Remember this John Kerry?  The Rudepundit does.  A good read.

Erg.  That was surely the most grinding week of the semester.  Conferencing with all my rhetoric students in the morning and afternoon, and grading in the evening the papers to be handed back the next day.  Grade and discuss.  Grade and discuss.  With some occasional car-fixing errands in the late afternoon, and some reading and planning for my fiction class jammed into the cracks. 

But now, it’s done.  And I have time for a quick posting or two.  I must say that this week has been more than enough to inspire serious second thoughts in me about the whole academic project.  So much effort into the grading and conferencing, for such little recognition!  There are no classics of paper-grading.  My graded papers will not likely find themselves canonized and anthologized in the “Best American Paper Comments, 2004″ edited by John Updike.  Alas.

So, last week is gone.  And all that’s here now is an ickily warm Halloween weekend. 

But there is some good news.  My voip phone is up and running well so far.  My car has been somewhat repaired.  After getting the distributor fixed I drove the car home, where it promptly died again.  I had it towed to a new mechanic (who like the last one told the the problem was likely the distributor).  I had him replace the engine computer with the one I snagged from ebay, and the car to started right up.  So there.

Last weekend also I caught a couple neat spectacles.  Stanley Fish and Ann Kaplan came to town to debate with Cary Nelson on “The Future of the Humanities.”  Fish (is this man ever right about *anything*?) not only launched into a defense of a strictly apolitical humanities, but announced that if he were Cary Nelson’s Dean, he’d fire Nelson on the spot, for a classroom exercise in which Nelson said he substituted the names for Iraqi citys for Vietnamese ones, when introducing some anti-Vietnam War poetry from the 60’s.  (Fish recapitualted agruments you can find in the NY Times essay he published back in June).

Fish made a spectacle of himself and made useful discussion difficult.  He said some silly things about Samson Agonistes, too.  I may hunt down his article on the subject, although my dissertation studiously avoids Milton. 

The most interesting material from the talk came by way of reference to Bill Reading’s book on The University of Excellence, which seemed pretty useful. 

But more eloquent than Fish et. al. on the subject of the post-human and the post-humanities last weekend was the show I caught last Sunday by Captured by Robots!.  While the academics bemoaned the university of meaningless excellence, JBOT and his robotic captors delivered the post-human excellence via a gang of threatening robots and projections of sadly disturbing exercise tapes from the late 80’s.

The show was not musically amazing and was kind of frightening to watch.  JBOT’s band and captors are robots, which he must control (or, erm…be controlled *by,* I mean…) and speak for while playing his own instrument, making witty remarks, dealing with semi-heckling audience participation, and occasionally noting that “no, really” he *was* looking for a place in town to sleep for the evening.  He was good, vamping aptly, even if the whole thing had a kind of nervous tight-rope quality to it. 

The Humanities Lecture and Captured by Robots! exhibited the same eviscerated human figure,  surrounded by gleaming machine that present a hostile and meaningless excellence.  It was JBOT though, who’s entrails were literally hanging from his body,  who tightrope-or-no seemed to have more fun.

*-”Crudesence,” it seems to my surprise isn’t actually a word.  But it sounds good.  Not of course to be confused with “cruentation”–the bleeding of the wounds of the dead, that occurs when the murderer is brought near the body of his victim.

I’d wanted to write a thoughtful word or two on higher education.  If I had energy I could whip up something urbane and thoughtful on this.  But here are some notes towards a real argument I haven’t got time to make.  The _Chronicle_ will have to wait. 

This last week I was feeling nostalgic for Allan Bloom, to the point that I picked up a used copy of his old _Closing of the American Mind_.  Maybe thinking about Father Fitzgerald put me in mind of Bloom, who as college freshman I admired.  I owned a copy of his book and brought the U Chicago course cataloge with me to UI, to replicate the U Chicago liberal arts education as much as possible at the big State U, where I decorated my dorm room with Matthew Arnold poems, before setting out to discern and defend the Truth.  (Cute, yes?  But also more than that, maybe.)

