Saturday, August 28, 2010

Right This Way to the Ministry of Love


As long as I’m on a roll with contrary-to-liberal views (“I’m liberal but to a degree” –Bob Dylan), let me take a stab [sic] at the wonderful world of hate crimes.

A big news story of the past few days has to do with a guy in NYC who took a knife to a cabbie for being Muslim. Granted, the perp was drunk, but that’s no excuse (just “social lubricant,” right?). It’s no different from crimes against blacks fifty years ago, but today we have hate crime laws that get called into play when the victim is of a particular religious, racial, or sexual group. And while it’s been made explicit that such laws do not abridge the right to free speech or association, they do provide for enhanced sentencing and federal involvement.

What nags at me is the idea that you can be prosecuted not only for a criminal act but also for your underlying motive. It’s not enough that the guy knifed somebody; the reason he did it makes it worse? But how can it? Is the cut any deeper? And as some have pointed out, hate crime has been construed almost exclusively as being committed by, well, let’s face it: rednecks. Gay-, black-, Muslim-, outsider-bashing rednecks.

I’m not sticking up for rednecks and their prejudices. The kind of people who commit atrocities such as those against Matthew Shepard and James Byrd deserve no leniency whatsoever. I don’t care if they had deprived childhoods, bring back medieval torture devices for the likes of these animals. Make them feel the kind of pain they meted out. But criminalizing state-of-mind is as slippery a slope as there ever was. Aren’t Islamic jihadists also guilty of hate crime? (They so much as admit it.) What about Christians who murder abortionists? (Is this an act of love?) Or minority crooks who choose to prey on more affluent whites? (Remember Alvy’s father in Annie Hall regarding the thieving cleaning woman: “She's a colored woman, from Harlem! She has no money! She's got a right to steal from us! After all, who is she gonna steal from if not us?”) Love of money may be the root of all evil, but I suspect hatred is the root of most crime.

The fact that the Wikipedia article informed me that James Dobson was a major opponent of hate crime laws made me squirm, but lefties shouldn’t take wingnut opposition as justification for support. This is about thought crime pure and simple. And if it takes burrowing into your private life to ascertain a “hateful” motive, aren’t we setting ourselves up for the thought police? (Even before prosecution of hate crimes became p.c., I harbored similar doubts about “conspiracy.” If the cops nab a couple of crooks robbing a bank, they can also be prosecuted for planning to do so. Outrageous!) How far in our future is rehabilitation in the Ministry of Love? Transform that hatred into love for Big Brother.

So I’m tipping my hand here: my pet peeve #3 is political correctness in any guise – and the campaign against “hate crime” is but one of them. If you get to the root of any crime, you’re going to find bitterness or resentment, so we might as well launch a dual prosecution for every offense. But our judicial system shouldn’t be running some kind of Spanish Inquisition (which of course nobody expects). The bottom line is, it’s the crime that needs to be punished.


Thursday, August 26, 2010

Mohammed wears army boots ;-D


Some might think that, in siding with Laura Schlesinger and against the Islamic center advocates, I’ve gone over to the dark side. That my three-month lay-off involved a brain transplant or, worse, deciding that maybe Glenn Beck has a point or two. ;-D

But I assure you, such is not the case. ;-D

Doing anything with a wink is okay these days. Irony rules. Pass a black man on the street and call out “How it hangin’, nigga?” and when he sees you smiling he’ll smile right back and flash you one of those special hand signs usually reserved for “brothers.” Try it yourself and see! ;-D

Now that emoticons have permeated the culture, it’s become possible to say whatever you want but then give it a semiotic twist that says “Hey, I was only kidding.” If I were to write “all illegal aliens ought to be lined up against the wall and shot,” you might think I’ve been living in Arizona too long. But if I were to follow that statement with “;-D” then you’d know I was just indulging in a bit of ironic mischief. Right? ;-D

So if I were to come out with some insult like “Mohammed wears army boots” but followed it with the appropriate wink, that makes it cool. Just like the Florida minister the NYT reported on who wants to stage a public burning of copies of the Koran. What a fun-loving guy! When he says “Islam is of the devil,” you know he’s gotta be smiling devilishly inside. (In fact, in that picture he’s actually standing in front of the last sign that bears the “;-D” emoticon. (Actually it’s next-to-last; the last says “Burma Shave.”)) The article gives the guy’s age as 58, so he’s probably thinking back to when he was an impressionable young teen and burned his Beatles records at the urging of the [predominately southern] clergymen who regarded John Lennon’s statement that his group was more popular than Jesus as some kind of sacrilege. It probably even motivated him to enter the ministry. A burning desire, you might say, maintaining a tradition of smiling righteousness that stretches back to when his forebears incinerated heretics and witches. Why can’t the people protesting the NY Islamic center be as lighthearted? ;-D

As long as America continues to produce people with such a finely tuned sense of humor, world peace can’t be far away. :-รพ

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Deconstruction Zone


A recent article in Huffington Post gave a shout-out to “the 17 most innovative university presses,” and I’m proud to have had long-standing ties to two of them. Huzzah!! But I have to give a smack-down to the author for in one breath extolling books “of the moment” in subject areas like politics and border studies, and in the next praising four presses for their publications in literary criticism.

