Kieran Healy

Speaking of the “nature of excellence”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002651.html, my sister-in-law “Sarah Dupré Healy”:http://www.fast-women.com/photos/adidasindoor03/big17.jpg ran her first marathon today — the “Chicago Marathon”:http://www.chicagomarathon.com. She “finished seventeenth”:http://www.chicagomarathon.com/page_L2.aspx?subMenu=11&Page_ID=291&Nav_2_ID=309&Page_Title=Race%20Results in the Women’s Race, which is not too shabby, given there were about 40,000 people running altogether. Conditions were windy and she suffered a lot over the last 10k or so, dropping a few minutes off what had been a 2:38 pace. But I think it’s just fantastic that she finished in the Top 20, which is why I’m telling all of you about it.

“David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05brooks.html today:

bq. Every few weeks I hear about a new twist in American strategy or tactics. It always seems promising, but conditions don’t improve. On the other hand, officials in this administration don’t have a thought in their heads about not sticking this out.

I know there’s a word for this. Just give me a minute and it’ll come to me. Alternatively, the CT “time machine”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000423.html can bring us back to last September:

bq. The U.S.’s day-to-day problems in Iraq may end up resembling Northern Ireland rather than Vietnam: car bombings, political assassinations, a general effort by terrorists to violently undermine civil society and resist the occupying power. The cost in terms of soldiers’ lives would be much lower than in Vietnam, but if there’s no viable way to extricate yourself the feeling of the situation may be much the same.

“Tom Friedman returns”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?oref=login in his new guise as Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief Sassanian Senmurv’s Sub-Deaconry Baldachin Polisher in the Noble, Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

bq. Sorry, I’ve been away writing a book. I’m back, so let’s get right down to business: We’re in trouble in Iraq. I don’t know what is salvageable there anymore. … This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever. … For all of President Bush’s vaunted talk about being consistent and resolute, the fact is he never established U.S. authority in Iraq. Never. This has been the source of all our troubles. We have never controlled all the borders, we have never even consistently controlled the road from Baghdad airport into town, because we never had enough troops to do it. … Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don’t fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don’t apologize – for anything – because Karl Rove says the “base” won’t like it. Impose a “Patriot Tax” of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage – or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees – impugn it or ignore it.

Whew! Did ole “Airmiles”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001614.html finally run into “Daniel”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001153.html in a 1st Class Transit Lounge somewhere? Perhaps Tom is realizing that, thanks to the Bush Administration, he may get the “twenty year occupation”:http://bodyandsoul.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_bodyandsoul_archive.html#88706640 he told _Oprah_ viewers to gear up for last year.

If anyone has a copy of “There’s No Land Like Poland” from _Not the Nine O’Clock News_ in convenient MP3 format, this would be a good time to send it to me.

“Belle”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002586.html below and “Edward”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2004/09/reponse_to_a_le.html at “Obsidian Wings”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/ have already said most of what needs saying about Prof. Martin Kozloff’s “fear- and hate-filled letter”:http://doctor-horsefeathers.com/archives2/000298.php. I knew people like Prof. Kozloff in Ireland, where terrorist groups in the North spent twenty-five years or so “plumbing the depths”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000041.html of pointless, evil violence. But “frustration is not a strategy.”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000309.html It’s easy to give in to blind anger, but if you don’t follow it up with any tangible action it’s just political onanism, and if, God help you, you _do_ follow through then you just find yourself in the same boat as the people you despise.

Prof. Kozloff is “Watson Distinguished Professor of Education”:http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/ at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. What sort of values does he think schools should try to embody? What sort of values does he think make it possible for there even to _be_ such things as Distinguished Professors of Education in the first place? Yet he says “We will … muzzle or remove anti American professors,” and “We will burn your mosques,” and “We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun.” In the face of this, I’m not ashamed to say that my view is best expressed in, of all places, a comic novella by Alexander McCall Smith:

[click to continue…]

Three stories I heard on “NPR”:http://www.npr.org on the way to Daycare which made me want to drop myself off there and play for the day while sending my baby daughter off to the office instead:

* “This kid”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4048551 whose doctor and parents are reluctant to take her off the “Zoloft”:http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/sertral.htm they suggested she start taking, even though she’s been asking to stop for a year. Some of the doctors quoted in the report are a bit frightening. “Oh, we don’t know when to take them off the stuff — some of my patients have been on them since they were seven and now they’re in their 20s,” or words to that effect. Mom and Dad insist they are just waiting for a “less stressful time” in their daughter’s life to stop her course of anti-depressants. But guess what? She’s a junior in high school, is looking at colleges, next year’s senior year and then it’s the transition to University and … you see how it goes. That’s the kind of parent I want to be! “Honey, the problem isn’t your shitty high school, it’s serotonin re-uptake malfunctions in your brain.”

* John Kerry is starting to “refer to himself in the third person”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4049569, like Bob Dole did in ’96. A sure sign of fatigue. Bush’s glib one-liners about Kerry are better than Kerry’s rebuttals. I’ve come to agree with “Matt”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/expectations_ma.html that the debates are going to be a rough ride for Kerry.

* Perhaps saddest of all was hearing the father of “Sgt Ben Isenberg”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4048547 of Oregon talk about his son’s death in Iraq. Sgt Isenberg was killed when his Humvee ran over a home-made mine. His father quietly explains how the war in Iraq is a “spiritual war” and that people “need to just dig into their Bible and read about it — it’s predicted, it’s predestined.” He says his son understood he had to go to Iraq because “our current President is a very devout Christian … [who] had the knowledge, and understood what was going on, and it’s far deeper than we as a people will every really know, because we don’t get the information that the President gets.” What can one say in the face of such belief? The President is simply unworthy of the trust these people have placed in him.

