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Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Keeping conservatives out of academe

A friend writes to say, “So how come you haven’t said anything about all these post-election reports on the ‘liberal domination’ of universities?  Don’t you know that this is going to be one of the Right’s next offensives in the culture wars, as evidenced by the House of Representatives’ vote to revise the Higher Education Act of 1958 so as to provide direct federal ‘oversight’ of international-studies programs and individual scholars, not to mention David Horowitz’s ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ and the attempt to get state legislatures to compel all academic departments to hire for ‘ideological diversity’?”

Well, yes, I do know about all this.  In fact, folks, I’m writing a book about it.  So get off my case.  I’ve even read Brian Leiter (twice!), Juan Cole, and (back in August) The Blue Bunny of Battle (the artist formerly known as the Pink Bunny of Battle) on the subject, all of whom are really smart and all of whom have pretty much said what needs saying.

But the immediate reason why I haven’t posted anything on the subject is that I’ve been too damn busy making sure that my department doesn’t hire any conservatives this year.  We have two positions open in Rhetoric; we’re interviewing candidates at the MLA in late December, of course, and we’ll be conducting campus visits in the first five or six weeks of the new year.  I’m not on the search committees, but I am the ad hoc political advisor to those committees, and it’s my job to screen all the application letters and writing samples to make sure that no conservatives sneak through.  And it’s hard work.  It’s hard, hard work.

First of all, you have to understand that there are literally thousands of politically conservative Ph.D. candidates in the field of English language and literature, just as there are untold thousands of political conservatives applying for academic jobs in the visual arts, in special education, and in philosophy.  Over the last ten years, we’ve tried to head them off at the pass by telling them that graduate school involves anywhere from five to ten years of rigorous study culminating in the production of a 300-page work of original research, and that when they’ve completed all that while living hand-to-mouth on stipends or taking out student loans, then they get to go on the academic job market with the knowledge that they have about a one-in-three chance of landing a tenure-track job and making somewhere in the high 40s.  But they just won’t listen.  These bright young twenty-something conservatives just will not be deterred from the pursuit of scholarship in the arts and humanities, and they’ve been clogging our graduate schools to the point at which we’ve simply had to institute hiring quotas to keep them from joining the professorial ranks and eventually overrunning us.

So don’t believe any of my liberal and leftist colleagues when they say (a) they never inquire into the voting records of prospective job candidates, (b) they don’t believe that a candidate’s voting record is a reliable predictor of, say, his position on the Habermas-Lyotard debate or her understanding of the intersection of postcolonial theory and eighteenth-century studies, or (c) they can’t tell the candidate’s politics from the application materials alone.  Of course a professor’s voting record is important, of course it’s a reliable index of his or her intellectual interests, and of course you can tell from the application materials.  Take for example the candidate who claims to be studying “the rhetoric of individual agency and national identity in discourses of republicanism in post-Revolutionary America.” The word “republicanism” is the tipoff, folks, and so that dossier goes right in the circular file.  Or take the letter of application that says, “my work concerns the emergence of the ideology of the domestic ‘subject’ in early Victorian England.” The code word there is “emergence,” and if you have to ask why, you ain’t never gonna know.  86’d.

Sometimes it’s not so easy as this, though-- sometimes you need to hold the paper itself up to the light and check for the watermark.  But most of the time, the conservatives give themselves away long before the interview stage.  And that’s why liberals dominate departments like mine.

Next topic:  how my liberal friends in the theater industry are keeping conservatives out of off-Broadway productions of The Music Man!

