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Friday, June 09, 2006

ABF Friday:  Christopher Walken edition!

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Note: This is a cowbell-free Arbitrary But Fun Friday. Anyone showing up on this blog with a cowbell will be banned.

It’s well known that Christopher Walken has appeared in eight percent of all motion pictures ever made, and that his very presence in a film indelibly changes its character, effectively Walkenizing the entire work: witness, for example, his demonic turn as land developer Reed Thimple in the 2002 epic, The Country Bears.  As David Nusair has written, “the movie just might be worth a rental if only for the sight of watching Christopher Walken belt out a musical number using only his hand and his armpit.” That’s low humor, though.  The good people of The Onion‘s A.V. Club have a much more refined appreciation of the film:

in a deliriously bizarre mid-film moment, he dances around his office alone in red boxers and bunny slippers, playing with his own face, cackling, and dropping an immense remote- controlled weight on balsa-wood models of Country Bear Hall in order to practice the none-too-shocked line “Oh no! Country Bear Hall has been crushed!”

I’ve seen that scene.  I’ve replayed it many times.  It is sublime, I tell you.

Now, any random week of cable-cruising will acquaint you with a healthy cross-section of Walken’s work.  Where would Wayne’s World 2 be without Walken’s sleazy Bobby Cahn?  Wouldn’t you watch Catch Me if You Can again just to see Frank Abagnale, Sr. tell that story about the two mice who fell into the bucket of cream?  Who else could have made Communion so wonderfully unheimlich?  Can you even begin to imagine Antz without the moral crisis experienced by Walken’s Colonel Cutter?  And speaking of Walken in uniform, what’s better than his turn as Captain Koons in Pulp Fiction or his portrayal of Nick Chevotarevich in The Deer Hunter?

So the question for this Friday’s Arbitrary But Fun . . . er . . . Friday, then, is this: what’s your favorite Christopher Walken role and why?  To make things even more fun, we’ll divide Walken’s long career into three phases:

Early Walken: from Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976) to Cannon Movie Tales: Puss in Boots (1988).  And don’t forget about Brainstorm (1983)!

Mature Walken: from King of New York (1990) to Mousehunt (1997).  And don’t forget about True Romance (1993)!

Baroque Walken: from The Prophecy II (1998) to The Wedding Crashers (2005).  And don’t forget about Gigli (2003)!

(We cannot evaluate more recent films in Walken’s oeuvre because we do not yet have the necessary critical distance on them, which is to say, we haven’t seen them yet.)

Have fun . . . and don’t forget to be abitrary!  I’ll be in Washington, D.C., speaking at this thing.  See you Monday!

Posted by Michael on 06/09 at 12:01 AM
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Thinking about thinking

I had a fun Satan Day yesterday, and I hope you did too.  After spending a few hours writing about nationalism and things, I kicked back with Her Satanic Majesty’s Request and watched some old New Jersey Devils games on DVD.  Funny thing is, if you watch the Devils in super slo-mo, you can see their power play using the demonic “pentangle offense” devised by Lucifer “Lou” Lamoriello.

But when the fun was over and I awoke this morning with all these curious triangles of “scare quotes” carved into my body, I realized with some regret that I’d been kind of harsh this week on the question of left-liberal coalitions (and on the commenters who’d broached the subject, to whom I apologize).  All I’d meant to say is that sometimes, in such coalitions, the liberals muck things up, and sometimes the left mucks things up.  And when things get mucked up, the leftists tend to think of the liberals as spineless, unprincipled wusses who vote to confirm John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, and the liberals tend to think of the leftists as intransigent, ideological purists who cannot bring themselves to vote for Russ Feingold.  Sometimes these characterizations are well-deserved, sometimes they aren’t.  But only very rarely, after a muck-up, do you see anyone actually re-evaluating his or her beliefs, as opposed to his or her tactics.

Thankfully, I am beyond all that now.  Back in the day, I used to get regularly buffeted by both sides.  One time I picked up an academic journal and came across an essay in which I learned to my surprise that I had sneakily (or sheepishly!) disguised my real beliefs in order to break into the pages of the Village Voice (the actual charge was “Bérubé must, given the ideological limits of the mass media, disguise his position as centrist”), where, in 1992, I had noted that both Terry Eagleton (on the left) and Hilton Kramer (on the right) despise postmodernism.  This, I was told, was a version of the “left-right equivalent thesis” that “bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the centrist equations in mass media political discourse, as in Georgie Anne Geyer’s identification of the two poles of American extremism as ‘the militias on the far right who hate and want to destroy government’ and ‘academic leftists in American universities who are using their pseudo-Marxism to “deconstruct” America.’” And this “left-right equivalent thesis,” I was reminded, had been “fundamental in mystifying and legitimating U.S. state terror in support of, for example, the ‘governments’ of El Salvador and Guatemala.”

Yep, you read that right: I pretended to be a centrist in order to appear in “mass media.” The evidence for this was that I noted, in the centrist Village Voice, that both Eagleton and Kramer were critical of postmodernism.  Never mind the fact that this happens to be true: Eagleton and Kramer were critical of postmodernism. That’s not important.  What’s important is that saying so links me to U.S. state terror in Central America.

And a journal actually published this.

Then a few years later, a particularly clueless liberal called me “one of the most enthusiastic epigones of critspeak as revolutionary praxis,” which was especially odd considering that (a) I don’t speak critspeak, (b) I don’t have any revolutionary praxis, and (c) “epigones” is used, like, really incorrectly here.  You can be an epigone of William Faulkner, say, or of Margaret Mead.  But you can’t be an epigone of critspeak.  And a journal actually published that, too, and then followed it up with said liberal’s insistence that in a passage where I’d critiqued the idea of the avant-garde, I was actually endorsing the idea of the avant-garde.  That was kind of baffling.  And finally, a couple of years ago I was kindly schooled by old Ed Herman, who let me know, in the course of doing a Horowitzian cut-and-paste of a few of my essays, that my opposition to war in Iraq was actually a form of support for war in Iraq, because I wouldn’t put Saddam’s state sovereignty over every other consideration.

