Lance Mannion

College is a Waste of Time 101

I say this sort of thing sometimes.

College is a waste of time for a lot of people.

They just shouldn't go.

College isn't for everybody, and everybody isn't for college.

When I say that, I'm usually talking about students who aren't emotionally ready for college, either because they're not yet mature enough or they are too restless at the moment to settle down to four years of intellectual grinding.

Those kids should take some time after high school to work or travel or join the military or intently pursue a hobby.  After a few years, most of them will discover that they are not just ready for school again, they are ready to excel at it.

But often when I say that college isn't for everybody I also mean that there are lots of college students who shouldn't be college students ever.

I don't mean that they are somehow intellectually or emotionally unfit for college.  Many of the students I mean do very well in their classes.  I mean that college isn't preparing them for a life that will make them happy.

Most courses of study, even the ones that are very close to being purely vocational training, are preparing students for a career that will keep them indoors and sedentary, for jobs that are intellectual but only in the most ordinary and hum-drum sense of the word and thinking is mostly a matter of following instructions or collecting and organizing data, for jobs that will require them to use their hands only for keyboarding, manipulating a mouse, and checking off items on lists.

What used to be called with good reason white collar jobs.

What are now usually self-flatteringly self-designated "professional" jobs.

The fact is that every college classroom has in it at least one but probably more kids who are not born to sit at desks and push paper around for their whole lives, no matter how well those jobs pay, no matter how actually creative and challenging those jobs can be, no matter how well-regarded and popularly applauded those jobs are.

They aren't born accountants, lawyers, college professors, marketing executives, scientists, or engineers.

They are born carpenters, mechanics, electricians, animal trainers, cowboys, forest rangers, tugboat captains, and train engineers.

I'm not being classist or elitist here.  These students aren't products of their backgrounds.  They are the apotheoses of their own temperaments.

There are plenty of sons and daughters of lawyers, doctors, and captains of industry who are born carpenters, spot welders, plumbers, and beauticians.

And I'm not suggesting these kids are in any way intellectually deficient.  Those jobs take brains and skill and if they aren't smart and talented they won't succeed at them anymore than if they weren't smart and talented they'd succeed as lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.  But besides that plenty of them do very well in school and go on to be successful lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.

What they don't go on to be are happy lawyers and doctors and captains of industry.

But our society is classist and elitist.  We still have a skilled artisan class, but for the most part we don't think of it as a separate class.  We tend to see it as part of the working class and few parents who belong to the "creative" and "professional" classes would be happy to see their children moving a rung or two down on the ladder of status.  Few of their children, inculcated with their parents' classism and elitism, could see themselves taking on such jobs without also seeing themselves as failures in some way.

Doesn't matter that many of those jobs pay better than some high status white collar jobs (teaching, mainly, but also religious ministers, and some government jobs) and it doesn't matter that many of these very smart and talented kids would eventually go on to start and run their own businesses and so bring themselves back into the upper middle class fold.

It would take a very brave and secure kid to tell her white collar parents, "Mom, Dad, I've decided not to go to college.  I'm joining the union."

Still, I think it would be better all around if more kids did.

Basically, then, when I say that college isn't for everybody, I mean that college won't make everybody happy.

But when the pseudonymous Professor X writes in this article in the newest Atlantic that college isn't for everybody, he---at least he refers to himself as a he; he might very well be a she, depending on how complete she/he has tried to make his/her authorial disguise---means that there are lot of people entering college who are wasting their time because they are just doomed to fail.

And he means that they are doomed to fail because they are unfit for college and probably never will be.

Intellectually unfit.

He does not, however, mean they are stupid.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Some of their high-school transcripts are newly minted, others decades old. Many of my students have returned to college after some manner of life interregnum: a year or two of post-high-school dissolution, or a large swath of simple middle-class existence, 20 years of the demands of home and family. They work during the day and come to class in the evenings. I teach young men who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work...

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students...

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

End of Part One.  Today's assignment:  Read Professor X's essay in the Atlantic, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.  Be prepared to discuss by identifying themes, key points of his argument, and the evidence he presents in support of his thesis.  Do you agree or disagree with Professor X?  What do you think should be done about the problem Professor X identifies?  Do you think it is a problem?  Do you think college is a waste of time for some people?  Do you believe Professor X is a he?  Use the comment space for your answers.  Neatness counts.

I think the Atlantic has torn down its subscribers' only firewall.  If you can't get to the article, though, drop me a note and I'll email it to you.

Cross-posted at newcritics.

Set aside the date! The Drum Major Institute's Annual Benefit will be held Tuesday, May 20 in New York at Cipriani on 23rd Street right across from Madison Square Park..  This year's honorees include City Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito,  a founding member of Women of El Barrio, political organizer Steve Phillips, president and founder of PowerPAC.org, and David Simon, creator and producer of HBO's acclaimed series The Wire.  Tom Watson has more details.

Love among the Sims

The twelve year old is dealing with a crisis in his Sims 2 game.

One of his Sims has cheated on his wife.

Not a surprise, of course, the twelve year old informs me.  The philandering Sim is a Romance Sim.  Sims are driven by their needs but also by their aspirations.  Some Sims aspire to money, others to the family life, others to popularity, some to knowledge, and still others to romance.  Romance here apparently means being horny as a hound dog.  You have to keep your Sims on track, otherwise they'll pursue their aspirations to the point of neglecting their needs, all the other things that are necessary to keeping themselves alive, healthy, and happy.

When you've got a Romance Sim on your hands, it's a good idea to keep him or her out of the same room with another Romance Sim.

I asked him what happens when you don't.

He hedged.

I think I need to take a closer look at what's going on in Sim World.

