waldheim

2004-05-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

The future of the blog. For most of this blog's existance, now almost a year, I've been thinking about whether I should stop it. It's still inconclusive. But I'm about to start travels that will last about a month, during which time I'm extremely unlikely to post anything. After that, well, who knows. I think I'm probably going to give this up for good--at least this blog. I have an idea or two for a different, more focused blog; but again, I don't know if they'll go anywhere. Most likely blogging, as I said in my very first posts, was something to keep me intellectually occupied while not in school. Come August I'll start school again and hopefully won't need the blog.

So, right, we'll see. Maybe I'll see you in July, and maybe not.

2004-05-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

What do you do with a drunken royal? Pretenders to thrones are a famously dissolute lot, but this dispatch in the Guardian is particularly amusing.

Leaving a dinner given by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia on the evening of their son's nuptials, the heir to the Italian throne, Prince Vittorio Emanuele, was said to have hit his cousin and rival, Duke Amedeo, on the steps of the Spanish royal residence.

One report said the Duke was twice punched in the mouth and would have fallen to the ground had he not been caught by deposed Queen Anne-Marie of Greece.

The daily, La Repubblica, said Duke Amedeo was then helped inside the Zarzuela palace, where an unidentified Arab potentate applied an ice pack to his bruised lips.

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised that real monarchs like Juan Carlos and family would hang out with the obviously lesser-status pretenders like Vittorio Emanuele, Amedeo, and Anne-Marie.

2004-05-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

Linkily delicious. I'm not always good about acknowledging links, but I will now thank Zach and Josh. Also, a while ago something called Blog Father copied Crooked Timber's blogroll into a post, which I guess counts.

2004-05-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

David Dellinger dies. It is with great sadness that I note the death of David Dellinger, a noted peace and social justice activist. Dellinger is most famous for being the "adult" member of the Chicago 7, but he got his start as union activist at Yale in the 1930s. He was then a consciencious objector in World War II and continued his work in the anti-nuclear movement. His most recent fight was against the FTAA. When he was in jail for refusing to fight in World War II he also refused to eat in the whites only part of the prison cafeteria. AP (here via the Boston Herald) has an obituary. Ron Jacobs has an appreciation on the CounterPunch website. (More obits will be added here as I find them.)

I met Dellinger almost exactly three years ago, when he came to a Yale reunion (he was class of 1936). It was about the time I was (to quote a friend) "collecting old leftists." (Moe Foner, also now dead, was among my collection also. Surprisingly, the original member of my collection, my own grandfather, seems to be longest surviving. Note that the term is "old leftists" as in aged, not Old Left, although to some extent they go together.) As I just wrote to his wife, Dellinger was inspiring, approachable, and supportive of Alumni for a Better Yale, which I was then founding. Dellinger has inspired many generations of Yale activists, and I suspect his memory will inspire several more.

Dellinger was inspiring, and for the most part I agreed whole-hartedly with his politics. That said, one part of his story always sat ill with me. He described how he awoke politically during a trip to Nazi Germany after college. Not a bad place for a leftist to become radicalized. But I wondered how someone who became political after seeing the Nazis could make his first political stance a refusal to fight in World War II. That said, as someone who does not always reject violent struggle, it is inspiring to have known such a devoted pacifist.

The world is certainly a poorer place now that Dellinger is dead. It's not a phrase I usually use, but now it seems appropriate: may he rest in peace.

UPDATE: More obituaries in Thursday's papers. Washington Post; New York Times, which quotes Paul Berman: "Dellinger himself became the single most important leader of the national antiwar movement, at its height, from 1967 through the early 1970's. You could quarrel with some of his political judgments, but he was always sober, always resolute, always selfless and always brave." See also a nice little post at One Pot Meal.

2004-05-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Things to read. With more or less in the way of comments.

At Arab News, Khaled M. Batarfi writes a not-quite-convincing opinion piece calling for a one-state solution to Israel/Palestine, in which Israel would become a binational, secular, democratic state. Jewschool's Mobius, though whom I found it, posts his largely negative reactions.

Also through Jewschool, I find this post from Ampersand about how Cynthia McKinney got royally screwed by the "liberal media."

