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Friday, October 14, 2005

Can You Help This Man?

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Richard Cohen of the Washington Post is nearing a crisis.

As Digby remarks offhandedly today, Cohen “writes precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time.” This time, it’s

The best thing Patrick Fitzgerald could do for his country is get out of Washington, return to Chicago and prosecute some real criminals.

Last week, it was all about how Democrats were wrong to “jump all over” Bill Bennett’s casual association of black folk with criminality:

it is [Harry] Reid and the others who should apologize to Bennett. They were condemning and attempting to silence a public intellectual for a reference to a theory.

And who can forget Cohen’s eloquent “we must go to war with Saddam because of the anthrax in our nation’s capital” crusade of late 2001?

You see where this is going, folks—it’s not just a matter of writing precisely the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time.  Richard Cohen is running out of ways to be wrong. He has almost used them all up!  Of the twelve kinds of wrongness Aristotle describes in the Nicodeman Ethics (you remember, predictive, retrospective, substantive, distributive, boneheaded, etc.), Cohen has now employed eleven.  He has been wrong about things domestic and foreign, liberal and conservative, major and minor.

It’s not an overstatement to call this a national crisis of wrongness.  Unlike, say, the writers of Clownhall.com or Tech Central Station, Cohen does actual damage to the Republic with his compelling and influential wrongheadedness.  And in order for him to keep doing that damage, he needs to find new issues and events about which to be wrong.

Even the Washington Post Writers Group, in its blurb for Cohen, has acknowledged the problem:

Richard Cohen has a gift for writing in ways that touch people on issues great and small, and yet somehow coming to the wrong conclusion by means of the wrong chain of reasoning. In his twice-weekly column he tackles both complex issues and seemingly simple ones, helping people to understand what is happening around them, paradoxically by getting those issues so confoundingly wrong. From Ground Zero on that horrible September day to wherever his travels take him, his highly personal and graceful writing moves and informs his readers, showing them new and provocative ways to misconstrue and mischaracterize the events that affect us all.

The problem, of course, is with those “new and provocative ways.” Cohen’s Fitzgerald and Bennett columns alone deployed nine ways of being wrong, and the man just can’t keep this up forever.  He needs your help.  In comments, won’t you please suggest (a) new things that Cohen can be wrong about and (b) creative uses of the one remaining form of wrongness upon which he has not yet drawn?  I thank you, the Washington Post thanks you, and the entire Nation of Wrong thanks you.

Posted by Michael on 10/14 at 11:05 AM
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Thursday, October 13, 2005

The Social Bases of Political Activism

Guest Post by John McGowan

When we left off last time (I’m feeling a bit like Rocky and Bullwinkle), I was spouting something about sources of renewal in our perishing republic.  I spent forty minutes that could easily have become four hours in the World Bank bookstore in DC a few weeks ago.  It’s full of amazing things on rural development projects, and on grass-roots resistance to globalization; it has books full of graphs and statistics abut trade, taxes, income and wealth distribution.  I wrote down scores of titles, but the only thing I actually bought was a pamphlet put out by the Fabian Society (yeah, I didn’t know they still existed either) called Just World (Zed Books, 2005). 

The pamphlet contains position papers on various current problems/issues, ranging from immigration to the environment to global financial flows.  Each writer got six to eight pages to outline the issues, and then three to four pages to suggest solutions.  I loved the format: quick, schematic, and geared toward making proposals for action.  I hate to have to report that I found little in the book that I found very inspiring.  This group had their fingers on what is wrong in our world, but not as much as I had hoped in the way of solutions to offer.

In the final chapter, “The Politics of Global Change,” Adam Lent (identified as the co-ordinator of the Fabian Society project on globalization) writes:

“[P]oliticians are only pressured into or can only demand significant change when they are backed by a popular movement with a considerable degree of power to disrupt the normal run of politics, social relations, and the economy.”

So the big question becomes: how to create such a popular movement?

Lent continues:  “Any movement that has ever achieved any degree of significant and long-term popular backing has done so by recruiting members and supporters through pre-existing non-political networks. . . . Such pre-existing networks are vital because they allow movements to target their appeal to a group with shared interests and/or values who are already meeting together as a collective.  Effective movements will tailor their vision to suit the network they are addressing.  In particular, the most effective and long-lasting movements will develop a message that combines the self-interest of their target network with a more idealistic vision of a better world for which the fulfillment of that self-interest in central.”

