by publius
Via Kevin Drum, I saw Brian Morton’s Dissent article praising the liberal blogosphere as the “New” New Left. Morton notes that many of these writers are unapologetically liberal because they came of age after the Cold War. On this point, Ezra Klein agrees, noting that post-Cold War liberals face less constraints:
For instance, I can argue about suboptimal outcomes of market capitalism without anyone thinking I’m advocating massive command-and-control socialism. Or, at least, without many people thinking that, and without having to care whether or not they do.
I agree — the burn of Nixon and early Reagan left scars that simply aren’t on my (at 31) radar screen. But that said, there’s a downside to being post-Cold War too. Specifically, “newer” liberals have a lot of blind spots for the dog-whistle politics associated with these old scars.
Two of the recent Obama controversies illustrate the point well. Personally, I think younger people were a bit baffled about why the Jeremiah Wright controversy had such strong legs. I mean, they knew what the newspapers said, but they couldn’t feel the controversy in their bones the way Baby Boomers probably could.
That’s because Jeremiah Wright brings out old scars from battles we never fought. While it’s hard today to truly understand the intoxicating idealism of the civil rights era, it’s also hard to truly understand just how bitterly venomous the white backlash to these developments was.
Wright, then, isn’t a controversy because of what he said about 9/11 (though it’s tempting to think so). He’s a controversy because he represents in older white people’s eyes everything from busing to urban riots to black nationalism. If anything, Wright’s 9/11 comments give license to air what is essentially race-based animus lying beneath. For me, though, these issues have less resonance because I wasn’t around fighting them. (From what I gather, though, each demonstration was accompanied by either Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower or the Doors’ Five to One).
A similar dynamic exists with the whole “Marxist” bit that Kristol and Fightin’ Joe Lieberman recently trotted out. My hunch is that younger people thought this accusation was too stupid to warrant much of a response. But to older people, it still likely packs a punch. Remember that the neoconservative movement — and Reagan more generally — rose to power on anti-communist fearmongering. It’s still a powerful insult in many circles.
The big lesson here is don’t ignore the perspective of older Americans. There’s a reason why Obama is getting killed among Democrats over 65. And that’s why we aren’t going to see the end of this whole radical, commie, black nationalist business. Younger Americans may not be conscious of it, but these lines of attack will likely affect how pre-“post-Cold War” Americans view Obama.
publius, I agree. Being somewhat older than you I remember the atmosphere of fear. Rev. Wright’s anger is well justified but I expect for many it is a reminder of a time when they felt very unsafe.
I think Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing captures the feeling. If you haven’t seen it take a look.
I do find it a bit amazing, though, that “Marxism” still packs any punch. By now it ought to be a joke.
This is why Obama appeals to so many under 55. We cannot relate to the 40 year old fights. the insults from the 60s like pinko.
this is why people like the Clintons are so annoying to younger voters. the old predictable fights about Vietnam and commie. blah blah.
They keep it going to 40 years. get over it.
And that is why government doesn’t work and the parties have gone stale and stuck. Because they are all back in 1968.
The divisive and hateful screeds back and forth.
And that is why the gop and their old bag of tricks won’t register as much this year. Because so many are just sick to death of the whole thing.
It’s time to move on. Like by about 35 years.
It’s almost enough to make you hope the baby boomers will hurry up and die off so that we can stop being burdened by the political baggage of the battles fought 40 years ago.
I mean, throughout this whole primary race it seems that I continually hear the comparisons being made between this years primary and the race of ’68. The choice between the party insider (Humphrey/Clinton) and the passionate voice representing the youth movement (RFK/Obama). The festering war being fought in Asia with no end in sight. The fear being marketed of the boogeyman that’s out to get everyone (Communists/terrorists).
Come on! 2008 is not 1968, no matter how hard so many people try to fit the square peg into the round hole. Look, there’s no civil unrest. There’s no threat of World War III (even if we bomb Iran−which is not to say that I think such an action would be anything but morally reprehensible and would set back American relations in the region two generations). Face it old folks: this is not the 60’s. Things have changed. Please check your hippie or anti-hippie baggage at the door when entering the modern political arena.
While I do understand that many of the boomers will invariably perceive things through the lens of their youth it doesn’t mean I have to sympathize with their backwards looking myopia. I sincerely hope that in 2043 I won’t be trying to force the label of “The new Howard Dean” on some hapless politician.
Back in *my* day…….what? Git behind me, Buck! Jump back, gipsy! COVERED WAGONS! COOOOONESTOGA WAGONS!
Where was I?
Canny post, pub. The stuff about Wright, as well as Establishment black leaders supposedly being ‘threatened’ if they don’t support Obama, really does seem to set some of the older folks off. It’s a shame, because it’s not appropriate to this election or this time, but rather just emotionally pavlovian – like cheap music or television.
I’m 58, not 65, but I’m certainly a pre-post-Cold-War American, having been alive for 40 or so years by the time the Cold War ended. I don’t think I’m carrying a lot of baggage related to “hippie/anti-hippie baggage,” but I could be wrong — it’s happened once or twice before. I do know I like Obama a lot and am disappointed that this is breaking out so much along age lines. (It certainly wasn’t at my caucus in February; nor gender lines either.)
But Zebra, I guarantee that you will see the world differently in 2043 from the way you see it now. You might even approach the 2043-vintage “modern political arena” with some mental habits that are being shaped right now. And I also suspect that you won’t be ready to concede to people 20 or 30 years younger the right to appoint themselves gatekeepers of who gets to enter the 2043 “modern political arena” and who doesn’t.
The political arena includes whoever’s in it. That’s all. You don’t have to like it, but hey, I still have the vote.
god you’re sexy, publius.
but Wright’s statements about America deserving 9/11 as a kind of blowback cut straight to the debate me and my radicals friends in the seventies lost to Reagan’s gunboat diplomacy.
We wanted to change the subversive way America related to other nations. And if it didn’t, we predicted retailiation from any self-respecting nation.
And I’ll bet that Wright was on our side.
but the Soviets, the Cubans, et al, kept locking individuals up without due process. Without ordinarary Americans knowing the ways in which the USG was incessantly tried to subvert those governments experimenting with socialism, they appeared as bad as Pinoche, the Dirty Wars, etc., the very governments we were arguing against.
And then Walter Mondale called Che despicable, and, sure enough, we were alienated from the Democratic Party.
So the real question is Are you guys going to keep running away from us? Are Dems going to keep talkin that annihilate-Iran-action-hero moral cowardice, or what?
Obama needs to stay on message: His is the campaign to get out of Iraq.
god you’re sexy, publius
best comment … ever. 🙂
Good post, publius.
I actually think the reaction to Wright was more about the “God damn America” statement in the post-9/11 world than it was about race. I could be wrong. If his remarks had been solely about civil rights, they would probably have been written off as the rantings of an out-of-touch old man.
That said, there does seem to be a difference between how pre- and post-cold war folks hear and respond to things.
It’s almost enough to make you hope the baby boomers will hurry up and die off so that we can stop being burdened by the political baggage of the battles fought 40 years ago.
Sorry, not dead yet.
I plan to spend all your Social Security money before I go, too, so go get a job, will ya?
Rotten kids.
The political arena includes whoever’s in it. That’s all. You don’t have to like it, but hey, I still have the vote.
Damned straight.
Thanks –
more about the “God damn America” statement in the post-9/11 world than it was about race. I could be wrong.
I think you’re wrong– John Hagee and Jerry Falwell think that God damns America, too. They just think He does so because we don’t put gay people in jail or make Jewish kids pray to Jesus in public schools. And no conservative cares. The Rev. Wright flap is 100% about race. It’s the new Southern strategy.
Also, an older fellow with some degree of governmental responsibility told me a few years ago that his son in Iraq was “killing a lot of communists.” So, yeah, I think they might be kinda hung up on that whole thing. Good post, publius.
John Hagee and Jerry Falwell think that God damns America, too.
Yes, and people who don’t want John McCain to be President make lots of political hay out of it. Just like folks who don’t want Obama to be President make lots of hay out of Wright’s comments.
And, to clarify, IMO Wright’s comments have merit, while Hagee’s do not.
No doubt race is an element. You can’t swing a dead cat in this country without touching on some aspect of race. It’s woven into the fabric of American life, and probably will be until the USA is a footnote in somebody’s history book.
If Wright had not extended his comments beyond civil rights issues, however, I doubt anyone would have cared or even noticed.
People are tired of civil rights issues in this country. Plain old tired. Black folks are tired of the treatment they get, and white folks (and every other color folks) are tired of hearing about it. Nobody’s really that interested in doing anything about it anymore. It’s probably one of the more damning things I could say about us, but IMO it’s true.
Compare the difference in the amount of play Wright’s comments got with Michelle Obama’s. His got days, hers got 15 minutes. And she was his *wife*, not his pastor.
She didn’t say anything about blowback. He did.
That’s my analysis. YMMV.
Thanks –
I really liked Obama’s response to the wright thing, even the sillyness with Ayers. It was kind of comforting to know that he has at least listened to leftist (not liberal) criticism. Every one remembers that lost in the “god damn” quote was after the unfairness of the Drug War. Which has just been a disaster.
Finally, HRC’s campaign has been a circus. It’s all ‘nobody could have anticipated a post-super tuesday stratigery’ not to mention the silly games with MI and FL.
But at this point, for most of us, it is now just a giant stage play and events are beyond our control. We do live in interesting times.
“(From what I gather, though, each demonstration was accompanied by either Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower or the Doors’ Five to One).”
Well, no. We usually hummed a few bars of “The Internationale” (nobody knew the words), Country Joe & The Fish (“One, two, three four…”), or retreated to the bar to sing old Wobblies songs.
But you still see this crap. The other night Buchannan told Maddow to “can that marxist dialectic” as if that was supposed to be a real zinger.
What an idiot.
Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Latvia, etc., might think that Reagan’s “fearmongering” probably led them to be better off now than as Communist Soviet satellites.
Communism was and is a bad deal for people. Still is pretty bad in North Korea from what I can tell.
Al Qaeda, Iranian/Taliban style mullochracy, Baathism, those are pretty bad too. And dangerous. All are worse than our “God Damn” ‘ed ” America” in my opinion. But that’s just my opinion.
publius,
I’m with russell on the Wright flap. More generally though, do you have any evidence that older white folk reacted to Wright specifically because it reminds them of their fear of blacks in the 60s-70s? This seems like a very difficult proposition to test for…
Wow, DaveC. Communism was bad? America’s better than North Korea or Iran?
You’re a brave, brave man. I hope you know the kind of controversy you’re in for.
It takes true courage to compare your town or team or country or family with the absolute worst one in the whole world, and decline to criticize your own on those grounds.
do you have any evidence
there’s that pre-9/11 thinking again. evidence, blah.
seriously, i don’t. I just see that the post-65 numbers for obama have been bad. the rest is just speculation. to be honest, i don’t know how you could test for it. it’s not like they would say, “yes, i didn’t like it b/c i hated blacks in 1971”.
publius, thanks for answering. Opinions are fine and Lord knows I welcome any excuse to blame all problems in our society on the hated old folks.
The only way I could think of to test for it would be to run a poll where you asked people to rate how important the various crisis (busing, riots, etc) were in their lives and how strongly they felt at the time and then look for patterns based on age. This wouldn’t be cheap, but it is the sort of thing I’d hope the Obama campaign would blow some cash on.
“Yes, and people who don’t want John McCain to be President make lots of political hay out of it. Just like folks who don’t want Obama to be President make lots of hay out of Wright’s comments.”
Sorry, I don’t remember Hagee’s comments absolutely dominating news coverage for several weeks. If you don’t see a glaring double standard there, you’re watching a different American media than I am.
And I am old enough to remember Republicans basically shutting down any discussion of sensible economic policy by claiming that any policy other than tax cuts was socialism. In fact, given Buchanan, Kristol and Lieberman’s recent playing of the Marx card, I’m not convinced we’ve moved past it yet. I also fear we won’t get our fiscal and regulatory house in order until we live through another Depression-level crisis. Those being ignorant of history condemned to repeat it and all that.
I think the Wright controversy may be partly over race, but also over nationalism. Sure, right-wingers think God is angry at us over our domestic policy, but when it comes to confrontation with a foreign country, He shuts up and salutes like any good American citizen. Wright doesn’t.
I should add that Wright’s approach can turn into a sort of anti-nationalism that is nothing but the mirror opposite of right-winger’s nationalism. It can be the assumption that we are Great Satan and the tendancy to automatically root for whoever is against us.
Having to actually think out the merits of a confrontation and reach a decision on a case-by-case basis is so much more work than a simple knee-jerk reaction that not many people are willing to do it.
Wait, what? The civil rights protesters were Cylons? And they had been all along?
*ducks*
Anyway, this post reads a lot like “a lot of our problems stem from the fact that baby boomers won’t let go of the past,” and that type of argument has caused pretty serious flames here in the past.
Thank you for your post.
I just heard a middle aged woman call into my local public radio station say that ‘women might be more of a minority than black people.’ (As someone who has spent the past 5+ years studying racial disparity in the US, I find this sort of opinion egregiously uninformed.)
As you suggest, some Clinton supporters conflate the civil rights movement with an erosion in middle class security. Ironically, this is exactly the sort of struggle among the working class that Marx & Engels wrote about. Their premise was that the basic structure of capitalism encourages those who don’t OWN the wealth of society fight among each other about our small slice of the pie. imho, they got that right.
I look forward to this election focusing more on the issues and less on sound bites from various candidate supporters.
It’s almost enough to make you hope the baby boomers will hurry up and die off so that we can stop being burdened by the political baggage of the battles fought 40 years ago.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29261
In all seriousness, I don’t want them to die off (my parents are quintessential boomers, after all), but I do want them to acknowledge that the country just doesn’t belong to them or their concerns alone anymore, something which many seem reluctant to do. I find this especially ironic given that many have made a living off of tsk-tsking Gen. X and the Millenials for being slackers and failing to take a leadership role in society.
The Vietnam and hippie/square divide complexes have been dominating our national political consciousness and dominating the tactical and political thinking of both major parties far too long, and frankly I couldn’t care less about either. I don’t care if Obama smoked pot or what Hillary said about stay-at-home moms or whether McCain’s Vietnam service makes him more patriotic than his opponents, because frankly there are much, much more important issues facing our country than hashing out dorm room spats from the ’60’s. It seems like every argument about issues of the day gets filtered through some self-regarding Vietnam era prism by the boomer dominated national media and policy apparatuses. Going into Iraq was a chance to exercise the ghosts of Vietnam. Going into Iraq would be a debacle just like Vietnam. Islamic fundamentalism is the new Communism.
It seemed like nobody in a position of power (I know this is not true of people here or the blogosphere in general) ever stopped and said “actually, there’s not much in common between Iraq and Vietnam”, or “Islamic fundamentalism is actually a pretty different animal from communism”. I know that people automatically try to understand new situations by analogizing them to those of their past experience, but if history’s taught us anything, it should be that one must always be wary of fighting the last war.
Furthermore, I’m rather appalled by the selfishness many of the boomer generation have shown toward their children and grandchildren. Both the Bush administration’s profligate deficit spending and myopia about long-term problems like climate change, and the Democrats’ adamant refusal to do anything about unsustainable growth in entitlement programs for the elderly, are both going to land on my doorstep when I’m fifty and trying to put my own kids through college.
I think recent elections have also demonstrated that that the majority of America’s racists, homophobes, and bigots are old people. Those remaining of the Greatest Generation are undoubtedly the worst in this regard, but I find even people like my mother, well-meaning ex-hippie that she is, are still burdened by prejudices forged in the different world of their youth (in her case, constantly expressing the hope that during my globetrotting phase I wouldn’t marry someone from a different cultural background), and resistant to the social changes that someone like Obama represents.
None of which is to put my own generation on a pedestal – I’m sure when I’m old the young people will be doing something I find myself deeply uncomfortable with. I’m going to try to remember that the world will always change, though, and accomodate myself to that fact.
bobbyp, answering publius, began: “(From what I gather, though, each demonstration was accompanied by either Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower or the Doors’ Five to One).”
Well, no. We usually hummed a few bars of “The Internationale” (nobody knew the words), Country Joe & The Fish (“One, two, three four…”), or retreated to the bar to sing old Wobblies songs.
Just be glad you haven’t had to argue with actual Wobblies. (Why, in my day…) In the mid-1970s, just out of college, I met one who was living in a cabin on the hippie homestead of a classmate’s parents. It was barely possible for two of us hotshot kids to argue him to a standstill. You kids are lucky that the viewpoints of us boomers, which you see as black-and-white, are as nuanced as they are.
Seriously, the generational issue you raise has plenty of deja vu. I could not emotionally understand how the Great Depression impacted my parents’ generation, born in the 1910’s.
Just an additional two cents here, but:” Admittedly, I wasn’t around when the Boomers (Cylons again?) were undergrads, but it sounds to me from all I hear that a greater level of confrontation was both permitted and expected in disagreements.
From what I’ve seen of debates amongst older people and debates amongst those my age and younger, I’d have to say I think younger people tend to be less confrontational, or at least, the rules of debate amongst the younger allow for less direct confrontation. This is both a strength and a weakness, but either way it’s a difference.
In class discussion, or conversations with friends, I almost never hear, “You’re wrong,” or “That’s wrong,” but rather something along the lines of, “Well, that’s interesting, what you said, and it’s a good point, but it makes me wonder though, because….
At any rate, I’m not sure if I’m right about the above, but I have thought that I’ve seen it play out in this primary. Over and over again I hear older people talk about how Obama needs to “be tough”, how he needs to “hit back” and I’ve really been mystified. Because usually amongst people my age, when someone starts yelling insults in an arguments, the other person basically wins by default – doesn’t have to do anything other than remain polite. As far as I’m concerned, all HRC does by saying nasty things about Obama is hurt herself. He doesn’t need to ‘fire back’ in my book.
Similarly, we heard a lot about how Edwards or Clinton would “fight” for us. I don’t think this rhetoric plays well for younger people. We really prefer consensus building to epic struggles for The Good Side. But maybe this is one more reason why Obama has trouble with older people, who want to hear a more conflict-oriented platform?
Ultimately I think that millenials (and younger gen-x-ers too) are really a bit like kids who grew up in a household with their parents yelling at each other all the time. (My own never did, and were wonderful, as, I’m sure were tons of Boomer parents – I just mean this in a very broad generational sense.) We don’t like hearing people yell at each other. We’re sick of it. Even if we agree with everything the yelling people are saying.
Anyway, just my 2 c, and of course I welcome corrections.
Regards,
Beren
Beren said From what I’ve seen of debates amongst older people and debates amongst those my age and younger, I’d have to say I think younger people tend to be less confrontational, or at least, the rules of debate amongst the younger allow for less direct confrontation. This is both a strength and a weakness, but either way it’s a difference.
I think you’re being too nice to my lousy generation. While I agree that confrontational tactics don’t make for decent intellectual discourse, their lack of arguing politics is because they are, in general, completely self-absorbed and, also, their “me-first!” attitude allows them, in their mind, to transcend the threads that bind us together in society. Can you tell I’m a little bitter?
Anoymous said “Wow, DaveC. Communism was bad? America’s better than North Korea or Iran? You’re a brave, brave man. I hope you know the kind of controversy you’re in for.”
In DaveC’s defense, the modern left’s rush to have the state employ programs for the “public good” arouses paranoia in me too. The fact that communism was responsible for the worst conditions imaginable and genocide in the 20th century, I feel, is something to take very seriously. Do I think the modern left wants to revert to genocide for us non-revolutionary malcontents? No. But allowing the government this type of absolute authority in our economic affairs arouses genuine concern.
In DaveC’s defense, the modern left’s rush to have the state employ programs for the “public good” arouses paranoia in me too.
By programs for the public good, do you mean the Department of Defense?
But allowing the government this type of absolute authority in our economic affairs arouses genuine concern.
One third of the discretionary budget is DOD. A tiny tiny slice of the federal government decides how to disburse one third of the budget with minimal review. We have entire industries that would collapse over night if DOD funding changed. Does any of this raise genuine concern for you? Or are you only concerned about unspecified programs proposed by “the left”?
We need some definitions here. What they had in the CCCP was called communism, but was really more of an oligarchy (rule for the benefit of a small group of people) that used some tenants of Marxism for inspiration (nominal worker ownership of means of production), but ended up functioning more like a bunch of old robber baron style monopolies with crappy products. Have you ever run into a soviet refrigerator (makes so much noise it’s most practical to turn it on when you leave) or a East German car (body panels are made out of compressed cardboard, two cycle engine that burns oil by design -2-cycles are only found in weed wackers in the US)? There are real reasons that their economy collapsed that have nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with a fat cat bureaucratic elite that didn’t want to change anything because THEY were doing just fine, thank you (sound like Wall Street anyone?)
