Keele Diary #4

Well, I appear to have settled on using the shower nozzle unit to fill the tub partway and then doing a hybrid bath-shower thing. What a hassle. No wonder this country lost its empire. Hell, even in Ireland I've always been able to shower. Ireland!

So a little about the University of Keele. The university is located on its own somewhat isolated hilltop surrounded by little villages, outside of which are a number of small towns in the North Midlands. The nearest real cities are Manchester and Birmingham, each an hour or so away. Of the surrounding towns, one, Stoke-on-Trent, is large enough to support a Premiere League team, if that is any sign of anything.

The university was established after World War II when just as in the United States, there was an explosion of demand for higher education created by returning veterans, heightened post-war prosperity (which admittedly took longer to arrive in Britain than in the US), population growth, increasing globalization (admittedly not a word that would have been used in that generation) and a general transformation of the role of the university in society. No longer was higher education the domain of the elite few going to Oxbridge or settling for one of the other older universities.

And yet while Keele is new, it does not feel quite as new as its counterparts in the United States that emerged at roughly the same time. This is largely because the university is built on an old estate (I believe it was known, cleverly enough) as the Keele Estate. And so there are some aged, historic buildings, on an expansive, bucolic setting. There also is the natural beauty of the region, and the historic "Potters" that I do not know enough about yet to speak intelligently except to say that apparently the area is renowned for its pottery.

There certainly is a lot of new architecture, and much of it clearly went up in the 60s and 70s and so qualifies as what architects term "butt ugly," but in general the university has a lot of brick and stone and someone has worked hard to develop a really rather nice campus. My office is located in The Chancellor's Building, which has a few characteristics that seem to be a requirement for at least one building at every typical university: It is complex and easy to get lost in, the hallways are labyrinthine and narrow, there are lots of bizarre angles, alcoves, and hideaways, and it has a certain charm to it even if there is nothing especially spectacular or even aesthetic about the building. The academic wings also are connected by the central area which has, among other things, a cafe and a restaurant, an art gallery, and a few official offices.

The David Bruce Centre for American Studies is named after the respected former United States Ambassador to England, David K. E. Bruce. I was pleased to see that Bruce's biography was penned by Nelson Lankford of the Virginia Historical Society , where I was a fellow several years ago, and there is a copy in my office on the coffee table, which is a nice touch. The Centre is located on the floor where my office is, although really the Centre consists of the faculty, the fellow's (my) office, the seminar room and library, and a few administrative staff. At one point I guess American Studies was its own department or unit, but it now has been combined with the humanities faculty generally and thus in some ways has been reduced, largely because of what by all accounts is administrative shortsightedness. So there is another commonality between Keele and most other universities, including most in the States.

My office is a nice space. My desk faces the back wall, which consists mostly of a picture window that covers the whole length and more than half the height of the wall. I am surrounded by shelves of books that are part of the Bruce Centre library and that are in the process of being re-cataloged and re-shelved, though that project is thankfully in abeyance while I am here, so I just get to have an office that looks like a devoted Americanist's office, albeit surrounded by books that by and large could have been in the office of a mid-20th-century Americanist, which actually is not all that bad. One learns to appreciate the shoulders of those giants one stands upon when reminded of the great output of our predecessors. I have an little alcove behind me with a chair and another shelf, and on the window ledge is the requisite tea pot, while next to my desk is a chair for the visitors I am largely unlikely to have, even given that I am doing a tiny bit of teaching while I am here. The office is well lit and provides a nice place to work. My computer is new, though my monitor is old and a bit small, so that I can only see a few lines of my emails as I type them, and there are formatting issues with some of the newer, busier websites. But I have no real complaints, they are treating me very well, have equipped me well for productivity, and have done as much to integrate me into the larger community as quickly as possible as any fellowship I have ever held.

If only the office had a shower . . .

Big Daddy Drew's Favre Issues

Suffice it to say, Big Daddy Drew is not happy (warning: his language makes me seem like a timid church mouse) at the prospect of Brett Favre joining his beloved Minnesota Vikings. Enjoy!

Quick Hits

Because dcat readers cannot live solely on a diet of Keele Diaries, here are a few links with brief commentary:

Eugene Robinson takes on the very real and deeply disturbing possibility that The New York Times Co. might shutter The Boston Globe. He uses words such as "pimp" and "cannibalism" to describe the Times' behavior. It is hard to disagree with him.

At Salon Glenn Greenwald goes after Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic for what Greenwald (to my mind rightfully) calls Rosen's "smear" of potential Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Rosen basically relies on little more than anonymous sources to attack Sotomayor's intellectual abilities. long-time readers know my view on journalistic use of anonymous sources, especially when those sources are used simply to grind an ax or pursue an agenda. It is one thing to protect a source who would otherwise be in legitimate danger and whose evidence is essential to the telling of a story. It is quite another to rely on anonymous sources to provide the only evidence you have to accuse someone of being dumb, sloppy, or both.

Finally, Jonathan Chait at The New Republic asks what happened to conservatives cherishing the rule of law? It was vital when it came to pursuing Bill Clinton for lying about his infidelities. Apparently it is less important when it comes to the rather more significant matter of engaging in torture. I am not sure where I stand on pursuing convictions. It seems to run the risk of guaranteeing future tit-for-tat. At the same time, should being in a presidential administration automatically grant one carte blanche for what are, not to put too fine a point on it, human rights violations?

Keele Diary #3

Men were also not meant to take "showers" using a hand-held nozzle attachment drizzling water at a trickle. Be warned: An ongoing subtext of these diary posts might well be my lamentations about the state of my bathing situation.

Yesterday marked my first real duties here at Keele. In the morning I sat in with an undergraduate seminar in Southern history. They have reached the Civil Rights Movement and so it made a certain amount of sense to have me there to toss in my random observations. The students were generally prepared, they watched the first episode of Eyes on the Prize, which clearly had a powerful effect and then had a discussion centered around some primary sources they had been assigned.

Keele operates on a bizarre schedule whereby they have a twelve week term, but after week then they broke for a month for Easter and then basically for what is Keele's "conference season," which is apparently a pretty lucrative period for them. Academic (and I assume other?) conferences in the UK are different from the majority of those in the US in that they are self-contained. So if Keele hosts a conference, it provides lodging, meals, and even pub nights in addition to hosting the actual meeting itself. So that has been going on for the last month, while the students were either preparing for exams or writing their course papers or, as you might imagine, simply enjoying a month off. Now they have returned for the last two weeks of classes, which must be very difficult for all involved. And for those classes with papers but not exams, the professors are pretty much at the whim of the students when it comes to attendance. That a good number of the students sowed up yesterday is a testament, I would say, to them, but also to the professor, Martin Crawford who embodies the respected senior British academic, and the students clearly adore him.

Then yesterday afternoon was the roundtable panel on President Obama's first hundred days. I had been working on that presentation virtually since my arrival, and had been reading and thinking about the topic for a few weeks. My fellow panelists were the respected diplomatic historian John Dumbrell, Professor at the University of Durham, and Keele political scientist and historian Jon Herbert. Our event was one of several on a vibrant Keele Wednesday afternoon, so there was competition for the audience, but we had a nice enough turnout and the panel went quite well, inspiring a lively q&a/discussion session that lasted well beyond the allotted time for the session. Obviously others will have to be the judge, but the feedback I got was that I acquitted myself well in my first real public presentation of my fellowship.

The gist of my argument was based less on Obama's performance (shorthand: Fine so far, but too early to make any real judgments) and was more of a reflection on the hundred days itself. I started off by comparing the Hundred Days to the NFL draft, which I had to explain to my British audience, inasmuch as during and after the draft th experts will et together and act outraged or otherwise absolutely certain in their convictions despite the fact that no one actually has any idea how the draft turned out. I feel a bit the same about the impassioned responses to any president's first fourtee weeks, two days in office. Here, if you'll pardon the self indulgence (on top of the self indulgence that is this whole diary conceit) is a sample from my talk, which I actually wrote out because I wanted to make a good first impression. (If you want footnotes, contact me; I basically stole the Napolean bit from Alonzo Hamby, for example.):

We draw on the first hundred days from the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course. I suppose it warrants recognizing that the concept antedates FDR, extending back as far the references to the period after Napoleon's triumphal return from Elba. But that resulted, ultimately, in Waterloo. So let us for our purposes do what Americans do best, which is to say, let us pretend the rest of the world and its history does not exist. For Americans, and admit it, for the rest of the world, the First Hundred Days evokes FDR.