At any rate, Romance Sims do not make the best spouses, for obvious reasons, and marriage is a bad move for them and a problem for you the player.

I asked him why he let this Sim get married.  He didn't.  The game handed him a pre-built family.

Do I need to tell you that this Romance Sim is married to a Family Sim?

The twelve year old is appalled by his Sim's adultery. "He's got two daughters!"   This is not moral indignation on his part.   It's a purely pragmatic reaction.  Divorce is apparently an option that the Sim wife can choose on her own, although, since she's a Family Sim, she's not likely to do that.  She'll continue to pursue her aspiration but now at the expense of her needs and her happiness and health will suffer.  What's more likely to happen is that the cheating Sim will run out on his family.  If he does it will be to chase yet another Sim not the one he's already cheated with.  Romance Sims flit from flower to flower.  If this family dissolves it will mean ruin for both the cheating Sim and his wife.  Neither will be able to achieve their goals.  There will be repercussions that will affect his other Sims.  The twelve year old isn't about to let that happen.

"I can fix it," he says.

How many people have said that about failing marriages in the non-Sim universe.

It's interesting to me that Sims 2 is teaching him some very unromantic but important things about marriage.  First, that marriage is, whatever else it is, a financial arrangement.  A marriage in Sim World is what it is in our world, as the poet and essayist Wendell Berry has pointed out, a merging of two economies.

Second, a marriage doesn't just involve two people.

Even if there are no kids,

When a marriage breaks up a little piece of the community the couple lives in breaks apart and a small section of the local economy is shaken up.

There's a reason societies tend to frown on divorce.  It is destabilizing, socially and economically.

That's not an argument against it, just a practical observation that you have to keep in mind when you're playing Sims 2.

What I don't know is if this is teaching the twelve year old a sad fact about human nature.

There are some people who are Romance Sims.  They live to fall in love.  They are as compelled to flit from flower to flower as bees are.

And for some reason these Romance Sims don't avoid getting married.

And when they get married, somehow it almost always turns out that they marry a Family Sim.

Another reason Jefferson was right

One of the evils of capitalism is that whenever we need their money it forces us to treat morons and assholes as if they were geniuses and saints doing us all a great big favor simply by existing.

A system that makes most of its citizens defer on a daily and sometimes hourly basis to hands-ful of morons and assholes is not a democracy.

This is why unions, universal health insurance, paid family leave, job tenure, and the ability to sue are all essential to a democracy.  So that the morons and assholes don't hold all the cards.

Another thing that's essential is fewer people who think they have a right to behave like morons and assholes just because they have money.

Just had to get that off my chest.  Nothing personal, boss.

Who's super-hot and who's super-not?

Over at Living Between Wednesdays, a soon-to-be new addition to the blogroll, because she's the kind of comic book fangirl who makes being a comic book fan seem almost cool, Rachelle's doing some important work.

Rating the superheroes for hotness.

You probably won't be surprised to hear that Batman currently ranks Number One.  Rachelle's working with a scale of 40 points as she rates the heroes on hotness of their costumes/appearance, attractiveness of their alter-egos, coolness of their day jobs, and sexiness of their superpowers, and Batman scores a 37.  He loses a couple of points on his costume because of the ears and Rachelle docks him another point because of red flags arising from some of his personality quirks:

...he has a bit of a temper.

And he...kinda...dresses like a giant bat and throws bat-shaped objects at people. And drives around in a bat-shaped car. And flies a bat-shaped plane. And pilots a bat-shaped boat. And has bat-shaped tracking devices. That doesn't mean he's...like, crazy or anything.

Meanwhile, Superman ranks second on the list, although some of Rachelle's readers think she allowed some bias to cloud her otherwise purely objective and scientific judgment and docked the man of steel three points for his fondness for making bad jokes just so he wouldn't rank ahead of Batman.

Personally, I think Superman deserves extra points for, despite his love for Lois, scoring, as Rachelle says, "some hot mermaid action on the side."  But then Batman has Catwoman, so maybe that evens out.

Superman is actually tied for second with Midnighter.

You'll never guess, though, who comes in third.

Rachelle seems to have stuck strictly to the comic books in gathering her data and not allowed herself to be influenced by any movie or TV incarnations of the heroes, which would explain why, despite what Robert Downey Jr's done for his image in the movie (for one thing, causing the blonde to say bizarre and I'd have thought totally out of character things like "He's to die for!" when describing Iron Man to her girlfriends), Iron Man scores a mere 11 points.

Follow the link for all the heroes' scores.

Tip of the hat to Jaquandor and his Sentential Links.

Wev, Wev

Happy Birthday to my blogging heroine, Wev McEwan!

I'd put a lot of heartfelt complimentary stuff and goopy palaver about what an honor etc. etc.  But she'd only come along and tell me I'm turning into a sentimental old fool and demand to know why I wasn't blogging about something important and scoff at the idea that her birthday is important at least to some of us.  So...

You know, wev, Wev.

PS.  Nice shoes.

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Updated Monday night.

The melting Nazis were not a good idea.

The Mannion guys came up with a plan.  To prepare for the opening of Indiana Jones and the Unnecessarily Long and Unwieldy Title That Sounds Like the Titles of Two Bad Movies Collided, they decided to watch the first three Indy movies in order for Family Movie Night, starting tonight so that we'd wind up watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade the night before we went to see the new one.  So we just finished watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The melting Nazis were not, not, so definitely not a good idea.

Great movie with such a disappointing and ill-conceived ending, so far removed from the tone and spirit of all that had gone before, that I'm sure the original audiences would have walked out of the cineplexes befuddled and depressed if John Williams' rousing march hadn't come back on over the end credits and carried us all back to the moment when the whip snaps the gun away from the treacherous guide and Harrison Ford's scarred and scowling face looms out of the shadows and the adventure started all over again in our imaginations.

