One of the most entertaining little sideshows to the ‘08 election was the one about Bill Ayers writing Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. All the shouting about how Barack Hussein is really a Muslim was (and is) revolting and stupid and the birth certificate business was (and is) unimaginably tedious, and of course stupid as well. At least with Ayers and Obama there’s a real story. Plus I lived in Hyde Park in the early 90s and I like to imagine that I was just a few blocks away while past terrorist and future president were busy palling around.

Jack Cashill is the man behind the theory. In the last few weeks of the campaign he produced a steady stream of articles about it for WorldNetDaily.com (there’s a handy list on his website — it seems to be growing, too). Each one is written in perky little paragraphs, many of them nearly identical to the perky little paragraphs in an earlier post, but there’s usually something new, too. Cashill is quite the salesman — his pitch has the mesmerizing feel of an infomercial, and almost as much depth.

As he reaches out to the media and to experts who might help build his case, the literary quest — a diligent search for Ayers’ fingerprints in Obama’s book — becomes a story within a story. There’s a turning point on Oct. 23 and you, dear reader, are practically a co-conspirator. Cashill “despaired of breaking this story beyond the Internet and talk radio” but then “a seriously can-do congressman intervened,” and suddenly “we are running sophisticated data-driven tests at two separate sites.” Maybe there’s a real chance to “somehow penetrate the battlements the mainstream media have built around Obama.”

Cashill returns time and again to his correspondence with Patrick Juola, an expert in literary forensics. What he learned from Juola was that no “data-driven computer analysis” would give him a definitive result, and so his best hope was to persevere with the “good old-fashioned literary detective work.” There is, as Scott Eric Kaufman points out, a rich tradition there — thanks to just that sort of sleuthing we know that “the plays of William Shakespeare were written by Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, or Edward de Vere.” (Kaufman has had a great time with this story. If you want a good laugh you should read his posts — this one links to most of the other ones).

Ultimately, though, Cashill decided the old-fashioned detective work wasn’t going to do the trick: “there was a general feeling among people interested in this story that the public would need the confirmation of science, and not just from one source.” And of course what he found, as the title of the post says, is that “Science points to Ayers authorship of Obama’s ‘Dreams’”. This is what science sounds like:

“Using the chi-square statistic,” observes one professor, “Obama’s and Ayers’s books were indistinguishable, while Obama’s book was easily distinguishable from books by other authors.”

[…]

“Under the Q-value statistic,” argues one university-based analyst who tested “Dreams” against Ayers’ 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” “segments of ‘Dreams’ consistently compared as well with ‘Fugitive’ segments as it did with other segments of ‘Dreams’ itself. In contrast, ‘Dreams’ compared poorly with other documents.”

Like Mark Twain said, there are “three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

As if the work of the “systems engineer,” the “professor,” and the “university-based analyst” weren’t enough, Cashill mentions “a fifth stylometric analysis, soon to be released, this one from a British scholar of international repute…,” and that’s where the story starts to get really interesting. With the election approaching and the Obama juggernaut still cruising out front, a man named Bob Fox with $10k in hand approached Peter Millican, a Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University. Negotiations fell through when Millican and Oxford University Consulting insisted that the results be made public no matter how they came out. A couple of days before the election, Millican told his side of the story in The Sunday Times. He pronounced Cashill’s “science” to be extremely unimpressive and added that “[he] was left with the impression that payment for propaganda was fine; but payment for objective research was quite a different matter.”

As he went down in flames, Cashill shook his fist and shouted, in so many words, “Curse you, Oxford don!” It was about 2500 words, actually — half of them blustering through his version of the Millican-Fox transaction (“No, bro, you have dissed too many of my homies to get away that easily”) and the other half regurgitating the “literary” pitch one more time. Like they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Besides the bad taste in his mouth, Millican got the results of the analyses that had already been done. He’s set up a page on his web site to go over the details. At the beginning and the end he considers some of Cashill’s literary and impressionistic observations, dismissing each one in an understated, donnish way. Near the end he takes up Cashill’s offer to “bet my house against Millican’s mailbox that the gifted writer Ayers wrote” two passages in Dreams he singled out. Millican responds, “I hereby accept the bet. Let him put up, or shut up.” I don’t know if Cashill ever put up, but he certainly hasn’t shut up.

The really good stuff is in the middle of Millican’s exposé, when he looks into the “science.” There are all sorts of obvious and fatal flaws, but the most blatant problem is the controls — the things that Cashill breezily refers to as “books by other authors” and “other documents.” The specifics are a whole lot less impressive:

Second stylometric analysis.
Claim: “The Ayers-Obama matching shows a measurable and substantial effect. It is easily and objectively distinguishable from comparison to a third document. … the initial data presented is highly suggestive that these two documents share large portions of authorship.” (that’s Cashill via Millican)
Control: Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, published in 1885.
Millican’s bottom line: “[T]he word-length frequency correlations are not remotely close enough to be ‘highly suggestive’ of co-authorship…. Nor does the ‘easy and objective distinguishability’ from Grant’s Memoirs count for anything: it isn’t the least bit surprising that two memoirs written at the end of the 20th century have more in common than one written over a century before.”

Third stylometric analysis.
Claim: Comparisons of word frequencies on a small and a large set of words, using software written by Millican, shows that Dreams is more like Fugitive Days that like the control.
Control: Free Air, by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1919.
Millican’s bottom line: “These analysts found that Dreams was more like Fugitive Days than Free Air in some respects, but that of course isn’t surprising at all (given the difference in genre and vintage). If we add more realistic controls, then the apparent similarity — which isn’t even impressive to start with — entirely disappears, as shown by the following “Principal Component Analysis” graph….” (the graph is about 2/3 of the way through Millican’s web page). “Again there is nothing to link Obama with Ayers. And all the evidence so far examined if anything points against there being any close link between them.”

So, thanks to science you can rest assured that Obama’s book is more like Ayer’s book than it is like a novel written in 1919 or the 1885 memoir by the man supposedly buried in Grant’s tomb. In his Sunday Times piece, Millican notes that the Sinclair Lewis novel was used as a “‘random control’” because it “just happened to be easily available on the web.” He also describes Bob Fox as “sincerely interested in getting to the truth” — I don’t think he’d have gone to Millican if he wasn’t. I suspect that for many of the people involved, the project wasn’t cynical and calculating as much as it was starry-eyed and inept. As far as Cashill himself is concerned, I don’t know.

Whether it’s the number-crunching or the old-fashioned detecting, a lot of Cashill’s sleight of hand is a matter of context, or the lack of it. For instance, he makes a big deal about the way both Ayers and Obama riff on the difference between “education” and “training.” If you can’t think of any similar passages from another writer, well, it’s hard to say why it’s not significant. So maybe it is, and if you really want to be convinced, the door is wide open. On the other hand, if you did a search and found all sorts of other writers making a similar point in similar terms, the Ayers-Obama parallel would quickly lose its charm. But who’s going to take the trouble to do that? (Kaufman, of course, though not on this particular point) Cashill sure as hell isn’t — he needs to keep your head in a little fishbowl with just the incriminating texts, where all sorts of things are plausible. In the stylometric analyses, the control is the context. It’s a reference point, and the trick is to put it outside the fishbowl — way, way outside, so from there the bowl is just a dot on the horizon, and boy is it hard to see any difference between those fish!

More than that, the essential trick — the secret to Cashill’s success, such as it is — is to write for people who really, really, really want to believe. If you’re in the target audience, keep in mind that the analysis by Chris Yavelow is quite a bit different from the others. Millican finds nothing impressive about it, but he does allow that it’s “the only one of the four that stands any chance of providing any basis for a more substantial case.” So keep the faith!

In fact, I know what you need to do. Head on out to Highway 61, where I’m sure you can be very easily done. Look for Mack the Finger or Louis the King, over by the “forty red white and blue shoe strings/And a thousand telephones that don’t ring.”

Kaufman’s first piece about the Cashill hypothesis generated one of the oddest flame wars I’ve ever seen (keep in mind, though, that I mostly live under a rock). In it he mocked Jeff Goldstein, prime mover of Protein Wisdom, for taking up Cashill’s hypothesis and running with it. Goldstein’s vehement response is so strange and embarrassing that I can’t resist picking it apart. Here’s a quick recap:

1. Goldstein muses over the implications of the Cashill hypothesis. He notes first off that “[t]he charge of having one’s memoir molded into literary shape by an unrepentant domestic terrorist… is a serious one — and I do not wish to present the accusation lightly.” And he doesn’t. He writes “disinterested observations that flow from an exploration of language, the narrative process, and the differences in gradation between the author as historical figure, the author as author, and the author as ‘author.’” It’s like some late-night undergraduate effusion of fermented carbohydrate wisdom — very, very heavy:

   For if Bill Ayers has indeed ghostwritten at least portions of Barack Obama’s memoirs, as some are alleging, then it is fair to say that the “Barack Obama” of those memoirs is more even than a construct: he is at least partially a fictional character, given that it is “his” words that ostensibly create “him” — making it follow that, if the words creating him are not his own, then “he” is really a kind of living literary portmanteau, a blend of influences, an ontological hybrid insofar as he exists publicly.

   […]

   If the charges are true, and Obama’s memoirs were in fact written by Bill Ayers, at least in part, than it is clear that at least in part, Barack Obama is a creation of Bill Ayers….

   On that meta level, “Obama,” as we’ve come to know him through his memoirs, is more Ayers than he is Obama.

2. A few days later, while he was having some fun at Cashill’s expense, Kaufman took a quick swipe at someone else. If you follow the link, you find that the someone is Goldstein:

   If, however, you only use Cashill’s juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things you already believe about Obama, then you’ve fully embraced the Cashill Doctrine.

3. Fun ensues when Kaufman’s post is picked up by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Goldstein is affronted that he has to “deal[] with readers of the online Atlantic” — these are people who clearly don’t appreciate his “rather academic exhortation on the various beings of agency” as a weighty work of pure literary criticism, and not only that, they have the gall to doubt the sincerity of phrases like “as some are alleging” and “if the charges are true.”

   Worse, though, is that thanks to Kaufman he was getting “unsolicited, uninformed letters” like this one, from “someone calling himself George.” Here’s the first third of George’s letter:

   He can’t be shook bitches…keep it coming. Behind closed doors he is laughing at all you pathetic needle dick motherfuckers. In your eyes he couldn’t possibly be smart enough to write his book. However, there is no denying that he is still slowly squeezing the life out of that grimy, decrepit, fish belly white, warmonger. What’s next—Obama did not graduate from Columbia, or Harvard Law. Obama was not president of the Harvard Law Review. It’s all a sham Harvard and is lying on his behalf. He is not really running for president. It’s really some white dude in black face.

It’s presumptuous of George to finger Goldstein as a person who wants to turn Obama into “some white dude in black face.” The ghostwritten-by-a-terrorist story would surely be just as attractive as a political land mine and, for Goldstein, as an opportunity to crank out some scare-quoted profundity, even if the “author” was white. And the politician as a figurehead controlled from behind the scenes is an old plot line that doesn’t need any racial subtext.

But Goldstein’s gripe isn’t really with George, it’s with Kaufman, who wrote that Goldstein “fully embraced” something when really all he’d done was to flirt ostentatiously with it. In particular, he hadn’t said anything about the evidence, except in the comments on his first post, where he was skeptical about one point. It’s a legitimate complaint that’s hard to pick out of the turgid rhetoric — I didn’t really get it until I scrolled way down to where Goldstein explains it to an especially conciliatory commenter.

