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Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Vacation time

Later today I’m leaving the country with my family for two weeks.  Take care of the place for me, will you?  When I get back I want to see Cheney in an orange jumper, doing the perp walk.  Oh, yes, and don’t forget to water the plants, especially the ficus in the den-- it’s always needed a little extra attention.

I’m not bringing the laptop, so this is pretty much it for the blog for the rest of June.  As always, many thanks to the 1500 (!!) of you who’ve been stopping by every day for the past couple of weeks, and to everyone who’s been reading this thing since it opened for business back in January.  Hope you like the redesign and the expanded expanded blogroll (thanks, Kurt!)-- I was getting tired of the standard-issue professor-with-books photo, and besides, that really is Henri Richard over there.  I’ll try to come up with some more recent photo (of me, not him) when I get back.  And, of course, I hope some of you will still come by to visit this place in July.

OK, gotta go.  I still have to pack a bunch of these, and bring the recycling out front.  Thanks again for your visits and your comments, and see you soon.

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 03:50 AM
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For a vital center

I read a story in the newspaper this Sunday and felt that I had to comment on it because it was so important.  It was called “A Nation Divided? Who Says?” and it was written by John Tierney.  Here’s how it begins.

WASHINGTON� If you’ve been following the election coverage, you know how angry you’re supposed to be. This has been called the Armageddon election in the 50-50 nation, a civil war between the Blue and the Red states, a clash between churchgoers and secularists hopelessly separated by a values chasm and a culture gap.

That’s true.  I’ve heard all these things, and they just confuse me.  That’s not the world I live in!

But do Americans really despise the beliefs of half of their fellow citizens? Have Americans really changed so much since the day when a candidate with Ronald Reagan’s soothing message could carry 49 of 50 states?

Golly, I hope not.  I remember 1984� we were happy then.  We were unified.  Everything was pretty calm and soothing. There weren’t any unpleasant arguments that I can recall.

To some scholars, the answer is no. They say that our basic differences have actually been shrinking over the past two decades, and that the polarized nation is largely a myth created by people inside the Beltway talking to each another or, more precisely, shouting at each other.

These academics say it’s not the voters but the political elite of both parties who have become more narrow-minded and polarized. As Norma Desmond might put it: We’re still big. It’s the parties that got smaller.

Now this is where I really began to think-- it’s so true.  It was one thing when the GOP was taken over by guys like Tom DeLay, and the White House was run by one of the most far-right crackpots ever to stagger out of Wyoming.  But then when the Democrats started shouting too, I think it turned everybody off.  Take that Waxman fellow� what’s he on about?  He sounds to me like he’s trying to start a fight.  And the way Ted Kennedy was arguing with John Ashcroft the other day, I just had to turn the sound down.

Most voters are still centrists willing to consider a candidate from either party, but they rarely get the chance: It’s become difficult for a centrist to be nominated for president or to Congress or the state legislature, said Morris P. Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“If the two presidential candidates this year were John McCain and Joe Lieberman, you’d see a lot more crossover and less polarization,” said Professor Fiorina, mentioning the moderate Republican and Democratic senators. He is the co-author, along with Samuel J. Abrams of Harvard and Jeremy C. Pope of Stanford, of the forthcoming book, “Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America.”

“The bulk of the American citizenry is somewhat in the position of the unfortunate citizens of some third-world countries who try to stay out of the cross-fire while Maoist guerrillas and right-wing death squads shoot at each other,” the book concludes. “Reports of a culture war are mostly wishful thinking and useful fund-raising strategies on the part of culture-war guerrillas, abetted by a media driven by the need to make the dull and everyday appear exciting and unprecedented.”

It’s about time somebody had the courage to say this.  The media have been fanning the flames of discontent ever since John Kerry called for the collectivization of American farms and mandatory abortions for all pregnant women.  If only Joe Lieberman had been the nominee!  But no, Democrats with their manic hate-Bush rhetoric have hitched their wagon to a guy who advocates arranged gay marriages, nationalized day care, a $12/hr minimum wage and a 100 percent inheritance tax.  It�s like living in someplace like, I don�t know, El Guataragua or Panador, with all the guerrillas and the death squads.

