The Genius of Our Times

• As I'm sure you've heard, Obama is doing something about housing. Someone, please, dumb this down for me. Thanks.
• Speaking of housing: "Orange County: Subprime lending stupidity capital of the U.S." And it shows.
• I think we have a theme here: Pew Research asks, where would YOU want to live in America, based on whatever idea you have of that other place. The result? Denver's #1!!! Yay Denver. As Tamara, a fellow Coloradan said, I love it when pseudo-scientific research shows that my hometown is the best. Well Tamara, you need to meet...
• David Brooks! A man who will take selected aspects of that pseudo-scientific research and moralize about it at length:

These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A...They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red...

The folks at Pew asked one other interesting question: Would you rather live in a community with a McDonald’s or a Starbucks? McDonald’s won, of course, but by a surprisingly small margin: 43 percent to 35 percent. And that, too, captures the incorrigible nature of American culture, a culture slowly refining itself through espresso but still in love with the drive-thru.

The results may not satisfy those who dream of Holland, but there’s one other impressive result from the Pew survey. Americans may be gloomy and afraid, but they still have a clear vision of the good life. That’s one commodity never in short supply.

Oh David, you know us so well - we are so incorrigible. The man's a genius, I swear, and yet, an ordinary person. You can find him at an Applebee's salad bar near you.

• Not really related to housing, but certainly related to the sagacious brilliance of our nation's op-edessoriate, is Peggy Noonan's latest attempt to wander the upper east side in search of truth:

And there's something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

Deeper, yes...like the core of imperialistic, religiously inflected violence that will one day lead America to squander its potential and devour itself? No - it's because a woman had eight kids (seriously. That's what she says. Read the article).

That's it! I demand a David Brooks/Peggy Noonan morning show. We must be able to gape at the awesome wisdom of these leading intellectual figures every morning, not just twice a week. Also, if I were rich I would sponsor a Peggy Noonan essay writing contest.

Lets get this right

Glenn Beck: We actually believed in something in 2000. We believed in something in 2004. It's not really easy to be, you know, the pariah in your office, to be the hate-monger, racist, that wants to steal, or, you know, to starve everybody's children, and just hates anyone who's different. We actually took a lot of crap for a long time, and then you guys betrayed us. Why should we even think twice of pulling a lever again? Fool me once, shame on me.

Michael Steele: Right, right...

GB: Fool me twice? Oh my gosh!!

MS: Yeah, you know, Glenn, I'm not gonna, look I'm not gonna soft peddle this with you, I'm not gonna try to blow smoke either. The reality of this is that you are absolutely right: there's is absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions at this point. So, yeah, it's gonna be an uphill climb.

GB: I have to tell you Michael, that's refreshing

[end scene]

So, Glenn Beck conservatives are racist, hate-monger, thieves who want to starve your children, and who can't trust the words and actions of the GOP. Considering that the latter has betrayed the values of the former, Beck wonders why conservatives should even think twice about pulling a lever again. Though, I believe he means the opposite - that his viewers should think twice about pulling a lever in the future, that is if Glenn Beck's audience ever thinks once, let alone twice, and if the lever in question is the one I'm hoping it is.

One more minor point of linguistic clarification: It's FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU, FOOL MY TWICE, SHAME ON ME. And it's a Chinese proverb and has nothing to do with Texas.

No wonder my students don't think rhetoric and communication are important in the working world. Now, please, can the idiots get off my internet machine and not come back until 2012. Thank you.

Facebook is learning

Incomprehensibility, Understanding, Control

Some assorted and eclectic pieces from my daily wandering through the internets on the economic bill: Larry summers is trying to kill infrastructure. Some moderate/conservative democratic congressman, Jim Cooper, is saying that Obama is secretly pushing for less spending. Venture capitalist progressives (?) like Leo Hindery are being shut out. And The Nation's daily pessimism seems too much on point. Meanwhile, the emerging narrative is something like, bipartisanship vs war: who's winning?




I haven't cared much for the hermeneutical divinations of Obama's cabinet picks nor for the now-continual analysis of media representations and narratives. Analyzing representations is easy, and is all the media has done for two years during the campaign. The sorts of narratives thrown up by the media, mainstream or otherwise, are attempts to make sense and organize the reality or unreality or sur-reality of politics. This clearly isn't a form/content issue (as if things could be simplified so clearly) but neither is it all form; there is a content here, all the more unstable in its formlessness.

What I mean, more prosaically, is that I do not understand any of the news stories above. I don't understand the economy, or politics, or political economy. And I distressingly feel that reading neither James Galbraith nor Frederick Jameson would help me. If we could spy on the government the way they spy on us, or, more simply, if we could assign an ethnographer to the "field" of the White House, I'm not sure we could fully account for the process by which this bill is being produced, let alone understand a more abstract entity, like "The American Economy."

