George Bush, Reader

Karl Rove tell us that George Bush is not the dolt that we think he is. That he,

Reader at Work

in fact, reads at a rate that more or less qualifies as voracious.  According to Rove, Bush read 95 books in 06, 51 in 07, and 40 in 08.  It would be churlish to note that his gradual decline mirrors his poll numbers.  In politics, of course, everything is political, even book lists.  Rove goes on:

“The reading competition reveals Mr. Bush’s focus on goals. It’s not about winning. A good-natured competition helps keep him centered and makes possible a clear mind and a high level of energy. He reads instead of watching TV. He reads on Air Force One and to relax and because he’s curious. He reads about the tasks at hand, often picking volumes because of the relevance to his challenges. And he’s right: I’ve won because he has a real job with enormous responsibilities.

“In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.

“There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one. Like so many caricatures of the past eight years, this one is not only wrong, but also the opposite of the truth and evidence that bitterness can devour a small-minded critic. Mr. Bush loves books, learns from them, and is intellectually engaged by them.

Richard Cohen sneers a bit at the Rovean effort to refashion Bush as an intellectual.

“It is awfully late in the day for Rove — and, presumably, Bush — to assert the president’s intellectual bona fides. Now feeling the hot breath of history, they are dropping the good ol’ boy persona and picking up the ol’ bifocals one. But the books themselves reveal — actually, confirm — something about Bush that maybe Rove did not intend. They are not the reading of a widely read man, but instead the books of a man who seeks — and sees — vindication in every page. Bush has always been the captive of fixed ideas. His books just support that.

Cohen strikes me as nitpicking.  I have so little respect left for Bush that I certainly feel no need to defend him.  But it feels like Cohen is fighting a battle that’s over, and maybe now that we can be released from Bush fatigue we can be just a bit pleasantly surprised that a man who negotiates the English language like a right guard in a tutu actually bothers to read at all. Imagining

On to Finnegan's Wake

Bush with a book brings with it the same kind of bemused shock at seeing Marilyn Monroe pondering the intricacies of Ulysses.  (Ok, I admit that Marilyn Monroe is much more pleasant to imagine.)

Cohen’s article does raise the intriguing question  “What is a Reader?”  For Cohen, obviously, just reading isn’t sufficient.  It requires a certain kind of curiosity, a certain level of abstract interest in discovering things beyond your normal range of familiarity and comfort.

I’m not opposed to that, and I think it’s fair to say that Cohen’s complaint points out that the simple fact of reading often brings with it some kind of ethical bonus points that are hardly deserved.  Reading doesn’t necessarily make us better people.  It doesn’t even necessarily indicate that we are very curious about the world.

However, in this day and age I’m happy that anyone reads at all, and Bush’s list is hardly lightweight.  As an overtaxed academic/administrator, I doubt I’ve read 95 books in a year for the last few years at least (though I probably do pick up and glance at 95 books a week).  If I could give up Criminal Minds and The Mentalist, I might be able able to squeeze in a few more.  So I’m not in a mood in the new year to be churlish.  Bush is no Obama when it comes to linguistic acumen, but let bygones be bygones.  I’m just happy that Bush is going to have  a lot more time to read in the next four years.  May he learn something.  May we all.

News Flash: Limbaugh Votes White!

Is he indeed?

This just in.  After having excoriated former secretary of state Colin Powell for voting for Obama because he is black, Rush Limbaugh denied rumors that he only votes for white presidential candidates.  Nevertheless, investigative reports digging deep into Limbaugh’s past and present uncover the startling truth: Limbaugh has consistently voted his race in both the primary and general elections for the past thirty years;  moreover, he has publicly endorsed only white candidates.  Reporters were not quite sure what to make of this astonishing contradiction in Limbaugh’s record as Limbaugh was unavailable for comment.  Through spokesperson Joe Schmoe, Limbaugh declared that he was not a racist.  After all, said Schmoe, “some of Rush’s best friends are black people.”  When asked why Rush did not choose to endorse one of these unnamed black friends for the presidency ( if, indeed, he had really wanted to vote for a black person), Schmoe declined to comment.  Later on his website, Limbaugh said that the rumour he has only voted for white people is the kind of liberal smear campaign that public has come to expect from the elitist and

Joe Sixpack opens his bid for the vice-presidency

anti-American liberal media.  Meanwhile Joe Sixpack, who also happens to be white, began pressing Limbaugh for an endorsement for vice-president, believing himself at least as qualified as a moose-hunter from Alaska.