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 10:18 AM
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Sunday, December 05, 2004

More plans for Democrats in distress

Ever since the election I’ve been hearing a lot about the South.  In fact, even before the election, liberals were knocking themselves out about the South.  It’s occurred to us, of course, that the last non-Southern Democratic nominee to be elected President was Kennedy, and we know that even Kennedy wouldn’t have squeaked in if not for the overwhelming last-minute turnout of dead people in Chicago.  The problem is that whenever one of us talks about appeasing the South politically– when a liberal says he follows NASCAR, for example, or says he wants the support of guys with Confederate flags in their pickups, or suggests that Democrats should interpret the Bible more literally and treat evolutionary “theory” more skeptically– we all go batshit insane in response.  Some of us have even suggested that the Civil War was a bad idea– that we should’ve let the South secede back in 1861, and waited around a hundred and thirty-something years for a NATO “humanitarian intervention” to end slavery.  In response, Southern liberals have raised hell, accusing their blue-state colleagues of every kind of regionalist elitism and moral hauteur; one of them (I forget who, or I’d provide the link) reminded us that even in a blood-red state like South Carolina, over 40 percent of the voters went for Kerry.

I haven’t weighed in on this debate until now.  And I have only two words for y’all: stop it.  That’s right, stop it.  And I get to say “y’all” because I lived in the South for six years– not deep in the South, but indelibly in the South nonetheless (you know, where people use “right” as an intensifier, as in “I’ll bring that over right quick”), and I can tell you that although the region is profoundly conservative in every sense of the word, it’s also responsible for some of the best music and literature produced in this nation.  We need the South culturally, even though it’s way beyond problematic politically.  And there’s no use going into all the reasons why it’s so problematic politically, because (a) we already know perfectly well what those are and (b) we are forbidden from speaking about them, lest the media portray us as mandarin, green-tea-sipping elitists.

Besides, we need to focus our attention on jettisoning an even more problematic region– a belt of Even Redder States that have none of the cultural advantages or storied charm of the South.  That’s right, I’m talking about nullifying the Louisiana Purchase.

That’s really where things went wrong, folks.  Jefferson’s Folly (as it should hereafter be known) gave us what is now Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, half of Minnesota (we’ll keep some of Minnesota, thanks), North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, most of Montana and Wyoming, small chunks of New Mexico and Texas, and the conservative eastern half of Colorado to boot.  Check the map if you don’t believe me.  And while everyone’s been obsessing about the land of Dixie and its peculiar institutions, the good people living on this windswept, culturally barren swath of land have been dragging the country to the right, to the right, to the right, and right off the cliff.  It’s time to cut them loose.

“Holy Heartland, Michael,” you say.  “Have you lost your mind?  You can’t undo a real estate deal from two centuries ago– there’s no precedent for it, no protocols!  What are you saying, we give all those half-billion acres of land back to the Sioux and the Pawnee?  And on what legal reasoning, may I ask?”

What legal reasoning are you talking about here?  What kind of ignorant imaginary interlocutor are you?  Haven’t you ever read the text of the Louisiana Purchase?  The final sentence of the document reads, “Done at Paris the tenth day of Floreal in the eleventh year of the French Republic; and the 30th of April 1803.” Don’t you see? There is no month of Floreal.  That was a reference to some weird-ass, short-lived “French Revolution” calendar that doesn’t exist anymore, full of dates like “le dix-huitième Brumaire” and “le vingtième Fromage.” That contract isn’t binding, any more than your lease would be if it said you had to pay the rent on the thirty-ninth day of each month.  “Eleventh year of the French Republic,” indeed.  It might as well say “Year Zed in Organic Time.”

And no, I’m not talking about giving the land back to the Native American tribes who lived on it.  It’s not theirs, after all– it belongs to the French.  Thus, when we void the Purchase and return the territory to France, all those red-state voters will become French citizens, and the fair cities of Baton Rouge, Pierre, Des Moines and Cape Girardeau will– at long last– be repatriated.  Of course, we’ll have to ask for our $15,000,000 back, prorated for inflation since 1803 (or “year eleven,” ha ha ha).  I suggest we set a reasonable price of $10,000 per acre, which brings the total cost to $5,299,116,800,000, or enough to reduce the federal deficit by almost 75 percent, knocking it down under the $2 trillion mark.

So the United States will be close to solvent again, and the upstanding, God-fearing people of Nebraska and Wyoming and Oklahoma will join together in singing “Le Marseillaise.”