At that point I decided I’d had enough of liberals and leftists alike.  I couldn’t count on any of these people!  (And my replies to each of them were just foolish beyond belief, each in a different way.  But I didn’t have a blog back then.) However, it was not until December 2004 that I finally announced the Coalition of Me and formed the Red Party, consisting of me.  Chris Clarke, flexing the wit that has made him famous throughout the Internets, promptly wrote its anthem, “The Ballad of the Hemp Beret,” and I sing it to this day to open my party congresses, which take place every six months in my study.

My apologies, therefore, to all of my readers who weren’t aware that I had actually solved the problem of left-liberal coalitions eighteen months ago.

Now to switch gears. Today is the day that Janet leaves for a month, to teach in various secret undisclosed locations in Ireland.  She did this three years ago, too (and went with Nick that time), but of course I didn’t have a blog then and couldn’t regale thousands of readers with tales of the Jamie and Michael Show (theme song sung to the tune of “The Itchy and Scratchy Show") as we took road trips every weekend.  The waterpark story is definitely worth telling one of these days.  Alas, there will be no weekend road trips this time, although Jamie and I do have a cross-country gig at Twin Peaks Lodge, where there’s a conference I have to attend later this month.  Jamie will come along for the fun, fun, fun and for a side trip to the Vancouver Zoo.

So it’s time for a Jamie story.  I have a couple of ‘em saved up from the past few months, and here’s one.  It was mid-April, and we were visiting Janet’s family for the weekend.  I was thinking ahead to my graduate seminar on disability studies the next Wednesday, and reading over Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals (about which I blogged briefly here, in the midst of a weird April illness).  But since everyone was getting ready for an Easter dinner and no one would talk to me about MacIntyre, I decided to ask Jamie about it.  Yes, I know, 14-year-olds with Down syndrome don’t often file reviews of the work of neo-Aristotelian philosophers, but Jamie knows he has a disability, he knows I taught a course about disabilities this spring, and he’s extraordinarily disability-aware in general.  (More about all this in future installments.) Occasionally, I tell him what I’ve been reading about Deaf culture or people with Down syndrome or people who use wheelchairs.  But this time, I wanted to talk to him about animals.  So I said, “hey, Jamie, can I ask you a question?” while he played with his grandmother’s bingo pieces, which he can do for hours while watching Animal Planet in the background.

“What is it, Michael?”

“Well, I’ve been reading this book for my course on disabilities. . . .”

At first this was met with “try other stuff” and “bo-ring” and other such teenager-demurrals, but when I explained that this guy was also writing about animals, I got his attention. 

“So here’s the question, Jamie.  Can animals think?  Some people say yes and some people say no.  What do you say?”

For Jamie, this was (so to speak) a no-brainer, because his Lucy happens to be the among the very smartest dogs on the planet, capable not only of determining when a family member is ill but also of knowing when she is in Connecticut by using elementary canine-calculus to determine her position in the hemisphere.

So we talked for a bit about how Lucy can be happy or excited or worried (about the thunder, because she does not understand about weather) or sad (when she sees a suitcase), and about how some animals have brains that are very complicated but others have brains that are very simple.  “Sharks,” Jamie did not fail to say, “are one of the best predators.”

“True enough,” I said.  “Animals can be very clever about finding food.  And they can have feelings, like sadness or happiness.  And complicated animals like dogs and horses can even understand humans, too.”

“Or chimpanzees,” Jamie added.  “Or gorillas, like Koko. Or dolphins.” Here Jamie did his dead-on imitation of dolphin clicking.  And being the disability-aware kid he is, he is fascinated that Koko learned sign language.

“But, of course, animals do not speak human language,” I added.

Quick as a flash, Jamie replied, “Parrots.”

“Right, parrots.  Good one.  And of course dolphins and whales can talk to each other in dolphin and whale language.  So we know that animals can understand things, and can figure out how to find food even when it is very difficult. But do they have thoughts about these things? Do you think Lucy can sit down and say, ‘hey, maybe I shouldn’t be so worried about the thunder’?  You remember when you were sad, and you thought about it, and we talked about what it is like to be sad.  Do you think a dog can do that?”

Jamie mulled this over for a few seconds.

“Well . . . you can train,” he said.

OK, I know I’m a biased observer, but I think that’s just brilliant.  Just.  Effing.  Brilliant.  What Jamie meant, I learned, was that animals must be capable of some form of thought if they can be trained.  Lucy, for example, must have some reflective relation to her bodily functions in order to learn not to urinate and defecate in the house.  (We talked for a bit about the rule, in Babe, that ducks and pigs are not allowed in the house.) But then, as my class argued later that week, even goldfish can figure out when it’s feeding time.  But then again, as MacIntrye points out, bottlenose dolphins learned enough of an artificial human-dolphin language to distinguish the sentence “take the surfboard to the frisbee” from “take the frisbee to the surfboard.” MacIntyre comes down squarely in favor of the proposition that animals can think, and he takes to task wankers like Heidegger, who, with their big fat thumbs on the scales, purchase the uniqueness of human language by distinguishing us from what MacIntyre cheekily calls “a welcome variety of bees, moths, freshwater crabs, lizards, sea-urchins, woodworms, and woodpeckers.” So in one way Jamie might be wrong: the fact that you can train an animal with operant conditioning isn’t necessarily evidence that the animal has become, how should we say, thoughtful.  I myself trained a white rat to respond to a fixed-ratio schedule in college.  (What the rat was doing in college I’ll never know!) But the more radical implication of Jamie’s remark—that you can train an animal to think—is really interesting.  And it reminded me of my favorite passage in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, about which I also blogged briefly about two years ago.  From one of Ms. Costello’s (problematic) lectures on animal rights:

Sultan [a chimpanzee] is alone in his pen.  He is hungry: the food that used to arrive regularly has unaccountably ceased coming.

