Quote of the Day: "The Hammer Needs to Come Down"

Rather than letting the market work its magic… or addressing inequality solely through “bottom up” policies… America [] has to start looking at inequality from a different angle: from the top down. The hammer needs to come down on the corporations and the one percenters, hard. We need to crack down on their rent-seeking activities, eliminate the special protections they enjoy via unreasonable patent and intellectual property protections, wipe out their undeserved public subsidies and unfair tax breaks, dramatically increase marginal tax rates, and institute a tax on all forms of wealth. These people have too much money, which gives them too much power, and it is poisoning our society and our political process. The bulk of their money needs to be taken away.


— Kathleen Geier

"You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision"

In an interview in the 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, Noam Chomsky says in an interview:

The U.S. media are alone in that you must meet the condition of "concision" -- you've got to say things between two commercials or in 600 words. And that's a very important fact, because the beauty of concision -- you know, saying a couple of sentences between 2 commercials -- the beauty of that is you can only repeat conventional thoughts. Suppose I get up on Nightline, I'm given whatever it is, two minutes, and I say Qaddafi is a terrorist and Khomeini is a murderer, the Russians invaded Afghanistan, all this sort of stuff -- I don't need any evidence, everybody just nods. On the other hand, suppose you say something that just isn't repeating conventional pieties. Suppose you say something that's the least bit unexpected or controversial. Suppose you say,

At this point the film cuts from one place to another, a series of different statements Chomsky made in different contexts:

• "The biggest international terror operations that are known are the ones that are run out of Washington."
• "What happened in the 1980s is the U.S. government was driven underground."
• "The United States is invading South Vietnam".
• "The best political leaders are the ones who are lazy and corrupt."
• "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged."
• "The Bible is probably the most genocidal book in our total canon."
• "Education is a system of imposed ignorance."
• "There's no more morality in world affairs, fundamentally, than there was at the time of Ghengis Kahn, there are just different factors to be concerned with."

Then the cutting stops, and the interview goes on:

You know, people will quite reasonably expect to know what you mean. Why did you say that? I never heard that before. If you said that you better have a reason, you better have some evidence, and in fact you better have a lot of evidence, because that's a pretty startling comment. You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision. That's the genius of this structural constraint.

(Film transcript from here.)

Similarly, you can't give reasoning if you're stuck with concision; you can't give nuance if you're stuck with concision.

I don't believe it's only the US media that does this — at least, not any more, if it ever was.  Importantly, today, it is true of most social media, certainly big ones like facebook and twitter.  Now, there's an important difference, that on facebook & twitter you get microclimates of conventional opinion, which means outrageous statements (to some people) are treated as banalities (to others).  But nevertheless I think the basic problem — "You can't give evidence if you're stuck with concision" — remains: and we are left either nodding our heads at what we agree with (perhaps a particularly nice formulation, perhaps a new instance of a familiar phenomenon or new instantiation of it — this isn't useless at all, but fleshing out what you believe is different from changing your beliefs), or dismissing something as rubbish without giving it a genuine hearing.  Often the same claim will produce both reactions, from different audiences.

It's something other than conversation.  Personally, I find it deeply frustrating.  And to the extent that we are, in fact, more divided than before (an issue I am not sure what I think about), I think this is one of the structural causes.

Everything You Need To Know About Internet Comment Sections, In One Picture

(From this article)

"I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there"

Putting together a lecture on Gay Rights in the 1970s (for my class on the history of the US since 1973), I am, of course, including a substantial section on Harvey Milk.  But after talking about his life, his politics, his murder and the immediate aftermath, I go on to talk about how he is remembered.  And in doing so, I am going to explain why with the following quote, which I thought I'd share:

As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by implying that Joan's history in the world ended unhappily with her execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a woman has got herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into the drawing-room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter, and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.

— George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Saint Joan (1924)

Sometimes what comes after a life is just as important as the life.

And, for what it's worth, I think Harvey Milk might agree.

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.

— Harvey Milk, in a recording "to be played only in the event of my death by assassination," made November 18, 1977, one year and nine days before his assassination.

Far From the Only Reason, But A Key One, This Blog Has Been Slow of Late, Revealed In Humorous Fashion as a Parodic Request

Hey, y'all, quick favor: I need the entire world to stop for, oh, I dunno, not too long, maybe a week?, yeah, a week, that'll do it, so I can sorta catch up on some things. You're all willing to do that, right? I mean, no big. I'd appreciate it. You're the best! See y'all in a week. Which, for you, will be tomorrow. KTHXBY.

I Swear I Don't Know Why But Sometimes These Things Just Pop Into My Head

Rudolph, the red-eyed dragon,
Had a very flamey breath,
And if you ever saw him,
It would be a firey death.

