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Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Finals!

Jamie takes part one of his French II final today.  Wish him luck!

And as for those other finals:

Three things about this clip are awesomely awesome.  One, “because of the excitement, the CBS television network pre-empted its prime-time regular programming to carry this game.” Two, there is no music in the world like early-70s sports highlights background music.  And three, the unreadable clock at the old Chicago Stadium, which makes its first appearance at 2:38, just after Lemaire’s world-transforming goal from 80 feet out.

Oh, yes, the action is pretty good, too.  Note Pappin’s reaction to Dryden’s insane kick save at the 4:00 mark—one suspects that Pappin relived that painful moment in his dreams many, many times.  I have one question, though—who’s “Henry Richard”?  I wonder if he bears any resemblance to this guy.

(Oddly, this account of Richard’s stormy relationship with short-lived coach Al MacNeil underplays the drama going on behind that series:  “Richard was a veteran player on that 1971 Montreal team, and his ice time was not what he was used to. After game 5 of the Stanley Cup finals with Chicago Richard boiled over, calling Montreal coach Al MacNeil ‘incompetent’ and ‘the worst coach I’ve ever played for.’” Um, MacNeil had benched Richard in game five.  Which made his exploits in game seven all the more delicious.)

Two things from jazzbumpa’s comment 66 in the previous thread:

Quenville throws tantrums like a petulant 2 Yr old.  When I pointed that out during last year’s play-offs, you agreed with me.  (I just spent the week end with a fun 2 Yr old - quite a refreshing experience.)

Yes, I agreed with you about that incident, but that’s partly because Quenneville’s disastrous outburst in last year’s conference finals was so anomalous.  I’ve followed him since he got his first head-coaching gig in St. Louis, and he was always calm, cool, and collected.  His Blues teams were disciplined and always stayed classy (except for that Pronger kid).  So when he lost it in game 4 against Detroit, it was as if his whole team went down the tubes with him.  But no, he doesn’t make a habit of that kind of thing.

Anyway, did you see Hartnall take a running elbow smack into the back of one of the Hawk’s heads last night?  What can that be other than an intent to injure.  At least it got called, which was also refreshing.

Yes, it appears that for the very first time in his career, Scott Hartnell got called for throwing an elbow to the head.  His previous 388 unpenalized elbows to the head notwithstanding, he went to the box and felt shame.  But the Hawks won’t get that call tonight, just as they didn’t get it in games 1-4.

And here’s an idle question.  Pittsburgh likes to think of itself as a tough town, a steel town, a hard-workin’ burg where real men eat real food.  Philadelphia likes to think of itself as a tough town, too, full of nasty Phillies and Eagles fans and Broad Street Bullies and cheesesteaks wiz wit.  And yet the Penguins have always been exclusively a “finesse” team, which, as King Kaufmann once explained, is code for “a team that listens to show tunes in the locker room.” And everyone involved with the Pittsburgh franchise, including the fans, is cool with that.  Three Stanley Cups can’t be wrong!  Whereas the Flyers simply can’t help themselves.  Even when they have some real finesse-type talent to their credit, like Briere and Gagne, it’s as if they just don’t feel adequate out there unless they’re also stocked with an array of cheap-shot artists (from Bobby Clarke to Hartnell and Pronger) and murderous psychopaths (from Dave Schultz to Dan Carcillo).  On that note, here’s a hello to namesake Craig Berube, the former enforcer (seventh all-time on the Feel Shame list!) who’s now a Flyers assistant coach.

Go Hawks!  Win tonight and spare us 48 hours of chatter about what happened to you all in 1971.  Because if I hear one more time about Hull’s shot hitting the crossbar instead of giving Chicago a 3-0 lead, I’m going to give someone an elbow to the head.

Posted by Michael on 06/09 at 10:51 AM
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Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Rambling

Hockey is the only source of good news in the entire world.

Litbrit sums it up nicely, i.e. terribly, as do George Friedman and Rebecca Traister. And then there’s Gary Coleman.