Around 1993 however, I was weened from Bloom.  And looking back at COTAM now, he certainly seems an  unpleasant and dangerous character.  And a man of strong stupid prejudices, of many kinds.  But I’ve been moving back to Bloom in some ways.  I’m sure everyone read the NYT Suskind piece on GW Bush and the “Faith Based Presidency” (if you somehow haven’t, you should).    I was struck by one part of the piece (discussed by Philosoraptor), that seems to have folks a-talkin:

Now, where does this kind of thing come from? 

The [Bush] aide said that guys like me were ‘’in what we call the reality-based community,’’ which he defined as people who ‘’believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘’That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’’ he continued. ‘’We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’’

Where does this kind of thinking come from?  Well, it seems like the kind of Nietzschian line conventionally attributed to Bloom’s mentor, Leo Strauss, who declaimed against such relativism, but sometimes uttered cryptic things about esoteric teachings.  Strauss and Bloom were not only the intellectual leaders of the “Culture Wars” of the 80’s and 90’s, but as it turns out the teachers of many of the key figures in the Bush administration.  Were Strauss and Bloom leaders of a cynical neo-gnostic cabal of authoritarian faux-foundationalists?  I can’t tell you.  But there at least a degree of influence here. 

But the Straussian emphasis on *doing* rather than knowing, eerily echoed by the Bush aide who Sukind quoted may point to a significant failure on the part of cultural studies and text-based social criticism that on almost all accounts is now in a period of advanced crudesence.*  While left-leaning intellectuals asked their students to interpret or deconstruct texts, or to show how texts work upon readers, traditionalist critics like Bloom consistently pressed the question of right action.  For Bloom, like Strauss, Political Science was really the chief science–uniting the sciences and the humanities.  And the end is action:

They [political scientists] therefore engage in policy studies who’s end, whether it is stated or not, is action.  Defense of freedom, avoidance of war, the furthering of equality–various aspects of justice in action–are hot subjects of study.  The good regime has to be the the theme of such political scientists, if only undercover, and they are informed by the question “What is to be done?”

Bloom may have been a racist and a sexist; but at least he was never one to foolishly insist on an Ivory Tower of intellectualism disassociated from politics, a la Stanley Fish.  It should be clear now that the critical practices of Strauss and Bloom contained a radical potential that often went unappreciated by “Cultural Studies,” even thought the cultural transformation advocated by Bloom and Strauss was in most ways deeply reactionary (though Chris Hitchens types are fond of noting a liberal idealism in the expansive plans of Paul Wolfowitz and others). 

Bloom’s advocacy of “What is to be done?” education is more than a little joke at the expense of Leninists.  His nominally conservative educational program seems to offer real radical potential.  Some of Bloom’s worthwhile principles:

1) Questions about the moral values of actions of literary characters should not be ignored, or dismissed on the grounds that asking such questions sentimentally asks readers to overlook the ways that texts work to construct character and plot.

2) The imperative to “always historicize” likewise cannot be an excuse to avoid dealing directly with the moral claims and arguments of texts we discuss.

3) Liberal arts faculty should push for an integrated curriculum that encourages political and ethical questions to be posed across classes. 

4) Questions about “how the text works on us” cannot be allowed to eclipse questions that students (and teachers) need to face squarely as to the nature and justification of their own beliefs. 

For most of my students here at UI, beliefs come from mom and dad and church.  Bloom convincingly insists that that education should involve a reassessment of one’s own deeply held beliefs, and not merely asking students to deconstruct and historicize texts that are all merely exterior forms of entertainment.  This was probably the reason for my attraction to him as a college freshman, and it remains attractive now.  So, yes, back to Bloom, I think.  Kind of.

The left, if it wants to combine “studies” with action would do well, I think, to appropriate some of the methods and language of Bloomian liberalism.  We don’t need to adopt Bloom’s conservatism to appropriate the metods he advocates.  We don’t especially need to say with Bloom that rock music is a bunch of “hymms to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents.”  And if we do, we could always mean it as a compliment.

So it looks like the new One Main building in Downtown Champaign will soon house some neat stuff.  There are ambitious plans for Downtown Urbana, too; which could certainly use a little livening up.  Because sometimes that lonely Bierkenstock store just isn’t enough…

Life, lately, is difficult.  My car was fixed yesterday.  Or rather, fixed enough to make it home before dying again.  So now, fruitless dispute with the deceptive garage, and I will be taking the car to another place.  These confused mechanics probably replaced a perfectly fine distributor, but now they claim that since I was able to drive it home, and since I had them install a used distributor, they own me nothing.  (they are wrong, surely?)

