Ok.  It’s a couple hours before the presidential debate.    I will of course be watching.  Predictions?

My instinct is that Kerry will do better than expected.  Despite his mean ‘rep, George Bush is acutally *not* a great debater.  On issues he loses.  He wins with swagger and “down home” style.  In a debate where people know about and and care a lot the issues at steak, Bush is vunerable.    Insofar as this debate may end up being more debate than style show, Bush could be in trouble.  His huge mistakes about social security etc when debating Al Gore went unnoticed.  Mistakes and confusions about Iraq will not be ignored in the same way.  People care about this stuff.  If Bush strays from his script even a little, the resulting confusions will hurt him. 

Kerry’s also become better at turning the tables, by pointing repeatedly to events on the ground in Iraq, instead of defending and explaining his vote to go to war.  For every Bush” “We were attacked.  [pause]  Attacked!”  Kerry can reply by pointing to the present disaster. 

So things have evened out for Kerry.  Moreover, Bush will have to lie tonight.  He’ll perhaps give up a little more than expected, by admitting to some difficulties.  But I’m guessing that the Bush penchant for lying big will overcome the more sensible method of deception that admits to obvious truths, and lies only where believability can be achieved.

Bush, lying, will be in a postion of covering up, which will eventually distrtact and annoy him, drag him down, by making him seem a little more hunted than he wants to be.

Hopefully Kerry will not look too Orange, or be dogged by little debate lights.  If his voice is in good shape and he looks ok, the dynamic of the dabate should be his, as he will get to occupy the moral high ground of truth teller–a role he knows and can reprise from the early 70’s. 

If the debate stays light and friendly, Bush wins.  If it gets serious, it will get *really* serious, and Kerry will end up the winner, if he can seem to issue statesmanlike, rather than shrill denunciations of Bush’s policy.  I think kerry knows this, can do this, and will press Bush hard.

Bush gets a little off-program, a little tounge-tied, and generally seems on the defensive against a presidential Kerry.  The media is feeling embarrassed and will try not to “Gore” Kerry as horribly as they did Al–and the issues at steak in this first debate will not be so easily overshadowed by micro-gaffes, skin-tone questions, or wardrobe issues. 

My geuss is that Kerry leads in national polls by the middle of next week.

That’s what I see.  I’ll post this now, and leave it up.  We’ll see shortly how very right I am.

Some problems viewing the site using Internet Explorer today.  Hopefully these are now resolved, though the site does continues to look pretty terrible viewed with IE.

Anyone still using Explorer might do well to consider an alternative.

I noticed today a horrible abomination.  This:

This is of course the Oak Street Book storage facility.  I spied it from Neil street.  It was on the opposite side of the railroad tracks, stuck in between a power transformer and cement factory.  Traditionally, a library and the books it contains were at the physical and symbolic heart of universities everywhere.  But no more.  They’re now shipped to the periphery, along with the hazardous materials sheds and the aquaculture ponds. 

It will not be possible for patrons to browse the books at Oak Street, since they will be arranged not by subject, but by size, and they will be stored in bins requiring the use of a forklift to access.  You’ll need to know what you want, and order it through a computer.  Then it will be shipped to you. 

I know I’ve been spoiled here at UI, with its wonderful Library bookstacks, in which most of the university’s collection has been browsable to grad students and faculty.  This is especially useful in subject areas lacking adequate bibliographies.  It’s a shame to lose such a resource, and consign rarely used books to this massive cold storage shed.

I was shocked, too, to find the big bookshed in an industrial zone.  If any train should happen to derail, UI’s book collection will disappear in just a few minutes.  The collection will be vulnerable to anybody with a grudge against UI who can put a piece of scrap metal on the tracks.

Past generations here at uiuc have added-on to the main bookstacks, as recently as the 1970’s.  Obviously in the 1970’s a remote storage facility would have been an option, but it was then considered important to keep the collection together and browsable.  While many universities with large collections and little space available on campus have turned to remote storage in the last couple of decades, uiuc’s central bookstacks seemed to be in unusually fine shape, with only a large parking lot behind the main stacks, and another large parking lot catty-corner to the main library, adjoined in by soccer fields and tennis courts.  UI’s original planners took care to leave plenty of room for the library.

Yet when room in the stacks began to run low this time ’round, it was decided not to expand the stacks, but to remove much of UI’s libarary collection a storage shed next to the railroad tracks.  Why was this?  There was space available.  Was it for the good of the books?  Well, perhaps not.  Here’s why, more likely:

The college of business and commerce wants the space that would in the past have been used by the library.  They want to put a new “landmark” business building in the parking lot near the library, and stick a parking deck (presumably) in the place that previous generations had saved for library expansion.

