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Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Leftover business III

Congratulations to Ned Lamont and the good people of Connecticut!

I have to admit that for a while, I didn’t believe that this primary was going to be a world-historical event.  I was pleased to see Lieberman challenged, of course, and I’m even more pleased to see him defeated.  But I have an allergic reaction to cable news and the screaming punditocracy, you see, so for months I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen, “it’s not just about the war, it’s about Weepin’ Joe’s terrible record on everything from Enron to the culture wars; and besides, good grief, primary challenges happen all the time!  Just two years ago, Arlen Specter narrowly survived a primary challenge from someone who ran on the platform that Jesus wants us to believe that the earth is six thousand years old and that we should therefore abolish income taxes.  And nobody cried that the very legitimacy of the Republican party was at stake.” Now, I had a point about all that hype.  If there’s one thing that the past few months have demonstrated, it’s that cable news and the screaming punditocracy (including its Whispering Division, David Broder, supervisor) are almost completely in the tank.  (Just in case you forgot!) Republicans run to their base: good.  Democrats run to their base: smelly McGovernite hippies are coming!  the nation cannot long endure! Lather, lather, repeat 24/7.  This despite the fact that no other conservative Democratic senator faced a primary challenge like Lieberman’s, and despite the fact that Lamont is not actually a smelly McGovernite hippie and doesn’t even own a copy of David Horowitz’s 1965 masterpiece, Free World Colossus.

But now I think I was wrong to argue for a more nuanced position on the significance of Lamont v. Lieberman.  Today I say, it was all about the war!  This is a tremendous defeat for the War Party!  The nation has never ever seen anything like it ever!  And (last but not least) it’s all because of bloggers! Now to re-defeat Lieberman in November!

I hail our new Blogofascist Overlords, and thank them for their work on Lamont’s behalf.  And now I must get back to Leftover Business Week, because that is what Kos has ordered me to do.  Damn you, Kommandante Kos!  I would have had so much more fun writing parodies of Marty Peretz and Lanny Davis this week.  Thankfully, Lieberman’s newfound Independementum® will afford me a few more opportunities in the months to come.

________________

Today’s installment is qualitatively different from yesterday’s and Monday’s.  For today we’re not dealing with a branch of the left whose opposition to American foreign policy has led it foolishly to embrace profoundly anti-liberal forces around the globe.  Today we’re going to look at the curious consequences of a certain kind of “radical” rhetorical overkill, a phenomenon worthy of analysis in its own right.  (Remember, I dwell among the academic left, arts-and-humanities division.  Quite often, in order to distinguish ourselves from those milquetoasty, craven liberals who have the temerity to agree with us from time to time, we have to denounce X far more emphatically than they do.  Why?  Because that’s all we got.  And then we round off our denunciation of X by calling for a fluid “coalition politics” consisting of people who agree with us that mere liberals and progressives are pond scum.)

In early February 2005, a few days after the oddly-timed Ward Churchill Backlash began (I assume I don’t have to remind you of the details, but briefly, 9/11 little Eichmanns Hamilton College O’Reilly), Z magazine co-founder and editor Michael Albert took to the Internet to defend Churchill’s right to be wrong. His essay, like Daniel Lazare’s sparring with Horowitz chez Medved, starts off pretty well:

I remember when Ward’s post 9/11 essay came out. My reaction was to wish he hadn’t written it. Ward took clear and cogent insights about the causes of international hostility to U.S. policies and weighed them down with not so clear and not so cogent non insights about the general population of the U.S. . . .

Why Ward Churchill? I think Ward would probably say it is because what he is doing is very effective. Ward may even see the attacks on his essay as evidence that the essay had great dissident merit. I think Ward would be wrong in that. Ward is being attacked not because he is the strongest possible target, but because he is one of the weakest possible targets. His essay is featured not because it was seriously threatening, but because it is easily ridiculed. Ward provided right wingers fodder they could manipulatively use.

Personally, I think Churchill’s “insights” into 9/11 would have been a bit more clear and cogent if he’d had the faintest idea of who struck us that day and why.  If you go back and read ”Some People Push Back”, you’ll find that it is animated largely by the belief that 9/11 is payback for post-1990 U.S. actions in Iraq.  But otherwise, Albert has it just about right: troping on the title of one of Churchill’s more widely-recognized works, he reminds us of “the little matter of free speech,” namely, the kind of political speech with which one disagrees—but which one defends on principle.  Like that Voltaire fellow said.  And Albert is right about Churchill’s effectiveness, too: as I’ve said before on this blog, I don’t believe that “Some People Push Back” actually initiated a widespread national consciousness-raising about how ordinary Americans are like unto “good Germans” under Hitler (that’s the other animating belief of the essay).  Very, very few Americans heard Churchill’s remarks, slapped their foreheads, and said, “by George, he’s right!  The World Trade Center dead were comparable to Eichmann— because, after all, some of them worked in global finance!  Why didn’t I see it before?  I must have been living in the FOX Matrix!” On the contrary, once Churchill’s essay made the rounds, many Americans concluded that one wing of the “antiwar” left really did hate them, to the point of wishing them dead.  (Because let’s not take the “little Eichmanns” line out of context, folks!  Let’s remember the entire sentence in which it was embedded: “If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”) So that wasn’t good.

But then a very strange thing happens.  Just after saying “Ward provided right wingers fodder they could manipulatively use,” Albert engages in a little thought experiment:

Since 9/11 at public talks I often compare George Bush and Osama bin Laden. I note that if you could have been a fly on the wall of the inner circle meeting rooms of the U.S. government leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan, I believe you would have heard no discussion, not even a minutes worth, taking into account the well being of the Afghan people in the face of possible massive starvation induced by our assault. Mass media at the time reported (on back pages only) that bombing Afghanistan could lead to five million deaths. No mainstream paper had a headline “U.S. contemplates killing millions to prove we are tough,” though all knew it was true.

I also indicate in the public talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask bin Laden how he could possibly have chosen to undertake the assault on the Twin Towers, despicable as this act was, I think he would probably understand the question and would reply, roughly, that he thought the gains (in trying to propel the U.S. into reactions that would provoke fundamentalism throughout the Mideast) were worth the price in human loss. Bin Laden, as evil as his designs surely were and are, would understand, that is, that there was something untoward that occurred on 9/11, piles of corpses, and that the negative deaths had to be weighed against what he saw as positive political gains. Sane people will reject his moral calculus, of course, but I am guessing that at least he had one.

On the other hand, I say in these talks that if I were to now have the opportunity to ask Bush and Cheney how they could possibly have chosen to undertake the bombing of Afghanistan, I think they would not even understand the question. They would not see any need to weigh off benefits against costs because they saw no costs. For them the general estimates made by all responsible parties that literally millions of Afghans might suffer starvation if bombing were to commence counted for naught. For them, Afghans are like bugs outside our front door are for the rest of us. To Bush and Cheney Afghans are expendable. Bush and Cheney have no moral calculus. They reduce humans to the status of fleas.

And then I say in these talks, if there is a deep hell for sinners surely Osama bin Laden is headed for at least its seventh floor down, but George Bush and Dick Cheney are going to ride an elevator even further down to a deeper basement. Everyone at talks like this given in the U.S. understands these images and few have any problem with the harsh tone.