I think the problem, actually, probably *is* the computer; however I — with by big torso and forearms, and hands, — am simply too large to curl up under the dashboard and get my hands up where they need to go to replace the computer myself.  Trying to do this I broke a stupid bolt that for some reason you needed to turn *right* to loosen (wtf?).  The new mechanic I plan to take my car to won’t be available til Tuesday.  So today I took the bus to get a haircut and some groceries, because I’ve been looking like kaspar hauser lately, while living off Jimmy John’s sandwich delivery, and food I could scavenge from the gas stations here on North Prospect Avenue.  Truly, I have become a feral grading creature.

******

Two days ago, attentive readers will recall, I signed up with Lingo’s voice over IP service.  (Even now my new phone box is hurtling towards me through space, somewhere between New Stanton, PA and Champaign, in the Brown belly of UPS).

The day after I signed-up, and after tdq noted that with services like Skipe you no longer really need a phone company, Michael Powell (who was pretty much breathless  after discovering Skype) has diverted his attention from relaxing media ownership rules (and punishing CBS for Janet Jackson’s nipple)  long enough to propose a set of new federal regulations (and taxes?) on voip.  And then yesterday, the predicable outcome of the FCC’s proposed regulations.

What’s funny is the Google News headlines about the Powell’s FCC proposals.  They range from “FCC Chair Advocates Hands-Off Approach to VoIP” and “Powell: Let’s Start a Revolution” to “FCC chairman to seek federal oversight of VoIP” and, of course, it”s the latter characterization that’s more accurate.  And from the subsequent announcements by Microsoft and SBC, you can guess who all these new regulations will favor.

As the commentators on Slashdot aptly noted, a centrally regulated voip industry will be more subject to lobbying efforts by the likes of SBC and Microsoft.  What’s particularly galling is how rhetorically successful Powell was in selling his new set of regulations, while praising the “revolutionary” character of voip, and declaring himself disgusted by the prospect of cumbersome regulations instituted by indivudual States, rather than a few sleek little regulations mandated and enforced by the Federal Government.  Clear the trees to save the trees.

There’s always a trick bolt in there somewhere.

According to John Kenneth Galbraith:

“Under the thrust of power of present forces, including the money-making powers, there’s going to  be a continuing and disastrous decline” in America [. . .] “We are seeing the disintegration of the American economic and wider world role, which could well continue after this election.”

He’s right, of course.  I’m not sure that even people on the left are aware how irrevocably GW Bush has set the US on a course of permanent decline.  Galbraith notes that more than half of US discretionary spending goes to the military, to fight an arms race against the *possibility* of an arms race.  Meanwhile us technological and scientific leadership diminished steadily.  More ominously still for the US, its allies and enemies are reconfiguring themselves against the US for the long-term.

The old Onion article had it right.  And this isn’t a competition the US is likely to win.

This, of course, is the good news.  The US record as superpower and hegemon has been mixed at best, despite some notable accomplishments.  And ethically there was never any way to justify US economic and military supremacy.  Yet (the bad news is that) the rest of the world doesn’t appear to be ready for the transition.  In fact as Russia and China slide towards a kind of fascist state Capitalism, I fear that what’s happening is not a transition to an equitable post-hegemony world order, but a slide back into the nationalist multi-polarity that preceded World War I.

What’s the answer.  Perhaps this?

It’s an idea I like, and a start. 

For good measure, here’s a couple of other small but interesting ideas, about the upcoming election:

Sign a petition and take action against devious Sinclair Broadcasting.

Is this ethically permissible?  Maybe if I had a little more cash, or if Bush weren’t leading in WI by 10 points…

Well, *that* was a long and pedagogically interesting day!

After a weekend spent mostly inside and under the weather, with my car in the shop (due, it must be said, to a bad distributor, and apparently not to a computer…), I lugged myself to campus today, where I taught rhet, and then conferenced with my fiction students all afternoon.  So I’m predictably exhausted, and I’m quite sure that my final few students were inwardly gaping in horror at the ill-considered and misformed sentences that plopped from my mouth in the late afternoon.

