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They’re gonna put me in the movies

They’re gonna make a big star out of me. . . .

Well, maybe not.  The movie won’t be out until the end of the year, and I have no way of knowing whether I’ll really be in it.  But the other day I heard about a feature-length film called “Brainwashing 101,” and thinking oh come on, there’s no way to make a screenplay out of that Ben Shapiro book, is there, I checked out their website.

And discovered to my surprise that the two nice men who came to my house and interviewed me last year about this time, who gave their names as Evan Coyne Maloney and Stuart Browning of On the Fence Films, are actually, in real life, Evan Coyne Maloney and Stuart Browning of On the Fence Films! 

They said they were independent filmmakers traveling the country making a movie about campus controversies, allegations of liberal bias, and such things, and so naturally I thought, “aha!  independent filmmakers!  this means they must be men of the left– no doubt they also run a local food co-op and teach yoga and meditation classes at the People’s Center for Peace and Composting in their spare time.” I thought I would talk to them for a while about David Horowitz’s evil right-wing schemes, and then ask them for recycling tips, like, for example, can I include the hard-plastic orange juice containers with the soft-plastic gallon jugs of cider and the plastic-coated paper clips?

And so, dear readers, lulled into a false sense of complacency, I told them all our secrets about how we keep conservatives off the arts and humanities faculty and brainwash our students into becoming members of the Church of Chomsky!  What a fool I was, what a trusting fool!

Actually that’s not true.  They did indeed interview me, but I didn’t assume anything about them one way or the other; they didn’t ask any slanted or leading questions, and they were entirely pleasant throughout the hour-or-so interview.  I stumbled verbally a couple of times (once in the first ten minutes, when I was recapping Paul de Man’s argument about the closing couplet of Yeats’s “Among Schoolchildren”– weird, no?  but they asked me what deconstruction was and where it came from, and I was completely unprepared to do my Intro to Decon bit), but so far as I recall, I didn’t say anything outrageous or colossally stupid.  I’ve gone over my mental notes, and I don’t believe I said

– that the people who died in the World Trade Center were “little Eichmanns”
– that ROTC students are babykillers
– that anyone who blows up the Pentagon has my vote
or
– that fighters for global justice have no choice but to support the Iraqi resistance,

so I have a sinking feeling that I’m just not the kind of lunatic academic leftist the folks behind “Brainwashing 101” are looking for.  And why would conservatives and libertarians be looking for lunatic academic leftists?  Because LALs have become, in the past three years, one of the right’s most reliable recruiting devices, that’s why.  (Which reminds me: a hearty parenthetical thank you to Big Max for slapping down the Wingnutty Professor’s efforts to make Ward Churchill the poster boy for the American Left.) Eerily, just as the PNAC-inspired war in Iraq has swelled the ranks of al-Qaeda recruits instead of peeling away moderate Muslims from Islamist fanatics, so too do the far-left campus blowhards swell the ranks of Bush voters instead of peeling away centrists and independents from the radical neocon/theocon right.  Coincidence– or symbiosis?  This humble blog is not sure.

All the same, my “Brainwashed” interview might not be wholly useless.  I think my twenty-minute exposition on the relation between deconstruction and queer theory could make for a thrilling theater experience, so I implore Messrs. Maloney and Browning not to leave that segment on their cutting-room floor.  I think it screams “Golden Globe,” I really do.  And finally, though I don’t usually go around telling libertarians what to do– it makes them behave so wild and nasty!– I have to say that in my ideal universe, libertarians would not go around complaining that “Curriculums have been transformed to meet the demands of various ‘victim groups’ with politicized area studies such as Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Queer Studies - while the Western Canon, that body of literature and art thought to consist of the best that has been thought, written and otherwise expressed has been partially jettisoned in an attempt to rid the curriculum of the influence of ‘dead white males.’” In my ideal universe, libertarians would support the right of faculty in the arts and humanities to be just as queer, black, and feminist as they wanna be, and they would be a bit more hesitant about championing undergraduates who wear hoods and blackface on Halloween.  And, of course, they would not get so hysterical and hyperbolic about a little curriculum revision here and there.  Or, at least, if they were serious fans of the Western Canon they invoke, they would insist that the Plato-to-Nietzsche, Beowulf-to-Virginia Woolf surveys be required of the nation’s business and engineering majors as well as the left-leaning art-and-literature students who actually care about such things.  I think that would be great.  I personally love dead white males, and hope to become one myself someday!