Now, let’s get this much straight: nowhere here does Albert express any “support” for or “solidarity” with bin Laden.

OK.  But even still, I have to wonder about these public talks at which everyone “understands” the argument that bin Laden ranks a bit higher on the moral scale than Bush and Cheney because Michael Albert has imagined having a conversation with him about the cost-benefit ratios entailed in the attacks of September 11.

And now I want to make something else clear: the point at issue, for me, is not whether Bush and Cheney are good men or bad men.  And I don’t ask that every single person on the left open an analysis of 9/11 by intoning, “America good, Islamists bad.” And I don’t want to hear, in comments, that I’ve fallen for the “they hate us because of our freedoms” line.

Thanks in advance, everyone.

Instead, my point is this: why in the world would anyone make this argument in the first place?  What is gained by claiming, on the basis of an imaginary conversation with bin Laden, that bin Laden has a moral calculus (albeit one that “sane people will reject”) whereas Bush and Cheney do not?  And (although this is but an ancillary question) what does this claim have to do with a defense of Ward Churchill’s rights under the First Amendment, anyway?

Well, for our present purposes, the important line is this: “Mass media at the time reported (on back pages only) that bombing Afghanistan could lead to five million deaths. No mainstream paper had a headline ‘U.S. contemplates killing millions to prove we are tough,’ though all knew it was true.” Here, Albert is referring to, among other things, the New York Times article of September 16, 2001, “Pakistan Antiterror Support Avoids Vow of Military Aid.” It was actually published on page five, but what the hell.  And it included the following:

Washington has also demanded a cutoff of fuel supplies, an end to the use of Pakistani banks as conduits for clandestine money movements and the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population.

But Foreign Minister Sattar said today that Pakistan would continue “to exchange views with the government of Afghanistan in a spirit of friendship and fraternity.”

He dwelled at length on Pakistan’s warm relations with the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,’ the formal name adopted by the Taliban.

The foreign minister chose that friendly tone despite a warning from the Taliban, issued through its embassy in Islamabad, that “the possibility of a massive attack by our holy warriors cannot be ruled out if any neighboring country offers its ground or air bases to U.S. forces.”

The Pakistani ambivalence posed a clear problem to the Bush administration: how to mount the large-scale military operation that many believe would be needed to hunt down an elusive enemy—Mr. bin Laden and his followers constantly move around Afghanistan’s deserts and mountains—without a secure land base in the region.

One possibility seemed to be that American troops and supplies would be staged through Pakistani airspace and airfields on their way to building bases inside Afghanistan.

Another deep problem is this: Might winning the cooperation of Pakistan lead to the destabilization of the country, which detonated a nuclear bomb in 1998, and its possible takeover by the very radicals the United States is trying to suppress or eradicate?

I quote eight paragraphs of the original article because subsequent discussions of it have focused exclusively on those truck convoys.  Context, you know.  The question of how to proceed in U.S.-Pakistan relations was then, and is now, one of the diciest in the post-9/11 world—and what’s more, last I checked, that elusive Mr. bin Laden was still elusive.  But never mind that.  Let’s get to the moral calculus.  Two days later, Noam Chomsky told Radio B92 (Belgrade):

The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that.

At the time, international aid organizations warned that five million Afghans were at risk of starvation before 9/11, and that the number could go to 7.5 million if aid were interrupted and the U.S. began a bombing campaign.  Chomsky elaborates on these warnings here (in a February 2002 essay) and elsewhere; they became the basis for his famous claim, in October 2001, that the U.S. was engaged in a “silent genocide”:

According to the New York Times there are 7 to 8 million people in Afghanistan on the verge of starvation. That was true actually before September 11th. They were surviving on international aid. On September 16th, the Times reported, I’m quoting it, that the United States demanded from Pakistan the elimination of truck convoys that provide much of the food and other supplies to Afghanistan’s civilian population. As far as I could determine there was no reaction in the United States or for that matter in Europe. I was on national radio all over Europe the next day. There was no reaction in the United States or in Europe to my knowledge to the demand to impose massive starvation on millions of people.  The threat of military strikes right after September—around that time forced the removal of international aid workers that crippled the assistance programs. Actually, I am quoting again from the New York Times. . . .

Well we could easily go on—but all of that—first of all indicates to us what’s happening. Looks like what’s happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that whatever, what will happen we don’t know, but plans are being made and programs implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks—very casually with no comment, no particular thought about it, that’s just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe.

Actually, there was plenty of comment about this at the time, and throughout the fall of 2001.  Aid organizations continually criticized the Cheney Administration for its ineffectual (and PR-driven) food drops from the air, and plenty of merely liberal commentators (in the New York Times and elsewhere) debated the likely humanitarian costs of the war.  But wittingly or not, Chomsky sometimes gives people the impression that he is the only person in the West who is willing to bring such things to light, and as a result, when he is criticized on the points at issue (by fools like me), those people sometimes respond as if all dissent is being crushed, and all criticisms are really ad hominem smears.  What happened, in fact, was that Chomsky’s claims were debated on the merits.  In November 2001, on the nonpartisan site Spinsanity, for example, Brendan Nyhan agreed that Afghanistan was facing a humanitarian crisis, but argued that the conduit from Pakistan

would not have fed those millions of people in the first place, as Chomsky should know. The reason for the US demand is that truck convoys from Pakistan passed through Taliban-held areas, and the Taliban were likely to divert the shipments. Taliban confiscations of food supplies held by relief programs in Kandahar and elsewhere have borne this out.

And a bit later that November, progressive journalist Laura Rozen wrote, in Salon, about the debates within those humanitarian aid organizations about whether their initial predictions were warranted:

But aid experts say that the agencies’ repeated alarms about the impact of the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban on relief efforts have ignored the fact that more food has been reaching Afghanistan since the U.S. bombing began than was before—a lot more.

“More aid has gone into Afghanistan in the past month than in the past year,” says John Fawcett, a longtime humanitarian relief worker who studies the politics of aid. “The aid agencies cried wolf. They said the bombing will stop us from delivering humanitarian aid. It will create 1.5 million refugees. Well, in fact, the result of the bombing is there are 150,000 new refugees—one-tenth of what they expected, and there’s been a tenfold increase of humanitarian aid getting in, because everybody’s focused on the problem now.”

The lead U.N. food agency, the World Food Program (WFP), has been getting 2,000 tons of food a day into Afghanistan—up from 200 tons a day before Sept. 11, Fawcett notes. The WFP confirms that.

Chomsky, for his part, was not so sanguine about these revised estimates.  About the fall of the Taliban, he wrote, in that February 2002 essay I cited above, “When Taliban forces did finally succumb, after astonishing endurance, opinions shifted to triumphalist proclamations and exultation over the justice of our cause, now demonstrated by the success of overwhelming force against defenseless opponents. Without researching the topic, I suppose that Japanese and German commentary was similar after early victories during World War II.”

