Posted 10:15 PM by Angie Schultz

Pilgrim's Regress

Via John Coumarianos at Innocents Abroad comes this fascinating piece by Janet Daley of the London Daily Telegraph.

It describes how Berkeley turned her into a Marxist, and how living the Marxist dream turned her into a conservative. This article puts its finger directly on something I meant to write about in the next few days, so I'll save that part for later. But I did want to mention another thing that struck me.

Daley starts out life as liberal New Englander ("I had my own version of the American dream: a cross between New England Puritanism and cerebral Jewish idealism.") and comes to late '50s California for her last two years in high school. She's "appalled" that her new classmates don't seem to have any shred of social consciousness (conscience?): "The idea with which I had been raised--that life was, at least in some sense, a moral mission--was literally unintelligible to most of my friends."

She says she was particularly moved by the film Operation Abolition, made by the House Un-American Activities Committee to discredit its critics, especially those in San Francisco---but not in the way those who showed it to her intended:

The film described the demonstrators as "dupes" of a communist plot to abolish the heroic congressional committee (hence the movie's title). As the water swept them painfully down the marble stairs of San Francisco City Hall, we were, I suppose, expected to cheer...What I thought went something like this: "There is something seriously wrong here. I have been taught that we live in a free country and that, of all the freedoms, free speech is the most important. Whatever it is that these people believe, they ought to have the right to express it without being hounded into silence. And whatever objections they have to this committee, I would like to hear them. And, furthermore, I didn't know that I lived in a country where people who disagreed with congressmen got flushed down the stairs by fire hoses."

I was going to point you to the Prelinger Archives, where, I thought, you could download Operation Abolition, but it's not there. You can, however, download Operation Correction (Part I and Part II), a film made by the ACLU to "correct" the impression made by Operation Abolition. I thought both films were there.

The commentary on the Prelinger Archives site says, of Operation Abolition, "the resultant publicity did much to engender the social consciousness of the 1960s."
When Daley got to Berkeley she found herself among sympathetic souls. However, she never quite explains how a concern for civil liberties (which I would have shared) became sympathy for Marxism (which I wouldn't). In any case, she eventually went to Britain, where she taught "liberal studies" to lower-class boys "with no occupational ambitions beyond becoming factory hands."

They greeted any suggestion that they might consider professional or higher academic training with flabbergasted hilarity...[T]he parents, it seemed, were part of the problem. British working-class parents hardly ever urged their children to do better in life than they had done themselves. On the contrary, the adage was, "What was good enough for us should be good enough for them." Self-improvement and ambition were not traits to be admired but rather signs of class disloyalty and snobbery. I had never before met people who, when urged to let their children go to university, said, "Don't go putting ideas in his head."

The point I wanted to make was that this attitude is not confined to urban British factory hands: it works for rural Americans too. I encountered this attitude when I wanted to go to college to study physics. It stems partly from the old-fashioned notion of a university as a sort of junior social club for the rich---a place where personal ties can be formed so that business ties can be formed later. Hobnobbing with the high and mighty will avail the poor boy nothing (since they will always stick to their own kind, in the end), and only make him dissatisfied with the life to which he must return.

But that's only part of it. Another part is the realization that when one member of the community makes good, it makes the rest look bad. "Hey, it wasn't bein' poor that kept us back; it was the fact that we'd rather drink than study! Who knew?"

Daley believes that this attitude was excusable in people whose ancestors "had learned bitter lessons about the dangers of 'getting above yourself.'" She does not clarify what this means, but whatever it is, it's hardly likely to apply equally to the descendants of American farmers, which is where I found it.

But here's something even more interesting:

But what was less explicable than this working-class defeatism was to hear those who regarded themselves as progressive liberals conniving in it. The Left in Britain then (and scarcely less now) believed deeply that personal ambition was a petit bourgeois vice to be despised...

The notion that private prosperity could transform the lives (and self-image) of ordinary people was viewed as faintly obscene...

Not only did the left-wing intelligentsia dislike uppity lower-middle-class arrivistes: they positively discouraged the most deprived working-class people from rejecting their "roots." With a sentimental complacency that astonished me, they venerated the very social habits and attitudes that seemed to me so perversely backward...