We need some definitions here. What they had in the CCCP was called communism, but was really more of an oligarchy (rule for the benefit of a small group of people) that used some tenants of Marxism for inspiration (nominal worker ownership of means of production), but ended up functioning more like a bunch of old robber baron style monopolies with crappy products. Have you ever run into a soviet refrigerator (makes so much noise it’s most practical to turn it on when you leave) or a East German car (body panels are made out of compressed cardboard, two cycle engine that burns oil by design -2-cycles are only found in weed wackers in the US)? There are real reasons that their economy collapsed that have nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with a fat cat bureaucratic elite that didn’t want to change anything because THEY were doing just fine, thank you (sound like Wall Street anyone?)
There are real reasons that their economy collapsed that have nothing to do with Marxism and everything to do with a fat cat bureaucratic elite that didn’t want to change anything because THEY were doing just fine, thank you
The argument against Marx being, of course, that there is no way to change the situation he described without it morphing into an oligarchy of some sort. Human beings are hierarchical by nature, and history would suggest the best that can be done is to smoothe out the equality curve so that that the people at the top of the hierarchy don’t control ALL the capital and political power.
(sound like Wall Street anyone?)
I don’t know if you’re suggesting this, but Wall Street isn’t to blame for the current economic situation. Investors are. It’s investors who ultimately fuel market speculation – in the case of the current housing collapse, the banks acted irresponsibly, but would have been forced to do so even had they preferred not to. In an overheated market, no investment banker who prevents his or her clients from making profit by investing their money overcautiously is going to keep his or her job for long. The occasional speculation-fueled collapse is inevitable in a capitalist economy.
There are some obvious cases of corporate abuse (Enron et. al.) but the current economic slowdown is not one of them.
Xeynon said By programs for the public good, do you mean the Department of Defense?
I believe that defense and law enforcement are best left in the public domain and are a legitamate function of our government. I was thinking more along the lines of huge ponzi schemes like Social Security getting the proverbial heave-ho.
“Anti-communist fearmongering”; You write that like there was nothing to fear. Really, is it that we oldsters won’t let go of the past, or that you youngsters won’t learn from it?
the modern left’s rush to have the state employ programs for the “public good” arouses paranoia in me too
Which people on the modern left? Which proposals, specifically, are you thinking of?
Yeah yeah – I had to walk to school – uphill both ways…
“anti-communist fearmongering”
Glad to know it was just fear-mongering and there was really nothing to it at all…
Look – I have no problem with Obama being elected – I’d really like to see it. But Wright’s comments were offense. Ayers is a real problem. Some of his wife’s comments have been offensive to me. Some of his comments have been offensive to me. He’s had a bad couple of weeks and his inexperience is showing. I can say these things with no racism involved. I can point these things out and still hope he gets elected.
There’s a reason why Obama is getting killed among Democrats over 65. And that’s why we aren’t going to see the end of this whole radical, commie, black nationalist business.
We haven’t got to the general yet. But yes, let’s keep in mind that we are primarily talking about Democrats at this point. 😉
Lt Nixon,
Social Security is a well-funded, secure pension program. I don’t see how the continuation of that wildly popular, seventy-year-old program is something that should “arouses paranoia in” you.
Please consider the possibility that your thinking on that point in your two posts might be a bit muddled. I appreciate your willingness to discuss these things with people with different views– and, of course, we all respect your having served this country. I’m trying to avoid all snark in this post. I hope you hang around.
Brett Bellmore– please be aware, that, even though Communism was a threat, the Army wasn’t infiltrated with Communists, according to Eisenhower, contrary to what McCarty said. Just because something is bad doens’t mean there can’t be fear-mongering about it.
Plus, today, resistance to Communism is slightly less important than resistance to Naziism, or lynchings. Not that those things never happened, or that they were not terrible things, but people under 50 aren’t really concerned that the Red Menace is one of the top 100 things to worry about in this election.
Also, what, OCSteve, is the importance of the fact that Ayers lives in the same neighborhood as Obama? Why do you prefer to focus on that than evaluate Obama on his voting record, his speeches, and his policy proposals?
We’re losing in Afghanistan, drifting along in a hated occupation in Iraq, watching our economy teeter, and trying to reduce the mammoth debts that the past 7 years have wrought. We don’t have the luxury of focusing on irrelevant, personality-based politics.
People who use the term “Ponzi scheme” to refer to Social Security clearly do not understand what either of those things are. Either that or they’re using shorthand deliberately designed to confuse and mislead.
Brett, yes, in terms of the likelihood of the US ever becoming a Communist country, yes, it was fearmongering. And the arms race factor is orthagonal to the Communist factor.
“Social Security is a well-funded, secure pension program.”
Social security is a whole ‘nother topic, but long story short, the notion that it’s “well funded and secure” is economic lunacy. It’s a pay as you go system with no real assets, and will be demographically infeasible… before I retire, damn it. Which is why I keep my 401-k in foreign stocks.
OCSteve: Look – I have no problem with Obama being elected – I’d really like to see it. But Wright’s comments were offense. Ayers is a real problem. Some of his wife’s comments have been offensive to me. Some of his comments have been offensive to me.
And back in 2004, you swallowed the Swiftboating of John Kerry hook, line, and sinker. It’s not an identical campaign this time – very different candidate, very different media tactics. But you are swallowing it down with the same wide-open throat as you did the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Just as you swallowed down the lies the “military experts” told you.
If you feel conned, OCSteve, isn’t it time you started taking a long hard look at the nice, fat, juicy worms that get dangled in front of you before you swallow?
From what I’ve seen of debates amongst older people and debates amongst those my age and younger, I’d have to say I think younger people tend to be less confrontational, or at least, the rules of debate amongst the younger allow for less direct confrontation.
That is a really good insight. Does this ring true with you other young’uns? It seems to make sense of some things for me. Thanks for that.
It also sounds like a welcome change. If that’s how you guys are gonna run things, I, for one, welcome our new GenX overlords.
Furthermore, I’m rather appalled by the selfishness many of the boomer generation have shown toward their children and grandchildren.
This is kind of an old tune, and to be honest, you’re welcome to it.
Just for perspective, when the ‘boomers’ came of age they inherited the cold war, Vietnam, and a remarkable sequence of political assassinations. De jure racial segregation was common in much of the country, de facto in most. Women could be housewives, nurses, or schoolteachers, pick one. Rivers caught fire due to industrial pollution. I could go on.
The boomers did their best. And, of course, by ‘boomers’ I really mean the half-generation before me, personally. It was the folks born between, say ’45 and around ’53 that people mean when they say ‘boomers’.
I was born in ’56. I experienced pretty much all of the turmoil of that period via the TV. All of the changes my older boomer siblings brought about didn’t cost me a thing. So, they have my gratitude.
The dirty fncking hippies did well. They accomplished a lot. May you do as much.
Good luck!
Thanks –
As an official boomer (b. 1947) let me remind you that although we grew up with the Red scare and hiding under our school desks to avoid nuclear fallout, we also had the ’60s, Vietnam, and Watergate. I also grew up in the deep South and experienced official segregation personally. When I hear voices like that of Jeremiah Wright, I know he is speaking the truth – I lived through some of the history he talks about. The tactics the right-wing noise machine uses against Obama today are merely updated versions of the tactics Nixon used to win his seat in Congress.
The “liberals” today remind me of Nixon. For example, Hillary Clinton’s much-touted health care program is pretty much the same idea that Nixon brought out in 1971 to defeat the single-payer health plan being proposed by Ted Kennedy. Today’s “far left” was our center right.
We also lived through the terror of the late sixties when the 3 most powerful voices for change were gunned down, no doubt by our own government. That’s why you find so many boomers in the 911 Truth movement. We expect the government to lie, we have zero trust for anyone in leadership in Washington. We know that neither HRC nor BHO will bring meaningful change, that both will continue the sellout of our nation to corporate interests, but that either is preferable to electing a lying neocon asshole.
Whee! Best get your doubter checked out.
Their doubters are evidently completely kaput.
Just for perspective, when the ‘boomers’ came of age they inherited the cold war, Vietnam, and a remarkable sequence of political assassinations. De jure racial segregation was common in much of the country, de facto in most. Women could be housewives, nurses, or schoolteachers, pick one. Rivers caught fire due to industrial pollution. I could go on.
I didn’t mean to imply that the boomers haven’t done a lot of good for American society as well. I actually think you guys (I’d call anyone born pre-1960 a boomer, even if they don’t meet the technical sociological definition) are a bit too hard on yourselves sometimes – in many areas of American life, your generation did just as much to make the world better as the so-called “Greatest Generation” did.
All that said, time marches on. Things that were once defining struggles (e.g. feminism, civil rights) become the subject of history books. Battles that have been won define the terrain that shapes a new generation. To me, the ideas that the government could make laws prohibiting me from marrying someone of a different race, or ban someone with dark skin from eating at the same lunch counter as I do, is patently absurd. Not in the sense that I’m not aware that such realities were once commonplace, and still are some places in the world, but in the sense that I find them so unreasonable that I can’t take them seriously. Most sociological indicators suggest that my attitude is pretty normal for my generation. Hence, to see the reaction to Obama’s candidacy devolve into a hand-wringing bull session/shouting match about white guilt, African-American victimization, patriotism, and the Ghost of Black Panthers Past is mystifying and deeply irritating. As is seeing something like the Iraq War debated as a proxy pissing contest about who loves America more, Vietnam vets or peacenik draft dodgers, rather than as a policy question about what’s in America’s interest.
And longterm issues like climate change and the longterm fiscal soundness of the welfare state matter a lot to me. More than they seem to to a lot (though by no means all) people in the boomer cohort.
LTNixon: “In DaveC’s defense, the modern left’s rush to have the state employ programs for the “public good” arouses paranoia in me too. The fact that communism was responsible for the worst conditions imaginable and genocide in the 20th century, I feel, is something to take very seriously. Do I think the modern left wants to revert to genocide for us non-revolutionary malcontents? No. But allowing the government this type of absolute authority in our economic affairs arouses genuine concern.”
The thing is, I can’t see how wanting to have government programs for the public good translates into “absolute authority”. That, for instance, WIC, which provides food vouchers to “low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants and children under the age of five.” I take it this is a clear example of a government program aimed at the public good. Does the fact that we adopted it imply anything at all about granting the government “absolute authority in our economic affairs”? I can’t see how.
Lots and lots of countries adopt programs for the public good. Some of them were communist. Others are countries like Sweden and Norway, which have both robust democratic traditions and a historical commitment to the kinds of programs you mention. Some are centrist. Some are conservative. Some were fascist, or monarchist. These programs are ubiquitous.
The fact that Democrats advocate having some of them does not mean that we’re on the slippery slope towards Marxism, any more than it means we’re on the slippery slope towards becoming more like the UK, or Taiwan, or Pinochet’s Chile, or Franco’s Spain, all of which also have or had government programs aimed at the public good. Absent some evidence that Democrats favor the USSR variant of these programs, as opposed to the Swedish, or UK, or Chilean version, or even, astonishingly, our own variant of them, I can’t see that bringing the USSR into things illuminates anything.
Also: as others have said, it is possible for there to be fear-mongering about something that is actually dangerous. The USSR was actually dangerous, as well as being abhorrent to its own people and its neighbors. But there was also fear-mongering: McCarthy going on about all the Communists he imagined existed throughout the government, LBJ and people on the right talking about a Communist Vietnam being a threat to our national security, etc., etc.
What makes it fear-mongering is that it involves citing dangers that do not exist (even if others do), and inflaming fears beyond reason. — It would be slightly melodramatic to call those people who advertise antibacterial soaps by citing the dangers of bacteria on your countertops “fear-mongers”, but they are people who are doing the sort of thing I’m talking about. Bacteria are, in fact, dangerous. But people who take basic hygiene seriously are not in danger from their countertops, and in fact the use of these soaps is not just unnecessary but counterproductive, since they help create resistant bacteria.
I can’t speak for publius, but I think a fair amount of anti-Communism, as actually found in the US in the 60s and 70s, was like this, only writ very, very large.
Xeynon: To me, the ideas that the government could make laws prohibiting me from marrying someone of a different race, or ban someone with dark skin from eating at the same lunch counter as I do, is patently absurd. Not in the sense that I’m not aware that such realities were once commonplace, and still are some places in the world, but in the sense that I find them so unreasonable that I can’t take them seriously.
The same kind of laws, passed by the same kind of people, are still being taken seriously in the US today, and are a commonplace reality for people in a majority of the states in America today. The federal government, and many state governments, has passed a law prohibiting you from marrying someone of the same gender. The laws that allow states to refuse to recognize a valid marriage carried out in another state of the Union, or that allows the State of Massachusetts to be difficult about allowing couples to marry who live in states where same-sex marriage is not legal, are the same laws written to prevent “interracial” couples from marrying.
It’s unreasonable, yes: but if you are lesbian or gay in the US, you are compelled to take such unreasonable legislation seriously, along with the unreasonable legislators who enforce it.
Don’t forget, the North/South divide is still with us after a hundred-years plus. The 60’s were not like the Civil War; however they both had huge swaths of white folks feeling like they were stabbed in the back. And having a hard time getting over it.
anon: Also, what, OCSteve, is the importance of the fact that Ayers lives in the same neighborhood as Obama? Why do you prefer to focus on that than evaluate Obama on his voting record, his speeches, and his policy proposals?
I’m not sure why you would think I’m “focused” on it. You could search the archives here or the entire Internet for that matter and see that this is the very first time I’ve ever mentioned Ayers. But it’s much more than living in the same neighborhood. And it’s much more than Ayers doing some minor bad stuff back in the day when the big O was only 8. Ayers was part of a group that set off bombs. We call that terrorism. The bomb that killed 3 of those a-holes was meant for a dance at Ft. Dix. They killed police officers. The only reason he is walking around a free man is because of a government screw-up – not because he is innocent, and he is completely unrepentant about his actions.
Obama served on a foundation board with him, took contributions from him, and even held an event at the guy’s house. And when asked about it he did not even really try to distance himself from the guy, instead equating the relationship to his relationship with a Senator whom he has policy disagreements with. The best I can say about that is it is very poor judgment. That doesn’t mean it would keep me from voting for him – it means that I question his judgment on this particular relationship.
Jes – I’m going to have to pass on responding to your comment as it would likely invoke the wrath of the kitty.
The welfare state and leftist policies were OK for the average American before the Civil Rights movements. The War on Poverty was only given a decade to be a success…other white Protestant nations (Nordic/Scandinavian, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK) gave their programs much longer to kick it and help society.
Shorter me – as I’ve seen it stated somewhere (I forget exactly where) substitute McCain for Obama and Eric Rudolf for Ayers and then tell me it doesn’t matter.
I, for one, welcome our new GenX overlords.
Classic.
We will slack you all to death.
“Just be glad you haven’t had to argue with actual Wobblies.”
Why would I argue with them? I still agree with a lot of what they stood for!
The same kind of laws, passed by the same kind of people, are still being taken seriously in the US today, and are a commonplace reality for people in a majority of the states in America today. [bunch of correct statements about gay rights]
None of what you said is wrong, Jes, but you entirely missed Xeynon’s point, which aligns pretty well with my views. It’s not that racism and homophobia don’t share extremely similar underlying patterns of thinking and disenfranchisement, and aren’t just as worthy of defeat. It’s that the dog whistle politics that are specifically racist/red scare in nature and specifically so in ways that set off alarm bells in people of certain generations, largely produce puzzlement and eye-rolling from those who did not grow up in that era.
“Shorter me – as I’ve seen it stated somewhere (I forget exactly where) substitute McCain for Obama and Eric Rudolf for Ayers and then tell me it doesn’t matter.”
One could come up with many such associations of public conservatives and ‘way out there’ racists, fascists,…etc., etc.
But they do not get much, if any, press. So I guess no, it doesn’t matter.
OCSteve: Jes – I’m going to have to pass on responding to your comment as it would likely invoke the wrath of the kitty.
I do not believe the kitty will get mad at you for acknowledging that you’ve been gullible in the past and you’re going to try to quit: as for example, not getting so offended about a black man getting really, really angry because the US isn’t living up to the ideals it claims. (Jeremiah Wright was a Marine: but I guess, as with John Kerry, the words “thank you for your service” no longer apply when the serviceman is – or is supporting – a Democrat for President.)
The same kind of laws, passed by the same kind of people, are still being taken seriously in the US today, and are a commonplace reality for people in a majority of the states in America today.
I agree; I’m a supporter of marriage rights for same-sex couples. I don’t think it’s precisely analogous, however. Race is, on a physiological level, a pretty much meaningless concept – it’s essentially an artificial social construct based on a few related genetic characterististics with very little scientific meaning. What Judith Butler thinks aside, that’s not true of gender. For better or worse, opening marriage up to same sex couples is a fundamental definitional change in the basic legal conception of marriage as it’s been defined in American legal thought since the beginning. As such, I think the argument against it, while still wrong both morally and practically in my view, has a tad more intellectual credibility.
It’s unreasonable, yes: but if you are lesbian or gay in the US, you are compelled to take such unreasonable legislation seriously, along with the unreasonable legislators who enforce it.
Uh, with a handful of exceptions, this is true if you’re gay or lesbian ANYWHERE. Even the vast majority of European countries don’t recognize civil marriages between gay couples. Vermont passed a civil unions law a full five years before Britain did. So while the U.S. is not where I want it to be on this issue, it’s hardly unique in this regard.
Catsy: It’s that the dog whistle politics that are specifically racist/red scare in nature and specifically so in ways that set off alarm bells in people of certain generations, largely produce puzzlement and eye-rolling from those who did not grow up in that era.
Yes: and the racist attacks on Barack Obama have had to be much more subtle than the misogynist attacks on Hillary Clinton. But they still work – witness the number of perfectly decent white people who are getting really, really offended at Jeremiah Wright: how dare a black man be that angry? And how dare Obama presume to value that angry black man? Nothing brings out the latent racism so much as the discovery that those people with the wrong skin color whom you’ve been so very nice to are not quiet and gratefully appreciative of your niceness. Being openly angry is one of those things that people in minorities are not supposed to do.
My point was that dog whistle politics still work, and still work the same way – it’s just gay marriage and “pro-life” dog whistles bring voters to heel.
Xeynon: I don’t care if Obama smoked pot or what Hillary said about stay-at-home moms or whether McCain’s Vietnam service makes him more patriotic than his opponents, because frankly there are much, much more important issues facing our country than hashing out dorm room spats from the ’60’s.
Well said. I’ll drink to that.
But I think it goes further: it’s not just the boomers who are continually refighting Vietnam (or the 60s in general), I think we of GenX/Y/Whatever often adopt that frame and import the old conflict into the new paradigms. [This is particularly true, IMO, on the neoconservative/pro-war side.] We’re sort of glorifying the past, only we’re not regarding the 60s with glory so much as we are as archetypal. Maybe it’s because the battle lines were so clearly drawn — squares v. hippies; Vietnam supporters v. Vietnam opponents; etc. — that it gives a nostalgia-fuelled sense of moral clarity that is otherwise lacking in this messy post-modern age.
Or maybe I’m just full of crap. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Beren: In class discussion, or conversations with friends, I almost never hear, “You’re wrong,” or “That’s wrong,” but rather something along the lines of, “Well, that’s interesting, what you said, and it’s a good point, but it makes me wonder though, because….”
That’s true for particular demographics but it’s by no means universal. I know plenty of younguns who’ll cut you dead if you say something stupid, and I know plenty of older folks who will be exceedingly tactful in their dissent. The tolerance for those responses seems equally dispersed. Consider the obvious example, that Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly remain popular — even with the younger generation, bless their tiny, tiny withered hearts — despite their spittle-flecked jeremiads.
There’s certainly something in what you say, mind, but I think the argument needs to be made a lot more precisely before I can agree with it.
Jes: I do not believe the kitty will get mad at you for acknowledging that you’ve been gullible in the past and you’re going to try to quit:
I do, however, believe that the kitty will get mad when OCSteve reaches through the screen and strangles you for being a condescending prat. Not that I want to put words in his mouth or anything (:
OCSteve: On Ayers, I don’t see it. As background to this, I think that Ayers was a terrorist, and have precisely no sympathy for him at all.
