Category Archives: the polis

Fake Conservatism and the American University

Posted on by under education, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Griping about how “tenured radicals” destroyed academia’s commitment to the humanist tradition is quite a tradition among pundits who consider themselves Conservative Intellectuals. As the general narrative goes, US colleges and universities were awesome until the 1960s, when left-wingers took the wheel and ruined everything, such that now our children are forced to study post-colonial queer Marxist avant-garde TV culture instead of the Great Books. The New Criterion is one of the coaling stations for this point of view. Now, to their credit, TNC publishes work by William Logan, one of the last good poetry critics in America. But to their discredit, they also publish appallingly stupid bullshit like this:

Academia is still a protected oasis—you can gauge just how protected by checking the astonishing price tag—but its signature purpose is no longer to pursue the scholarly life, to preserve and transmit to the next generation the riches of our cultural inheritance. On the contrary, colleges and universities have increasingly been subjugated to a leftist ideological agenda bent on dismantling that tradition. Anyone who speaks of “the riches of our cultural inheritance” would be shouted down as a reactionary whose views were not worth listening to. . . . They find willing accomplices in college administrators whose chief ambition is not to uphold standards of accomplishment and conduct but to appear ostentatiously enlightened.

Really? For the past thirty years American schools have replaced full-time professorships with an army of graduate-student TAs and adjuncts, even as the number of richly compensated corporate managers (er, Administrators) balloons, even as those administrators suddenly push for outsourced online courses, even as more lucre goes to amenities like gyms and football stadiums, even as the humanities have experienced the worst of the unnecessary and devastating cuts in public funding for higher education (even though, pace current mythology, the humanities fund the STEM fields), TNC claims this? This? Has their entire editorial staff undergone some terrible brain trauma? That’s their argument? That deviously powerful liberal intellectuals have rendered themselves broke and powerless so as to become . . . even more powerful?

Wonder what those traitors think about how things stand? Speaking as a college lecturer, I can assure you that it is easy to slide through four years of school without reading a long novel or learning anything about Plato or Gettysburg. So they are probably pretty happy, right? Consider one prof’s take on the situation:

“Here’s what matters: These and other treatments of grand trends insist that higher education is one of the last revered Western institutions to be ‘de-churched’; that is, it is one of the last to have its ideological justification recast in terms of corporatization and commodification and to become subject to serious state surveillance,” she writes. “Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward both enlightened politics and public service. Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.”

“Western institutions”? “The best in art”? Guiding young minds? Why, that sounds, uh, conservative. Unless you’re huffing glue, or not bothering to actually read what your supposed opponents are saying, TNC‘s pronouncements are tough to accept. Oops.

Granted, there are plenty of shrill leftist ideologues in academia, people who have proudly told me things like “I don’t teach white authors” (as if one couldn’t do Malcolm X and Henry Adams in the same course). But those people are not deans, regents, consultants, or chancellors. They aren’t running the show. Theirs is not, in fact, the dominant view of most of the American academics I’ve met. On the contrary, the majority of humanist scholars believe passionately in the idea of a Tradition of great texts and ideas. They might argue about who belongs to that tradition, but they are at heart Burkean conservatives, because they are committed to the crazy notion that thoughtful grown-ups should know something about literature, philosophy, history, and the arts (and math and science, for that matter).

Indeed, it is difficult to be an academic scholar without having a fundamentally conservative temperament. You might undertake a queer-feminist reading of Shakespeare or apply Edward Said’s theories to Impressionism, but you’re still writing about Shakespeare or Impressionism. Someone needs to remind TNC‘s hacks how much fucking training in the Western Tradition it takes to earn a PhD in the humanities, whatever one does with that education afterward.

The creepy corporatist mentality that has damaged American higher education so badly isn’t conservative in the true sense. Rather, it is a mode of Ayn Randian free-market fetishism that also contains a pronounced contempt for intellectual life, a contempt which emanates from the present-day Republican Party and its bleating lackeys. (As Andrew Sullivan has been arguing for years, the contemporary GOP is dominated by right-wing radicals, not actual conservatives, because actual conservatives don’t proudly reject science, deny gay citizens the right to marry their loved ones, attack long-standing institutions like Social Security, revile a private citizen’s right to make decisions about her own body, harbor imperialist fantasies, or try to stifle the will of the people.)

