Cronon Affair Not About Academic Freedom, But Political Persecution

By now you might have heard about the latest national media mini-sensation, the sticky situation over University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor William Cronon's work e-mail.

In case you need a synopsis, the Wisconsin Republican Party has filed a standard Freedom of Information Act request to obtain e-mails that include any of a set of keywords from Professor Cronon's university e-mail account. They did this after Cronon started blogging and writing op-ed pieces critical of Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans. They did this because they want to know if Cronon, as a sort-of-public employee in his capacity as a professor at a public university that receives 20 percent of its total funding from public sources, might have been in violation of the University IT policy on "commercial, political, and non-university activities," which is as follows:

Persons may not use University IT resources to sell or solicit sales for any goods, services or contributions unless such use conforms to UW-Madison rules and regulations governing the use of University resources. University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum. No one may use University IT resources to represent the interests of any non-University group or organization unless authorized by an appropriate University department.

Cronon's supporters claim the FOIA request amounts to a witch-hunt and potentially a violation of academic freedom, while other pundits, mostly conservative, argue correctly that the FOIA request is legally sound.

The FOIA request is legally sound, and academic freedom is a pretty sketchy defense against such a request. For the record, academic freedom would be a relevant defense should the fruits of the FOIA request place Cronon's job in jeopardy on account of his political views. But we're not even there yet, and I doubt we'll get there either.

More importantly, however, this whole affair is not so much about academic freedom or the legality of the FOIA request, but rather the purpose and implications of this request. The government of the state of Wisconsin, which is more or less overrun at this point by the Republican party, has some recourse to oversight in matters of publicly funded institutions; however, it's abundantly clear in this case that Professor Cronon is only being targeted because he has expressed in public, as is his right, some political views that the Republican investigators don't like.

Though they have legal recourse, technically, to request Cronon's e-mails, the Republican investigators in this case aren't actually worried about the possibility that Cronon is somehow operating a vast and secret and well-funded political machine out of his University e-mail account, or that he's in any way abusing his position as a history professor at a public university (civic engagement with contemporary political issues is explicitly part of the job description of a university professor of history). Rather, Republicans are going after Cronon because his personal political views are different than theirs. The Republican investigation of Cronon is an attempt to penalize someone for espousing an opposing ideology, and, accordingly, to make political hay about the fact that Professor Cronon is all at once an academic, a public employee, and a liberal--all things that Wisconsin Republicans can't stand.

What we should take away from this episode is not that there's some erosion of academic freedom going on, or that Cronon is a "tenured radical" for having political views that Republicans wouldn't support, but that American politics has undertaken a considerable shift in the last several years. Though we remain a two-party country, our opposing parties are no longer comprised of what could be called "liberals" and "conservatives," left and right.

What we have now is pluralists and singularists.

Some Americans, pluralists, believe that freedom includes the permission of dissent and the toleration of ideological diversity. For the pluralists, it's not OK to go after someone for espousing views with which you might disagree. For the pluralists, the very core of American history and the American experience is polyvocality, grown out of this mishmash of people from all ends of the world. Pluralists are more likely to find commonalities in what America is than instances of what America is not.

Some Americans, singularists, believe that freedom is the privilege only of a specific group of people--Americans--who think a certain way about what America is and what specifically constitutes American values. Singularists are willing to use financial, legal, and military means to enforce their ideological position on what's best for America and Americans. Singularists are more likely to understand diversity and dissent as instances of anti-Americanism and antagonism than as part and parcel of the American experience.

The Republican attack on Cronon is a singularist attack, waged by people who are, at the very least, uncomfortable with the idea of a professor at a state university publicly owning a political position that is critical of their party in general, and its state leader specifically.

In Defense of Play: A Person's Manifesto

Bears know more about people than people know about themselves, because bears are quite happy to be bears, while people struggle endlessly to dehumanize themselves. While people indulge this peculiar blend of human insecurity and human arrogance, bears observe with the placid bewilderment of creatures that still understand play.

Consider Richard Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins is a leader among a vast and variegated group of people who generally believe that anyone who believes in a god or practices a religion accordingly is an idiot. The basis for Dawkins' belief is science. For Dawkins and people of a similar persuasion, any human behavior that is not driven by scientific knowledge is irrational and may lead to idiocy. What frustrates, enervates, motivates, and ultimately compensates the likes of Richard Dawkins is the tendency of humans to behave in certain ways that do not comport with scientific knowledge.