Posted by on 02/02 at 10:01 PM

  1. I was at UNM on 9-11, and sure enough there was a prof who made a statement that day that anyone who could fly a plane into the Pentagon had his vote. Yes folks, there are such fools. He postured on behalf of his tenured academic freedom, acted annoyed by people who went snooping into his past, and then grovelled a bit to keep his job. Moral of the story: It’s hard to be a First Amendment martyr when you won’t allow people to hold you accountable for what you said.

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  12:42 AM

  2. It’s also hard to support the first amendment when you only use it to protect speech you don’t find repugnant.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  02/03  at  01:17 AM

  3. Yes! Six required semesters of Beowulf-to-Woolf for all business majors. For all law majors, that plus 80 hours of Plato-on-Socrates, I mean, Plato-to-Nietzsche in the original language! How will our youth be able to spot promoters of a homosexual lifestyle without having read the Symposium in Greek? After all it’s in the classics that we learn true moral values! I’m sure this blog can be enlisted for a broad coalition in support of Dead White Males for everyone.

    Posted by Idelber  on  02/03  at  02:43 AM

  4. D’oh!  I forgot to specify 80 hours of Plato-to-Nietzsche in the original languages!  My bad.  (Likewise with that full semester of Alcibiades-on-Socrates sex, too.  Gotta preserve those classical moral values.) And I should add, before I forget this too, that these enormous survey courses are the groundwork for the required senior seminar in contemporary Continental philosophy, Husserl to Derrida, and the capstone literature course featuring Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Clarice Lispector, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.  Thanks, Idelber!

    Obviously this will all require a massive new faculty hiring program.  So please, everyone, write to your state legislatures today if you care about the fate of the West!  Tell ‘em Pan the Goat-Boy sent you! 

    Posted by Michael  on  02/03  at  08:53 AM

  5. The thing that kills me about critics who bemoan the politicization of the curriculum and the dismantling of the Canon is that I get the sense that many of them really aren’t that knowledgable about the Canon that they champion. They bitch and moan about what students are reading, how they should be reading other stuff, etc., but if you ask them their thoughts on, I don’t know, Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, Austen, Dickens, Joyce, de Tocqueville, etc., they kind of look at you with a blank expression. I swear that their knowledge of the Canon is limited to the blurbs they pull from their Bartlett’s to throw into op-ed columns.

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  09:46 AM

  6. Borrow a fake salt-and-pepper goatee from somebody, STAT! Call costuming and get more tweed! Macramed throw rugs! Are we ready? OK, roll film!

    Posted by norbizness  on  02/03  at  10:08 AM

  7. These guys make the fight game look honest.  They’ve been knocked out repeatedly at the junior high and high school level, and now they get a heavyweight title shot?  Where’s the state commission?  Shouldn’t they at least have to out-point structuralism or knock out John Dewey on the undercard first?

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  11:16 AM

  8. The thing that kills me about critics who bemoan the politicization of the curriculum and the dismantling of the Canon is that I get the sense that many of them really aren’t that knowledgable about the Canon that they champion.

    Absolutely correct.

    This is, by the way, the converse of the phenomenon in which a writer is declared anathema without the speaker actually having read the writings of the person being anathematized. Rightists do this, for example, with Chomsky, and leftists with Rand.  People like Joe Conason do it with both.

    (That’s not to say that the criticisms of Rand aren’t largely accurate.)

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  02/03  at  11:57 AM

  9. I consider myself an integral part of the chain of transmission (silsilah, in Sufi terminology) of dead white European males - I am of European descent, and have even been to Europe, and while not quite dead yet I’m not as young as I used to be.  As was once said about the food in some Catskill hotel or other, “Not so good - and such small portions, too.” Likewise, life is full of tsuris [aggravation, for you few with less than a dozen words of Yiddish - I probably know two dozen, myself] and over too soon.  Or is it?

