Category Archives: culture

. . . snakes

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Not writing. It’s a year to the day since we returned from Eastern Europe. I’ve just realized that I’ve now been blogging for more than a year, but I’ve been away for more than a month. I need to write here again, before whatever readers I may have begin to think I’m dead. Here are some things I’ve been thinking about while I’ve been not writing, not writing being an actual activity. It might be fun to undertake a defense of not writing. Maybe I’ll do that one of these days.

Ted Kennedy. My coffee table sometimes holds a copy of Splash Kennedy’s book about his senator. As I looked around this morning, thinking about the book, which is charming and witty and altogether a hoot, especially if you love dogs, I was struck by the meanness of some of the commentary about it when it came out. All tne more struck now that Edward Kennedy’s life has entered a new stage. I expect Kennedy would be among the first to acknowledge that politics is a rough and crude business. In fact, Splash announces on the second or third page of his book that he owes his relationship to the senator to a familiar saying: “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” I, on the other hand could take the photo of Kennedy and his dog that appears on the back of My Senator’s dust jacket as the way I want to remember this man, who is my senator too. God bless him.

Tim Russert. And while I’m thinking of folks I hope will be blessed, God bless Tim Russert. I think it’s possible to agree in principle with Alexander Cockburn in The Nation that Russert wasn’t a progressive, that he often spoke for the political establishment–and at the same time to wish that Cockburn had held his peace for a while. What Cockburn calls “The Canonization of St. Tim” has revealed what many knew about Russert, that he was a devout Catholic who took his faith’s exhortation to serve very seriously, and a serious family man and father. Friends at Boston College say that he could often be seen wandering the hallways waiting for his son to finish class so that he could take him to lunch. I believe Russert was a good and decent person, who died far too young, and not a bad reporter. I miss him.

Plenty to drink. Both the Post Dispatch and The New York Times today carry stories to the effect that Anheuser-Busch is preparing to fight the takeover by InBev. Here in St. Louis we’re hoping that can be done — the city and region stand to lose a good corporate citizen whose relations with workers and other local businessses have on the whole been good over many decades and whose philanthropy has shaped other local institutions so numerous that one can’t even attempt to list them. If the takeover goes through, A-B will be replaced by a corporation whose relations with workers recall those of Wal-Mart and whose willingness to continue A-B’s philanthropic relationships seems questionable. All this to benefit a group of stockholders who for the most part don’t live here. InBev has now filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court to establish its ability to approach A-B stockholders individually, “to ensure that Anheuser-Busch shareholders preserve their voices.” No doubt we’ll be invoking sainted grandmothers with a few shares of A-B stock protecting them from the wolves as beneficiaries of the InBev raid. But the real wolf is InBev, itself.

High water. While the flood waters have yet to recede entirely upriver, we’re pretty dry in St. Louis. The city is built on bluffs. It’s outlying towns, particularly in areas of the flood plain where levees have broken that have suffered. And of course Iowa City, where the Iowa River rose many feet above the level of 1993, and the university remains closed with many buildings permanently damaged. The media are full of praise for FEMA’s response to midwest floods this year, but we’ve heard otherwise here. More about that later — it’s summer now. The Gettysburg Address will be on display at the new Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois until sometime in August. We’re thinking of making a trip to see it.

public intellectuals

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Tim Burke sent me this morning to a good piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Tales of Western Adventure” Particia Nelson Limerick describes a public sphere project of her own and at the same time makes an argument about the role of the humanities in public life that I wish I heard more often. Instead of pursuing “individualistic research, directed at arcane topics detached from real-world needs and written in inaccessible and insular jargon,” humanists should embrace the new world of applied research as Limerick has done at The Center of the American West that she chairs at The University of Colorado.

Limerick’s program reminds me very much of an ambitious program I once had a small part in called The Center for Texas Studies. It should have succeeded, for all the reasons Limerick marshals in describing her program at Colorado. But it didn’t. I think perhaps Texas Studies focused too much on heritage — a new center with the same name at TCU seems to do the same. But the former center also attempted to form alliances with business and non-profit communities, sponsoring programs on water, ecology, and other issue complexes with economic dimensions and attempting to “dissolve the barriers that block the full engagement of professors with the public.” Texas Studies probably failed, though, because of weak institutional support, a particular dean that didn’t see the virtue of it and the constant necessity of translating its work into FTEs. Which are ways of saying that UNT was still too dependent in those days on the traditional funding formulas of a former teachers’ college to accomplish much with generalized public sphere projects.

Today we see more and more academics emerging into the public sphere. I think especially of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who regularly appears on Bill Moyers Journal. Jamieson and other humanists, such as Stanley Fish, who are making an impact on public discourse, suggest that the growing matrix of partnerships between the academy, government and business is entirely positive. But Moyers Journal recently carried a story that points up a serious problem area — quoting Melody Peterson, a journalist:

A very powerful technique that the drug companies spend millions and millions of dollars on is hiring physicians to give lectures to other physicians on their drugs. It looks like the physician is up there giving his independent position on this drug, but often he’s been trained by an advertising agency. His slide presentation has been created by an ad agency. It looks like independent science, but it’s not… They want to get as many articles published in our medical journals as they can that show their products in favorable lights and will get physicians to prescribe them, so they often hire a Madison Avenue ad agency to write up an article for them or a study. The name of the ad agency rarely appears in the published version; instead, they hire doctors to put their names on as author… It’s gone so far that some independent scientists are starting to view our medical literature as propaganda.