That said: Serving on a board with someone is not a big deal, I think: my impression is that the statement you make is that the organization whose board it is is one you feel comfortable with, not that the rest of the board members are. Certainly, the one time I ever sat on a board, I had no idea (beyond the rather cursory biographical blurbs we got) who my fellow board members were, and frankly, if none of them had any past associations that would make me uncomfortable, I would be very much surprised.
(I mean: it’s a board I ended up quitting rather quietly, but on a matter of principle. (Quietly meaning: I did make my reasons known, but tried to be tactful rather than make a Big Stink. I did this mostly because I thought it would be more effective, and I believe my quitting might have had an effect.) Since I quit on principle, it would surprise me if not a single one of the individuals involved had associations implicating that same principle. But I didn’t know any of this when I joined.)
Taking contributions: again, I think it’s hard to hold people responsible for everyone who decides to contribute to them. I mean, I don’t believe that the various political candidates I’ve contributed to have gone through any actual process that leads them to think: yep, we’re comfortable taking hilzoy’s money. I expect that if someone sat down with the contribution list of any candidate major enough to have gotten a lot of contributions, that person would probably find someone pretty objectionable.
The party: I’d need to know a lot more about how it was set up, what Obama knew, etc. But having this happen once in his life does not strike me as obviously damning. About what Obama knew: Ayers is not an uncommon name, and iirc being in the Weathermen is not obviously evidence of much more than terminal stupidity: without doing all the research I’d need to, I seem to recall that it had a bone-headed yet aboveboard phase, when it took over SDS, and only later turned into the underground bombers. It was violent throughout, but there is, at least to me, a difference between saying something like “it will be necessary to resist police brutality by violence”, or even smashing a window, and setting bombs.
(It’s not, of course, the difference between OK and not OK.)
The only reason I know the names of some of the Weather Underground leadership is because I watched the 2002 documentary about them. I’m a couple of years older than Obama, I think, and was probably more political than he was during the events in question, which is why I take me sense of what I would have known, and whether I would have recognized Ayers to be significant: I wouldn’t have, and I would have been more likely to than Obama.
The Weathermen registered, for me, around 1970 and 1971 (when I was 11 and 12, and Obama would have been 9 and 10 and probably in Indonesia), but I pretty much forgot about them thereafter, and certainly didn’t know their names. The relevance of this is: I wouldn’t have known that Ayers was in their leadership, or that he had been one of the underground bombers as opposed to a hanger-on or a minor footsoldier who quit after the Days of Rage, or something, without the 2002 movie.
Which means that if he had offered to host a party in the mid-90s, I would probably not have figured out who he was. It might have been a good idea to check, but I hate expecting politicians to be androids like that.
(Naturally, I would take a completely different view of all this if I thought there was any reason at all to think that Obama was secretly sympathetic to the Weather Underground. But, um, I don’t.)
That is a really good insight. Does this ring true with you other young’uns?
Missed this question earlier, but to give you my perspective:
My mom is an ex-hippie and solid liberal on most issues. My dad is a dyed-in-the-wool, Rush-Limbaugh listening conservative. Political disagreements having been a fairly large factor in their divorce, I’m not too keen on red-faced shouting matches about politics myself – I get my political debate fix almost entirely on the internet.
Even leaving that aside, though, I do think that growing up as basically a centrist between two ends of the spectrum and coming to understand both worldviews as well-meaning, but based on very different assumptions about people and society, has led me to try to prefer a less confrontational style of political discourse in my day-to-day life. I can’t say that that’s representative, though.
Anarch owes me a keyboard.
Jes, I’m not sure where you think I’m disagreeing with you. I don’t think any of what you said is in conflict with anything I said: it can be simultaneously true that dog-whistle politics both produce eye-rolling from my generation and are also capable of hurting him in the general.
And Anarch: the kitty was annoyed, and particularly hoped that Jes would consider that this:
“Jeremiah Wright was a Marine: but I guess, as with John Kerry, the words “thank you for your service” no longer apply when the serviceman is – or is supporting – a Democrat for President.”
might easily be taken, by OCSteve or anyone else, as being about his attitudes towards vets, not about e.g. the attitudes of other people who talk about Wright. And if I were OCSteve and took it that way, I’d be angry. As the hypothetical “me-as-OCSteve” is not the actual OCSteve, I have no idea whether it annoyed him, but the kitty hopes that you will avoid giving the impression of telling people who are vets how they feel about other vets, especially when they are vets who have more than earned a presumption of fair-mindedness and goodwill.
Hertzeberg on Ayers. He uses the word “McCarthyism.” I find that entirely accurate.
Also: John McCain now knows, and probably has known for a while, that George W. Bush & his cabinet authorized waterboarding. McCain has said that waterboarding is torture, and a felony. This involves actual grotesque recent violence, not juvenile plans to engage in violence decades ago. McCain has certainly had more of a relationship with Bush than Obama has with Ayers. Why is this taken for granted & not worth mentioning by the press, but Obama’s being on a board with Ayers & going to a party at his house & receiving a donation from him which he probably didn’t even know about a “serious problem”? Because the press is engaged in McCarthy-level attacks on Obama’s patriotism, that’s why.
I was at a panel discussion with Dohrn in 2004, by the way. I had a vague idea that she had been in the Weather Underground & a fugitive at some point & her tenure at Northwestern had been controversial; I assumed that she had not been involved in trying to murder anyone (I think this is accurate, not sure) & had repented & renounced violence in so forth; apparently they are not so repentant but I did not fully vet her. So I am dangerously sympathetic to the Weathermen, you see; it’s lucky I don’t post here anymore or you would all be tainted too.
Not 2004, 2006.
And longterm issues like climate change and the longterm fiscal soundness of the welfare state matter a lot to me.
Yes, those are going to be two of the big nuts for your generation to crack. They will be hard, I wish you luck.
I’d add one more, which is figuring out where and how the US will fit in a really multi-polar world.
Boomers grew up with the US (good guys) and the USSR (bad guys). You guys will be living in something like US, EU, Russia, China, India, the middle east, central and southeast Asia, and maybe even Africa at some point, all contending as independent players for a place at the table, and with no real ‘good guys’ or ‘bad guys’ to point at.
Perhaps your non-confrontational, consensus building skills will be put to good use.
I really do wish you luck with it, because it will be a hard needle to thread.
Thanks –
What they had in the CCCP was called communism, but was really more of an oligarchy (rule for the benefit of a small group of people) that used some tenants of Marxism for inspiration (nominal worker ownership of means of production), but ended up functioning more like a bunch of old robber baron style monopolies with crappy products.
Oh so very true. But that makes it even more despicable how the boomers marched through the streets shouting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Min”, put big Mao posters on their walls and told Eastern European dissidents: “that’s terrible what happened to you, but now sit quietly in the corner and write your memoirs while we figure out how to put a happy face on socialism.” And I could go on and on, and yes I’m bitter and generalizing unfairly, sorry, but it’s time for these people to stfu.
Anarch: “That’s true for particular demographics but it’s by no means universal. I know plenty of younguns who’ll cut you dead if you say something stupid, and I know plenty of older folks who will be exceedingly tactful in their dissent.”
Thanks for your post, Anarch, and for inviting me to be more precise. I’m not by any means speaking universally, i.e. I’m not saying that the difference I claim to observe will be applicable to any particular two people, one older, one younger, that we might randomly select. Nor am I really talking about personal tact, exactly. A better way to put it might be that the rules of discourse amongst the younger often tend to have stricter (implicit) rules against polarizing or confrontational speech. This doesn’t necessarily mean that a given young speaker is actually going to be less adversarial in arguing a point – just that if (s)he is confrontational, (s)he is more likely to lose the audience’s sympathy and thus the argument, if the audience is also made up mostly of younger people.
So this isn’t really a question of the personal goodwill of the speaker, but rather of the range of tactics available to a speaker trying to win an argument, either in front of an auditorium of thousands, or in a room of five. Righteous anger won’t help you out as much in front of a younger audience, as it will in front of an older audience, or so it seems to me. And it’s more likely to harm you, because there are fewer situations in which it’s approved of (though, obviously, if you’re arguing against someone who’s advocating genocide or something, you’re allowed to get angry).
I’ve seen people in an undergraduate context win an argument simply by being quiet and polite while their opponent showered them and their positions with a torrent of aggressive and (partly) uncalled-for attacks. They didn’t need to hit back, and in fact it wouldn’t have helped them to win the argument if they had hit back. To my 29-yr-old eyes, HRC’s attacks upon BHO have looked like more of the same dynamic. Thus, I’ve been mystified to hear older pundits of all political stripes (and my father, a devoted Obama supporter) all say that Obama “has to hit back hard”. Of course, he does have to explain himself on issues where there might be misunderstanding. But as for attacking Hillary in return, I think that by the rules of discourse amongst the younger generations, ‘hitting back’ is the last thing he needs to do.
Thanks again for pointing out my imprecision. Further disagreements/comments would be most welcome.
novakant: I have very little interest in defending the excesses of the late 1960s. But fwiw: at the time, no one had any idea what was actually going on in the PRC, other than very vague ideas about barefoot doctors, since practically no journalists were allowed in at all. Certainly what the cultural revolution actually meant was completely unknown.
This absolutely means that people who put up Mao posters were taking a rather large and stupid gamble, being pretty ignorant of what Chinese communism actually meant on the ground. But it does not mean that they approved of the actual PRC of the time, as we now know it.
I very much appreciate someotherdude’s comments about the Civil War, because they bring into focus a distinctive characteristic about American society and politics: the pretense that history is over, that things that are happening are affected only by immediate circumstances.
Xeynon, your characterization of society-wide reactions to social change as “dorm-room spats” is inaccurate as well as offensive. As for Meditative Zebra’s view that all these boring disputes will disappear when my generation finally dies: they won’t.
The struggle between right and left on economic issues, the advance and retreat of legal and social equality and acceptance, the domestic and world consequence of the United States’ imperial foreign policy… these have gone one for at least the last 150 years. They’re not the particular obsessions of my generation, though they did converge in an especially intense way during our formative years.
The convergence was so intense for the same reason that the echoes of that particular convergence are louder than under-40 Americans would probably prefer: our g-g-generation is just so damned huge.
And, I don’t regret to inform you, we aren’t going to hurry up and die. Please refrain from publicly wishing that we would, because it makes it hard to hear anything else you’re saying.
@novakant: Yes, you’re clearly bitter, and generalizng wildly. Exactly which people should stfu?
“And I could go on and on, and yes I’m bitter and generalizing unfairly, sorry, but it’s time for these people to stfu.”
That was a self-refuting comment.
Anyway, people who did take pro-communist positions in the 60’s can be found all over the political map now. And people who are spectacularly wrong on issue A are often spectacularly right on issue B. People change their positions and the same person who might look prescient at one time can look like a fool on a different issue.
It’s my understanding that Vaclav Havel was for the Iraq invasion. So was Ramos-Horta (Nobel Peace Prize winner from East Timor). So I suppose I should never listen to them on anything.
And what Nell said, regarding the 150 year comment and everything else. To a lot of us (I’m a tail-end boomer, too young to have done anything in the 60’s), Vietnam, Iraq, the Philippines, and US policy in numerous other places at many different times are all examples of American imperialism. I suspect a fair number of people will continue to see it that way after all the boomers die.
Where’s my cane?!! hey what?? hey you Kids.. First, If you’d guys VOTE once and awhile we might take you more seriously. Second, In 10 years when I’m 62 our generation will be the largest over 60 generation the US has ever seen. We will overtake the under 30 class. And we vote! Suck on that for awhile..huh! what???
It’s fair to generalize about generations with regard to the formative experiences they have in common (“greatest generation” experienced the Depression and then WWII, boomers experienced the civil rights era, Vietnam and Watergate). It is unfair to ascribe a common political outlook or opinion on some issue to that group. Yes, I am a “Boomer” — born in 1948. No I didn’t put Mao or Che posters on my walls. Various people I knew who did likely did so for some pretty different reasons. Some liked to be iconoclastic — the posters were almost a fashion statement to them. Some were so repelled by the racism and injustice they learned about for the first time in college that they spent a lot of time reading books like Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” and other anti-colonialist, anti-racist writings. They felt so deceived by their childhood education that didn’t address truthfully the bad as well as the good that was America that they rebounded in the opposite direction: instead of unalloyed boosterism of America, they became unalloyed critics.
But many “Boomers” from less privileged backgrounds than mine had to serve in Vietnam, or saw their brothers or lovers have to serve. Though some reacted by becoming anti-war, many became very angry at war protesters as denying the patriotism and service of the men who were drafted or otherwise served in that war. Others, like Rev. Wright, saw the deep contradictions between American jingoism that sent him to war yet denied him equality at home.
I’d like to give many boomers who underwent experiences like mine credit for seeing to it that the curricula of public schools improved in telling a less iconic and more nuanced story about America. I also think many Boomer parents have helped their children be less racially conscious than their parents were.
But our experiences still shape how we see the world, but yielding very different expectations and assumptions. Please don’t make the kind of blanket statements that I’ve seen earlier in this thread. While those may have been thoughtless or for comic effect, it isn’t helpful.
Publius,
You might be interested in this similar piece from “The Root”. I blogged about your piece and that one this morning–it’s dealing with some of the same issues you mentioned here.
hilzoy: If Obama had given a response anything close to yours I would have been happy with it. 😉 I just would like to see him distance himself more from those two. HRC can’t really use this given that her husband pardoned two of the others, but Republicans will have a field day with this.
if I were OCSteve and took it that way, I’d be angry
Nah. Jes and I have done the Swift Boat Vets Tango more than once so I understood where she was coming from.
And Jes, I’ll thank McCain for his service but I strongly disagree with some of his positions and I don’t think he should be CiC. I’ll thank Wright for his service but I still think some of his remarks are repulsive. I’ll thank Kerry for his service but I still think he is a doody-head. Having served doesn’t make one immune from criticism. I mean, Charles Whitman was a marine…
OCSteve: …but I still think he is a doody-head.
I’ve never seen it put so succinctly. Thanks for the laugh of the day. (So far. 😉
I’ll thank Kerry for his service but I still think he is a doody-head.
I remember reading a British commentator during the 2004 election who said that, to him, Kerry “sounded like a haunted tree”.
I like Kerry well enough, and he certainly got my vote last time around, but ever since reading that I haven’t been able to listen to him speak without breaking up in laughter.
Thanks –
OCSteve: Nah. Jes and I have done the Swift Boat Vets Tango more than once so I understood where she was coming from.
That’s probably more gracious than I deserve… also, I am now wondering what the hell the Swift Boats Tango looks like. 😉
And Jes, I’ll thank McCain for his service but I strongly disagree with some of his positions and I don’t think he should be CiC. I’ll thank Wright for his service but I still think some of his remarks are repulsive. I’ll thank Kerry for his service but I still think he is a doody-head. Having served doesn’t make one immune from criticism.
Heh.
but I still think some of his remarks are repulsive.
Which ones?
Wait…Kerry was in the armed services? How come no one told me?
OCSteve: the thing is, I don’t think they’re close enough that distancing is possible.
I read somewhere that John Kerry looked like an ent, which was so accurate that I never did manage to get it out of my head.
I guess not ignore, but doesn’t it mean we have to you know, marginalize them?
OCSteve: I don’t think you’ve yet realized that the “distancing himself” thing is, in fact, the entire game.
The whole POINT of the game is to make Obama distance himself. Because what thay says to the public is “Obama was once close to someone who was bad. Even Obama admits he’s bad. Obama hangs out with bad people.”
It’s an old trick. The point isn’t to prove that, say, Obama kicks dogs. The point is to make him deny it. To get the idea out there. To let it settle into the hindbrain of voters and let it fester.
That you keep falling for that game is probably Jes’s peeve.
The rest of us are just finding the game really old, and frankly — really stupid.
Wright’s festering in your brain — I’ve read the sermon in question, seen the whole thing in context. I don’t find it terribly offensive at all — I can certainly see where he’s coming from. Why do YOU find it offensive?
What about Ayers? Why should Obama denounce a man whose crime (supposed or not — I don’t remember if he was ever tried) happened when Obama was 10, and whom he obviously knows only professionally — and distantly at that?
I read somewhere that John Kerry looked like an ent, which was so accurate that I never did manage to get it out of my head.
Talked like one too.
Certainly what the cultural revolution actually meant was completely unknown.
I take your word for it, hilzoy, but I still wonder: what in the world were they thinking when they quoted from Mao’s Little Red Book?
Exactly which people should stfu?
I thought it was clear within the context of the discussion, but to remove the possible misunderstanding that I was bashing all boomers:
Those who, whatever their current guise, are still fighting the battles of that time or draw their main inspiration from that time. This also includes those on the right, and those who have simply switched sides (the spectacular volte face is quite popular among the people I’m talking about).
Why?
Because it’s ideological, it’s counterproductive, won’t solve our current problems, which are incredibly pressing, and is essentially a narcissist exercise. It’s also hugely annoying.
People change their positions and the same person who might look prescient at one time can look like a fool on a different issue. (…) So I suppose I should never listen to them on anything.
It depends on what you mean by “listen to them” (and I’m making no presumptions here).
If it means “noting their opinion” – sure, why not. But if it means “giving special weight to their opinion” or even “following their lead” because they are famous politicians or public intellectuals, I think you would be on the wrong track:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.
That doesn’t mean one should figure it out all alone sitting in a dark room chewing pencils, but it does mean that putting faith in people’s positions because of their status as opinion leaders is fundamentally wrong – and you cannot deny that a lot of that was going on in the period we are talking about.
novakant: whatever they quoted from the Little Red Book, they are responsible for. I just don’t think they’re responsible for knowing about what the PRC was actually like at the time. It was utterly closed until sometime around Nixon’s trip.
Fwiw, I have very little brief for significant chunks of the far left in the late 60s. (E.g., for SDS.) (Needless to say, I don’t have much use for most late 60s conservatives either.) It’s just that part of the reason for that is that I think they were very careless about what they thought and did, and I have no wish to emulate them.
Brett: Really, is it that we oldsters won’t let go of the past, or that you youngsters won’t learn from it?
I can’t believe it, I actually agree with Brett on something!
anon: Social Security is a well-funded, secure pension program.
Geez, you don’t want to get us going again on the trust fund, do you? I find myself agreeing with Brett’s 7:08AM. Twice in one post!
As a full-fledged baby boomer(b. 1946), my recollection of the 50’s was the tremendous respect we had (and were taught) for the government, especially federal, and the confidence we had in science and technology. As time passed we soon discovered our trust in both had been badly misplaced. You can imagine the anger we felt in the 60’s when we found out that our own government was lying through its teeth – especially about Vietnam. And one reason some of us seem to be so angry still is that we see it happening again, with a younger generation that just doesn’t seem to care (present readership excepted, of course).
What I can’t explain is why so many of my generation would support HRC over BO. It’s like we haven’t learned that divisiveness won’t get us anywhere. But then, I never voted for her husband either, and am quite disappointed with the boomer presidents we’ve had so far.
“t depends on what you mean by “listen to them” (and I’m making no presumptions here).
If it means “noting their opinion” – sure, why not. But if it means “giving special weight to their opinion” or even “following their lead” because they are famous politicians or public intellectuals, I think you would be on the wrong track:”
Well, that’s good advice, but it should be applied to everyone, and not just boomers or boomer politicians or intellectuals or even people who have had spectacularly wrong opinions on some important issues. I don’t give special weight to Nelson Mandela’s opinion on Castro (they’re pals), though I have more respect for Nelson Mandela than any politician anywhere. I don’t give special weight to Vaclav Havel’s opinions on Iraq or the US (he flatters us too much), though he was, arguably, the Nelson Mandela of Eastern Europe. I haven’t looked up their birthdates–are they boomers?
I respect hilzoy (though often disagreeing with her on some points), but she might go all goofy on us sometime. I’m continually on the lookout for that. (She’s a boomer, I think.)
Obama served on a foundation board with him, took contributions from him, and even held an event at the guy’s house.
I think the “event” was his initial fund raiser and introduction to the local liberal elite
when he first ran for state office. Some auspicious beginning!
Which means that if he had offered to host a party in the mid-90s, I would probably not have figured out who he was.
But if it was your first fund raiser as you ran for political office?
I don’t have my Obama time line in front of me, but Ayers was not exactly an unknown quantity to Obama. Michelle Obama put him on a panel with Obama. I think the problem is that Ayers is so well accepted in the liberal confines of Hyde Park that perhaps it didn’t seem all that bad of an association at the time.