I can’t think of a more satisfying outcome.

Posted by Michael on 12/05 at 04:57 PM
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Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Democrats United

So here’s my plan for helping our friends and comrades survive the Bush Winter.  You’ve already seen two of the trial balloons these rapacious, bloodthirsty plutocrats have floated into the bleak and barren sky-- one, removing the tax incentive for businesses to contribute to their employees’ health insurance plans, and two, borrowing anywhere from “hundreds of billions to trillions” of dollars from the already-more-than-drained Federal treasury in order to create those “personal retirement accounts.” Word on the Washington street is that the first proposal is just a head fake, designed to make us all grateful in late 2005 that Bush and Congress have agreed to a “compromise” that involves merely quadrupling employees’ health insurance premiums.  (This will be hailed by Candy Crowley & Co. as evidence that Bush’s second-term agenda is “bold, but tempered by pragmatism.") But the second proposal is gonna happen, folks.  It’s what the Norquistas call a “once-in-a-lifetime twofer”:  you get to bankrupt the Treasury in order to destroy Social Security.  You gotta love it!  (It’s funny about Social Security, isn’t it?  The only non-means-tested, universally-implemented social-welfare program in the country, and it’s paid for by the most regressive tax on the books-- remember, not a single penny over the $87,900 income level is taxed-- and conservatives still hate it.  Yes, it’s a quasi-socialist program, but it’s quasi-socialism American-style:  paid for by working stiffs in the middle-income bracket and almost completely unsupported by wealthy wage-earners and the even wealthier folks whose income derives mainly from investments.)

And then think of our gay and lesbian friends, who’ll be needing untold amounts of money for all kinds of legal challenges just to keep the handful of rights of citizenship they do possess.  Think of women who will try, for whatever reasons, to terminate unwanted pregnancies even after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.  For that matter, think of the medical and travel costs involved for such women even now, and think how much worse those costs will get once that last-minute “appropriations” bill is signed, along with its sly little anti-abortion “Federal Refusal Clause” and assorted far-right goodies.  No question about it, our friends are going to be in need this long, long winter, and not all of them can buy those thick woolen socks and high-tech Arctic outergear.

So it’s up to us Democrats to protect our own.  We should create a fallback system for helping out everyone who gets devastated by Bush’s social and economic policies, every family without health care, every elderly citizen fleeced by Medicare “reform,” every gay man and lesb***n hounded by the Fell Legions of the Right-- as long as they voted for Kerry.  The Bush voters, they get what they said they wanted.

Maybe this sounds punitive and mean, at first.  Maybe even (gasp!) divisive.  But think about it for a second:  when we came around this October, knocking on doors and trying to persuade these people that they’d be better off with health care, a sane tax system, and an end to neomedievalism in US science policy, they told us we were traitors.  We said we grieved for the deaths of their children in Iraq, and they told us we were part of the homosexual agenda that’s destroying America.  Why, Tom Frank even wrote that book about how their “leaders” were taking them for fools, and they told us we were arrogant pinot grigio-sipping elitists who didn’t understand real Americans.  So maybe we better take them at their word:  we don’t, after all, really know where their “real interests” lie, and it is arrogant and old-school-Leninist of us to think that we understand their interests better than they do.  When they say they’re less interested in getting their kids inoculated against infectious disease than in getting them inoculated against evolutionary theory, we should believe them.

But when one of us needs help-- that is, one of us who tried his or her best to head off the Bush Catastrophe-- we should step up and lend a hand.  We can’t do it alone; we’ll need to pool our resources.  So while we’re contributing to the ACLU and Amnesty International and NARAL, let’s set aside a reserve of funds for Democrats United.  How, exactly?  I don’t know.  I’m only a literature professor, folks.  But maybe we could get in touch with that George Soros and ask him how we can put together a trust fund of a few trillion dollars.  I hear he’s good with money.

Who’s in?

Posted by Michael on 12/01 at 04:28 AM
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