Lose the Debate, Win the Election

As I left at friend's apartment at 5am on Saturday morning Berlin time after watching the first presidential debate, I admit was not a happy Christopher. My chosen, cherished candidate had disappointed me. The opposition, I felt, gave an unusually strong and coherent performance. I decided to just go to bed and spare myself what I was sure would be dispiriting post-debate analysis.

When I woke up later that afternoon and crawled to my computer, though, I was greeted by something rather surprising. Obama had won the debate--so said the snap polls--and most commentators were busying themselves trying to explain why Obama had been deemed the more appealing contender.

Had I seen the same debate as everyone else? Am I living on another planet? I struggled for an explanation. Was this evidence of media bias? Or did Obama's campaign simply outmaneuver the McCain camp in post-debate spin? Or am I simply hopelessly out of touch?

Whatever the explanation, I now feel more confident about Obama's chances for winning the presidency than I have at perhaps any other point this year. What his victorious failure in Friday night's debate proves is that Obama is so firmly in command of the election narrative that no intercession of real events will able to halt his progress.

McCain could hardly have hoped for a better performance. He is almost certain to do worse in later debates. Obama could still falter, but it is far liklier that he'll put on a better, more energetic and personable show in the debates to come.

The point is not that McCain failed to acheive his "game-changer": the point is rather that game can no longer be changed. Obama's lead, I now believe, is becoming entrenched. Gallup actually has his number increasing by three points since the debate.

If Obama can do this well while doing this badly, then the election is over.

Living with an Asterix

Is it all a dream? At some point the question must be confronted, the body must be pinched. Is this real life, or a Zwischenspiel? Are Americans who live abroad really just “on leave”, living with an asterix—for years or decades perhaps—like so many university professors whose starred departmental profiles provide annual disappointment to scores of over-eager pupils?

I am not an expatriate. I have neither married a European nor given up my American citizenship. I jealously—bitterly—cling to my right to vote, among other New World privileges. Despite soon beginning work for a European magazine, my mind still inhabits a media community whose main organs are centered in New York. I am considering opening a Roth IRA. My return to the United States may be perpetually deferred in an earthly, temporal sense, but it is always imminent as a mental proposition. My waking mind might be uncertain about its future plans, but my unconscious has no doubt that it will soon find itself back on the other side of the Atlantic.

So what does it mean, in the year 2008, for Americans in their early twenties to pack up and move to Europe? Everyone draws on traditions, whether they like to or not, and “losing” oneself in European exile in an especially venerable one. And yet, as I open the Literatur section of this week’s Die Zeit and read about Truman Capote’s romp around Venice with Donald Windham, I feel more distance than resonance. Capote’s own gay grand tour, his Italian muse-mongering, was untraditional in its own way, and cannot really be compared to the kind of American exile-experiences chronicled and/or imagined by earlier writers like Henry James.

But Capote seems much closer to James and the nineteenth century ‘Grand Tour’ model than he does to any Americans I know today. What’s so different about 2008?

Well, for one thing, the dollar is a lot weaker. In a way this is the crucial thing. Americans living in Europe can no longer correctly style themselves as the emissaries of American empire, feasting upon the cultural left-overs of a ruined and bankrupt continent. Neither are we burdened with the same sense of cultural inferiority that Americans once inevitably were. In matters both cultural and economic, the scales have tipped back towards parity. Does this make the European-American relationship in some way “purer”, an encounter between equals?

The other thing that must be said—loath as I am to over-extrapolate from my inevitably narrow experience—is that moving to Europe feels entirely normalized. It has carries with it no special romance or cachet. In a way, deciding to move to Berlin is not so unlike deciding to move to New York, or Chicago, or San Francisco, particularly if you speak German. Part of this is a cyber-effect, no doubt, an illusion of closeness.