Just a reminder that without Williams' music Harrison Ford might not have had much of a career because George Lucas might not have had one. A third if not half of the original Star Wars' contagious joyfulness came from Williams' score.  A lesser composer and Star Wars might easily have been a one-shot, a cult favorite, kept alive by repeated late night showings on the Sci-fi channel back when the superimposed cartoon aliens commented on every film.

And the Indiana Jones franchise exists only because CBS picked up Magnum PI and Tom Selleck, Lucas and Spielberg's original choice for Indy, had to bow out of Raiders.

Did I mention that the melting Nazis were a bad idea?

It's funny how that George Lucas, having originally conceived of the Indiana Jones movies as being full of the occult and the spook-tacular, had to have all that wedged into each movie, as if he looked at Spielberg's first edits and said, "Where's all the scary mystical stuff, Steven?  Go back and put some in, ok?"  Then when he began producing the Adventures of Young Indiana Jones for TV by himself he forgot all about it in favor of the history young Indy kept stumbling into.  Here's hoping he didn't remember it when he began producing the new movie.

I'm looking forward to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull although I don't have high expectations for it.  Throughout the Star Wars movies Lucas indulged a really bad habit of quoting himself.  How many versions of the Death Star did he blow up?  Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's likely to be two and half hours of allusions and homages to the first three movies, how much so depending on whether or not Spielberg, no slouch in the self-referential department himself, felt like arguing with him.  Judging by the trailer, there appears to be at least two re-hashes of the chasing down and taking over the truck carrying the ark scene from Raiders and a wholesale lifting of the opening scenes in Central America.  And how many times do you think we'll hear the line "I've got a bad feeling about this?"

But I'm glad they convinced Karen Allen to return to play Marian again.

Watching Raiders tonight brought back all the old feelings.

At the time the original came out I was madly in love with Karen Allen.  I'd fallen for her hard in Animal House and I carried that torch through a really stupid movie called A Small Circle of Friends, Raiders, and Shoot the Moon.  At the end of Starman I was ready to marry her.  Maybe it was the freckles.

Then, fortunately for my sanity, she more or less disappeared from the movie screens.

But, boy, she was a doll in Raiders!  I just wish they'd found something more for her---and Harrison Ford, for that matter---to do at the end of the movie than stand there with eyes squeezed shut while the special effects people went to work melting those Nazis.

They shouldn't have killed off Indy's nemesis Belloq either.  Wouldn't you think that, as an archaeologist rivaling Indiana Jones in learning and experience, he'd have known to turn his head away as soon as the dust particles inside the ark began to glow?  Probably nothing could have saved Temple of Doom but it and the Last Crusade would have been a lot more fun with Belloq showing up at least once in each to thwart and outfox Indy.

Last Crusade included a melting Nazi too, didn't it?

At least Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is set during the Cold War.  There won't be any Nazis around to melt.

Spielberg and Lucas will have to settle for melting a few Commies.

Indiana Jones and the Updaters of the Last Blog Post:  You'll see from my own comment below, that I'm not keen on the guys' idea to watch all three of the originals.  I didn't like Temple of Doom the first go-round and I don't think it's worth showing the guys.  Turns out Steven Hart watched it himself recently and he confirms what I was afraid of.  It's even worse than I remember:

I took another look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom last night and I’d forgotten the sheer balls-out nastiness of the thing, with its army of enslaved children being whipped and burned, the gross-out banquet of bugs and brains, and the coarse insult-slinging between Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw serving as a poor replacement for the fizzy banter with Karen Allen from the original movie.

Steve's not much looking forward to the new one or any of the big summer hopefuls.

Updated upon release of Indiana Jones and the Outraged Fan of George Lucas:  Jaquandor takes serious issue with my dissings of Lucas and the melting Nazis and comes to the defense of Temple of Doom.

A friendly reminder about the future of the Supreme Court

It's not just that Justice Stevens is 88 years old that's worrisome.  Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75.  Stephen Breyer is 70.  And that punk kid Souter is 69.  I know Supreme Court Justices are notoriously long-lived, but still...

Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas will probably be around for another 20 years, Roberts and Alito for 30, at least.  And I wouldn't be surprised if Antonin Scalia has arranged to have his mummified corpse hauled into court and propped up on the bench by his clerks for the next couple centuries or so.

Anthony Kennedy is the only one of the conservatives I wouldn't be surprised to see get tired and call it quits in the next five or ten years.

This means that the odds are that next President will be replacing more of the liberal Supreme Court Justices than he will conservative ones.

The ghost

This country has had only three great Presidents.

Washington.  Lincoln.  And Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In the house where I grew up Roosevelt was still a living presence.  Actually, in the country I was born in he was still the President.  His ghost guided the nation and haunted his successors and kept them in line.  The first seven of them, at any rate.  Even Nixon had to propitiate his spirit.

Reagan defied it but in the end he had to make an uneasy peace with it.  But George W. Bush has come close to exorcising it at last.  Reagan thought he could get rid of Roosevelt by declaring the New Deal over and ending some of its programs.  But Bush, the accidental genius, has out-Reaganed Reagan by screwing up the government FDR built and the nation he forged from top to bottom.  It doesn't matter how much of the New Deal remains in place if none of it works.

Obviously I think highly of FDR.

But he was just a man and just a politician, the most brilliant politician to ever hold the office, which means he was the most gifted when it came to the art of the deal.

Roosevelt wheeled and dealed.

That's a way of saying he compromised.

A word that is synonymous in a lot of people's minds with "sold out."

Unfortunately, it real life it often does mean selling out some people.

FDR saved the United States.  He made it a better place too.  We love him for it now.