McCain the Impaler

Ok, I admit this is totally unfair, has no rational justification, and contributes nothing

The Age--"McCain Goes for Jugular, but Misses"

to civil dialogue about the political process.  It also has nothing to do with reading.  However, I can’t stop laughing.

And, really, doesn’t this seem like an icon of the campaign at the moment.  Obama so far above it all he seems vaguely bored, or boring.  McCain on the verge of a psychotic break.

Rego on Roosevelt

I had the pleasure a couple of weeks ago to read my colleague Paul Rego’s new book on Teddy Roosevelt.  Although I’m a little more critical of Roosevelt than Paul is, his book seems very timely, and does a good job of pointing our Roosevelt’s continuing relevance.  Even this week John McCain morphed into a Roosevelt Republican taking on the Titans of Wall Street.  Whether McCain was convincing in doing so is another matter, but it was in line with Paul’s insight that Roosevelt remains a touchstone figure for many contemporary presidents and presidential aspirants.

I thought I was supposed to do a full-blow review/critical response to Paul’s book at a reception in his honor, but I had the honor of introducing him instead.  What follows are my meandering scribbles on Paul’s book, titled, by the way “American Ideal:  Theodore Roosevelt’s Search for American Individualism.” These don’t quite amount to a review since they’re mostly notes for a talk, but I thought I’d post them here anyway.

In some respects, Paul’s book focuses on the irony of his subtitle: Roosevelt’s search for an American individualism. Though an intellectual biography, Paul seems to suggest that Roosevelt doesn’t arrive at settled substantive positions so much as he grapples mightily with antinomies of American thought, practice and culture—the most important of these being the split between the pluribus and the unum in the American psyche. Born out of the Enlightenment, American politics and culture has never rested easily with the earlier notion of an individual as being one member of a group. Instead, the individual and the society are necessarily in tension with one another, if not actively opposed to one another. On this view, the individual is society’s other, not matter how much we may say that society’s could not be conceived of without individuals and vice-versa. On this reading, a search for an American individualism is a quixotic quest—my reading, not Paul’s—since to be an American is to be a part of a collective, but one which only defines itself through the exaltation of the individual. Nevertheless, however impossible the project, the struggle to reconcile these opposing forces gives Roosevelts work much of its energy and contemporary relevance, no matter that he didn’t completely succeed in his quest.

I especially like Paul’s tracing of the opposition between progressivism and individualism. For one thing, those people in American literature who pay any attention to Roosevelt tend to emphasize his individualism, and so Paul’s attention to Roosevelt’s progressivism was enlightening. Moreover, I learned a lot in Paul’s argument that at the turn of the twentieth century, progressivism was imagining largely in collectivist terms and was in some respects seen as anti-individualism. The complexities involved suggest, as Paul explicitly attempts to do, that politics of the early 21^st century continues to bear the marks of the discourses of a century ago. Liberals still rocket uneasily between individual empowerment and government regulation and intervention, while conservative ideals of the self-made man and the destructive energies of capitalism collide, sometimes violently with the conservative values of community, family, and tradition. If Roosevelt has not solved the problem of the pluribus and the unum, neither, really, have we.

Paul doesn’t really take up the gendered elements of Roosevelts thought, and I think they are important on various levels. Roosevelts view of individualism is, in my view, deeply masculine, verging on masculinist, and one reason for the popularity of his books lay in his idealization of masculine activities—war, hunting, camping, and the like—as a remedy for the feminizing forces of culture. Ironically, of course, many conservatives perceived the government as just such a ‘feminizing” force, wherein a man had to give up his manly individualism in favor of the will of the collective. The identification of progressivism with the feminization of American culture is everywhere in American literature at least, and finds it’s way even in to contemporary politics. Think, for instance, of the fairly popular conservative dismissal of the liberal “nanny state,” and the preference that men pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Paul argues that Roosevelt was willing to use the powers of the state in order to enable the possibility of individual achievement. Whether this is genius or hopeless contradictory may depend upon your politics, but I’m struck by the way in which this structure is represented in one of Roosevelt’s signature achievements—the establishment of the National Park system. One reason, though not the only one, that it was brought in to existence was so a place where men could test their mettle against the forces of nature could be preserved in a rapidly urbanizing society.