And yet I still wonder if this a detour from life as I will one day live it. Whether this were so would be much clearer if I were living in, say, Bangkok. There would be no question in my mind that living in Thailand would carry a very big asterix indeed. Berlin is fuzzier, because it is less exotic. Maybe this really is real life. Maybe my expectations of myself shouldn’t be any different than they would be back in the states. Maybe I should be looking for a long-term career, a long-term mate, a mortgage-loan, etc.

Surely one of the chief reasons young Americans go abroad in the first place is because they don’t want to look for these things. Maybe it’s a mistake to qualify jobs and marriages and mortgages as “real” and everything else as “vacation”. Maybe life really is a beach. Or should be.

Bringing up Bridget

With the all the hub-bub surrounding candidate children and photo-op exploitation (or sexploitation, in the cases of poor young Bristol and Levy--when do you think they were informed they had to get married?), one candidate child has been notably missing on the various convention stages and magazine spreads. This is a shame because Bridget McCain, John and Cindy's infamous 'Black' (actually adopted Bangladeshi) baby, the one who arguably cost him the South Carolina primary and perhaps the entire presidency back in 2000, is almost certainly the most interesting candidate-child around, notwithstanding the fierce competition from special-needs Trig and promise-ring Bristol (and bizarrely-named Track, so dubbed, if we are to believe press releases, in order to pay tribute to 'high school track meets').

To see a regrettably unflattering picture of Bridget look here. http://bigheaddc.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/mccain-sisters.jpg

Everyone always whines about how awful it must be for candidate children to have to endure the withering media spotlight, but how do you think it feels to be the only kid around barely getting any attention at all? Is it because Bridget isn't white? or not pretty enough? or not pregnant enough? I know virtually nothing about Bridget McCain, but I demand to know more. It's time the folks at the National Enquirer gave me a Bridget scandal, because everyone knows it isn't any fun to be left out.

Will the GOP have another Harriet Miers moment? The answer is no, it's all about Roe

Democrats have rightly been complaining that GOP rank-and-file support for Sarah Palin demonstrates how hypocritical and/or disingenuous their attacks on Barack Obama's 'inexperience' have been.

I'd like to draw attention, however, to the fact that the army of conservative writers who have leapt to Sarah Palin's defense (notably William Kristol at the Weekly Standard and almost the entire staff of the National Review) include many of the same voices who brought down Harriet Mier's supreme court nomination with bitter accusations that Bush's favorite lawyer was light-weight and unqualified.

Why the 180 degree shift from Miers to Palin? It is now clear (as it was to some even at the time), that conservatives mounted their vigorous assault on Miers not because they thought she was unqualified, but because they were worried she wasn't conservative enough, and, especially, that she did not offer a reliable vote against Roe vs. Wade. With Palin, on the other hand, there is no question about her opposition to abortion rights, which is as extreme as can be. That the conservative commentariat's reactions to Palin and Miers have diverged so dramatically offers an instructive lesson: in the Republican party, ideology always trumps talent.

Which isn't necessarily such a bad thing, were republican ideology not so frightening. During the Miers controversy, a lot of liberals leapt on the dump Miers bandwagon, heaping praise on her impeccably credentialed--but intractably hard-line--replacement, Samuel Alito. We should all be asking ourselves whether we wouldn't be better off with a dummy like Miers than a villain like Alito.

Juno in Juneau

How does the revelation that Alaska's first daughter, seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin, is five months pregnant affect our view of her newly ennobled mother, Alaska governor and McCain VP pick Sarah Palin? The media, which in its reactionary, post-PC mode has taught itself to genuflect before any manifestation of the lives and values of the white working class, has been busy convincing itself that little Bristol's teen pregnancy contributes to the 'authenticity' of her mother's backwoods, moose-hunting image. The Palin family, say the McCain cmap and its media plants, is just working through the kind of issues and curveballs that life throws at all ordinary Americans.

