Whiskey Fire

We Participate in the Shit

So the clock on the old computer tells me there's only about a half hour left for Patriot Day. I hope you've celebrated this glorious occasion with all the pomp and festivity it deserves, by singing Patriot Day carols, giving Patriot Day gifts, and, I dunno, jerking off to Powerline, or whatever the fuck else it is you're supposed to do on "Patriot Day."   

You have to hand it to the Bushites and the wingnut hordes, and (of course) their media enablers. They've not only managed to turn one of the most traumatic single days in American history into a machine for short term political gain, a Zozobra wheeled out to gin up support for their insane foreign policy jihads -- they've also managed to turn the deaths of 3,000 people into retarded, badly done kitsch. People jumped out of windows to their deaths... so, well, fuck empathy and decency and basic humanity and all that candyass bullshit, c'mon kids, let's put on a show.

I refer of course to  ABC's The Poop to 9/11. Ack.

Not that I watched it. Not merely because it seemed like a pack of childish lies, but also because it looked even more boring and inane and insensitive than the usual run of the mill network garbage. I was not so much driven to outrage by the crassness of the whole dishonest spectacle than I was driven to sullen, vituperative grouchiness. For one thing, that is my normal mood anyway.  For another, I was blugeoned to numbness by the sheer pointless bloodymindedness of the entire misbegotten enterprise. It was not the lying, it was the schlock, to parody late 1990s discourse entire. 

I mean, I in fact disagreed with Digby, who said

The reason this matters so much, and why Democrats are so apoplectic at the way ABC has handled this material, is that popular culture has a way of inculcating certain concepts into people's minds, especially young minds, far more effectively than talking head programs or earnest debates among political bloggers and columnists. This is the kind of thing that could taint the debate for generations if it takes hold.

Obviously, the miniseries "matters," and should be denounced and jeered at. But I don't think it will influence generations to come; hell, I don't think it will influence anything but ABC executives this week taking lots of Maalox before they're asked to open a vein for greenlighting this televisual abortion. 

TV miniseries like this used to be very influential. But then, that was only for a fairly brief period of time, a golden or at least bong-drenched age when cable was still in its infancy and the networks bestrode the American cultural landscape like a colossus, albeit a tight-jeaned, crotch-bulged, feather-haired Bo Duke colossus. I refer of course to the 1970s.

Probably the most influential TV miniseries, like, evar! was Roots. (Actually, I can't think of any others that really mattered. Maybe I'm just whiffing mentally. But Roots certainly was a phenomenon. There were lots of minseries after that, but they were all biting Roots's jock.) And how do I know Roots was influential? Because everyone of a certain age knows who the fuck Kunta Kinte was.

Sure! But then, beyond that, the question of what exactly Roots influenced, and how much, is an open one. Aside from Kunta Kinte, what else do people remember about Roots? Uh... It's that slavery sucked major ass, and thank FUCKING CHRIST we don't do that cracker assed slavery shit anymore.

Roots succeeded because in even the most regressive parts of the country it was maybe ten years late for real controversy by the time it was made. Even the most head-up-the-ass bigoted bastards in the country in 1977 (and I lived next door to some of them) would have looked stupid trying to oppose Roots on straight-up racist grounds -- at least on network TV. Roots was not, you see, for all its virtues, any more of a challenge to institutional racism than was the runaway success of What's Happening!!, the show that broke the superfulous exclamation-point barrier and dared to rip the lid off the terrifying epidemic of black Californian adolescents  illegally taping Doobie Brothers concerts.

The point is, aside from wholly gratuitous Rerun-bashing, that network television in general does not break debilitating social or cultural taboos. That's an illusion. Rather, it waits until they're already broken, and then more or less gingerly moves in and acts "brave" by confirming that they're indeed defunct by blessing them with the Sanctifying Grace of a Very Special Network Event. Which is not to say that Roots sucked, or was not worth doing, or anything similar.  It's just to say that network television would never have filmed the thing unless it were already assured in advance that by doing this "groundbreaking" miniseries they would be showered with plaudits for acting all "groundbreaking." In other words, if other, actually brave people had not already stood up and risked having their asses hung from trees for defying American racism, and thus prepared the grounds for the eventual discrediting of at least overt, John-Birchy racism in "respectable" American cultural discourse, Roots would not have been made.

