Random Observations from the AHA

I just returned from Atlanta, a city that is evidently committed to the principle that free wireless connections must not be allowed to take root anywhere. I thought I might be able to sneak in a quick Althousian post addressing the mediocre wardrobe choices that govern the historical profession, but alas . . . not a signal to be found anywhere near Peachtree Center.

My time at the convention was brief and marginal. I didn’t see any panels of great note, and I didn’t spend much time at the book exhibit. Some readers will be pleased to learn that I scored a free hotel room when a 15-year old girl in California — the daughter of a friend’s colleague — broke her ankle, preventing her mother from attending the conference at the last minute. The room, which was being used to conduct interviews, was fantastic. (Best wishes, of course, for a speedy recovery to the clumsy California teen.)

While I was in town, my friend Brett — who runs an amazing blog about pigs — took me on a tour of “Sweet Auburn,” the neighborhood built by black Atlantans after the they were more or less expelled them from the downtown area a hundred years ago. I did manage to see the gravesite of MLK and Coretta Scott King, as well as a sharp exhibit at the MLK National Historical Site on the Atlanta Race Riot, whose centennary year just ended. We dropped by the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King himself ministered and where his mother was shot to death in 1974; we saw (but didn’t tour) King’s birth home and the Atlanta Life Insurance company, founded by Alonzo Hendon in 1905; and we politely refused numerous fliers advertising some of Atlanta’s sub-elite gentlemen’s clubs. (Interestingly, one of the guys handing out fliers immediately identified us as historians. “You’re here for that historical convention, aren’t you?” he asked. I don’t know what that insight says — if anything — about Brett and me, or about historians in general, but we didn’t bother to pretend he was wrong. Nevertheless, we passed up offer and went to Daddy D’z that night instead. The barbeque probably took five years off my life, but I have no regrets.)

For all its historical attractions, the Sweet Auburn neighborhood continues to be desperately poor; as these things usually go, parts of Sweet Auburn are being tenderized for the urban gentry. Old buildings have been hollowed out, their antique facades retained to give the soon-to-be-completed condominia the aura of historical legitimacy. I’m not familiar enough with Atlanta’s contemporary political scene to add much more, but it’s always distressing to watch the trouncing of historic urban districts. It’s as if the fragmentary celebration of the past — e.g., here’s King’s birth home, here’s the Odd Fellows’ complex — provides the alibi for the wider neglect of the people who actually live there.

Also: The Detroit Lions Are Terrible, and Carrot Top Isn’t Funny

Here’s a surprise:

Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.

The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.

It’s almost enough to make me lose faith in the intellectual integrity of Glenn Reynolds.

The Meaningless of the Term "Politically Correct," Part Eleventy-Billion

Charlotte Allen using a Young Americans for Freedom list of college courses it doesn’t like to churn out a quick, lame, and uninformed op-ed is a well-worn and extremely tired routine. (Michael Berube‘s new book does a great job with the genre, especially the use of course titles without any discussion of actual course content.) I thought this was kind of a nice contribution to the well-worn genre, though:

At Duke, you can take “American Dreams/American Realities” (No. 11), a history course on American myths such as “a city on a hill.”

So much for Ronald Reagan.

See, Ronald Reagan was saying that the United States is literally a city on a hill, and anyone who questions it as if it was a metaphor has no business indoctrinating tender young minds! (I also enjoyed her description of a course on “Cyberfeminism” as being about the discovery that “women use computers.”)

But what I really enjoy about the column is that Allen–while arguing that universities shouldn’t offer any courses with titles that make prissy, anti-intellectual reactionaries uncomfortable, irrespective of their content–while touting their description as “politically correct.” Needless to say, the person who thinks speech she doesn’t like should be excluded before the fact in this case is Charlotte Allen, not professors who think that race, gender, or class might in some way be relevant to the study of the arts and humanities.

Farcical Self-Parody: End-of-Term Hypothetical

Let’s say you’re a prominent blogger with a well-known shtick of alternating boot-licking Republican hackery with claims that anyone who disagrees with you about anything is excessively “partisan” (usually as a substitute for substantive engagement.) Let’s say that someone making mild fun of said persona posts under your name in a comment section, while linking to their own website in the hyperlink so that nobody with an IQ over 75 (which, admittedly, probably excludes large parts of your regular readership) could think it was actually you posting. You’d just laugh it off, right?