And with good reason. The first hundred days of what historians call the First New Deal resulted in a flurry of activity. The Emergency Banking Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Alphabet soup of the CCC, PWA, and the ill-fated AAA and NRA. Some worked well, some did not. But all represent the larger driving principles of the Hundred Days; Elastic rather than static, pragmatic rather than ideological, experimental rather than dogmatic, and flexible rather than rigid, the programs of the Hundred Days, indeed the New Deal as a whole, were intended to, as any decent first-year student ought to be able to tell you, bring about the Three R’s of Relief, Reform, and Recovery. (And to my colleagues in the room teaching first-year students, keep in mind that I am speaking of the ideal, platonic form of first year students, and not, alas, of either yours or mine necessarily. Think of mine as a normative conception rather than a conception driven by normality.)

And the Hundred Days is a tremendously useful lens through which to view the FDR presidency. But it is useful not because in and of itself it has any particular utility – our obsession with base-10 tends to make us value numbers ending in five or zero more than those ending in, say, 3 or 7, even if inherently they are no more important or meaningful, and expressed another way, one hundred days is fourteen weeks and two days, hardly a logical or meaningful measure – but rather we utilize the hundred day benchmark because of the particularities of the historical context within which FDR operated. Those particularities give meaning to the concept of the hundred days; the hundred days does not give any particular meaning in and of itself. This, I believe, is why the hundred days has been so appealing but its invocation ultimately so sloppy. Devoid of a specific context, the hundred day measuring stick is arbitrary and meaningless. In fact it can warp meaning because it tries to fit ongoing processes into historical boxes for which the present may be ill-fitted indeed.

What is most perplexing about the resilience of the hundred days is that it was obsolete with FDR’s death in Warm Springs, Georgia in April 1945. How many people – indeed, how many historians – can tell you much about the first hundred days of the presidencies that followed FDR’s? And of the ones that are memorable, how many are memorable because they were part of an organized effort to marshal energies in that timetable? The reality is that the hundred days model was a one-off, a singular phenomenon that journalists, with the help of historians desperate to be talking heads (CNN: Call me!) have perpetuated long after the idea had any historical utility.

Useful invocations of history are cognizant of and respectful toward context. The problem with most invocations of history is that they tend to ignore the context in the pursuit of a usable past. Absent context, however, the usable past tends to become a misused past. And a misused past tends to be most suitable for the ideological present.

I then address the questions of whether the Hundred Days might still be effective as a framing device, and failing that, as a descriptive advice before moving on to talk generally about Obama. Professor Dumbrell followed with a wide-ranging discussion on the Obama administration's foreign policy, Dr. Herbert on domestic affairs primarily. Both, though certainly men of the left, displayed a remarkable willingnes to engage with Obama critically, throwing yet another wrench into the thesis of an academy beset with leftist ranters.

I'll admit I'm having one of those days when inertia has set in. My next responsibility is my research seminar next Wednesday, and the best way to prepare for that is to spend most of the next few days working on my current chapter. But not writing is the easiest thing in the world, so I've been spinning my wheels. Which surely is unconnected to the fact that after the roundtable a group of us went out to dinner at a nearby pub, where I then stayed to watch the Chelsea-Barcelona Champions League semifinals (Barcelona won on aggregate goals based on away goal differential in the home-and-home semis. Ahh, soccer.)

Keele Diary #2

First off, let me tell you something: Men were not meant to take baths.

I walked into my flat for the first time the other day and all looked fine with one exception -- no shower nozzle. Just a plain old bathtub. So for the last two mornings I have had two lines from Seinfeld running through my head. The first has been Kramer dismissing the idea of taking baths when he is having shower head issues as "lying in a tepid pool of his own filth." The second is when Kramer offers Jerry the chance to take a soak in the hot tob Kramer has installed in his apartment. Jerry demurs, referring to Kramer's hot tub as a "bacteria frappe." We are working on trying to rig up some sort of shower nozzle. Let's hope.

So I am settling in. I can just about make a beeline from my flat to my office in the labyrinthine Chancellor's Building several hundred meters away without any missteps. I am participating on a roundtable today on President Obama's first hundred days and so have been working on that, putting in some serious writing time yesterday and this morning. I am convinced that I will have the most productive month of my life if the pace of the first two days is indicative of anything.

I was invited to attend an undergraduate seminar on Southern history this morning, which enabled me to meet some of the students and to partake in the teaching process, something that is sadly rare in these kind of fellowship environments. And yesterday evening I attended a history department colloquium on the state of history at Keele past, present and future in which many of the lamentations sounded familiar and could be echoed by professors at the bulk of institutions in the English-speaking (and I suspect beyond) world. (Think: silly administrators, uncommitted students, a sense that the public does not get or appreciate history, declining funding, an obsession with assessments, shifting goal posts of expectations, the role of technology for good but also for ill, and so forth.)

It's been rainy and damp in the North Midlands, but there are vague rumors that the sun is supposed to re-emerge. Apparently the weather was glorious until my arrival. I'll beg off drawing any major conclusions from that and will hope that the coincidence will be revealed by a few sunny days to come.

Keele Diary #1

I am settled in to my office at the David Bruce Centre at the University of Keele. The trip over was extensive: Flights from Midland to Dallas to Heathrow; Heathrow Express to Paddington Station where I caught the tube to Euston Station, train from Euston to the nearest town, Keele on Tyne, where the head of the Bruce Centre picked me up and got me settled. After some confusion regarding where the key was, they got me into my faculty flat on campus, which is more than suitable, and I was able to get settled in. Campus is largely self contained because it is somewhat isolated, being a couple of miles removed from the nearest real town. I'm sure there is a dual-edged sword to what must at times feel like a hermetically sealed environment, but for my purposes here for a month, it is great that the student union has a grocery store, news agent, post office, pub, cafe, and places to eat.

One of my main adjustments, even after all of these years of international travel, is dealing with jet lag. Largely because in many cases my way of dealing with it is not to. But because my flight arrived at mid-day yesterday, rather than at the more common 8-9in the morning, I did not have to kill a full day. By the time I got to Keele it was in the aternoon, and once I got settled in, and after a nice pub dinner with the centre director, I only had to stay up for a little while longer in order to fight off really screwing with my sleep pattern. And as a saving grace, my flat has a television! It only has the five basic channels, but it's enough to provide background noise and entertainment. I had to be up this morning for some more introductory stuff, so while I could have slept another three or four hours, at least I will make that time up tonight rather than by sleeping in late and never quite adjusting.

Anyhow, sorry for the rather pedestrian reportage. Hopefully I will have something more clever to report in the days and weeks to come. Until then -- cheers!

Off to Keele: Self Indulgence Alert

In a matter of a couple of hours I will be heading off to England (solo, alas) where I will be spending a month as a visiting fellow at the University of Keele's David Bruce Centre for American Studies. In addition to working on my next book(s) I will be giving a research seminar, will be participating in a couple of the program's graduate seminars, and am participating ina roundtable on President Obama's first one hundred days. I also will be giving talks at other universities across the country. For the next four weeks, then, you will be getting what I will sim[ply call "England Blogging," which will be the same thing but I hope somewhat more frequent (given the time to write and think) and 25% more Anglotastic!

David Barash is a Moron: Idiocy Alert

Well, folks, I have my nominee for the dumbest thing written by anyone anywhere in 2009, and if you think about today's climate of dialogue, that's quite an assertion. My selection comes from David P. Barash, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, whose "The Roar of the Crowd: Sports Fans' Primal Behavior" appeared in March in The Chronicle Review, a publication that most of the time I really like, as it provides an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the life of the mind.

Under ordinary circumstances I would go paragraph-by-paragraph, line-by-line to eviscerate this screed against being a sports fan. But the article does not compensate for its idiocy with brevity, so I'm only going to have to address a few of the lowlights. I will excerpt some of the passages and then will provide my responses -- if you are a sports fan, enjoy:

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn't religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month's collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.

Note the condescension. But also note that one could replace "spectator sports" with, say, movies (I bet you a thousand dollars Barash prefers the word "film") or theater or music or television, or even literature while making the same argument. In other words, yes, as human beings we sometimes do not make all of our own amusements. Even onanism, intellectual (a skill at which Barash seems particularly well equipped) and otherwise, cannot provide sole intellectual sustenance. Sometimes we rely on others, since we live in communities larger than ourselves, to help facilitate our various enjoyments. Or maybe Barash only watches movies in which he knows all of the participants. Plus sports have an added benefit: They are real. I love movies and tv and the other amusements, but I don't privilege them over sports largely because sports represent real drama played out in real time by real people with immense gifts and who do not have their lines or their blocking written out for them.

Now for the second paragraph:

Not that I would try to stop anyone from root, root, rooting to his or her heart's content. It's just that such things are normally done by pigs, in the mud, or by seedlings, lacking a firm grip on reality — fine for them, but I am not at all sure this is something that human beings should do. In desperation, if threatened with starvation, I suppose that I would root — for dinner. But for the home team? Never.