Were the Dawkinses suddenly and ironically imbued with godly powers, they would undoubtedly order the universe precisely as it is, changing only humans. Instead of making humans human, the Dawkinses would make humans into scientific beings who apprehend with perfect accuracy and adroitness the empirical truth of the world. These Dawkinsian humans would know everything knowable, and lack any desire to know anything more; indeed, the concept of the unknowable would be entirely foreign to these humans, a non-concept. A rigid scientific curiosity for the unknown points toward its own obsolescence, which culminates in Dawkinsian humans. These humans would not have an imagination, for they would have no need for one. They could stand on the shoreline and look out into the sea, and what would they see: a taxonomic cornucopia spread out over a visual field of 2.9 miles or 2.52 nautical miles (depending on the height of the person and the clarity of the sky in the given moment). Dawkinsian humans would not practice religion or believe in gods, as they know all that is knowable. They would never fight or disagree over concepts, as all empirical truths would be evident to all Dawkinsian humans, and no concepts that are not empirical truths would exist. That being the case, there would be no intellectual or ideological diversity among them, which means there would be no ideological wars between them. Instead, their wars would be fought over things that contemporary humans find deeply immoral and disturbing: observations of phenotypical difference, racial difference, and disparities in physical strength or natural fitness. Indeed, all conflicts among Dawkinsian humans would be the result of, as contemporary humans would put it, racists and bigots. Without the ability to espouse differences in what Martin Luther King, Jr. would call "the content of one's character," Dawkinsian humans, red in tooth and claw as all humans, nay all creatures are, would fight, oppress, and enslave those who were, in and of themselves, through and through, empirically different looking (as no character content differences would exist). Dawkinsian humans would be ruthlessly hierarchical, for empirical differentiation necessitates hierarchies (we may not know whether Joe Montana was a better quarterback than Dan Marino, but, given a common set of metrics across-the-board, we know with certainty that David Lekuta Rudisha, the new 800m world record holder, is a faster 800m runner than former world record holder Wilson Kipketer, and is thus higher on the records list).

You may find these assumptions and extrapolations about Dawkinsian humans unlikely or unsubstantiated, in large part because, as a non-Dawkinsian human, your powers of empirical knowing are quite limited. In fact, before scientists began to pretend that the word "empirical" means "evidence-based" and not "based on human sensory perception"--that is, before contemporary humans brought about this clever shift in the etymology of the word "emprical"--human sensory perception was perceived as enough to produce reliable evidence. Now, however, the Dawkinses scorn and ridicule flawed human perception. This is why "empirical" must now mean "evidence-based" instead of "based on human sensory perception": because the transhumanist Dawkinses must elide any traces of human frailty and subjectivity that must necessarily (but unspeakably) be involved in the processes of rendering scientific evidence. In other words, the problem of humans being such unscientific beings--which, for the Dawkinses, produces so many of our disgustingly human problems--is why we need to evolve into as close approximations of Dawkinsian humans as we can. For the Dawkinses, human subjectivity is a stain best rubbed out by striving for scientific objectivity.

This is in large part what is meant by "scientific progress." More practically, "scientific progress" means the patronage of society by scientists, who scoff at any judgment that is not "empirically" derived. Our scientific patrons provide (or consume mounds of resources trying to provide) contemporary humans with various comforts and amenities, from the life-ameliorating (nicer televisions, longer-lasting batteries, etc.) to the life-changing (semiconductors, electronic networks, etc.) to the life-saving (biomedical technologies, vaccines, etc.). These amenities are crucial to "scientific progress," because while scientists are busy providing us with nice things, many are also busy theorizing the complete suffusion of all human qualities and variabilities with scientific knowledge. To put it economically: have this mechanical heart, so that you may live to see the day when we make a computer that writes better than Nabokov.

In case it hasn't become clear by now, there are two ends to scientific progress. One is the forfeiture of human intellectual diversity, creativity, and play; the other is the embarrassing realization that despite all that humans have tried to do to deny, transcend, and forfeit their humanity, it was all a big ruse, a god delusion.

To say nothing of their ethical implications, both of these outcomes sound pretty fucking boring.

By this point in the manifesto the Dawkinses are feeling attacked. The scientists who wouldn't align themselves with the Dawkinses are feeling ill-used and victimized. The armies who daily make disparaging remarks about the arts and humanities from their own positions of societal and academic privilege are incensed about the possibility that their evidence may be of an insufficient standard to convince not gods, not religious nuts, not politicians, but mainstream humans that we should all lie down for this iteration of progress. You who have become oppressors of humanity (and the humanities), who have conditioned yourselves to receive all criticisms of your scientific telos as idiocy, ignorance, anti-scientific ideology, or even an attempted resuscitation of the days when the arts, religion, and philosophy unjustly presided over the kingdom of knowledge, are modern clergy. You boffins, it's no longer you who are marginalized. The victim is yours, and the victim is play.