Whatever the reason, Goldstein goes to extraordinary lengths to foist onto Kaufman the full responsibility for George’s email and any other ignorance inflicted on him by Atlantic readers. To do that he has to make assumptions that are wilder and more insulting than any of George’s (SEK = Scott Eric Kaufmann).

I also noted that SEK, rather than excerpting any of the post in which I purportedly suggest “all the unsavory things” I “already believe about Obama,” merely provided the link and his inaccurate and dishonest description, knowing, as he must by now, that those predisposed to read his political hackery are similarly predisposed to avoid confronting primary texts, especially those from villainous “right wingers” who, by the Atlantic’s lights, are the kinds of “low-info voters” who have no business pretending to engage in literary criticism. On my preparedness to do so I’ll let my record stand — while noting that I don’t miss the irony of those who have long been in favor of “democratizing” interpretation and sounding the death knell of authorial control in favor of an ascendancy of “interpretive communities” suddenly pretending that one needs some kind of special political sensibility in order to properly engage in textual pursuits.

The best part of that is the irony he doesn’t miss, which sounds like the answer to a final exam question in a freshman survey class. Goldstein, in a fit of really highfalutin’ foolishness, is confusing Kaufman with a whole school of thought, one that’s betrayed its own bomb-throwing manifestos. Further along in the post we learn that this insufferable pedant is Goldstein’s inner “literary critic.”

But because leftists like George are driven by outrage, emotion, and a decided lack of intellect — and are steered in a certain way by betters like SEK, who, after the revolution, will assume the role of the elect — I am in fact confronted by such idiocy and self-righteousness, which, were I to allow the literary critic in me to come out once again, is suggestive, I’d argue, of a kind of hamfisted paternalism and projection, much as one might expect from those who pretend to champion the Other (the unspoken acknowledgment being that the poor dears can’t be expected to champion themselves!) while not even fit to wipe their own asses.

Goldstein had already described “the likes of George” as “people who haven’t the capacity to read and understand on their own, but who rather rely on ‘specialists’ like the folks at the Atlantic, or SEK, to do their misreading for them.” So he may not be convinced that Obama is the creation of Ayers, but he’s definitely convinced that the likes of George are the creation of the likes of Kaufman.

In the post Goldstein mostly writes around both George and his obnoxious email — perhaps Goldstein figured his readers already knew what to think. There are a few comments that are a little more direct, and they take up a theme that’s near and dear to the hearts of culture-war conservatives: their brave defiance of the PC lynch mob. Goldstein pops up to say, “I’m as guilty as George for pointing out George’s guilt. WAIT FOR IT!” Protein Wisdom deputy blogger Darlene Click seconds: “Criticizing him makes you a racist/sexist/genderist/yadda yadda yadda.” I don’t think she read very carefully, though. It’s true that George sounds kinda black, but Goldstein criticizes him as a leftist, which is not a race, sex or gender. Does Click really think that Goldstein is so hypocritical that he’d write George off as “some white dude in black face,” an idiot being led around by the nose by his betters?

Goldstein does seem to want to prove that he doesn’t take a backseat to anybody when it comes to genital references. After all, “Needle dick motherfuckers” is so conventional. He’s got something much more original, and while he’s at it he throws in a racial stereotype that’s as bizarre as it is gratuitous. Check out this PC-mob-defying bravery:

“GEORGE DOES NOT REPRESENT US! HOW DARE YOU USE HIM AS AN EXAMPLE!” — SEK, forthcoming.

preemptive answer: he represents one part of “you”. And you, as the intellectual vagina to his Asian gal’s ping pong ball, represent another. Deal.

I’m sure it’s just because I’m being too literal, but my mind boggles at the metaphor of a male vagina giving birth to part of himself. You have to admire the double-layered insult, though — Kaufman is not only a feminine body part, he’s a pathetic one. No doubt a real manly intellectual, when he becomes a metaphorical vagina, can pass an Aryan broad’s bowling ball.

Anyway, no abuse from the PC police was forthcoming, or at least it’s not in the comments. And there was no “HOW DARE YOU” from Kaufman, though he dropped in several times for some textual slicing and dicing.

In the end Goldstein does a fine job of making George look like a class act. Both of them indulge freely in mindless generalizations about the opposition, but George is at least forthright about it. He’s gleeful but not particularly vindictive and his insults are generic, though I guess you’re always free to take it personally if you want. He’s fairly specific about who he’s talking about, too — “Talk Radio, Fox News, … your right wing blogosphere and … your professional liars like Bill Kristol [and] Glenn Beck….” The usual suspects, in other words. For Goldstein there’s just “the likes of George” and their “betters.” The idiots like George also “seem to think themselves entitled to hurl their venomous, imbecilic rants at any who displease them.” When it comes to venomous, imbecilic rants, though, Goldstein is peerless.

Cameron Todd Willingham with his daughter Amber, manipulating us from the grave.

Well, never mind how many weeks months it’s been, I’m gonna try to pick up the thread from my last post. The theme is still the criminal justice system — how it fails and who it fails. It’s quite a can of worms, and for someone like me who’s had the good fortune to avoid much contact with the cops and the courts, it’s quite an education. What I’m writing should be read in that spirit, as notes on a continuing education.

Last time the eye-opener was Alan Gell — how little it took to railroad him onto death row and how much it took to get him out. But eventually the built-in safeguards worked. They worked and worked, in fact, for about 10 years while Gell relaxed in jail. But hey, it could’ve been worse. He could’ve been in Texas and ended up like Cameron Todd Willingham.

Until his house burned down a few days before Christmas 1991, Todd Willingham lived with his wife and three young daughters in Corsicana, a small town in northeast Texas. He’d gone back to sleep, he claimed, after his wife left the house that morning. About an hour later a shout from the two-year-old woke him up. The house was full of smoke. He yelled for her to get out and made his way to the childrens’ bedroom but couldn’t locate the twins, who were about a year old. All three girls died.

In “Trial By Fire,” the masterful account of Willingham’s case that ran in the New Yorker last September, David Grann describes how injustice was piled on top of catastrophe. Fire inspectors quickly concluded that the blaze was arson and that Willingham’s story of waking up and getting out of the house was a fabrication. He had no compelling motive for either arson or murder but the authorities decided that he was nonetheless “a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder.” At his trial the prosecutor portrayed him as a monster. A jury agreed and sentenced him to death.

As time was running out for Willingham, a scientist and inventor named Gerald Hurst agreed to look at the forensic evidence used to convict him. Hurst’s work had been instrumental in freeing Ernest Ray Willis, another Texas death-row inmate, and he was amazed at how closely the two cases paralleled each other. He rushed out a report debunking the evidence against Willingham. This time it didn’t do the trick — Willingham was executed in Feb. 2004 — but his reports on both cases found their way to a couple of reporters at the Chicago Tribune. They consulted with several other fire experts and at the end of the year published the first exposé on Willingham. The Innocence Project and the Texas Forensic Science Commission followed with detailed reports analyzing both the Willingham and Willis cases. The unanimous opinion of the nine fire investigators who’ve reviewed Willingham’s case is that the forensics is riddled with scientific misconceptions and that no legitimate proof of arson was presented to the jury. It’s a sobering result, but in a way not so surprising. Comprehensive scientific standards for fire investigators weren’t published until 1992, and on many points those standards contradicted the conventional wisdom that had long circulated in the field.

The Willingham case got a burst of attention last fall in the wake of Grann’s article and the release of a report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission by Craig Beyler. It turned into a campaign issue for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, since back in 2004 he signed off on Willingham’s execution in spite of the report from Hurst. At the end of September Perry staged a heavy-handed intervention to rein in the Forensic Science Commission and push any serious consideration of the Willingham case off its agenda. It was a sleazy move, but it seems to me that the governor’s opponents were about as indifferent as he was to the commission’s actual purpose, not to mention the folks most likely to benefit from it — the poor saps who might otherwise be railroaded by “junk science” (there’s a fine post on Grits for Breakfast about the gap between what the committee was prepared to do and what everyone wanted to argue about).

Gerald Hurst: “The proof that they used for arson… is in the report and in the testimony and that is not proof. So yeah, Willingham was innocent.”

The unavoidable hot-button question is the subheading of Grann’s article — “Did Texas execute an innocent man?” I like the way Gerald Hurst answered it on Nightline: “The proof that they used for arson… is in the report and in the testimony and that is not proof. So yeah, Willingham was innocent.” The evidence that the fire was intentional was the foundation of the case against Willingham, and if that evidence was grossly misinterpreted and misrepresented, then his guilt was not proved and he was legally innocent. No doubt it would be quite a coup if Texas was forced to acknowledge that. It’s only the admission that would be a breakthrough, though, since any argument about the innocence of a convict is, like the lottery, heavily rigged in the State’s favor. Ernest Willis managed to win the argument when the stakes were his life, and what he showed was that the courts in Texas are quite capable of sending an obviously innocent man to death row and of fighting like hell to keep him there until the bitter end. If Willingham was the first innocent man (or woman) they managed to execute, it was just dumb luck.

Nothing suits the law-and-order machine and its apologists better than a debate focussed on something so easy to doubt and impossible to prove as Willingham’s factual innocence. The physical evidence is long gone. The only thing that the original forensic work proves is that the investigators were, at best, misinformed and irresponsible — it would be giving them way too much credit to imagine that they proved anything about the fire. I don’t know what kind of evidence might be filed away in the archives, but most of the other evidence at the trial was part of a narrow-minded effort to scare up suspicion and loathing. One thing that it’s good for is undermining any claims that Willingham was factually innocent. Otherwise it stinks, and it always has — it’s never been necessary to get into the forensic details to pick up the foul smell this case gives off. That’s the argument I’m going to try to make, anyway.

It’s true that the legal system is way outside my area of expertise (whatever that is), so I might be missing something big. Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand what counts as proof or what counts as justice. I’d worry about it more if the authorities who built and prosecuted the case didn’t act like justice was just a matter of tossing out a piece of human garbage in the quickest and most self-righteous way possible. They seem incredibly narrow-minded, and as far as I can tell they were completely untroubled about compounding the misery of a family that was already deeply traumatized. The ultimate risk, if they made a false charge stick, was that a man would be executed merely for surviving the horrible accident that killed his children — a truly obscene miscarriage of justice. So it seems like they’d embrace their burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, if not out of common decency then because of the prosecutor’s statutory obligation “not to convict, but to see that justice is done.” They couldn’t honestly expect Willingham’s meager defense to hold them to it. But no, they did their very best to make all the reasonable doubt just go away — they put on a witch trial.

The fire inspectors set the whole process in motion and they gave the proceedings a veneer of rationality. Actually, though, they were priestly figures, and when they conjured up the crime and the defendant’s guilt, it was presented and accepted as a matter of faith. The crime was horrific, too — little children intentionally burned alive, which happens to be the kind of thing witches do. To make it seem plausible, the jury was offered a lot of highly suggestive testimony that was supposed to show that Willingham wanted to kill his children and that he stood by while they died their gruesome death. It was, in effect, a portrait of the defendant as an evil and abnormal person — the kind that does horrific things for no particular reason. Of course in modern-day Texas a man like that isn’t a witch, he’s a monster or a demon, but same difference.