Excuse my ingorance: since when is teen pregnancy a core American value, or indeed, the kind of issue that confronts 'all american families'? It may be the kind of issue that confronts ordinary families in Iran, but teen pregnancy rates in the United States are pretty near the all-time lows achieved during the Clinton administration.

Rates inched upwards, of course, during the Bush years and the imposition of Abstinence-only policies, but becoming pregnant at 17 (or was she sixteen when it began?) is still hardly the norm.

Where danger lurks for Sarah Palin is that Bristol's pregnancy will alter the way voters think about her evangelical pentacostalism. For teen pregnancy can be thought of not only as the result, but, in a sense, the secret agenda of evangelical 'family values'. The trouble with Palin on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday was that it was difficult to criticize her hard-line evangelical conservatism without sounding like she should have aborted Trig, her baby who suffers from down-syndrome. But now with Bristol's pregnancy, it's all getting a bit out of control. There are all together too many children in the Palin orbit. Becoming a grandmother at 44 is simply not the American dream. Although the media tends to present the white working-class as a cultural monolith, there's a world of difference in the cultural attitudes of (largely Catholic) working class whites who live in the suburbs of major Midwestern cities and the kind of evangelical millennarians who pack up and move to Wasilla, Alaska. Palin's endlessly proliferating progeny might play well in Salt Lake City, but how about among union members in Akron, Ohio? Whereas at first it seemed that the existence of Trig put Palin's pentacostalism off-limits, or somehow beyond reproach, Bristol's pregnancy once again invites to consider whether we really want a religious extremist with her finger on the nuclear trigger.

Quick notes on Palin

Sorry to my readers, if there are indeed still readers, for being so remiss about updates. Just got back from traveling in Croatia, and will resume daily updates.

Just wanted to highlight a couple points about Palin, some of which ratify the core contentions of BerlinerBlog:

- she is a marathon runner

- she is rabidly pro-life but somewhat gay-friendly, giving the lie to the phony notion of "culture wars". Republican hostility to gays will continue to recede with the next generation of conservatives (young evangelicals are far more homophilic than their parents), but the abortion issue isn't going anywhere

- she isn't really that much of a surpise: she's been on the shortlist all along, and I've been saying for weeks that she was arguably the strongest choice on the list. Miles ahead of the radically unpleasant Carly Fiorina.

- her children are named Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper, and Trig Paxson Van.

- there are real dangers for the Obama campaign in criticizing her inexperience. It's tempting to use Palin to neutralize McCain's argument about Obama's inexperience, but it will take a lot of political art to make this line work without inviting unflattering comparisons to Obama.

- Palin is sexy, and this is a liability for her. Like Obama, she is not simply young, she carries with her a whiff of sexuality. It will look awkward for McCain--a man who left his first wife for a much younger woman--to be on the trail, arm in arm, with a MILF.

- the "pre-packaged scandal" that comes with Palin won't hurt her. Palin seems to have gotten her sister's ex-husband fired from some government job. Nobody will care, particularly since the guy sounds like an asshole.

- in the end--it really is true--no one votes for VP. Palin is a strong pick for McCain, I think, but not one that really 'changes the game' in any significant way.

Backlash: the Abuse of a Concept

Of all the rich and various ways to make a surprising, counter-intuitive argument, few are as popular, as cheap, or as intellectually impoverished as the concept of 'backlash'. For media types, the beauty--or should we say the crude utility--of penning a 'backlash' story is that it provides the template for the simplest, indeed, the most intuitive kind of contrarian reasoning.

Backlash stories abound in the daily press, the most notable recent example being the coverage of the alleged backlash against Barack Obama's trip to Europe, during which 'presidential' photo-ops supposedly became 'presumptuous' in the popular imagination. Backlash--the journalistic notion that every event that seems moves politics or taste in one direction inevitably triggers a countervailing force in the opposite direction--has an elegant, Newtonian predictability to it. It allows journalists to believe they are being clever and unconventional without actually having to craft a complex thought.

