Weekly Wisdom

"If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears."

--Stephen Fry

This month in democracy

All things being equal, I should probably be feeling a lot more deflated and cynical vis à vis democracy and its discontents these days than I am. Three big blows to the democratic process have been landed, two in the U.S. and one here: (1) Stephen Harper’s prorogation of parliament, (2) the U.S. Senate’s stagnation and obstructionism, and finally (3) the recent decision by SCOTUS to reverse a century of legislation restricting corporate political contributions, effectively opening the floodgates for corporate money to influence and/or buy elections and elected officials.

I have watched the special Massachusetts election of Scott Brown, which took away the Democrats’ supermajority, and the ensuing commentary with bemusement. The Village Voice captured the absurdity most succinctly with their headline, “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate.” If ever there was a moment in which the American electoral system was showing its flaws, surely this is it—the pros and cons of the current health care reform bills notwithstanding, surely an eighteen vote advantage should be enough to pass legislation? Apparently not with the threat of the filibuster hanging over it.

The U.S. Senate, it should be pointed out, is a pretty undemocratic body to begin with. It was originally designed to be the “sober second thought” in the crafting of legislation, with senators having six year terms as opposed to congressmen’s two ostensibly leading to a more stable, mature consideration of proposed bills. The senators were also fewer in number, and—most importantly—not determined by the populations they represented. Rather, each state gets two senators, regardless of size. This was less of a problem back in the late eighteenth century when there were only thirteen states, which did not have vast discrepancies in population; however, when the people of California (population thirty-six million) have the same representation in the Senate as Vermont (population six hundred thousand), the influence small states wield is wildly asymmetrical.

But that’s neither here or there—the filibuster has become an increasingly common tool for blocking legislation, to the point where, in practice, an obstructionist minority only interested in preventing votes (such as we now see in action) can grind the wheels of the legislative branch to a halt. Employment of the filibuster has increased more than fivefold—between 1951 and 1960, it was used an average of 3.2 times a year, whereas between 1981 and 2004 the yearly average was 16.5. (For a good breakdown of the procedural issues, read here and here).

The filibuster has a quasi-romantic quality in the popular imagination—from its very name, which means “freebooter” or “pirate,” to Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith, to the West Wing episode “The Stackhouse Filibuster”—connoting a lone heroic individual standing up against the system. And indeed, certain instances of individuals filibustering do conform to that idea (though not always on the side of the angels, as with Strom Thurmond’s attempt to block the Civil Rights Act). More and more however it has become standard operating procedure for the minority party to thwart the majority agenda. While its use has traditionally been that of last resort, it has become business as usual.

I can’t help but see a parallel to Stephen Harper’s use of prorogation, insofar as it too is an arcane parliamentary procedure of last resort. The argument could be made that last year’s invocation of it was just that, a desperate manoeuvre to circumvent an undemocratic power grab by the opposition (not an argument I agree with, but it could be made nevertheless); no such claim could me made however about the decision to prorogue parliament this past December 30. This time, it was so blatantly and baldly a move to avoid having to address the Afghani detainee scandal until after the Winter Olympics, by which time (Harper would hope) the public’s attention would be elsewhere.

The use of prorogation twice in the space of a year is worrisome, not least because it would seem to set a new precedent for the PM’s autocratic powers, and redefine the relationship between the PM and parliament. For me, Stephen Harper’s most troubling quality has always been his obvious desire to arrogate presidential power to the PMO and overturn the Westminster standard of “first among equals.” The high-handed use of prorogation—both times—bespeaks both arrogance and a disdain for the checks on prime ministerial power that are a cornerstone of parliamentary democracy (to say nothing of the disrespect to the Governor General, and of all the bills before the House of Commons that now die).

What keeps me buoyed in the face of these events however is that it puts these governmental flaws on people’s radar. Prorogation Part Two would certainly seem, at this point, to have backfired for Harper. If he banked on Canadians’ apathy to see him through, the early signs aren’t good for him: his poll numbers have dropped, and people across the country are speaking up angrily. Nor have I heard anything in the way of support for Harper’s actions—the right seems more or less mum on the subject, which is a tacit admission that the PM was way out of line on this one. I have reason to hope that this may have been one bridge too far for Harper.

Similarly, there is also some real discourse in the U.S. happening about the filibuster, and the Senate’s arcane procedures more generally. I have less hope that anything will happen on that front than I am about prorogation being Harper’s Waterloo, but it is heartening. One way or another, Obama seems to be fired up: he’s taking a more oppositional and populist tone than he has since the election, and he has re-hired his campaign director David Plouffe to chart a new course. Hopefully, after a year of being conciliatory, he’s pissed off. The State of the Union should be a barn-burner.

Finally, the Supreme Court’s ruling last week taking the restrictions of corporate political donations doesn’t have me as outraged as I might have imagined. A large part of my calm was summed up nicely by Glenn Greenwald, who observes that any lament about the certain corporate interference in American government necessarily suggests that this is not already the case:

The reality is that our political institutions are already completely beholden to and controlled by large corporate interests (Dick Durbin: "banks own" the Congress). Corporations find endless ways to circumvent current restrictions—their armies of PACs, lobbyists, media control, and revolving-door rewards flood Washington and currently ensure their stranglehold—and while this decision will make things marginally worse, I can't imagine how it could worsen fundamentally. (Salon.com)

Sadly, I can’t disagree with Greenwald’s argument. Furthermore, in looking closely at the case and the decision, one finds that there are in fact some significant First Amendment issues that would have made the reverse ruling problematic from a free speech perspective. That the court decided to overturn a century of precedent on the funding of elections strikes me as something of a baby/bathwater situation, but it is fairly clear that there was no easy extrication from this case one way or another.

On the other hand, the ruling has evoked a storm of condemnation on both sides of the political coin, and may ironically do more to draw attention to the need to reform the way election campaigns are funded than any previous endeavours.

So, to recap: the U.S. Senate is broken, but so visibly so it has excited serious discussion about how to fix it. Stephen Harper has prorogued parliament in autocratic and arrogant fashion, and in the process ignited a grassroots protest and sent his numbers into a tailspin. And America’s Supreme Court has formalized corporate ownership of elected officials, which may well lead to a bipartisan effort to scale back the excesses of soft money. Of course, none of these eventualities may pan out—I sit here with fingers crossed. But if one or more of them do, it would be a vindication of the principle that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.

Speaking of fantasy ...

OK, so the story of Robin Hood isn’t fantasy per se, insofar as it lacks magic and magical beasts, and besides which is ostensibly historical ... but it certainly satisfies in the same way that fantasy writing does—i.e. it is medieval in its setting and sensibility, it employs such fantasy staples as castles and knights and swordfights, and it above all provides imaginative escape from such onerous modern trappings as indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and regular bathing.

I mention this because when I found the Clash of the Titans trailer on YouTube for my previous post, number one in the “related videos” listing was the trailer for the new re-booting of the Robin Hood legend—starring Russell Crowe as the man himself, Cate Blanchett (sigh) as Maid Marion, and directed by Ridley Scott. One of the good things about having Scott as the director is that even if the film totally sucks (what was he thinking with G.I. Jane?), it is going to look amazing.

