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.

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)

• 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.

Google turned up a blog entry by David Friedman that sums up the facile political tribalism of internet debates. I think he’s right that human beings are wired to make that kind of in-group/out-group distinction. But it also seems self-evident that a genuine intellectual would reject tribalistic reasoning as a matter of course. Apparently that’s not the case, unless you make it part of the definition of “intellectual.” Judging from his blog, Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW), you’d be hard-pressed to find a more committed tribalist than KC Johnson—in fact I feel like I’ve finally found the word that captures the relentless polarization of Johnson’s Wonderland. In an article I recently criticized, historian Alan Kors starts by idealizing academia as a place that’s utterly hostile to ideological tribalism but then turns to a political pitch that smacks of tribalism, or so it seems to me. It makes sense, I guess, that Erin O’Connor’s reacted to my criticism by confusing me with a whole tribe of “critics.” But before I get to that, a look at the dark side of team spirit…

One of the starkest incidents of tribalism stirred up by rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team was literally about turf. A couple of weeks into the saga, a couple of Duke students at the Cook Out (a drive-through restaurant) were surrounded and physically assaulted by young men shouting that it was “Central Territory,” referring to historically black North Carolina Central University, where Crystal Mangum, the team’s accuser, was a student. Mangum’s graduation last month provoked a strident op-ed in the Duke Chronicle by Kristin Butler, and the rhetoric of tribal antagonism has flared up again.

You don’t have to go far to see what a hot button Butler pressed—the 500-plus comments that follow her column make it pretty clear. She told Eric Ferreri of the News & Observer that “she’s surprised by the level of reaction she has received, but regrets only that her writing didn’t spark a more constructive dialogue.” Writing that she’d “never again take an NCCU degree seriously, and neither should any other self-respecting Dukie” because “NCCU’s ‘seal of approval’ no longer guarantees good character” wasn’t an invitation to constructive dialog (and since when have colleges been handing out diplomas that guarantee the good character of their graduates?). As she frames it, the problem is that NCCU has done things that are hostile and insulting to upstanding Dukies such as herself. She makes a number of good points that transcend that frame, but her interest in them, and in NCCU in general, pretty much starts and ends with whatever happens to impinge on Duke.

Butler’s chauvinism is most obvious when she writes about Solomon Burnette, a notorious enemy of Duke who graduated from Central last year.

Burnette, you may recall, robbed two Duke students at gunpoint in 1997. After finishing a 13-month prison sentence, he had the audacity not only to enroll in Arabic classes on our campus in April 2007; Burnette also penned a column I and many others interpreted as inciting physical violence against white Dukies in his student newspaper.

Burnette’s column is a nasty piece of work, for sure. The paper’s editors must have some discretion in choosing editorials, and it’s mind-boggling to me that they rationalized this one. NCCU chancellor James Ammons made it clear that, unlike Burnette, he believed that “the facts do matter in this case and every legal case and violence is not the answer.” My understanding of the first-amendment advocacy of groups like FIRE is that toleration for outrageous, irresponsible, and ignorant self-expression like Burnette’s is the real test of our commitment to freedom of speech. Perhaps his suggestion that violence is, in fact, the answer puts him over the line—it’s something that Butler could have argued, anyway, instead of dwelling on just how scandalized she is.

Rev. Carl Kenney, a Duke divinity school graduate and freelance writer, stepped in as Butler’s opposite number, more or less. But Kenney’s reaction also reflects his ambiguous history as an African American who attended Duke. It seems that the choice didn’t sit well with some black Durhamites who weren’t shy about letting him know just how they felt. After working to moderate that reflexive distaste for Duke, Butler’s column left him “feel[ing] like stuffing [his] head in the sand.”

Kenney’s sense of betrayal has a counterpart in the racially-charged animosity that bubbled over into violence early in the scandal. The Cook Out incident and other threats directed at Duke students led to a heightened security consciousness around campus, and according to Charles Piot, Duke’s black male students came under suspicion and scrutiny. Tribal logic is especially hard on the folks with divided or ambiguous loyalties, who don’t obviously fit in one place or the other.