So, to get back to this 9/11 miniseries debacle. First, the evidence is mounting that the disaster was perpetrated by a gang of wingnut loons. If so (it's so), what is impressive is how badly they botched this shit. Though it makes sense, weirdly... I'd bet you a nickel that these assholes remember and still resent the success of Roots, because it seems like they're trying to ape it -- right down to the nonsense about having Scholastic provide cartoonish shit to schools, just like they did back in the day. I certainly remember the stuff they gave me when I was a PS 41 lad, all those handouts about Roots. Of course, I remember the stuff they gave us about a Very Special episode of The White Shadow even better, because it was funnier. But still.

More to the point, networks are just not what they used to be: capturing the high grounds of ABC's Entertainment Through Joy Division hardly means ultimate victory in the culture war when everyone has the handy alternative of cable, not to mention hot n' cold running Internets porn.

Network miniseries follow the zeitgeist. They don't, and can't create it, though they can reinforce it. This wingnuttery is stillborn. Nobody who already isn't a right-wing wanker wants any part of their embarassing 9/11 pornography and masturbatory historical revisionism.

Football Heroes

Lou Holtz is God.

I really wish I could link to this... anyone who missed Holtz talking about "whiffle dust" on ESPN's College Gameday Final missed a real sort of Crispin Glover moment. Wow.

Hidden Longings No Longer Concealed

I've wanted to get back to the topic of Gunter Grass and his recent admission that he served in a Waffen SS tank division instead of the regular army, but  I have had no time or energy  to put together anything spectacular or even coherent. But what the hell, it's a blog, here's what I'm thinking.

I just reread Dog Years, and managed to confirm something I'd kinda-sorta remembered. The narrator of "Love Letters," the brilliant but self-confessedly emotionally baffled Harry Liebenau, belongs to the fictional analogue of Grass's real life generation. He is too young to serve in the initial phases of WWII, but old enough to get in at just about the time when it is becoming clear that Germany is going to lose. Harry's military career in the novel mirrors Grass's in real life. He becomes a member of a Danzig anti-aircraft battery; he applies for duty in a submarine, because it seems a thing to do, though this ends up not going anywhere; he next finds himself drafted and in a tank on the Western front. From there he becomes a prisoner of war.

No, Harry does not say that he was in an SS armored division, and of course, fiction is not fact. But I thought it was interesting that since we know that Grass mines his own life heavily for his own work, nobody really seems to go back to especially the Danzig trilogy to see what's there about what we can now say he may have already "admitted." Though I'll concede that I'm of course limited to English-language sources, and that because I'm a lazy blogger I haven't really looked beyond a few Google searches.

Not that this would change the meaning of the work... though maybe it might confirm it. Dog Years for instance is about German manias and the national past; it is about gulity secrets. One wonders if even now Eddi Amsel is calmly dredging some river for the knife his friend Gunter threw there, after helplessly, viciously, furiously yelling "Sheeny!" Now that would be something.

The thing that I can't quite figure out is why Grass didn't confess this for so long, because in some ways, it is not quite a big deal. The Waffen SS was the SS, but Grass was in what appears to have been military branch. He wasn't a concentration camp guard; he was not shooting political prisoners. Nobody has any evidence that he committed any atrocities. Also, I've seen nothing to dispute his claim that he was drafted. The Waffen SS chose him, he did not choose it. The more one looks into this, the more it seems a bit of, well... a dud of a confession. So, why? I really have no idea.

Many people have proposed their own answers -- answers which, with all the miraculousness that is usual in such controversies, all seem to magically confirm their originators' own prejudices, preconceptions, and desired cultural positions. The most entertaining one available in English of course belongs to Christopher Hitchens, who ends up warning Grass that he will end up remembered as a "bit of a bloody fool." One notes in passing that these words are in fact pretty likely to end up written on Hitch's own tombstone, or at least peed into the snow that softly covers his boozy grave.

Anyway, the two simplest (or basest) explanations don't seem to hold water. The first is that he is trying to drum up interest and sales for his memoirs. I sort of doubt this. He's won the fucking Nobel Prize. Maybe he spent the entire award money on hookers and blow, but even so, he was pretty much assured a decent return for his next book no matter what. The second explanation, that he was worried about what the upcoming release of his Stasi files would show, would seem to have been refuted by John Leonard:

anyone could have learned his secret by looking in the files at his 1946 discharge form from the U.S. Army Marienbad prison compound, on which, right above his own signature, POW No. 31G6078785 was described as a marksman for the Tenth SS Tank Division “Frundsberg.”