But from a local perspective, the new Robin Hood is going to be an EVENT, because the guy playing the musician Allan A’Dayle (the giant chicken in the Disney version) is none other than Alan Doyle, aka the lead singer of Great Big Sea. Whose name, seriously, is already so close to the character he’s playing that I’m already thinking of him as Alan A’Doyle. As it falls out, Doyle is, like, totally BFFs with Russell Crowe. Who knew (well, besides everyone in St. John’s)?

As with Clash of the Titans, the Scott/Crowe Robin Hood has the advantage of a low bar. Because, seriously: just how many snafus and fuck-ups during the writing, casting, and producing of a film about Robin Hood would you have to have to make it worse than Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves?

And another advantage of having Alan Doyle involved? It radically lowers the chances of having Bryan Adams on the soundtrack.

Return to Olympus

In the Interesting Trends In Upcoming Films category is an apparent resurgence in interest in Greek mythology. Well ... I say “resurgence,” but really it’s just two films, which is nevertheless two films more than we’ve seen in some time (since the god-awful Troy in 2004, at any rate).

Behind door number one we have a remake of Clash of the Titans, with a pretty impressive cast of players—and impressive not so much for its “bankable” stars as for the fact that they’re all really good actors. Liam Neeson plays Zeus, Ralph Fiennes is Hades, Danny Huston is Poseidon, Polly Walker (Atia from Rome) is Cassiopeia, and Alexa Davalos (yes, please!) plays Andromeda. Sam Worthington plays Perseus, and the only thing I know about him is that he’s the main guy in Avatar (a film that seems less and less likely I will go see the more I read about it). Also in the film, based on my exhaustive thirty-second internet research, are Peter Postlewaite, Gemma Atterton and Jayson Fleming. So they’ve managed to assemble a pretty promising team.

They’ve also definitively updated the special effects. Remember the kitschy stop-motion animation of the first one?



I have to say it, because it is a timeless truth: giant scorpions are cool. Especially when they sting the ground in time to the soundtrack’s rhythm.

I suspect this film will be a great mindless pleasure—I get to see some of my favourite actors chewing the scenery, in a story where I don’t have to worry about subtlety or nuance. That was what ruined Troy for me—if you’re going to adapt the Iliad to film—and leave out the gods, no less!—have an eye to the story’s details. But no. Fortunately for Clash of the Titans, the original was so cheesy and bad, they can only go up from there.

The second film is adapted from a series of young adult novels in which a teenager named Percy Jackson discovers that he is the son of Poseidon and gets embroiled in the affairs of the gods (along with a cadre of other offspring of the Greek Pantheon). My question is: where were these novels when I was twelve?

Again, the film boasts a pretty impressive cast, with Uma Thurman (Medusa), Rosario Dawson (Persephone), Pierce Brosnan (Chiron), Catherine Keener (Percy’s mom), Sean Bean (Zeus), and the awesome awesome Kevin McKidd as Poseidon.

(Can I just observe as an aside that I think Sean Bean has a weakness for wearing breastplates and/or chain mail? Seriously: Odysseus in Troy, Boromir in The Fellowship of the Ring, Zeus, and Ned Stark in the upcoming adaptation of A Game of Thrones on HBO. Does his agent put these scripts in the “automatic yes” pile?)

So, Percy Jackson and the Olympians is a little glitzier in its casting, but still pretty solid. And it looks pretty good too, and doesn’t seem like it’s taking itself too seriously:



I’ve been idly thinking lately about a trend in which science fiction is waning and fantasy is waxing—at least, that seems to be the consensus on a handful of literary blogs I follow, confirmed by book sale numbers. I did a public lecture last term about the conservative and regressive tendencies of fantasy as a genre (one of the many things I neglected to blog about), and will be rehashing that it in a guest lecture for our Masters in Humanities program in February. That fantasy is trending up and SF down is an interesting phenomenon at the present moment, and these Olympian films would seem (on the surface) to correspond to this tendency.

My thoughts on this are still somewhat inchoate, and I’ll return to this topic in the future. One suggestion I will make however is that part of what we’re seeing is a disenchantment with technology—not so much in nihilistic terms, such as marked the post-WWI generation, but in terms almost of boredom. I think there’s a certain sense that technology has caught up to, and indeed in some ways surpassed, the imagination of the future. The golden age of SF up through the 60s and 70s was largely enamoured of technology and science’s potential, something epitomized by Star Trek’s utopian vision; what we’re seeing now, however, is increasingly dystopian or militarized SF (think the new Battlestar Galactica), as well as an interesting trend in “literary” fiction to appropriate the trappings of dystopian SF while stubbornly resisting the label (such as Margaret Atwood’s latest offerings, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy).

Again, these are just early thoughts. Does anyone else have any ideas about this trend?

The best television series of the aughts

The end of the decade kind of surprised me—in the sudden welter of top ten lists for movies and music and what have you, I suddenly realized that ten years had elapsed since we celebrated the end of the millennium. And in spite of my love of lists, I find myself ill-equipped to compose many of the usual suspects: I have seen not nearly enough film in the last ten years to do a best films list; I suppose I could do a best fiction list, but it would be woefully incomplete, absent the dozens of novels that were published that I did not read (ironically, because I was reading too much); and my musical tastes sort of calcified in the mid-late 90s.

On the other hand, I do watch a lot of teevee, and have in the last two years made it something of an academic sidebar. The other day my television guru friend Jen apologized on her blog for not yet having gotten to her own best of the decade, and I thought, “AHA! A list I can do!” This is indeed something I have been thinking a lot about, though not in these exact terms. So here follows my top ten list for the decade for which we have yet to devise a handy moniker (I’m holding out for the “aughts,” if for no other reason than one day being an old-timer who can reminisce about the “back in aught-seven, when I was working in the salt mines ...”).

Of course, the question of what makes a television series “good” is a vexed one at best. I have little doubt my list will furrow a lot of foreheads, so here are my criteria: I am concerned in this particular list with television that broke the mould, that challenged viewers and resisted the typical formulaic pitfalls of an episodic structure, and above all else was intelligent. More importantly, unapologetically intelligent: series that did not feel compelled to explicate their more complex elements or confuse knowledge with subtlety (such as Chris Carter was so often guilty of on The X-Files).

In this respect, the aughts offered an embarrassment of riches: we saw in the past decade the rise and indeed renaissance of exceptionally well-written, well-acted, and well-produced television. HBO was the epicentre of this phenomenon, but not its exclusive purveyor: other specialty cable networks like AMC, Showtime and FX followed the Home Box Office’s lead, as did a few adventurous network forays. Further, I think critics will see the aughts as a time when serious actors decamped from Hollywood films and took on roles they could sink their teeth into over several seasons of well-written scripts: actors like Ian McShane, Glenn Close, Edward James Olmos, Mary-Louise Parker, Martin Sheen, Steve Buscemi all appeared in deeply nuanced and complex roles; we saw late-career renaissances in Ted Danson, Alec Baldwin and Henry Winkler, and breakout performances from the likes of Jon Hamm.

So, without further ado ...


10. 30 Rock

I think I can safely say there has never been a television show more certain make me laugh hysterically and often. Tina Fey shows us she’s got way more game than a bit player on SNL and Sarah Palin impersonator: each episode is unpredictable, madcap, and usually absurd, while nevertheless making us care pretty deeply about the characters involved. What I think I love most about Tina Fey is that she is smart enough to subordinate her own ego to the show: Liz Lemon is the geeky and pathetic calm at the center of the absurdist storm, and Fey is happy to let every scene her alter ego is in get stolen by each and every one of the crazy characters she has created. Each episode is a gem, but I think my favourite was the Amadeus parody that came at the end of season 2, in which Tracy Jordan plays the pornographer Mozart to Frank Rossitano’s Salieri. Also, no comment about 30 Rock would be complete without a shout out to the comic brilliance that is Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy.