Meanwhile, the other Jewish blog I read, Protocols, has absolutely plummetted in quality since Steven I. Weiss left it. He's now posting at Fiddish, but it's unclear to me how he'll adapt to a "slightly-edited" blog. If you do go to Protocols, skip anything Luke Ford writes. But another guest blogger, Daniel Radosh, has been posting some interesting stuff. See his introductory post and his post on humanist Judaism. Of particular note are the comments posted to those posts. I haven't seen such rabid and offensive comments since, well, since anyone posted anything decent on Israel.

At Wonkette, I read Dana Milbank's pool reports during Yale Class Day on Sunday. Last time Bush was at a Yale graduation, Milbank got to write an article about how no one liked him. This time he was stuck across the street wondering where POTUS was. But one thing he was, at least part of the time, was with Yale president Richard Levin. Yeah, the same Yale president Richard Levin who is on the committee investigating the false causus belli that got us into Iraq. Does no one see the glaring problem with Bush hanging out with Levin?

At Crooked Timber, Belle Waring posts about how about the totally outrageous smearing of Brandon Mayfield.

UPDATE: At HNN is an article well worth reading by Irfan Khawaja called "How We--You and Me--Missed the Story of the Taliban in the Years Leading Up to 9-11". I actually think that Khawaja is slightly unfair. Speaking as someone who took part in the Yale rally he mentions, I know that lots of people knew about the Taliban. Indeed, I hated the Taliban before hating the Taliban was cool. I think the question is why it took so long for people who aren't feminists to come around to that conclusion.

2004-05-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Loring for lending her instructive discourse to waldheim last week. In retrospect, it perhaps was a bad week to do it, since I wasn't posting much or even spending much time in front of the computer, but nonetheless it was fun, and I especially enjoyed her post on sports doping and leading me to the book of prettiness.

2004-05-23T02:14:00.000-07:00

Third parties. Paul Martin finally called an election in Canada, which occasions an overview article from the CBC. Included is this:

Liberal support fell by seven points in Ontario, where 42 per cent of respondents said they would vote for the governing party. Much of that support in Ontario is going to the New Democrats, not the Conservatives, according to the poll, conducted for the Globe and Mail and CTV this week.

While the NDP isn't going to win the government, and in that way isn't a "viable" party, it's nice to imagine a country in which a vote for the left-wing third party isn't seen as "giving your vote" to the right-wing party.

2004-05-20T22:40:00.000-07:00

Pretty things. Courtesy of Bookslut, a link to a lovely little book entitled "Sela Ward is more attractive than Shannen Doherty".

2004-05-19T22:12:00.000-07:00

About the only thing that has made me feel moderately patriotic in the last few months. Just when you think the Bush administration is actually going to succeed at strong-holding all three branches of government into going along with all its plans (re-election included), something like this happens and one can rest a bit easier, reminded that America is not an *entirely* totalitarian state. Phew.

2004-05-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

US Doping Scandal. I just think all of this is wicked interesting. To me, the bottom line of this whole story is that American athletic culture is a mess. (Perhaps not a particularly profound or surprising pronouncement, but certainly proven true by this series of events.) Kelli White has been celebrated for winning a whole, whole lot of medals in the past, and we were all suuuuper excited for her to win 3-5 of those 100 we're supposed to win in Athens come August. And yet, because her coach encouraged her to take a drug *that the USADA can't even test for*, she has outed herself as a THG user and has been stripped of her medals since 2000.

Who's really to blame here? I'm not at all convinced that it's White herself. And it does seem that this time around (as opposed to, say, the Ben Johnson scandal in 1988--a scandal I don't really remember, given that I was 8, but which at the time seemed to center almost exclusively on Johnson himself), the sports world is doing a better job of holding both White's coaching staff and the lab that made the drug responsible. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that the scandal goes much, much deeper than the track star and the coach and the lab--all the way down into American culture's relationship to sports. We want athletes to be big and strong and do impressive things, and we implicitly encourage them to use all sorts of performance-enhancing substances to accomplish these things. But even though a whole, whole lot of substances are OK to use, some governing bodies somewhere have decided that others are not (mostly steroids, I think, but maybe other substances too). And so we celebrate the people who run real fast and hit real far and lift a whole lot as long as they 'just' use creatin, etc., but demonize them the second they use something that some organization has decided is not OK.

