Can Mitt Romney Read?

I do think that one of the most basic, visible, and practical applications of studying literature is the ability to understand words in context. This ability is regularly taken for granted; and yet every four years those who run campaigns for the US presidency place multi-million dollar bets on the probability that you can't understand words in context.

In fact, outside of election years, the entire industry of political punditry is driven by the perpetual, reciprocal struggle of one side trying to persuade an audience by using words to distort meaning while another side tries to put the words back in the context in which they are meaningful. One might even argue that this is true of the entire institution of democracy, the "currency" of which is said to be "information" ("information" being short-hand for that which is by definition without meaning and without context).

The amount of money, energy, and strategy that goes into using words to manipulate meaning, and thus to manipulate rather directly the views of people who elect our leaders to govern, boggles the mind. And while much of this process of misleading is handled by chart-wielding wonks and technocrats, narrative remains the core medium by which political ideas are bought and sold. It should go without saying that the final step in this process is real policy that affects your life in real ways. Again, we tend to be dismissive about the level of verbal bullshit and manipulation in politics; but in the germination cycle of real-life policy, it shouldn't be surprising how close together are narration and application.

The reason I bring this up is because the Romney campaign has been particularly hard at work in exploiting the inability of most Americans to understand words in context.

The first sign we got of this tactic was in a Romney campaign ad back in November. The ad depicted Barack Obama, in a speech, saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." In the ad and on the campaign trail after, the Romney campaign blasted Obama for saying this, criticizing him for trying to avoid talking about the bad economy and running away from the issue. Of course, the full quote from the Obama speech, which the Romney ad neglected to show was "Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.'" As we can see, the thing that Romney accused Obama of saying was actually, in context, a thing that Obama's former Republican opponent John McCain was saying; and a thing that Obama was actually criticizing McCain for saying. The Romney ad took the quote out of context to make it look like Obama was espousing an idea that Obama was actually critiquing. The ad, in short, conveyed the exact opposite meaning of the truth.

One of the things we teach in literature classes is that you don't accept the meaning nor the validity of a singular quote without doing the research necessary to place it in context. This context may be textual, as, for example, in determining that a statement is ironic rather than sincere in light of the surrounding text and events in a chapter. It may also be historical, as, for example, when we match the commentary in the text of Gulliver's Travels to Swift's critique of a group of eighteenth-century politicians.

Consider, for example, the frequently quoted poem "The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost. Certainly, if not guilty yourself, you know someone who has quoted the most famous lines of this poem as a celebration of individuality, having the guts to choose the more difficult or uncommon path, bucking the tide, being your own person, and so on:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

If we take a second look at this poem, however, and place this very famous quote in its proper context within the poem, a very different meaning reveals itself to us:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

As you can see, then, the speaker in the poem tells of having taken the road less traveled by "with a sigh"; so our traveler is not a proud individualist taking the difficult path to fortune or success, but instead someone with deep regret. All of you who quote these clipped lines from this poem as inspirational lines are wrong, in other words; you're drawing inspiration based on bad reading, while those who know better rightly understand "The Road Not Taken" as a rather depressing poem that, if anything, suggests that by taking the "road less taken," you're not distinguishing yourself in a positive way, but setting yourself up for longstanding and crippling regret.

But do leave it in your Facebook profile.

We can turn now from Frost to Romney (never thought I'd have the chance to write those words) for the latest installment of misleading language and the inability of "readers" to properly contextualize what has been said.

Yet again Obama is at the center of Romney's attack, stating on video "If you've got a business, you didn't build that."

Of course the Romney campaign has gone to great lengths to milk this clumsy comment of Obama's, claiming that Obama is trying to discredit business owners and entrepreneurs. Romney's camp even held a business forum with a giant backdrop that says "We DID build it."

Though Obama's spoken message comes through more clearly when heard, the full text of his comments is:

"If you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own. You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. "

Though Romney and Republicans are sloppily assuming the "that" in Obama's remarks refers to "business," such that Obama is saying to people who own businesses that they didn't build the businesses, the "that" in Obama's "you didn't build that" actually refers to the "roads and bridges" referenced in the previous sentence. Obama misspoke here in using "that" to refer to the plural "roads and bridges," and he used awkward syntax, but in context it makes absolutely no sense for the "that" to refer to anything but "roads and bridges." Obama's point here is that if you own a business, you likely didn't build the roads and bridges (and other structural and civic advantages) that aid your business.

Taking the whole of these comments (especially when comparing them to Romney's nearly identical comments about Olympic athletes getting help to make it to the Olympics), it's clear that Obama's meaning is to acknowledge the ways broader society aids and facilitates individual talent and effort, even when individuals deny that they have been nurtured by such societal privileges. On a smaller scale, however, it's also clear that Obama was simply saying in those two controversial lines that most business owners likely didn't build the roads and bridges that benefit the business, not that they didn't "build" the business itself. Sure, because of the sloppy way in which Obama spoke that passage, there is some ambiguity in the lines that the Romney campaign seized on. But after paying a little critical attention to the passage as a whole, the Romney campaign's reading of it is exposed as implausible.

