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Monday, October 10, 2005

Back at home

“Michael,” no one has recently said to me, “you’re the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State and yet you never blog about college football.  Why is that?  Is there a clause about this in your contract somewhere?”

No, there are no clauses in my contract—it’s just that I know relatively little about college football and do not want to embarrass myself or anyone else at Penn State by suggesting that USC is overrated or that Virginia Tech should run more play actions from a broken-I formation or that the way to contain the Longhorns is to present them with eight defensive backs and blitz, blitz, blitz.  You’ll not hear such things from me, I assure you.

But I will admit that over the past four years, I have heard a rumor or two about Penn State football.  A small but vocal chorus of critics across the country has pointed out that Penn State has fallen on hard times of late, and that these hard times just happen to coincide with my arrival here in 2001.  I’ve argued time and again that (a) we actually had a good year in 2002, except for some very strange officiating in Ann Arbor, which I’ll get back to later in this post, (b) our defense has never wavered all this time—it’s just been a question of getting some speed and power in the offense now that we no longer have a Larry Johnson-like back in the backfield, and (c) it is not customary to blame literature professors for a football team’s performance.  But do these critics listen?  No, they do not listen.  “Bérubé must go,” they say, fingers in ears.

So I hope you all were paying attention this weekend.  Penn State is now ranked eighth in the nation, having beaten sixth-ranked Ohio State 17-10 this past Saturday.  On ESPN, in prime time.  And together with 109,867 of our fellow humans, Janet and I were at the game.

More specifically, we had a pair of seats in the President’s Suite.  No, we don’t do this kind of thing very often.  This was our first-ever invitation to the President’s Suite.  The invite (from President Spanier’s office) arrived about six weeks ago, and when I opened it, I thought, hey, Ohio State, October 8!  Hmmm—that might be fun, but jeez, we’re going to be overmatched. Over the first three weeks, as Penn State went 3-0 against various Piñata State teams while the Buckeyes lost a heartbreaker to Texas, I didn’t see much reason to revise that assessment, though our flashy freshmen, Justin King and Derrick Williams, did seem like exciting players to watch.  Then we pulled off a comeback against Northwestern; down 23-7, we rallied for a 34-29 victory on Michael Robinson’s last-minute pass to Williams (on a drive that started with a 4th-and-15 deep in our own zone).  “Yeah, but that was Northwestern,” people said.  “All you did was prove you could beat a weak team despite turning the ball over fifteen times (or thereabouts) in the first half.” Northwestern bounced back from that defeat (and a bye week) to win a shootout with Wisconsin this weekend, 51-48, in a game played with a live pig instead of a traditional football.  But of course, no one could know that then, so we didn’t get credit for beating a decent team.

And then last week, back home in State College, the Nittany Lions ran for over three thousand yards (or thereabouts) against then-number-18 Minnesota, en route to a 44-14 trouncing of the lusterless Golden Gophers.  I watched the second half on TV, and after we went up 27-7 early in the third quarter, the announcers suggested that we should start thinking about putting together a long, ball-control drive that would eat up the clock.  Eat up the clock?  That’s for wusses!  We control the ball by running options and reverses for twenty, twenty-five yards at a clip, folks.  So we scored again three minutes later.  Speed kills!  It’s so true. By the time that weekend was over, we were number 16 in the AP poll, and the pregame excitement for Ohio State began last Monday morning.  On Tuesday, when ESPN announced that GameDay would be coming to our happy little valley, people began to run madly in circles until their heads exploded.  Hundreds of students camped out in tents outside Beaver Stadium, creating what became known as Paternoville.  Home jerseys flew off the racks at the local clothing stores.  It was really cool, not least because no one took any of it for granted: yes, I was told, this kind of thing used to happen around here all the time, but back in those days, everyone associated with Penn State simply assumed it was their birthright.  This time, it was tinged with all kinds of anticipation—and some worry: no one (either on ESPN or anywhere else) picked us to win this game.  By Saturday afternoon, the smart money was saying that the Nittany Lions would lose a close one.