Really, I was going to try to write something this week about how the financial collapse of 2008 and the Gulf disaster of 2010 are such enormous, systemic failures—so clearly the result of deeply dysfunctional institutions in which both the primary players and the “regulators” were rotten to the core—that they should have provoked sweeping, wholesale reviews and radical changes in business as usual.  We’ve known for some time that there will be no radical changes in business as usual on the financial front.  I’m guessing that we’re not going to see any radical changes in the oil industry or in American energy policy either.  I could be wrong—it’s just a wild guess.  But for almost two years now I’ve been haunted by one sentence from a blog comment by Roger Gathman—“I figure we are in the Soviet endgame zone—say, USSR, 1985, with trivia pursuing corruption as one institution after another fails.” Perhaps President McCain is our very own neo-Konstantin Chernenko, and in 2012 President Issa can be our neo-Boris Yeltsin.  We already have our neo-Chernobyl, thanks.

As for U.S. policy with regard to Israel, of course it is possible to hope that the attack on the Gaza flotilla will be the tipping point that finally provokes a sweeping, wholesale review and a radical change in business as usual.  Last I looked, Turkey was a NATO ally, after all.  You’d think that would count for something.  But for some reason I’m not giving in to that hope.  And I’m not writing that post about total system failures, either.

So that leaves the Stanley Cup finals.  You’ve probably heard that teams who go up 2-0 at home are 31-2 since the Pleistocene.  I also heard someone (Doc?  Olczyk?  Pierre?) note that the last time a team won the first two at home and lost the Cup was last year.  Odd, isn’t it, that no one remembers the other time? No, wait, Cliff Koroll remembers.

This series is going to get very interesting when the scoring lines show up.

Well, I’m off for a while.  Off to this thing, then that thing, then the other thing.  Notice that all these conferences and meetings are taking place at the same time, which poses something of a logistical challenge for me.  Bus to Philly, Amtrak to DC, Metro to College Park, Metro back, bus from DC to State College (no, there’s no way to combine a train to Harrisburg and a bus from Harrisburg if I want to get back by Sunday night, which I do).  Next week, more fun!  Back to the AAUP, then to the CHCI.  So, in other words, my mid May-mid June schedule consists of UCI followed by the MLA, SDS, AAUP, ADE, AAUP, and CHCI.  The MLA has done a few good things lately, and I’ll try to find the time to tell you about them.

Posted by Michael on 06/02 at 08:53 AM
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Friday, May 28, 2010

ABF Friday:  Off Piste edition!

Why do we call it the “off piste” edition?  Because, arbitrarily but funnily enough, today’s installment of Things I Write is over here, off piste.  Have an ABF weekend, everyone.  And sing!

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu;

Ne swik þu nauer nu.

The last line means “and you don’t stop.” Variant: throw your hands in the air, and wave ‘em like you just don’t care.

(That one was for you, Dr. Virago, if you’re still using the internets.)

Posted by Michael on 05/28 at 10:32 AM
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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Video Thursday

My friend Chris Castiglia brought this to my attention the other night:

[Warning:  the language gets a little spicy toward the end, with a vorhanden here and an aufgehoben there.  NSFW—not safe for wissenschaft.]

It’s funny because it’s true!  I took Rorty’s Heidegger seminar in spring 1985 partly because I was told, in the fall of 1984, that I would need that seminar in order to understand what would be going on in the Derrida seminar scheduled for fall 1985.  I never took the Derrida seminar, though, which is why I remain mired in the metaphysics of presence to this day.  It’s ontotheological, I know, but I like it.

I also like this.  It is my second favorite ad in all of adland, next to everyone’s favorite ad, the Old Spice “the man your man could smell like” bit.  But what I really like is that at 0:11…

the standard disclaimer appears, “Professional driver on closed road.  Do not attempt.” Because I would hate for you kids today to go careening around the surface of Ganymede in your hip-hoppity moon rovers just because you saw someone do it on TV.

Posted by Michael on 05/27 at 06:28 AM
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Monday, May 24, 2010

Civil rights

OK, now back to some old business.

Megan McArdle, you’ll recall, replied to this old post from April 13 later the very same day. Like so:

Michael Berube’s response to my writing about the lack of conservatives in the cultural elite is, perhaps unsurprisingly, just a tad overwrought, and not very responsive.  Frankly, I sort of wondered if he didn’t outsource it to an undergraduate.  He makes some decidedly unhilarious jokes—conservatives!  country clubs! take my wife—please!—and then proceeds to berate me for not mentioning Jim Crow.

