Public Lives

I am very fond of my undergraduate institution, Wesleyan University. It's a great school, with an amazing intellectual culture that produces more than its fair share of interesting academics, activists, and artists. The incoming president, Michael Roth, is a fairly young alumnus who is an academic himself, the former president of an art school, and seems like a cool guy. (Unlike the previous president, who was an anti-intellectual jerk who made no secret of his general dislike for the student body.) I'm excited about the school's future, and will be a happy (small) donor some day when I have more money.

However, I just noticed something. We got this press release that Robert and Elena Allbritton, young but apparently wealthy alumni, gave $5 million to the school to create a "Center for the Study of Public Life."

The Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life is a response to significant changes across the social sciences, which include the creation of new interdisciplinary ventures, the use of multiple methodologies in research, and the rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements. The Allbritton Center will build on evolving relationships between scholarly research and both the political process and the greater public. It will host courses taught by people who have had distinguished careers in public service, including law, business, government, the non-profit sector, and media. It also will house a Quantitative Analysis Center to educate students in the analysis and interpretation of large bodies of data

Sounded laudable enough to me. The press release goes on to point out that Robert Allbritton founded Politico, a political web site with a Republican slant I find generally annoying, but whatever, it's all good. We left wing types are open-minded about who we associate with.

But do you know what else Robert Allbritton has done in his short career? Well, he was President and CEO of Riggs Bank, a local financial institution in Washington, DC, owned by the Allbritton family. And why does the Allbritton name sound vaguely familiar? Well, in March he resigned as president in disgrace. Why? Let's ask the Washington Post!

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which has closely monitored Riggs since early last year and must approve any senior executive appointments, was informed of Allbritton's replacements, the company said. Riggs was fined a record $25 million by the OCC last spring for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws, and in January the bank pleaded guilty and paid a $16 million fine for failing to prevent possible money laundering by former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and officials of the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea.

That's right. It's turn out that the Allbritton family is widely believed to have personally assisted Certified Evil Dictator Augusto Pinochet in hiding his assets from the various courts that are trying to seize them. Want more? Read another Post article. Robert's father Joe seems to have been the major culprit--although some random low-level employees took the legal fall--but it's hard to believe my illustrious brother in Wesleyan alumdom was not part of some very bad things.

And this guy wants to start a "Center for the Study of Public Life"? Well, I suppose it is true that Pinochet did pioneer a certain "rethinking of the idea of the public in a variety of intellectual and social movements," in that, you know, he had most of his public secretly executed.

I guess whatever, Wesleyan can use the Allbritton money. But I respectfully suggest that it might make a fitting tribute to the institutions of democracy if it were renamed the Salvador Allende Memorial Center for the Study of Public Life. After all, 2008 marks the centennial of Allende's birth, and if Robert Allbritton is really looking for a way to assuage some guilt with his gift, he might as well go all the way.

Okay, fine.

I might be an Obama supporter, I might dislike the Clinton family individually and as a unit, but...I have to admit, the new Hillary campaign video is brilliant.


That said, her official campaign song is a sappy French-Canadian ballad? Clearly somebody did not, as all campaigns should, hire an in-house musicologist.

This Country, I Tell You What

Sorry, no poetry this Friday. I'm too cranky.

This past Tuesday there was a big march in Los Angeles to push for immigration reform, one of a number of marches around the country. The day was entirely peaceful and positive, as all of these immigration marches have been. And then, at the end of the day, there was an altercation between some cops and protesters at MacArthur Park. Supposedly, a rock or two might have been thrown, although possibly it was just some plastic water bottles. The police responded by charging the crowd, firing rubber bullets indiscriminately at a mass of people that included families, ice cream vendors, and the usual homeless people that live in the park. Parents dived on top of their toddlers to keep them from being killed by the rubber bullets.