I'm certainly not arguing that using steroids should be OK--only that if Americans understood sports differently, steroids and creatin and EPO and _all this_ would be an entirely different issue.

If only the whole athletic world could exist in the same drug-less, passionate, down-to-earth way my Division III sports team did . . .

2004-05-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but... Through Jewschool, I learn of Miri Ben-Ari, an Israeli hip-hop violinist. I kid you not. And she's really good!

2004-05-18T23:15:00.000-07:00

Apple! Really!?! APPLE? Yes, folks. That is apparently what Gwyneth and Chris Martin named their baby girl.

2004-05-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

I am a giant tool. After posting yesterday about Erin O'Connor not leaving her tenure track job, I got two fat reminders that I had NOOOOOO idea what I was talking about. EGJ pointed out to me yesterday that there is no reason to burn bridges when leaving any job, and that even if O'Connor had asked for a leave, that would be a highly reasonable request given the career gamble she's taking. And then this morning, I came to work to find an email from Prof. O'Connor herself in my inbox! It turns out that the comment I cited was not only unfair, but mostly untrue. It was totally, totally not OK for me to jump to conclusions about Prof. O'Connor's decisions based only on the comments of some random troll (as I now understand these commenters to be called). In order to avoid any type of further stress for anyone involved, I'm going to delete my old post right now. Sorry, Erin! Rest assured that the neophyte blogger has learned an important lesson.

2004-05-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

Sea shanties. For a project I'm doing for my roommate that is somehow related to teaching English phonetics to French people, I had to make a list of sea shanties I'm able to sing. Where better to look than the website of ARRR!!! the "acapirate" group from Brown? And indeed, they have a very useful compendium of sea shanty lyrics. I'm excited.

2004-05-18T11:42:00.000-07:00

Fat traitors. Apropos Savage Love this week, I just found this blog called Fat Traitors, with the tag line "Former activists reject fat acceptance and accept fat rejection." It's unlikely to become a regular read, but some of the posts are quite interesting. Check out, for instance, the post on Savage Love column in question (although I don't think I buy the argument) and a report back from Fat Pride Day.

2004-05-18T10:40:00.000-07:00

To my California readers. In his latest budget proposal, Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to eliminate funding completely for the Institutes for Labor and Employment at Berkeley and UCLA. There can be no question that his plans are politically motivated. As United Students Against Sweatshops writes: "It is outrageous that labor research is being singled out for elimination by the governor, while research for business and other concerns are left intact. The ILE has generated research for living wage policies, health care access, paid family leave, immigration policy, global outsourcing, and hundreds of other issues that affect working families. Its elimination is not only a direct attack on labor, but also a threat to academic freedom." The fact is, labor centers are to labor what MBA programs are to business--and you don't see Schwarzenegger trying to terminate MBA programs at UC schools. This isn't only a labor issue; it's an issue of academic freedom. The research that the ILE does is considered politically suspect to Schwarzenegger and his Republicans, so the institute's budget is being eliminated.

What's needed in California now is for the Democrats in the state legislature to stand up against the governor. And what's needed for that is for them to hear from Californians. Take a moment to write a letter.

2004-05-18T10:06:00.000-07:00

Rethinking gay marriage. Back when the Goodrich decision first ordering gay marriage licenses in Massachusetts was handed down, I was pessimistic. I wrote that I was afraid that for a relatively small gain of legalizing gay marriage in one state, the people who spearheaded the decision were creating a wedge issue that would drive social conservatives into the arms of the Republicans, when their economic interests suggested that they should be Democrats. Given the importance of this election, I thought that was a mistake to do in an election year.

But you know, it's hard to keep that attitude in the face of articles like this, in today's Times, or the ones I linked to yesterday from the Globe. It's difficult to see what happened yesterday in Massachusetts as anything but an unmitigated vistory for civil rights, and it's hard to argue that such a victory for civil rights should be postponed for election strategy. It also happens (by coincidence, I presume) that the first gay marriages were on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board, which points out the problems and the successes of court-ordered civil rights. On one hand, because school desegregation was mandated by federal courts, and not by the political branches, it was never backed by a general change in attitudes and thus has remained unpopular and unsuccessful to this day. On the other hand, Brown I think has to be seen as a galvanizing moment for the then nascent civil rights movement. Given that my generation is increasingly supportive of gay rights, perhaps we'll look back at the one-two punch of Lawrence and Goodrich as the start of a massive, popular, gay rights movement.