I noticed the above picture in some UI fundraising materials.  It includes,  you’ll note, a model of the future expanded “business campus,” complete with a large structure, wrapping around the stacks, supporting cars instead of books.

This is of course the contemporary state of the humanities in higher education.

I noticed today that our local Meijer superstore is selling little yellow ribbon stickers, that one can affix to one’s car to “support the troops.”  Meijer’s ribbon sticker is smaller and more subtle than most of those I’ve around, but I’m glad anyway to have finally discovered at least one source of such stickers.  Since seeing the first of them I’ve sort of been wondering where they come from.  Is there there somewhere a secret Tristero distributing these?  Were they coming from Clear Channel, or Wal-Mart, or some local churches?  It was a strange mystery.  (Oddly, these yellow stickers link service in the SCWOT to Irwin Levine’s simple,pretty song about a man returning form prison with a sense of moral guilt, who’s asking for forgiveness.  How much, I wondder, of Levine’s ambivalence is supposed to echo in these plastic magnetic ribbons?).

More the point however, I’ve been wondering where I can get my hands on one of those “Yesterday, Today, Forever: THE CHIEF” bumper stickers I’ve lately seen around town.  I wandered into one of campus’s most bitterly pro-Chief merchandisers yesterday, and cased the joint, to no avail.  So my quest continues for one of the oddly off color (orange and off-red?) and nasty little stickers.

You may perhaps ask why I would want one.  Well, I’ve been thinking about them lately and sort of wanted to scan it as an image for a possible article about the recent and sure to increase nastiness of the “Chief” Illiniwek acrimony here on campus.  It would be a sequel to this one.

I got the following email from the PRC a couple weeks ago:

Dear friends,

Have you seen the pro-”Chief” bumper stickers on vehicles around town?

(For those of you who haven’t seen them, they say, “The Chief:
YESTERDAY, TODAY, FOREVER” — a direct and disturbing reference to  racist
Governor George Wallace’s famous quote, “Segregation
yesterday, today, and forever”).

This is disturbing, but it is probably not exactly true, or is at least controvertible, since Wallace himself was quoting an old hymn.  I think it was this 1890 hymn that really popularizes the phrase, which is itself Biblical , coming from Hebrews 13:8 of the KJV.  This is all from the first page resulting from a google search for the phrase. 

So, do these pre-Wallace uses of the phrase let the pro-Chiefer’s off the hook?

No.  In fact they make the whole thing ever worse.    Why, we should ask, are the Pro-chief’ers using an expression of Biblical undefeatability to announce their determination to “celebrate” traditions and people who were historically non-Christian?

Moreover, it turns out that the writer of the popular 1890 hymn “Yesterday, Today, Forever” is Albert B. Simpson, who happens to have been a strident and influential champion of Christian Missionary work, meant to extirpate native religious beliefs and practice.  At the turn of the last century, Simpson was among America’s most influential American proponents of Protestant missonary work.  A world cat. search for works by or about Simpson produces 62 items, including a filmstrip and a musical (not yet available on DVD, I fear). 

In hymns like the ‘The Missionary Cry’ and tracts like his 1925 ‘Missionary Messages” Simpson insists that “the heathen world is still lying in darkness and crying to God against the unfaithfulness of His people,” and take as his life’s mission the effort to redeem Heathen souls by converting them to Christianity–”a religion that is not going to stop until all evils are banished from this globe.”  (MM, 110).

By taking a Biblical phrase, popularized by an anti-Heathen missionary and later famously employed to defend Southern Segregation, the Pro-Chief’ers are hardly being subtle.  This is the newly emboldened anti-intellectual rhetoric of the redneck Crusade that one hears from a Christian right increasingly ready to issue a brazen “fuck you” to those it opposes.

It stands in contrast to the recent “compromise” resolution passed by the BOT (since removed from all public UI webpages), that promises to keep honoring and celebrating Native Americans on the uiuc campus, regardless of what any any Native groups or individuals might have to say about it. 

Though the text of the BOT’s resolution has been removed from public view, you can get a sense of its flavor from honorthechief.org, which now announces on it main web page:

Not only do we want to honor the Chief, but we wish to offer a higher vision of the tradition and its future value, and encourage research and educational efforts that preserve, respect, and reaffirm our Illini heritage.

This is the face the pro-chief movement likes to put forward on its slick website.  But the orange-and-red stickers one sees around town, echoing the words of George Wallace, Albert Simpson, and Hebrews 13:8 tell a different and uglier story.