Let me begin by saying this is way too Leninist for me.  The talk of “targeting” and “tailoring” suggests people from the outside who infiltrate or otherwise occupy the pre-existing group and wrench it to a more political purpose.  But if we get past the hint of vanguard thinking here, there’s much worth considering.

So here’s some thoughts stirred by Lent’s comment.  They are exploratory and certainly not fully worked out.  But I’m interested in how you will respond to them.

1) In the United States, the churches have often been that site of political activism, from abolitionism through the temperance and civil rights movements down to today’s right-wing evangelicals.  The key is that people who belong to churches are going to meet anyway—and meet regularly.  And they are devoted to those meetings; they are not just a regular, but also a pleasant, part of their lives.  Recall Oscar Wilde’s quip about democracy requiring too many meetings.  No political movement can survive unless people meet a lot, and do a lot of talking.  So those meetings have to be something people enjoy, feel energized and transformed by, not a burden. 

2) Meetings are not experienced as a burden if there is an immediate pay-off in stimulating contact with people one admires, respects, and likes.  But there also has to be a sense that the meeting is leading to something, that progress is being made toward some goal.  And, finally, there has to be a sense that I, as an individual, will not only be heard by this group, but that my input will actually influence its decisions.  Malcolm Gladwell had a great piece in the New Yorker (September 12, 2005) about how the preacher Rick Warren created his mega-church in Orange County, California.  The central device was small groups—of about eight participants—which met once a week at each other’s houses for prayer and discussion.  (It’s the old cell structure so beloved by radical parties of the 20s and 30s of the last century.) People feel adrift and disconnected in our society.  A big organization has to find ways to not feel like all the other big organizations in which our society abounds—remote, untouchable, and indifferent to the fate or views of individuals.

3) Everyone loves to say all politics is local.  But what local issues does the left have?  Because leftist analysis tends to identify systematic and structural causes for our ills, leftists tend to believe the real action is on the national level.  Spyder (in the comments to my last post) did point toward the “grow and sell locally” movement –and I think it does provide a great model for what I am groping toward here.  The key to the local is that it gives people some real influence, an arena in which they can actually have an impact, in which they can begin to enact the very solutions that they want to propose to the society as a whole.  Living wage campaigns in various locales have a similar strength.  The right, of course, has specialized in school boards, and can always agitate for lowering taxes at every level of government, no matter how small.

4) The best issues, then, are those that can be addressed locally, but which have national resonance.  Groups work on improving or transforming certain conditions in their own locales, but also agitate for larger scale changes because they keep running into those larger roadblocks to their success on the local level.  Classic examples are the women’s movement and the gay movement.  Women held consciousness-raising meetings (much like the prayer group meetings Gladwell describes) that were experienced as life-transforming, set up women’s health clinics and shelters for abused women, and worked to change various laws about domestic relations, sexual harassment, etc.  Gays mobilized to combat the scourge of AIDS.  They didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for large-scale responses from states or the federal government, but they fought for those changes as well. 

5) Churches are not necessarily leftist or rightist, as our history shows.  But labor unions, which obviously combine the local fight with a particular employer to a national politics (and which also provided in many cases the kinds of comraderie that churches offer), are just about inevitably leftist.  No wonder the right in this country has been single-minded in its campaign to destroy the labor movement.  I don’t know if we can resurrect the unions.  It is certainly worth trying, but we need to develop and nurture other movements as well.

6) So we should not understand the “self-interest” of which Lent speaks in a narrow or an economic way.  People get involved in social activities, are “interested” in and by them, because of the quality of the interactions those activities enable, and because of a sense that those activities provide ways of changing and developing.  Politics needs to be interesting—and the most likely basis of that interest will be a commitment to and vital engagement with the other people involved.

7) To some extent, the interest and the passion will come, I suspect, from a sense that one—and one’s group—is at odds with the mainstream.  Either one will be defending a way of life that seems threatened by the way things are going, or one will be advocating a fairly radical change in the ways things are currently done.  Just the relief of finding some like-minded souls goes a long way to leading one to want to hang out with them.  (I find this blog seductive in exactly that way.) Those who are comfortable in the world as currently constituted are not likely to become politically active in the ways being considered here.  The sense of urgency comes from the embattled sense that most people think or live otherwise.  But the sense of futility is overcome by at least having found a group that thinks like you.  And that group might then move on to more fleshed-out experiments in living those alternatives.

