Politics: November 2003 Archive Page

In one of the most secretive presidential trips in American history, George W. Bush flew to Baghdad under intense security on Wednesday to spend Thanksgiving with United States troops and to thank them for standing up against the "band of thugs and assassins" they are fighting in Iraq. --Elizabeth Bumiller --On Secret Iraq Trip, Bush Pays Holiday Visit to G.I.'s (NY Times)

This was a genius PR stunt on a slow news day. I tried using the NY Times link generator, which supposedly creates a permanent link for use by bloggers, but it didn't work. Anyone else have better luck?

Everyone knows that some very good people leave teaching because it pays so poorly. Some experts estimate that there is one well-qualified teacher not teaching for every one now in the classroom. Under my Leave No Teacher Behind Act, some of these people would surely return and others stay. That would increase the pool of teachers, giving school districts greater choice in whom they hire and retain. --Richard Cohen --Leave No Teacher Behind (Washingto Post -- Will Expire)

Via Arnzen's Pedablogue.

Even now, surveys show that fewer than 50 per cent of Americans believe there was just one gunman. | One of the effects of this is that an entire industry has grown up surrounding the death of JFK, who was shot twice as his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza... --The Assassination Industry (NZ Herald)

Hmm... I wonder whether the surveys are really a sign of historical ignorance, rather than a belief in conspiracy. The JFK assassination was 40 years ago, so it's probably true that there are more Americans now who don't remember where they were or what they were doing that day than there are who do. If the survey question is "Do you believe that one gunman killed JFK," I bet that many will say "I don't know" simply because they have no idea, not because they want to believe in a conspiracy. But then again, news stories like this one keep putting the consipracy theories in the public eye, and thus contribute to a willingness to believe in conspiracy. Having said that, this article does offer some good analysis into the reaons why Americans want the death of a popular leader, the leader of the free world, to have more meaning than it would if JFK really had been taken out by a lone nut.

--Lileks vs. Salam Roundup (Instapundit)

Glenn Reynolds has a good collection of links covering Minnesota blogger and fisker extraordinaire James Lileks's angry reaction to Iraqi blogger Salam Pax's criticism of the US-led occupation.

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.... Like its publishing arm, DCI's business is to influence elite opinion in Washington. But instead of publishing articles, DCI specializes in what's known as "corporate-financed grass-roots organizing," such as setting up front groups to agitate for a client's position, placing letters to the editor with key newspapers, and using phone banks to generate calls to politicians. TCS, for its part, includes a disclaimer on its site noting that "the opinions expressed on these pages are solely those of the writers and not necessarily those of any corporation or other organization." But it is startling how often the opinions of TCS's writers and sponsors converge. --Nicholas Confessore

--Meet the Press: How James Glassman reinvented journalism--as lobbying.  (Washington Monthly)

Thanks Jess, SHU's webmaster, for sending this one my way. I have complex feelings about it.

Glassman is the libertarian-conservative economist who is probably most famous for insisting that in the months before the dot-com crash, the stock market was wildly undervalued. Needless to say, he was very wrong. The gist of the article (see a brief discussion on Ars Technica) is that James Glassman's opinion columns tend to match extremely closely views advocated by the sponsors of his "Tech Central Station" magazine, which isn't really a magazine at all but rather a mouthpiece for the think tank that publishes it. The mission of TCS, according to its detractors, is to use corporate funding to generate grass-roots movements that support the funders' positions (a term appropriately enough called 'Astroturfing').

There's nothing wrong with publishing a magazine around the views of a particular entity (Oprah Winfrey or Rosie O'Donnell, or onion farmers, for instance), but the content of those lifestyle and trade magazines isn't presented as scholarly research. And as far as using donated money to generate grass-roots activity, there is little difference between Microsoft donating a boatload of money and Barbara Streisand or Paul Newman using their celebrity status to attract attention to a cause. Which side of the political spectrum is the "Rock the Vote" campaign designed to reach, anyway? Still, nobody will mistake a pop music performance or the donated proceeds from a bottle of salad dressing for unbiased research and scholarly opinion.

On the other hand, in a free economy, why shouldn't Publisher X be permitted to buy the rights to Author Y's article, and base that decision on whether the viewpoint expressed by Author Y is consistent with the expectations of Publisher X's audience and advertisers? I mean, you wouldn't fault Rolling Stone for not publishing an article that all pop stars and the people who listen to their music are going to hell, would you? The subtitle of TCS is "Where Free Markets Meet Technology," which is a pretty obvious way of identifying a pro-business profile. Still and all, I'm not sure whether there is any real moral difference between the corporate way of manipulating the opinion of the public or the Hollywood way of doing the same thing. In general, most people are too apathetic to bother thinking critically about important issues; it's human nature that we believe in the people we like and trust, which is why actors, pop stars, and TV journalists have such an impact on our society, and why people with money who want to make even more money work hard for access to and control of these cultural forces.

For me, the solution is not to denounce TCS, but rather to redouble my resolve to teach my students to look beneath the glossy package of the message (whether that comes from Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, or academia).

Update, 20 Nov: Corrected a few typos.

