This Friday, I’ll be leaving my home country of Kenya to visit England for this conference. I’ve never been to England and am a nervous traveler, so you can do the math: I’m not sure what to do for the five days I’ll be there without a conference to hold my hand. In other words, if you had four days in England to do whatever you wanted with, what would you do?
Remember all those older, white conservatives who were upset when I pointed out that most Sarah Palin fans were older, white conservatives? They do. The headliners of the current Tea Party Express include a few token minority participants whose presence is designed to prevent critics like me from pointing out the obvious, i.e. that the Tea Party consists of old white people who’d denounce their Medicare benefits as fascist if they had sense enough to self-reflect.
You don’t have to take my word for it: one of their token minority presences unwittingly admitted as much in a post intended, ironically enough, to prove that the Tea Party has no problem with race:
I am a black performer/activist traveling on my third national Tea Party Express tour. We just finished our rally in North Platte, Neb. Two white families asked me to hold their newborn babies and pose for pictures. Excited white grandparents who are fans of my articles and music asked me to pose for pictures with them and their grand kids. Numerous white patriots shook my hand with tears in their eyes thanked me for what I was doing for our country. A white woman who said she was 86 years old gave me a big hug in thanks for my efforts. Polatik, our young Hispanic conservative rapper, got his usual huge positive response from the mostly older white crowd. [emphasis mine]
Needless to say, trying to demonstrate that the Tea Partiers have no problem with race by saying that the “mostly older white crowd” loves its token minorities is counterproductive. But it also, and importantly, reminds us why the logic of tokenism is so pernicious: when your version of “diversity” involves placing in positions of power the one or two minority candidates who buy into your backward ideology, you’re inevitably going to end up with a host of Michael Steeles.
Creating structural incentives that level the playing field, however, allows for actual talent to rise through the ranks. Instead of establishing a system in which talent will out, conservatives would rather elevate an untalented token for P.R. reasons, which is a pretty clear indication of what they’re up to: they need to protect the future status of their own marginally talented children, and if that means having to brook the presence of a Michael Steele, really, what choice do they have?
My overstuffed inbox informs me that Jonah Goldberg is writing half-histories again, but if you can believe it, this time the argument he makes is more accurate than not:
Look, eugenics was a very complicated phenomenon. But it does not clarify the topic to insist that, contrary to mountains of evidence and common sense, that all of the progressives who subscribed to it were just wearing a conservative mask.
That’s true as far it goes—progressives who supported the study or practice of eugenics weren’t crypto-conservatives—the problem is that it doesn’t go very far:
[T]here’s no evidence provided that any conservatives supported eugenics.
Nor would you expect there to be, because the reason that conservatives opposed eugenics in particular was that they opposed science generally. Given that, at the turn of the last century, eugenics required a belief in some sort of form of evolutionary theory—not Darwinism, strictly speaking, but a pre-synthesis amalgam of mutation theory, Lamarckism, and orthogenesis—it should come as no surprise to anyone that then, as now, many conservative opposed eugenics on religious grounds. G.K. Chesteron’s principle complaint in Eugenics and Other Evils was that regulating who could marry would undermine the traditional family, and some of his examples are eerily prescient:
Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them “The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly. (13)
Death panels, anyone? Granted, Goldberg is more than happy to occupy this moral high ground, coinciding as it does with the moral positions of contemporary conservatives; however, he downplays the obvious corollary, i.e. that in the name of what we now call family values, earlier generations of conservatives would have severely curbed scientific progress.
I’m not saying that eugenics per se was laudable, but it was necessary to the furtherance of scientific knowledge: it validated human society and the human body as objects of scientific inquiry. Conservatives opposed this because it removed humanity from its pedestal of special creation. To thinkers like Chesterton, treating humans like animals was patently absurd, which is why he characterized eugenic proposals circa 1910 as emanating from a period in which
Mr. Bernard Shaw and others were considering the idea that to breed a man like a cart-horse was the true way to attain higher civilization, of intellectual magnanimity and sympathetic insight, which may be found in cart-horses. (ii)
So why, then, were liberals more likely to support eugenics? Because conservatives clung fast to their retrograde and anthropocentric beliefs. Goldberg downplays this, and rightly so, because opposing science on principle isn’t a particularly praiseworthy attitude, and his game here is to smudge the historical record such that the only legible items are those that condemn the forebears of his ideological opponents. He offers no affirmative argument for his political kin because, I suspect, he knows that there’s not much of one to be made.