Ha! See what he did there? Root can have two different meanings! Sports fans can root! Pigs do something entirely different, called "rooting"! David Barash is clever. I'd also bet I can list a whole lot of really really smart sports fans who have a perfectly fine grip on reality. Why, some of them are even in academia. Are they really all akin to pigs? Still, that little "root" wordplay? Priceless!

So instead of sports, he suggests:

Is life so pale, dull, and unsatisfying that it must be experienced vicariously in order to be savored? You might try reading a book, talking with your family, going for a walk, wrestling with the dog, listening to some music, smelling a flower, making love.

Now this is so serially foolish that I really do not even know where to begin. Once again I'll point out the vicarious nature of, say, watching movies or going to the theater. But beyond that, I love his dualism -- if you spend three hours watching a ballgame, for Barash the logical conclusion is that your life is dull. It must be great to be one of David Barash's students, because it means you can get away with saying some really fucking inane, illogical things in the papers you write for him because David Barash is clearly a complete fucking moron. (Hey, he introduced the name calling.) You see, apparently no one who watches sports reads books. (Though I am going to place as an aside that I would bet you a thousand dollars that as a disciplinary imperative as a historian I've read a lot more books in 2009 than psychologist David Barash.) If you watch sports you do not talk with your family. I certainly am not going for a walk with my wife in the next half hour because I will also watch sports today. We own cats, so he's got me there. But if you watch sports and have a dog, sorry -- you have to pick one! Smelling a flower doesn't really take all that much time, but again, the logic is unassailable. And it is a proven fact -- sports fans never have sex. Which is why going to a ballgame is a bit like attending a Shaker meeting -- there are lots of old folks because of the prohibitions against sexual reproduction. If I ever quit on sports though, I am going to root the hell out of . . . (hey, another meaning for root! David Barash, watch yourself. I'm catching on fast!)

Then we get some some ham-handed differentiation between those who participate in sports -- which he sees as admirable, and thank God we jocks have his imprimatur -- and those who watch. Because they are obviously never the same people. People who love sports either only participate or watch, in David Barash's reading-prolific, wife-walking, dog-wrestling, flower-sniffing, cocksman's life. I'm not even going to waste much time pointing out with how absurd his argument is, or reminding you how those who have played the game often love the game in myriad forms. Because later on he drops this little gem:

Of course, there have been athletes who were admirable, even off the field. On balance, however, the probability is that successful athletes number among themselves more than their share of alcoholics, misogynists, sociopaths, and violence-prone dimwits and miscreants. After all, these are adults paid to play children's games, and there is simply no reason why the ability to do remarkable things with one's body — things that are generally quick and violent — should make someone worth emulating in any other way, and probably good reasons why the opposite is more likely.

Now this one absolutely infuriates me. For one thing, it's a pretty fucking brazen assertion without even a scintilla of evidence. And it is an assertion from someone who presumably does not watch enough sports to be making this sort of value judgment. There is also, Dr. Barash, no reason to assume that the ability to do, let us say "semi remarkable" things with one's mind "someone worth emulating in any other way." Therefore following your logic, I would assume that the probability is that successful psychology professors at the University of Washington number among themselves more than their share of pedophiles. The logic is exactly the same. Except that society generally does not give two shits about psychology professors, so their boy-rooting (when you play with fire, Scarecrow . . .) does not end up on Sportscenter or in the newspaper. And naturally a DWI makes news among the famous in a way that someone not getting a DWI does for reasons that ought to be apparent to anyone who understands a rudiment about how the world functions. And yet clearly based on the episodes he observes between stuffing his face in flowers, Barash is capable of drawing an evidence-free conclusion on athletes based on the public embarrassments of a tiny, tiny, minority. And if there is evidence, he doesn't cite it, which in its way is actually worse. Because I at least acknowledge that I have no evidence that Barash is a pedophile (though following much of his logic in this article, I also have no evidence that David Barash is not a pedophile. Work your algorithm magic, Google!).

Then there are literally hundreds of words of really lousy argumentation that are based on evolutionary psychology, including some claptrap about how we can fool the American oystercatcher by placing an enormous fake egg where her real egg is and she'll try to nurture it. And so somehow this is analogous to human sports fans for reasons that I am either too dumb or not dumb enough to divine. (Stupid American oystercatcher! Stupid sports fans -- watching a game you have come to love over the course of your life because it gives you enjoyment! What a silly fake eggsitter you've turned out to be!)

Much later, because Barash is really beginning to grate, and because you just knew it was coming:

Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless, not uncommonly resulting in giggles, laughter, yawning. Sometimes it is more sinister. As Koestler emphasized, the acts of greatest human violence and destructiveness have arisen not from personal aggressiveness or nastiness, but from self-transcendence in the form of seductive, mindless identification with a group. Think of Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, Nazis and Jews, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestinians.

Yes! Yes!! YES!!! Godwin's Law! Godwin's Fucking Law!!! "Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless" but sometimes -- and surely in statistically significant enough doses to make it worth addressing -- Red Sox fans actually just want to machete some motherfuckers. ("Yankee fans.") That's just how we roll. And the death camps at Invesco Field? They really are something to behold. Seriously: Is he joking with this?

And for the conclusion, which I will take on sentence by sentence:

By we, the fan means the whole deliciously desirable, immensely seductive group.

You can assume that the "we" in that sentence should probably have appeared in quotation marks and refers to the tendency of sports fans to refer to their Gestapo units, er, favorite teams, with a strong sense of identification. The shame!

He means that he is no longer just little old himself, but something larger, grander, more impressive, more important, and thus, more appealing.

Want to debate whether the gendered language is intentional? In any case -- yes, again, many of us actually realize that we are not in and of ourselves a sustainable planet. We have to look outside of ourselves. I, for example, do not have David Barash's ability to regurgitate cud from one of my four stomach units, so I sometimes look outside of "little old myself" (hello, syntax!) and go to a restaurant. You know who else liked restaurants? Idi Amin.

Sports fans, in this view, are nationalists writ small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazi nonsense. Except that "nationalism writ small" is an almost useless concept given what "nationalism" actually means as either a word or as a historical concept. It would be like referring to "giantism writ small." Given what giantism is, or what nationalism is, the idea of either being "writ small" indicates a desire to use an ad hominem that one does not understand.

Or oystercatchers writ human, which is to say, moved by inclinations less distinct and less automatic than the rigidly stereotyped response to releasers and the obedient superresponse to supernormal releasers that are found among many animals, but inclined to some sort of response nonetheless.

No idea what this means or what the framework for the analogy is. Just asserting an analogy is insufficient. And most professors in our varying disciplines try to stomp out this sort of fatuous attempt to grasp the world through shallow analogizing. Not David Barash. He got a Chronicle Review article out of it.

There is nothing unusual about it, although even now, I must admit, the whole business perplexes me.

This is the first sane thing you've said: Being a sports fan is an enormously common phenomenon. Given that fact, perhaps it's not everyone else who is wrong. Just a little self reflection might have saved us all this headache. You do not like spectator sports. I do not like evolutionary psychology. The difference is, I would not compare evolutionary psychologists to genocidaires.

But an oystercatcher would understand perfectly.

If you have a better nominee for the most fucktarded thing written in 2009, I'd like to see it. David Barash goes into the clubhouse (sports analogy! Achtung, bitches!) with a lead I do not see him relinquishing.

South Africa's Election (Part II) -- Self Indulgence Alert

The Foreign Policy Association has published Part II of my analysis of South Africa's elections. (Go here for Part I.)

A Mother's Love

If this story from the latest Texas Monthly does not inspire a pretty strong emotional reaction, you might not have a soul. It got very dusty in hacienda dcat by the end. It tells the tale of a tragic high school football injury, remarkable human spirit, and above all a mother's deep devotion. You'll probably want to give your Mom a call after this one.

Winnie, Piglet, and the Swine Flu

Heh. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

The First Hundred Days

I have been thinking and reading a great deal about both the idea of a president's "first 100 days" and also about how President Obama has fared in his early tenure as president. This is in large part because I will be participating on a roundtable on Obama's First Hundred Days next week after I arrive at the University of Keele, where I will be a fellow at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for the month of May.

Alan Brinkley has an article at The New Republic in which he argues that Obama, in this mythical timespan, "has been less frenetic than Franklin Roosevelt's, but in some ways more productive." The comparison with FDR is both obvious and inevitable because of the fact that the very concept originates with FDR and because of the circumstantial analogy between today's financial crisis and that DR confronted when he took office.

I do not want to pre-empt my own presentation from next week, but in shorthand my view is: Too early to tell; first hundred days is a journalistic rather than a historical construct when it comes to analyzing most any president but FDR; There might be better comparisons to make than with FDR.

The New and Improved Africa Blog (Self Indulgence Alert)

Please check out the new and improved Foreign Policy Association Africa Blog. There might be some tech glitches early on, but in the long run it should be bigger than better than ever, and the FPA blogs already make up the premiere network of foreign policy blogs in the world.