And then what’s all this squabbling about “torture memos”?  Republicans want torture.  Democrats want no torture.  Where in this debate is there any place for a good decent centrist who can split the difference and bring the nation together over the principle of some torture?

Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston College, reached similar conclusions in his 1998 book, “One Nation, After All,” which called the culture war largely a product of intellectuals.

“Compared to earlier periods - the Civil War, the 1930’s, the 1960’s - our disagreements now are not that deep,” Professor Wolfe said last week. “Indeed, it is only because we agree so much on so many things that we can allow ourselves the luxury of thinking we are having a culture war. When one of society’s deepest divisions is over stem cells, that society is pretty unified.”

I have a friend who insists that Alan Wolfe can be counted on, in articles like this, to say the most annoying, triangulating, Liebermanesque things you can possibly imagine.  But in this case, I think Professor Wolfe is right: when 98 percent of the country supports stem-cell research, and it’s blocked by a tiny handful of fundamentalist Christians who grant nine-day embryos the moral status of living humans, that’s really quite a luxury.  We should be happy that we agree on so much, down deep.  Besides, stem cells are really very tiny things.  You can hardly see them!  We’re really quite lucky we are to live in a society that “sweats the small stuff.”

If only those Democrats weren’t such a bunch of loudmouthed extremists.  They’re just as bad as the Republicans, if you ask me.  It’s about time somebody spoke up for the rest of us. 

Posted by Michael on 06/15 at 03:30 AM
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Monday, June 14, 2004

Real work for a change

I’m finishing up a big long review essay on four books-- spent all day yesterday and half the night churning out about 4000 words.  (Thanks to Janet for the day.  Saturday, Jamie and I went swimming, played basketball, rode go-carts, and went to the laser tag arcade.) So no blogging ‘til this thing is done.  I’ll be back a bit later with a heartfelt lament about how partisan extremism among Democrats and Republicans is betraying the vital center of American life.  Really.  I read in the New York Times yesterday that “it’s become difficult for a centrist to be nominated for president or to Congress or the state legislature,” and I just think that’s wrong.

Posted by Michael on 06/14 at 03:54 AM
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Saturday, June 12, 2004

The morning after

I do hope Ronald Reagan rests in peace.  And I have great sympathy and admiration for anyone who cares for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, though I also think that George Williams has just about the right take on this.  As we reflect on Reagan’s mortality and ours, I thought it might be useful to suggest that while we in the disability community have good reason to support anyone with a degenerative, debilitating illness (and his or her caregivers), we also have an obligation to all our fellow humans.

With that, I turn you over to James W. Trent, Jr., author of the remarkable book, Inventing the Feeble Mind:  A History of Mental Retardation in the United States:

“In January 1967, Ronald W. Reagan, the newly elected California governor, ordered all state agencies to eliminate 10 percent of what he characterized as ‘fat’ from their budgets.  More specifically, he insisted that state hospitals and institutions for the retarded cut their budgets by $17 million.  This cut, Reagan insisted, would eliminate 3,700 state jobs, close fourteen state-operated outpatient clinics, and begin a process of community-based care, with communities taking greater responsibility for the guardianship of their ‘mental patients.’ Angered by reaction to his proposals, Reagan remarked that state hospitals (and prisons) constituted the ‘biggest hotel chain in the state.’

