Extra nuggets for the extra day on the calender. In light of the recent passing of conservative icon William F. Buckley, several blogs have posted this 1968 debate between him and Noam Chomsky from Buckley's television show.
What's the likelihood of seeing anything like this on network television today? Surprising no one, serial hypocrite Bob Knight has accepted a job as a television analyst. King Kaufman wins the pool by predicting Knight's destination as ESPN. Knight can finally prove whether he really is better than the cliche-spinners in the media he loathed all those years. Though, to be fair, he always had a soft spot for the ex-jocks who fill up the job he now holds and American eardrums with vapid babble. Because they kissed his ass, not because they were dishing more enlightening analysis. What, you were expecting consistency? A well-earned congratulations for Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary on Sunday. It surprised me for two reasons, first, it broke the tradition of deferring this category to the film with the highest box office receipts, and secondly I had assumed it's unflinching revelations of the torture archipelago would be too racy for the gun-shy academy. I thought the more reserved No End in Sight would be a safer choice. The rest of the night reflected a similar pattern, though naturally the academy's sudden discovery of taste caused the ratings to sink like a stone (says I, the unrepentant middlebrow).
Gibney was also nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys of the Room, which also introduced me to my favorite Tom Waits song.
...in lieu of this comment thread that apparently what Naderites were supposed to have "learned" over the years is that Democrats are Not As Bad As Republicans and, furthermore, this is their self-confessed chief virtue. It's easy to see where this comes from, of course; that was essentially the only reason why they came to power in 2006 and should win the presidency this year. And, eight years from now, the scales will tip and Republicans will win an election on the virtue of being not-Democrats. That's how the two-party mutual power sharing agreement that is our government works out.
I've said before that I don't think there's much utility to supporting a Ralph Nader candidacy this year and that the cause of serious electoral reform would be better off if he stayed away but, sweet lord, the throttled squeals of the liberal blogs and their obsession with laying all the blame for the Bush years at his feet (IOZ calls it Thanksralphery, which I'm adopting as well) is reaching the point where concern for their health is in order.
Perhaps, as Stump Lane says, they're being tied up on an logical paradox.
The Pavlovian attack-dog reaction of The Partisans to Ralf [sic] Nader’s latest presidential run is— though entirely predictable —nonetheless astounding.
Most befuddling to me are the dual sentiments:
* Gore won. * It’s Nader’s fault Gore lost.
It does seem difficult to reconcile the Donkey excuses that Bush stole the election and Nader also spoiled it for them. Of course, they say, if Nader hadn't run at all the election would not have been close enough to steal, an assertion both nakedly anti-democratic and wrong on the merits. It makes the common Democratic assumption that all left-leaning voters would owe their vote to the Dems if all other options were taken away, and that they wouldn't join the tens of millions of their fellow citizens who cast their ballot for "Stayed Home and Masturbated"--as an anonymous commenter eloquently put it--a group which curiously skates away scot-free from the liberal inferno.
Thanksralphery is a many-splendored thing, and its dogged persistence is a testament to its utility. Chiefly, though, it's a way to absolve the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere for habitually rolling over for the Bush Administration. It's not their fault, poor dears, if President Gore had been atop the chamber they never would have succumbed to the jingoes crying out for Muslim blood and planting the Stars'n'Stripes in every orifice on the planet. And all the netroots would currently be lining up to elect Joe Lieberman president; the same Joe Lieberman they valiantly tried to unseat from the Senate in the real world two years ago.
I won't suggest that Gore would not have been a better President than Bush; a moist paper bag of goat dung would have been a more useful presence in the Oval Office than the Current Occupant. But Gore was taking the imperial scepter from the man who invented the concept of Cruise Missile Liberalism, launching a few of them off into the wilderness every few months to prove what a Manly, Humanitarian Hero he was. The idea that Gore would have responded in the wake of 9/11 with a markedly different approach to the use of military force is wishful thinking. He might have been a more preferable outcome for the Liberal Hawks Do It Better crowd, but he was no antiwar champion. Even on Gore's trump card, the environment, his record during the Clinton Administration is mixed.