Idiocy Alert: The Conservative Meltdown

In today's Boston Globe Scott Lehigh gets after the completely idiotic conservative accusations of liberal fascism (Jonah Goldberg's book of the same title is probably the worst example of journalistic use of history ever, by the way) and Vermont Socialist (but really Social Democrat) Bernie Sanders similarly dismisses the conservative accusations of socialism.

Part of me is amused that contemporary conservatism has become a bastion of idiocy and shallow thought as the movement implodes into incoherent tea parties ("We are about to return to the high marginal tax rates of the first Bush administration! Batten the hatches!") and as Rush Limbaugh becomes the most prominent person within the movement (which says more than anything I could about the state of the right). But there is also a patina of danger behind this unhinged and marginalized right-wing zealotry. Idiocy fetishized as resistance breeds violence.

The South African Elections: Self Indulgence Edition

Tomorrow South Africans will go to the polls for the fourth time in the post-Apartheid era. The Foreign Policy Association has published my preview. This is the first part of a two-part feature. The second half will appear later this week when I assess the immediate aftermath of what could represent a very important thermometer for South Africa's still fledgling, but absolutely vital, democracy.

Running a Bit BAAS-ward

I spent the weekend in Nottingham, England at the British Association for American Studies' (BAAS) Annual Meeting, which has fast become one of my very favorite conferences. I was able to see some very good friends, including RoJo, who has made periodic appearances here at dcat. I'm trying to get readjusted from a whirlwind, virtually sleepless trip and get caught up on life here in the States but will blog more soon.

Bruscino Puts the "Fun" in Funston

Friend of dcat Tom Bruscino provides the introduction to (and was the motivating force behind) Bison Books' new edition of Frederick Funston's memoir Memories of Two Wars: Cuban and Philippine Experiences

Go buy a copy. And buy a copy for a friend. Congratulations, Tom.

So Much Style That It's Wastin'

How are YOU going to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Strunk & White's Elements of Style (Itself a revision of a usage book White had published in 1918)? If you are The Boston Globe's Jan Freeman, you are going to bitch about it. As for me, I find usage guides to be pretty tedious slogs (of course my usage is probably lousy) but if you are a writer, don't mess around -- go get The Chicago Manual of Style (I believe the latest is the 15th edition) and be done with it. A full run of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is on my wish list as well, but between cost and space, my OED fantasies will remain just that.

I Want My Book TV! (Self Indulgence Alert, Redux)

Just a reminder that you can see me on C-Span 2's Book TV tomorrow when it shows some of the highlights from the Virginia Festival of the Book, including the panel I was on featuring books about the Civil Rights Movement.

Arsenault on "The Voice of the Century"

Last week Dwight Garner of The New York Times reviewed my friend Ray Arsenault's new book, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America. I'm just glad Ray and I are not working on the same topic any more -- that's a competition I'm not likely to do especially well at!

Time for My Close-Up: Self Indulgence Alert

If you are hanging around this weekend wishing something for brilliant and edifying to appear on your television, your prayers have been answered! C-Span 2's Book TV this weekend will feature some of the highlights of this year's Virginia Festival of the Book panels, including the one on the Civil Rights Movement on which I participated. The programming is scheduled to begin at noon, eastern time, on both Saturday and Sunday. It will be even better if you have a copy of Freedom's Main Line in front of you! (check out the price under new/used from Amazon's partner booksellers!)

Opening Day!!!!!!!!!!

Today (or tomorrow -- see the next paragraph) should be a national holiday. And were I king of the world (someday, someday) enacting such a festive respite in honor of the start of baseball would be one of the first pronouncements I would make, alongside establishing the global fashion police (hey you, Fatty, where you think you're going in that spandex? Walk back into the house slowly and no one gets hurt . . .) and establishing a college football playoff system. And I know there was baseball played last night, a blasphemy that too would be done with the stroke of a pen in my enlightened despotism.

The Red Sox were scheduled to be on national television today, but because of frightful April weather in Boston, the game has been postponed to tomorrow. Which brings me to the question of what the hell the Sox and Rays are doing kicking off in Boston in early April when both teams just left Florida, where the Rays play in an indoor facility. I love Fenway, I love baseball, and I love Opening Day, but Fenway in early April can be frigid, and if it is wet it can be utterly miserable. Why not play this series in St. Pete and open at Fenway in a couple of weeks? 'Twould be done in dcat's world (admit it -- you're growing warm to the idea of my benevolent dictatorship).

Here are my perfunctory predictions for the season:

American League:

AL East: (Predicted order of finish; * denotes predicted Wild Card berth) Red Sox, *Rays, Yankees, Orioles, Blue Jays (In the best division in baseball, maybe in baseball history, three teams will win 90 games and the fifth-place team will be fighting for a .500 record through September.)

AL Central: Indians, Twins, Tigers, White Sox, Royals (The Indians will rebound to win a stunningly mediocre division.)

AL West: Angels, Rangers, A's, Mariners (Also mediocre, but more competitive, one of the stories in the West will be the Rangers finally having some good young pitching to go with a team that can always hit. Still, at least for this year, the Angels will continue to be the class of the division.)

National League:

NL East: Mets, *Phillies, Braves, Marlins, Nationals (It is fun watching the Mets collapse, but they have strengthened their bullpen and should win the East, though Philadelphia is not going to give up the crown all that easily.)

NL Central: Cubs, Cardinals, Brewers, Reds, Astros, Pirates (Why in the hell does the NL Cantral have six teams while the AL West has four? This has always annoyed me. My benign autocracy will shift one of these teams to the American league -- welcome back Milwaukee!

NL West: Dodgers, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Giants, Padres (Manny really is a difference maker. This should be a good race to the end, though, and the Diamondbacks could pull it out.)

Postseason:
ALDS: Sox over Indians; Angels over Rays

NLDS: Cubs over Phillies; Mets over Dodgers

ALCS: Sox over Angels (Again.)

NLCS: Cubs over Mets (hey, one of these years this much-anticipated matchup is going to happen)

World Series: Sox over Cubs in six. (What, you thought I was going in another direction? The Sox both have my blind loyalty and a hell of a team. The pitching staff, starters to back of the pen, could be other-worldly and the lineup will have its usual stellar season. That's a nice combination.)

Play Ball!!! (Tomorrow!)

Unabashed, Naked, Shameless Self-Indulgence Alert

At Amazon right now a handful of the booksellers are in something of a pricing war, which means that you can get a copy of Freedom's Main Line for less than $19. I have no idea if or how this counts toward my sales total, but it's a pretty good bargain for the cost-conscious book buyer. Act now, as the tv ads always say, this deal won't last forever! Or maybe it will. How would I know?

At the Africa Blog

I've been busy busy busy over at the Foreign Policy Association's Africa Blog. I hope you'll go over and take a look at my commentary on African affairs ranging from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and across the continent, with lots and lots of South African politics as a focus. South Africa will hold elections later this month, and the country has not been in this kind of political flux since 1994. I hope you'll check in regularly, bookmark the Africa Blog, and put it on your blogroll if you blog.

Losing the Globe?

I grew up reading The Boston Globe. Or at least I grew up during my formative newspaper years -- from junior high onward, when my stepfather came into the picture and brought the paper home early every morning from his pre-work coffee run, thus broadening my horizons each morning from the tiny and provincial local newspapers that graced Newport, New Hampshire -- reading the Globe. I placed particular emphasis in those early years on the Globe sports section, which was hands down the best in the country.

So it is with fear and trepidation that I read this morning that the Globe's corporate overlord, The New York Times Company, is demanding $20 million in concessions from the myriad unions that serve in production and distribution of the Globe or else shuttering the paper is a very real possibility. Some of these concessions are surely necessary. But I cannot help but think that at least some represent an attempt to squeeze labor during difficult times knowing full well that if things do return to something resmebling prosperity, the workers will not get back what they give up.

The loss of the Globe would feel like a personal tragedy, but also would represent the most significant newspaper loss so far. Maybe the era of the newspaper, so seemingly permanent for so long, really is ending. Maybe in ten years we really will get all of our news from the internet, and that those newspapers that do survive will do so in a solely or primarily web-based form. But I hope not. The web offers many things that atraditional newspaper cannot, but so too does the paper-and-ink version offer pleasures that even the most user-friendly technology cannot replicate. I am crossing my fingers that the Globe will emerge from this current crisis.

Rugby Pics

The Boston Globe has a collection of twenty-five spectacular rugby picturesfrom the past few weeks, focusing particularly on the fans and players of last month's world rugby sevens competition in Hong Kong.

Git Yer Hot Dogs Here!

MSN has one man's opinions on the seven best hot dog places in the country. I cannot vouch for any of them, but any time we can talk about hot dogs is a good time here at dcat. Indeed, we had a great conversation on this topic when I raised a similar issue, listing some of my own favorites, at the late great Rebunk.

