But Could They Field-Dress a Moose?

Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz write on the growing tension on the Left between black folks and gays in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8 in California. The debate continues: is gay marriage the new civil-rights frontier? Or is the comparison intrinsically offensive to black suffering?

As the son of a black man, it saddens me to see the casuistry with which many black folks try to draw distinctions here. Just call a spade a spade, so to speak: much black resistance to gay marriage is not philosophically principled; it is indefensible homophobia.

But actually the reason I'm singling this Op-Ed out has little to do with the issue at hand, and everything to do with the authors' introduction of an especially useful term of art, in discussing those who must fit under the Democrats' big tent. Angry White Men, Soccer Moms, Hockey Moms, etc.: Move aside. Has there ever been a more felicitous phrase in political demography than 'minivan moms of Minnetonka'?

Lyndon W. Hoover

A while back, I was resisting the growing sentiment that W. has been our worst president ever; as we flail about in the midst of the current financial crisis, however, resistance becomes harder to mount (who would have ever thought it possible to combine Depression- and Vietnam-era flashbacks in one administration?). But how much of this disaster can we put on George W. Bush, really? Surely a crisis of this magnitude had many fathers.

It all depends on what our understanding of the nature and causes of the current predicament are. If a large part of the problem has to do with financial deregulation and a lack of proper oversight, then the problem can be traced back to the 'Rubinomics' of the Clinton Administration. So the question is, what exactly can we blame Bush for?

As I understand it, the shit really hit the fan when Henry Paulson allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse. And according to Floyd Norris, Bush might have avoided the current bust, or lessened its impact, if he'd been more flexible on tax policy: after cutting taxes in order to start a boom (people like Paul Krugman, of course, question whether the cuts caused the boom, or raise doubts as to how much of a boom there was in the first place), W. should have then raised taxes in order to deal with the enormous ensuing budget deficits, and in order to 'apply the brakes' to runaway growth.

Is that enough to justify talk of 'George W. Hoover'?

Obamanomics

Saw a great talk at Davidson recently by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, whose book Predictably Irrational seems to be getting a lot of attention (he gives good interview, too). Hell, behavioral economics in general seems to be getting a lot of attention, e.g., David Brooks' recent column.

Noam Scheiber reported a while back in The New Republic that Austan Goolsbee, Barack Obama's top economic adviser, seemed to have some kind of fan-boy thing for Brooks; Goolsbee consults regularly with his University of Chicago colleague, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler; is that the connection?

Fearless Predictions, I: Bill and Barack

42 and 44 will become unlikely friends, with Bill an infrequent but notable guest in Obamalot. Bill wants influence, can't help but dispense political advice; Barry has little to gain, but ... that old Clinton charm? Hey, who would've ever predicted 41 + 42? Perhaps, too, there'll be the Rahm Emanuel connection, as well as the Rubinomists at Treasury. How many Clinton staffers surface in the new Administration? How much choice does Obama have, really? I should think that Carter Administration vets would be quite long in the tooth by now--but then again, 43 reached all the way back to the Ford Administration...

H.N.I.C.

!!!
Who would have ever thought that a tall, dark, and handsome graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law might one day be elected President? Is this a great country or what?

Deep Play

Is it me, or has there been a really interesting convergence of soccer and art in the last few years? I'm heartbroken I missed this particular installation, which one critic describes as a parable concerning the way contemporary technology guarantees omnipresence but not omniscience.

What Made the Depression 'Great'?

With the early 1930s currently being invoked on an hourly basis, I've been meaning to refresh my memory as to the nature of that particular crisis. Unfortunately, I'm absolutely dismal when it comes to this particular science--I almost failed econ in high school, and the semester I spent auditing a macroeconomics seminar in graduate school didn't provide any evidence of improvement. The only stuff I can understand comes from Robert Heilbroner. Fortunately, this piece in yesterday's NYT spells out some of the similarities--and dissimilarities--in bite-sized chunks.

Expensive Lipstick

An article on the front page of the Times today (you see, kids, the NYT also comes in this hard-copy format called a 'newspaper'...) documents a change in tactics among conservatives keen to expand their influence on the nation's campuses. Instead of aggressively polemical attacks on the usual betes noires (postmodernism, multiculturalism, ethnic studies, feminism, etc.), right-wing financiers and foundations now tout their pet projects as nonpartisan efforts to 'embrace a broader range of thought'. In practice, however, it amounts to funding initiatives by conservative academics that adopt a more positive stance to 'Western culture' and offer a 'triumphal interpretation of American history'.

There's no need to see in this some kind of insidious plot: it's perfectly legitimate to be concerned about the way American history is being interpreted and transmitted to the next generation. But--to quote Edmund Burke out of context--'in order for us to love our country, our country must be lovely'. There may be much we can learn from conservative political thought: those who disagree with Burke's ultimate assessment of the French Revolution may still have much to learn from his ideas concerning the value of the past or the most prudent pace of change; those who recoil from Carl Schmitt's politics may yet benefit from a tussle with his political theory. But that is a different kind of education than what these determined triumphalists and soft-sell culture warriors seem to be proposing.

WWABS?

The results of a recent poll, we are told, augur a fundamental shift in the American public's moral philosophy: three years ago, a majority of Americans believed in absolute, acontextual standards of right and wrong; today, that majority, by a slim margin, inclines toward casuistry. What would Allan Bloom say? He was decrying creeping, postmodern moral relativism back in the eighties, when we were apparently still moral absolutists...

Ethnovideography, Etc.

I've just discovered the work of a British social anthropologist named Alan Macfarlane: he's got hundreds of videos up on YouTube, and apparently he's cuckoo for the uses of video for teaching and disseminating anthropological ideas. He posts ethnographic videos of any number of social rituals (he's done fieldwork in Japan, Nepal, China, and other parts of Asia); interviews with thinkers of interest for anthropology and related disciplines (I just spent an hour raptly watching a conversation with George Steiner, was less enthralled by a recording of a seminar with Ernest Gellner); and most helpfully for teachers of social theory, extremely lucid, well-organized introductions to various social theorists and fields of inquiry (Macfarlane's rather low-key, tweedy presentations gradually seduce).

Right now I'm in the middle of a fascinating presentation by the anthropologist Piers Vitebski, recorded by Macfarlane, on love, death, and forgetting.



In part Vitebski recounts, orally and via his own videorecordings, the shamanistic practices of the Sora of India, who rely on holy men (but mostly holy women) to channel the spirits of their dead loved ones in order to talk to them. As I was reflecting on the dilemmas of the ethnographer regarding, say, the suspensions of judgment and disbelief necessary to do this kind of fieldwork (I'm guessing these are pretty naive reflections for anybody more familiar with ethnographic methodology), I was suddenly reminded of our own practices of mourning and remembrance: is not the most salient characteristic of all our recent most successful memorials the fact that they allow the bereaved the chance to speak to the dead?