But how would we have felt if we---and apologies to my readers over 70, but by we here I mean those of us in the liberal blogosphere who were not alive or old enough to understand what was going on back then---were around to see him make deals with Big Business to get their support and trade away rights and opportunities for black Americans for the votes of Southern populist but racist politicians who were glad to embrace the New Deal but only for their white constituents?  How would we have felt when he turned away  Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Europe and ordered the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans and then asked their sons to go fight and die for the country that did not trust their loyalty?  What would we thought when the firestorms engulfed Tokyo and Dresden?  And how would we have reacted when we learned what he'd given away to Stalin at Yalta and that the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were his legacies?

One of the only three great Presidents we've had and he failed us and himself and his God---FDR was a believer, by the way---so many times.

Look at what FDR did and look at what he did wrong and look at all he wasn't able to do.

Now tell me.

What did you think President Hillary Clinton was going to be able to do?

What do you think President Barack Obama will manage to accomplish?

I'll tell you what.  I won't be satisfied but I will be glad (and amazed) if at the end of eight years these things are done:

The war in Iraq is over.

We have a federal regulatory system that doesn't let tainted meat into the supermarkets and allow poisoned toys to wind up in the hands of our children.

Our Justice Department is a department of justice and no longer the legal legbreakers for the Republican Party.

We have at least one more even moderately liberal judge on the Supreme Court.

We have something close to affordable, universal health insurance.

We have made some strides towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and slowing global climate change.

That's far from all I'd like the next President to have accomplished but it's still a tall order, even for another FDR, which we aren't going to get.

But none of that needs another FDR to get done.  It just needs a well-intentioned and competent Democratic President and a real Democratic majority in both houses of Congress.

This is why I've kept saying and will keep saying that more than it matters which one is in the White House, Clinton or Obama, it matters who is in running the show in Congress.  Right now it's the Bush Dogs and the Republicans.

The next President doesn't have to be another FDR for another reason.

We already had FDR for President.

His government and country are still there.  What the next President needs to do is steer us back towards it.  We're off course.  But his ghost is there, up there on the highland, waving to us, showing us the way home.

We'll get there.

We don't need a great sailor at the helm.

Just a captain who can follow his own nose and a crew willing to put their backs into it.

We're the crew.

Nose. Spite. Face.

Sigh.

I wish Hillary was going to win.  I think she would have made a good President.  A part of me is still hoping she can pull it out.

Ain't gonna happen.

So, listen.  I'm disappointed too.  But helping to make John McCain President will not punish Barack Obama or any of the various Obama supporting bloggers you've come to loathe and despise.

You don't like Obama?  Fine.  There are 435 Congressional elections going on.  There are 35 Senate seats up for grabs.  Go find a candidate for the House of Representatives to fall in love with.  Throw your support behind a Senatorial candidate.  Or two.  Or three. Give them your time.  Give them your money.  More and better Democrats!

You don't have to vote for Barack Obama anyway.

Go out and vote against John McCain.

Otherwise you're just punishing yourself.

Not to mention all the rest of us, including those of us who voted for Hillary.

You'll be punishing Hillary Clinton too.

You want her to have to continue to work in a Senate where Joe Lieberman still matters and where all the Republicans who have been in lockstep behind George Bush are now in lockstep behind the Maverick and Commander?

Who do you think she's going to be voting for?

She loves New York...and Frederick Law Olmstead

WARNING!  POST TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE!

Central Park.  Late April 2008.  Swiped from Claire-Helene.  Claire was in New York City a couple of weeks ago.  She just got some of her pictures back.  Yep, she still uses film.  She's got a good eye and a camera that I know covet, a Nikon n80.

Follow the link for more of Claire's NYC Snaps.

At the circus

echinde crafts a nifty metaphor in a short prose poem of economic protest:

It's like middle-class tightrope walking, this current economic scene in the United States. You step on the rope, hanging on to your balancing umbrella (that 401(k), that employer-provided health insurance policy, perhaps parents with some money) and you lift the other leg up in the air while the audience oos and ahs, watching the rope swing ever more violently under your foot.

And then the umbrella disintegrates, spine by spine, and there you are, trying to balance yourself with a stick.

One illness may be the exact distance which separates a middle-class household from poverty.  Or one divorce or one job loss.

And that's just what's happening in the center ring, read the rest of her post, Teetering On The Edge, for the more dangerous and desperate acts going on in the other rings, outside the spotlight and for the story that inspired her post.

All over but the shouting

Updated Thursday at high noon.

I still want all the states to vote.  I still think the campaign's good for the Party, and good for Obama.  Around 1.2 million people voted in the Indiana Democratic primary yesterday.  About a third of that voted in the Republican primary, which isn't surprising, considering McCain's got the nomination all sewed up, but this isn't important as a measure of Republicans' boredom; it's important as a measure of how fired up the Democrats are and I'm convinced their excitement will carry through November.  I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way.  I believe that Clinton will concede on June 4th, after the last votes are counted, and all our fences will be mended by the time of the convention.

There's not much Clinton can hope for now except denying Obama the nomination on the first ballot and the super-delegates are just not going to let that happen.  In fact, I'd bet that plenty of her own delegates don't want to see that either and a lot of those who aren't tied to the mast will jump ship long before Denver.  For a while there, I was kind of looking forward to a floor fight at a convention that would actually decide something.  I thought it would be fun to watch and I thought it would cause lots of folks out there in TV land to tune in and I thought that if they did they would catch the excitement too.  Then I remembered.

A floor fight would make great theater but lousy television.

