WASHINGTON, D.C. – One month after <a href=”http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=287809″>calling for a review of the video game ratings process</a> in the wake of “Manhunt 2″ receiving a “Mature” rating, Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) called for a thorough review of the video game “Enhanced Interrogation 2.” In a letter to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), the Senators explained that the recent change in the game’s rating in the U.S. opened the door to widespread release of the game, which depicts acts of prolonged torture.
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Michael
Well, it looks like <a href=”http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_11/012454.php”>everyone’s</a> making <a href=”http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/7789.html”>popcorn</a> for <a href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/books/07cons.html?ex=1352091600&en=ee37f9bbfe3bf306&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss”>the big Regnery suit</a>, looking forward eagerly to the discovery phase in which we may finally learn just how many copies of Regnery books are “sold” by being shipped from one wingnut outfit to another. As the <i>New York Times</i> reports:
<blockquote>The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.
“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.</blockquote>
<a href=http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/11/07/more-regnery-hilarity/>Jane Hamsher asks</a>, “Do these authors really not understand that it takes incredibly deep pockets to do what they’re accusing Regnery of doing, and that they are the beneficiaries of it?” Since the answer to this question is something like, “sadly, no,” it appears that this lawsuit might also suggest an answer to a question that has long vexed the philosophy of wingnuttery: <i>can there be a group of Regnery authors so stupid that other Regnery authors would notice?</i>
Elsewhere, in other wingnut welfare news, <i>New Criterion</i> editor/publisher Roger Kimball has <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/”>donned pajamas</a> and is now <a href=”http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2007/11/03/the_groves_of_academe_or_you_c.php”>complaining</a> that NYU is having a one-day conference about public toilets. No, you really can’t make this stuff up. (And the comments are priceless! –though some of them are probably subsidized by Regnery.)
Well, it’s been months and months since my last contribution to this fine blog, but this time, folks, I have a real excuse: the dog ate my August, and it’s all Janet’s fault. Janet, you may recall from months and months ago, is married to me. We learned in mid-July that Janet would need surgery to keep a couple of bones in her neck from pressin’ on her spinal cord. Those bones have now been put back in their proper places, and Janet’s recovering the way people do when they’re told that their surgery has been a “complete success.” (That’s how the neurosurgeon felt about it; now we gradually find out what the patient thinks.) As for me, the minute I learned the surgery would take place on August 28 and that Jamie would have no summer camp in August, I realized that I would very likely have to spend every spare waking second of my summer trying to finish a draft of the book I’ve been talking about for the past couple of years, <i>The Left At War: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hume to Human League</i>. So I made my apologies to my fellow CTers via “electronic” mail, and let them know that I probably wouldn’t be posting again for quite some time. And though I know this will mortify Janet no end, I thought I’d offer CT readers a closeup of the X-ray that started the whole thing:
I have <a href=”http://www.thecommonreview.org/fileadmin/template/tcr/pdf/berube61.pdf”>an essay</a> (.pdf) in the latest issue of <i>The Common Review</i>, on Harry Potter and my younger son’s adventures in the world of Hogwarts. But never mind me– the real news is that this is apparently the week for Azar Nafisi Football, Round Two!
On Monday, as I returned from my brief family vacation, I was greeted by the arrival of the latest issue of the <i>American Quarterly</i>; its lead essay, by John Carlos Rowe, is entitled “Reading <i>Reading Lolita in Tehran</i> in Idaho.” If you’ll recall Hamid Dabashi’s <a href=”http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm”>critique</a> of Nafisi from way back in ‘06 (elaborated later in the year in <a href=”http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10707″>this interview in Z</a>), Rowe writes, as he explains at the outset, “to work out the scholarly and historical terms that are often lacking in Dabashi’s more strictly political analysis.”