Yesterday was the 140th anniversary of Lincoln's famous address. There is only one known photograph of President Lincoln at Gettysburg (here's the detail view if you're having a hard time spotting him). The Library of Congress website explains that the image sat for more than half a century in the National Archives before anyone recognized President Lincoln in it.
--Fourscore and Seven Years Ago... (Metafilter)

I have a special fondness for that speech, in part because I played the mayor in a high school production of The Music Man. An extended joke in an early scene is that the mayor is trying to deliver a rendition of that speech at a patriotic gathering, but he keeps getting interrupted.

I knew full well that on the night before the play opened, when traditionally people would play tricks on each other, that Bryan Louiselle (who played Harold Hill) wouldn't interrupt me when he was supposed to. So I memorized the whole speech (which wasn't in the script; back in the pre-WWW days, I actually had to look it up in a book). When Bryan didn't interrupt me, I just sailed ahead with the speech, and Bryan made his entrance after I finished. (Confession: I only got through about half of it before I stumbled, but then I skipped to the end, and I'm pretty sure nobody else on stage or in the audience knew the speech better than I did, so everyone probably thought I gave the whole speech.)

Angela's AshesLiteracy Weblog)

I'm reading Frank McCort's Angela's Ashes. I recently showed a video, "People Like Us," to my Seminar in Thinking and Writing students. In the video, a talking head says that everyone with class aspirations has a copy of Angela's Ashes, but that nobody has read it. Kind of like the opposite of The Bridges of Madison County, which people with class apsirations tried to hide.

Anyway, my parents passed on their copy of AA to me, and there it was, sitting on the shelf, so I started reading it. I think one or two of the short stories in James Joyce's The Dubliners does a better job of capturing the misearable and pathetic state of the Irish destitue, though the motion of the family from America back to Ireland offers an interesting twist; the McCort children are taunted for being Yanks.

I'm about half way through the book and the narrator is still only about five or six years old. He does a great job jerking your heart around, as when the drunken lout of a father eases his baby's raspy breathing by sucking the snot out of his nose -- not exactly a classy thing to do, but his wife looks at him adoringly for it. Then, after a long bout of unemployment, the father finally lands a job, drinks his wages on Friday night (again), is so drunk he misses work the next day, and loses his job.

Pathetic.

It's supposed to be a memoir, which means that it all really happened that way and I can't fault the narrator for unrealistic plot twists or maudlin attempts at melodrama. Most of the time, the childish eyes of the narrator can't see clearly enough to criticize. The effect is similar to that of Benjy's chapter in The Sound and the Fury -- Benjy is an objective reporter who offers no sense of awareness outside himself (except for the final few lines, where he indicates that he trusts Caddy when she tells him he has been dreaming).

But in the tale of the father losing his job, I felt myself resisting the narrator's attempt to pull my heartstrings. Am I a bad person because I roll my eyes at the predicability of the plot? Am I not quite able to enter into the young narrator's world? Am I too reluctant to give up my romantic view of the Irish side of my family (on my mother's mother's side)?

While driving Torill Mortensen to the airport after her visit to Seton Hill, I learned a very enligthenting discussion about the way Europeans feel about their distant American relations who return to the villages of their ancestors after two or three generations of no contact with their roots. It's certainly not the fault of these travellers that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents never came back to their ancestral villages, and I can certainly see it is ridiculous to suggest that people should drop what they are doing to throw a prade for distant relations who wish to play detective in the cemeteries and church record offices. Torill mentioned that, to those who stayed, the Americans who come back are the decendents of people who left. America wouldn't be what it is today if it had not been for the passion and drive of generations of people who left their homelands in search of building a better life for themselves.

Maybe the book will change eventually, but when I read Angela's Ashes, I can't help but think to myself, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." And I don't like thinking that way, mostly because it's not exactly fashionable for Americans to show their patriotism in international circles these days.

This isn't a very intellectual blog entry, but I'm gonna submit it anyway.

Disney started producing films for a new animated character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, in 1927. | Mickey Mouse was conceived the next year during a cross-country train ride, according to the "official" company history. Walt Disney had just been forced to give up the Oswald rights to his ruthless New York distributor, who had exercised copyright control over the character. | On the ride back home to Los Angeles, Disney conjured up a little mouse named Mortimer. His wife, Lillian, thought the name too pompous and suggested Mickey. --Disney's Mickey Mouse Set to Turn 75 (Yahoo!/AP)

On Tuesday, the Mickey Mouse character turns 75, which means that, had it not been for some recent legal changes in the implementation of copyright, the Mickey Mouse character would have entered the public domain, and the corporation would lose the rights to market him (just as today anybody can use characters such as Huckleberry Finn or Ebeneezer Scrooge).

When I started my Ph.D., I chose the time span of 1920-1950, becuase I thought that during my academic career, one by one all of the literary works that were created during that period would start falling out of copyright, which would mean that I could publish my own online editions of these works. But thanks to Disney, that's not going to happen -- Disney's laywers managed to get the copyright laws extended for another 25 years. A few works that I studied did fall out of copyright before Sonny Bono (formerly of Sonny and Cher, and also the U.S. House of representatives) did his groovy legalistic magic.