The man who used to feed him and has now stopped feeding him stretches a wire over the pen three metres above ground level, and hands a bunch of bananas from it.  Into the pen he drags three wooden crates.  Then he disappears, closing the gate behind him, though he is still somewhere in the vicinity, since one can smell him.

Sultan knows: Now one is supposed to think.  That is what the bananas up there are about.  The bananas are there to make one think, to spur one to the limits of one’s thinking.  But what must one think?  One thinks: Why is he starving me?  One thinks: What have I done?  Why has he stopped liking me?  One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more?  But none of these is the right thought.  Even a more complicated thought—for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor?—is wrong.  The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

Sultan drages the crates under the bananas, piles them one on top of the other, climbs the tower he has built, and pulls down the bananas.  He thinks: Now will he stop punishing me?

The answer is: No.  The next day the man hangs a fresh bunch of bananas from the wire but also fills the crates with stones so that they are too heavy to be dragged.  One is not supposed to think:  Why has he filled the crates with stones?  One is supposed to think: How does one use the crates to get the bananas despite the fact that they are filled with stones?

One is beginning to see how the man’s mind works. . . .

At every turn Sultan is driven to think the less interesting thought.  From the purity of speculation (Why do men behave like this?) he is relentlessly propelled towards lower, practical, instrumental reason (How does one use this to get that?) and thus towards acceptance of himself as primarily an organism with an appetite that needs to be satisfied.  Although his entire history, from the time his mother was shot and he was captured, through his voyage in a cage to imprisonment on this island camp and the sadistic games that are played around food here, leads him to ask questions about the justice of the universe and the place of this penal colony in it, a carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts him away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason.  And somehow, as he inches through this labyrinth of constraint, manipulation and duplicity, he must realize that on no account dare he give up, for on his shoulders rests the responsibility of representing apedom.  The fate of his brothers and sisters may be determined by how well he performs.

Food for thought, folks.  And with that, we conclude this week’s series of daily posts of two thousand words or more, and for the next four weeks, modulate into the Three Posts a Week we’ll be doing while we’re on the single-parent schedule.  See you Friday with a game that will be arbitary . . . but fun.  Really fun this time.  I promise.

Posted by Michael on 06/07 at 12:21 PM
Jamie • (84) Comments • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Still nation time

OK, I’ve decided to continue yesterday’s discussion up here, because (a) I don’t want some of these arguments to stay buried deep in comments and (b) some people are still disagreeing with me, and despite my commitment to pragmatist pluralism, I think this has just gotta stop.  So the discussion of Glenn Greenwald and civic vs. ethnic nationalism can keep on goin’ afresh.  But those of you who are already weary of this topic and are looking for something else on this very serious blog are advised that Scott Lemieux and I are covering the Stanley Cup finals over at Lawyers, Guns, and Hockey, and an intrepid blogger known only as Moi Oci (I think that’s a pun) has devised a groundbreaking set of equations for calibrating dangerality against dangerosity.  You already knew I was the worst or second-worst professor in America, but Moi Oci has quantitative proof.

Now for civic nationalism and yesterday’s comments.  First, Ben Alpers.  In response to my comment --

I think it’s quite difficult, actually, to read Greenwald’s outrage as anything but an expression of civic nationalism.  Remember, he wasn’t alarmed by the creation of the category of “enemy noncombatants” and the Bush Administration’s decision to hold thousands of detainees at Gitmo.  That was the tocsin for any number of other smart attorneys at home and abroad, many of whom have been interviewed by the invaluable talking dog.  Greenwald, by contrast, wasn’t that kind of internationalist or universalist; he was motivated by the deprivation of a citizen’s rights, and though you can read that motivation as being directly or indirectly allied to a more internationalist revulsion at the tactics of police states, it seems, here, quite specifically directed at a breach of the citizenship protocols of the nation-state.

-- Ben kicks off all kinds of mischief with an innocent little parenthetical remark:

But does even a revulsion “quite specifically directed at a breach of the citizenship protocols of the nation-state” necessarily involve a commitment to civic nationalism (and here I’m using nationalism in its normal sense to designate a form of patriotism, or belief in the superiority of one’s particular nation)?

The answer to this question, absent the parenthesis, is simply yes.  An objection to a breach of citizenship protocols involves a commitment to civic nationalism.  Crucially, that commitment need not preclude what Ben wisely calls “a universal commitment to citizen’s rights, a commitment that includes a belief that the legal distinction between the rights of citizens and non-citizens is necessary to the functions of the nation-state, while still maintaining that states in general should honor the rights of their own citizens.”

But the parenthesis mucks everything up.  When you say you’re using the word “nationalism” in “its normal sense to designate a form of patriotism, or belief in the superiority of one’s particular nation,” you’re putting a big fat thumb on the scales (and in saying this I do not mean any form of recognition harm with regard to Ben’s actual thumbs).  You’re deliberately evacuating the term “nationalism” of its civic, procedural sense, and substituting for it a common form of jingoism.  You’re deliberately confusing Greenwald’s civic-proceduralist conviction that the president does not have the power to set aside laws passed by Congress, and substituting for it the belief that the United States (GoUSAFreedom!) is better than other countries.