But in addition to its everyday role as a ready-made template for media 'analysis', the notion of backlash also shapes the popular understanding, the 'collective memory' we might say, of the history of post-war liberalism. Although there are many variants on the story, practically every explanation for the flagging fortunes of the Democratic party since 1968 relies on the notion that Democrats started to lose their New Deal white working-class majority when they began to push a liberal social agenda (in succession: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights) at the expense of their left-wing economic agenda. Because there are few commentators who, on the merits, can really bring themselves to speak ill of the civil rights movement and its offspring--is it really possible anymore to oppose desegregation or sexual harassment legislation?--mainstream critics of social liberalism have relied on arguments related to political strategy to explain why, for instance, the democrats need to stop advocating gay rights.

This is where the notion of 'backlash' comes in: liberal elites, especially those on the Supreme Court, have imposed progressive values from their imperial pedestal onto a conservative populace that has responded with anger and resentment. At their most extreme, proponents of the conservative backlash theory actually argue that court decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education or the recent California ruling on gay marriage actually harm liberal causes by provoking a backlash whose negative ramifications exceed whatever good is done by the legal decision.

There is virtually no compelling evidence, though, of a 'backlash' effect against most progressive Supreme Court decisions. Some people are racist, and some people are sexist. Most people, perhaps, hate gays. But did people become more racist after Brown? Are they becoming more homophobic as a result of the gay marriage decisions? The evidence of the last fifty years suggests the opposite--that supreme court decisions have tended to be leading indicators, substantially moving public discourse in a progressive direction. Anecdotally, of course, there may be instances of negative feedback, of minibacklashes where things actually get worse for persecuted minorities as a result of elite-authoritarian policy shifts. The overall effect, though, is clearly one of positive feedback, of front-lash. Not two steps forward, three steps back, but rather three steps forward, and a slight pivot back while the body politic stabilizes itself in its new position.

There is an exception, though, to this general story of the Supreme Court leading and the masses slowly following. The exception is Roe vs. Wade, which arguably really has produced a sustained political backlash among large segments of the American populace. Whereas popular attitudes towards race, gender, and sexuality have changed dramatically in the last fifty years, in an almost seamlessly progressive direction, attitudes toward abortion have been much less predictable, swinging back and forth. The country is not significantly more pro-choice today than it was in 1980.

I support abortion rights. The freedom to choose is one of the most important prerequisites to Women's liberation. Still, Roe vs. Wade is fundamentally different from Brown vs. Board of Education or Lawrence vs. Texas, and the attempt to smuggle the abortion debate--an issue which, on the merits, is unavoidably contentious--into the broader debate about civil rights is one of the political sleights-of-hand that has helped conservatives to dominate American politics for the last thirty years. This lie is best summed up with the bogus term 'culture wars', which seeks above all else to leverage popular opposition to abortion into opposition to every other feature of the liberal social agenda.

These days, when people talk about the 'culture wars' or invoke 'values voters' they are trying mostly to link abortion to the gay rights struggle. It won't work, though. At the end of the day, the California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision is much more like Brown vs. Board than it is like Roe vs. Wade. Thirty years from now, same-sex marriage will be the norm and no one will remember why everyone kicked up such a big fuss (just as it seems incredible today that African-Americans in the south were largely prevented from voting until the 1960s). But abortion will still be argued about, likely with the same amount of vigor as today or as in 1973. In a country as religious as the United States, abortion will never go away--the substance of the issue is too divisive.

On Not Caring About China

Apologies are in order for those who rely on a daily dose of BerlinerBlog to combat the malign tedium of contemporary life. I've had a striking, well-dressed visitor in town, one who's appeal is neither to be sneezed at nor to be multi-tasked.

But I return with fresh enthusiasm and a very important message:

I don't care about China.

Of course, this revelation brings with it an apartment-complex of guilt and self-doubt. Am I radically out of step with my generation, missing the vernal Asian forest for Europe's shabby trees?