But now Janet and I had skybox seats in the President’s Suite for the biggest home game in six years, not to mention invitations to the pre-game President’s tailgate, which began three hours before kickoff, at 4:45.  Janet hired someone to hang out with Jamie for the evening (he doesn’t really have “babysitters” anymore); she arrived at 4, and we left the house at . . . 5.  One of us was ready to leave at 4, and one of us was ready at 5.  Suffice it to say that in some respects we are a traditionally gendered household.

As a result, we got to the tailgate a bit late, and learned that we were seated at a table that included (alongside a few of our faculty colleagues) NCAA president Myles Brand, his senior assistant Wally Renfro, and Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany.  At the next table were Ed Rendell and his wife Midge, as well as Cynthia Baldwin, chair of Penn State’s Board of Trustees, and her husband Art.  In the course of the evening we spoke briefly to Brand, Renfro, and Rendell; on the shuttle bus after the game, Ms. Baldwin talked to us about her English M.A. thesis on the fiction of W. E. B. DuBois.  You know, just your average football weekend in a college town.

Two things about the skyboxes: one, it is true that watching the game from a box is like being at the game at one remove.  We’ve been in the stands and in the boxes, and the stands are certainly more intense.  (In fact, the first game Janet and I attended just happened to be the October 27, 2001 comeback victory over Ohio State in which Joe Paterno passed Bear Bryant’s record for wins (323) by a Division-I coach.  Note to interested Penn State readers: the Nittany Lions are now 2-0 in home games against the Buckeyes when Janet and I attend the game.) But two, it is not true that people in the boxes spend their time chatting and hobnobbing.  Not on a night like this.  On the contrary, everyone was intent on the game from the kickoff to the seal-the-deal sack by Tamba Hali with just over a minute to play.  The people around me (including me!) groaned mightily at Jeremy Kapinos’ opening punt of eleven yards (yes, you read that right), which set up Ohio State’s field goal, and we screamed at Calvin Lowry for failing to field an Ohio State punt a bit later on, even if only to call for a fair catch (it took a Buckeye bounce and wound up as a 60-yard kick).  But a few minutes later, when Lowry intercepted a pass in Ohio State territory and ran it back to the Buckeye one-yard line, we decided to forgive him.  By that point we were up 7-3, thanks not only to the speed of Robinson and Williams (who scampered 11 yards for the touchdown), but also to Joe Pa’s decision to go for it on 4th-and-2 from the Ohio State 35.

The second half was less than pretty.  After regaining a seven-point lead on Kevin Kelley’s 41-yard field goal, the Lions basically decided to go to the run-run-scramble-punt offense the rest of the way, betting that our defensive speed and savvy would chase the Buckeyes all over the field and shut them down.  This turned out to be a good bet, but it had the effect of muting the crowd somewhat; at one point, in fact, people booed the offense as they left the field after another three-and-out.  What in the world was that?  “You’re 5-0 and up by seven against the number six team in the country with eight minutes to play,” I pointed out to the assembled 110,000.  “You really shouldn’t boo the blue team under these circumstances.” “Sorry about that,” replied the 110,000.  “We’re just nervous.  You’re right, we’ll chant DEE-fense instead.” They really were nervous, not least because of that well-known law of football physics: the team whose offense fails to pick up a first down for the final twenty minutes of play and whose defense yields a tying touchdown in the final minutes invariably loses in overtime.  But on this damp and raw Saturday night, there would be no tying touchdown, and there would be no overtime.  And just like that, I’m teaching at a school whose football team is in the top ten, and chatting with the chair of the Board of Trustees about W. E. B. DuBois on the way back from the game.  Congrats to the whole team, and especially to the truly tenacious D, led this time by linebacker Paul Posluszny—who had fourteen tackles and a sack, and who covered so much lateral ground that on a couple of plays, I wondered whether Penn State was playing two or three guys with the number 31.