9. The West Wing

As much as I love this show, I was hesitant about including it, as it has—on reflection—more of a 90s feel to me, and the balance of its seasons that appeared in the aughts, from 2003-2006 were the post-Aaron Sorkin version of the show. Starting season five, The West Wing lost something crucial with Sorkin’s departure. It maintained the high seriousness, the machine-gun dialogue, the unapologetically wonkish preoccupation with the inner workings of the executive branch ... but it lost the energy of Sorkin’s brand of dialogue, and with that, the humour that animated so much of the first four seasons. However much the series depicted the life-and-death drama that happens on a daily basis in the White House, it always did so with extraordinary humour, so that Charlie could give Mrs. Landingham a hard time over her new car or CJ could get emotionally attached to a turkey, even as the President deals with the drama of a besieged embassy. And that is why it makes the list, the final three seasons notwithstanding.

8. The Sopranos

Oz was the first dramatic series that defined the new approach HBO was taking; The Sopranos demonstrated that it had legs. The series was unapologetic in its profanity, its violence, its corrupt and unlikable characters, and above all, the inescapable parallels between the mafia hierarchy and “legitimate” capitalism. None of this was new, of course—mob films had been doing it since Public Enemy. What was different was that this was television—and the finite story arc of the gangster’s meteoric rise and inevitable fall that defined the genre was thrown out the window as the Soprano clan struggled with the ups and downs of affluent suburban family life over seven seasons. The bizarre series finale that pissed so many people off I thought was genius; the sudden cut to black with no resolution whatsoever was the last nail the series drove into the mob genre’s coffin, suggesting that there was no tidy and poetic resolution—no Tony Montana gunned down, no Henry Hill relegated to symbolic death in suburban wasteland, no Michael Corleone dying pathetic and alone. Nope. Tony and his family muddle along, and there is no poetic justice for anyone.

7. Lost

Few shows divide opinion like Lost: those who love it, love it with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns (and may well issue a fatwa on me for relegating it to number seven), or hate it with equal intensity.

My own sense of the series is that J.J. Abrams &co. totally did not expect it to make it past season one, even if it got that far. They offered this amazing and bizarre setup, and then were taken a bit aback when it became a hit (or at least, this is how I imagine it happened), and then suddenly had to devise storylines that, every episode, raised more questions and offered no answers. This, predictably, became a little lame by season three, and this is when I lost interest. On the urging of certain Losties however, I started tuning in again for season four, and am now irrevocably snared in the narrative web again. The writers have found their stride and totally upped the ante for the series. Whatever its inconsistencies at times, the show is always very, very smart, well written, well-acted, and always willing to throw curveballs at the audience (which is synonymous, on the Fox Network, with cancellation -- a lesson I wish Joss Whedon would learn).

6. Arrested Development

This, of course, is the show that launched Michael Cera’s career, but I am willing to overlook that offense because of just how good it was (Arrested Development, I mean, not Michael Cera's career). I am still amazed that Arrested Development survived as long as it did on network television, given its quirkiness, weird characters, quasi-absurdist humour and palimpsest of in-jokes that required multiple viewings to catch them all. What’s more, the series effectively picked up the challenge thrown down when Seinfeld ended, namely, where does the sitcom as a genre go from here? Seinfeld epitomized the irony and disaffection of much of the 90s by pointing to the inescapable fact that sitcoms, structurally, are necessarily about nothing. Arrested Development picked up this thread and carried on with comically one-dimensional characters all caught up in their own narcissistic dramas. The Bluth clan broke the mould: all sitcoms are about family in one capacity or another, and the underlying unity that informs that are what make them endearing. Arrested Development had the audacity to depict the most merrily—and obliviously—dysfunctional family ever.

5. Battlestar Galactica

If someone had told me five years ago that they were going to (a) remake Battlestar Galactica and (b) that it would be one of the best television shows ever made, I’d have responded, respectively, “Good luck with that” and “Uh ... sure.” But not only did they update the 1970s kitsch-fest that was the original series with kick-ass production values and visuals—which would have been cool enough in and of itself—they also turned it into one of the most complex, nuanced sagas of loss and redemption this side of East of Eden. Unapologetically smart, beautifully written, and indeed daring in the Big Questions it poses (without offering trite or moralistic answers, ever), it raised the bar not just for SF television but for television generally.

4. Deadwood

What The Sopranos did for the mob genre and BSG did for space opera, Deadwood does for the western. The series is really about the brutal and violent origins of democracy: we follow the lawless mining camp of Deadwood as it slowly moves toward civic and municipal identity and ultimate annexation to the U.S.A., and watch the body count rise en route. Beautiful in its dirt and grit, the language of the show raises profanity to a Shakespearean level. The final season was a bit of a disappointment because it was rushed to a close—finished at three seasons rather than four because of budgetary reasons—but even at its worst moments, it was superior to pretty much everything else on the tube.

3. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart / The Colbert Report

If the aughts were the Bush/Cheney decade, we can be relieved that it was also the decade of Stewart/Colbert. It is a sad statement that the most incisive speakers of truth to power were a couple of clowns on Comedy Central, but that statement in and of itself does nothing to detract from the keen intelligence and often brutal satire of a pair of shows that thrived in a decade when satire and irony were otherwise defanged by a mendacious administration and inept media. Stewart and Colbert gave us a breath of intelligence and hope, and threw in juvenile dick jokes as well, just to remind us that they’re both really goofs at heart.



2. Mad Men

At once the antidote to simplistic nostalgia about the 50s and 60s and a suave and stylish fetishization of period, Mad Men critiques Madison Avenue culture by seducing us with the very kind of polished surfaces Sterling & Cooper strive to market. “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons,” says Don Draper dismissively, even as he realizes that his mistress and her young lover are, in fact, in love. Such is the subtlety of Jon Hamm’s acting that in that instant, in the brief tightness in his voice, we see his own futile desire for something he can’t comprehend. What do you get when a superlative salesman invents himself based on what he tells America it wants? You get Don Draper—possibly the single greatest character to appear on a television screen in this or any decade.

1. The Wire

More than any other television series ever, The Wire found itself compared in style and structure to the novel. “Dickensian” was the word often used, though to my mind this is entirely a misnomer based in the show’s depiction of urban decay and poverty; where Dickens took his readers by the hand and essentially explained everything as it unfolded, the web of individual stories making up The Wire unfolded with little or no attempt at explanation. It takes until about the third or fourth episode to have a handle on things, and at that point there’s no looking back. David Simon’s saga of the fallen city Baltimore and its struggles with drugs, violence, poverty and de facto racial segregation is not so much an allegory of America as a microcosm. Each season focused on a specific part of the city: season one was the police force versus the drug dealers; season two, union politics and the fall of the American working class; three, city hall; four, the school system; and finally in season five, the media in the form of a dying newspaper. The structures of power in “legitimate” Baltimore parallel and intersect the drug world’s hierarchies, and the money cleaves them all together like an insidious glue.