That dice-switching hampers our ability to think clearly about states, citizens, and universal commitments to citizens’ rights; closer to home, here on this very blog, it created a kind of dogpile on civic nationalism, and plenty more blurring of the difference between ethnic and civic forms of belonging.  (Of course, on the Internet no one knows if there are any actual dogs on the dogpile.) Next up was Luther Blissett:

Just want to agree with Ben Alpers’ comment above.  The line between civic and ethnic nationalism cannot be so boldly drawn.

Part of the debate over immigration posits the Samuel Huntington argument: America’s civic documents, institutions, and procedures are the product of certain ethnic worldviews, and so America cannot allow in too many of certain ethnicities and must force other immigrants to assimilate in order to preserve its civic identity.

And part of my end of the debate rejects the Samuel Huntington argument altogether.  Look, folks.  Drop the Hardt and Negri already; it’s not like they have anything coherent to say about citizenship and rights.  And please, please don’t adopt Huntington for any purpose whatsoever, not even in the safety of your own home.  Nothing good can come of that kind of “experimenting.” Instead, look closely at the difference between these two principles:

1.  The executive branch should be bound by the laws passed by the legislative branch.

2.  This land is the rightful land of the Anglo-Saxon people, having been won in conquest and in accordance with the will of God.  (For “Anglo-Saxon” substitute any form of ethnos you like.  Even your own!  If you have one, that is.)

Now, I suppose you could blur these two forms of nationalism if you wanted to, by citing some ethnocentric crackpot who believes that the principle of the separation of powers is uniquely Anglo-Saxon.  But why would anyone want to do this?  In order to argue that we shouldn’t get too upset about Bush’s secret and illegal NSA surveillance, because, after all, this whole “the president is not above the law” business is merely one of the ethnic folkways of one little proceduralist tribe?

Next comes jpj, to take issue with my claim about the constitutional origins of the United States:

I would argue that Michael is wrong when he argues that the US was “founded entirely on civic rather than ethnic grounds.”

For most of our history, our laws reflected the idea that civil society was a racial trait.  I’m sure I don’t have to rehearse the litany of racially based laws the country has had.  Chinese Exclusion, the 1924 Immigration Act, the entire structure of Jim Crow in the South… The list could be endless.

There was even an entire theoretical apparatus on the “Teutonic Origins of Democracy” to support the idea that democracy was a racial trait of Northern Europeans and that extending democratic ideals to other European races, never mind the “colored” races, was doomed to fail.

Given that extensive history, whipping up concerns about Mexican invasions is all to easy to explain.

Again, I don’t want to get parochial about this, but in my experience, I’ve found that propositions that begin “I would argue that Michael is wrong” almost never pan out.  And this one is no exception!  You certainly don’t have to rehearse the litany of racially based laws in the United States, because, as it happens, I recently wrote a very scholarly (and very heterosexual!) lecture on the subject, a lecture commissioned by General J. C. Christian himself.  No one around here is going to argue that the history of the United States is free of ethnic nationalism.  But we will argue that the checks on executive power in the Constitution are not predicated on any form of ethnic belonging.  Likewise, there is no provision in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that declares the section null and void if the President happens to be a good ol’ boy with whom one would like to have a beer.  (That would be silly!) So yes, jpj is right that there is plenty of ethnocentric precedent for whipping up concerns about Mexican invasions.  But he is wrong to see this as having any bearing on the separation of powers.

Which brings me to Lee Konstantinou’s comment.  Lee starts off great:

The problem with Greenwald isn’t that he’s finally starting to smell the coffee (we’re all very pleased that he is, really) but that by justifying his complacency and lack of interest in politics in the pre-Bush II Era on the basis of some Constitutionally-enforced political equilibrium, he suggests that If Only We Could Return to Politics as Usual then Everything Would Be OK.  Well, sorry, but it won’t be OK.

But then goes horribly awry:

There is a strong case to be made that Bush II’s policies are merely natural extensions of what has come before.

If you’re arguing that Bush II represents a restoration of the Nixon Presidency rather than the Reagan Presidency, then this is just about right.  (In a recent essay, I harked back to my belief, in my more optimistic moments of 2004, that “progressives would begin to look back on the Bush Presidency as a failed attempt to re-animate the Reagan Era, complete with tax cuts, cowboy boots, winks to religious fundamentalists, and tactical Constitution-shredding on the side.” Hey, I was wrong about the “Reagan” part!  It happens, you know.) But otherwise, it’s a very serious mistake to argue that anything about this administration is a “natural extension” of anything.  When we make the case against Bush’s NSA program and the Cheney Archipelago, we serve no good purpose if we do not stress the unprecedented nature of these things.  To do otherwise, I’m afraid, is to fall into the trap of arguing things like, “well, Clinton was just as bad in his way, and that’s just like Cheney’s secret torture sites if you think about it,” and thereby making a “left” argument that winds up having strange affinities with the right in its attempt to normalize Bush II.

Which brings me, at last, to Eric J-D and his citation of Robert Jensen’s argument about why leftists should distrust liberals:

I think at times like these it is quite difficult to know what to do with someone like Greenwald.  Certainly the exigencies of the present suggest to some the necessity of forming as broad a coalition as possible with those who oppose the present administration, but as Robert Jensen argues here, there are good reasons for those on the left to be suspicious of the value of building coalitions with liberals.

