Cynical Idealist?

I've been thinking a lot about why I have so much emotionally invested in Obama's possible presidency. I think I knew all along, but I've been slow to admit it to myself. I read or heard somewhere, I can't remember, that it's pretty much been proven that most people vote for those whom they feel are most like them. Now, this seems awfully solipsistic, and also illogical. Just because someone isn't like you doesn't mean they can't be a good leader.

But when I'm really honest with myself, I know that I like Obama because more than any other politician, pretty much ever, I feel akin to his experiences. Of course, he' black, and I'm not. However, beyond that, for many years before he entered politics, he was a scholar of law. I define myself, at least professionally, as a scholar. His three favorite authors are Faulkner, Melville, and and Phillip Roth. Talk about going 3-for-3. In Dreams From My Father, his very well-written memoir, he talks about reading Invisible Man, and Malcolm X's autobiography--and several other books that have stirred me as well, and meant quite a bit to me over the years.

His wife's name is Michelle, he has young daughters, he's lived all over the place, and he's simply and obviously more attuned to my generation. I also agree with him on most (not all) of his policies and general beliefs about political and governmental issues. But part of my enthusiasm for him also stems, I think, from two other things: my early fascination with hip-hop culture, which many suburban white boys have experienced, and Obama's non-militaristic background. Let me be clear here: I have nothing against the military. I have many relatives who fought for the U.S. in WWII and Vietnam.

Yet, I think part of the reason that Iraq has been bungled is that this country often commits the error of confusing means and ends. What I mean is that our attitude toward the military, which is encapsulated by the common "Support the Troops" sentiment, promulgates the idea that we enter wars so that our heroes can exercise their god-given right to valor. For example, anyone who questions the Iraq War is often assumed as having not "supported the troops," as if this is the only thing that matters when evaluating our foreign policy. We get into wars to exercise foreign policy objectives, not to justify our already having sent troops to the battlefield. The argument that we would be somehow disservicing our troops if we were to get out of Iraq ASAP, suggests that the experience troops have, and their self-perception, and our perception of their heroism, is tantamount to why we went their in the first place. Sadly, though, our administration doesn't have a clue as to what exactly they want...a free Iraq? Palestine was also "given" a democracy and they elected Hamas. What if the Iraqis elect someone we don't like? Will it be a failed enterprise? Will a "free Iraq" really "change" the middle east? Maybe, but how could anyone answer that with the assurance necessary to send our troops to war, especially when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? That's a huge price to pay, and risk to take, for something you're merely guessing will turn out ok. If a war cannot be justified, you don't keep troops into the battlefield just to save face. You bring them home, cede that you've erred, and ask for forgiveness. If only we lived in that kind of world.

Call me an idealist. I've always considered myself a cynic and a skeptic, but lately I've realized that there's an idealism in me which has played a significant role in why I am so invested in this campaign, and which leads me to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when I disagree with him or when he shows weakness. I hope in the end that my enthusiasm for his candidacy will be justified by history and not simply by my own identification with him.

Even Sandy's and Danny's summer ended

My summer is officially over. Tuesday I start back to teaching class, and more importantly, begin my newly disciplined and streamlined schedule in which I finish the first chapter of my diss this term.

I'm very habitual and live by my routines. Alas, malaise, much like I imagine a very addictive drug, is the easiest habit to acquire, and has overgrown my day-to-day this summer like a bad weed. Granted, much of that was spent with my new daughter, so I really don't regret my do-nothingness. Nevertheless, I must thwart summer's complacency with different and better habits.

That means less TV (and football season is starting, too!). Less time online. Less sleeping generally. More time writing. Hopefully not less time with Ada and Michele. Overall, less fun.

For, malaise, contrary to its connations of rottedness and decadence, can also be a tempting wellspring of, maybe not joy, but certainly a deceiving contentment. Even further reason to rekindle my ambition, lest I become permanently mired in a bog I only thought had been a fountainhead.

Here's to summer, and back to life.

Thankful for the Chicken

My summer home with Ada, regardless of the time I've not spent writing my dissertation, has seen at least one of my skills improve. Given that Michele normally comes home at least somewhat, if not very tired, and that she just wants to hold and feed Ada anyway, dinner has become my responsibility. So I've perfected my barbecuing skills, really learned how to cook both pork and beef roasts, and basically focused on all the little things that make a complete, nourishing, healthy, and interesting meal.