The Beijing Olympics have unleashed a predictable tsunami of commentary in the West devoted to describing, dissecting, and sometimes decrying China's rise. And yet I remain dry, untouched by this particular media deluge. I'm embarrassed to confess I haven't read a single China-related article in the last month.

My lack of interest in the Middle Kingdom must be reckoned one of my dirtiest intellectual secrets. Abstractly, of course, I'm aware I should be interested in China. And I've tried before, taking seminars with Jonathan Spence, grilling American friends about their abroad experiences, grilling Asian friends about their childhoods. I even claim to have enjoyed The Emperor and the Assassin.

I admit these things with very real trepidation. As my witty visitor aptly put it, at our university, undergrads uninterested in China were treated like a "persecuted minority". Which I find funny until the phrase cashes out its humor and leads my madly associative mind to consideration of the Falun Gong, the Uiguhr, and any number of other persecuted Chinese groups whose plight only inspires me with cranky boredom.

But everytime I try to think myself into an intellectual relationship with China, I'm always frustrated. That's because my problem, I've come to believe, is fundamentally libidinal. I'm just not attracted to Chinese people, not sexually at any rate. Any every intellectual interest, I've become convinced, relies at least in part on a libidinal motor. Is it really possible for a straight man to develop a serious academic interest in the Far East, indeed, to devote his entire life to oriental study, unless he's sustained by a sexual attraction to East Asian women?

Looking at the Yale history faculty provides some clues, and not just regarding East Asian specialists. The army of old white men who research in what is arguably the best history department on the planet is flanked by a cortege of younger spouses, many of them academics in their own right, who overwhelmingly hail from the very countries their older mates have dedicated their lives to studying. Although the department itself may seem stunningly undiverse, adding wives to the picture reveals a large number of latina and east asian faces. The link between sex and scholarship here would seem to be self-evident.

And here I sit, pathetically excluding myself from this love-fest, sexually innoculated against what looks less like 'yellow fever' than like a golden touch. For the future belongs not only to the Chinese, but even more, perhaps, to the horde of sinophiles readying themselves for the orgy to come.

Eventually, of course, taste will recalibrate itself to economic reality and Asian males will see their sexual stock rise sharply. There's always a time gap, though, and I've come of age to early to take advantage of the looming libidinal realignment.

There's no honor in being a lagging indicator.

Rise Against: marathon running and the psychopathology of everyday life

It's all well and good for Americans to say that morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun. In Europe, though, firearms are harder to come by, limiting our chances to shoot and kill those with whom we disagree. So let us assert, for those of us unprivileged by conceal-and-carry legislation, that morality should begin with orality, at the level of the mouth, the tongue, and the everyday conversation. It is in the casual conversation, afterall, that lies get propagated, evil takes hold, and infamy spreads. But not if we take a stand.

The surging popularity of marathons has to be among the most disturbing phenomenons of recent times. To run a marathon is to surrender to a frightening psychosis, to an almost medieval, self-flagellating and self-destructive compulsion. Running a marathons is not good for your body. It is not good for your soul. And yet somehow it has acquired prestige and cachêt, particularly among the young, educated, and upwardly mobile.

How many times in the last year have you let the revelation that someone is "training" for a marathon slip by without comment or rebuke? Even worse, how many times have you actually praised someone, professed your awe and admiration--to their face--for undertaking such a herculean (and purposeless and demented) endeavor?

Society asks us to respect marathon runners, to look up in wonder at their unhinged faces, perhaps even to pledge money to help support their descent into madness. Through some insidious mechanism, marathons have managed to ally themselves with a whole range of worthy causes, and we must reckon AIDS, breast cancer, and the rest to be innocent bystanders of the marathon runner's masochistic rampage. Marathons threaten to give community service itself a bad name, to contaminate the whole constellation of contemporary virtue.

