Yeah, right!

What happens at the intersection of history, art, and commerce, when historical sites and/or historical re-creations are turned into tourist attractions?  Some folks on my blogroll have been writing thoughtfully on these questions. 

First, Flavia at Ferule and Fescue went to North America’s “Shakespeareapalooza” this summer (a.k.a. the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) and writes about the curious flava of the festival:

[T]he best parts of the festival were the most amateurish, in the best sense of that word: though the actors were all professionals, there was a palpable sense that they and the audience (even the annoying lady with the dyed-red hair in the row behind us, who was loudly showing off her Shakespearian expertise before the show and during intermission) were there out of love for the plays, for Shakespeare, and for live theatre. And if you have to be a tourist in a tourist town, it’s pleasant for it to be one with three bookstores on the main drag, where you can saunter to a tasty post-show dinner at midnight, and where all the other tourists also have rolled-up programs popped beneath their arms.

But the less amateurish stuff was less agreeable. The mainstage production–the one in the fancy theatre, with the big-name star, and with lots of special effects–was dreadful.

And speaking of dreadful–some inept ”social media” hack from the Stratford Festival “argued” in the comments with points she didn’t make, in a commentary on the festival that was overwhelmingly positive.  Whatever, d00dz!  Keep on practicing using those interwebs, will you?

Next, Chauncy DeVega at We Are Respectable Negroes wonders about the practice of sleeping in slave cabins:  is it “Honoring the African Holocaust and our Ancestors, or Trivializing their Memory?”  He writes,

Civil War reenactor Joseph McGill has been trying to commune with the ancestors by sleeping in slave cabins throughout South Carolina. His mission is noble and ought to be admired. However, part of me is uncertain about his project. For example, I have always wanted to go on a tour of the underground railroad where one traces the actual routes used, sleeping in basements, navigating north to freedom over several weeks. I have also wanted to go to Goree Island in Senegal, where I would meditate in the slave fortresses where thousands upon thousands were imprisoned and died.

As powerful as the experience would be, I wouldn’t have slave dogs on my heels and bounty hunters a step behind me. I wouldn’t be trapped in the belly of a beast, exhausted and frightened beyond all belief, for I knew not what would happen to me tomorrow. What would you do? How does one balance a yearning to experience just a tiny bit of the unimaginable with a fear of reducing hallowed ground to a tourism destination?

I think these are important questions–but ultimately, I come down on the side of opening up as many public history sites as possible, especially those that commemorate the lives of people whose histories pose challenges to Whig history or American exceptionalism.  All re-creations are ultimately performative and sanitized versions of the history they re-create–Stratford, Ontario offers just a highly selective view of Shakespeare’s world.  Colonial Williamsburg (for example) is undoubtedly lice-free and the re-enactors there bathe or shower and launder their clothes a lot more often than they would have in the eighteenth century.  Plimoth Plantation doesn’t hold public executions, and all of the bodies remain buried at Gettysburg. 

My bet is that the people who would choose to visit or even stay the night in a slave cabin are people who are genuinely curious about the history and would be respectful of the sacred grounds they visit.  It would be wonderful to have public history sites that commemorate the histories of enslaved and working people in the same numbers as the sites that recreate their owners’ and bosses’ lives in high-style Georgian and Victorian mansions.

What’s your view of the intersections of history, art, and commerce?

Meanwhile, upon Mamie’s recommendation a few days ago in our discussion of Jennifer Weiner’s and Jodi Picoult’s critique of the American literary establishment , I’ve been reading Nina Baym’s classic essay, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood:  How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33: 2 (1981), 123-139.  Dandelion made the same point that Baym elaborates on in her essay about American literature:  “In my reading, it seems the bulk of American literature deals with main characters individuating and separating. Since it’s ’selfish’ for women to individuate and separate, the bulk of American literature doesn’t involve women. If women writers are writing stories about women’s lives, then, they are, by definition, not going to be writing literature.”

