DIW has its virtues. Johnson has a remarkable ability to synthesize information coming in from all sides and quickly turn it into cogent text. And what he writes about is well documented and well linked, so the blog is a tremendous resource for anyone interested in tracking down a document, an event, or a quote from this or that phase of the scandal. Gathering and organizing all the detail and technicality of a legal proceeding is something he seems well suited for, and as far as I can tell his coverage of Nifong and the judicial and law enforcement aspects of the case is thorough and accurate. He’s thanked personally in the statements Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty made when they were exonerated—something he can justly be proud of.

Roughly half of the blog [correction: roughly a quarter] is devoted to the way the case played out at Duke, and there is, in my opinion, much less to be proud of on that side. Under his blog title, Johnson promises “comments and analysis about the Duke/Nifong case.” No matter what aspect of the case he’s writing about, though, he approaches it more as a prosecutor than an analyst (at times inquisitor is probably more apt). An analyst explains and explores and maybe even illuminates, if you’re lucky. Prosecution is by comparison much more focussed, selective, and agenda-driven. While the job of a criminal prosecutor is to build a case against the defendant(s), as I understand it his ultimate goal is not supposed to be conviction but the correct verdict. The big villain of the lacrosse case was a prosecutor who cared about nothing but the conviction. Johnson has prosecuted the so-called “Group of 88” Duke faculty in the court of public opinion with a similarly narrow and self-serving commitment to doing what it takes to get that guilty verdict, and he’s proven to be much better at it than Nifong. Given all the scorn he heaped on the now-disgraced criminal prosecutor, with good reason—for ignoring exculpatory evidence, manipulating public opinion and various other shoddy maneuvers—you’d think Johnson would be more principled in taking on his own chosen wrongdoers. If he is, it’s not by much.

That’s not to say that there’s any ethical equivalence—Nifong betrayed the trust he held as a public servant, and if he had been successful the consequences would have been catastrophic for the people effected. Even his failed prosecution turned lives upside down. The worst Johnson can do to any individual is trivial by comparison, but he still has enough influence on opinion and discussion of the case to do widespread damage. The charge leveled at him most often is that his attacks and misrepresentations have fueled virulent, hateful communications of the kind Provost Peter Lange lamented in his January email to the Duke faculty (Lange himself refers to blogs generically as one source of the attacks that trouble him but doesn’t single out DIW or any others by name). I have very little inside information about the personal costs of these attacks and don’t want to imaginatively overstate them—however bad things were when the controversy was most heated, I think it’s safe to say that most of the faculty who came under attack will be able to shrug it off, if they haven’t already. I doubt that it’s so easy for those who’ve gotten the most virulent and threatening messages, though. Three that are particularly vile are included in Duke Professor Charles Piot’s recent critique of DIW. Regarding the effects of such attacks I don’t have anything to add to what Lange and Piot have to say, best considered along with Johnson’s rebuttal of Piot and his response to “The Group of 88’s E-Mail Canard” of Lange and others. Later I’ll have plenty to say about the relationship of DIW to the more strident and bigoted rhetoric about the case.

In early October, Duke professors James Coleman and Prasad Kasibhatla sent a letter to the Duke Chronicle in order to correct what they felt was a broad misconception left by the lacrosse controversy about the relationship of Duke faculty to their students. Coleman, who teaches law, is widely admired both for his early, pointed criticism of Nifong and for the clarity and evenhandedness of the report on lacrosse team behavior issued by a committee he chaired. In a “Cast of Characters” post, Johnson justly puts him first of the list of heros. Coleman and Kasibhatla single out Johnson (along with Stuart Taylor, coauthor with Johnson of the book Until Proven Innocent) for contributing to “the continued drumbeat of destructive criticism” that’s spread the notion that

the faculty at Duke and at other universities are increasingly a bunch of ideologues who care less about the their students and more about promoting their own extremist agendas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Faculty at Duke… care deeply about students and are passionately committed to their personal and intellectual growth. Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of the daily life of a faculty member will quickly appreciate the time, effort and energy that faculty put into teaching, advising and mentoring students. To suggest otherwise, on the basis of isolated and selective incidents that occur over the course of complex events and are taken out of context, is nothing more than a tragic rush to judgment.

A glance through the signatures on the internet petition circulated by Friends of Duke University gives a pretty good idea of the problem. The petition was originally a statement by the Duke Economics Department, and in one of its two clauses they affirmed that they welcome to their classes and other activities all students, including members of the lacrosse team. Posted as a petition for the public at large, signatures by non-faculty (the vast bulk of the 900 or so) are, in effect, admonishment to Duke faculty to be tolerant, and many who signed—I hope the majority—did so in the spirit of affirming broad tolerance and urging the administration to be more vocal in supporting the indicted students. But the signature pages are peppered with hectoring, intolerant jabs at the 88. What Coleman and Kasibhatla make plain is how shallow these judgments are, and how disconnected they are from the day-to-day reality of the university as they see it. It’s by no means debilitating harm, but still a shame that a professor, of all people, would foster such a narrow-minded judgment of a university.

I got a taste of Johnson’s prosecutorial tendencies in our email exchange, in which he kept wondering when I’d produce my “evidence.” I fully understand his insistence that I back up my harsh characterization of DIW, and it may have been poor judgment on my part to lay my bottom-line opinion out so baldly when I knew it would be days before I’d be prepared to explain it in detail (and as usual it’s been many more days than I expected). But “anti-academic,” “irrational,” and “insidiously divisive” are clearly matters of (more or less well-informed) opinion, so I found it odd and a little ridiculous that he kept wondering what evidence I thought I had unearthed about the “Group.” I’m sure he had every confidence that there could be no such thing.

Something that comes out both in Johnson’s email and the response to me he posted on DIW is his conviction that if I was attacking him I must be defending the “Group.” I’m certainly not defending the “Group of 88,” for reasons I’ll explain in a bit, and I’m in no position to defend any individual’s statements or actions with reference to case. I don’t doubt that some Duke faculty, including some who signed the “listening” statement, prejudged the guilt of the lacrosse players and acted rashly and irresponsibly on that basis. Like the potbangers, a fair number of people around campus let their outrage and moral certainty get the better of them. People who cared about broad issues of social and racial justice should have been more concerned and vocal about due process and fair play in the investigation and prosecution of the rape allegation. I think Duke as an institution has everything to gain from looking all those problems squarely in the eye, though when I say that I’m thinking of a broad-minded and inclusive oral and documentary history and not the inquisitional “full public accounting of the faculty’s conduct in spring 2006” that Johnson mentioned in one of his last emails to me. If there was ever anything to gain from dwelling obsessively on the most outrageous and indefensible aspects of the “rush to judgment,” that time is long past. And if the behavior of a faction of Duke’s faculty was so abominable, it didn’t require Johnson’s heavy-handed, narrow-minded, scornful, divisive polemic to bring it to light.