Being somewhere between liberalism and the left, let me return the favor: Jensen’s article is a standard piece of self-flattery, in which “the left” is principled and steadfast, and liberals are compromising (and compromised) wimps.  But I don’t always see things quite that way.  (Except when it comes to The Left, because he’s always objectively correct.) Apart from the fact that Counterpunch has, in the past, spread a nasty (and quite stupid!) little fib about how I am secretly in cahoots with David Horowitz, thereby giving me good reason to be suspicious of them, I have reason to be suspicious of the value of building coalitions with any part of the left that champions the “Iraqi maquis.” (For a brief but scathing reply on the left, check out Joe Lockard; for a trenchant analysis of the decline of the New Left Review more generally, see Danny Postel’s recent interview with Fred Halliday.  Long story short, right now I have fewer coalition-forming problems with Glenn Greenwald than I do with, say, Alexander Cockburn or Tariq Ali.) Yes, there are times—more than I can count—when liberals have been disappointing, craven, or worse; this snarly blog has remarked on many of them.  But there have also been times when liberals have been consistent on domestic civil liberties and universal citizenship rights, as well as on Cuba, Liberia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and the Middle East while “the left” has been all over the map, from good sound anti-imperialism all the way to noxious red-brown alliances.  So I don’t think there’s any reason to hold Glenn Greenwald to the Counterpunch standard of ideological purity.  Perhaps, in some people’s opinions, it took him too long to get where he is now, and perhaps he didn’t get there for all the right reasons.  But personally, I’m with cloudsplitter when s/he says,

To me, every voice of reason that’s raised against the erosion of civil liberties in America—while it’s still possible to raise them—is a welcome addition, and when the voice is as consistent and forceful in its articulation as Glenn’s, I’m a lot more interested in turning up the volume than in determining the exact motives for the decision to speak.

And that’s why, in closing, I’m going to direct you all to Amanda Anderson’s defense of Habermasian civic nationalism, as elaborated toward the end of The Way We Argue Now.  Anderson acknowledges that civic nationalism relies on a faith in proceduralism that, as I mentioned yesterday, seems unacceptably weak when juxtaposed to other forms of belonging:

proceduralism is seen as overly thin, arid, and abstract. . . .  It is further asserted that people need affective attachments and meaningful affiliations, that attachment to impersonal procedures and universal principles cannot provide the glue that holds communities of various scales together. . . .

Historically, the idea that participants in modern democratic life might fundamentally aspire to the forming of an attachment to abstract or universal principles has been a key issue in the debate over the possibilities for a nationalism defined in civic rather than ethnic terms (stretching back at least as far as J. S. Mill), and it has also informed discussions about cosmopolitan attachment (can one experience solidarity as a world citizen?) and about proceduralism of the type that Habermas espouses (not only through his concept of “constitutional patriotism,” but also through the idea of commitment to postnational institutions like the European Union and to international law).

Anderson then goes to argue that a commitment to proceduralism and civic nationalism need not be so arid and thin after all, especially if you take into account the history of ethnic nationalism:

Habermas has emphasized the ways in which citizens can form solidarities and affiliations based on a common struggle to install abstract principles and procedures at the heart of their national political institutions.  Sharing a common history in which there were collective efforts to overcome the damning effects of ethnic nationalism—as is certainly the case in Germany—can have the effect of what we might call “thickifying the thin.” In these instances, a shared dedication to principled democratic procedure itself promotes those forms of affective solidarity that Habermas elsewhere assigned exclusively to preexisting ethical life.  “The political culture of a country crystallizes around its constitution.  Each national culture develops a distinctive interpretation of those constitutional principles that are equally embodied in other republican constitutions—such as popular sovereignty and human rights—in light of its own national history.  A ‘constitutional patriotism’ based on these interpretations can take the place originally occupied by nationalism.” [Quoting Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in The Inclusion of the Other, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff (MIT Press, 1998), 118.]

Thus, Anderson argues, “the collective attempt to resist forms of patriotism that attempt to subordinate or sidestep the rigorous demands of law, principle, and right—at either the national or the international level—can themselves promote productive forms of patriotic and cosmopolitan affiliation.” (By the way, this reminds me: wasn’t The Valve supposed to do one of their collective reviews of Anderson’s book?  Back in January, Scott Eric Kaufman was promising us a “book event” “in the next month or so.” And after all, wouldn’t they be better off reading Amanda Anderson than wasting their time and ours with houses of cards?)

This Habermasian project, I submit, is precisely what Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act? attempts to accomplish: to counter America’s history of narrow, ethnic nationalism with a constitutional faith, a procedural commitment to principled democratic procedure itself.  And every effort to blur the distinction between the ethnic nationalism of the Volk and the civic nationalism of political constitutions hampers that attempt.  In my humble yet tenacious opinion, the left should try to keep that distinction as clear as possible.

Posted by Michael on 06/06 at 01:22 PM
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Monday, June 05, 2006

Nation time

Glenn Greenwald opens How Would A Patriot Act? with an intriguing rhetorical move:

I never voted for George W. Bush—or for any of his political opponents.

I believed that voting was not particularly important.  Our country, it seemed to me, was essentially on the right track.  Whether Democrats or Republicans held the White House or the majorities in Congress made only the most marginal difference.  I held views on some matters that could be defined as conservative, views on others that seemed liberal.  But I firmly believed that our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse, by our Constitution and by the checks and balances afforded by having three separate but equal branches of government.

My primary political belief was that both parties were plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive, but that as long as neither extreme acquired real political power, our system would function smoothly and more or less tolerably.  For that reason, although I always paid attention to political debates, I was never sufficiently moved to become engaged in the electoral process.  I had great faith in the stability and resilience of the constitutional republic that the founders created.

All that has changed.  Completely.  Over the past five years, a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation.  This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but is instead driven by theories of unlimited presidential power that are wholly alien, and antithetical, to the core political values that have governed this country since its founding.