8) There’s nothing like a formula for political success here.  I don’t think you can simply “target” or “take-over” a pre-existing network, while the formation of a network from scratch is close to impossible.  Rather, a network will become political and grow when circumstances demand, when a way of life is threatened, or a way of life has become too dysfunctional for some people to tolerate it any longer.  Certainly, a lot of people on the left have been politicized by how much wrong has been done in this country over the past six years by the right.  What we have been less good at is finding local ways not just to express our frustration, but to make progress toward a better way of doing things.

9) And there’s also no call to romanticize what “popular movements” can do.  Yes, they are crucial for progressive—and for retrogressive—politics.  But it would be foolish not to recognize that they are just one of the “pushes” in a complex political landscape—and that the “money power” of big business is getting stronger and stronger all the time in this country.  Why take all the trouble to form a grassroots movement when you can just buy the politicians?  At the national level, the hill a popular movement has to climb to be effective gets steeper all the time.  Many of the thoughts offered here stem from my sense that the mass march, the demonstration, has played itself out.  In the current context, getting 100,000 people or even 500,000 to assemble in DC to protest this or that has no impact.  So renewal is not going to come through that route.

I’ve got more thoughts on this subject—and apologize for ending on such a down note.  But what’s here is more than enough to get the discussion rolling.  And I’ll be back in a few weeks with some further thoughts.

Posted by John McGowan on 10/13 at 07:41 PM
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More lefty pitching

From the good people at Wampum comes a notice (oh, all right, it was posted last week, but here at michaelberube.com, our office clocks have a week hand and a month hand) about next year’s Koufax Awards.

MB Williams writes: 

While it’s great to win the top prize in the awards, the best part of the event is the showcasing of hundreds of blogs, posts and commentors which are often overlooked, or too quickly forgotten in the lightning speed of cyberspace today. As the years have passed, the number of nominations have increased exponentially, with over a thousand nominees last year alone. Personally, while it means a lot more work, we here think this is a very good thing.

Well, this diffident blog didn’t win any top prizes, but making the finals and picking up a couple Honorable Mentions almost doubled my daily traffic.  (Thanks, everyone!) For me, the highlight of last year’s Koufaxes was watching Amanda Marcotte, of whose Mouse Words I had not heard prior to their Koufaxization, hand me and James Wolcott our asses in the “best new blog” category.  She was very gracious about it at the time:  “Messrs. Bérubé?  Wolcott?  Vos derrières, s’il vous plait.” People with French-Canadian surnames sometimes speak that way, you know.  Actually her real—even more gracious—response is here in comments, alongside my own votes for 2004.  And now that she’s blogging away at Pandagon, where, of late, she’s managed to extract the venom from some of the right blogosphere’s slimier denizens (yes, I know, they’ll make more—it’s an infinitely renewable resource), this is a good moment to thank the Koufax Award process for bringing her to worldwide blogging prominence.  Her and people like Lindsay Beyerstein, Susie Madrak, Brad Friedman, and the very possibly charismatic N. Todd Pritsky, just to name a few.

Anyway, here’s why they’re fundraising now.  For plenty of good reasons:

One, we’d like to spread it out over a greater length of time, as not everyone is flush with cash at the same time of the month. Also, we don’t want to compete with the holiday season, when wallets are already overstretched (even more so this year, with rising energy costs.) On our end, we’d like to plan for our added expenses up front, so we don’t end up with unexpected disruptions like we did last year. Lastly, fundraising during the awards itself always has felt weird to us, as we fear that some might see an opportunity for vote buying by donations from nominees. By holding the drive in advance, we feel we can avoid any appearance of such conflict of interest, so to speak. If you want to rig the election, it will take a wicked large check to stand out in our easily distracted minds.

The awards have always meant to be fun and informative. This year, our plans are to hold them on my and Eric’s end while joining in relief/reconstruction efforts along the Gulf Coast (where we had planned to spend December and January even before the disaster occurred). Our goal is to help to keep the pressure on, even if the media is engaged elsewhere with missing white women and the like.

Those sound like good plans.  So head on over to Wampum with that wicked large check already.  Tell ‘em my friend Jack Abramoff sent you!

John McGowan will check in later today with a followup to last week’s post, and then he’ll be off until early November.  And yeah, one of these days we’ll get around to updating the blogroll, which hasn’t been touched since the month hand was pointing to March or something.