Writing to welcome new readers to the blog after the publication of his book, Johnson describes the event at Duke that galvanized his interest.

I first turned my attention to the Duke case after an April 2006 ad signed by 88 members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty. The ad stated unequivocally that something “happened” to Crystal Mangum; and said “thank you” to protesters who, among other things, had carried “CASTRATE” banners and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters of the lacrosse team. The professors’ decision to sign the ad betrayed the ideals of their—and my—profession.

Johnson’s writing his own blog, so he’s entitled to go after the folks who offend him in whatever way he wants. On the other hand, not only is he deriving credibility as a critic of academics and academic culture from the fact that he’s a professor, he’s positioning himself as a defender of academic ideals. I think it’s fair, then, to expect him to analyze or criticize or, if he must, prosecute in a way that’s consistent with those ideals, and in my opinion he doesn’t come close to meeting that standard.

His worst failure—one I consider positively anti-academic—is that he is a friend to ignorance, often in subtle ways but sometimes they’re not so subtle. He’s willing to pass judgment without drawing clear lines between what he knows for sure, what’s probable, and what’s unknown, and he avoids shining a light into the grey areas if they make for useful innuendo. He offers little resistance to readers inclined to render superficial and harsh judgment of the figures he attacks—regularly boiling his attacks down to a dismissive or derisive phrase that’s repeated as a tag line or epithet, for instance. Another thing that flies in the face of academic or journalistic standards is that he often makes no attempt to interpret and convey the main point and purpose of the texts he criticizes, approaching them instead like a prosecutor digging for evidence, free to pull out a passage or just a phrase and give it a literalistic, context-free reading if that furthers his case. Combine that with the habit of dwelling with self-righteous and unwavering certainty on an interpretation of the evidence that puts his opponents in the worst possible light, and there’s little chance of constructive debate—another core academic value.

For me the foundation of the scholarly enterprise, and what I most value in a student, is free-ranging curiosity. A prime academic virtue that gives curiosity some space to do its work is the placement of understanding before judgment (it’s something I’ve thought about when I’ve taught music classes like Intro to Jazz because they’re a great opportunity to give students some practice at suspending judgment). Whether it’s a scholarly ideal or the pie-in-the-sky idealism of a marginal academic, I don’t know—the success of Johnson’s “Group of 88” campaign suggests the latter. But on a personal level I find it disturbing that DIW—a sprawling text that purports to analyze an intricate human drama—is relentlessly and schematically judgmental. With the interest in people and things almost entirely channeled into prosecuting rather than understanding, Duke-in-Wonderland—the version of reality in which Johnson has an open-and-shut case—is a dismal and intellectually impoverished place.

The second sentence of the welcome message quoted above (“The ad stated unequivocally…”) puts in a nutshell Johnson’s principal complaints about the “listening” statement (an earlier post has a few more links to articles about this statement, which was published as an ad in the Duke Chronicle). I’ll call it the standard indictment formula, because variations of it crop up dozens of times in DIW. Its two clauses highlight the most objectionable lines in the “listening” statement. Johnson raised the issue for the first time in his April 23, 2006 post titled “The Group of 88,” which points out that

[t]he statement spoke of “what happened to this young woman” (which at that point consisted of nothing more than uncorroborated allegations) and gave a message to campus protesters: “Thank you for not waiting” until the police completed their investigation. Activities of these campus protesters, as we now all know, included such items as the “wanted” poster and branding the team “rapists.”

I can accept this first blast, before the charges have been reduced to a formula for incrimination, as justified indignation—the parts of the ad that he singles out bother me, too. And I don’t discount the bitter frustration behind his refrain, in subsequent entries, that nobody on the faculty or administration at Duke is calling Nifong to account or speaking up for the students under investigation. But right out of the gate, Johnson is making sweeping claims that say much more about his sensitivities and prejudices than about the ad. In the very next paragraph he has the ad’s endorsers thinking in unison about holding the lacrosse players broadly responsible for prejudice and oppression and even wanting them prosecuted solely on that basis:

In today’s Newsweek, a student at predominantly African-American North Carolina Central carried the Duke 88’s thinking to its logical, if absurd, extreme. The student said that he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”

The apparent confidence that he can read 88 minds at once reflects his certainty that the text of the ad coming from the people who endorsed it can only mean one thing—a cornerstone of the “Group of 88” crusade and an article of faith that Johnson has never questioned or analyzed in any serious way. The two lines in the ad that really matter are the two that strike a nerve and serve as the basis for the standard indictment. The other thing that registers is that the ad talks about perceived incidents of racism or sexism, which to Johnson translates into a charge that racism and sexism is rampant at Duke. His willingness to let a text be defined by a selective and sensitized reading of it is entirely characteristic.

Here is my best effort to summarize Johnson’s principles of Groupthink—the assumptions and habits that have allowed him to create a monster called the “Group of 88” out of the 88 people who chose for one reason or another, and with no thought of forming an ongoing collective, to endorse a text that was emailed to them (as a gesture of resistance to the idea of a “Group of 88”—and I’m know it’s futile—I’ve chosen to refer to those who signed the ad as “endorsers,” which is less of a mouthful than “signatories”):