Now, you might not know this, but this stuff happens all the time at protests. And it is usually pretty well-documented. I wasn't at this particular protest, but a bunch of friends of mine were at one of the big anti-IMF protests in Washington, DC back in 2000. The Wesleyan contingent was part of a larger group that was blocking traffic at an intersection, with their arms chained to each other. The student newspaper I worked on, Hermes, published the accounts of these protesters, and here is the story of one friend of mine:

The police bus pulled up around noon. We'd scarcely seen a squad car all morning, and we were off our guard. Everyone in the lockdown circle stood up to see what was going on, which was the worst thing we possibly could have done. The police came off the bus running, and formed a riot line a few feet from our circle. None of them were wearing badges. They didn't even order us to clear the area--one shouted "Let's do this," and they charged us, nightsticks first. In the training sessions, they told us that you're supposed to sit down when the police charge you--that way they can't push people around, knock them over, and start a stampede. Our lock-circle was standing, staring stupidly at the riot visors and shouting for support when they hit us. People's arms started twisting inside the lock-boxes, and they started screaming. A couple unhooked. A soft line formed around us and starting shouting for us to sit down. I sat. The riot officer in front of me looked over at someone who'd just pulled out of his lockbox, looked at me, and drove his nightstick into my face.

I don't know quite what happened next. I was bleeding, screaming, trying to get my arms out of the boxes and figure out where my glasses had landed. There were so many cameras snapping it sounded like machine-gun rounds. When I unhooked my right hand, I saw Sasha, reeling and bleeding, pulling her hand out from the other side. The police backed off--I don't know why--and a second later I was behind the lines, two medics were taking care of me, and a legal observer was interrogating me in the most apologetic tone imaginable.

In the emergency room, they put seven stitches in my face and told me my nose was broken. Sasha had a broken nose and was missing a third of one of her front teeth. And in the hospital waiting room, we watched the network news shows laud the DC police for their restraint.

This stuff really does happen all the time. As Tuesday's march showed, it is rarely related to actual threats from protesters; the LA Times is estimating that there probably about a dozen anarchist-types in MacArthur Park, out of the hundreds of protesters. In the DC case quoted above, the protestors were literally chained to the ground, and were in no position to be a threat to anyone!

Luckily here in LA, MacArthur Park was also home to an area where the press was stationed, underneath a clearly-marked tent and next to their news vans. We're not talking a couple of hippies with video cameras, we're talking the normal national and local news. The police nevertheless pushed through the press, at once point kicking an NBC cameraman while he was on the ground. The national news anchor for Telemundo was roughed up. A woman producer was punched. And so, for once, there is actually some awareness of what happens. Here's a YouTube clip of Brian Williams telling the story:

Know what bothers me? This stuff always goes on at marches, and the media knows it. It's only when their own people get beat up that they get outraged. Know what also bothers me? The so-called progressives in the blogosphere have largely ignored the story--both the marches, and the police violence. Am I missing something or was there not a single post on DailyKos about this? They are so busy worrying about electing Democrats, they could care less that the down are literally being trod upon.

And in other news, today, the president of the American Musicological Society--probably one of the most apolitical, if not downright conservative, scholarly groups out there--emailed all the members to give us an update on Nalini Ghuman. Ghuman is an assistant professor of music at Mills College. (For my non-academic readers, that means she is a full-time faculty member on the tenure track.) She is a British citizen, with degrees from Oxford (BA, MA) Kings College (MA), and UC Berkeley (PhD). Having a job in this country, she has a work visa good through 2008. She went to England this summer for a month to do some research. When she flew back home, to begin her fourth year of teaching, she was detained for eight hours at SFO. Her visa was then revoked, and she was sent back to England.

No explanation.

Eight months later, the government still won't let her come back into the country, as the INS has not yet granted her a security clearance. Again, no explanation. She has apparently heard a rumor that it is a case of mistaken identity, but no official word. While stories like this are sadly a dime a dozen, this really hits home. I don't know Prof. Ghuman, but I do know how difficult it is to be a student in a foreign country, and also how hard it is to get a tenure track job. And to think that it could all be taken away from her because her name is probably similar to the name of someone who once visited the Middle East or something.

Outrageous, and depressing.

Gobama

This is so awesome.

