Author Page for Paul Campos

The best Simpsons episodes

In honor of the show’s 500th episode, the Guardian conducted a reader poll to pick the top ten, all of which not surprisingly came from the program’s first decade (yes I too haven’t seen an episode in many years).

A few personal favorites:

Tree house of Horror VII:

Kodos: It’s true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system. You have to vote for one of us.
Man 1: He’s right, this is a two-party system.
Man 2: Well I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.

Bart Sells His Soul

Lisa: Hmmm, Pablo Neruda said “Laughter is the language of the soul.”
Bart [obviously offended]: I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

Mr. Burns Runs For Mayor

Mr. Burns: This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.
Smithers: You are noble and poetic in defeat, sir.

Lisa’s Rival

Dr. Taylor: Hi Lisa. I’m Alison’s father, Professor Taylor. I’ve heard great things about you.
Lisa: Oh really? I…
Dr. Taylor: Oh, don’t be modest. I’m glad we have someone who can join us in our anagram game.
Alison Taylor: We take proper names and rearrange the letters to form a description of that person.
Dr. Taylor: Like, er… oh, I don’t know, uh… Alec Guinness.
Alison Taylor: [thinking] Genuine class.
Dr. Taylor: Ho ho, very good. Alright Lisa, um… Jeremy Irons.
Lisa: [looks worried] Jeremy’s… iron.
Dr. Taylor: Mm hmm, well, that’s… very good… for a first try. You know what? I have a ball. Perhaps you’d like to bounce it?

Homer v. the 18th Amendment:

Homer: To alcohol . . . the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.

Shary Bobbins: (basically the whole episode)

Shary: If there’s a task that must be done,
Don’t turn your tail and run,
Don’t pout, don’t sob,
Just do a half-assed job!

If… you… cut every corner
It is really not so bad,
Everybody does it,
Even mom and dad.
If nobody sees it,
Then nobody gets mad,
Bart: It’s the American way!

Shary: The policeman on the beat
Needs some time to rest his feet.
Wiggum: Fighting crime is not my cup of tea!
Shary: And the clerk who runs the store
Can charge a little more
For meat!
Apu: For meat!
Shary: And milk!
Apu: And milk!
Both: From 1984!

Shary: If… you… cut every corner,
You’ll have more time for play,
Shary & OFF: It’s the American waaaaay!

You Only Move Twice:

4th Grade Teacher: [On Bart's first day in his new school the teacher discovers he can't read cursive handwriting] So, you never learned cursive?
Bart: Well, I know “hell” and “damn” and “get ben…”
4th Grade Teacher: No, no! Cursive handwriting! Script! Do you know multiplication tables? Long division?
Bart: I know *of* them.
4th Grade Teacher: [Unimpressed] Hmm.

Lisa the Vegetarian

Lisa: When will all those fools learn that you can be perfectly healthy simply eating vegetables, fruits, grains and cheese.
Apu: Oh, cheese!
Lisa: You don’t eat cheese, Apu?
Apu: No I don’t eat any food that comes from an animal.
Lisa: Ohh, then you must think I’m a monster!
Apu: Yes indeed I do think that. But, I learned long ago Lisa to tolerate others rather than forcing my beliefs on them. You know you can influence people without badgering them always.

And of course “Meat and You” (from the educational film series “Resistance is Futile”):

Which schools give you a better chance to become POTUS than to play in an NBA game?

Clearly, Harvard qualifes.

Even if we only count graduating from Harvard College, and not the law and business schools, we’ve got John Q. Adams, Hayes, (whoops, he actually went to Kenyon and then HLS), the two Roosevelts, and JFK.

Others?

In re Santorum

I confess to having paid almost no attention to the GOP “race,” in part because my two favorite prognosticators of such things have been saying for quite some time that there was no longer as a practical matter any question about the outcome. This, however, makes me wonder a bit. If Santorum is leading Romney by more than 2 to 1 among Republicans in Romney’s home state (a state in which Romney’s father was elected governor once upon a time on the Socialist Worker’s Party ticket) does this suggest it’s time to rethink his inevitability (assuming Gingrich drops out soon I suppose)?

Stigma and Silence

In his book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the sociologist Erving Goffman makes a distinction between virtual social identity and actual social identity. A person’s virtual social identity is made up of those attributes which are assumed by others to be a normal part of one’s make-up, given who one is supposed to be. When a gap between one’s virtual and actual social identity becomes known to others, and this gap is socially discrediting, the person in such a situation is stigmatized by the “normals” — that is, by those who do not suffer from a gap between their virtual and actual social identities. A stigmatized person has a spoiled identity: that is, he or she suffers the consequences that follow from the disclosure of the gap between what society expects that person to be, and what the person actually is. Read more…

The empty idea of private property

I suppose very few non-lawyers have ever heard of Shelley v. Kraemer, and more than a few lawyers would need to be reminded about the case’s substance as well. Shelley involved a racially restrictive private real estate covenant (a contractual promise between a buyer and seller of land which also binds successors of the buyer), that limited ownership of a residential property to people not of “the Negro or Mongolian race.” JUSTICE GRAMSCI ruled that:

In granting judicial enforcement of the restrictive agreements in these cases, the States have denied petitioners the equal protection of the laws and that, therefore, the action of the state courts cannot stand.