Baym writes about the rewriting of the literary history of the early Republic that will sound familiar to those of you who have followed my comments on American literary fiction and criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  (Which is to say that I’ve been influenced by Baym for decades, not the other way around, surely!)  In short, twentieth-century literary critics pushed aside the authors of the first wildly popular American novels like Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple, among others) and Hannah Foster (The Coquette) in order to crown Charles Brockden Brown the first real author of the American novel.  (Now, late eighteenth century novels aren’t the most readable relicts in all of literary history, but Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as the most unreadable of all early American novelists.)  Baym explains:

[I]n his lively and influential book of 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fielder describes women authors as creators of the “flagrantly bad best-seller” against which “our best fictionists”–all male–have had to struggle for “their integrity and their livelihoods.”  And, in a 1978 reader’s introduction to an edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid write as follows:

What it meant for Brown personally, and belles letters in America historically, that he should have decided to write professionally is a story unto itself.  Americans simply had no great appetite for serious literature in the early decades of the Republic—certainly nothing of the sort with which they devoured. . . the ubiquitous melodramas of beset womanhood, “tales of truth,” like [Rowson’s and Foster’s books.]

There you see what has happened to the woman writer.  She has entered literary history as the enemy.  The phrase “tales of truth” is put in quotes by the critics, as though to cast doubt on the very notion that a “melodrama of beset womanhood” could be either true or important.  At the same time, ironically, they are proposing for our serious consideration, as a candidate for intellectually engaging literature, a highly melodramatic novel with an improbable plot, inconsistent characterizations, and excesses of style that have posed tremendous problems for all students of Charles Brockden Brown.  But, by this strategy it becomes possible to begin major American fiction historically with male rather than female authors.  The certainty here that stories about women could not contain the essence of American culture means that the matter of American experience is inherently male.  And this makes it highly unlikely that American women would write fiction encompassing such experience.  I would suggest that the theoretical model of a story which may become the vehicle of cultural essence is:  “a melodrama of beset manhood.”  This melodrama is presented in a fiction which, as we’ll later see, can be taken as representative of the author’s literary experience, his struggle for integrity and livelihood against flagrantly bad best-sellers written by women.  Personally beset in a way that epitomizes the tensions of our culture, the male author produces his melodramatic testimony to our culture’s essence–so the theory goes.

So the theory goes. How sad is it that Baym’s claims may seem more radical now than they were nearly 30 years ago?  (It’s that old devil patriarchal equilibrium again!)  Thanks to all of you for your insights and recommendations in the earlier discussion.

Weepy demagogue Glenn Beck

Paying attention to weepy demagogue Glenn Beck is akin to giving oxygen to a house fire–no good will come of it, and you’ll probably make it worse.  I was cross enough about his appropriation of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 (and only in part because it was my birthday)–but his comments on President Barack Obama’s supposed “liberation theology” bear a little commentary.  I’m surprised that more people haven’t commented on this already–so here goes:

My theory is that this is Beck’s stealth strategy for calling Obama a Marxist or socialist.  Not that I think most of his followers get that–he’s dressing up his ideas in inteleckshual-sounding phrases that are designed more to deflect deep thought than inspire curiosity and further research.  Finally today, Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times tells us what liberation theology actually is, and why it’s so stupid to accuse Obama of being one of its acolytes: 

Liberation theology is a movement that took shape in the late 1950s and ’60s among Latin American Catholic thinkers, foremost among them the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who coined the term. The other “founders” were the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo; the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, who has spent most of his career in El Salvador; and the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff. (These are hardly shadowy figures; Gutierrez, for example, is the O’Hara Professor of Theology at Notre Dame.)

Their common position was that social injustice is a form of violence arising from sin. They urged the poor — and those acting in solidarity with them — to reflect on Scripture from the perspective of the poor. To that end, some argued that certain facets of Marxist analysis, particularly those having to do with social class, could be helpful. None of this is particularly mysterious, nor does it have anything to do with Obama. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone touched by liberation theology proposing anything like his Wall Street bailout. 

Word.  But for the full-on Beck-a-palooza roundup, head on over to our friends at Religion in American History.  Paul Harvey has links to lots of posts and articles by actual inteleckshuals and their analyses of Beck:

• Messiah College Professor and Blogger John Fea in the New York Daily News, on “How Glenn Beck distorts the Christian Teachings that Inspired MLK, Jr.”  He writes today that “I’ve been taking a little bit of heat from Glenn Beck supporters who have been writing in the comments section of my New York Daily News op-ed.”  Ya think?  No one ever said fighting the crazzy was easy work, John!
• Joanna Brooks, on “America’s First Mormon Televangelist.”
• Alex McNeill, “‘Me’ The People:  A Day with the Tea Party”
• Andrew Murphy, “Beck Plays Prophet”

American history doesn’t disappoint, does it, friends?  Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse–it finds a way!  Never say we’re not a can-do kind of people.

Srsly?