    Posted by mistah charley  on  02/03  at  12:00 PM

  10. I dare anybody to read Rousseau all the way through.  If you can do it without having a stroke and muscle spasms, you’re a better pan-sexual than I.

    I take great pleasure in the thought that he is Swiss-- the most earnest, boring, conservative people on the face of the ennui-o-sphere…

    Posted by Ryan  on  02/03  at  12:15 PM

  11. Dammit Michael, weren’t taught to keep your mouth shut when you were given the top secret, super duper, anti-Conservative handshake? After the film comes out, while you’re being flown coast-to-coast and getting the red carpet treatment, I’ll have to go back to reading Allan Bloom.

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  12:44 PM

  12. Maloney and Browning seem to be very concerned about “speech codes.” Clicking their link-through, I discovered Syracuse University, among other institutions, being chided for banning “sexual, sexist, or heterosexist remarks or jokes,” because, “Under rules such as these, if applied to the letter, major voices of public criticism, satire, commentary, and debate would be silenced on American campuses.”

    “There once was a man from Nantucket . . .” is some funny shit, but since when did it become a form of public criticism, satire, commentary, or debate?

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  12:48 PM

  13. I think you’re missing the more shameful thing, according to the Klein and Webster study.  If we take the study’s methods seriously, then there is hidden apathy on college campuses.  Business is the worst field, because Klein and Webster could only find party registrations of about a third of accounting and marketing profs at Berkeley and Stanford, and they could find only 4 of 13 Stanford music faculty with major-party registrations.  So there’s something rotting in the practice rooms at Stanford.  The greatest threat to patriotism on campus is the failure of faculty to vote at all!  Clearly, the solution is mandatory voter registration for all faculty on campuses, and then we put webcams in all the offices to see if they secretly dress up as Ché Guevara.

    Posted by Sherman Dorn  on  02/03  at  01:01 PM

  14. You sure are becoming popular. When are you going to start selling t-shirts on café press?

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  02:04 PM

  15. What do you mean, “start”?  I thought I was already selling t-shirts on café press as of last September.  That was supposed to pay for Nick’s college tuition!  Oooooh, when I get my hands on my marketing people I’m gonna be so mad. . . .

    Posted by Michael  on  02/03  at  02:21 PM

  16. Michael - do they feature your likeness? Are they in a Che Guevara style? Do the profits go to underpriveleged invertebrates, or to propping up your secret Calphalon fetish?

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  04:41 PM

  17. I like your suggestion on the Plato to Nietzsche survey for all!  I want to timidly echo that these people don’t understand the dead white men they’re defending.  I say “timidly,” because if the conservatives figure out that some of these dead white men were writing critiques of capitalism, leading people toward critical thought, and otherwise breeding young subersives, they’ll ban the humanities altogether.

    So these guys call themselves libertarians?  How curious.  I have always heard that libertarianism was just a trick to get the potheads to support the global corporate takeover…

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  04:42 PM

  18. Churchill, so far as I can tell, is a nitwit--his current defense of his remarks at Zmag mixes some legitimate Chomskyite attacks on US foreign policy with some morally idiotic comments implying that maybe some of the people at the WTC deserved to die.  Though I’d be happy if someone could convince me I’m misinterpreting him.

    That said, he seems to me to be in the mainstream of American thinking when it comes to just war theory.  He says you only target the guilty and if others die, it’s regrettable.  If we could only ban him from polite society along with, say, virtually every pundit from far right to center-left, it’d be something I could live with.

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  04:53 PM

  19. End of the year? It appears you can download the film from that link right now.

    Posted by Aaron Swartz  on  02/03  at  05:01 PM

  20. Oh, I see, that version of Brainwashing 101 is merely an interim offering while we wait for the theater version… How thoughtful.