Claim your bits and pieces of this manifesto as you inevitably will, human as you are. But here PMB affirmeth nothing but play, that delight in endless variability and purposelessness which is the hallmark of all creatures great and small.

Fixing Student Ghettos

A good bit of news lately has touched on the increasingly visible issue of the student ghetto, like this piece on the ghettos in Albany, NY. What is a student ghetto?

It's more or less exactly what it sounds like. In college towns, where students constitute a large enough population relative to the total population, civilian residents generally prefer not to live next to or immediately around students. The reason for this is simple and understandable: student lifestyles typically mean late nights, loud parties, raucous behavior, loud music, irregular waking hours, and other fun things that most non-students would rather not subject themselves or their children to indirectly by living nearby. Once a "student" section of town emerges, other factors contribute toward the deterioration of student neighborhoods and the properties students occupy.

For one, students typically require cheap housing, which gives landlords the opportunity to treat student housing in the same hands-off manner as they might an urban slum. Two, student partying, excessive drinking, and general immaturity contribute to property damage, littering, and abundant housing code violations in student housing sections, making student housing even more slum-like, and the landlords even less likely to enforce code or repair damage year after year, as new students come in and wreck things anew. Three, the partying and code violations attracts police officers, many of whom will have come from an entirely different socioeconomic background than the privileged college students--or at least as much is often presumed by both police and students alike. The combination of all of these things creates, quite literally, a ghetto in the student housing section: low property value, unregulated and neglected destruction of the neighborhood, bad behavior, and an antagonistic relationship between law enforcement and the residents of the student ghetto.

PMB lived in a student ghetto for the better part of 5 years, which was long enough to witness a shocking deterioration of an otherwise fine part of town at the hands of a predominately affluent and intelligent student population. Recalling his experiences in the student ghetto, PMB offers the following suggestions for improving student ghettos, restoring college neighborhoods, and healing town-gown relations:

1) A friendlier approach to policing. Frustrated with rampant drug-dealing on every corner of his district, a station commander in the HBO series The Wire decides to round up all the corner boys and junkies and transport them to one of three sections of town where police will monitor violence, but otherwise turn a blind eye to the drug trade. At first these ghetto zones look disastrous, until community volunteers and public safety workers intervene to pass out clean needles and contraception, and police and volunteers help children organize basketball and boxing groups. Police begin to interact with drug dealers and addicts like human beings, rather than simply going around looking to knock heads.

Because the student ghetto is by definition a self-contained area of student housing, and because students will drink and party regardless of what police do to try and stop them, police would do better to take a friendlier and more realistic approach to policing the student ghetto. Running into and searching every house with a party, often without a complaint call and sometimes in clear violation of constitutional rights, and bashing the heads of drunk and belligerent students has proven widely ineffective. Instead, were police officers to patrol student areas with an eye out for violence, destruction, or brazen violations (public urination, etc.), rather than storming houses, students would likely become more cooperative, and learn to respect their boundaries.

2) Crack down on absentee landlords. When responsible students can't get their landlords to fix basic problems with the house, like a faulty heater or a leaky faucet, students rapidly develop the attitude that because the landlord doesn't care about them or the property, they ought not to bother with keeping it clean and keeping damage to a minimum. The result is usually an accumulation of little damages and a few large ones over the years, all of which go unfixed by the landlord, who lives on the other side of the country and only shows up once a year to collect rent money from the local agency he employs to "look after" his properties in the area. If landlords will live remotely, as they have every right to do, students need better resources and support from both the municipalities and the universities to crack down on landlord violations and slumlord practices. It's a lot easier to trash a property that's long since been in the process of being trashed, and about which nobody seems to care.

3) Affordable university housing. One answer universities have provided to deal with student ghettos is building more university owned and regulated housing for students. The problem: this kind of housing is typically of the revenue-generating mold, meaning they're expensive and aimed at the richest students. Universities then justify the high cost of such accommodations by packing them with amenities like gyms, commercial food courts, expensive cable television plans, and redundant computer labs. Low-income students who might otherwise live in university accommodation end up saving hundreds of dollars per month in rent by living in the student ghetto. The price disparity between university housing and private housing in the ghetto diffuses any sense of competition for the business of large groups of students, which means that university housing can continue to be overpriced (taking money from rich students who can pay) and ghetto landlords continue without any pressure to make their properties more attractive to students by cleaning them up.