Check out this protest by some writers of the coronation of Jonathan Franzen by the American literary establishment as the next Leo Tolstoy:

This time around a couple of best-selling female writers, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, have tweeted their disdain for what they see as critical fawning over Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.

Weiner has even come up with a phrase to describe her feelings: Franzenfreude.

“Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain of others,” Weiner says. “Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”

But her angst is not just about the book — or even about Franzen himself.

“It’s about the establishment choosing one writer and writing about him again and again and again,” Weiner says, “while they are ignoring a lot of other worthy writers and, in the case of The New York Times, entire genres of books.”

So why Franzen, and not (for example) Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, or Barbara Kingsolver?  Gee:  I wonder!

“It’s just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families,” Weiner says. “And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America.”

Now, I really liked Franzen’s The Corrections, and I asked for Freedom for my birthday this year.  But Picoult and Weiner are absolutely correct.  As I have argued here before American literary fiction has no room for women.  I have assumed that I like Franzen’s work because I too am a white, Protestant midwesterner who grew up in a particular kind of family and neighborhood at a particular moment in the twentieth century, and I thought The Corrections captured that very well, in addition to offering a lengthy sub-plot that was a hilarious academic comedy of errors.  I don’t have any illusions that his subjectivity is the only “Great American” subjectivity, like a lot of the reviewers of certain clever men novelists seem to think.  (Take David Foster Wallace, for example–please.  Now he wrote some clever and entertaining things, but was anyone else annoyed by his writerly tics of returning to tennis and Illinois all of the time?  Who the frack cares about tennis or Illinois?  How are they such universal concerns?)

It’s like John Updike’s blurb on the book jacket of the Joyce Carol Oates novel I took with me on vacation a few weeks ago said:  “If there were such a term as a woman of letters, Oates would deserve it.”  That’s the view of the inbred, talking-only-to-themselves New York-based American literary establishment of The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.  “If there were such a term as woman of letters”–but of course, there isn’t, and our literary tastemakers who are nearly all the same age, sex, regional background, and race will make sure it never happens!

Good for Picoult and Weiner.  Their courageous stand will win them nothing, and will probably cost them a lot.  I guess they can kiss their hopes for future reviews in the New York Times goodbye!

It seems like almost everyone I know and love has a late summer birthday–ej, Mark, Kathleen, Blake, and Dad. Consider this a lazy, lazy happy birthday wish for us all!  (And it was coincidentally recorded last year on my birthday.)  For those of you who remember the 80s (and I know that all of you listed above do!), Comrade PhysioProf posted this birthday classic by Altered Images earlier this month.

I love the 40s!

I just wish a$$holes would stop giving speeches and holding rallies on my birthday. It used to be a pretty classy day.  Then two years ago I couldn’t go out to dinner in Denver because The Precious was giving The Speech, and now this.  (Thank goodness I haven’t lived anywhere near the Lincoln Memorial for fourteen years.)

More reporting on my birthday dinner to follow on this blog.

Participants will attend a two-day meeting at the Huntington Library on May 27–28, 2011, to discuss a precirculated chapter-length portion of their current work in progress along with the work of other participants. Subsequently, the convener will write an essay elaborating on the issues raised in the workshop for publication in the William and Mary Quarterly. . . .

As the work of a new generation of women’s historians surged to the forefront of the historical profession in the 1970s, studies on planters’ wives, republican mothers, and female slaves, to give only three examples, reshaped fundamental assumptions and practices of early American history. In the ensuing decades, research on women has multiplied, focusing on politics, legalities, and religion among the factors governing women’s lives, on the textures of their roles in families, and on the systems of race, class, and labor that shaped women’s experiences from the beginning of the colonial era to ca. 1820. Simultaneously, the study of early American women evolved into the analysis of gender and sexuality. In the process, an explicit analytic and even topical focus on women has seemed to fade. To reflect on the current state of the field, we wish, to paraphrase Mary Ritter Beard, to return to the question of women as a force in early American history.

The organizers invite proposals from scholars who focus on the study of women in early North America. We encourage proposals for papers that introduce new research agendas and/or reflect on the current practice of women’s history. Where are women at the centers and on the margins of early America, whether familial, geographic, legal, political, or sexual? How do women’s experiences intersect with ideas of class, race, and status? In what ways does the range of women’s experiences shape global, borderlands, and local perspectives? What theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches best frame early American women’s history today? What are the future directions for early American women’s history?