In the end, the Romney campaign and anyone who is unfortunately convinced by its out-of-context quotes are a bit like the misreaders of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken": an embarrassing inability to read renders the opposite meaning of what is and is said in truth. In fact, meaning isn't always as readily apparent as we'd like to think it is or should be.

On the Penn State Problem, The NCAA is a Disgrace

It's telling that what is perhaps the NCAA's most forceful intervention in collegiate athletics and athletics-related institutional misconduct (at Penn State) is also such an utterly colossal fuck-up.

The NCAA's punishment for Penn State consists primarily of a $60,000,000 fine, a ban on post-season football for Penn State for four years, and the loss of 20 scholarships per year over a four-year period.

I'm happy to translate this punishment for you. There will be:

1) a $60,000,000 fine to be born by the University, which, however foolishly, has too much of its finances tied up in its disgrace of a football team. This means that those who suffer most from this fine will be the real student-athletes at the university: people who play softball, track & field, volleyball, soccer, and so on, not as slave labor in a fake-amateur, exploitative professional sporting atmosphere, but as true extracurricular athletes. How or whether this fine will affect the primary mission of the University (purportedly)--to educate students--is something I'm not sure about.

2) a guarantee that instead of not spending time preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting for Penn State in the Bowl Season, the rabid PSU football fans for the next four years will spend time not preparing for classes and learning stuff and instead rooting against Michigan and Ohio State in the Bowl Season.

3) a guarantee that with the loss of scholarships current student football players will have to seriously consider uprooting their lives to transfer to a new institution to play football, along with a guarantee that young people will lose scholarship opportunities, perhaps the one partially redeemable aspect of big-time NCAA football.

As you can see, the NCAA has imposed a penalty designed to make the NCAA look tough on sports and sports-program related misconduct, as though the NCAA, the lousiest rent-seeking fake agency there ever was, would ever truly consider what happened at Penn State as a fine occasion to dismantle itself, pack up, and fade the fuck away into the darkest recesses of the annals of the history of unrepentant shame. But no, the NCAA has found a way to make a terrible situation at Penn State even worse by posturing and penalizing more or less any innocent student and potentially reasonable side effect of the institutional dominance of that bloated beast of a distraction, the Penn State football team.

Not that the NCAA actually has any legitimate power that a university president and board of trustees couldn't swat away with full institutional authority (were any of these people serious about the fundamental mission of higher education, which is to say, higher education); but if it were up to me and I had the power to impose sanctions on Penn State, I'd order the football team to pay that fine to the University itself for education, and for merit and financial need scholarships, never to be spent on football again. I'd demand that the football team operate as a nonprofit entity in relation to the University, such that any and all profits at the end of the season go directly into the general fund, under the discretion of the trustees, administration, and faculty of the university, never to be spent on football again. Instead of taking away scholarships, I'd demand that Penn State honor all of its football scholarships, even if the players decide to quit playing football or transfer to another university (PSU would have to pay for these students to attend another institution up to the cost of PSU tuition). For starters.

Admittedly, however, it's awfully difficult to separate out the football program for punishment when the football program was able to gain such influence over the institution as a whole. I'm sure we'll continue to have a national conversation about what all this means for Penn State football, forgetting entirely that the fundamental issue of a child abuse cover-up was the direct result of an institutional power imbalance that is not unique to Penn State, and whose evils are not confined to sexual abuse scandals.

Non Gun Owners: It's Your Fault

As the fallout of the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting unfolds, those on the left and right will get busy accusing one another of using a terrible tragedy to make a political point about gun rights versus gun control.

Once we get through this layer of bullshit we'll proceed to a second layer, the debate about whether more guns versus fewer guns present in that Aurora movie theater when the shooting occurred would have made the people there more or less safe.

For the record, I'm of the opinion that the ability to purchase hundreds and thousands of rounds of ammunition on the internet, semi-automatic assault weapons at gun shows, and virtually anything that enables you to fire off 60 rounds in a minute makes all of us less safe, regardless of how many holstered heroes happen to be haunting our public entertainment venues.

Others, however, will argue that if only guns were easier to get and more acceptable to carry with us at all times, tragedies like the Aurora shooting could be curtailed or avoided altogether. Says Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America:

'It is very sad that there was a no-guns policy in that theatre and that nobody had thought to take a gun with them anyway.'

'At a church in the same city four months ago something somewhat similar occurred but with a very different outcome. A dirtbag ran his car into another car in a church parking lot and stormed out of his car, killed a woman, and people were leaving the church at that time. So as soon as he did that somebody that had a concealed firearm drew down and killed the attacker, and his slaughter was put to rest immediately. So a clear take-away message from what happened is "don't go into gun-free zones unless you are willing to break the law".'