A blog post probably isn’t the best place to work this out, but in general I’m with Sullivan: ultimately, conservativism in the tradition of Burke is a framework for looking at the world, not a discrete collection of ideological convictions. It is a tool, not a dogma. Conservatism is about accepting the inevitability of change while managing and negotiating it within the context of a society’s cultural and political institutions. One can have progressive sympathies–like Barack Obama–and still be a philosophical conservative who constantly talks about things like fatherhood, marriage, and Enlightenment democracy (like Barack Obama).

Unfortunately, the word “conservative” is probably ruined in the United States, because most people with functional cerebral cortexes and a glancing familiarity with current events hear it and think of cheap-hearted thugs like George W. Bush and Ann Coulter. Maybe someday it will be reclaimed the way “liberal” is being reclaimed by young activists, but I doubt it. At the very least I’ll be moribund by the time it happens.

The dumbest thing about the supposedly pro-market worldview of the people who run our colleges and universities is that it licenses policies that hurt the free market. Just as the lack of a decent national health-care system stifles innovation because it discourages people from starting their own companies (ask a small-business owner how fun it is to purchase insurance on the open market), so too does gutting the budgets of universities, especially public ones, devastate the economy. It is difficult to invent, to innovate, to create, to re-imagine when you can’t get a decent education without taking out ruinous loans (if your broke-ass, standardized-test-riddled high school even prepared you for college in the first place).

And the band plays on. Stupid professors.

Boston

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about going to college in Boston. It started on a trip my family took to the city when I was sixteen. We had visited a bunch of random places when I was a kid (Hawaii, New Mexico, Fresno), but Boston was my first experience with what I thought of as authentic east coast culture, and I wanted to be a part of it.

Growing up in San Jose, California makes one feel detached from the big moments of American history. While San Jose dates back to the Spanish colonial days of the late eighteenth century, you don’t see much evidence of this outside the missions. What history was visible when I was growing up revealed the tension between what San Jose had been, a suburban orchard town, and what it has become, Silicon Valley, and all that that entails. I really haven’t spent much time there since I left about a decade ago, but when I visit I am still struck by the lack of aesthetic consistency of the place: bungalows from the 1920s are around the corner from run-down apartment blocks from the late 1970s, which are across town from gleaming new Shiteaus in planned communities. At the time it was hard for me to knit together a good narrative about the place, though now I understand that this is true of most places, Boston included.

Still, as a young nerd who loved American literature and history, my first trip to Boston was like walking into a novel that reconciled old and new in ways San Jose couldn’t. The buildings looked like they had been built in conversation with one another. It seemed like every other corner had a sign noting some historical event of the colonial period. And yet there were cool looking young people all around me too. Beautiful girls a few years older than me who dressed like they were going to work in art galleries even when they were just going for coffee. Dudes wore clothes that fit. Now, a part of me thought these people were tools. I was in my shoegazer/monstrously depressed singer-songwriter phase. I thought I was deeper than guys in khakis. And yet I could see myself there, walking the brick-lined streets, a college student studying literature or film, wearing sweaters, going on dates with pretty girls, maybe even getting to go back to their apartments. Things seemed possible for me in Boston in a way they didn’t in San Jose. And this was all before I set foot on the campus of Boston College.

I went to high school at an all-boys Jesuit prep school in San Jose that regularly sends dozens of kids a year to the Ivy League, Stanford, Berkeley, and other schools of this ilk. I wasn’t going to be one of those guys. For my school I was probably a little above average. I didn’t take AP classes, I only got through as much math as I had to, and I am stunned I didn’t pull C’s in French before dropping it after my junior year. My SAT scores were good though, and actually made me look like an underachiever, but as I explained to some of the college admissions people who interviewed me, I like tests. And my grades weren’t that bad. I was in the market for a college that was excellent, but not elite. And BC, the best Jesuit school for guys without the grades for Georgetown, seemed like the perfect fit.