In any case however, these conferences were still pretty great, due to a slacktivist accident.  I’d wanted to return their papers to them a few days ago, in accordance with the usual rule of thumb that you should hand back papers and give students a “cooling down” period before discussing their work with them.  But my slowness in grading these led me to return them today, in conferences, where my students had come to discuss their *next* paper.  Maybe I’m just strange, but I *loved* this returning papers in conference thing.  It was really great.  Grading bad papers always nearly kills me.  One feels (I feel, anyhow…) as if the badness of the paper is assaulting me in some way.  It bewilders me.  I wonder what kind of person could produce an artifact of such badness.  And I then returns papers with a sense of guilt and bad faith for having had those feelings, and for writing disingenuously mild (or, rarely, sort of nasty) remarks on the things I’ve graded. 

But with the author *there,* one can talk the paper over, and usually find all sorts of very good ideas that just didn’t find expression.  Or the person acknowledges that they just threw the thing together.  One can feel so much better about assigning a grade to and commenting on a paper, if it can be returned and discussed right away, face-to-face.  One student complained about a (generous) A-, but pretty much all the other interactions were better than I’d expected.   

Additionally…

I wait in great anticipation for some cable tv person to come to my house tomorrow to install cable broadband.  Insight now lets you buy cable broadband for just $44/mo., and does not require you to buy even basic cable television.  This, plus their new 256k upstream data rate, means that it will be a good move to get broadband, and add a voip phone service for $20/mo.  Thus I’ll get broadband data *and* phone service for less than my old phone bill, and I’ll escape the fees I often accumulate when I exceed the alloted hours The University rations to dial-up users.  And I’ll get to catch all the phone calls I usually miss while on-line.  It’s a sweet forking-type move I’m glad to have spotted.

Most importantly I’ll have cable-modem access to EEBO, the only really notable technological achievement of the last 30 years.  Who would not be giddy with expectation?

Anyhow, we’ll see how it works out.  Insight Cable will install tomorrow between 1-5, and once it’s up, I’ll be contacting Lingo, which is an upstart crow of a voip company, but unlike Vonage it offers numbers in the 217 area code, and unlike Packet8, it doesn’t require 11-number dialing, or charge a $59 disconnect fee.  I’ll then have unlimited phone time to anyone in the US for $20/mo, and virtually free connections everywhere else.  If the sound quality is ok (yes, this is a big if)  and Insight’s cable connection doesn’t constantly cut-out on me, this should be a neat deal. 

If voip turns out to be problematic, I may have to give in and join the cellphone wielding multitudes.  But I’ll resist this if possible, to save cash, and to keep my phone on my end table where God put the thing in the first place.

A further note: I see that you can now get wifi phones that work via voice over ip.  So, if you go to a coffee shop or library, you can talk over wifi for free, with no cellular plan.  Or, if you are lucky enough to live in certain futuristic utopias, you could buy one of these things and have a non-cellular mobile connection all around town, without paying any fees to a cellular company for the minutes used.

It’s all quite interesting — and it makes you wonder why you’d even need a telephone company, once you have a broadband connection.  If you are willing to do without a traditional phone number, it turns out, you probably don’t.

Below is piece quoted from Today’s New York Times, cut from from The Daily Kos.  Looks like it all comes down to epistemology again.  Enough to shake one’s antifoundationalism to the….  Well to shake it, anyhow.  More thoughts on this sort of thing soon.

***************
The Faith-Based Presidency
by DemFromCT
Sat Oct 16th, 2004 at 22:55:41 GMT

[editor’s note, by DemFromCT]
By request, this story, which fell off the page, has been moved back up for evening readers.

Tomorrow’s Sunday NY Times has an unforgettable and rather chilling personality piece on one George W. Bush, written by Ron Suskind (author of  “The Price of Loyalty”). If you wish, you can think of it as a companion piece to Matt Bai’s John Kerry article last weekend. But the two stories are as different as the candidates themselves. Only one is the Faith-Based President.

It’s quite a piece, and also quite long. Start with this:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ”if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.” The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

”Just in the past few months,” Bartlett said, ”I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.” Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush’s governance, went on to say: ”This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can’t be persuaded, that they’re extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he’s just like them. . . .