"B" is for "Better"

Due to economic circumstances my MA alum UNC-Charlotte (which, for branding purposes tries to go simply by "Charlotte")is scaling back its plans for its new football program. And while this will seem like rationalization, making virute of necessity, I think the new Plan B is better and saner than the original Plan A.

(Hat tip to this guy. The Yankees suck.)

The Arms Race in the East

At The Boston Globe Tony Massarotti is enthusiastic about the Red Sox pitching corps, particularly the bullpen. The American League East is going to be incredible this year, maybe the greatest division in baseball history, and so how the pitching staffs fare will go a long way in determining which teams will be playing in October and which very good team will be stuck watching. None is so blind as he who will not see, but I still think the Rays will be the odd team out, though of course I hope the Yankees can spent October counting their money while watching the Sox and Rays fight it out for the right to go to the World Series.

Opening Day Approacheth

Opening Day, which should be a National Holiday, and will be when I am benevolent dictator of the world, fast approaches. It appears that the Red Sox are pretty close to settling on their Opening Day roster, an ultimately meaningless decision that injuries and performance will make moot within weeks if not days. Nonetheless, meaningless or not, I'll freight it with meaning. There are few surprises. I'll run down the roster position-by-position as The Boston Globe's Tony Massarotti sees it shaping up:

STARTING LINEUP
(L) Jacoby Ellsbury, CF
(R) Dustin Pedroia, 2B
(L) David Ortiz, DH
(R) Kevin Youkilis, 1B
(L) J.D. Drew, RF
(R) Jason Bay, LF
(R) Mike Lowell, 3B
(S) Jed Lowrie, SS
(S) Jason Varitek, C

The biggest factors in the success or failure of this lineup will be health, which separates the Red Sox from the rest of the league in almost no meaningful way except inasmuch as the Sox had relatively more vital players suffer fairly serious injuries last year. Another issue will be whether Tek can add anything to the batting order. The Red Sox will hit, and Tek's value comes almost wholly from leadership and running the pitching staff. That said, no American league team can afford a pitcher-size void in the 9-hole in the lineup. The Red Sox will hit and they will score runs. But if they stay healthy and guys play to their best-hope projections, this is a team easily capable of leading the league in runs scored, which is not something most teams can say even if they do not lose a game to injury and everyone has a career year.

BENCH
(R) Rocco Baldelli, OF
(R) Nick Green, IF-OF
(L) George Kottaras, C
(L) Chris Carter, IF-OF

The Sox chose Carter over Jeff Bailey but Bailey is a guy management and fans foresee a great future for and so he will get time in Boston this year. Kottaras would have been a surprise in February, but once the Sox got rid of Josh Bard, Kottaras had the inside track. If he performs well as Tim Wakefield's de facto personal catcher and can even come close to hitting Big League pitching there may be less need to overpay the Rangers, say, for Jarrod Saltalamacchia or Taylor Teagarden.

STARTING ROTATION
(R) Josh Beckett
(L) Jon Lester
(R) Daisuke Matsuzaka
(R) Tim Wakefield
(R) Brad Penny

Penny is the classic case of paying short money on long odds and hoping the bet comes in. If it does, this might be the best pitching staff, one-to-five, in the Majors. Beckett needs to come back and have something of a redemption year. And until Dice-K gets through a full season and can up his innings and lower his pitch count there will be concerns. But he was lights out in the World Baseball Classic, which is both a great sign for obvious reasons, but is also worrisome because of how Matsuzaka has shown a tendency to break down at the end of a long season even without something like the WBC lengthening his year all the more. His economical start yesterday is a nice portent, I hope. In any case, bank on one thing: Clay Buchholz and Justin Masterson are almost certain to get their share of starts, and they probably will not be alone. Repeat after me: There is no such thing as too much starting pitching.

BULLPEN
(R) Jonathan Papelbon (closer)
(R) Takashi Saito
(L) Hideki Okajima
(R) Justin Masterson
(R) Manny Delcarmen
(R) Ramon Ramirez
(L) Javier Lopez

The bullpen, at least the middle-relief component of it, was problematic in 2008. On paper this looks like a solid group, and if Okajima returns to his 2007 form, there is reason to believe that the Sox will have a sick Pythagorean rating this year (which is a formula of runs scored to runs given up that is a remarkably good predictor of wins and losses). But expect volatility. The Sox have young arms that will likely not remain in Pawtucket for long, and if guys falter management will have no qualms replacing them. No one sets out, after all, to be a long reliever.

DISABLED LIST
(R) Julio Lugo, SS
(R) John Smoltz, P
(L) Mark Kotsay, OF

Lugo's injuries forestalled a decision on the shortstop fight, but that may well have been Lowrie's slot to lose to begin with. Smoltz represents another gamble, but if he can return in May and is healthy, he will solidify the staff. We'll worry about where he fits in later -- there is lots of time between now and when he will return. Kotsay's return will require a roster move, but we're swapping parts at that point, and in any case, health issues usually mean that when a guy comes up there is someone to hide, and some of the bench guys have options available, so sending them to Pawtucket won't be a problem. And if the Sox have too many Major League bodies, well, that's a good problem to have.

Consider this the first solid Sox talk of the year. Do not expect it to be the last. Opening Day against the Rays in Fenway is six days away and counting.

Cricket Chirping in the US

Over the years I've really come to like cricket. I don't claim to understand the game anywhere near as well as I do, say, rugby, a game I played in South Africa and that I feel I have a pretty good grasp on both in terms of the play on the pitch and also understanding teams and the international game (especially from the the professional and international vantage point of South Africa). Cricket is extraordinarily complex, the scoring system is far from straightforward, and any game that can take five days to play (in its most traditional, purist version) inevitably has its share of nuances.

I am nonetheless skeptical of (though also pleased with) the attempts to bring the game to the United States. Ours is a country of sporting xenophobia. Americans don't understand cricket or rugby, and so tend to mock it, even though they are among the most played team sports in the world -- cricket is probably the second-most popular team sport across the globe behind soccer and rugby cannot be too far behind, though baseball and basketball also have a substantial global footprint. When these international sports -- and I include what most of the rest of the world calls football -- garners any attention on Sports Center, for example, the odds are good that the mention will be both fleeting and mocking. Cricket and rugby almost certainly will never make enormous strides in part because of this sporting xenophobia, and in part because rugby is too much like American football, cricket too akin to baseball.

Still, there are some signs that cricket may well at least enter the fringe in the United States. There is an active and growing cricket community at American colleges that hopes to grow the sport here. USA Cricket is active and is growing. Manny Ramirez even took a few swings from a bowler in an effort to promote DirecTV's new cricket coverage. And a new version of the game, 20-20, represents at least in part an effort to bring a faster-paced version of the game to American audiences (despite the unfortunate Mark Saranford connections).

I'll be happy if someday I can catch international test cricket on my cable. Cricket is a very difficult game to follow in the United States, and I'd be happier if I could just watch the occasional mach (and if I could catch rugby even more regularly).

Happy Hour Approacheth

Esquire has a list of the best bars in America, conveniently listed by state. I will give the caveat that Esquire should have provided that in its estimation all of the best bars in America are located in each state's largest cities with very few exceptions. New York, for example, has a large number of listings, not surprisingly, but apparently every great bar in New York State is located within three of the city's boroughs. Similarly, it seems that every great bar in Texas is located in Dallas or Austin, with one in San Antonio. This all seems improbable. Nonetheless, flawed though it may be, let the list be your guide and drink up! Many of you live very near some of these places -- a report would be more than welcome.

John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009, Rest in Peace

I only met John Hope Franklin twice. The first time was at the Citadel Conference on the Civil Rights Movement in 2003. He was gracious and spoke with me for a few minutes and I naturally felt blessed just to have gotten him to acknowledge me. The second time was at one of the recent meetings of the Southern Historical Association. I just wanted to say hello, mentioned the Citadel conference, and because he was that kind of man, he fibbed and said he remembered.

Because of these two brief meetings, and because of the monumental nature of his work as the practical founder of African American history, it was with more than ordinary sadness that I learned about Professor Franklin's passing on Wednesday. He was 94.

Franklin holds a remarkable place in American historical scholarship. He is not known for any particular interpretive schools or historiographical debates, largely because he practically established the school and the historiography. His most famous book, From Slavery to Freedom, is still in use after several revisions. His memoir, Mirror to America, is a model of the historian's autobiography, with the added advantage that Franklin was a historian who made history, a thing so rare that you would excuse most people for thinking it nonexistent.

Creationists Are Idiots

Sometimes the level of complete fucktardery in the state in which I now live is astounding.