Also, I'd like to point out that I just tried to schedule an eye exam to renew my contact lens prescription, and the first available appointment was May 21st at 7:45 am. That's 47 days away. I suspect that a student health center with 35,000 students might want to have more than one optometrist.

John Cage in Tehran

Know what's cool? Last Thursday night, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra performed Cage's Four⁶. The Cage community is understandbly all a-twitter. The late number pieces are not my favorite, but how often do you see major American orchestras performing any Cage at all!

The press releases don't mention it, interestingly, but Cage himself performed in Iran once, at the 1972 Shiraz Arts Festival--a festival originally created to celebrate the 2,5000 year anniversary of the founding of Persia. You can read an article about it here. [pdf] The concert was sponsored directly by the Shah himself, and was no doubt undertaken with the support of the U.S. government.

Marshall Berman later wrote, "When a creative spirit like John Cage accepted the support of the Shah of Iran, and performed modernist spectacles a few miles from where political prisoners shrieked and died, the failure of moral imagination was not his alone." That's rather sanctimonious, but he had a bit of a point. It's nice to know that at least for one evening this week, Cage's music was being used for slightly less imperialistic ventures.

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This is what I get for not keeping up with my blog reading: everyone in the world has already posted about this. (I really wish I could read that last one, it looks fascinating!)

Obamamania

Pursuant to my primary pondering, I went today to the Barack Obama rally in Los Angeles. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. He was a charismatic speaker, but in an unusual way. He speaks surprisingly slow, with a deep but precise tone. It takes a moment to get used to the slow pace, and the pauses, but by the end of the speech it does a great job of convincing you that he is both thoughtful and passionate. Those are unusual qualities to hear in a politician's speech.

Also, he is a very good looking man. And he is, I believe, the first presidential candidate ever not to have politician's hair.

But the most impressive thing about the rally for me was the crowd. It was a big crowd, first of all; the papers are saying "in the thousands." That's pretty neat considering the primary is over a year away. But more importantly, it was one of the most diverse political events I have ever been too. Truly multi-racial, a wide range of ages, lots of different causes, and a ton of enthusiasm and energy. And as Kelsey pointed out, you don't get the feeling that it was stage-managed by his staff. There wasn't even a lot of publicity for the event, I just happened to notice on his web site that LA was the next stop on his tour. I've been to a lot of political rallies over the years, and there was a new energy at this one.

So I guess I can officially say...Go Obama!

----------------------
Update: The SF Chronicle just posted an article about the rally. It's a nice positive article, but it just goes to show what most reporting is like:
1) It claims 7,000 people were there. That's not even close to true--the local news is saying 3k, which sounds about right.
2) Hordes of uniformed school children? I must have somehow missed these hordes.

Choices, Choices

Will somebody please tell me who to support in the Democratic primary? I'm not usually this far behind. In December of 1998 I was already a member of the Connecicut Committee for Wellstone. I still have my green "Wellstone for President" t-shirt. The silk-screening is fraying a bit, so now it's only for special occasions. And I still remember my first primary, 1988. I was in...third grade, I think? I was a Jesse Jackson supporter, and then reluctanctly campaigned for Dukakis when my elementary school had a mock election. Since I grew up in the Easy Bay, I think Dukakis won by like 80%. I distinctly remember that there was only person in my classroom who dared vote for Bush Sr.

But when you are writing a dissertation, it is hard to remember the outside world. So somebody tell me what to do:

1. Hillary Clinton.
Ick. Nope nope nope. I've never been a fan of the Clintons--remember DOMA, don't ask don't tell, the end of welfare as we know it, and several spurious bombings of random countries?--and that distrust overrides my mild desire for a woman candidate. I don't like her peddling to the right, I don't like her consistent support of the war. And I don't think she is electable, so what's the point of compromising what I believe in? That sure got us all somewhere last time. And the time before. And the time before.

2. John Edwards.
I don't know, he's just so boring! And short.

3. Barack Obama.
I'm surprised to find myself leaning towards him. I'm really not a fan of senators running for President--only the ego of a U.S. Senator could believe that he or she is going to be the first Senator since JFK to be elected--but I find myself getting a little misty-eyed about him sometimes.

