Month: December 2012

William Deresiewicz ruminates:

An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, "It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual."

Public also smacks of publicity, of the new apparatus of celebrity that turns scholars into showmen and makes pundits out of hacks.

Susan Sontag, already halfway towards a parody of the intellectual in the older sense—mobile in her moral positions, more a transmitter than originator of ideas, and not much of a writer at all—pioneered this kind of self-promotion. Now we have the likes of Cornel West, doing his shtick all over the airwaves.

But celebrity, like the institutionalization that comes with being an academic, is inimical to the intellectual’s mission: questioning the mental status quo. The more a part of things you are—the more embedded in the machinery of status and position—the harder that is to do.

Indeed. Which is why Hitch's commitment to posthumous writing remains – literally in my case – the gold standard to which this blog aspires.

(Photo: Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama greets his supporters as scholar Cornel West stands next to him during 'A Night at the Apollo' fundraiser event at the Apollo Theater November 29, 2007 in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. By Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images)

A reader writes:

I was struck by your post … not the sweetness of it, but the Army’s antiseptic at best and hostile at worst regulations about such animals. I suppose I can see the logic (we don’t want soldiers exposed to rabies, etc.), but all I know for sure is that attitudes and rules must have changed over the years. “Found” mascots have been companions to soldiers in war for centuries, perhaps all of human history.

I thought you might be interested in the attached photo. It shows my grandfather sometime after the liberation of Paris and before the German surrender, holding tight his pal – a refugee mutt he named “G.I.”  The note on the back for my grandmother Rose reads:

This was taken close by our quarters. The dog is my pal “G.I.” (that’s his name). Note my campaign ribbon. I’m proud of it!

Notice that he mentions the dog first, and his decoration second? My grandfather did a lot of heroic and not heroic things in the war, from storming Normandy Beach to being locked up in the brig for going AWOL. He even got cursed out by Patton once (if his stories are to be believed). But that he possessed the capacity to care for a helpless animal in the midst of brutal destruction is, to me, the surest measure of his character. 

A slightly related personal memory: my maternal grandfather ran away from home at 16 to join the British Army. He lied about his age and got sent to India. He died when I was six so I only have a few distinct memories of him. But one was his tale of a dog he loved in India, a stray who befriended him. He wasn’t allowed to take the dog back to Blighty when he left, and he was frightened that the animal would be mistreated if abandoned. So he took out his pistol and shot the dog, sobbing afterwards. You can see why such a story would stick in my mind. It made me think of my grandfather as both deeply cruel and deeply kind. Which was a form of growing up, I suppose.

“Something has gone terribly wrong when the biggest threat to our American economy is the American Congress,” – Senator Joe Manchin, West Virginia.

(Chart: Congressional approval in 2012 via Pollster.)

Some preliminary thoughts from the smoke emerging from the Capitol. It looks that any compromise will indeed mean a big movement from Obama's clear campaign platform to raise income taxes to Clinton era levels on those earning $250,000 a year. That number appears to be hovering at $400,000 or even higher. Chait is getting nervous:

The tax cuts are the one area where [Obama] enjoys overwhelming leverage over the Republicans. Their only threat is to block extension of tax cuts on income under $250,000, a wildly unpopular stance countless Republicans have acknowledged they could not sustain for long without courting an enormous public backlash. This is the hand where Obama needed to collect all the chips. Instead he is allowing Republicans to whittle down the sum by essentially threatening to shoot themselves in the head.

And this is the most ominous thing about it. The big meta question looming over Obama’s term is whether he has learned to grapple with Republican political hostage-taking. Hostage-taking is not simply aggressive or even irrational negotiating. It is the specific tactic of extracting concessions by threatening to withhold support for policies you yourself endorse, simply because your opponent cares more about the damage.

I think Obama has always understood that his second term will not only be determined by his bargaining skills with the GOP leadership but by the economic consequences of failure to get any deal at all. So I can see the reason for letting the $250,000 level go up. What I don't understand is why he cannot attach a new stimulus to that concession. Or indeed get any other concession for it except jettisoning the eminently sensible chained CPI proposal.

Apparently, Senate Democrats are also trying to suspend the sequester, which seems to me a bad idea. We desperately need to cut spending by a trillion over the next decade if we are to return to fiscal balance, especially given the puniness of the tax increases now taking shape. I support keeping it – and cutting half from defense and half from entitlements, rather than domestic discretionary spending. We need to retain some measure of urgency in controlling the debt monster before it truly does control us – and it's entitlements – not discretionary sending – that are the core problem. But at this point, those long-term questions are being entirely overshadowed by the short-term deals and last-minute compromises that legislating under this kind of insane timeline will inevitably bring.