Curt Schilling: Kind of a Big Deal

At The New Republic Jason Gay compares Curt Schilling to Ron Burgundy of Anchorman. My favorite line actually comes from a commenter who quotes someone else: "another webs article summed up Schilling perfectly: 'since Curt was a bit smarter than your average ballplayer, he mistakenly assumed he was smarter than the public at large . . . being the tallest jockey in the racetrack locker room doesn't make you a giant'."

I am in the camp that, his bombast aside, Schilling belongs in the Hall of Fame. Everyone will look at his win totals, which at 216 are very good but not great, but of course wins are not necessarily the greatest metric for assessing how good a pitcher is given how team dependent a statistic it is. Think of it this way: Who pitched a better game, a guy who struggles through five innings, gives up six runs, but happens to benefit froma slugfest, or the guy who goes eight, gives up one, but loses 2-1? Surely one outcome is better than the other, but strictly looking at the pitching performances, the guy who lost did a much better job than the guy who won. In nearly every other statistical measurement, Schilling is clearly Hall-worthy, with the understanding that his postseason performances put him over the top.

I Don't Care: Give Me a Steak

This tragic, sad, poignant, disturbing story may well be true. But a world of less red meat is a world where the living envy the dead. Plus, every time they find something that is yummy that kills you, someone eventually discovers that no, in fact, that consumable is actually good for you. I am ready for the inevitable egg-like comeback of red meat. Though for me, red meat never left.

Baseball Bits and Pieces

Even as the Red Sox look ahead to the upcoming season, including worrying about what effect participation in the World Baseball Classic will have on Sox players, especially Daisuke Matsuzaka, they also look to the past. Curt Schilling has announced his retirement. There are lots of aspects of Schill's personality that have grated in recent years when he either was not pitching or else was not pitching well -- he is, for example, bombastic and mouthy and has never met a microphone he does not love. But no matter what flaws Schill has shown while on the shelf, we'll always have 2004, the year when Schill was unquestionably one of the biggest difference makers on the field, in the bullpen, in the clubhouse and, yes, in front of the media.

Someone asked me to comment on the World Baseball Classic in the last couple of weeks. I love the idea of the WBC. I think it is great for the game and will help grow baseball internationally. But the problem is that it will never mean that much to American fans, not as long as teams and thus fans run the risk of losing some of their best players to injury right before a new season on Major League Baseball, which is where fan loyalties in the United States lie.

The reality is that in international sports, the national team has to inspire the loyalty above all other configurations of their teams in order for that sport to explode as a phenomenon within international competition. Thus in South Africa, the Springboks reign supreme above even Super 12 or Currie Cup competition. Even in England, people place their loyalties to England above their deep and abiding loyalties to their Premiere League teams, which usually ends up in country-wide despair. I wonder if a WBC played in November in the Caribbean or elsewhere where the weather would cooperate would not work better than one played in March. And I simply cannot abide the numerous days off during the WBC. Baseball is played daily, or near so. There is no reason for multiple days off during a torunament such as the WBC. So, I like the idea, but the execution needs some tinkering.

The Epic Road Trip

3,510 miles of driving. A nights spent somewhere in a highway hotel in east Arkansas, multiple nights each in in Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia, and Charlottesville, and a couple of hours dozing at a rest area outside of a place called Hope on a marathon drive home. Research at the University of South Carolina's South Caroliniana Library and a well-attended panel at the Virginia Festival for the Book (keep your eyes open for it on C-Span's Book-TV). A fellows reunion for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Also: a still unresolved hotel charge in Charlottesville involving a several-hundred-dollar error currently errantly going (natch) in their favor. Oh: And an absurd speeding ticket (note to Virginia's Highway Patrol: shame on you for pulling over five cars in a row in the last three miles on I-81 in Virginia, all of which had out-of-tstae license plates on a race weekend when thousands of people were descending on your highway redoubt. And fuck you, Trooper Badge #5093, you premature ejaculating lying pedophile -- the false accusations bit works both ways -- I had not even reached the speed limit and was barely even back on the Interstate after having stopped to get gas a few hundred yards before. I wasn't even going 70, never mind 79.)

Finally, home. Seeing the wife (yeay!) and eating home-cooked food. Serious unpacking. And blissful sweet sleep. Hopefully I'll be back in regular contact soon.

National Book Critics Circle Awards

The National Book Critics Circle has named its award winners for books published in 2008. I am a member of the NBCC. None of my top choices won (I am not a very influential member, clearly), though the winners are worthy.

Grammar FYI

Apparently lots of journalists are misusing the word "prepossess" and its myriad derivations. I have no idea if this matters to any of you, or to me either.

We're #1!

In honor of this year's 15th Virginia Festival for the Book, Charlottesville's alternative newsweekly The Hook is honoring its "15 picks for the 15th anniversary." Their number one pick for this year's festival?:

1. Stories from the Civil Rights Movement. The panel line-up may be heavy on the white guys, but UVA law profs Richard Bonnie and Mildred Wigfall Robinson co-edited a collection of 40 essays written by people who were in school when one of the most influential Supreme Court decisions was made. It's called Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education. With Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides author Derek Catsam, and Peter Wallenstein, who wrote Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement. [An unsung Civil Rights hero, John A. Stokes, who helped lead the Farmville student strike in 1951, will be talking at another event at Walton Middle School open only to students].
Noon Thursday, March 19, at UVA Bookstore

Sure, their motivation for plugging the panel has largely to do with another book, and I basically get dismissed as just another white guy, which I probably am, but there is no such thing as bad publicity, especially at such a powerhouse event as the Virginia Festival. If you are anywhere near Charlottesville, please do attend.

The Times' Upgrade

The New York Times has replaced the goddawful William Kristol, whose tenure as a columnist was mercifully truncated a while back, with The Atlantic Monthly's Ross Douthat. This seems like a good call and is a serious upgrade in intellectual heft and ideological seriousness.

On Journalism Schools

Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that journalism school is kind of bullshit? Michael Lewis had just such a concern in 1993 and so visited Columbia's highly regarded School of Journalism to see if his suspicions were true. The result was this classic crackback in The New Republic. And frankly stuff like this (also at Columbia) doesn't help either.

The friend I am staying with here in Asheville is like a brother to me (and he periodically checks in on this blog) and he went to Albama's graduate school in journalism to get an MA. He enjoyed it, and surely found it useful in terms of giving him something to grasp on to after an undergraduate career in which he did not intend to pursue journalism and in an aconomic climate not especially conducive to helping a new graduate transition into professional journalism in small-town New Hampshire. He worked in the field for a few years and hated more about it than he liked - all while living in poverty even with full-time writing gigs - and is now a nurse (which required two more years of schooling). My own views of journalism school were shaped at my PhD program, an admittedly small sample, where the Contemporary History Institute included members of our nationally- ranked journalism program. The bulk of my journalism colleagues (CHI is an interdisciplinary program) were so enamored by the reputation of their school and the occasional big name passing through to teach for a year or a semester that they forgot to consider whether or not one-sentence paragraphs represent an especially wise approach to writing or why knowing stuff made their colleagues in history (or occasionally poli-sci, though at Ohio the political science grad students, and more than a few of the professors, tended to be fools and lackwits) so much more prepared to engage in substance than they were.

As far as I am concerned we could close all of the business, journalism, and education schools tomorrow, (keep early childhood education, which we could team with psychology or something) and the world would be none the worse for it. If these programs were limited to graduate school we could ignore them. But they pervade undergraduate education to the point where the journalists and teachers in training do not realize that you need to be teaching or writing something of substance that you know something about. Meanwhile undergraduate business majors all think they are going to be the next Donald Trump when the reality is that they are on a fast track to a middle-management trainee program somewhere that will teach them all they actually need to know about how to run that local Walgreens. Meanwhile the elite firms in accounting, consulting, investment banking, and what have you are recruiting senior English, history, and econ majors at Williams and Dartmouth knowing that smart people can be trained to pick up rudimentary business skills but that dumb people with business degrees cannot necessarily be trained to have analytical and critical thinking skills.

Road Trippin'

I am writing from a hotel room east of Little Rock. Yesterday I started a long road trip that will take me to, among other places, Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia and the University of South Carolina, and Charlottesville, where next Thursday at noon at the UVa Bookstore you can see me participate in the Virginia Festival for the Book. I'll post as I can.

Debunking New Deal Revisionism

In the latest New Republic Jonathan Chait puts the smack down on Amity Shlaes, the current darling among the conservative let's-selectively-(and badly)-invoke-history-for-our-own-ideological-purposes set. As an added bonus, he uses a new book by the incomparable William Leuchtenburg, to help reveal Shlaes' book on the New Deal for what it is.

The Natural

The Boston Globe has a story about a 16-year old baseball player in Las Vegas who conjures up images of The Natural.

Insanity Plates

Hate vanity plates and the people who own them? So does this guy, which is why he started this blog with a friend. Enjoy.

Another SI Snafu?