'The idea that you tell people they've got to go into a public place without a firearm is setting them up for this kind of disaster. Most of our mass murders have occurred precisely where the criminal knew that he would find unarmed victims, and by and large he has been right.'

You will see plenty of these kinds of arguments, which will begin with an example of an incident in which someone besides the attacker was packing heat, and that person managed to take down the attacker. From this point you will hear arguments that, as such an incident demonstrates, the increased presence of guns only makes us safer, and more of us need to be carrying concealed weapons in public for our own, as well as public, safety. After all, violent criminals tend to stay away from those kinds of movie theaters where they know that everyone inside is strapped; they only prey upon the kinds of movie theaters where they figure it's likely that everyone decided not to bring along a lethal weapon.

Such arguments are contestable head-to-head. Presumably, for example, the fact that the US is up there with the likes of Columbia, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua in per capita gun deaths (and we fight our drug wars in these other countries; not our own) says something about the fact that even if guns make us 'safer' in some sense, they definitely make the consequences of altercation more lethal for us than any comparably developed country in the world.

But once you strip away all the bullshit, all the technocratic arguments by economists and lobbyists for and against greater measures of gun control, and all the sappy stories about modern John Wayne figures gunning down an assailant at the local Church, the real argument of people like Larry Pratt becomes clear.

For Mr. Pratt, the NRA, and the broader gun lobby, the reason some lunatic armed to the teeth with multiple handguns, semi-automatic assault rifles, explosives, and enough rounds of ammunition to hold down a fort for an afternoon was able to take over a movie theater filled with innocent people and commit mass murder comes down to you, average citizen: it's your fault. And if only you were a better educated and more reasonable person, and if only your government would allow you even greater access to deadly weapons, you could have prevented this senseless tragedy. If only you would have had the foresight and the freedom to bring your personal-issue Glock 19 along with you and your children to eat popcorn and watch Batman, you could have mowed down this crazy with a flurry of high-minded civic action right to the chest, and saved your fellow moviegoers from this monster.

This is really what the pro-gun argument comes down to. We don't have enough guns because decent, well-meaning people like you are being stopped by your tyrannical government from pursuing the right of lethal self-protection that you were born to embrace. If only we could get rid of Obama and the liberals and gun restrictions, you would all be free storm your local gun shows and Wal Marts and suit up for combat.

The thing is, I'm personally not very interested in the nuclear detente theory of personal responsibility. I'd like to think that, based on what I'm told by gun lobbyists, it would actually be a greater affront to my individual freedom if I had to think about going to the movies or Church or the grocery store or anywhere outside of my home (which, presumably, should resemble a barracks) as though I lived in Fallujah. Well, I'm sorry Mr. Pratt, but fortunately I don't live in Fallujah, and I'm not interested in conceiving of everywhere I go as a potential war zone, for which I should be packing heat and prepared to use lethal force to protect myself and my loved ones. The fact is, we all deserve better than that, and we can do better than that. The average American, I'd wager, avoids bringing a gun to the movies because the average American doesn't want to live that way, and isn't interested in "protecting" themselves with lethal weapons. We choose not to bring guns to the movies because we don't want to bring guns to the movies, not because the government is stopping us, or because we feel an unwarranted social stigma about carrying.

When you argue that a greater gun presence would make us safer, you're arguing smoke and mirrors. It may even be true that, hypothetically, the good guys would have a better chance against murderous gunmen if the good guys thought of themselves as a militia, and 6 in 10 of them were armed, trained, and prepared to return fire. But in reality this isn't the way we live, nor the way we aspire to live. There will always be crazy people who will do what they can to harm others, and there will always be altercations. Our job as a society is to reduce the lethality of these unfortunate circumstances. Our job as a society is to make it harder for a disaffected individual to purchase 3000 rounds of ammunition on the internet, not to make sure that more of the rest of us are purchasing 3000 rounds of ammunition on the internet as a counterforce.

So go on and say what you will about your twisted utopia in which the imminent threat of death for any person at any time, at home, at the movies, at the store, or at a political speech in the public square guarantees that we're all sufficiently wary and suspicious of one another's lethal intentions that we all keep our concealed weapons in their holsters. But for the rest of us in the real world, freedom means something more that that; and we'll work toward more sensible and desirable solutions to the problem of gun violence.

Do We Want A Really Rich President?

I espouse the radical view that the president of the United States should be held to higher standards than the average person. This doesn't mean that presidents and presidential candidates must be demigods who aren't allowed to make human mistakes, but rather that I have a serious problem with what you could call the Sarah Palin criterion for leadership: the more average, the more appropriate.

I admit that my expectations put presidential candidates in a tricky position: they must be at once exceptional and relatable, elite and populist, above the chatter of daily life and yet very much in touch with the chatterers.

