Now You See It...

A few people may have noticed that this blog disappeared for a couple of days this week.  ("Few" because, due to my own laziness and scandalously infrequent posting, it gets so little traffic now.)  On Tuesday morning I got email from Blogger notifying me that someone had flagged the blog for review, so they removed it.  I was allowed to appeal, and I did. This morning I got another message, telling me that they'd re-evaluated and "upon review, the blog has been reinstated," so here we are.

Needless to say, I'm immensely relieved.  Seventeen years of writing had gone up in smoke, and like a fool I hadn't backed it up.  The first thing I did after the reinstatement was to do just that. Coming on top of the Republican victory on Tuesday, this episode left me stunned, and I walked around in a daze for a while.  Even if no one else had read it, this blog is my intellectual journal, allowing me to revisit my thoughts on a range of subjects over the past two decades - which highlights my carelessness in not having backed it up.  I hope I've learned my lesson.

So here we are.  Looking back at November 2016, I see that I had a similar reaction to Trump's victory then.  It's worse now, because he won the popular vote this time, and the GOP won back the Senate.  The outcome for the House of Representatives is still unsettled as I write.

I've mostly avoided the usual media, because I know pretty much what they're going to say.  My timeline on Facebook is also predictable.  I've seen it all before.  Eventually I'll have more to say, I suppose, though I also have a backlog of other topics I've put off addressing, and I intend to write about them for awhile.  For now, let me quote what an old Bloomington friend from the 1980s posted on Facebook.

I think the news media bares [sic] a lot of responsibility for Trump winning. News media is now primarily entertainment media. So they cover candidates who are entertaining. President Biden did not and will not offer a daily dose of entertaining "event"s because he is too busy doing his job as President and whose ego doesn't require constant validation. Whereas Trump is entertaining and will say anything to keep attention on himself. The current news media and Trump are made for each other. Sadly the entire world will now suffer the consequences.

I don't entirely disagree with this - I've criticized the corporate media harshly and often - but my friend overlooks a few things.  One is that despite the "current news media," Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and Joe Biden beat Trump in 2020.  The Democrats also defied the odds and drubbed the GOP in the 2022 midterms, to the disappointment of most of the corporate media.  By my friend's logic, none of that should have happened.  So while the news media should be criticized, it seems to me that something else could have been involved; could it perhaps be issues?  Like many liberals, my friend assumes that the masses are just sheep who do what the Lying Media tell them to do.  (Not him, though - why not?)  But you don't have to remember very far back to know that they don't, not always.  And it wouldn't do to ask why.  Ironically, my friend is echoing Trump's demonization of the media here.

I strongly disagree with his evaluation of Joe Biden's ego, which led him to seek re-election and to hang on to his candidacy no matter how unpopular he became.  His dogged support for Israel's crimes also hurt him, as it did Harris.  In general US media support Israel too, no matter what, so they can't be blamed for the public's revulsion against the atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories.  On the other side, Trump's notorious laziness didn't keep him from doing a lot of harm during his first term, and I expect his second term to be even worse.  I'd hoped that the Democrats would control Congress, which would have impeded Trump's agenda somewhat, but that didn't happen.

One correction I want to make to yesterday's post.  I thought that "the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling," and I was flat wrong about that.  From what I've read and heard, voter turnout this year was the highest it has been since 2008, and while some of that involved voters who opposed Trump and the GOP, it wasn't enough to counter Trump's highly motivated supporters.

P. S. A correction to the correction: a reader tells me that voter turnout wasn't as high as I thought.  He thinks 2020 was higher.  I'm not going to dig into it, because it's certain that Trump's base went to the polls in sufficient numbers that he won the popular vote this time.

Rejoice, For the 2028 Presidential Campaign Is About to Begin!

What more is there to say?  I don't think it's just my advancing age that has made this election cycle seem worse than its predecessors.  If so much weren't at stake, it could have been entertaining: the progressive deterioration of Biden and Trump on live television, the antics of party and personal loyalists as reality kept throwing banana peels in the path of their dreams, the incompetence of most of the Beltway news media, the fecklessness of administration spokespeople trying to defend the indefensible, and so on and on.  Watching State Department spokesperson Matt Miller smirk helplessly as he runs interference for Israeli atrocities, or White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre roll her eyes like a bored teenager at impertinent questions would strain credibility of satire, but it's all real, which makes it no fun at all.