It was a banal little bush-league witch trial, but not a purely metaphorical one — there’s a real undercurrent of superstition. Grann describes how the lead prosecutor, John Jackson, gave the faith-based forensics a bible-belt twist:

During his closing arguments, Jackson said that the puddle configurations and pour patterns were Willingham’s inadvertent “confession,” burned into the floor. Showing a Bible that had been salvaged from the fire, Jackson paraphrased the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whomsoever shall harm one of my children, it’s better for a millstone to be hung around his neck and for him to be cast in the sea.”

On Nightline last fall, Jackson was more specific about what Willingham burned into the floor — it was, he said, “perhaps a pentagram kind of a figure that some people associate with devil worship.” In a letter to the local paper a few weeks earlier, Jackson pointed out that Willingham refused the “opportunity” he was offered to “eliminate himself as a suspect by polygraph examination.” A more fitting way for him to prove his innocence, which wasn’t in any meaningful way presumed, would have been to offer him a millstone and a body of water. He would have either sunk to his death or, if he was really a devil-worshiping monster, maybe he would have floated. That would have been the same kind of justice he got, just quicker and more humane. But the general sentiment was that Willingham had already failed his life-or-death test when he didn’t go back into the burning house for his kids.

Inside and outside the house after the fire (pictures from the Texas State Fire Marshal’s office, by way of the Dallas Morning News).

I’ll get back to the trial, but I want to stick with the inspectors for a while. Unless their critics are completely misrepresenting the science of fire, their gross scientific misconceptions are undeniable. That’s gotten plenty of coverage already, so I won’t get into the specifics (here’s an overview and some links, though). The poor understanding of fire was apparently fairly typical of inspectors back when Willingham was tried. The culture within the field must have been good at explaining away challenging information, unfortunately at the expense of the people who came under investigation. I suspect that an attitude like that is one thing that makes junk science so pernicious and hard to stamp out.

As the lead inspector in the Willingham case shows, it’s just the attitude for witch hunting. A local firefighter, Doug Fogg, did the initial inspection. Based on what he saw, a specialist named Manual Vasquez was sent in from the Texas State Fire Marshal’s Office. Craig Beyler’s bottom line on Vasquez is that “[his] opinions are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation.” Fogg had pretty much the same beliefs, but arson investigation wasn’t his main gig, so it’s not so alarming that he relied uncritically on the conventional wisdom he’d been taught. Vasquez’s personal beliefs about fire had been reinforced by over a thousand investigations. They were articles of faith and all indications are that his close-minded self-assurance made him quite persuasive.

For the science-minded reviewers Vasquez’s testimony raises one red flag after another, and not just because of all the misconceptions about fire. Early in his testimony, as he was describing his experience and qualifications, he said that almost every fire he’d investigated had been arson. The expert reviewers have been uniformly incredulous of the claim — at the time his peers were finding about half of the questionable fires in Texas to be arson. Although he made it clear that most any burned-out building whispered “arson” in his ear, Vasquez’s conclusions were never seriously challenged in court.

Later in the testimony Vasquez presents himself as a kind of clairvoyant and the red flags go up again. A line of Beyler’s that’s gotten a lot of play describes Vasquez’s attitude as “hardly consistent with a scientific mindset” but “more characteristic of mystics or psychics.” The Lentini report criticizes the same passage as a dangerously deceptive performance of expertise in the courtroom (my emphasis):

Mr. Vasquez indicates that he understands the nature of expert testimony: that of interpreting fire artifacts for the jury. At page 244 [of the trial transcript], he states:

“The fire tells the story. I am just the interpreter. I am looking at the fire, and I am interpreting the fire. That is what I know. That is what I do best. And the fire does not lie. It tells me the truth.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Willingham, while the fire may not have “lied,” Mr. Vasquez misinterpreted what it was telling him. Such willingness to offer “expert” testimony, while lacking the knowledge to present accurate information to the jury, may excuse Mr. Vasquez’s many serious errors. The judicial system that allows such testimony to be presented, however, is clearly flawed and in need of reform.

The fire told Vasquez an awful lot. Not just that it was started in three places with a liquid accelerant but that it was Willingham who started it and that he did so in order to kill his children. The fire told Vasquez that it wasn’t the cause of Willingham’s injuries so he concluded they must have been self-inflicted — Beyler calls the diagnosis “remarkable” and concludes that “Vasquez seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created.” Because it was so “aggressive,” the fire even told Vasquez that it “was not a planned fire. It was a spur-of-the-moment fire.” That, for Beyler, is a degree of “mysticism” that’s “beyond belief in the context of fire investigation as an applied science.” It seems to me that’s putting it pretty tactfully.

As Vasquez was uncovering the tell-tale signs of arson he was also unmasking the arsonist. Grann describes the moment when Vasquez’s quasi-mystical certainty encountered Willingham’s confused and defensive attempts to explain himself. The inspector knew what he knew and had no qualms about dismissing Willingham as a liar. It’s a moment that epitomizes how ignorant and unprofessional the whole investigation was.

During the interrogation, Vasquez let Fogg take the lead. Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house?

“No, sir,” Willingham replied.

A map of the house was on a table between the men, and Vasquez pointed to it. “You walked out this way?” he said.

Willingham said yes.

Vasquez was now convinced that Willingham had killed his children. If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed.

Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. “I didn’t have to jump through any flames,” he said. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the fire as he was retreating—first, torching the children’s room, then the hallway, and then, from the porch, the front door.

This might be a good thing to remember if you’re ever tempted to explain yourself to the authorities without an attorney. In court, the story must have weighed heavily against Willingham. It left the jury with a memorable image — Willingham’s unscathed feet — and it also burnished Vasquez’s cleverness and his authority. To the Lentini committee, though, the simplistic assumptions behind his little trap were sadly familiar.

Fire investigators who reach false conclusions, then hear descriptions of events from fire survivors that do not comport with their conclusions, frequently have testified that only the killer or the arsonist has a motive to lie. The undersigned investigators, having been involved in cases of fires misattributed to arson, are familiar with this phenomenon. Mr. Vasquez first formed the conclusion that the fire was intentionally set. Then he was allowed to tell the jury:

“I’ve talked to the occupant of this house and I let him talk and he told me a story of pure fabrication.”

Mr. Vasquez’s only basis for reaching that conclusion was his own misinterpretation of the meaning of the fire artifacts that he observed.

Willingham did lie, there’s no doubt about it. Not about getting down the hall in bare feet — that was Vasquez’s fabrication. But shortly before he was killed Willingham admitted that he hadn’t really gone into the children’s bedroom as he claimed. It’s the kind of lie an ordinary man might tell out of fear or pride, knowing he’d been scrutinized and judged from the moment he was spotted outside of his burning house. As far as I’m concerned that’s a lot more plausible than the outrageous lies he supposedly told to hide his monstrous guilt. It was a foolish lie, of course, and I’m sure it cost him. A decent advocate might have helped him get his story straight and saved him from himself.

If Willingham had an advocate it might have saved the investigators from their own worst instincts, too. Willingham was the only person alive who could have seen what was going on inside the house during the early stages of the fire, so when Vasquez wrote Willingham off as a liar he wrote off one of his strongest reality checks. It was Vasquez’s job to be skeptical, of course. Healthy skepticism is a two-way street, though, and there’s no sign that Vasquez had any for the story the fire was telling him — if he did, he didn’t act on it in any useful way. Instead he decided, in effect, that the chances he and Fogg were wrong were less than the chances that their prime witness — a man they knew very little about — was a liar who woke up and for no apparent reason torched his house while his children were inside. My sense is that it’s much more likely for a run-of-the-mill expert to be wrong than for a typical or even a questionable witness to be an infanticidal monster. You can see what a great racket junk science is, though. Don’t let anyone challenge your precious theory just because they saw what happened! Call ‘em a liar, send ‘em to jail, get ‘em executed! That’ll take care of ‘em, huh?

Willingham’s story wasn’t the only serious challenge to the investigators’ theory of the fire. Laboratory tests found no traces of the all-important liquid accelerant anywhere but the front threshold, where there was an alternate explanation. The prosecutor if not the investigators was bothered by this. Jackson told Grann that “he ‘never did understand why they weren’t able to recover’ positive tests” from other places that were supposedly doused with lighter fluid. Apparently he was unwilling to draw the obvious conclusion, though. Also, Vasquez’s scenario was contradicted by the first eyewitnesses, who looked straight at the porch and through the front door and saw no flames. These are not small problems.

It’s also hard for me to believe these investigators had a good case because I haven’t come across a single word from them about how Willingham went about setting the fire and how it progressed from there. There was no way they could say exactly what happened, but if they had a robust theory they should have been able to say something concrete. There was an hour or so after Willingham wife left before neighbors saw him on his porch — plenty of time to douse some carpet with lighter fluid and light a few matches. But where did he get the lighter fluid? How much would it take to make the puddle shapes the inspectors found? What would happen when he lit those puddles and how long would it take to develop to the stage firefighters observed when they got there? When (if ever) would someone look at a house set on fire that way and say it was just “smouldering”? One inspector suggested that the entryway was set on fire in a way that’s “typically employed to impede firemen in their rescue attempts.” How did he know to do that?

Naturally, coverage and criticism of the case focusses on the fire inspectors but the police were busy, too. Beyler notes in passing that they interviewed about 40 people and collected “information about Willingham’s arrest history, his relationships with others, the dynamics of the household, and his past in general.” In other words, they were digging up dirt. Perhaps that was appropriate, but it seems they did little else.

The investigators didn’t tax their brains working on this case. They didn’t have to. All they needed was enough evidence to charge Willingham with a crime and then to make him seem guilty, which is a lot easier than proving that he committed the crime. They didn’t have to worry about much of a challenge from Willingham’s bargain-basement defense. The way they approached the case, in fact, less is more. It’s best not to get too real about the details — setting a fire, for instance, or waking up in a burning house — because that might get people thinking. In a witch trial, ignorance is strength.

The negative reactions that I’ve come across tend to work the premise that we should have gotten a more original, ambitious, challenging, and/or grand work of art. To some extent this is a matter of taste and not worth arguing over. But it seems to me that there are unexamined assumptions behind that “should,” and those I’m inclined to question.

• The first critics to get my attention were commenters on The Edge of the American West. Here are some fragments from ninjaphilosopher, Ahistoricality, and a few others.

  I know it was cheesy and basically just an arrangement of the Copland, but I thought it was both nice and appropriate.

  [In response:] I think the Copland is basically just an arrangement of “Simple Gifts”.

  [T]his wasn’t Williams coincidentally deciding that “Simple Gifts” is the Quintessential American Melody, but Williams deciding to arrange a riff on Copland’s Quintessential American Symphony for that meticulously multiethnic quartet. There wasn’t an original thought anywhere in the piece, in conception or execution.

  I believe the announcer credited everyone involved with that performance except for Copland.

  I’m dubious as to whether or not John Williams has ever had an original musical idea. Don’t get me wrong, I think his movie music is fun and dramatic, but original? I don’t think so. A better idea would have been to pare down the original chamber version of the theme and variations, and not have Williams in the picture at all.

  [I]t would have been more appropriate to admit up front that it was a Copland schtick, rather than calling it a John Williams piece.

