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Cliopatria's History Blogroll Part I / Part II.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer by training, so he has a particular view of what the “rule of law” means. That’s fine. On most points, I am in complete agreement with him, especially in recent years where investing the constitution with actual authority puts you at odds with pretty much the entire US state apparatus. But I regard his claim that Citizens United vs. FEC is “good law” with all sorts of reservations. As he puts it:

One of the central lessons of the Bush era should have been that illegal or unconstitutional actions — warrantless eavesdropping, torture, unilateral Presidential programs — can’t be justified because of the allegedly good results they produce (Protecting us from the Terrorists). The “rule of law” means we faithfully apply it in ways that produce outcomes we like and outcomes we don’t like.

In other words, while this decision might have pernicious effects in practice, he gives priority to the decision’s theoretical justification, the fact that it is “good law,” that it follows the constitution’s explicit guidelines. I don’t particularly think that he’s wrong. But I don’t think you can be right on this kind of question, or at least not in the simple way he‘s pretending to be. The “rule of law” is a convenient fairy tale for both simple-minded people and for whip smart lawyers like Greenwald who, for whatever particular reason, find it congenial to act as if they believe there is a clear line dividing legal from illegal or constitutional from unconstitutional. But as Jeffrey Toobin put it during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings (a man who knows a thing or two about Supreme Court history), it is a fiction that “the law” can exist separate from the minds that, in interpreting it, radically re-create and transform it:

Justices have a great deal of discretion—in which cases they take, in the results they reach, in the opinions they write. When it comes to interpreting the Constitution—in deciding, say, whether a university admissions office may consider an applicant’s race—there is, frankly, no such thing as “law.” In such instances, Justices make choices, based largely, though not exclusively, on their political views of the issues involved. In reaching decisions this way, the Justices are not doing anything wrong; there is no other way to interpret the majestic vagueness of the Constitution.

Posted on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Theodore Roosevelt has a big stick, but from where did he get it?

The most famous Rooseveltian phrase (and he was a quotable fellow) is the slogan “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” As Gail Bederman puts it in Manliness and Civilization (in a passage unfortunately not Google books-able), it’s such a cheap shot to note the phallic resonance of that phrase that we almost don’t want to. But we also sort of do: when a manly man like Roosevelt talks about big sticks, he’s talking about big sticks, ya know?

But one of the interesting things about that phrase is that our first record of his using it (and only his first use), in a letter to an ally in the NY state senate, turns out to attribute the phrase to a “west African proverb.” I would love to know where he’s getting it from, how exactly he’s thinking through its West African provenance; hopefully I’ll be able to find out. But that’s the last time he mentions it as having an African origin, as far as I can tell; after that, he calls it an “old adage,” a “homely old proverb” and a “homely proverb.” Given how pervasive (and for Roosevelt, how problematic) is the conventional cliché/stereotype of African masculine, shall we say, endowment, there’s something fascinatingly suggestive in how this ultra-phallic imagery of big sticks begins with an African origin only to swiftly be stripped of it, as it comes to be the official slogan of a great white man president:

Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 10:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, December 3, 2009

UC Governance and Blaming "Sacramento"

As Ralph noted yesterday, I've written an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about trying to find ways to teach to the experience of seeing UC Berkeley students get treated like criminals by armed and armored riot police for peacefully demonstrating on their own campus. That was, for them and for me, an education in how the UC administration apparently thinks about its authority on its campus, and I hope that some good can come out of a really bad situation.

But it also seems to me like the conversation that's been going on so far about the UC system has been hamstrung by a lot of uninformed assumptions about how the UC administration comes to have the authority it does, and what their relationship is with "Sacramento," the town no one seems to like. One of the common myths about the UC system crisis, in fact, has been that “Sacramento” is the real villain, and that protesting the UC administration is a waste of time. The administration itself likes this one; they like to send us emails urging that the legislature is the actual problem, because they're the ones who have allocated less money to the University system (leaving the administration holding the bag). Instead of occupying the Office of the President of the UC system, therefore, students should really be protesting politicians in Sacramento.

This seems to me to be both wrongheaded and misinformed. The president (and the regents who appoint him) are Sacramento, while the university community itself has not only had very little role in the massive top-down restructuring of the university that got under way in July, but they have been quite actively shut out of it, by the Regents and by President Mark Yudof, who are doing the job Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed them to do. Which is to say, when students from the university protest against the regents and the President, they are protesting Sacramento. The legislature in Sacramento may have created the problem by cutting funding for higher education, but it’s the representatives and appointees of our Sacramento-based governor who have turned the problem into an opportunity to privatize higher education in California.