All of Santa's reindeer
Used to scream and run away,
Because they knew that Rudolph
Ate about one per day.

Then one foggy Christmas eve
It was Santa's turn,
But when Rudolph ate him up
It gave him quite bad heartburn.

So now it's back to reindeer,
No more plump elvish men:
Rudolph, the red-eyed dragon
Won't be eating them again!

Claiming Victim Status

Unfortunately, claiming victim status does not itself bring sound ethical choices. Stalin and Hitler both claimed throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they, too, were victims: of an international capitalist or Jewish conspiracy. During the German invasion of Poland, a German soldier believed that the death grimace of a Pole proved that Poles irrationally hated Germans. During the famine, a Ukrainian communist found himself beleaguered by the corpses of the starved at his doorstep. They both portrayed themselves as victims. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-first century, we see a second wve of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit reference to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence. The Austrian policeman shooting babies at Mahileu imagined what the Soviets would do to his children.

— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), pp. 399 - 400

...But I'm SURE Our Elites Are Ready To Rise To The Challenge!

A surer formula for widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots—at least while still paying lip service to ideals like opportunity and meritocracy—would seem difficult to devise.

- Ann Hulbert

5

Incredibly, my beloved son, Joseph, is five today.  Hard to believe.

Here are three photos from Thanksgiving (all by my uncle, John Henry Stassen):

And here's one from his school:

Happy birthday!

Link of the Day

One of the signs, for me, of a really great piece of internet writing (article, blog post, whatever) is that I find myself googling to try and dig it up again weeks or months or years after I first read it.  I just did this, not for the first time, with this article.  So I thought I'd share it with you.  It's by Adam Kotsko, who blogs here.  It's called "A Defense of the Lecture", which was not a title I was (prior to reading it) likely to be sympathetic with.  Now I keep rereading it.

Here's a small bit of it:

A lively discussion of a book by a small, engaged group is an ideal to be aspired to. At the same time, it seems to me that such discussions are pretty rare, even among professional academics (note how often people will express surprise that a conference session had good discussion). Such skills need to be cultivated, and of course you can only learn by doing. Yet there are some base-level confidence issues that need to be addressed as well, and unless we want to cultivate students who believe that their every utterance is intrinsically worthwhile due to their precious snowflake-hood, it would probably be good to get them to a point where their confidence is earned, where it’s based in actual knowledge....

I think that the assumption that students have baseline reading skills is behind the thinking of people who want more or less exclusively discussion-based classes — lectures, they suppose, are just trying to transmit information, which the books can do by themselves. If we assume that the students are reading attentively outside of class, we can use the class time to practice our critical reading with each other. I don’t think it’s at all clear, however, that students typically come to college with the skills necessary to make such a model work. Some will, but it’s much safer to assume that your students need help. And I believe that we should interpret students’ desire for more lectures precisely as a cry for help.

Read the rest.

Michael Kammen (1936 - 2013)

I returned from a Thanksgiving trip to the news that my graduate advisor, Michael Kammen, died last Friday.  I hope to write something soon about him, in particular about what an amazing advisor he was.  For now, I don't have the heart.

For the moment, I thought I'd just post links to obituaries I've seen.  (I've seen precious few; I assume there will be more.  I'll add links when I see them.)  Here are some links:

Newspaper obituaries:

• The Cornell Chronicle
• Cornell Daily Sun (partially reprinted at HNN)
• The Washington Post
• Boston Globe
• The LA Times
• The New York Times 

Other comments & remembrances:

• US Intellectual History Blog• Organization of American Historians
• The Historical Society
• The Ithaca Journal
• Sara Polak

More will be added as I see them.  (If you have seen others, please leave links in the comments.)

Rest in peace, Michael.  You are sorely missed.

The Same Thanksgiving Post I Have Put Up Every Year Since 1621

Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.... Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

-- Psalm 100:2, 4

ANYA: I love a ritual sacrifice.
BUFFY: It's not really a one of those.
ANYA: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.

-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Pangs" by Jane Espenson

Thanksgiving is a holiday, and holidays are rituals. And one of my holiday rituals is to give thanks to you, Noble Reader, for reading. Not all sentences said ritualistically are heartfelt -- it goes with the territory -- but this one always is.* I am thankful that you have dropped by; I hope you will come back again.

I wish everyone a joyful Thanksgiving, however (and whether) you celebrate it, and to whomever (and however) you give thanks.

But I must admit to you all that the title of this post is a lie. The first Thanksgiving feast was in 1621; so obviously I did not put up my first blog post commemorating the event until the following year, 1622. My apologies for the inaccuracy.