  Williams’ debt is undeniable, of course. Any chamber-music setting of “Simple Gifts” will call Copland to mind. Bring the tune in with a solo clarinet and it’s like a neon sign—C O P L A N D. Aside from the overall concept, the moments that strike me as especially Coplandesque are the wind-whistling-across-the-prairie spareness of the opening chords and solo violin and the crystalline brilliance of the tutti finale to “Simple Gifts” (explained and charted in part 1). But somehow the idea that Williams’ composition is derivative turns into the idea that it’s really Copland’s music. It’s not. As far as I can tell, anyway, Williams didn’t lift any passages out of anyone else’s music.

  I don’t think that the melody of the Air owes much of anything to Copland. I don’t think he wrote melodies like that, though I don’t have all of his work at my fingertips, so I could be wrong. But the Air on its own—and even more the Air in relation to the variations, which is the essence of the composition—is unquestionably an original musical construct.

• One thing that’s clear from Terry Teachout’s blog post is that he was not at all in sync with the celebratory mood on inauguration day. I know the feeling all too well from some other presidential elections that I’d rather not think about too much. With that in mind, it’s probably not fair to take too seriously his suggestion that what Perlman and Ma should really have played is Appalachian Spring. Copland’s composition needs at least a chamber orchestra, first of all, and it’s about 25 minutes long. It uses the full stretch of time to great effect—with the gorgeous crepuscular meditations at the beginning and end, it’s like a dawn to dusk experience. To carve four or five minutes out of the middle and arrange it for that “meticulously multiethnic quartet” would have been sad. I can’t imagine that Teachout would have approved of such a thing.

• The New Yorker’s Russell Platt describes the piece as “a touching little tribute to Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’” from “America’s best second-rate composer.” That’s about right if you consider Williams’ composition to be the setting of “Simple Gifts” and nothing else. But if you thought that you’d be wrong.

• Anne Midgett, writing for the Washington Post, thought “the music seemed awfully austere for an event that calls for at least some measure of celebration,” and apparently she would have preferred “a stirring film-score-type theme proclaiming a new beginning for Barack Obama.” Obama had a different plan, it seems, and all I can say is that I’m glad Midgett wasn’t in charge of the music.

• On the LA Times blog, Mark Swed marvels that “so momentous an occasion… would be signaled by classical musicians playing on the Capitol veranda.”

  We have reason to believe we have an arts president. So now, let’s get to business. Williams’ four-minute quartet struck an apt tone of seriousness and celebration. It was Americana through and through. Politics were served by a violinist born in Israel, a cellist of Chinese heritage born in Paris, a pianist from Venezuela and an African American clarinetist from Chicago. None is a stuffy classical player but likes to collaborate widely. That’s all to the good. But …

  Frankly, the Williams quartet was a bit hokey. For Obama to be an arts president he will have to think higher and even further out of the box. If he really wants change, he will have to have the courage to listen to artists who can’t be controlled, whose vision is greater than his and his handlers. We need artists not merely to sing our achievements but to communicate new ideas and to spread our voice through the land and the world. Obama must mobilize the arts to help him change the mood of our nation and raise our energy.

  I like the trick of declaring Obama an “arts president” in one paragraph and then in the next paragraph criticizing him for his shortcomings as such. Apparently his first order of business should have been to go out and find his Shostakovich.

  Now if I’d had anything to say about the music commissioned for the occasion, I would have turned first thing to just the category of artists Swed is promoting. I would love it if we’d ended up with a piece that had the uncompromising personality of George Crumb’s Black Angels or the cerebral brilliance of Elliott Carter’s Anaphora. Or, if those two greybeards are too old school for a Change president, then maybe some distinctive 21st-century brilliance from Radiohead. If the point was to highlight a significant American artist, there were an awful lot of people in line in front of Williams. But was that the point? I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion that it was, and I’m inclined to think that it wasn’t. A bit of high-concept, well-crafted movie music may well have served the day better than any number of highly original masterpieces. It’s unhelpful, in any case, to start out by sorting the artistic world into uncompromising visionaries on one side and on the other patsies controllable by the president (and his “handlers”—that was a nice touch).

The most informative review I found is from Anthony Tommasini, writing in a New York Times blog:

Mr. Williams came through with a stylish and appealing four-minute work, “Air and Simple Gifts.” In high-minded contemporary-music circles Mr. Williams, the most successful film music composer in history, has endured much condescension for his work in Hollywood. But the best of his film scores are skillfully, artfully and even subtly composed. And he is a comprehensive musician who knows how to write for all orchestral instruments.

He got the mood right, I thought, in this contemplative occasional piece. President Obama, it turns out, has a fondness for the music of Aaron Copland. So Mr. Williams fashioned a work that evokes the melancholic, calmly affirming, harmonically open-hearted world of Copland.

Alex Ross brought his usual clarifying touch to the occasion (and I picked up most of these other critics’ reactions from his links).

Indeed, it’s no Quartet for the End of Time [(the WWII masterpiece by Olivier Messiaen for the same four instruments)]. But I liked several things about the work and its place in the ceremony. 1) The quiet, almost bittersweet ending—a welcome change from the grimly bombastic Williams film music that marred Obama’s victory speech in November. 2) The gesture of homage toward Aaron Copland, whose Lincoln Portrait was pulled from an Eisenhower inauguration event in 1953 at the insistence of a Red-baiting congressman. 3) The look of delight on the face of the president…. 4) I liked most of all the diverse picture of the classical world that the performers presented: an Israeli-born violinist, a Chinese-American cellist, a Venezuelan-born pianist, and an African-American clarinetist from the South Side of Chicago.

I’m with him on all four counts. But for me there was more to the visual aspect than the appealing diversity. The body language of classical chamber musicians is especially rich in signals of interdependence. In musical styles that settle into a steady groove, the body language tends to convey immersion and emotion (here’s a couple of wonderful examples). There’s an element of self-expression in all music making, and a social aspect and a degree of coordination in any ensemble playing. But classical music is especially intricate in its entrances and exits, its tempo changes, and its shifts from one texture to another. I especially enjoyed Yo-Yo Ma’s expressiveness as he looked and leaned left and right, and looked forward with a different kind of awareness than I’d expect at an ordinary gig. It was a good day to see four people thriving on interdependence.

[I was just googling and came across a post on aworks with a slew of critical reactions, mostly on the snarky side with respect to the composer.]

[Tonight I ran across a much more personal reaction on zunguzungu. It’s fine reminder of the limits of analysis—what you get out of a piece of music depends on what you bring to it, or, as he says, “We’re all responding in our own ways right now.” The back story is lovely, too.]

What with the bungled oath and all, Stephen Colbert officially welcomes our 44th president, the man who happened to be on the TV screen at noon on January 20th, Yo-Yo Ma!

I had been paying enough attention to know that I’d be hearing Rick Warren and Aretha Franklin, but the “unique musical performance” of “a composition arranged for this occasion by John Williams,” to quote Diane Feinstein, caught me by surprise. My heart sank a little at the composer’s name, but still. There, on the screen, four freezing, windblown musicians with ridiculously old-fashioned instruments were playing their hearts out. At the moment he officially became president, Obama was listening intently to the music. Like most anyone who’s dealt with string instruments and the people who play them, I was astonished to see Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma sawing away, not even in overcoats. And it sounded pretty damned good! I thought maybe they’d rigged up some way of flooding the area with warm air. It didn’t occur to me that they might be playing to a recording. It may be a sign of just how much of the Kool Aid I’ve drunk that I really don’t care. I’m glad to know what was going on, though—everything makes sense now. (See the New York Times for a fairly thorough article about the decision to use a recording, or this shorter piece on the BBC.)

I was delighted by the performance, and on balance I liked the composition, too. My immediate reaction was about the same as Carl Wilson’s: “Musically, John Williams could have been far worse—there was dissonance! Yo Yo Ma looked so ‘Yo yo yo!’” Low expectations were a factor for me, as well (I’m not quite sure about the “yo yo yo!” part but I think I’m with him on that, too). I probably wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but that evening I came across some criticism that led me to call the thing up on YouTube and listen again. I found that the piece (my sense of it, really) holds up pretty well under repeat listening, and it also holds up pretty well under analysis. The analysis addresses some of the criticism, so I’ll see how much of it I can get across without getting too technical, and then get back to the critics.

This clip, out of many choices on YouTube, skips Feinstein’s introduction but gets all of the music (the one that found its way into a lot of the early reviews cut out the first few seconds of the performance). It’s the clip I’m referring to when I give time points. If you use a different one you’ll probably have to adjust by a few seconds. For audio only, here’s a blog with an mp3 recorded off the radio.

INTRO |AIR            |SIMPLE GIFTS                                               |CODA (AIR)
+-----|---------------|transition---|variation 1---------|variation 2-------------|----------+
pn     vn       vc     cl   (tempo)  vn         vc        pn      trading  tutti
:06    :16      :54    1:26 1:44     2:09       2:24      2:39    3:09     3:18    3:44
(pn=piano, vn=violin, vc=cello, cl=clarinet)

For listeners who liked the piece, the things that seem to stand out are (1) the plaintive theme in the Air, played beautifully by Perlman and then Ma, (2) the familiar Shaker song (according to Wikipedia, it’s not a hymn) and the evocation of Aaron Copland’s gorgeous setting of it in Appalachian Spring, and (3) the dramatically somber ending, which brings back the music and mood of the Air. Taken on its own, Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is unremarkable, though it’s not as indebted to Copland as some listeners seem to think. The Air is more original, but neither part stands on its own—the contrast between the two is integral to the composition. And it’s not just a matter of bookending the cheery song with something more serious. From the beginning, when the violin’s first line rubs against the piano’s placid opening chords, there’s interaction between two different kinds of music, and at the end those interactions are intense and dramatic.

A good place to start is with the contrast between tonalities. The Air is sort of minor, but really it’s modal (specifically Dorian, on A). (The links are to Wikipedia, and I’m not sure how helpful they are. There are some little musical examples, anyway.) Modal melodies tend to have folk- or world-music connotations (think Scarborough Faire, the second line—“Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”—and especially the second syllable of “rosemary”). In a major or minor key, there are deeply ingrained relationships between melody and harmony. It would be hard to find a more straightforward, stripped-down example of major-key harmony and phrasing doing what comes naturally than “Simple Gifts.” It manages to be graceful and appealing and at the same time utterly conventional—in a way, the message of the song is built into its musical structure. Williams’ Air, like most modal melodies, is more free-standing. The introductory chords and the sparse counterpoint are nice, but the melody line conveys a great deal on its own. That’s a real asset in a piece that’s meant to reach a huge mass of people milling around outside in the middle of winter.

Halfway through the Air the violin and cello switch roles. The cello plays the same tune as the violin up to the last phrase, and then there’s one change. When the violin ends its statement of the melody, there’s a stepwise descent—G-F-E-D (0:43 in the recording). We’ve come to expect F sharps, so the F natural stands out. It stands out even more when the cello plays it, though. Instead of stepping down the line skips up to the F an octave higher (1:20), and with that change the last phrase turns into a series of three dramatic upward leaps, landing on an ethereal high A, played as a harmonic. Williams’ melody is remarkably for its economy, clarity, and eloquence. I guess that’s why he makes the big bucks.

Other aspects of the music reinforce the contrast of tonalities. In “Simple Gifts”, the first thing the bright major-key melody does is to climb cheerfully up an octave. The dark, minor-sounding Air starts by going down, and throughout it, descending lines alternate with wide skips up and down.