Here is one of the many footnotes from Susanna Clarke’s novel, “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, which Henry “reviewed”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002484.html recently:

bq. Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps the week after that.

“Publish-or-perish” is hardly the best motto for good scholarship, but if the alternative is to perish without publishing at all then perhaps it might not be so bad. This footnote may find itself stuck above my desk come Monday. Or Tuesday, at the latest.

How many different (and distant) placenames can an institution fit into its name and address? “Miami University, Oxford, Ohio”:http://www.miami.muohio.edu/ is way out there in the lead, I think.

On CNN’s _Newsnight_ last night, “David Brooks”:http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0409/23/asb.00.html took his favorite rhetorical trope — that there are “two kinds of people in the world”:http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2004/9/20warner.html — to its _realpolitik_ conclusions:

bq. You’ve got to have a political strategy and you’ve got to have a military strategy. … You’ve got to use our Iraqis, the Iraqis who want a democratic Iraq to give them something concrete, win them over. But then you’ve got to have a military strategy too and those are the people who, like Zarqawi, who just want to spread death and destruction. So, what you do is you win over the people you can, town by town and then you kill the people you can.

Brooks was ready to fly to Iraq and lead the army from house to house in Iraq using his magic glowing finger to distinguish the Iraqis we must kill from those we must win over, he did not go on to say.

I agree “with Matt”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/the_hawk_of_lib.html. Jacob Levy’s defense of the possibility of Libertarian Hawkishness is coherent and even forceful in the context of the Afghanistan war, but “Belle backed down too soon”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002557.html. It’s just not plausible to construe libertarianism as really being about massive, state-sponsored,[1] centrally-planned,[2] militarily-administered[3] efforts to invade and reconstruct another country — let alone to imply that libertarians are by temperament the kind of people who are confident that enterprises like this usually succeed as planned. So, I think “Schmibertarians”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002549.html could adopt as their anthem a slightly modified version of Randy Newman’s song “The World Isn’t Fair”:http://www.randynewman.com/tocdiscography/disc_bad_love/lyricsbadlove. It’s about “Karl Marx”:http://www.marxists.org/, which doesn’t seem promising for Schmibertarians with aggressive foreign policies.[4] But consider:

Oh Karl the world isn’t fair
It isn’t and never will be.
They tried out your plan
It brought misery instead,
If you’d seen how they worked it
You’d be glad you were dead.
Just like I’m glad I’m living in the land of the free,
Where the rich just get richer
And the poor you don’t ever have to see —
It would depress us, Karl.
Because we care
That the world still isn’t fair.

Just replace ‘Karl’ with “‘Bob'”:http://www.theihs.org/libertyguide/people.php/75853.html and “they” with “we” and you’re set. Sure, Iraq was run by a wholly evil despot before. But so what? After all, who if not libertarians can we depend on to remind us that the world isn’t fair, your plan brought misery instead, and that you’re just wasting your time — and probably making things worse — by initiating some Grand State Scheme to control unemployment, the market for rental accommodation, civilian air traffic or infant polio. This argument scales up to things like the forcible invasion, occupation and political reconstruction of faraway countries. Given that the country posed no credible threat to the U.S., Libertarians ought to have opposed the war and especially the subsequent occupation in Iraq. And indeed “many of them”:http://www.highclearing.com did.

fn1. That is, botched.

fn2. That is, botched.

fn3. That is, botched.

fn4. Note that we’re talking about the Schmibertarians of Samizdata here, not Jacob Levy of the University of Chicago.

For various reasons we needed to locate some Kosher dairy products today, which proved to be more difficult on short notice than I imagined. However, if anyone wants to set up a shop selling such things, it’s obvious that it should be called “Jews for Cheeses.”

Bob Morris points out that Florida counties which voted for Bush in 2000 seem to have been “visited with calamities”:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/21/213652/820 in the past few weeks. I think He is trying to send a message. (Hat tip: “Erin Kelly”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/~elkelly/.)

Snippet of a conversation with a student from my “Sources of Social Theory”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/soc300-syllabus-f04.pdf class:

Student: I just wanted to be sure I understood the “Engels reading”:http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1844engels.html.
Me: OK.
Student: I mean, I think I got it — like, he went to Manchester and it was totally gross and everything, right?
Me: That’s about right, I suppose.

And speaking of class warfare, consider the headlines from these two stories, nestled next to each other in the _Times_ right now:

bq. “U.S. Seeking Cuts in Rent Subsidies for Poor Families”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/22/nyregion/22housing.html?hp. The Bush administration has proposed reducing the value of subsidized-housing vouchers given to poor residents in New York City next year, with even bigger cuts planned for some urban areas in New England. The proposal is based on a disputed new formula that averages higher rents in big cities with those of suburban areas, which tend to have lower costs…

bq. “Legal Loophole Inflates Profits in Student Loans”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/22/business/22college.html. The federal government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary subsidies to student loan companies even though the Bush administration has the authority to cut them off immediately, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office.

It’s probably worth some Think-Tanker’s time to express the money involved in the former story in terms of the money involved in the latter story, and package it into a 1-liner about the present Administration’s approach to social policy.