When we wandered around the campus I was kind of numb. My folks and I had been on college campuses before, but never one that felt so, well, collegial. Most universities in California, no matter how old they are, feel like they were built in the 1960s. This is because most of them were, or at least most of the parts that we see today don’t date back much before the days of Pat Brown. Boston College felt old and important, just like the city, but it felt old and important in a way I had been trained by years of Jesuit education to recognize. I can’t describe it really. It’s a combination of stone, trimmed grass, stained glass, library books, and leather that just makes sense to me. This was the place I would have to go to college. It was the place that would get me out of San Jose and make me interesting. It was a real American city. And, hell, I didn’t have my heart set on Harvard. I was a good Jesuit boy with decent grades and great test scores. BC would have to let me in, I thought.

Of course, they didn’t. In fact, they wait-listed me in April of my senior year, and then sent me two rejection letters on the day I graduated from high school, one addressed to “Dan,” and one addressed to “Daniel.” I have no idea how that kind of clerical error happens, but it felt personal. I’d spent the year and change after my trip telling all of my smarter friends that I would be going to Boston College. It sounded almost on par with their Columbias and Yales, but also like I had chosen something different. Like I knew something they didn’t. When it became clear that I wasn’t go to BC, or even BU (I got in, but we couldn’t really afford it), a certain sense of what my life could be like kind of disappeared. I didn’t really mourn it, which actually surprises me. I was all about college radio and coffee shops, both of which, at the time anyway, promoted a culture of self-indulgent introspection. Instead, I think I simply shut a door between myself and this life I had been desperate to lead. For the next decade I moved up and down the coast of California, from LA to Santa Cruz, from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, from Santa Barbara to back LA, from LA back to Santa Barbara, and finally back to LA. I can’t imagine myself as anything other than a coastal Californian, and I am happy I went to college and grad school at the three places I did. I know most of the people who mean anything to me because Boston College rejected both Dan and Daniel, and I live in a city with a culture and history that strikes me as every bit as important and authentic as Boston’s did when I was sixteen.

But that door I closed thirteen years ago (!) opened a little on Monday when I heard about the terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon. Even though I have never been in Boston for Patriots’ Day, I have always been aware of it because it means the Red Sox play a really early game, at least out here on the West Coast. The whole idea of a day that only means something to one city excites me. I wish LA had something similar. The fact that evil people decided to prey on a city’s desire to celebrate is not surprising. The kinds of people who would blow up a crowd of strangers can’t possibly understand love and community in the simple way Bostonians embrace a day of baseball, running, and drinking to their shared history. No doubt whoever did this has some allegedly complex grievance they think must be taken seriously. But it shouldn’t be. This was cowardice. Cowards don’t get taken seriously, and cowards ultimately can’t ruin the world for the rest of us. They may try, but they can’t if we don’t let them.

There were a lot people down at the Marathon on Monday who weren’t originally from Boston. Many, I would imagine, were even from San Jose or the dozens of other history-less suburban hubs like it around the country. People who got to go through the door at some point in their lives, and who have experienced the culture that seemed to me so essentially American when I was in high school. To them, the native Bostonians, the runners from around the world who just wanted to race, and to everyone else who was touched by these acts of cruelty perpetrated in the name of nothing of any value, I wish eventual peace. And for the people that committed these crimes, may they never know peace as long as they live.

James Baldwin on “Florida Forum” (1963)

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, the polis, Visual

The video is a bit grainy, and there is some distracting superimposed text, but this is still pretty great. Wearing a suit so on-point that it could have destroyed televisions across America, Baldwin ventures into the conservative bastion of 1960s Miami and talks about the “Negro Problem” in the passionate yet measured, cerebral tones you may recognize from essays like “Notes of a Native Son” and books like The Fire Next Time. Remember when writers could be well-regarded public figures? Remember that? Me neither. Oh well. Enjoy.

Talk About Burying the Lede…

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Gee, Wall Street Journal (via Yahoo!), you say the service at McDonald’s is terrible? I wonder why that could be. Maybe it’s because they pay next to nothing to the people who actually seem to understand why their business has problems. From the middle of the article:

Monica George, a McDonald’s employee in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she can understand why customers complain, and that there are frustrations on both sides of the counter. “Let’s say I’m in front at the register and the grill’s not pushing out food quickly enough. So you have to wait on food, and the customer is getting aggravated at you because you’re not giving them the food quick enough, and the grill gets aggravated with the cashier because we’re asking where the food is,” she said.