So, I live in a house built perhaps around 1930.  It’s two stories tall, capped by an attic, and mounted on a very unfinished basement.  It’s covered in some not-very-pleasing yellowish aluminum siding, and set on one of the busier streets in this medium-sized town here in Central Illinois.  The house sits on a somewhat barren lot, that contains three trees and a large gravel driveway or parking lot. 

Functional but unbeautiful, this is clearly a rental property.  The house is subdivided into an upper and lower apartment.  I occupy the somewhat larger lower level, which is a space that includes some some well-preserved hardwood floors, a fireplace, and seventeen windows.  It also contains some horrible linoleum, some tacky wood paneling, and some horrid acoustic tiles on the ceiling.  It’s an interesting old building that’s been sadly ignored, as layers of ugly, utilitarian, and amateur coatings and coverings have slowly swallowed up what was once a decent and well-assembled little home.

Which brings me then to Harvey.  He’s the landlord.  And he scrupulously maintains the place.  So scrupulous is he in fact, that almost every day he is to be found wandering around the outside of the apartment, doing maintenance of an indeterminate kind.    He’s picking up twigs from the messy Sycamore tree.  He’s poking at the gutters.  He’s watering the nasty chive-type plant.  He’s doing I don’t usually know quite what.  But he’s there. 

I woke up the other day (the international day of the Other) around 8 or so, to find Harvey (not unusually)  standing squarely in front of my North window, watering something.  I sat at my desk, in the south bay window, and perhaps 10 minutes later he was standing right outside that one jiggling a gutter.  He remained there for several minutes before again disappearing.  Then he was in the basement, where you could hear him moving things about.  Now, I’m not sure why, but somehow Harvey’s random circling around my apartment was beginning to freak me out.  I decided to leave the apartment, perhaps to get a taco.

When I opened the door from my apartment into the front hallway, there was Harvey.  Harvey was perched on the stairs that ascend to the second floor apartment, leaning out from them to change a hallway lightbulb that I’m quite sure hadn’t burnt out (I discovered later that he’d installed an incandescent lightbulb of a strange greenish yellow color) .  I said hello to harvey and ducked under him and headed to my car.  I noticed as I turned the key in the ignition that one of those fat brown web-weaving spiders had built an enormous web across the passenger seat and now appeared to be hovering next to my head.

Ok, so the spider is not harvey’s fault.  And one cannot dislike him (Harvey that is) too much—two years ago he had a heart-attack raking leaves on my front lawn (I was gone, and he called for help on his cellphone).  For a while after, his kids would come over and rake leaves.  And I offered to help a few times.  But he continues to appear most days, performing random and often unnecessary maintenance tasks.  And though his terrible repairs are slowing encrusting the property with ugliness, his compulsive conscientiousness is I guess preferable to the hostile neglect practiced by most landlords.   

Yet the persistent popping up of Harvey in front of this or that window is beginning to get a little disconcerting.  And his recent desire to install a plastic shower stall in my bathroom, covering up a window does not meet with my approval, any more than his green-yellow hall light, or the taupe-colored faux wood paneling that cover the walls of the kitchen.  The project of finishing my dissertation, finding gainful employment, and acquiring a place of my own is looking better and better all the time.

Other news includes:

Yesterday: tried some delicious fried Mandoo w/April at that one Korean place on campus.  More experiments in Korean food to come, I think.

Also yesterday: had some fantastic office hour conversations with three very sharp students.  Two of these concerned Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited”–a subtle sad story that contains a number of details that I missed on first reading it.  These conversations  reminded me why it is occasionally possible to really love teaching.

A fine weekend, including a couple of lovely get-togethers, courtesy of the English and Philosophy departments.  Just what I needed, really.  A succession of short standing-up conversations that were almost but not exactly meaningless.  The philosophy party inexplicably had a dj, but no one danced till he left and somebody plugged her ipod into the system.  It was the kind of slightly reckless late night house party that perhaps tends to vanish from one’s life in one’s thirties, if not earlier.  Giant perfectly white waste treatment tanks loomed from across a field that faced the house.  Little chairs were in the house’s driveway.  Pinkish floodlights  gave the tanks an alien glow,  keeping them safe from vandals and rascals.  One must suppose these tanks were filled with excrement, but that was ok, and it was good that they were there.