Some Biden dead-enders are still fuming that "They stabbed that man in the forehead," though most quickly jumped on the Harris bandwagon.  I still see some complaining that Harris was 'forced' on the voters without a primary, though the immediate flood of support she received, both verbal and monetary, ought to be evidence enough that there was massive uneasiness about Biden at least among the Democratic rank and file before he was pried loose from his candidacy.  Some continued to lie for months that it was too late to replace Biden's name with Harris's on the ballots in various states, though this was propaganda from the Trump campaign.  Even funnier were MAGA complaints about all the campaign material with Biden's name on it that had become useless overnight - all that money wasted, so unfair!

Myself, I felt enormous relief when Biden finally abdicated.  I was not, and still am not, an enthusiast for Harris.  Her choice of Tim Walz as running mate was probably her best high-profile move.  I think it's fair to call her handling of opposition to US support of Israel a misstep, though it's impossible to say how it will affect the election, especially since Trump is even worse on Israel/Palestine than she and Biden have been. Among her supporters there's a tendency to talk as though criticism and opposition come only from Arab-Americans and Muslims, though that is certainly not true.

I think the number of hardcore MAGA voters is dwindling, though again it's impossible to say by how much.  One thing that sticks with me is that, in the small town where I live, whose government is dominated by Republicans, the local GOP office did not have a Trump sign in its window until he secured the nomination: instead there was a De Santis sign, which was removed when he ended his campaign.  For several weeks, the only signs in the window were downticket candidates.  I saw fewer Trump-Vance signs than Harris-Walz signs around town until the past week or so.  This bespeaks a lack of enthusiasm for Trump in an area where I expected him to be much more popular.

The abortion issue is going to be important, and may bode well for Democrats at all levels. That's been clear since the 2022 midterms, and Republicans are running scared.  Even Trump is trying to distance himself from it, which isn't going to win over many voters and has alienated some forced-birther Republicans.

I wanted to write this before Election Day, just out of guilt for not having weighed in before.  One thing that reinforced my sloth was that when I looked at my posts during previous election cycles, I saw that I'd said before everything I wanted to say this time.  But I feel bad because in the future I won't be able to look at what I've written this year as a kind of journal, which I can do for campaigns in 2008 and later.  I won't be following Election Night coverage this time, any more than I have in years past.  One previous post I do want to refer to concerns the likelihood that we won't know who's won for several days.  I remember that this maddened many mainstream journalists in 2020, and it's likely to be true this time around as well.  But we'll see, and one lesson we all should have learned this year is that events can surprise us.  However, I don't think most people have learned that lesson at all; many are determined to know what will happen, what we can expect, in advance anyway.

One prediction I will make with some confidence, though: as they wait impatiently for the results to come in, commentators will be asking: What does this mean for 2028?

One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays

One way I can tell what I ought to write about is that a topic nags at me for a long time.  This example goes back five years, to Edmund White's 2018 book The Unpunished Vice (Bloomsbury).  In May 2019 I wrote about White's confusion of cultural absolutism with cultural relativism, his youthful infatuation with premodern Japanese culture. It would be tempting to call this confusion fashionable, if it weren't so widespread and enduring.

In that post I wrote that I intended to discuss some disparaging comments White made about the US educational system.  If five years seems like a long time for me to be bothered by them, notice that White was still fussing about something that had happened over sixty years earlier. 

I went to a Deweyite public grade school in Evanston outside Chicago, where no grades were handed out, only long written comments by teachers on how successfully a student was realizing his potential. That whole system of education was scrapped after the Russians launched Sputnik 1 in 1957; Americans feared they were falling behind in the Cold War. But in that happy pre-Sputnik era of "progressive" education, we were contentedly smearing finger paint, singing a cappella two hours every week, helped along by our teacher’s pitch pipe, and trying to identify Debussy’s Jeux or Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in music appreciation class. Richard Howard, the poet, and Anne Hollander, the costume historian, had attended a similar public school in Cleveland. A poem of Howard’s starts with the line "That year we were Vikings."

Far from being the whole system of American education in those days, progressive schools were a tiny minority, and remained so.  If White hadn't been living in an upscale suburb, he wouldn't have attended a Deweyite school, even in Chicago.  His father was rich and his mother was a psychologist, both of which had something to do with his placement in such an environment.