4. Bill Richardson
I have an odd affection for him, considering that I suspect he is rather corrupt. But I like that he is governor of a western state, and Latino.

5. Tom Vilsack
Don't know anything, and he hasn't done anything to make me want to.

6. Dennis Kucinich
The thing is, I just really hate Kucinich supporters, on a social level.

7. Joe Biden
I'd rather vote for my box of kleenex.

8. Christopher Dodd
Thanks to my former involvement in Connecticut Democratic party politics, I've been on this guy's mailing list for years. Despite the weekly informational emails from "Chris," I am not impressed.

9. Al Gore
Al Gore did once try to run over one of my friends with a car. And I would not put it past him to mess up another presidential campaign as badly as he did the first time. But it's been a long time since the ugliness of the 2000 Democratic primary, so maybe I could forgive and forget.

Sigh.

The Universe Runs Amok

One of the chapters of my dissertation is essentially about the concept of universality: there are many things in life that are so entrenched in people's belief systems that we assume their universality. The classic example, for instance, is the racial category "white." Whiteness is always assumed. When "we" see a white man on the street (and by we, I mostly mean white people, but the dominance of this ideology is such that this is not guaranteed) we might say to a friend, "There is a man." When "we" see a black man on the street, we are likely to say, "there is a black man." This presumption of universality is a classic way of maintaining power. Richard Taruskin likes to point out that when Germans wrote German music, it was called romanticism, but when Czechs wrote music, it was called nationalism. The most popular music on the charts is always called pop music, no matter what it sounds like, whereas all of the other music charts are still basically defined by the minority communities who listen to it: Country (rural white folk), R&B (originally called "Race music" by Billboard), and so on. My chapter looks at this concept at one particular moment: in pop music right after World War II, the world of people like Patti Page, Jo Stafford, Vera Lynn, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, and so on. As I have blogged before, this music was so universalized, it did not even have a name. And it was played just as Joseph McCarthy was using that same power of universality to fictionalize a new vision of the United States, a tabula rasa from which was wiped any people who were not "everyday Americans." Musicologists call this "covert and casual values," the rest of the academic world calls it hegemony.

I was reminded of this by an article in Sunday's Los Angeles Times about the Bush Administration's recent about-face in administering the Iraq colony. Like many, I have grown disillusioned over the past six years of war, and often don't take the time to stay informed about the mundane details of the occupation. Randomly, however, the new general in charge of coalition forces in Iraq is a cousin of mine (just by marriage, and I don't think we've ever met, but still) so I gave the article a read.

There are a lot of shocking things about what is happening in Iraq. But this article in particular highlighted the fact that our nation is still under the sway of Cold War ideologies. And the two biggest keywords are the post-WII concepts of "democracy" and "capitalism."

Now neither capitalism nor democracy is a natural thing. Neither systems have existed forever, and neither will continue to do so for all future. As a good leftie I am obviously a fan of the latter, suspicious of the first. But I do at least recognize that these are simply ideologies, and not realities. They are culturally produced. If you were to take a town in, say, feudal England, and tell the inhabitants that there are no longer any feudal loyalties, you would not suddenly have a democratic society or a capitalist economy. Ideologies take time to worm themselves into people; after all Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, and I don't think capitalism became completely universalized in this country until the Clinton administration. (Thanks, Bill.) And the United States still does not give the vote to all of its citizens, nor is its leader elected democratically.

And how do these entrenched ideologies work in the world at large? One of the stories this article tells is of the state-run factories in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. Iraq was, after all, a basically national-socialist state, and the economy was heavily controlled by the government. When the United States occupied the country, they closed down all institutions run by the government, including the factories. This of course left thousands unemployed. The article tells the story of an American named Timothy Carney who was sent to Iraq to run the "Ministry of Mines and Materials." Quite reasonably, he assumed that it would be a good idea to repair and reopen these factories. Unemployed and impoverished Iraqis=badness.