Yes, America is screwed. We might as well get used to it.

(Photo: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican from Virginia, center, arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Dec. 31, 2012. U.S. lawmakers hurtled toward a midnight deadline to avert hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases and spending cuts, struggling to extract the country from a fiscal trap they created. By Jay Mallin/Bloomberg via Getty Images.)

This low: he accused the secretary of state of lying about her concussion, saying that she had the equivalent of "acute Benghazi allergy". He wasn't the only one. I'm used to the true crazies casting wild accusations about Hillary Clinton – but this is a test case of how deep the rot has gotten. Krauthammer has a first class mind, but being on Fox News too long can bring you to Instapundit level. Sorry, actually Instapundit is one rung lower in wingnut hell. Even now, even after Clinton is revealed to have a blood clot, Glenn Reynolds retweets the following:

The "chick" remark is particularly special. Then he links to Althouse:

BENGHAZI: What’s Happening to Hillary? Only a clod would say the clot is a plot! “The suppression of information — the site of the clot — suggests 2 radically different theories: 1. fakery/exaggeration to evade testimony, or 2. something horribly serious. I read Sepkowitz to exclude the middle ground.”

Here is Althouse's full wingnut position:

With all that assurance that Hillary Clinton would testify, later that day, we heard the news that Hillary Clinton had entered the hospital with a blood clot. We weren't told the site of said blood clot. Was it her brain (recently concussed)? Was it her leg (where she had a blood clot back in 1998)? The former is a big deal, the latter, not so much. Why not specify the site, since it make such a big difference, medically? Oh, but we're told we must not display any skepticism, any hint of suspicion that the SOS is trying to avoid having to testify about Benghazi. The woman is ill. Only a clod would say a clot was a plot.

Look: skepticism is fine. By all means get a medical record (I'm still waiting for Palin's after all). Public officials have to cope with that level of scrutiny. But when someone is admitted to hospital with a blood clot, the idea that she didn't have a concussion at all seems perverse – especially when the Benghazi fuck-up has been investigated and already shown to be a failure of State Department foresight, not some strange, weird plot, devised by Fox News, desperate to find some last minute strategy to derail Obama's re-election.

But this is what conservatism now is: total denial of reality in favor of an entirely new Fox-driven universe. Well, it gets ratings.

Steven Mazie laments how little time most Americans take off:

For most Americans, Christmas week represents about half of the time off we will enjoy all year long. Compared with Australians (at least 4 weeks off, plus 10 public holidays), Brazilians (22 days of paid leave with a 33 percent salary vacation bonus) and the French (at least 5 weeks off and as many as 9 for many public employees), we are seriously bereft. … [T]he United States is the only OECD country that does not require employers to provide even a day of paid leave to its employees.

Chart from (pdf) "No‐vacation nation USA – a comparison of leave and holiday in OECD countries." Derek Thompson adds some context:

To be fair, some states and local governments have minimum paid vacation laws. … And around the country, nine in ten full-time workers get paid leave from their employers averaging 12 days, according to a paper by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt for the European Commission. That still puts us at the bottom of the OECD.

As a result of social media, Whitney Erin Boesel fears "we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us":

We’re busy people; we like the idea of making one announcement on Facebook and being done with it, rather than having to repeat the same story over and over again to different friends individually. We also like not always having to think about which friends might like which stories or songs; we like the idea of sharing with all of our friends at once, and then letting them sort out amongst themselves who is and isn’t interested.

"Cleaning Out Your Apartment" by Elizabeth Alexander:

A fifty-year-old resume
that says you raised delphiniums.
Health through vegetable Juice,
your book of common prayer,

your bureau, bed, your easy chair,
dry Chivas bottles, mop and broom,
pajamas on the drying rack,
your shoe-trees, shoe-shine box.

I keep your wicker sewing kit,
your balsa cufflink box. There’s
only my framed photograph to say,
you were my grandfather.

Outside, flowers everywhere,
The bus stop, santeria shop.
Red and blue, violent lavender.
Impatiens, impermanent, swarm.

Please consider supporting the Poetry Society of America here.

(From Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 © 2011 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press. Photo by Flickr user puuikibeach)