Posted by Michael on 10/13 at 12:29 PM
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Wednesday, October 12, 2005

On impending indictments

Regular readers of this bashful blog may be wondering why I haven’t said anything about Valerie Plame or Judith Miller or Karl Rove or Scooter Libby or Count Novakula, King of the Undead.  Well, that’s because this diffident blog doesn’t do much in the way of Beltway speculatin’.  It’s learned from bitter experience that it’s not very good at speculatin’ and prognosticatin’, and it doesn’t like doing things it’s not very good at, especially in public.  So I’m just sitting around in blogspace, waiting to see what Patrick Fitzgerald has in store for everyone.  I’m hoping it’ll be broad and sweeping and utterly devastating.  After all, the issue at hand does involve national security, nuclear proliferation, and the central rationale for war in Iraq—all of which are regarded by many people as being even more important than oral sex.  Now, if only there were some way we could tie all of this to Richard Perle as well!  That would be very pleasant.

I just want to add that I went to high school with Patrick Fitzgerald.  Regis H.S., New York City, Class of 1978.  Graduating class of about 105.  I didn’t know him well, but still, I’m sitting around in blogspace cheering him on. 

Go Pat.

Posted by Michael on 10/12 at 01:39 PM
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Ian Williams Fan Club accepting new members

I remember 2002 as, among other things, the Year I Didn’t Know Whom To Trust.  The left wing of the left seemed to me to have gone right off the rails, denouncing the war in Afghanistan as an imperialist occupation and then, in the same breath, complaining that the Taliban was regrouping while Bush-Halliburton turned its attention to Iraq.  I could only gather that this wing wanted US forces out of Afghanistan and a more thorough routing of the Taliban, plus a pony.  But the right wing of the left seemed to me to have hopped right onto the Bush-Halliburton rails, ready to ride ‘em all the way to Baghdad and Beyond.  Christopher Hitchens led the charge, of course, but many (more circumspect and less incendiary) liberals joined him, sometimes for “humanitarian” reasons.  My friends and allies were horrified.  “With these preparations for war in Iraq, George Bush is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name,” some people said.  “Uh, no,” others replied.  “Actually, it’s worse than that—Michael Ignatieff himself is giving the concept of humanitarian intervention a bad name.” Everyone I knew that year had a Theory of Hitchens, the most compelling of which, I think, was that he had suffered the fate of Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black, and his body was being occupied by an enormous bug.  But every time people like me would take their distance from Hitchens’ lurch to the right, we would be bumped from behind by guys like Ed Herman, who went a few rounds with me in Z (online) in the course of arguing that my opposition to war in Iraq was in fact a form of support for war in Iraq.  (Herman has since moved on to bigger and better things, like denying that the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica really happened.) For a while, it looked like the Party that Approved of One but Only One Military Response to al-Qaeda, namely, the destruction of the training camps and the removal of the Taliban (whom we considered a rogue government inhabiting a failed state) but not a foolish, illegal, and counterproductive war in Iraq, was small enough to hold its meetings in a coffeehouse.  Without taking up all the tables, either.  And while we were flanked by people to our left calling us cruise missile leftists and shills for Bush, and people to our right calling us appeasers and neo-isolationists, we muttered to ourselves, “you know, both these camps agree that Afghanistan and Iraq are part of the same enterprise—though one calls that enterprise ‘imperialism’ and the other calls it ‘liberation.’ Whereas we think one thing was a strike against al-Qaeda and the other is a PNAC project that has nothing to do with 9/11.  What do we have to say for ourselves?”

Well, I don’t want to revisit those dark days minute by minute, not now when we should be focusing all our attention on how the Bush Administration is replaying the second term of the Nixon Administration (and I so hope someone is taping everything for us—and that there won’t be any mysterious erasures this time!).  I just wanted to say that I came out of 2002 with profound respect for the work of Danny Postel, Mark Danner, and Ian Williams.  Flying below the radar of the Celebrity Deathmatches between Hitchens and Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, and more recently George Galloway, these writers have taken on post-9/11 politics with serious intelligence and almost zero fanfare.

So I thought I’d try to embarrass Williams with some fanfare.  His latest short essay, on the UN Oil-for-Food program, is available only to Nation subscribers, but (a) you should go ahead and get yourselves a Nation subscription (just say you’re a member of the Williams Fan Club), and (b) I can give you a Nation subscriber’s sense of why I say (a).