Next week we play Michigan at Michigan.  Now, last time Penn State visited the Big House, two funny things happened.  First, near the end of the third quarter, James Millon tipped a Michigan punt and then tipped over the punter.  Keen-eyed Big Ten officials saw the second tip but not the first (though both were clear as day on replay), and as a result, Penn State did not get the ball at midfield with a six-point lead, but, rather, was hit with a roughing-the-kicker penalty that gave the ball back to the Wolverines so that they could come down the field and score to go up 14-13.  Ah, but Penn State kept fighting back, and with forty seconds to play and the score tied at 21, Zack Mills threw a pass that receiver Tony Johnson caught at the Michigan 22.  Now, you all probably know that in college ball, a receiver needs only to have one foot in bounds in order to make the catch.  Tony Johnson went up for the ball, and his first foot came down in bounds.  Then his second foot also came down in bounds.  Actually, his second foot came down about six or seven inches from the sideline.  It wasn’t even close, and it couldn’t have been any less ambiguous if Johnson had also landed with both elbows in bounds and had begun to draw circles in the grass with them.  But this was in Ann Arbor, where officials sometimes see things differently than you or I might, and Johnson was ruled out of bounds.  We lost 27-24 in overtime.

In other words, we wuz robbed, robbed in broad daylight.  And I don’t imagine that anyone around here has forgotten about it.  So next week should be just as interesting as this week was. 

Go Lions.

Posted by Michael on 10/10 at 01:51 PM
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Thursday, October 06, 2005

Shine, Perishing Republic

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books (cover date: October 20), a letter from Gary Hart (of all people) opines that “republics are based on civic virtue, popular sovereignty, resistance to corruption (by special interests), and a sense of the commonwealth.  By any measure,” Hart concludes, “early-twenty-first century America is a republic in name only.”

To which Tony Judt responds:

“I believe that Gary Hart is right.  Of course, one should not idealize ‘republics’; over the centuries they have taken a variety of forms.  An emphasis upon the ‘civic virtues,’ and a grounding in ‘popular sovereignty’ are not inherently incompatible with the abuse of power, as the French revolutionaries and others could attest.  But whatever their attendant virtues and defects, republics appear to decline in much the same way: their institutions atrophy, their elites become mediocre and corrupt, their citizens lose interest in political freedom and public debate or are bludgeoned into acquiescence by the specter of war or disorder.  The American republic is robust and distinctive (not least in its longevity); but it is not invulnerable.  Indeed, the illusion of invulnerability is perhaps its greatest weakness and may prove its undoing.”

I don’t endorse Judt’s comment entirely.  I am especially skeptical of generalizations across very different times and involving very different places.  But the sentiment expressed in his last sentence haunts me.  We, as a nation, seem to me to be selling—or pissing—away our democratic heritage (or our republican one, if you prefer) without the slightest sense of what we are doing, as if our daily actions in the public sphere, in our legislative bodies and executive agencies, and on the world stage are completely without consequences.

I am also aware that lots of previous doom-sayers have declared that the sky is falling—and yet here we are.  My title for this post, after all, comes from a poem written in 1925 by that world-class pessimist and misanthrope Robinson Jeffers, a poem that begins:

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens . . .”

I wouldn’t defend a position that claims it has all been downhill since 1925.  Our history is more up and down than that. There are various moments of renewal—and progress on some fronts even as there is lamentable decline on others.  But I do believe that the general trend of the past thirty years has been downward and that the need for renewal is immense. Where will renewal come from?  That’s the question I am charging myself to address. So you are warned: I feel a series of posts coming. (John)

Posted by John McGowan on 10/06 at 08:30 AM
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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

More driving time

No raillery and idle japes today—there’s real work to do!  I’m driving down (well, over and then down) to the University of Delaware, where I’ll be speaking tomorrow about cultural studies and the post-9/11 left.  Also about blogging, literary studies, and undergraduate curricula (but not all in the same talk—at other events).  Some of my remarks on the post-9/11 left are going to sound something like the essay Sasha Abramsky published yesterday in OpenDemocracy.net, because, you know, that’s just the way I am about these things.  But oddly enough, some of my other remarks are going to consist of elaborations on my responses to Thomas Frank’s critiques of cultural studies.  And still other remarks are going to revisit the whole “cultural left/ reformist left” debate of the 1990s.  So it’ll be like delivering three talks at the same time!  Will it work?  We’ll find out tomorrow!

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a really contentious subject for debate, check out this item from today’s Inside Higher Ed.

