wrong with the impulses in themselves - just that these modern variants reflect an urge to restrict them to a credentialed elite. The credentials also obscure the fact that MBAs and journalists are just like the rest of us - bozos floundering around. But what I think matters more is that any praise or critique of the one ought equally to apply to the other.

On Watchmen - Nothing But Spoilers

I saw Watchmen with Gowanus yesterday. I thought it decent, with good moments; Gowanus had a much more dim view. So, some thoughts, starting with why I liked the original comic, as an explanation to why I thought the movie was decent, if not great.

The comic is just well-crafted, for dialogue, plot, art, etc. It's a somber meditation on the nature of heroism, its insufficiencies and its dangers - that a hero, like Euripides' Medea, can bring a poisonous excess of heroic virtues into the polis, import savagery and violence. (I'm stealing this Medea reference from an article whose author and title I can't recollect right now.) It meditates on the loveliness and joy of humanity (inextricable from the savage evil of humanity) by hopping from person to person, assembling a mosaic of personalities - I think of Camilo Jose Cela's La Colmena, The Beehive - to get a sense of the wonderful variety of mankind, and make you realize what you lose when you kill even one person, much less many. It's a defense of the ability of the comic-book medium as a means of insight into the human condition - hence the extended pirate-comic sequence. It provides a number of gripping individual characters, notably the Comedian and Rorschach. I'm not sure any one thing the original comic does is brilliant, but they're all well-done, and they are woven together to stunning cumulative effect. Is it Shakespeare? No - but what is. It's Literachuh and Ahrt.

As for the movie: it's a competent, if not inspired adaptation. Zach Snyder does have a taste for the bloody and the obvious - but the book is quite bloody, even more so in its off-panel implications, and I wasn't in a mood to be put off by the obvious. They've excised the gayness or the existence of some of the (pathetically) sick-and-twisted gay characters - Captain Metropolis, Hooded Justice - although Adrian Veidt is a bit more effeminate in the movie than in the book. (Mind you, the movie makes obvious that Veidt is most in love with himself.) The movie preserves the decentered structure of the comic - the leisurely tour of the personality of the different heroes - and doesn't engage in the brutal simplification necessary to make it a standard movie plot. It doesn't preserve the explorations into the characters of all the little people - the newspaper seller, the psychiatrist, etc. - that made the comic so rich - but by preserving the ensemble effect, it at least shows that Snyder knew this was a virtue of the book. The acting of the Comedian and Rorschach is good - they make them human - and Dr. Manhattan is made eerie, terrifying, more effectively even than in the book. A nuclear reactor, a god, deus ex machina most literally, only tenuously human - powerfully done. One doesn't quite care for any of the characters in the movie - and even granted that Moore's structure doesn't encourage such empathy, this counts as a failure - but, all in all, it's a respectful adaptation that preserves the essentials of the book, both in plot and in spirit, and has moments that are more than just decent. B plus, I'd say.

On Charles Freeman

I find it hard to believe that Freeman would even have been considered for his post, or defended by his peers, if he weren't an anti-Semite. Here we have an obvious, despicable rogue, bought and sold by Saudi and Chinese gold, who doesn't even remember that America is supposed to sympathize with the victims of foreign tyranny -- but because he rants about Israel, and the Jewish Lobby, his defenders spring to life. And if a Jew should happen to say, "well, gosh, he's a vile anti-Semite" - we get to ignore that, because you can't trust anything those Jews say in their defense, or about Israel, or anything. No, you have to say "well, he's vile on Saudi Arabia and China - we won't even mention how he's vile on Israel too." And even after you've framed your argument entirely about Saudi Arabia and China, Joe Klein will tell you it's the Israel Lobby darkly at work. Auditioning for a place on the Judenrat, Joe? Oh, no, you're just a dangerous fool. But I digress. As I say, I don't think Freeman would even have been considered for such a post save for his anti-Semitism. And this is a reasonable yardstick of how the position of Jews is deteriorating, even in the least anti-Semitic country (outside Israel) in the world. I fear it will only get worse.

Star Trek Degrades Historians!

Just saw "The Space Seed" with Goldberry. I note the direct-from-the-romance-novel lady historian, looking to be dominated by a strong (super)man - and I take offense on behalf of historians! After all, they condescend to women throughout the show, but this (I think) is the only time they show a historian on the show - and she's a complete ninny, who displays neither research skills nor command of the secondary literature on the Eugenics Wars. Why the AHA didn't send a letter of complaint, I don't know.

Postcards from the Dowd-o-Sphere

Regular readers of A&J know I'm a huge fan, as it were, of New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd.

Sometimes I'm worried I go a bit overboard with the random Dowd-baiting. "So, Captain Alpheus," Withywindle asks, "what do you do when we harpoon the red whale?"

But now Arethusa points me to this post at a feminist liberal blog called "The G Spot." Apparently not only have I not scratched the surface of Dowd-hatred, I haven't even peeled back the transparent protective skin. How can it be that someone on the Left finds Dowd so much more inherently objectionable than I do? (For the record, I don't think Dowd is -- to quote Kathy G -- "a twisted freak.")

At any rate, the Left's perspective on Dowd is a question for another time. What makes this post a real treasure is that it contains an actual secondhand account of a date with Maureen Dowd. And that date goes exactly as you'd expect, given that it took place in the late '90s.

Eight or nine or ten years ago, someone fixed up Modo with a friend of mine (whom I'll call "X."). It was at a dinner with a number of other people, but Modo and X were seated next to each other and it was fairly clear this was a set-up....