We would certainly learn something from all these endeavors and more. But like a recession, the content of these proceedings is immanently elusive, something defined in retrospect (perhaps, borrowing from Zizek, we can reframe the Nation article: the US economy will have been destroyed by Geithner and Summers). But by asserting a content, however elusive, we also recognize at some level the consequences: the 'realness' of the economy (that way that its forces produce something recognizable as reality), and also the realness of our political situation (the way that it is susceptible to forces that shift it one way or another).

These thoughts, or lack of thoughts, plus a weird non-encounter from earlier today, plus the perpetual stillness of Orange County, leave me this afternoon vaguely terrified.

Love and Work

For a long time I've been concerned to the point of obsession with the education, especially and perhaps narcissistically my own. It took three years in college to find, or perhaps realize, an interest in a set of knowledge more specific than 'everything' and there was much soul searching in the meantime (the administrators at my undergraduate university would probably be delighted at this 'journey' of self discovery and would put me in their brochures. I am certain of this.).

This tendency for over-self-reflection has only grown as the stakes of my education have grown. I don't think I am alone here at UCI in thinking that there is something vaguely 'wrong' here, if not with the education itself then with the situation as a whole. Probably most at fault are macro factors, like the disintegration of the university in general and in particular the humanities. There are medium-level factors, like Irvine, which bother some more than others (readers of this blog or knowers of me can guess my stance in this regard...).

Then there are specific things like the structure of our lists, feedback or lack thereof on papers, etc. These are things that generally get grouped within the broader problematic of "professionalization," which, in sounding both terrible and necessary at the same time, tells you everything you need to know about graduate school. I hate the term because it divides the hopefully nuanced work we do into hardened categories: that which is quirky, experimental, and creative vs. that which is rigorous, conventional, job-getting. I also hate the constant stating and restating of our "interests," this meaningless, oppressive practice that neutralizes us in advance.

This became a point of particular concern for me recently, as I slogged through writing my MA paper, which bored me to a painful degree. I've quickly realized that the most important thing for me is to not get bored, because if I'm going to be bored there are lots of other boring things to do out there in this world (well, maybe less so now...). I've also realized that I see academic work very much in terms of that thing that I've always valued above all else: art. Writing, most obviously, but writing in different forms and contexts, and not just writing. I think an academic milieu can be a supportive and productive one for working, but it can also be a destructive one.

My experience goes both ways. The one thing I, and the like-minded professors I've been talking to, need both in my work and life is social contact, community. Intellectually, this is missing, at least in comparative literature, which is why I find anthropology and the various interdisciplinary departments here so interesting and, homey. Why do people in my department not engage with each other, when they are the only people within 10 square miles or more that share the same general interests? Are they just "busy" and "tired"? Do they value their privacy, do they see in books a chance to escape, to hide, to be alone, free from fake smiles and social obligation? Is solitude a cycle that reinforces itself (as it is, now, for me)? Could I be so negative to say that some are so parochial in their interests that they lack a fundamental curiosity that would drive them out of themselves? Are they just not that into me? I don't know, but it's too bad, because it is likely that few if any of us will get jobs. So as far as I can see, the time available to us to be thinkers and writers, to make and exchange ideas (and make them in their exchange) is now. Of course we should prepare ourselves for the future, both its academic and non-academic possibilities, but in fact interaction facilitates rather than distracts from this preparation. This being more important, for me, than correctly citing my sources, than being "well read," than learning how to perform an expertise in a given subject, and certainly more important than this constant hand wringing and worrying.

So much for the potential intellectual community. As far as the social community...well, I'm the kid who threw a party that no one came to.* The sad thing is that I wasn't all that surprised.

*one person did come. still.

Awwww!!!

But this historic rivalry, one of the best in any sport, is also a friendly rivalry, despite all the power and spin these two well-mannered young men employ against each other when they are on opposite sides of a net. And so it was no surprise that Nadal, the first Spanish player to win the Australian championships, was soon putting his left arm around Federer and helping him pull himself back together long enough to finish the speech that he had begun

"Of course it can happen to all of us," he said of Federer’s breakdown during the ceremony. "It was an emotional moment, and I think this also makes sport grander, to see a great champion like Federer expressing his emotions. It shows his human side. But in these moments, when you see a rival who is also a comrade feeling like this, you enjoy the victory a little bit less."

This of course is reminiscent of that time when Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson tearfully embraced after the 1991 NBA finals. Oh - it wasn't Magic? Well then who...oh...right...