As for Sputnik, it gave reactionaries another club with which to belabor American schools. But if they had been dominated by feel-good, academically vacuous trends (or if Deweyism had really been incompatible with academic success), it would have taken much longer than it did for the US to put its own satellite into space.  Explorer I was launched in January 1958, three months after Sputnik. The US had a large aerospace system in place already -- where did all the test pilots who went on to become astronauts come from? -- as Gerald Bracey among others explained:

Thus there were lots of reasons for the Russians to accomplish space flight ahead of the U.S.: Our neglect of ballistic missile development for 6 years after World War II; our two-many-cooks approach once we did get serious; the internecine rivalries among the services; the disregard of [rocket pioneer Robert] Goddard's achievements; and Eisenhower's thinking about long-range space policy.

None of these reasons had anything to do with what was happening in schools. It didn't matter. The scapegoating began almost immediately.*

I use Bracey here because he goes on to detail the scapegoating.  I'm old enough to remember the praise of the Soviet educational system that followed, including the five-part series in Life magazine comparing an American high school student, derided as lazy and aimless, to a driven, brilliant Soviet counterpart.  Bracey tracked down the American who, stung by the notoriety, went on to become a jet pilot, but couldn't find the Russian kid, who may not have even existed. I believe that the pro-Soviet trend expanded from the right-wing Life to such elite media as Reader's Digest; nowadays, of course, it's East Asian schools that are supposedly leaving our kids in the dust.

White's an excellent writer, and I've read most of his books, often with pleasure.  But he loves to gripe, inaccurately, about cultural relativism, political correctness, and feminists.  Sometimes he has an arguable point, but usually, as here, he's fantasizing.  

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* Gerald Bracey, Education Hell: Rhetoric vs. Reality (Educational Research Service, 2009), 37-38.

 

Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships

I should know better than to write about reviews of books rather than the books themselves, but I've been lazy lately, and since this review irritated me enough to start me writing, I'll go with it.  Remember, though, that I haven't yet read the book in question, and that I'm writing about the review.

So I happened on this review at the Guardian's website, of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm, published in December by Oxford University Press.  My beef is primarily with the reviewer, Peter Conrad, who writes as if he's never read a book about gay history before.  While that's true of many people, including gay ones, I expect a little better from a reviewer in a prestigious newspaper.

Evidently the book focuses on the brutal persecution of "the sodomites, as Malcolm grimly insists on calling them," and Conrad says it's all the fault of Christianity as he grimly but pruriently insists on detailing the punishments that our fore-uncles suffered.  "As Malcolm demonstrates, this paranoid bigotry derived from a misreading of scripture. The ungodly city of Sodom is condemned because its inhabitants committed a particularly abominable sin, but the Bible does not specify that this peccadillo was 'male-male sexual intercourse or desire."  Conrad here echoes gay Christian apologetics of the 1960s through the 1990s or so, which argued that the story of Sodom was not about male-to-male buttsex but about violations of hospitality.  This line reached its peak in John Boswell's influential Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago, 1980), which strained mightily to prove that Christianity was not hostile to homosexuality at all.  Boswell was effectively rebutted by numerous gay scholars, but his work remains popular (if largely unread) by gay laymen.  I'll just note that Conrad overlooks the prohibitions of male-to-male sex in Leviticus (18:22 and 20:13), which commands the execution of both partners, and in Romans 1, without referring to Sodom.  He also overlooks the hostility to receptive partners in Greek and Roman antiquity, expressed in heated rhetoric that presaged the ranting of medieval theologians on the subject.  That hostility is often found among gay men today.  While male-to-male sex was clearly common and popular in Roman society, an equally popular way to discredit one's political or other enemies was to accuse them of enjoying sexual passivity.  This let the accuser wallow in elaborate exciting fantasies about other people's practices, as bigots have done ever since.

The persecutions of sodomites weren't as consistent as Conrad implies either.  That doesn't excuse them, but it does indicate that religion wasn't the only or determining factor.  In Florence, for example, moral panics came and went.  According to Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford, 1996), authorities realized that draconic punishments made it harder to get convictions, so they changed the penalties to fines. "Sex here seems to be followed, almost automatically, by excruciating death," Conrad writes; well, sometimes, but not always or "automatically."  If the Florentine sex cops were driven by religious fervor, they should have maintained the beheadings and torture.  Conrad even acknowledges this: "The moral panic whipped up by these prosecutions often concealed squalid financial or political motives. A French assault on the secretive Knights Templar in the 14th century used sodomy as an excuse for confiscating their wealth."