[snip]

So how did it go? X. told me that, the whole night, all Maureen could talk about was which women Bill Clinton was sleeping with. Literally. "Do you think he's having an affair with B.? I think he is. But maybe they did and it's over now and he's moved onto someone else. Ya think? Maybe he's messing around with C. -- she seems more his type. I'd bet he'd love to have an affair with D., but I'm not sure she'd fool around with a married man." And on and on and on and on and ON in this vein. The whole night long. X tried to engage her on other topics. The world, after all, is full of a number of things: Books. Movies. Theater. Travel. Music. Food. And how about, not what Bill Clinton was doing with his penis, but what he was doing with his policies?

But alas, in spite of my friend's ministrations, he could not get the lady off Topic A.

Suffice it to say, it was a long night.

And to make the horror complete -- Chris Matthews was also at this dinner.

Wow. Kathy G hates Chris Matthews too. Maybe there's hope for bipartisanship after all. The enemy of my enemies....

And what's Topic A for Ms. Dowd nowadays, given that Bill Clintón's penis no longer bestrides the national stage?

I think we all know the answer to that.

On Banning Harry Potter

FLG had a post a few days back mentioning evangelical Christians who dislike Harry Potter so much they want to ban it. This made me think about the Catholic/Protestant divide (generalizing, generalizing) in reactions to fantasy, Catholics (Tolkienian ones, anyway), welcoming fantasy as a way to bring people to Christianity, Protestants disliking it as a pagan/devilish distraction from the Bible. I wanted to emphasize the last bit when thinking about Protestant dislike of Harry Potter: it's not so much (I think) that they're afraid that readers will believe in magic, as that it will their sense of the marvelous in the Bible, think of it as nothing more than another story; that the place of the Bible in the imaginative universe of the reader will inevitably shrink when exposed to something else fantastic.

Thinking out loud here ... Catholics fear more the reader numb to the fantastic, stuck in the prosaic, secular world; any fantasy, it is thought, will exercise the mode of perception that reaches beyond the everyday world; any fantasy opens the possibility for the unbeliever to perceive the Divine. (Evangelical) Protestants, on the other hand, fear more the rivalry of alternate fantasies, and take their power more as a danger to faith than a way to it; secular, prosaic literature is in some ways less of a danger. Catholics think of fantasy as a tool for evangelizing; Protestants think of it as a to by the Devil to strip the faith from the faithful.

All this also works as instant analysis where you substitute "secular culture" for "fantasy", but I think less sharply.

In the broad scheme, I think the evangelicals may have a better case; I bet Harry Potter dulls more people's faith than it brings people to the faith.

Coulter and Maher

This piece on the Coulter-Maher debate was admittedly written by a conservative, but it brings up an important point -- one that, yes, I've made here more than once before. There's a lot of hand-wringing on the right about what to do with people like Coulter, but not so much on the left about folks like Maher, who is, to my mind, far nastier than Coulter. I'm not saying Coulter is a paragon of grace and goodwill in argumentation; just that there's a real discrepancy between how someone like her is regarded on the Right and how comparable non-paragons-of-grace-and-goodwill are regarded on the Left.

I dream of a world where every time some leftist starts going off about Coulter and how disgraceful she is, any conservative present will immediately ask if the speaker has similarly hard feelings about Maher. It's not as if there's a shortage of obnoxious things Maher has said. (See, just for a start, here and here -- oh, and just for fun, here's a picture of Maher's dead-Steve-Irwin Halloween costume. Classy.)

Leftists who go on about Coulter should be confronted with a choice between (a) admitting that both sides have prominent figures who cross the borders of good taste and (b) making it plain that they're hypocrites.

A Banana Through The Heart

One of my Great Unwritten Novels - at any rate, no more than a bad first chapter written - was a murder mystery set at Worthmore College. The chairman of the physics department has been found dead with a banana (superfrozen, sharpened) through his heart. Who had access to the physics department superfreezer? Who would want to kill the chairman? Will our hero detective manage to avoid the danger of undue attention to the student body? Was the banana organic? Not even our author knows the answers, since he quit early.

It would have been a great cover, with that banana in the victim's chest and blood seeping over the lab coat.

I give this plot to anyone who wants to use it.

On History Grad School

This is a more extended sketch of ways I want, right now, to change the structure of history grad school. This is by way of a call for mild reform, not for revolutionary change – in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair number of grad programs already have a similar structure. The proposed reforms stem from my personal experience as a grad student and junior teacher, both in terms of what worked and what didn’t work. I offer them tentatively, as things I think would be good, but not as the Only Possible Way To Be Educated Properly.

MA Program: Broad, general knowledge is useful for both high-school teachers and college professors, so an emphasis on that here. For future college professors, an emphasis on preparing you to teach your bread-and-butter survey courses – which (so far as I can tell) will generally be the European history, American history, and World history sequences. Therefore, three tracks of four courses each, to prepare you for the survey courses. For Europeanists, a survey course apiece in ancient Europe (Mesopotamia and Egypt through Late Imperial Rome), medieval Europe, early modern Europe, and modern Europe. For Americanists, survey courses in each century of American history. For everyone else, four of the five survey courses on East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Four further courses at the student’s discretion, possibly including (especially for terminal MAs) a lower-level independent study tailored toward a long research paper.

The ancient history requirement for Europeanists is problematic in terms of turf wars and department funding: in many universities, it will amount to a huge subsidy of the Classics department, in terms of guaranteed students. It will also require said Classics department to offer this sort of broad, graduate-level survey, perhaps against their druthers. If the Classics department is sticky about this, some alteration of the program will be needed. I would recommend a quid-pro-quo, where Classics students are strongly encouraged to take a course in medieval history.

The requirement for World history I know is oddly broad, and a specialist in Chinese history will be more than usually frustrated as he takes his Latin America course. I repeat: said China specialist is reasonably likely to end up teaching a world history course, and he will be utterly at sea if he hasn’t taken such a course first. This is meant to prepare you for a teaching life.