The question then becomes: in what specific ways should our leaders be held to higher standards, and in what ways should they be expected to think like and relate to the average person? A related question is: how elite is too elite?

The second question is perhaps easier to address. Consider intelligence or intellectualism on a scale of zero to absolute elite. Many countries in the world, including the US, would and should be happy with leaders who also happen to be scientists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. These are certainly elite professions, but by and of themselves they don't plausibly remove their practitioners from daily encounters with a multitude of social types. Sure, there are plenty of demagogues who would call someone with a PhD in history from a well regarded state university who makes $56,000 a year on 60-hour work weeks an 'elitist,' but in practice such characterizations are pretty thin. There are always exceptions, of course.

But would you want an Albert Einstein for president? A T.S. Eliot?

I would think not (at least I'm not so sure I would myself), because this is the sort of person whose understanding of the world, while perhaps infinitely valuable to humanity, is so distant from that of the average person that the task of leadership on a national or international scale would seem fraught. Of course the Einsteins and T.S. Eliots of the world could very well make an effort to connect with a breadth of people and demonstrate fitness for high-level political leadership--which is why 'type' or 'profession' should never be absolute barriers to leadership--but they would have to show me something else besides the Theory of Relativity and The Waste Land before they could win my vote for president.

If it's not clear, my point here is that while presidents and other high-level political leaders should be exceptional (to the extent that they can cope with the exceptional expectations of an exceptional job), extreme elitism is something that must be countered and explained for viable presidential candidates. The question of whether such a leader can not only handle the rigors of the job but also keep a finger on the pulse of the common constituency is a legitimate question. Could you imagine T.S. Eliot speaking productively on pedagogy and assessment strategy before a panel of frustrated, inner-city school teachers as a prelude to education policy reform? Could you imagine Einstein making personal calls from the Oval Office to the families of lost and wounded military heroes?

It's easy enough to speculate in this way about various levels of intellectual elitism precisely because America's tolerance for leaders with intellects verging on the elite is extremely low; so low, in fact, that we rarely get a glimpse of that kind of elitism in public office. If President Obama, a lawyer (like everyone else in government) and part-time law school lecturer is considered the extreme end of that spectrum, then, and no offense to Obama, we're a long way off from being ruled by T.S. Eliot or Albert Einstein.

Other forms of extreme elitism, however, would seem more acceptable in mainstream American politics. While having attended Harvard (despite how many people in government have attended Harvard) is considered a relatively extreme mark of elitism (such that all those politicians who attended Harvard have to be pretty quiet about that), having a seven-figure annual income is at worst a neutral reality, and at best the cornerstone of a presidential campaign. Elitism in wealth, to extremes that far surpass any intellectual elitism in government, is conventionally taken not as a sign of removedness, but one of industriousness and, ironically, blue-collar values.

We would be naive to think, however, that extreme wealth doesn't have the ability to separate those who possess it from the average person any less than extreme intellectualism. The likes of Mitt Romney, the obvious and until now unnamed subject of this meditation, does not hunch over the kitchen table to do his taxes once a year the way the rest of us do. He doesn't cram into a bus on the way to work every day; and when he flies, it's not on the way to his only vacation of the year, a 5-day trip to a mid-Atlantic beach, in coach between two screaming infants. When he asks you to borrow money from your parents to attend college, he assumes that your parents, like his did, have money to lend. I could go on.

Now when this kind of elitism, which serves to disconnect in very practical terms the likes of Romney from the quotidian lives of average people, is pointed out, they call it class warfare. What pointing out such realities really is, however, is asking the same kind of question that every one of us, left or right, asks about a presidential candidate: can I relate to this person, or are they so removed from my world in their elitism that I can't trust them to govern on my behalf? Conservatives continue to ask the same question about President Obama; the only difference is that they tend to frame it in terms of Obama's intellectual 'snobbery' or elitism.

So I put the question to you: do you want a really rich president, a president who is in terms of financial elitism more like an Einstein or a T.S. Eliot than is Barack Obama?

An important thing about this question is that, contrary to the way it's too often received, there is no implication that being elite is somehow immoral or a bad thing. Say what you will about Romney, but I certainly don't begrudge him his wealth. No more than I begrudge Einstein his intellect (though if given a choice between the two, I certainly think the latter has brought far more to humanity than Romney's business dealings; but that's another topic). No one says (or ought to say) that in our own private lives we shouldn't be free to pursue wealth or poetry theoretical physics to the apex of our abilities and opportunities. The question is simply whether extreme elitism in any form is something we want in a president. Because right now only one presidential candidate occupies the extreme end of the elitism spectrum, and it ain't Barack Obama. As for me, Mr. Romney will need to show me something apart from his financial elitism that qualifies him for the presidency of the United States; and revealing his offshore bank accounts and labyrinthine trail of semi? legal tax avoidance is no start. If only he were offering that much.