The Stasi explanation is indeed silly. It assumes that the Americans would not have known his whole service record, which further assumes that he could or would have lied to them about this as a POW. And it goes further to state that the Americans would have cared enough for unknown reasons to keep it private. Finally, we would be required to believe that Grass is a total fool who forgot about his POW existence entirely, as well as all the information he knew the Americans had and would have no reason to hide, but became panicked when he read about the Stasi files, about whose contents he could know nothing precise.

Right.

Leonard's answer to the "why" question is "He was ashamed," as Grass said. Seems about right to me. (By the way, I'd still consider Grass something of a hero: most of my heroes are deeply flawed, and many of them could be considered total assholes. So...?)

Leonard's article also follows along with the same logic as my previous post on this. My earlier post is a lot better than his article, though. The poor fellow, outstripped by a mere blogger.

Weird

Really weird.

Karl Rove says he's not The Exorcist.

Rove, the Bush political shaman Democrats love to demonize, enlisted a trio of clergymen to exorcize Hillary Rodham Clinton's left-wing spirit when he moved into her West Wing office in 2001, according to an unflattering new biography.

"I talked to Karl; he said it's not true and, beyond that, he will have no comment," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

Clinton smiled and shook her head in disbelief yesterday when asked about the tale, which appears in "The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power," by James Moore and Wayne Slater.

"I'm speechless," she finally said, heading toward a Senate elevator.

Later, Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines quipped, "If the story is true ... they sure did exorcize any lingering competence right out of the building."

Deal Hudson, a former Fordham University professor Rove enlisted to woo Catholic voters, told the authors that he witnessed the exorcism, which he described as "an actual liturgical ceremony."

He did not return a message seeking comment.

I got nothin'.

 

I'm Not Here to Drink All the Beer

Via Roy, we discover that the Wingnut Masses are engaged in a Mass Action, pledging themselves to boycott beer-brewing giants Miller and Anheuser-Busch because they refuse to nuke Mexico City. Or something. It's not altogether clear. Anyway, the delightful Ms. Malkin bubbles:

... Anheuser-Busch supports pro-illegal alien policies, too.

So if you're going to drink beer, make it yourself.

Myself, for the duration of this crisis I swear to do my part by drinking lots of imported French wine. Take that, Islamofascism!

You Can Be Anyone They Told You to

My question:

What accounts for the success of modern "conservatism"? How have "movement conservatives" accrued so much political and cultural power, even as they labor under the handicap of being in fact utterly loathsome, spittle-flecked geeks?   

My answer:

Their success rests on a disturbingly pleasurable, yet freakish, essentially self-inflicted masturbatory hysteria, one that has been frantically scotch-taped together into an asinine, if weirdly coherent, wholly self-reinforcing demonology. Eeek, "liberals." Grrr-oss! What fun!

(Hark! to shrieks as in manner of crowded 9-Year-Old Girl slumber party)

(This is of course an oversimplification, but, like vulgar materialism, it manages to explain at least 90% of the actual facts -- not a bad batting average for a blog post. So, carrying on, then.)

What I mean is that today's conservatives don't seem to care about articulating a positive ideology so much as they want to tell insane fairytales about Evil Liberals, who are supposed to be all-powerful and everywhere. Look at any "conservative" blog. Listen to right-wing radio. Check out the speeches of any self-avowedly "conservative" politician. The majority of their bullshit is making up spooky ghost stories about "liberals" and what they allegedly "believe." It's crazy.

Take my beloved Maximos. He is, yes, a 45th-tier wingnut (albeit arguably, and impressively, the worst writer currently going on the Internet). But his example is instructive. Max is just bright enough to grasp that the "neocons" are nuts, on the quite plausible grounds that they have yet to advocate any single policy that has ever in fact worked as advertised. Pat him on the head, folks. We have high hopes that he'll be tying his own shoes by Thanksgiving. But he is still capable of spewing  bizarre and offensive gibberish about how liberals are philosophically stymied by age of sexual consent laws -- because of strawman shit that he just made up, essentially. Oh, and the neocons are all liberals anyway, luckily.

Or take this absolute fucking gem of a post, where Max comes out strongly against nuking Mecca, and good for him: "Well, some things must be taken off the table, lest we, to the ruin of our souls and, ultimately, our civilization itself, succumb to the temptation to will evil that some good may come of it, to act in accordance with the (false) belief that the nobility of our ends sanctifies any means we choose toward their realization." FUCK yeah! Feel the mellow. But then he harshes the vibe: "The rigourous exclusion of Islam and its adherents from Western lands is a morally licit solution to the dilemma of Islam and its fundamental incompatibility with even a Western civilization lapsing into its senescence. It is the only means by which we can avoid losing either our civilization or our souls (and then our civilization)."