(Naturally, I would take a completely different view of all this if I thought there was any reason at all to think that Obama was secretly sympathetic to the Weather Underground. But, um, I don’t.
What about his debate answer? Sure he calls Ayer’s acts despicable, but he relegates them to history even when Ayers (as reported on 9/11 no less) that they didn’t “do enough.”
Ayers is anything but repentant for blowing up buildings and trying to blow up people. The U.S. is still a terrorist organization. Obama’s “I was eight and that was 40 years ago” is a terrible response to his association with Ayers. He served with him on boards after 9/11.
but ended up functioning more like a bunch of old robber baron style monopolies with crappy products.
I really hope this is not how the left now looks at the USSR? Wow.
This absolutely means that people who put up Mao posters were taking a rather large and stupid gamble, being pretty ignorant of what Chinese communism actually meant on the ground. But it does not mean that they approved of the actual PRC of the time, as we now know it.
Huh? This is a defense of communist sympathizers? That they didn’t know? That we really didn’t know the details? That Mao and Stalin didn’t get along and therefore Maoist China was somehow completely different?
The whole POINT of the game is to make Obama distance himself. Because what thay says to the public is “Obama was once close to someone who was bad. Even Obama admits he’s bad. Obama hangs out with bad people.”
Plus even if he does “distance himself” (whatever that means) it doesen’t even end the matter. Nope he will be made to denounce again and again – remember “Oh he denounced Farahkann but he didn’t reject him!!!”
Plus all distancing and denouncing is subject to review by the GOPniks to determine if the distancing was sufficient to set aside the very grave concerns of republicians. Hint – it usually isn’t.
sorry about the italics.
bc: About the Mao posters: I think people absolutely knew about the USSR, the contents of Mao’s red book, etc. I was making the very limited point, of no great importance, that there were a few things they did not know. Like the state of the PRC, what the Cultural Revolution actually was, and so on.
I’m not really trying to excuse anyone. Just to make an observation about the times. I recall when that stuff started to come out. People I knew — and not Mao sympathizers; I’m thinking in particular of two people who were experts on various aspects of China, way more informed than your average student — were genuinely surprised.
“She’s a boomer, I think”
I always forget whether I am or not, technically. (Born 1959.) But I think of myself as being in the generation that came next. — I mean, I think of Boomers as having actually had the opportunity to go to Woodstock. I had only recently turned ten.
for “people absolutely knew”, please substitute “people absolutely should have known”. Obviously, I have no idea what any actual person who put up all those posters actually knew about the USSR.
Hilzoy:
Technically, you’re a boomer, even if you’re not what most people think of when they think of boomers. Boomers were born 1946-1964. That seems like too broad a range to me, but that’s the official definition.
Jes: Which ones?
Ah, we’ll bore everyone here. You know what I’ll say; I know what you’ll say…
hilzoy: the thing is, I don’t think they’re close enough that distancing is possible.
I could be wrong (shocking I know) but wasn’t it his campaign manager who confirmed they were friends? Just sayin’ – if there is a link or a bridge there it needs to be blown up now…
I read somewhere that John Kerry looked like an ent, which was so accurate that I never did manage to get it out of my head.
I think I recall that but it is fun to be reminded. When I combine that with russell’s “sounded like a haunted tree” it becomes “sounded like a haunted ent” and it cracks me up…
Morat20: Wright’s festering in your brain — I’ve read the sermon in question, seen the whole thing in context. I don’t find it terribly offensive at all — I can certainly see where he’s coming from. Why do YOU find it offensive?
Actually I don’t give him any thought at all beyond when these conversations come up. I’ve watched it in context too – I find it offensive. That’s me.
Why should Obama denounce a man whose crime (supposed or not — I don’t remember if he was ever tried) happened when Obama was 10, and whom he obviously knows only professionally — and distantly at that?
Ayers was never tried because the FBI spied illegally on them, never brought to trial due to prosecutorial misconduct. But he is pretty open about what he did and pretty proud of it to this day. There really is no question about his guilt. He admits it and is proud of what he did.
Did they cross paths a few times or are they closer is the question. Ayers is well known in Chicago politics. He helped launch Obama’s political career. He participated in a couple of forums with Obama at Michelle’s invitation. All that is meaningless – the GOP will kill him with this if he doesn’t literally nuke any bridges ASAP.
Xeynon, your characterization of society-wide reactions to social change as “dorm-room spats” is inaccurate as well as offensive. As for Meditative Zebra’s view that all these boring disputes will disappear when my generation finally dies: they won’t.
I didn’t say that society-wide reactions to social changes were dorm-room spats. I said that continuing to fling insults about who did or didn’t serve in Vietnam, go to Woodstock, burn their bra, etc. were. I don’t see any particular relevance whatsoever to our current situation in these disputes (as opposed to, say, those that were taking part in the roaring 20’s), other than that there are a lot more people who experienced them are still alive today.
The struggle between right and left on economic issues, the advance and retreat of legal and social equality and acceptance, the domestic and world consequence of the United States’ imperial foreign policy… these have gone one for at least the last 150 years.
The struggle between right and left has been continually redefined as the economy has changed from an agrarian one to an industrial one to an information-based one. Economic policy of the 1930’s, or even the 1960’s, is not particularly relevant today. Social equality and acceptance are important, yes, but I don’t think there has ever been a “retreat” on these issues – it’s been one slow but steady march forward. The consequences of our foreign policy are important, yes, but again, the world we live in today and the problems we face are different. E.g., Iraq is not Vietnam, and to draw facile parallels between the two vastly oversimplifies the issues in a way that is not at all helpful.
And, I don’t regret to inform you, we aren’t going to hurry up and die. Please refrain from publicly wishing that we would, because it makes it hard to hear anything else you’re saying.
I for one didn’t say this (in fact I said precisely the opposite).
And what Nell said, regarding the 150 year comment and everything else. To a lot of us (I’m a tail-end boomer, too young to have done anything in the 60’s), Vietnam, Iraq, the Philippines, and US policy in numerous other places at many different times are all examples of American imperialism. I suspect a fair number of people will continue to see it that way after all the boomers die.
Great. What does that really tell us, though? It’s like saying they were all examples of wars or examples of disputes between the U.S. and foreign countries. As a label, it’s so broad that it has little prescriptive value when it comes to policymaking. Our misadventure in the Philippines was undertaken at a very different time, when western attitudes toward the developing world were very different, for very different motives, using very different tactics. As offensive as many people find Bush today, it would be unthinkable for him to say that foreign invasions are justified because the white race is the vanguard of civilization and has a duty to conquer and civilize brown people, but that was a common view at the time of the Philippine War.
My point is that history is instructive, but only to a point. Saying that historical parallels have their limitations is not the same as ignoring history – and it seems to me many old people (not just boomers, nor by any means all boomers) see today’s world as more analogous to that of their own formative experiences than it actually is.
Actually I don’t give him any thought at all beyond when these conversations come up. I’ve watched it in context too – I find it offensive. That’s me.
We’ve probably been through this before, but just to reiterate:
1. there is no state religion
2. because of (1), state invocations of God (see coinage, “God Bless America”, presidential speeches, pledge of allegiance, etc) necessarily refer to MY God
3. you don’t get to invoke MY God and demand his blessings without giving me the right to say “no, God does not bless America because of X, Y, and Z”
Now, we could have avoided this problem if the state kept its filthy snout out of my religion and if it consistently refused to misappropriate things it had no business dealing with. But thanks to theocratic republicans, it didn’t. The bottom line: you don’t get to tell me what my religion is or how it works or how it views the state. Telling me what my God will or will not damn is wrong.
Maybe people who have been following this issue, or who have time to follow all the links in comment threads, have seen this, but it seems that maybe OCSteve hasn’t, and I certainly hadn’t:
(from Wikipedia, FWIW:)
For me, this reinforces what Morat20 wrote at 5:04. It appears not to be true that Ayers said he wished he had set off more bombs; in fact he appears to have explicitly and repeatedly “distanced himself” from that allegation.
If wishing he had set off more bombs is the heinous offense from which Obama is supposed to distance himself…then what? Does he have to distance himself from every imaginary friend his opponents invent for him? And by saying imaginary friend I’m not addressing the question of how close he is to Ayers (or not), but the fact that the Ayers you want him to distance himself from appears to be a figment…..
that’s good advice, but it should be applied to everyone
Certainly, it’s supposed to be universal, it’s Kant ;). And maybe it’s even in “trite but true” territory for people like us, but one wishes it was more commonly accepted.
The point as it relates to ’68 was, that paradoxically or tellingly the initial impulse to question authority was quickly swept away by a desire for ideology and a cult of personality.
I would like to think we now live in less ideological times. This assumption could be supported by looking at current political activism and how it has become more pragmatic, humanistic and goal oriented. Of course there is still a lot of crazy ideological stuff going on, but I hope with Hegel that these are essentially ideas that have outlived their relevance, so that they will continually loose traction. Of course, I might be spectacularly wrong on this one.
Turb: I’m not religious in the least. So I’m not sure where you are going…
JanieM: seems that maybe OCSteve hasn’t
I had actually:
But, Ayers writes on his blog, he has never escaped his past. Nor has he ever explicitly apologized, saying the times and his actions need a more nuanced rendering.
“I hear the demand for a general apology in the context of the media chorus as a howling mob with an impossibly broad demand, and on top of that I’m not sure what exactly I’m supposed to apologize for,” he wrote. “The ’68 Convention? The Days of Rage? The Pentagon? Every one of these can be unpacked and found to be a complicated mix of good and bad choices, noble and low motives.”
“Some read my failure to apologize as arrogance, stupidity and recalcitrance, or worse,” he wrote, “but I think, or I hope, that I’m holding on to a more complex, a truer read and memory of that history.”
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not very good at the whole nuance thing.
Sorry – this guy is a terrorist, plain and simple. No more and no less than McVay. He has no regrets over what he did. He gloats about it. He relishes the fact that he got away with it because the FBI screwed up the case. The fact that he is now an accepted part of society, an advisor to the mayor of a major city, in a position to actively attempt to indoctrinate the youth of the country – that just all makes me ill.
I’m still trying to grasp the idea that the great civil rights and feminism battles are all fought and won and we can just move on from them. When our Supreme Court recently decided that, unless a woman can find out what all her co-workers make within the first 6 months of her employment, she can’t later sue when she discovers that she’s systematically been paid less than men who do the same work for years and years, I’m not quite willing to grant that premise.
OCSteve — I’m not good at much else besides nuance at this point in my life. To me, it isn’t even straightforward to say, “this guy is a terrorist, plain and simple.” It’s a word that has been laden with far too much baggage, projection, and black-and-white thinking to be (as you put it) “plain and simple.” To me, there’s pretty much nothing whatsoever about human beings that’s “plain and simple.”
One person’s, or era’s, or region’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter, and plenty of people who I’m pretty sure you would call terrorists (depending on which side you were looking from) have become heads of state once the war (whichever war) was over.
People just aren’t monolithic, even in the moment, never mind over the course of a long lifetime. And in the media circus that is public life today, where anything anyone says, any nuance, any shade of meaning, any complexity of motivation or emotional reality is distorted, lied about, shredded to bits and pasted back together in some dishonest way — I probably wouldn’t apologize either, no matter how I felt privately about something I had done.
“plenty of people” is a hasty exaggeration / generalization. I was just trying to say that “terrorist” is a fuzzy, perspective-constrained, and often time-limited term. Do you think anyone who takes up arms against what s/he considers to be tyranny is a terrorist, and forever?
@Xeynon – A couple of points:
I never attributed to you sympathy with the sentiment that we should hurry up and die; that was Zebra.
As much of the post-Wright-speech discussion on this blog demonstrated, there are very different understandings of the amount and steadiness of the progress on social issues (not only in eradicating anti-black racism, but in issues surrounding women, disabled people, LGBT, and onward). I believe you underestimate the reality of backlash, backsliding, and the shallowness of some kinds of progress. From your perspective, I’m probably not celebratory enough of the progress that’s been made.
I have not made facile comparisons of the U.S. wars of agression in Iraq and Viet Nam. Nonetheless, to deny that imperial foreign policy is at the root of the two conflicts is to miss a pretty big piece of the picture.
Your supposed counter-example, the old-fashioned excuse for imperial war, is less of an argument against my approach than you might think. The mindset that supports our unchangingly imperial foreign policy is the same — only the exact character of the high-minded excuse changes. American exceptionalism, the bland assumption of our right to intervene anywhere and to be taken seriously as having some well-intentioned purpose, now justifies itself as being about “democracy promotion” instead of “the civilizing mission”.
That we’re once again in a ruinous, unwinnable war driven by our government’s lies is not evidence that I’m stuck in the sixties — it’s evidence that the country is, having quickly erased a lot of the lessons briefly learned at such a high cost.
I’m not religious in the least. So I’m not sure where you are going…
Ah. Some people are specifically pissed off that Wright said “God damn America because…” instead of saying “America is bad because…”. My comment is directed to those people. It sounds like you’re not one of them because the thing that pissed you off was criticizing America in general. Apologies and please ignore the misdirected comment.
JanieM: The bomb that took three of them out was intended for a dance at the NCO club at Ft. Dix. Non-commissioned officers (read blue collar, not officers) and their wives enjoying a night out. The security guard and the cops that they killed left wives and lots of kids behind. I’m working on nuance – this just doesn’t fit in…
I was just trying to say that “terrorist” is a fuzzy, perspective-constrained, and often time-limited term. Do you think anyone who takes up arms against what s/he considers to be tyranny is a terrorist, and forever?
George Washington et al= not terrorists. Even after 200+ years.
Hamas attacks against civilians=terrorism
Osama Bin Laden=terrorist.
Sure, there may be some gray area in the middle, (and you might consider Che in the middle) but blowing up members of the armed services (noncoms)at a dance with a suitcase packed with dynamite and nails? You have a problem calling that terrorism?
OCSteve — I suspect that if we had time and leisure, we’d find out that I’m not all that far from you in how I would judge for myself what Ayers did a long time ago. I think I’m reacting more to the question of how it fits, in the big scheme of things, in relation to a current presidential campaign. Every last thing is turned into such a stupid media circus, with spin and distortion and gotchas and all the rest. That turns my stomach. Not that violence doesn’t as well, truth to tell.
Thanks for the dialogue.
Ideology:
Which part do you object to?
The bomb that took three of them out was intended for a dance at the NCO club at Ft. Dix. Non-commissioned officers (read blue collar, not officers) and their wives enjoying a night out.
Your writing communicates a sense of intense outrage at the barbarity and injustice of such senseless violence. I appreciate that and I certainly agree with it. I part ways with you when it comes to the selectivity of this outrage. There were lots of blue collar folk in Iraq who have fared a lot worse and there are tons of GOP politicians that have “close” associations with Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Feith/Pearle/etc. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but do you feel the same sense of outrage for those killings?
George Washington et al= not terrorists. Even after 200+ years.
Of course they’re not terrorists. They won. If they had lost, they would have been terrorists. We’ve cleverly defined terrorism to be violence conducted by a non-state actor intended to effect political change. Washington et al win and become a government, so they can’t be terrorists. But if they had lost…
This is a very clever game: the same actions can be either terrorism or legitimate statecraft depending on who orders them. A neat trick indeed.
Sometimes I am good at nuance. However, as regards Ayers between, say, 1970 and, oh, maybe ’75, I don’t feel much need for it. (I have not followed what he has said since then, so I do not propose to talk about it.)
Some of the goals of the Weather Underground were goals I agree with: e.g., ending the Vietnam war. Some not. Most groups have some goals I agree with: I’m sure that al Qaeda must say something about, say, helping the oppressed, and I’d agree with that.
Means matter, though. And the means the Weather Underground took in the service of these goals were appalling. They set bombs. After three of their members blew themselves up while planning to bomb a dance of NCOs, they used precautions to ensure that no one was hurt, but (a) their initial plans included blowing up the dance, and the people at it, and (b) precautions don’t always work, and setting bombs necessarily runs the risk that people will get killed.
Moreover, their reasons for doing this were totally idiotic. By their reasons I don’t mean their goals, but rather the completely mythical connection between the means they chose and any actual way of realizing those goals. I mean, supposedly, setting these bombs was going to help end the war. How, exactly? Well, that’s sort of a mystery. It was going to help with the fight against worldwide oppression. Again, how? Again, a total mystery.
I don’t have a problem, in general, with people being stupid. It happens. But I do think that there are some things that you don’t get to do without making sure that this time, you are not being stupid — things that you can only choose to do by accepting an obligation not to be stupid this time.
Setting bombs is one of those things. I think it’s wrong under most circumstances, but when you do it without any more justification than some completely fantastic idea that by blowing up NCOs at a dance or the Marin County Courthouse or whatever, you are going to bring on the revolution, you are culpably stupid in a way you wouldn’t be had you just exercised your stupidity as, say, a golf caddy.
I have no problem at all calling the Weather Underground terrorists. None.
“Fwiw, I have very little brief for significant chunks of the far left in the late 60s. (E.g., for SDS.) (Needless to say, I don’t have much use for most late 60s conservatives either.) It’s just that part of the reason for that is that I think they were very careless about what they thought and did, and I have no wish to emulate them.”
The SDS up to the convention 0f 1969 of was most certainly not the Weatherman, and I’d contend that until that point the organization did invaluable work in organizing opposition to the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and otherwise in political education, with the lunatic nonsense largely being confined to the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL) groups, which overlapped with the later Revolutionary Youth Movement segment of the post-1969 period, and their sympathizers.
Do you really feel that the SDS of 1962 through 1966, 1967, and 1968, were of little use or positive value?
I certainly agree as regards what was left of SDS after the 1969 disintergration; but I don’t agree as regards the earlier years.
Ditto that although I’ve had good friends who were Maoists, I always found their politics appalling.
(For those unclear, I was born in November, 1958, so my knowledge is just about all second and third-hand. But the topic is one I’m fairly well-read in.)
As a bit of context, incidentally, OCSteve, without making the faintest apologies for Ayers, do keep in mind that it was a time of mass riots, shootings of students by the National Guard, assassinations of Black Panther leaders, COINTELPRO, a White House convinced that revolution was imminent, mass arrests of tens of thousands of people at a time, tanks on the streets of Washington, and on and on.
But the most relevant thing is that Bill Ayers and Barack Obama have had almost nothing to do with each other, and claims otherwise are laughable: how many hours are they documented to have spent in each other’s company, ever? Let alone one-on-one?
Ayers is just guilty-by-association mud.
Our misadventure in the Philippines was undertaken at a very different time, when western attitudes toward the developing world were very different, for very different motives, using very different tactics.
I find the “it was the times” defense a shaky one at the best of times; here, it should be pointed out that there was a fairly significant movement – the Anti-Imperialist League – in the US opposed to the “misadventure”. (One of the leaders of the League was one of my personal heroes, Carl Schurz, who – IMO – managed to be on the right side of every major issue from 1848 to 1900.)
Gary: I did mean the late 60s. What I had in mind was, oh, ’68 onwards.
“George Washington et al= not terrorists. Even after 200+ years.”
You might want to take that up with the Iroquois. Not that their own wartime conduct would have been in compliance with the Geneva Convention.
“Our misadventure in the Philippines was undertaken at a very different time, when western attitudes toward the developing world were very different, for very different motives, using very different tactics. As offensive as many people find Bush today, it would be unthinkable for him to say that foreign invasions are justified because the white race is the vanguard of civilization and has a duty to conquer and civilize brown people, but that was a common view at the time of the Philippine War.”
It’s no longer acceptable to be so blatantly racist, but I think the feeling that we are a morally superior society and therefore have the right to invade other countries for their own good is still running strong.
In some ways we’ve slid backwards. I get the impression there was more of an uproar over the Philippine atrocities 100 years ago than there has been with respect to the torture scandal. They tried General Jacob Smith back then, though according to wikipedia it wasn’t for ordering war crimes but for conduct not conducive to discipline.
Do you really feel that the SDS of 1962 through 1966, 1967, and 1968, were of little use or positive value?
Check it out: the Port Huron Statement, 1962.
It’s kinda long, but not that long. It’ll take you maybe 20 minutes to read it through.
These guys were what, 20 years old when they drafted this?
These were serious people. Good, bad, or indifferent as the paths were that they ultimately took, they were trying to figure out a good and worthwhile way to live in the world.
I’m with hilzoy. Ayers should be in jail.
But there was much, much more to the SDS and similar groups than bomb throwing.
All of which is by way of historical interest.
