Matt Zeitlin

One of the best genres of movie is Eurasian national epic. Hero is pretty sweet, despite being a full-length apologia for the unification and centralization of China. Mongol, the first part of a three part Genghis Khan biopic/Mongolian national epic, is similarly awe inspiring, despite providing a justification for the eventual horrors of  Hulagu.

Of course, the large scale epic is hardly a new genre, and neither movies really bring anything original to the basic format. I think that they benefit from two things. One of them is a total lack of irony about celebrating the essential goodness of Mongolia or China, and of their controversial foundings. They also are quite expensive productions done in countries where labor is cheap, meaning they can use a lot of extras instead of the CGI warriors that spill most of the blood in Western epics like Lord of the Rings.

The more abstract reason why I appreciate these movies is because I don’t approach them skeptically or ironically. Maybe because they use subtitles or because I have very little familiarity with the actual history of Mongolia or early China, but it’s much easier to approach these movies with which we have a certain distance on their own terms. Instead of constantly questioning what the directors are trying to do or how they’re representing their country’s history, I can just sit back and appreciate what they’re trying to do and accept their vision of these events for two or so hours. What would be interesting is to see how Mongolians or Chinese of my temperament – skeptical, ironic with a strong cynical streak (but still willing to be convinced by displays of cinematic awesomeness) – respond to these two films.

After David Foster Wallace died, I figured I should read more of his stuff. At first, I devoured as many essays and journalistic pieces as I could find for free online. But I wanted something more substantial, and seeing as I couldn’t find much time in my schedule for a 1000 page (footnoted) tome, I turned to Wallace’s first novel, the Broom of the System.

 Talking about the plot would be pretty silly. All the plot – featuring a young baby-food company heiress in Cleveland searching for her missing great-grandmother (who studied with Wittgenstein), all the while having to manage the career of her talking cockatiel Vlad the Impaler – does is allow Wallace to engage in some serious authorial fireworks with entire chapters full of dialogue, stories within stories, absurd characters and hilarious meta-commentary on the United States circa 1987. 

 It would be quite generic to compare it Crying of Lot 49, but it’s really the most appropriate analog. In both stories, you have young women ostensible trying to solve a mystery, and all the while being waylaid by all sorts of events and people which are all quite peripheral to the story at hand. This is the kind of book that James Wood would not like. The point of the work is not the plot or the characters or achieving any type of realism; it is instead a blank space on which Wallace can impart all sorts of funny dialogue, philosophical jokes and broad-purpose metafictional and satirical hilarity. The book is light in every sense of the word – after finishing it (with the plot having reached no real conclusion, of course), you get the feeling of having enjoyed yourself for 460 pages, but really nothing more.

 But its lightness should not be read as a criticism. If you approach the book with clear eyes, you won’t complain about the lack of heft, you’ll instead be really impressed that Wallace had managed to write a 460 page book that’s heavily concerned with the work of Wittgenstein and is set in Cleveland without me ever getting bored. 

 For fun, I’m reading The Secret History now, but seeing as I might not be enrolled in an English class this quarter, I want to read some literature next. Any recommendations? I’m thinking about reading the Rabbit books, but that’s just because I want to lament Updike not winning a Nobel Prize without sounding like a total imbecile. 

I guess the Times web guys had a tad too much turkey

How come this auslander can explain the joys of Thanksgiving better than any American? Or at least better than I can. Seriously though, read Massie’s piece.

I should add, however, that he merely states what so many of us feel about Thanksgiving. The beauty of the holiday is the lack of artifice associated with it. There’s no long forgotten historical events, no wars, no Saviors, no miracles or any extra ornamentation to force people to feel some sort of holiday spirit. Instead, the feeling of thanksgiving – that of being thankful for spending time with your friends and family – is a natural one for which we only need a slight nudge to express.

I think one could very easily make an ontological argument for Thanksgiving being the holiday of which no greater holiday can be perceived. My criteria* for holiday greatness are rather arbitrary, but Thanksgiving is off the charts on all of them. I hope everyone has a relaxing and enjoyable Thanksgiving. I know I will. 