In addition to limiting the number of advanced courses you take, this will have a more than usually inhibiting effect on people doing imperial history, women’s history, etc. – anything thematic, anything crossing the Europe/America/World divides. I hope it will be an inhibiting structure, not a crippling one, but I acknowledge that it will inhibit. I think it’s a necessary cost to prepare you for likely survey courses.

This sequence will also be good for professors, as it requires them to stay current, at a fairly high level, with the broad historiography of their period. They will much rather teach a more narrow grad course! – they must be forced, kicking and screaming, to teach these grad-level surveys.

The syllabi for these courses should overlap considerably or entirely with the Teaching Comps Reading List; see below; this should make the Teaching Comps easier.

I also realize, from personal experience, how quickly you forget the material you learn in these courses. I would have been much better on the medieval section of my Development of Europe course ten years ago. Still, better to have forgotten something than never to have known it.

Ph.D. Courses: Teaching of History: 1-2 semesters. In addition to a skeleton of ed school readings on teaching theory (not entirely useless), I would include 1) sitting in on a number of classes, both lecture and seminar; 2) leading both a lecture and a discussion section as a guest in a class; 3) writing two syllabi, one for a survey, one for your specialty; 4) commenting on and grading a sample essay; 5) (it pains me to add) preparing a Power Point presentation for a class; 6) selecting from several competing textbooks, and explaining your reasons why; 7) a section on English spelling and grammar, both for your benefit and the benefit of your students. And perhaps a session teaching in a high school history class, so you have a sense of one of your fallback options.

Research Seminar: 2 semesters. This should be the capstone course - and acceptable to take after your comps. Spring and Fall, with time in the summer to do research in an archive. You write an article that you can submit to a professional journal. This should 1) get you professional level of knowledge of the scholarly literature of a small field; 2) introduce you to the methods of archival research; 3) give you the ultimate practice in learning how to write in a professional and timely manner; 4) provide you a chapter of your dissertation; 5) diminish the leap from dissertation to published monograph.

Additional Courses: To taste, optionally. There shouldn't be more than a handful more before you go on to comps and the dissertation.

Comprehensive Examinations: Three exams, one in general knowledge (50 books), surveying the entire European/American/World sequence, and then a major field (125 books) and a minor field (75) books. Note that some books that could also appear in your major and minor field will appear instead in your general knowledge exam, so there's less distraction from your specialization than at first appears. The exam on general knowledge should draw its leading list from the survey courses listed above, and should have questions focused on how one would teach the material.

Dissertation: I'm reasonably happy with the current requirement to produce, in essence, a crude monograph. I would try to create tracks that allow one to substitute 1) a scholarly edition of a primary source; and 2) 3-4 articles accepted for publication. But the rationale for producing a monograph strikes me as a pretty good one, so I'd still make that the default option.

Why Did God Invent Morning Classes?

Why? Why? Or, as Linus put it, Why Me?

Lockstep Agreement = Truth

The Times -- that's the New York Times for those of you in Wasilla -- today runs a story on a conference of global warming skeptics meeting in midtown Manhattan this week. The story is relatively balanced by the standards of the Times (and the times) but throughout it runs the idea that opposition to the dominant ideology on global warming is somehow discredited by the fact that* some skeptics also disagree with other skeptics.

From the Cairo Times, 9 Rajab, 399 A.H.:

Dozens of self-proclaimed "humor skeptics" have gathered at the university here this week to challenge the idea, now the overwhelming consensus among learned men both in the Umma and in Christian Europe, that imbalances in the four bodily humors play a dominant role in the causation of disease.

But as prominent thinkers like Avicenna continue to offer new support for the role of the humors in mental as well as physical disorders, the skeptics about the theory are showing signs of internal rifts and weakening support.

The meeting participants hold a wide range of views about the causes of disease. Some acknowledge that the humors probably play a role, but contend that doctors ought to concentrate on forms of treatment other than attempting to purge the humors. Some claim the humors are controlled largely by the influence of the planets. Others believe in the importance of blood, but say that phlegm plays only a secondary role. A few deny that the four humors exist at all.

One of the participants, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, argued that proponents of humorism need to be more rigorous in submitting their theory to experimentation, but also blasted many anti-humor extremists who contend that the humors are entirely irrelevant to health.

"Blood and bile are obviously very important elements in the body," al-Biruni said. "Looking to evil spirits -- or other invisible creatures -- to explain disease is just asking for trouble."

You get the idea. What I especially liked in the Times article was the suggestion that the skeptics at the conference are somehow less intellectually respectable because Exxon isn't funding the conference organizers, as it once did. It's nice to be able to have it either way: when corporations gave money to climate skeptics, the skeptics were whores (but the global warming advocates who took even more money from governments weren't). Now that they continue to push their message with reduced corporate funding, they're kooks.

[*Now every time I use the phrase "the fact that" I wonder, "what would FLG do?"]

Babes with Arms

Taxicab Confessions, with Maureen Dowd:

Let’s face it: The only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps. Her husband urges bold action, but it is Michelle who looks as though she could easily wind up and punch out Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Madoff and all the corporate creeps who ripped off America.

In the taxi, when I asked David Brooks about her amazing arms, he stared at me strangely. “Sure,” he said. “She has nice arms.” I tried to press the point. What did he think of them as a man? Would he like to touch them? To feel them behind his back, pulling him to her? Too embarrassed to answer, my fellow Times columnist shuffled his feet and stared fixedly out the passenger window on his side of the cab.

“It looks like it might rain,” he said nervously.

That was when I realized he had it bad for Mrs. Obama too.

I had never found myself thinking about another woman in that way before. But now...