This state of affairs was the subject of a recent New York Times article, but reports like this have been in the news for a good many years now; here’s a 2003 article from the Guardian. Pharma is neither benign nor heroic, in spite of a slick image campaign linking it with white-coat clichés.

And the military–industrial complex isn’t benign either. Recent complicity of medical and psychological practicioners in the torture of so-called enemy combatants and others has caused both the American Medical and American Psychological Associations to reiterate ethical standards that prohibit such complicity. But the complicity goes on, or apparently it does.

The extent to which public discourse and practice have been poisoned not just by politicians but by intellectuals as well during the past quarter century sometimes leads me to wonder if there’s a remedy. Limerick optimistically compares today’s public humanists with Dante’s Virgil, “guiding [scientists and engineers] through the inferno of cultural anxieties, laypeople’s misunderstandings, and political landmines.” One may certainly hope.

But it isn’t Virgil who causes Dante to undertake the journey through hell and purgatory. Virgil is without hope; only his words are salvific. Dante’s true source of hope and the desire to emerge into the realm of the blessed is Beatrice (Inferno ii, 133-142), who is both eros and Christ’s vicar. Maybe I better not pursue that thought too far.

human rights, embodied

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The ABC has given vent to some further thoughts about human rights. The full text, together with spin, is here. Dr. Williams’s argument in this piece seems to turn on this claim: “The recognition of a body as a human body is . . . the foundation of recognising the rights of another.” To which Tobias Haller’s cat, Augusta Victoria, appends the following critique, based on years of experience with a bodiliness that has been subject to numerious transformations, not the least of which involved the removal of portions of her anatomy. As Augusta Victoria sees it, Dr. Williams’s framing of the issue “seems to shift the embodiment away from the body itself into the subjective perception of it by some other entity . . . ,” and hence,

[T]he question arises as to whether Feline Rights are innate (based on existence as a Feline Being) merely on account of embodiment as a feline, or the recognition of that fact by another entity, be it Human or Dog.

The whole issue is problematic, especially since Dr. Williams’s remarks seem less occasioned by issues of human rights and more occasioned by a concern for “any apparently human body we encounter as in some sense a potential communicator with [us].” This becomes clearer as Dr. Williams develops the argument:

The right of the imperfectly rational person – whether the child or the person with mental disabilities – may be put in question if we stipulate a capacity for reasoned self-consciousness as a condition for acknowledging rights. And to speak of the right of the body as such casts a different light on the sensitive issue of the right of the unborn. . . .

To which the wise feline responds with the suggestion that

As the very earliest embryonic forms of feline and human are barely distinguishable except by the application of sub-microscopic analysis of DNA sequences, it would appear . . . that rights ought not be governed merely by “embodiment” — or by an even more abstruse concept of “recognized embodiment” (surely a receptionist suggestion) — but rather use as a point of reference the principle of descent from other humans — or felines; if, that is, one wishes to address the reality of the fluid nature of embodiment at all its stages of life.

Realizing the fluid and indeed manifold nature of “embodiment at all its stages [and perhaps forms] of life,” as well as the legitimacy of Dr. Williams’s interest in “apparently human” bodies, I put the question to Maximillian Augustus and Murphy O’Farrell, two near relatives of mine who happen to dwell in the neighborhood.† Maximillian, affectionately known as Maxie, stated his conviction that all bishops are alike — “If you’ve smelled one, you’ve smelled them all.” But Maxie isn’t sure that bishops, as a tribe, are human. Murphy countered that the ABC at least looks interesting. “A man with a big, white beard can’t be all bad,” Murphy observed.

†In the photo, Murphy is the poodle on the right, with the raccoon eyes. Maxie is the one who looks like a movie star, on the left.

still not buying it

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The New York Times got what it wanted when Barack Obama repudiated Jeremiah Wright. Previously I quoted George Will gloating in The Washington Post. But Not even Will can match the condescension with which the Times in last Tuesday’s edition gloats on its editorial page.

It took more time than it should have, but on Tuesday Barack Obama firmly rejected the racism and paranoia of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., and he made it clear that the preacher does not represent him, his politics or his campaign.

My own mixed reaction to this whole business has sent me looking around to clarify my views by reading those of others. What I’ve found is an almost universally negative reaction to Wright, coupled with sympathy or disapprobation for Obama depending on the bias of the writer. Martin Peretz, while he holds no brief for Wright, has some very laudatory things to say about Obama in a couple of posts at The New Republic. Here’s the first, in a post entitled “The Wrong Stuff.”