But no, the American authorities in Baghdad didn't allow it. Because, although supposedly we were invading Iraq to install Ideology #1 (democracy), we were more covertly there to install Ideology #2 (capitalism). And so, no government money was going to be used on these factories. Instead, these spectacularly hubristic Americans assumed that "private investors" would buy the plants, repair them, and hire workers. Of course, there would be a gap in which there would be higher unemployment, but that magical invisible hand of Adam Smith would reach down from on high and set things straight before long. Because, after all, capitalism is natural, and inevitable.

Well, guess what. It wasn't. Six years later, the factories are still closed, unemployment and poverty have reached untenable levels, and violence has inevitably skyrocketed accordingly. There is neither democracy, nor capitalism, nor even everyday safety. 14th century feudalism would be better than this. Our nation's belief in the universality of our ideologies has amazingly managed to beat Saddam at his own game. Saddam tried so hard to run his country into the ground, but it took us, with our democracy and our capitalism, to really do the job properly.

Go Team

I'm not sure I've ever been more proud of my department. I only wish I could say I took the course, but unfortunately I just audited it last quarter.

I will say, obviously nobody listens to crackpots like the Young American Foundation when they issue press releases like this, but I am disappointed that the Los Angeles Times chose to publish this op-ed in favor of the list. My favorite line is when the unfortunate author ("Charlotte Allen, author of The Search for the Historical Jesus") attempts to define what this crazy "queer musicology" is: "a new field dating from the 1990s based in part on the idea that if you're gay, then music by gay composers such as Benjamin Britten will sound different to you than it would if you were straight." Yup. That's exactly what we do. I'm just going to just save time and print that on my future syllabus.

Never fear, Ms. Allen, you have your friends in the academy. Really, it's a good thing, all of this. Soon I can write the sequel to my dissertation, "Music and McCarthyism 2: This Time We Mean It, Godless Pinkos."

Oregoniana

With apologies to my friend and Oregonian apologist Regarding, want to hear a story that will make us Californians feel a little better about our state government?

Jackson County, Oregon, where my parents live, is about to shut down all of its public libraries. Not trim staff, not close branches, but close down completely in March. How did this happen?

1. The state of Oregon has no sales tax.
2. 55 percent of the land in the state of Oregon is owned by the federal government, which does not pay property taxes.
3. All that federal land comes mostly in the form of National Forests.
4. Back in the day, the Feds used to give local counties in Oregon a percentage of the money made from timber in those forests.
5. There is no longer a timber industry.
6. After the collapse of the timber industry, the Federal Government agreed to still give Oregon counties subsidies. This money was pretty substantial--$23 million to Jackson County last year, as I understand it.
7. What with the Republicans, and the war, and the general federal desire to end subsidies to industries without powerful lobbies, these subsidies are ending next year. (Hey, somebody has to pay the Midwest to grow corn!)
8. Suddenly, Jackson County has $23 million less than it used to. Does it cut the Sheriff's department, or the public libraries?
9. In anticipation of this problem, the county votes on a parcel tax which would provide money to continue funding the library system at its current level. This tax was rejected by 60% of the voters.
10. So that's it. No more public libraries in the county. My mother is a volunteer at the Ashland library, a beautiful Beaux Art facility with a brand new addition. In fact, a recent county bond measure had actually built a bunch of new library facilities throughout the county, providing community spaces and information access to a very rural and working-class part of the state. All of this is going to be gone in March.

A Change is Gonna Come

Almost didn't exercise democracy today! My plan was to vote in the evening, once I got home from school. Jewel Dakini and I left at 6:30 pm, which should have been plenty of time to be home before the polls closed at 8, but there was staggeringly unpleasant traffic, and it took us over an hour to get to WeHo. By the time I dropped her off and found parking, I had five minutes left to vote, and also to deliver Violet Vixen's absentee ballot. (I'm hoping that in the future, every single person I know will have a blog so that anytime I recount a story I can link to every single person.) But I made it, and there were no lines, thank goodness.

