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Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Thug life

A number of readers have written to ask me how I feel about David Horowitz calling me a “thug” on yesterday’s radio show.  Well, if I thought for a moment that David knew what he was talking about, I would be mightily pleased with myself: if, by the end of the year, I can get Ann Coulter calling me a maniac and Tom DeLay calling me a crook, I’ll have hit the trifecta.  But, alas, He Who Shall Not Be Designated By His First Initial and a Drastic Truncation of His Surname probably doesn’t deserve that much credit.  Veteran readers of U. No.’s work know that he is prone to making embarrassing “mistakes” regarding things like “accurate” “quotes” and “actual” “facts,” so I’m inclined, in this case, to believe that the poor old man has me confused with this guy.

Besides, today is Disability Studies day!  I’m off to teach my seminar.  Here’s a snippet from one of last week’s readings.  Hey, Andrew Sullivan—this would be a good day for you to stop by my humble blog and do some readin’.  From Steven Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, two quick tunes.  A one:

The difference between strict hereditarians and their opponents is not, as some caricatures suggest, the belief that a child’s performance is all inborn or all a function of environment and learning.  I doubt that the most committed antihereditarians have ever denied the existence of innate variation among children.  The differences are more a matter of social policy and educational practice.  Hereditarians view their measures of intelligence as markers of permanent, inborn limits.  Children, so labeled, should be sorted, trained according to their inheritance and channeled into professions appropriate for their biology.  Mental testing becomes a theory of limits.  Antihereditarians, like [Alfred] Binet, test in order to identify and help.  Without denying the evident fact that not all children, whatever their training, will enter the company of Newton and Einstein, they emphasize the power of creative education to increase the achievements of all children, often in extensive and unanticipated ways.  Mental testing becomes a theory for enhancing potential through proper education.  (182-83)

And a two (remember, this little gem goes all the way back to 1981):

I have said little about the current resurgence of biological determinism because its individual claims are usually so ephemeral that their refutation belongs in a magazine article or newspaper story.  Who even remembers the hot topics of ten years ago: Shockley’s proposals for reimbursing voluntarily sterilized individuals according to their number of IQ points below 100, the great XYY debate, or the attempt to explain urban riots by diseased neurology of rioters.  I thought that it would be more valuable and interesting to examine the original sources of the arguments that still surround us.  These, at least, display great and enlightening errors.  But I was inspired to write this book because biological determinism is rising in popularity again, as it always does in times of political retrenchment.  The cocktail party circuit has been buzzing with its usual profundity about innate aggression, sex roles, and the naked ape.  Millions of people are now suspecting that their social prejudices are scientific facts after all.  Yet these latent prejudices themselves, not fresh data, are the primary source of renewed attention.

We pass through this world but once.  Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.  (60-61)

Golly, that Gould could write, couldn’t he?  I wonder why The New Republic didn’t do more to promote his work in the 1990s.

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THUG LIFE UPDATE:  Hey, kids, David Horowitz is at it again!  David’s froth-a-lot response to my op-ed has just appeared today, and contains a extra special bonus piece of stupidity, this one assisted by his ethically-challenged friend Art Eckstein:

Professor Berube himself has written that the notorious article by professors Mearsheimer and Walt, which blames the Jews for the war on terror and the Jewish lobby for controlling American foreign policy and the American media—a sort of contemporary version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—“has many virtues.”

I have?  Jeez, when did I write that?  I haven’t even read the Mearsheimer / Walt article!  Ah, here’s the answer:  I wrote a brief reply to Scott Jaschik’s Inside Higher Ed article about the Mearsheimer / Walt article.  Within a few hours of the appearance of Jaschik’s article on the morning of March 27, my dear friend KC Johnson showed up to bash the AAUP off-topic.  Here’s my reply to KC, in full:

I see that KC Johnson, as ever, wastes no time going after the AAUP, despite the many virtues of this article and despite Roger Bowen’s judicious remark about the blinders of scholars who are too ideologically entrenched on one side or another of the Israel-Palestine question. Reasonable people might remember that the AAUP opposed the AUT’s foolish boycott of Israeli scholars, but not our KC. He’s a culture warrior through and through, and doesn’t miss a single opportunity to rehearse a right-wing talking point. Those blinders must work pretty well.

KC, in return, responded with the sagacity that is his trademark:

I confess, Michael Bérubé has exposed me: I’m a pro-gay marriage, pro-choice, pro-Hillary Clinton “right-winger.” We’re a very large group. (I wasn’t aware, by the way, that sympathy for Israel was considered a “right-wing” position as well.)

Right on point, KC!  And then along came Art Eckstein with this stupefyingly dishonest comment:

Professor Berube finds that the Walt and Mearsheimer paper has “many virtues”. But Dennis Ross (Clinton’s leading Mideast negotiator) indicate it is the work of ignoramuses. But of course Ross is Jewish, Professor Berube—and you may have noticed that there are several folks on this blog, siding with you, who will therefore automatically discount it. You ought to think seriously about the company you’re keeping. . . .  That Professor Berube finds “many virtues” in a paper that rebirths The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a stunning statement—he should be ashamed of himself. Or, perhaps he should re-examine some of his assumptions.

And thence from Art Eckstein back to his friend David Horowitz, I am now an anti-Semite!  That’s how the smear factory works, folks!

But regular readers of this blog know what kind of shabby game Art is playing here:  he’s played it before, on this very blog, in fact.  He shows up and pretends not to know what the referent of “this” is (or worse, he actually doesn’t know, in which case one has to wonder how in the world he ever got a job in a university).  In this case, of course, he takes my praise for Scott Jaschik’s article (to which I referred, in a comment on Scott Jaschik’s article, as “this article"), and pretends that it is praise for the Mearsheimer / Walt article.

Eckstein should be ashamed of himself—for being incompetent, or for being something worse (we’ll leave that call up to him).  As for Horowitz, asking him to display shame about a claim like this (and by “this” we mean “this little stunt to which this here hyperlink refers") is like asking him to display some ordinary human decency.  Don’t worry!  We know better than to waste our time.

Posted by Michael on 04/12 at 08:52 AM
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