In August, I wrote that the issue of gay marriage might be solvable by divorcing (so to say) the idea of religious marriage and civil marriage. That way, I argued, we would take away some of social baggage that comes with the debate over the word "marriage." Let marriage be a solely religious affair, and let religions do what they want. If they want to only have straight marriages, fine; if they want to allow plural marriages, that's fine too. Civil unions would be what would be needed for all the important civil benefits of marriage--immigration, taxes, children, whatnot. (See also this long post, where I defend the idea.) Living in France has made me change my mind somewhat. In France, the idea I proposed in August is sort of what already exists. Here, every couple gets married at the Marie (city hall) and then, if they chose, gets a religious marriage. Here's the thing, though: although there's a national civil union-type-deal (called Pacs) that gives gay couples many of the rights of marriage, gay marriage itself is still a major issue (one which the Socialists last week decided to support). Apparently, the divorce isn't the panecea I saw it as.

UPDATE: Via Josh, I see an op-ed in the Times by Michael Klarman. He (who is presumably much more qualified to comment than I) argues basically the opposite as me. First, that Brown wasn't that important in the civil rights movement, because there had been a gradual change in attitudes that set the stage for the decision (cf. Lawrence). But troublingly:

Perhaps most important, the decision crystallized Southern whites' resistance to racial change, radicalized Southern politics, and increased the likelihood that protest, once it erupted, would incite a violent response. It was the beating of peaceful black demonstrators by Southern white law enforcement officers — many of whom were carried into office by the wave of racial fanaticism that swept Southern politics after Brown — that repulsed national opinion and led to the passage of landmark civil rights legislation.

I'm not sure what this does to my analysis above.

2004-05-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

John Kerry's penis. (That ought to increase google hits for a while.) The post to which Loring linked seemed to suggest that Wonkette somehow deserved credit for the "Kerry has a big schlong" meme. As long time readers of this blog will know, however, the credit goes to GoodForTheJews.com.

2004-05-17T23:19:00.000-07:00

MoveOn's "Go Big" campaign. Wonkette really says all there is to say about this one. The only thing I want to add is that, as one who received said "Go Big" message, I can safely say that not only was its phallic wording highly unnecessary, the message itself was rather poorly written. I mean, I signed the petition and all (Kerry certainly needs some encouragement to go left instead of middle, and I was far too lazy to write my own damned letter), but really! Can we get some better writers on staff over there at MoveOn?

2004-05-17T22:28:00.000-07:00

I'm really glad Jacob posted on gay marriage. In the Globe link he mentions at the bottom of his post, there's a link to an interview with the Goodridges, the couple from the Massachusetts lawsuit that gloriously began all this. The best part of the interview, which you can play using Flash, is when the interviewer asks the Goodridges' daughter whether her moms should be allowed to be married, and she says, "Of course! Not letting them get married is like saying that only people with yellow hair and blue eyes can go to the bathrooom!"

2004-05-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

Gay marriage in Massachusetts. Says a gay marriage opponent: "If we just sit around with our hands in our pockets and don't say something, I don't think the world will think we think this is important. For people not to make a statement would almost be a crime." Couldn't have said it better myself. Monday night at midnight, Cambridge started giving out marriage licenses to gay couples, and the Boston Globe covers the ensuing party, with 10,000 people out on Mass Ave in front of City Hall:

What started in the afternoon as a sedate lawn party in front of City Hall, with running children, glow sticks, and panting dogs, had by midnight become a celebration so huge that it was hard to walk across the thin lawn without getting a face full of bubbles, knocking into someone with a sign reading “Mazel Tov,” or colliding with women singing “Going to the Chapel” accompanied by a brass band.

The cheer that went up at about 10 minutes past midnight, when it became clear that the ﬁrst gay couple had ﬁled their application for a marriage license, was so long and so loud that it nearly drowned out the ﬁnal strains of Mendelssohn’s wedding march.

By 12:30 a.m. those cheers were erupting every minute or two, as each couple emerged from the building, marching down an impromptu aisle cleared by the crowd, one step closer to full-ﬂedged marriage.