Honourable Mentions: Rome, Damages, Dexter, Weeds, Angel, Oz, The Tudors, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, Six Feet Under, True Blood, Veronica Mars, Friday Night Lights, Pushing Daisies

Top Ten Characters (and the actors who portray them), in no particular order:

Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), Dexter
Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), The Wire
Patty Hewes (Glenn Close), Damages
Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson), Lost
Don Draper (Jon Hamm), Mad Men
Omar Little (Michael K. Willams), The Wire
Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Deadwood
Spike (James Marsters), Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), 30 Rock
Anne Boleyn (Natalie Dormer), The Tudors

Top ten bad guys (or are they?):
Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), The Wire
the lawyers of Wolfram & Hart, Angel
Benjamin Linus (Michael Emerson), Lost
Number Six (Tricia Helfer), Battlestar Galactica
George Hearst (Gerald McRaney), Deadwood
Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson), Damages
Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons), Oz
Devon Banks (Will Arnett), 30 Rock
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson (Felicia Pearson), The Wire
Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Best potty-mouths:
Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Deadwood
Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter), Dexter
Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), The Sopranos
Silvio Dante (Steve van Zandt), The Sopranos
Felicia “Snoop” Pearson (Felicia Pearson), The Wire

Too quirky (or weird) for words:
Kenneth the NBC Page (Jack McBrayer), 30 Rock
Kirk Gleason (Sean Gunn), Gilmore Girls
Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), The Office
Winifred "Fred" Burkle (Amy Acker), Angel
The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Doctor Who
River Tam (Summer Glau), Firefly
Olive Snook (Kristin Chenoweth), Pushing Daisies

Shows that were probably in the running, but I have never watched: Breaking Bad, In Treatment, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords, Curb Your Enthusiasm

Those amazing Brits: The Office, Extras, Dead Set (best zombie TV series ever), Torchwood: Children of Earth, Doctor Who

The Auteurs: Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse), J.J. Abrams (Felicity, Alias, Lost, Fringe), David Simon (The Wire, The Corner, Generation Kill, Treme), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, True Blood), David Milch (Deadwood), David Chase (The Sopranos), Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip), Amy Palladino (Gilmore Girls), Matthew Weiner (The Sopranos, Mad Men)


So ... what’s on everyone else’s list?

Just a thought

According to the radio this morning, one of the intelligence failures that allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the plane he nearly blew up was the U.S. State Department’s inability to determine whether or not he had a visa. He did; the State Department thought he didn’t. Why? His name was misspelled.

This is disturbing in and of itself, and is a glaring demonstration of why relying on technology rather than human intelligence and common sense gets us into trouble. But what strikes me as particularly worrisome is that if a misspelled name can lead to a terrorist slipping through the cracks, we’re doubly in trouble when the principal antagonists originate from countries that don’t share our alphabet.

Seriously. We can’t settle on how to spell al-Qaeda (al-Qaida?). If Momar Qaddafi (Moammer Khadafi? Muammar al-Gaddafi?) didn't travel everywhere with a huge tent and sexy bodyguards, he could probably board a plane for Des Moines tomorrow without being identified.

The government endorses my laziness

I'd been feeling guilty lately about being slack in posting, but it just occurred to me today -- I have not, in fact, been delinquent in my blogging ... I just prorogued "An Ontarian in Newfoundland" back at the end of November. So not only is my absence here explainable, it's also constitutional.

Thank you, Stephen Harper, on behalf of all Canadians, for this catch-all excuse for abject laziness. Once again, your moral example is like a beacon of light unto the country. Or a beacon of something, anyway.

Now, if I can just convince Michaelle Jean to dissolve the winter semester ...

The illusion of substance

A student sent me this, possibly in retribution for something—one way or another, it made my head hurt.



I have little doubt about two things here: first, that it is entirely likely there were any number of answers of substance and intelligence that didn’t make the cut because they didn’t fit the overall narrative; and two, that one could have easily cobbled together a comparable series of interviews at Obama’s election night rally in which people vapidly spouted empty rhetoric about hope and change. However, there is a third thing I have little doubt about as well, and that’s that the Palin supporters who can speak substantively to the issues are always going to be vastly outnumbered by Obama supporters who can.

I can claim this with confidence for two reasons. The first is simply the law of large numbers: whatever spin has been put on Palin’s popularity, she is actually a lot less popular than she has been made out to be; and her favourability rating is significantly lower than Obama’s (see Christopher Beam’s astute distinction between “favourability” and “job approval” here—he makes the point that Palin’s job approval rating can’t be measured because, well, she has no job). Hence, the proportion of naturally-occurring intelligence translates into higher numbers for Obama.

More importantly however, the number of Palinites able to speak substantively to policy issues will be significantly less because Palin herself has no substance. None. And it has been exasperating and baffling to read a series of op-eds this week and see otherwise intelligent people falling victim to the illusion that Palin’s largely media-driven persistence on the American stage is evidence of substance. Rex Murphy in The Globe and Mail and Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in The New York Times all opined that people on the left (and some on the right) claiming that Palin is a “joke” need to rethink their position—that she does in fact possess political wiles and savvy well in excess of what people imagine. Dowd states that Palin “reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls” and that “Democrats would be foolish to write off her visceral power.” Rich claims, “Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid.”

It was however Rex Murphy’s column in this past weekend’s Globe that most dismayed me, as whatever issue I might take with some of his positions, I can usually count on him for good contrarian common sense. His column was particularly irritating because he made some spot-on observations, but framed them in assumptions about the character of Obama supporters, and brought it all to an embarrassingly (for him) wrong-headed conclusion.

He says, “It will make Obama fans perspire to hear this, but Ms. Palin has a more forceful bond with her supporters than he with his.” This observation is exactly right, but I wonder why he feels the need for the caveat—Obama supporters are well aware of Palin’s forceful connection with her base. Indeed, it is one of the key things that worries many people about Palin: the bond is not intellectual but instinctive, proceeding not from the mind but the gut, and it is a manifestation of the most troubling elements of American reactionary nativism. In this she is not, as Mr. Murphy suggests, a unique new force in American politics, but the latest of American conservative politicians (following the likes of Dick Armey, Karl Rove and Mike Huckabee) to achieve a radioactive half-life balanced somewhere between actual elected officials and pundits like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. She is, to coin a term, a politainer: a political actor concerned not with policy or governing but her own specific brand, and when she pronounces on policy delivers what Jon Stewart (always the voice of sanity) calls “a conservative boilerplate mad-lib … delivered as if it were the hard-earned wisdom of a life well lived.”

It is his conclusion however which is most egregious: “Ms. Palin has rare gifts and stamina enough to give them play.” Certainly, she has a keen ability to cater to in reactionary American nativism; whether that counts as a “rare gift” is doubtful. But stamina? This is the governor who quit well before her term was up, just when tanking oil prices put Alaska’s economy in a spin; who didn’t actually write her own book; and whose political pronouncements emanate from Facebook and Twitter, not exactly forums that allow complex or nuanced thought.

Yet, Mr. Murphy observes, people respond to her intuitively and viscerally, and where there’s smoke there must be fire—forgetting, presumably, that in politics where there’s smoke there’s more likely to be mirrors. The abject loathing not just from the left but from the conservative intelligentsia equates presence, apparently; he writes, “A truly dumb and witless person would not have the demure columnist David Brooks hissing dismissively, angrily in fact, on a Sunday morning talk show that Sarah Palin ‘is a joke’ … Empty vessels do not inspire such venom and fury.” With all respect, Mr. Murphy needs to take a longer look at the culture of celebrity today—empty vessels fire the popular imagination as they never have in the past, and the heat they generate is no evidence of light.

