I’m on vacation, and net access is bad around here but I got an email from Professor Michael Berube, DP* and he informs me that his new book What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? is now available through Amazon. I’ve read it and it’s flat-out wonderful.
Like all of Berube’s writing, the book is crystal-clear, often very funny, and eloquent. His ostensible subject is the modern liberal arts education as seen from inside the belly of the beast, the English Department, ground zero of the extreme right assault on American academia. But as interesting as that is, and it’s very interesting, that’s just the maguffin (google it). It’s like saying Gravity’s Rainbow’s about WW II rocketry. Well, yeah, but…
To be brief about it, if you have any interest in what liberalism really is, what it can accomplish in the US today, and why it is crucial to vehemently resist the far right’s relentless obsession to eliminate it, you should read this book.
Full disclosure: Yes, Michael’s a friend of mine. If you read the book, you’ll understand why. He asked me to read What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? in galleys and, if I liked it, to blurb it. I did so, happily. In fact, I’m quite honored he asked me, of all the people he could have asked.
*DP = “Dangerous Professor.” Dr. Berube has been designated by David Horowitz one of the most Dangerous Professors in America and I am so totally jealousl I could spit.
There’s plenty of commentary this morning about this Brian Williams interview with the president yesterday. But can I just point out that neither Williams nor Bush make any damned sense? Take this exchange:
WILLIAMS: When you take a tour of the world, a lot of Americans e-mail me with their fears that, some days they just wake up and it just feels like the end of the world is near. And you go from North Korea to Iran, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and you look at how things have changed, how Americans are viewed overseas, if that is important to you. Do you have any moments of doubt that we fought a wrong war? Or that there’s something wrong with the perception of America overseas?
BUSH: Well those are two different questions, did we fight the wrong war, and absolutely — I have no doubt — the war came to our shores, remember that. We had a foreign policy that basically said, let’s hope calm works. And we were attacked.
WILLIAMS: But those weren’t Iraqis.
BUSH : They weren’t, no, I agree, they weren’t Iraqis, nor did I ever say Iraq ordered that attack, but they’re a part of, Iraq is part of the struggle against the terrorists. Now in terms of image, of course I worry about American image. We are great at TV, and yet we are getting crushed on the PR front. I personally do not believe that Saddam Hussein picked up the phone and said, “al-Qaida, attack America.”
Talk about dumb and dumber. I know the president is intellectually handicapped and I don’t expect much from Williams either. But couldn’t someone have written down the questions for him beforehand so he doesn’t ramble incoherently when he’s interviewing the president?
And why oh why can’t somebody pin the codpiece down when he says in one breath that the war came to our shores and that’s why we’re fighting in Iraq? Couldn’t Williams have followed up with, “but if Iraq wasn’t involved in the attacks, in what way was it part of the struggle against terrorism? Until we invaded, Iraq didn’t have any terrorists.” Bush would blather on about weapons of mass destruction and our oceans not protecting us, but at least it would be out there. That would be too much to ask, I guess.
The thing about how we are “great on TV but getting crushed on the PR front” is just bizarre. I have no idea what he meant by it other than it’s something someone said about about himself and he applied it to the country. I can’t figure out any other explanation.
This next part makes me feel sad for Bush the first. Junior is a terrible son, condescending and rude. Shakespeare is needed to explain it properly:
WILLIAMS: Is there a palpable tension when you get together with the former president, who happens to be your father? A lot of the guys who worked for him are not happy with the direction of things.
BUSH: Oh no. My relationship is adoring son.
WILLIAMS: You talk shop?
BUSH: Sometimes, yeah, of course we do. But it’s a really interesting question, it’s kind of conspiracy theory at its most rampant. My dad means the world to me, as a loving dad. He gave me the greatest gift a father can give a child, which is unconditional love. And yeah, we go out and can float around there trying to catch some fish, and chat and talk, but he understands what it means to be president. He understands that often times I have information that he doesn’t have. And he understands how difficult the world is today. And I explain my strategy to him, I explain exactly what I just explained to you back there how I view the current tensions, and he takes it on board, and leaves me with this thought, “I love you son.”
