adjunct radicals

Juan Cole has addressed better than I’d ever be likely to bother to do the recently recurrent bugaboo about liberals in academe. In short—it’s not clear exactly what counts as a ‘liberal’; it’s probably not true (if one includes conservative programs like engineering and economics) that there are a disproportionate number of them in academia; to the extent that is it true it can’t be a conspiracy but is probably because the pay is so low and right-wingers can make more money in the private sector of business or think tanks. Not to mention that those think tanks and corporate boards are disproportionately republican/right, and no one is talking about rebalancing those by adding some leftists. Also, I would add, maybe liberals have more of a service ethic and are more willing to work for lower pay, and what about the possibility that more education makes people more liberal? How is it that education and intelligence seem to be disqualifying factors in American public life?

the shape of enlightenment

The shape of November is numerically flexible: second Tuesday, last Thursday, dark and cold and those bright yellow leaves against bare black branches. Not like July 4, 14 July, those dates, bright and sunny any day of the week.

Ron Susskind in the Oct 17 NYTimes (with initially unacknowledged reporting from Susan Mazur):

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Jonathan Freeland in the UK Guardian comments about the Susskind piece:

Look hard enough and you can see this mindset in the current Bush campaign. The Bush-Cheney billboards with the single slogan: One Nation Under God. The unwavering certainty of the supporters in Marlton. Bush's inability to name a single mistake of his presidency. There can be no doubt; they are doing the Lord's work.

One of my students (the lone Bush voter in a class of 16, as it happens) wanted to argue in an essay that all notions of justice come from religion. So much for the Enlightenment. (I pointed out to her there were secular theorists of justice, and anyway, she should concentrate her argument on something about the class texts and do-able in 5 pages).

Anyway, various bloggers are now declaring themselves proud members of the reality-based community. Me, too, but maybe in a poststructuralist kind of way. Talk about strange bedfellows. I mean, I saw a PBS documentary about Rumsfeld’s “war with the Pentagon” a few weeks ago and it made me all sympathetic to the military. Jeez.

blgprblems

Perhaps I need a new cmputer. That wuld be computer. That would be would. The O key sticks. The space bar sticks. And I am a crummy typist anyway, even on the best of keybards. Uh, keyboards. Though a keybard would come in handy. Singing, bardically, everytime I sat down to type. Anyway writing turns out to be a little more work than it might otherwise be, if I had either a keybard or a keyboard that worked. A little more work than the usual ease that Dorothy Parker so well described (“writing is easy, you just sit down and open up a vein”). Oh, yeah, otherwise I’d be churning out those essays and letters and lectures and stories. Yeah. And this blg, blog, whatever, which I must have started because I had so very much spare time on my hands? Nah, I just had some spare outrage on my hands.

Anyway, the outrage is fading into numbness as the catastrophe piles up.

This from Walter Benjamin:

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

selection update

Investigations into voting irregularities, election problems, possible fraud, in Florida, New Hampshire , Ohio.

Q: What do you think of US democracy?

A: I think it would be a good idea.

hell in a handbasket, film at 11

Baghdad Burning says "Things are deteriorating swiftly"--and that's still before the video of an American soldier shooting a wounded Iraqi in a mosque. And yet there they are, having dinner and watching tv.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and yet most of the time I am thinking about the books I am teaching and the committee I'm on and the courses I'm planning and the people I talk with and quotidian life as though people weren't being shot in the head, bombed, buried under rubble or pierced with shrapnel or . . . you get the idea. Not to mention the constitution being gutted. Not to mention tens of thousands of children dying of curable diseases, of people starving to death.

red dreams

So now he's appointing Alberto "the-Geneva-Conventions-on-torture-are-so-quaint-and-outdated" Torquemada--Gonzales, whatever-- as Attorney General.

Mostly at this point I want to stay in the hut and dream red dreams. Bloody dreams. Commie dreams. Stateless dreams.

has god spoken, or was she just clearing her throat?

So, Wisconsin will be teaching creationism and US soldiers are getting pumped up with prayer before they enter Fallujah to kill the barbarians and philistines. You know, those evildoers who run hospitals. By all means what we need is more sense of our own righteouness and more disdain for those strange heathens who don't seem to want us to liberate them.

man and wife

Texas schools will be getting new textbooks. To conform with state law banning gay marriage, they'll replace texts that use phrases like "married partners" instead of "husband and wife." So it's not just anxiety about gay people having great sex (was it Mencken who defined a Puritan as someone haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying something) but about making sure gender roles are clear. "Husband" and "wife": those terms conjure up a world where women defer to men and do all the housework.

we was robbed

Thomas Paine wrote, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery"--or, y'know, to make him like a woman, since it was another 150 years or so after he wrote before women were enfranchised in the US.

This week's US election didn't meet international standards for clean elections


paperless electronic voting
No paper trail, no recount. Diebold delivers the votes. The ghost votes in the machines. Exit polls (which were accurate in paper ballot states) showed Kerry winning Florida and Ohio.


absentee ballots
Plenty of people never got theirs--college students, military folk in Iraq, sundry expatriates.
In a course I teach, out of 16 students, one didn't get her absentee ballot fromAlaska. Another has a friend stationed in Iraq, who didn't get his ballot; neither did any of those he's stationed with.


registration problems
Sproul was hired by the republican party to register voters, and apparently encouraged workers to ditch, destroy non-Republican registration forms.


polling access
People turned away for lack of identification. It happened in New Orleans, I hear. Voter intimidation & supression was not infrequent, and worst for students and, of course, in communities of color.


disenfranchisement
felons, former felons, possible felons, people with names that resemble those of felons, people who might vote democratic--purged, purged, purged.