Some may not like the US President, but we should all appreciate what America has done for the world ....
I don't want the Americans to go home. In fact I am terrified of what would happen if they did. Their going home in the past has often meant suffering for others. Sure, I want them to change. I want more consistency. I want Bush to stop tolerating the nastystans of Central Asia, to tell Ariel where to get off, to treat allies with more respect, to dump the hubristic neo-cons, to sign up to Kyoto, to reverse 'he who is not with me is against me' to 'he who is not against me is with me'. I would like acknowledgment of the mistakes and crimes of the past. I would quite like Bush to become Wesley Clark. | But our enemy is not America. --David Aaronovitch --Why I say welcome  (Observer/Guardian)

This essay is popular in the blogosphere right now, as a sort of antidote to the protest coverage surrounding Bush's visit to the UK.

Some soldiers got drunk and climbed atop a memorial fountain before being run off politely by the Canadian police. Peter Miller, drafted out of the assembly line of a Procter & Gamble soap factory in Quincy, Massachusetts, found himself in jail in Seattle following a dustup at the bus station. | After a few weeks of this military being and nothingness, the men of C Packet were told to get their wills in order, their teeth fixed, and their dog tags ready because they were being shipped to Vietnam as permanent overseas replacements in the First Infantry Division. Most of them knew what was coming, but some were taken by surprise, and the news provoked a round of concerned calls to the base from relatives, congressmen, and clergy. --David Maranass --Vietnam and America in 1967 (MSNBC)

The above is an excerpt from Maranass's book, which examines in detail an antiwar protest and an ambush on US forces in October, 1967. I wasn't yet born then.

Seton Hill University is hosting a "War and Antiwar Memorabilia" display. In the halls of the admin building, weapons and uniforms from the war are displayed. In a room at one end of the hall are photos of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania) war dead, with rubbings of their names taken from the Vietnam War Memorial. Some facutly were holding a routine meeting in that room when I visited it a little while ago, just as if they weren't in an impromptu shrine to our war dead. At the other end of the hall, in a large, brightly lit room that I had never seen used before, is a display of anti-war newspapers, poster, and slogans.

A cousin of my mother's served in Vietnam, and when he came back sometime in the mid 70s, he started bringing over refugees. At one point, about 30 Vietnamese men and boys were living in our house, sleeping on the cement floor of our basement. We would eat dinner in three shifts. Cousin Jim and his friend Terry started a furniture business -- first buying unfinished chairs and tables, finishing them, and then selling them on street corners.

I have no idea what my parents' politics are on the Vietnam War, but my own youthful experience of seeing so many refugees who were grateful to America for giving them a place to go and start a new life for their families means that I didn't grow up with the the knee-jerk "the war in Vietnam was bad" attitude that much of mainstream America has. And as a college student, I volunteered at a nursing home with a Vietnamese girl who was born in the U.S. of refugees who were grateful to the U.S. for giving them a place to go.

I was reading a New York Times article on financial aid, and how rich schools like Stanford get more aid money than regular colleges that actually educate average or lower-income students. Then, out of no where, came Seton Hill. --Julie Young spots a quote from SHU's president. --Rich Schools Get More Financial Aid Money (Work in Progress)

Kitty Kelly has sold it to CBS. No, just kidding. A tremendous night. It's the beginning of a second media century, Joe, where it's much more of a people-driven media. And I say that not lightly. It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there's never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three. And the pressure went all the way to the top of a super company called Viacom, and the chairman earlier today is my information said, "Listen, let's just get it on cable. Let's do it on Showtime. Let's show it uncut. Everybody will watch." So the word is that CBS will pass on it. It will not air on free television, but the full glory of "The Reagans" will air on Showtime. --CBS Passes on "Reagans" Biography (Drudge Report)

Pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio induced CBS to pass on "The Reagans," which has been described by CBS officials as too biased against Reagan to be fixed through editing. Is this censorship? Note that CBS had already edited the show considerably, to the point that there would have been dead air time because of the number of scenes that had been cut. By admitting the show was biased, not the romantic love story that had been pitched and purchased for airing, CBS gave up on it, but Showtime will air the whole thing uncut. Without the intense pressure from the blogosphere and talk radio, the editied version might have been shown, and nobody would have ever seen the full version (until the "director's cut" DVD came out, that is).

"The pirate's life is so deadly that humor is an essential part of what they do. They tell jokes, they make jests, they perform plays. They're hilarious." People are obsessed with pirates, Rediker says, because, while pirates may be "the common enemy of mankind," they're also "the freest people on earth," which makes pirate humor particularly cutting. Because they stand?or sail?apart from the culture, pirates are well suited to make mockery of it. Pirates may have always been funny, but their contemporaries usually found them more terrible than witty. Either way, they found them fascinating. --Jill "Calico Bless Kid" Lepore --Talk of the Past: The Sea in Me Blood (Common-place)

Best insight from this piece, attributed to Dave Barry: "What if Bill Clinton, a fancy-dressed freebooter if there ever was one, had told the American people, 'I did not have sex with that woman, me hearties'?"