Bourgeois values were the real enemy of working-class self-respect, because they made people who did not subscribe to them feel alienated and insecure. The socialist ideal was not to free people to fulfill their personal potential but to guarantee that no one would ever feel inferior to anyone else in any respect--intellectually, socially, or economically.

There's much more of this, in four paragraphs around the middle of the article. Does it sound familiar? It should; they're basically the same arguments the anti-globalization crowd makes.

"Oh, how terrible that Hejhogovenia has a McDonald's now! It will completely supplant their wholesome native ant puddings and dirt pies and boiled slugs. Right now their children are starving; soon they'll be---eeewwww!----obese! And when McDonald's comes in the door, you know their authentic culture will go right out the window! What will happen to the colorful Pricking Festival? You know, the dangers of being stabbed repeatedly with long needles are really over-rated, and besides, it's their culture, isn't it? I mean, you have to really respect that, don't you? And besides, my friend over at UNONUTN says they'll have pricking-related deaths down by five percent in only ten years!"

This point was the one that really struck me, and it ties in nicely with a similar attitude that cropped up in the Prelinger CD set Our Secret Century (which I have finally got my hands on). I'll be posting about that in a day or so. Betcha can't wait!

Posted 4:29 PM by Angie Schultz

Red America

Going back for Grandpa's funeral gave me a chance to see what Red America is up to.

For those of you playing along at home, "Red America" is a term used by some to denote those who voted Republican in the 2000 election: states whose electoral votes went to Bush were colored red; those who went to Gore, blue. Generally the term means a more conservative, often rural, demographic---but my grandfather, a staunch Democrat, would be incensed to find he was being painted as a Republican.

In Red America, as here in Houston, there are flags on houses and cars, and signs exhorting us to support the troops. (Those of you who may have thought Houston was also Red America may now learn your error; it's more like Violet-Red America. Being a large city with universities and museums and suchlike, it has a blue tinge to it---much more so if you read the Chronicle.) There, however, some signs said "Support Our Troops in Action", and I didn't see any signs urgin "No War".

In Red America, downtown is drying up, leaving an ugly scar. My grandfather lived in a town whose city limits sign says "Population: 1500", but I think that must be the highest population it's ever had, back in its misty heyday. Now, near as I can find, it has about 300. It was always a rinky-dink place, but now its one-intersection "downtown" is deserted.

So Grandpa's funeral was held in a nearby town of about 3500, which is where everyone in that part of the county goes for groceries when they don't want to run to the county seat (a big city, pop. 20,000), 20 miles away. That town used to have a small factory on its main street, plus the usual assortment of businesses (including a silvery diner called "The Streamliner", and the "Stag Bar"---men only, please). Now there's almost nothing. The buildings are still there, boarded and sullen. All the businesses have moved out to the highway (they have a McDonald's now, oh the horror), by which I mean a two-lane state highway, not an interstate.

In Red America, they stop for funerals. My sister worried that we would not have a "funeral" flag to stick on the antenna. We might get a ticket for going through stop signs and such. My stepdad told her not to worry. "This isn't like St. Louis," he said. "People will stop." And so they did, not just at the stop signs, but oncoming traffic pulled over to the side and stopped. I'd never seen that, didn't know you were "supposed" to do that. That would wreak havoc in every town I've lived in for the past 20 years. And getting a ticket would've been unlikely, as one of the town's two police cars was dispatched to stand athwart the state highway and halt traffic for us.

In Red America the neighbors bring over tons of food, and after the funeral you go to the church basement where the church people have more food for you. Some of it was straight out of the jello salad section of The Gallery of Regrettable Food, and I LIKED IT.

At the church a lady asked me about Australia, and when later I asked my mother who she was, my stepdad stage-whispered, "That's the wife of one of your mother's old boyfriends, ha ha." Of course, my mother had previously introduced me to her cousin by saying that my stepdad only married her (my mom) because the cousin dumped him. This pattern repeats itself throughout my family, e.g.: my mother's aunt had a high school friend who became my father's sister-in-law; my father and stepfather were both in the same graduating class (numbering maybe 25, tops), etc.

Everybody's comment about everybody else was: "I didn't recognize them!"

It's a small world, Red America.

Posted 3:22 PM by Angie Schultz

On the Internet, You Live Forever

NOTE: Some of these posts are just for me. This is one of them.

My maternal grandfather died last Thursday. He was 86.