He speaks as if his father is some simple working class bloke who loves his highly successful son and keeps him grounded with homespun wisdom. Bush doesn’t listen to him about important things. But that’s ok, because his simpleminded old Dad “understands that often times I[Junior] have information that he doesn’t have.” Sad, sad, sad.
Williams actually asks one interesting question:
WILLIAMS: The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9/11, do they have a case looking back on it?
BUSH: Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.
Dear God. He brags endlessly about lowering taxes and then calls it a sacrifice for the war effort. It’s true that having air travel disrupted for a week was truly a lot to ask of us but we rose to the occasion. The economy he’s been pumping as being great for years is now seen to have “tanked” and caused Americans great suffering. I won’t even mention the war we didn’t need to fight that’s costing huindreds of billions of dollars — which he promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues and which will instead cost every American child more than can even be calculated.
The truth is that we have been asked to make a lot of very important sacrifices. As the blogger Phila at Boufonia writes:
It’s often claimed that George W. Bush has asked for no sacrifices in this time of war. On the contrary, he’s asked us to sacrifice our humanity and our compassion. He’s asked us to sacrifice our privacy and freedom, and our respect for our fellow citizens. He’s asked us to sacrifice every irreducible ideal – and there were few enough of them, God knows – on which this country was founded, and whatever fragile steps we’ve taken towards implementing them under the law. He’s asked us to sacrifice any religious truth that would interfere with the dreary, mechanical pursuit of redundant wealth and false security. He’s asked us to sacrifice our souls and our conscience, in exchange for his snake-oil promise that we’ll never have to suffer the consequences of our own inhumanity. He’s asked us to sacrifice our present for his future, and our future for his present.
And we have to take off our shoes at airports too.
Update: I just saw an extended version of the interview and Williams did follow-up with Bush about al Qaeda in Iraq and as predicted, Bush blathered on about all the usual crap about “suiciders” and state sponsors of terrorism and the world being safer without Saddam. But the question was, at least, asked.
So Mounthir Abbas Saud, whose right arm and jaw were ripped off when a car bomb exploded six months ago, must have thought the worst was over when he arrived at Ibn al-Nafis Hospital, a major medical center in Baghdad.
Instead, it had just begun. A few days into his recovery at the facility, armed Shiite Muslim militiamen dragged the 43-year-old Sunni mason down the hallway floor, snapping intravenous needles and a breathing tubes out of his body, and later riddled his body with bullets, said family members.
In his book appropriately titled Liberty and Freedom author and historian extraordinaire David Hackett Fischer says, “In early uses, both words implied a power of choice, an ability to exercise one’s will, and a condition that was distinct from slavery. In all of those ways, liberty and freedom meant the same thing.”
But Fischer goes on to describe other ways in which their original meanings were different.
Our English word liberty comes from the Latin libertas and its adjective liber, which meant unbounded, unrestricted, and released from restraint. A synonymn was solutus, from the verb solvos, to loosen a set of bonds. These words were similar to the Greek eleutheria and eleutheros, which also meant the condition of being independent, separate, and distinct. The Greeks used these terms to describe autonomous cities, independent tribes, and individuals who were not ruled by another’s will. That ancient meaning survives in the modern era, where eleutheros has spawned scientific terms such as eleutheropetalous or eleutherodactylic, for separate petals or fingers or toes. Eleutheria, like the Roman libertas, always impled some degree of separation and independence.
Freedom has another origin. It derives from a large family of ancient languages in northern Europe. The English word for free is related to the Norse frie, the German frei, the Dutch vrij, the Flemish vrig, the Celtic rheidd, and the Welsh rhydd. These words share an unexpected root. They descend from the Indo-European priya of friya or riya, which meant dear or beloved. The English words freedom and free have the same root as friend, as do their German cousins frei and Freund. Free meant someone who was joined to a tribe of free people by ties of kinship and rights of belonging.