Paul recognizes Roosevelt’s racism and makes the argument that he must be understood as a man of his time, and I think Paul also successfully shows that Roosevelt’s understanding of individualism did not exclude African Americans, making room for those of the race who in some sense transcended the handicaps associated with racial oppression. To some degree, this is a common argument made about someone like Lincoln—who Roosevelt took as an ideal. By modern standards would clearly be understood as a racist, but his thinking was supple enough to imagine the possibility of transcending the racial categories of his days.

Nevertheless, I wonder if some of the issues surrounding race as well as gender don’t go closer to the root of the problem Roosevelt faced, which would be in how the individual is imagined as an individual. That is, the political conception of the individual in American history is always imagined in raceless terms; however, in our conceptualization of race until very recently, only white people can be raceless. To be black is to be raced; in other words to be inherently marked as identified with a collectivity. By contrast, whiteness is more usually understood as the sign of individualism, of being unbounded by tribe, history, tradition and society. In short, to be free. The great literary essay on this idea remains Achebe’s meditation of Heart of Darkness, where he rightly points out that the travails of Conrad’s white characters depend upon the facelessness and inarticulate jabbering of the black mass that makes them stand out as individuals. In other words, however much room we may make in our conceptualization of individualization for specific black people, this is very easily transmuted in to the understanding that others can become individuals by becoming just like me—in which case they are no longer clearly other in terms of race.

This having been said, I tend to agree with Paul that the structure of this thinking can’t be blamed on Roosevelt, since it is part of the structure of American thinking per se. He did not invent it, nor is it completely clear how he could have escaped it. Instead I think it points to the notion that perhaps the reason these issues cannot be reconciled is that they begin with a deeply flawed notion of what it means to be an individual, however attractive that ideal may continue to be.

She speaks in sentences!!!

This analysis from Laura Rozen at War and Piece, commenting on Sarah Palin hurdling the high linguistic bar set by the Bush-Cheney era in her interview with Charlie Gibson.

“She’s alert, she speaks in sentences, identified the threat from Islamic extremists, and it seems that she’s capable of absorbing new material at least at a certain level.”

She speaks in sentences?  She’s capable of absorbing new material at least at a certain level?  And we’re supposed to be reassured? This sounds like a doctor speaking about the victim of a car accident who has just awakened from incapacitating brain injuries.

On the other hand, the saddest thing to say is that Sarah Palin seems like an improvement.

Sarah Palin, Reader

The New York Times reports the following of the Republican candidate for vice-president.

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”

I always wonder if such people read intensively to discover those books that they know everyone else really shouldn’t read.  We are forever grateful.

Well, at least we know she can field dress a moose.  That and a membership in the NRA will truly prepare our children for the 21st century.

Obama, Prissy Prince Charming; Or, why it is possible to be an Obamabot and have a sense of humour

I’m not much convinced that The New Yorker cover works as satire (more on that below), but I think the guys over at JibJab have another hit with this take on the political campaign.

More later on why I think this works and the New Yorker cover fails, but first I have to say I’m so glad that the world is abuzz with cultural theory! Ok, not so much. But the New Yorker’s ill-fated attempt at satire has the chattering classes hard at work trying to parse questions of genre, reader response, aesthetic taste and various other kinds of folderol. If it was satire, would people get it? If people didn’t get it, could it really be considered satire. Does the message of the image depend upon it’s intended audience as David Remnick

Satire or New Yorker inbreeding? You Decide

seems to suggest it does when he asserts that it’s intended, after all for “Readers-of-the-New-Yorker,” that snooty bunch. But is the meaning of the visual text here determined by the intention of the artists and the reading capabilities of an intended-and-oh-so-sophisticated-audience? In this day an age? When ANY text has no chance of being targeted exclusively at an intended audience because it will immediately be spewed endlessly into the blogosphere. What is an intended audience in such a world?

I’m impressed by the degree to which the discourse has revolved around criticisms of readings and possible readings. Maureen Dowd–I liked her much more when she was being smug and condescending about Hillary Clinton–smirks that obama is prissy and humourless and should just realize that COME ON, everyone in New York knows its just a joke. This seems just like the kind of answer a New Yorker would give, believing as they do, and apparently Maureen does, that the world is their oyster.

Philip Kennicott has a more interesting take on this same general idea over at the Washington Post. Agreeing with Dowd that Obama may be a bit too prissy in his response to the cover, he goes further and links it to the particular aura of printed material in comparison to our video-oriented imagination. Satire lives, but only in the bawdy possibilities of the moving image.