My voting was along the expected lines. No on the annoying Props. 83 and 85, yes on the bond measures, the cigarette tax, and the alternative fuel thingy. Also, no on that measure that would have forced the legislature to put transportation taxes towards repairing roads--if there is anything I learned from my mother's career as a school board member, it's that state propositions are a bad way to allocate funds. I skipped the judges since, really, who has any idea, and voted a straight Democratic ticket everything else.

When it came to governor, however, I took the opportunity to indulge in a bit of caprice: I didn't vote for Democratic candidate Phil Angelides. Which is not to say that I voted for Herr Schwarzenegger, because believe you me, I am not looking forward to a lifetime of having students looking at the diploma on my office wall and seeing Arnold's signature. No, I voted for Peter Camejo, the Green candidate.

Now, I don't know a ton about Mr. Camejo. I feel like I have heard a few inklings of negative stuff about him, and at any rate, i definitely don't support the Green platform all the way. But voting Green was a wonderful feeling. When I first registered to vote, days after turning eighteen in 1998, I was a committed supporter of third parties, and gleefully registered as a Green Party member for my maiden election. Remember 1998? Things were so hopeful. Yes, the Republicans controlled the House, and yes, the Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken a few months earlier. But still, having lived under a Democratic administration ever since I was twelve years old, it was hard to imagine the evil that lay ahead. One could imagine that greater change was possible, and that one's convictions, rather than fears, could be the source of my vote. Don't worry, by 2000 I knew the jig was up, and voted for Gore.

But I still remember that feeling of optimism when I first registered to vote, and could actually vote for someone whose politics I agreed with. That really hasn't been possible since then. Like every other leftist, I've compromised, and compromised. And I don't regret it at all, because these political times have required it. But in this election, where Governor Arnold was headed towards a landslide, and the Democratic candidate had run a sniveling, unpleasant campaign, it felt great to be able to vote Green. And I could do so not just because my vote was a throwaway, but because once again, I'm feeling optimistic.

Kiss Lieberman Goodbye

Today's New York Times has an article about the bruising primary fight around Senator Lieberman. It is a very frustrating piece, typical of the Times. Poor Lieberman, he's trying to be all collegial and nice and non-partisan, and those flame-breathing anti-war Democrats are out to get him. The unspoken politics of the Times is that having political beliefs, either left or right, is wrong. The only correct way to do politics is in the "middle", where there are no ideologies or beliefs involved. Please! Nothing frustrates me more than moderates who claim to have no ideology. Of course they have an ideology. I don't know anyone more ideological than Joseph Lieberman. I find it profoundly insulting that people such as myself who are not afraid to speak their political beliefs out loud get labeled extremist, and those who keep them secret--or "moderate", as they say--are given some sort of moral legitimacy.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the status quo newspaper supports the status quo.

One of the more frustrating things about this article is the claim that this is simply a knee-jerk reaction by anti-war Democrats. The fight against Joseph Lieberman goes back a long way. When I was living in Connecticut, I was often pretty heavily involved in state Democratic Party politics, from driving Susan Bysiewicz to a fundraising cocktail party in her first run for statewide office, to participating in a secretly-organized slander of now-former Congressman Sam Gejdensen's Republican opponent--after that little adventure, I was literally advised that I should stay inside for a few days and not answer the phone, lest the media find me. Not one of my prouder moments.

Anyways, this is just to say that I've known people in the Connecticut Democratic Party for quite awhile. And I can tell you, even way back in 1998, when the Iraq War was still just a twinkle in the Bush family eyes, the grassroots of the state party hated--hated--Joseph Lieberman. And it wasn't a matter of ideology, or even any specific political platform. It was that he was considered a Machiavellian, power hungry jerk who was personally unpleasant to everyone in the party, and had made his career by running against fellow Democrats. Lieberman got his start doing just what Lamont is doing now--by attacking the Democratic Party from the inside. And now finally it's caught up to him.

V For Vendetta

Last Friday Mary and I saw V For Vendetta. What a complicated movie. Although I had a good time watching it, I think I ultimately had a lot of problems with it.