Last Friday I pulled out our Betty Crocker cookbook, a gift given to Michele by her grandmother, and flipped through the "Soups" section. But a few things about this cookbook. It looks about fifty years old, its target audience is definitely the female "homemaker" of the 1950s, and its sexism is so quaint its now funny. For example, in the opening section called "Kitchen Know How," the advice reads: "Every morning before breakfast, comb hair, apply makeup and a dash of cologne. Does wonders for your morale and your family's, too! Think pleasant thoughts while working and a chore will become a 'labor of love.'" Hey, I'm all for combing hair and the occasional dash of cologne, but not even Ada wants to see me in makeup.

But Betty's book's datedness is also its strength. Its comprehensiveness challenges the idea behind the more contemporary cookbooks, which are now almost exclusively specialized. The Betty Crocker cookbook does not promote a certain "lifestyle"; it assumes a certain unanimity among its audience, and its recipes are thoroughly mid-century American: by that I mean that any reference to foreign methods or ingredients--and there are many--are subsumed into a uniform blandness.

And yet there are so many great recipes. I decided on the Mulligatawny, a thick, curry-flavored soup that mixes some fairly incongruous ingredients: onion, carrot, apple, celery, chicken, green pepper, cloves, mace, curry and consomme. I even made the consomme myself earlier in the day. I cooked a chicken, harvested all the meat and made about 10 quarts of broth, most of which I froze and will use later.

I felt like I was enacting a cliche (which is probably true) about the relationship Native Americans had with the animals they hunted. They respected them by not wasting them. For some reason it felt better that I was getting so much out of just one chicken. Enough meat for two meals, and enough consomme for probably three different soups. I've thought about vegetarianism before, but I do not have the will to surrender the pleasure of tasty meats. It would be a serious sacrifice that I'm just not willing to make.

What does feel good is that I know that this particular chicken was not wasted. It reminded me of Marx and one of his many astute critiques of capitalism--that it separates product from the worker, and the manufacturing process from the consumer, which in turn results in the illusion that goods appear magically, out of nowhere. By emphasizing ends, and not means, this process encourages a free-floating consumerism which is disastrous for its cancelling of origins. There's always more where that came from, is the idea.

And yet it seems that we're slowly figuring out that this kind of mentality is not sustainable. At least some of us are. Animals, obviously, are not morally equivalent to humans. Otherwise, I would not eat them. But that does not mean that the human/animal relationship need be devoid of morality altogether. While some may see hypocrisy in this position, I think there's a clear difference between animals we raise for our own consumption, and wild animals we hunt merely for our pleasure. I don't understand people who hunt cougars or bears or other mammals that, if they're not on the endangered list already, will be soon. I think that livestock, when treated "humanely" (isn't there even some irony in using this word?) serve a moral purpose, and might even claim more usefulness than many humans, since at least they provide sustenance to other beings.

The chicken we ate gave his life so that three people could eat several meals. While I don't think I'll ever become a vegetarian, I was thankful for the chicken. I respected him by eating all of him, and by culling, even from his carcass, the flavors that will enliven meals to come.

The Aesthetics of Greatness

I've watched more of this Olympics than I had planned on, mostly for two reasons: Michael Phelps, the world's best swimmer, and Misty May-Treanor, the world's best, and hottest, beach volleyball player. As a sports fan, I'm mostly a total homer--I usually only watch the teams that I'm invested in (Seahawks, Beavers, Mariners), but I'm also attracted to greatness: the type of athlete that dominates not just because of athletic ability, but through will, determination, and killer instinct.

Phelps has it. Tiger has it. Jordan had it. The new Olympic "Redeem Team" is very talented, and of course will win the gold this year. Upon watching some of the highlights, I think that both Kobe and LeBron will probably, in the end, rack up better career statistics than Jordan; one might even argue that physically, their talent matches Jordan's. They're both winners, and they're both fun to watch (beside the fact that I still cringe when considering Kobe's Colorado incident).

Yet, the reason why Kobe and LeBron will never be Jordan, and never ultimately compare to Jordan's greatness is not because of statistics or longevity or even championships. It's that, while Kobe and LeBron are indeed entertaining, they do not exhibit the physical grace Jordan did.