Of course, he also ignores the vast body of unscientific theories of personal and cultural inheritance that were embraced and vigorously defended by social conservatives. Concurrent with the rise of the eugenics movement in America was a vogue for historical novels of the Revolutionary period—at least 141 novels set during that time were published between 1898 and 1903—the majority of which trafficked in talk of blood and breed, i.e. the unscientific counterparts of eugenics that just so happened to favor those with financial, social or political capital. Isn’t it funny how this branch of conservativism never makes it into books about creeping fascism?
Lame titular puns never augur well, and this post is no exception, as it concerns something Sarah Palin said in Searchlight, Nevada yesterday. Before a crowd of millions, Palin attacked the “lame-stream media” for being a mixed metaphor, then said precisely the opposite of what I hope she intended to, insisting that “telling people that their arms are their votes is not inciting violence.”
In this case, the verb “to be” is a linking verb that establishes the equivalence of the nouns to its left and right. For example, in the previous sentence, I established that “the verb ‘to be’” and “linking verbs” are nominal equivalents. Think of it as an equal sign: you can write “Obama is the President” or “The President is Obama” without changing the content of the sentence because
Obama = The President
So when Palin said “their arms are their votes,” she may not have been trying to incite violence, but she was saying
arms = votes
That equivalence is best understood in the language of action film clichés, e.g. “Our arms are our votes, and we’re gonna have us an election.” Palin’s supporters will contend that she’s merely explaining a metaphor, and one unfortunate consequence of doing so is using verbs of equivalence to explain what something represents, e.g.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, from the universe of potential metaphors, Palin’s people went with the view through a telescopic weapon sight. The crosshairs may be metaphorical, certainly, and what they imply—that people outside a district should contribute money to “take out” the Democrat elected by the people of a district—may be antithetical to the concept of a representative democracy, but the real issue here is the initial decision to employ a sniper’s scope as political imagery.
But honestly, because he’s proven it’s possible to be gainfully employed in academia and functionally illiterate, I can’t even manage a few moments of schadenfreude. Remember that post I wrote yesterday? The one in which I clearly indicated that I’d condensed a thread’s worth of insults into a nonsensical stream of ad hominem?
Donald Douglas not only thinks Jeff Goldstein wrote it, he considers it to be a “deliciously devastating slam.” I’ll take the compliment on its face—the art of collage is an art—but the fact that someone employed by an institution of higher learning found that paragraph compelling is, I think we can all agree, probably the most embarrassing thing someone employed by an institution of higher learning could ever do. The only reasonable response to such a brazen display of idiocy is to take a screen-shot of it and put it on the internet forever:
By now, you know how I feel about Mark Millar; but until I read Nemesis, I couldn’t have accounted for why my dislike has always been so visceral. Turns out, all I needed was to witness his treatment of a character I have more than a fleeting investment in to figure it out. For those unfamiliar with it, the premise of the book is, according to Millar:
It pisses me off that people I attack without cause think I’m a jerk. If my former professor didn’t want to be associated with what I’m writing now, he never should have worked with me then. His request to have his name removed my site is political censorship. OUTLAW!
Goldstein’s old professor listed “a propensity for stifling opposition” as one of the reasons he wanted to distance himself from the site, but as Goldstein notes, that’s nonsense. Consider, for example, the condensed version of the rational arguments with which he and his commenters engaged my argument the other day:
I have a confession: I have never watched or listened to Glenn Beck for any sustained period of time. I’d read transcriptions of his rambling monologues and seen parodies of his lunatic shtick, but until today, I’d avoided prolonged exposure to the Glenn Beck Experience. Would that I could still say the same. As a public service to anyone else out there who might be tempted to try and understand his appeal, I offer the following transcript of the horrors I witnessed condensed down to their rhetorical appeals:
If you’re Jeff Goldstein, you declare yourself to be way cooler than everyone else; if you’re Darleen Click, you draw a cartoon in which the President rapes a woman, then tells her that he and friends will be back to rape her again later. In the clinical sense, Click is the more interesting case because she thinks that the only problem with her cartoon is that it’s racist. I repeat: she drew a cartoon in which the punch line is a gang rape and the only potential problem with it she can see is that it might be racist. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s plenty racist—plays into tropes as old as slavery and everything—but the punch line is that the President and his associates are going to gang-rape the Statue of Liberty with, I kid you not, immigration reform.