Far from being a failure, by any rational standards oil-for-food was a success—so much so, in fact, that the United States asked the UN to maintain it six months into the occupation. (Citizens of the Gulf Coast might have welcomed the program’s expertise last month, too.)

The [Volcker] inquiry did identify $8 billion of revenue for Saddam—nothing to do with oil-for-food, though. These billions came from oil trades with US allies, condoned and in many cases facilitated by the United States.  In fact, Volcker’s committee found that US officials were fine with Saddam profiting from these trades; they only became agitated when Syria and Iran began to take part. The sole finding of corruption directly tied to oil-for-food was that Benon Sevan, head of the $100 billion program, reported $147,000 in gifts over four years from a now deceased aunt in Cyprus; the committee suspected it was from oil-trade commissions from a company run by friends of Sevan.

The Volcker committee didn’t look into the more than $9 billion in oil-for-food surpluses given to US occupation authorities in Iraq. No accounting of these funds has been provided, either to Congress or to the UN monitoring board. Richard Goldstone, a former Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor who served on the committee, says, “The fate of the cash handed over to the Coalition Provisional Authority was not in the committee’s mandate” but adds that “the report largely rebutted the wild claims made in some of the media about corruption in the UN itself.”

We can be sure that Congressional committees mining oil-for-food for political advantage will also steer clear of CPA corruption. Expect to hear little about cases like that of Custer Battles, a security company set up by defense consultant Scott Custer and Fox News commentator Michael Battles that’s accused of looting the CPA of $50 million. The US courts have ruled that those responsible can be prosecuted only if they stole US money. If it came from the UN, they get off scot-free.

Williams has worked this beat before—in a short May 2004 piece (subscription required, hint hint) and in a more substantial (definitive, I think) analysis of “The Right’s Assault on Kofi Annan” in January of this year (free and open to the Internets public).  So if you know a friendly neighborhood wingnut who likes to go on about Annan and the UN and Oil-for-Food in the way wingnuts will, you should consider sending him or her this handy three-pack of essays, courtesy of the Ian Williams Fan Club.

Posted by Michael on 10/12 at 12:16 PM
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Tuesday, October 11, 2005

Blogging:  an academic question

I know I’m naive and sentimental and a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, but I admit that this piece of news, involving the denial of tenure to Daniel Drezner (and, earlier this year, Sean Carroll) at the University of Chicago, took me by surprise.  How much by surprise?  This much by surprise: I don’t know what to think about it.  Now when’s the last time you heard me say that?

On the one hand: there’s no reason to think that their blogs hurt their tenure cases.  The University of Chicago is one of those places that doesn’t go around tenuring people just because they’re smart and productive, oh no.  So the headline “smart productive person denied tenure at Chicago” is a little like “Cubs Fans Say ‘Wait Til Next Year’” or “Rick Santorum Bites Man.” You know, not news.

But on the other hand: Carroll and Drezner are among the best academic bloggers in the academic blogosphere.  They have Serious Blogs (in Sean’s case, he had a Serious Blog that merged into a Serious Group Blog) on which they actually discuss matters relevant to their areas of scholarly expertise, whereas some academic bloggers I could name have Occasionally Silly Blogs that take extended vacations from matters of scholarly expertise.  So if indeed their blogs hurt their tenure cases, that would mean that at certain elite universities, even the very best kind of academic blogging is to be frowned upon and shunned.

Is that a real possibility?  Yes, it’s a real possibility.  Following the Inside Higher Ed link to Juan Non-Volokh (apparently not his real name), I read the following:

I’ve often heard academics disparage non-academic writing in terms that suggest it could be a negative in the tenure process, irrespective of the quality of academic work under review. This is one of the reasons I’ve blogged under a pseudonym—and will at least until my own tenure vote—as I want my file, and the work therein, judged on the merits. In my view, that I spend some of my free time blogging is no more relevant to the process than a colleagues’ decision to spend his or her time attending theater, performing in dance recitals, or raising children, but there is no guarantee that one’s colleagues will agree.

And you know what?  I’ve often heard academics disparage non-academic writing too.  I’ve heard it from the moment I published an essay in the Village Voice in 1991, and I heard a whole earful of it at a conference held in 1997 at the University of Chicago, where I found myself on a panel with someone who insisted that “public” writing was not sufficiently rigorous to be considered worthy of a scholar’s time or attention.  Fortunately, Laura Kipnis was in the audience that day, and she pointed out in response that some forms of “public” writing involve far more rigorous editing and intellectual exchange than some forms of “scholarly” writing.  My co-panelist denied this.  He was wrong, but that was OK.  He was talking about matters outside his area of expertise.