As I noted in the comment section back in June, I find this whole line of argument kind of mystifying.  On my reading of this claim, there are two things going on here: the first is a weird version of the film Minority Report, in which the U.S. is found guilty of horrific crimes against humanity before they happen; the second is even more dubious, in which the U.S. is found guilty of horrific crimes against humanity that did not happen, because we allegedly intended for them to happen, or proceeded with the knowledge that they might happen, even if we eventually ensured that they did not happen.  This is especially strange when you consider all the subsequent crimes against humanity the U.S. has in fact committed in Afghanistan—and in the Secret Cheney Archipelago of secret torture sites, as well as in Gitmo.  There would seem to be no need to invoke all the millions who might have died as a result of the alleged intentions of the people who ordered the two-month interruption in one avenue of aid convoys.  Unless, of course, you want to distinguish yourself from the mere liberals and progressives who denounce post-2001 U.S. crimes in Afghanistan and Gitmo and the Cheney Archipelago.

Now, I know that there are plenty of people ready and willing to defend every point on this line of argument.  Last time around, I was duly referred to Chomsky’s September 2005 essay on the subject, in which he opens by blaming himself for not having done more to bring attention to Afghanistan’s food crisis, and then argues that the interruption of aid was both gratuitous and calculated: 

All of this would have been horrendous enough even if there had been a credible reason for driving the aid agencies out of the country, demanding termination of the flow of food, and then the bombing with its shocking expected effects. But there was no credible reason. . . .

But more important, the answer to that question has no bearing whatsoever, precisely none, on assessment of the pre-bombing orders to Pakistan, the threats that drove the aid agencies out of the country, or the bombing itself. It’s the merest moral truism that actions are evaluated in terms of the range of anticipated consequences.

Believe me, folks, I’m well aware that one strand of leftist thought still holds that the overwhelming problem with U.S. action in Afghanistan is not that we failed to capture bin Laden, and not that we have since allowed most of the country to fall right back into the Talibanian chaos and severe repression that innocent Afghans suffered before 2001, but that we interrupted aid convoys and thereby, on some calculations, ran the risk of consigning millions to death by starvation.  But since those millions did not die from starvation, I’m more concerned about the fact that the Cheney Administration ran off to PNAC Fantasyland in Iraq rather than rebuilding Afghanistan, offering reparations for war damage, and keeping the Taliban and its enablers at bay.

But I hope I have retraced the line of argument accurately.  For all I’m trying to do here is to explain how it is that in 2005, an American leftist would go around saying that on the basis of an imaginary conversation about 9/11 and its aftermath, Osama bin Laden has a moral calculus and Bush/Cheney don’t.  Between 2001 and 2005, the interruption of aid convoys from Pakistan, taken together with the bombing, had become a “silent genocide,” and the silent genocide had become the basis for the subsequent conclusion that “Afghanistan, if we look at it, is one of the most grotesque acts of modern history.” To this Michael Albert then adds the supposition that by contrast with the architects of that grotesquerie, “bin Laden, as evil as his designs surely were and are, would understand . . . that there was something untoward that occurred on 9/11.” And that, dear friends and critics, is how a certain kind of rhetorical overkill produces the very curious conclusion that Osama bin Laden, unlike Bush and Cheney, is to be credited with understanding the likely consequences of his actions.  For whatever that may be worth.

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Postscript

I wish this were unnecessary, but it ain’t.  So, for the record.

I actually don’t like criticizing Noam Chomsky.  I find it’s usually far more trouble than it’s worth, not least because it leads some people to believe that I am an Advocate of Silent Genocide and an Enemy of All Good Things.  I do, however, believe that his fans sometimes treat him too reverently, and that his critics often treat him too dismissively.  Some of those critics do, in fact, smear the man, and in those cases I completely understand why good people would reflexively defend him.  As I’ve said before, he is among the most accomplished and influential intellectuals of our time, so respect must be paid.  Moreover, Chomsky is not:

– an apologist for Pol Pot
– a traitor
– a self-hating Jew
– a bad person who kicks cats

and this blog will never suggest that he is.  On the contrary, I will be happy to nominate Chomsky for a Lifetime Achievement Award on the strength of (a) his championing of the Palestinian cause at a time when no major U.S. media outlet would touch the issue, (b) his searing condemnations of U.S. interventions in Central America in the 1980s, including his denunciation of the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, for which my former congressman, Ted Weiss, rightly called for Reagan’s impeachment, and (c) his critiques of U.S. nuclear policy and nuclear proliferation. 

However, I think he hasn’t had his A game for some years now.  In 1998, his lifetime batting average of .958 was almost six hundred full points above Ty Cobb’s, but I believe it has dropped considerably since then.  (There will be a little Saturday addendum to Leftover Business Week on this for those of you who desire such things.) Which is to say that “I’ve had my differences with him, a few quite strong.” Actually, I didn’t say that. Dennis Perrin did. And since I think very highly of people who think highly of Dennis, I’m glad to hear that it’s OK to have some differences with Chomsky, a few quite strong.

Posted by Michael on 08/09 at 01:46 PM
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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Leftover business II

One of the problems associated with critiquing the “radical” “left” is that its numbers are so few and so powerless.  That’s why there’s no such thing as “left-right” equivalency: the “radical” “left” is despised by the right, ignored by the center, and criticized by the democratic left, whereas the radical right (no scare quotes necessary) of Coulter and Horowitz and the Kingdom Coming of Christian-Millennialist Wingnuttia actually have ready access to mass media and the White House.

But today, as this humble blog turns its attention to the pro-Iraqi resistance position on the “radical” “left,” we’re not taking issue with a few leftover neo-Maoists and Workers World Party apparatchiks.  Instead, we’ll be touching on positions that have been forwarded by international leftist luminaries, some of whom are reverently cited by American leftists who take every word as the definitive “left” statement of the matter.

Before I open the vault, though, I want to take a moment to note that a primary election of some kind is apparently being held today in one of the lower 48 states.  And just as this blog decided to spend its time talking about Beckett and Yeats when everyone was talking about Israel and Lebanon, today we’re going to spend our time talking about David Horowitz and his enablers when everyone is talking about Ned Lamont and the possible de-Liebermanization of the Democratic Party.  For the record, this blog considers de-Liebermanization necessary but not sufficient.  I wish Ned Lamont good luck, and I’m eager to see how all this plays out in the mainstream American media.  Perhaps it will turn out to be more than just a primary challenge, after all.  We will see.

_________

On December 13, 2004, Daniel Lazare, a frequent contributor to the Nation, debated David Horowitz on “America’s number-one show on pop culture and politics.” That’s right, we’re talking about the Michael Medved Radio Show!

Consider the context.  The election is recent history.  David Horowitz is two months away from unveiling “Discover the Network(s),” the far-right wingnut extravaganza that purports to disclose the hidden connections between Katie Couric and Mohammed Atta, Roger Ebert and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.  “Discover the Network(s),” in turn, is the online representation of Horowitz’s argument in Unholy Alliance, the book in which He.Who. argues that the antiwar movement/ the global left/ liberals everywhere/ anyone to the left of Lieberman is insufficiently critical of/ in cahoots with/ actively cheering for radical Islamist theocrats.

Now, you may have noticed that all through my dealings with U.No. in calendar year 2005, I never once alluded to his radio “debate” with Lazare on the Michael Medved Show in December 2004.  Why?  Because I wanted to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away.  And why do I bring it up now, over a year and a half later?  Because the phenomenon it represents has not gone away.  It has gotten a great deal of attention on the right, of course—and that’s why I’m not providing a link to the following transcript: because it can be found only on certain very ugly far-right websites with very unattractive color schemes (you can get it if you really want, though, by googling “Horowitz” and “Lazare”).  But it was ignored by most liberals and progressives, who either (a) never knew of its existence or (b) considered its existence too insignificant for mention except by the spittle-flecked, Dorito-stained legions of Lower Wingnuttia.

