Angry Black Bitch writes one of the best things I've seen on the practical realities of being a community organizer and activist. Admirable as all hell.
I don't want to get too caught up in the hand wringing over last night's results, because I think it was wildly optimistic to think that there would be an out come other than Obama succeeding in Wisconsin, and I said as much going into it. And the real tests come in the next few weeks, when we will see if the certainty on the right is matched by certainty on the left.
But what I'd like to point out really just crystallized for me this morning, as I thought about exit polling results: if I'm disheartened about last night's outcome, it's because I think the exit polling reflects something on both sides that's more than a little distressing - the triumph of the elite over the working class.
Throughout this election cycle, one of the most striking elements of the results has been Barack Obama's lack of appeal to the working class. High school graduates, people making under $50,000 a year... these people have gone, significantly and consistently for someone else, usually Hillary Clinton. Even last night, people with high school diplomas, or who never finished high school, went for Clinton 53-44. People earning less than $50,000 were 51-49 Obama, an essential tie.
It's easy to, as folks over at Cogitamus do, dismiss winning these folks as unnecessary. And by the looks of it, it may well be; Obama is the first candidate whose appeal to the elite of the left may be enough to win him the nomination and ultimately the Presidency (hat tip to Nick Beaudrot over at Cogitamus, for a fascinating list of similar candidates with similar appeal... all of whom lost).
Edward Larson (I know... who?) raised my eyebrows yesterday in The Wall Street Journal with yet another attempt to float the "liberals know nothing of history" argument. This trope says that only conservatives read, know, or understand history, while liberals... oh hell, let's just let Larson tell it:
Liberal Democrats have always looked to the future with hope and
embraced marginalized groups. When they look back, even to the deeds of
their own former leaders, they see trails of tears like the one over
which Andrew Jackson drove out the Cherokee. Blemishes on past
presidents, even those who pointed the way toward future progress, tend
to stain them wholly for at least some key elements within the
Democratic coalition.
Yes, it's true: we're all so embarrassed about America's past, and our role in it, that we can't bear to look at it. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman... hell, even Andrew Jackson, as Larson states. It's all so depressing....
Oh wait, I had the sarcasm button on. Now let's talk about why all of this is nonsense.
The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a
female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or
Swarthmore.
What the internet has taught us so far: Swarthmore doesn't offer a degree in education; Brown hasn't either, since 1929 (there's a graduate program... but it's not an education degree).
Which is to say, as someone points out over at Cogitamus, that Goldberg's "quintessential liberal fascist" doesn't exist.
Goldberg - a/k/a son of Lucianne - has enough publishing savvy (his Mom, after all, came to prominence during the Clinton scandals as the book agent for Linda Tripp, among others) to know that you need a hook to sell a book, and his has been that unlike other right wing screeds - or indeed, his own snarky column style - his book is a "serious, thoughtful" examination of the topic of fascism in history and how modern liberalism is its natural inheritor.
Perhaps he'd have a better understanding of "serious" and "thoughtful" if he'd been taught by one of those Swarthmore gals... but of course, she doesn't exist.
Don't get me wrong - I actually like Goldberg, even though he's intellectually a bit of a lightweight and his conservatism grates. I am always supportive of the folks, like me, with serious geekery going on - Goldberg's teenboy love of sci-fi (he's a Trekkie and a serious Battlestar Galactica fan) and The Simpsons means he can't be all bad, and we are about the same age, both hung out in Towson, Maryland in our teen years (Goldberg went to Goucher College, which few Towsonites take seriously) and similar Mama's boys. Which is why I find the run-up to the release of Goldberg's - sure to be bad - book hilarious. I mean, if you're going for the intellectually serious pose (which is hard enough for a Goucher grad)... at least try to keep a straight face.
Perhaps the best way back in after the brief hiatus is ruminating a bit on age. I spent tonight with several women half my age, watching a sneak preview of Walk Hard, which I should be reviewing shortly. And it got me thinking, a bit, on the questions of age and experience.
The young woman sitting next to me is a new coworker, only recently started, early into her college career; she reminds of several women I've known, especially RedStar, self possessed and well spoken, wise, I think, somehwat past her years... but still somewhat unformed. She, and her roommate, regarded me with a discomfort that I suspect was borne out of the confusion young people have with Older People You're Not Attracted To. Without a clear sense of motive, or purpose, conversation gets stilted, silences get uncomfortable. It's the "who is this guy, why is he here, does he expect us to socialize with him" kind of thing.
And that's the thing about getting older - you get to see this experience, if you're thoughtful, from both sides.
Like Ezra, I too have been trying to avoid the revived examination of studying the "links" between IQ and race; unlike Ezra, though, I think I can get out with just one bite at the apple, and not wade in a second time so as to just muddle the most valuable point: the highly subjective nature of IQ testing.