On “Saturday Night Live,” a sketch in which Michelle Obama tossed the flag in the fireplace and Barack Obama took off the pinstripes to reveal a flowing white robe would be seen as outrageous — and funny. Print cartoonists, unfortunately, find themselves working in an oxygen-free environment that is increasingly akin to the atmosphere of academia, or PBS. Cable television makes print seem like something ancient and sacred, a rule-bound sanctum fraught with the ever-present risk of sacrilege. Print is becoming a strange land where the solitary reader might easily go astray.

“People say, well, I get it, but I’m afraid that so-and-so is not going to get it,” said a mildly exasperated Remnick.

Which is to say that even as we pride ourselves on our media sophistication, as debunkers and decoders of the visual, we fret about the power of the printed image to circulate beyond the comforting control of television’s continuous interpretation and contextualization. In the age of YouTube — where for the most part we can still laugh at each other and ourselves — we are increasingly becoming print-humor iconoclasts, terrified that someone might be worshiping images in the wrong way.

I can really only go part way with him on this. Do we really think print is sacred. Just the other day in my reflections on Hard Times I was suggesting that we are so super saturated with “print”–broadly considered–that print has lost it’s aura. I think the same applies to the image.

Tom Toles, The Washington Post, July 16 2008

[Side note: I can see the point that everyone can be a little condescending to readers in fly-over country, still, I think this take from Tom Toles on the controversy is a lot smarter than the original and a lot better satire too. Score one for the post, and tom Toles.]

It may, of course, be that a good number of lefties have been holding Obama sacred, and The New Yorker cover doesn’t work for the same reason that jokes about Jesus mother don’t play in the Vatican.

But really, I don’t think the real issue is that all the Obamabots are humorless. I thought the JibJab video was hysterical–and not just because it’s skewers are equal opportunity. It’s because the satire reveals and revels in something that is kind of really true about Obama, who is the subject of the piece. By contrast, the real subject of the satire on the New Yorker cover is nowhere to be seen–and, to be honest, nowhere in consciousness. We could, of course, satirize the reader of the The New Yorker because the reader is at the scene of reading and so, in viewing the image, would view something grotesquely true about themselves. Instead, the New Yorker cover tries to laugh at someone else without referencing that someone else anywhere in the image. Thus the image seems to be “about” Obama even when we pause and have to say “No, it really can’t be.”

This is not a lack of irony on the part of readers, as Remnick and others have lamented. Rather, the image is not ironic at all, playing off a doubleness contained within the image or within the readers’ experience of themselves viewing the image. Instead, it is a kind of postmodern archness which is anything but ironic. Indeed, I think it’s kind of smug.

On the other hand, the JibJab video really does reveal something that’s kind of true about Obama, as much as I love him. If stretched and distorted and made into a grotesque–which is what satire does, witness Swift–then you really feel the truth of the criticism that Obama is just a little too good to be true, and that too good to be trueness depends heavily on a lack of specificity that lets us project our fairy tales on to him. He will inevitable disappoint (witness Dowd’s grouchiness). In this sense, the video becomes not only about something that seems vaguely real about the Obama candidacy, it becomes about us as the viewers of the video (and more specifically as viewers of Obama). We see the truth about ourselves and our fantasies in ways that make us uncomfortable but also make us want to laugh.

None of this necessarily makes me happy, about the New Yorker, I mean. I used to think that The New Yorker was the repository of all that was smart and superior and intelligent in the world. But the guys over at JibJab are way smarter. Score another one for video. Where the smart people are.

April 4, 1968

Today is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The video is a montage surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and the life of MLK with the speech by Robert F. Kennedy playing in the background.

I was in many ways too young to completely understand what was happening in 1968. But even now these words and these images move me.
The words speak for themselves. Related to the general interests of this blog, they make me think of one thing very simply: Words Matter. Whether in the life and preaching of Dr. King, or the eloquence of RFK, summoned from the heart at the instant of crisis.

I think I am no sentimentalist to say that I find myself longing for a leader who could quote Aeschylus by heart, who did not hold words in contempt, who knew enough to see that eloquence isn’t empty. Through words we imagine a life we can’t yet see.