Medved opens the proceedings Medved-style:

Medved: And another great day in this greatest nation on God’s green earth, where one of the great questions that too many people don’t want to face is the question about the American secular Left. The American secular Left would seem to have very, very little in common with the Islamo-fascist terrorists who menace the United States everywhere, and yet, there is—does seem to be what David Horowitz has called an unholy alliance between radical Islam and the American Left.

That is the title of his new book, Unholy Alliance. He accuses the American Left—running from Hollywood, through our universities, through the political system [huh?]—of soft-peddling [sic] opposition to Islamo-fascism and, in fact, to, in many ways, encouraging the enemies of the United States of America.

Well, you can see that Lazare is playing on a tilted field, and he opens up pretty well, with a couple of good counterpunches to the Horowitz Thesis:

Lazare:  First of all, it’s one thing to protest the war, and it’s one thing to criticize the protesters. But he’s playing a very dangerous game when he accuses the protesters of being an alliance, a fifth column, an alliance with the Islamic fundamentalists of al-Qaeda and other groups. That’s—you know, in the ‘50s, that was pure McCarthyism, where anybody who spoke out against McCarthy was accused of being an ally of Joseph Stalin. And he’s playing the same game. It’s a very dangerous game, number one.

Number two, the people who participated in the war in Iraq were not supporters of Saddam Hussein, were not supporters of Osama bin Laden, or were quite horrified, obviously, as everyone was, by the offense of 9/11, and had no support for Saddam’s regime in Iraq.

Nicely played!  And a bit later on, Lazare even engages in a deft piece of détournement.  As Horowitz pushes the “leftists love bin Laden” line, Lazare replies:

Lazare:  But in any case if you want to talk about sophistry, this whole phony game of drawing parallels is sophistry. I can draw parallels between George Bush and bin Laden, as well. They were, after all, on the same side in the ‘80s in Afghanistan. They’re both religious zealots, for example. They both believe in fighting Communism. So, therefore, using David’s logic, I could somehow join a quotation.

And then, suddenly, the wheels come off.

Medved: But wait. There’s a difference Daniel Lazare, with all due respect, there is a difference here. Let me cite for you something that happened recently since David’s book, Unholy Alliance, came out, which is that in Chile when President Bush visited Santiago, the demonstrators there demonstrated with hammer and sickle signs and headbands, and someone was holding a very large sign that said, “Hang on, Fallujah.” Now, do you think that—do you feel some sympathy for the so-called insurgents in Fallujah?

Lazare: Oh, absolutely yes, total sympathy, total solidarity.

Medved: You do?

Horowitz: So who’s the sophist here?

Lazare: Of course, absolutely. The insurgents in Fallujah are repelling a foreign invasion. They have every right to do it. Now, I’m not going to support every last action by every last fighter there, obviously, but certainly they have a right to repel a foreign invasion of their country.

OK, maybe, just maybe, you think, he has a point about that “foreign invasion” bit . . . and then it gets worse.  Much worse.  There’s a commercial break, and then we come back to:

Medved: Daniel Lazare, would you like to see the elections scheduled for January 30 in Iraq fail?

Lazare: I’m totally opposed to what the U.S. is doing in Iraq. Therefore, I would no more support U.S. elections than I would support German elections in France during World War II.

Medved: So you’re sticking with this comparison of the United States to Nazi Germany?

Horowitz: He is, because he believes it in his soul.

Lazare: I believe it. I believe it entirely.

. . .

Medved: Okay. This is what I find so clarifying about this. Very often, when I have people representing the Left on this radio show, they dissemble, they hide. You’re straight out there. You’ve said unequivocally you think America today in Iraq and presumably around the world is like the Nazis under Hitler.

Lazare: Well, actually, I’ll go further. No, I think David and you, too, Michael, have done a really great service. You really have clarified things really, very well. I don’t say that Bush is Hitler. I’m not drawing an equation, obviously, but I am drawing a comparison. And not only am I drawing a comparison that his attack on Iraq was comparable to Hitler’s on Poland, but I quite agree that the millions of people who took to the streets in protest against the invasion of Iraq were motivated by this perspective. That was precisely why they took to the streets because they saw in Bush’s actions a frightening parallel with the events that occurred, what, 65 years earlier in Europe. And so he’s absolutely correct. I think Hitler had probably more reason to attack Poland than Bush had to attack Iraq.

Medved: David Horowitz?

Horowitz: Well, I hope people are listening because this is a validation of the case I have made in my book.

Actually, Lazare had done more than simply “validate” Horowitz’s argument (“actually, I’ll go further,” he says helpfully).  He ascribes his views to the millions of people who took to the streets in protest against the invasion of Iraq.  So guess what?  If you demonstrated in 2002-03 (I was at the NYC demo on February 15), Lazare speaks for you!

Finally, late in the debate, Lazare gets around to cheering “secular democratic” forces that he hopes will defeat all kinds of religious fundamentalisms.  Medved follows up.

Medved: So are there any good guys currently engaged in trying to counteract the murderous Islamic extremists?

Lazare: Sure.

Medved: Who are the good guys?

Lazare: I’m trying to do it.

Horowitz: Oh, come on now. Look, there wasn’t one demonstration in front of the Iraqi embassy in the entire lead-up to the war that said to Saddam, “Disarm. Obey the UN resolution.”

Lazare: David, you’re actually talking to one of the few leftists with the—if I do say so myself. . . .

Horowitz: Who demonstrated in front of the Iraqi embassy?

Lazare: You’re actually talking to one of the few leftists, if I do say so myself, with the courage to defend the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan.

Don’t ask me how this follows.  It doesn’t matter:  the debate is over.  Game, set, match.  Horowitz chortles with glee, Medved sputters with delight, and they sign off thanking Daniel Lazare once again for finally showing us the True Face of the Left instead of dissembling and hiding behind those innocuous “peace and justice” banners the way sneaky leftists like to do.

Dear readers, I hope I won’t be accused of anrcissism or special pleading if I suggest that this is not a good way to debate David Horowitz.  By going out of your way to confirm his argument, and then some, I mean.

Now, if this were simply a random exchange on the Michael Medved Show, I would let it lie dormant in the Vault of Regrettables, even though I’m told (by Michael Medved’s announcer) that Medved hosts America’s number-one show on pop culture and politics.  But the reason it’s worthy of inclusion in Leftover Business Week is that Lazare is echoing the sentiments of some pretty well-regarded figures on the international “radical” “left.” At the end of the July-August 2004 issue of the New Left Review, for example, Susan Watkins closed an editorial statement in ringing tones:

The first, elementary step against such acquiescence is solidarity with the cause of national liberation in Iraq. The US-led forces have no business there. The Iraqi maquis deserves full support in fighting to drive them out.

The plausible second sentence sits uncomfortably between two thoroughly implausible ones, like a hapless subway rider sandwiched between two people determinedly yelling to themselves.  Yep, the Iraqi maquis deserves full support. No qualifications whatsoever.  By contrast, Arundhati Roy did a bit of circumspect throat-clearing before getting around to supporting the “resistance”:

I think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes women. It depoliticizes things. It’s undemocratic in so many ways. But at the same time, when you look at the massive amount of violence that America is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a position to tell Iraqis that you must fight a pristine, feminist, democratic, secular, non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that that resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine struggles in which to invest our purity.