Jordan played a very stylized game of basketball. The way he moved, the proportions of his body, the way he carried himself while in flight, the way he walked down the court, his perfect jump-shot: he exuded effortlessness, even nonchalance, all while dominating. I'm not sure if that's a fair measure of greatness. But aesthetics remain an unrecognized, and un-theorized aspect of American sports. What made Jordan the greatest was that, like Ali did for the ring (and for so many other aspects of American culture), Jordan did for the court: he made dominance, determination, and push-to-the-limit physical exertion look, well, cool (in the Miles Davis sense of the word). I think of it as the ability to sustain a fundamental irony: coolness is normally synonomous with leisure, relaxation, and maintaining the appearance of remaining aloof from the type of anxieties and annoyances that usually impact the rest of us mortals. What Jordan does is to fuse that type of coolness with an intensity which would seem to be its opposite.


Anyone who plays basketball now retains traces of Jordan in their movements, but there's only one Real McCoy.

More Torture; Edwards, etc.

So now we learn that they're using coffin-sized boxes to hold detainess for up to 12 hours at a time at Gitmo. Know who used coffin-sized boxes on their prisoners? Nazis at Auschwitz.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/07/segregation.boxes/index.html

Many construe criticism of our government's torture methods, such as waterboarding, as overly-sensitive swooning for people who want to kill us. But you know what? It's not about them, it's about us. If Bush wants to lecture China on human rights abuses, which he did yesterday, then we should not abuse human rights either. Under this administration we have lost all moral high ground.

The Edwards story just broke as well. 1.) Did he actually think this wouldn't have come out if he had won the nomination?; 2.) I'm glad that he didn't win because it would have sunk him; 3.) Given the timing, he must have been two-timing his wife while she was being diagnosed with very serious cancer. Classy.

I'm so glad Obama has none of this type of baggage. I'm tired of that kind of soap opera, which we got enough of during the Clinton years.

1.20.09*

I was reading a piece by Thomas Frank today at Salon,

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/08/07/frank_wrecking/

and after what has become a daily ritual for about the last two years--reading about how corrupt our government is--my chest knotted up, blood rushed into my face, my teeth clinched. Thank God for term limits.

Anyway, this passage captures something I've been mulling over for some time: if conservatives pretend to be so suspicious of government, why are they so eager claim its mantle?

"Yes, today's conservatives have disgraced themselves, but they have not strayed from the teaching of their forefathers or the great ideas of their movement. When conservatives appoint the opponents of government agencies to head those government agencies; when they auction their official services to the purveyor of the most lavish "golf weekend"; when they mulct millions from groups with business before Congress; when they dynamite the Treasury and sabotage the regulatory process and force government shutdowns -- in short, when they treat government with contempt -- they are running true to form. They have not done these awful things because they are bad conservatives; they have done them because they are good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds follow naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition."

A real conservative might answer that conservatives enter government in order to keep it small--but if government is measured in terms of how much we spend (a very good, but not the only measure), then it's been liberals actually, and not conservatives who have balanced the federal budget in the last 30 years. It's conservatives who have launched us into a foreign policy that requires an exponential expansion of the federal government, and which has forced us to borrow literally trillions of dollars from China. It's conservatives, who are supposed to know what they're doing in the field of business, who have presided over one of the worst financial collapses in American history. So if they fail at governance, and fail at free enterprise, why do we continue to vote for them?

Today's conservativism seems to thrive on, what for most of us, would appear to be a contradiction: even if conservatives fail at government, they can still claim they've succeeded by pointing out that government doesn't work anyway--that it fails because it's meant to fail. They stay in power by pretending to care about socially conservative causes, or by pretending to be religious, and yet their policies often run counter to the economic well-being of the people who normally vote for them (this is a basic version of Frank's thesis in his book, What's the Matter with Kansas?). Like Larry Craig and Mark Foley, they'll rail vociferously against gay marriage, all the while soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms and sending naughty text messages to underage boys. They'll pay lip-service to anti-abortion causes, and yet have never seriously challenged Roe v. Wade.

I began to veer away from conservativism when I oberved, around 2002-03, that conservativism in action bears very little resemblance to its philosophy. I started making these observations when it was clear that our Iraq adventure was based on a foundation of lies--lies worse than Nixon ever told. And I became very angry about those lies.

But perhaps incompetence is rooted in conservatism; its contempt for government seems to go hand-in-hand with a contempt for American citizens, who are incessantly force-fed lie after lie, and a contempt for truth itself.

----
*1.20.09 is, of course, Bush and his cronies last day. (Thanks to Becky for '08/'08 correction).