That brings us to an important point. Many people believe they would have been getting the Al Gore of 2006 as president, the man of "Inconvenient Truth" and "The Assault on Reason " rather than the Gore of 2000 who was tied up in the reactionary triangulating shadow of the Clinton years. Gore, to his credit, has effectively admitted this by refusing to run for office again and focusing on his other projects instead.
Much of the news in the state over the weekend was dominated by two big sports stories.
At the top of the page was the second basketball coaching change in three years at the Alma Mater. Kelvin Sampson accepted a buyout of his contract after a recurring scandal involving overflowing phone calls to recruits was finally blown open by the NCAA two weeks ago.
I'm not so much conflicted about the decision here (I think the university probably did the right thing here) but by the reaction. On the one hand I'm silently gleeful that the win-or-die zealots who so eagerly ran Mike Davis out of town now face an even more sobering future. Sure, you have what is probably the best Indiana team since the early '90s, but the time is coming to pay the piper. On the other hand, many of those people were never fully satisfied with the decision to hire Sampson in the first place, distantly insisting he wasn't white enough sufficiently tied to the mythos of "Indiana basketball." Now they'll have another chance to fulfill their nativist fantasy and drive the program into further irrelevance. After twelve years of acrimonious division, the nation's two major formula-car racing series struck a reunification deal last week in Indianapolis. Most of the bitter ideological duels that marked the early days of the divide during the early years had been moot for some time, and so the settlement was big news for the fifteen of us left who still care at all.
Were "The Split"--as it's colloquially known--to occur today, I probably would have been on the opposite side as the one I actually took for most of the past decade or so. When Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Tony George created the fractional Indy Racing League back in 1996, it was seen by many of its early boosters as a chance to purge what they saw as the decaying effects of international road racing on the sport and re-fertilize it with American oval racers, simultaneously returning the Indianapolis 500 to its halcyon years of the '50s and '60s when it was the exclusive province of Americans. Supporters of the established CART series saw it is a naked power grab by George, who threatened to fracture the sport in an attempt to get more decision-making power for himself.
It looks like the latter group may have been closer to the truth. George has undoubtedly won the long battle, but the resulting product looks little like what many of his early boosters imagined it might (much to my delight, I should add). After years of struggling to gain traction with his series of mostly lower-budget, ragtag operations, George began to woo many of his former enemies from across the fence, and, with their sponsors feeling the pinch of being shut out of the sport's premier event, most of the top open-wheel teams and manufacturers filtered over to the IRL during the first half of this decade. Indeed, the mass defections effectively destroyed the old entity of CART, which declared bankruptcy in 2004 and was replaced with a successor state known as CCWS.
The final product of a merger will look a lot like the one from before the war, with a nearly-even split between ovals and road races, but a good deal less apparent to most of the country. In 1996, the split was front-of-the-sports-page news in much of the country; the reunification was lucky to see P6. There is some hope that eliminating popular confusion between two virtually-identical series will re-energize some public interest, but the new series starts life with few familiar faces, two of which were recently poached by NASCAR in attempt to boost its own sagging fortunes with an uncharacteristic nod toward meager cosmopolitanism. Thank the Deity for "Dancing with the Stars," I suppose.
I've seen similar reasoning to what C/W posted in comments on Monday (moderates who would support McCain over Clinton but not Obama) and interestingly I've also seen it used as ammunition for Clinton supporters who think Obama's popularity with right-leaning moderates who are currently propelling him will abandon him for McCain. I personally can't support it, of course; even though I thought McCain would be the "least-bad" president out of the abysmal GOP field, there's still no way you can support him over the boiled corpse of Anton Chekhov. Hopefully it doesn't come that.
I happen to think Obama runs rings around McCain in the general (it'll be pushing double digits, at least.) McCain is already starting to look like a crusty gaffe-prone fossil in comparison, and it'll only get worse as the months grind on. I don't even buy the pundit trope that his weighty foreign policy experience will submerge Obama; for McCain's record to have merit his positions have to actually be popular, which is a lot less promising now for Mr. Hundred Years.
While we're on the subject, a couple of words about what some have dubbed the "Obamacans," Republicans and right-leaning moderates who are crossing over to vote for Obama in the primaries and who have been used as ammunition at the pro-Clinton sites as proof that he lacks support of the "real" Democrats. This is a little perplexing, since Obama has also been the choice of many prominent liberal organs, including Moveon.org (via overwhelming membership polling) and The Nation magazine. Clinton seems to be outflanked on both sides in this race, so where exactly is her backing coming from?