For one thing, she was strong. She was a strong woman, like me, Maureen Dowd. She would know what it was like to be too powerful and intimidating for the men around her. She wouldn’t be overawed by me, no. She would know how to tame me.

And we had so much in common. She took fashion risks; I took fashion risks. We had both experienced the strange thrill of being highly compensated for holding pointless jobs we weren’t really qualified for. Neither of us was an especially talented writer. Maybe men weren't necessary, after all...

My mind had wandered. I was jarred from my reverie by David’s awkward attempts to remove my hand from his thigh. His bald head was sweating. He looked so cute.

“Maureen,” he said, with that earnest look he always has on the News Hour. “I’m a married man. It’s one of the few things I’m a conservative about.”

“Oh David,” I murmured thickly, running my free hand through my unnaturally red hair. “I’ve been so lonely for so long....”

Read the whole thing.

Better Gifts from Barack Obama

To Gordon Brown: A first edition of Stephen Spender's "I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great." Also, a biography of Anthony Eden.

To Nicolas Sarkozy: A first edition of Alfred Lord Tennyon's "The Lotos Eaters."

To Dmitri Medvedev: A karaoke CD of "There Are No Strings On Me."

To Hu Jintao: A first edition of Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan.

To King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia: A first edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.

To Benjamin Netanyahu: Assorted spare parts for an F-16 Fighting Falcon.

To Mahmoud Ahmedinejad: A detailed map of the Natanz Nuclear Facility, in the English copy and the original Hebrew.

Vassilis Paleokostas

Lately, I've been a bit depressed -- about the state of the world, about the academic job market in Classics, about a slow-motion falling-out with an old friend (her choice). So much to be unhappy about. But suddenly, I'm a lot happier. And why?

Because Greece's most flamboyant criminal, the Robin Hood of Trikala, Vassilis Paleokostas, has escaped from a maximum-security prison. In broad daylight. By helicopter. Again.

If, like most non-Greeks, you haven't heard of Vassilis Paleokostas, you're missing one of the great stories of our time. Paleokostas is a bank robber and kidnapper famous chiefly for three things. First, most of his crimes have been exceptionally daring, the kind that lend themselves to screaming headlines in the Athens dailies. Second, he commits his crimes with notable politeness: he apologizes mildly to bank tellers as he holds them at gunpoint, and is courteous even to his kidnap victims -- most recently multi-gazillionaire George Mylonas* -- who, inevitably, are quoted later in the press marveling about how pleasant the whole experience was. (This is only a slight exaggeration.) Finally, and most charmingly, Paleokostas doesn't keep all the loot for himself. He distributes a substantial portion of it -- most of it, by some estimates -- to the poor in his native region of northern Thessaly.** Needless to say, Paleokostas has become a popular hero, the stuff of the Greek genre of outlaw music called rebetiko.

Then, a few years ago, the Greek police finally managed to nab Paleokostas and lock him away in the Korydallos prison in the Piraeus. But that was not, needless to say, the end of the story. I'm tempted to narrate what happened next, but why hear it from me when you can hear it from -- yes, reader, this gets even better -- Taki Theodoracopulos (which is where I read the news of Paleokostas's most recent exploit)?

I have to say, I don't think Paleokostas is as physically unappealing as Taki seems to think, but Taki's standards in these matters are high, and Paleokostas is so dreadfully lower-class. Judge for yourself: here's Paleokostas. Not a bad looking fellow, right? Ladies? How can you resist that rakish Van Dyck thing he's got going on in that photo?

And at least one hot babe was willing to hijack a helicopter for this guy, tossing a rope ladder into a prison exercise yard while spraying the guard towers with an AK-47. The stuff of cinema. Or, since no one got hurt, the A-Team. In fact, I strongly suggest you listen to the A-Team theme music while reading this account of Paleokostas's career that fills in some of Taki's gaps -- including, for example, a little more background on Paleokostas's crazy Albanian sidekick. (Again, how much like a movie is this? In Hollywood, the sidekick would be black, but Albanian is the Greek equivalent.)

I suppose I shouldn't say too much about the Albanian, Alket Rizai, since Rizai, unlike Paleokostas, is known to have some actual murders to his credit and it's therefore a bit of a shame that he too is now at large.

On the whole, though, I find myself mightily cheered by the news that such things as Paleokostas's escape can still happen in the world. Of course, it was (as Taki emphasizes) facilitated by the incompetence (and possibly corruption) of the Greek authorities. Then again, as America prepares for extortionate taxation and computerized medical records, the idea that there are still a few civilized countries where government is something to laugh at rather than fear makes me pretty happy too.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Not to be confused with George Mylonas the great archaeologist, whose daughter Ione caused such scandal at the excavations in the Athenian agora. (How's that for a tease?)

**The region is suffering economically. Trikala, the city near which Paleokostas was born, was one of the centers of those riots last summer.

On Gifts

Gordon Brown's gift of a Churchill biography registers the enormous hold of Churchill on the British imagination. Consider that a leftish Labor PM gave the gift to a leftish Democratic President - that Churchill is not beloved in the Labor left - and that Brown could not think of a better symbol of Anglo-American amity. Well, among prime ministers, perhaps so. As a gentle suggestion to Mr. Brown: why not a biography of Tom Paine next time around? Surely Anglo-American radicalism and reform is more to Obama's taste? - and who knows, Obama's patchwork education may not have included any mention of Mr. Paine. As for a gift to Brown, superior to a collection of DVDs: How about Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes? Not particularly American or Anglo-American as a theme, but surely something to provide economic and financial information and parallels, and ideological comfort, to Brown at a difficult moment.

Barack Obama: Leftist Ideologue or Egocentric Jerk?

Really, I shouldn't even bother to write a blog-post. The title is perfect by itself.