Obama, Faulkner, and Race

Obama’s erudition and eloquence was on display again yesterday in what, I have to say, was a remarkable speech on all kinds of levels. A small part of the speech touched on American literary history in his reference to William Faulkner:

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

The evocation of Faulkner is interesting on various levels. On the one hand, it signals Obama’s efforts to speak through the voice of a symbolic and prototypical Southern White Man, and to signal his broad allegiance to “American culture.” More, most of Faulkner’s oeuvre is devoted precisely to the agonized sense that the racial past is inescapable in the South. Finally, of course, it’s ironic since Faulkner himself never escaped that past and seemed to willingly embrace it regardless of his agonized sense of its destructiveness. Faulkner, after all, said that if it came down to it he would take up a gun to kill blacks in the street if he had to do so.

[Side note: Obama also comes out as a champion of reading to your children. Small point, but glad to see it.]

I’m generally with those who feel that Obama’s speech was one of the most important on race by a political figure in the past twenty years. At the least, it was one of the most courageous by a politician, who as a class are more given to dissembling, avoidance, and double-speak. The easy thing would have been to try and throw his former pastor under the bus–as, for instance Bill Clinton did with someone like Lani Guanier.

Obama’s willingness to risk the idea that Americans can stand subtlety and thought about a desperately complicated issue seemed to me…well…I almost want to say presidential, but in the context of American politics of recent decades that would be faint praise. It was leadership that we might hope for but see too rarely.

You can see and read the speech in its entirety at his web site.

Hillary, Undead

Somehow I missed this back in January, but apparently Anne Rice–she who has traded in the blood, gore, and eroticism of vampire novels for markedly less bloody, gory, and erotic stories of the life of Jesus–endorsed Hillary Clinton for President.

Hard to tell what the effect has been. January and February were hard on Hillary. About as much appeal as Rice’s Christian novels. More lately, though, Clinton’s been behaving like the undead. In more ways than one. Barack’s got to find a stake. But is he too nice a guy to drive it in?

Weirdly, the video was posted with some ubiquity around the web, but has been removed from its original reference on YouTube and can no longer be found on Rice’s website. I thought nothing ever disappeared from the web. A transcript can be found at Greg’s Opinion. Otherwise I can’t find a copy of it anywhere. Hard to say why. Eerie.

Maybe the Clinton campaign renounced the endorsement–which included a strong pro-life and rather strong and convoluted evangelistic pitch from the erstwhile Queen of the Night. Indeed, the campaigns seem to be in a rather depressing competition of late to see who can most effectively and swiftly renounce, denounce, dismiss, and otherwise distance themselves from their unsavory supporters.

McCain renounced Hagee–the fundamentalist pastor who said the Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment on homosexuality in New Orleans. Barack today denounced his pastor and spiritual mentor, who had asked that God damn America for the three strikes laws that have wrought havoc in some black communities; this after Barack had to renounce and denounce–or was it reject–the endorsement of the Nation of Islam in language that Hillary found most pleasing–this despite the fact that Bill had been more than happy to make nice about Farrakhan in the recent past. And Hillary had to renounce and denounce Geraldine Ferraro after her racially tinged gaffe this past week. And she apparently renounced Eliot Spitzer’s endorsement after behaviour that no doubt reminds voters of Bill’s pursuit of younger women. (Or did she? The campaign claims that it never had the Spitzer endorsement on their “official” endorsement page, merely on three other pages of the web site; does this amount to a renunciation or a denunciation but not a rejection? There are consultants that get paid to determine this kind of thing; And why wasn’t Spitzer’s endorsement as the governor of New York–one of those famous big states that are the only ones that really count in Hillary world–on the official page anyway. Did she know something we didn’t? Inquiring minds want to know.).

One wonders, in fact, whether Hillary ought not renounce and denounce Bill, not only because he turned the African American vote 90% for Obama, but also because it’s his support more than any other that is likely to wreak havoc on the campaign if she is nominated, and on the administration if she is elected. That would be refreshing: I renounce and denounce my husband for his self-serving campaign style, his racial insensitivity, and for his general desire to keep running things even though he’s not running.

But as for Anne Rice, I see no reason Clinton would have to be embarrassed by Rice–however embarrassing Rice may actually be. After all, I’m sure Rice will bring in both the Goth vote, as well as those devout Christians who believe that abortion is the most important determining factor in the election.

Two HUGE constituencies for the Democratic Party this fall.

If anyone knows somewhere to still find a copy of the Rice endorsement, I’d love to get hold of it.