1. Johnson knows what message the 88 endorsers sent when they signed the ad. Any claim by an endorser to have read the ad differently or intended a different message is either disingenuous or delusional. In particular, there is no denying that the ad signals a firm belief that a rape occurred at the lacrosse team party. So, for example, Johnson has no trouble dismissing out of hand Alice Kaplan’s claim that “the statement was about the climate on campus…. There’s nothing in the statement that says anyone is guilty or innocent.” What she said, and should retract and apologize for, is what Johnson says she said, not what she thinks she said (here’s another post along the same lines).
2. The ad-hoc collection of 88 people who endorsed the ad is a cohesive, capitol-G “Group.” The absolutist interpretation of the ad is one basis for this myth of unity, I think—they all signed the same statement, so they all said the same thing, so they all must think the same. There’s also the hypnotic power of language to create the impression of substance. The “Group of 88” is the title of first post about the “listening” statement—a convenient way to refer to the collection of people he’d just become aware of. A facile and uncritical writer, Johnson settles comfortably into the habit of calling people who endorsed the ad “members of the Group of 88,” as if the “Group” was an organization with members like the Academic Council or the YMCA. Naturally, the “listening” statement becomes the “Group of 88 statement.” From the perspective of a prosecutor a useful feature of the “Group” is that, no matter how much like an organization he treats it, it has no spokesperson and so will never answer back.
3. The “Group of 88” is a meaningful reference point for any discussion of Duke faculty or campus culture. In fact, it’s practically mandatory. When Johnson writes about ad endorsers they’re always tagged as “Group members,” several times if possible. “Group sympathizers” and “Clarifiers” (those who didn’t endorse the “listening” statement but signed the “concerned faculty” statement in January) are also habitually tagged. Put a few endorsers together in a room, with or without others, and you have a “Group of 88” event. A post about a few endorsers is, more often than not, a “Group of 88” post (“The Group of 88’s Latest Defense,” “The Group of 88’s Imagined Reality”, “The Group of 88 Rehab Tour”, which I somehow joined in “The Group of 88 Rehab Tour Continues”). In fact the phrase “Group of 88” or some variation is sprinkled so liberally and gratuitously throughout the text of DIW that it is made to seem relevant to just about everything.
4. With an occasional exception, “Group members” are only newsworthy when they do or say something that serves the prosecution—the only reason to mention any of them is to attack, criticize, disparage, or dismiss them. This means that, on DIW, they are almost entirely defined by the statements and actions Johnson feels are prejudicial or hostile to the lacrosse team, that show them to be unreasonable, thoughtless, or conspiratorial, or that in some other way put them in a bad light. My guess is that’s what Coleman and Kasibhatla had in mind when they complained that Johnson and Taylor portrayed faculty members “on the basis of isolated and selective incidents that occur over the course of complex events and are taken out of context.” In his series of “Group profiles”—entries in which he describes the scholarship of select endorsers—the only ones he profiled who had not already been roundly condemned for other reasons were those he could portray as radically left-wing, overly PC, engaged in marginal scholarship, or in some other way ideologically suspect. There is a short post about his selective profiling followed by a long discussion of it on the blog Acephalous. More than half of those who endorsed the “listening” statement have done nothing else that warranted a mention on DIW, and the bulk of “Group of 88” criticism is directed at less than a quarter of the group.
5. Because their behavior is always placed in the context of the “Group,” most anything bad that’s said about one endorser reflects badly on all of them.

The “Group of 88” a miserable excuse for intelligent analysis, but as a rhetorical tool it’s worked brilliantly. It’s a sticky gob of condemnation and scorn, and anyone who tries to defend it is swallowing a poison pill—something I’d prefer not to do. Drawing on 15 years experience on the Duke faculty, much closer to the action than I’ve ever been, Stuart Rojstaczer sums it up this way in his review of Until Proven Innocent:

With regard to the ‘Group of 88,’ Taylor and Johnson are engaging in demagoguery. Certainly there are some left-wing crackpots at Duke (and no doubt some right-wing crackpots). But there are nowhere near eighty-eight of them. These eighty-eight faculty members are not an organized group that thinks in lock step…. The drama created by Taylor and Johnson related to this ad and the “Group of 88” may be believable to some; but it is fiction.

The review as a whole is a well-informed, no-nonsense look at both the strengths and weaknesses of the book—I highly recommend it.

A prime example of Johnson’s willingness to use ignorance to his advantage is his treatment of the “Castrate” banner from the potbanging protest. As I wrote a couple of entries ago, the existence of the banner first registers on DIW in early January 2007, when it’s mentioned in Johnson’s dismissive response to an editorial by Cathy Davidson. A separate post on the same day—“Cathy Davidson: In Her Own Words”—uses a picture of the banner as a bludgeon by framing it with a quote from her editorial on top (she’s “adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade”) and on the bottom the line from the “listening” statement thanking protestors (the image no longer displays, but from the name of the image file—“castrate2pb3.jpg”—there’s no question what it was). The Liestoppers page makes the same insinuation graphically:

POTBANGERS NOT WAITING



“Thank You!” - Duke’s Group of 88

Throwing the “Castrate” banner at Cathy Davidson was, as far as I can tell, pure and simple opportunism. If there was any reason to single her out for the treatment, I can’t find it and Johnson doesn’t mention it. The picture was available, it was useful reinforcement to Johnson’s message that Davidson’s editorial could be written off as sheer disingenuous hypocrisy, so up it went. It seems like the revelation of such a vile threat would warrant some discussion, but careful, rational consideration would distance the banner from the people Johnson most wants to associate it with—not the potbangers but the ad endorsers. In the same vein, but even more groundless and opportunistic, is Johnson’s exploitation of the revelation months after the events that

[Duke lacrosse coach Mike] Pressler and his family were subjected to death threats. Protesters taped signs to his house with such messages as “DO YOUR DUTY. TURN THEM IN.” Several days later, when the Group of 88 issued their “listening” statement, the professors offered a message for such protesters: “Thank you for not waiting and for making yourselves heard.”

This insinuation hangs on the bare thread of Johnson’s choice of the word “protesters” for a few vicious, small-minded people who took it on themselves to harass Pressler and his family—taping threats to someone’s house in the middle of the night is not “collective noise.” And though Johnson doesn’t suggest that it was “protesters” who made the death threats, putting the harassment that was supposedly covered by the ad’s “thank you” in that context gives the insinuation extra bite. It’s not clear what Johnson’s basis for mentioning death threats is in the first place, since the Sports Illustrated article that Johnson cites doesn’t mention them (it’s an article that’s worth reading, by the way).

So, does Johnson believe that the endorsers were actually thanking the people who were taping signs to Pressler’s house at night? Does he believe that they knew that was happening, or that they didn’t know but would surely have approved if they did? Does he believe that all or even some of them knew about the “Castrate” banner and were approving it with the ad’s “thank you”? Or that they didn’t know about the banner but some or all of them considered the threat or even the act of castration appropriate in the circumstances? Johnson considers all of these to be irrelevant questions, as far as I can tell. Like the readers of DIW who have left comments for me, he seems to think that the only reason to raise them is to absolve the endorsers of all sin.

What I’m actually suggesting is something quite different and very simple—that Johnson ought to act like a professor. A smart man arguing a strong case doesn’t need to make wild insinuations, and I consider the insinuations about the “castrate” banner and about Pressler’s harassment both to be wild. In an environment where, for instance, “Mr. X” can write me off as “just another Klan of 88 enabler” in the TalkLeft thread about my posts, they make for fine demagoguery (there are a fair number of references to a “Klan of 88” in the comments on DIW, as well). Johnson’s insinuations are congenial to the knee-jerk fantasy that there’s a moral equivalence between the 88 people who signed the “listening” statement and the Ku Klux Klan, and to any number of other fantasies based on blanket, facile judgment of liberals, left-wing academics, “angry studies,” and the like. The only stance consistent with the academic ideals that Johnson claims to defend is to actively resist that kind of ignorance and bigotry. Thinking more like a prosecutor than an academic, he gives them free rein.

