Some weeks ago, watching our Dear Leader answer questions on television, I was overcome with a wave of pity. Not for the president, but for those poor souls, many as yet unborn, who will one day specialize in studying his administration.
Can you imagine having to read countless transcripts of George W. Bush’s speeches? Let alone being obliged to posit them as meaningful? And yet, in the fullness of time, it must come to pass.
Then again, maybe not.
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Please tell me I didn’t just read a white male blogger dismiss a black woman complaining about the lack of any black or latino bloggers at the Bill Clinton blogger meetup by telling her not to attack “her betters” and insinuating that she is too ignorant to write properly. Pleasepleaseplease. Aw, damn:
So, Liza, dear, before you go assailing your betters and making Jane stand in for every blond white woman who ever pissed you off, maybe you should head back to eighth grade English and, you know, learn to spell and to write in a linear fashion. Although judging from your other posts that I read, mediocrity may be a chronic condition for you….You just might have a future in this blogging thing, although I think you might be more at home on LiveJournal or MySpace where you can post lots of photos of yourself to distract from your decidedly tepid prose and numerous grammatical faux pas.
This is coming on the heels of lots of sarcastic “sic’s” and “ed’s” inserted in the quoted passages. That’s just uncalled for. I make spelling errors too; so does everyone. Telling a minority woman blogger she’s too stupid and uneducated to make it in the big leagues, and telling her not to “assail her betters” (?!) is just bullshit, and all the black-co-blogger-having in the world isn’t going to make it OK. There are plenty of ways to disagree with people, even humorously, even vehemently, that don’t play into harmful stereotypes. I know that sarcastic mockery of other people’s spelling and grammatical errors is an internet trope from the usenet days of yore, and I’m not saying women or minority bloggers are exempt from ordinary mockery, but think about the context a little. Context matters. If someone makes fun of, say, the lovely John Holbo for some typo, there’s really no subtext. It’s just: “ha-ha!” John will think, whoops, I was typing fast. Oh well. No one questions his right to be heard on the internet.
When a black woman is asking a legitimate question about why minority bloggers are absent from a blogger meet-up in Harlem, and you turn around with a lot of complaints about her writing and reasoning ability, there most definitely is a subtext: you’re too stupid to write properly, and that’s why no one who looks like you was at this meeting. You’re not good enough. Don’t assail your betters. I was actually kind of shocked to see this up at Firedoglake, which is an excellent blog. I’ve never read Liza’s blog before, so I have no real opinion about it or her previous dust-up with Jane Hamsher over the Lieberman-in-blackface thing, but I’ll be reading her posts a damn sight sooner than TRex’s, I’ll tell you that.
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Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.
In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.
The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.
“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”
And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
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I wrote a summary of my drive West for friends and family. Given the interest some people around here seem to have in highways and that part of the country, I thought I’d post a copy of it here.
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Joseph Lindsley on the “Weekly Standard’s website”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/657klans.asp?pg=2 .
AS THE NEW ACADEMIC YEAR BEGINS, parents will give, as they always do, lectures about studying hard and attending class. But nonetheless many collegians will devote time to chugging pints, throwing darts, and doing just about anything that doesn’t involve cracking the books. This seems a gross waste of resources, but, considering the often ridiculous content of those neglected textbooks and ignored lectures, some of these prodigal students just might be better off.
…[various denunciations of various courses] …
Swarthmoreans have to wait until next year to feast on “The Whole Enchilada: Debates in World History,” but right now they can take “Engendering Culture” where they’re supposed to learn how “culture is constructed and reconstructed to replicate gender roles,” by studying “New York night life and John Wayne movies and the masculine West.”
Timothy Burke gives us the rather demanding “syllabus”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?page_id=203 (for it is he) for his course at Swarthmore, “The Whole Enchilada: Debates in World History” (copied below the break).
This displays in its primeval majesty the boneheaded stupidity of a common genre of opinion article (and occasional “rigorously researched”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201 report) on the Evils of Left Wing Indocrination and Pandering to Lazy Students in the Modern University. Sloppy Google searches and sweeping assertions don’t provide evidence of anything other than the author’s laziness and desire to find backup for his prejudices with the least amount of exertion possible. The kind of guff that deserves an F, in other words.
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Drawn & Quarterly’s long-awaited Moomin, the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip vol. 1 is delayed until October, but in the meantime they are releasing a strip a day from the publisher’s site, and you can download a 6-page PDF preview sample.
I have been so curious and eager. I’ve read and enjoyed moomin books since childhood and am not ashamed to say I once answered a daughter’s innocent, ‘why did you want to have children?’ with a less innocent, ‘so I could read them moomin books.’ Which was a wretched half-truth. (Belle and I also have plans to construct a plush Groke toy for children’s beds. It will have an opening in which you insert one of those athletic injury cold paks, so in the morning your bed has a horrid cold spot.) Until last year I didn’t even know there had been a long-running moomin newspaper strip.
Now that I see samples for the first time, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, the art answers gorgeously to my need to feed my eyes on all the antlers and pajamas and especially the triangular noses and the over-sized ones. But the characters are all changed.
Hattifatteners who demand cocktails?
Where’s the small jolt of the silent, nordic, static electricity of vaguely yearning existential dread in that? No Moominmamma and Moominpappa? Sniff as an incompetent, pushy get-rich-quick schemer, played to broad, slapstick effect? Silly fake elixir of youth turning old ladies into old men who roar off after can-can girls? Obviously I must withhold judgment, but it looks as though – at least initially – Jansson didn’t trust the subtle tones of her storytelling to the three-panel form and somewhat condescended to it, letting lovely pictures do all the work. Or maybe she just has to grow into it.