1) When I look at Obama's ambitions, I wonder if he's really a party man - somebody interested in the well-being of the Democratic Party. It seems to me that his ambitions risk a re-creation of the Reagan coalition (or a similar successor) to limit or roll back his reforms, and that he is, perhaps, willing to see Republicans resurge, so long as his policy program is institutionalized beyond their ability to undo. Surely he aims to harmonize the interests of ideology and party, but there is a potential tension between his ideology and the long-term interests of his party, and the tea-leaves begin to indicate that he is willing, at a remarkably early stage, to put ideology before party. By way of contrast: Johnson did Civil Rights knowing he would lose the South to the Republicans for a generation or more, but he did this after a long career as a party man; Clinton abandoned the Democrats by triangulation, but only perforce after the Republican Revolution of 1994; Bush ultimately put Iraq before party, but spent considerable time in 2002 and 2004 working for the Republican party as a whole; McCain touted his non-partisan credentials, but he only came unglued from the Republican party after nearly two decades as a loyal footsoldier. Obama shows signs of being more interested in policy/ideology than party only a month into his presidency, after a very short previous career in politics. I think this may be a difference.

This argument, I realize, is based on the presumption that Obama's policy ambitions present a real danger to the survival of the Democratic coalition, and that Obama is proceeding fully aware of these dangers. These presumptions are still sufficiently speculative that I present my own speculations about Obama's character with some diffidence, and a willingness to retract them as events unfold.

If true, this does indicate that the narrative of the Obama presidency will revolve around the extent to which Democratic politicians begin to realize that Obama doesn't particularly care about their interests. If such a perception becomes general, it could cause serious damage to his programme.

2) Vague thoughts that one of the values of party politics, where the party is an ideological coalition, is that it compromises ideological purists - puts party friendship above ideals. This is often thought of as a minus, but I think it might be a plus. And shall we say that it may open the way to cross-party friendship? Once you've realized that you can be friends with a party member who disagrees with you, you realize you can be friends with a member of another party, who disagrees with you even more.

3) And then the thought that describing Obama as essentially ideological may miss the point - he may simply be a bit of an insensitive, egocentric jerk, who just doesn't give a damn about whether other members of his party get re-elected. Not that this is out of the ordinary for politicians. I add to this portrait various data points - his willingness to throw old associates under the bus, his dismissive jab toward Hillary back in debate in New Hampshire, his current rudeness toward Gordon Brown. Against this, quite a lot of people who actually know him (as opposed to his distant worshipers) do seem to like and respect him, which argues that "egocentric jerk" probably isn't a sufficient portrait. Still, I vaguely suspect it's part of who he is.

Reading Lists

As I read through my Development of Europe textbook, looking at the recommended readings at the end of each chapter, I think to myself that I really should have read all those books (or some similar selection), not only to prepare myself to teach the survey course, but for my general knowledge. (I know shockingly little about ancient Mesopotamia.) At the very least, a selection. A proposal: for my comps, I read about 150 books on Early Modern Europe, 100 on Modern Europe. Would it make sense to slice off 30-50 books from that list, and shift them over to a general historical knowledge list - perhaps tied to a Teaching of History Course - and make for a third comp? So one general history list, one for your major field, one for your minor field. I don't know how this generalizes for other disciplines, or even for Americanists or Latin Americanists or what have you, but gearing the comprehensives to prepare you for your bread-and-butter survey course seems to me like a good idea.

The Only Way Obama's Gift of 25 "Classic American Movies" for Gordon Brown Could be Funnier:

"I say, what's this? Requires Region 1 only NTSC-compatible player?"

"Oh, bloody hell...!"

Feel the Hope! Taste the Change!

So, just to review:

The markets are still going ker-plunge (after a small uptick yesterday, the Dow is down almost 4% since trading opened this morning). Unemployment claims and labor costs continue to rise while worker productivity is slipping. The future of the bond market is in doubt.

Abroad, Iran is about to build nuclear weapons. China is ramping up its defense budget. Russia is throwing its weight around in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. In Venezuela, Chavezismo has gained a new lease on life and a new wave of nationalizations has begun. The government of Pakistan continues to weaken vis-à-vis the Jihadists.

And the Obama administration seems to be poorly equipped to deal with any of this. Apparently the agents of Hope and Change have been concentrating on more important matters, like developing a large-scale strategy to attack Rush Limbaugh.

I know this story is already old news, and indeed, there are signs that the White House is now in retreat on the Limbaugh front. (Apparently Obama won't be taking up Limbaugh's offer to debate him any time soon?) I just wanted to register my dismay and disgust that this is how this new administration thinks. We control the White House. We control both houses of Congress. Our popularity is sky-high and the major media are tamer than at any time in two generations. Now we must demonize an inconvenient talk-show host. As an actual strategy. With polls and focus groups and coordinated plans and the active participation of the President and his press secretary.

I've asked it before, about the Left: What kind of people are these? Did the evil Bush administration and its sinister Richelieu Karl Rove ever coordinate attacks on a private citizen like this -- a journalist, a pundit, a critic of any kind? A newspaper? A television network? Or even, for that matter, a political opponent of any kind (with the exception of John Kerry during the 2004 campaign)?

Computer Diagnoses

WW: My track pad and keyboard don't work. Do they need to be replaced?

Repair Guy (RG): Mm, nope. You have a bulging battery. See, it presses into the back of the trackpad and the keys. You need to replace that.

WW: A bulging battery.

RG: Sure, feel that. It curves.

WW: By golly, so it does. A bulging battery. Huh.

Dreher and Other Tooles (UPDATED x2)

Well, Rod Dreher -- one of those bo-bo squishy-cons I don't much care for -- has put his foot in it. "Mongoloid Right"? (UPDATE: Dreher has, perhaps wisely, amended his post so as to remove the troublesome language. But Ace of Spades provides the original version of the relevant paragraph.)