In the end, the problem with Charles Murray'sThe Bell Curve isn't co much in the conclusions he draws (with Richard Herrnstein) as it is in his premise, relying on IQ data in the first place. We rely on IQ as a measure of intelligence mostly because there's nothing else. That doesn't ensure its validity, or give it some patina of credibility. Indeed, it's mainly the sort of pseudo-science that seems plausible most to the people who find it leads to conclusions they pretty much had anyway. This is the problem with SATs too, and with drawing too many conclusions, or basing college admissions, on a standardized test with inherent biases and statistical flaws.
It's a fool's errand to get drawn, as the otherwise sensible William Saletan has, into examining and reexamining relationships between IQ tests and race; there are different kinds of intelligence, and being smart knows no particular race, creed, or national origin, All the dollar words people use - heritability, biogenetics, etc - are really ways to dress up little more than common social attitudes about race and class, which have nothing to do with rigorous, scientific scrutiny (and which, then, leads me to my high horse about how the social sciences are not really sciences, but never mind). The point is that all of this is just so... unnecessary. And mostly, I think, it's what happens when conservatives get a little too much free rein; suddenly every crazy idea seems to reappear, in yet more earnest form. The only winning move is not to play.
I had planned to talk about the mind boggling appointment of an avowed contraception opponent as the head of family health programs at HHS, but the story only deepens with the news today that middle school students in Portland, Maine will be able to get birth control pills privately, without parental notification.
...and I realized, I could goose my numbers.
Sure, I'll get a lot of cheap search engine hits off of "teen sex" (If only I could add boobs, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears... nah, that's just cheating), but seriously... what is it with Republicans? And when will this country figure out how to talk about sex?
Apropos of nothing - except maybe the time I've wasted watching abbreviated portions of Step Up on cable - I add
to my useless observations on things around Boston.
One thing the place is lousy with (outside of a certain overrated donut shoppe) is... colleges. Indeed, Boston is an object lesson on how even in close quarters, schools are able to create their own unique identities. The most obvious is probably MITs unique subset of freaks and geeks... but you have to be here to see how the rich Catholic girls (and boys) of BC differ oh so subtly from the rich Jewish girls (and boys) of BU. Emerson has carved out its niche of oh so creative, oh so artsy types (so much so, I find myself I wishing I'd gone when I had the chance).
Anyway, I wanted to mention one special subset: Good Looking U.
And like Red, I have the experience of my school to point to as well - my experience there when the Speakers
Union brought up Phyllis Schlafly for a colorful evening of protest by the Women's Center, open hostility and Schlafly's smug anti-feminist lines, which came off, sadly, as mostly dated and irrelevant. It's the sympathy I tend to feel for schools that get Ann Coulter... or really, even Al Gore. All too often, with these big name, high visibility speakers you get some fluffy stuff that trades on their celebrity reputation, precious little useful insight, and a student body that's primed more to argue and protest for entertainment than substance. (I was slightly renowned at school for questioning Jesse Jackson in 1988, just prior to his announcing his run for President, when he made a boilerplate, silly, statement about believing in "family values"; to my surprise I actually got to the mike something like second to ask what in the world that meant - was he suggesting someone didn't value families? He hemmed an hawed for a bit, and then pretty much wilted. Shortly thereafter, he seemed to drop the whole line.)
Ahmadinejad has been so demonized that there's little way to dress up an appearance at Columbia as little more than sensationalism; Columbia's long, undeserved rep as both the happening place in student protests (proximity to New York's media outlets accounts for a lot of that cred) and the Ivy League bastion of educational excellence (more money than God, less than stellar output, by most accounts... easily eclipsed by Harvard and Yale... which is really rather sad) isn't improved with this.
And really what is there to say? Expecting Ahmadinejad to either a) turn out to be so crazy that he'd walk in front of large American University audience and do things like deny The Holocaust or b) turn out to be so crazy that he'd say "Oops, there really was a Holocaust after all and we're closing down our nuke program" are both fantastical, and neither one amounts to much of anything anyway.
Still, Red offers one serious point, and I'd like to talk about it as well, because I think it, too, is people making a mountain out of very little: Ahamdinejad's supposedly asinine announcement that Iran has no gays.
Thank goodness I'm not a "major blogger" (haha, that's sarcasm, people), so I don't have to defend my silence on the events in Jena, Louisiana.
Still, I haven't blogged about it, mainly because i thought a lot of people were doing a better job than I ever could getting to the issues in the case that matter. But I think it's time to add some thoughts.
RedStar first alerted me to the "Jena 6" in this post, one that prompted a fascinating discussion about race issues in the North and the South. One thing that animates this whole raising of awareness in Jena is a larger narrative that tends to bring the vestiges of northern activism in the south out when southern events like this occur, and we shouldn't ignore that, nor the reality that many northerners like to slip on a cloak of righteousness about other people's racial problems while ignoring our own.
Still, Jena is a pretty awful example of what lingers down South; and dealing with those remnants continues to be an ugly, difficult topic for all concerned.
Recent Comments