What would look like democracy in all its glory in action to political junkies like me would look to most normal people like a great big sleep-depriving mess.  And the convention is not going to be covered on TV by the likes of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, who would have enjoyed the fun and been careful and smart about explaining what was going on down there on the floor and backstage.  It's going to be covered by Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Charles Gibson and the gasbags from Fox News and MSNBC, all of whom will gleefully tell us how bad all this looks and how it shows the Democrats at their divided, divisive, disorganized, discombobulated, indecisive, internecine worst.

A week later they'll be up in Minneapolis "reporting" on how orderly and united the Republicans are and how the smooth running of their convention shows that the GOP is still the party of the stern daddies who know how to keep their kids in line while those indulgent mommies in the Democratic party let their spoiled brats run wild and how it proves that the Maverick and Commander is in COMMAND.

It's too bad that the conventions have become nothing more than a week-long free campaign ad for the candidates, but that's the way it is and it's not going to change.  I want our Obama ad to be every bit as pretty as their McCain ad will be.

But in case I needed reminding that a contentious convention is a blown opportunity I read an excerpt last night from Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Even if I thought Hillary could win on the floor and even if it really and truly mattered to me that she gets the nomination instead of Obama---I feel like I always have to make this clear.  I like Clinton more than I like Obama, but not that much more, and liking her more does not mean I don't like him.  And. please, save yourself the trouble of trying to persuade me not to like her.  You can't do it.  You don't need to do it, unless your own commitment to Obama is so shaky that the slightest doubt about him on anybody else's part causes you to doubt yourself, in which case your arguments just aren't going to be all that persuasive anyway.---as I was saying, even if I cared, I wouldn't want her to be delivering her acceptance speech at 3 in the morning to a roomful of angry and exhausted people and in front of television cameras beaming pictures to millions of turned-off TVs.

Obama in prime time needs to be on everybody's minds when John McCain steps up to the podium in Minneapolis.

Word of warning.  I think some people reading the excerpt from Rick's book might see some unnerving parallels between '72 and now.  The parallels are trivial, though, coming nowheres near to mattering as much as the divergences.

That was then, this is now.

For one thing, John McCain is not an incumbent President who has just opened up China and created a detante with the Soviet Union.  Nixon was ending the war in Vietnam (supposedly) while McCain's promising to keep this one going forever.  Labor's not going to abandon the party.  Abbie Hoffman's dead.  And Barack Obama is no George McGovern.

I don't know if any Democrat could have beaten Nixon that year, but the party couldn't have nominated a more certain loser than George McGovern.  McGovern was a terrible candidate from the get-go.  Obama's been brilliant all along.  McGovern turned out to be no good at pretending he wasn't a politician acting out of political expediency, while Obama has been so smooth at it that an awful lot of people haven't even noticed him doing it (a lot of those people are among the ranks of his own supporters, but that's not surprising since they've invested a great deal of their own vanity in the idea that only the Clintons fight dirty.  In the long run I think they'll be glad to learn that's not true).   Obama is a harder man and his organization's tougher and more skillful than McGovern's was.

Once again, here's the link to the excerpt from Rick Perlstein's book.

Rick's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is one of my favorite political histories and I can't wait to read Nixonland. Digby has a posted a  glowing review at Hullabaloo.

Rick Perlstein blogs here.

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Late-breaking:  Just heard from Rick Perlstein who wants folks to know that copies of Before the Storm custom-autographed by the author himself are available through this friendly neighborhood ebay auction.

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Some shouting before it's all over:  Chervokas and Watson make a good case here, but I can't see it happening.  Hillary would make a great Vice-President, assuming she and Obama could work together, but I think she'd be a problem as a running mate:  Too much of a chance of her upstaging Obama, too many openings for McCain's Donut Brigade in the Media and the Right Wing Noise Machine to attack Obama's manhood by pushing the idea he's whipped by his own VP, too little to be gained that can't also be gained by his picking someone like Bill Richardson or Wes Clark or Tim Kaine or Janet Napolitano or Kathleen Sibelius.

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Updated motivated by partisan loyalty:  Disassembling a David Brooks column to reveal the design flaws and built-in bugs, John Sides of the Monkey Cage lays out some numbers that show a couple of very interesting things.

One is this:  In the Pensyvania primary, "voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42.  Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49."   Sides says this shows that the lazy stereotyped thinking behind the CW that Clinton is the candidate of the working class and Obama the candidate of the "creative" class is in fact lazy and stereotyped.  Clinton won by winning the votes of both groups.  That would seem to support the argument Clinton's trying to make right now, that she has the broader appeal.  But---and Sides doesn't get into this; he's working on a different point---please notice, as if it isn't obvious, she did not win anywheres close to 100 per cent of either group's votes.  Among the voters without college degrees, which presumably includes much of the white working class he's supposedly not convincing, Obama got 42 per cent of the vote.  That probably includes a disproportionate number of African-Americans, but it still has to include many white blue collar and small-town rural voters.  He couldn't pry enough of them away from Hillary to matter because...they were already committed to voting for Hillary.  They voted for Hillary for the same reason I, with my college edumacation and master's degree, and the 51 per cent of the college grads in Pennsylvania voted for her.  They like her better than they like Obama.  But all these numbers tell us is that Barack Obama cannot win a majority of their votes when his oppenent is Hillary Clinton.  It tells us nothing about how they will vote when his opponent is John McCain.

This is where Sides' argument dovetails with the top portion of this post in which I said, "I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way."

Sides shows that over the last few decades Democrats have become more partisan.  They vote for their party's nominees without splitting their tickets anywhere up and down the line, which very strongly suggests that despite all the grumbling and the fist-shaken to heaven promises never to vote for Obama and the assertions that they will stay home, not pull the lever or punch the button or touch the screen at the top of the ticket, or write in Hillary's name, the odds are that on the second Tuesday of November, Democrats will be voting for the Democratic candidate for President no matter what they're saying now.