1. The England Issue. V had a rough time at the box office in England, and was pretty mercilessly savaged in the press, even the left press. This is completely understandable, and not just because Natalie Portman can't do a British accent to save her life. As the Guardian review notes, it is a particularly American movie, and setting it in England feels very wrong. Not that the U.K. doesn't have bad political problems, and that anti-fascist critiques of the U.K. aren't useful--see the British punk movement circa 1983. But this movie feels very off, as if a bunch of Americans came to town, blew up half the city, killed off most of the inhabitants, all to make a point about American politics. Which leads me to...

2. The Violence Issue. I don't have a problem with the parable of using violence to overthrow a government. But I did have a rather visceral reaction to one tiny little clip. Near the end of the movie, there is a montage that shows the history of a terrorist biological attack on the country. A disease was spread in a school, in the water system, and in the tube system. Fake news clips were shown of each location, but for the last, the attack on the underground, I'm pretty sure that the director used actual clips from the bombing of the London underground last summer. I'm not positive, and it was a very short clip, but I'm pretty sure that I remember that specific clip. This ties in to my point above--the makers of this American film use particularly-European iconography to portray a climate of fear. That's a displacement I don't really like.

But there is more to this. As my loyal readership knows, I was living in London during those attacks last summer. So when that little clip flashed on, I was immediately transported back to that moment, and I remembered my own fear at the time. Now, the movie makes lots of big points about fear, and about how bad it is, and how it is responsible for right-wing political movements that promise security in exchange for freedom. The transformative moment for Natalie Portman's character comes when, after being tortured, she learns to live fearlessly.

I just don't like that. First, I find it sanctimonious on the part of the movie. But more importantly, I think that fear is just a necessary part of living with other people. And it is part of living under globalization, and under postmodernity, or basically in any kind of proximity to people who are different from you. Not to get all academic, but the Wachowski brothers have always struck me as hopelessly modernist and old-fashioned--everyone gets off on the fact that they showed a character reading Baudrillard in The Matrix, but the instant Neo takes the pill and finds out that there is a real meta-narrrative behind the simulation, you realize that they have probably never actually read Baudrillard. And remember, totalitarianism is an essentially modernist concept. And if there is one good thing about postmodernism, I do think it produces a world so hopelessly fragmented and mixed-up that totalizing meta-narratives like fascism become impossible, in a way. There are still political challenges, and horrifying social situation that need to be acted upon, but an old-fashioned critique of fascism and fear no longer feels relevant to me. To face the problems of postmodernity, we can't pretend we are still fighting Big Brother.

Supporting NYU Grad Students

I urge anyone who is in the position to do so to support the NYU graduate students on strike. The history of labor relations at NYU is too long and complicated to go into here, but even just a little bit of research will show the callousness of the NYU administration towards those who do the majority of the teaching at a very privileged, and very expensive, private university. Beginning this quarter, the administration has "terminated the fellowships" of striking workers. As Bitch Ph.D. points out, they have to use that awkward terminology because if they were to simply "stop paying" the strikers, that would be admitting that the graduate students actually are employees who do work for the university. Can't have that. We graduate students are just lucky for the privilege of working our butts off for our "fellowships" that put us below the poverty line.

Bah humbug.

Dear Rich People

Giving money to the arts is good. Giving money to education is good.

However, there are more effective ways of funding both the arts and education than giving Princeton and Yale $100 million each.

Just saying.

McCarthyism Redux

There has been much discussion in the press the past week about the Bruin Alumni Association. The BAA is, of course, part of a nation-wide conservative movement in the past few years which has been agitating against what they see as liberal bias in academia. This is nothing new, of course. In many ways, we can trace the beginning of modern conservatism to academic politics: it was William Buckley's 1951 book God and Man at Yale which kicked off Buckley's career, and gave rise to the National Review. And even Buckley's book was rooted in the context of post-war McCarthyism, which began in the late forties with the Alger Hiss case. One of the key features of the hostility towards Hiss was a general suspicion of the highly-educated, often academic, men who Franklin Roosevelt had surrounded himself with in the 30's and 40's, of which Alger Hiss became the prime example. The Republican Party very effectively managed to convince the public that to be academic was synonymous with being soft on communism.