I know of precincts on the left—actually, I inhabit some of them—where Greenwald would be dismissed on the basis of those first three paragraphs alone.  Many liberals would consider him foolish for believing that the question of who controls Congress and the White House—and, thus, who appoints the members of the cabinet and the heads of the regulatory agencies—makes “only the most marginal difference,” say, to women or to people in poverty.  Many progressives would take him to task, and rightly so, for describing the edges of the Republican and Democratic parties as “plagued by extremists who were equally dangerous and destructive,” as if the Democrats have a branch office of the Khmer Rouge to balance out the GOP’s far-right theocrats.  And many leftists would conclude that anyone who opens a book by professing the firm belief that “our democratic system of government was sufficiently insulated from any real abuse” needs a refresher course in American history before he’ll be worth listening to.  For that matter, there are leftists who would dismiss the book well before they got to the first three paragraphs, on the basis of the word “Patriot” in the title.  This isn’t caricature, you know: there are plenty of people on the left who get pissed off every time Todd Gitlin tells them they’re insufficiently patriotic.  Which is understandable, up to a point, since no sensible person on the left likes being told that they need to proclaim their one-hundred-percent Americanism before they’ll be taken seriously.  But surely, as Greenwald makes clear, there is a form of patriotism that involves civic rather than ethnic nationalism (about which I’ll say more in a moment, for it is the very subject of this post), and surely, if you were a sensible citizen of the United States in 2002, it was plausible to argue that launching a war in Iraq and creating a Cheney Archipelago of secret torture sites from Gitmo to Kabul would not, ultimately, serve the best interests of the United States.  The problem is that in order to make that argument, you have to invoke something like a “national interest,” and, for various reasons, that’s a move that some on the left are unwilling to make.

What interests me about Greenwald’s opening, however, is precisely that it positions Greenwald as a disinterested proceduralist who was radicalized by the Bush Administration.  In saying this I don’t mean to suggest that Greenwald is misrepresenting himself somehow, or indulging in a “merely” rhetorical opening; I believe he’s telling the truth about his earlier self, for what that’s worth.  Rather, I mean that the author of How Would A Patriot Act? opens by saying that when it came to welfare reform or private-school vouchers or gay marriage or the minimum wage or workplace safety or universal health care, he didn’t really have a dog in the fight.  He was all about the Constitution and the separation of powers, and as long as those things were functioning, everything else would kinda sort itself out.  But then he began to get the sense that something was rotten and beginning to smell:

What first began to shake my faith in the administration was its conduct in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 on U.S. soil and then publicly labeled “the dirty bomber.” The administration claimed it could hold him indefinitely without charging him with any crime and while denying him access to counsel.

I never imagined that such a thing could happen in modern America—that a president would claim the right to order American citizens imprisoned with no charges and without the right to a trial.  In China, the former Soviet Union, Iran, and countless other countries, the government can literally abduct its citizens and imprison them without a trial.  But that cannot happen in the United States—at least it never could before.

Isn’t this precisely the kind of reaction liberal Americans would like to have seen from their fellow citizens in 2002?  As opposed, say, to the more common “everything changed on 9/11” reaction known to faithful readers of this humble blog as “I used to be a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m really outraged by Chappaquiddick.” What Greenwald offers here is a mode of nationalism—of patriotism—that consists of principled opposition to the unlimited expansion of executive power by the Bush/Cheney regime.  It’s a mode of nationalism that might, and that should, be more popular than it is.

But, of course, in some circles “nationalism” is as dirty a word as “patriotism.” In the United States, it often speaks to the history of exclusion and exceptionalism—and in many other places, to ethnocentrism and funny ideas about the pure unadultered Volk as well.  You don’t want to go down that road, right, because it leads directly to Michelle Malkin and Pat Buchanan.

And that’s the point: think of all the Americans who’ve been whipped into a nationalistic frenzy in the past year—not by Bush and Cheney’s various shreddings of the Constitution but by . . . gasp! Mexicans. These are Americans who are just fine with NSA surveillance, and who think it’s perfectly OK for Bush to have lied about his NSA program repeatedly over the past five years.  Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants, though—that drives them crazy.  Why, that’s a threat to the very nation!

It’s possible to conclude, from the relative lack of nationalist outrage over Bush’s data mining and the outpouring of excess outrage over immigration, that any contest between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism will look a little like a reply of Spinks v. Tyson.  It will be ugly and embarrassing, and civil nationalism will be sent from the ring in about 91 seconds.  Civic nationalism, after all, involves a complex, reflective kind of fealty to procedure, to political forms and institutions; ethnic nationalism involves an unexamined fealty to the ethnos.  Even in the United States, which was founded entirely on civic rather than ethnic grounds, civic nationalism appears too “thin,” too tenuous a form of belonging to motivate ordinary, unaffiliated people to get up and ask how would a patriot act?  And as a result, when “patriots” do get up to act, more of them grab a gun and head for the border than grab a laptop and write How Would A Patriot Act?

It’s possible to come to that conclusion, yes.  I’ve come to it often enough myself.  But liberals and progressives who do so today, I think, give up too much along the way—rhetorically and politically.  So here’s hoping that Glenn Greenwald helps to make the (popular) case for a civic nationalism, with his tenacious love of liberty and with his many allies in the blogosphere.

Posted by Michael on 06/05 at 11:07 AM
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Friday, June 02, 2006

Arbitrary but fun Friday:  Nancy Fraser edition!

We open this Arbitrary but Fun Friday with a federal report and a beer ad.

First, the report:

Women Gaining on Men in Advanced Fields

By BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP)—Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate—from biology to business—and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine and other advanced degrees.