My first Mets post of the season

So I'm trying to follow tonight's game against the Dodgers on Yahoo's GameChannel while catching up on some blog reading and I just looked over and saw that the Mets are now up 4 to 1 because Moises Alou stole home!

Is this a joke?

What's Alou?  Like a hundred and five?

His legs are shot.

How in the name of Jackie Robinson can Moises Alou steal home?

Did the pitcher fall asleep?

Somebody tell me if this really happened and how and if Alou's still alive.

Indiana wants me! Lord, I can't go back there!

Updated Wednesday afternoon.

Six years I lived in the Hoosier State and I don't think a day went by when I didn't say to myself---and to any of my friends willing to listen---"God, I can't wait to get out of this place!"

I wasn't completely miserable there.  In fact I had some of the best times of my life in Indiana.  But I was emotionally and imaginatively dizzied a lot of the time.   My complaints were mainly topographical and geographical.  The portions of the state I knew best and saw most, between Fort Wayne, where the blonde and I lived, and Muncie, where I worked, and between Fort Wayne and Chicago, to which we escaped as often as we could, were flat, flatter than flat, too flat for my internal gyroscope, which had been calibrated in upstate New York and the Adirondack Mountains, to cope with.  I swear I could have set a ball bearing on my dashboard when I left for work in the mornings and it would have stayed put the whole eighty-one mile drive down to Muncie, the road was that flat and that straight.  And we were just too far from too many people I loved and missed and from too much that was interesting and exciting.  Chicago was three hours away.  Our families were nine and eleven hours drives, without stopping, and there were no direct flights home from the Allen County Airport.  We considered ourselves very lucky to get back east twice a year.

Culturally, Indiana was a little too whitebread and mayonaise for my tastes and more openly and self-congratulatory Christian than I was used to.  The Germans who had been the main settlers of the region in the first half of the 19th Century had long ago assimilated into WASPY blandness.  Same with the Irish who followed them.  Even the Native Americans, descendants of the Miamis who had not been so much pushed out by the whites coming in as subsumed, were often blond and blue-eyed.  Fort Wayne had plenty of people of different ethnic backgrounds besides Irish, German, and WASP:  African-Americans, Italians, Asians including many Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees sponsored by the Lutheran and Catholic churches, Hispanics---there was a growing population of Central Americans who were coming in under the auspices of the Amnesty movement---but none of them had enough critical mass to give the city any sort of real ethnic identity.  The one minority that made its presence felt strongly enough to leave a stamp on the cultural landscape was the Amish.  And people did their God-bothering loudly and in public.

Politically, the state was a strange mix of Progressives, Conservatives, Reactionaries, and wild-eyed members of the Right Wing lunatic fringe.  I met more casual racists there than I encountered anywhere else, and I lived in Boston not too long after the busing crisis.  I'm sure I've written before about a student of mine who bragged in an essay about how proud she was of her neighbors who were in the Ku Klux Klan and what nice people they were.  One of my most talented students was a skinhead.  One night when the blonde and I were driving home from a visit to Chicago our car broke down around Valparaiso.  The white tow truck driver who came to our aid and gave us a lift to the nearest motel alternated between telling us about his newborn son and giving us his theory on racial politics---the blacks were ruining everything---and he cheerfully seemed to think we'd be equally interested and agreeable towards both subjects.

But Allen County had the best public library I've ever been in, and I hear it's gotten even better.  The mayor of Fort Wayne during most of the time we lived there was a Republican who was more liberal than the Democrat who'd proceeded him, more liberal than a lot of Democrats I knew back in Boston.  And I mentioned the presence of the Amnesty Movement in the local churches.

Indiana does not like to help make Democrats President.  But it has and has had Democratic governors.  It's indiscriminate about sending Democrats and Republicans to Congress.  Dan Quayle was one of its Senators once.  So was Birch Bayh.

Like I said, I had some good times there.  Fort Wayne had a surprising number of fine restaurants, a first-rate symphony orchestra, a film series offered by the art museum that made our trips to Chicago easier because we didn't have to pack in any esoteric or foreign movies folks who live in the sticks supposedly never get the chance to see, and there was that great library.  But one of the best and most fun things about living there was that we had Nancy Nall as our good friend, colleague, frequent dinner guest, and regular traveling companion.  Almost all our trips to the Stratford Festival were in Nancy's company.

You can't really get to know a place in a few years, especially if like me your heart and your head were always somewhere else.  We left Fort Wayne at the end of 1990.  But Nance stayed on for fourteen more years.  And partly because it was her job to pay attention to the place---she was the award-winning columnist for the local paper back when it was still worth something as a newspaper---and partly because she was much less of an East Coast snob than I was---she was an Ohio snob, a very different sort of animal---and partly because she lived there for so long and started her family there, Nance became much more of an honorary Hoosier than I ever did.  She hasn't been out of there for that long so there's still a great deal of Indiana in her blood.  So when Nance tells you that there are things the Presidential candidates need to know about Indiana you'd better believe she knows whereof she speaks.

And as it happens, she is telling you things the Presidential candidates need to know about Indiana, in an op-ed over on the Washington Post's web page.  So go read it already.

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Hoosier Pride: Indiana native Jennifer objects to the "bashing" I gave to Indiana and has posted a heartfelt defense of the state where she was born and raised.

Sex and the single-minded journalists

Strange, strange essay by Michael Wolff in the newest Vanity Fair.

Its very premise is strange, Wolff seems to have a strange conception of who is middle-aged and what it is to be middle-aged, and he includes an anecdote that is strange in itself and which is very strange of him to have bought and passed along, but I'll get to that.

First, the strange premise.  We are all fascinated by the sex lives of elderly politicians and spend our time wondering about what they do in bed.

Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race...

We want to know. That’s a big part of Bill Clinton’s legacy: there’s always a sexual explanation. We’re savvy. Sex completes the picture—it explains so much. Tim Russert and other Sunday-talk-show hosts might maintain the illusion that politics is, or should be, a formal dialogue about impersonal issues, with sex only a topic of surprise, scandal, and shocked-shockedness, but in real life everybody is constantly and openly speculating on the sexual nature and needs and eccentricities of every rising and demanding political personality.

Openly speculating?

Really?

Can't recall that I have.

Doesn't seem to come up very often on the blogs I read either.

Lots of talk about health care plans, gas tax holidays, the collapse of the economy, and isn't there a war we're involved in somewhere?

People I know in the analog world don't seem to be doing that kind of speculating either or thinking that "there's always a sexual explanation."

My mother called me up just before the New York primary to ask me my opinion on Obama and Clinton.  She didn't want to know which one I thought was sexier.

Or kinkier.

The only people I know who have done any speculating on the question are journalists like David Broder, Patrick Healy in that voyeruistic article for the New York Times about how much alone time Bill and Hillary were managing, and now Michael Wolff.

The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.

I shouldn't speak ill of the dead since by now a mob of "the post-sexual set" has probably dragged him from his office in the Conde Nast building and hauled him uptown to Central Park where they've hung him up by his genetalia from Cleopatra's Needle, but that paragraph alone should consign Wolff to his shrink's couch for several hundred hours of psychoanalytic unraveling.

Listen, normal people do not speculate about the sex lives of politicians and not because we're all that virtuous or prudish or hypocritical or because most politicians are not very pretty and picturing them in the sack causes us to shudder.

It's because normal people do not spend their time speculating on other people's sex lives.  It's the mental equivalent of being able to walk by our neighbors' houses at night without having to rush up to press our noses against each and every lighted window.

Part of what scandalizes us about political sex scandals is that they force us to consider things we don't think it's any of our business to consider...things like Eliot Spitzer's socks.

For people who do want to speculate on the sex lives of strangers, that's why we have movie stars and teenage pop idols, who are at least blessed with beautiful and photogenic naked backs and bare shoulders.  But even among the most gossip-addicted readers of People and the National Enquirer, the real interest is in the romantic lives of their favorites.  The sex is part and parcel.  And the point is to live vicariously through the likes of Brad and Angelina.

And it's not so much the case that people want to be Brad and Angelina as they want to be what Brad and Angelina are, beautiful, rich, famous, and adored, living lives in which romantic misadventures are the worst of their worries.

With very few exceptions---Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton in their prime---most people do not look to politicians for the same vicarious thrills and escapes into fantasy as they do movie stars.

We want our politicians to represent us but that's far from saying we want them to stand in for us as surrogate selves.  We hire them to do a job and our interest in them is in how well they do that job and that's why, to the consternation of the professional scolding class in the Media, we often don't care at all about their personal oddnesses.

Wolff, though, believes otherwise.  Stranger than this, however, is Wolff's contention that while we're all imagining our political leaders naked we're creeped out by what we're imagining and what creeps us out is the fact that all these naked politicians are middle-aged.

Middle-agedness is in itself creepy.  To be middle-aged is to be grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous, and all of this creepiness, grotesquery, repulsiveness, and ridiculousness is, tautologically, both caused by middle-aged sexuality and makes sex in middle-age creepy, grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous.

Which, according to Wolff, is why folks like Barack Obama so much.  He's not middle-aged.

There is next to no speculation about Barack Obama’s sexual secrets. This is a seismic shift in racial subtext. The white men are the sexual reprobates and loose cannons (while Mitt and Hillary are just strange birds) and the black man the figure of robust middle-class family warmth.

Against these middle-aged people, he’s the naturalist, the credible and hopeful figure of a man who actually might be having sex with his smiling, energetic, and oomphy wife. (During the Spitzer affair, a friend of mine, a middle-aged white doctor and an active Obama supporter, curiously dropped into something like street talk to say Obama would never have the sex problems of middle-aged politicians, “because Michelle would whip his skinny ass.” A good man, in other words, is a controlled man.) He’s the only one in the entire field who doesn’t suggest sexual desperation. He represents our ideal of what a good liberal’s sex life ought to be.

A couple more paragraphs for Wolff to talk over with a professional, but note that, besides the strange racial and marital hang-ups, Wolff is saying that we don't have to worry about Obama making himself ridiculous or creepy in our dirty minds' eyes because he and his wife are young and good looking, as if no one with an "oomphy" spouse would ever be tempted to anything besides healthy, uncreepy, monogamous and conjugal sex.

This is in an essay that includes discussions of the sex lives of John Kennedy and Eliot Spitzer, both of whose spouses rate fairly high on the oomphy-scale.

But JFK and Spitzer cheated on their oomphy wives and, as the title of Wolff's article gigglingly proclaims, "It's the adultery, stupid."

(Wolff says Obama is young.  But he's only two years younger than Eliot Spitzer and, if and when he's sworn in as President, he will be older than John Kennedy was when he died.  Wolff also calls the 65 year old Fred Thompson middle-aged.)

Adultery, here, is what makes middle-aged sex creepy.  Forget that.  Adultery is middle-aged sex.  Adultery is also the defining characteristic of middle-age.

Middle-aged sex is middle-aged men making fools of themselves by cheating on their wives.

Middle-aged women cheating on their husbands don't exist in Wolff's article.  Hillary Clinton is an object of sexual curiosity only because when we look at her we can't help thinking about what Bill is up to and what thong-flashing young woman he might be up to it with.