“Nevertheless,” he adds,
<blockquote>even as I wish to distinguish my approach from Dabashi’s, I want to agree at the outset with his conclusions. Although I do not think that there is a direct relationship between Nafisi’s work and U.S. plans for military action in Iran, I do think Nafisi’s <i>Reading Lolita in Tehran</i> represents the larger effort of neoconservatives to build the cultural and political case against diplomatic negotiations with the present governmentof Iran.</blockquote>
I’ll get back to Rowe’s essay in a moment, but first, here’s yesterday’s arrival in the mail: the <i>Common Review</i>, with my little essay– as well as an essay by Firoozeh Papan-Matin, defending Nafisi from Dabashi! Comme c’est curieux, comme c’est bizarre, quelle coincidence!
I believe my last post here — almost a month ago — was all about <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/03/time-check/”>not having enough time in the day</a>. Well, today my summer finally begins. I returned the last of my twelve graduate seminar essays, and I dropped off the First Child. I left him the car in which we drove 800 miles in one day, and flew back to central Pennsylvania the next day. Now that’s efficiency! We decided to forego <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/reporting_for_duty/”>the traditional father-son knife fight</a> upon parting, because I had myself a one-way airline ticket that I’d purchased only eight days before, and we figured I would attract quite enough attention in the airport without having to explain away sundry fresh flesh wounds.
Nick turned 21 last month, and will begin his senior year of college in the fall. I don’t know whether that makes me the CT contributor with the oldest child, but I figure I’ve got a shot at that dubious distinction. And so, for my return-from-little-hiatus post, I’m going to dilate a bit about parents and professors.
I teach my last class of the semester tomorrow, and what a semester it’s been. In the four months since I gave up full-time, long-form solo blogging, I have put my extra time to good use: freed from the demands of daily blog posting and comment-section maintenance, I found time to work out every day for 90 minutes, meditate for an hour, cook dinner nightly, and brush up on my French. As a result, I am fit and sane and centered, enjoying a balanced diet and the consolations of the <i>passé simple</i>.
Actually, that’s not true. And Bourdieu didn’t really appear in <i>Slap Shot</i>, either. This semester, neither did I: my Nittany Hockey League teams had 28 games scheduled this semester. I made it to <i>ten</i> of those. I worked out once, maybe twice a week. I last meditated in 1999. I last cooked in 1994. (Janet and I have taken to asking each other, “whom shall we dial tonight?”) And my French is just as abysmal as it ever was.
So what happened to all that time?
Among the many reasons to love the late Pierre Bourdieu, quite apart from the range and quality of his scholarly work, is the fact that he was willing to appear in the 1977 film <i>Slap Shot</i> as the character of Moe Wanchuk. He wrote about the experience many years later in <a href=”http://www.homme-moderne.org/raisonsdagir-editions/catalog/bourdieu/contref.html”><i>Contre-feux</i></a>, but most English-speaking readers remain completely unaware of Bourdieu’s brief career as a Charlestown Chief. I mean, talk about putting your cultural capital at risk:
“Hogging” is a very special kind of blogging, in which I blather on about hockey at great length. How great? Well, let’s find out — but let’s keep it below the fold, out of consideration for the feelings of people who couldn’t care less:
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OK, we’ve worked out a hockey playoff format. I’m going to cover the Eastern Conference, and the redoubtable Scott Lemieux of <a href=”http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/”>LGM</a> will provide your guide to the Western. Perhaps we’ll even include some vlogs of ourselves watching the games and offering commentary with a couple of large glasses of red wine! That sounds like good fun. I haven’t got my predictions ready just yet, because I’m not done with the best-of-777 coin-tosses I traditionally use for the first round of the playoffs. I’ll have those ready within the next 24 hours or so.
But when <a href=”http://scores.espn.go.com/nhl/recap?gameId=270408011″>the Islanders scrambled into the playoffs over the weekend</a> by sneaking a few pucks past the Devils’ little-known backup goaltender while everyone else was watching the Masters (how little-known is Scott Clemmensen? Apparently he got an email after the game from his parents, who were relieved to know of his whereabouts and thrilled to learn that he was still on the Devils roster), it occurred to me that I might do well, this year, to apply to the NHL playoffs the nearly-flawless prognosticatin’ method I have used in the past for the annual Grand Championship of American Foot-Ball, namely, <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/mister_answer_man_super_bowl_edition/”>predicting the outcome of the contest by determining which team is wearing the more masculine jersey</a>.