Gotcha. Dropping nuclear weapons on  Muslim nations: bad! Forcibly deporting all Muslims from all Western nations, and making Islam illegal in all Western "lands"? What a swell idea! There's not even a downside! What could possibly go wrong!

Find an enemy. Buy a thesaurus. Link to RedState. Denounce the MSM. Become a well-regarded ignorant little shit, fuck up the world a little bit more, get a link from Malkin, wet your shorts.

And so it goes.

I find this sort of thing completely disgraceful. That nice Marshall Wittman fellow is ever so smart. Who would ever want to parody him. How shocking.

Whatever happened to civilty. I weep.

Big School!

Continuing from below. In this article Kevin Carey argues that complaints about the Dept. of Education's push to gather information on individual students are overblown, and that "elite colleges" are not adequately providing information to the public about how well they are actually teaching students. I dealt with the privacy thing already; now I'll discuss the other side, about whether or not college students are learning and how that might be measured, and how that data might be disseminated. It's a more tangled issue than Carey lets on.

I am in general sympathetic to the argument that private and public & private universities with competitive admissions standards don't necessarily do a better job of teaching than say, community colleges. Both 4-year and 2-year schools rely heavily (too heavily) on adjunct faculty to staff their bread-and-butter freshman classes. In any given place, nearby CCs and universities are likely to draw on the same pool of qualified or at least acceptable adjuncts, So, for many of her courses, a first year CC student could be getting exactly the same instructors as a first year student at the Big School ten miles away, and be paying a quarter of the tuition. Heck, if the CC is employing some of the Big School's grad students, the CC will be employing the ones who are more experienced -- an entering MA student could be the teacher of record at the Big School, but not at the CC. As for full-time faculty, well, full-timers at a CC will obviously be more committed to teaching at the 100 and 200 levels. Moreover, given the tight academic job market, especially in the humanities, more and more PhDs and ABD's (all but dissertation) are turning to CCs as an employment option, further lessening any gap between the education on offer at a Big School and that on offer at a CC. So if the question is that of deciding at what sorts of places students learn the most, well, I'd agree with Carey that "elite" status is not necessarily a guarantee of superiority.

Of course, at the same time, if you get into Yale and can pay for it, sure, you should go there and not to a CC. Brand names matter -- and even if you emerge from an Ivy League school a thoroughgoing intellectual and ethical mediocrity, you can still be president someday!

Ahem.

Moving back to Carey's article. Carey acknowledges the problem inherent in figuring out what schools do a better job of helping schools learn the most is the incredible diversity not only of institutions, but of subjects offered within individual colleges. By comparison, high school curricula are relatively standard throughout the nation, making standardized testing at least a theoretical possibility (though even there, there are of course problems, but that's another topic). Carey sugests however that there is a way out of this mess:

Instead of testing discrete pieces of knowledge, test the higher-order critical thinking, analysis, and communication skills that all college students should learn (and which employers value most). The Collegiate Learning Assessment, recently developed by a subsidiary of the RAND Corporation, does exactly that. Instead of filling in bubbles with a No. 2 pencil, CLA test-takers write lengthy essays, analyzing documents and critiquing arguments.

This approach is usually called "value added assessment"; that is, you test students when they first arrive and then you test them as they leave, trying to measure what "value" has been "added" to your students' thinking abilities in the 4 years you've been inflicting knowledge upon them. And it sounds great. (A lot of schools have developed their own such instruments, and I've heard and read a lot of material on how vaulable they think they are.)

But there are problems with this approach. One practical issue that really throws a wrench into the works is student motivation. Think about it. The CLA test Carey is talking about is not tied to a student's grade in any subject, and indeed, is meant to measure the institution's performance, and not so much the student's. OK. So you're a senior in college, and an administrator one day comes up to you and says, "hey, sport! I have an hours-long extended exam for you to take, where you will write lengthy essays, analyze documents, and critique arguments! And there's really nothing in it for you personally! Doesn't that sound like FUN!"