Or, alternatively, you could complain about it in the comment section, complain about it in an email, complain about it in a post on your own blog (with a link to the original comment carefully excluded so nobody can see how foolish your complaint is), and then append an update in which you complain that the “blogger in question, instead of answering my email or being at all decent about it, has indicated strong support for the imposter commenter and thinks the whole thing is just funny, including my objection.” If you did this, you would be (almost) beyond parody.

Light…

Sorry for the light blogging; I am furiously rushing to finish a couple of syllabi that I should have finished weeks ago. The problem with winter break is that it ends…

"A strange mix of the anodyne, the obvious, and the risible."

I’m always up for some Strunk & White bashing. [Via U.O.]

Nice Hold, Pretty Boy!

One reason I like football somewhat less than hockey or baseball is that I’ve never been a really big fan of any team. This playoff game, however, is my Maximum Rooting Interest–the team I’d most like to win the Super Bowl against the time I’d least like to win it. So I would have advised you to bet the mortgage on Dallas before I got on the plane if I had time, but I’m happy that I was probably wrong…good that the ref had the balls to overturn that ridiculous spot too.

…Yesh! Although given the quality of Seattle’s secondary I wasn’t counting on anything until the Hail Mary actually hit the turf…

…and a beating-Dallas doubleheader is certainly a nice digestif. As I’ve said countless times, who needs Jarome Iginla when you have the immortal Byron Ritchie?

Ow! It’s the Whining of Self-Described Moderates!

Lord Saletan:

The political fight over animal cloning is just beginning. It’s a lot like the fight over human cloning, except that the roles are reversed. Right-wing groups and Republican senators fanned fear and ignorance about human cloning; left-wing groups and Democratic senators are fanning fear and ignorance about animal cloning. Moderates on both sides get trampled. So do principles. The same liberals who demand stem-cell research using human embryos and who blasted the FDA for delaying approval of emergency contraception now accuse the FDA of recklessly approving cloned food.

I’m not really a specialist in this area, largely because I don’t really care about cloned food, but this strikes me as a classic Slate “pox on both their houses” paragraph, with a bone to the uncherished middle tossed in. But even I, a simple caveman, can see that there’s some nonsense being pushed here.

Right-wing groups and Republican senators fanned fear and ignorance about human cloning; left-wing groups and Democratic senators are fanning fear and ignorance about animal cloning.

Has anyone come out in favor of human cloning? Is there really a “political fight” about it? Yes, wingnuts fly into hysterics at the very idea, but I don’t remember a lot of leftists thinking that human cloning is a great idea, either. Indeed, apart from the word “cloning” I’m flummoxed as to what the relationship between the two debates is. Moreover, whatever leftish opposition to animal cloning exists is presented, quite clearly, in public health and policy terms, questions which are subject to evidentiary examination. Human cloning evokes an entirely different set of questions and debates. Lord Saletan is playing fast and loose…

The same liberals who demand stem-cell research using human embryos and who blasted the FDA for delaying approval of emergency contraception now accuse the FDA of recklessly approving cloned food.

Huh. Well, now that I know I’ll be denounced for inconsistency if I don’t say either a) that the FDA should approve everything immediately, or b) that the FDA should never approve anything ever, I think I’ll refrain from taking any positions on what the FDA approves. Not too difficult, since it already describes my policy on the FDA. I’m also uncertain that liberals “demand stem-cell research using human embryos”; if other options were available and just as useful, this wouldn’t be a political question at all. The liberal position on these questions, to the extent that one can be described, clearly seems to be built around pragmatic public policy concerns, the basic “principle” at stake being an increase in human health.

The thing is, I largely agree with Saletan about cloned animals. Some of the objections that Saletan details are silly. But Lord Saletan can’t resist the impulse to be Mercutio; he can’t simply lay out the case for genetically modified foods without also trying to construct some “moderate” meta-narrative. The thing is, conservatives don’t read Slate anyway, and aren’t going to start. I have to wonder why he and Weisberg and Shafer and Dickerson bother.

EEEEEYAAAAHHHHH!!!!!

That’s a nice unbeaten streak you’ve got there, Bruins. It’d be a shame if somebody came along and broke it.

InstaLunacy

The Ole Perfesser is still implying that we haven’t initiated regime change in Iran because of their secret trove of nuclear weapons. Because if the Iraq War proves anything, it’s that there’s no possible downside to razing a government and baselessly hoping that a stable pro-American government with a liberal constitution written and enforced by ponies will emerge in its place. There’s no other explanation except for that secret weapons stash nobody but Glenn Reynolds has heard of.

The most popular “warblog,” ladies and gentlemen!

[Via Greenwald.]

UPDATE: Hacktacular!