On Favre and Ledger

Two of the most prominent sports/entertainment stories this summer have been Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight and Brett Favre's non-retirement. Is there a more perfect example of fate's sick sense of irony that when Ledger died, he was effectively denied (or denied himself?) the chance for a graceful exit, while Favre, when given the perfect chance for a well-deserved and celebrated adieu, instead insists upon simply being annoying?

I have no problem with players playing as long as they want; but for the past three years, Favre has insisted that he's retiring, and then finally come back. Last year, he stated very plainly that he was definitely retiring. And now he's everywhere again.

On the other hand, there's Ledger, whose Joker completely overcame what was already a pretty wonderful version of Batman. I would go so far as to say that his Joker is the film's protraganist, in the same unintended way that, about 350 year ago, John Milton's Satan became the hero of Paradise Lost. Christian Bale is a delightful and talented actor, but in comparison to Ledger, his Batman came off as churlish, arrogant, and even tyrannical (especially given his penchant for ubiquitous surveillance a la the Bush regime), only a certain part of which I think was dictated by the director and script.*

I highly recommend this film, and like most important films during this decade, it will surely be classified by history as "post-9/11" (but what isn't classified as "post 9/11" these days?).

Ledger and Favre are also interesting for a different reason: they are icons for early twenty-first century American manhood/masculinity. It's been a staple of every Sunday for the last fifteen years, to hear the fawning of the nation's collective sportswriters and commentators over how boyish and fun and manly Brett Favre is.

Why is it acceptable for mainstream American men to openly express their man-crushes on Brett Favre and to regale over his fun-loving boyishness (often celebrated for his love of the risky, inadvisable throw), while for the same people Ledger's performance in Brokeback Mountain, which represented a true professional risk, produces so much squeamishness? And yet, what Ledger accomplished for American culture in that role was to show that "manliness" isn't as simple as enacting a few telling characteristics. Manliness, at its best, contains strength and warmth, substance instead of empty posturing.

Favre is undeniably talented, and was very fun to watch. But Ledger is the man.
________

*Bale's and Ledger's talent can also be compared in they Bob Dylan pseudo-biopic I'm Not There.

*NFL quaterbacks must fit into one of the three following categories: 1) cerebral/professional (Peyton Manning, Steve Young), 2) hunky and perfect (Tom Brady, Joe Namath), 3) boyish and free-wheeling (Brett Favre, Terry Bradshaw).

Why I'm blogging

As I wrote in "about sam-plings" (to the right), I started this blog so that I can get into a regular habit of writing, which I need to be more disciplined about since I'm currently writing my dissertation. It's the final step--and by far the most difficult--I'll take in my graduate career before I finally get my PhD and hopefully, a tenure-track job.

Writing a dissertation is almost equivalent to writing a book (it's roughly the same length as the average book)--but not just any book. My readers are four very smart people who have all published widely-read books themselves (at least in lit crit circles); in addition, I'm writing about literature, which means I'm writing about writing. Lastly, the authors and texts I write about are ones that I care about and deeply respect.

All this has led to a reluctance to write. I've been researching and reading on my topic for over a year now, but that's the fun and easy part. Concocting and designing arguments that have not already been proffered before--that's what has me frozen at the moment. It's not really a crisis of confidence--I haven't gotten this far without a certain amount of confidence in my ideas and my ability to analyze--but that at this point I think I'm expecting too much out of myself. The first step is just to get my ideas on paper. I can always revise.

As far as this blog goes, I will rarely touch on my diss. A couple models that I'm following are Andrew Sullivan's (he writes for The Atlantic), and my friend and teacher, Charlie Bertsch's blog. What I appreciate about Sullivan's blog is his radical openness to other people's ideas and to critiques of his own positions. He's a conservative (in the old-fashioned sense--suspicious of collective action and government intervention), which means I disagree with him quite a bit. But I tend not to read blogs by people who I know I will agree with, because I can always predict their position. Sullivan constantly surprises me with fresh takes that are well-argued and unpredictable. He also has a knack for staying on top of important cultural trends.

What I appreciate about my friend Charlie's blog is that 1) they're very smart 2) he covers a wonderful variety of topics (everything from music to his daughter to sports) 3) he's very honest without being solipsistic.

Anyhow, I hope that what I imagine will be a very small readership of this blog, at first, will eventually grow. If not, I'm glad to write to family and friends. In the least, I hope it functions as a way for people who I care about to get to know me better. Most of my posts will be brief, but occasionally, I'll take time to write longer, more involved posts (once a week?).