Maybe you can spot the difficulty here. Even if the exam is made mandatory, that doesn't mean students will care about doing their best on it if there's no real incentive for them to try their hardest. If it's turned into a graduation requirement, you risk telling, say, a student with a B average they can't get a diploma just because he turns into a puddle for standardized tests. I've honestly heard of colleges resorting to bribery ("take this exam and we'll give you an i-Pod!"). But that's hardly ideal.

Another serious problem is that since "higher order thinking" isn't really a subject, after the test is administered there is no clear way to tell just what exactly it is your institution is doing well or is screwing up. Suppose the results come back and they're less stellar than you'd hoped. OK. Well, what do you do then? How do you know what classes to change?  Your students write crummy essays -- is that because your English department is staffed by dope fiends, or because students only need to scrape a C in freshman comp and then never have to write another sentence in any other course ever again? The little rats can't think logically -- so who needs to step up, math, history, physics? In other words, it's not clear what exactly the results of these exams are really telling you about what it is you're doing. Whether it's to fix problems or to recognize strengths, you're left with guesswork. And who's to say that any change you might then implement won't make matters worse?

This vagueness is also why using such exams to make comparisons between different colleges is at best problematic and at worst  completely misleading. Carey whiffs this point entirely. Here's the nadir of his article, in fact:

While several hundred colleges and universities have participated in the CLA, most have kept their results confidential. The University of Texas System, however, has made results public, and they're surprising. The CLA tests freshmen and seniors, gauging the amount of learning students gain during their college careers. Senior scores are also compared to the scores predicted by students' ACT or SAT results. The best Texas university by this measure isn't the flagship, highly ranked UT-Austin campus. The biggest gains are occurring at UT-San Antonio, UT-El Paso, and UT-Permian Basin, all of which are at the bottom of the U.S. News rankings.

Remember that the point of these exams is to show to what degree students improve "higher-order critical thinking, analysis, and communication skills that all college students should learn" during their higer education careers. Thus, the Texas results are not surprising at all. Of course the schools with less competitive entrance requirements show that their students make greater gains, because their students started off at a lower point. To use a metaphor, their students started at 15 and made it to 30, a 15 point gain -- and good for them. But does that mean these are better schools than UT Austin, where students began at 40 and only made it to 45, for only a 5 point improvement? Uh, no.

I'm afraid Carey here unintentionally gives a bit of the game away about why schools at any level, on any tier, are so reluctant to make the results of these sorts of assessments public: they are so easily misinterpreted. This is in fact a very serious problem. In my experience, colleges really are willing to talk about what they do; most professors will indeed bore you to tears about this if you let them (don't!). But when it comes to "assessment," well... let me put it this way. If it were not so appallingly clear that the long knives are out for American higher education on the part of certain political forces, then maybe you'd find  American higher education more forthcoming about these matters. (To be clear, I don't think Carey has such an agenda, but I think he is somewhat naive about where the pressure on academia comes from, nowadays.)

Gah

Well, that second half bit. Oh well. The O-line did better than I'd feared they would, Wright had flashes of brilliance, and the defense deserved better. This loss was less of a bitch than last year's, but still, bleah.

More posting when I get rid of this latest illness inflicted upon me by my children.

The Perfect Angels Who Monitor Your Intentions

I see that Maple Syrup Boy has linked to a piece in the Washington Monthly on higher education. I'd seen the Kevin Carey piece already, though, and it disturbed my High Equanimity. Carey confuses two issues that are in fact different. This has led to difficulties. I will unravel them.

Carey has an issue with privacy and an entirely separate but far more extended discussion of how student learning could be measured and reported. That he mashes these together is problematic. Here, he gets to the privacy issue:

The U.S. Department of Education recently asked colleges and universities to submit enrollment, graduation, and financial records for every student, in order to better calculate things like institutional graduation rates and student costs. Yet despite the fact that strict federal privacy laws would prohibit the names of individual students from ever being released, lobbyists for private colleges put on a full-court press to block the proposal, loudly denouncing it as "Orwellian" and "an assault on Americans' privacy and security in the shadow of the Fourth of July."

Um. There is some bullshit here on either side. But notice the sleight of hand. The issue is not what information will be publicly released, but what information will be collected and tabulated, or to be even more precise, who will do the collection and tabulation. Does the US Dept of Ed need the data for "every" student, or can they rely on the individual school to send them their aggregate data? That is the real bone of contention. Make up your own mind here, but the sentence above beginning "yet despite" is crap.

We can now talk about the entirely separate question of whether or not American higher education works, or does not.

We will discuss this later.