During the summer of 2004 Roy made the same point in a variety of ways.  This is perhaps the clearest, and the most widely cited:

The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle.

Like most resistance movements, it combines a motley range of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists, fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we are only going to support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity.

Of course, Roy is right in one respect: the “resistance” contains any number of people and factions no secular feminist gay-friendly democrat should support.  But I can’t help pointing out that, for Roy, while the party trying vainly to unseat the Cheney Administration was not worthy of “our” support in 2004, the Iraqi “resistance” was, on balance, good enough. Their battle is our battle. I suppose that when it comes to Muqtada al-Sadr, hey, we don’t go to war with the army we want, we go to war with the army we’ve got.

Or we don’t, folks.  It’s really up to you.  Remember, just because Arundhati Roy, for all her many virtues, says you have to support the Iraqi resistance, that doesn’t make it true!  She’s not the boss of you.  Roy frames it this way: you can’t dictate what form the Iraqi resistance will take (quite true), and therefore you have no choice but to support whatever form it takes (not true at all).  All I’ll say for today is this: the Iraqi resistance is not the French resistance (not by a long shot), and it’s not the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, either.  It’s the job of thinking leftists to make these calls one by one.  Mine is this: though I wholeheartedly opposed this disastrous war, the battle of the so-called Iraqi maquis is not “my” battle.

Posted by Michael on 08/08 at 06:17 AM
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Monday, August 07, 2006

Leftover business

When I returned from blogging in mid-July after a seventeen-day layoff, one of my critics was here to greet me.  It seems that I had committed the thoughtcrime of calling Israel’s bombing of Lebanon “disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive,” following this in comments by saying that Israel’s response to Hezbollah was “morally illegitimate” because of the degree of civilian casualties it entailed.  That condemnation of Israel, however, was not good enough.  Instead, it earned me this little comment:

Sort of like labelling the Nazi response to the Reichstag fire “German’s disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive response to the latest Dutch anarchist outrages,” isn’t it?

When I objected to the implicit Israelis = Nazis trope animating this remark, calling it a form of moral idiocy, my critic reappeared to explain that I had misunderstood him.  It turned out that he was not likening the Israelis to Nazis; no, he was likening me to Nazi apologists:

But as you know very well, this trope is not a = b (Israelis = Nazis).  The trope is x:a::y:b - Those who cluck their tongues about Israel’s “overreaction” to Hizbullah terrorism are analogous to those who clucked their tongues about the NSDAP’s “overreaction” to the communist torching of the Reichstag.

1933: “I agree, the Communist menace in Mitteleuropa must be stopped, but the Reichskanzler’s reaction to the fire has been disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive.”

2006: “I agree, Hizbullah’s terrorism must be stopped, but the Prime Minister’s reaction to the kidnapping has been disproportionate and profoundly counterproductive.”

Liberal moral cowardice, right across the board.  Is there a difference?  Sure.  In 1933, the Center Party honorably refused to support the Reichstag Fire Decree.  In 2006, HRC has announced unequivocal support for this slaughter.  No doubt you’ll be sending her a check in two years’ time.  The plague take you all.

Well, thank goodness that little misunderstanding was cleared up!  And once it was all straightened out, I banned this person from further commenting.  (First, however, I consulted the Blogger Code of Ethics, just to make sure I had no obligation to continue playing host to someone who wants to abuse me in this fashion.) The striking thing is, though, that this guy was not just any ordinary loudmouth at the bar.  He is, in fact, Professor Michael McIntyre, the director of the International Studies Program at DePaul University.  That’s right, the director of the International Studies Program at DePaul University showed up on my blog to suggest that I am akin to post-Reichstag Nazi apologists for not condemning Israel’s bombing of Lebanon with the all-out Godwin’s-Law-violating vehemence with which he wanted it condemned.  Which is really kind of depressing when you think about it.  And also kind of depressing when you don’t.

At first I had a few ungenerous thoughts about this.  A plague upon us all, eh?  Maybe I should get out of the defending-the-academic-left business, I thought, and just let David Horowitz take the hindmost. But then, after a few days’ reflection, I decided that Professor McIntyre simply was not my friend, and I crossed him off my invitee list for my big Chairman Mao Birthday Celebration this December. 

And then a few days later, to my astonishment, I realized that even Professor McIntyre was Anti-Israel Lite compared to some of more impassioned voices in the “radical” “left,” online and off.  Over the course of this week, I’ll try to persuade some of you that these people should be considered neither radical nor left, and that’s why I’ve put “radical” and “left” in “scare” “quotes” in the preceding “sentence.” But why am I bothering to devote a week to this nonsense?  Why, that’s a very good question.  Most of the time, I try to ignore it, on the grounds that (a) these people constitute a lunatic fringe about whom no one cares except their competitors in other post-neo-crypto-Situationist fringe groups, who routinely denounce them as “splitters,” and (b) to criticize them is to invite all the usual garbage from them and their friends, about how I’m a corporate imperialist running dog DLC operative who’s only trying to burnish my mainstream credentials by taking out a few radicals here and there.

But here’s the problem, folks.  We are now at the point at which one wing of the “radical” “left” has announced its support for

– the Iraqi resistance,

– Hezbollah,

and, in one extraordinary case,

– Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

For the “we are all Hezbollah now” “left,” check out this remarkable fellow, whose support of Hezbollah is nothing if not full-throated.  For the pro-Iranian “left,” there’s a “leftist” the like of which has not been seen since the final days of the liberation of Symbionia, and who has taken to cheering Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the “Persian Chavez” who should serve as a model for “the rulers of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.” Amazingly enough, she is the editor of the zine of the Monthly Review.  And for the pro-Iraqi-resistance “left,” there’s the New Left Review and its many expressions of solidarity with what it calls the “Iraqi maquis,” on the grounds that the Iraqi resistance has the moral authority of the French resistance during World War II, and the U.S. . . . well, you can complete the analogy easily enough, I’m sure.

How bad have things gotten?  Well, when you’ve got an American graduate student writing a love poem to Hezbollah, you know things are pretty bad out there.  I’m sorry to see that Ms. Lucas and her poem have lately become the toast of the right blogosphere—and I’m sorry for any number of reasons, not least of which is that this kind of attention can’t be good for Ms. Lucas’ health or peace of mind.  Another is that in the wake of Israel’s pulverization of much of Lebanon, I see another perfect political storm brewing, the like of which I sensed in early 2002: a crazed, radical kleptocrat-theocon administration in power, a volatile geopolitical crisis, and a “radical” (that is, reactionary) “left” opposition (International Neo-Stalinist ANSWER then, “we are all Hezbollah now” now) that couldn’t be more foolish or more destructive of the legitimate goals of a truly global, truly democratic left.  (No, not the left of those Euston fellows!  They botched the job with all their prowar-in-Iraq apologetics, and I didn’t sign their chatty, scattershot little manifesto.  But the straight-off-the-cliff pseudoleftist phenomenon to which they were trying to respond is quite real, more visibly so in the UK than here.)