That’s when I realized something that has probably been obvious to many of you, even though (solicitous of my feelings as you are) you have refrained from telling me all these years: NHL logos suck. Really bad. Almost every one of them sucks, and collectively they suck in many different ways.
Well, I just had to give it a shot. But it turns out that this vlogging thing is a lot harder than it looks:
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Late last year, I had <a href=”http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i16/16a00801.htm”>lunch with David Horowitz</a> on the <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>’s dime, and this world-historical event was noted on <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/”>this very blog</a>. Alas, not everyone understood what I was trying to do in that little encounter. Moreover, those who did understand my approach, including various CTers, disagreed as to whether I did the right thing. <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181414″>Harry</a> thought I pretty much blew it, whereas <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2006/12/05/horowitz-v-berube/#comment-181433″>Henry</a> thought I took exactly the right tack. Which is fine, really, because as you’ve already gathered, I seem thoroughly incapable of winning universal assent to stuff I say. I’m tempted to blame this on <i>the very structure of language itself</i>, but much of the time it’s my fault; my tactics misfire, I misgauge the occasion. And sometimes people just disagree with me.
But here’s what I was thinking at the time: OK, I’ve agreed to meet David Horowitz. In this context — the <i>Chronicle</i>, as opposed to <i>Hannity & Colmes</i> — this grants Horowitz, and his complaints about academe, a certain legitimacy. My job, therefore, is to contest that legitimacy, and to model a way of dealing with Horowitz that does not give him what he wants: namely, (1) important concessions or (2) outrage. He feeds on (2), of course, and uses it to power the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Massive Persecution Complex he runs out of Los Angeles; and most of the time, we give it to him by the truckload. Liberal and left academics need to try (3), mockery and dismissal, and thereby demonstrate, as I put it <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/its_just_lunch/”>on my blog</a>, that when someone tries to blame tuition increases on Cornel West’s speaking fees, that person needs to be ridiculed and given a double minor for unsportsmanlike bullshit.
<a href=”http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03242007.html”>Alexander Cockburn wants to know</a>, and it’s sweet of him to ask. In his most recent essay, “Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now,” he writes:
<blockquote>But today, amid Iraq’s dreadful death throes, where are the parlor warriors? Have those Iraqi exiles reconsidered their illusions, that all it would take was a brisk invasion and a new constitution, to put Iraq to rights? Have any of them, from Makiya through Hitchens to Berman and Berube had dark nights, asking themselves just how much responsibility they have for the heaps of dead in Iraq, for a plundered nation, for the American soldiers who died or were crippled in Iraq at their urging?</blockquote>
Cockburn’s essay is gradually making its way through the Intertubes, as I learned this weekend when I got an email from one of Cockburn’s more gullible readers, asking me to apologize to the children of Iraq. Well, I don’t know how Makiya and company feel about such things, but I can say that my position on Iraq four years ago hasn’t led me to wonder how much responsibility I have for the war. I opposed the war, and no, I’m not sorry about that.
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Greetings, O Timberites! Welcome to “spring,” unless it’s now “autumn” for you. (I hate these fashionable nods to “global relativism,” but I’m informed that some CT readers and contributors are adherents of some kind of Southern Hemisphere Standpoint Epistemology.) I fear that my nasty reputation has preceded me to this prestigious blog, but just for those of you who might be wondering who I am and why I’m here, my name is Michael Bérubé. I teach literature and cultural studies at Penn State University, where I also co-direct (with my wife, Janet Lyon) Penn State’s Disability Studies Program. In future posts, I will be more than happy to remedy this blog’s inexplicable inattention to (a) disability studies and (b) professional hockey in North America, but first, I should probably mention by way of introduction that I published two books last fall, one of which features my <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/images/uploads/berube_rhetorical.jpg”> ginormous looming ghostly head</a> and the other of which has been widely lauded for its innovative jacket design:
Hey, hold the phone!