Dreher says he was just using the word in its "Ignatian sense" (as in Ignatius Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces -- about which, more in a moment) to mean "dopes":

No reference to Down syndrome sufferers is intended; I just like thinking about Mongo-Cons....

Ahem. Well, where do you think "Mongoloid" in the sense of "dopes" came from, Mr. Dreher? And it's not even considered tasteful to refer to Down's Syndrome sufferers as "Mongoloids" anymore since that term got applied to them in the first place because their distinctive facial structure was seen as resembling that of the peoples of East Asia, who might bristle at the association. I'm not someone who's persnickety about such things, but -- wow. Don't expect "Mongo-Con" to catch on anytime soon, at least on the right. (Al Gore and Maureen Dowd might feel differently.)

So, fine. Dreher goofed, and he goofed because he's so obsessed with Confederacy of Dunces. Can I just take this opportunity to say, I hate that book?

I should explain why, but I'm never very good at this because, from my perspective, it's hard to see how anyone could like it. Every character in the book is unappealing; many are downright disgusting. It's not clear to me whether we're supposed to have sympathy for the main character, Ignatius Reilly, or not. I admit he has a certain eccentric, fish-out-of-water charm, but his own lack of sympathy for others -- along with his limitless vices and bad habits, all lovingly described by Toole (apparently to know all is not to forgive all) -- makes it pretty hard for me to have any fellow-feeling for him. And if we're supposed to loathe him...well, what then? Does the pleasure of the book consist in looking down on him and the other lowlifes who infest Toole's New Orleans? I can appreciate art that produces emotions like fear, horror, dread, sorrow, and even anger. But I don't want to sit through a couple of hundred pages of disgust.

Another thing about the book that bothers me is that I suspect Reilly is supposed to be a weird caricature of G.K. Chesterton, whom I like a great deal. The similarities are not insignificant: they're both very Catholic, very fat, very much in love with the Middle Ages and averse to modernity. Both have big mustaches. Doesn't the cover illustration in the Wikipedia article on Confederacy look like Chesterton? Oh, yes: Ignatius, like Chesterton, likes to play with swords. Even their writing styles are not, I think, entirely dissimilar, but I can't prove this -- it's only my impression. (Chesterton, though, is not known to have had masturbatory fantasies about deceased dogs or to have made a fetish of his pyloric valve.)

People try to justify Confederacy by saying it's an attempt to revive the traditions of Menippean satire, or by talking about how thoroughly it captures the strange, raucous spirit of New Orleans. Meh. I guess I'll stick with Petronius and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Maybe someone who's a fan of the book can explain? Even if I'm not converted, I promise I won't call anyone a "mongoloid."

UPDATE: Apparently Ignatius Reilly did have an original, an English professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where Toole briefly taught:

Fletcher sees no gray area in the matter. "Bobby Byrne is indisputably the inspiration for Ignatius Reilly," he says.

Byrne retired in 1985 and passed away in 2000. Rickels says she is probably the last person alive on the faculty who knew Toole and Byrne well. "Any day I can spend talking about Ken [John Kennedy Toole] and Bobby is a happy day for me," she says. "When we first saw [the opening chapter of Confederacy of Dunces] in New Orleans magazine," Rickels says, "We thought, 'How awful.' We thought it would destroy Bobby.

"Finally I had the courage to ask Bobby if he liked Confederacy of Dunces," she remembers. "Apparently he never saw it. He knew he was the inspiration for Ignatius, but he didn't care. He didn't read modern books and said he never read best sellers. He was reading Boethius."

Byrne and Toole were apparently friends. Which makes me even more queasy about the Ignatius character than I was when I thought Toole was merely going after Chesterton.

A Sorry State of Affairs

Dearest Reader,

You suck. You also stink. I'm tired of your ugly face and unpleasant voice and all the stupid, disgusting things you say and do. Everything about you is a disgrace to the human race. You are vile. You are worse than vermin. You are what is wrong with America.

What? Apologize? *blinks* Whatever for?

Oh, because the things I said are insulting and untrue and I shouldn't have said them and I regret them.

Um, well. I may have overstated things a bit. And it certainly wasn't my intention to offend. But as I understand it -- and my understanding is based on quite a number of web sites that I glanced at this morning, as well as pronouncements from the White House and other Democratic leaders -- what an apology means that I never had the right to criticize you about anything. It means I utterly subordinate myself to you and bow down to you and that you, not I, are the true head of our political party.

Don't you see that?

What? You're saying it doesn't mean any of those things. *looks puzzled* It just means I made a mistake, and want to make things right between us? It may just mean I respect you and value our relationship, that my ego isn't brittle, and that I'm a classy guy?

Strange....

* * *

Okay, satire off. But I really hate the way our society seems to look at apologies nowadays. I feel crotchety saying that, but...well, its's true.

Apologies serve an important social function. They're a key element in civilization. They permit or encourage reconciliation and forgiveness, and they help us get past the little obstacles that inevitably arise between human beings. They also force us to own up to our mistakes and become better people thereby.

At least, that's how I was taught to think about them, growing up.

These days, it seems to me, people are unusually quick to expect apologies but unusually slow to offer them. An apology is seen as a serious humiliation instead of as a polite gesture of respect.

If people do issue apologies, they're often attack-apologies like "I'm sorry you feel that way" or bizarre conditional apologies like "If I offended anyone by saying all Latvians are filthy losers, then I'm sorry." Ideally, the conditional apology should be offered with a raised-eyebrow look of perplexity, as if someone would have to be touched in the head to be offended so easily.