The introductory chords place the dorian melody in relief. They belong with the key of the song, not the Air. The piano says C sharp, but the violin says C natural, and says it emphatically—it’s the apex of the first half of the tune (0:26). When the clarinet enters with “Simple Gifts,” some of the brightness comes from the return of C sharp. Between the clarinet entrance and the violin taking the lead (2:09), which is when the music settles decisively into D major, there’s a chaotic back and forth. Phrases of the song, rising up through C-sharp, are answered by fragments of the Air, descending through C natural.

One thing worth noting about Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is the shift from a texture that features one player at a time to more intricate, conversational interplay. The second variation starts with the strings exchanging brilliant flurries of notes while the piano plays the song. Then the melody is broken up into fragments and passed from instrument to instrument (3:09). Finally, everyone comes together for the big tutti. The effect is expertly orchestrated (in both the musical and metaphoric sense of the word), and though music enacts these dramas of cooperation and cohesion all the time, it had special resonance on that particular day.

Though the final tutti seems to be heading for a grand cadence, the music withdraws as it reaches the last note. We hear the first fresh harmony since the music settled into D major, and the ground shifts. There’s nothing unprecedented about the way it’s done—now and then you’ll hear the same chord used in roughly the same way in a pop song—but in addition to absorbing the energy of the tutti, it’s an effective bridge back to the tonal world of the Air.

The two tonalities are brought into their sharpest juxtaposition in the coda:

(GIFTS)------------------|CODA------------------------|--------------------|--------------------------+
tutti   cadence  harmony  Air                 D major  Air       False      Last...three...chords
                 change   phrase 1  phrase 2  scales   phrase 2  ending     Bright   middle   final
                          vc        ens                again     Eb...............            (bare)
                                                                 in middle  on top
3:18    3:39              3:43      3:53      4:00     4:05      4:10       4:20               4:25

The final efflorescence of D major, when Williams has the musicians run up the scale three times, is one of the least inspired moments in the piece. But it serves its purpose, and on the whole it’s a striking coda. The Air returns, transposed so that it’s based on D. The cello plays a phrase, the rest of the ensemble joins for another phrase that comes to rest on D, which in turn blossoms into those flamboyant scales. The second phrase is repeated, and this time the D it ends on is the basis for a simple, subdued rocking figure (4:10). Listening to piece for the first time, I thought that was the end. But Williams has introduced a new pitch, E flat, at just this point (of the two quick notes, it’s the upper one). The highest, most prominent note of the emphatic dissonant chord at 4:20 is E flat. The unorthodox final cadence is partly about that E flat sinking to D—yet another receding effect. At the end there’s no bright major chord, just the single pitch D.

There is a movie music sensibility at work here, for sure. That’s not what I’m looking for when I sit down to some chamber music, but in this instance I’m not convinced it was such a bad thing. The pulling back and shifting gears at the end of “Simple Gifts” strikes me as especially cinematic. It’s music guiding the emotional response to the turning point in a story, cueing the reflection that’s supposed to follow the exaltation. I don’t know to what extent Williams was writing on spec. I doubt that he had detailed instructions, but he may well have been given some guidance about the tone he should set. For whatever reason, intentional or fortuitous, the cue fit President Obama’s message remarkably well.

Continued in part 2, because everyone’s a critic.

In one sentence the ACLU’s demands that unsavory techniques be banned from questioning suspected terrorists. In another, the ACLU urges putting the feet of the President of the United States into a flame to force him—torture him, if necessary—to do what they want.

Interesting, huh!?

This came to my attention because of President-elect Obama’s interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday. In one section, George asked about that pledge—the one the ACLU is willing to betray its core civil libertarian values to make him live up to—to close Guantánamo. [my emphasis]

So, if the ACLU turns up the heat—maybe they’ll target Obama with another searing ad in the New York Times, but there’s no telling what extremes they’ll go to—it’ll be (yet more) proof that the ACLU is a quivering mass of hypocrisy, perfectly comfortable with torture when it suits their purposes. Don’t worry about Obama, though. He’ll already have his nose to the grindstone (the way the shit’s gonna hit the fan, it might be a blessing in disguise). I doubt he’ll even notice the hot feet.

According to his biographical blurb, “Rich Galen has been described as ‘what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.’” I don’t know about philosopher, but he’s a hack, for sure. A hack with a self-deprecating sense of humor—the piece I just quoted starts with a personal anecdote that’s amusing enough. But if that nonsense about feet to the fire is meant as a joke I can’t find the wink.

I’m stumped as to why Galen would make such an inane claim. I don’t actually believe that the explanation is that he’s stupid, though he may think that his readers are. His editorials also run on Townhall.com, and the general feeling in the comment thread there is that it’s not possible to overstate the perfidy and ignorance of the ACLU. Within that worldview, one commenter manages to turn Galen’s point into something that sounds vaguely rational:

“Feet to the fire” is obviously a figure of speech but its not an idle threat when it comes to the lengths the ACLU will be willing to go to get what they want.

Right after the election I listed a few of the wacky paranoid theories that were circulating in what what Michael Bérubé recently dubbed (“politely”) the “low-information conservative constituency.” Here’s one I hadn’t seen before, from Galen’s comment thread. Scotch Indian “would not be shocked to see [Obama] pass an amendment so he can run for more than two terms.” Not so fast, replies wbheff—“he might not even bother to ‘pass an amendment’.”

Barack Hussein Obama, President for Life. Those folks have really got his number. Once he’s sworn in on Lincoln’s Koran, just hours from now, all bets are off.

Some of my favorite bloggers have found a new font of conservative self-parody—Big Hollywood. I might as well bandwagon along for a minute. There’s a choice post over there written by Evan Sayet, “simply the best political comedian working in America today,” according to FrontPage entertainment critic David Horowitz. Sayet doesn’t waste any humor on his “unified field theory” of a comic-book menace called “Modern Liberalism,” though. He’s not just a stand-up guy, he’s a Thinker, and he starts his think-piece on Bruce Springsteen with some intellectual heavy hitters.

The “culture war” that we hear so much about is, to borrow Thomas Sowell’s phrase, a “conflict of visions.” Visions, Sowell explains, go deeper than mere policy—in fact they are the font of where we stand on the issues—and they are founded on some of the most basic and fundamental beliefs the individual holds about the nature of man and, in turn, the role and purpose of government, family, religion and all other influential forces that society has evolved. Sowell called the conflicting visions the “Constrained” and the “Unconstrained” and offered Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith as primary examples of the visions in conflict. More contemporary examples are John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, the former holding the “unconstrained” vision (which I call here the Neo-Liberal view), the latter the “constrained,” or, in my term, Conservative take. Just to be clear, yes, I’m saying that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Sowell recognizes that, at its most basic level, this conflict of visions revolves around what one believes to be man’s innate nature. Is it, as the Neo-Liberal believes, that man is born good and then corrupted by the institutions of society or, do the Conservatives have it right and man is born with a dual and conflicting nature—capable of good and evil and everything in between—requiring cultural forces to help him tamp down the darker side and cultivate the good within?

I think it’s safe to say that Sayet is a Springsteen fan, though he never says so outright. He admires Springsteen’s lyrics for what looks to him like a conservative vision of humanity, but that vision seems to be at odds with Springsteen’s “Neo-Liberal” politics. So far so good—some very fine criticism has started with that sort of realization. But the disconnect could be Springsteen’s doing, or it could be a sign that Sayet hasn’t got the “Modern Liberal” thing as totally figured out as he thinks. Is his one-dimensional test really such a foolproof way to sort the “Conservatives” from the “Neo-Liberals”? Is Springsteen’s all-American working-class liberal mindset really captured by a second-hand cliché from 18th-century France? Those are two obvious questions he might have asked, and I’d say the answers are no and no. But if Sayet knows anything, he knows right from wrong. The only way to solve the puzzle is to split Springsteen down the middle. His right half—the one with all the poetic vision—is one-hundred percent Republican. His left side—the Beverly Hills liberal poser—is clueless about what the other half is doing. That’s not the same as a half-and-half blend of “Conservative” and “Neo-Liberal.” That would be like a cross between an elephant and a donkey, and what could come out of such an encounter but a bloody mess?

Maybe Sayet meticulously questioned all his assumptions before he settled on his Dr-Jekyll-and-Mr-Hyde theory of the Boss. I doubt it, though. There are no signs in the article of a reflective, self-critical mind at work. He spends most of the piece cherry-picking the conservative message from songs like “Thunder Road” and “Long Walk Home.” The lyrics never stood a chance. Sayet’s interpretive efforts got the full treatment from performance critic Scott Eric Kaufman. As usual, the show is entertaining and educational.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell and cherry picking, I noticed when I was on Townhall.com that, like Galen, Sowell is a regular columnist there. Now I can see why he appeals to Evan Sayet. The piece of Sowell’s that caught my eye is titled “‘Intellectuals’”. As you can probably guess from the scare quotes, the word is used scornfully throughout. You might think that’s an odd thing for Sowell to do—with a PhD in Economics from Chicago, a raft of books authored, and a high-profile position at a major think tank, what is Sowell if not an intellectual? But in this little piece of mindless pandering he earns his share of the scorn that he pours indiscriminately on his class. I guess that counts as practicing what he preaches.

“‘Intellectuals’” is a reaction to a New York Times column—Nicholas Kristoff wondering if Obama’s success is a “step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life.” Sowell found it “hard to know whether to laugh or cry” about what he seems to have read as a rose-colored paean to intellectuals and intellectualism in politics (that’s not what it is, but never mind). To put Kristoff in his place, Sowell leans unimaginatively on the old trope about how superior common sense is to book learnin’. I think what he has in mind, really, is left-wing book learnin’. He jumps from a few specific cases of leftist intellectuals getting things hopelessly wrong—they’re not hard to find—to this gross generalization:

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century—far more so than ordinary people.

RIght after that passage he paraphrases William F. Buckley’s far more incisive way of making more or less the same point—Buckley famously said that he’d rather be governed by some regular folks from the Boston phone book (“the first two thousand names,” according to Wikiquote) than by the Harvard faculty. I wouldn’t want to be governed by the Harvard faculty either, so I guess Buckley had a point. Whether those “regular” folks who have gone through life getting called first for everything would be better, I’m not sure. The choice that Buckley offers doesn’t bear close examination, but the message is clear and memorable, and that counts for a lot. On the other hand, Sowell’s book (The Complete Idiot’s Feel-Good Guide to Dangerously Misguided Intellectuals and the Ordinary People Who Could Have Set Them Straight) could be written and written and written again. Playing a game of mix-and-match with “intellectuals,” “ordinary people” (whoever they are), and “things,” you could tell just about any story you wanted to. (Back in September, Roger Kimball explained Buckley’s zinger in multisyllabic and historic detail and then patted himself on the back for his slavish devotion to the caricature and his Buckleyesque enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, the “cruise missile aimed from Middle America” at the intelligentsia. Roger Kimball, there’s Buckley’s true heir. Screw the low-life son.)

Just for fun, let’s look at how intellectuals and ordinary people have scored on some recent controversial things. I’ll starting with Barack Obama. We don’t actually know how things will turn out with him, so I can’t score anyone. What I can say is that it will be hard to score. Some ordinary people seem to think he can walk on water. Others figure he’ll trample the constitution and make it impossible to buy an American flag. I checked in with some of that latter group earlier in this post, by way of a Townhall.com comment thread. They are much more likely Sowell readers than the Obama enthusiasts, and in “‘Intellectuals’,” Sowell effectively blesses their petty anti-intellectual prejudice. It’s not the most contemptible performance like that I’ve seen, but it’s nothing to brag about.