Frankly, I don’t think that Wright means doom at all for Obama. But the emeritus pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ was received on Sunday by 10,000 enthusiasts at an NAACP gathering in Detroit, reported in Monday’s New York Times. This event tells you how far we have yet to go in the coming together of the races in America, and it also is a demonstration of why we need Barack Obama so much.

As Peretz notes, Wright’s detractors might well pay attention to the fact that he is often greeted with enthusiasm by large audiences. But the heart of Peretz’s praise for Obama can be seen in another post very unfavorable to Wright and entitled “Barack Obama: Putting Race Hustlers Out of Work.”

Obama returned to the subject foisted upon him by Jeremiah Wright, and he tried once again to show that he did not choose to have American politics be assumed as a battle over enemy territory. There is some nobility in the effort, a nobility akin to Abraham Lincoln’s. It is a disposition that many Republicans used to honor and many Democrats, too: you may disagree, disagree over significant matters, but you try to found common ground. Obama is the last Democrat standing who still believes there is common ground, and I dream that when he and John McCain finally face each other without Hillary Clinton in the mix they will be speaking from different podiums but across common ground.

Peretz lumps Wright together with Cornell West, calling West a race hustler. Yet Peretz, himself, often presumes that American politics is “a battle over enemy territory.” A die-hard cold warrior, whose views about palestinians often border on racism, Peretz can find anti-Semitism under rocks it would never occur to me to inspect. Still, I think his admiration for Obama is sincere, and as an Obama supporter I’m grateful for it. I too still cherish the hope that Obama and McCain can face each other across common ground, and that’s why I understand how difficult Wright is for Obama.

But whatever difficulty Wright’s anger may pose for Obama agonistes, Wright is correct more often than he is wrong, in my view, as John Nichols pointed out a couple of days ago in The Nation. Wright deals in what Shelby Steele calls poetic truth when he talks about politics, and that makes his speeches easy to parody and to deconstruct as mere rants. This is what Obama did in repudiating Wright, but there is much in Wright’s message that all Americans ought to take seriously, albeit his language may be polarizing, and albeit he speaks from a racialist position that makes much of what he says uncomfortable to hear. Wright has been accused of egotism, but I think it shames Obama and those editorialists who have followed him to have dismissed Wright as a fraud and to have accused him of “giving comfort to those who prey on hate.” Indeed, as Nichols points out, Wright’s theme was reconciliation as he spoke before the National Press Club, and it was primarily in the question period that he occasionally went into attack mode as the questioners attempted to force him to give answers that could be sensationalized as anti-American.

Anti-Americanism is the bugbear of today’s revived McCarthyism. A google search turned up 948,000 hits for anti-Americanism. It has seemed to me, reading around, that those who deplore Jeremiah Wright from the political right focus on what they term anti-American in his language, while those on the left characterize Wright as racist and paranoid. I am wondering why Wright has become so important that he is singled out for particular vituperation from all sides. I’ve already quoted The New York Times. Martin Peretz calls Wright “a side-show, a freak side-show that is propped up by other black hustlers.” Richard Baehr fulminates against Wright’s “brand of crackpot racist anti-American lunacy,” as though it weren’t sufficient simply to call him anti-American.

Maybe Wright’s poetic truth is the real truth about America.

It isn’t Obama’s poetic truth. That’s about what America might be, can be, is on our best days. But what about the other days, like the gritty day lately when one of my neighbors whispered to my beloved that the new folks on the block are an interracial couple? And what about the gloating in the Times and elsewhere where writers and editors ought to know better? I think first, that Wright has received attention in proportion to Obama’s importance as a public figure and that the “matter of Wright” will be a measure of what our country has lost if it succeeds in taking Obama down. It has already diminished him. And I think, too, as I have said before, that the Jeremiah Wright spectacle is a drama of non-significance as it is being portrayed, that it displays the propensity of a sensationalist mediascape to focus on what it can hype, that it displays, as John Nichols says, “a contemporary political culture that has come to rely on character assassination as an easy tool for reversing electoral misfortune.”

We ought to be deeply ashamed as a people that we allow ourselves to be manipulated by political pornography. Barack Obama would have been right had he repudiated that, and my heart would be far less heavy today. But I have to say two more things about the Times editorial before I stop. This sentence, “In the last few days, in a series of shocking appearances, [Jeremiah Wright] embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism,” is simply not true. It is unworthy of the Times to have printed such a lie. And finally these two passages, which taken together remind me of Leon Wieseltier when he called Andrew Sullivan “Obamaboy” in print on the last page of a recent New Republic and accused him of Jew baiting.

This could not be handled by a speech about the complexities of modern life. It required a powerful, unambiguous denunciation — and Mr. Obama gave it. […] This country needs a healthy and open discussion of race. Mr. Obama’s repudiation of Mr. Wright is part of that. His opponents also have a responsibility — to repudiate the race-baiting and make sure it stops.

Wieseltier had the decency to apologize for his remark (more or less). If the Times wants to help stop race baiting, it might start by cleaning up its own editorial page.