And how in the world do things get this bad on the left?  Over the course of the week I’ll offer a couple of suggestions, and I’ll start with this one: in some quarters of American life (very few, needless to say), people operate under the strange assumption that the political position calling itself the “leftmost” position is necessarily the most virtuous, and that people like me back off from the “leftmost” position either because we don’t have the moral courage to speak the unvarnished truth (that’s the benign interpretation) or because we are actively “aligning with power” (that’s the darker interpretation, advanced by, among others, frequent ZMag contributor Ed Herman, to whom we’ll return on Thursday).  Whenever and wherever that assumption is in play, you have the potential for some real mischief, as you’ll see in the next couple of installments.

The other reason things have gotten this bad, at least for the “radical” “left,” is that it has been decided—again, in some quarters, where the “leftmost” position is the most betterest—that the proper “left” position is an “anti-imperialist” one, and therefore all forces that are anti- the Empire deserve at least some degree of our support. A very smart essay by Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” critiquing this position, has been gradually making the rounds, and at the risk of doing some injustice to Professor Postone here, I’ll summarize his argument briefly: when the “anti-imperialist” forces are in fact organizations like Hezbollah or al-Qaeda or the Iraqi resistance, “anti-Americanism” is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Of course, some of this “radical” “leftism” is just the sloppy thinking of people who believe that in order to oppose Israel’s response in Lebanon, one has to endorse the other side—as has the Los Angeles chapter of the newly re-formed Students for a Democratic Society, which has apparently decided to bypass the early democratic years of the initial SDS and move right into the Weather Underground phase.  But here on this blog, where we condemn Israel’s response while desiring Hezbollah’s disarmament and wishing that all parties in the region would acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, we try to avoid that kind of sloppy either-or thinking.  We also think there’s more to it than just some sloppy thinking, and so, begging your indulgence, we begin Democratic Left week with a nod to the good people at Human Rights Watch, where they hold all parties to the standards that every democratic leftist should support.

Posted by Michael on 08/07 at 10:51 AM
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Friday, August 04, 2006

ABF Friday:  National Review edition!

The jury has reached a verdict . . . and without further ado, we bring you

THE TOP TEN CONSERVATIVE REGGAE SONGS OF ALL TIME

10.  Black Uhuru, “No Loafing”

A stirring call to action from Trenchtown’s most trenchant critics of the welfare state and the culture of dependency it fosters.

9.  Burning Spear, “The Fittest of the Fittest”

Winston Rodney (Burning Spear to you and me) is the man Jonah Goldberg should have consulted for his forthcoming work on Herbert Spencer.  Because nothing drops the Social Darwinist knowledge so effectively as this bouncy little ditty from the sunny Caribbean.

8.  Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Kaya”

“Got to have kaya now/ For the rain is falling.” A haunting hymn about the dangers of drug addiction from someone who’s been there.

7.  Junior Murvin, “Police and Thieves”

Later hijacked by the Clash and enlisted in that band’s extreme radical far-left agenda, this lilting melody is actually a powerful testimony to the “broken window” theory of urban social policy.

6.  Desmond Dekker, “Israelites”

Not sure what this one is about, but it certainly sounds important.

5.  Specials, “Concrete Jungle”

Urban decay and its remedy come together in this hard-hitting two-tone anthem.  “I have to carry a knife/ Because there’s people threatening my life.” More knives, less crime!

4.  Black Uhuru, “Rent Man”

This moving, somber song reveals the unintended consequences of rent control—for the sufferahs, yes, but also for the rent man himself, who cannot get a fair market price for his investments.  Woe to all the downpressors!

3.  Jimmy Cliff, “The Harder they Come”

I and I say no fraternity party would be complete without this classic!  A fiery song to be played loud every time some cut-and-run liberal talks about the “insurgency” or the “civil” “war” in Iraq.  Bring ‘em on!  And the harder they come, the harder they fall, one and all. . . .

2.  Steel Pulse, “Rally Round the Flag (Worth His Weight in Gold)”

O my people, this one needs no explanation.  Climb ye the heights of humanity!  Rally round the flag!

1.  Peter Tosh, “Stand Firm”

The title alone could be the official motto of George Bush’s presidency, and the searing lyrics suggest some of the core beliefs of the man who leads us through troubled times: “If you want to be in the light son/ You’ve got to love Jesus Christ son.” Faith-based jammin’ from one of the original masters of the genre!

Posted by Michael on 08/04 at 01:00 AM
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Thursday, August 03, 2006

For a good time, call

Curiously, both the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscriber only) and Inside Higher Ed ran pieces about RateMyProfessors.com last week.  You know, like Pixar releasing A Bug’s Life and DreamWorks releasing Antz in the same month.  These things happen.  It’s all a lattice of coincidence, you know.

In a lively essay titled “Let’s Sue,” graduate student Eric Strand tells of his reaction to being labelled “strange and awkward” on RateMyProfessors by one of his former students.  Having moved through the stages of anger, anger, anger, and being royally pissed off, he is now ready for resolution, by means of a class action lawsuit, “Professors, adjuncts, and graduate students of America vs. RateMyProfessors.com.”

Along the way, he writes,

RateMyProfessors is viewed seriously or semi-seriously by important people and institutions. Our campus newspaper occasionally dismisses the site’s importance but says that students should consult it when selecting courses. . . .  Most stunningly, some instructors I know have been told that their ratings are read in order to track their performance.

And in IHE, the inimitable Terry Caesar writes,

From a reader’s point of view, who cares if these comments are accurate? They’re fun to read. From a colleague’s point of view, who cares if just about any comments are just? They’re irresistible to read, like gossip. RATE opens up the whole evaluative process insofar as teaching is concerned. Suddenly students get to say what they really think, not just to themselves but to a potential audience of thousands. Rather like guests on certain afternoon television talk shows, individuals feel inspired to be more recklessly candid.

This is an odd thing to say, since students “get to say what they really think” on ordinary course evaluations as well: we professors don’t get to see those evaluations until well after the semester has ended and all the grades are turned in, and those evaluations, at least at Penn State and Illinois, are not purely quantitative.  They give students far more space for commentary than RateMyProfessors does, and those written evaluations are read by our department heads (and, of course, by us).  At Illinois, the written evaluations took up one side of the page, the quantitative # 2 pencil bubble-filling the other; at Penn State, the written evaluations are on a separate sheet of their own.  I read all of mine carefully, especially the ones that make constructive suggestions about how to improve the course (something you certainly won’t find on RateMyProfessors).  But it’s an even odder thing to say when you realize, as Caesar notes with astonishment ten paragraphs later, “in fact, students at RATE don’t even have to be students!”

Do tell!  You’d think people would take the site a bit less seriously, right?

Ah, wrong.  For hardened culture warrior David French, over at the National Review’s Phi Beta Cons, even Caesar’s essay is a “screed” and a “rant”: “One of the more amusing recurring elements of Scott Jaschik’s excellent Inside Higher Ed is the occasional professors’ screed against RateMyProfessors.com. The most recent version of this rant discusses the high correlation between easy grading and high scores on ‘Rate.’” And French concludes that “in the aggregate, all of these seemingly random evaluations actually add up to something important.” It’s good to see people sticking up for intellectual standards and things. 

