Low class is better than no class at all....

For fun, I did the "What Class Of White Are You" test Charles Murray's hawking. I won't link to it, but I'll link to commentaries here and here and here. The fun part is trying to guess what point he's making with each question, and then reading the scoring guide and realizing just how weird his internal cultural map is. As I pointed out at LGM, " By his own admission, backed up with statistics, most of what scores you points on this test are minority experiences, in some cases quite narrow ones (Military service. Who the hell identifies race car drivers by sight? Branson? And what’s the socioeconomic profile of people who made Inception a top-grossing film?)."

So, how did I do?


1. 5
2. 0
3. 6 (but working at a college in a small town shouldn't count, right?)
4. 0 (what do you mean, "Graduate school doesn't count"?)
5. 0
6. 0 (what do you mean "Carpal Tunnel doesn't count"?)
7. 0 (I had a friend who was a Monarchist: that ought to count for something)
8. 0
9. 4
10. 0
11. 1
12. 0
13. 0
14. 2, but only because I had guests coming who drink the stuff
15. 1
16. 3
17. 0
18. 2
19. 2
20. 0
21. 1
22. 0
23. 1
24. 0
25. 4

Total: 32

"A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents.
Range: 11–80.
Typical: 33."

Am I "upper-middle-class"? Not by income, but I certainly fall into the overeducated liberal elite category he's trying to guilt-trip into voting culture-war Republican (though anyone with a real interest in improving the lives of lower-class working folk wouldn't).  To be honest, lots of my points come from having married into a family with rather different tastes and having lived where I needed to live to pursue an academic (though not an elite) career.

Does this suggest that I need to rethink my understanding of American society? No: the logical leaps and cultural blinkers and statistical junk pseudo-science is strong with this one....

Pop Quiz: Politics or Theology? Wait, there's a difference?

Trinitarian debate or Republican mythology?

He's nothing like the father! He doesn't share the epistemology of the father. He doesn't have the nature of his father, the knowledge -- he has nothing in common with the father.

This actually comes from a discussion of Pres. Ronald Reagan and what, in theory, he would think of Sarah Palin. [via] It's a member of the current conservative commentariat telling Ronald Reagan JR. that she has a better grasp on his father's political judgement than he does. At one point she seems to conflate Reagan with the Founding Fathers, and concludes by saying that Ron Reagan, JR. must never have really met his father. Politically speaking, presumably.

The metaphysical discussion of political legacy aside, what actually struck me about this exchange is that Ron Reagan, JR. seems to have a higher (and better supported by recent evidence) opinion of his father's abilities and judgement than the so-called conservative he's arguing with, who seems to have absorbed the common liberal opinion about Pres. Reagan's essentially emotional/anti-intellectual approach to governance.

Update: to make things more interesting, Michael Reagan is getting into the act, raising the possibility that the Reagan legacy could split into opposing camps....

Comment Elsewhere: The Evil of the Clone Wars

Towards the end of a discussion of character and continuity in the Star Wars universe I commented:

Am I the only one who thinks that the animated Clone War series is a cruel trick on children, who will think of Anakin as a mildly annoying but basically heroic figure, only to discover that he’s really a mind-shatteringly evil person outside of that very limited storyline? Also, all the characters they are getting attached to get wiped out in a vast slaughter, except for the ones who eventually get killed one by one....

I really don't understand what they're thinking: they're creating a generation of children who will view their movies as a vicious betrayal. With luck, I suppose, the franchise will wither and die as a result. One can only hope.

Comment Elsewhere: The Birther Game

Over at Washington Monthly I wrote:

I've become convinced that the Birther meme is a long-term game. Nothing that happens now or in the near future matters, as long as the issue remains in the news on a regular basis. What matters is 2012, when Obama's electoral filings are going to be challenged everywhere. While those challenges have very little chance of succeeding individually, the complete derailing of political discourse -- and the potential for a bad judicial or commission decision is small but real -- will almost certainly be destabilizing.

Comment Elsewhere: Judeo-Calvinism?

here:

on Winchester: “Judeo-Calvinist dreariness”?????