My understanding of the Obama-Ayers issue is that Ayers gave Obama $200, and hosted a party at which his predecessor in the state senate introduced him (Obama) to some local political types. And, oh yeah, they were both on the board of a charitable organization.
This is a scandal?
Next topic, please. Yes, I know the Republicans will try to crucify him with it, but seriously, next topic please.
Thanks –
OCSteve, please provide evidence that Ayres is trying to indoctrinate the youth of this country.
The fact that he, in looking back at what he did, is not properly remorseful does not make him a bad person today, unless you have evidence that he is actually doing something bad.
And as Gary has pointed out, to somehow or other uses Ayres to paint Obama in a bad light is absolutely ridiculous.
“I could be wrong (shocking I know) but wasn’t it his campaign manager who confirmed they were friends?”
Cite? I realize you seem to be saying you don’t know, but since you have the internet right there, presumably you can either check to your satisfaction, or choose to pass on a rumor whose truth or falsity you have no idea about. I’m hoping you’ll give a cite.
“Did they cross paths a few times or are they closer is the question. Ayers is well known in Chicago politics. He helped launch Obama’s political career. He participated in a couple of forums with Obama at Michelle’s invitation.”
That’s the thing. All that’s there is that Alice Palmer used the Ayers/Dohrn residence for a party at which she announced her retirement and endorsed Obama, and Ayers was asked to be on a couple of academic panels with Obama. And they were on a board, with no evidence they ever even met in that capacity, let alone were closer.
The former wasn’t Obama’s choice, was decades ago, and is trivial. The panel “connection” is equally trivial; I’ve been on dozens and dozens of panel discussions at conventions and conferences and the like, and I’d completely repudiate endless numbers of beliefs of endless numbers of people I’ve been on panels with, including people I’ve asked to be on panels.
So what? We’re not allowed to debate or engage in public discussion with people unless we either agree with them, or denounce them for what they did decades ago?
I don’t think so.
If Ayers and Obama were best buddies, or partners in a two-person firm, or something like that, sure, there’s be a valid complaint. But this is pure classic guilt-by-association.
Unless you have specific cites demonstrating otherwise. “Smoke” isn’t a legitimate charge; it’s a smear.
I get the impression there was more of an uproar over the Philippine atrocities 100 years ago than there has been with respect to the torture scandal.
More uproar not just about the atrocities but getting involved in the first place, William Jennings Bryan and Mark Twain to name two. The speech by Bryan was the day after he had secured the Democratic nomination.
“Sorry – this guy is a terrorist, plain and simple. No more and no less than McVay. He has no regrets over what he did. He gloats about it. He relishes the fact that he got away with it because the FBI screwed up the case.”
What quotes are you specifically referring to, please?
“I’m with hilzoy. Ayers should be in jail.”
I don’t have access to any of the history books I once had, I haven’t read Ayers’ book, and my memory is imperfect. Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in 1981. Did he or they do any actual bomb constructing/setting, etc., or did they just justify it? I don’t know at the moment, and would welcome clarification.
Dohrn:
If Ayers and/or Dohrn did actually engage in more than rhetoric, to the point of engaging in acts that substantively contributed to the moving forward of the bombing, then certainly they syhould have been tried for that, but if they had, and been found guilty, would they have been sentenced to more than 30 years in jail, for what they did nearly forty years ago?
If so, can we also get back to talking about why there haven’t been war crimes trials for Henry Kissinger, et al? Since we’re not letting bygones be bygones.
A couple years ago a some of my work colleagues and i went out for drinks and got talking about our respective pasts, Turns outt this one guy had set many many bombsback in the day. in fact he had dropped too many to count. I asked him if he knew how many peoplel had died from his bombs and he said he had no idea. i asked if if he knew how many were people he intended to kill and how many were bystanders and he said he had no idea.
Contrast that with Ayers and Dohrn who, on the rare occassions that they actyually manged to get one of their bombs to go offf timed the explosions for the early hours of the moring so as to kill no one.
Ayers and Dohrn had incredibley stupid reasons for blowing up bombs. AS i understand it they thought they wre part of a revolution.
My work colleague also had an incredibly stupid reason for killing thousands of people: he was carrying out orders. The oreder were given for incredibly stupid reason: obstensively to stop the spread of Communism but really in an effort to save our natinal vanity.
If we are going to get all huffy and puffy and moralistic and judgemental about Ayers, should we also question the judgement and values of those who killed som many more people for reasons equally self=indulgent annd self-delusional?
Or maybe we should get over the sixites and worry about current problems.
If so, can we also get back to talking about why there haven’t been war crimes trials for Henry Kissinger, et al?
Dude, you’re giving me a woodie.
Bring it.
Thanks –
As I said earlier, I hadn’t been following this story. I tried to make a more or less abstract point and did it poorly, and there were things about the story I didn’t know.
Other people have done a better job of getting at what was bothering me, but instead of trying to trace through everyone’s comments and say “I agree, thanks for saying it so well,” I’ll just follow up on Gary’s question about Kissinger with another question.
If Ayers is a terrorist, what is George Bush? What are Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld? Et al….
What exactly is the word for them, given the number of people who have died because of their idiotic stupidity and arrogance and sureness that they knew what was best for other people?
I’m not being snarky or sarcastic, I really want to know. Given how laden with outrage and disapproval “terrorist” is, what word is adequate for these people?
If there’s no particular word, nevertheless does everyone who thinks Ayers should be (or should have been in) prison think all the above-named should be right there with him? If so, that would make me feel a little better about this conversation.
Did he or they do any actual bomb constructing/setting, etc., or did they just justify it?
If we are going to get all huffy and puffy and moralistic and judgemental about Ayers, should we also question the judgement and values of those who killed som many more people for reasons equally self=indulgent annd self-delusional?
My assumption here has been that Ayers had some material connection to bomb making. If he did, IMO he should have done time. If he didn’t, but just thought it was a good idea, probably not, although he wouldn’t be on my Christmas card list.
My operating assumption, personally, is that there’s no good reason short of an imperative need to defend yourself to blow other people up. ‘Revolution’ is, IMO, just not good enough. ‘Stopping the spread of Communism’, ditto.
I have no, zero, nada, zip problem being judgemental about that. I think it’s dead wrong. IMO it’s murder.
As always, YMMV.
Or maybe we should get over the sixites and worry about current problems.
OK with me.
Thanks –
I’m quite happy with the idea of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld being in prison for war crimes. (Powell, no, unless he approved war crimes.)
As far as I know, “terrorist” means someone who uses terrorism, and terrorism is using violence against civilians to produce terror. It is not the same as using violence against military targets, with or without the possibility that civilians might be harmed. That can be bad (depending on the target, the reasons for striking it, and the relationship between the possible casualties and the target’s value — e.g., knocking out the train lines to Auschwitz would, according to me, have been OK even if it risked killing a small number of civilians.)
I do not know that Bush et al have used this tactic. If they have, I’m fine with calling them terrorists. If not, I’d prefer to stick with war criminals, given their violations of the laws of war.
If Ayers is a terrorist, what is George Bush? What are Cheney, Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld?
As I make it out, all of the folks you named conspired to mislead the American public in order to initiate a war of aggression against a country that posed no realistic threat to the US.
Further, they all sat in a damned room and discussed the details of an interrogation regime that very likely violated US and international law.
Jail, b*tches. Sounds fine to me. Fire up the special prosecutor and lets get to work.
Thanks –
I also assumed he was connected to the bombings. He was, I think, in the Weatherman leadership, and one of the three people who was killed in the townhouse explosion was his girlfriend. If he wasn’t involved, what russell said.
I also don’t know that I think Ayers should be (or have been) in prison. It depends what I get to assume. As I understand it, he was not charged because of government misconduct. Since I think that government misconduct in the collection of evidence should be grounds for excluding that evidence, assuming that that was why the charges were dropped, I don’t think he should be in jail. Otoh, if I get to assume that the government got evidence legitimately and made its case, then yes, I think he should have gone to jail.
I am also more than happy to drop the 60s.
Since I think that government misconduct in the collection of evidence should be grounds for excluding that evidence, assuming that that was why the charges were dropped, I don’t think he should be in jail.
Actually, I agree with this. Please amend my comments above to state that, if Ayers had some material connection with bomb making, he *deserved* to have done time.
If he got off because the government failed to obey the law when making its case, that’s on them. On the whole, IMO we’re far better off letting a handful of the guilty go free in order to preserve the rule of law, paradoxical as that may seem at first blush.
Thanks –
An aside, prompted by the discussion of the Weathermen and domestic terrorism.
My wife is a few years older than me. She grew up in northeast OH, attended Kent State, and was there on the famous day.
Four young people were shot dead by the National Guard on a college campus. Two of them had nothing to do with any kind of political protest, they were just walking to class.
Wrong place, wrong time. Tag, you’re it.
Nine others were wounded. One was permanently paralyzed.
And horrifying as that was, it was by no means the only scary or horrifying thing that happened during those years. Far from it.
Those were very, very, very hairy days. It’s all history now, so we forget, but scary, dramatic, violent, intense events were astoundingly normal at the time.
I don’t mind those days being done.
Thanks –
Well, Bush et al. have used propaganda against civilians to produce terror, but admittedly propaganda isn’t quite what is normally meant by violence. So I guess I’ll have to stick with war criminals too, although I have to say I think our society lets people who only use propaganda instead of violence for these purposes off too easily.
I should say that one reason this is all on my mind is that I’m reading Rick Perlstein’s new book, Nixonland. (It’s very, very good.) Prompted by the book, a couple of days ago I re-watched the Weather Underground documentary, and (as happened the first time I saw it) it made me livid.
As I make it out, all of the folks you named conspired to mislead the American public in order to initiate a war of aggression against a country that posed no realistic threat to the US.
I don’t think that this is the case, I think that the Congress looked at most of the available information, before AUMF, If stating what you believe given your interpretations of the available information is conspiracy, then what isn’t a conspiracy?
Further, they all sat in a damned room and discussed the details of an interrogation regime that very likely violated US and international law.
a) International law, by whom? I don’t think terrorists are protected under Geneva conventions, and surely our enemies are far more in violation of international law than the US.
b) I don’t believe that anybody set policy that terrorists can be tortured. I think that was an effort to protect intelligence agents, who many times had to operate under different circumstances than a domestic crime, as opposed to trying to overt pending acts of terrorism.
Jail, b*tches. Sounds fine to me. Fire up the special prosecutor and lets get to work.
The left wing historically wants their political opponents to be thrown in prison or psychiatric hospitals, to be guillotined, etc. Maybe the International Criminal Court will defer action on Kim Jung Il, and Robert Mugabe to pursue the Bush Administration. You can only hope !
I too grew up in northeastern Ohio and had friends at Kent, though no one I knew was in the area where/when the shootings happened. My sister now teaches there, and on a visit a few years ago we walked over to the place where there are plaques in the pavement marking the places where the students died. It’s more viscerally horrifying and sad to me now than it was then. I hate to say it, but at 20 I was too young and had too little experience of life to realize just how bad things were.
Russell, northeastern Ohio is well-populated, I know, but I wonder how many degrees of separation there are between us. I grew up in Ashtabula…. If you don’t want to say more, I get that, but tell your wife hi from someone else who grew up in “northeastern Ohio and northwestern Pennsylvania…the best location in the nation” — as they used to say on the radio.
Btw: if anyone is not tired of, well, not the 60s but 1972, Perlstein has a fascinating article on the ’72 elections. Excerpts:
Nothing like the old days to put our present squabbles in perspective.
When our Supreme Court recently decided that, unless a woman can find out what all her co-workers make within the first 6 months of her employment, she can’t later sue when she discovers that she’s systematically been paid less than men who do the same work for years and years, I’m not quite willing to grant that premise.
The Supreme Court decided no such thing. They decided that a plaintiff cannot bring legal action if they don’t discover within the first six months that they are being discriminated against. In this case, the plaintiff was a woman, and was being discriminated against because she was a woman, but those facts are incidental to the case. This is a civil rights issue, but it’s not a feminism one.
As much of the post-Wright-speech discussion on this blog demonstrated, there are very different understandings of the amount and steadiness of the progress on social issues (not only in eradicating anti-black racism, but in issues surrounding women, disabled people, LGBT, and onward). I believe you underestimate the reality of backlash, backsliding, and the shallowness of some kinds of progress.
Can you give me one example of such backsliding? Sure, there’s been lots of hand-wringing and tooth-gnashing by social conservatives about changes to American society they don’t like (e.g. feminism, multiculturalism), but when has the reactionary pushback against these issues ever succeeded in stuffing the genie back into the bottle? I cannot think of a single case. As recently twenty years ago, a network sitcom centered on a career-oriented single mother (Murphy Brown) was controversial. That ain’t so anymore. America continues to let in immigrants by the millions each year, and even the legal ones are overwhelmingly non-WASP. Gay marriage (which would have been unthinkable in the 1960’s, btw) may have been halted for the time being, but it’s going to happen, because polls show that a majority of young people support it. As for racism, in the social circles I moved in the idea that something like interracial dating would be an issue was ridiculous. Granted, my cohort – college-educated northeasterners – is one of the most socially liberal in the U.S., but such liberal attitudes would have been pretty rare among any but the most radical members of the same segment of society in, say, the 1950’s.
Social reactionary types are fighting a rearguard action against the progress of history, to use somebody else’s phrase. It’s not that they will lose, it’s that they already have and just don’t know it yet.
It’s no longer acceptable to be so blatantly racist, but I think the feeling that we are a morally superior society and therefore have the right to invade other countries for their own good is still running strong.
Among older people, mostly. I honestly don’t know a lot of people my age (including people who’ve served in the military) who hold such attitudes. Look at Pat Tillman, the guy that was held out as a model of patriotism to our generation by the government. Sure, he did an incredibly selfless and patriotic thing, giving up a career as an NFL player to fight in Afghanistan. But that didn’t stop him from opposing the Iraq War because he thought it was an imperialistic violation of international law, or questioning the motives or ethics of his government.
In some ways we’ve slid backwards. I get the impression there was more of an uproar over the Philippine atrocities 100 years ago than there has been with respect to the torture scandal. They tried General Jacob Smith back then, though according to wikipedia it wasn’t for ordering war crimes but for conduct not conducive to discipline.
I’m not sure I buy this (McKinley and TR, the primary boosters of the Phillipine undertaking, were both quite popular, and no leading politician of the day opposed it – not true of Bush or opposing politicians today). But even if it is true, a sense of perspective is necessary here.
In the Philippines, “atrocities” meant things like burning villages to the ground, systematically slaughtering non-combatants, including children (in Smith’s case), and herding civilians into concentration camps. The torture scandal, while shameful, involves a limited number of people and torture methods that are tame by comparison, and is still such cause for outrage that it is, after all, a scandal.
Certainly, progress doesn’t always move as fast as we’d like. But that’s not equivalent to backsliding.
When our Supreme Court recently decided that, unless a woman can find out what all her co-workers make within the first 6 months of her employment, she can’t later sue when she discovers that she’s systematically been paid less than men who do the same work for years and years, I’m not quite willing to grant that premise.
The Supreme Court decided no such thing. They decided that a plaintiff cannot bring legal action if they don’t discover within the first six months that they are being discriminated against. In this case, the plaintiff was a woman, and was being discriminated against because she was a woman, but those facts are incidental to the case. This is a civil rights issue, but it’s not a feminism one.
As much of the post-Wright-speech discussion on this blog demonstrated, there are very different understandings of the amount and steadiness of the progress on social issues (not only in eradicating anti-black racism, but in issues surrounding women, disabled people, LGBT, and onward). I believe you underestimate the reality of backlash, backsliding, and the shallowness of some kinds of progress.
Can you give me one example of such backsliding? Sure, there’s been lots of hand-wringing and tooth-gnashing by social conservatives about changes to American society they don’t like (e.g. feminism, multiculturalism), but when has the reactionary pushback against these issues ever succeeded in stuffing the genie back into the bottle? I cannot think of a single case. As recently twenty years ago, a network sitcom centered on a career-oriented single mother (Murphy Brown) was controversial. That ain’t so anymore. America continues to let in immigrants by the millions each year, and even the legal ones are overwhelmingly non-WASP. Gay marriage (which would have been unthinkable in the 1960’s, btw) may have been halted for the time being, but it’s going to happen, because polls show that a majority of young people support it. As for racism, in the social circles I moved in the idea that something like interracial dating would be an issue was ridiculous. Granted, my cohort – college-educated northeasterners – is one of the most socially liberal in the U.S., but such liberal attitudes would have been pretty rare among any but the most radical members of the same segment of society in, say, the 1950’s.
Social reactionary types are fighting a rearguard action against the progress of history, to use somebody else’s phrase. It’s not that they will lose, it’s that they already have and just don’t know it yet.
It’s no longer acceptable to be so blatantly racist, but I think the feeling that we are a morally superior society and therefore have the right to invade other countries for their own good is still running strong.
Among older people, mostly. I honestly don’t know a lot of people my age (including people who’ve served in the military) who hold such attitudes. Look at Pat Tillman, the guy that was held out as a model of patriotism to our generation by the government. Sure, he did an incredibly selfless and patriotic thing, giving up a career as an NFL player to fight in Afghanistan. But that didn’t stop him from opposing the Iraq War because he thought it was an imperialistic violation of international law, or questioning the motives or ethics of his government.
In some ways we’ve slid backwards. I get the impression there was more of an uproar over the Philippine atrocities 100 years ago than there has been with respect to the torture scandal. They tried General Jacob Smith back then, though according to wikipedia it wasn’t for ordering war crimes but for conduct not conducive to discipline.
I’m not sure I buy this (McKinley and TR, the primary boosters of the Phillipine undertaking, were both quite popular, and no leading politician of the day opposed it – not true of Bush or opposing politicians today). But even if it is true, a sense of perspective is necessary here.
In the Philippines, “atrocities” meant things like burning villages to the ground, systematically slaughtering non-combatants, including children (in Smith’s case), and herding civilians into concentration camps. The torture scandal, while shameful, involves a limited number of people and torture methods that are tame by comparison, and is still such cause for outrage that it is, after all, a scandal.
Certainly, progress doesn’t always move as fast as we’d like. But that’s not equivalent to backsliding.
Small world, JanieM — I grew up in Perry, and my mother and sister still live in Madison today. NEOhio represent!
The left wing historically wants their political opponents to be thrown in prison or psychiatric hospitals, to be guillotined, etc.
Is anyone else going to point out to DaveC all the examples just from the past seven years of right-wingers calling not only for liberal politicians, but for journalists, anti-war protestors and Democratic voters to be hanged for treason? No? Ok then, I’ll do it.
Phil, I sincerely admire your persistence, while sincerely feeling there’s not a great deal of point when its target is DaveC.
Xeynon: In this case, the plaintiff was a woman, and was being discriminated against because she was a woman, but those facts are incidental to the case. This is a civil rights issue, but it’s not a feminism one.
Yeah, because it’s not as if women are systematically paid less than men for doing the same work.
…oh wait.
Which part do you object to?
Oh come on Gary, I thought you were an educated guy. If you don’t view ideology as inherently problematic, if you don’t see that one of the major impulses behind modern philosophy from the Enlightenment, to Hegel, Marx/Engels, Nietzsche, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Deconstruction and gender studies has been, implicitly or explicitly, the critique of ideology – then you’ll have a hard time understanding much of modern thought.
Ideology is also commonly used in political discourse, at least in my world, in the pejorative sense, as in “fiercely ideological”, “hardened ideology” or “neocon ideology”, denoting a doctrinaire view of the world.
Of course it might not be possible to free oneself entirely from ideology and, as I have mentioned above, critics of ideology frequently run the risk of becoming ideologues themselves, but that only makes a critical awareness of it even more important.
Yeah, because it’s not as if women are systematically paid less than men for doing the same work.
…oh wait.
Women receiving less pay than men for the same work is a feminist issue, absolutely. But it’s just coincidence that it was this particular type of discrimination at issue in this case. If it had been a disabled person or an old person or a black or what have you been being discriminated against, the exact same case would have come before the Supreme Court. As such, I don’t find the argument that their ruling in this case is evidence of an imminent anti-feminist counterrevolution persuasive.
I don’t think that this is the case…
As you wish. Good luck.
In this case, the plaintiff was a woman, and was being discriminated against because she was a woman, but those facts are incidental to the case.
Strictly speaking, this is true, but the phrase “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel” comes to mind.
Janie, my wife grew up in Stow. Her people were from Butler PA, and moved to OH during the 30’s to work rubber in Akron. Most of her family is in OH now, but she still has some folks back in Butler county and thereabouts.