4) Enforce basic housing code policies during the day. Rather than tussling with drunk students at night, send police vans around during the day. If houses have indoor couches on the porches and on the roofs, remove them. If a student's front lawn is strewn with beer cans so thick you have to kick them away to reach the front door, fine the house. If the residents ignore the fines, arrest them and bring them to court. Few students will take resistance far enough to get cuffed and dragged out of their house unexpectedly during a game of Madden.

5) Don't conspire with the university. Work with it. In PMB's student ghetto, a common police trick went as follows: university police, who had no jurisdiction outside of university property, would ride by off-campus houses in the student ghetto and hear parties. Since they had no jurisdiction, they would phone in a fake noise complaint to the municipal police who did have jurisdiction, so the municipal police could come in and bash heads. Once students were cited with municipal violations, and punished accordingly by the municipality, that information was shared with the university. The university would then level a second punishment, effectively doubling-up the punishment for what was a non-violation in the first place.

Instead of practicing these kinds of bullying tactics, universities and municipalities should get together and determine in what ways the university can compel (or require) students to complete community projects as part of their studies. PMB was fortunate enough to partake of one such project, a work-study internship with the local (you might have guessed it) housing code administrator. Learning about the inner workings of community building and community policing can be illuminating experiences for students, who too often fail to grasp the notion that they live in a community beyond that of the university.

End The Humanities Now, Keep Future Bill Gateses In School

Were PMB looking for advice on higher education, he probably wouldn't ask two college dropouts, no matter how rich they are. But that's just PMB. The reason? It's not that PMB looks down on the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (is that even possible?) because they didn't complete their undergraduate degrees. It's not that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren't incredibly intelligent and productive individuals. It's not that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren't world-changers of the highest caliber. The reason PMB wouldn't ask these two about higher education should be obvious: neither one of them saw much value in higher education relative to what they might accomplish without it.

Sure, if Reed College trashed its whole (exceptionally loose) curriculum and means of student evaluation and catered to the needs and whims of teenaged Steve Jobs--i.e., if Reed College valued Jobs' opinion of what higher education should be when he was a college student--he might not have dropped out. And if Harvard would have just given Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg what they wanted to become genius world-altering billionaire technological innovators--whatever that might have been--they might have stuck around for a measly bachelor's degree. But the fact of the matter is that none of these people was ever actually interested in higher education, and their ends, not to mention their means, always have been fundamentally different than those of a higher education institution. Put simply: while Bill Gates would prefer that colleges and universities focus their curricula on job training and job creation, this is not the mission of a college or university. If people like Gates want job-training and job-creation centers, they certainly have the means to do what Gates has already begun to do: fund their own institutions that satisfy those core missions. For the rest of us: well, maybe we're not all convinced that entrepreneurship is the only civic virtue (or that there are no such things as human virtues that might be cultivated in the academy).

So PMB repeats: if you want to learn something about how to change higher education for the better, don't ask people just because they're rich and successful. Ask people who actually have a stake in higher education. Ask journalists, professors, small business leaders, engineers, maybe even grad. students. Don't ask someone who never saw much value at all in the answer to that question, or the institutions to which the answer most pertains.

Ask PMB, and this is what he'll tell you:

We need to end the humanities and focus on job creation. The first departments to go will have to be the English departments. Does English create jobs? No. English does not create jobs. Most people already know how to read and write English, like these people:

“It is my job to ensure proper process deployment activities take place to support process institutionalization and sustainment. Business process management is the core deliverable of my role, which requires that I identify process competency gaps and fill those gaps.”

If you are reading this then you know how to read English, which means we don't need English departments, which are redundant, which are redundant.

The next departments to go will be the foreign language departments. Do foreign languages create jobs? No. Foreign languages do not create jobs. You might say, "but PMB, aren't Arabic and Mandarin foreign languages?' No, Arabic and Mandarin are not foreign languages. Arabic and Mandarin are business codes, like Python and C++. Business codes, like all business things, create jobs. Foreign languages do not.

The next departments to go will be the religion departments. If you believe in a religion you can go to church. If you are an atheist you can go to England. If you are an atheist and I am an evangelical, you can go to hell. But neither religion departments, atheism, or the devil create jobs. Therefore we should not have religion departments, which are redundant, which are redundant.