The general reaction to my focus on the “castrate” banner has been that it was just one of many outrages, that the professors who signed the ad would have or should have known about enough of them not to say “thank you,” that I’m making too much out of it. Of these, the one I take most seriously is from Nick, a recent alum who was a student in one of my classes (the link is to his second of three comments—the first is on that same post, and the last one puts the lacrosse experience in the context of his Duke experience as a whole). He grants that professors may or may not have been at the potbanging protest or known about the details, but

it is not as if the other protests were much better. Sure some talked in more abstract terms about racial and sexual issues at Duke and abroad, but most speakers just assumed or even declared the lacrosse team rapists. I was shocked that such intelligent people could react in such a way…. My problem isn’t that radical professors (and some are pretty radical) responded in this way…. My problem is that such views were accepted (or even respected) by other professors.

Based on that experience, I understand his indignation. I hope that I would have been offended too, if I had walked across campus and found people on soapboxes pretending that denouncing the lacrosse team as rapists was somehow striking a blow for justice or fighting the good fight against sexual assault, and had then heard colleagues describing it with approval. I wish some of the people who were in the thick of that, including some who signed the “listening” statement, would step up to the plate and speak candidly about the atmosphere Nick describes. At the same time I’m confident that there are students—some of the ones quoted in the “listening” statement, for instance—who had vastly different experiences, and a range that are in between. None of them make Nick’s any less valid or worthy of attention.

When I raised the issue of his insinuating treatment of the “castrate” banner in email, Johnson’s response was to allude to all of the coverage of the potbanging protest and to several other outrageous protests—his boilerplate response to the suggestion that the protestors thanked in the “listening” statement are not the ones who attacked and prejudged the lacrosse team. Criticizing my posts in DIW he imagines—and I warn anyone short on sleep or prone to migraines not to think too hard about this sentence—that I “suggested that [his] chief fault was suggesting that the Group’s ad could be interpreted as suggesting that the sole message of the potbangers’ March 26 rally was the ‘castrate’ banner.” This is wildly off the mark, but gives him a chance to repeat yet again a few of the other protest banners and slogans that have been grist for the DIW mill since it started grinding a year and a half ago. Then he wonders if I’m imagining that press coverage might have “fooled the Group” with a benign impression of the potbangers, or if I’m thinking that “Group members were so reckless that they thanked protesters… even though they had no idea what the protesters were doing or saying.” Whatever it is, it must be about the “Group”… PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Next, the mechanics of misrepresentation.

Proffitt’s simplifying frame tends to reduce accuser and accused to archetypes—Rapist and Survivor. Another level of abstraction is close at hand, though, in his list of discriminations that rape survivors are leading the resistance to (“violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism”) and Rajendran’s sweeping claim to be calling the lacrosse team to account for “the racism and the sexism and the classism” of what they did. Rapist and Survivor become Oppressor and Oppressed. In an essay “Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim: The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident”, posted a month after the lacrosse party, Wahneema Lubiano, a professor in Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies, critiques the habit of “perfecting” the protagonists so that the role of oppression or prejudice in an incident is blatantly obvious and therefore “spectacular.” The inevitable resistance sets up a polarizing dynamic:

I hear desire on the part of various constituencies for the comfort either of being able to construct a perfect offender and a perfect victim, and, therefore, some kind of resolution, or the converse position—the comfort of saying that the impossibility of constructing a perfect offender and a perfect victim means that nothing happened and that nothing needs to be resolved.

Lubiano urges like-minded activists responding to the lacrosse case to get off this treadmill, since it causes “[w]hatever is routine about this incident [to be] marginalized while a desire for the incident to live up to its most horrific possibilities fights it out in public discussion with its rhetorical other….” A good description, I think, of the lacrosse-case version of a culture-war shouting match, and her description of the dynamic as a “desire… for comfort” is apt. She describes it, in sympathetic terms, as the comfort of an “understanding [that is] complete, coherent, and visible” but I’m inclined to put it in less benign terms, as the comfort of simplistic moral certainty or, in some cases, the fastidious, egocentric comfort of piling all the dirt on those people over there. And it seems that it’s more comforting to be on the side that’s constructing perfection. It was the discovery of a crime against the team committed by an eminently perfectible collection of Duke faculty that grabbed KC Johnson’s attention. With total dedication to ferreting out the “most horrific possibilities” in everything they’ve done, he’s constructed a perfectly skewed Wonderland, using the so-called “Group of 88” as a sponge to blot all the stigma off his side and spread it on the other. Among the most perfect of his many offenders is the one who “gleefully labeled the players the ‘perfect offenders’” (or so Johnson would like you to believe) in the course of telling anyone who would listen, and without a trace of glee that I can find, that such “perfecting” was a bad idea—Wahneema Lubiano. (I’ll reinforce what I said in my introduction to this series, though: I’ve never communicated with Prof. Lubiano. She’s not responsible for my opinions and interpretations and I’m not responsible for hers. If anything I say about her work bothers you, please complain to me and not to her.)

It seems to me that the controversy has revealed not so much the limitations but the dangers of spectacularity, or at least the dangers of actively “perfecting” in order to achieve it. Doing so tends to put an bloated frame around the incident, call up broad characterizations, and debase the language. In the MSNBC interview, Rajendran’s frame is “a nation… wrestling with a long legacy of institutionalized racism and a whole culture of sexual violence… with centuries of oppression,” which, she suggests, the community outrage will help to undo. That’s a hell of a lot of baggage for one incident to carry. In the show as a whole (Rita Cosby Live & Direct), Rajendran ends up as one act in a many-ring circus that includes an epic shouting match about an incident in which a man was shot 50 times by the police, another high-speed chase that ends in an explosion, and a woman who looks like a man interviewed from jail about how she supposedly kidnapped her own kids. This must be what Lubiano has in mind when she mentions “the spectacle that is news and the news as spectacle,” perhaps trying to suggest that activists should avoid feeding the beast. Then there’s Houston Baker’s temper tantrum—his open letter to the administration at Duke peppered with “privilege,” “white,” “male,” “athletic,” and “violent” in various combinations. His concern over the “horrific” incident seems to be based more on type of people involved than the nature of the acts alleged. A word like “privilege,” which should have real meaning in an incident that begins with two women’s bodies being ordered up like $400 pizzas, turns into a bludgeon (I think “entitlement” is more to the point, anyway). This kind of thing opens the door for the wholesale dismissal, on DIW and elsewhere, of virtually any criticism of the lacrosse team that invokes race or gender and to the parodies that lurk a step or two behind it—“reverse racism” and the like—which thrive on language debased by careless, reflexive “perfecting.”