My parents were divorced when I was just a few months old. For the first year of my life I lived with my mother's parents, and so they were especially fond of me, and I loved them because they loved me.

I wish now that I'd had a video camera, so I could have "recorded" him. He used to do this routine of slow-motion comic astonishment, rearing way back and opening his eyes wide as if you'd said the most shocking thing in the world. When I was a little girl this annoyed me, because I thought he was making fun of me, rather than just making fun. Wish I could see it again.

He used to pretend to flirt shamelessly with waittresses, even into his eighties. Naturally, when I was a teenager I found that embarrassing. He flirted with the nurses at the old folks' home, too.

Grandpa's left hand was not much use, and it handled things clumsily, as if he were wearing a thick mitten. When I was little his left thumbnail was black half the time from being hit, unfelt, with a hammer. Even in his casket the hand lay curled and obstinate. Despite that, he made fine cabinetry, and worked as a mechanic, carpenter, electrician, machinest, pipe-fitter, bricklayer---anything like that, he could do it. I'm not sure they make guys like that anymore.

When I was a little kid, he worked as a mechanic for a man who owned several Sinclair gas stations. Grandpa drove around in a green truck with a red dinosaur on it, and brought us Sinclair doo-dads, mostly inflatable dinosaurs. That is Kid Heaven. We rode with him often in the green truck, which smelled of grease and metal. At the funeral, my sister leaned over to me and whispered, "I can sometimes smell Grandpa's truck." To this day the smell of a mechanic's garage makes me calm and happy (until I get the bill).

When my mother was in high school, Grandpa built a beautiful house, and had a pond (actually a small lake) dug and stocked with fish. Then he built a suspension bridge over the pond. My stepdad said he remembered the day the bridge was finally completed. Grandpa had made a mistake, and as a result the span had a graceful arch to it, rather than being flat as intended. But I figure that successfully building the bridge was pretty damn good for a man who'd never made it to high school.

He used to sit out on the back porch of the house in his undershirt and drink beer. At his funeral my sister and my cousin put up a bulletin board of pictures, making sure to include one of him in his undershirt. I used to sit on his knee, and he would commit child abuse by giving me little sips of beer. If Papaw was drinking it, that was what I wanted too! Thanks to my grandfather, today I really hate beer. (Grandpa, if he knew anything, knew the value of a dollar, and so bought the cheapest available beer.)

And when the house and the bridge were finally done---he kept building. He was always wanting to be building something. They moved from that house in the late '70s, and into a house trailer. (Grandma said the house was getting too much to take care of. I think "How long ago that was! They must have been very young, still!" But Grandpa would've been about 62.) It was big, as trailers go---a double wide, and a fancy one. But he couldn't stop building, so he built a room onto the house trailer. Now, since a mobile home has to be mobile, and since they can't be longer than a certain length to travel on the roads, there was a bit of a problem. So grandpa made the room so that it would "telescope"---sliding onto the rest of the trailer, making it only slightly larger than it had been originally.

They eventually moved back to their hometown, and bought a house across the street from the one in which my mother was born. After Grandpa finished fixing it up, he went around fixing things for the neighbors. When my paternal grandfather died, my mother's parents went to the visitation, even though the families had little contact for decades. My father asked Grandpa what he was doing to keep busy, and Grandpa replied, "Oh, I go around and help out some of the old folks in town." He was on the high side of 75 at that time, and hadn't meant it as a joke.

Just a few months ago Grandma told him how a neighbor had taken care of some small repair around the house, and Grandpa complained that there wouldn't be anything left for him to do when he came home. (He kept believing he'd eventually get out of the nursing home, when we knew he wouldn't, and it broke our hearts.)

Grandpa was in WWII. He was a Navy mechanic, and was sent to the South Pacific. He was on Okinawa after the fighting there was (mostly) finished, and was in the hospital there when the war ended. Now, on TV we often see pictures of people celebrating by firing their guns into the air, and as us physics types know, if it goes up, it has to come down. When the end of the war was announced, many of the men celebrated by firing their guns into the air, and the bullets did come back to earth again---some of them through the tent roof of the hospital.

Unfortunately, that's about all I know of Grandpa's military service. He Didn't Like to Talk About It, you see, which was very common, and we didn't press him.