*They involve food, football/sports, seeing my family and a lack of religious content. 

**I should note, however, that the NFL should schedule their Thanksigiving football games a week or two before they happen. What could be better than getting the best games of the week on Thanksgiving Thursday? That, or just stop giving the Lions such a marquee game.

Megan McArdle, following up on a cryptic post, elaborates a rather strange argument on the argument that the New Deal was responsible for saving America from a violent communist revolut:

There are two problems.  The first is that a program that must give people money so that they will not kill/imprison/etc the donors may be practical, but it is also immoral.  This means, it seems to me, that you can either claim that the New Deal is a sort of broad spectrum Dangeld, or that it is a moral necessity, but not both. 

The second is that this is not necessarily a good argument for New Deal programs.  If the concerns are merely practical, then perhaps the New Deal was the more cost effective way to buy peace; but perhaps not.  This could just as well be an argument for rich people buying bigger and better guns than poor people.  Even rich people are, presumably, entitled to shoot back.  

I think most of the people who make this argument are, in fact, being sophistic; they aren’t particularly interested in saving American capitalism, but they think that the people to whom they speak might be persuaded by this remarkably stupid and amoral argument.  I have, obviously, a mixed opinion of the New Deal.  But I find this particular “logic” an unbelievably offensive slur against my country.

Stanley Fish’s extreme anti-foundationalism can get a bit annoying, but it has a lot to recommend to itself in analyzing passages like this:

We’ll continue to lose until we can successfully relabel LGBT rights a civil-rights issue situated firmly within the context of other civil-rights struggles, not an issue mired in the culture-war swamp of moral controversy. (To a lesser degree, the same goes for abortion rights.) “Culture” implies we are comfortable with different parts of our country and different groups of people seeing this issue differently. It implies that there is no absolute right or wrong — just two sparring factions — and that we’ll simply have to wait for the rest of the country to come around. Culture changes slowly. This is something I’ve heard a lot in the wake of the passage of California’s Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. “History is on our side! Don’t worry, the demographic trends are with us!”

John Ziegler on DFW’s death.

To ensure balance between utter assholery and insightful, wonderful writing, here’s a link to “Host” Wallace’s amazing profile of Ziegler and of the right wing radio phenomena.

The Daily Northwestern reports:

After a controversial last-minute decision, the Muslim-cultural Student Association plans to bring former Weather Underground member William Ayers as its 2008 fall speaker Thursday at Cahn Auditorium, said Weinberg junior Dana Shabeeb, McSA co-president.

The selection continues the recent trend of student groups bringing figures to campus who have been lightning rods for criticism, including a For Members Only speech by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. that Ayers attended as a VIP.

Ayers will be speaking with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a professor in the School of Law; and Imam Zaid Shakir, a black Muslim scholar. A&O Productions, Alianza, Asian Pacific American Coalition, South Asian Student Alliance and FMO have co-endorsed the event, called “Peaceful Progress: A Discourse on Affecting Change,” Shabeeb said. 

Good thing that this was announced after David Horowtz spoke at Northwestern, because had he been around for it, he very well could have spontaneously combusted.

Freddie DeBoer, Jamelle and Sullivan are all up on arms over this Joe Carter post in which he “questions” Obama’s Christian faith and eventually concludes that he needs to pray “that he will find a spiritual leader who will help lead him to a true knowledge of Christ.” Basically, in Carter’s approximation, Obama appears not to meet the lowest threshold for being a Christian. And although Jamelle’s point is well taken – the definition of Christianity has been a flexible one for about 2000 years – I can’t help but agree with Carter’s central point.

Obama, at least according to this interview Carter excerpts, does not describe Jesus as “both fully-human and fully divine.” From what I understand, when most people call themselves Christians, and I really do mean most (all Catholics, Orthodox and the overwhelming majority of Protestants), they are referring to a belief that Jesus is the Son of God and is God who “died for our sake” and was resurrected. Now, it may very well be true that this definition of Christianity is contingent and is just the result of one denomination winning an institutional battle 1700 years ago, but if we accept Christianity as having a definition beyond “the religion of people who call themselves Christians,” then the Nicene Creed’s statement about the divinity of Christ is probably it.