John McGowan will drop by tomorrow.  And it’s a good thing, too, because this increasingly loopy blog hasn’t published anything judicious and/or discerning and/or even-tempered all week.  Remember, as Henry Farrell put it in his decisive anti-Tribblerian essay on academic blogging,

Literary theorists who lament the problematic public image of their field should look to the example of Bérubé and McGowan, who are happy to weave discussions of critical theory and its significance into their more general blogging.

Thanks, Henry!  We won’t let you down.  Even when we’re wasting our time (and everyone else’s) creating things like “Future Search” websites. 

Posted by Michael on 10/05 at 03:46 PM
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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Miers ushers in “Age of Aquarius”

There seem to be three schools of thought on Harriet Miers.  The first is that of the Skeptical Left: You’ve got to be kidding.  No, really.  Who’s the real nominee? Variations on this include Rox’s suggestion that Miers is an elaborate head-fake, that she’ll be scuttled before too long and replaced by Janice Rogers Brown when the DemocRATS complain that she’s not qualified for the job.  That doesn’t seem as likely as it did even 24 hours ago, though, because everyone to the left of John Ashcroft, from Harry Reid to Big Max, agrees that Miers is about as mild as a Bush SCOTUS pick can possibly get, and they’re OK with that.  So if she’s scuttled, she’ll be taken down by the Other Side.  If that happens, all bets (even yours, Wild Bill B.) are off the table.

The second is that of the Wary Left: maybe she’s a stealth candidate the like of which we never imagined. Maybe she’ll be placed on the Court in order to shield Bush and company from future indictments, as Digby suggests:  “With the election fixing, gerrymandering, corruption and executive power cases coming before the court over the next few years, her position will be very important to the GOP machine.” Maybe she’ll also put an end to baseball’s antitrust exemption; maybe she’ll deal the final death blow to the Fourth Amendment; maybe she’ll wreak havoc on zoning law as we know it.  Hard to say, but something must be afoot.

The third is that of the Disappointed, Depressed, and Demoralized Right: I was so hoping for Vlad the Impaler.  Now I worry that my Impaler will never come.

But all you people are wrong.  You are trying to assess the candidacy of Harriet Miers by looking at her past (not much to go on there!), or by estimating George Bush’s present political capital (disappearing faster than the polar ice caps!).  These are inevitably flawed methods to bring to bear on such an important subject.  Instead, we should focus on analyzing the future.  And thanks to Google’s brand-new feature, “Future Search,” you can check out the full record of Justice Miers’s service on the Supreme Court.

It’s all right there on the Future Internets: her famous declaration in early 2006 that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided . . . and that a woman’s reproductive rights should be predicated on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment instead!  Pro-life groups were especially outraged when Justice Miers closed her opinion with a sentence that many legal analysts interpreted as a repudiation of the American religious right: “Psyched you all out, didn’t I?” Justice Miers then followed this decision with a stunning series of rereadings of Fourteenth Amendment case law, reaching all the way back to the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which first established the principle that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution.  “No way are corporations persons,” wrote Miers in June 2006, deftly undoing 120 years of precedent and restoring to the Fourteenth Amendment its original function of extending the scope of U.S. law to actual living people (particularly freed slaves).  “Check out Section Three of the Amendment if you don’t believe me,” Miers wrote, in the famously colloquial style that won her legions of admirers and epigones throughout the legal profession.  “There’s no question that ‘person’ means ‘a guy’ or ‘a woman,’ not ‘a commercial entity.’ How could Acme Corp. or Amalgamated Products Inc. serve in Congress or as an elector, or be a state legislator, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, et cetera et cetera et cetera?  It doesn’t make any damn sense.”

Perhaps the most controversial opinion Miers wrote during her time on the bench—even more surprising than her revocation of baseball’s antitrust exemption in 2009—came in the landmark case of Bush (Jeb This Time) v. Obama/Bérubé (2016), in which Miers extended her analyses of the equal protection clause to the point at which she insisted that Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided.  Although the ensuing years saw much confusion, as Congress agreed to reset the calendar at December 12, 2000 and strike down every executive order and administrative decision issued by the Bush Administration, most legal analysts agreed that Miers’ bold stroke had, in the words of Laurence Tribe, “righted an unbearable wrongness, and removed a terrible stain from the record of Constitutional law.”