On Sunday, the funeral home was packed, making the funeral director testy. The procession must have stretched over a mile. They draped his casket with a flag, and at the cemetery half a dozen old gents from the local VFW showed up to offer a rifle salute, and play "Taps" on a tape player.

Grandpa's mother died when he was five, and he was raised by his maternal grandmother. In his last months he began to "see" her. He told my grandmother that his came to him in dreams, and that he'd gotten up in the middle of the night to call her on the phone.

When I am old and wandering, I will see him and Grandma. We will sit on the back porch on hot days and sip beer, and look for duck eggs and dinosaurs by the pond, and ride to town in the old truck to get ice cream bars, and in the evening Grandpa will barbecue some ribs.

But, frankly, I'm hoping I won't live that long.

Posted 9:13 PM by Angie Schultz

PSA

Not that anyone's likely to notice, but I'll be gone for a couple days. Back on Tuesday, probably.

Posted 9:12 PM by Angie Schultz

More on the Agonist

The Houston Chronicle has an article about Sean-Paul Kelley. It ran on the back page of the "Houston" section, which is the lifestyles section (p 14D). In other words, it was behind the comics, on arguably the very back page of the paper.

I don't think it tells us anything we didn't already know. There's a slight local connection in that he is a '93 graduate of the University of Houston, with a degree in history.

The more interesting bit is this:

Keith Woods, the reporting, writing and editing group leader at the media think tank Poynter Institute, says that if a Web site is acting in a journalistic fashion, it should follow all rules of journalism such as accuracy and fairness. Once you step out of that realm, there are still rules that apply to lying and deception, he says... Woods says [blogs'] credibility must be carefully weighed. For example, a Web log attached to a news organization is more likely to be accurate, he says.

Enjoy a hearty laugh at that last sentence.

UPDATE MORE THAN SIX MONTHS LATER: News organization, dammit, news. Not new organization. I've fixed it. I'm stupid. Oh well.

Posted 9:56 PM by Angie Schultz

More BBC Bashing

InstaPundit links to this column, so you don't really need me to point to it, but it jibes so well with my experience that I thought I should.

Denis Boyles lives in France, and he apparently doesn't have TV, or at least not English-language TV. So after listening to the war on radio on the BBC's World Service---and finding that the war is not going well, that the Americans are lying about their progress---he goes to watch TV at the home of a friend who has satellite TV. He also brings along his radio, for comparison:

It was a startling multimedia event. I could listen to the BBC's Paul Wood telling me once again that there was no sign of the American incursion into Baghdad. Yet on the screen in front of me there was the 3rd Infantry. They were cruising through Baghdad, driving down the highway, turning into the streets...At the airport, a correspondent was asked about the Iraqi claim that the Americans had been driven out of the airport and were being "pounded" by Republican Guards. He looked around, mystified, then replied that he'd been at the airport for two days, that it was securely in Coalition hands, and that the only Iraqi challenge he had noticed had been a couple of small skirmishes that were quickly quelled by Coalition forces. "Maybe that's what he meant," he said, generously. Behind him, soldiers lounged around like the stranded tourists they were.

The BBC's correspondent at CENTCOM was asked whether the Americans or Iraqis should be believed:

It's obvious the Iraqis are lying, Marcus shot back, adding that the American incursion was not only real, it was significant and had gone deep into the capital. "Anybody who questions that can't see the forest for the trees," he said. It was the only real-world comment I had heard in a full day of World Service listening. That was the last I heard of Marcus that day.

Remember, this is the Jonathan Marcus who asked Tommy Franks why he should believe that Iraqi troops had been surrendering, and hinted that he didn't want to be spreading American propaganda. (See also this Andrew Sullivan post.) Did he come up with that question, or was it fed to him by BBC HQ? Will the real Jonathan Marcus please stand up?

This was also my experience of watching the BBC in Sydney: time and time again their American correspondents' reports of what was going on in the US were so out of kilter with what I'd been hearing from other sources as to border on fantasy. This includes things like the "panic" after the anthrax attacks, and "fear" of flying after 9/11. Their military analysts were often very dismissive of US capabilities, and (thus) very frequently wrong. This didn't stop them from being brought back again and again.

This little bit shocked me:

But the World Service's revision of focus also coincided unhappily with a key decision announced early in March by the BBC's controller of editorial policy, Stephen Whittle. It was Whittle's wish that corporation broadcasts specifically reflect anti-war opinion.