Which is why, the next time your neighbors Derek and Kaitlyn, or your colleagues James and Michael tell you they're training to run a marathon together, you need to take a stand. You don't need to deliver a sermon: even a throw away line can make your resistance clear. Instead of reverentially intoning "wow, that's great", just chuckle and say "wow, that's crazy. Isn't that, like, really bad for you?" It's important to literally use a word like "crazy" or "maniacal", something to keep the register clinical.

Try it out. I swear, it won't come off nearly as rudely as it's intended. Particularly if they're in the late stages of training, marathon runners tend to be pretty dulled to subtle rhetorical warfare. Écrazez l'infâme! Each of us has to do our part.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.

carving your niche, vandalizing your soul

Is this what it's all about, not just in blogging, but in life in general? Finding your niche, your specialization, your persona. Claiming your domain, declaring your expertise, narrowing your portfolio. Are these the secrets to a successful life in the twenty-first century? Will having a schtick get me a job, or a book deal, or a mate for the night?

There's something deeply depressing about all this niche talk. "Self-fashioning", as the lit. crit. set calls it, could potentially sound like a fun after-school project. To me, it sounds a little like death, less like an embrace a single identity than a rejection of a million others.

And then the most disturbing thought of all: is all this niche-filling, this ruthless self-marketing, this vain theatrical posing--are these things we actually mean when we talk about "growing up"? Deciding to tell one's story in a specific, stylized way: does this give content to the empty concept of becoming an adult?

The scary thing about "self-fashioning", from my perspective, springs from two sources. The first is the pressure to let 'demography be destiny', to let certain objective, unchangeable facts about yourself drive and dominate your self-story. The second is 'path-dependency': the self-reinforcing, seemingly irreversible dynamic of choosing a story and sticking to it.

Take me, for example. I'm gay. I'm fine with the adjective. I still struggle with the noun, though. Am I 'a' gay, and does that give me special expertise, a special story to tell, a degree of authority on same-sex matters simply because of this demographic indicator? Should I be writing about 'gay' things? I've just pitched a story to major magazine-website about gay asylum-seeking (looking at the international debate about whether being a homosexual in certain countries, e.g. Iran, should constitute automatic grounds for asylum in the West, etc.). I feel somewhat embarrassed, pathetic, and sleazy-sly pitching a story on a 'gay' topic, as if I'm tricking the magazine into thinking that I would be the best person to write this story simply because I'd had sex with a couple dozen men (none of them asylum-seekers, as far as I'm aware).

This is scary to me because it seems like a fateful step. If I'm lucky and end up publishing a story on gay asylum, that will give me a compelling excuse to pitch more gay stories. What began as a flawed, invented premise--that I have any idea what I'm talking about when it comes to gay issues--might soon ratify itself. Once you start carving yourself a niche (or is it digging yourself a grave?), you really do become an expert on a narrow range of topics. It starts to make less and less sense to write about anything else?

So what is my niche? My signature issues? The hallmarks of my style? Certainly just being a 'gay' writer isn't enough. There are millions of those. Gay ivyleaguer? We're still running in the thousands. Gay ivyleaguer originally from Detroit, living in Berlin, with diffuse interests, leftish politics, and an abiding superiority complex (closely shadowed, and often challenged, by its inferior twin)? Well, that's not a story at all. Not a persona or an agenda. Just a heap of arbitrary facts.

So I'm turning to you, my few and fickle readers. What's my schtick? How do you even spell schtick? The Germans like to talk about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, about 'coming to terms with the past'. Well, I'm asking you to help with my own, personal Gegenwartsaufarbeitung, my coming to terms with my present. Quo vado?

And so it begins, in a scrappy and plaintive key. A vague, unusable character, slowly coming into relief...

When ivy mediocrity turns against itself

After a very short but still agonizing period of deliberation, I have decided to abandon the format to which I swore allegiance in my first post. Three ideas are too many for a single post. I therefore reject the tyranny of my own rules.