The extent to which Obama is better on policy for liberals is quite small, though it is relevant especially, I believe, on many of the more peripheral issues. But I recall again something Molly Ivins said about Bill Clinton. During the 1990s, many left-liberals defended the Clintons reflexively out of the belief that they were getting a raw deal from the press and the Republicans. However, many of them silently resented the Clintons for the center-right takeover of the party, and now, presented with a legitimate contender to change the party's leadership, they've turned hard against the Clinton dynasty.
These people, despite their naive optimism in the Democratic party, still have a soul to save. Their fellow travelers, however, are the hardcore partisan Democrats, the Yellow Dogs, the red-hot blinkered, disciplined straight-ticket pulling party operatives. The kind of person whose entire political existence rises and falls with the Donkey, the Party itself is all the ideology they need. Politics, for them, is an interminable cricket match* of Our Team against Their Team, and the Clintons really are persecuted saints who have never done wrong because they won 'em for the Gipper**.
They've also got an infamous touch for picking losers, but, thanks in part to those Obamacans, their will is poised to be averted.***
*A redundancy?
**No, not THAT Gipper!
***It occurs to me that if the Democrats want to win more reliably they should follow the formula of a) seeing which candidate wins the primary among registered Democrats and b) electing the challenger. This is not, I should add, a Broderist fantasy about the "vital center." I think there are just as many, if not more, independents in this country who would be more accurately graphed to the general left of the Democratic Party. But that's another post.
Severalblogs are having fun with a new bit of knee-slapping wankery from the National Review.
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics. (During the Clinton Administration we were all introduced to then U. of Pennsylvania Professor Lani Guinier — also a half black/half Jewish, red diaper baby.)
Hee Hee Hee!
And here I thought we were in trouble when Comrade Hillary the She-Commie looked headed for defeat. But a shady Chicago socialist offspring of misceginating Communist parents? Where do I sign up? (And I apparently spoke too soon when I declared red-baiting out of season...)
Before we say goodbye to Huckabee, who's been so good to us even though we didn't begin to scratch his creamy surface, I want to send you this piece from WJB biographer Michael Kazin on the limitations of comparing Huckabee with Bryan.
Bryan helped initiate the progressive income tax; Huckabee wants to abolish it in favor of a national sales tax that would fall most heavily on the working and middle class. Bryan tried to expand federal power to aid working people; Huckabee opposes universal health care “mandated by federal edict.” Bryan was the first major-party nominee to receive the official backing of organized labor; most unions shun Huckabee, who governed a right-to-work state where Wal-Mart has its headquarters. Bryan hated war and resigned as secretary of state in 1915, when he thought President Woodrow Wilson was leading the U.S. into the hell of World War I; Huckabee strenuously supports the war in Iraq.
How to apply one’s faith to public life has always been a controversial matter. In 1896, Bryan’s Republican opponents lambasted him for using the Crucifixion as a metaphor for his monetary policy. But neither in that campaign, nor during his two other races for president (1900 and 1908), did he ever, like Huckabee, advertise himself as “a Christian leader,” give sermons in churches or call for amending the Constitution to fit “God’s standards.”
For Bryan, who idolized Thomas Jefferson, the separation between church and state was absolute. As an exponent of the Social Gospel, he used the Bible to justify aid to the poor and scorn for the rich – not to install his faith into law. What’s more, he needed the votes of Catholics and Jews, and so avoided taking positions that would alienate them.
Many somewhat reputable gossipers (about the best you can do, really) have Huckabee filling out the GOP ticket as McCain's veep, which makes no strategic sense to me. Huckabee is toxic to the kind of independent moderates and Republicans embarrassed by the prevalence of religion within the party that McCain will need to pull to have any chance at winning. Also, Huckabee won't be much geographic help; if a GOP presidential candidate needs to solidify southern white evangelicals, he's already in a world of trouble.