To “perfect” is also to dehumanize. The way the lacrosse players were treated as clones of a generic “privileged white male” has been widely observed, and it was no credit to those who, in other contexts, would be quick to denounce the cheap generalizations of racists. But idealizing the accuser was even more integral to the thinking of the activists I’ve quoted, and it seems to have compromised their ability to think sensibly and realistically about events and issues they care about. No matter how much sincere concern was involved, the perfected accuser was little more than a comforting fabrication that made it easy to judge and to act, and do so rashly. I suppose such a thing might serve a cause or a community in some situations. But it seems more likely to undermine than to help a woman bringing rape allegations, since she will almost certainly look bad and the accused good relative to their perfected stand-ins. The effect was stark as the lacrosse case progressed, but it seems to me that in any rape case “perfecting” the accuser can only add fuel to the legal scrutiny of her character, and likely to any public scrutiny, as well—the last thing she needs.

The “listening” statement—the basis of an endlessly distracting controversy—shows in practice, I believe, what Lubiano was getting at when she advised others to “move from the specific harms associated with the incident alleged at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd. in order to look at the more difficult to ‘see,’ the less spectacularly visible harms of more generally structured and distributed sexism and racism.” The ad is built around a collection of quotes that gives a kaleidoscopic impression of the state of mind of a group of minority students in the wake of the rape allegation. The three comments about “self-segregation” and generic indignities of parties and classes, taken from an article in the Independent Weekly, most clearly convey the “generally structured and distributed” experience. Most of the other quotes show the students feeling anxious or at odds with the community or the institution in the heightened atmosphere post-allegation. Notably missing, especially in comparison to the protests and to statements like Houston Baker’s, is any direct comment about the lacrosse team’s behavior, guilt, or character. The closest contact with “the specific harms associated with the incident” is by way of one woman’s anxious imagination (“If something like this happens to me…”)—not a factual statement about the party but a representation of how vulnerable she felt. Whether or not it was it a good idea to put that quote in the ad without explanation or qualification is an excellent question—one of many about how effective or appropriate or representative the ad was. In principle they’re worth discussing, but not in a climate where those most interested in the ad insist on treating it as nothing more than a smoking gun. Questions like that are off track for me at the moment, anyway—all I’m trying to do here is explore the connections between Lubiano’s “Spectacularity” article, the listening statement, and the potbanging protest.

The reading that pulled the ad into the swirl of controversy dwelt especially on two lines—the mention of “what happened to this young woman” near the top, taken to indicate a firm belief that a rape occurred at the party, and the nod to “protesters making collective noise” near the end, which serves as a versatile link between the ad and anything a protestor has done or said about the lacrosse case. The central message of the ad as I see it doesn’t need a reference to protestors and doesn’t require the rape allegation to be true, so I don’t think either line is necessary as written. The mention of protestors seems especially superfluous, and it’s on that point that I’m most sympathetic to the criticism of the ad—it’s hard to reconcile the blanket endorsement of protestors followed by a long list of faculty signatures with the crowd on the sidewalk at Buchanan Blvd. holding a banner that says “Castrate” and hounding out the lacrosse team as rapists. I find it odd and disappointing that those who signed the ad and continued to speak out and editorialize didn’t meet the issue head on. Is all collective noise really good collective noise? The one line in the “concerned faculty” statement issued last January—“We do not endorse every demonstration that took place at the time”—was worse than nothing, I’m afraid, since all it did was to acknowledge that the issue was being dodged.

With the image of that crowd on the sidewalk in mind, it’s hard to reconcile the mention of protestors with an intention to steer clear of spectacularity. I have no way of knowing what image “protestors making collective noise” brought to mind for Lubiano in early April 2006, though I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that one. What is more clear is that even though the ad and the potbanging protest come from the same general political mindset, they are worlds apart in purpose and tone, and in exactly the way Lubiano articulates in her essay. The protest is addressed to “the most horrific possibilities”—a brutal gang rape—while, based on the student quotes she selected, Lubiano seems to be pushing for a day-to-day life at Duke in which African American students feel fully secure, confident that their perspective and experience won’t be dismissed when it’s inconvenient or challenging, and that they’re not marked as threats or colorful sex toys. If nothing else, the gulf between intention and interpretation makes a fascinating study in non-communication, and maybe there’s even something to be learned from it.

There’s another, more fundamental difference between the discourse of the protestors and the text of the ad, one that was aggressively sidelined when the latter became a rhetorical football: in the ad there’s an attempt to deal with people. It’s pretty successful, too—the quotes mesh with my experience of students at Duke, at least. The potbanging protest was, as I see it, conspicuously not about people but rather about pawns. My strong impression is that those who see the ad as rank prejudgment of the team read the quotes as the words of puppets. The reduction of people to pawns and puppets is a constant of ideologically polarized debate, whether you think of it as spectacularity or as culture war. There’s often a Hollywood semblance of humanity in the portrayal of the good side, but whether it’s the activist’s sanctified survivor or the bland but perfectly polarized sympathies that structure DIW, it’s something less than human. I think everyone involved knows and expects that they’re dealing with pawns (knows and expects it, that is, from the other side). The ad put humans on the favored side and leaves the other side open, to be filled in by the imagination of the reader. Considered in isolation, it’s an improvement on angels and fiends, but maybe not much different in context—readers sensitized by the broad-brush rhetoric directed at the team naturally drew on that to fill in the blank.

The first and perhaps the most admirable line of the ad—“We are listening to our students”—was another humanizing touch that may have had an unintentionally divisive effect, since it was only the favored group of students who were actually heard. I accept the implicit explanation of the choice of students to highlight—in general “the most vulnerable among us” because least well established, most likely to be alienated or marginalized or misunderstood. At that moment, though, among the most obviously vulnerable students were the ones under investigation by an unethical prosecutor. A less obvious group of students who might have been feeling especially vulnerable were the ones who were being stretched across the fault lines of race or gender or whatever. The point is that listening, of all things, shouldn’t and needn’t be selective, and it doesn’t seem like a good idea to give the impression that it is at a time of high tension and polarization. It’s a shame that the response of those who were offended by the ad has never, as far as I’ve seen, been to try to listen more closely and more broadly.

The legacy of the potbanging protest is not pretty. Rendering facile, sweeping judgment on 40-some young men they knew little about did a great service for the crowd on the other side that’s packaged the incident and its aftermath as a “hoax”—a story as comforting in its one-sided simplicity as in it’s perfect harmonization of justice, decency, and good sense with the good old social pecking order. It’s a position that needs a diametrical opposite in order to thrive—you have to have a lie in order to have a liestopper—and as the Liestoppers page I linked in earlier shows, the “Castrate” banner has a place of honor in the shrine that gives their project meaning and urgency. It’s not just that the protest left priceless relics for the other side’s endless re-incitement, though. It was in effect a conspiracy with the “rhetorical other” to make war on ambiguity from both sides. The only way for a case like this to shed useful light on the real, everyday harms of social or racial or gender inequity is to put it in a frame that’s wide enough to contain the ambiguity of real everyday people. Otherwise it’s just another cheesy comic book.