I’ll tell her you said “hi”, she’ll get a kick out of it.
Thanks –
Russell — When I was a kid, Stow was pretty much outside my horizon of awareness. But later my sister and my parents lived there for over 20 years, and I visited once or twice a year. Nice area.
Phil — Madison and Perry, now they’re more like neighbors.
Funny world. I’ll stop being OT now. 😉
Speaking of Pearlstein.
I recommend his ‘divilog’ with Frum on bloggingheads.
As I remarked to Thullen, I’ve avoided the segments involving Frum, but this one turned out to be really satisfying.
Pearlstein is so wonderfully sharp and a master of his material, in a way most ‘authorities’ can only dream of.
Pearlstein looks to be 16 or so, and speaks in a squeaky voice; an apparently archetypal teen-age nerd.
But he twists Frum, the smooth, suave, confident insider, around his little finger, and squeezes the juice from him.
He knows his stuff so satisfyingly.
To his credit Frum squirms gracefully. But Pearlstein deftly spreads egg on Frum’s face and shoulders and all down his front.
Highly recommended, as they say.
“In the Philippines, “atrocities” meant things like burning villages to the ground, systematically slaughtering non-combatants, including children (in Smith’s case), and herding civilians into concentration camps. The torture scandal, while shameful, involves a limited number of people and torture methods that are tame by comparison, and is still such cause for outrage that it is, after all, a scandal.”
I suspect the Philippine conflict might have been worse, though I’m not sure. Burning villages to the ground is not that different from what happened to Fallujah. I don’t think we systematically slaughter civilians in Iraq (with some exceptions, which aren’t systematic), but there’s evidence of indiscriminate firepower being used at times and the recent winter soldier hearings provided examples of the “rules of engagement” being very loose in practice. I’m guessing we won’t really know much about the extent of US atrocities in Iraq (and I’m not claiming to know that they are massive in scale) for many years to come–details about the Korean War keep trickling out, 50 years after the fact.
Fallujah and much of Baghdad are run something like vast camps–I don’t want to use the term “concentration camp” because that’s picked up Nazi-like associations that are too extreme, but anyway, the classic methods of keeping populations under control in a guerilla war have been employed. Many thousands of innocent civilians have been tossed into prison. I don’t know enough to compare the scale and intensity of torture use 100 years ago vs. now. I do know they would force water down people’s throats and then jump on them 100 years ago, and in the current war on terror some people have died under interrogation. Torture should have been a major Presidential campaign issue in 2004, but it wasn’t, presumably because Kerry thought it would hurt him on the patriotism (i.e., jingoism) front if he made much of it.
Overall, when I read about the Phillippines and the reaction back here in the US, and when I read about Vietnam and now as Iraq is occurring, the similarities seem greater to me than the differences, but ymmv.
“Look at Pat Tillman, the guy that was held out as a model of patriotism to our generation by the government. Sure, he did an incredibly selfless and patriotic thing, giving up a career as an NFL player to fight in Afghanistan. But that didn’t stop him from opposing the Iraq War because he thought it was an imperialistic violation of international law, or questioning the motives or ethics of his government.”
I’d love to think Pat Tillman was a typical young American–a Chomsky reader who nonetheless volunteered to go to war in Afghanistan (so he’s not a kneejerk Chomsky follower), while also thinking that the Iraq War was criminal from the very start.
If he were typical then I don’t think Obama’s relationship with Rev Wright will be any problem with the younger set. I’d love to think so, but I doubt one can categorize any generation by pointing to individual examples. My own admittedly limited knowledge of 20-somethings and their politics is that they span the same political range as their elders–some are flag-waving jingoists (sometimes refighting Vietnam themselves) and some much further to the left.
My own admittedly limited knowledge of 20-somethings and their politics is that they span the same political range as their elders–some are flag-waving jingoists (sometimes refighting Vietnam themselves) and some much further to the left.
On some issues (economics or the size of government), this seems to be true. On others, the political divides are almost entirely generational. Gay marriage, for example, is not a particularly salient issue for a lot of young conservatives the way it is for older people. Even young evangelical Christians are pretty liberal on this issue. The same is largely true of issues relating to race and gender. I think patriotism is somewhere in the middle, but I don’t think on the whole my generation is nearly as patriotic as those that came before us were.
Speaking as a twentysomething who’s more conservative than most of the twentysomethings I know, I can say that I don’t find Wright’s comments particularly troubling. He sounds like a curmudgeonly and thoroughly out-of-touch old man, and while I think that a lot of the things he says are both wrong on the merits and insensitive, I don’t have the same sort of visceral reaction to them that many older white people seem to. I find the idea that the fact that Wright sometimes says nutty things means that Obama himself is a cipher for 60’s style militant Black Power ideology positively ludicrous. The same is true of Ayers. There are a lot of legitimate reasons for me to resist voting for Obama (his far-lefter-than-I’d-like economics, the messianic undertones of the campaign, etc.). The fact that his preacher is an old school angry black man or that he lives in the same neighborhood as some long-in-the-tooth ex-radical are not among them.
Again on 2012 and generational politics
By Fester: Publius at Obsidian Wings has an outstanding post on the generation gap that has been exposed during the Democratic primary. The younger coalition of Obama versus the gray-power coalition of Clinton is a reprise of the battles of
I’m quite happy to get out of the 60s as well. I’m dropping it now but I figured I should respond to specific questions. I just really think that the GOP is going to make this a big problem for Obama and he needs to be able to respond better than he has so far. YMMV.
john miller: please provide evidence that Ayres is trying to indoctrinate the youth of this country.
Article here.
Gary: What quotes are you specifically referring to, please?
“Guilty as hell, free as a bird — America is a great country”
Cite? I realize you seem to be saying you don’t know, but since you have the internet right there, presumably you can either check to your satisfaction, or choose to pass on a rumor whose truth or falsity you have no idea about. I’m hoping you’ll give a cite.
“Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school. … They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together.”
Did he or they do any actual bomb constructing/setting, etc., or did they just justify it? I don’t know at the moment, and would welcome clarification.
Don’t you have the internet right there? 😉
“I don’t regret setting bombs”
Sorry about not providing links for everything, but you know how the spaminator would feel about that.
“As recently twenty years ago, a network sitcom centered on a career-oriented single mother (Murphy Brown) was controversial.”
This is a seriously untrue.
Having a career-oriented single woman as the protagonist of a an American tv comedy has been a staple since That Girl, Julia, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. (Julia was also a single mom.)
And there were more single moms on tv than I can count. This book says: “The 1970s had 14% of the tv families run by single mothers” and that 21% were so in the 1980s. See Table 7.5. 14.1% of all tv families in the 1950s were headed by single moms. In the 1960s, it was 13.5% of all American tv families.
Murphy Brown got some controversy because the career-oriented woman decided to have a child out of wedlock. Not because she was a “single mom.” That’s just wrong.
It may have escaped your attention that single moms can be single moms via divorce and widowhood, rather than simply deciding to have a child.
“Social reactionary types are fighting a rearguard action against the progress of history, to use somebody else’s phrase. It’s not that they will lose, it’s that they already have and just don’t know it yet.”
You seem to assume the “inevitable progression” of “progress of history” as regards your social ideas inevitably winning out.
This is not a notion terribly well-supported by history, as it happens, at least insofar as one might care about mere periods of hundreds of years at a time. Things change, and not in necessarily linear fashion, nor by any means always in a single or particular direction.
The course of history of ideas of human rights, and their implementation, is certainly not a history of inevitable “progression.”
But, yeah, I do believe that you’re young.
“Is anyone else going to point out to DaveC”
Is there someone who takes DaveC as a non-troll? Why?
What would be the point in “pointing out” something “to DaveC”? He announces to people what they think; input isn’t part of the process, and neither is honesty.
“Oh come on Gary, I thought you were an educated guy. If you don’t view ideology as inherently problematic,”
I don’t. I view as problematic privileging ideology over observation, and I view wrong-headed ideologies as problematic, and I view a variety of ways ideologies have often been used as problematic, but I don’t view the idea of having a set of views as problematic, no.
I do view the knee-jerk assumption that “ideologies” are inherently suspect and bad as problematic, though. It leads to all sorts of wrong-headed conclusions, such as that having no coherent view of the world is inherently virtuous, or that someone with a coherent ideology is “doctrinaire,” and is therefore apt to reach wrong conclusions, and so on.
But I’ve only had three months of college, actually. So maybe organizing one’s collection of ideas is indeed bad, and I don’t have enough education to realize that.
I’m sorry, but where does this quote come from, and what’s the cite? As in, can you give a URL to what document you are referring to, and its context?
“Sorry about not providing links for everything, but you know how the spaminator would feel about that.”
Life is hard. If we can’t post links, then ObWi might as well be shut down, in my view. Certainly I, at least, would have no interest in hanging out somewhere where we can’t support our claims. Please give actual cites if you want to be taken seriously. Either break them into only three per comment, or put up with writing Hilzoy/Kitty to free them, or petition Hilzoy and Publius to institute a system to allow people to post links more easily, or to switch to new software, I suggest.
But if the idea is that we can just say stuff, and links are forbidden, then, hey, bye-bye, and thanks for all the fish. What would be the point of endless unverified fact-free exchanges?
OCSteve; Article here.
Thanks for the link, OCSteve.
So, a right-wing pundit thinks it’s bad for high-school kids to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit” and for teachers to “be capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.”
You think social justice and liberation are bad things, OCSteve? American school children ought not to be aware of the “social and moral universe”?
Incidentally, although Stern in a throwaway line claims to prioritize teaching kids to read, another article linked to from Sol Stern’s Manhattan Institute webpage is all about how terrible it is that New York City spent how much money on inner-city schools.
Ok. Similarly, every single person who teaches, and has ideas about justice, is “trying to indoctrinate the youth of this country.”
“Indoctrination” is a nice scare-word, but teaching kids to salute the flag, say the Pledge of Allegience, respect democracy, and a zillion other things are just as much “indoctrination.” So what?
So we’ve just indicted every single teacher in America who has a notion about justice, or perhaps about politics, or who even makes any kind of suggestion about America’s character as a nation at all?
Or is it just that we’re supposed to be indoctrinating according to your personal preferences? Or what?
What’ll we do tomorrow night, now that we’ve indoctrinated American kids, Brain?
Are what you’re saying is that people with political views you disagree with shouldn’t be allowed to teach? Or what? What am I supposed to be upset by, here?
I’m sure Ayers has plenty of ideas I wildly disagree with, but so what? Are we vetting teachers and college professors for political correctness, now? What’s your point? What am I supposed to be Viewing With Alarm?
To try to speed this along, OCSteve, I see that Stern linked in that piece to this piece, which includes this: “A few years after stepping out of the shadows, Ayers reflected on his odyssey in a conversation with journalists Peter Collier and David Horowitz: ‘Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country,’ he exulted.”
But there’s no link to said conversation, or indication of when or where it took place, let alone any kind of context, let alone any kind of transcript.
“Exulted,” needless to say, is a construction, presumably from Collier and Horowitz.
Horowitz, to be sure, is a flaming moron, and willing to say any looney thing about anyone he considers part of the leftist conspiracy, so I’m not apt to put much faith in anything he says that doesn’t have an accompanying audio or video tape.
Do you have more specifics, though? Or are you just swallowing all these assertions as gospel?
The rest of Stern’s piece seems to boil down to “Ayers has leftist ideas.”
We get endless stuff like this:
Hey, me, too. I’ll sign up to agree with all of those quotes.
So?
g. farber: “What would be the point of endless unverified fact-free exchanges?”
The joy of provocative barroom-like conversation without having to pay $6 a drink?
It seems fair to say that you and I tend to have different approaches to the internets, Jay.
Gary: Please give actual cites if you want to be taken seriously. Either break them into only three per comment…
Three per comment? I can’t get one through on occasion. And the issue is not so much with the particular comment, but the darned thing then blacklists me for some hours or even as much as a day. Not only is it very picky but it holds a grudge.
In any case, I was careful to provide exact quotes, which makes it easily searchable. If you copy/paste it into google you get 53 results. It’s from an interview he did with David Horowitz in 91. Oops – on preview I see you found it, and dismiss it without the tape.
On the rest… From the same article you found:
In 1997, Ayers and his mentor Maxine Greene persuaded Teachers College Press to launch a series of books on social justice teaching, with Ayers as editor and Greene serving on the editorial board (along with Rashid Khalidi, loyal supporter of the Palestinian cause and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University). Twelve volumes have appeared so far, including one titled Teaching Science for Social Justice.
Teaching science for social justice? Let Teachers College professor Angela Calabrese Barton, the volume’s principal author, try to explain: “The marriages between capitalism and education and capitalism and science have created a foundation for science education that emphasizes corporate values at the expense of social justice and human dignity.” The alternative? “Science pedagogy framed around social justice concerns can become a medium to transform individuals, schools, communities, the environment, and science itself, in ways that promote equity and social justice. Creating a science education that is transformative implies not only how science is a political activity but also the ways in which students might see and use science and science education in ways transformative of the institutional and interpersonal power structures that play a role in their lives.” If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities.
The series doesn’t yet have a text on mathematics, but it’s sure to come, since the pedagogy for teaching social justice through math is even more fully developed than for science. One of the leading lights of the genre is Eric Gutstein, a Marxist colleague of Ayers’s at the University of Illinois and also a full-time Chicago public school math teacher. Gutstein’s new book, Reading and Writing the World with Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, combines critical pedagogy theory and real live math lessons that Gutstein piloted with his predominantly minority seventh-grade students.
Like Ayers, Gutstein reveres Paolo Freire. He approvingly quotes Freire’s dictum that “there neither is, nor has ever been, an educational practice in zero space-time—neutral in the sense of being committed only to preponderantly abstract, intangible ideas.” Gutstein takes this to mean that since all education is political, leftist math teachers who care about the oppressed have a right, indeed a duty, to use a pedagogy that, in Freire’s words, “does not conceal—in fact, which proclaims—its own political character.”
Accordingly, Gutstein has relentlessly politicized his math classes for years, claiming that this approach has improved his students’ math skills while making them more aware of the injustices built in to capitalist society. One lesson, for example, presents charts showing the U.S. income distribution, aiming to get the students to understand the concept of percentages and fractions, while simultaneously showing them how much wealth is concentrated at the top in an economic system that mainly benefits the superrich. After the class does the mathematical calculations, Gutstein asks: “How does all this make you feel?” He triumphantly reports that 19 of 21 students described wealth distribution in America as “bad,” “unfair,” or “shocking,” and he proudly quotes the comments of a child named Rosa: “Well I see that all the wealth in the United States is mostly the wealth of a couple people not the whole nation.”
Now I don’t know about you, but when I pay my school taxes I expect the money to go towards teaching kids math and science in math and science class – not leftist talking points. I stand by using the term indoctrination for this. But then I guess I’m “hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities”.
Are we vetting teachers and college professors for political correctness, now?
Apparently. Again, same article:
In a sworn legal document, Head recounted that when his professor showed the class a videotape purporting to reveal institutional racism against immigrants, he responded by suggesting that most immigrants actually came here because they realized they would be better off, including benefiting from healthier race relations. Professor Kress responded that anyone holding such opinions was clearly “unfit to teach.” Head further infuriated the professor by suggesting that the class be allowed to read black social scientists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams to provide some intellectual balance on the issues of race and education.
After turning down Kress’s offer to reeducate him on these issues personally, Head received an F for the class, even though a grade below B for a student who has completed all assignments is almost as rare in ed schools as serious intellectual debate. The school wouldn’t let Head enroll in the student teaching class, and so, for the time being, it has blocked him from getting his teaching certificate. After exhausting his appeals to the university, he filed suit earlier this year, charging that the school was applying a political litmus test to become a teacher and had violated his First Amendment rights.
OCSteve: I’m still a bit confused. WHAT exactly, did Wright say, that was so offensive?
I’ve scrutinized the entire sermon and really can’t find anything offensive. There’s a few things I disagree with, and a number of things that seem rhetorical exagerattions — but ones I don’t see as offensive, even without stopping to consider what a black man who lived through the 60s is going think about life.
So what part did you find offensive and why?
Regarding links, I have never, ever had a problem putting links in comments. But I do that a great deal less frequently than Gary does.
Which does nothing to reduce Gary’s frustration, but I don’t think it’s everyone that’s having this problem.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I pay my school taxes I expect the money to go towards teaching kids math and science in math and science class – not leftist talking points.
Among those “leftist talking points” in the US is the fact that evolution is an accepted scientific theory which cannot become unacceptable without rolling back the biological sciences to the early 19th century.
Among the true conservative positions is that children ought to be taught that evolution is “just a theory”, and that there are other, competing theories. You will find other conservative positions here, opposition to which is typed as “leftist talking points”.
In fact, given the current state of conservativism, my guess is that a civics class which covers the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in thorough detail, is going to be classed in this Sol’s eyes as a set of “leftist talking points” – teaching children to understand that when Bush bloviates about warrantless wiretapping, he is confessing to committing an impeachable offense.
After all, why should kids who go to high school learn what their rights are? Isn’t the concept of basic rights just another “leftist talking point”? True conservatives support kidnapping and torture on the government’s say so: it’s a mere “leftist talking point” that argues for due process.
OSCteve, I have no opinion about whether or not the student in your example was actually a victim of rampant political bias or not. However I do have an opinion about the text yu have presnted; it is clearly written from a highly ideological perspective. note all the sacrastic cant:If you still can’t appreciate why it’s necessary for your child’s chemistry teacher to teach for social justice, you are probably hopelessly wedded to reason, empiricism, individual merit, and other capitalist and post-colonialist deformities. Etc, etc,
And why on earth shouldn’t a math taecher use real life examples to teach the reading of charts? You would have a point if the information in the charts was untrue. However it is not a leftwing talking point that the richer are getting richer in the country and the rest are getting poorer. it’s a fact. An uncomfortable fact for capitalist ideologs, but a fact nethertheless.
Horowitz is a notoriouus exaggerator and he thesis about leftwing indoctrination of students has been debunked over and over. In an educationalsystem as vast as our you can fid examples of every kind of behavior. Arizona , for example tried to pass a state law tht would protect religious fanatic students from being taught geoplogy that controdicted their interpetation of the Bible in stae university geoplogy classes. Oh no!vast right wing conspiracy to indoctriate students in Arizona state schools!
No just an outbreak of idiocy. Horowitz uses the odd outbreak of leftist idiocy here and thehr to promote his long term goal of pushing rightwing idiocy onto the schools. He isn’t a very good source of information .
Wonkie: Horowitz was the source for the guilty and free as a bird quote. The articles are by Sol Stern. Given that he is a strong supporter of vouchers he won’t be any more popular here. 😉
For the record (responding to Jes too) I disapprove equally of ID or anything else Republicans would like to do to meddle with what kids are taught.
Morat20: So what part did you find offensive and why?
I’m not happy with God Damn America, but the big one would be that we created AIDS to wipe out people of color. That’s one of those conspiracy theories that have been around for many years. I think it’s highly irresponsible for a man in his position to promote it.
Horowitz is a demonstrably unreliable witness. He’s never given up the “by any means” style of politics he held to in his Maoist-Trotskyite days, he’s only changed targets. He’s been caught outright manufacturing quotes time and again, and misrepresenting wildly ones that aren’t pure fabrication. I’m not sure there’s anyone prominent on the left who’s so completely willing to ignore the truth in the alleged pursuit of virtue, but if you imagine anyone on the left as such a liar, OCSteve, then Horowitz is his or her mirror on the right.
Seriously, it’s to the point where I don’t take his assertion that something is so as adding the slightest probability to its being as he reports it to be. If anything, the odds are good that it is not as he reports, in some important regard.
I can dig up some citations to this if you’d like to skim a bit further on it.
I’m not happy with God Damn America, but the big one would be that we created AIDS to wipe out people of color.
I am entirely unable to find any actual direct quote from Wright about AIDS. I have found of course a good many right-wing sites claiming that he said “The government invented the AIDS virus as a means of genocide” but none actually giving a transcript of the sermon with that quote in context.
Have you? Can you link? (Transcript rather than Youtube vid, please.)
Morat20: To clarify, not only is the concept repulsive, but spreading that theory does real harm to blacks:
“It’s a huge barrier to HIV prevention in black communities,” Wilson said. “There’s an issue around conspiracy theory and urban myths. Thus we have an epidemic raging out of control, and African Americans are being disproportionately impacted in every single sense.”