”This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,” Bartlett went on to say. ”He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.” Bartlett paused, then said, ”But you can’t run the world on faith.”

You think Bush has little respect for science and rational thought?  Put yourself in the shoes of a reporter as it dawns on you that the logical, rational way of approaching the world just got thrown out the window:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

And what re the consequences (for us) of disagreement?

And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ”You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. ”No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final ”you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

I while ago Dave Lartigue’s Legomancer discussed the tendency of voters generally, and supporters of GWB in particular, to be unaware of the relative positions of Bush and Kerry about all sorts of issues.  A study quoted by Mr. Lartigue surveyed Bush supporters on foreign policy matters, finding that:

Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto Treaty on global warming (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44%) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%).

Not encouraging.  And as Lartigue and others have noted, the corporate media — whether feeding a distracted and appetitive public eye, or serving the interests of an elite hegemony, bears much of the blame.  (And, on this issue, did everyone see Jon Stewart v. Tucker Carlson on this issue over at Crossfire?  Until reading this transcript, I would never have guessed that that horrid Tucker Carlson could receive a verbal thrashing so severe  that I would actually wince on behalf of the unfortunate bow-tie wearing George Will wannabe.). 

Anyway, it’s clear that the media does at best an awful job informing the The People about issues of the day.  And the press actively misinforms people about these issues, too — cf. Chomsky, etc.  But finally — and most strangely — there are stories and sets of issues that don’t get covered by the mainstream press but are well-known among conservatives.  These stories appear as weird flickering shadows among conservative pundits in the mainstream press, but never make it into the spotlight, which is a very serious problem.

**********

Take the issue of Salman Pak. 

“Salman Pak” is supposed to refer to “a highly secret terrorist training facility at Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations.”

For a couple years I’ve heard occasional mentions of this on FOX, O’Reily, etc.  The idea that Saddam had a hijacking training camp — complete with a 737 — operating a few miles south of Baghdad is extremely pervasive among conservatives.  It provides millions of people in the US with a lynch-pin connecting Saddam to the 9-11 attacks.  My Dad (who I work almost daily to reclaim from Dittohead-dom), mentioned this to me the other day. 

Bill O’Riley considers this story of crucial importance.  This summer O’Riley told his viewers that he is stupefied that Bush won’t remind American about the plain fact of Saddam’s involvement in 9-11, as proven by Salman Pak:

O’REILLY: But see, I can’t understand why Bush didn’t do what I did. You know, remind people about Salman Pak, about Zarqawi, about all of the things that we can prove.

See, they can’t — the propagandists can’t come on. The Michael Moores of the world can’t come on and say there was no Salman Pak. There is no Zarqawi. They can’t do that. But Bush deals in theory rather than in things Americans can take home.

KEENE: Yes, you have to deal in facts on this. The Democratic spokesman this morning said the president was wrong because there were no terrorists in Iraq prior to the time we invaded. That’s just flat-out untrue.

O’REILLY: Who said that?

KEENE: It was one of the Democratic responses from — I forget who it was, Bill. It was in “The New York Times” this morning.

Rush Limbaugh pushed this story hard, too.  His website boasts satellite pictures of the site, and some Tom Clancy-ish ruminations on how to interpret satellite pictures of aircraft.

The driving force behind this story was an Iraqi defector and ally of Ahmed Chalabi, Sabah Khodada, who described an area south of Baghdad as a “terrorist training camp,” with an elaborate infrastructure, including a full-scale commercial jet for the special purpose of training hijackers.  He even drew this picture:

Khodada’s story was reported in the New York Times, and Frontline (the above picture comes from their website). 

However mainstream news sources, presumably skeptical of the accounts of the Iraqi defectors, largely shied away from the story — to the outrage of Limbaugh, O’Riley, and the others on the right.  Limbaugh and O’Riley, as quoted above, were also dumbfounded that the Bush administration didn’t push this story as a “smoking gun.”