Yes, obviously, Jim Crow was an important means of maintaining segregation.  And yet, in the three quarters of the country where it didn’t exist, we still didn’t have a lot of blacks getting hired into positions of responsibility by white institutions.  How could that be?  It’s almost as if there was some other force . . . maybe we could call it “discrimination” . . . that was keeping people out of whole areas of employment.

Get me the New York Times! The world needs to know about this!

Yep, that’s one finely-wrought response there, coming from someone who kicked things off by likening the position of conservatives in academe to that of African-Americans in the 1950s seeking jobs as bank managers.  But I have to admit that the bit about whether I outsourced my post to an undergraduate stings, and stings badly.  I have been called out by one of the finest prose stylists on the Internets. Who else could have written

Obviously there’s been an enormous amount of ink shed about why this is, but my experience of talking to people who might have liked to go to grad school or work in Hollywood, but went and did something else instead, is that it is simply hogwash when liberals earnestly assure me that the disparity exists mostly because conservatives are different, and maybe dumber.

... all by herself without any help or outsourcing?  I guess that’s why Megan McArdle writes for the Atlantic and I don’t.  It’s a meritocracy out there, and like all libertarians, McArdle has only herself to thank for her success.

So what do readers think about her argument?  Here’s Mitchell Freedman, commenting on my blog:

I just responded to McArdle at the Atlantic.  She wants us to think Jim Crow is a solely southern phenomenon and of course that is horribly ignorant.

What I should have also added is that she then talks about structural discrimination as if that is something outside of Jim Crow, when it is part of Jim Crow.  Weird, really.

And then here’s Buzz, commenting at Crooked Timber:

Well, McArdle gets the best of this in her cogent response to this nonsense. The whole Jim Crow angle is obviously wrong because, as McArdle points out, even without the force of Jim Crow laws in most of the country, blacks still weren’t being hired for certain positions.

And so it is with conservatives in academe: even without the force of law, there is very real institutional and departmental bias against hiring people with certain points of view.

I feel sorry for your students, Bérubé, for having such an blinkered fool for a professor.

Hmmm, looks like opinions differ.  Surely both sides have their strengths and weaknesses.  We’ll have to call it a tie!

Which is fine by me, because I have no real interest in arguing with Megan McArdle.  It’s not terribly productive or illuminating.  More important, after reading that slacktivist post on the Procter and Gamble hoax, I don’t think it’s simply a matter of ignorance about Jim Crow or racism.  (I was serious when I said that discussion has changed my sense of how the world works.) It’s not even something specific to McArdle herself; there are just too many conservatives and libertarians out there complaining that they face structural discrimination in the “cultural elite” comparable to that of institutionalized racism in the pre-civil rights era.  You can try to tell them that this is absurd, but I’m getting the feeling that it’s a little like telling the evangelicals that Procter and Gamble doesn’t really donate a portion of its profits to the Church of Satan.

And Moloch knows, it’s not as if I haven’t tried!  Why, only a few years ago I wrote a whole entire book called What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Here’s a relevant passage:

It turns out that there’s something more serious and insidious going on here, and that—once again—race is an issue even though African-American scholars make up only five percent of all college professors nationwide (and half of those scholars teach at historically black institutions).  For much of the conservative complaint about “underrepresentation” is drawn disingenuously from the legal discourse of affirmative action; in the American Enterprise issue that announced the findings of the Horowitz/ Zinsmeister study, attorney Kenneth Lee, a member of the far-right Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, made the case in so many words.  “The simple logic underlying much of contemporary civil-rights law,” said Lee, “applies equally to conservative Republicans, who appear to face clear practices of discrimination in American academia that are statistically even starker than previous blackballings by race.” Even starker than previous blackballings by race: according to Lee, conservative scholars have it worse than did African-Americans under segregation and Jim Crow.  (This would mean, I imagine, that on some campuses there are fewer than zero conservatives.) It is a fantastic and deeply offensive claim in and of itself, but it becomes all the more offensive if you go back and look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to affirmative action programs in American higher education.

Better still, you might look at the history of conservatives’ opposition to desegregation across the board.  That would be instructive.