The one idea I have for today is simply to attack Bill Deresiewicz's recent article in the American Scholar "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education". Deresiewicz was a professor of English at Yale until he was denied tenure in 2007. Readers of his most recent article might be amused to learn that Yale canned him in part for spending too much time on journalistic pursuits and not enough time on scholarship.

Well Bill, I've never read any of your scholarship, but if it's anything like your journalism, then we really should wonder about the worth of an elite education. The article is stunningly shallow, relying entirely on pious common-places and carefully avoiding surprising or insightful analysis. It's the kind of article you would expect to read on the op-ed page of a campus daily, not in a major literary magazine.

Deresiewicz serves up conventional wisdom of the most studenty sort. Instead of effectively exposing ivy mediocrity, he embodies it. Even the prose brings us back to Sophomore year, but at least in college awkward stumbles of phrase like "the constellation of values ceaselessly inculcated" or "the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization" might still be taken as signs of overeager intellectual promise. When you're as old as Deresiewicz they start to look more like signs of ingrained rhetorical deficiency.

Do Ivy leaguers feel entitled? Do they think they're better than everyone else? Are they often stupid and parochial? Of course, though most of them probably aren't as disturbed by having to talk to their plumbers as D-wicz. But in trying to prove these obvious, incontrovertible points, D-wicz ends up saying plenty of things that aren't true.

Like that Yale is easier than Cleveland State. Although the article is almost totally uninformed by data, when the odd number does show up, it actually undermines Deresiewicz's point. When trying to explain how easy it is to get an A at Yale, he cites grade inflation statistics intended to show a huge gap between grade distributions at Public Universities and Ivy League schools. The gap, though, is suprisingly small: 3.0 vs. 3.4. If you think that grades are supposed to reflect some absolute (imaginary) measure of academic quality, it would be shocking if the grade gap were any smaller.

Wiczy also tells us that ivyleaguers all want to become bankers, dignitaries, and "important people in New York", and that no one would degrade themselves, by becoming, say a teacher. A couple minutes of googling might have helped him find that becoming a teacher is the MOST popular post-grad occupation. Which just goes to show, I guess, that there are lot of entitled, snobby, dumb teachers out there. But this was another thing we already knew.

Along the same lines, the Wicz sounds the alarm about "the long-term drift of students" at Yale "away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics". The five biggest majors at Yale are History (by far), Economics, Political Science, English, and Biology. None of these majors is in the least "practical", and none is pre-professional. A lot of English majors (though hopefully few professors!) probably think that econ has to do with banking and stuff, but anyone who's taken an Econ course knows that the academic discipline of economics bears only a distant relationship to finance or accounting. There is some skill overlap, but not more than between English and journalism or philosophy and law. One of the things that makes the Ivy league such a rarefied and elitist place is that it is one of the last places where students are barred from the kind of 'vocational' training that D-Wicz decries.

Still, Dereciewicz is right that the Ivy League is mostly soulless and careerist. The best line in the piece is Wiczy's observation that "Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to". Ducking risk and rowing ducks is what most ivyleaguers have spent their pre-college lives doing. We can't expect them to behave differently after college.

Most of all though, Dereciewicz's piece fails because it doesn't acknowledge the complexity of the questions at stake. What is the purpose of a University, if not simply to reproduce the class system? What should be the job description of a college president? The answers are not at all obvious, though I feel pretty certain than an ideal university does not include a class on "the literature of friendship". Dereciewicz never fleshes out or gives content to the "larger intellectual journey" he mentions.

That would take some imagination and careful thought to figure out. Lucky for Bill, he's got a lot of time on his hands.

Number One

Wilkommen to my blog, ye faceless cyber-throngs. I can't imagine many of you will manage to read this, much less return each day, but for those unhappy few who are forlorn and desperate enough crave a daily piece of my mind, you will find here a regular post consisting of three paragraphs: one on politics, one on culture, and one on life (my own and those of others).