Since then, this mythology of liberal bias has often invigorated other conservative movements. In the 1980's, the Dartmouth Review served as an incubator for conservative intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza. In the 1990's, the campus culture wars over identity politics and sexual expression nearly destroyed the NEA and the NEH. In the past few years, the main domestic battleground over the Israel-Palestine issue has taken place on college campuses. And we shouldn't forget that our current president's own reactionary and anti-intellectual conservatism was formatively shaped by his undergraduate experiences at Yale.

So, this whole history noted, I'm still not sure what to make of it. I am not at all worried about the Bruin Alumni Association. Its leader is this young kid, a recent graduate, who is quickly managing to alienate other conservatives, especially conservative academics. It only takes five minutes on the organization's web page to see that he is just in search of attention, that he is more interested in being the next D'Souza or Horowitz then actually creating change at UCLA. The BAA is destined to self-destruct.

I still wonder, however, about the form in which these movements take place. A few observations, just to see if I can make anything out of it.

1. The leaders of these movement are all men. I have yet to hear a single quote in the press from a woman, or read a single article in the campus conservative paper by a woman.

2. It tends to be very small groups of men. One never gets the sense that there is a large silent majority backing them up. I imagine that at UCLA, we are talking about no more than a dozen people actively involved, out of 24,000 undergraduates.

3. These men are often, but not always, white. The exceptions are important to note. One of the leaders here at UCLA, a kid who started his own conservative newspaper that features a regular professor profile titled "Nut of the Month," is Armenian American. Many of those involved are Jewish, radicalized, I imagine, by the Israel/Palestine issue. I am not quite sure what to make of all this.

Certainly, it is worth noting that here at UCLA, the targets which the conservatives have attacked most viciously are Latino and African-American student groups. The Bruin Republicans lead a horrible campaign last year against MEChA, the largest Latino student group, claiming in all seriousness that MEChA was plotting to overthrow the country. They attack student of color groups rather than attacking, say, the Bruin Democrats, or labor groups, or anti-war groups. So much so that in the last student elections here, the Bruin Democrats shamefully teamed up with the Bruin Republicans in an attempt to limit the power of student of color groups. As I say, I am not sure what to make of all this exactly, but race is playing a large role.

4. It is easy to spot that the campus conservatives have adopted the rhetoric of identity politics. They talk about discrimination, about victimization, about being unfairly singled out and punished for who they are. This tactic is extremely effective. I don't think it actually works as they intended--nobody feels sorry for some privileged white boy. But it has completely destroyed the efficacy of that rhetoric, and those of us who care about the issues raised by identity politics have not yet found a new mode of organizing.

Phew! Suffice to say, this all worries me.

Other interesting takes on the BAA:

• Michael Bérubé has a typically amusing and trenchant post about the BAA.
  
  
• The leader of the BAA has always been a jerk. Confirmed by his former classmate.
  
  

The Best Political Ad of All Time

Today I have received nine pre-recorded phone calls urging me to vote one way or the other next Tuesday. They ranged from Barbara Boxer telling me no on Props. 73 and 77 (unclear why those two only), the mayor of West Hollywood telling me to vote no on everything, to a really sketchy call that had a man sobbing while telling the story of how his daughter died because Planned Parenthood prescribed her RU 486. Yikes.

This all makes me wish I lived in New York City, which has the greatest political ad of all time, no matter what your politics.

Via Alex Ross.

Wrong About the Right

This week's issue of The Nation has an important article by Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava analyzing the success of conservatism in the United States over the past few decades. It's unfortunately not available online to non-subscribers, so if you see the Nov. 7 issue of The Nation on a newsstand, it's definitely worth your three bucks. Hardisty and Bhargava astutely point out the principles which allowed right-wing conservatism to grow so successfully in this country. For example, allowing ideological diversity rather than a monolithic movement. An emphasis on serious ideas, not "framing." Grassroots active listening rather than hierarchical control. Electoral politics as a means, not an end. And most importantly, the fearlessness to take what might be considered extreme positions at the time.