A very similar meaning also appeared in the Sumerian ama-ar-gi, the oldest know word for anything like liberty or freedom, which appeared on clay tablets in Lagash before 2300 B.C. Ama-ar-gi came from the verb ama-gi, which meant literally going home to mother. It described the condition of servants no longer in bondage who returned to their free families.
In that respect, the original meanings of freedom and liberty were not merely different but opposed. Liberty meant separation. Freedom implied connection. A person with libertas in Rome or eleutheria in ancient Greece had been granted some degree of autonomy, unlike a slave. A person who had Freiheit in northern Europe or ama-ar-gi in southern Mesopotamia was united in kinship or affection to a tribe or family of free people, unlike a slave.
The question has been asked many times whether people in Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Is that possible? I’m not necessarily asking is that so, but more is it possible for someone to enjoy a higher degree of freedom while existing beneath a dictator’s umbrella?
Fischer again:
Roman libertas gave rise to a complex vocabulary of stratification and mobility that still echoes in modern English speech. The Latin adjective liberaliter meant knowing how to behave gracefully and generously, in the manner of a highborn person who is secure in the possession of many liberties. It is the root of our word liberality. The noun libertinus meant an emancipated slave who had been granted liberties that he had not been prepared to use. Our modern word libertine preserves this ancient meaning.
Within this social frame, ancient philosophers developed libertas and eleutheria as ethical ideas of high complexity. The leaders were the Stoics, who wrote at greater length about liberty than others in the ancient world, especially the slave Epictetus (A.D. 55-135) and the emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-180). Both argued that to be truly free is to cultivate a spirit of independence from things that are not in one’s control: bondage, tyranny, illness, pain, and death. This Stoic condition of liberty could be achieved even in a despotism. It is striking that the leading stoic philosophers of liberty in ancient Rome were an emperor and a slave.
The article linked to above continues:
Authorities say it was not an isolated incident. In Baghdad these days, not even the hospitals are safe. In growing numbers, sick and wounded Sunnis have been abducted from public hospitals operated by Iraq’s Shiite-run Health Ministry and later killed, according to patients, families of victims, doctors and government officials.
As a result, more and more Iraqis are avoiding hospitals, making it even harder to preserve life in a city where death is seemingly everywhere. Gunshot victims are now being treated by nurses in makeshift emergency rooms set up in homes. Women giving birth are smuggled out of Baghdad and into clinics in safer provinces.
In most cases, family members and hospital workers said, the motive for the abductions appeared to be nothing more than religious affiliation. Because public hospitals here are controlled by Shiites, the killings have raised questions about whether hospital staff have allowed Shiite death squads into their facilities to slaughter Sunni Arabs.
I guess in some cases it really sucks to be free.
Perhaps the great young inde-rocker Conner Oberst (with Emmylou Harris) said it best in his song Landlocked Blues:
We made love on the living room floor With the noise in the background of a televised war And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say “If we walk away, they’ll walk away”
But greed is a bottomless pit And our freedom’s a joke We’re just taking a piss And the whole world must watch The sad comic display If you’re still free start running away Cause we’re coming for you!
UPDATE: Here is a very nice set of photographs set to this Bright Eyes song (via You Tube) — stay with it long enough to hear the bugle (is it a bugle?) that follows the words above, and of course, to hear the beautiful voice of Emmylou Harris. For those not familiar with Conner Oberst, the Bright Eyes front man, Rolling Stone Magazine tagged him as this generation’s Bob Dylan.
What changed in the US with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we had entered a period of consequence — Al Gore
I assume that a great many of you have seen An Inconvenient Truth by now. If you haven’t, make a point to do it as soon as you can. One year ago today, that picture was on all our television screens and it is one scary image.
It’s quite clear to all sentient beings (which excludes the faith based GOP and its corporate masters) that global warming is real, it’s very serious and it’s vastly important that we do something about it as soon as possible.