How about the global financial meltdown? I think that’s still pretty fresh in everyone’s memory. It seems to have caught most of the experts with their pants down. Are experts the same as intellectuals? Some of them must be, and almost all “experts” are “intellectuals.” As to ordinary people, thank goodness they knew enough to avoid dodgy mortgages they couldn’t afford or a whole lot of them would be up shit creek now without paddles (but with lots of intellectuals, and in a pinch, you know… it just might work). And not so long ago, the U.S. invasion of Iraq was another thing. Some of the neocons around Rumsfeld, guys like Wolfowitz, had intellectual pretensions and advanced degrees, and true to form, they had it figured woefully, criminally wrong. Now the liberal intelligentsia kept saying “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”, but like they say, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. As for ordinary people…

(photo: Shawn Duffy)

It so happens that Tenured Radical just put up something about Obama and “The Return of Educated People.” so there’s another favorite blogger to add to the mix. She even included a YouTube clip of Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing “This Land is Your Land.” Unfortunately “the video has been removed by the user.” I found another clip of the same performances.

You know that it’s only a matter of time before we’re all singing “Kum bah yah” like pod people. Maybe the least we can do for the other side is to chip in for liquor and anti-depressants.

If you google obama ayers khalidi, what comes up is mostly the ranting of people already certain about who to be more afraid of. It was in the interest of the Republican side to make the most of the two professors’ radicalism and their ties to Obama, and anyway, radical professors are a favorite specter of the Right. The academic world’s reflex to circle the wagons and shout “McCarthyism” is represented by the fulsome petition at supportbillayers.org, and the list of over 4000 names under it. But not all Obama supporters were sympathetic to Ayers and Khalidi, and the first line of defense from his camp was to downplay the connection.

I noticed one person conspicuously trying to play on both sides of the fence, to make the most of the radicalism but downplay the connection—KC Johnson. Inside Higher Ed tags him as someone who’s “frequently criticized academe for a lack of political diversity” when he’s dragged in for balance in an otherwise soft-headed article “In Defense of Ayers”. In fact he approached the controversy about Obama’s radical pals the same way he’s approached the Duke lacrosse case, not as a critic but as a crusader rooting out the extremists of the academic Left. As I’ve pointed out ad nauseum about his lacrosse-case stuff, his crusading mentality reduces people and issues to cartoonish black-and-white, and his reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric are all compromised. His defense of Obama shows how in the grip of it he is, because it’s not really a defense, it’s an attempt to capitalize on the controversy in order to promote the academic culture war as a Democratic party agenda.

Inside Higher Ed picked up Johnson’s take on the controversy from a post on Cliopatria, a group blog on the History News Network. I imagine that one reason the blog exists is to give academic historians a place to editorialize, but it’s a shame to see it used as a soapbox for misrepresentation and simple-minded polemics—my opinion hasn’t changed in the months since my testy exchange with Ralph Luker, the chief blogger over there. A premise of the site is that “history is complicated,” and behind this controversy are the complicated histories of several complicated people. Ayers went from being a fugitive militant radical to being a key player in Chicago school reform, apparently acceptable in that context to establishment figures from both parties. Khalidi was attractive to the International Republican Institute (chaired by John McCain) in the mid-90s because of his “coolness to the PLO” but a decade or so earlier was apparently, despite his denials, speaking for the PLO (I like this post by Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief for the Jewish news organization JTA, grappling with the ambiguity after being forced to back down from defending Khalidi against the PLO-spokesman charge). Johnson wants the two as poster boys for academic extremism—not exceptional but typical—so it served his purpose to leave intact the simplistic and superficial impressions that were already in circulation and contribute a little spin of his own to the caricature of Khalidi. All in all it does nothing for Obama but it’s a nice little gift to the Republican operative Johnson quotes who wants Obama to “own his friendships with individuals that are in some cases anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist.”

A couple of days after it went up on Cliopatria, Johnson posted a modified version of the commentary on his lacrosse-case blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), and the rhetoric and agenda-driven reasoning are ramped up somewhat in the process. The same thing happens with another KC Johnson polemic that initially went up on Cliopatria, this one about a couple of Brooklyn College professors who’ve been petitioning on behalf of Syed Fahad Hashmi, a former student detained on terrorism charges. In that one, the crusading logic is even more obviously in the drivers seat, especially in the rewrite, which panders to DIW loyalists with cheap rhetoric that Johnson couldn’t get away with on Cliopatria (I hope). The funniest part is a line about statements made by Hashmi’s supporters that “read as if cribbed from a defense brief.” Has anyone covering a legal controversy ever written more “analysis” that sounds like a defense brief than Johnson?

[For more on the Hashmi case, read the next post. There’s a response to this paragraph from KC Johnson in the comments.]

The tribalism runs deep in DIW. Wherever you look over there, including at the legal teams and their arguments, one side seems to have cornered the market on whatever’s honest, decent, sensible, and worthwhile. Mike Nifong’s efforts were pathetic and dishonest enough that an unbalanced impression of the criminal investigation is probably unavoidable. But Johnson’s treatment of the ongoing lawsuits has the same cheerleading slant. The way he describes “The Duke Motion to Dismiss”, it’s cynical legal maneuvering, or else “(scarcely credible) p.r. spin” straight out of Creative Writing 101. The “powerful response” from the plaintiff’s attorney, on the other hand, is beyond reproach or even criticism—no legal maneuvering there. It may be that Duke’s position is so weak that it can’t do anything but grasp at straws. But it’s hard to believe that such a lopsided characterization is the result of serious analysis. I haven’t tried to size up the lawsuits, but on one point I happened to look up, both sets of plaintiffs offer pure spin.

Though it’s toned down, Johnson brings the same attitude to his support for Obama. During the primaries a major focus of his Cliopatria posts was the disingenuous and muddle-headed nature of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Among the variations on the theme, “Clinton’s Rhetoric and Reality” has her making absurd claims of sexism in her concession speech, “Clinton’s Constitutional Conundrum” has her pandering to Guam and Puerto Rico, and “The Clinton Dozen” details the “latest in [her] campaign’s effort to play the race card.” And then there’s the other Clinton, who, in “Bill Channels Wilentz,” “[advances the] bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process.” I expect that a lot of the criticism is fairly well founded, and it often comes with interesting historical tie-ins. But like the DIW account of the lacrosse lawsuits, the overall impression is that only one side is playing politics.

Johnson is very good at framing a controversy or dispute so that he can efficiently sort the good/right/true from the bad/wrong/false and play them off against each other, or just dwell on the bad, which is more typical. Things can get ugly if the frames overlap, though. A bad joke that a mutual reader tried to post to DIW shows how ugly: “just to rib [Johnson], I wrote ‘Can’t we all get along?’ and suggested that perhaps he and Crystal [Mangum (the accuser in the lacrosse case)] should get together to co-host a rally for Obama.” Plenty of crude humor makes it through Johnson’s “lightest of touch” comment moderation, but this time, somehow, it didn’t.

In his analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks,” Johnson tries to play in both the culture-war and campaign frames and finesse the clash. It seems to have been an opportunity that was too good to pass up. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Ayers and Khalidi are so unexceptional and integrated in the “groupthink academic environment” that Obama couldn’t be expected to avoid them. In other words, the depth of the problem turns out, somehow, to be his candidate’s excuse. Oh, and by the way, the Democratic party better get with the program, because it was their “poor record in promoting diversity of thought and pedagogical approach on the nation’s college campuses” that made Obama vulnerable in the first place. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!

On DIW it’s “The Lacrosse Case & the Khalidi/Ayers Controversy.” Here’s Johnson letting Obama off the hook—text removed from the Cliopatria post is overstruck, text added for DIW is bracketed.

For the GOP attack to work, Ayers and Khalidi have to be viewed as exceptional figures[—wholly unlike nearly all other professors]. Obama’s judgment can hardly be questioned if his “buddies” were not marginal characters but instead people who are like [resemble] lots of other academics, especially since Obama lived in an academic neighborhood (Hyde Park) and spent several years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the basic [pedagogical and academic] approaches of Ayers and Khalidi fit well within the academic mainstream. Ayers is, after all, a prestigious professor of education (hardly a field known for its intellectual diversity, of course [as I have explored elsewhere]). Khalidi was of such standing that Columbia hired him away from the U of C, and named him to chair its Middle East Studies Department. From that perch, [he presided over a wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum, even as] he informed readers of New York that students of Arab descent—and only such students—knew the “truth” about Middle Eastern affairs.

I lived in Hyde Park for six years, and I can’t tell you how many of my friends turned out to be unrepentant terrorists. Or, well, maybe I could… but I don’t have any political ambitions, so never mind. The DIW commentariat was no more more impressed than I am by Johnson’s clumsy sleight-of-hand, which insults not only the reader’s intelligence but the candidate’s as well. It would be understandable if it took a while before Obama realized that the Education professor putting together that big grant was once wanted for planting bombs in federal buildings—even in academia, believe it or not, that’s a singular bio. But Khalidi’s involvement with the Palestinian cause was ongoing and obvious, and over time it was the basis for conversations that included, by Obama’s account, “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.”

My impression is that Johnson’s fans mostly brushed the lame excuse aside. Rantburg sums up the real message of the post:

Prof. Johnson is certainly correct about the American academy: once you venture away from the hard sciences, you encounter a world in which people like William Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, Ward Churchill and others like them are not just ordinary and common-place, but both accepted and powerful.

David Thompson thumps the same drum but at least has a little more imagination in conjuring up outrageous academic villains—after all, his banner promises comic books, and what could be more entertaining than vanquishing “far left fantasists” intent on “‘groom[ing]’ youngsters with the ‘correct’ political outlook”? (it’s a lot more fun than the actual research, that’s for sure).

The bone Johnson throws to DIW readers in the passage I quoted is the comment about Columbia’s “wildly biased anti-Israel curriculum.” Elsewhere, the revised version is sprinkled with references to Duke’s all-purpose band of extremist stick figures, the so-called “Group of 88.” Khalidi is, in Johnson’s account, not only overvalued and hostile to America’s true friend in the Middle East but also ready to pass dismissive and self-serving judgment on the students he’s supposed to be teaching. If that sounds a lot like the “Group” profile, well, lo and behold, a few paragraphs later Johnson reads his tea leaves and declares that “[i]f Khalidi or Ayres were employed at Duke, doubtless they would have joined the Group of 88.”

Johnson doesn’t give a link to that New York magazine article, but when I tracked it down I found that Khalidi’s comments are not nearly so clear-cut. True to form, Johnson whittled them down to just the bullshit that suits his agenda.

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” [Khalidi] says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

Whatever this is, it’s absolutely not a blanket claim that one group owns the “truth” and the other doesn’t. The essence of it is that one has experienced more dissonance than the other, which doesn’t seem like such a controversial claim. Are the Jewish-American kids who go to Columbia more likely than the Arab-Americans to come from a relatively homogeneous community in which they’re well integrated? I believe they are. And are the students of Arab extraction more likely than the Jewish ones to encounter views on the Middle East that clash with their own views? Yes—public and political opinion in the US is overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now just because Khalidi’s basic claim is plausible doesn’t mean it’s right, and even if it is right the differences between the groups might not be as stark or as significant, in practice, as Khalidi seems to think—that’s where my skepticism really kicks in. But there are all sorts of ways to object to this passage without misrepresenting it.