Kipnis eventually elaborated her remark into a short, spicy essay called “Public Intellectuals Do It With Style” (minnesota review 50/51 [1999]: 193-96).  The essay opens like so:

In academic life you regularly encounter people (these would be professors) with vast storehouses of accumulated knowledge who still manage to be singularly uninteresting about what they know.  Ask an academic what he’s working on and all too often he starts vying with Fidel for the longest monologue on record.  Does he think you’re interested?  No, he’s forgotten you’re even there.

But, as Kipnis makes clear a bit later on, she’s not entirely against academic solipsism: “I write as someone who is extraordinarily grateful that institutions of higher learning exist which are willing to provide us geeks with some semblance of refuge from regimes of the normal and to reward us for what so much of the rest of the world finds offensive and incomprehensible.” What’s valuable about “public” intellectualism, however, is precisely its willingness to try to speak to people who aren’t always already interested in the subject at hand:

What it means to be a “public intellectual,” then, is not only to be interdisciplinary rather than disciplinary and surprising rather than fetishistic, but also to seduce an audience that isn’t compelled by any particular compulsion (be it requirements of a major or “keeping up” with the profession), and that isn’t composed of enablers and co-dependents of the knowledge-fetish (who are non-academics, in other words), into donating its attention.  Thus, being a public intellectual demands modes of mediating one’s private fascinations and the driven aspects of one’s intellectual engagements in order to establish connections and rapport whose terms and publics are not dictated in advance.  I will designate these modes of mediation, style. . . .

It’s pretty obvious why the subject of “public intellectuals” arouses such antipathy in the academy: it poses a request, even a demand, to produce different and enlarged forms of mediation. . . .  Insofar as this demand represents an interruption of business as usual in our small corner of the world, insofar as it constitutes a critique of existing practices, it resonates with other critiques of entrenched privilege and power in the academy.  The demand for style—in the largest sense of the word—interrupts a largely unexamined academic privilege of largely unself-examining academics, that is, the privilege academics have long enjoyed to be boring with impunity.

What is true of “public intellectuals,” in Kipnis’ sense, is true a fortiori of bloggers: the mediating skills that we knowledge-merchants have to learn, in order to write for magazines, newspapers, and general-audience journals, are on even more immediate display in blog format—and, of course, the response from readers is more immediate as well.

That’s certainly one of the reasons I’ve grown so fond of blogging, and I imagine that’s one reason why (so far) I haven’t lost too much academic prestige by indulging in this here medium, either.  Most of the professors and graduate students who know about this humble blog have said very kind things about it, sometimes so emphatically as to threaten its status as a humble blog.  But every so often someone says to me, with just a barely audible sneer, “I suppose you’ll be putting this on your blog” or “is this a real talk, or just something from your blog?” and I’ve even heard one professor playfully insult another (not me this time), “oh, go tell it to your blog . . . and both your readers.” Of course, most people who know me or my work know that I was pretty compromised on this score to begin with.  “Well, no wonder Bérubé has a blog,” they say.  “He was already writing for newspapers, it was only a matter of time before he sank even further into the ‘public’ muck.” The idea, clearly enough, is that blogs lie somewhere on the respectability-spectrum between personal diaries and obsessive basement hobbies, and that while it’s fine that you write about your life or build your model trains on your own time, you should at least be circumspect—if not positively sheepish—about doing it in public.

I think that five or ten years from now, that idea is going to look pretty silly.  While it’s true that the blogosphere is home to any number of Comic Book Guys and Dennis Miller Wannabes and Assorted Cranks (and don’t worry, Blogging Jesus loves every one of you), my guess is that before too long, academics will be slapping their foreheads and saying, “what were we thinking?  All these years we were waiting for the second reader’s report on the essay we submitted to the Journal of the Econometric Analysis of Advanced Eggplant Parmesan, we could have been using blogs for any number of intellectual and pedagogical purposes, from extramural class discussions in individual courses to wide-ranging debates about Constitutional law, the legacy of structuralism, and the impact of intercollegiate athletics on the labor market in professional sports!” At which point I fear I will not be able to refrain from saying yeah, well, told you so.

But right now I still don’t know what to think.  Suggestions welcome.

Posted by Michael on 10/11 at 01:46 PM
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