But saying that Obama isn’t a Christian is a rather inflammatory remark, one that is likely to simply inspire passionate, uninformed responses like Andrew’s, in which he appears not have even read Carter’s original post. So maybe Carter should have just said that Obama appears to hold heterodox views about the divinity of Christ that are contrary to the views of 99% of Christians. Can we agree on that point, at least with reference to the evidence provided?

I should have thought of this earlier, but Josh Marshall has a great point re: the speculation that Obama offered Clinton the Secretary of State job. Namely that the activities of Bill Clinton make the idea of Hillary heading up the State Department ridiculous.

Clinton has basically been spending the last eight years getting very rich people to donate large amounts of money to the Clinton Global Initiative, all the while serving on a variety of boards and getting all sorts of goodies from his wealthy benefactors. He has also been doing favors for his donors; most notably, helping to arrange a huge mining contract in Kazakhstan, after which the person signing the president gave the CGI a large donation. And while this behavior, though sketchy, isn’t illegal per se, it certainly raises all sorts of conflict-of-interest questions for a potential Chief Diplomat. 

Well, not at all surprisingly, the Obama people are looking into these deals and into Bill’s behavior as part of the vetting process for Hillary. 

So here’s my prediction and explanation for the rather odd, Hillary as SoS offer. That Obama will ultimately not offer the job to Clinton. He will either use stuff his vetters dug up about Bill as a justification, or the requests for information and explanation will get so invasive that the Clintons will withdraw from consideration. This, of course, is speculation, but if Obama can A. convince Clinton that she was really Obama’s first choice while B. not actually offering her the job, that would be quite a coup.

There are two good articles on Michelle Rhee and her battle to abolish tenure and reform DC’s horrible schools. One from the Times and one from the Atlantic.  Go read them.

Let me say first that I’m totally on board with Rhee’s desire to pay teachers more and get rid of their tenure. I’m also on board with her centralizing control of the district in herself as opposed to parents and community groups. Same with her focus on evaluation and testing. I think these are all good things. There’s one problem with her entire vision, and with much of the basic liberal educational reformer platform: money.

As of now, Republicans are lining up behind liberal Democrats like Rhee, Fenty and New York School’s Chancellor Joel Klein because they are taking on a constituency that the GOP despises for political and policy reasons: teacher’s unions. But I don’t think we can count of Republican support for this agenda in the long term, and if Rhee and her comrades-in-arms embitter themselves against the unions, they may find themselves supported only by education wonks, centrist columnists and some reform-minded Democrats.

That’s because, as of now, the huge pay increases that Rhee wants to give to to good teachers without tenure (along with the rest of her experimenting) are being funded by private donors. There is obviously a problem with scaling that model up. If more school districts and states were to get on the Rhee program, it would mean allocating more money for schools. And not just that internet money, but tax money. At that point, expect Republicans to stop pretending they support liberal school reform and start carping about vouchers again.

The other big sticking point will be control. If teachers shouldn’t get tenure and instead should be paid on how well their students are doing, it wouldn’t make much sense to make the testing, high-level administration and rule setting be done by a patchwork of local officials. Especially if we are to see big increases in teacher pay, then the money couldn’t just come from local property taxes and go directly to those local school districts. Republicans, again, are generally opposed to more state and federal control of education. Sure, Bush passed No Child Left Behind, but now conservatives are talking about how much they don’t like it. There isn’t much of a policy constituency or base to build up support for broad-based school reform beyond just criticizing teachers unions and talking about vouchers.

Who knows, maybe some smart, policy minded Republicans like Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal and Mitch Daniels will push their party to go all the way with reform-minded Democrats in remaking our school system, but as of now, it’s unclear if Republicans are really interested in substantive policy at all, especially policy that will end up alienating their conservative base on two issues dear to its heart.