“Nine months later, Niels Erik Bank-Mikkelsen, the director of the Danish national services for mental retardation, visited the Sonoma State Hospital, a large institution for the retarded in California.  Even before Reagan’s proposed cuts had fully taken effect, Bank-Mikkelsen found conditions in the institution dreadful.  He told a reporter:  ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.  It was worse than any institution I have seen in visits to a dozen foreign countries. . . .  In our country, we would not be allowed to treat cattle like that.’ What he had found were wards of naked adults sleeping on cement floors often in their own excrement or wandering in open dayrooms.  Not uncommon were ‘head bangers.’ Many residents were heavily medicated, existing in a pharmacological daze, a daze exacerbated by the constant shouting and screaming around them.  In its defense, the California commissioner of health and welfare insisted that the state’s treatment of the retarded was ‘the most advanced in the nation.’ Bank-Mikkelsen feared he might be right.” (256)

Now, let’s be clear about one thing:  Reagan did not create those conditions.  In fact, you could argue that under such conditions, policies of “de-institutionalization” and “community-based care” are thoroughly humane-- but then, you’d have to argue that Reagan actually provided the resources for humane de-institutionalization and community-based care, and you shouldn’t try, because you’d hurt yourself with the strain.  No, the only thing Reagan is liable for here is that brutal and quite gratuitous crack likening the state’s prisons and mental hospitals to a “hotel chain"-- and the insistence that the “fat” in the state mental health budget had to go.

That was almost 40 years ago-- but then again, it was a few years after New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1965 attack on the inhuman conditions of the Rome and Willowbrook State Schools.  Draw from this what lessons you will, and let’s hope we all learn to do better by those with cognitive and developmental disabilities from here on in.

Posted by Michael on 06/12 at 05:29 AM
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Reversal of stereotypes

My heartwarming tale of “Dinesh and me” has generated lots of interest over the past two days, and I continue to be amazed that blogs are read by approximately 1000 times more people than the number who read my discussions of D’Souza in Public Access and Transition magazine in the 1990s.  But one friend has written to me privately to say hold the phone-- how can you discuss The End of Racism on your blog without mentioning D’Souza’s theory of “rational discrimination,” which underlies the whole thing? Fair question.  Here’s how the theory works, in D’Souza’s own words:

Only because group traits have an empirical basis in shared experience can we invoke them without fear of contradiction.  Think of how people would react if someone said that “Koreans
are lazy” or that “Hispanics are constantly trying to find ways to make money.” Despite the prevalence of anti-Semitism, Jews are rarely accused of stupidity.  Blacks are never accused of being tight with a dollar, or of conspiring to take over the world.  By reversing stereotypes we can see how their persistence relies, not simply on the assumptions of the viewer, but also on the characteristics of the group being described.

Here’s what I said about this in Transition:  “This, perhaps, is right-wing sociology’s finest moment:  reversal of stereotypes! why didn’t we think of that?  OK, now let’s get this straight.  Koreans are not lazy, Hispanics do not try to make money, Blacks are spendthrifts, and . . . hey!  wait a minute!  those tightfisted clever Jews really are trying to take over the world!”

A creative misreading, yes, but you get the point.  All right, that’s enough of that.  I have to shower too, you know.

Posted by Michael on 06/12 at 05:09 AM
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Friday, June 11, 2004

A couple other things to think about today

First, that the Stanley Cup champion Tampa Bay Lightning also happen to be the first (and still the only) NHL team to sign a female player-- goaltender Manon RhÈaume, who played in an exhibition game against the St. Louis Blues in 1992, and who later played for the first Canadian women’s Olympic team in 1998, winning a silver medal.  In my office at school I have one of Ms. RhÈaume’s Tampa Bay trading cards (alongside my photo of the New York Rangers’ 1994 victory parade), and I’m not selling.  Here’s to Manon, and her brother Pascal, who won the Cup last year with the New Jersey Devils.

Second, that the NASA probe Cassini makes its first encounter with the Saturn system today, flying by the outer moon Phoebe (which, with its retrograde orbit, is probably a “captured” object like an asteroid or the nucleus of a comet).  Cassini was launched in 1997, and will spend the next four years orbiting Saturn, exploring its 31 moons.  Cassini also carries still another probe, Huygens, which will parachute down onto the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, on December 24 of this year.  It’s a shame that dazzling engineering feats like these don’t get the buzz they deserve, but that’s the way it goes.

Yep, it’s Nonpartisan Blogging Day here at this humble blog.  May Ray Charles rest in peace.  I’ll be back on the weekend with more of the usual.

Posted by Michael on 06/11 at 03:09 AM
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