Mitt Romney and the Denial of Personal Responsibility

I have written previously about how political ideology takes on strange forms in the US as a result of arguments based not in principles, but in reaction to political opponents. The politically schizophrenic Mitt Romney embodies this phenomenon, perhaps no more so than in his recent denial of anything to do with Bain Capital post-1999, when some of Bain's dealings resulted in bankrupted companies and mass employee layoffs.

I believe Romney when he says that he wasn't involved in the day-to-day running of Bain post-1999. Further to this point, Fortune has found conclusive evidence that Romeny was not managing Bain funds after he left to run the Olympics.

But this is really beside the point. It's also a demonstrable fact that Romney remained on the books as CEO, President, Chairman, owner, and sole shareholder of Bain through 2002, the period after Romney "left" to run the Olympics and during which the Bain business practices and decisions that have since come under fire occurred. Romney can state all he wants that he wasn't involved directly in Bain's post-1999 questionable actions--and it's true--but that doesn't mean that as paid CEO, President, Chairman, owner, and sole shareholder of the company, he isn't responsible for the actions of the company.

One of the main reasons that CEOs and corporate board members get paid large salaries is because, in such roles, they bear significant responsibility for the actions of the company. For example, if some employee you've probably never heard of makes a mistake that results in a $7 billion loss, it's the CEO's head on a platter. Maybe it's your opinion that guys like Jamie Dimon nevertheless make too much money for what they do; but when guys like Dimon and their defenders justify such high executive-level pay, it's important to note that part of that justification is the remarkable level of responsibility that CEOs and board members are expected to bear.

The important thing about this deal, if we're going to conduct it fairly, is that you don't get to take the big bucks but refuse the responsibility that comes with them. This is why, despite being removed from the day-to-day dealings of his company, Mitt Romney must ultimately admit to some responsibility for what Bain did between 1999-2002. Romney received a large salary, the prestige and accordant benefits of being owner, CEO, etc. of the company; he received these benefits and continued to travel back to Massachusetts regularly for board meetings and company business because he was very much involved--or expected to be involved--in the strategic running of the company.

Instead, Romney shirks his responsibility and denies anything to do with the company during the time in which the company was in his own damn name. He could have made a quick series of statements about "yes I wasn't directly involved, but we did make a few mistakes back then; this happens in business; you win some, you lose some; etc, etc." He could have explained himself. He could have had some faith in his own damn message: that his business record qualifies him to turn the economy around. But alas he did what he seems to do best: equivocate, disavow, and pretend that everyone watching is so stupid that we won't pick up on these things.

What's especially shameful about Romney's handling of the Bain attacks is that, as a Republican, he purports to be all about personal responsibility. You might say personal responsibility is one of the cornerstones of Romney's presidental campaign. But when it comes to taking responsibility for his own company, and with it his own highly remunerated duties of strategic guidance for that company, Romney is simply not interested in personal responsibility.

Increasingly, when people like Romney--conservatives who defend and romanticize the accumulation of wealth absolutely and at all costs--talk about personal responsibility, they're talking about you, not them. They'd prefer that you take responsibility for the fact that you weren't born the son of a millionaire businessman/politician and his politician wife, and may not be able to borrow money from your parents to attend college and get a good education. You take responsibility for the misleading mortgage form you were sold by a huckster; you take responsibility for the underperforming schools in your neighborhood, the last round of layoffs at the company you used to work for, the inability of your insurance company to offer you coverage with your preexisting condition (or that sudden illness that resulted in your bankruptcy). By the way, you also take responsibility for that trader who lost your entire retirement savings, that company that failed but also had to be bailed out by the taxpayer, and that industrial farm whose cattle feed off your subsidy while you struggle to put food on the table for your own family.

If we were serious about personal responsibility, our presidential candidates would own up to what goes on under their vast and ornate corporate roofs. The risks associated with making large investments or providing student loans would be accountable to individuals, rather than socialized and born by the taxpayers. And we probably wouldn't be in this financial mess to begin with.

Addendum:
What's also especially sad about this affair is how easily I can see someone like Romney being genuinely vexed and perplexed by the fact that some people are trying to hold him accountable for the actions of his own company. In Romney's world, there probably is a certain expectation that one with as much privilege and corporate experience as himself can simply kick back with what they take as a corporate board sinecure, do nothing, and let the benjamines roll in without a second thought. I'm sorry to report for the likes of Mitt that you can't have it both ways. Either these corporate board members are super important strategic visionaries who deserve the high pay, and so must be accountable for their super important strategic visions; or they're lazy fucks collecting a paycheck for doing nothing, and they should be scolded for being the bums they are.