To my mind, if there’s one field of scholarship that’s totally useless, it’s literary criticism. According to a not-too-old joke, the college science major goes out into the world to ask, “Why is this happening?”; the engineering major asks, “How can I make this work?”; the English major asks, “You want fries with that?” Unless you can find something socially useful to do with an English degree, producing lit crit seems to be the alternative to ending up in the service sector. Only it’s not half as useful.

I can’t remember why I became an English major; back then, it was simply the mark of a general liberal education – nobody told me it would seriously limit my job prospects. But in all my literature courses, I was never really aware of criticism; we just read the damn stuff and then the prof lectured about it. Turns out that my time in academia, the late ’60s, coincided with the end of book-centered study before “literary theory” took over, so for me it was a narrow escape.

I know that my advisor was disappointed that I didn’t go to grad school – that I wasn’t propagating the species – but I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing useless research on topics like the impact of Shakespeare’s hangnail on the writing of Coriolanus. I spent a few years in the textbook biz thinking I was helping to disseminate knowledge until I realized it was just repackaging information. It wasn’t until I embarked upon my career in university press publishing (our collective motto: “Keeping the world safe for pedantry”) that I found my niche – and became aware of lit crit. My own press did mercifully little of it, but enough to let me know it wasn’t natural. When I started a freelance business writing catalog copy for other presses, I discovered just how insidious it is.

The problem with lit crit is that it’s such an insiders’ game. Political theory, e.g., can have real-world applications (for better or worse) when it percolates in think tanks and seeps its way into government bureaucracy. Books about the U.S.-Mexico border can help us confront one of America’s most pressing issues. Revisionism in history can show thoughtful people how to consider the past from new perspectives (yes, there’s more to it than Holocaust denial). But literary criticism and theory are pretty much scholarly circle jerks: Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art  (“how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships”); The Spread of Novels: Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century (“recasts the genre’s rise as part of a burgeoning vernacular cosmopolitanism”); A New Theory for American Poetry (“how today’s consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people”); Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (“the first book to examine the fascinating exchange between the work and literary spheres for laboring women in the rapidly industrializing America of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries”). And these examples from the four presses cited in HuffPo don’t even scratch the surface.

My own theory of literature is simply that it should be enjoyed, not over-analyzed. Classroom discussions and reading groups are all well and good, but books in lit crit aren’t intended for outsiders despite the claims of the HuffPo author (or of descriptive copy – take it from someone who’s written it); their only purpose is to help the authors get tenure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that – but it’s a helluva way to make a living.

And it begs a more serious question: “Cheese on that burger?”


Monday, August 23, 2010

Brouhaha at (or maybe somewhere near) Ground Zero


Several years ago, I got into a debate with a libertarian friend about the effects of media violence on the real world. I maintained that the people who produced violent movies and video games were in some way responsible for the actions of young people trying to emulate what they saw. My friend mistook my opinion for an advocacy of censorship and stuck up for the producers’ First Amendment rights, but this wasn’t the case; I was merely lamenting the fact that the producers weren’t behaving responsibly, in the interest of society. Sure, they have the right to produce whatever they want, it’s just a shame they don’t consider the consequences of their actions. It’s a no-win situation, and as a result we all suffer.

The same thing has been going on for years regarding guns. The right to bear arms has overshadowed any consideration of where the fault lies whenever somebody goes postal. Then of course there’s the supposed right to talk on your cell phone while driving. Hey, this is America! – we’ll claim all the rights we can.

We have a similar situation with the proposed Islamic center in New York. Sure, the Muslim community has a right to exercise their religious freedom in building their center at the site they’ve chosen. But they’re not thinking through the consequences of their actions, i.e. the animosity it will create among short-sighted citizens and the harm it could do to Muslim-Christian relations. The problem isn’t that they’re being disrespectful as some claim but, rather, disruptive.

It’s easy for liberals to come down on the side of the Islamic center simply because conservatives are so jingoistically lockstep against it. What once had been a sleeping dog is now up and snarling, so I would have to ask the Muslim community: with relations between the two major faiths already near the boiling point, why would you want to kick a snarling dog when it has the potential to get the whole pack riled up? You made the choice to put the center only a couple of blocks from GZ, and to my mind that’s not a whole lot different from Rockstar Games making the decision to release Grand Theft Auto III or the NRA defending private ownership of assault weapons. Exercising your rights is all well and good, but at what cost?