Indeed, the Globe has pretty good coverage throughout, it being a local story of national significance.

2004-05-17T10:26:00.000-07:00

Light (Jacob) posting ahead. Just a warning (to Loring, too): I've vistors for the next several days, so my posting will likely be light.

2004-05-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

New blogger in town--and no, not the one currently gracing this page. The Ghost of Tom Joad has recently appeared, promising regular commentary on "usually American policy, both foreign and domestic, history, books, music, film, and anything else that I feel I am educated enough to comment on." And I particularly like it, because this blog is listed as an "(Almost) Daily Blog Read." Welcome, Tyler.

2004-05-16T22:53:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger Loring Ann Pfeiffer here, writing from Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, with an empty, crumb-y lunch plate in front of me and an SAT PREP class to teach later this afternoon.

By way of introduction, I'll say the following: until about 3 months ago I haaaaaated blogs. I refused to read them (except if google stalking revealed that someone I had a crush on kept one), and assumed that those of my acquaintances who kept them were true egomaniacs, convinced that their own thoughts were sooooo terribly interesting that the whole, wide world needed to be made aware of them.

But this all changed not too long ago. Being in Hong Kong has left me feeling pretty distant from the kind of intellectual camaraderie I enjoyed in college and during the year following. In this space, blogs have opened up a way for me to engage in some of the kinds of discussion I've been missing since leaving the US last September. Until now, my degree of engagement with these conversations has primarily been limited to eavesdropping (or lurking, I suppose), but with Jacob's invite, I have decided to throw myself into the blogosphere in a more direct way.

The types of blogs I like tend to be of two varieties: these and these (both of these examples come from folks affiliated with my undergraduate institution). The well-written, personal-life-y kind of the first variety satisfies my lust for gossip from people I used to know (however vaguely) and reminds me that it's good to view the world through a more romantic, sense-driven lens than I sometimes remember to utilize on my own; I like the second type because it points me to articles I'd like to read and has a spin on current events I appreciate. I enjoy both Nori's and Prof. Burke's writing styles a whole, whole lot, and find them both highly blog-appropriate, if pretty different, on the whole.

I spend a good bit of time thinking about grad school in the humanities these days, much like a lot of other bloggers and academic publications out there. Despite the e-pleadings of the aforementioned Prof. Burke and Erin O'Connor (via another blog I frequently read), grad school seems like something I'm going to try to do. Victorian Literature and Culture is just too interesting and relevant (although I recognize that some may contest this notion) for me not to at least try to devote my life to studying it.

I have recently noticed that frequently when I read stuff, I pick out the one (usually irrelevant) fact about Victorian England in whatever I'm reading, and remember that fact over whatever the story was actually about. Case in point, an article in the May 17th issue of the New Yorker about a silver thief. The article in itself was a real page-turner (who doesn't like a good heist story, after all?), but the one sentence I found most interesting was near the beginning of the article, describing this weird Victorian-era silver set that the dude stole. Apparently each piece of silver had a different zodiac sign on it--turns out Astrology was a big deal for the Victorians. I don't currently know why Astrology was such a big deal or what type of a role it played in Victorian era goings-on, but I'd like to know. In fact, I think I'd be pretty happy spending quite a bit of time and energy examining various aspects of the Victorian psyche--from astrological forks to George Eliot.

Many thanks to Jacob for inviting me to play around with this. More to come later in the week.

2004-05-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

Guest blogger. I'm really excited to announce a new thing on waldheim: guest blogging. My first guest blogger is one of my favorite people in the whole world: Loring Pfeiffer. You know that she'll be a good blogger because according to Webster's Revised Unabridge Dictionary, her very name means "instructive discourse." When she starts on Monday (for a run of a week), Loring will introduce herself, but just to give you a preview, I'll tell you that she's an American currently living in Hong Kong, and that she's not currently a blogger, although I believe she reads more blogs than I do.

Why a guest blogger? Well, it's an experiment (one that may or may not be repeated). I'm curious how a guest blogger works on a personal blog (as opposed to guest bloggers on groups sites). And I'm doing it vaguely as a test for an idea I have for future blogging, which I won't get into now. I encourage my regular readers to email me with comments about what they think of the idea of guest blogging on a site like this.