Wolff is limited to a degree by the examples he has to draw on.  Politics is still a male-dominated world.  But go back up to that passage I quoted where Wolff describes Hillary Clinton as the "special interest candidate of...the post-sexual set."   He's saying that middle-aged women are done with sex.

Actually, look over his description of the Obama marriage and you'll see that he doesn't seem to think that even a young woman like Michelle Obama has a real interest in sex for the sake of pleasure or love---young women use sex to keep their men in line; older women, having lost all sexual desire, no longer have control over their men, and that's why those men make fools of themselves in the beds of younger women or men, which would seem to imply that Mrs Senator Larry Craig could have kept her husband out of airport bathrooms if she'd still been willing to get nasty with him.

Middle-aged sex is defined by male desire and adultery, and besides being ridiculous and repugnant it is pathetic.

Now, why Wolff thinks we are fascinated by the sex lives of the ugly, pathetic, and foolish is beyond me.  As I said, for those who want to live vicariously through the sexual and romantic psychodramas of strangers we have movie stars.  And for those who get off on fantasies about what strangers are actually doing when they get naked we have pornography.  Why then anyone would waste a minute contemplating what John and Cindy McCain might enjoy when all the kids are out or in bed and they turn the lights down low is a mystery.

I can guess where he gets the idea that people are indulging themselves with such unerotic erotica.

Sex sells.

It sells newspapers and it sells ads on TV.

When criticized about the Media's obsession with sex and scandal and other trivial pursuits, various Media types will defend themselves and their industries by claiming something along the lines of "We're only giving the public what it wants!"  Which isn't much of a defense in the mouths of the heirs of P.T. Barnum.  In the mouths of the supposed heirs of Edward R. Murrow it ought to cause their tongues to snap off their rollers.

But some people will buy anything and there are nearly 300 million people in this country.  A very small percentage of 300 million is still an awful lot of people.  If you make a buck off of just one percent, that's 3 million smackers right in your pocket.

Besides the fact that getting rich off of exploiting suckers doesn't tell you anything about the people who didn't buy your snake oil, there is also a chicken and the egg question to consider.  Are you selling what the people want or are the people buying because that's all you've got to sell them?

You can't tell what the public wants from what some members of the public buy.  What you can see is that our National Press Corps is very interested in the sex lives of the politicians it covers, whether that's because they're all a bunch of hacks who think it's their job to feed the suckers a steady diet of sex and scandal or because it's the members of the Press Corps themselves who have this very strange compulsion to openly speculate on how soon Bill will embarrass Hillary with another bimbo eruption and to swoon over the size of George Bush's package and tell us that Jerri Thompson looks like a pole dancer and assure us that John McCain must be a vital old codger because well, look at his wife, for crying out loud!

Journalism is a voyeuristic endeavor by nature and reporters have to be in a way and to a degree spies and gossips, and just as among the ranks of shoe salesmen there are bound to be foot fetishists, journalism probably attracts a fair share of Peeping Toms.

But over the last few decades, as the coverage of national politics has become more obsessive and endless it has also become more and more driven by the superficial and easily managed---process has trumped policy and personality has trumped both.  It's a whole lot easier to employ some cheap Freudianism---"Sex explains everything"---than to try to find out and explain what any given candidate for any office actually plans to do when elected. 

I'm not saying that the sexual misadventures of politicians are never news.  (I would argue that it's not the sex but the corruption and mis- and malfeasance that are often contingent upon the misadventure that make the sex news.  Rudy Giuliani's cheating on his wife is none of my business except that he got the City to pay for it.  I don't care if John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist; I do care if he was bought off by the corporate interests on whose behalf she was lobbying.  And as for Eliot Spitzer, well, being stupid has never been a disqualification for holding elected office, but breaking the law while being stupid...?)  But sex doesn't explain everything.

It's a matter of character, they'll say.  JFK's recklessness about sex should have told us how reckless he'd be in office.  Reckless?  Really?  Does that explain why he was so cautious about Civil Rights?  Does that explain why he didn't get us all blown up in October of 1962?  Wait a minute.  How about the space race and his decision to set us on the challenge of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade?  He was sex obsessed and what are rockets anyway if they aren't the ultimate phallic symbol?

So, speaking of JFK, that brings me to the final strangeness in Wolff's essay.

Kennedy had affairs with Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe.  It's been reported that he used to go skinny dipping in the White House pool with various young women who worked in the Executive Offices.  If there was a politician whose sex life might reward the temptation to openly speculate about it as if he was a movie star like Errol Flynn, it was JFK.

So what story does Wolff tell us about Kennedy's sex life?  A distinctly non-erotic one concocted to make JFK look creepy.

There is a story Gore Vidal tells about J.F.K.: having sex in the bath, he liked to suddenly push a woman’s head back underwater, causing her to fight for air, just as he was about to climax.

I'm not saying this never happened, but...I don't think it ever happened.

Why not?

Well, first because Kennedy's back was so bad he couldn't have managed it, and second because the source of the story is Gore Vidal.

I wouldn't call Vidal a liar, but I have suspected him of embellishing his anecdotes on occasion.  And he also has some issues when it comes to John F. Kennedy.  Vidal wrote a novel, Washington, D.C., in which he implies that Kennedy's heroics after the sinking of PT-109 were made up.  The Kennedy-esque politican who is the anti-hero of the novel is a phony war hero.  When I first read the book back in college I just figured Vidal was engaging in a wicked game of "What if?" and consciously making fiction by imagining an alternative reality.  But then Vidal announced upon the publication of The Golden Age, the novel that concludes a historical cycle that begins with Burr, in which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and other heroes of the Revolution are portrayed as clowns and scoundrels, that he wrote that FDR more or less engineered the bombing of Pearl Harbor to get us in