And French isn’t alone.  This past February, in the Chronicle, Rob Franciosi wrote an essay that, while complaining about “how invalid these RMP rankings are; how little they have to do with learning or real teaching effectiveness; how there’s no way to guarantee that the contributors are even students, let alone students who have taken your class,” nevertheless served up a confession and an admonition:

And, yes, I realize this RMP.com habit, like my compulsive e-mail checking, should be resisted; but I can’t seem to kick it. As with so much on the Internet, the RateMyProfessors site simply offers this distracted academic too many easy pleasures. . . .

It’s not surprising that students not only contribute to RateMyProfessors.com but also scrutinize the rankings before they register for classes. Several have told me they choose instructors at least partly based on what they read on the site.

People, people, people.  Have you all been smoking Ye Olde Cracke Pipe?

A couple of years ago, I used to check RateMyProfessors.com—until I realized I was being cyberstalked by a Dinesh D’Souza obsessive.  At first, my ratings on the site conformed pretty closely to the ratings I’ve received over twenty years of teaching.  The first one was posted in November 2003, and while it didn’t say anything about the intellectual content of the class, it was pleasant enough to read:

He is so funny and makes the class go by with ease, very enjoyable.

The next two (rating the same class, English 232) were posted in March and April of 2004, and they were 5s with no written elaboration.  The next one, for English 467, was the nicest yet:

He is one of the funniest, smartest teachers I’ve ever had. I wish the class could have been more forthcoming in discussions...he deserved better from us!

So I was cruising along, hmmm hmmm hmmm, no problems in the world.

And then my D’Souza fan showed up, and things started getting weird.  (You can find a little synopsis of my writings on D’Souza right here.  It includes the cheeky sentence, “no one has noted that Dinesh D’Souza is himself the most visible contradiction of the Right’s major premise in the academic culture wars—namely, that campus conservatives are persecuted by liberal faculty and intimidated into silence.") Here’s my next evaluation on RateMyProfessors.  It is decidedly harsh:

He has written that a particular “conservative” academic’s success disproves singlehandedly that conservatives aren’t discriminated against. An average 14 year old can see at least 2 things that are absurd in this statement. Moron!

D’Souza isn’t an academic, but let’s not sweat the small stuff.  Here’s the next entry:

Unbelievably juvenile sense of humor. See his website if you don’t believe me.

This one happens to be accurate, though it doesn’t say much about my teaching.  It was accompanied by the lowest numerical score possible.  Suddenly, along with my 4, 5, 5, and 5, I had myself a pair of ones.  That threw off my average some.

And this kind of thing went on with some regularity over the next few months, both on RMP and on Amazon.com.  It was the same stuff every time:  I was juvenile, I was arrogant, I was illogical, I had dismissed a certain conservative writer.  The last “evaluation” in this vein is dated May 2005:

Never has such arrogance mixed with such ignorance. He thinks he is intelligent, and few human beings I have ever met are less capable of thinking logically and rationally.

This was nearly identical to (a) an earlier posting on RMP and (b) a “review” of one of my books on Amazon, which the good people at Amazon eventually removed because it had nothing to do with the book under review.  (Actually, the Amazon story is a bit more complicated, and I tell the full version here.  Note, though, that back then I didn’t think the RMP stuff was important enough to mention.) So RMP deleted the earlier posting and kept the more recent one.  In the meantime, I received a few tepid-to-negative reviews that weren’t quite in this vein, and might very well have come from actual students (I’ll get to that in a second).  And later in 2005, I got a brief “great teacher” and a more detailed

I graduated from PSU in 03, I found Prof, Berube to be mos helpful and understanding. He makes the unfamiliar, familiar and reponds to all inquiries clearly and quickly. I wish there were more like him. I learned more in his class than in most others, I would take his class again in an instant.

So it looked as if my D’Souza guy had given up for now.  I breathed a sigh of relief, and relaxed and learned to accept the occasional outburst of “moron!”

And then late last year another hostile review appeared, almost as libidinally invested as my D’Sousa fan:

What an arrogant jerk. Every class with him was painful as he tried to be funny/show off his knowledge. No doubt he’s smart, but the kind of smart where he enjoys lording it over everyone else. His lectures ramble. This class alone made me rethink my english ambitions, because I couldn’t stand the idea of a career around people like Berube.

Well, I thought, let it not be said that I have failed to do my part to ease the job crisis for Ph.D.s in English! But at first I wasn’t sure that this was a real student, because (a) I’ve gotten poor reviews in graduate seminars before, but nothing so visceral as this, and (b) I don’t lecture in seminars anyway.  So I decided to re-check the my official evaluations I’d gotten for English 501 (fall 2004), because that wasn’t a seminar, and sure enough, in that class of 24 students there was one person who utterly despised me—not the course (this he merely considered a waste of time), but me.  I was arrogant, I paraded my knowledge, and . . . though you won’t find this on RMP . . . I spent all of class time talking about my own work.

Goodness gracious, that was brutal!  OK, some explanation is in order.

English 501 is the introduction to graduate study in English at Penn State.  It’s a required course.  It is sometimes referred to as “boot camp,” and in one especially unhappy year before my arrival, when Penn State admitted 35 students to the program instead of the usual 25, the rumor (groundless, but potent) went around that 501 was going to be the means by which the department winnowed out some of the new recruits.  Look to your right, look to your left, this time next year one of your buddies will be dead.  It wasn’t a happy time, I’m told.

The course was taught for a couple of years thereafter as a kind of Welcome to the Profession, here are some guest lecturers on medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, Victorian, etc., here’s the library, here’s the rare book room, and so on.  And then in early 2003, my department head noticed that I’d recently written an essay in which I argued that

training in contemporary literary theory should be one of the central purposes of graduate education in English.  I want to emphasize the literary in that theory:  I mean, more or less, the history of twentieth-century theories of literature and of textuality, beginning with the work of Viktor Shklovsky and his fellow Russian Formalists (including Mikhail Bakhtin’s and V. N. Volosinov’s replies thereto) and running through Marxism, psychoanalysis, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism/deconstruction, feminism, reader-response, New Historicism, postcolonialism, and queer theory—in other words, from the origins of a discipline-founding theory of the literary (this discipline-founding aspect is what would distinguish Shklovsky from Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Matthew Arnold, or, for that matter, John Crowe Ransom or Northrop Frye from Sir Philip Sidney) to the moment of the breakdown of the very idea of the specifically literary text under the pressure of structuralism and poststructuralism.  I believe more firmly with each passing year that this history of twentieth-century theories of textuality should be something like a lingua franca shared by advanced graduate students, not only because it gives them access to myriad ways of reading literary and social texts, but also because, if it’s taught in a sufficiently historically and institutionally grounded way, it gives entrants into the discipline a good general idea of the history of the discipline as we can plausibly claim to know it.

He promptly asked me to take over 501 the next fall.  I hemmed and hawed (and rambled), knowing that 501 was easily our students’ Least Favorite Course Ever, and that it had killed many a professor doughtier than I.  But I was eventually convinced that it was the right thing to do, particularly if I actually believed any of the things I’d written.  So in the fall of 2003, I taught the course for the first time.

It didn’t go very well.  The evaluations showed it, too.  The course was rated a lowly 4.95 on Penn State’s seven-point scale ("but that’s good for 501,” I was reassured, not very reassuringly), and though I squeaked out a 5.95 on the instructor rating (my second-lowest score in my five years here), some of the written comments suggested that the course needed serious rethinking.