Conrad may not be aware of it, but gay scholars have been investigating these matters since at least the 1970s.  In addition to Rocke, I think of a paper in The Gay Academic (ed. Louie Crew, Etc. Publications, 1978, pp. 73-78) on a sodomite hunt in the Netherlands that led to the execution of at least fifty-nine men, plus the harassment and expulsion of many more, in 1730.  Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History (Crowell, 1976) has a long documentary section on official violence against gay people. Louis Crompton's Byron and Greek Love (California, 1985) details the public torture and executions of English sodomites in the late 1700s. And so on: these are just off the top of my head.  I imagine Noel Malcolm is aware of his predecessors, even if Peter Conrad isn't.

I look forward to reading Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, possibly this year; the Kindle edition is reasonably priced, so I intend to buy it soon.  But I found this bit, the end of Conrad's review, off-putting: "Announcing that he has 'come to this subject with no personal investment in it', Malcolm resists the wishful thinking of historians who double as gay activists and back-project 'anachronistic sexual significances' on to blameless friendships between medieval men."  For a moment it was as if I were reading about a publication from the 1970s or earlier, with the author distancing himself from his subject (he's not that way, he's impartial and objective!), as if anyone cared anymore.  Even worse is that bit about "anachronistic sexual significances" and "blameless friendships."  I've written about that before.  Erotic love relations between men are also blameless, and there's nothing anachronistic about wondering if same-sex friends were also erotic partners. The ancient Greeks, for example, were sure that the Iliad's Achilles and Patroclus were erastes and eromenos - though they couldn't agree on which was which.  If anything, gay scholars like Alan Bray and David M. Halperin have done the opposite of what Malcolm says, denying erotic elements in medieval friendships.  So I'll have to see Malcolm's remarks in their context.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2023

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio posts them.  Have a look, and see what you think.

If Corporations Are People, What About Black Holes?

NPR strikes again.

I've noticed before how their news programs use astronomy as an excuse for flights of erotic fancy.  Last Thursday, though, they took a further step into feel-good, Culture-of-Therapy inanity, giving three minutes of their valuable airtime to an astrophysicist named Regina G. Barber.  Google News kindly sent it my way, showing that the Internet is malicious (if that wasn't already obvious).  "Black holes can teach us how to live our best lives," read the headline, and it was entirely accurate. 

One of my favorite celestial objects in the universe is the black hole.

Granted, I'm an astrophysicist. But I know I'm not alone. People love black holes. They seem to hold a near-mythic status in movies and pop culture.

People, movies, and popular culture love serial killers and zombies too.

What lessons do black holes have to teach us, according to Barber?  Here's the first one.

Lesson One: Push the limits, even if others doubt you

From there she tells how black holes were theorized and their existence eventually confirmed.  Apparently they were sitting out there, light-years away, patiently waiting to be found, pushing the limits against old meanie Albert Einstein's doubt about them.  But his obstructionism "didn't work," and they emerged to take their place in the sun.

And so on.  If you want to know the other two lessons, click through.  Barber concludes:

So, next time you're feeling unsure about your place in the world, remember: "Just because you are not seen, it doesn't mean that you are not there or that you are not, you know, playing a very, very important role," says [fellow astrophysicist Priyamvada] Natarajan.

Black holes have feelings too, just like you.  They too are Somebody.

This is of course all bullshit.  Planets don't dance with each other or kiss each other, and black holes were not waiting for astronomers on Earth to prove their existence.  I'm working on a blog post about meaning and purpose in scientific accounts of the universe, and despite what some philosophers and scientists will tell you, there was never any danger that personification of Nature was going to go away.  I don't know what Barber thought she was doing here; I suspect it's another attempt to make Science and Scientists look like nice guys instead of mean old grinches who want to take away all your illusions.  Luckily for us, black holes are too far away for people to try to pet them.  Barber and Natarajan would be first in line.

The Democratic Establishment Also Believes, and Trembles

 

This is pretty good, but I think it's misleading to take all the "Red Wave" predictions from Fox. I don't watch Fox. I do listen to NPR every morning, and they were just as sure as Fox News that the GOP would win big last November; also as disappointed when it didn't pan out. And I can't help wondering what Chris Hayes was saying before the fact. Don't misunderstand me, I think the lefty-Democratic resurgence is great news and I hope it continues. But corporate news coverage is mostly terrible, and Hayes himself as a booster of "meritocracy" is opposed to democracy.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition aired a brief interview on the UAW strike with Bernie Sanders, which they sought to balance with comments from a guy from the Brookings Institution. Does NPR "balance" its interviews with right-wing politicians and pundits by talking to people from the left? They do not.  If they can, they'll talk to commentators who are further to the right.