Even with such enormous gains over the past 25 years, women are paid less than men in comparable jobs and lag in landing top positions on college campuses.

Well, this is certainly a mystery, and it looks like we have two possible avenues of research into it—once we correct for the liberal bias of academe, of course.  The first would involve a study of the evolutionary psychology of women, to try to determine the biological mechanisms they have developed, over millions of years, that lead them to forego power and money in exchange for intellectual achievement.  The second would involve interviewing a handful of undergraduate women at Yale, to find out if they plan to have babies and raise families, thereby accounting for the “lag” in the power-and-money department.

OK, now for that beer ad.  Readers will surely recall Amanda Marcotte’s recent guest post on the new “man law” announced by Miller Lite—you poke it, you own it—and the explosion of antifeminist (and/or pro-ad) bloggolalia that followed her original post on the subject. 

There’s no correlation between the two, of course—it’s not as if stupid beer commercials are responsible for salary disparities between men and women, or the strange scarcity of female administrators on American campuses.  And it would take a virtuoso form of patriarchy-blaming to see these two things as part of a seamless garment.  Besides (to save the most obvious point for last), the federal study is “important,” and the beer ad is not.

But there’s a critical principle at stake here, and that’s why I want to follow up on one or two of Amanda’s guest posts.  It’s not just that I agree with her that (a) Go Fug Yourself is scathingly funny in a not-antifeminist way and that (b) “you poke it, you own it” is a gratuitous, smirking, juvenile piece of work.  With regard to (a), when Amanda writes, “I’m going to weigh in on this debate on the side of ruthless mockery,” she is both politically and theoretically correct, for as Karl Marx famously put it in an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, “it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless mockery of all that exists, including celebrities with unfortunate dress sense.” And with regard to (b), it’s worth keeping in mind that at the Budweiser-Miller level, beer advertising is not supposed to sell beer.  It’s not even supposed to raid a few beer drinkers from the other guy’s camp.  It’s almost purely about brand image, which is why Miller Lite’s self-parodic “Dick” ads of the late 1990s caused such a shitstorm in the advertising industry (as James Poniewozik pointed out at the time, while describing the ads like so: “This 1997-98 campaign, presented as the work of ‘Dick,’ an advertising ‘genius’ shown in a thick-sideburned yearbook photo, played off stereotypical beer-ad promises of sex and charisma, associating Lite with ugly, Dadaist images: fat, sloppy drinkers, a pitchman licking a Lite bottle in gruesome close-up”).  While it’s true that approximately 95 percent of beer ads are stupid (according to an independent study conducted by me during last night’s Sabres-Hurricanes game), there really is a world of difference between the stupid of the “Dick” ads and the stupid of the “Man Law” ads, and it’s perfectly legitimate for any cultural critic—even the Sacred Order of the Shrill feminist kind!—to say so.

But, again, my agreement with Ms. Marcotte is not the point.  The point is that the federal report seems to speak to “real” politics, the kind that involve money and power, and the beer ad seems to speak to merely “cultural” politics, the kind that involve offended sensibilities and deliberate or unintended slights to large or small fractions of the general human population.  And whenever someone unloads (what Amanda calls) the “I’ll give you something to cry about” counterargument in response to a critique of something like the Man Law ad, they’re basically trying to trump someone’s “merely cultural” concerns with something more real, more substantial, more about power and money (or health care, or abortion rights in South Dakota, or women in Afghanistan).  That is, if they’re being the least bit serious, as opposed to merely trollish.

Well, on my end of the campus quad, we spent most of the 1990s trying to hash these things out.  (Those of you who’d like to take this opportunity to use the Internets to read Judith Butler’s 1997 essay, “Merely Cultural,” can do so right here.  Not that she’s the last word on the subject, but she’s responding to a whole array of mid-1990s complaints that the American left had given in to identity politics and forgotten its, er, “common dreams.”) Some of you may remember those innocent days, when we campus humanists were merely Stalinist PC clones rather than objectively pro-Islamofascisterrorist dangeral types.  Depending on where you got your news, cultural politics were a distraction from the country’s massive shift rightward—or cultural politics held the key to understanding that shift and how to reverse it.  Cultural politics were the legacy of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, from race and gender to sexuality and disability, and they represented either a challenge to or a fulfillment of the (long-betrayed) universalist promises of the Enlightenment; or cultural politics were the dirty-bongwater residue of 1960s counterculture delusions, in which merely money/power politics were rejected in favor of focusing on the deeper, more psychosociostructural foundations of social inequities. 

Late in the 1990s, Nancy Fraser attempted to referee the proceedings by jettisoning the rhetoric of “cultural” versus “real” politics and proposing, instead, the terms “politics of recognition” and “politics of redistribution.” Recognition harms, Fraser argued, could have redistributive effects, but they were not to be reduced to their redistributive effects; they were to be understood as recognition harms on their own terms, whether they consisted of ethnic slurs, jokes about the short bus, or nasty remarks about someone’s appearance.  At the same time, however, Fraser insisted that priority be given to recognition harms that do have redistributive effects, because hey (and I think I’m quoting here), there just isn’t world enough and time, everybody.

OK, so you can see where that last move just might set the cat among the pigeons.  As I put it in a 1999 review essay on Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country,

the cultural conditions in which gays and lesbians, or people with disabilities, or ethnic minorities live in the United States can be dehumanizing in ways that have nothing to do with taxation, federal spending, private investment, and the minimum wage, even though strategies of dehumanization may have broad implications for the distribution of goods; and surely any left worthy of the name should mount opposition to strategies of dehumanization without regard to their economic implications.