But it seems to me that Kenney gives in to tribal logic, too. He makes little if any effort to separate what I think are natural and appropriate questions about Mangum’s status at NCCU from Butler’s way of raising them. Knowingly making a false felony accusation is a felony for a good reason—it’s terribly destructive. It’s easy to get fixated on the drama of poor black woman vs. rich white men (adding adjectives to taste) but the damage spreads to women who have been raped and those who will be in the future, and it spreads to communities and institutions—the scandal ground its way through Durham as tabloid news and, as NCCU alum W. Russell Robinson says in his response to Butler, “everyone lost” (with that point and several others Robinson seems, to my ear, to be saying that it’s time to set the tribalism aside). Mangum wasn’t held legally responsible for the damage, and as Butler points out it seems that she wasn’t accountable to NCCU’s honor code, either. Instead she’s been awarded a degree in “police psychology.” It’s not clear what sort of major that is—I can’t find any mention of it on NCCU’s web site, which is odd. It’s drawn plenty of bitter sarcasm (“Police psychology? If it includes conning cops, she’s at the top of her class.”). Peel away the sarcasm, though, and there are reasonable questions that a degree in, say, Visual Communications wouldn’t raise.

Kenney believes that Mangum is just “a person getting a second chance after a mistake is made.” As far as I’m concerned she deserves a second chance as much as anyone else. But a second chance implies a fresh start, and with the dust still settling on the scandal and no sign that she’s faced up to her responsibility for it, it’s hard for me to believe that she’s reached that point. It’s not something I can settle one way or the other. What is clear to me is that it’s a situation that should be open to discussion, that calls for some reflection—more than a shrug (“she earned the credits, so here’s the diploma”) or tribal defensiveness (“she’s one of us so leave her alone”). I don’t know exactly how they should go about it—Ferreri mentions privacy laws that restrict the information NCCU can make public about Mangum or any other student, so they can’t and shouldn’t just open her files to the public—but surely there are ways for the school and its community to show that they’re grappling with the issues raised by her conduct. Maybe that would even dampen a little of the free-floating indignation.

I see that while I’ve been puttering away, KC Johnson has put up a post of his own about three reactions to Butler’s column—Kenney’s and two that I haven’t read. One must be in print but not on the web, since there’s no link, and according to the little note Johnson appended to his post, the other one was taken down soon after his went up. Someone posted it in the comments, though, so it’s not gone. Thank goodness.

Johnson’s latest is a by-the-books DIW post of a particular type, running down a list of critics. Tribalism is the main order of business—letting you know who’s wrong and cataloging their failings so you know just how wrong they are. Four numbered items this time—bang, bang, bang, bang. For people keeping score, it seems like a convenient format, though the score must be so lopsided by now that it’s hard to imagine anyone would still care. It seems to be less important to dwell on who’s right—it’s not like there’s any doubt. In this case Johnson just reminds his readers that Butler is an award-winning student journalist and leaves it at that.

He shows once again that he’s never more insistent about the value of facts than when he’s found one he can use to discredit an opponent. Only a certain kind of person would use a “damn-the-facts” argument. And only a true Wonderlander like Rev. Kenney would “fantastically assert” (or claim, demand, wonder, etc.) anything. Johnson and I seem to more or less agree on one thing, at least—some soul-searching on the part of NCCU would be a good thing.

Last week, Erin O’Connor responded to criticism of Alan Kors’ article, “On the Sadness of Higher Education” (originally in the New Criterion, but the full text is available from the Wall Street Journal). She’s

shocked by the amount of vitriol that was slung in Kors’ direction, not least because the academic establishment, if it does nothing else, readily grants authority to analyses based on personal experience and is so friendly to reflective memoirs that it even tolerates a few that have been exposed as fabrications. But Kors is no Rigoberta Menchu, and critics accord him no such authority.

Where did all this “contemptuous dismissal” come from? She gives two links. One is to a post of mine. The other is to the comments on a post in Timothy Burke’s blog, where there are lots of unflattering generalizations about conservatives but I’m the only person with anything to say about Kors’ article—possibly the only one who read it. O’Connor also points to comments on her original post about the article, where Mike cogently suggests that Kors “go[es] off the deep end” on one specific point, and Luther Blisset briefly outlines a more sympathetic perspective on the developments that Kors decries. The most far-reaching criticism is again from yours truly. I did quick Google and Google blog searches and found a number of people who clearly admired the article and only one mild objection—incidentally, part of a thoughtful post that takes on more urgent issues in higher education than the one I’m going on about.

So it seems I’ve become “the academic establishment,” or at least the bulk of it. As Wayne would say, I am not worthy! For one thing, I’ve never accorded a shred of authority to Rigoberta Menchu, haven’t given her any thought at all beyond reading the name here and there. And I’ve never ranked higher than Visiting Instructor—I hope the new title comes with a raise.