It’s a slippery slope, admittedly. Other American cities, without any such “hallowed ground,” have seen protests against the construction of mosques, so some might extend the above argument to discourage exercising rights whenever any segment of the public gets upset. Well, let’s face it, there’s always going to be somebody upset about something. Some folks in Murfreesboro TN may not cotton to the idea of a mosque in their town, but they don’t exactly have a ground-zero argument to fall back on – just ignorance. And I suspect that if something had been built at GZ in NY by now, an Islamic center in its shadow would be no big deal; it’s the heel-dragging that keeps the wound open and the tempers hot.

It’s that never-the-twain situation again, putting self-interest ahead of social concerns, and it looks like it doesn’t apply only to white folks. If those behind the Islamic center assumed a little responsibility and moved their project to a less sensitive location, it would go a long way toward defusing a no-win situation.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Nigga say what?


I don’t usually stick up for conservative pundits, but Laura Schlesinger had a valid point when she talked about the use of the word “nigger.”
Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger.... I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it’s affectionate.
It’s true; context is everything. Blacks also use “motherfucker” to arbitrarily indicate another individual: you hear it in street talk, it peppers Miles Davis’s autobiography, and in a book I once read documenting prison life, the glossary even defines it as “a person; not necessarily pejorative.” But I suspect it’ll be a while before it makes it to broadcast TV, just because it’s “vulgar” (not because it’s racist).

Anyway, Laura isn’t alone in not getting it (although I suspect she’s clueless about a lot of things). But I think political correctness goes too far when it decrees that not only can this epithet never be spoken, it can’t even be referenced except as “the n-word” (just like “the f-bomb”), as if the reader or listener should not under any circumstances be exposed to it. It’s kinda like when something is said that you think you’re not supposed to hear and you stick your fingers in your ears and go “la-la-la-la-la.” Even stories in the press about the Schlesinger brouhaha take pains to not spell it out; they relate how she “used the n-word” or “said ‘n*gger’” as if actually printing the succession of six letters would cause the sky to fall. It’s America’s version of not depicting the prophet Mohammed.

You-tube doesn’t have Lenny Bruce’s classic take on this, so we’ll have to settle for Dustin Hoffman’s re-creation in the biopic. I think it says it all:




So sure, we can criticize white people who call black people “niggers” (and continue to titter uneasily when blacks employ it freely). It really isn’t very nice and we ought not to use it. But pussyfooting around objectionable words strikes me as even more objectionable than using them, because it helps give them more power than they deserve.


Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Never the Twain


As most of my faithful readers will recognize, I have two pet peeves. One is people who talk on cell phones while driving in busy traffic. The other is people who try to inflict on the rest of the public their belief that the book of Genesis contains a factual account of the origin of Earth and its life forms.

For me, what these pet peeves have in common is stupidity (a common tag running through this blog), so along those lines one might assume that I believe teabaggers run a close third. But while I don’t have a very high opinion of these folks, I can understand their frustration and recognize the extent to which they’ve been manipulated. “Only a pawn in their game,” as Dylan once put it. It’s a sad state of affairs.

What’s saddest is the extent to which this country is divided. And while I can’t say I told you so (since probably no one except Beth heard me say it), I did see the potential for it when Obama decided to run for president. He had divisiveness written all over him from jump street, and now the pendulum has swung from a president despised by the left to one despised by the right as Fox pundits pounce on his every word.

Isn’t there anyone who can bring us together?

The irreconcilability of left and right is staggering, and I’ve tried for a long time to wrap my head around whether there’s some underlying cause that explains it. Did it all start in the sixties? Before that it was the Eisenhower era, and the only dissidents were beatniks in Greenwich Village and commies in the woodpile. Then social consciousness arose with the struggle for civil rights and protests against the war in Vietnam, and more and more people began to question the prevailing order. Nothing’s been the same ever since. Now the South votes Republican and the protesters are old white people.

But for all of the political realignments, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s as simple as this: people of the right want what benefits or safeguards themselves and their families, while people of the left want what benefits society.