Speaking of which, we no longer need philosophy departments, where logic is taught. Logic does not create jobs, and jobs are not created by logic, therefore we do not need philosophy departments.

The next departments to go should be classics departments, which do not create jobs. Think about it: if we called Greek and Roman antiquity the subject of "the classics" 200 years ago, then our classics education is 200 years behind. Presumably, since Rome declined in the 5th century CE, our "classics" departments should have been updated to cover the period 200 years after the fall of the Roman empire, which is right in the middle of a period called "The Dark Ages." Studying the Dark Ages would have been much more relevant to contemporary efforts at job creation; but classics departments have failed to relate, innovate, synergate, and put food on my DINNER PLATE. So classics departments have to go.

The next departments that have to go are the law departments. Do law departments create jobs? Well, ok, maybe sometimes they do. But does the LAW create jobs? No, the law prevents jobs. PMB proposes that we keep the lawyers and law school departments, which generate revenue and create jobs, and get rid of THE LAW, which DESTROYS JOBS.

Finally, once we've scrapped all of these departments, we need to get rid of history departments. History departments do not create jobs. But they do remind us of when job creation fails at job creation. We must eliminate all backward-looking history departments effective immediately, lest we bear witness to all we've just dumped in the shredder, the entire history of humanity.

Lessons from Knut

When something happens in the world that strikes PMB as so fundamentally wrong, the bear becomes philosophical. As Japan picks up the pieces of pre-disaster life from post-disaster rubble and war breaks out in Libya, what moves you? As Uganda's parliament considers a bill to legalize the execution of homosexuals, and systematic rape rages on in Sudan, what moves you? When women are stoned to death in the Middle East and prisoners held without due process on Guantanamo Bay, what shocks you?

What moves PMB about the premature and unexpected death of a 4-year-old Polar Bear is not merely species affinity, but a deep and burrowing sense of sadness. The root of this sadness is tragedy: humanity thinks it knows tragedy; but when tragedy happens on a nonhuman scale, humans fail to comprehend non-humanly. Humans should know the depth of tragedy, its layers, its multitudes. Humans should know that tragedy begins small and discreet. It brings a little wave over fiddler crab, turning it on its back; then it brings a big wave and we name it tragedy. It puts a wounded calf in a wolves' den, then it puts a girl neck-deep in a stoning pit, and we name it tragedy. It takes the life of a photogenic polar creature before its time, then it takes the life of someone from your tribe, your kind. And then you name it tragedy. These things are not equivalent, but they are related.

Lessons from Knut (Maxims and Barbs):

1) Before you name them, there are seeds of tragedy all around.

2) All humans understand of death is distorted through the jagged lens of (human) life.

3) A bear will eat you if he's hungry enough, but your humanity he will find indigestable.

4) Your brain doesn't forestall the possibility of play, but your job does.

5) We all have claws: some for tearing flesh, some for digging holes, some for scratching surfaces.

6) If you have the courage to love across boundaries, you can be your own god; life imitates art.

7) Fur warms the body, but connection warms the heart.

8) Mind your foundation, for you stand on ice and the sun is out.

9) Forgetting is the process by which memories are internalized.

10) Be good to bear, for bear has brought you joy.

We Will Miss You, Knut

Today PMB mourns the loss of a fellow bear, the Berlin Zoo's world-famous Knut the Polar Bear. As this report suggests, Knut, who was a healthy, four-year-old cub, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

Humans come and go, and, with the capacity to experience suffering in such a panoply of ways, largely fail and disappoint, as 'elevated' creatures, to reduce suffering in the world. When such an embodiment of human joy as our beloved polar bear cub succumbs to death so young, the tragedy is almost too much to bear. PMB is a most melancholy creature today. In what kind of fucked up world does such a thing happen?

Let us hope that the speculation of Peter Trophimof in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard applies to bears: 'Perhaps [bear] has a hundred senses, and when he dies the five senses that we know perish with him, and the other ninety-five remain alive...'

We will miss you dearly, Knut.

Why Consumer Boycotting Sends The Wrong Message

PMB observes a variety of consumer boycotting behaviors, almost always practiced by people who have good intentions and a strong commitment to cause. Boycotts range from the short-term and particular (as when someone avoids purchasing Dior products until they can the guy who made anti-Semitic remarks) to the long-term and sweeping (as when someone makes her own clothing to avoid patronizing companies that use sweatshop labor). Even food choices, like vegetarianism or veganism, are sometimes (but not always) made based upon the principles of the boycott (as when someone refuses to eat meat in order to attenuate and ultimately overturn the animal-rights-unfriendly agro-business model).