    Posted by Aaron Swartz  on  02/03  at  05:04 PM

  21. I began to be very confused about Libertarians when I found out that they were staunch proponents of “English-only” legislation. If you are a true libertarian, shouldn’t you be against anyone trying to impose an official language? Wouldn’t the libertarian ideal being as many different people speaking different languages in as many different situations as possible? (Preferably to people who couldn’t understand what you were saying.) At least, that’s the way I see it.

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  05:08 PM

  22. So clearly Republicans are fully backing St. Johns University? 

    (Does their senior-level curriculum advance students’ general knowledge about humanity up to or just past 1900?  It’s been a while since I’ve looked...)

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  05:09 PM

  23. C’mon… The only way the Republicans would advocate teaching the canon was if they got to define it.

    I doubt they even really want that.  What they really want is no humanities whatsoever.  Just a nation of engineers, only able to think as engineers, with no ability to relate to words, concepts or ideas.

    This is not to denigrate the engineers, but I know I have rarely met one able to think clearly ouside of his expertise.

    Posted by Ryan  on  02/03  at  05:26 PM

  24. Oh, there are still some conservatives out there who truly love the arts and humanities-- old school arts and humanities, usually (not that degenerate stuff that happened after Picasso and Joyce got all weird on us), but I’ll settle for what I can get.  These would be the people who own all of Roger Kimball’s books and a couple of Hilton Kramer t-shirts from café press.  Some of them know how to use the “middle voice” in ancient Greek, and they’ve mastered Latin’s vexing fourth declension neuter (you know, nouns like cornu, cornus.  Come on, you remember-- where the nominative, dative, accusative, ablative and vocative singular are all cornu, and then the plural goes cornua, cornuum, cornibus, cornua, cornibus, vocative cornua, and I forget how to tell those -ibus endings from those of the third declension adjectives).  And yes, they like St. John’s and a handful of other colleges.  Problem is, they’re not reproducing themselves-- for whatever reason.  And so they are what cutting-edge evolutionary theorists call a “dying breed,” and when they go I will quite honestly miss them terribly.

    I devoted a paragraph to this phenomenon in my essay “The Utility of the Arts and Humanities,” by the way.  It goes like this:

    I sometimes think this is why the cultural right has urged us so often in the past decade to return to the eternal verities of the fine arts:  it’s part of a two-step plan to eliminate the arts and humanities from any serious social or curricular consideration.  For when it comes to defending the utility of the arts and humanities, the cultural right is every bit as and ambivalent and divided as is the cultural left . . . yet far more coordinated:  one bunch of conservatives–- we could call them the Allan and Harold Bloom Consortium–- wants us to return to the canon, to aesthetics, to the pursuit of beauty, instead of all this queer theory and multicultural pabulum.  These are the conservatives one finds clustered around the New Criterion and the Hudson Review, the ones who line their shelves with volumes from the Loeb Classical Library and decry the mediocrity of minor-city symphony orchestras.  The other bunch of conservatives–- let’s call them the Tom DeLay Gang–- doesn’t see any reason why taxpayers should support public universities, or why parents and trustees should support private universities, in which faculty and students fritter away their time pursuing pointless things like ‘beauty’ when there’s important work to be done and people need to see a return on their college investment.  These are the conservatives who, in alliance with economic libertarians, declaim from the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the ‘important work’ to be done consists of eliminating estate and capital gains taxes, gutting workplace regulations, and shredding environmental standards.  They like to have a few Allan Bloomers around to talk about the cultural superiority of the West and the depravity of Western academic intellectuals, but as long as those estate taxes are repealed they really couldn’t care whether college students are reading Cicero or comic books.  The two-step plan, then, consists of this: the first group will urge arts and humanities faculty to return to beauty, whereupon the second group will come along and cut all funding for the frivolous aesthetic pursuits of the arts and humanities.

    --As usual, folks, I am only half-kidding. 

    Posted by Michael  on  02/03  at  05:44 PM

  25. "People’s Center for Peace and Composting” - I love it!  Can I name my garden that?

    Posted by  on  02/03  at  06:24 PM

  26. What’s so wrong about voting for guys who crash jetliners into buildings? Everyone who’s been elected that way has never yet gone to war, overspent the budget or tried to personalize Soylent Security accounts for gullible young daytraders.