Posted on Thursday, December 3, 2009 at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Learned Ignorance: What John McWhorter Can't Allow Himself to Know About African-American Studies

I found John McWhorter’s jeremiad against African-American Studies unimpressive when I read it, but then I’m sure I’m not his intended audience (What African-American Studies Could Be," Minding the Campus, 30 September, and McWhorter, "What Should African-American Studies Students Learn?" TNR, 1 October).

He asks “What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?” and then spends the rest of the piece complaining that all African-American Studies departments do is complain about racism. In his words: “the answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present…too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.”

Constructing this straw man of African-American studies allows him to make sure that when he gets around to asking “whether this, for all of its moral urgency in the local sense, qualifies as education under any serious definition,” the answer can hardly be anything but no. Which is why, even though I don’t particularly disagree with his argument that the black conservative tradition is important and should be included and studied rather than dismissed, I’m disgusted by the extent to which he gets to that point by saying preposterous things about what actual African-American studies departments actually do; there is an argument to be made for increased attention to the black conservative tradition, after all, but this kind of intellectual dishonesty is not it.

Posted on Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:16 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Thursday, July 30, 2009

"I don't know; maybe it's a guy thing"

Not at the white house this evening will be Lucia Whalen, pretty much the only person involved in the Gates imbroglio who didn't over-react, the only person whose actions don't seem to reflect a sense of personal grievance or entitlement, and the person who has been most adversely affected by the fiasco. And while it's not surprising that she wasn't invited to the white house, if only because the narrative of the "beer summit" is one of Obama trying to mediate between the two aggrieved parties, Gates and Crowley, her absence is worth noting. After all, the narrative of the beer summit is of overcoming racial difference through masculine homosociality -- as Mark Katz puts it, "Beer is American shorthand for guy-to-guy commonality" -- and in that sense, her absence is as necessary as any other element in the entire tableau. But the video of her press conference is also sort of devastating; behind all the bombast, posturing, and political games that almost everyone has been playing, there seems to be little or no room in the narrative for a person who simply tried to do the right thing in a difficult situation, with full cognizance and awareness of the difficulties of that situation. No good deed goes unpunished.

Posted on Thursday, July 30, 2009 at 2:10 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Arrest and Transfiguration of Henry Louis Gates

The police who arrested Henry Louis Gates the day before yesterday must have been a miracle worker, or at the very least a lay clergyman of some kind. After all, what else are we to make of the moment when a property owner whose house had recently been broken into was himself transformed into the perpetrator? Such things do not merely happen; divinity must have been involved.

Posted on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:36 AM | Comments (32) | Top

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Making Sense of Mahmood Mamdani's Saviors and Survivors

Over at Making Sense of Darfur, a SSRC blog edited by Alex De Waal, there's been a vigorous debate over Mahmood Mamdani's newest book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. It's worth checking out, especially now that Mamdani has joined the discussion:

Posted on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 4:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, March 23, 2009

Thinking the apocalypse

Brad DeLong resorts to the apocalypse:

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?
A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world's largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off-in either case at an immense profit.
Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn't make back its money?
A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money-for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

I have very little to say about the nuts and bolts questions at stake here; macro-economic predictions is certainly not my thing. But while he may be completely right or wrong about his measured approval for the Geithner plan, I'm (like several others) fascinated by the rhetoric of the statement, the way an entire area of inquiry gets located off-screen on the assumption that, if it were true, we have much bigger problems that render this one irrelevent. In the TV show House, MD, it isn't uncommon for our polymathic protagonist to instruct his team to assume that a patient's condition is not the result of the most obvious explanation, because if that were the case then the condition would be terminal and nothing could be done anyway. And in the context of that kind of diagnostic triage, it makes a kind of sense: assuming that the patient is suffering from a curable condition will produce the most likely favorable outcome.

Posted on Monday, March 23, 2009 at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, February 9, 2009

Praising Elizabeth Alexander's “Praise Song”

(I want to thank Ralph again for inviting me to join Cliopatria. And please pardon the excess verbosity of a first-timer; this post ballooned to a greater length than I meant it to, but it's an example of the kind of project I'm trying to figure out how to do: somewhere between "Africa" and "America" -- as well as between history and literary studies -- but hopefully only a little bit lost at sea).

I think it's safe to assume that the title of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day," was meant as some kind of reference to some kind of "African" traditionalism. As the OED defines it, a "praise song" is "n. a laudatory song, a song of praise" and it goes on to note, parenthetically, "spec. in some African traditions." But that "spec." stands for "specifically" in a wonderfully unspecific way; after all, what is specific about "some African traditions"? This Encyclopedia Britannica definition has the same problem: it tells us that a praise song is "one of the most widely used poetic forms in Africa," which strikes me as a little like saying that "the novel" is one of the most widely used prose forms in the West. However true the statement might be, what's most interesting about the form is the irreducible heterogeneity within it which such a definition has, of necessity, to finesse.

Posted on Monday, February 9, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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