The weirdness of academic conferences

We just finished up last Sunday the annual Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) conference, my favourite academic organization. I’ve been attending CAAS for four years, and have been on the executive committee for almost that long. Last year I organized the conference and hosted it at Memorial; this year, happily, it was held in London Ontario, which meant (a) I was on very familiar ground, and (b) I got to spend time with Kristen (I’m writing this entry at her place while she growls at the Library Sciences paper she’s writing).

(I also have a post on the CAASblog about the conference here).

The annual CAAS conference is a highlight for me, in part because it always feels a bit like going home (even when it’s not actually in St. John’s or London). I am and have been a member of a variety of scholarly societies, and usually attend the Congress of the Humanities every year in May. CAAS is the pleasant antithesis of the Congress—small (this year there were about ninety papers), tight-knit, friendly, and supportive. There’s something to be said about seeing the same faces every year, especially when you can be confident that this will lead to fruitful collaborations and discussion.

CAAS is a comfort on this front, because academic conferences—especially the larger they get—can be, if not necessarily daunting, then certainly odd.

There’s always a moment at conferences, usually when I’m sitting in on a panel whose papers are all way outside my areas of expertise and interest, when I reflect on the strange beast that is the academic humanities conference. I’ve tried to explain to non-academic friends and family the ostensible purpose of usefulness of conferences, and I have on occasion defended them in principle when friends and colleagues in academia inveigh against them as wastes of time, money, and energy. The thing is, I sort of agree with both perspectives; I always look forward to conferences as a chance to travel (even when the location is no great destination), to see friends and colleagues from other universities, and, yes, to see papers and engage in discussions about the subjects being discussed.

At the same time, there are always points at which the conference experience can be excruciating—even when the topics or themes under discussion are of interest to you. It is at times like that that I wonder why we do it, usually when I’m sitting in an overly heated hotel conference room in an uncomfortable chair trying to be interested in a poorly presented paper droning on well past its allotted twenty minutes … with no indication that the panel chair will be taking steps to bring the presenter to a close. Of course, the disturbing thing at those moments is wondering how many people in my audience will be thinking that about my paper.

The fact is that at your average conference you have to kiss a lot of frogs, and realize as well that you will yourself be one of those frogs for any number of people. Which is why, in my experience, the larger the conference the more likely that feeling of futility will surface. I return to CAAS every year knowing that the conference will be more of a collaborative effort than an atomized group of people there to put in the twenty minutes necessary to get a line on a CV.

Why he's the master

Chickens, as in the coming home and roosting thereof

Unsurprisingly, the saga of Rush Limbaugh’s failed attempt to buy the St. Louis Rams has made for some amusing commentary on both sides of the political coin, with those on the left barely able to contain their glee, and those on the right crying foul and proclaiming Rush a martyr to political correctness. I, of course, count myself among the first group, with the one difference being that I am making no attempt to contain my glee. Schadenfreude is fun.

What amuses me the most, and what I find most instructive about this minor but entertaining incident, is the “free speech” spin Rush and his apologists have put on it. Joseph Ziegler at Big Hollywood, speaking about the snub, stated, “I strongly believe that it also represents a seminal moment in our cultural history as well as the sad state of free speech in this country.” This kind of response is typical of a certain species of ultra-conservative commentator, flame-throwers who spew hatred and untruth and then whine that their first amendment rights are being abrogated when their comments are subjected to criticism. David Horowitz, the serially mendacious attacker of liberal bias in universities, employs this gambit quite frequently—often claiming that the fact he is not invited to speak at campuses is a form of censorship (and has nothing to do with the hefty fee he demands, or that most of those booking speakers don't tend to invite people who will then spend their lecture attacking them).

Even more bizarre was a post at the conservative blog Red State, which eulogized Rush’s failed ownership bid in language I really, really hope is meant to be facetious: “Earlier this evening, as most of you now know, one of our own, Rush Hudson Limbaugh, while taking withering fire, crashed and burned. Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a radio personality. Tonight, Rush is no longer ‘just’ a NFL owner denied. Tonight, Rush is us. And we are him.” The “attack” on Limbaugh, the poster maintained, is representative of the left’s totalitarian intentions, which “proved that they will stop at nothing to end our dreams.” As egregious as this claim is, it is topped at the end when the poster quotes, in its entirety, Pastor Martin Niemöller’s infamous poem about the Nazis:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Seriously? You’re seriously going to compare the failed bid of a multi-millionaire to buy a crappy NFL franchise to the Holocaust? The rhetoric has gotten way out of hand these days, and when American conservatives claim equivalency between their analogies between the left and Nazis and the left’s cries of “fascism” against the Bush administration, they’re ignoring two crucial points: (1) just because some extreme voices on the left made such intellectually dishonest accusations doesn’t make the reverse acceptable, and (2) the people calling Bush et al fascists were a small minority and by no means in the mainstream—which cannot be said of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the Fox News contingent. Red State's insanity is not limited to just such wingnut blogs: when an Obama spokesperson announced earlier this week that "Fox News often operates either as the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party. We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent," Glenn Beck interpreted this as an infringement of free speech and also invoked Pastor Niemöller’s poem: “Ask yourself this question: When they are done with Fox and you decide to speak out on something … the old, ‘first they came for the Jews and I wasn’t Jewish’.”

(I recently taught George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” to my first-year English class, and have been working on a post about words and phrases that need to be shelved until people are ready to use them intelligently again. Not to give too much away, but pretty much anything involving fascism, Hitler, and Nazism are all on the list.)

To return to my original topic here, my favourite part of the whole Limbaugh-NFL saga is that, for all the cries of liberal interference and thought policing, what really is at work here is capitalism in action. In spite of what some conservative commentators would like to believe, it wasn’t Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who sabotaged Rush’s ownership bid, but the other people with whom Rush was planning to buy the Rams. The other rich white men pooling their resources dropped Rush at the first sign of rough water, basically as soon as the NFL and the players’ union expressed concern about Rush’s history of making racially charged comments. This, to be clear, was not a prohibition exercised from on high by the forces of political correctness, but a business decision. The NFL is pretty controversy-adverse, and it is doubtful whether the ownership bid would have ultimately been successful if Rush’s cabal had stuck to their guns; but the fact is they didn’t, in the interests of their prospective investment. If Rush wants to portray himself as a martyr, he should be attacking his erstwhile business partners for lacking intestinal fortitude and the courage of their convictions—but of course he won’t, because their convictions begin and end with the bottom line on a ledger, and the ideology of money is one Rush embraces. So he and his dittoheads will attack the left, the Obama Administration, the NFL itself, and Bob Costas (seriously), but in the end Rush’s very public opinions on race made him toxic to a business that trades to a large degree on the goodwill of a large African-American constituency.

And that’s not censorship—that’s being forced to take responsibility for one’s words.

Danny Williams poses with Arnold Schwartzenegger for a photo op ...

... and somewhere in Toronto, a The Hour Has 22 Minutes writer jizzes in his pants.

Yup. Got me.

While researching my doctoral thesis on conspiracy and paranoia, I visited an awful lot of conspiracist websites. The problem with this particular survey was that a significant number of the sites were spoofs or parody of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. And honestly, it was difficult to tell the difference because so many of the genuine sites were actually crazier than the parodies.