The article is about the controversy over the classroom behavior of professors in Columbia’s Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). It’s well worth reading—the reporter, Jennifer Senior, gives a good account of both sides. Khalidi is quoted extensively. He’s “passionately invested in the future of Mideast studies,” and therefore on the defensive, since he sees the charges against his department as a “huge club” that’s being used to attack the field as a whole. But he doesn’t dismiss the charges, which date from when he was still in Hyde Park palling around with Obama.

“You know,” he concludes, “it could be the case that there are students who have serious grievances and it’s the case that threats to our academic freedom have developed over the last two years. This is a situation where you have to assume it’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Johnson’s analysis of “Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks” was a daredevil attempt to walk and chew gum at the same time. He failed miserably—not a surprise, since his heart wasn’t really in it in the first place. His talents run in the opposite direction, towards mind-numbing moralistic either/ors, and in that department the differences between him and Sarah Palin are mostly a matter of vocabulary and accent.

I was in Seattle for Reagan’s re-election, and had moved to Chicago a few months before the 1988 race that gave us our first four Bush years. For most of the time in between I was studying music at CalArts, the avant-guarde school that Disney built at the northern edge of LA’s sprawl, where it was slowly surrounded by the clean-cut and conservative cul-de-sacs of Valencia. The land of fruits and nuts, as a friend of mine used to say. It was a Reagan-era kind of place.

Chicago—Hyde Park, in fact—was a huge change. There’s no getting away from politics in Chicago. It’d been a year since Harold Washington’s sudden death, but the city was still battling through the aftermath. I was still there four years later, and that time I finally got to vote for the winner. What I remember most clearly from ‘92 isn’t Clinton, it’s Carol Mosley Braun’s run for the senate. People I knew in the neighborhood were involved in her campaign, I think. We were all thrilled that she won—too bad things didn’t go as well once she got to Washington. I guess by that time, Barack Obama was circulating in the neighborhood and teaching at the U of C, not that I had a clue.

I was in Boston for Clinton’s re-election, and down here in North Carolina for the Bush v. Gore debacle. God was that depressing! And in many ways the 2004 election was even worse. How could such a bungling idiot get re-elected? Canada never looked better, but I consoled myself that if Kerry had won, it’s likely he’d have been a weak president who’d have to absorb Bush’s catastrophic mistakes and would likely absorb a lot of the blame as well. Better, maybe, for Bush to keep stewing in it, and it seemed pretty clear that he’d thoroughly discredit himself if he had four more years. He did just that. Too bad all the rest of us are stuck in the hole, too.

After Bush won in 2000 I felt like I understood what the people who loathed the Clintons had gone through for 8 years. Just the sound of that Texas drawl on the radio and I can’t turn the thing off fast enough. It’s a gut reaction, and I’m sure Bill Clinton’s voice can do the same thing to a lot of Republicans. And for many people I know, and to some extent for me, too, there was an apocalyptic feel to the Reagan victory, and even more to Bush II. It was a show of political force from hordes of people who apparently wanted to bulldoze life as we knew it, and it wasn’t clear what was going to stop them. Fortunately the complicated business of running a country slows down even anti-government administrations.

Anyway, I have some sympathy for the people who are feeling alienated and anxious in the face of all this whooping and hollering and talk of change. When you’re stuck on a ship, it’s not a good feeling when someone you don’t like or trust takes over the wheel. It’ll be tough having to listen to President Obama holding forth from the bully pulpit, and having to listen to all the ridiculous and obnoxious stuff his supporters and fans will come up with. One consolation, if you voted for Bush, is that your guy is leaving a huge mess, and it’s hard to see how Obama will have the time or money to enslave the white race, or whatever. So no need to let your imagination run away with you. If it’s already run away, and you’re convinced that Obama is Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the US, that he didn’t write his own book, that he’s a Marxist, that you better stock up on American flags because pretty soon you won’t be able to buy one, etc., etc., here’s what I’d suggest:

Grow up, folks! Get a grip! There’s lots of real problems—go find one!

In the mean time, I’ll be enjoying myself. It was nice to be able to vote for the winner back in ‘92 and ‘96, but this time it’s a whole lot sweeter. Even though I had a feeling from the beginning that Obama would pull this off, it’s still hard to believe it actually happened. An articulate president who’s seen the world from many angles, from the ground up, and reacts with curiosity and intelligence? A president who’s as gifted a politician as Bill Clinton and has self-control to boot? A president who’s broken through the most symbolic of racial barriers with the grace and confidence of a man who has nothing to prove about how black he is or about how black he isn’t? A president who projects the best qualities of the two countries that have shaped my life, America and Kenya?

It’s too much.

Here’s a timely message from Sam, the American Eagle. (hat tip)

…the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism”—how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

The idea of “intellectual diversity” is a classic of postmodern conservatism (for those who don’t like their conservatism quite so postmodernized, it’s “intellectual pluralism”). It’s a slippery concept that’s inspired plenty of heated and arcane debates—to get a feel for them, go Fish. Based on what I’ve seen—a fairly haphazard sample—“intellectual diversity” is mostly used as a pretentious euphemism for “political diversity,” something that’s a lot like cultural diversity. If smart, educated, and decent people can come from a wide range of races and cultures, then it seems reasonable to say they can come from the different political persuasions as well. I’m not sure how many people really believe that, in their heart of hearts, and the relativism is sure ironic coming from the conservative side. But there’s some merit in the idea, I think. Cloistered orthodoxy and petty intolerance are endemic to academia, and the tendencies are only encouraged by too much homogeneity. A while back I pointed out a couple of professors whose contributions are tied to the way they stand out as conservatives against a background that’s largely liberal.

Positive examples are especially illuminating because intellectual diversity is usually promoted by highlighting the negatives its supposed to fix—the outrages of liberal bias and political correctness. In fact, it seems to me that one of the better arguments against intellectual diversity as a reform agenda is the poor quality of the polemics launched by some of its promoters and fans. When high-minded ideals are coupled with low-minded rhetoric and feeble, agenda-driven reasoning, it’s the practice that reveals the intentions and integrity of the critic far more than the preaching. David Thompson is a peripheral example, KC Johnson a more central one. What the practice suggests is that an ideologically balanced campus would be like one of those TV shows where liberal and conservative pundits try to shout each other down. It’s a mindset that offers nothing of value to academia’s pool of intellectual diversity.

In his column in the Cornell Daily Sun, Gabriel Arana criticises conservatives on his campus for dwelling on denounciation and symbolic resistance to what they see as the dominant culture instead of offering intellectually engaged alternatives. (hat tip)

In this sense The Cornell Review and the conservative discourse it represents owe more to Ann Coulter than William F. Buckley; the discourse is polemical, a tired repetition of conservative mantras attacking a liberal campus culture. If the Veritas grant does anything, I hope it will be to invigorate conservative discourse that has—at least during my time here—failed to really engage the intellectual community here, to bring to light new opinions that do not simply recapitulate conservative pundits’ talking points. Perhaps it can start by refraining from attacking our faculty and students and propose something to talk about.

The editorial was in response to the announcement of a $50k grant from the Veritas Fund for Higher Education to help launch Cornell’s new Program on Freedom and Free Societies. Arana’s objections aren’t with the program, they’re with the rhetoric coming from the Fund’s executive director, David DeRosiers. And he isn’t alone—even the Program’s point man on campus, Prof. Barry Strauss, distanced himself from DeRosiers’ rhetoric (“…I wish they had consulted me about their summer update. I would have told them that I respectfully disagree with much of what they say.”). Here’s a sample:

Veritas identified Cornell as one such university that prides itself on diversity, but lacks the intellectual kind, stating in its update, “most new courses of the last several decades have focused entirely on race, gender, or postmodernism.” Cornell, over the last forty years, has neglected traditional learning offerings such as Western society, thought and economics, according to the statement.

“The idea behind what we’re doing is to bring back triumphalism to moderate the excesses of gender and [diversity courses],” said DeRosiers. “To teach courses that have gone out of style. They have had a focus on race, gender, class—and in doing so, students have been given a partial view of reality with America as the force of many evils. It’s more to the fact that they’re only receiving a diet of such things—they’re being malnourished.”

According to Arana, the sweeping claims about the curriculum are easily rebutted by Cornell’s course catalog. That’s small potatoes, though, compared to the apparent determination to fight excess with excess by “bring[ing] back triumphalism.” Triumphalism? I can’t imagine a self-respecting humanities professor promoting the idea—maybe that just shows how deep the grooves of liberal bias are in my brain. But if triumphalism is seriously part of the program, it seems like a shame to put the West back in it’s rightful position at the apex of history and just stop there. Might as well put mankind back in his rightful place at the apex of creation, too—“intelligent design” is ready and waiting. And with science out the window, why not go whole hog and bring back geocentrism, too? That would be some potent triumphalism—America at the center of God’s universe. With a little of that in the curriculum you might just moderate all those America-hating zealots of oppression studies right out of existence.

Thompson writes as if he knows about higher education and he’s building a case against its liberal elements. Like anyone who’s been to school and can read a paper, he knows something about it. The problem is that his case depends as much on not knowing things as it does on knowing them. It’s a problem for me, I should say—I may be coming at it with the wrong standard. If the blog is meant as nothing more than entertainment with a political slant, then I guess he has a pretty good formula. The post I’m looking at probably wrote itself once he had the quotes, and like-minded readers get a nice little buzz off the righteous indignation. To have that impact there has to be an appearance of reasoning. A lot of actual reasoning with real-life complexities and ambiguities would be counterproductive, though—more effort for less effect. Thompson’s not an academic decision-maker, so I suppose he might as well write whatever he wants. Still, his criticism is supposed to sound smart but it makes a virtue of ignorance, and that really bugs me.

The theme of the post is “classroom political advocacy.” Thompson starts by invoking a scene from the documentary Indoctrinate U. about a professor who faced “a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues.” That sounds like a matter of professional intolerance, not classroom advocacy, but it makes the point that bad things are happening to good people in the halls of learning. Cut to “[a] recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics….” Thompson picks out three passages from the comments, arranged from ridiculous to reasonable. The first is from a person who thinks the world as we know it will end if McCain is elected, and since the other side doesn’t play fair why should his side? The comment starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not an academic nor a purist.” But never mind that—the site is still popular with left-leaning academics. And that’s the basic strategy: Pick up statements from here and there, brush off the reservations and qualifications and clarifications, then post them under a banner that says “leftist academic.”

The context for the next pair of quotes—the ones from Johnson’s editorial—is “Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department,” and “Rhonda Garelick, an associate professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College.” In other words, left-wing professor from a certain kind of department—neither seems to have a public reputation, so the names are irrelevant. In effect it’s about the same as “popular with left-leaning academics,” though less a matter of guilt by association, and it adds a gender and a department. [After posting I see that Furr is somewhat notorious, though not with anything like the name recognition of, say, Ward Churchill.]

The problem isn’t that the quotes are taken out of their textual context, it’s that all context beyond that it’s from the pen of Dr. Lefty is treated as irrelevant. Readers are free to follow the links and soak up all the context they want, and it seems to me that anyone who’s curious or who wants to understand the problems that Thompson is exercised about would want to do just that. Garelick and Furr are both articulate people writing from personal experience (especially Garelick—Furr’s discussion-group post is pretty dry), so whether you’re pro or con there’s more to be gleaned from their writing than how outrageously wrong they are. But to really understand what they’re trying to communicate would require careful reading with the judgmental filters turned off, and I don’t want to be responsible for any harm caused by unprotected exposure to dangerous and offensive ideas. We are, after all, talking about an unreconstructed feminist and a man who disdains conservatives in favor of Marxists. Some plain old realism wouldn’t be so much to ask, though—a vaguely realistic model of college instruction that puts the political issues into perspective, some scepticism towards friendly sources like Indoctrinate U., and a better model of the relationship between what’s thought, said, or written and what’s done.