Speaking of that, the next stop is Wonderland…

How did protesters espousing an end to not only sexual violence but all violence convince themselves that it was a good idea to stand in front of the lacrosse players’ house on Buchanan Blvd. with a banner screaming “Castrate!!”? Even given the rally’s aim of confronting the lacrosse team to get them to talk, it’s hard to see what purpose such a vile but empty threat could serve, and also hard to imagine that no one involved realized how much it made them look like hypocritical, bloodthirsty zealots. Of course that’s all ridiculously easy to point out in retrospect. I don’t at all discount the genuine concern for victims of sexual assault—a terrible, debilitating crime—that motivated most if not all the protestors. I expect that some of the outrage came from brutally real personal experience of assault, something that far too many women have to live with. I can only go on what I can see and read, though, and in that the action is represented not only as a denunciation of the team but also righteous support for the woman alleging rape and for other assault survivors. The “Castrate” banner, which was likely the work of only a few of those present but was apparently tolerated all around, shows how much the action was ultimately defined by what was opposed rather than what was supported.

Behind the rally was a spirit of vigilantism. The call to protest that went out the night before (see below for a link) describes the alleged rape as a fact and says the lacrosse team has to be confronted because they’re “maintaining a strict code of silence.” The “Castrate” banner as well as the other slogans like “You can’t rape and run” and “It’s Sunday morning, time to confess” were apparently meant to break down the team’s resistance. The decision to shout down the team as rapists was based on incomplete, highly filtered, second- or third-hand information, or, in the case of the “code of silence,” misinformation. It’s all depressingly consistent with vigilantism’s bad rap. I get a whiff of mob psychology from the videos of the event on YouTube (especially the second one), which doesn’t mean I have any truck with the knee-jerk geniuses who imagine the potbanging crowd as some kind of lynch mob—it’s like saying a headache is the same as a brain tumor. I can’t blame activists acutely aware of sexual assault as a largely unacknowledged, unpunished crime for having an intense urge to do something. But I wish they’d treated the story the police were telling about a “wall of silence” with even a fraction of the skepticism they would have treated a story from the same source that was unfavorable to the accuser.

Provocative as it is, the “Castrate” banner didn’t attract much attention until months after the protests. A quick LexisNexis search finds only one mention of it immediately after the rally, in the next day’s Durham Herald-Sun—not something that found a lot of eyeballs, especially around Duke. My best guess is that the banner became a fixture in discussions of the case after the picture was included in an account of the protests posted on Liestoppers in Nov. 2006 (the post, which quotes the call to protest in full, is fairer and more informative than you’d think from all the bric-a-brac of grudge-nursing around it). It isn’t mentioned on DIW until Jan. 2007 (the single instance that seems to be from 2006 is misdated). Both the banner and the typical liestopper reaction to it perfectly follow the culture-war logic that pumping up your own indignation and hurting the other side trumps all else. While I was searching for background on the protest I stumbled across a post from John In Carolina, who took it to comic extremes by writing a letter to the editor complaining that The News and Observer didn’t even mention the “Castrate” banner for more than a year—imagine how many decent citizens were deprived of their full portion of moral outrage!

Speaking soon after the event in an MSNBC interview, Manju Rajendran, one of the protest organizers, describes the confrontational tone as an end in itself:

Women in Lima, Peru, initiated this as a way of surrounding the houses of women who were being assaulted by their husbands or by their partners. And it was a very confrontational way of saying, We demonstrate solidarity with the women who are being attacked in this way or by anyone who’s being persecuted in this fashion. We challenge the racism and the sexism and the classism implicit in these actions. We want to shame the attackers, and we want to invite the witnesses to step forward and come clean.

A little googling makes it clear that the cacerolazo is a common form of protest in Latin America, but I can’t find any examples that fit Rajendran’s description. In principle, especially in a place where incidents of sexual assault or domestic violence generate little attention (if not unhelpful attention) from the authorities, it sounds like a fine idea. But she transferred wholesale to Durham a response to a very different sort of rape, one involving intimate partners, from a very different context, the social framework of a tight-knit third-world neighborhood (that’s my inference, of course, but I can’t think of a plausible alternative), where among other things the effect of shame would be both more pointed and more contained.
The fact she was talking about the protest a few days later on nationwide TV shows how uncontained the shame and everything else was in her version. That the protest would send words and images ricocheting out of control around the media and the web seems utterly predictable (though I may just be indulging 20-20 hindsight).

One discrepancy is especially revealing. Unless there’s some kind of women’s brigade in Lima that responds to distress calls from here and there, the intervention Rajendran describes would have to be organized by women familiar with both the victim and her abuser. It seems to me that Rajendran wasn’t differentiating between her connection to the parties of the lacrosse allegation and the connection she’d have if, say, a friend or neighbor in an abusive relationship came to her for help (in which case a lot more deliberation would surely be involved before gathering a crowd to chant on the sidewalk). But knowing the accused and accuser by type and role—gender, race, class, titillated viewer or demeaned hireling, etc.—was apparently enough familiarity to call out the pots and pans on Buchanan Blvd.

An essay written by Durham-based activist Brian Proffitt in the wake of the protests and the negative DNA results is another window onto the reduction of the lacrosse team’s accuser to a type. In it he stresses his “commitment to believing those who come forward with stories of survival first.” His perspective is different from Rajendran’s, in that he’s writing as an advocate for assault survivors rather than a scourge of assaulters, but he and Rajendran both have ties to Ubuntu, a group founded in reaction to the lacrosse accusation, and my impression is that, whether or not he was involved in the potbanging protest, he is speaking from the same general perspective. Even when I disagree with him, I admire his forthright efforts to explain his position without rancor. He’s at his best writing as an advocate about the debilitating effects of sexual assault and the bleak prospects survivors have for a fair hearing, much less justice and resolution.

Proffitt also makes a couple of good points in support of his “commitment to believing.” One is that, for a woman going through the grueling process, simply being believed can make a big difference. The other is that bringing a charge of rape is typically a punishing and humiliating experience for the accuser—a natural deterrent to false allegations. Just how much of a deterrent is a matter of psychology and socialization, though—I don’t doubt that it’s enough to many women who have really been assaulted that they choose not to press charges. But there must be some who would be much less bothered, especially in our fame- and notoriety-driven culture. But Proffitt’s blanket faith is so ironclad that, in his writing about the lacrosse case there is no “accuser” (and no “allegation”), only a “survivor”—one of a sanctified class that’s “creating the path forward… [by] resisting violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism.” It’s a belief that would tend to short-circuit the difficult questions that should be asked before standing on a sidewalk and very publicly denouncing people accused of a serious crime, like whether the case fit the scenario in which false allegations are highly unlikely.