…
“The whole notion of conspiracy theories and misinformation . . . removes personal responsibility,” Wilson said. “If there is this boogeyman, people say, ‘Why should I use condoms? Why should I use clean needles?’ And if I’m an organization, ‘Why should I bother with educating my folks?’ The syphilis study was real, but it happened 40 years ago, and holding on to it is killing us.”
Actually, there is a reason not to use real-life examples. but since it only showed up in today’s NYT, no one being quoted here could have known about it:
It would probably just be stirring to note that there’s better circumstantial evidence for AIDS having been created or at least spread through government efforts than is for Iraq’s culpability in any way for 9/11.
(I don’t believe it’s so, but the US has gone to war and done other terrible things on flimsier evidence.)
And again, OCSteve; Where did you read the sermon transcript in which Jeremiah Wright – who, as I understand it, is an advocate of safe sex and involved in his church’s program for free condom distribution, no nutbar conspiracy theorist like the kooks the White House currently pays to promote their rightist talking points to schoolchildren – actually said that AIDS was a virus invented by the US government?
To be clear, OCSteve, according to this the US federal government has spent 11 years promoting abstinence-only sex education programs, at a cost of more than $1.3 billion, which have done more than any other government action to spread STDS including HIV, and increase the rate of unwanted underage pregnancies in the US>
Yet many pundits who had no problem supporting the Bush administration and have never said anything critical of abstinence-only sex education programs, appear to be making up crap about what Jeremiah Wright said about HIV/AIDS. (I infer this from the lack of direct quotes and links in any of the websites I’ve seen referring to this.)
Whatever Wright said, it could not have caused 1% of the damage 11 years of federally-funded abstinence-only sex education has caused. Yet you’re attacking Wright, with a venom I do not recall your ever using towards the Bush administration for its promotion of the spread of STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
Why’s that?
Jes: Where did you read the sermon transcript
I haven’t seen a transcript of the full sermon no. But if he didn’t really say that then you have a scoop because no one else (even Obama) seems to be disputing that he said it.
Yet you’re attacking Wright, with a venom I do not recall your ever using towards the Bush administration for its promotion of the spread of STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
Venom? Really? I mean I don’t feel particularly venomous right now…
I found the remark to be repulsive. I find the administrations abstinence only approach to sex education programs to be stupid and ineffective and dangerous – so yeah that’s repulsive as well. And in the past I’ve consistently agreed with you on that point.
Oh yes, he said it — as part of a list of government lies. Given he ALSO promotes safe sex and his church deals with condom distribution, I have a hard time thinking he’s makign the problem worse.
And after Tuskegee, I can at least UNDERSTAND how he could believe it.
So that’s it, then? You’re offended over the fact that he thinks HIV is part of a government conspiracy? A position Obama rather obviously does NOT share?
Seriously, OCSteve, there’s not a single politician — probably not a single PERSON — in the United States that does not have a friend, associate, or colleague who believes something like that.
Heck, if you have even a single black friend — 50/50 chance right there he’s got his doubts about the government’s role in the cocaine trade, or HIV.
Congatulations. Obama is just like us. What do you want from him on this? Making it clear that he doesn’t believe it isn’t enough?
Should he formally renounce and reject him? Cast him out in the darkness? Maybe in Latin?
What IS the winning formula, because I’ve got some friends whose views I’m sure you’d find offensive, and if I ever run for office I want to know how to throw them under the bus properly.
hilzoy, I don’t think that what you quoted is really analogous to what was mentioned, teaching kids about graphs and percentages using a chart showing income distribution. Presumably that teaching is still being done using abstract symbols – mathematical operators, etc. – and not by, say, measuring out bits of string and comparing them. If you just offered up an identical chart with nothing but number values, the task would be taught the same way.
But if he didn’t really say that then you have a scoop because no one else (even Obama) seems to be disputing that he said it.
Said what? Seriously: I have no doubt that Wright said something about the US government and its role in helping to spread AIDS. So have a hell of a lot of people, and justly so.
I have not yet seen any direct quotes from Wright that assert that the US government devised the AIDS virus to wipe out black Americans. Not, at least, any on websites I would regard as reliable sources.
Morat, what exactly did Wright say and when did he say it and what was the context? You seem to have more information about this than OCSteve does…
Wright’s statements about America deserving 9/11 as a kind of blowback
Let’s get rid of this lie: They weren’t his statements — he was quoting a Republican.
re Wright, I see that the North Carolina Republican Party’s definition of Freedom of Religion is “a churcjh we approve of” and Freedom of Association is “anyone we approve of”. Because some Democrats support Obama, they’re running ads associating them with the “detestable” Reverend Wright. (I wish the Dems would run ads featuring Coulter and Robertson. Doubt they will, though.)
Morat: You asked me and I responded. Jes thinks I’m venomous, your comment reads like I had just said “I can’t support Obama because of Wright.”
Let’s back up a little. Before the normal off topic stuff, all I said was this:
I have no problem with Obama being elected – I’d really like to see it. But Wright’s comments were offense. Ayers is a real problem. Some of his wife’s comments have been offensive to me. Some of his comments have been offensive to me. He’s had a bad couple of weeks and his inexperience is showing. I can say these things with no racism involved. I can point these things out and still hope he gets elected.
It was in response to publius’s contention that “older white people” feel the controversy more due to some bitterly venomous backlash to the civil rights era.
I suppose I should have just said WTF? and left it at that. I tried to make the point that one could be offended by some of these things with no racism involved. I wasn’t offended because I want to go back to the good old days of Jim Crow. I was offended because some of it was offensive to me. I understand that others see it as no big deal. In the end it doesn’t change my opinion of the man and I hope he gets elected.
Sometimes us old farts just get cranky.
Sometimes us old farts just get cranky.
You know, I’ve never thought of you as an old fart, OCSteve.
Were you including yourself with Jeremiah Wright (born 1941)? Or do you feel that while you’re entitled to be “cranky”, he isn’t?
Jes: You know, I’ve never thought of you as an old fart
Me neither, although certain muscles and long ago broken bones would beg to differ. Wright is older than me by a couple of decades, and I’m at the far end of what could be called a boomer.
Or do you feel that while you’re entitled to be “cranky”, he isn’t?
Not at all. But I have no influence over hundreds (thousands?) of other people. He can be cranky all he likes. I can take offense when he says dumb stuff all I like.
Shorter me: Thou shall not criticize the OBAMA on anything, lest thee thyself wish to be criticized as a racist b*stard.
Screw that. I like the guy, but I’m going to say what I think.
He’s running on his judgment. That certainly opens the door to criticize his judgment… Or one would think…
You know, I’ve never thought of you as an old fart, OCSteve.
Were you including yourself with Jeremiah Wright (born 1941)? Or do you feel that while you’re entitled to be “cranky”, he isn’t?
I’m all in favor of tormenting and abusing OCSteve for his many many many personal failings, but this has gone beyond parody. Jes, can you please go torture a small animal or something? Because watching you try to do the online equivalent just got very dull.
But I have no influence over hundreds (thousands?) of other people.
So the problem is that Wright is better at rhetoric than you are?
Shorter me: Thou shall not criticize the OBAMA on anything, lest thee thyself wish to be criticized as a racist b*stard.
Well, so far, you’re criticizing Obama because he hasn’t managed to repudiate either Ayers or Wright to your satisfaction.
Like Morat, I’m wondering what he has to do. Grovel? Squirm? Beg for approval? What does a black guy who has black friends who have said things that offend white people have to do to make clear to white people that he’s not his friends?
Heck, if you have even a single black friend — 50/50 chance right there he’s got his doubts about the government’s role in the cocaine trade, or HIV.
Except that it was ultimately proven that in fact there was US involvement in the cocaine trade. How much involvement is unknown and, alas, likely unknowable; but the HIV theories are, sadly, not without real-world precedent.
[Consider also the CIA’s involvement in the Laotian heroin trade. Again, precedent aplenty.]
I don’t think the HIV theories are true, of course, but that’s another matter. And given how the band played on, I find it colorable — though not necessarily convincing — that the government’s reaction to HIV was muted due to its concentration in “undesirable” communities.
Washington et al win and become a government, so they can’t be terrorists. But if they had lost…
Washington’s treatment of the enemy and civilians was exemplary to my knowledge. He didnt’ target British civilians and bomb them, or fire a broadside into a military ball.
You might want to take that up with the Iroquois. Not that their own wartime conduct would have been in compliance with the Geneva Convention.
Washington respected the Native Americans and the half-king was on his side, wasn’t he? Awful that I read His Excellency not that long ago and don’t remember.
Are what you’re saying is that people with political views you disagree with shouldn’t be allowed to teach? Or what? What am I supposed to be upset by, here?
No, but apparently the school of thought engendered by Ayers thinks that way Sol Stern has a longer article (than the one referenced by OCSteve above) here that goes further into Ayer’s philosophy of education. Read into it about the case of Steve Head and decide for yourself. I couldn’t find much update on Head’s case (no pun intended).
And I still have no idea why we look to a person like Ayers on how to teach our children.
And how about his wife, who, I believe, thought the Manson murders were justified. And she teaches lawschool. (crim law, I wonder?)
Check it out: the Port Huron Statement, 1962.
Uh, yeah, but weren’t most of those formative SDS people proud communists? I mean, Tom Hayden was a Pol Pot fan. I hear the Soviet constitution read quite well, BTW.
OCSteve, I understand your concern, but that article has no objectivity to it. Look at the examples, the use of descriptive terminology. Hell, the article comes from a site that Giuliani thinks is great.
That tells you all you need to know.
And BTW, teaching science aas having meaning beyond formulasd and how science can be used to better the world, not only through chemistry but through some sense of social justice.
But then some people think there is no reason to teach ethics in a business school.
And I just read the original article you linked to (Since I was reading from the bottom up I found the other link first) same site, same agenda.
Based upon the language used I could say that Stern wants to produce a group od children that don’t think for themselves or others, that he wants something similar to the Hitler Youth. It would have as much legitimacy.
By the way, the UIC education program is considered one of the best in the country.
What Stern is objecting to is that there are techcers who don’t accept his narrow view of how to teach children.
hilzoy: I just read that NYT article today as well, and it’s absolutely fascinating. I’m not entirely sure what it means — that is, I’m not entirely sure how the rules of an artificial game relate to the more functional methods to be learned (particularly in the realm of algebra) — but it sure means something. Alas, I’m getting out of the education business so I guess I won’t have the chance to find out.
“Alas, I’m getting out of the education business so I guess I won’t have the chance to find out.”
Are you getting into another business?, he inquired nosily.
It’s interesting that for learning rules for second language, it seems that the exact opposite holds, in that people who learn abstract rules are often not able to communicate very well and it is only after learning how those rules are related to the real world that communicative ability begins to flower. The general understanding of Second Language Acquisition is that attempts to simply teach grammatical rules rather than present real world analogues ends up with the students crashing and burning. Possibly the difference is that math rules are, for the most part, exception less and grammatical rules are full of holes.
Are you getting into another business?, he inquired nosily.
Indeed! I have just been offered a position as a software developer which — after a decent interval — I shall accept. For a quintupling of my present salary. So I’m ok with that. (:
I think experience shows that in math teaching both the abstract way and the example way should be used because the transfer trouble exists in both directions.
Children have to learn both to apply the abstract rules to real problems and to be able to “extract” the abstract principles from the examples.
If 22 2/3 chicken lay 45 1/2 eggs in 5 1/4 days how many eggs do 15 3/5 chicken lay in 6 1/3 days?
Here the problem is to find the abstract structure, so it can be universally applied.
Children are known to be confused easily, if the chicken and eggs are replaced by old ladies and knitted socks.
What is the beverage can that for a given volume uses up the least amount of material?
Here the problem is to find out which abstract model can be applied for this special problem.
The other direction many have problems with is how purely abstract things like logarithms work and how they are relevant to “real” things (how can one multiply a number 2.34 with itself?).
OCSteve: Let me walk it back a bit, and come at it from a different angle. I really had a somewhat different point than Jes.
Basically put — EVERY politician (probably every person EVER) will have, at minimum, some form of occasional contact with offensive views.
You probably work for, or have worked with, a virulent racist — now, or in years past. You’ve undoubtably got a friend or two, or relative, who makes your eyes roll on occasion but you put up with because other than the fact that he/she’s a moron on Subject X, they’re not bad people everywhere else. Or heck, maybe they’re just a form of family.
The only difference between me (For the record: Two severely racist cousins and at least one out-right homophobe through business dealings) and you, and someone like Obama, is that neither of US are having teams of trained professionals digging through everyone we’ve ever met, interacted with, and worked with, and playign the game of “Let’s make Morat/OCSteve grovel and repudiate these people. Even though we know OCSteve/Morat does not share whatever views makes them noxious to us.”
I’m sick of that game, OCSteve. Why aren’t you?
What does playing that game change? Do you honestly think Obama is sympathetic to the idea of domestic terrorism, even a minimal-casualty approach? Do you think he was a Weatherman sympathizer at the age of ten?
What does this ritual of denouncing people you barely know, repudiating people simply because they said something nice about you once, or did something bad back when you were a kid, actually change?
That’s the nub of it to me. That’s the bit I don’t get. It’s the part of me that was cheering at Obama’s exasperated “You want me to reject AND denounce Farakhan? Fine, I denounce and reject him. Are we done with this stupidity yet?” response to Hillary Clinton.
It’s a stupid game, OCSteve. It doesn’t tell you squat about Obama. It’s a pointless bit of ritual slander that, for some reason, has become accepted politics in the last 40 years.
So, I guess what I want to know is — why do you want Obama to thoroughly reject Ayers or Wright or whoever the bad man of the week is? What will the act of rejecting him convince you of?
Why do you see it as anything put pointless Kabuki theater?
I’m all in favor of tormenting and abusing OCSteve for his many many many personal failings…
Thanks Turb. That got a genuine belly laugh out of me. For real. 😉
Jes: Well, so far, you’re criticizing Obama because he hasn’t managed to repudiate either Ayers or Wright to your satisfaction.
So far, I’m criticizing Ayers and Wright and saying it does not change my opinion of Obama. I’m saying that if Obama wants to run on his judgment, then he better be prepared to have his judgment questioned. I’m saying Obama better address it better than he has or he is going to get his ass handed to him.
john miller: That tells you all you need to know.
That’s valid of course. But what sites can I link that are going to be judged as impartial around here? Nothing that supports my viewpoint, that’s for sure. If you don’t like the source or the tone, what about what is reported? It can all be independently verified, or not. If I read that Ayers worked with Maxine Greene to “launch a series of books on social justice teaching” that is either true or it is not, no matter where I link it. When I read something like that, I assume it is either true or that the author is making a laughable claim that would be debunked in 30 seconds flat. On the rest concerning Ayers, you all can tell me how bad David Horowitz is or more productively, show me one instance where Ayers ever repudiated his actions.
[You is not “you” personally here John – I respect you immensely. This was just the one more comment on this same angle that I’ve heard a lot of lately. And truth be told, I’m probably going off on you about it because I think you’ll take it OK. Which is really kind of dumb for me to do that, as I like you and value what you have to say.]
Uh, yeah, but weren’t most of those formative SDS people proud communists?
I don’t know.
To inject a bit of reality here, I think it’s worth nothing that “communist” as a label covers everything from the horrors of Stalin’s gulags to the cultural criticism of someone like John Berger. It includes the careful, insightful thought of social critics like Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas. It includes the radical pacifism, non-violence, and religiously inspired social activism of somebody like Dorothy Day.
Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot would happily send you along with a million others to a brutal, anonymous death.
Berger would help you see a painting in a way that you’d never thought of before.
Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas would help you understand the interconnections between power, culture, human dignity, and freedom.
Dorothy Day would make you dinner and give you a bed to sleep in.
They’re not all the same.
“Communist” is not the same as “evil totalitarian dictator”. I’m not a communist, because I don’t hold with a materialist understanding of history or human nature, but I can hear, understand, and respect the insights that a communist analysis has to offer.
As a good friend of mine says, “Eat the meat and spit out the bones”. Words to live by.
Plus, you know, before we congratulate ourselves on the triumph of capitalism (odd that it’s never presented as the “triumph of democracy”), let’s see if we survive this brand new century.
It’s four bags of rice per customer at WalMart these days. Check that out, right here in the good old USA. Maybe we’ll all be asking Brick Oven Bill for his squirrel recipes before we’re through.
Thanks –
I can probably trump just about anyone in the “eek, relatives” department, much as I’d rather not. I mean, how many people not related to me can possibly have an uncle of whom Wikipedia writes: “Over the years he has expressed at least some level of support for leaders such as Joseph Stalin[1], Mao Zedong[1], Enver Hoxha[1] and Pol Pot[1].”?
One of many reasons I will never run for office.
For the record, whatever I might think of his views (and I leave you to guess where on the spectrum between *shudders* and “you must be mad” those thoughts fall), I would not be happy having to renounce him.
Oh, and Anarch: congrats. 😉
hilzoy, why do you always beat me to it?
Anarch, -ahem- as usual I second hilzoy. Welcome to my world.
Indeed! I have just been offered a position as a software developer which — after a decent interval — I shall accept.
Strength is irrelevant.
Prepare to be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Welcome to the dark side!!
Thanks –
Maybe we’ll all be asking Brick Oven Bill for his squirrel recipes before we’re through.
I think it’s the Canada Geese that we should be eating. They poop all over the place, and there’s that Canada bit, too.
Washington’s treatment of the enemy and civilians was exemplary to my knowledge. He didnt’ target British civilians and bomb them, or fire a broadside into a military ball.
I’m working from the following definition of terrorism, taken from thie FBI report: Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “…the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85)
There are lots of definitions and one can quibble over terms, but I think that one is a reasonable starting point. So, was Washington a terrorist? I’d argue that he was a major leader in a terrorist movement. That movement launched an insurrection against its lawful government. Insurrections are usually considered to be unlawful. And they do tend to involve force and violence. And a good bit of that violence was directed towards coercing or intimidating loyalists by threatening their persons and property. Do you think loyalists during the war were well treated? What exactly do you imagine were the consequences for loyalists who were found to be providing intelligence to His Majesty’s Army?
Sure, Washington was an amazing man. But being a terrorist involves more than bombing military dances. Wars, especially insurgencies, are not pleasant affairs. They are brutal exercises in domination and control of civilian populations by means of violence and threats of violence. The American Revolution was no different in that regard.
Welcome indeed Anarch. Is it just me, or do lawyers and software engineers constitute 90% of the commenters here?
Anarch: For a quintupling of my present salary.
Knowing that I may make 4 times more doing what I do than what a person such as you make teaching our best and brightest, I may just fold my hand and call it a day. There are way too many jokers in play…
Morat20: You probably work for, or have worked with, a virulent racist — now, or in years past.
I would not say virulent as he kept it on the down low, but yes.
Do you honestly think Obama is sympathetic to the idea of domestic terrorism, even a minimal-casualty approach? Do you think he was a Weatherman sympathizer at the age of ten?
Not at all. I just think that the GOP will clean his clock if he doesn’t get his crap all in one bag.
…why do you want Obama to thoroughly reject Ayers or Wright or whoever the bad man of the week is? What will the act of rejecting him convince you of?
I guess at one time I used to preface all comments like the ones in this thread by saying “as an ex-GOP-warmonger-etc member of the VRWC here is how I think the Republicans are thinking / will think / will do about this. I guess I thought most folks got used to that and I didn’t always have to do that.
I like Obama. I hope he wins. The way he is going the last couple of weeks the GOP is going to hand him his ass. He’s raising money McCain can only dream of. He is inspiring. I want to see him win. And he is going to get his ass kicked if he doesn’t get it together real quick.
Is it just me, or do lawyers and software engineers constitute 90% of the commenters here?
I think it’s lawyers, software engineers, and academics, who also are now or have at some point been in a band.
And Gary!
Thanks –
High School marching band member, might not be an exact match.
I was going to note earlier today that there seem to be a lot of software folks around here. I’m not a software engineer…more like a technically oriented jack of all trades who started programming so long ago that not only did you not need a degree, but one of my early employers wondered if my work was going to involve doing things to the computer with a screwdriver. (No. I leave the screwdriving to other people.)
I don’t write code any more, I plan and analyze and write specs for other programmers to code. I also do a lot of testing and writing and editing, but that topic belongs on the other thread where Jes and others were writing earlier today about wages, job descriptions, and gender.
I was a flute player in my high school marching band for a year, accompanied the choir on the piano for the rest of high school (and the newly singing masses at Masses after Vatican II), and played the fiddle in a contra dance band for a few years in my 40’s.