Hmm.  All this portentous mystery this may be a clue that I’ve been teaching _Heart of Darkness_ in my fiction class.  Not having read the text in a number of years I was stunned and kind of taken aback by the nastiness of Conrad’s description of Africans, and I showed up ready to defend myself for having assigned such a thing.  Well, of course there only one person in the class willing to suppose out loud that the novel might possibly be racist in any way.  And generally, the class was bored and annoyed, prompting me to eventually mention a participation problem—a step that is almost always a bad idea.

Reading HOD again, I was struck not just by its racism, but also by what seemed a kind of a basic stupidity in th novel.  I’ve fallen out of sympathy with poor Conrad, I suppose.  I mean, tell me, just how clumsy is this:

[mysterious sage Marlow opines about Colonialism:]  “‘What redeems it is the idea only.  An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; an an unselfish belief in the idea–something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . .’

He broke off.

Ok.  Hmm.  The white man, worshiping an idol?  The horror!  And in case you don’t get the point of Marlow’s dark insinuation, this idea will be repeated every 5 or 10 pages throughout the rest of the novella.  What drums like church bells, you say!?  Good God, what can you mean, man!?

This annoyance aside, the Africa of C’s novel demands attention—I can’t help thinking about the reports of war and cannibalism from out of northern Congo now.  Despite the rapacious evil of the Colonial project (then, as now), Conrad’s narrator at least cares enough about the Africans he describes to despise them.  The bland indifference to the novel I felt today from my students creeped me out even more than Conrad’s descriptions of devilish cannibals.* 

In Conrad’s hateful descriptions there seems to be something *wrong* at least—with the narrator, with the Company, with the abjection of the Africans, or with God, who must be guilty, either of having produced a lower race, or for allowing a people to be enslaved and debased as a result of historical accident.  Or perhaps God is blamable here only for his absence (in which case we circle back then to Marlow’s Colonial idol).  I dislike in Conrad his iconophobic unwillingness to get beyond exhausted despair at the prospect of even a little idolatry, or to consider carefully what might constitute idolatry.  For Conrad any tolerance of idolatry can lead only to monstrous Kurtzian idols.  Conrad therefore, like Marlow, simply  stops dead at the thought of human-made meaning — a move that forever cuts off African worshipers of strange Gods from Conrad’s human community.

Still, despite his racism, Conrad troubled by problems observes in the Congo, and gets credit for that.  Whereas my students seemed disengaged by the problems of Africa—at least as presented in Conrad’s novel, and perhaps more broadly.  HoD leads readers to attempt to identify the wrongness of events in the Congo–a point at which things seem to become murky, and we are left with one or more overwhelming and necessary question(s).

If the class seems quiet again Wednesday, I will try to bring this a little more fully into view.

Tonight, Sidney perhaps.  Need to wrap up this section posthaste and try try onwards.

[EDIT 9/19:  Raised this all quite pointedly in class on Friday.  The class seemed gradually to awaken to the issues here, or perhaps to notice the presence of issues to which they were already awake in a novel which had not immediately revealed them.  Sadly, class ended just as many students began participating in earnest.  Perhaps it is not too late for the class to achieve a higher level of participation and interest.]

This post, accidently made public, has been removed.

I wonder if you’ve seen this:

I hadn’t.  And sure, Kerry’s just an editor here, and presumably didn’t choose the cover picture on this 1971 collection of essays.  But still.  Despite the the odd expression of the fellow in the middle of the picture, this is pretty impressive.  As is Kerry’s 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Too bad I wouldn’t have come across this unless I’d poked around in right-wing anti-Kerry blogosphere.

It’s almost enough to make me like Kerry.  Or at least consider liking him, as a guy who’s a hardly the lamely chipper “reporting for duty” fellow we watched salute at the Democratic convention. 

What else would I’d like to see?  I’d like to ask anti-Kerry repubs who snipe at Kerry’s “unpatriotic” 1971 comments a simple question or two:  Ok, so you claim Kerry was unAmerican for criticizing free fire zone and search-and-destroy missions as “war crimes.”  Fine.  Ok.  So, then (Mr Rove, etc.), you *support* bringing back the kill-zones and destroy missions to which Kerry objected? 

How easy it would be to turn these questions into a consideration of the Bush admin’s disregard for human rights, and willingness to use torture violence as first resorts.

But we’ll see no radical Kerry this election cycle.  Except perhaps from the Republicans.  Who knows—watching Republican accounts of Kerry may be the only way to discover a chord of decency in him that makes him worth voting for.

Here is a place for miscellaneous writing.  Like the belly of certain whales, it will fill with detritus and musty old ships.  Its cavernous interior might easily be taken for either Heaven or Hell, and it will move about slowly, resembling from afar a pleasant island.