Ms. George, who says she earns $7.25 an hour, said one problem behind slow service and inaccurate orders is that employees are trained to do specific tasks and don’t always understand what other employees are doing.

Meanwhile:

McDonald’s shares have also rebounded since they took a hit last fall. In 4 p.m. trading Wednesday, they were up 43 cents at $101.49, near their record of $102.22 in January 2012.

Someone’s loving it. Just not the wage slaves who cook the food. Or the people eating it.

Speaking of Non-Majority Rule

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Piggy-backing off of Ryan’s piece, I thought many of you might find this article from The Week interesting. I am not a very good liberal when it comes to gun control, but not because I have any special love of guns. I have only fired one a couple of times, and frankly didn’t get the appeal. The fact that people can talk about “gun culture” is bizarre, and doesn’t square with 2nd Amendment defenders’ claim that guns are simply tools. They’re not. Spatulas are tools, and there is no such thing as “spatula culture.” Guns are something altogether different.

So no, guns aren’t my thing. The reason why I am a bad liberal on gun control though is because I don’t think much of what the government can do will decrease the number of guns in this country or the prevalence of gun violence. By some estimates there are almost as many firearms in America as there are people, and nearly half of U.S. households own at least one gun. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to simply ban most guns and think it will accomplish anything. While I believe that there should be background checks on every kind of gun sale, even this won’t stop the kinds of mass shootings we saw in Connecticut or even Colorado. And that really shouldn’t be our priority. What is needed is a change in “gun culture,” and that starts not with pieces in Mother Jones (although everything written in their article is true, they’re preaching to the choir), but with gun owners like Paul Brandus standing up to the NRA and its minions in government. Brandus writes:

The NRA has also spread the false notion that the Second Amendment was designed to protect you against government tyrants. Unless you’re a constitutional scholar, you’ve probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker. Someone who is a constitutional scholar, Professor Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland, points out that Article I of the Constitution allows militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. If you think the Constitution allows you to rebel against the government, guess what? The Constitution says you’re a traitor. Writes Spitzer: “The Constitution defines treason as ‘levying War’ against the government in Article III and the states can ask the federal government for assistance ‘against domestic Violence’ under Article IV.”

It’s not your fault that you don’t know this. How would you know to wade through a giant appropriations bill from 2011, or to sift through the Constitution’s fine print? And it is this — your lack of knowledge — that the NRA and its toadies on the Hill are banking on. One of my favorite quotes from the father of our Constitution, James Madison, comes to mind: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”

As with everything, culture matters. The NRA claims to speak for all gun owners, but it doesn’t represent even a majority of these people. Not even close. And yet the NRA seems to determine how both sides of the gun control debate talk and think. The left gets itself in a tizzy every time Wayne LaPierre says anything, which is exactly what he wants. The NRA feeds on a collective sense of powerlessness that many people feel. If liberals really want to decrease gun violence in America, they’ll stop overreacting to everything the NRA does, stop demanding legislation that won’t accomplish anything, and start building a culture where kids are better educated, more employable, and less likely to buy the bullshit the NRA is selling.

Alterna-Winning

Posted on by under Other Critics, the polis

You just wouldn’t expect the twenty-first-century GOP to stoop this low.

As we all know from school, democracy is important to America. But as you might also know, if you had a good history teacher, anti-democratic wankery is as American as apple pie, too. Jonathan Chait puts it lucidly in a recent edition of New York (one of the cool city’s cooler mags):

The tradition of expanding the scope of American democracy commands all the retrospective historical glory. But the counter-democratic tradition—a concerted advocacy not of dictatorship but of restraints to prevent the majority of citizens from exercising political power—runs just as long and deep. It runs through John C. Calhoun, the titanic nineteenth-­century theorist who defended the rights of the white South against the growing majority in the North. (“The first and leading error … is to confound the numerical majority with the people, and this so completely as to regard them as identical.”) Our history books record the arguments of the crusaders for voting rights for women and blacks and overlook that they were, necessarily, arguing against something. Women’s suffrage, warned former president Grover Cleveland in 1905, would “give to the wives and daughters of the poor a new opportunity to gratify their envy and mistrust of the rich.” In 1908, New York City tried to suppress voting by Jews (who held notoriously left-wing views) by limiting voter registration to Saturdays and Yom Kippur. It took a hotly contested constitutional amendment in 1913 to allow people nationwide to vote for their senators, who previously were appointed by state legislatures.