Speaking of ol' John, there's a burgeoning and admirable effort among liberals to scrub the popular media image of McCain as a straight-talkin' maverick. But their focus is narrow and their incredulity a little forced; McCain is a conservative, but there are good reasons why the right-wing populists don't fully trust him. In particular, many white liberals may not appreciate how great a shibboleth the immigration issue is to the hardcore jingoes, and thus the significance of McCain's relatively sane position go right past them. McCain is seen as someone who goes along to get along with the social conservatives; while he gives lip service to them, they don't believe he's someone who'll fight for their issues once he's calling the shots, especially with more Democratic gains in Congress. He is an extremist on the war and foreign policy in general, of course, and is only a "moderate" because he clears the exceptionally low bar of opposing the torture gulags.
But what of all those right-wing media gasbags and other public mouthpieces who are suddenly overcome with enmity for McCain now that it's too late to reasonably derail him? And why did James Dobson finally endorse Huckabee once the race was effectively over? (Most of the Frat Row conservatives similarly became infatuated with Romney.) My hunch is that they are bailing off the sinking ship so when McCain goes down heavily they can initiate the inevitable meme that he was not conservative enough and won't have themselves tied down to a landslide loss. The truth is exactly opposed; McCain will do the best he can running as a faux-moderate who will still struggle to escape the shadow of the Bush regime. But I don't expect that to faze them.
Been a slow posting couple of weeks, as I've been feeling especially stupid and dense lately. Also, it looks like the election won't be over anytime soon, so I've been less interested in delving into the day-to-day minutiae. Luckily, I can still post video treats. Here's Joanna Newsom and her traveling band playing my favorite song of 2006, boiling down Van Dyke Parks' lush string arrangement into a minimalist but still sublimely effective stew.
Also, I hope everyone was up late to catch Yeasayer on Late Night with Conan O'Brien on Friday. If I haven't plugged their record "All Hour Cymbals" enough yet, allow me to do so again. I'm really becoming addicted to it.
I wanted to pick a George Carlin bit for the sermon, but couldn't settle on just one. I think what I admire about this the most is the subtle rhythm of the cadence that lets you enjoy it even on repeated listens.
I've been slogging my way through Dr. Louann Brizendine's book "The Female Brain" and, alas, it doesn't appear I can make it all the way through. It's not that the book is long, exactly, but my poor abused wallpaper tells me it can take no further punishment. Perhaps I should have taken the back cover blurb by David Brooks as a warning sign.
Maybe I'm being unfair. I did make it through the sections of the book on love and sex, and it can only get better from there, right? But that's what I'm here to talk about today, as you might have reckoned by the date.
The title of the book thankfully spares me the trouble of describing its contents. Brizendine is an accomplished psychologist, and distilled this book out of decades of her own research. It is, as far as I know, scientifically unassailable, and may even be informative if you've never spent significant time around a woman and occasionally listened to anything she said, a solution I'd recommend I'd recommend as a source of more accurate information than this dreck. I admit my bias here; I'm a quixotic crusader against determinism, biological or divine; which is to say I'm pissed off at whichever one gave me the short end of the stick, and intend to get my revenge.*
In Brizendine's book, she tells the story of one of her clients, a film producer named Melissa who has had a string of misses with on the dating scene, until one night at a dance club.
Melissa was locked in gaze with this stranger. A wave of energy shot up her back. It was the feeling she hadn't experienced in all the months of her bad dates. There was something vaguely familiar about him. "Hmm, who's that?" she said under her breath to Leslie, as her brain's cortex scanned her memory banks. No match was found, but all her attention circuits were now on "mating alert status."
The closer he got, the more unfocused Melissa became. She grabbed her drink tightly. Her eyes and attention were riveted on him--his leather Armani shoes, his sexy black cords, and no wedding ring on his finger.
Aww, yuppies in love! Indeed, this is an ongoing theme in the book which makes it easy to see why Bobo and his friends were so enraptured; it could more easily be titled "Trials and Tribulations of the Urban Bourgeoisie."
Even though Melissa is an "independent economic unit," she must still go through her assigned evolutionary duty of seeking a man to be a provider, which Brizendine assures is us "not sex stereotyping" but cold, hard biological fact (reminiscent of the scientific racism of "The Bell Curve" and the unfortunate Dr. James Watson). I'll save you the suspense; Rob is indeed a successful marketing consultant, saints be praised, and as far as we know their molecules coexist happily ever on.