My point, obviously, was that people of good conscience shouldn’t have to consult the Power/ Money Chart, or wait around for some measurable economic or political fallout, before objecting to ethnic slurs, jokes about the short bus, or nasty remarks about someone’s appearance.  (Or stupid beer ads.) On the other hand (for we are nothing if not fair and balanced on this Libran blog), Fraser was merely trying to establish a “relevance” criterion for recognition harms, and though she doesn’t nearly have Amanda Marcotte’s sense of humor, I like to believe that she’d be OK with some ruthless mockery here and there, too.  After all, a left that goes around objecting to every single possible recognition harm in this sublunary sphere will quickly find itself way too busy with things that really are trivial in the grand scheme of things (and I should know, because I have the Grand Scheme of Things Chart on my wall right next to the Power/ Money Chart)—and it might find itself becoming kind of dour and humorless, too.

For example.  I happen to think that the “you poke it, you own it” ad is qualitatively different from, say, the Axe body spray ads, which are positively cringe-inducing, far beyond any hope of being read as hyperbolic self-parody.  (Perhaps Spin magazine could say to the Axers’ media buyers someday, “you know, we’re running a serious pop-music magazine here, and unlike some other pop-music magazines, we have almost no covers that feature scantily clad women.  We don’t see why we should be insulting our male readers by running ads about how your smelly product will induce five women to take showers with them.”) Part of the smirkiness of the “Man Law” ad lies in the fact that it’s not explicit, and that it scores relatively low on the dehumanization scale: it is, for one thing, completely bikini-babe-free.  But I was a 13-year-old boy once, and I can tell you precisely what’s going on here: part of the juvenile-giggling “fun,” in designing the ad, involved waiting for women to respond with outrage.  It’s as if you managed to get away with saying “who’s Dick Hertz?” on national TV, dude!  Even better, the women who object to the “you poke it” bit get cast as the Schoolteachers with the Terminal Hairbuns, rapping their rulers on the desk and saying, “Dick Hertz?  ‘You poke it you own it?’ If that’s your idea of humor, young man, you can explain it to the principal,” and off we go down the hall to the principal’s office, laughing all the way.  Get it?  The secondary “humor” is our mockery of the “humorlessness” of the women who picked up on “poke it”!  Good one, dudes!

So yes, even as beer ads go, this one’s deliberately annoying.  But I have my recognition-politics limits too, and I’ll close with a counterexample or two.  Here in my wing of the disability community, we’re acutely aware that no one knows what to call anything (remember “physically challenged” and “differently abled”?), and we’re especially wary of being casually stigmatized and dehumanized.  There are people who object strenuously to the term “Down’s syndrome,” preferring “Down syndrome” on the grounds that the possessive “s” makes it appear as if J. Langdon Down owns a segment of the population, sort of like “Jerry’s Kids.” (And I’ll assume you know how much the disability community hates the telethon phenomenon and the locution “Jerry’s Kids.") Personally, I could not care less about Down and Down’s.  As I said in Life As We Know It back when Jamie was five, I cared more about whether Jamie could say and understand a possessive “s” than about whether he was marked by one.  Likewise, every few years someone tries to recalibrate the official terminology across the board.  Most of us go by “people first” language, in which we say “a child with Down [or Down’s!] syndrome” rather than “a Down syndrome child.” (And both are better than “a mongoloid idiot,” which, back in the day, was entirely common parlance.) The rationale is that a person is a person first, and not a syndrome or a disease.  But recently, I’ve heard people argue that phrases like “a person with autism” regrettably suggest that autism is all a person “has,” and that “an autistic person” is more indicative of the adjectival nature of the autism and its relation to the human being it modifies.  The first (and second and third) time I heard this argument, I wondered just how many ways the deck chairs on the Titanic could be arranged—and in writing this, I do not mean to demean the people making those arguments, or, indeed, to demean any Titanic-Americans reading this blog.  I’m merely saying, in a merely cultural kind of way, that we all have different (and sometimes conflicted or internally contradictory) standards for what kind of recognition harms we consider significant, and what kind we consider trivial—regardless of whether those recognition harms conceivably have any redistributive effects.

So this Friday’s arbitrary but fun challenge, Nancy Fraser edition, is this: how or where do you distinguish between trivial and nontrivial slights to our common humanity?  And how or where do you allow for the ruthless mockery of everything existing?

Posted by Michael on 06/02 at 09:47 AM
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Thanks, Cap!

Yes, I know I promised I wouldn’t blog about hockey, but this isn’t about hockey.  It’s about labor and management.

Just WTF is this piece of pro-owner propaganda doing in the Associated Press account of the Carolina Hurricanes’ victory over the Buffalo Sabres last night?

[Rod] Brind’Amour also assisted on Justin Williams’ goal in the final minute to seal it, propelling the former Hartford Whalers into the finals against the five-time champion Edmonton Oilers.  The small-market, best-of-seven matchup, helped by the NHL’s new salary cap in this first post-lockout season, opens Monday in Raleigh.

Edmonton-Carolina is a small-market matchup helped by the salary cap?  Hello? As opposed, say, to the pre-lockout matchup of Calgary and Tampa Bay back in 2004?  Let’s see, we got a small-market team from the South, check.  And a small-market team from Alberta, check.  Looks like the salary cap is doing its work! 

Well, good riddance to those boring, predictable pre-cap days when the big-market Chicago Black Hawks and Los Angeles Kings dominated the West and the behemoth-market Montréal Canadiens and New York Rangers dominated the East.  Finally, we’ve got us some parity around here.

Paul Kiel is right.  This whole Associated Press bamboozlement enterprise has got to stop.

Posted by Michael on 06/02 at 09:41 AM
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