You can pre-order from Amazon – and at a good discount: Moomin, the Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip vol. 1
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In the last ten years, most of my friends became parents. One thing I observed was that many of these New Parents, both men and women, changed their character a little. Of course, people didn’t suddently become different persons by moving into parenthood; but the more I watched them, the more evidence I gathered that people who become parents somehow soften a little. Character traits such as being very assertive, being bossy, being easily irritable, all lost their sharp edges. In addition there were the changes in character, values and worldviews that these New Parents noticed themselves (and that are generally not observable to outsiders). Writing deadlines became much less important, work could wait till another day. What once looked like an almost unbearable cost of parenthood (like getting up at 5.30 am every morning) suddenly was of little importance.
Am I deluding myself when I believe to observe that the move into parenthood softens characters and makes many previously Really Important Things suddenly look rather trivial?
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Tuesday is, of course, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There is by now a considerable body of pirate historiography. But is the field of piracy studies sufficiently well theorized?
Aye, often have I axed myself, only to be distracted by the plundering of booty.
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Via a “comment”:http://www.haloscan.com/comments/maxbsawicky/2521/#240907 by Michael McIntyre at MaxSpeak, this extraordinary _Telos_ article (translated rather too literally from the German, I suspect) on Condoleeza Rice.
In a bright turquoise suit and with her hair finally looking relaxed, she seems younger than two years ago in the White House, and the hemline of her skirt above the knee proves that as head of the State Department she has definitely not adopted the fashion styles of elderly ladies. Was it historical symbolism to have me wait in the Marshall Room, I ask, but evidently too softly for someone who has entered the realm of the Secretary: she takes me by the hand to lead me, with quick athletic steps, to the office of two colleagues concerned with public relations. The boss introduces me, notes with the pride of an engaged teacher that her former colleague has passed “the test,” and we set off in the opposite direction, passing the flag with fifty stars in the reception room, which any visitor would recognize from many press photographs, to her office. I sink into a yellow chair, opposite the couch of the Secretary, who crosses her lovely legs and urges me, in a friendly if somewhat impatient tone, to pose the first question.
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As “Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2006/09/will_the_us_legislate_torture.html says, the headline of this Washington Post “editorial”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401587.html is admirably blunt.
A Defining Moment for America: The president goes to Capitol Hill to lobby for torture
PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.
Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.
Both Michael and (as usual) “Marty Lederman”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/at-last-issue-is-publicly-joined-and.html have more.
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Most of my students write in Word, as (like Daniel) I do. I’m not crazy about it, and used WordPerfect for years, before collaboration with other people who write in Word made me fall in line. But Word does have one feature that I love: the grammar and style warning constituted by the little green underlining of any string of words that Word doesn’t like. I find that eliminating the green lines almost always (19 times out of 20) improves the way that the text reads. It is especially valuable to me because my grammar has never been brilliant (though it is better than my spolling, and much better than my typinf). It is not perfect; some strings that it underlines are the best way of putting things, and many strings it doesn’t underline are not.
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Over at Comment is Free, our very own Daniel “has joined”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/group_post/2006/09/post_389.html with other writers on that site to urge support for the Global Day for Darfur.
Pace Belle, I’ve failed to hype The Weblog not through shyness — or even laziness — but from the assumption everybody already knows about it. Even if it isn’t listed in the CT Lumber Room (hint hint), a situation that has long been a puzzle to me.
Likewise, I’ve assumed that everyone has seen the well-produced greatest hits album by Scott Eric “Acephalous” Kaufman (from Ronco!) including such chestnuts as “My Chiasmus of Hatred and My Hatred of Chiasmus.” But no more, with the assumptions. Check it out. The collection seems like the prototype of some new blogal genre, for which no name has yet been coined.
Finally, just to tie things together: Adam Kotsko of The Weblog certainly ought to put together such a compilation. So say we all?
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C’mon it’s The Weblog. You’re missing out on insightful posts like this one from Dominic, on how Fay Weldon is the antichrist:
The model of libidinal economy endorsed by Weldon is essentially that of middle-class parenting: let your children have the smallest possible amount of what they clamour for – sweets, television, computer games – and make their access even to that conditional on an unremitting parade of good manners and the assiduous consumption of vegetables. In such a manner is exorbitant desire acknowledged through gritted teeth – when it is not being exploited to secure obedience. All of this is fair enough in extremis, which is where most parenting of small children is done, but it is nauseating to encounter an adult person still willingly enthralled by such a ruthlessly petty system of restraint and reward. If adolescence has any purpose at all, it is to shatter those bonds.
Read the whole thing, because it really is an excellent little essay. On a lighter note, you can be astounded by the unparallelled quote-mining skills of Adam Kotsko:
In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr quotes a Southern politician protesting against suffrage tests for black voters “on the ground that they would discriminate in favor of the educated Negro against the servile, old-time Negro”:
Now, sir, the old-time Negro is assassinated by this suffrage plan. This new issue, your reader, your writer, your loafer, your voter, your ginger-cake school graduate, with a diploma of side-whiskers and beaver-hat, pocket pistols, brass knucks [sic] and bicycle, he, sir, is the distinguished citizen whom our statesmen would crown at once with the highest dignities of an ancient and respectable commonwealth.
I think I speak for all of us when I say, humina whatsa ginger-whisker beaver-hat whaaaaa? The Weblog has many other fine posters, too; I’m sure your life needs more Ben Wolfson. McLemee may be shy to hype The Weblog, but I’m not. Go ye, and read of it. Also, ginger-cake.
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