This decision essentially ignored the state action doctrine: the doctrinal principle that constitutional rights only protect people against government, rather than private, action. If the state action doctrine were to be interpreted to apply to the enforcement of “private” rights generally, this would would mean that, as a practical matter, there would be no state action doctrine. In this sense Shelley can be interpreted as a remarkably radical ruling. Extending its logic generally would mean that any time a private party tried to use the power of the state to do something that the state itself would be barred from doing — such as, for example, ejecting a person from a premises because of his race — the state would be barred from doing so.

Shelley was never extended in that way, and it remains an outlier ruling, that can’t be integrated with the standard state action doctrine. But the principle at its base — that the enforcement of “private” rights by state violence, i.e., the law — is ultimately a form of government action, is a potentially powerful one.

In this regard, consider Gov. Chris Christie’s remarks about how civil rights activists would have been happy to have state-wide referenda on civil rights issues in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. I have a piece here about the apparent historical ignorance that underlies the evident absurdity of that claim. I think it’s useful to remember that the patron saints of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, fiercely opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, not only or even primarily on the basis of states’ rights arguments, but more particularly on the basis of arguments about the sanctity of private property.

Such arguments are a good example of a peculiar blindness to which many libertarians are prone. After all, in a context such as the Jim Crow South, “private” property meant the right to use the power of the state to enforce a state-sanctioned racial caste system. In this crucial sense, there was nothing “private” about it. “Liberty,” in this context, meant the liberty to use state violence to enforce the existing racial hierarchy. Under such circumstances, it should be especially clear that the line between the “public” and the “private” spheres is in a crucial sense always something of an illusion.

Ideology and legitimation

“Ideology” can mean a number of things. I’m using it here in the sense of the received consciousness of a particular social order, which legitimates that order and helps reproduce it. The lawyer and sociologist David Riesman aptly described how ideological modes of thought produce a kind of “sincere” mental state that allows someone to habitually believe his own propaganda. A dominant ideology generates a set of views that distort social reality in a particular way: in a way which advances the economic interests of the dominant group, without the members of the group becoming conscious of the fact that they believe what they believe because it is in their self-interest to believe it.

A simple example might be how the ideology of free enterprise capitalism in early 21st century America creates a sincere belief in the mind of a hedge fund manager that paying himself a salary of one billion dollars, which is then taxed at a lower rate than the salary of the average American full-time worker, is wealth maximizing for society as a whole, and therefore by definition a good thing. Read more…

Everybody’s in show biz

Email from a reader (published with permission of the author):

This email will seem to you like the least surprising thing in the world, which makes it ever more tragic. Read more…

It figures a guy named Fielder would end up as somebody’s DH

Per the Twitter, the Tigers have just signed Prince Fielder to a 9-year $214 million deal. Since Detroit already has a pretty good first baseman who is also signed to a long-term megadeal, this means there’s either a trade for Cabrera in the works or that Dave Dombrowski has read The Obesity Myth.

Breaking . . . supposedly Cabrera has agreed to move to DH. Can Fielder, you know, field? I’ve only seen him hit home runs.

Also, what about Victor Martinez? He has a torn ACL, and is supposed to be out for all of 2012, and isn’t expected to be able to catch again. He’s basically going to be a DH for the rest of his career.

Could Cabrera move back to third? He has soft hands and a decent arm but at this point his mobility is slightly better than a sleeper sofa’s. This must be what it’s like to root for the Yankees. In other words, fun!

A True Story

I’ve been reading William Ian Miller’s latest book, Losing It, which is about getting old:

Occasionally I flatter myself that I am earning my keep, contributing more than I am consuming. And unlike those football players and boxers who do not know when to quit, professors, like me, cannot be cut. Tenure and age discrimination laws let us keep working, which somehow does not seem the right word. Besides, there are always a couple of lazy colleagues whose real contribution to the enterprise is to make less lazy ones feel like we deliver value for the price. Never mind that my keep would fund four entry-level scholars in history or anthropology who are now unemployed: I still have kids of my own to feed, though I might be feeding them with someone else’s. Self-deception and wishful thinking, looking on the bright side in a self-interested way, keep us conveniently color blind to our real value, seeing black when the ink is red. Or simply not caring if it is red, when we see it.

As Miller’s mordant take on his subject makes clear, the inevitable decline of our faculties forces all of us who will be both lucky and privileged enough to have a real choice in the matter to grapple with the problem of knowing, or not knowing, when to quit. Read more…

Is it Very Serious or is it satire?

You make the call!

I want to be coldly analytical, not moralize, here. I want to tell you what Mr. Gingrich’s behavior could mean for the country, not for the future of his current marriage. So, here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude—psychologically—from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

4) Two women—Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives—have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation.

Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

Working for free and class privilege

Three or four years ago, things were finally getting bad enough that even legal academics were starting to notice that a lot of our graduates seemed to be having trouble getting jobs. In fact the only real change in the situation was that a bunch of big firms laid off a lot of junior associates and deferred many of their new hires. At the vast majority of law schools such developments affected a very small portion of the graduating class (90% of law schools send less than a quarter of their grads into big firms, and 80% send less than ten per cent), but given the obsessively hierarchical nature of our business everyone suddenly became aware that there was “a problem.” Read more…