American history has always tugged back and forth between a more pure democracy and some constricted facsimile thereof. “In the very long run, to be sure, we have become more democratic,” Harvard historian Alexander Keyssar has written, “but there have been numerous moments in our past when the pendulum swung in the opposite direction.”

Nice of a journalist to know a lot about history. Hey, kids: take that little seminar where the professor makes you write a 25-page paper. You might end up a contend-uh.

Your Sunday Rage

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Decaying middle-class incomes? Fewer and fewer jobs that pay a decent wage for hard work? Higher and higher health-insurance premiums? (Or maybe your job just disappeared altogether, along with that great HMO coverage.) Sure does suck to be you, American worker, even if you toil in a sector that is supposedly run by good-hearted Prius owners.

But hey, at least you can admire the gated communities going up on the edge of town, browse Stanford’s website (they’ll even let you take an online course), maybe cruise the Whole Foods parking lot and try to guess which shoppers buy what percentage of their grocery list there, knowing that at least a few of your betters are doing just dandy.

Here comes the LA Times to cheer you up some more. From a Sunday feature story with a somewhat euphemistic title, “The Tougher Workplace”:

Employers once wanted long-term relationships with their workers. At many companies, that’s no longer the case. Businesses are asking employees to work harder without providing the kinds of rewards, financial and psychological, that were once routine. Employers figure that if some people quit, there are plenty of others looking for jobs. […]

The workplace is even tougher for the millions of Americans who have lost the security of a steady paycheck, as companies rely more on temporary staffing agencies. Temp jobs used to be a gateway to permanent employment. Increasingly, they have become a way of life. About 25% of the workforce is temporary, according to research firm Aberdeen Group, up from 17% in 2009.

Woah, slow down, Upton Sinclair! You could take the glass-half-full angle, and see this as an economic environment where workers are given the opportunity to explore creative employment pathways they didn’t even know existed. One man’s untreated chronic illness is another man’s steroidal profits.

For more on the brave new neo-liberal paradise we’re slouching toward, check out this great new documentary.

Bad Lieutenants

Posted on by under in the news, the polis

In Werner Herzog’s quirky dark comedy The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call–New Orleans (a remake of an earlier Harvey Keitel vehicle), Nicholas Cage plays a cop who is a serious dick: he’s an irritable, capricious, drug-gorged gambling nut who robs civilians and happily serves as a mole for a local narco-king (a job for which he gets paid in cocaine).  But Cage’s portrayal—his first halfway decent work in a long time—also renders Lt. McDonagh a kind of damaged Romantic hero.  He’s a selfish prick, but he’s also smart, ironical, and tenacious.  Herzog’s film is the best fictional treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans that anybody has done in the five years since that catastrophe, and you should see it.

In real New Orleans, though, things aren’t so charming.  Bad cops are just bad, and unfortunately the NOPD has a nasty habit of employing (and promoting) lots of them.  Add this to an unprecedented civic disaster during which everyone was understandably losing their shit, stir in decades of terrible race relations (like most urban American police departments, New Orleans’ has a shitty track record re: poor black and brown people), and you get a situation like the one Frontline‘s most recent documentary, Law and Disorder, unpacks in saddening detail.  In the first days of the great flood, a young black man who was apparently doing nothing worse than gathering stray foodstuffs in a shopping mall’s parking lot got murdered by a nervous NOPD rookie, after which high-ranking members of the city’s S.W.A.T. force attempted to conceal things by personally torching the man’s body in his car (and beating the shit out of friends who got involved).  Frontline is the best in-depth news program in the U.S., and here they’ve partnered with journalists from Pro Publica and the New Orleans Times-Picayune to produce an incisive, if depressing, story about some of the ethnic tensions, many of them institutional, that continue to trouble “post-racial” America.  Watch it here.

-TGR