Carbon dioxide and other gases warm the surface of the planet naturally by trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. This is a good thing because it keeps our planet habitable. However, by burning fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil and clearing forests we have dramatically increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere and temperatures are rising.
The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. The evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.
We’re already seeing changes. Glaciers are melting, plants and animals are being forced from their habitat, and the number of severe storms and droughts is increasing.
The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years.
Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places like the Colombian Andes, 7,000 feet above sea level.
The flow of ice from glaciers in Greenland has more than doubled over the past decade.
At least 279 species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving closer to the poles.
If the warming continues, we can expect catastrophic consequences.
Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years — to 300,000 people a year.
Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide.
Heat waves will be more frequent and more intense.
Droughts and wildfires will occur more often.
The Arctic Ocean could be ice free in summer by 2050.
More than a million species worldwide could be driven to extinction by 2050.
There is no doubt we can solve this problem. In fact, we have a moral obligation to do so. Small changes to your daily routine can add up to big differences in helping to stop global warming. The time to come together to solve this problem is now – TAKE ACTION
This, I think we can assume, is the fall campaign. The idea is to psyche the Democrats out. To make them think they can’t win an argument about foreign policy. To make them act like they can’t win an argument about foreign policy. And to thereby demonstrate to the American people that even the Democrats themselves lack confidence in their own ability to handle these issues.
This is terribly important for everyone to understand. This is not a real critique. It’s a psych-out designed purely to make the Democrats go wobbly and to get the media to portray them that way. It’s about optics, heuristics and image. If the Democratic Party falls for it, it will be a crime. There is no substance to what they are saying and there is no reason for Dems to even flinch from such empty intimidation. Indeed, they should snarl right back in their faces.
A bunch of people have commented on this kewl kidz exchange as they tried to explain their crushes on Flyboy McCain. Their halting explanations are all perfect illustrations of typical vapid, courtier sensitibilities. But I’d like to address just one comment from Howard Fineman, who seems to have gotten over his Dubya infatuation at long last and gone back to his first love:
MATTHEWS: — after listening to the four of you. Why does the media like McCain? What’s going on here? Does he seem to be more authentic than other politicians?
O’DONNELL: Well —
FINEMAN: Well, I think part of it on this —
O’DONNELL: Well —
FINEMAN: — part of it on this specific thing, he knows what he’s talking about. He clearly has a lot of experience, militarily, from the inside out on the Armed Services Committee.
MATTHEWS: OK.
FINEMAN: He knows his stuff on that — on this particular question.
Feinman was referring to military issues apparently, but I think it’s fair to extrapolate from that that he thinks McCain would make a good Commander in Chief. This leads me to mention Senator Straight Talk’s recent unbelievable quote once again:
“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,'”
There’s a man who knows what he’s talking about, alright.
Now, McCain does know a lot about certain military matters from his perch on the Armed Services Committee — weapons procurement. He finds the odd system to rail against to keep his reputation as a “reformer” but he’s neck deep in the military industrial complex. For instance:
I believe the American people can and must be protected from the possibility of a missile attack on our soil. Recent reports of successful tests of a missile defense system demonstrate that such a system can work. I supported legislation stating that it should be the policy of the United States to build a national missile defense system as soon as technologically possible. As President, I would make the deployment of a national missile defense system, as well as defense systems for our Armed Forces deployed overseas, one of my highest priorities.” salon.com | Jan. 10, 2000
FORT GREELY, Alaska, Aug. 27 — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said here Sunday that while the fledgling United States ballistic missile defense system was becoming more capable, he wanted to see a successful full-scale test before declaring it able to shoot down a ballistic missile.
“I have a lot of confidence in these folks, and I have a lot of confidence in the work that’s been done,” Mr. Rumsfeld said after touring one of the system’s two interceptor sites. But he added that he wanted to see a test “where we actually put all the pieces together; that just hasn’t happened.”