It’s bad enough we get folded in with Christendom, but you’d think the culture that produced the Song of Songs would get an exemption from accusations of Calvinst Victorianism.

[Yes, I know "Calvinist Victorianism" is a linguistic and historical atrocity. That's my point.]

Comment Elsewhere: Pony Chokers

I wrote:

A quarter-century from now, when one of your students asks you when “pony-choker” became slang for the old Republican party, you can say that you were there at the creation….

A millenium for now, some enterprising anthropologist will note that the absence of large-scale pony graveyards in the styrofoam strata suggests that the ancient tales of “pony-choking republicans” were apocryphal. Or perhaps that the tradition of pinata can explain the idiom.

You have to go read the original to see why, and it's worth it.

(also, I noted the overlap of neo-confederate and anti-New Deal/stimulus thought....

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

It's been a while since I bothered updating my Impeachment Index, partially out of exhaustion, attention to other matters, etc.

But the latest issue of Vanity Fair has An Oral History of the Bush White House which is a fairly extensive "greatest hits" based on interviews with a whole bunch of highly placed people. [via]

I'm too much of an historian not to say "take it with a grain of salt." But it's fundamentally consistent with the view we've had for years from the outside: they lied, and broke laws, and got most of the important stuff wrong over and over and over again.

My favorite two bits (though the whole thing is worth reading, despite its length):

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor:
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?

Not only did they screw up the Middle East, they thought nothing of screwing over their own people:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.

Yeah, the VP's office was spying on the NSC. I actually laughed out loud at that one.

Comment Elsewhere: Absurdity in motion

In response to goofy comments on an otherwise sober and informative discussion of New Deal economics, I wrote:

Both of you are ignoring the evidence: time-traveling islamofascists replaced the Founding Fathers with body doubles and revised the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — abandoning the Articles of Confederation for ideological reasons — creating a quantum causality wave that made the otherwise erudite and wise George W. Bush stupid just in time for the 9/11 attacks, which were coordinated through suicide wormhole technology. This is why we can’t find Osama bin Laden: he’s actually hiding in a parallel existence, playing pinochle with his parallel self and waiting for the final victory to come. Barack Obama is another time-traveller, from a future of racial harmony and socialized medicine, who is working against bin Laden, but who nonetheless is also working against the interests of the real Founders who wrote the Articles of Confederation and then time travelled foward to lead the Confederacy.

I'm pretty sure that I'm kidding. But someone objected, and I had to go on:

I’m sorry you feel that way, but the chauvinistic tunnel vision of single-timeline American specialists just doesn’t encompass the reality of the multiverse the way we World Historians understand it. Like Hitler, we have a vision of a world unified under a healthy, vigorous, expansive Historical hegemony, and like Hitler, we will keep invading your blogs until you appease us with internationalism, then we will invade your other blogs, conferences, textbooks and seminars, anyway.

To which the blog host responded, quite appropriately, "It’s funny because it’s true."

Time to settle up!

The long-running parlor debate is over. For years, political junkies both professional and amateur have amused themselves by arguing whether the US would first elect an African American, woman or Jew to the White House. It's over: an African American was first, and there's little doubt that a woman is much more likely than a Jew at this point. Jews now fall into the "miscellaneous Caucasian ethnic" category, probably less likely than Hispanics.

Anyone who had outstanding wagers on the subject is now required to hand over the money, booze, embarassing photographs, personal services or to undergo the appropriately noteworthy hair styling to which they committed themselves. I'm not much of a gambler myself, so I'm pretty sure I don't owe anyone anything.

Echoes of Fascist Rhetoric

In response to a funny post at Terry's blog, I got serious

Stalin was a low-key, low-charisma party functionary who parlayed administrative responsibility into strategic superiority; he wasn’t as much an ideologue as he was a power-hungry S.O.B. (he ended up adopting large portions of Trotsky’s program after hounding Trotsky out of the country for programatic heresy!)

Palin, on the other hand, reminds me more of a non-military version of Juan Peron or Francisco Franco: someone who plays the demogogue in democratic terms until the game isn’t working for them, then they bring the hammer down, having laid the groundwork for accusing their opponents of subversion, treason, etc.