The reason for the Bush admin’s reluctance is now evident, as Seymour Hersch pointed out in a New Yorker article from May of last year.  Hersch writes:

In separate interviews with me, however, a former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst said that the camp near Salman Pak had been built not for terrorism training but for counter-terrorism training. In the mid-eighties, Islamic terrorists were routinely hijacking aircraft. In 1986, an Iraqi airliner was seized by pro-Iranian extremists and crashed, after a hand grenade was triggered, killing at least sixty-five people. (At the time, Iran and Iraq were at war, and America favored Iraq.) Iraq then sought assistance from the West[.]

So the Bush admin. probably knew why that plane was put there.  But of course they did nothing to dispel the rumor of a Saddam/9-11 link that the Salam Pak story implied, and instead worked to keep this impression alive, despite the reservations of the CIA, and even despite the military’s own investigation at the site:

It is, of course, possible for such a camp to be converted from one purpose to another. The former C.I.A. official noted, however, that terrorists would not practice on airplanes in the open. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” the former agent said. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.”

Salman Pak was overrun by American troops on April 6th. Apparently, neither the camp nor the former biological facility has yielded evidence to substantiate the claims made before the war.

Yet the reports about Salman Pak have never been definitively corrected in the wider public arena.  Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, a piece in Media Matters, and the small-voiced addendum that Frontline added to its website: “Editors Note, June 2004: A year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there has been no verification of Khodada’s account of the activities at Salman Pak. It should also be noted that he and other defectors interviewed for this report were brought to FRONTLINE’s attention by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a dissident organization that was working to overthrow Saddam Hussein.”  — can hardly serve to correct the impression of an Iraq/Al-Qaeda connection made by the mass-media syndication of likes of Limbaugh, O’Riley, Sean Hannity, and etc., who repeatedly described Salam Pak as the “smoking gun” that the President was just too much of a loft visionary to bother mentioning.

This puts mainstream media in an odd position.  The public has been grossly misinformed by  right-wing media outlets that continue to repeat what now appears to have been a lie; or at best, this story is allowed to remain uncorrected, undiscussed, and uninvestigated.  Since the mainstream news organizations did not relentlessly push this story, they have felt little obligation to either apologize or otherwise seek to correct the public record on the subject of Salam Pak.  However it nevertheless seems crucially necessary for these mainstream news organizations — and others — to take it upon themselves to correct the stories told by conservative individuals and organizations that are now unwilling to correct themselves. 

If (as it increasingly appears), Salman Pak was never in fact a news story on its own merits, it has become one now, by virtue of the enormous numbers of Americans who continue to use it to link Iraq and 9-11.  It’s time for more major news organizations to re-examine the evidence at Salman Pak, and to re-examine the way that the Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was able, through the media of the American Right-Wing, to distort the understanding of the American public in way that served his personal interest at the expense of those who have suffered and those who will suffer as result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Ok. So we all know Ambivalent Imbroglio.  But what about The Black Doll’s Imbroglio?

Edward Packard would be proud.  Or at least disconcerted.

It’s been a long day.

I managed six hours sleep, but this was not enough, since I’ve managed to contract an energy-sapping virus.  Or: I’ve got a cold, in Anglo-Saxon terms.  I dragged myself through my poorly prepared classes today.  Nonetheless my Engineers liked “The Kept University,” and my lit. students nonetheless seemed to enjoy discussing break-up Sadism in Ama Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy.  With a little prompting, they seemed interested in the gender and racial dimensions of this Sadism, too.  Which was good, since I was barely functional.  Reading Aidoo’s novella next to Conrad’s HOD was interesting too.  I noticed how in both the progress towards the heart of darknesss/whiteness leads to a confrontation with a kind of elemental loneliness, the perception of which leads immediately in both cases to an abrupt and permanent departure.  The desolate melancholia of Conrad’s Congo howling savages always struck me as odd or uncanny.  I guess either Marlowe or Conrad, like young Skywalker, found what he brought in with him.  And maybe Sissy, too, dissing her lonely German Marija.   

These stories, with their final refusals or failures of communication or exchange, make me glad I included Gorey’s “The Object Lesson,” and John Phillips obscure “Lost Memory,” on my syllabus.  For me, this the course seems increasingly to concern inncomensurabilty, and failures of communication of different kinds.  Which have always freaked me out. 