The health care debate says it all. Liberals want to help their fellow citizens, while conservatives don’t think they should have to pay for strangers. But it extends to other issues as well:
  • taxes: conservatives don’t want the government taking their money away; liberals are willing to give up some of their personal wealth to benefit society
  • immigration: conservatives feel threatened by outsiders; liberals want to help them
  • abortion: conservatives want to safeguard the family by extending protection to the unborn; liberals put a woman’s rights first
  • gay rights: conservatives seek to define the family by emulating Adam and Eve; liberals seek equal rights for all
  • capital punishment: conservatives fall back on Old Testament morality by calling for an eye for an eye; liberals are...well, more liberal
  • guns: conservatives want to protect themselves (especially from those who want to take away their right to protect themselves!); liberals want to make society safer
  • foreign wars: conservatives are concerned with protection from global threats; liberals would divert money to domestic agendas
  • terrorism: conservatives’ protectionism rears up again; liberals seek to understand enemies’ points of view in pursuit of international accord
  • religion in public life: conservatives want their family values to have validation; liberals want to protect non-believers from proselytizing
  • evolution: conservatives fear the challenge to their core beliefs; liberals see it as just another brick in the wall of understanding
  • climate change: conservatives dispute the need to make sacrifices; liberals are willing to sacrifice for the broader good
The GOP of course exploits these attitudes to advance their pro-business agenda; and since business interests are often at odds with societal interests, it’s only natural for these anti-societal factions to unite. (The “what’s the matter with Kansas” scenario isn’t as much of a mystery seen from this perspective: agrarian heartlanders are by nature more family-oriented, without the diverse societal interactions of city folk.) And it goes a long way toward explaining why the twain shall never meet.

To make matters worse, many people on the right believe there is a liberal elite that looks down their nose at them. And while it’s probably true that the majority of teabaggers are comparatively under-educated, they don’t help matters any: they get their information fed to them by an agenda-driven Fox News; they subscribe to superstitions like creationism; they respond to appeals to their innate jingoism; they hunker down with what they know best, their sense of self-preservation.

(Why are they under-educated? Maybe they did poorly in school because they received no encouragement from under-educated parents. Maybe they couldn’t afford to go to college. Maybe they couldn’t even afford to finish high school because they had to go out and work - because they live in a society not known for fairness, where business interests call the shots and keep the working class at a disadvantage. The same of course could be said for ethnic groups traditionally associated with the left - to be sure, all that keeps family-oriented minorities from joining the fold is that they’re also concerned with overcoming discrimination - but teabaggers think of themselves as real Americans to whom this unfairness has been meted out. And if life isn’t fair to them, why should they be expected to show fairness to gays or immigrants or Muslims?)

So it’s become to the advantage of the Republicans to cultivate this segment of the electorate, to convince them that the Democrats want to chip away at the defenses they’ve erected against everyone they think is out to get them, to win votes by promising to uphold “family values” so that once elected they can pursue their real goal of protecting business interests. As long as this segment of the electorate remains under-educated, they’re not going to know any better and continue to be suckered into supporting the party that supports the interests that help keep them down. And as long as they identify an educated liberal elite as their enemy, they’re going to take pride in their own under-education and resign their children to the same fate.

We read reports all the time about how American education is lagging behind the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Texas subjects its schoolchildren to right-wing distortions of reality and Arizona bans “ethnic studies” and Christians everywhere support home-schooling to guarantee their children’s indoctrination. Is it any wonder that the dichotomy in this country exists? Is there any reason to hope it will heal?

There have been studies that suggest liberal and conservative leanings have a genetic basis, and I suspect this may be true. The protectionist attitude that runs through most conservative policy stances seems like an animal instinct (and Sarah Palin now likens herself to a mama grizzly) while the liberal attitude reflects a recessive gene for cooperation (found in critters less worthy of emulation like bugs and birds). If that’s the case, there doesn’t seem to be much hope for reconciliation, at least not in our lifetime – and my hunch is that natural selection will work in favor of the protectionists. The outcome? Most likely some form of annihilation, after which the whole evolutionary cycle can start all over again. (And I suspect that, above the bacterial level, only those nasty but cooperative bugs will have survived.)

Stupidity like phoning while driving shows lack of common sense; confront people with the empirical evidence of accidents and maybe (a big maybe) they’ll see how dangerous it is and change their behavior, if only in the interest of self-preservation. Stupidity like creationism reflects a shackled mind that’s been discouraged from questioning established beliefs; educate people to weigh the evidence and draw their own conclusions and maybe they’ll recognize folklore for what it is. But behavior is easier to change than belief, especially if that belief is the very foundation of your instincts for self-preservation.

As long as the under-educated segment of society watchdogs the education process, nothing will change. Just as a country like North Korea, where education is controlled from the top, teaches its children to adore their leader and view all outsiders with suspicion, America, where school districts call the shots and are subject to takeover by anyone who wants to control young minds, inculcates its own brand of blind obedience and paranoia. Meanwhile, countries in western Europe, where education is probably left to actual educators, have societies far less religious than ours. Our own democratic approach to schooling is undermining our children and our future. (But that’s just my liberal-elite p.o.v. Others no doubt applaud the propagation of American values in the face of threats from all fronts.)

And so I’m forced once more to conclude that, when considering America’s political circus of red versus blue, never the twain shall meet. And no politician will arise to unite us, because on these many issues we cannot be united. Not because of what we’ve become; just because of what we are.