In response to a Sam Crane comment on Maoist guerrilla tactics as a metaphor for McCain's rural strategy (which has intensified, since), I said

More to the point, it resemble's Mao's use of rural peasants as "authentic" and politically pure, whereas urbanites and educated citizens were suspect and required retraining. This woman really does worry me.

I still wasn't going to make a big deal of it, but this attempt to claim that the recession is just "some regions of the country not doing as well as others" has a direct parallel in the Maoist obfustication of the Great Leap Forward Famine. At that time, official reports claimed that the Great Leap Forward was going very well, producing record amounts in both agriculture and industry, while the reality was that both agricultural and industrial production were dramatically undercut by the Maoist program. Famine across most of China resulted in roughly thirty million deaths, but the vast majority of the Chinese people believed -- and many still believe -- that the Great Leap Forward was generally successful except in their districts. This propoganda sleight of hand effectively shifted the blame for the famine away from central planners (or planner) to local officials and a "failure of revolutionary zeal" among the population. That gave the regime cover for the Cultural Revolution, a political purge and self-destructive "renewal" that killed millions more and set Chinese intellectual and cultural life back decades.

Blame shifting is a natural human act, not a particularly fascistic or Republican one. But the cumulative effect of the specific tactics is suggesting to me an affinity with extremist politics which is deeply unsettling:

• shifting blame away from the center
• blaming minorities (especially for the mortgage crisis; also immigration issues and Islamophobia)
• calling for a renewal of lost "authenticity"
• excluding large segments of the population from membership in the "the nation"

It never ceases to amaze me that right-wing radicals can get away with much more than left-wing ones, but there has to be a line somewhere....
[Crossposted]

Welcome, Avedon readers! Also Open Left folks!

Exploding Head Alert

I will admit: I have long considered the POW/MIA Flag a somewhat morbid and borderline pathological symbol, evidence of our inability to accept any loss or ambiguity, and odd desire to redeem an extremely unpleasant national historical episode by shifting the focus to a narrative of personal honor and sacrifice bereft of strategic or ethical implications. I have sneered privately (I don't sneer publicly, if I can help it) at the repeated cinematic recapitulation of this theme as bad history, misplaced patriotism and hyperviolent wish-fullfilment.

Now, though, comes the reporting of Sydney H. Schanberg which marshals considerable evidence that

• a substantial number of POWs -- hundreds -- were not returned by the Vietnamese and their allies after the signing of the 1973 Paris Accords
• Nixon's administration, and subsequent ones, were aware that these soldiers, sailors and airmen were in Vietnamese hands, but felt they lacked the leverage to get them free
• Every administration since Nixon has hewed to the line that no US POWs existed, suppressing and distorting evidence, or simply refusing to look for it
• John McCain was an active participant in the process of marginalizing those families and investigators who believed in the existence of these abandoned POWs

OK, I admit, I love the fact that McCain is implicated: his hypocrisy on this issue goes to the core of his personal narrative. But the article also implicates Sen. John Kerry and other Democratic figures, and twelve of the last thirty-five years have been under Democratic presidents who seem to have willingly participated in this historical deception.

I'm disgusted. In order to appear strong, the US abandoned its own code of military honor, the willingness to search for truth, democratic process. In order to gain some financial leverage, the Vietnamese government held -- and ultimately executed, most likely -- hundreds of men who had every right to be returned to their homeland. It's a violation of international law, and I know that holds little water for some, but I take it seriously: it's the bare minimum code of ethics which is supposed to keep atrocities like this at bay.

So, I'm officially revising my view of the world: the POW/MIA Flag is a memorial to a real, legitimate atrocity, an international shame.

But my worldview revision is relatively minor compared to the stripped mental gears which are going to come from those who consider McCain a "hero" for his time served and believe that he has the best interests of Americans -- civilians or military -- at heart.

[Crossposted]

Try to remember....