Melissa may not have wanted to meet anyone that night, but her brain had other plans that are deep and primitive. When it saw Rob across the room, a signal went off for mating and long-term attatchment, and she was lucky that his brain felt the same way. Each of them will come up against anxiety, threats, and mind-numbing joys, over which they have little control because biology is now building their future together.
Yes, very lucky indeed. For us ugly shits*, or people without the limitless leisure hours for gene experimentation as a San Francisco film producer or marketing consultant, we'll have to find some other way beyond the time-tested ways of our ancestors, who were apparently Yalie Cavemen. Brizendine here actually contradicts something she says at the beginning of the chapter, which is that Melissa was, in fact, looking to "settle down" and find a mate now that she was secure in her career. This is an ongoing problem throughout the book; using arbitrary anecdotes to buttress supposedly hard-wired behavior. In another passage, we learn Melissa doesn't sleep with Rob on the first date because her brain is still sizing up his long-term suitability. I'm more than capable of doing the same, of course. If our brains assign us long-term partners based on first sight, most people's experiences would suggest they aren't very good at it.
Everyone, I think, can point to having a similar response as what Brizendine describes in Melissa. Mine was my first year of college, when I was wholly smitten by another journalism student with a cherubic face, a river-long smile and a cool sweep of blonde hair. On any given day I was both earnest and terrified with the prospect of seeing her, and felt the onset of stomach sickness if I was around her for too long. You can predict how it played out, and it wasn't with me screaming at her that my brain had ineffably assigned her to me against my will. (She was mercifully graceful when I did finally confess it.) I think most people emerge more practical from these infatuations, and don't try to justify it with evolutionary twaddle.
It seems to me people can be just as fulfilled in relationships where they talk to each other in addition to fucking. Perhaps Brizendine shares Brooks' concern that white folks are denying their biological impulse to extend their genes and are being outbred by the darker-skinned mob. I'm sure we'll find a way to survive, even if you end up with a withered branch of the evolutionary tree.
*I'm aware this is not a sufficient excuse for me, of course, since beyond beyond horrifying to look at I have all sorts of other personality defects that won't be getting passed on. I reckon this is a point in Brizendine's favor.
It bears mentioning as well that Brizendine doesn't consider much beyond the straight-arrow polarities of "male" and "female" brains. What about the vast gray area in between? Too unseemly, apparently, along with the rest of the proles who don't fit the Urbane Gothic paradigm.
After all that depressing inanity, I'll raise you a Billy Bragg elixir.
It didn't used to be like this. I have sometimes tried to explain to people, usually unsuccessfully, that we've always had born-again Christians; we just used to call them New Deal Democrats. And those construction workers, easy foil of the New Yorker cartoonists, were once part of a Democratic electorate before they were lured away by the likes of Ronald Reagan.
For many years, as the Democratic establishment has become wealthier, the traditional Democratic base has been steadily pushed away as too dumb, too prejudiced, or otherwise too unworthy of the party. It wasn't that abortion, gays and family values were intrinsically so important. But if your campaign contributors won't let you talk or do anything about pensions, healthcare, outsourcing or usurious interest rates, the door opened wide for the rightwing hypocrites.
Class has always been the forbidden fruit of American political debate. A civil rights activist, Julius Hobson, with whom I worked once put it this way:
"The struggle isn't whether you like a nigger or a nigger likes a cracker or whitey is a pig or any of that stuff. I've called people whitey and pig and the FBI never said a word. All I have to do is put on a dashiki, get a wig, go out there on Fourteenth Street, and yell, 'Whitey is a pig and I'm going to take care of him' -- the FBI will stand there and laugh at me. But the moment I start to discuss the way goods and services are distributed and I start talking about the nature of the political system and show that it's a corollary of the economic system, that's when the FBI comes in for harassment."
And the Washington DC of today proves Hobson's point: a black city run by black politicians that is one of the most class-divided places you'll find in America but about which hardly anyone ever talks.
So along comes a wealthy southern white male lawyer and tries to change things back to the way Democrats used to do it. And what happens? Yes, those with power move to keep him in the background. Yes, from the start the establishment media gave him as little coverage as possible.