Coming up next, the dangers of perfection…

It seems to me that some of Potter’s original comments were in fact excessive, based on a year-old picture of the team’s behavior on the night in question, when it was spun to make them look as bad as possible. But somehow when a few more or less careful and thoughtful people and a bunch of more or less smug and/or self-righteous and/or ignorant and/or hypocritical ones (take your pick, mix and match)—many of whom have deputized themselves to defend the honor of their fine young men—start posting comments, writing emails, and complaining to the University president, no apology is forthcoming. What a surprise, huh?

Part of it is an internet-era problem. There’s nothing new to say on either side, but there’s outrage to be vented and comment boxes to fill, so on and on it goes. The logic of these things is that both sides find something or other to blow out of proportion, and they did. A smallish swarm of liestoppers peppered Potter’s site with biting comments, most of which she deleted. Meanwhile back at the ranch (DIW, that is), reading the comments is like listening to a roomfull of drunks who are feeling very clever. Not a surprise—self-righteousness in a crowd is intoxicating.

[Dropping back into this post to put in a link that I left out, I’ll take the opportunity to say that, while I still think the image of drunks being clever fits much of the comment thread I refer to at the end, there are some who have put in more serious and substantial remarks.]

If you’re reading through my lacrosse-case series, the next one is about potbanging.

Although I’m a low-level member of the Duke faculty still for at least one more semester, I’m writing more from an outside than the inside perspective. I was part-time and “visiting” for most of my nine years at Duke, and I taught my last class (or so I thought) and moved out of my office at the end of this past spring semester. I haven’t been involved in any faculty or institutional response or discussion of the case, and none of the people at Duke who have played a public role in the controversies are friends or acquaintances of mine. All that makes it relatively easy to express myself frankly, but also means that I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, speak for the university, its administration, or any other member of the faculty. Any interpretations I offer are my own—I’m not in a position to defend the statements or actions that anyone else has made about the lacrosse case, and I’m not offering any such defenses.

I find looking back at the spring semester 2006 through the lens of the lacrosse case to be a little surreal, since the unfolding scandal left almost no impression on my own experience teaching a small and congenial class two afternoons a week. I had a deadline looming at the time and was only sporadically following developments in the news. I can’t say anything firsthand about the major incidents and events—protests and “wanted” posters and the like—except to make the obvious point that they weren’t ubiquitous. It’s a reminder of how selective and unrepresentative a picture of life on campus you get from the assembled highlights of the controversy—one of the things that doesn’t register is how much of it was boringly normal.

What’s on my mind isn’t so much the incident and legal proceedings as the remarkably polarizing and dysfunctional dialogue the case has spawned. The long letter Duke Provost Peter Lange sent to the faculty last January gives a pretty good idea of how it looked from the eye of the hurricane. The letter is so even-handed and deliberative that it’s hard to tell what’s the statement and what’s the statement about making a statement—it’s the antithesis of the quick and dirty texts “intended not to clarify but to embarrass, punish, demean or humiliate” that Lange was writing about. A fine model for a more illuminating discourse, but I don’t see any signs that either form or content made an impression. It is a little odd to read his carefully considered back-and-forth touching on language, rhetoric, debate, democracy, the technology of communication, etc.—all core academic issues—and then get to the part about the challenge ahead for Duke, which is… campus culture. Nothing is more fundamental to a liberal education than effective and responsible use of words, and surely there’s an academic agenda along those lines that can compliment whatever’s been decided about housing, drinking, and athletics. I’m not that tuned in to what’s happening on campus, though, so maybe it’s been press-released and Chronicled and I missed it.

The picture Lange paints is of extremist rhetoric silencing those who don’t want to be pummeled and pulling the rest toward the fringes. That fits with my impression that zealots have set both the terms and the tone of the discussion, kept it stoked with resentment, and whittled it down to stick figures and false choices. As a way to look at the mechanics behind all this, I’ve picked out two parties to the war of words, one collective and the other individual. Representing one side, the “potbangers“—activists who rallied on March 26, 2006 to denounce the lacrosse team at the site of their disastrous party on Buchanan Blvd. For the other side, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and outspoken critic of critics of the lacrosse team, who blogs on Durham-in-Wonderland (DIW). Neither stands alone—I’m not claiming that either is single-handedly responsible for the way things have turned out. In the first few weeks after the news broke there were a number of rallies condemning the team’s actions and highlighting the issues of sexual assault and racism, some on campus and some off, and there were similar messages in the media and elsewhere. The potbanging protest left an especially deep impression on all that followed, though. And there are several other blogs and web sites dedicated to exposing the terrible injustice they believe has been done to the team. DIW seems to me the most influential and insidiously polarizing of them. Liestoppers is the grassroots hub of the network, though, and for my own convenience I’m going to refer to the community as a whole as “liestoppers.”

To some extent DIW and the potbanging protestors is an arbitrary pairing I’ve settled on by indulging the bad habit—one I share with most everyone else who commentates about the case—of writing first and foremost about the things that piss me off. Despite all sorts of differences, though, what the pair has in common (treating the protestors as a single perspective) is significant. Both were galvanized by an act they saw as despicable, and so blatantly true to type for the people who committed it that it was also a perfect scourge. Diametrically opposite the bad guys are some good guys, and the portrayals of both sides of the face-off are predictably skewed. The compromises that come from letting ends justify means are clear in both cases. The protestors, who I believe consider non-violence and compassion to be foundation principles, nonetheless took up intimidation and the suggestion of violence. The scathing critique of members of the Duke faculty on DIW trades on Johnson’s credibility as a professor and gives an impression of offended rationality but the core of it is both irrational and anti-academic. Other than the last few details, it’s the same old, same old of polemics and ideological crusades.

The “listening” statement—an advertisement placed in the Duke Chronicle on April 6, 2006 and endorsed by 88 people, mostly Duke faculty members—figures in both halves of the critique. It’s a document that might have been no more than a blip if it hadn’t been picked up by Johnson (it’s what focussed his attention on the case) and other bloggers. The way Johnson has been able to reduce the ad to exactly what’s useful to him is a good example of how the range of the conversation can be narrowed by a strident, polarizing voice. What I find especially interesting is the link between the “listening” statement and the potbanging protest, something Johnson has been able to exploit to great effect in spite of efforts when the ad was written to make much different points in a much different way than the protestors.

The issues raised by the ad and the minority students it represented didn’t deserve to be treated as special interests in a zero-sum game, and tempting as it is to think so, it wasn’t only the efforts of the ad’s critics that landed them there. The potbangers slotted the case into the frame of generalized Oppression, loading it down with moral clarity that obscured the particulars of the case. Other voices—professors, editorialists, pundits, etc.—pronounced the same black-and-white antithesis between the lacrosse team and the interests of women and minorities (and all decent, thinking people, of course). Following a time-tested script, the liestoppers fought back by turning the protestors’ perspective on its head while continuing to sing the same songs of victimization and prejudice, now in the circumscribed context of freakish outrages (which includes the Tawana Brawley scandal and I’m not sure what else).