Mr. Rumsfeld’s assessment was more cautious than that of the Missile Defense Agency director, Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering III of the Air Force. General Obering said recently that he was confident the system could have shot down a ballistic missile test-fired July 4 by North Korea, if it had been a live attack aimed at the United States.
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Aug. 15 — The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, concerned about a potential threat from Iran, plans to recommend in the coming months a European site for ground-based interceptor missiles, the head of the agency said Tuesday.
Poland, the Czech Republic and Britain have been named by the agency as possible candidates to help bolster a fledgling U.S. missile defense shield against missiles launched from the Middle East.
Despite all the happy talk by people “who know what they are talking about,” missile defense continues to fail spectacularly. But it sure pays well.
This is what McCain knows so much about. He knows how to feed the MIC beast. He’s still stands solidly for this money pit and will stand solidly behind many more defense department money pits. He’ll point to his lists of “defense pork,” counting on the gullible kewl kids to take him at his word that they amount to anything — or that he will lift one finger to stop any of them. But at the end of the day, the greatest insight he gained as a member of the armed services committee has been to deliver for defense contractors. The main lesson he’s learned about national security generally is to enthusiastically endorse every single war that is proposed — and then modify his position as necessary as the war proceeds. He does this for purely political reasons — voting for war means never having to say you’re sorry. He wisely calculates that he can con the kewl kidz into covering for his bad judgment because they think he “knows what he’s talking about” even though he’s often wrong and constantly criticizes the execution of wars he “supports” when it becomes politically expedient to do so.
It’s possible that the calculation has changed with the obvious failure of Iraq, but I doubt it. Certainly, among the gullible kewl kids all you have to do is strut manfully and they will fall in love every time.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has tumbled into a new dispute over the Sept. 11 attacks of five years ago.
Its Presbyterian Publishing Corp. has issued “Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11” (Westminster John Knox), containing perhaps the most incendiary accusations leveled by a writer for a mainline Protestant book house.
Author David Ray Griffin tells of concluding that “the Bush-Cheney administration had orchestrated 9/11 in order to promote this (American) empire under the pretext of the so-called war on terror.”
“No other interpretation is possible,” he asserts … Presbyterian Publishing’s unapologetic responses to the critics insist that Griffin’s “carefully researched” work and “intellectually rigorous arguments” merit “careful consideration by serious-minded Christians and Americans concerned with truth and the meaning of their faith.”
The publisher’s publicity contends that Griffin “applies Jesus’ teachings to the current political administration” and puts forth “an abundance of evidence and disturbing questions that implicate the Bush administration.”
Presbyterian News Service explains that the publishing house, though one of the denomination’s six national agencies, receives no church money and “operates with complete editorial autonomy.” It is governed by a board elected at the Presbyterian assembly.
Griffin’s ultimate goal? He wants Christians to try to supplant America’s “demonic” regime with a system of “global government.”
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voiced defiance on Tuesday as a deadline neared for Iran to halt work the West fears is a step toward building nuclear bombs, and challenged US President George W. Bush to televised debate.In a news conference, Ahmadinejad condemned the US and British role in the world since World War II but made no direct mention of the international nuclear confrontation.“I suggest holding a live TV debate with Mr. George W. Bush to talk about world affairs and the ways to solve those issues,” he said.
Former Director Michael Brown told ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” Sunday he stood by comments in a Playboy interview, and President Bush wanted him to take the heat for the bungling.
[…]
The former FEMA chief cited what he called an e-mail “from a very high source in the White House that says the president at a Cabinet meeting said, ‘Thank goodness Brown’s taking all the heat because it’s better that he takes the heat than I do.'”
How do I know he’s telling the truth? Well, I can’t prove it, but I doubt very seriously that poor little Brownie read the Washington Monthly in 2002 and remembered this little tid-bit:
During a trip to West Point on June 1, Bush pulled White aside for a private talk. “As long as they’re hitting you on Enron, they’re not hitting me,” said Bush, according to this Army official. “That’s your job. You’re the lightning rod for this administration.”
That is why he shall ever be known as the Empty Codpiece.