In service of the cheapest of laughs, Click asserts that the statue that symbolizes America’s commitment to the tired, poor, huddled masses of the world is about to be raped because of the President’s commitment to those selfsame masses-yearning-to-be-free. Talk about your industrial grade ideological incoherence—and I would, except for the fact that Goldstein, never one to be upstaged on his own blog, told a woman that the only way she would ever be cool was if someone raped her with an icicle. That’s not true, though. Goldstein never said that. What he said, and I quote, was:
It goes without saying that John Nolte will write something like this:
Annually we are showered with Leftist films created by morally superior beings who lecture us on human rights, civil rights, feminism, lookism, racism and any other “ism” they can conceive, when in real life they’re the very worst in all of these departments.
He honestly believes that because some people on the left are sexist or racist, everyone on the right is morally superior despite, you know, supporting policies designed to protect the interests of white males. In this case, his ire is raised by a New York Post article about the casting call for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie:
The filmmakers sent out a casting call last week seeking “beautiful female fit models. Must be 5ft7in-5ft8in, size 4 or 6, no bigger or smaller. Age 18-25. Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants.” And they warn that there’ll be a “show and tell” day. To make sure LA talent scouts don’t get caught in a “booby trap,” potential lassies will have to undergo a Hollywood-style jiggle-your-jugs test and jog for judges.
Nolte is outraged on behalf of surgically-enhanced women everywhere:
This isn’t some sleazy porn peddler in the valley doing this, this is…Disney. DISNEY is going to subject and exploit young women desperate to be stars to the indignity of a booby ”show and tell.” DISNEY is going to have them jog in place for producers and casting agents in order to keep score of the bounciness of their breasts.
Not only is this a case of discrimination against women whose only crime was undergoing a dangerous surgical procedure in order to enhance their appeal to sexists like Nolte, it involves a particularly dehumanizing “booby ‘show and tell’” in which woman will be asked to “jog in place for producers and casting agents in order to keep score of the bounciness of their breasts.” How does he know this? It says so right in the actual, unexpurgated casting call:
Must be 5’7-5’8, Size four or six – no bigger or smaller. Age 18 to 25. Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants. This is a show and tell of costumes with the director and the producers. Plan on an entire day of trying on clothes and being photographed.
Sticklers might insist that the prepositional phrase “of costumes” modifies “show and tell,” and that there’s nothing in the casting call about actresses being asked to “jog in place” so producers and casting agents can “keep score of the bounciness of their breasts.” Since it’s not in the casting call, where did this idea of a “booby ‘show and tell’” in which a parade of topless women jiggle only what the good Lord gave them come from? Where else?
The imagination of John Nolte.
The man can’t even defend hypothetical women without undressing them in his mind. This isn’t to say the casting call isn’t sexist, because like most items relating to Hollywood and the female form, it clearly is. The point here, as usual, is that conservatives who like to think of themselves as morally superior to liberals when it comes to racial or gender equality always reveal themselves to be purveyors of the very ills they decry. In this respect, Nolte is no different than affirmative action opponents who offer, as proof that we live in a post-racial society, the fact that there’s a nigger in the White House.
Scott already covered the awful news, but if anyone is worth a follow-up post, it’s Alex Chilton. Like most of my contemporaries, I came to admire Alex Chilton through his professional admirers; and like everyone who came of age before the Internet, what I knew about him consisted of a host of believable rumors. I’ve never tried to verify those rumors, though, because it was their believability that mattered more than their truth. For example, Alex Chilton indirectly named one of the most important albums of the 1990s via the resilience of a particular lyrical gesture: the sincerely feigned grand statement. On “September Gurls,” he sings:
The noise from the right about the constitutionality of “deeming” beggars description. Consider Limbaugh:
If [House Democrats] pass this using the Slaughter solution—in other words, literally shredding the Constitution.
I decline to comment on his claim that passing this bill by “deeming” it passed will literally cause someone to walk into the National Archives and ribbon the Constitution, because the point of Limbaugh’s literal metaphor is plain enough: if the majority of the House votes to “deem” the Senate version of the bill passed, Democrats would have skirted the Constitutional requirement that, to become a law, a bill must “have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” as “determined by Yeas and Nays,” i.e. a simple majority.
How would the Democrats have accomplished this dastardly unconstitutional deed?
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