The Washington Post and the Subject Fallacy

I have always suggested that media sensationalism does more harm than good. One of the specific ways that media sensationalism does harm is through lazy higher education reporting. A perfect example of this harmful phenomenon is Paul Farhi's Washington Post article, "Truthinessology: The Stephen Colbert Effect Becomes an Obsession in Academia."

This article is made especially awful by the coincidental fact that Farhi has been vocal elsewhere about the need to give journalists a break when reporting sucks. See, for example, his piece in the American Journalism Review titled "Don't Blame the Journalism."

Well, Mr. Fahri, would I be playing too loosely with semantics if I were to, say, blame the journal-ist?

The first thing: a handful of academic articles that place Stephen Colbert within wider disciplinary contexts like political philosophy, political satire, and media studies, cherry-picked out of literally thousands of academic publications since Colbert first appeared on-air, in no way constitutes an "obsession."

Second, characterizing "the college crowd" as "ivory-tower eggheads" who "devote themselves to studying all things Colbertian" would be tantamount to accusing the Washington Post staff, naturally a bunch of hard-drinking, backroom-dealing, source-inventing, sales-grubbing pencilneck grammarians, of an obsession with Justin Beiber because they occasionally print articles on him.

Thirdly, couching this marginal academic interest in a popular television personality--hardly the first time academics in different disciplines have turned their sights on pop-cultural material--as a broader, tongue-in-cheek argument that our nation's colleges and universities are "in big trouble" is a pretty insipid way of making light of the kind of mobilized anti-intellectualism that really does threaten America's colleges and universities (higher education is one of the few things that America is still the best in the world at doing). And I have no doubt that sentences like "These ivory-town eggheads...they've sliced and diced his [Colbert's] comic stylings more ways than a Ginsu knife" are very much designed to play to the anti-intellectual crowd, and to make academics, even those studying Colbert, to appear silly, useless, and out of touch.

Aside from Farhi's playground-style treatment of academic nerds, the big assumption that underlies the article is perhaps the most ridiculous aspect of it. Fahri, like many, trots out the subject fallacy, the idea that the seriousness of the object of study is equivalent to the seriousness of the study itself.

Fahri mounts himself atop the merry-go-round so all the kids can see him standing tall, and proclaims "look at these eggheads! They're studying Colbert! ColBERT! Stephen COLBERT! But STEPHEN COLBERT is on TV! TEE-VEE! Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuppp."

Yes, because Stephen Colbert is a TV comedian, this infantile fallacy goes, we're supposed to think anyone who takes him seriously in an academic context is obviously, prima facie, either a self-important gasbag or an idiot so dimwitted that s/he fails to understand that this, after all, is just comedy, just entertainment, just a bunch of laughs, and for heaven's sake, why take it so seriously?

Why take it seriously that Colbert's show is expressly built on political satire (which Fahri even goes out of his way to demonstrate in his article)? Why take it seriously that guys like Colbert have performed at events like the White House Correspondents' Dinner (an event dedicated to journalists)? Why take seriously that the Colbert Report, as reported in Fahri's Washington Post, has upwards of 1.6 million viewers, as well as international distribution (maybe the WaPo is also obsessed with Colbert?)?

I have written elsewhere about the way the subject fallacy works day-to-day in our perceptions of people like neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists (people who study the brain must be smart, because the brain is what makes us smart!; people who study evolutionary biology must be experts on everything, because everything is part of our natural evolution!), but others have satirized stereotypes-by-academic-subject, like here.

The problem with these ways of thinking is that, quite obviously to anyone who actually bothers to think about it, there are really smart ways and really dumb ways to study the brain, just as there are really smart ways and really dumb ways to study pop-cultural phenomenon like the Colbert Report. Judging these pursuits by the straightforward perception of their objects of study is just nonsensical.

On the topic of Colbert, we tend to have a discomfort with bringing our entertainment into the classroom, lab, or library, which is understandable in light of the fact that most of us flock to entertainment to catch a break from things like the classroom, lab, or library. But just because something popular is studied, doesn't mean the 'study' of it is just entertainment or passive consumption, nor that we are somehow shallow or wrongheaded to develop more serious interests in things that, after all, are watched, loved, hated, and talked about by millions of people every week. To think something like the Colbert Report insignificant to academic study, so much so that it signals a laughable decline of higher education, is ridiculous. We've long had a "cultural studies" battle over whether to teach the greats or whether to teach Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and if you push me on it I'm leaning well toward the greats. But the question isn't one of mutual exclusion. To dismiss pop-cultural material as unworthy of study for no reason other than its popularity is of course a non-argument; but it's especially stupid because it takes a high level of relevance as a reason for irrelevance, complete nonsense.

Doing Public Humanities Wrong in Galway

The Volvo Ocean Race is a sailing race around the world, culminating in a giant, international festival at its final port. This year's race finished in Galway, giving the little port city on the Western coast of Ireland a chance to show off a little.