It’s disconcerting enough that O’Connor seems to be responding mostly to me but refers instead to “critics” without mentioning my name. What’s even stranger is how little she has to say about what I actually wrote. It’s true that I was sarcastic at times, and no doubt it annoyed her that I wondered out loud if a followup comment I left on her blog didn’t appear because she wanted to “duck the challenge.” But “contemptuous dismissal”? “Vitriol”? I don’t see it. I thought I made it clear that I admire the resonant case Kors makes that a wide-ranging, open-minded dialog of perspectives is the essence of academic intellectualism, even though I don’t understand why he sets the ideal aside when he turns to his political agenda. I quote examples of perspectives on the “therapeutic university” that, in counterpoint with his, suggest a more rounded understanding of the situation. I hoped that part might drum up some more constructive responses, but none of it seems to have registered with O’Connor, nor did the substantive points made by Mike or Luther or any other elusive “critics” floating around in cyberspace.

It’s clear that O’Connor has a great deal of respect and admiration for Kors, and that she’s moved by the “hopeless and defeated” tone of his essay. No problem there—that sort of personal reaction is good blogging material, and people should speak up for their friends. And I suppose looked at that way, it’s fine to point out that he’s “winding down a long, genuinely important career” during which he’s been “one of the most important and influential crusaders for free inquiry that we have.” But to O’Connor these points are not just personal appreciation, they’re somehow an answer to the “critics.” Kors’ fine qualities go hand in hand with the qualities of others who contribute to the “good fight—the fight that organizations such as FIRE, ACTA, the NAS, and individuals such as Mark Bauerlein and KC Johnson fight.” FIRE gets a rhapsodic paragraph, in which she remarks that in the time since it was founded by Kors and Harvey Silverglate, it has “definitively shaped the fair-minded defense of individual rights and free expression on campus… [and] given hope to those who want to believe that higher ed can be saved from itself, and who think it’s possible for the academic world to be usefully and substantively reformed for the good of all.” She’s standing with her tribe, in the firm belief that virtue is on their side.

And then there’s my tribe—the “academic establishment,” “critics” who adore Menchu but dismiss Kors, who deal in “vitriol” and “contemptuous dismissal.” “[H]ard core, uninformed cranks [who] continue to insist that FIRE is a right-wing organization devoted to advancing a right-wing agenda.” No doubt there are critics and cranks like that, but as far as I can see they aren’t involved in this little discussion. Based on my limited experience, supporters of FIRE seem to think that any and all criticism is outright dismissal or condemnation. All I’ve done is to question the highly partisan treatment of the lacrosse case on FIRE’s web site and poke a little fun at the rhetorical excesses of its cofounders. I have to wonder what sort of disclaimer it would take to keep from being lumped with the “hard core, uninformed cranks.”

I’m used to the tribalistic lumping, though no one has found a stranger or more furtive way to do it than O’Connor. It’s usually much more overt. The post KC Johnson wrote to introduce me to his readers started with a ten-paragraph narration of the “long, and torturous, path” of the “Group of 88 rehab tour”—a list of about a year’s worth of seemingly inexcusable and muddleheaded efforts to “rehabilitate the Group from its rush to judgment.” Finally, “[t]he latest stop in the Rehab Tour, a series of posts by Duke Music professor Robert Zimmerman.” I had no personal involvement with anything he lists and no contact with the other professors. But his readers are primed and ready for yet another of those kind of people. It’s easy enough for them to line up much of what I say with their reflexive beliefs about the tribe and whatever doesn’t line up can be ignored. Not that I’m complaining—it’s good for laughs and usually validates my analysis. And there are always a few people who are more curious and open-minded.

Johnson cultivates the tribalistic atmosphere but leaves its coarser aspects to his readers, many of whom happily answer to a title—“blog hooligan”—that sums up the violence and intolerance of tribalism remarkably well. And when it comes to conspiracy theories, the us-against-them mindset is just the ticket. Of the things that have been said about me, this is a personal favorite, from a couple of weeks ago:

If I were an attorney representing any of the plaintiffs in the lax civil suits, Zimmerman would be on my deposition list. He has been poking into what the Klan of 88 did and corresponding with at least some of them (or their enablers).

I can’t really explain how off the wall that is, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. What’s funny is that she (I’m guessing) starts with a reasonably astute analysis of my “modus operandi” in leaving comments here and there. Maybe it’s someone from the bowels of the poststructuralist humanities—someone who’s sophisticated at parsing texts—gone undercover to plant blatant evidence of the “faux juridicalism” that Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt wrote about.

It’s not just blog hooligans who are inclined to imagine the “Group of 88” and it’s “enablers” and “sympathizers” as a nefarious tribe. Apparently it’s possible to deplore the hooligans and still insist that Duke’s atrocious reaction to the lacrosse incident has an undeniable tribal “vibe”, or discount my analysis of people and things from Duke on the assumption that I’m acting out of tribal loyalty, or something very close to it. It’s only good sense to be skeptical about my loyalties and my objectivity, but skepticism can also turn into just another excuse to be dismissive.