So the so-called "Flamer" movement I mentioned in my last post? A spoof. It is one of a number of groups on the left replying to militant anti-health care rhetoric with parodies of its worst excesses. My favourite so far was the "Billionaires for Wealthcare" who attended Glenn Beck's 9/12 rally in Washington, carrying signs saying things like "If we ain't broke, don't fix it" and "Our death panels turn a profit!" They also sang a song to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic, whose refrain went:

If our healthcare corporation
Never faces regulation,
We'll be brimming with elation!
Let's save the status quo!


So, the "Flamers" (really, the name should have tipped me off, but then again the people they're parodying initially embraced the moniker "teabaggers" before someone told them what that actually meant) are of a piece with these guys, responding to the Glenn Becks of the world in what is probably the only rational way.

Of course, when you have people at town halls holding signs like this:


... or white supremacists marching for "white civil rights," that line between satire and reality gets disturbingly blurry.

This week in batshit: a wingnut roundup

Four items to tease you with on this good Saturday. To start, we have what is perhaps the biggest “WTF?” moment I have had in a long time—and after this summer’s batshit insanity masquerading as grassroots protest and Glenn Beck caroming madly between conspiracy theories, that’s saying a lot. Then we have further evidence that Sarah Palin should seriously consider a voicebox-ectomy, a bizarre almost-visitor here on the Rock, and lastly a former Growing Pains star “fixes Darwin.”

Good times.


1. “I’m sorry, you haven’t paid your fees. I’m afraid we have no choice but to let your house burn.”

First there were the Birthers, those people who claim Obama wasn’t born in America. Then the Deathers, who maintain government-run health care will result in “death panels” deciding whether you get treatment or get to die. And then the Tenthers, a group that interprets the Tenth Amendment as meaning that individual states have the right to reject any law issuing from the federal government.

Now, apparently, we have the Flamers. No, they’re not gay Republicans or Calgary fans; they are a group dedicated to, and I quote, “The privatization of everything in America.” That’s right—EVERYTHING. And their nickname? It derives from their favourite project, which is the privatization of firefighting in the United States. Troy Conrad, president, says “I shouldn’t have to pay for your fire.” Firefighting, he maintains—like everything else—should be a for-profit business. “All we know,” he says, “is that the free market always works as long as it’s unregulated. Even if that means a lot of people have got to die, it’s still worth it, because unregulated free market is the way to go.”

Watch him explain his point:



I watched this twice through, trying to figure out if this was just an elaborate hoax. I’m still not entirely sure it’s not, but there seems to be evidence that it’s genuine. They even have their own website, called Angry Town Hall.

I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.

What is perhaps weirdest about this for me is that one of the best arguments for U.S. government-run health care I read this summer, and one of the best debunking of the “socialist” accusation, was an op-ed piece pointing to government takeover of fire prevention in the mid-nineteenth century. Fire-fighting was, once upon a time, run on a private for-profit basis. The government finally stepped in because, besides the catastrophic damage that predictably occurred when fires raged in poor and hence unprofitable parts of cities, there were increasing numbers of suspicious fires occurring, as well as firemen standing idle until the property owners agreed to pay a much steeper fee.


2. Sarah Barracuda hits the lecture circuit

For an undisclosed fee probably in the hundreds of thousands, Sarah Palin delivered a talk to a group of investors in Hong Kong. Apparently, she spoke for about ninety minutes, the very thought of which makes my head hurt. I would pay a lot of money to not have to listen to her.

The lecture was closed to the media, but a few enterprising souls discreetly recorded it. I haven’t read the full transcript, but here’s a small sample of Palinese to make you nostalgic for the 2008 campaign trail:

"Personally, I’ve always been really interested in the ideas too about the land bridge. Ideas that maybe so long ago, had allowed Alaska to be physically connected to this part of our world so many years ago. My husband and my children, they’re part [unintelligible] Eskimo, Alaskan natives. They’re our first people, and the connection that may have brought ancestors from here to there is fascinating to me. Making our world seem a little bit smaller, more united, to consider that connection that allowed sharing of peoples and bloodlines and wildlife and flora and fauna, that connection to me is quite fascinating."

Ah, there’s the lyrical nonsense I’ve been missing. If only we could get William Shatner to do a spoken word performance of this one too.

The best part of the speech however was where she, with laserlike precision, identified the site and source of last year’s economic collapse: "I'm going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street U.S.A. ... We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place. We're not interested in government fixes, we're interested in freedom.” Ah, I see. The meltdown happened because of overregulation.

Yes. Yes, this is truly the person Americans want representing them to the biggest creditor. Wise move. She should get together with the flamer guy. They would have a lot to talk about.


3. Put ‘im on Signal Hill, I says!

For a little while there, it looked like Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi was going to be stopping over in St. John’s for a night as his plane refuelled. Alas, it is no longer to be—he has cancelled all the reservations for his one-hundred-plus retinue. Why, I couldn’t say. It might have something to do with not wanting to be chastised by our foreign affairs minister, who was going to fly to St. John’s specifically to upbraid him for giving a hero’s welcome to the Lockerbie bomber.

My theory is that there was a problem with the tent. One of the interesting factoids that has surfaced this week while Qaddafi was in New York is that when travelling he brings his own Bedouin tent to sleep in. He had difficulty finding somewhere to pitch it in New York—apparently no one wanted him in their back yard—and there was discussion of where he would set up camp in St. John’s. As a friend of mine observed, “A tent? In Newfoundland in autumn? It’s like a ready-made CODCO skit."

I don’t think the cancellation was because of the planned rebuke. I think he just found out what the Newfoundland climate is.

The worst part of this saga is that I now have a mental image of Qaddafi pitching a tent, and that’s just not something I want in my head.


4. Darwin=Hitler. Who knew?

And lastly, everyone’s favourite child-actor-turned-evangelical Kirk Cameron is, with the assistance of his friend Ray Comfort (known as the Banana Man), publishing Darwin’s Origin of the Species and distributing it to students ... with a new fifty-page introduction, that is. This introduction outlines “the history of evolution, a timeline of Darwin’s life, Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection with the theory, Darwin’s racism, his disdain for women, and Darwin’s thoughts on the existence of God.” Um, what? Hitler’s what with the what? Obviously, I need to get my hands on a copy of this. I have missed a crucial historical narrative apparently, in which Hitler travels back in time and forces Darwin to write Origin between his athetistic race-baiting and misogyny. So much I have still to learn.

Incidentally, the official Nazi line on evolution was that the Aryan race crashed fully formed on Earth frozen in a comet. But they were down with everyone else coming from apes. Which, when you think about it, totally confirms Kirk’s thesis.

That boy needs to learn about the logical fallacy called the “reduction ad Hitlerum.” But let him make his case himself:



I love the bit where he says, “All we want to do is present the opposing and correct view, without being censored ... which is exactly the case at present.” All I have to say to that is: Um, atheistic censor bureau? Can you please get your shit together? Obviously, you’re not doing a good enough job.

Raise a glass to Arthur

My parents are currently touring Ireland, and are fortunate enough to be there during the celebrations of Guiness' 250th anniversary. They wrote me an email to remind me that today is the day, and that I must raise a glass of the blonde in the black skirt to mark the occasion.

Well, I suppose if I must, I must...