I could only find one item on this, in the Guardian. Their first paragraph says the same thing as Boyles's, but the rest of the article says that Whittle wanted to make sure anti-war opinion was presented, not necessarily that only anti-war opinion was presented.

LATE ADDITION: Although I've not quoted those parts, Boyles also mentions BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan, quoted as being skeptical that the Marines had entered Baghdad, saying, "...the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements." Gilligan is the subject of this Guardian article, in which he says he's looked at the 15th floor room at the Palestine Hotel where two journalists were killed and three injured. This has been attributed to US tank fire, and troops there at the time have admitted firing on the hotel, because they said they thought they saw spotters on the roof.

But the roof is not the 15th floor. Gilligan says he doubts that the damage was caused by an American tank because 1) a tank shell would have caused more damage, and 2) it was at the wrong angle; the tanks would have to have fired around a corner. The first point was my impression also, from seeing the TV pictures yesterday. I have no idea about the second. Anyhow, this is to give Gilligan his due.

Posted 8:43 AM by Angie Schultz

Folk Songs

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the evening
I'd hammer on Saddam
All over Baghdad
I'd hammer out chu-unks
And sell 'em on eeeEEEEbaay
I'd hammer out love between the Yankees and Iraqis
Aa-aall over Baghdad!


OK, the love line is sappy, but it's in the original. (Why's NIH listing folk song lyrics?)

First some Iraqis tried to knock down Saddam's statue with a sledgehammer. They made a valiant effort, but it's a big pedestal, and they had only one sledgehammer between them. (It looked like they were trying to chop down a tree.) So the Marines offered some mechanical assist.

I think half the crowd in the square was media. Most of the people swarming on the Marines' vehicle were photographers.

Fox wonders what Iraqi Information Minister Muhammed Sa'id al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob) will have to say about this, or whether he'll call in sick today.

I was a little worried when the Marines trotted out an American flag and put it over Saddam's face, but they took it down later. Just a little triumphalism is necessary for morale.

As Saddam's statue topples, Brit Hume wants to know what De Villepin and Chirac are thinking. The Marines manage to make the statue fold over, but it resists coming off its pedestal. Fox's female anchor (Brigitte Quinn, I think) says, "Well, they say Saddam will cling to power..."

Now they're dragging the statue's head through the streets.

More pictures linked when they're up.

The Yahoo slideshows are a crapshoot, since the URLs for picture plus caption are not static! The JPEG locations are, however, so that's what I'm linking to.

Here's a really nice picture of the square and the statue. Notice all the people on the vehicle; most were media photographers. I love the colors on the buildings, sky, and trees.

Here's a better view of the Easter Egg Mosque, as I like to call it, and here's even more detail on the dome.

After the Marines took down the American flag, they put up a pre-Gulf War Iraqi flag, which Saddam wore like a scarf for a bit. (Pre-GWI flags do not have writing on them.) Just before they pulled down the statue, someone crawled up and retrieved it. That's Cpl. Edward Chin of New York, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines Regiment, by the way.

Cindy, I swear! He meant nothing to me!

He had great, big, nasty teeth, but we pulled them.

This has nothing to do with statue-toppling; I just like it. It's the Martyrs' Monument. Yes, I'm sorry. I like fascist architecture, OK? Give me big, superhuman structures. It looks very spooky up close. By the way, try not to think of anything Freudian when viewing this monument.

Where's Tex when you need him? Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy! Harley! Those are Kurds in Sulaymaniyah.

Posted 8:46 PM by Angie Schultz

The Rites of Spring

Note: this small essay has been written by everyone in the world by now. It's just filler.

'Tis spring, when a young man's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of regime---I mean, time change.

Niles is performing the semi-annual Rite of Time Changes. This takes him half the night. Between clocks, watches, TVs, VCRs, phones, stereos, and the microwave, we have 21 clocks in the house, plus one in the car. (For some reason this is a very clock-intensive home. There's a place in the kitchen you can stand and see three clocks simultaneously. Naturally, no two display the same time.) This does not count 4 computers, at least three of which are smart enough to set themselves.