Indeed, keeping with the vegetarianism/veganism example, the best book PMB has come across on animal rights, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, takes a utilitarian ethical position, ultimately encouraging readers to address the problem of animal mistreatment by becoming vegetarian or vegan. The thrust of Singer's political message is that through boycotting something that leads to a negative outcome, we could collectively reduce the outcome.

While PMB is sympathetic to a number of causes that call for boycotts, there remains a disturbing and legitimately dangerous logic that underpins the act of boycotting.

When we choose boycotting as a means of individual and/or collective action as consumers, what we're really saying is that the responsibility to make ethical judgments, and then to do the right thing, lies only with us consumers. In taking on the brunt of this responsibility, the boycotter demonstrates to the producers--of meat, clothing, etc.--that we've chosen the market as our primary weapon against their ethical shortcomings. In boycotting, we tell corporations that as long as they can get by selling unsavory things to enough of us, they can survive without changing their behavior.

The explicit problem with boycotting, then, is that it's a strategy that aims to take on producers at their own game: marketing to as many people as possible an image of the company as providing not only a product you want, but by a means with which you can be satisfied. The boycotting efforts of righteous individuals--and righteous groups of individuals--are easily co-opted by large and unscrupulous corporations and industries. In fact, in many cases, as with the tobacco industry, companies actually market controlled versions of counterculture to their adversaries and critics, with much success. Boycotting is a game that, very often, boycotters are already set up to lose.

The implicit and more insidious problem with boycotting, however, is that it plays into corporate hands in a much more profound way. By taking the market as the primary instrument of ethical critique, boycotters implicitly give primacy to the market as a means of ethical regulation. In a move that's meant to be pragmatic--an acknowledgment that because money talks so loudly, the most effective attack is a blow to the pocketbook--boycotters actually undercut their very raison d'etre as boycotters: to introduce ethics into a system that fails to produce ethical standards for itself. Boycotting, in other words, is an admission that the market rules the day, and that the only (or best) way to effect change is by and through the market itself. Boycotting absolves corporations of their responsibility to anything but the bottom line.

The obvious alternative to boycotting, however, is throwing the same political effort behind industry regulation. Why boycott BP, a prominent example of corporate ethical lapse, when you can appeal to an elected government for better regulation of the entire industry? Why go vegan instead of campaigning for reforms of the entire farming industry, including where even veggies are loaded with growth hormones? Why take individual responsibility for something that is more properly the responsibility of a whole society?

PMB is aware that unapologetic free-marketers and some kinds of libertarians will take umbrage with the idea that citizens might appeal to an elected government, rather than the market itself, to impose industry regulations; however, the reasonably successful history of governments imposing industry regulations to account for gross ethical problems not solved by the 'invisible hand'--such as anti-trust legislation, or the laws and inspections that prevent any old schmuck from opening a restaurant that serves you rat feces sandwiches--should be enough to placate most of you.

In the end, it's easy enough to wash your own hands of corporate malfeasance; but what should we do when an entire economy needs a bath?

Lady Gaga and Amateur Cultural Criticism

Upon release of the 10-plus minute "Telephone" video, featuring Lady Gaga and Beyonce, amateur cultural critics began to recognize and draw attention to the video's various moments of allusion, parody, etc. Articles like this one demonstrate how people of various interests and professional backgrounds have been compelled to "close read" Gaga's video for cultural meaning; and these analyses, deployed with varying degrees of adeptness or incompetence, come off with varying degrees of success.

The phenomenon repeats itself with the launch of Gaga's latest art-house-style video, "Born This Way." MTV chimes in with this and this, a pair of lists attempting to detail all of the video's "allusions." Some are clear, while others seem wholly contrived, over-read. Take this gem from the MTV "Part 2" list:

Michelangelo's "Last Judgment": Massive fresco inside the Sistine Chapel, it depicts the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse. Several readers noticed the similarities between the painting and the "Born This Way" scene where the "evil" child is born, as the souls of humans trapped below rise toward their Mother Monster for judgment.

What's most curious about this behavior is that even though the acts of criticism, reading, hermeneutics, and "cultural analysis" are typically thought to belong to the high-minded and disconnected, and applicable only to "great works" of art and literature, the most puerile pop-cultural medium in existence, MTV, can't help but attempt to draw connections between cultural products in attempts to produce meaning. And they like it. They really, really like it.