Since the city has two main universities--the flagship National University of Ireland, Galway and the 'polytechnic' Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology--the boat race festival was also a chance to set up shop and show visitors what interesting research and degree opportunities are going on at the universities.

You may have seen this kind of thing before, as it's a common and necessary form of university PR: large tents with different stations for each broad academic discipline, attendant representatives of the school or discipline, flyers, brochures, etc.

As someone with interest in the public humanities, I love stopping by these setups to see what kind of public face a university school or department puts on. What strategies are at work? What kind of marketing is happening? What does it look like the school of engineering or the school of arts and humanities or the school of biological sciences wants you to know about it when you wander into the tent with a sausage in one hand, a beer in the other, and an open mind?

As the title of this piece suggests, I was a bit disappointed in the school of humanities presentation, and I'll explain why.

Let's first state the obvious: if you're manning the science booth at one of these things, you can make putty out of flour or erupt a paper mache volcano with baking soda and vinegar and call it science, and the kiddies will gather round. But what the hell do you do at the arts and humanities booth?

Here's what not to do: don't position your booth (or be positioned) behind a barrier to the entrance of the tent, in a corner with your back to the entrance, essentially telling anyone who enters with curiosity to go the fuck away from you. Don't stick some unenthusiastic graduate student on the booth all day who will do nothing but stare at her laptop and refuse to look up when people come by to browse or chat (you never know; the person coming by to chat with you might just be a humanities professor! OK, now I see why she wasn't looking up.). Don't label your booth 'creativity,' then decorate with nothing, show no visual aids, have no performers or depictions of performance, and hide behind a few crates of flyers on courses like 'Writing,' which may be quite valuable and unique, but aren't self-evidently so without an engaging person to explain (yeah, I looked up the Writing MA and found that it's actually a very interesting blend of training in creative, technical, and other forms of writing; something that if properly explained would be advantageous for a range of professional pursuits).

I mean, yeah, it is a little bit easier to engage the public with mildly explosive chemical reactions than flyers on writing classes, but for fuck's sake would you try a little? The humanities aren't a point-and-know set of disciplines. You don't just raise a finger and say 'loook [at this flyer]!' and win hearts and minds. You have to do a bit of talking, engage, perform. If you're going to commit the venial sin of lumping together humanities work with art or performance (venial in the context of a public humanities presentation; cardinal otherwise), then, by the grace of god, please have some performers. Bring a musician; a painter, a couple actors to do theater shorts; anything! Performance and visual art are your point-and-know tools, and, despite a graphic of Venetian masks displayed below the word 'creativity,' you performed nothing but isolation and disaffection, and you created nothing but a microclimate of self-defeated fuckoffishness. What else? Show them a copy of the New Yorker or something, bring in a food or film critic, maybe a librarian with an old first edition and some plastic gloves. At least give them something to touch.

The point I'm making here is that if you want people to care about arts and humanities work, you have to make the effort. If you have a platform, why waste the opportunity? It's not easy; but you didn't choose it because you thought it would win you fame, fortune, acclaim, and press releases. If you're in the humanities with any sincerity, it's your responsibility teach the stuff. Otherwise, you'd be better off using the pages of that novel to build a paper mache volcano.

The Higgs Boson and 'Mass' Hysteria

Simply stated, the work they're doing at CERN toward the discovery of the Higgs boson--the elusive particle that makes mass possible and holds together the Standard Model of the universe--is really cool and really important. No one should doubt that, nor should they doubt that figuring out essentially how the universe is put together is a truly amazing accomplishment. I don't even care if no application ever arises from this discovery, because I have always believed that knowledge possesses its own power, its own value, its own pleasures, and its own significance in the universe of the human mind. We should always be willing to find more and more ways of seeking knowledge for itself, lest we betray ourselves and our fundamental nature as humans.

However, the universe we live in also happens to be one of limited resources and unlimited problems. Within this universe, when we sensationalize the value or importance of one kind of knowledge, we necessarily do so at the expense of other kinds. In other words, in terms of the cultural capital we accord certain types of knowledge production and discovery, sensationalism and inflation of value lead not to discovery and better knowledge, but to ideology.

What is ideology?

First, what isn't ideology--at least in no feasible sense--is something that can be objectively demonstrated or satisfactorily addressed as a falsifiable question. For example, one could argue plausibly that gravity is a form of ideology, but to do so would be ridiculous, as there are properties of the natural world (like gravity) that we experience as a constant. You can't undo the 'ideology' of gravity by launching yourself off a 30-story building (or maybe you can; but I suspect you'll never get around to publishing that paper in the event).

Apart from constants of the natural world that we rightly and heuristically exempt from the category of ideology, how do we know that something has become an ideology?

Quite simply, something has become an ideology when it becomes a dominant social tenet, such that questioning that tenet is a minority act, an act of subversion.