At the same time, the apology on behalf of a group, or on behalf of someone else, seems to be gaining in popularity. It's pretty common now for public figures to apologize for slavery or Japanese internment or U.S. treatment of Native Americans. As I learned on the Diane Rehm show yesterday, Madeleine Albright even apologized for the American role in overthrowing Iranian Prime Minster Mossadeq. I'm starting to suspect that these supererogatory apologies are in fact worse than attack-apologies, because what they really do is glorify the "apologizer" (who has no share in the sin and, not being Jesus, can't atone for it) at the expense of those apologized for. Look how much better I am than those dead people who did those bad things.

I suppose it's all part of the weird movement of America from a guilt society back toward a shame society. Traditionally, an apology is an acknowledgment of, and therefore an atonement for, pre-existing guilt. But if you take away the idea of internal guilt, then an apology -- a genuine, personal apology -- is nothing more than a loss of face. And therefore it's something to be avoided, until and unless the external costs of avoidance become too high to sustain.

I think this theory is confirmed by my observation that many of the same people who are most reluctant to offer apologies are also the most reluctant to accept them. More and more often I see people react to apologies by pressing some advantage they think they've gained. For example, they'll use the apology as a chance to reiterate how bad the original offense was. Or, incredibly, they'll act like the apology is insignificant. A shrug or a "whatever" is not (to my geezerly way of thinking) an appropriate response to an apology. I suppose, from the shame-culture POV, acceptance of apology also entails some small sacrifice of one's pride. Shame-culture Goofus accepts the apology; shame-culture Gallant uses the oppotunity to further assert his status.

Anyway, this state of affairs, assuming I've diagnosed it correctly, sucks. And it's on display again in the whole Michael Steele-Rush Limbaugh imbroglio. Either Steele had a reason to apologize, or he didn't. We can debate that. But, in the old-fashioned guilt-culture theory of apologies, a sufficient reason could exist entirely within Steele's own conscience. And even if the uproar on the right about Steele's remarks helped stimulate that conscience, that still doesn't mean the apology wasn't sincere, or that Steele isn't a better and stronger person for having made it.

The classy thing for Limbaugh to do now is to accept the apology and say some kind words about Steele. And the classy thing for the Democrats *coughs* and the media *chokes* is to move on.

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman in Hell

John: Ah, Milton. You're well?

Milton: Hell is a wooly scarf on a hot day. And you?

John: Hell is a torn parasol. So. Have you seen the news lately.

Milton: I have a devilishly fast landline. I'm au courant.

[Pause.]

CHORUS, IN UNISON: It's your fault!

[Uncertain pause.]

Milton: That's my line.

John: No, no, dear boy, mine. Your ideas ...

Milton: Certainly not! Far more your ideas than mine.

John: Mais non, cher ami. My disciples, I grant, are to blame.

Milton: Mine too, mine too. The thing about disciples is, well, they're very flattering for the ego, but ...

John: Bonny and buxom at bed, but not at blackboard.

Milton: I refuse to know what you're talking about.

John: Take my word for it. So, our disciples are not what they should be.

Milton: Chicago will go the way of Nineveh.

John: Cambridge went to Sodom long ago, I'm happy to say. Do you suppose Karl is happy? Every time the stock market wobbles, he smiles; he must be in seventh heaven now.

Milton: He is, he is. His beard waggles in a Teutonically joyful manner. He pores over the latest Krugman columns and says, "Ach, zo, ach, zo, I knew it!"

John: Krugman?

Milton: I'm afraid so. God wept.

John: Homer nodded. And here the value of labor appeared by the long boats; and here the value of labor appeared again by the walls of Troy. Oh, Karl.

Milton: O tempora, o mores. Obama?

John: Friedmanite, I swear it. A native son of Chicago.

Milton: He's sent the economy into Keynes-Stokes respiration. Also I'm told he's a Keynes smoker. He's one of your brood.

John: Alas, a disciple, I do confess it. A bonny, bonny lad, though.

Milton: Careful, John.

John: Come back with your blackboard or on it, I always said, and some came on it indeed. Oh, Cambridge! So near to God, so far from hell and me.

Milton: Oh, Chicago! So cold in winter, I'd rather be in hell.

John: All sing amen.

Apologists for Iran

I recently -- as in, several minutes ago -- made the mistake of listening to NPR, specifically the Diane Rehm show. I only caught a short portion of the show, but the guest was a British fellow, Con Coughlin, whom I'd never heard of. His basic position seemed to be that Islamic fundamentalism was a serious obstacle to normal relations between Iran and the West.

I would have thought that this was a relatively uncontroversial position. But apparently not in NPR-land. Every caller during the 15-20 minutes during which I listened, and Rehm herself, seemed to want to relieve the Iranian regime of responsibility for the tensions between Iran and the U.S. One especially generous soul went so far as to acknowledge that the strain wasn't all America's fault, but most of the callers felt that the U.S. in general, and Bush in particular, bore almost total responsibility for everything wrong in the U.S.-Iran relationship.

The callers didn't have a lot of facts at their disposal (other than the fact that the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Mossadeq fifty years ago and the "fact" -- i.e., probable lie -- that Iran sent a communiqué to Bush in 2003 proposing a credible deal to stabilize Iraq), but they did have a lot of epithets like "right wing," "ultra right wing," "neocon." They seemed to feel that to identify the guest as "right wing" was ipso facto to discredit him. (And of course, for him to believe what he believed was sufficient to ID him as right wing, so there was no shortage of circulus in their probando.)

I can't believe that at this late date the mainstream Left -- surely NPR is mainstream? -- can still shock me. But to believe that, in the U.S.-Iran relationship, the U.S. is the problem? Sure, we overthrew Mossadeq. But how many terrorist attacks against Iran have we orchestrated in the last fifty years? How many Iranian hostages have we seized? How many Iranian soldiers and civilians have been killed by militant groups working for the U.S. while engaged in peaceful activities? And this is only to mention Iranian hostilities against the U.S. directly. Which power do most of Iran's neighbors feel more threatened by -- us or them?