It’s a narrow perspective that overcompensates with grandiose gestures of righteousness. One of my favorites is the name of the legal defense fund set up for the players, a perfectly reasonable cause that didn’t need the pretense—the Association for Truth and Fairness. Although it’s a brittle construct that requires blinders and constant vociferous defense, as a platform for defending the status quo it’s hard to do better than an understanding of Truth, Fairness, and Justice that hinges on the rare but spectacular victimization of society’s least vulnerable. And it’s a fine basis for drawing conclusions from the case about Duke or Durham or society in general without worrying about whether or not the players represent the kind of Duke students likely to be undermined or alienated by prejudice, or the kind of people likely to be victimized by the sex industry or to suffer from the whims of the justice system, among other things. On that last point Reade Seligmann was able to introduce a welcome dose of reality, and it’s not my claim that identifying strongly with the lacrosse players as victims of injustice—the basic motivation of liestoppers, I think—is incompatible with understanding and sympathy for other perspectives. But a point of view based on outrage, especially one as precarious as this, is driven to justify itself with rhetorical warfare that brings the battle lines into sharp relief. The easiest way to do that—standard practice on DIW—is to package the people in the line of fire into special interests to be attacked, dismissed or defended, and pretend nobody else exists.

For background on the case—if you just found your way to my blog from Mars or something—a good place to go is the Duke Chronicle’s Lacrosse scandal page. There is a small collection of articles about the “listening” statement and the 88 who signed it, including a link to the ad itself and an especially good account of the ad and it’s repercussions by Steve Veres. Duke News and Communication has a page with links to various press releases and reports. Finally, this past April Newsweek had a good retrospective on the scandal.

There’s a short postscript to this post about a squabble that illustrates some of my points. A detailed look at the two sides of the coin starts with potbanging.

People who dislike HIP tend to see it as the musical version of PC. It’s true that the more zealous and simpleminded HIPsters can be preachy, can come at you with a moralistic sense that it’s their duty to correct the bad habits of the uninformed by foisting onto them a laundry list of dos and donts (this bow, those strings, that tempo, these ornaments, etc. etc.). But the idea that HIPsters have a unique claim to authenticity was punctured a long time ago. Deflating claims to authenticity has become a cottage industry with academics and high-end critics. I’m not that hep to the HIP literature, but everyone knows Richard Taruskin’s “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” almost 20 years old now, in which he showed that the “historically informed” sound grew out of Stravinsky’s aesthetic much more than Bach’s. That’s why they stopped calling it “authentic performance” and switched to “historically informed.”

It’s odd to see people still talking about HIP as a kind of fashion police and debating it as a monolith—it’s a well-established, diverse part of the music world that’s way past its heady, revolutionary days. Yet even OC seems to think that it takes courage and “powerful allies” to stand up to Harnoncourt and HIP, which looks to me like a touch of Imusitis, a disorder that makes people conjure up a PC gestapo in order to make whatever they’re saying sound better. It’s a mild case, but still a little disappointing in the face of her usual sly intelligence and enthusiasm. It’s the peanut gallery that takes up the theme and runs with it, turning it into a low-grade flame war. It’s interesting to me as an example of the bad habit people have of talking about taste in moral terms, and of writing as if it’s possible to browbeat someone into changing the way they hear music.

[As I get ready to post, after a delay of a day or two, I see that there are more comments on OC’s site, including more moderate ones from darahbee. I based what I wrote here on the comments through May 23, and I’m going to leave it that way but attach a postscript]

Most of the commenters are reasonably civil. There are only 3 who are conspicuously negative, and of those it’s darahbee and Benedict who stick around for a fight. Darahbee uses his opening line to suggest that he’s probably dealing with dilettantes then briskly moves on to insult OC as “just an opera fan.” Benedict invokes the Rolexes in the audience at Salzburg in his own gesture of anti-dilettante snobbery and shows that he, too, is deft at putting people in their place by declaring that “musicologists belong in the audience,” not on the podium. At times it might as well be a couple of five year olds shouting “no, you’re the poopyhead!” at each other. Even when it’s more substantive, points are made in a spirit that’s uniformly contentious and argumentative.

To be fair, darahbee’s primary interest is to tell OC off for being disrespectful, and since he’s dealing with simpletons (aka opera lovers) and dilettantes, he doesn’t seem to expect or want much of a discussion. It’s hard to reconcile with the high musical ideals he alludes to, or with his admiration for Harnoncourt. He has nothing to say that might draw a person to listen to Harnoncourt’s music, and I don’t think it does any service to the man to leave the impression that’s he’s a great favorite of the holier-than-thou.

The only person who has the grace to own his taste is claviclaws. He “loves[s] the sound and love[s] the feel” of HIP. And it’s not just the musical feel but also the communal feel—“the passion and commitment of the musicians”—that he loves. This is not only an realistic and honest take on the roots of his preference, it’s an invitation to a conversation instead of a fight.

The only music forum I can think of that can sustain long substantive discussions is Sequenza21. A few weeks ago, a review was posted that drew in some angry newcomers, and it had a striking effect on the quality of the discussion, shifting it in the direction of the Harnoncourt flap I was just talking about (an additional factor that fanned the flames was the misguided suggestion that the newcomers were spamming). A quick point-counterpoint sums it up.

Point (David Salvage):

Cipullo’s music can veer into syrupy Lydian-land, but the first act holds up relatively well. The second act unfortunately sacrifices musical and dramatic continuity for applause-nabbing solo arias, and the show ends up lacking impact despite its loaded subject matter.

Counterpoint (Marley):

The dramatic morphology of Glory Denied is a brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative of Thompson’s life into an opera. I think Mr. Salvage should attempt to understand a work before he derides it.

Salvage was bothered by the way the opera was broken up by solo numbers with applause. It’s meaningless, not to mention insulting, to respond that he didn’t understand—he doesn’t know what continuity is? His ears aren’t connected to his brain? He’s wrong to be bothered by things that bother him? There’s no answer to be made on a musical level. Marley falls short in another respect, very familiar to me as a teacher. Salvage is writing about things that are concrete and meaningful whether you heard the the opera or not, but “brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative…” is nothing more than the overwrought opinion of a complete stranger who I know nothing about—another dead end.

[Darahbee (who must be conductor David Alexander Rahbee) posted a long, more diplomatic and informative comment after I stopped reading and started writing. It’s familiar stuff to anyone who’s looked into HIP—the kind of thing that should induce open-minded people to give it a listen, though I think for the most part it’s defeated by the pointlessness of telling people how they should hear things. All the less likely after the tone he had coming into the discussion. It’s to his credit that he stepped back and gave it a shot, though.]