Does anyone in the NFL have a stronger arm. In the entire game against the Dolphins, he didn’t wind up to throw once. When he needed to throw the ball 40 or 50 yards down the field, he merely flicked his arm. When he had to throw 20 yard outs with lots of touch, he would flick his wrist. Of course, his wide receivers are varying shades of crap, while his favorite target, Zach Miller, can not get down the field to exploit the full power of his artillery-piece arm. His offensive line simply can not protect him, which is yet another barrier to get down the field. You can’t throw anything more than outs and slants when you only get three steps in the pocket before you’re scrambling around and getting harrassed by defensive linemen. I don’t really see any future for Russel on the Raiders. Even if we get Michael Crabtree in the draft, the basic problem – lack of blocking (which also means no running game) – will persist. It’s so sad to see a great cornerback (Asomugha) a solid linebacking core, three good running backs and premier talent all flounder so sadly.

Sorry for the pitiful pace of blogging. I’m a college student! I’m busy! But I have been writing up a storm at North by Northwestern, the world’s greatest college online publication. I have a piece up exploring my ideal cabinet and wrote two posts for the politics blog, one about the Obama job questionairre and one running down the pros and cons of Clinton as Secretary of State (hint: cons section longer than pros).

Today in my seminar, we were talking about the Columbian Exposition of 1893, otherwise known as the Chicago World Fair. Since it’s considered to be the best and most historically significant World’s Fair in American history, it has gone from interesting historical artifact to cultural landmark. The Fair is not just the province of cultural historians who also happen to teach me, but also of playwrights, novelists, songwriters, poets and what not. When we talked about it in class today and yesterday, I realized that I’d heard of the Fair before, specifically in Sufjan Stevens’ “Come On! Feel the Illinoise” and in the opening chapters of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

And then it hit me: my background for a landmark cultural event really was a Sufjan Stevens song and a Pynchon novel. What term could describe such a person? How about…hipsterllectual? Alas, this term isn’t original to me. Although there are only 39 hits for it on google, I have to credit Monica Tan, who coined the term on her blog back in March. I should note, however, that I came up with the term all on my own, just that Tan did so first. 

*Yeah, Yglesias already used the Shins song for a post title, but I don’t feel bad about pilfering from him. Sometimes being germane is more important than being original.

One of the largest gaps in our historical memory is that of World War I. Whenever you hear Americans, even at the time, mocking the French for being exceptionally defensive in World War II or the British for not wanting to get involved until they absolutely had to, you’re not necessarily hearing wise foresight of the Nazi threat, you’re also hearing profound historical ignorance of exactly why Europeans were so reluctant to once again engage in intercontinental battle. World War I was very clearly not a fight for freedom or liberty or justice or anything like that. It was, instead, a mechanized slaughter where the nations that “won” suffered appalling losses, while the nation that lost was gleefully and spitefully emasculated. 

For an idea of the scale of horrors in World War I, think of July 1, 1916. In one day, during the Battle of Somme, some 19,000 British soldiers died. That’s almost fives times the amount of American dead in Iraq. World War I was also the debut of chemical weapons and a horrific preview of the use of ever more advanced weapons to kill ever more people that so defined World War II. It’s a pity that we don’t think of World War I more. If we did, we would probably be less likely to view was as a net-positive activity. That’s because most wars are like the Great War, where both sides come off worse. World War II, the one we like to remember most, is a historical aberration. 

So, on this Veterans Day, try to remember its original namesake – Armistice Day.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep.  Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.  Gas!  GAS!  Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. – Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin, If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs Bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, – My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie:  Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Dulce et Decorum Est – Wilfred Owen

Alex Massie has a nice piece at Culture 11 making many similar points. 

I’m not going to write a detailed summary of the interlibertarian squabble between Todd Seavey and Kerry Howley re: whether libertarians can be feminists and vice versa, but if you want catch up, click here, here, here and here. 

To give the briefest outline, Howley thinks that libertarianism is primarily concerned with maximizing freedom and autonomy. She also thinks that it is not only the state which impinges on individual freedom, but also constricting social norms and things that are generally the domain of feminist, as opposed to libertarian, criticism. Seavey, on the other hand, takes the strict libertarian line that libertarians ought to be concerned with the state. For a little taste of how dogmatic he is on this point:

Would Kerry contend the highly-traditionalistic Amish are by definition not libertarian (which seems odd, given their aversion to taxes, Social Security, and police)? Or, if the raising of children by overly bossy parents complicates your answer on the Amish, then what about voluntary adult converts to Mennonite life, of which New York State has plenty, their lives as patriarchal as all get out?