    Some of our best leaders were dead well before they reached the White House.

    Posted by Abdul & Andy  on  02/03  at  08:41 PM

  27. As a person who gained his horns not so much in learning Latin as in forgetting it I can claim some slight experience in reading Loeb’s Gallic Wars on both sides of the page (moreso one than the other-- but if ever there evolves a chick who is excited by Latin it was all on the left hand side).  With that experience I can pretty much generalize that any shit who uses Latin tags (aka George Will) is a shit who knows how to look up Latin tags.

    People who actually care about the Dead Language are far too interested in beauty to get involved in politics.

    Posted by Ryan  on  02/04  at  12:48 AM

  28. There are only a few conservatives left...what we are witnessing is the rise of the right-wing nihilist...ethics and morality are relative to the power of the Party’s alpha-male.

    Even the right-wing nihilist of Germany hated the weakness of German conservatives...they never dared to dream BIG.

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  02:13 AM

  29. Maybe if the Righty-Tighties succeed in cleaning all the Libruls out the ivory tower they will require a new survey of the other Dead White Guys (some only brain dead) - Nixon to Bush II: Modern Post-Second Reich Political Philosophy & Practice.  Vocabulary will be limited to 1,000 words, and the text must be memorized and repeated, over and over and over and over…

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  04:29 AM

  30. Whoops - I be tired.  Make that the Post - Third Reich.

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  04:31 AM

  31. I care about the Dead Language. Deeply. Kind of like
    I get delirious whenever Latin’s near. Lose all self-control, baby just can’t steer, wheels get locked in place & a stupid look on my face. Delirious.

    Or is that “delirium tremens”?

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  09:43 AM

  32. I wish they still taught the Dead Language in schools.  Then maybe we’d have some kids with vocabularies. 

    It was good to see a little “cornu” action.  I, too, have forgotten a lot of Latin, but it was my favorite subject years ago.

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  03:24 PM

  33. i thought this was already the format for Hannity & Colmes? heck, for cable news “debate” in general?

    -L.

    >Wouldn’t the libertarian ideal being as many different people speaking different languages in as many different situations as possible? (Preferably to people who couldn’t understand what you were saying.)<

    Posted by Librarian  on  02/04  at  04:00 PM

  34. Glad you liked the cornu action, Mr. Tragic Faulkner Character-- it’s probably obvious that we’ve had cornua on the brain around here ever since Pan the Goat-Boy showed up in the comments section back on Monday afternoon. . . .

    Posted by  on  02/04  at  05:01 PM

  35. I think you’ll find, gentle goat herder, that even fictional goat-boys have their horns removed in this paranoid society.

    Posted by Ryan  on  02/04  at  05:34 PM

  36. Glad you liked the cornu action, Mr. Tragic Faulkner Character-- it’s probably obvious that we’ve had cornua on the brain around here ever since Pan the Goat-Boy showed up in the comments section back on Monday afternoon. . . .

    Yeah, it’s been a veritable… what’s the phrase I’m looking for?… ah yes, a horn of plenty of caprid referents around here.

    But that’s fine. It’s nice to know that when the sex cops come looking for us pansexuals, we can count on Professor Bérubé to bacchus up.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  02/04  at  05:44 PM

  37. Yeah, man.  And did you hear about this person who compared a news reader to Eva Braun and said the only thing she regretted about 9/11 was that the attack did not occur on the NY Times building?  I hate these nutty people poisoning our minds at colleges...no, wait, she is on television and radio almost every single day poisoning minds throughout the land.

    So why no outcry for her job?  Why no outcry that she should be banned from the public space?

    The answer man knows the answer: IOOKIYAR.

    As Bobo of the NY Times says, “When will those Democrats ever learn?”

    Posted by  on  02/05  at  02:57 PM

  38. And one more thing:  Ever notice how few liberals and pro-labor economics professors there are?  Or how few liberals and anti-war people teach military history?  Hmmm...methinks there is a conspiracy against liberals, pro-labor, and anti-war historians in these departments!  Investigate!  Investigate!

    Posted by  on  02/05  at  03:02 PM

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