But more significant was the reaction of average members of the liberal - really post-liberal - establishment. Ridicule and disgust combined with a stunning disinterest in Edwards' issues that told much about the Democratic Party today.
Not only was this elite bored with Edwards' program, it made clear that the candidate didn't look or talk right, was too wealthy to say such things, and, when you come right down to it, wasn't one of us.
And, oh yes, the most frequent comment of all: he once had a $400 haircut.
Nowhere was it mentioned that Hillary Clinton had had a $1200 makeover during her Senate campaign. But then she wasn't the issue. She belonged.
I cut a lot of the post, because it's an absolutely brilliant analysis, and I still left quite a bit there worth reading.
When Deer Hunting with Jesus was released, a lot of people instinctively compared it to What's the Matter with Kansas? because both dealt with the rightward drift of the rural white working class. But there's a crucial distinction. Frank's dilemma is why these voters supposedly vote against their economic issues in favor of their social values. Bageant's counterargument is to point out that this is a false choice; the Democrats don't in any meaningful way represent the economic interest of the white working class, so they go with the right-wing puppets of fundie religion instead, the only people who'll at least pretend to care. (Incidentally, Frank seems very aware of how the DLC sellout in the '90s brought about the current paradigm, but doesn't let it faze him too much, perhaps because liberals wouldn't want to read his books about the backwards proles.)
But to suggest the Democrats have become a narrowly-defined platform of feel-good social liberal causes is severe heresy, and causes certain liberal activists to blow their stack. You're selling their issues down the river to appease the white Christian male oppressors, just like the scheming Liberal Dude(TM) they always suspected you were. Pretty soon we'll have back-alley abortions with coathangers, government-sponsored re-education camps for gays, and all kinds of other unpleasantness.
And they aren't necessarily wrong, because this is how the Democratic establishment typically behaves when it needs to pull in some rural voters in flyover country. They certainly don't want to step afoul of all the Party's new friends who are giving them such a huge fundraising advantage this election cycle. Besides, they reassure the activists, everyone knows the rubes are utterly implacable on Jeebus and abortion anyway, and letting them in the party would erode all your work.
Is this true, or a convenient lie to keep the barbarians away from the gates? I won't fully sanction the hagiography of Edwards, but he was the candidate with the most aggressively populist message, and he was also a very popular choice among social liberal activists on the Internet. There doesn't need to be a conflict here; indeed, the only places where it exists are the heads of the donkey brass. Edwards ran very well in head-to-head polling against the GOP, but we'll never know if he could've built a much more radically inclusive update of the New Deal coalition than the celebrity version proffered by Hilbama and endorsed by the media and the Party.
Continuing the theme of songs for summer (or perhaps it's me associating everything good with the summer months), here's Beirut (the band, not the city, of course).
Mister Leonard Pierce of Sadly, No! is blogging from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. It may be ostentatious Tompsonesque prose, but that and a barrel full of narcotics are probably necessary to survive that much crazy all packed in one location.
I do have to steal this particularly revealing picture:
The only thing wrong with all those flags is they're blocking the telescreen. Saint Reagan can't see out.
King Kaufman gives the dear departed General a well-deserved one-finger salute.
The Knight chorus -- which, it's important to note, includes most of his former players -- will go into iambic pentameter about discipline and molding young men. But who was more undisciplined than Bob Knight?
If he had an ounce of self-control, the slightest ability or desire to tame his own impulses, his career would be ending not with his slinking off in the middle of the season in a relative basketball backwater, but as the much-respected coach of a perennial power, if not Indiana than some other giant in the Big Ten, ACC or Big East
If Bob Knight had a player with the same lack of self-discipline that Bob Knight the coach had, the kid wouldn't have made it to Thanksgiving of his freshman year.
Convicted felons aside, Bob Knight is probably the single famous sports figure I'd least want my kids to grow up to be like.
For authoritarian sociopaths like Knight, however, the hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug; a fact Knight tacitly acknowledged throughout his career. He had paid his dues to society, and now society had no sway. This is how paternalism recycles itself; by ensuring each new generation of the repressed resents its masters enough to empty out the pent-up frustration on their successors.