As long as I'm on the subject of all things Irish, I should mention in passing that last week U2 played in Toronto and I WASN'T THERE. Kristen was, as well as a significant number of other friends of mine, but there was no way I was getting away in the first week of classes, alas.

I'm rather happy that U2 is touring while my parents are in Ireland, because my parents are exactly the sort of people who would wander into a small pub in Dublin and befriend the four guys having a quiet pint, and later tell me "They were all very nice, even the guy in the sunglasses. He wouldn't shut up about Africa. They said they were all in a band. Have you heard of them?"

Weekly Wisdom

"Alas, irreverence has been subsumed by mere grossness, at least in the so-called mass media. What we have now--to quote myself at my most pretentious--is a nimiety of scurrility with a concomitant exiguity of taste. For example, the freedom (hooray!) to say almost anything you want on television about society's problems has been co-opted (alas!) by the freedom to talk instead about flatulence, orgasms, genitalia, masturbation, etc., etc., and to replace real comment with pop-culture references and so-called "adult" language. Irreverence is easy--what's hard is wit."

--Tom Lehrer

Damn, I spilled my sherry on my research …

Oh, Margaret Wente …

Yup, she’s yet again taking aim at the contemporary Canadian academy, and applying the trademarked Wente rhetorical strategy—namely, cherry-picking one or two anecdotal incidents or observations and expounding from them to a broad generalization of outrage.

In this case, it’s the fact that professors, apparently, don’t teach. She cites the fact that today’s undergraduate experience tends to involve large, if not massive classes, often “taught by itinerant graduate students” rather than professors. “Classes are held in giant amphitheatres,” she continues, “with multiple-choice tests instead of essay questions.” She goes on to observe that the dropout rate of undergraduates it at an “all-time high,” with 30 percent bailing after the first year and only 56 percent finishing after six years.

This much is undeniably, and unfortunately, true. I could go further and point to the fact that the balance of teaching, especially crucial introductory courses, is now done not by full-time professors (or even itinerant graduate students) but by part-time and contractual faculty who have few benefits, no job security, and often don’t know what or how much they’ll be teaching—and hence how they’ll support themselves financially—until mere weeks before classes start. The ratio of courses taught by sessional faculty to full-time is usually around two to one, sometimes three to one. This is a situation that has been worsening for many years now as budgets get cut and departments are increasingly told to do more with less, with predictable ripple effects within among our student populations.

This has, indeed, become one of the Gordian knots of the academy both here and in the U.S., much puzzled and fretted over at all levels of the university. There are a host of reasons why we have arrived at this impasse, none of them reducible to a simple set of causes. However, never one to let complexity or nuance dissuade her from an outraged generalization, Ms. Wente sums up the site and source of the problems as follows:

“The universities say the problem is money. If only they had more of it, they could do a better job of educating undergraduates. There's just one catch. Educating undergraduates is just about the last thing most professors want to do.”

Huh. As it happens, I’m writing this on a break from preparing the three classes I’m teaching tomorrow, which all together total about one hundred and thirty students. Two of them are first year classes, one the standard first-year English that every student at MUN has to take, and the other an advanced composition course. I’m also teaching my usual twentieth-century U.S. fiction class, which this year is necessitating a lot more work because I decided to teach all novels I’ve never taught before, in an effort to keep the material fresh.

And however much I might complain about aspects of teaching, this is to my mind the best part of my job. I love teaching undergraduate courses. Now, of course, that’s just me—but honestly, I have met very few professors, either here at Memorial or at my time at Western, or in the larger peer circle of Canadian academia, who have not taken undergraduate teaching seriously and devoted much time and energy to providing their students with the best instruction they can. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but they are just that—exceptions. And I take exception to Ms. Wente’s attempt to invert the ratio of this rule. To hear her speak, we all would rather bury ourselves in our research and ignore the undergraduate populations of our campuses entirely.

In true cherry-picking fashion, she supports her claims with a quotation from a U of Manitoba professor: “‘My colleagues do everything they can to get out of teaching,’ says Rod Clifton, who works in the faculty of education at the University of Manitoba. ‘They'd rather not have the students around, because they'd rather do research and stand around and sip sherry.’” Ah, the indolence of research, which apparently occurs during booze-soaked mixers in the faculty lounge. The fact that neither I nor my colleagues drink sherry notwithstanding, I’m not sure whether Dr. Clifton’s comment is meant to be facetious or intellectually dishonest; either way, it doesn’t bode well, in the absence of other evidence, for Ms. Wente’s argument.*

If professors’ reluctance to teach is the principal stumbling-block to a quality undergraduate education, its partner in crime is the research that preoccupies them and takes them away from the classroom: “Professors are rewarded not for turning out high-quality graduates, but for turning out books and papers – even if they are unread. This perverse system stubbornly persists, despite the fact that everyone knows it's absurd.” While generously granting that “some research,” useful, specifically in science and medicine, Ms. Wente effectively dismisses everything produced in the humanities. “Nobody,” she states, is “clamouring for another book on Moby-Dick.” I suppose this is true enough, as far as it goes; and it is hard to deny that the research requirements now leveled on professors are far more onerous than back in the halcyon days when Ms. Wente was an undergrad, when “classes were small and many of our professors were creative and enthusiastic,” to the point where “some of them were happy to hang around with us drinking coffee, smoking dope and arguing about Blake and life.”**

What this dismissal of research in the humanities misses is something crucial to the nature of the university itself. If teaching the Great Books and chewing the fat about Blake and Life, the Universe, and Everything were all that were involved, it hardly seems necessary to demand of professors the accreditation of a PhD. What research is largely about, whether the articles and books produced are read or not, is demonstration of an engaged and enthusiastic mind that didn’t freeze at the moment of the thesis’ defense. Part of the philosophy behind the university as a whole is that individual professors’ research make them better and more relevant teachers to both the undergraduate and graduate students.

Incidentally, this point was made today much more eloquently in the Globe and Mail by Clifford Orwin, a political science professor at U of T. He writes, “my teaching depends on that research. To teach is to communicate enthusiasm for learning, and what sustains that enthusiasm is continuing to learn yourself. It's also to set an example of progress to nourish in your students the hope that they too can contribute to progress. No, not all research done at universities is valuable. The surprise is how much of it is.”

I’ll end this post by observing that I’ve come to the conclusion that every time Margaret Wente is at a loss for something to whinge about, she pens an anti-university column. It seems to happen two or three times a year, and I’d really like her to make up her mind. Are we ivory-tower mandarins locked into cultural irrelevance? Or are we providers of pop-culture dreck who siphon off unwarranted federal research funds in our ongoing quest to bury the Great Books under layers of obfuscatory “theory”? Are we cheating our students of the great lessons of civilization by denying them those Great Books? Or are we cheating our students futures by not steering them into math and science and away from the irrelevant humanities? All these are variations on themes I have read in her columns, and taken together it becomes something of an inchoate but intense dislike that, I think, makes a little more sense if you read the opening paragraph of yesterday’s column. I’ve already quoted part of it, but here it is in its entirety:

“I went to university back in the golden age. Our classes were small and many of our professors were creative and enthusiastic. They even marked our papers themselves. There was lots of scope for what is now known as ‘engagement,’ which means that although we were undergraduates, some of them were happy to hang around with us drinking coffee, smoking dope and arguing about Blake and life.”