Ahistoricality Alert: Unspeakably Banal

I've not been terribly vocal about the Democratic campaign -- neither Clinton nor Obama were my first choice, both have fairly similar policies (neither of which will be enacted in anything like their present form), both have a thin but adequate resume, both have substantial talents and drawbacks as potential chief executives and both are way better than McCain. I was shut out of our state caucuses, due to time-bound obligations, so I didn't have to chose. Also, I'm on hiatus, and find most of the strong pro/anti arguments pretty vacuous, also well-balanced.

But sometimes someone says something so ... well, I'll just quote her:

"They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything."

(The original reportage, with a bit more context, is here)
This is, obviously, a riff on Niemoller's famous formulation. As other Jews have pointed out, this comes just in time for Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I have two reactions to this, both negative.

The first, and more obvious one, is that it is tactless, inappropriate, banal and absurd to compare global trade shifts to the Holocaust. I'm not going to say "it's offensive" because there is no objective measure of offensiveness. I will say, however, that I am offended. It is a gross dimunition of the Holocaust -- an atrocity that slaughtered Jews, Romany, political dissidents, Slavic peoples, religious minorities, and the disabled -- to use this in a speech on unemployment.

Second, and perhaps less obvious, is the historical absurdity of the statement. Niemoller's poetic formula works because it was pretty close to truth: there was very little resistance or protest in Germany as the Nazi programs were rolled out and Volk, Lebensraum, Judenrein became official policy. Trade, on the other hand, especially global competition and relocation, has been a constant political and economic topic of discussion, protest, legislation and speculation for the last thirty years or more. It may be true that classes who felt "above" globalization didn't take it seriously until the effects became obvious, but it's not at all true that there's been no cross-class unity, and "leadership" from unions, think tanks, legislators, presidents, affected businesses, the WTO, and assorted commentators.

I don't know if Hilary Clinton thought it was just a rhetorically clever move, or if she really thinks that outsourcing is some sort of economic Holocaust which justifies the equation she's made. I don't care: as an historian and as a Jew (also partially Polish, leftist and former union member, all of which would have gotten me rounded up at some point), I am offended.

Ahistoricality Alert Index

Every so often I run across some terribly abused historical analogy or argument. It offends me. This, of course, is nothing compared to the Carnival of Bad History, but it's my small contribution.

2008 May 2: Hilary Clinton compares globalization to Holocaust
2006 May 11: Right-wing commentators drastically underestimate Gandhi and channel Father Coughlin
2006 March 20: Secretary of Defense claims unwarranted virtue for US throughout history, calls for continued unwarranted virtue (follow-up)
2006 January 25: The cost of wars, compared, without any reference to context.
2005 December 4: Right-wing blogger ignores centuries of assymetrical warfare to make cheap political attack
2005 December 2: Not my catch, technically, but it does illustrate a common fallacy.
2005 September 12: An interesting discussion of "rules of war" under Lincoln.
2005 May 5: What is "America" and how did it do all that stuff?

Ahistoricality Alert: "Where are the skinheads when you need them?"

That's a quote from a popular right-wing author [via] fulminating about the "Gandhi-like passivity" being shown by Republicans and other so-called conservatives in the face of Democratic agression and social tolerance. Aside from the incredibly tasteless and frightening call to reclaim masculinity through violence, Gandhi was not passive: he was an advocate of in-your-face pacificism and mass political action. He was good at it, too.

Another member of the "I miss Father Coughlin" club spoke out about the Ahmadinejad letter, saying -- and this was so predictable I almost don't think his forebrain was involved --

Once again, it's the Democratic talking points, other than Israel, and even there -- yeah, it's [anti-war activist] Cindy Sheehan talking -- it is, you're right. It's Cindy. It's even some liberal Hollywood Jewish people talking point.

[via] After the smear and the schmeer (those rootless cosmopolitans: over a century of fearmongering, and going strong!), he then goes on to cite historical train wreck Shelby "Who's Man Enough To Make the Trains Run On Time" Steele.

Anyone who spots a conservative commentator or major blogger disavowing these people (not the statements: that's too easy. These are people with long track records of race-baiting, incitement-to-violence, civility-obliterating, discourse-lowering "shock-jock" quality rhetoric.) is invited to leave a comment or drop me a line. Why? Because I want to know which conservatives I can trust and which ones are just fine with slouching towards fascism.