Niles says that he seems to acquire a new clock every time change. Clocks come with items that no sane person would recognize as needing a clock. I calculate that at this rate, in 235 years it will take us six months to set all the clocks in the household, and so we will be employed full time just setting our own clocks. Fortunately, we're not going to live that long.

Thank you for reading this rant which was fresh and amusing ten years ago.

Posted 7:01 PM by Angie Schultz

More Academia Nuts

More on our favorite Columbia University airhead.

From the New York Post: De Genova gets death threats.

De Genova claimed death threats forced him to skip his 2:40 p.m. Latino History course at the university's Hamilton Hall - the first lecture he had scheduled since the March 26 anti-war "teach in"... "Because Nick is afraid for his life, nobody knows where he is," said one [of his grad students], who refused to identify herself.

From the Columbia Spectator: Students Wage Silent Protest for De Genova

Students of Professor Nicholas De Genova staged a silent, motionless protest on Low Plaza yesterday in support of their absent teacher... De Genova was not present in class because he is currently "in hiding," one graduate student said. She added that "he and his wife are fearing for their lives" after receiving "over one thousand death threats by phone and e-mail"..."We feel silenced by Nick's absence," added one of the other graduate students.

From Newsday: Columbia Prof.'s Remarks Spark Threats

[Faculty members] also bemoaned a more innocent victim of the comments made last week by Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova. The campus anti-war movement.

"I'm afraid the consequences could be that they could silence us," Jean Cohen, a political science professor, said of those making the threats.

No! Not They!

Cohen, an organizer of last week's teach-in where De Genova called for the killing of U.S. soldiers, said she and other organizers have received threats, even though they denounced De Genova's statements.

"It's frightening for me to get all these e-mails," Cohen said, adding that she was puzzled how De Genova could have called for "a million Mogadishus"... "It ended up drowning out all the other voices and tarring the anti-war movement with being anti-American and anti-patriotic," she said.

Newsday portrays Cohen as distressed and mildly bewildered about De Genova's words, which is quite different from the way she appears in this issue of the Spectator. Come enjoy watching the Peace People eat their young:

"He and the press have hijacked this teach-in, and I'm very, very angry about it," said Jean Cohen, Professor of Political Science, who first had the idea for the event. "It was an utterly irresponsible thing to do. And it's not innocent. ... This was a planned undermining of this teach-in."

Cohen emphasized that De Genova had not originally been invited to speak. He was replacing Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor who dropped out because of a medical emergency.

"At the last minute someone couldn't speak, and he just kind of appeared," Cohen said. "... He ended up on that platform by accident, almost by manipulation."

Cohen said that as soon as it was clear that there was an opening in the program, De Genova was "right there, all ready with his speech--which makes me suspicious."

"It's bad luck that there was an opening, but he was all too ready," she said.

Round and round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. Place your bets! Was it the FBI? CIA? MI6? Mossad? Or maybe the Stonecutters? Freemasons? Elks? Moose? Lions? Knights of Columbus? Knight Ridder? Microsoft? MacDonalds? Disney??

As you might have heard, Columbia president Lee Bollinger put up a notice on the University website to the effect that he was shocked (shocked!) that someone would say such a thing, concluding that he was "especially saddened for the families of those whose lives are at risk". Heaven knows who that refers to.

An innocuous enough statement, one would have thought---especially since Bollinger made sure to utter the Worship Words "academic freedom". But their gravitational pull warped knickers anyway:

"If the president is using the home page of Columbia University to condemn a particular perspective of a faculty member--and to condemn it in very harsh terms--then that counts as the University taking a position, and it creates a chilling effect," said Nate Treadwell, CC '05 and e-mail list administrator for the Columbia Student Solidarity Network.

Beware the dreaded chilling effect!

"I have no objection to Bollinger saying whatever the hell he wants, one way or the other, on the war," Treadwell said. "But it bothers me that Bollinger would use official University avenues to advertise his own political position, especially considering the threats of violence that De Genova is receiving."

Imagine that, the President of the University is using Official! University! Avenues! (totally unlike the University's email system, which Treadwell uses, not to mention the teach-in itself) to express the controversial opinion that Columbia's professors really ought not to call aloud for the defeat and slaughter of American troops during wartime.

Leigh Johnson, CC '03 and an anthropology major, had similar concerns.