Miers was not without her detractors.  Her fellow Justice, Antonin Scalia, thought little of her as a legal mind, and took to writing withering dissents as Miers’ influence on the Court grew.  Scalia was particularly appalled at Miers’ reasoning in Putnam County Soil and Water Conservation District v. U.S. (2012), in which she wrote, “When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars, 539 U.S. 558.”

“Mystic crystal revelation indeed,” wrote Scalia, in one of the shortest dissents in the history of the Court.

Through it all, Miers remained humble and self-effacing, saying only, “let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”

Posted by Michael on 10/04 at 09:22 AM
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Monday, October 03, 2005

Bennett Apologizes for Remarks, Asks to Roll “Double or Nothing”

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Las Vegas, NV – Disgraced political commentator and former professional scold William Bennett called a press conference today to apologize for suggesting, on his radio show last Wednesday, that “if you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down.”

The apology surprised many, coming just after Bennett’s combative remarks on Friday, when he was asked by CNN if he owed people an apology and replied, “I don’t think I do. I think people who misrepresented my view owe me an apology.”

“It was a simple reductio ad absurdum based on statistical probabilities,” Bennett explained today.  “And what’s more, I didn’t say it was a dead certainty.  I said I’d give you 7 to 2 that aborting black babies would reduce crime.  Hell, I’d even give you 4 to 1.  I’d drop a couple hundred thou on that proposition in a heartbeat.”

Champion of Civil Rights

“I’m not racist, and I’ll put my record up against theirs,” Bennett had said on Friday, referring to Nancy Pelosi and other critics. “I’ve been a champion of the real civil rights issue of our times—equal educational opportunities for kids.”

Over the weekend, however, this account was disputed by former Federal Communications Commission chairman Reed Hundt, who wrote in TPM Cafe:

When I was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (1993-97), I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him for help in seeking legislation that would pay for internet access in all classrooms and libraries in the country. Eventually Senators Olympia Snowe and Jay Rockefeller, with the White House leadership of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, put that provision in the Telecommunications Law of 1996, and today nearly 90% of all classrooms and libraries do have such access. The schools covered were public and private. So far the federal funding (actually collected from everyone as part of the phone bill) has been matched more or less equally with school district funding to total about $20 billion over the last seven years. More than 90% of all teachers praise the impact of such technology on their work. At any rate, since Mr. Bennett had been Secretary of Education I asked him to support the bill in the crucial stage when we needed Republican allies. He told me he would not help, because he did not want public schools to obtain new funding, new capability, new tools for success. He wanted them, he said, to fail so that they could be replaced with vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.

In response to Hundt, Bennett insisted today that he was merely “placing a side bet” on charter schools and religious schools, having been offered “a great tip” from Republican lawmakers who had assured him that they would “take out” America’s public schools “in the seventh round or earlier.”

Moral philosopher

Bennett has a long history of gambling on provocative moral issues, going back to 1989 when he suggested that there was a 6 to 1 chance that Thomas Aquinas would support the beheading of drug dealers, but only a 3 to 2 chance that St. Augustine would “want to be in on the action.” More recently, in 2000, he made headlines for insisting that George Bush’s 1976 DUI conviction was “no big deal” unless “he was on the wrong side of the .2 blood-alcohol-level over/under, ‘cause I had him under.”

Bennett closed his remarks today by asking the American people for a second chance.  “One more time, double or nothing,” Bennett pleaded.  “I just need one more shot.  I’m not ready to cash in my chips just yet, people.  Here.  Let me tell you how far the crime rate would fall if we aborted babies from Spanish-speaking households.  Twenty percent, I’m saying, and you give me a ten percent margin of error either way.  Eighteen to twenty-two.  Let it roll.  All in.  Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.”

Posted by Michael on 10/03 at 12:19 PM
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So three theocrats walk into a bar

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Your caption here.

Posted by Michael on 10/03 at 07:20 AM
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