Dating After Damascus

Steve Jobs riding his 1966 BMW.

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”--from a New York Times article on literary taste as a dating dealbreaker.

It's news to me that there could be anything tedious about life-changing-experiences-talk--on the other hand, I suppose there's a lot of earnest bloviation ('My mom's my best friend!') that seems like, but is not, appropriate date-convo. The other thing is that it's not always easy to itemize just how your life changed: I've never read Pirsig's book (I bought it after another student mentioned it in my advisor's social theory grad seminar, but never recovered the motivation to read it after bumping into the Big Guy at the cash register and being airily informed that his 13-year old daughter had found it a bit facile), but I'm sure I'd run into the same minefield with Ms. Heiblum if I tried to wax lyrical on my personal road-to-Damascus moment.

The Pros and Cons of Bush-Bashing

Last summer, I found myself the lone dissenter, at a small dinner party stocked mostly with Columbia law professors, to the contention that W. has presided over the worst administration in American history. I'm no fan of the Great Decider; I was simply worried about our presentist bias. But with the news of the Bush Administration's upcoming record-setting deficit, I think it makes sense to try to put everything in perspective. It seems fair to me to say that this is a failed presidency, but let's at least try to consider the Bushies' main talking points.

PROS

• Increased AIDS funding for Africa
• No Child Left Behind (YMMV)
• Persuaded Libya to give up its weapons programs
  
• Created the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands (June 2006)

CONS

• Eight years of deficit spending
• Ill-advised invasion of a sovereign nation (Iraq)
• Poor execution of same invasion
• Deterioration of situation in Afghanistan due to abovementioned invasion
• Denial of, then long-delayed and inadequate response to global climate issues
• Politicization of patronage system to an unprecedented degree
  
• Politicization of federal science initiatives
• An alternately weak or underperforming economy (though there's plenty of blame to go around here)
• Hurricane Katrina
• 'willfully looked the other way as Mr. Putin ... throttled a free press, jailed political rivals and used Russia’s oil and gas riches to blackmail neighbors', while also needlessly antagonizing the Kremlin with plans for a missile defense system in central Europe and expansion of NATO to Russia's borders
• Failed to pursue further nuclear arms control agreements with Russia
  
• ...
  

Even if the Cons have it, could W. really be worse than, say, Richard Nixon? Herbert Hoover? Warren G. Harding? Consider this an assessment in progress...

F*** 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke

So now it's 'Islam-a-phobic' to satirize Islamophobia?

I know I'm a little late on this one, but that's because I was in denial: for a few days, I just didn't want to believe that, along with the abovementioned meta-confusion, the discussion of race in this country has become so impoverished that a reference to racism counts as racism. NY Governor David Paterson claims that the cover was 'one of the most malignant and vicious' he's ever (ahem) seen. Malignant and vicious to whom? Could anyone with even a passing familiarity with The New Yorker believe that the editors were trying to stoke anti-Obama rumor-mongering?

I'd better stop here before my ACLU trick knee starts jerking and kicks over that other tempest-in-a-teapot: flag lapel pins.

Life's Work

Maybe my first post should've been more along the lines of a throat-clearing, existence-justifying effort. Here, then, I make amends:

I hadn't really thought about blogging--despite the fact that gazillions of my friends and peers seem to be doing it--until I read this post by the sociologist Kieran Healy. Healy pokes a little fun at the pretensions of his peers who disdain blogging as a tenure track-derailing frivolity, then makes a forceful case for the importance of blogging for academics by reproducing an essay on journaling by C. Wright Mills and replacing every occurrence of the word 'journal' with 'blogs'. In doing so, he convincingly updates Mills' dictum to the scholar to unify 'life' and work. 'You must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it', Mills exhorts us. As an urbanist and political theorist (self-described), that's what I aim to do here, and that's why blogging is an imperative--whether the audience turns out to be one (i.e., lil' ol' me) or a thousand (although I could get closer to the latter by requiring my students to read and post--hmmm....).


So there you go: existence justified?

Sense and Sinsemilla

All this time I thought American drug policy was singularly fucked up. Having just read about the plight of sprinter John Capel, however, I am sad to say that we're not alone. This poor guy went from winning the 200m at the 2003 World Championships to taking a $30,000 job at a paving stone company in 2006; he'd twice tested positive for marijuana and subsequently received a two-year suspension from competition. For pot!!! The article doesn't mention whether it was the national or the international governing body that meted out the suspension, so maybe it's still just our benighted American attitude towards drugs. I'd love to know the history here--e.g., is this indicative of an international mentality that equates pot-smoking with the general 'doping' problem? Or is this an international policy that reflects American influence (or pressure)?

Also amusing is the uncritical acceptance of such policies on the part of the Times reporter, Lynn Zinser; she blithely reports the harsh consequences of Capel's marijuana 'habit', and emphasizes the hopeful arc of a repentant sinner on the comeback trail. But what possible good does it really do to punish a sprinter's penchant for weed? What possible competitive advantage could pot confer?

It would be worth digging into the rationale behind such policies (me, I've got other projects in the works). But I doubt that it's a sensible one.