In November 2005, not long after I finished writing the book, National Association of Scholars president Stephen Balch appeared in Pittsburgh to testify in Pennsylvania’s very own Horowitz-inspired investigation of liberal bias in our public colleges and universities. The state legislature, Balch argued, “should expect to see the problem of intellectual pluralism addressed with the same vigor that the state’s universities are already addressing what they take to be the problem of a lack of ethnic and gender diversity.” So there should be an affirmative action program for conservatives—who, by the way, oppose affirmative action programs.  As Balch himself said in his very next sentence, “I’m opposed to according any preference to ethnicity or gender in academic hiring or admissions.” Yes, we got that part, thanks.

And that reminds me, in turn, of my old pal Dinesh D’Souza.

Fifteen years ago, I was asked by the journal Transition to review Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism.  You might remember that book for such pull quotes as “The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well” and “Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector. Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department.” (And now I wonder: why did he single out Procter and Gamble? Could it be ... Satan?) But you might not remember that the book’s concluding chapter called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act.  Here was my take at the time:

D’Souza’s rationale for repeal is clear:  “America will never liberate itself from the shackles of the past until the government gets out of the race business.” Now that racist discrimination against African Americans is largely a thing of the past—as D’Souza points out, “all the evidence shows that young people today are strongly committed to the principle of equality of rights”—government action can only produce a justifiable white backlash.  Drawing his inspiration from legal scholar Richard Epstein, D’Souza does not worry about freeing the private sector from antidiscrimination laws; for in a truly free market, racial discrimination would not exist at all, since “discrimination is only catastrophic when virtually everyone colludes to enforce it.” D’Souza’s case in point is major league baseball, about which he poses a truly novel thought experiment:  “Consider what would happen,” he writes, “if every baseball team in America refused to hire blacks.” Lest we are unable to imagine (or remember) such a state of affairs, D’Souza guides us step by step:

Blacks would suffer most, because they would be denied the opportunity to play professional baseball.  And fans would suffer, because the quality of games would be diminished.  But what if only a few teams—say the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers—refused to hire blacks?  African Americans as a group would suffer hardly at all, because the best black players would offer their services to other teams.  The Yankees and the Dodgers would suffer a great deal, because they would be deprived of the chance to hire talented black players.  Eventually competitive pressure would force the Yankees and Dodgers either to hire blacks, or to suffer losses in games and revenue.

There’s something disingenuous about D’Souza’s plans for integration, since D’Souza had argued earlier, citing Joel Williamson, that Jim Crow laws were “designed to preserve and encourage” black self-esteem.  But let’s assume, for the nonce, that D’Souza is serious here, and let’s assume also that franchises like the Celtics or the Red Sox of the 1980s could not win games without a sizable contingent of black ballplayers.  How precisely is this argument supposed to work in American society at large?  Are we supposed to believe that bankers and realtors don’t discriminate against black clients for fear that their rivals down the street will snap up all those hard-hitting, base-stealing young Negroes?  Or is it that when black motorists are tired of being pulled over in California they will simply take their business to the more hospitable clime of Arizona?

Ah, 1995.  A few outlying conservatives and libertarians were saying the Civil Rights Act was unnecessary because racism simply doesn’t make economic sense, and there was much wingnuttery in Arizona.  It was a different time, you understand.

So, you see, I’ve grown accustomed to hearing this kind of thing from a certain wing of the intellectual right.  Having tried their best to keep the Negroes out of universities (and sometimes the women too, as in the case of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton), and having opposed federal antidiscrimination laws, some of these good people are now terribly, terribly concerned about the possibility that they are being barred from the ranks of the cultural elite.  Well, they say the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, so I’m sure they will overcome someday. 

Posted by Michael on 05/24 at 09:00 AM
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Friday, May 21, 2010

Mister Answer Man:  Insane Clown Posse edition!

Dear Mr. Answer Man:  I am beginning to suspect that the letters you receive are not really letters from readers at all.  In fact, I am beginning to suspect that you make them up yourself, and then give the “letter-writers” names that you think are “clever.” Am I right?  --Mary Rosh

Mister Answer Man replies:  Ms. Rosh (if that is your real name), my letters are genuine real letters from readers.  All of them!