_________________________
* Yes, that sentence noting that the ritualistic sentence is said not just ritualistically but sincerely is now, itself, a part of my Thanksgiving ritual. I will note that it, too, is said sincerely and not just realistically, and shudder at the inevitable extrapolation of this trend. (As, for instance, the slightly odd shudder I get at copying & pasting the previous sentence from last year's post... (A parenthesis which, unlike this second-order parenthesis (which, along with this third-order one, is the only original text in this increasingly convoluted footnote (nay, post (this way madness lies!))), was itself cut & paste from last year's post...))

50 Years Ago Today

Here is a short editor's note from the December 7, 1963 issue of The New Yorker.  As was their custom at the time, it was unsigned; but it was written by John Updike (and was later republished in one of his many volumes of collected nonfiction—Assorted Prose (1965), I believe).  When I teach my seminar on the 1960s—as I am doing this fall—I use this to discuss Kennedy's death, since it captures (so far as I can tell, viewing the event through the lens of history) the experience of living through the assassination—the immediate, human experience of those days—as well as anything I've read.

For the fiftieth anniversary, I thought I'd share it here.

It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved; only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world's great mingled with the faces of landladies who had happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses, temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer's quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares.

What did it mean? Can we hope for a meaning? "It's the fashion to hate people in the United States." This quotation might be from one of a hundred admonitory sermons delivered after President Kennedy's death. In actuality, it occurs in an interview granted in 1959 to a United Press reporter, Aline Mosby, by a young American defector then living in Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald. The presumed assassin did not seem to be a violent man. "He was too quiet, too reserved," his ex-landlord told reporters. "He certainly had the intelligence and he looked like he could be efficient at doing almost anything." In his room, the police found a map on which was marked the precise path that three bullets in fact took. The mind that might have unlocked this puzzle of perfectly aimed, perfectly aimless murder has been itself forever sealed by murder. The second assassination augmented the first, expanded our sense of potential violence. In these cruel events, democracy seemed caricatured; a gun voted, and a drab Dallas neighborhood was hoisted into history. None of our country's four slain Presidents were victims of any distinct idea of opposition or hope of gain; they were sacrificed, rather, to the blind tides of criminality and insanity that make civilization precarious. Between Friday and Monday, three men died: a President, a policeman, and a prisoner. May their deaths be symbols, clues to our deep unease, and omens we heed.

The dream began to lift at the sight, on television, of President Johnson giving his broad and friendly handshake, with exquisite modulations of political warmth, to the line of foreign dignitaries who had come to Washington as mourners. The sanity of daylight has returned, but the dissipated dream should not be forgotten; it must be memorized and analyzed. We pray we do not fall into such a sleep again.

-- John Updike

At some point, in my handing this out, I lost the last paragraph, and gave out only the first two to my classes.  It was an error—hence my adding it back here—but I think it was the sort of error that, in popular memory, sands the rough edges off of famous quotations.  Which is to say that I think that, in certain respects, the passage reads better truncated at the word "heed"—that it does not feel incomplete without the final paragraph, and indeed that it is in some ways diminished with it.  Hence, in reading it over, I did not notice the lack, since the lack improved it.

Seven Score and Ten Years Ago...

...on this date, Abraham Lincoln said this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Amen.

Word.

This.

So say we all.

Poem of the Day

Mirror in February

The day dawns with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy-
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the awakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities,
And how should the flesh not quail that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young and not renewable, but man.

—Thomas Kinsella, "Mirror in February"

Seven Songs Per Decade: 1970s (Part 1 of 4.5)

In the spring, I am teaching I brand-new class, on the history of the United States from 1974 - 2014.  I am currently in the process of preparing the course.  One thing I thought I'd do, mostly just for fun, is play a song as the students walk in every day as a processional.  I'm only going to do this on days I lecture (not on discussion days or exam days), so it won't be every day.

But I want to come up with a list of songs which are A), Good, B) Representative, and C) Iconic.  Some songs will be on the list primarily for one of those reasons, but ideally most will be a mix of all three.  In order to get a comparatively even chronological mix, I'm going to try to do 7 songs each from the 70s, 80s, 90s and 00s, plus 3 from the 10s.

And I'm soliciting suggestions!

To give you a sense of the sort of thing I'm thinking about, here is a preliminary, mostly off-the-top-of-my-head list of six songs (leaving one TBD):

1. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1974)
2. Born to Run (or Thunder Road), Bruce Springsteen (1975)
3. Stayin' Alive, Bee Gees (1977)
4. Psycho Killer, Talking Heads (1978)
5. Gotta Serve Somebody, Bob Dylan (1979)
6. London Calling, The Clash (1979)
7. ??

At the moment, all six are by white men. I'm not happy about that (it's not true for other decades).  That's one dimension I'd like suggestions on how to fix.