In his March 9 article in Sports Illustrated, "The Wrong Man,", which is drawn from a new book on the Dodgers, Forever Blue, Michael D'Antonio makes what he and SI present as a new, provocative argument : That Walter O'Malley is not to blame for the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. That this argument still defies conventional wisdom is a testament to the tenacity of conventional wisdom. But it is not new. Neil Sullivan, in his book The Dodgers Move West (Oxford, 1987), made a similar argument more than two decades ago. D'Antonio's article makes no mention of Sullivan's book. I hope D'Antonio's book does not make the same mistake. It is a grave ethical oversight in both journalism and academia to present an idea as original if it is not. In this case, the idea decidedly is not original and to present it as such is deeply dishonest.

Save Money, Go To College

Looking to cut costs but still want to travel? The New York Times recommends going to college. In a manner of speaking. College campuses and the towns that host them have art museums and public lectures, culture and sporting events, places to eat and drink and things to do, libraries and bookstores. I always find that one of the pleasures of research trips is getting to experience another college. Late next week I will leave for a trip that will encompass The University of South Carolina, where I am a fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies this year, and The University of Virginia, where I will be participating in the Virginia Festival for the Book and attending a reunion of fellows at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

An Odd Odd Man Out

Uh oh. Yet another memoir is having aspersions cast upon its veracity. Odd Man Out is a memoir about a season in the low minor leagues that has garnered considerable press in large part because its author, Matt McCarthy, is a graduate of Yale and is now a medical doctor. Sports Illustrated recently ran an excerpt of the book. But now The New York Times has done some snooping and something is awry.

The accusations are of two types, one damning, one (possibly) less so. McCarthy claims that he took prodigious notes in journals during the time. Yet there are clearly some factual errors, and enough of them are substantial. This is fairly damning, especially since as of now McCarthy has refused to show his journals to anyone. The issue appears to be that his journals are undated. If so, this might be sloppy, but also would explain some of the factual inconsistencies.

The second accusations come from people who insist that they never could or would have said or done certain things. In almost all cases, the things they claim not to have said or done are offensive and make them look bad. These accusations I take with a grain of salt. Anyone who has ever spent any time in a locker room or on a road trip with male athletes and coaches knows damned well the sorts of things that guys will say and do. As a general rule, athletes say piggish things all the time. None would want those words exposed necessarily, but when someone exposes them, a denial does not make them untrue. I sure as hell am glad no one had designs on writing a memoir about my high school sports teams, or even my college track team, as trust me, being at Williams does not make guys any more sensitive about bodily functions, physical abnormalities, women, or basically anyone who can be made fun of. If there is any solace it is that guys are every bit as awful to their teammates as they are in discussing outside targets of their mirth, mockery, or meanness.

Of course if someone who was never on the Williams track team were to write a memoir, would anyone be surprised? The genre is beset with difficulties to the point where maybe we need a five-year moratorium on no-names writing them.

The Cassel Trade

Color me as one of the people who was unimpressed when I first heard that the Patriots had traded both linebacker Mike Vrabel and quarterback Matt Cassel to Kansas City for a mere second-round draft pick. After the year Cassel had, and with the paucity of good starting quarterbacks in the league, I think most people assumed that the market for him would slowly heat up and that the Pats would eventually be fending off suitors. Instead the Pats got rid of cassel on the first weekend of free agency, giving an indication that they felt the market might not be what they had hoped or that they are just that confident in Tom Brady's recovery from his devastating knee injury.

Whatever the circumstances, I think that the Kraft-Belichick era has shown us one thing, which is that the coach and his support staff know what they are doing. As today's Boston Globe editorial on the trade argues:

But the intensely competitive Belichick did not attain his professional preeminence by peddling talented players at discount prices. Critics of the Cassel trade risk putting themselves in the position of a tourist who thinks he knows that a rug merchant in the Tehran bazaar has sold a couple of carpets too cheap.

That sounds about right. Cassel had a wonderful year this past season and any Patriots fan has to wish him well. But he was not going to supplant Brady this year or anytime in the future and the time to get value for him was going to be fleeting. All's fine in Foxborough.

That Giant Flushing Sound

Naturally one of the things that an opposition party does above all others is oppose. But the Republicans are fast becoming the party of Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber. I'm going to bet that on balance that is not good for either the GOP or American conservatism. For a party that only serves to oppose loses its relevance rather quickly. And while I am enjoying the short-term spectacle of the right shrilly imploding it is not good for American politics for the right to become little more than a cartoon of obstructionism in action.

The Greatly Exaggerated death of the Humanities

The economy is tanking. And so naturally that brings about new concerns about the state of the humanities. Take a deep breath, folks. the humanities will be fine. We can imagine that college students are all mindless automotons looking to take nothing but business classes. But students still flock to history and English classes all across the country. They will be doing so in a eyar and they will be doing so in a decade and they will be doing so a century from now. The humanities, like the novel, and like rock & roll, always seem to be in a near-death state and yet always manage to defy the dire prognostications. A good rule of thumb is that the idea of a golden age is always a myth.

Vegas Bound

dcat will be flying to Las Vegas at 5:55 Central time and will be meeting two friends, including this guy. I'll post as I can but, you know, don't hold your breath.

The Greatest

This week's Sports Illustrated has a feature story on the incomparable Bobby Orr. You can have Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux, this generation can have Sid the Kid or Alex Ovechkin. I'll start my all-time player draft with Boston's #4.

"What's My Name, Fool?"

As most of you know, I quite like Andrew Sullivan's blog and find him to be the best conservative pundit out there. But Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic absolutely eviscerates Sullivan in what is supposed to be a correction about a pretty picayune matter. From the first line to the last, Wieseltier pretty much gives Sullivan a serious beatdown. It's a bit like a Jack Johnson fight, or when Mohammed Ali humiliated Floyd Patterson in 1965 for the latter's continuing to refer to Ali dismissively as "Cassius." The humiliation comes in the refusal to deliver a knockout because the beating is all the worse and more humiliating when you make the beating last. I half expected Wieseltier to punctuate each paragraph with "What's My Name, Fool?" as Ali did throughout the 1965 Patterson fight.

Speak Loudly AND Carry a Big Stick

Over at The Washington Post Anne Applebaum wishes American leaders would shut their yaps about human rights and simply act on addressing those issues instead. I have no problem with speaking up if action follows. What is intolerable is staking a self-righteous claim to commitment to human rights and then not backing it up, as in, say, Darfur.

The New Look

It was time for a new look at dcat. I'm still rolling with the hideous green hues toward which I've come to grow affectionate, but decided to go with something a bit different. I'm curious what you think, though I had to transfer all of the book and publication links manually, so I'm not likely to change it again anytime soon.

On Student Entitlement

As I prepare to grade a batch of exams that I just received, and a pile of papers that I should have finished more than a week ago, I cannot stop thinking about this Michelle Cottle post at The Plank , which she develops from this New York Times article, both of which take on the entitlement that many college students feel when it comes to grades. Their attitude can be summed up thusly: "I come to class and do all the work, I deserve an A." Which is to say that they believe that simply fulfilling the basic expectations of the class warrants an A. Read both pieces, and shake your head in a combination of disbelief and exasperation at both the sense of entitlement and the absence of the idea of quality in the minds of too many of these students, who have grown up in the academic equivalent of Lake Woebegone and who, upon coming to college, are stunned, but more to the point, outraged, that they are not all above average.

Cheesy Pasta Goodness

Mmmmmmmm, mac and cheese! (With recipes!)

Ranking the Presidents, Again

Over at Cliopatria KC Johnson brings his insight to C-SPAN's second survey of presidential leadership. He is particularly interested in exploring why there was so much relative volatility in the assessments from the last survey to this one. Some of his examples do not bother me: Why did President Clinton leap past George H.W. Bush? I dunno -- probably because by just about any measure he was a more successful, a better, a more important president? But his larger point about the temporal, indeed presentist, nature of these rankings is well worth remembering.

These exercises, however methodologically sound or flawed, are best viewed as parlor games and cocktail party fodder and are not worth much more. I've always been more interested in presidential impact than on presidential "greatness." That said, here is my "top ten" list, with all of the vagaries that term implies, with the recognition of my own clear biases -- I am a 20th century historian and I am a liberal and a Democrat -- and which could be different tomorrow and may have been different yesterday:

1) Abraham Lincoln
2) Franklin Roosevelt
3) George Washington
4) Harry Truman
5) Theodore Roosevelt
6) Lyndon Johnson
7) Woodrow Wilson
8) Thomas Jefferson
9) Dwight Eisenhower
10) Andrew Jackson

One lesson I draw from coming up with my own list is that the depth chart for United States Presidents does not go all that deep. That surely speaks to the nature of the job more than it does to the men who have held it. The presidency is a position almost built to conquer those who attain it.