Even leaving patterns of behavior aside, what about the simple fact that the Iranian regime is a rather ruthless theocracy which oppresses and persecutes (if those words have any meanings) many of its citizens? Do I have to rehearse what Iran routinely does to women who stray from the regime's rigorous sexual mores? To gays -- not that they exist in Iran, according to its president? To anyone who dares publicly criticize the regime?

When folks on the Right say that the Left is reflexively anti-American, the callers (and host) on the Diane Rehm show today are the sort of people we have in mind. Because I heard a series of people who believed -- and who clearly wanted to believe -- that the U.S. was morally inferior to the Islamic Republic. Maybe the people who call into NPR and get through the call screeners are all outliers, not representative of the educated American Left. But I'm afraid I doubt it.

What is the President Thinking?

[Left-leaning readers may want to skip this one. It's almost pure anti-Obama. On the other hand, right-leaning readers may want to skip it because they've heard it all before. This was one of those posts where I kept thinking an insight was lurking just around the corner if I kept writing, and none was. But it doesn't look like I'll have time to write anything else today, and a blog is, as they say, like a shark: a cartilaginous fish whose blood is in osmotic balance with the surrounding ocean.]

I used to be depressed that I'd reached my age without having a lot more invested in the stock market. Now, I'm a little less depressed about that and a little more depressed about the fact that the country I love is on fast the train to financial perdition.

It's harder and harder to avoid the conclusion that the ongoing collapse of the markets represents a lack of confidence in the Obama administration's plans and aptitude for dealing with the economic crisis. Nobody wants to sell at a loss, but that's what a whole lot of people are doing.

So, the people with something to lose are already bullish on Obama. But, incredibly, Obama doesn't seem concerned. As Rich Lowry pointed out yesterday at NRO, the One isn't even trying to address the crisis. Does this mean Obama is as much of a sillyhead as his most visible supporters? Or does it mean Obama doesn't feel he has to address the crisis?

I keep reading lines like this one on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal: "as the Dow keeps dropping, the president is running out of people to blame." I don't think Obama sees it that way. I'm going to try to put into words how I think Obama does see it.

If Obama's actions were more specifically targeted to address the financial crisis, they still might not have any short-term impact. (I think Joe Biden's "30% chance of getting it wrong" reprsented actual administration thinking.) But, conversely, there's a decent chance that, if Obama does nothing, the economy will bottom out by 2010. The midterm elections will probably be a bloodbath for Democrats, but probably not enough to lose them control of either house, and Obama will coast into 2012 will a solid recovery at his heels. It worked for Reagan, who came into office amid a disastrous recession that continued throughout the first two years of his first term. But by 1984, he was able to declare "morning in America."

Of course, Reagan's tax cuts represented a more, direct Keynesian stimulus than anything Obama is doing, but one could also make the case that the recovery from the early 80s recession was made possible in part because Paul Volcker at the Fed was brutual in crushing inflation -- "purging the rottenness from the economy," in the words of Andrew Mellon -- and therefore made people willing to invest again.* Perhaps Obama really does want to be like Reagan, at least in this respect, and perhaps somewhere in Obama's soul is a little bit of Andrew Mellon. Maybe he's willing to see this recession depression fiasco run its course, like a fever, until it inevitably breaks, which he figures will almost certainly be before he's forced to stand for reelection. As I write this, the Dow is up very modestly since the opening bell so who knows? -- maybe we've already seen the worst.

If that's Obama's thinking, I think he's probably mistaken. The policies his administration is pursuing seem to me likely to draw out the badness, perhaps for years. In that case, the model is not Reagan but FDR. And FDR was able to go on blaming Hoover for almost two terms while the economy languished in large part as a result of FDR's anti-business agenda. So why shouldn't Obama, with a media almost as slavish as FDR's and a Republican party in even greater disarray, imagine he can't pull of the same trick for a mere four years? It's not as if the people who voted for Obama are going to want to think that they're even partly to blame for their current woes.**

Call me a pessimist, but either way I think Obama is not unreasonable to count on a certain amount of slack. After all, his whole life is a study in not being held to the same standards as mere mortals.

For us mere mortals, there are always boxcars and bindles.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

[*Volcker's policies at the Fed were partly responsible for the sharpness and severity of the recession, but the economy was already rotten before Volcker began his tenure as Chairman.]

[**But it occurs to me: doesn't "Obamaville" sound a lot better than "Bushville?" If we need to update Hooverville, that is?]

Exporting Inflation

Gowanus (privately) and FLG have both linked to the Krugman article linking our woes to excess savings in East Asia (=China). So, is there a maximum of solid investment in the world at any one time? If so, what can one do with the excess savings that doesn't just lead to some bubble somewhere?

But it also occurs to me ... I used to hear it put that America exported its inflation by printing dollars that the rest of the world bought, because we were the unofficial reserve currency of the world. Does that mean that China, by buying endless American treasury bonds, in essence exported its own inflation to America and the rest of the world? If so, isn't that rather ingenious?

Sporadic Posting

I have essays to grade. Also, my keyboard and touchpad are acting up, and the computer is likely to go to the repair shop for a few days. Besides the which, I may not have anything brilliant to say just now. [Ed. Did you ever? Ww. Oh, hush up.] So, for well and good reasons, posting is likely to be sporadic for a bit.

ALPHEUS ADDS: Here too, alas. If this were an eighties sitcom, I suppose we could run a post where we have a few lines of new material that consists of us "reminiscing" about older posts. "Remember that time you had that idea about NATO...?" (slow dissolve)