"Bollinger made an emotional and political statement that silenced De Genova's speech on the part of the University, and that will certainly intimidate any faculty from speaking with similar positions," she said.

Johnson worries about the damage done to the anti-war movement by the strong reaction against De Genova's remarks.

"I think we have to resist every attempt of pro-war and conservative reactionaries to turn what De Genova said into an indictment of the anti-war cause, and we have to instead shift the debate to his constitutional right to say those things," Johnson said.

Because we wouldn't want anyone to actually examine his remarks to try to discover whether they were accurate, let alone appropriate. Freedom of speech means speech entirely free of consequences of any kind, including examination for something resembling "truth".

There are comments to this Spectator article, and the overwhelming majority are negative. But someone posting as Leigh Johnson, the woman quoted above, says:

Prof. De Genova stood in solidarity not with the dictatorship of Iraq, but with oppressed peoples around the world, people like those five year-old children fleeing Nasiriyah who were assassinated by U.S. death squads. People like innocent black men on death row in the U.S. who are denied fair trials. Those who call for Prof. De Genova to go live in Iraq miss the fundamental point that neither Iraq nor America are "free" or just countries. U.S. soldiers have a choice to participate in this unjust desert slaughter, and De Genova courageously encouraged them to say "no". No to empire and no to killing ordinary Iraqis, with whom American enlisted working class men and women have more common interests than they do with the racist tzars who run this country.

Lessee, ya got yer race baiting, yer class wars, yer big-eyed children, yer US "death squads", yer moral equivalence, and yer "empire". Somehow she missed misogyny; have to dock her for that.

There's oh so very much more in this article, including slamming the press for focussing on just this one speech, thereby tarring the whole "Movement".

I remember my college years. (This is going to be a "when I was your age, sonny" rant, so those of tender years might want to turn away now.) I spent my nose in a book, because I foolishly chose to major in a subject where you had to have actual right answers (more or less), rather than just make crap up, or find a subject where I could indulge my own prejudices, and write outrageous things just for the cachet of being a campus radical. How much more fun college would have been! I could have been an Eager Young Person, "fighting" for the rights of disenfranchised [fill in the blank], rather than actually learning anything.

And now it's coming back to haunt me. I can't get a university position now, not even at a much less lofty place than Columbia, but guys like De Genova can. That's what really ticks me off, you see. If they attempted to fire him there would be a great outcry that he was being fired for political reasons, when in reality he ought to be fired for simple incompetence. Then again, they'd probably have to fire 3/4 of the humanties professors on that score.

Finally, here's a New York Times article about a student in De Genova's class who'll be entering the Marines this summer.

Via several sources, including Big Arm Woman, Critical Mass, (hey, check out her link to Eric Foner's assertion that "any" news broadcast presents the government's arguments for war, with the insinuation that anti-war arguments are never aired; he's serious, so fire him too), and the Country Store.

UPDATE: A "blockquote" tag got lost; I've inserted it, and changed some spellings. I need an editor. I probably missed things, too.

Posted 9:13 AM by Angie Schultz

This Is Why We Need Big Media

I'm assuming that the Weekly Standard counts as Big Media. Maybe not.

For example, InstaPundit refers us to this article pointing out the way in which some journalists at CENTCOM briefings use their questions to make propaganda statements, rather than to actually gain information.

Now, who but Big Media would ever have thought to point that out? Brilliant, simply brilliant!

I was going to write up a further post with more questions, but there's no point now that Big Media Has Spoken. It's my impression that the propaganda questions have gotten fewer as the days wear on. Perhaps word got around that if you were known for your grandstanding statements, the briefers would be able to do without your participation.

At the bottom of his piece, Last mentions a question Michael Wolff of New York magazine asks, in which he says, basically, that he doesn't think the briefings are much use and wants to know:

So I guess my question is, why should we stay? What's the value to us for what we learn at this million-dollar press center?

What Last doesn't tell you is that the transcript says there was "applause" in response to that question. (Which is kinda funny, in that in the comments to this item on Command Post, Kalle asks why none of the journalists cheered or clapped at the announcement of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. Poor, naive Kalle! Several people straighten him (or her) out. Those objective journalists aren't supposed to cheer the newsmakers. Why, that wouldn't be objective!)