I also occasionally teach linguistics as a sabbatical replacement.
Software, music, academics, even a dilettante’s interest in the law…gee, I may fit in better here than I do in the real world.
😉
JanieM: …gee, I may fit in better here than I do in the real world.
I suspect that many of us do. 😉
As to fitting in – well, I’m here… They seem to take all kinds here, which is about 1000% more than I can say for most other places on the web. 😉
“Washington respected the Native Americans and the half-king was on his side, wasn’t he? Awful that I read His Excellency not that long ago and don’t remember.”
The issue was whether Washington used terrorist tactics during the Revolution. The answer is yes, though I suppose it depends on what you consider to be terrorism. Scroll on down the link and you can read Washington’s orders regarding how to handle them at that point.
“Them” in the previous comment meant the Iroquois.
JanieM, more small-world stuff, in a different sense — I’m currently a software engineer (small company, so I do both the analysis and most of the coding), have a degree in lingustics, played the violin, and currently accompany my church’s children & youth choirs on the piano. And yes, I too have a dilettante’s interest in the law.
It has been suggested that since the topic of the Philippine-American War (AKA the “Philippine Insurrection”) arose here, and since that falls within my area of expertise, I might comment thereon.
I haven’t jumped in hereto because there are no egregious errors on either side, AND because I’m d**ned if I can think of a clear lesson we might learn from the PAW experience.
On the one hand, the US Army was guilty of remarkable cruelty and barbarity in some provincial campaigns – especially Batangas and Sama – though not all. This included, but was not limited to, torture (such as “the water cure” – i.e., waterboarding), the torching of villages, the execution of (some) prisoners, and the forced relocation of entire communities to “reconcentration zones” (roughly coincidental in time with the British in South Africa putting Boers in “concentration camps”).
On the same hand, both the original entry of the USA into the invasion/occupation of the Philippines and the conduct of the war were publicly opposed by a sizable number of articulate people, including most Congressional Democrats (I believe), Mark Twain, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, William James, &c. It was possible, in other words, to find out (roughly) what the US was doing and fight against it.
On the OTHER hand, this opposition was singularly unsuccessful. They lost the 1900 elections (and 1902, 1904, 1906. 1908, &c.); they forced Senate Hearings in 1902 which provide us with a great deal of evidence, but led to no change in policy; they succeeded in getting a few military officers (e.g. Jake Smith) publicly shamed (or scapegoated); and that is about it. Look up the Anti-Imperialist League for more details.
I leave it to most of you to draw parallels (or not – I’m mindful of the whingeing of younglings upstream that we pay too much attention to history instead of being Now and With It and, above all, YOUNG) to current events.
I see many points of comparison, with the most obvious (to me) divergence being the comparative pliability of Congressional Democrats and wannabe presidents. Maybe they, in their own way, learned this lesson from the career WJB: Don’t Criticize An Administration At War. The more correct you are, the worse you’ll lose.
Is the USA, as a country, more restrained, more moral, than we were in 1898-1902? Maybe, but you’d be hard put to prove it by our Philippine adventure. One major difference, of course, has to do with the technology of warfare. A century ago one actually had to see – if at a distance – most of the people one was killing, whereas nowadays, and arguably since Guernica, at least, we can kill from a range which makes the victims literally invisible to us, and hence less human. I suspect we’re still squeamish about mistreating other humans in person (hence the embarrassment of Abu Ghraib), but so long as we can kill at a distance – or, better yet, indirectly, through the arming of “natives” who will kill each other – I don’t see great advances in evolutionary ethics.
I’d be happy to supply more details about the PAW for anyone interested. As for my judgment as to lessons to be learned – YMMV.
kenB, that’s pretty cool. I’d say a little eerie, actually. Statistically it’s not too surprising that 2 people have a list of 4 or 5 things in common, but that they comment on the same blog, out of the gazillions….
If you’re willing to say, where did you study linguistics?
For many years I did a little of everything: analysis, coding, documentation, interfacing with users… But times change, the company I do most of my work for grew, “younglings” started forging ahead into new worlds (the world wide one especially), and I finally got tired of the coding part, luckily just at a time when there was a high priority project that needed a couple of dedicated analysts, and I got to be one of them. Having taken a half-a$$ed approach to career-planning all my life (i.e. I did none), I feel pretty lucky to do what I do.
Having taken a half-a$$ed approach to career-planning all my life (i.e. I did none)
Hey, me too. Hmm, at this point I’m a little scared to say anything else about myself — for all I know, you could simply be my other personality, posting your comments during my occasional lapses of consciousness (why can’t remember what I was doing at 12:06 AM??).
I actually wasn’t in linguistics proper, I studied Slavic linguistics in the Slavic dept at Yale, though I took a few general linguistics classes. But the Slavic well dried up during my time there (not that it was terrifically deep to begin with), so I moved on to other, more immediately lucrative things. How about you?
First, yay congratulations! Congratulations are fun!
JanieM: Software, music, academics, even a dilettante’s interest in the law…gee, I may fit in better here than I do in the real world.
Good lord, it’s like we were separated at birth. By, um, several decades.
OCSteve: Knowing that I may make 4 times more doing what I do than what a person such as you make teaching our best and brightest…
Trust me, this semester? Not our best and brightest. At. All.
[And that, folks, is why academics blog anonymously!]
russell: Strength is irrelevant.
Prepare to be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Welcome to the dark side!!
Thanks –
No.
Thank you.
But the Slavic well dried up during my time there (not that it was terrifically deep to begin with), so I moved on to other, more immediately lucrative things. How about you?
This wasn’t addressed to me but I’ll chime in.
My undergraduate work was in music. The school I went to emphasized musicology, generally, and 20th Century performance.
If there is any musical career that offers a greater opportunity to starve than jazz, it’s 20th C. performance. Would you like fries with your Varese, sir?
I think there are about 27 people in the world making a living playing the modern percussion repertoire. I know at least two of them.
Worked for a while as a janitor and book store clerk in Philly for a year or two, then got some basic skills together attending a trade school that advertised on the subway. This was back in the early 80’s, when you could still sneak in the tech back door.
It’s all on the job training since then. Been almost 25 years, imagine that.
You could never get away with that now. I lucked out.
That’s my walk down memory lane.
Thanks –
Memories from a slightly earlier (I think) generation, though not my own experience.
My college roommate – who started in physics and switched to German, IIRC, though he fulfilled one sophomore requirement in “History of Civilization” by conducting a choral recital – went on for a PhD in linguistics. Phonetics it was, and back in the day (1960s) he had to teach himself enough primitive computer technology to be able to measure/model ever-so-slight variations between “eeEee” and “eeeEe” (or at least so I envisaged it).
Got his PhD from UChicago – not too shabby – and no job offers whatsoever, in linguistics. But was head-hunted for his computer skills by some defense contractor in Dallas, and off he went to a successful career in computers.
Oh yes – along the way he transformed himself from a useful amateur baritone to a world-class counter-tenor, performing, e.g., at La Scala.
Life is what happens to you when you’re making other plans.
Russell, everything is addressed to everyone, right? But adding a name is useful sometimes because it flags someone one might be directly responding to. I love to hear these stories.
kenB, curiouser and curiouser. I went to grad school in English at Yale in the early 70’s. By the time I was job-hunting there were no jobs, which may have been just as well because I don’t know that I would have survived academic politics (being learning-disabled in that direction, as a friend of mine put it). I wandered off into other things, started programming as a temporary expedient, stayed for 31 years and counting.
Several years ago, looking for something interesting to take a course in (having dabbled previously in peace studies but not finding anywhere to go with it), I did the intro to linguistics course from MIT’s open courseware website. I loved it. Later I discovered that the University of Southern Maine has a small linguistics department and took some courses. I’ve had a great time with it and have thought about going back to school, but I just can’t see myself doing what it would take to focus that hard for that long on one thing (more or less) in a field where there are (does this sound familiar) no jobs…
Geez
For me, undergraduate started in horn, gave up after 4 years and got linguistics degree, which, at that particular cow college, was a catchall degree rather than an actual program. After teaching abroad (with a half year stint in an munitions factory, a very eyeopening experience), ended up doing an MA in linguistics in a real program. Met my wife after thinking my Japan days were pretty much over and here I am. Still play horn, still feel I am massively underqualified for everything, so am grateful to the gods that I found something I can do that I can tolerate and seem to be decent at, though I seem to have never found anything that I was ready to chuck everything to do. When asked about what it is like to live with me, my wife replied ‘shumi ga oosugiru’ (he’s got too many hobbies…)
I seem to have never found anything that I was ready to chuck everything to do
Me too. I may sometime come to peacefully accept that that’s a feature and not a bug of this particular program.
I seem to have never found anything that I was ready to chuck everything to do
Aha! Someone has given me a cue to quote (once again) one of my favoritest poems of all time. Note in particular the last stanza.
the lesson of the moth
by archy (Don Marquis)
i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires
why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense
plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then to cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is to come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves
and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity
but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself
archy
Actually, since we have such a confluence of software types: is it possible to negotiate one’s salary upwards in the tech industry and, if so, how?
Also, changing gears slightly, as the one who prompted dr ngo to comment upthread, thanks! And eventually, one day, maybe, just maybe, I’ll listen to him…
is it possible to negotiate one’s salary upwards in the tech industry and, if so, how?
Dude, you haven’t even started the job yet! Yikes!
The short answer is yes, but the details depend on what your skills are and the industry you’re working in.
Dr. Ngo, great poem. Many thanks.
Dude, you haven’t even started the job yet! Yikes!
It’s simple enough: I’m in an incredibly odd position where I can be valued in two completely different ways. Their offer is right in the middle, so by one metric, I’ll be significantly underpaid (boo!); by the other, I’ll be massively overpaid (hooray!). As such, I have the bizarre ability to negotiate without caring what the outcome is (provided I don’t cost myself the job completely) since I can always consider the glass half full. And since you only get better at negotiating by practice, well, what the hell!
…of course, this would work better if I actually knew how to negotiate but, well, see above 🙂
Anarch, I may not be the best to advise you; I am an independent consultant and my contract negotiation experience usually revolves around intellectual property rights rather than money. Back in my salaried employee days I had a few hard knocks from which perhaps I have learned something but the following is based more on management experience in general rather than directly on salary negotiation. Still, I think it is relevant and may help.
My personal style when dealing with new people is to be open and gentle at first, giving the benefit of the doubt. This is exactly the wrong strategy for negotiation. It’s much better to start firm and soften only after becoming more familiar with the other party. Some people do not negotiate in good faith and if you give at the beginning and become firm at the end you risk a confrontation that benefits neither side. This was a hard won lesson for me so I hope you will not repeat my mistake.
For me, also, it’s important to decide up front what I believe is a right outcome. I may not achieve my ideal, but I have to consider how far I’m willing to bend to achieve an agreement I can be satisfied with. Sometimes one has to draw a line.
This advice is a little bit trite and you can probably find it in a book, too, but since you asked I offer it. It is from personal experience.
Anarch: Actually, since we have such a confluence of software types: is it possible to negotiate one’s salary upwards in the tech industry and, if so, how?
Once upon a time… Seriously, in the late 90’s we were so in demand that it wasn’t even funny. I mean it got embarrassing at one point. These days though, things are getting rougher. Used to be that my company could run ads for a new position everywhere for months and get little response. These days there is an absolute flood.
My advice FWIW – if it’s a decent offer, jump on it and don’t push your luck too much right now. Prove yourself, and then go for a nice increase in a year.
OCSteve, here is my problem. I jump in for a quick glimpse, then can’t come back for several hours (sometimes a day or two) and your last comment directed to me is three miles upthread.
The respect goes both ways. The main problem I had with your cite was that it never really produced any facts that had any real relevance to the judgements the author of the article was making.
I don’t consider Ayers some kind of folk heron. I graduated college in 1969, I was well aware of what was going on and basically disgusted with most of it.
My point is that there is the Ayers of then and the Ayers of now, and there is too much conflation of the two.
Secondly, the relationship between Obama and Ayers is extremely tangental at best. The closest they connect is working on the same charitable board. I suppose Obama could have resigned from a position that allowed him to do something very important to him and the community because (gasp) somebody with a bad past was on the same board.
The party at Ayers house is inconsequential.
And I would be willing to beat that over 70% of the American public had no idea who Ayers was when it was ludicrously brought up in the debate.
OT, did anybody see the Wright interview. It gave a much clearer view of the man, his thinking and even his love of this country. Of course you wouldn’t know that based on how it has been reported in the media.
Way up thread OCSteve explains that as a person who understands how Republicans think, Obama has to reject and denouce connections people make between him and tohers or he will have his ass handed to him.
The problem is that he can’t because some people (the media pundits especially) won’t accept the rejectgion or denunciatin no matter how many times they are given.
Obama has rejected Wright’s works repeatedly. He made a speech that put the Writh sermons in to a historical perspective. he rejected some more. Still not enough,
Some people ( hard rightwingers, people looking for an excuse to reject Obama and the MSM ) have a vested interest in refusing to accept his rejections. Oh and Hilllary Clinton, too. So they never will.
What we need to do–all of us who cara bout the process of demcracy–is to rejecta nd denounce this sort of smearing by the MSM.
OCSteve: I’m with Wonkie here. Rejecting/renouncing/repudiating won’t do any good. It’s a game with no way to win.
It’s smear-by-association, and not all the tossing under the bus will work.
The only way to win is, effectively, not to play the game. In years past, that didn’t work so well — too many people bought into the game.
I think that particular game is getting pretty stale, and if there’s anyone who can pull of breaking the game — it’s Obama. Half his message is “Isn’t everyone sick of these stupid games?”.
He’s got a lot of advantages when it comes to shrugging off the usual GOP attacks. Sure, they’ll still work on the GOP base — but those guys still think Bush is a great President. There’s no point appealing to them, and there’s a lot less of them then there was.
Just as an example — the GOP likes to paint African-Americans as thugs, criminals, gangsters, and sub-humans. They like to paint Democrats as ivory-tower elites.
It’s fun watching their gay-baiting, race-baiting, and homophobia baiting collide in an orgy of contradiction. Sure, the base will accept it — but the more contradictory their message, the harder to sell at the margins.
“Obama has rejected Wright’s works repeatedly.”
Only after Wright’s rants became a news story. Before that, Obama was mute about the revs excesses
“Just as an example — the GOP likes to paint African-Americans as thugs, criminals, gangsters, and sub-humans. They like to paint Democrats as ivory-tower elites.”
Generalities to the left of me, generalities to the right…
Jay, when you can come up with something factual, let us all know.
BTW, Jay, you do realize that Clinton worked for a law firm where two of the partners were self defined communists dedicated to defending Black Panthers and other radicals, weren’t you.
And this was done knowingly, and she was paid for it, and she has never disavowed this activity nor rejected and denounced those she worked for or defended?
And obviously, Jay, you are another one who never watched the whole sermons nor saw the interview.
And btw, I don’t condemn Hillarly for those associations mentioned above, but obviously they are even worse than the Obama associations with Ayers or Wright.
For OCSteve and anyone else who is open to taking a second look at Rev. Wright: a good account of his appearance on Bill Moyers’ show by Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft.
I saw Moyers and Wright last night. I agreed with virtually everything he said. He didn’t repeat the comment about HIV, which is the only portion of his comments I found objectionable in the first place.
To my mind, the fact that Obama runs away from what Wright said is the disappointing aspect of the whole affair, though I understand people think he’s got to do this to have any chance of winning. But if that’s true (and it probably is), it doesn’t speak well of our country.
I clicked on Nell’s link and it made me mad all over again–last night my wife and I watched Wright and both of us were saying “This is supposed to be a crazed preacher drunk on hatred?” This is the guy even the” liberal” New York Times condemned in an editorial the other day? Wright is the kind of pastor that would make me proud to be a Christian, as opposed to the cringing I usually do when some preacher appears on TV.
To get biblical for a moment, the people spitting on Wright aren’t fit to tie his shoes.
jay here’s something for HRC to reject and denouce: Bill’s decsion to grant clemancy to fifteen FALN bombers. They were responsible for thierty some bombings resulting in several deaths. They were given clemancy two days hafter a NYC politicians qwrote a letter to Hillary requesting her to use her personal influence with Bill to get clemancy. Two days later the clemancy was granted. Amazingly this all happened while she was running for the Senate in NY and need the vote of Americans of Puerto Rican descent. When asked about this she told a barefaced lie: stated that she had no prior knolweldge and ino involvment in the decison.
That’s the lady who says she is vetted and there are no surprises. That’s also the lady who thinks that it is legitamate to keep persevderating on forever about Ayers, even thought Obama was in elementary scholl when Ayers was bombing places (not people)and had no role at all in the legal process that Ayers wnet through.
So should HRC have to keep rejecgting and denouncing this all the way up to Nov 7?
john – if you’re referring me to the Black Panther/radicals topic because of Obama’s association with Ayers, I’ve never said anything about it – because it’s not an issue for me if Obama knew him socially and they sat around together, Ayers reminiscencing about the good old days of bombing draft boards and getting naked with flower girls in the back of VW busses…
I don’t care if Obama chatted with Ayers anymore than I care that Obama got stoned now and again twenty years ago: though if you’ve seen him lately at the end of a campaign day, his eyes look a little glazed and dull: Maureen Dowd says he “seems uneven and gauzy” and she ascribes it to a lack of ‘pizazz’ that’s crept into his recent speeches. But maybe after all the stress Hillary’s been subjecting him to, he’s inhaling a couple of tokes on the sly to calm his nerves.
Of course, I should point out that an associate lawyer working at a firm defending criminals doesn’t choose those client associations, and of course I hope you forgive me for saying I find your statement that two of the partners at Hillary’s law firm were ‘self defined communists’ somewhat facetious. Since so many of the Rose Law Firm’s clients are establishment corporations (Wal-Mart, etc) you’re assertion borders on the nonsensical– but I’m sure you’ll counter this with plausible links to the contrary and prove me wrong.
Rev. Wright, however, is a different kettle of fish (out in the sun too long, and growing more and more rancid). And sadly, I have to chastise you for asserting without evidence that I’m another one who never watched the whole sermons nor saw the interview.
I’ve seen whatever relevant Wright sermons are available on the internet, in their entirety. In fact, I was linking to Wright’s controversial statements weeks before they hit the national media spotlight, and also referring to other controversial statements published on Wright’s Church web-site (many of them since removed) which indicated the depth of Wright’s anti-white racist beliefs.
And yes, I did see the Moyer’s tv interview, and I’ve subsequently re-examined the transcripts (here), and can say with absolute certainty the interview was a whitewash (or it that blackwash?) with Moyers exhibiting as much (or as little) critical objectiveness as an ad agency public relations rep making an obsequious commercial for a client.
Moyers treated Wright with kid gloves. It was like a love-fest interview between two old pals, chatting it up: Moyer ‘warming up’ the audience with the fond reference to Martin Marty (an old acquaintance they had in common) and then lobbing soft-ball questions at Wright, but never asking hard follow-up questions, the kind of cross-examinations a journalist is supposed to make.
In one instance, Moyers didn’t even follow up on a topic he himself mentioned at the beginning of the show: Wright often repeating ‘the canard heard often in black communities that the U.S. government spread HIV in those communities.’ But the HIV subject conveniently slipped through the cracks of the patty-cake interview.
Moyers also defused the equally controversial topic of Wright’s promotion of Black Liberation Theology by reducing it to a ‘bumper sticker’ reductive definition (as merely the “interpretation of scripture from the oppressed”), sidestepping the more incendiary elements of Black Liberation Theology doctrine, such as statements from founders of the movement like James Cone, who said:
“Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him.”
So, Kill The Whitey God equates with Scripture From The Oppressed, does it? Well, as a ‘confirmed’ NeoAgnostic I don’t have much faith in religious doctrine to begin with, but come-on… isn’t there some kind of implausible divide between what Moyers and Wright defined as BLT doctrine, and the way it’s preached from the pulpit by ministers like Wright?
One of the things in the interview I did find interesting (not you, apparently, since it seems to have escaped your notice) was Wright’s response to Moyers’s question about Obama’s so-called ‘rejection’ of Wright’s controversial remarks:
Which sounds a lot like Wright’s saying Obama wasn’t being sincere in those renunciations of the God Damn America remarks.
RMJ doesn’t blog that often, but when he does it’s always worth reading. IMVHO, of course.
Here’s his take on the Moyers / Wright interview.
It’s the piece titled “For the wicked carried us away”.
Thanks –
That was a very nice post, thanks Russell.