Money(basket)ball

This weekend Michael Lewis took his Moneyball approach to this fantastic New York Times magazine piece on the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier. Moneyball, inarguably one of the most important, and certainly most misunderstood, books ever written about sports showed the ways in which a new generation of baseball front office people, embodied in Oakland's Billy Beane, were finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the marketplace for baseball players, thus allowing small market teams to compete against those with far superior resources. Lewis has taken a similar approach, through the lens of the incredibly sympathetic Ole Miss football player Michael Oher, to football and especially the left tackle position, and now to Battier and basketball.

It's safe to say that Lewis has found his niche. His earliest books took a similar approach to financial sectors. It would be formulaic were it not stunningly clear just how easily conventional wisdom becomes dogma in so many varied but related -- hypercompetitive, big money -- realms. It does not hurt that Lewis is a hell of a writer -- workmanlike, but crisp, clear, and readable, and he easily conveys complicated ideas to make them so accessible that you do not even realize they are complicated. Hopefully this piece on Battier foreshadows a book on the topic.

Goodness

I loathe the fact that one holiday segues directly into another. Christmas sales begin before Thanksgiving, sometimes weeks before. Soon after New Years the Valentine's Day candy and profligate pink festoons all available store space. Halloween costumes and their pumpkin and witch, ghost and ghoulie brethren hit the shelves before Columbus Day. Enough is too much, and was long ago.

But let me tell you one thing -- seeing (and, of course, buying, in bulk) my first Cadbury Eggs the day after Valentine's Day? Hell. And. Yes.

dcat's NCAA Basketball Coaching Debut (Self Indulgence Alert!)

For my entire time at my university I have been closely affiliated with our basketball program, and with the men's program in particular. I broadcast the play-by-play of the home games on radio and have been on numerous road trips with the team, at which point I have played a sort of jack-of-all-trades role, including serving as the most highly educated waterboy in all of college sports.

But tonight, due to a confluence of circumstances, which included the assistant coach having to miss a road trip to Austin and San Antonio and me happening to be in the Alamo City for the weekend, I took on a new role: Assistant basketball coach. I have a good deal of experience coaching track at the high school and college levels, but basketball coaching was new to me. I kept the stats, held the clipboard, looked up portentously at the scoreboard, yelled the encouragement, hollered at the refs, gave coach useful tidbits of information, shook hands with the refs before and the opposing team after the game, gathered the official stat sheets as I stood solemnly during time outs, and served as sounding board for coach before, during, and after what turned out to be a bad, bad loss, and -- this is most important -- responded with an appropriate blend of gravitas and hail-fellow-well-met when people called me "coach."

So, to all of you Division I programs about to can your head coach in the next month: I'm available at the right price. Just so you know.

Denying New Deal Denialists

Eric Rauchway takes on New Deal denialists in a post republished at History News Network. He drives a metaphor that he draws from Ronald Reagan into the ground, but otherwise, his arguments dovetails nicely with something I wrote last month in which I concluded that whatever its shortcomigs, the New Deal was quite remarkable, and that if we still place stock in the three R's of Relief, Reform, and Recovery, the New Deal was damned successful at the first, quite successful at the second, and middling (but not a failure) at the third.

Academia, The Economic Crisis, and What Professors Do

Over at The Cyber Hacienda Jaime has a post in which he links an open letter from an Arizona State University professor explaining what it is that professors do, clearing up some misconceptions along the way. I would further add that research expectations are not only prevelant at Research I universities such as ASU and that even in smaller institutions, such as mine, research is a serious expectation, and that when people don't get tenure here, as at a large swath of schools, it is almost universally because of a lack of research productivity.

The professor (who is not yet tenured) had to write anonymously because the university president has apparently put forth a dictum that faculty may not speak about the crisis. Were I a tenured professor at ASU, and especially were I in a discipline in which writing about politics or current affairs could plausibly be part of what I do -- ie: were I me -- I might challenge that demand of silence frontally in the name of both academic freedom and free speech. Of course that's easy for me to say here and now, as the crisis in Texas is nowhere near as dire as that in Arizona, and we are not facing such severe circumstances.

The NAACP at 100

Today marks the NAACP's 100th birthday. One can reasonably ask what purpose the organization serves today, but there is little question that the NAACP has been the preeminent civil rights organization in American history. By the 1960s the NAACP had come to seem passe, even conservative, by a generation of activists weaned on direct-action protests, but without the work of the NAACP, and especially its Legal Defense Fund, the prospects for success in challenging Jim Crow would have been diminished, the process would have taken far longer.

Everyone knows about the successes of the NAACP in fighting segregated education, which culminated in Brown v. Board. But the organization fought discrimination in its myriad guises, in diverse realms such the political arena and on public transportation. It is quite possible to assert that without SNCC or CORE there still would have been an NAACP, but without the NAACP there may never have been a SNCC or a CORE.

Phelps, Parker, and the Conservative Divide

Kathleen Parker weighs in on the silly Michael Phelps imbroglio and in the process reminds us that one of the many divisions within contemporary conservatives is that between those with libertarian inclinations (which is where Parker falls on this issue) and the insufferable moral scolds (think Sarah Palin, and frankly, too many who have held sway among the GOP for the last generation). Of course Parker became persona non grata on the right for her supposed apostasy on the Palin question, which just served as a reminder that you'll never err in underestimating the open-mindedness of most within the modern conservative movement.

Way to Go!

Planning travel in 2009? You will want to consult the 2009 Washington Post "Way To Go Guide." It contains all kinds of useful tips for everyone ranging from the experienced traveler to the neophyte.

Busing and Boston

It may be the most infamous photo in Boston history, is certainly the most infamous of the post-1960s Civil Rights Movement, and still leaves a lousy mark on a city with a fraught racial history even if it also is a city that has also historically been a beacon for freedom and liberty, in both rhetoric and reality.

Ted Landsmark was an up-and-coming lawyer entering the political realm on April 5, 1976. He was running late for a meeting of the Boston Redevelopment Authority that he was set to chair. He had difficulty finding parking and was rushing to get to his meeting when he was set upon by white thugs, one brandishing an American flag, in front of City Hall. The moment marked the nadir of the city's busing crisis, indeed, a nadir in the city's history.

So it came as a surprise, I'm sure to many (it did to me) top read Landsmark's recent op-ed in which he called for an end to busing to try to achieve equalization in the racial composition of the schools in Boston. And yet his arguments are worth considering.

Busing is a more complex issue than either its opponents or its supporters are willing to acknowledge. When Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education allowed for busing to begin with it was deeply controversial, but not necessarily wrong. But once the court (wrongly, in my mind) decided in Milliken v. Bradley not to allow busing to cross city lines, and thus to give suburbanites the chance to opt out of the system, and to accelerate white flight, and to racialize the inner city, it meant that busing was virtually doomed to fail, at least in those cities that maintained limited geographic boundaries (unlike Charlotte, the home of the Swann decision ironically enough, which continued to expand so that the city and county lines became virtually indistinguishable) because it could not address the systemic geographic roots of so much segregation, especially in the North and particularly in cities and suburbs. The Milliken decision did not alone guarantee Boston's ugly mid-1970s fate, but it contributed. Today black Boston-area students who live in overwhelmingly black communities get up early in the morning to get on buses the majority of which will likely take them to schools that, wherever they are located, are likely to be made up of black and Hispanic students from elsewhere in the city. Ted Landsmark, the most visible victim of Boston's ugliest period, now opposes busing. His words are worth considering, but only after we understand the real reasons why busing failed.

TPM Cafe Book Club

If you are looking for serious discussion about books, you could do worse than to bookmark the Talking Points Memo Cafe Book Club. Recent discussions have included Tony Badger, Alonzo Hamby, Andrew Bacevich, Nick Katzenbach, and many others.

Not to Say I Told You So . . .

I wrote the following as part of a post on Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's home run record in 2007:

The chase is done, though the recriminations have just begun. The self-righteous await hopefully ARod taking the record away, because they who remained willfully blind suddenly have decided that ARod was never part of the scandal they never saw when it was happening yet see so clearly in outrage-fueled hindsight.

Well, now we have this.

Flight of the Conchords Landing Near You

Normally, like any person with a modicum (even if only just) of dignity, I avoid novelty acts. But despite this general stance, I love Flight of the Conchords, the New Zealand folk duo that has stormed American hearts, largely through their brilliant eponymous HBO show. Bret and Jemaine are set to take flight (heh) on a nationwide tour.

Hat tip to the Thunderstick.

Encyclopedia Virginia (Incidental Self Indulgence Alert)

The Encyclopedia Virginia is now online. An effort of the incomparable Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (with which I was a fellow in 2004), the Encyclopedia is just one example of why the Foundation may well be the best state humanities organization of its kind. My modest contribution to the encyclopedia is an entry on the 1946 Supreme Court case Morgan v. Virginia, which directly led to the Journey of Reconciliation and Freedom Rides.