I'll tell you one thing: CENTCOM really needs to get its act together about its website. It's ugly. It's slow to load. Items are not always easy to find. I suspect they thought that only Big Media journalists would be accessing these pages. They need to watch more CNN pieces about blogs.

Last also says:

On the one hand, it's frightening to realize that the global media operate on a professional level roughly equivalent to a bad college paper. But on the other hand, it's a little bit liberating: After all, with press like this, no wonder the rest of the world hates us--America really is besieged by a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

Actually, since 9/11 I've been wondering whether this is true. This is a much more paranoid idea than I am used to entertaining. But in the world's press I've seen that our motives are misrepresented, our failures trumpeted, our successes ignored. Whether this is just age-old distrust of the powerful, the result of a widespread leftist mindset among the press (a bit paranoid), or the dying embers of Soviet propaganda (very paranoid), I don't know. But as these questions show, the "impartial" press is anything but.

Posted 10:37 PM by Angie Schultz

This New Blogging Thing the Kids Seem to Like

Well, I just saw Glenn on CNN. It was very short, but that's OK. The piece with Jeff Jarvis that they led off with was a scream. "If the blogger wants to talk about, say, bias in the BBC, he can link to the BBC web site!" Well Oh! My! God! Can you imagine that?? What will they think of next, images? And did you know that email didn't exist during the first Gulf War? I must've gotten mine through some sort of time tunnel.

Besides Glenn they had a woman on who looked kinda familiar, and I was trying to guess who she was. Virginia Postrel? Megan McArdle? No, she was Elizabeth Osder, a journalism professor at USC. "Ah," thought I. "This is going to so suck. She's going to tell us how you can't really trust anything you read in blogs, because it hasn't gone through the editing and reviewing and contemplation and juice-extraction processes that only Big Media can provide." But no, she didn't say anything of the sort. In fact, she pretty much echoed what Glenn said.

Instead, it was up to Aaron Brown to suggest that. Glenn told him about Tim Blair's Adventures in Fisky Fact-Checking. (Unfortunately, he failed to note who Tim Blair was; or rather, I thought the point that Blair is in Australia made it all the cooler.)

So I'm sitting there watching the segment with Niles, and Brown says something like, "But isn't it true that, even with all the different people contributing to it, that a lot of people are going to see incorrect information before the truth comes to light."

THAT'S RIGHT, ENTIRELY UNLIKE 24 HOUR NEWS, I shouted, poking Niles in the ribs with my feet. That happened a lot, as with the above-mentioned Tim Blair story, and when Glenn used the word "blogosphere", and Brown seemed surprised. "Bill Quick coined the term," Glenn told him. "Yeah," I said, "And Bill is always Quick" poke, poke "to point that out."

In fact, if there was a fault with Glenn's performance, it was the appearance of blog namedropping, what with Blair and Quick and The Command Post mentioned. The Jeff Jarvis ("he founded Entertainment Weekly"---poke, poke) bit mentioned Andrew Sullivan. Later, they say, "No one's making any money off blogging." I could not contain my outrage. "Andrew Sullivan is! He made eighty grand last year!" POKE!

Brown signed off with "I'm sure someone will be blogging this. In about a minute."

I leapt up off the couch. "That's right dear," said Niles. "Must make sure you are the first to---no, no, don't stop to go to the bathroom! Someone will post ahead of you!" But it would have been futile. The Command Post, linked above, plus Meryl Yourish plus Jeff Jarvis were much faster on the draw. In fact, Jarvis says Elizabeth Osder used to work for him, and has changed her mind about blogs. In this Wired article from three scant months ago, she said:

"Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books."

She added, "There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting."

Hey, I put a lot of work into those scrapbooks!

Seriously, if you look through the "recently updated" list on the Blogger site, you will find a lot of diary-type, navel-gazing blogs. But I am compelled to point out that reporters frequently have very little expertise on the topics they work on, as anyone who has seen the remains of their professional work after it's been through the media mill can attest.

In fact, the reason I started this blog is to have a place to vent at the media. My main bugbear is thumb-sucking commentary writers who seem to be channeling a parallel universe, and wailing about what that means for our society. You don't need much expertise to be Maureen Dowd, say, or to write basically anything that turns up in the Sydney Morning Herald. And the "expertise" of the straight reporters doesn't save them from looking like complete idiots on occasion, either. They just ignore their mistakes and carry on.