Nostalgia is a treacherous thing, for it distorts not only our memory of the past but our perception of the present. It makes me wonder if Ms. Wente so dislikes what she sees in the present academy because she resents that contemporary students don’t get this sort of experience … or because they do, but in her mind it could never rival that “golden age” (itself a deeply problematic concept that I would challenge her on, were she my student). What she describes in this passage is not at all a relic, but still something that many, many undergraduate students experience today (pot-smoking professors and all). Perhaps instead of Blake, they’re talking about Foucault, or Kathy Acker, or Quentin Tarantino. Or maybe even Blake, why not? Whatever she may believe, her idyllic university experience has not yet passed from this earth.


*Incidentally, were she to submit this column as an essay in my advanced composition class, I would grant it a C+ largely on the strength of being reasonably well written and possessing a clearly stated thesis; this recourse to a single piece of anecdotal evidence however fails utterly to make the connection to the statistics cited earlier in the piece or to persuasively account for them. I would call this a fallacy of insufficient inductive reasoning.

**Given the general capriciousness of Margaret Wente’s antipathy to the academy, I would lay bets that if there were a sudden rash of socializing dope-smoking profs hanging out in coffee shops with impressionable students, we’d be seeing a column on (a) inappropriate professorial behaviour, (b) evidence that professors are lazy and not earning their salaries, or (c) “THIS is where students’ tuition dollars are getting them?” Take your pick.

Nice one, Sacha. Less believable that Borat, though

There’s a metaphysical question that has been plaguing me for months now, akin to the age-old unanswerable poser dealing with angels, pinheads, and dancing. Every time I think I’ve arrived at an answer, something new happens to throw all reason and rationality into disarray.

My question is this: Is it possible for Glenn Beck to be MORE of a jackass?

Seriously, he has redefined conservative demagoguery ... and by redefined, I mean made it so inchoate, self-contradictory and, well, batshit insane, that it would function as a parody of the whole genre if it weren’t taken seriously by a scary number of people.


But it was the word “parody” that set off the light bulb, and gave me the blinding epiphany that finally answered the haunting question.

I suddenly realized. Glenn Beck isn’t real. He’s a character being played by Sacha Baron Cohen.


Wow. I mean, wow ... nicely played, sir. First Ali G, then Borat, then Brüno. But this one takes the prize, it really does. Kudos.

But, um, don’t you think you’ve taken this one a little bit too far by now?

In praise of minority

Call me a sentimental fool, but I think the wisest observation ever made about democracy was Winston Churchill’s famous declaration that it is the worst form of government there is, except for all the others.

None of the political wisdom and scholarship I have encountered in my life has managed to sum up so neatly the constant frustration with the venality, posturing, graft, waste, and partisan hackery of liberal democracy and the inescapable fact that the vast majority of us wouldn’t trade it for anything. Is democracy messy? Yes. Inefficient? Yes. These two elements alone make frustration with government and contempt for politicians the third and fourth constants in life after death and taxes. Which is why I’m generally willing to cut politicians a little slack for their failings, if for no other reason than those very failings are more or less inevitable on some level, unavoidable by-products of a political system based on horse-trading and compromise. Max Weber wasn’t exaggerating when he observed that one attempts to effect political solutions to social problems at nothing less than the cost of one’s own soul.

All this is apropos of our current shifting political landscape, or what we more commonly call a minority government. Rick Salutin had a column in the Globe last weekend in which he gently chided those complaining about the possibility of a fall election: “In a vital democracy, like ancient Athens or the Iroquois confederacy, people were involved in politics continually. Under our system, politics more or less equals elections, so you could call frequent elections our form of participatory democracy. It keeps citizens engaged and parties on their toes.” He then asks whether we’d have seen even the “minimal action” Harper has made on the economy or Afghanistan if the Tories had a majority.

Would I be happier with the Conservatives out of power? Absolutely. But a Harper minority is in a variety of ways preferable to a Liberal supermajority, for the simple reason that it tends to prevent complacency and the insufferable arrogance and tone-deafness that finally brought down the Liberals and would be worse (I believe) by a magnitude under a Harper majority. To keep his party in power, Harper has been forced to make all sorts of progressive concessions that would be unthinkable with a majority, and in response to Ignatieff’s saber-rattling he is floating concessions on EI spending in an attempt to garner NDP and Bloc support.

I love this for two reasons, one petty and one idealistic. The petty reason is that it puts egg on Harper’s face, who around this time last year was condemning the Liberals’ willingness to work with “socialists and separatists.” My, how the wheel turns.

The other reason is that I believe this is how it’s supposed to work. The whole point of having ideologically opposed political parties is to have them act as checks and balances on the other and mitigate their excesses. Would I prefer to have Prime Minister Ignatieff? Probably. But a Stephen Harper forced to reach to Iggy’s left will do nicely for the time being, thank you very much.

Atlas shrugs; Chris yawns

One of the interesting and irritating things I’ve seen as a northern spectator on American politics since Obama’s election is the re-injection of Ayn Rand into conservative discourse. Rand’s militantly individualist philosophy of objectivism has animated many of the arguments against the stimulus (significantly, the Obama version far more that Bush’s), and when the teabaggers have managed to complete full sentences, there has frequently been a Randian flavour to their protests. And now the prospect of “socialized” health care has resurrected the ghost of John Galt to argue against any legislation that aids the heavier and undeserving segments of society’s pyramids.

Jonathan Chait has an excellent article in The New Republic discussing two new biographies of Rand. He offers some excellent analyses of Rand’s particular brand of philosophy, but also puts his finger on what is the biggest flaw in her celebration of individual accomplishment and excellence: namely, that income is the purest denominator of success, and that “elite” in the Rand vocabulary is invariably synonymous with “business elite.” It is as if, quips Matthew Yglesias, “an Albert Einstein is just a kind of middleweight hack but the VP for Marketing at Federal Express is one of [the] ubermenschen.”

I had not, I must admit, read much Rand until recently. During my undergrad I read one of her lesser novels (Anthem) and imbibed enough of her philosophy to be entirely turned off; during the writing of my dissertation I had the entertaining experience of reading her Screen Guide for Americans, a guidebook she wrote for the Motion Picture Alliance that offered advice on how to detect, identify, and avoid communist influence in films (truly, a page turner, especially if you don’t quite understand how Frank Capra and Henry Fonda were raging Reds). I have lately been working (slogging) my way through Atlas Shrugged at the behest of a student who, as a Rand enthusiast, quite rightly suggested that if I wanted to mock Rand I should put my money where my mouth is and read what is considered her masterpiece.

So far? Unimpressed. I can see where the narrative is going, and while the celebration of personal accomplishment is always commendable, Rand’s philosophy is relentlessly bloodless and isolating. Putting aside for the moment the fallacy of making an absolute connection between income and excellence, Rand’s particular brand of individualism is so relentlessly militant it is anathema to any form or incarnation of community. Anything that impinges upon individual accomplishment—any obligation that individual has to other people, ethically or otherwise—Rand rejects as the leading edge of collective mediocrity eroding the heroic individual.

I suppose it’s because my own conception of “great accomplishment” tends to lean more toward the civic or political, or triumphs of the imagination creative or empirical—in general, accomplishment that presupposes the value of community and social contract, and the need to contribute to it—that makes Rand’s John Galts and Howard Roarks compelling but ultimately hollow for me. Shakespeare wasn’t a millionaire and Mozart died a pauper, after all, and as far as "accomplishment" goes, I'd put them ahead of Nelson Rockerfeller any day.