Note that as a general rule, I am limiting every single musician to one song on all five lists.  (I am making an exception for one, and only one, musician, to be revealed later.)  But bear that in mind: if you think someone's best or most representative or most iconic song is from a later decade, don't put them on this list!  Save them for later.

Note that while all suggestions are welcome, I'd prefer complete lists, either just a set of seven, or telling me what you'd add/subtract to my rough draft.

Update, November 15:

This query, cross-posted to facebook, generated a vigorous and (for me) very informative discussion, and far, far, far more suggestions than I could actually use.  After reading what everyone had to say, and painfully cutting it back down to seven, I came up with this revised list:

1. After the Goldrush by Neil Young (1970)
2. Search and Destroy, Iggy and the Stooges (1973)
3. Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973)
4. The Payback, James Brown (1974)
5. I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor (1978)
6. The Promised Land, Bruce Springsteen (1978)
7. Rapper's Delight, Sugar Hill Gang (1979)

 ...with the idea that the Talking Heads will be on the 80s list instead.

So now I'm soliciting suggestions, comments and revisions on this second draft list.  I'd love to hear what you think — but please, only suggest an addition if you also suggest which it should replace.  Also, remember that we are going for a representative list of iconic songs; quality is important, but only within that larger constraint.

Myself, I am liking the list pretty well.  The one I am most tempted to cut is "After the Goldrush", not as any reflection on the song itself, but since the chronology of the course really starts a few years later, in 1973/1974.

Up next: the 1980s. Stay tuned.

Quote of the Day

Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It as a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

— Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried, "On the Rainy River"

I'm teaching the first of three classes (in my seminar on the 1960s) on Tim O'Brien's amazing book The Things They Carried tomorrow.  It will be the fifth or sixth time, I think, I've taught it.  At least fifth, plus one time I taught the title story by itself.

Anyway, now, rereading it for class tomorrow, for the sixth or seventh or whateveritisth time, this quote struck me.  I've read those words before, of course, many times.  But each time through, of course, different quotes stand out; this one stood out tonight.

J. L. Austin's Philosophical Papers is Available Online

Awesome.  I was googling this book, hoping to use a 'search inside' function (either on google books or on Amazon or what-have-you) as an index (to then match it with my own, dead-trees copy), and I found that, lo and behold, the whole book is available online.

He's an obscure philosopher—at least these days—but, I think, an underrated one.  So now you can check him out, if you're so inclined.

Poem of the Day: Louis Macneice, "Charon"

Charon

The conductor’s hands were black with money:
Hold on to your ticket, he said, the inspector’s
Mind is black with suspicion, and hold on to
That dissolving map. We moved through London,
We could see the pigeons through the glass but failed
To hear their rumours of wars, we could see
The lost dog barking but never knew
That his bark was as shrill as a cock crowing,
We just jogged on, at each request
Stop there was a crowd of aggressively vacant
Faces, we just jogged on, eternity
Gave itself airs in revolving lights
And then we came to the Thames and all
The bridges were down, the further shore
Was lost in fog, so we asked the conductor
What we should do. He said: Take the ferry
Faute de mieux. We flicked the flashlight
And there was the ferryman just as Virgil
And Dante had seen him. He looked at us coldly
And his eyes were dead and his hands on the oar
Were black with obols and varicose veins
Marbled his calves and he said to us coldly:
If you want to die you will have to pay for it.

-- Louis Macneice

3/10/2013

I have blogged about palindromic dates once before, and at the time discussed two of my very favorite* palindromes: Georges Perec's Grand Pallindrome, and J. A. Lindon's brilliant palindromic poem "Doppelgänger".  (The latter is posted in its entirety at the link.)

Once you pass out of 2012, palindromic dates become in short supply -- although, of course, it all depends on what date system you use (search for "palindrome", or just scroll down.)  And if you just write the necessary numbers -- thus, "3" for the day and not "03" -- and put them in the European rather than the usual American order (which, to be fair, makes more sense (although not as much as the Chinese manner, which styles today 2013-10-3)), then today, yes, is a palindromic date.

So to celebrate, I thought I'd post** one of my very favorite artistic uses of palindromes -- up there with Perec and the Lindon -- Weird Al Yankovic's marvelous song/video parody, "Bob".

Incidentally, while the lyrics to this stand on their own (after all, they're perfectly balanced), the video itself is a parody of a famous video (avant la lettre) by Bob Dylan of his song Subterranean Homesick Blues.  If you don't know the latter, you might want to watch it first, not only 'cause it's great, but in order to properly enjoy the parody.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Weird Al:



Happy palindrome day!

____________
* Yes, I'm claiming the Perec as a favorite without ever having read it (see post for details); I like the idea of it, the fact of it, enough for it to qualify.

** Actually repost, but the earlier post was buried in a link dump and you probably missed it (close attention that I know you pay notwithstanding).