Garelick turns out to be the richest target, especially after Thompson spices her up to suit his taste. In his view, she “loftily dismissed students who objected to her use of French lessons to express at length her opposition to the war in Iraq.” I’m not sure what makes her dismissal lofty—maybe any opinion printed in the New York Times is by definition lofty. It’s a tone that’s more from his imagination than from the page, in any case. A purer figment of his imagination is the idea she went on “at length.” He returns to it a couple of times in the comments—first referring to French lessons “interrupted with lengthy screeds on the alleged evils of capitalism, ‘imperialism,’ ‘hegemony,’ etc.” and later to the “agitprop monologues” of French professors who “indulge their own political vanities at enormous length.” This is probably just a fact of life—left-wing professors drone on and on when they’ve got the indoctrination bug. She might have done just that, for sure, but all she says is that she “broached the topic of Iraq.”

What business does a professor of French have setting aside her syllabus to critique the war? I’m inclined to doubt that she has any business doing it. It’s a good question, anyway, and I don’t blame anyone for finding her presumption annoying or even offensive. The essay as a whole is grounds to wonder what goes on in her classes, where her priorities are, but it’s not grounds for any conclusions about those things. If, when she says she wants to “teach[] ‘wakeful’ political literacy: the skills needed to interrogate all cultural messages,” she’s sincere about the “all,” willing and able to take up feminist orthodoxy as critically as war-on-terror orthodoxy, that would make a big difference. If she’s at least ready to listen to her students as she is to lecture then, that would also make a big difference. The overall impression I get is of an attentive and responsible teacher. It’s not something I’d bet a lot of money on, but the clues are there and they clearly didn’t make a dent in Thompson’s armor of preconceptions. He found what he wanted to find—a stand-in liberal blowhard.

Thompson’s commenters take him up on the implicit invitation to sound smart sounding off, comfortable that even if they know very little, they know all that really matters. The setup is about the same as on Durham-in-Wonderland, where the posts often give the stamp of approval (Harvard PhD-certified) to irate ignorance, and the comments follow suit (with a vengeance). I saw the same sad dynamic on the Volokh Conspiracy, again engineered by a professor. Thompson chimes in in the middle of his comment thread with an opinion about the cost of liberal bias: because students are being “spared serious and thoughtful contact with opposing arguments, their own views can easily become lazy, reflexive and glib.” He and his crew do a superb job of modeling the problem.

Overall the comment thread has a clubhouse atmosphere—the reactions are not as vehement as on DIW, I guess because the evildoers are more generic and their offenses are not so fresh and outrageous. The tone is also not as vindictive as DIW tends to be, though several commenters relish the thought of suing the pants off that inexcusable professor of French (can you say faux juridicalism?). The prevailing sentiment at its most tasteless and overwrought comes from the clever fellow who’s about to send his kids “down the “large intestine of the university system” where they “may be exposed to this gibberish from incompetents who would be more benefit to society if they were waiting tables.” That’s not to say the comments are uniformly ridiculous and uniformed—they aren’t. What’s most notable, anyway, is what’s missing—there’s no inclination to either look into a mirror or take on more challenging targets than the inflatable monsters in the kiddie pool.

When I finally clicked over to Crooked Timber I was surprised to find a deliberative post questioning the ethics of devoting 45 seconds as students were gathering before class to encourage them to register to vote. That’s some perspective right there, and if you set this post and its comments next to Thompson’s, the idea that our universities need more conservatives to moderate the feckless liberal ideologues doesn’t come out looking so good. On Crooked Timber, Brian poses a real-life moral dilemma, elaborates some arguments on either side, and opens the floor. Mixed in with the usual comment-forum posturing and chatter are positions pro and con that are more reasoning that rhetoric—it’s almost like an honest-to-goodness debate. Thompson and company, on the other hand, prop up some stick figures and then bowl them down. It’s just a random comparison that, in the big picture, proves nothing. But it’s hard to take criticism seriously if the people pushing it (often pretty smugly) can tolerate that much dissonance between their rhetoric and the example they’re setting.

Thompson’s thoughts about students being spared from opposing arguments was a response to one of the few readers’ opinions with straightforward real-life implications:

I have three kids in college. In every case they have encountered a stereotypical liberal professor who indulged in the type of teaching I like to call “regurgitative learning”. They like to hear THEIR ideas, THEIR opinions and THEIR political views written down as mantra by their students. Opposing views are not acceptable and can be cause for failure.

In the same vein, another commenter with a kid in college says that “[she] told [her daughter] to lie, if necessary, to get through classes. Just give them what they want to hear…. [Her friends] all routinely lie on exams or papers, just to please their profs.” The fact that she thinks of lying as an option shows that something is seriously wrong (including her signature, “hermeneutics,” which, incidentally, is why I’ve arbitrarily made the person a “her”). Exams and papers are about knowing things and being able to reason and write—if the student has to take a position on some issue, it should be completely irrelevant whether it’s their actual opinion. Lying or not is beside the point (or at least should be). I don’t doubt that some professors are confused about this, but if it’s typical or even common where “hermeneutics” sent her daughter, then she chose the wrong school. Grades given to writing that backs up an opinion depend on overall impressions that can’t be quantified. That leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I suspect, though, that the more clueless and indifferent students—the ones who don’t really understand or care what it means to line up an argument in support of a conclusion—are the ones most likely to imagine that the trick is to just regurgitate. Anyway, what I’m most likely to conclude from a paper that parrots my opinion is that the student can’t think for herself, and that’s the practical problem with that parent’s advice—it might work well with a few bad professors, but the others might decide her daughter is a dimwit. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who gives a damn about education would give such advice to their child.

I do believe that there are preachy liberal professors out there. Based on the bitter and sarcastic comments I’ve come across, it seems that they leave a lasting and bad impression. As a student I never experienced any overt campaigns of indoctrination in the classroom, and it could be that I’m unfairly downplaying the complaint because of that. But anyone who’s more interested in taking full advantage of the better professors than in fooling the bad ones should read Chris Goff’s no-nonsense effort to “dispense some advice for students who want to remain true to themselves while turning in rigorous academic work.”

• js mill conservatives stupid critique
• john stuart mill quote conservative stupid
• john stuart mill i didn’t mean to say that conservatives are stupid people
• i did not intend to suggest that all conservative people are stupid but i did intend to suggest that all stupid people are conservative.

There’s another cluster that doesn’t seem to be as historically informed:

• stupid conservatives
• why are conservatives stupid?
• conservatives are stupid jokes
• stupid things conservatives say
• every stupid person i know is a conservative

Like Obama said to Letterman, it’s silly season in American politics—it seems like we’re really outdoing ourselves this time. I’m guessing that’s the spirit behind most of those searches (I’m not sure what the spirit behind the search on “lawn guys are stupid” was, though). Nothing spreads election-season cheer like a discussion of the innate stupidity of the other side, especially when the theory is endorsed by a certified Great Thinker.

The long-winded googler was definitely wrong about what Mill intended to suggest, dumbing it down by exaggerating the relationship (and I’d be willing to bet the query didn’t come from a conservative). This quote, apparently from a letter Mill wrote to a Conservative MP, seems to be what the searcher had in mind (emphasis added):

What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.

Mill was commenting on a tendency he observed in a political party in mid-19th-century England—capital-C Conservatives, who he considered not inevitably but generally stupid.

One objection I found to the philosophy professor’s wisecrack is that those Conservatives of yore were not conservative in the current sense of the word. And I found other suggestions, reading over that controversy, about what Mill probably didn’t mean to say. A recent New Yorker had an article by Adam Gopnik about Mill, and it has a fine paragraph about what Mill did mean to say (hat tip):

After Harriet’s death, Mill entered Parliament, in 1865, as a liberal backbencher, and did about as well as intellectuals usually do there. He was often hooted, and became notorious for having once described the Conservatives as “necessarily the stupidest party.” What he meant wasn’t that Conservatives were stupid; Disraeli, who was running the Tory Party then, was probably the cleverest man ever to run a political party, and Mill’s own influences from the right were immense and varied. He meant that, since true conservatism is a complicated position, demanding a good deal of restraint when action is what seems to be wanted, and a long view of history when an immediate call to arms is about, it tends to break down into tribal nationalism, which is stupidity incarnate. For Mill, intelligence is defined by sufficient detachment from one’s own case to consider it as one of many; a child becomes humanly intelligent the moment it realizes that there are other minds just like its own, working in the same way on the material available to them. The tribal nationalist is stupid because he fails to recognize that, given a slight change of location and accident of birth, he would have embraced the position of his adversary. Put him in another’s shoes and he would turn them into Army boots as well.

Applying that to the present is no trouble at all, which might mean that it’s not really Mill but Mill remixed according to Gopnik’s modern sensibility. Either way, our supposedly conservative president has just pushed through a massive public bailout of the banking system. Calling it “capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx) sounds like the one demanding from his party some “restraint when action is what seems to be wanted.” And, turning from economic catastrophe to political farce, the nomination of a stunningly insular 44-year-old to be vice president—that looks like the problem of having “a long view of history [or anything else] when an immediate call to arms [or the pressing need to get elected] is about.”

And then there’s “tribal nationalism.” It’s not something that comes up in any of the passages I’ve read about Conservatives from Mill’s writings. But in Subjection of Women, he has this to say about stupidity and tribalism:

Stupidity is much the same the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so those whose opinions and feelings are emanations from their own nature and faculties.

Whether it’s true to Mill or not, Gopnik’s line about the absurd significance given to an accident of birth captures my feelings about flag-waving, love-it-or-leave-it patriotism and a few other conservative staples. These days “stupid” is a vague and childish word, though—it’s a playground insult. If it’s replaced with “ignorant,” the ideas rings truer. And “tribal nationalism,” for the present, is as sensitive to internal red state/blue state borders as it is to international ones. With those caveats, I think the charge that “Barak Hussein Obama” is a closet muslim and that he pals around with terrorists—appeals to ignorance and fear as well as stupidity—are fine examples of the modern-day degeneration of conservatism into tribalism. It seems that it’s gotten so hot that it’s even burning McCain, and while he didn’t set all the fires, his campaign hasn’t shied away from fanning the flames—that’s what Palin is there for.

I have to admit that I get some satisfaction watching McCain struggle to tamp down the ugliness that he had apparently hoped to mobilize and then channel. But my side is quite capable of getting into the same kind of trouble—every so often the sans-culottes get riled up and want to chop off some Establishment heads. In the Duke lacrosse case—a pretty good microcosm of American culture-war politics—the strident, intolerant tone was set by zealots from the left, who went for a different part of Establishment anatomy (and if that doesn’t count as a stroke of sheer stupidity, I don’t know what would). Timothy Burke’s latest post, about how demoralizing he finds the “infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama,” drew a comment from a San Franciscan who keeps quiet about his support of McCain for fear of vandalism and ostracism. I wish I could think of a good reason to doubt him, but I can’t. The real problem, I’m afraid, isn’t conservatives, it’s people.