Gorey’s animated introduction to PBS’s _Mystery_ used to periodically traumatize me, when I was a child.  For some reason, the moment when the crying/moaning woman’s handkerchief passes across the face of the sleuthing detective, and he *still* remains oblivious to her peril troubled me deeply. 

Which brings me back, of course, to Derrida.

This entry is taking too long now.  But I’ve been thinking him over lately in the context of my own life.  I encountered him first in 1993, which was for me a very good year.  Spent here.  Or here.  The most beautiful place in the world still, by my reckoning.

That was where I first encountered Derrida, and the usual range of pomo theory-types (UWA undergrads in English were required to take two full years of classes on critical theory) .  Seeing Derrida obit. all over last weekend was a little taxing for me, as obits. always are.  The television lately seems like a device made to throw dead celebrities in my direction.  All the Derrida stories served to remind me of Father John Fitzgerald, who was a priest and a Carmelite Friar,  and the last professor of philosophy at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.  In 1993 I  remained a practicing Catholic, such that Fr. John was both my priest and professor, who would lecture on Kant on Friday, and on Sunday feed me wafers that were the consecrated body of God.  And on Thursdays students could meet at a pub near the seafront, for sessions of his “Vaguely Philosophical Society,” where he would gamely entrap undergraduates into well-oiled theo-philosophical snares.  Great fun.

Thinking of Derrida and 1993, I tried Googling Fr, John.  And guess what?  He’s alive(!)  Which makes me glad.  He was none-too-young in 1993.  And I must admit I feared that like John Ritter and Robert Palmer and Christorpher Reeve, he might have departed our company by now.  In 2003 he celebrated the diamond jubilee of his 1943 entry into religious life.

But no.  He is alive.  And I found a copy of his “Socrates Farewell” address, as the last retiring member of a philosophy department finally shut-down.  Father John was remarkable for his interest in his students, which allowed him to participate in a nonacademic kind of amateur praxis-ish philosophy that was worthwhile, at least for me, then.  Poststructuralism I was able to get elsewhere.

Should I send him a letter?  Maybe just a postcard?  I’m sure he won’t remember me.  But I’d sure like to tell him hi and thanks, even although I’ve become a little lost from his flock. 

Finally, a postscript.  Aber’s Philosophy department disappeared in 1993.  But perhaps not quite? 

Ok.  So here is a slightly technical post about how to blog it out, tdq-style.  I have learned just a little about how to blog in the last month; however I have discovered a few very recommendable little items, which deserve mention.  Those of you not interested in tedious blogging stuff may wish to shield your eyes from this particular post.

This here tdq blog descends from an old secret journal I used to keep over at diaryland.  This was fun since it was occasionally viewable by random people but not by anyone I knew.  My entries were very sporadic, but I found the process helpful.  As I was mentioning to sarah d a couple weeks ago, there is a prayer-like aspect to blogging, wherein by arranging one’s thoughts for a possible audience one can sort things through and arrive at plans of action.  (that’s also why people pray before going to sleep, right?  so that their resolutions and understandings can be processed into unconscious tendencies during dream-time, right?). 

But since blogging in total dark isolation can become a little odd, I decided to create this more public version of my private idaho.  But this isn’t without difficulties.  How confessional should I be?  What genre should my blog adopt?  Should I talk about my friends?  Make mean-spirited libelous remarks about people in my department?

It’s all quite complicated.  In one of my posts below, I talk about a class I’m teaching.  What are the ethics of that?

It’s all too messy to sort out.  My key-note statement remains my only thin guide.

But I can say a thing or two about the technical side of this here blog, mostly just to give credit where it’s due.  This blog, you’ll notice has its own domain-name.  It’s free-standing and no one needs set-up an account with Livejournal or Xanga, or etc. to post messages.  Its contents are  easy to find with google, and it is not hosted by the annoyingly administered servers at my university.  All of which means that I was vain enough to pay someone to host this thing.

Which brings me to viza-web.  Viza-web just plain rocks.  Their starter plan will buy you 300 megabytes of server-space for a year, at $35/yr, or $29, with a promotional discount.  For this cost, vw will also register a domain-name for you, which is nice, since a “WHOIS” query will reveal their name–not yours.  So good for us anonymous types.  And is that all?  Most certainly not.  Vizaweb offers a super-easy control panel that lets you do all sorts of cool stuff.  They have a scripting program called “Fantastico” that will set up a Wordpress blog for you on their server with, literally, a touch of a button.