For example, American exceptionalism--the belief that the US is qualitatively different from and special in relation to every other country in the world, and ought to act and be treated as such--is an ideology. If you question it publicly, or even hint at the possibility that it's not absolutely true, you'll be ostracized (ask Barack Obama about this one).

Returning to the discovery of the Higgs, when we sensationalize the discovery, we move away from the true value and credibility of the science, and into the ideology of scientism. Here is an example, from the Economist, of that rhetorical movement from science (a statement of knowledge) to scientism (the ideology that denies all importance of any form of knowledge not derived by the scientific method):

Its significance is massive. Literally. Without the Higgs there would be no mass. And without mass, there would be no stars, no planets and no atoms. And certainly no human beings. Indeed, there would be no history.

Above, we can see a fallacy at work, the wild conflation of the importance of the Higgs boson itself with the importance of the discovery of the Higgs. Implied in this passage is the idea that discovering the Higgs somehow accounts for all of humanity and human history, when in fact the Higgs (or whatever it is) has obviously preexisted its human discovery, and humanity has obviously produced something infinitely larger and more significant than the sum of its particles.

I do understand about as well as anyone that a discovery can smack you upside the head and cause an emotional, even irrational exuberance for what has been discovered and accomplished; and I do think people should celebrate such great discoveries and accomplishments. The problem is that we don't need to sour them by inflating them, sensationalizing them, and, ultimately, overstepping the bounds of our own knowledge and understanding such that we're speaking as scientists for all of human flourishing, for everything reduced to a particle that, after all, we never even created.

It would be ridiculous to think that the whole, or even the whole English-speaking world--would gather for a press conference on the discovery that Thomas Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare in the writing of All's Well that Ends Well. Yet this isn't the case because the discovery of the Higgs is necessarily--that is, without QUESTION or DEBATE--more important to human life and flourishing than a factoid about a Shakespeare play. Indeed, a discovery that would enable us to more readily provide food and water to impoverished, starving, dying people throughout the world would be more important in someone's universe than a fascinating determination about THE UNIVERSE. But if we take these discoveries for themselves, on their own merits: on one hand is the fundamental enabler of the physical universe, with which our interactions are always mediated by human experience and perception. On the other is the creation of one of the greatest works of artistic achievement in human history. Is the physical universe more universal than human creation and cooperation? Is a particle larger than a factoid? At least ask the question, right?

The biggest reason among many that a Shakespeare press conference would seem ridiculous is that the primacy of scientific discovery is ideological. By definition, you don't question whether the significance and interest of Shakespeare's authorship of a play are even comparable to those of the Higgs discovery. You wouldn't dare think to ask the question. You'd have to be insane, maybe superstitious, anti-science. You would be labeled an ideologue.

Watching With Others

Perhaps the most striking moment of Sean Penn's 2007 film adaptation of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild is when Christopher McCandless, fatigued, ragged, and dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness, summons just enough energy to lift his body to a writing surface and scratch into his journal:

"Happiness is only real when shared."

Though "happiness" is at once the most relatable goal and the most elusive, the ontology of this statement is both important and generalizable beyond the search for happiness: what we feel inside is only meaningful--becomes real--when others can relate to and participate in it.

When I watched Into the Wild I watched most of it alone, my own thoughts operating in isolation. The film was expectedly disappointing, with occasional moments of force, and some whiney, self-indulgent background songs in the recognizable voice of Eddie Vedder. In case it's not clear, this is me thinking aloud.

And then I was joined by someone else for that poignant scene in which McCandless/Supertramp appears to turn, his happiness appears to turn on something bigger than his zealous pursuit of absolute self-reliance, and we learn that the happiness of sitting alone eating an apple on the roadside with no pressing commitments isn't as real or as meaningful as the happiness shared with each of the supporting characters that McCandless/Supertramp meets along the way. Here was a very young man dying alone, recognizing that somewhere he had gone catastrophically wrong. No matter the degree of critical optimism or Thoreauvian romanticization one applies to the final moments of the film, this was a scene of piercing regret. In the presence of another person, I was no longer alone in watching a man die alone; and then my bitter thoughts about the film turned reflective in new context. Without conversing about what we had seen, we were both made to acknowledge in the presence of one another that what we were watching could no longer be rationalized out of existence as an artistic shortcoming stretched beyond its emotive limitations by Eddie Vedder's sappy (and award-winning) score. Now we had to admit in the real world of us that there was a lesson here, maybe even a great moment in film.

The same kind of realization strikes us in much less complicated way when we watch a comedy with others versus by ourselves. You find yourself laughing aloud at Will Farrell in a room full of people, yet when you're watching alone you hardly make a peep. It's not that Will Farrell isn't funny when you're alone, but that your experience of humor changes in the presence of others.

In this context (and for another post), I wonder what people are thinking when they propose to teach novels, history, philosophy, religion, etc. online, to a bunch of isolated information-uptake vessels?