Well, not really.  But this one is—I received it in the electronical mail two days ago.  It’s from “Clueness in Kansas,” and he writes:

Dear Mr. Answer Man:  We’ve all witnessed just how badly the Republicans want Obama to fail. They’re doing everything they can to derail any advancement or improvement he might possibly be able to make, just to point out that he failed. They’ve demonstrated that they’ll latch on to anything that could in any way be construed as bad, and drive it into his heart. My question to you is this: Given the extent to which they want to ruin this man, why don’t they take advantage of the Tea Party Sea/BP Gulf oil fiasco, and start screaming that Obama is not going fast enough to switch us all to renewables? Obama is even not admitting just how bad the leak is! He has no idea how to stop it, no plans to make sure this never happens again, no clue how to clean this mess up, and no clue how much death and economic destruction this is going to cause. Why aren’t Republicans screaming that this great nation of ours cannot afford to wait for the “Democrats” to get off their high horses and “negotiate” in their back room deals, and “agree” to make a “decision” to make a “plan” that will somehow magically “fix” all of the planet’s problems, but not until they’ve achieved social “justice” for little Demitria down the street? Why aren’t Republicans using this disaster to their advantage, taking this opportunity to call for a change in this nation’s energy priorities?  --Clueless in Kansas

Mister Answer Man replies:  Dear Mr. Clueless, I am happy to report that you are aptly named.  Your entire question, from start to finish, presumes that Republicans will use “logic” and “reason” to characterize Obama as a failure.  While you’re right that Republicans could make Obama look silly by calling for a renewed emphasis on renewable energy, you’re “right” only in the sense that your point makes “sense.” You need to understand that from the perspective of today’s GOP, the important thing is not scoring “logic points” from this disaster.  The important thing is that the American people have to understand that this socialist Muslim black blackety black man, who pals around with terrorists and (with the help of ACORN) elevated an actual scary Muslim person to the post of Miss USA, is arrogantly bowing too low to foreign leaders.  Also, socialism.  If we are ever to address the problem in the Gulf, we will need to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.

This answer may not make “sense” to you.  But it is the right answer.  And because I understand that, people call me--

Yours sincerely,
Mr. Answer Man

P.S. Who is “Demitria”?  That sounds like a made-up name.

Dear Mister Answer Man:  Last month, the Globe and Mail published an interview with Camille Paglia in which she said,

This whole thing about global warming—I am absolutely incredulous at the gullibility of people. What is this hysteria over drowning polar bears? And finally I realized, people don’t know polar bears can swim! For me, the answer is always more facts, more basic information, presented without sentimentality and without drama. To inflict this kind of anxiety on young people is an outrage.

Polar bears can swim!  Mr. Answer Man, this is perhaps the most disturbing thing I have read all year.  I mean, I don’t expect much from Paglia.  I wasn’t the least bit surprised that she’s become a birther.  For many years she’s been a flibbertigibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown.  But this is perhaps the single most stupid thing I have ever heard from a college professor, and that’s setting the bar awfully high.  Do you think this is dementia, or is Paglia consciously trying to bait us, the way she does sometimes?  --Concerned in Calgary

Mister Answer Man replies:  On the Internets, it has become customary to dismiss Paglia’s rantings by suggesting that Salon likes the attention and the click-throughs.  But that tired, reductive Marxist explanation won’t wash here, because this has nothing to do with Salon.  So we need to look elsewhere.

There is a moment, earlier in the interview, that leads me to believe that Paglia is going for deliberate self-parody:

Do you have any impression of the landscape in Canada right now?

I’m not that familiar with Canada. But when I was at York University a few years ago, I thought, “Oh my god, they are so shallow. Such a backwater.”

It’s kinda priceless to accuse Canadians of shallowness by prefacing your remark with “I’m not that familiar with Canada.” You can’t make that kind of performative-contradiction shit up.  But in this case, I . . . I . . .

People don’t know polar bears can swim?

Sweet merciful greataunt of Moloch.  I got a whole penalty box full of nothin’.  And I’m supposed to be Mister Answer Man!  Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out how much Paglia knows about facts and information and science.

We will have to ask her how magnets work.

Posted by Michael on 05/21 at 04:58 AM
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