I installed Wordpress 1.2.  Which is an amazing open-source free blogging program–very easy to use and install, even without Fantastico.  Lots of available plug-ins and options.

Since my blog evolved from a private journal, I installed a sort of tricky hack from web genius skippy , that allows me to make some posts public and other, journal-type posts, private.  This is a neat feature that would also allow me to display posts readable by “friends only” someday.  In fact with up to 10 levels of friendship available, I could promote and demote friends endlessly, as they meet or fail to meet my exacting friendship standards.  What exciting possibilities!

Right.  Anyway, Wordpress also allows one to sort by category, so that if someone wants to see only political or artsy or “lived experience” posts, it would be possible to make the blog present only the desired subjects.

It’s all quite flexible.

Ok, also, design.  There is a fellow by the name of Root,  who is a bit of a crusader on behalf of standards-compliant and carefully constructed Wordpress templates.  He makes available very ugly but incredibly solid templates that are designed to be customized to individual tastes.  This blog uses a very slightly modified version of his tried-and true Gemini. template.  Stylistically, my site is influenced by Eris’s lovely Track 17 template, along with my own fondness for the color of manila folders and lucida console (though my heart longs to see “thisdarkqualm” written in the still lovelier (but expensive) Letter Gothic).

Was that a post?  Not quite.  But much credit must be given to Vizaweb, Root, Skippy, Eris, and the whole (large and supportive) Wordpress.org community, for their impressive and generously shared achievements.  Which credit I therefore hereby give.

My small red 1991 Dodge Colt (secretly a Mitsubishi Mirage) has been an exemplary automobile.  I’ve hardly spent a dime on the thing, and it’s run beautifully.  But for the last maybe year or ten months it’s been tending to stall, needing to be warmed up to run properly.  And it’s been needing to get warmer and warmer lately to run without problems.

Well, last night it finally stalled altogether.  After a night of reckless dissipation, I found myself stuck (alone, naturally) on the empty street, in front of the Champaign City Hall.  After trying to start it numerous times, I (with the help of some charitable drunk fellows) pushed it over to a parking spot.  I walked out to visit the car today, figuring that the warm afternoon, and an unflooded engine would surely help the thing start right up.  But I was wrong.  My little red hatchback is now immobile, under a shady tree.

However, I’d been considering this problem for a while.  Having (I think) replaced the fuel filter and the spark plugs and etc, I had become convinced that the car’s problem is likely its computer.  It is said that the computer in this car *always* goes bad, in fact, often producing these kind of symptoms.  Unfortunately new replacements for these computers cost several hundred dollars a piece.  In fact , I believe that ex-Champaign labor-istas Kate and Storm B/H in fact ditched their old Colt on account of a bad computer.

So this possibility has been troubling me for a little while.  And I’ve been keeping an eye on Ebay, looking for cheap dodge ECU’s for some time.  And as it happened, I just yesterday came upon an appropriate ECU, and put a winning bid on it, only a few hours before my car went dead.

So, hmmm. Suspense ensues.  Will my guess about the problem be proved correct?  How long will it take the stupid part to get to CU?  How will I get my car three blocks down the street to the mechanics?  And what will become of the Baron?

If the problem *is* the ECU, and I’ve just managed to snag a functional replacement for $50, I shall award myself a small genius grant.  If on the other hand it’s a fuel filter that I in fact only imagined myself to have replaced, I will be notably disappointed.

The narrative tension produces such delight!  Will keep you posted.

This week has otherwise been slow.  Caught a somewhat obscure talk on Modernismin and the Colonial demi-monde, and went to an interesting semi-precious performance by the editors of Found magazine.  It seemed to be populated by many interesting-seeming (semi-precious?) library science types.  Watched some presidential debates (my take on it can be found here).  Graded 16 papers in one day.  Reading WK Jordan’s forgotten but impossibly amazing four-volume “Development of Religious Toleration in England”–a work that seems to have been so definitive as to both define and shut down a whole field of inquiry for more than a generation.

But no time for such talk. My laptop battery runs low, and I therefore now vanish.