This blog will not necessarily have anything to do with Berlin. I just live here, and my first choice name was already taken (by me, if I remember correctly. I can't remember the password though, so maybe I'm making it all up. What a blog it would have been!)

This blog may at times get personal, particularly in the 'life' paragraph. I might change names to protect the innocent, but I don't promise to do so, particularly when none of the protagonists is innocent.

Enough disclaimers.

1. The American presidential campaign has taken a depressing turn as a result of of John McCain's cleverly put together TV ad, Celebrity'. The genius of the ad is that it forces us to get into a discussion about race that goes over the heads of not only most voters, but also most journalists. Would the McCain camp have chosen to compare Obama to white celebutante sex symbols if Obama weren't a young(ish) black man? Almost certainly not. Race provides the discursive glue; it's what makes the ad work. Does that mean it is 'racist'? These are the kind of tricky questions that the Obama campaign can't afford to have us thinking about. Since the ad trades on nuance and subtlety (making it sinister, not 'childish'), it has plunged the media into a nuanced and subtle debate about racial cues and visual mechanisms. It is a debate the Obama campaign can't possibly win, because to win would be to prove that the ad is only as racist as its viewers, and that all Americans suffer from deeply entrenched, unconscious racial prejudices. Fine for a Freshman year literature course, but deadly for a campaign. Journalists, like voters, don't like to be reminded of their baser reflexes, and this is why they have covered 'Celebrity' in a way hostile and damaging to Obama. Democrats should simply try to move on, but next time they need to have ready a more considered and strategic response to McCain's race-baiting feints. Obama probably shouldn't put up any kind of counter-ad, but if he did, the charge he would have to counter is NOT the explicit one that he lacks experience, but the implicit one that he has, as a friend put it, an 'outsized sexual appetite'. Hence, the correct response is a Michelle-and-family ad, not an ad touting foreign policy credentials.

2. I saw "This is England" the other night, a 2006 movie about a young, bullied boy in the North of England who becomes a radical, violent skinhead. It is, to an almost comical degree, a british replica of "American History X", but with lower production values. Neither film is high art, but both are good propaganda. In America, in particular, there is a stunning unwillingness among most writers, artists, and politicians to utter a simple truth: in every country in the world, there is a sizable minority of radical right-wingers who hold views not merely out of touch with but unacceptably dangerous to the democratic majority. One of the main goals of the political system ought to be to contain, marginalize, and ostracize
such people, not to ply or persuade them. Because of the legacy of the Holocaust, Europe generally does a much better job of this. In France, even conservative members of Sarkozy's party routinely stage 'walk-outs' from public debates when politicians from the far-right Front National attend. In England, members of the nationalist BNP (British National Party) are not allowed to speak at Cambridge. In the United States, such people are simply the right-wing of the Republican party. Not the establishment, but not really the fringe either. Whereas the ten to fifteen percent of French men and women who regularly vote Front National are effectively shut out from national politics and (rightly) deprived of a voice, the radical evangelical fringe of the Republican party (not identical to the Le Pen types, but similarly beyond the pale of rationality) gets a very big say indeed. Getting back to the movies though, it is interesting to consider that the closest French equivalent is actually something like 'La Haine' (1995), even though it is about the 'other side': angry banlieu muslim youth rather than white skin heads. All three movies borrow from the same visual poetics of adolescent racial violence.

3. Die Zeit did a 'Dossier' story commemorating the 1968 uprisings in Prague last week, and although the story was pretty boring, the pictures were dazzling. The next time anyone asks me what my 'type' is, I'm just going to say Prague Spring (and if they just think I'm talking about Czech porn stars, that won't be too far off). Kitchy nostalgia might have no place in art or politics, but I'm all for it when it comes to sex. Nothing hotter than good kitch. If only I could force my libido to wish it was living in the eighties! Reagan, Madonna, and hair bands just don't do it for me, which means I'm excluded from about 70 percent of gay culture.