Are we to think that a hypothetical future world in which there is absolutely no government and no coercion (as traditionally defined by libertarians) but in which most women choose to spend their days jobless, giggling, and stripping (without pay) in front of males to get their attention and approval is in some way unlibertarian? It may be offensive. It may be stupid. It certainly doesn’t sound feminist to me, and maybe it’s even a bad idea — but it’s free.

 Thus, a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, but a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom is such that no one will hire him is as free as any white man. A gay couple who must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism is as free as any hetero couple. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is basically living in a libertarian paradise, so long as no one writes the rules down.

This may be true in some parallel world, or under some as-yet-unknown definition of the word freedom, but it’s pretty clearly not true given the world we have and the language we use.

Maybe instead of just bickering about how inclusive a term libertarian ought to be, we should pay attention to how, empirically, libertarians and liberals have responded to not-technically-state-coercion. And libertarians, from Barry Goldwater on down, have always adopted this incredibly strict definition of morally objectionable restrictions on freedom. And if you look at the progenitors of modern liberalism, like Mill or Wollstonecraft, they devoted a considerable amount of energy to questioning social norms and expectations. So I think the response that Howley (as well as Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey) ought to make is that they are not libertarians. Sure, they aren’t 21st century American liberals either, so maybe “liberals with libertarian characteristics”? But the point is, the strict definition of coercion and individual freedom that Seavey advances has been the core issue seperating libertarians from liberals for as long as there have been libertarians.

A good friend of mine sends me this instant message:

 the zionist conspiracy has infiltrated my elite liberal arts institution

i had to read an article from fucking commentary for my psci class

There are good arguments against Obama appointing Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary. For one, he is generally thought of as being something of a pain to work with. Not only is he always the smartest person in the room, but he also lets everyone else know. For that, and a few other reasons, I think Tim Geithner would be a good choice. Check out Noam Scheiber’s profile of him for more.

But, seriously, people have to chill the fuck out over Larry Summers. Matt Stoller and Max Blumenthal, you are both not telling the truth when you say that Larry Summers advocated the pollution of underdeveloped countries during his tenure in the World Bank. This claim has been around since the early 90s and has been debunked plenty of times. If Larry Summers were really so horrible, would you need to tell lies about him? As far as more substantive claims against him, they are either tendentious or exaggerated. For instance, look at Stoller’s brief:

Summers was one of the key proponents of the banking deregulation of 1999 that led to the current financial crisis.  In addition, Larry Summers has argued that women are innately less gifted in science than men, that ‘Africa is Underpolluted’, that child sweatshop work in Asia is sometimes justified, and that job destroying trade agreements are good for America.

As far as banking deregulation goes, that’s really more in Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan’s hands. Sure, Larry Summers doesn’t come off looking too good, but it’s not like he’s the chief villain of the late 90s. Also, I have yet to hear a good argument that the overturning Glass-Steagall has much to do with our current crisis. And I got Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on my side. As far as his comments about science and ability, he already lost the presidency of Harvard and I’m not exactly sure what his off-the-record, provisional, intentionally provocative comments have to do with his ability to be Treasury Secretary. Is Stoller worried that he won’t hire enough women? And re: the sweatshops and trade agreements, I’ll simply refer yall to “In Praise of Cheap Labor.” The author? Well, you have to read it to find out.

UPDATE: Noam Scheiber has a good defense of Summers here. His concluding point is very good. Summers has a long record of both setting policy and managing large institutions (including the Treasury Department). So, if you want to make germane criticisms of him, there’s a bunch of stuff to work with. The fact that critics are so quickly resorting to the specious (pollution memo) or the marginally relevant (gender/math controversey) proves that they are not making a strong argument. For a good argument against Summers, see here. I should also note that I have a pro-Summers bias. I just love ridiculously overachieving Jews*

*This is one reason why I’m so disappointed, as opposed to indignant, about, say, Noam Chomsky or Alan Dershowitz.