Knight's defenders have often claimed that his massive list of accomplishments has accorded him space beyond the moral law, a curious invocation of relativism from people normally not persuaded by it. But they realize admitting Knight's great achievements amount to winning basketball games would be vulgar, and they know any ordinary coach would have been sacked long ago for Knight's embarrassing shenanigans. So they point instead to his graduation rate and speak in lofty terms about crafting perfect masculine icons, as if this somehow would have justified his employ if those banners weren't hanging from the ceiling. But even this is damning with faint credit; in the flaming degraded pit of the college sports industry, Knight was the rare figure who did what should be the bare minimum. He was also filled with sneering antipathy toward the egg-headed academics who wanted to reform the system.
But in the world of late capitalism, there is no competition too trivial, no platform where refined masculine warriors locked in a brutal contest to slay their competitors is irrelevant, perhaps Bob Knight is an American hero. One who broke a cardinal rule of jockdom by quitting on his team in midseason. To the very last, nothing ever applied to him.
Obama last week won the endorsement of the members of Moveon.org, the activist group representing the largest liberal faction of the Democratic Party. A candidate needs a 2/3rds supermajority to win the group's endorsement, which Obama eclipsed with over 70 percent of the poll. The New York Times' Caucus blog reports.
The Republican National Committee weighs in, scoring the endorsement as a sign of what they call Mr. Obama’s left-leaning ideology and a rejection of Mrs. Clinton.
“It’s no surprise MoveOn.org would endorse the newly crowned ‘most liberal’ member of the Senate. Obama may claim to unite the country, but he’s only uniting the extreme-left wing of the Democratic Party,” said Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Republican committee. He added, “Considering how MoveOn.org was originally founded to defend the Clintons, this must be a blow to Senator Clinton. Coming after the Kennedy and Kerry endorsements, today’s news begs the question: Why are those most familiar with Clinton’s record rejecting her?"
What the GOP spokes-bot is referring to, before further killing the English language with yet another misuse of "beg the question," is the annual National Journal survey claiming Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate last year. You can't take a list too seriously that considers Obama and Biden further to the left than, say, Sanders and Feingold, and, as the Crooks and Liars post suggests, the conspiratorially-minded will note that National Journal's 2004 top spot went conveniently to Kerry and Edwards. Where would the GOP be without a liberal helping of liberal liberal talking points, preferably backed by authoritative sources! Liberal liberal liberal liberal liberal!
Kidding aside, this could make for an entertaining dynamic in the general election should Obama pull through and face McCain, who looks like a dead lock (and also looks just...dead). Will Obama follow his predecessors and react to the inevitable Liberal Scare by burying the base and running for safety in the Mushy Middle? Well, yes and no. Obama is an infinitely more skilled politician than Kerry, and he has so far been able to juggle the seemingly incongruent coalition backing him, and he knows he can't count on the muddy middle against McCain. Alas, he won't turn into an unabashed liberal in the general, and the substantive outcome will most likely be the same. But I think Obama's a better counterpuncher than he gets credit for being, and he could react effectively by using the "divisive" card to deflect charges of his liberal liberalyness.
As much as professional football is contributing heavily to the general rot of society, I still sometimes give in to the temptation, and I must say how much I thoroughly enjoyed the outcome of last night's Supper Bag, or whatever they call that thing. Mostly for the schadenfreude on Boston fans and self-righteous white liberals the country wide, I admit, though perhaps the only thing worse than a Boston fan winning is a Boston fan losing, especially if the loss is in tragic or dramatic fashion. Still, I think I can live with it, at least until the Don DeLillo novel XLII hits the bookshelves.
I was also pleasantly surprised by how few American Loyalty Checks there were during the Fox broadcast, though I didn't see any of the 58-hour pregame show. Give credit to the NFL; they run a tight ship and the broadcasters rarely stray from worshiping the Almighty Pigskin. Also heartening was the low quality of the perennially-hyped Super Bad Marketing Bonanza, giving hope that perhaps the country's best creative talent isn't expended in selling products.
No football for another eight months? It's Morning in America! (Hey Mel, my team needs a third-string safety!!)
I'm an ex-fundamentalist evangelical turned quasi-universalist egalitarian/ socialist exiled in Jesusland. I write about politics, religion, sex, music, movies, sports and other things I don't know anything about.