So I rethought.  While I kept the intro-theory component—and, dear readers, eventually translated some of my class notes into the widely-deplored “Theory Tuesday” series that appeared on this blog last year around this time (in four installments, one, two, three, and four)—I re-introduced the guest lectures (medieval, early modern, etc.) and devoted a couple of classes to talking about practical matters like revising seminar papers for conference presentation and submitting essays to journals.

I promise you all that I spent exactly zero time talking about my own work.  For I am not, in fact, responsible for most of twentieth-century literary theory, almost all of which was written by people other than myself.  And I did not lord it over any of my students—or, I should say, I did not try to.  Nor did I punish anyone or give out any bad grades, because, after all, the course was only an introduction to the field. As far as I’m concerned it shouldn’t be graded at all.

Actually, I fondly thought, I had done all right the second time around: the course evaluations for 2004 were markedly better than the previous year’s.  The course got better, from 4.95 to 6, and I got better, from 5.95 to 6.59 (16 sevens, 4 sixes, 1 five, 1 four, 1 three, and I’m willing to bet that this last guy is the one who showed up on RMP).  And this confirmed something Michael Levenson told me years ago, in the course of giving me some of the best dissertation-director advice I’ve ever heard: as I prepared to move my family to central Illinois, he told me that you very rarely get a course right the first time.  It’s like the first pancake.  Only when you’ve cooked the first pancake do you know what to do with the following pancakes.  (I have, by the way, retroactively apologized to many of my fall 2003 students in 501 for burning them on one side.) Getting a nasty evaluation for the 2004 class, then, was rather ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense of the term.

So that’s my RateMyProfessors experience over the years.  A mixed bag of reviews from actual students, combined with three or four flames from a former cyberstalker and a big fat rotten tomato from a graduate student who found me unbearable.  I now refer to the site as BathroomWalls.com, and consider it about as reliable as the information about professors you can find on those sites.

The truly weird thing about all this is that we actually have real course evaluations on file, and at Penn State and Illinois (if memory serves), these are mandatory for all professors.  You want a taste of reality?  I can give you a taste of reality.  I received just under 750 evaluations at Illinois, and on that five-point scale, the breakdown was

5:  440
4:  223
3:  66
2:  16
1:  2

for a 4.45 average overall.  At Penn State,

7:  95
6:  75
5:  22
4:  6
3:  6
2:  0
1:  0

for a 6.22, which, you’ll notice, is just a teensy bit off the 4.45/5 ratio (.888857 as opposed to .89).  So we’re talking about some serious consistency here over seventeen years (I think my four years of evaluations in graduate school were a bit lower).

Not that I’m keeping track, mind you!  But I did have to submit the record of my Illinois teaching evaluations for consideration when I was a candidate for this here job at Penn State, so I actually do have a file drawer full of them.

The written evaluations have been remarkably consistent as well: most students write positive things about what they learned or what they enjoyed most, though I’m not in the first tier of professors, where the truly amazing and world-transforming teachers reside, with their dazzling strings of 4.9s and 6.85s (one of whom happens to live in this very house, though she is mysterious and elusive).  Every year, a couple of students find me not to their taste, and a couple more students complain that I talk too fast.  De gustibus non disputandum est, of course, but the claim that I talk fast is just so much arrant nonsense.

Anyway, if you’re a college professor, or on your way to becoming one, the next time someone you know takes RateMyProfessors BathroomWalls.com seriously, please send them this post.  And if you’re not a college professor—hey, if you’re not a college student!—remember, you can write practically anything you like on RMP, about me or anyone else.

Posted by Michael on 08/03 at 12:35 PM
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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

How to do things with words

If you read blogs, like this very funny one or this very serious one, then you surely know by now that Rep. John Dingell (D- Michigan) has gotten his very own Two Minutes Hate, courtesy of the industrious citizens of Wingnuttia.  On Monday, on Time magazine’s Blog of the Year (special 2004 “we don’t know anything about blogs” edition), the following announcement appeared:

Yesterday, Representative John Dingell of Michigan appeared on a Detroit television program along with Republican Candice Miller. They discussed the crisis in Lebanon; Dingell proclaimed himself neutral. “I don’t take sides for or against Hezbollah; I don’t take sides for or against Israel.” Asked, “You’re not against Hezbollah?” Dingell answers, “No...”

I’ll turn the play-by-play over to Gavin of Sadly, No!:

But what’s this? Here’s part of Dingell’s last remark that mysteriously got cut off, before the clip popped up on Redstate.org . . . and metastasized to Pamalamaland (”Folks please pass this on to your neighbors, co-workers, anyone. We are in the fight of our lives. And the jihad is the defining issue of our times”), and then to Powerline, where bad ideas so often go to die.

Q: You’re not against Hezbollah?

DINGELL: No, I happen to be—I happen to be against violence, I think the United States has to bring resolution to this matter. Now, I condemn Hezbollah as does everybody else, for the violence.

. . . Waiting for that correction, John. Holding our breath ’til we turn blue. [Hhfp!]

Well, you can exhale, Gavin, because John’s buddy Scott chimed in yesterday with this correction, under the title “Dingellbats”:

I see now that the very silly far-left site “Think Progress” criticized me for posting an excerpt from Dingell’s appearance. The excerpt was emailed to me by a reader; I considered the possibility that it might be misleading because of something that came before or after. I concluded, however, that Dingell had plainly declared himself neutral between the state of Israel and the terrorist group Hezbollah, and that nothing that preceded or followed could change that disgusting fact. The longer excerpt posted by the loons at “Think Progress” confirms that I was right.

Now, I don’t usually go around decrying the decline of intellectual standards in America and all, but I do think it was a mistake for Minnesota to drop the “verbal comprehension” part of the bar exam.  For one thing, “Think Progress” is not a “very silly” site.  It is not even a member of the “very silly” party, which, as we all know, has long been dominated by Fafblog.  And although Think Progress has, on occasion, called for the smashing of the state, the abolition of private property, and the formation of autonomous workers’ councils, I don’t think it really merits the designation “far-left,” because it waffles unacceptably on the world-historical sagacity of the Great Leap Forward.

And yet it seems to me that the Power Rangers and the Washington Post Farm Team at Redstate aren’t even trying very hard any more.  All they did was recycle a truncated clip.  Dingell said, “No, I happen to be—I happen to be against violence, I think the United States has to bring resolution to this matter. Now, I condemn Hezbollah as does everybody else, for the violence,” and they quoted Dingell as saying “No.” I think that’s just lazy.

With just ten minutes of creative anagrammin’ labor, you could take Dingell’s remark and make it into this --

No, I happen to be—I happen to love Hezbollah and think it’s great, as does everybody else, for the violence

using only a fraction of the letters Dingell has provided! (Note that you can form “love Hezbollah and think it’s great” without even touching “the United States has to bring resolution to this” and taking only the “d” from “condemn.”) In only two short sentences, Rep. Dingell used twenty different letters, some of them repeatedly—more than enough rope to hang him with!

So if you’re a right-wing blogger, what are you waiting for?  Get to work!  Remember, the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy blogs!

Posted by Michael on 08/02 at 11:02 AM
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