Don’t forget:  Mexico and Central America are in fact in North America.  The Caribbean is North America.  All of Canada is North America.  Colorado, New Mexico, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and all of the other 45 U.S. states are in North America.  (I think Hawai’i counts here for the purposes of this conference.)  They’re not just looking for Anglo-American goodwives on the Atlantic littoral, friends.

Here are the directions for application:

The WMQ-EMSI workshop is intended to encourage the work of midcareer scholars working on second or subsequent research projects, though we will consider exceptional proposals from post-Ph.D. junior scholars. Proposals for workshop presentations should include a brief abstract (250 words) describing the applicant’s current research project, an equally brief discussion of the particular methodological or historiographical issues they are engaging (which will be circulated to all participants along with the chapter or essay), and a short c.v. The organizers especially encourage proposals from midcareer scholars. Proposals may be submitted online at the conference Web site (http://oieahc.wm.edu/conferences/workshops/cfp/index.cfm) or by email to Kelly Crawford (kscraw<AT>wm.edu) by October 15, 2010. All submissions will be acknowledged by email.  Questions may be directed to Christopher Grasso, Editor, William and Mary Quarterly, at cdgras<AT>wm.edu.

In the spirit of all of the complaints about young people today, I present you with a guest post by Mrs. Norbert Thrummox (nee Delphine Brumley), my entirely fictional great grandmother.

We didn’t have anything, get anything, or expect anything.  Christmas was pretty much like every other day of the year, only colder.  Our parents didn’t even know our birthdays, let alone celebrate them with cake and presents!  We never heard of such luxuries.

Breakfast was weevily cornmeal sprinkled on a half-sheet of newspaper, lunch was what we could forage on the playground at school, and supper was what we could beg from the bar we’d have to drag our daddy from at closing time.  (Mostly pickled eggs, or sliced radishes in summer.)  This was difficult, as we’d have to get up at 5 a.m. to make it to school by 8, but we were usually good and hungry for our suppers by 1 a.m. or so.  But we didn’t mind!  We were free.  Most things were free, because we didn’t have any money.  Theft was non-existent in our community.  I’d like to say that we never locked our doors, but that would imply that we had doors.  Most of us didn’t.

School was just one room 7 miles away, and the teacher wasn’t from one of your fancy normal colleges–just an Eighth Grade graduate, and that only if we were lucky.  But our teachers were really demanding and strict, and they got excellent results.  I was translating Catullus in the third grade, at least the poems without the dirty parts, and my brother was doing trigonometry in fourth grade.  That was probably because we knew teachers could administer fatal beatings to us if they wanted to.  Yes, teachers got results back then–they didn’t need a fancy normal college degree, and they knew that parents would back them up if they administered a fatal beating.  Unlike today.

Because we couldn’t afford flour or flour sacks, we kids used to amuse ourselves making newspaper dresses for each other.  Instead of stickball, we just played “stick” because we couldn’t afford a ball.  In the summers, we’d pretend we’d swing from a rope and plunge into the river for a swim, because our swimming costumes were made of newspaper, too.  (Besides, we didn’t have a rope.)  But, we had such fun!  Fun such as you’ll never, ever know, because it was a simpler time.  A time when a lot of what we had was made out of newspaper by our own two hands, before all of the pool parlors, the filthy comic books, the lemonade stands, and crystal radio sets ruined American childhood.  Where is the imagination in opening a comic book and reading a story?  Where is the creativity in just turning a dial to hear music?  Who couldn’t make a tasty drink sweetened with sugar?  We used to make our own fun.  Now they just buy it like it’s for sale, like something cheap made in Occupied Japan. 

Lord, I don’t know.

Leave your reminiscences of the “good old days” (real or fictional) in the comments below.

Pull up a chair on the porch and let Grandma Historiann give you a little history lesson about the days when we were all smelling the teen spirit, wearing our ballcaps backwards, and affecting the heroin chic look in imitation of Kate Moss.  Back in my early postcollegiate days–the early 1990s–there was a recession on, and a lot of wailing and rending of garments about what a pathetic bunch of losers we 20-somethings were.  A lot of people I know lived with their parents after college graduation and sometimes during grad school, or at least while they tended bar/coached junior high soccer/planned their next degree and/or move.  We too were lectured by older people and looked down on as “slackers,” stereotyped as unmotivated baristas with useless Comp Lit and Art History degrees.  A lot of ink was spilled on the return of ink–that is, tattoos–on a lot of our bodies, and whether or not we’d ever get “real jobs” after getting sleeved.  Then guess what?  The economy was roaring again so that by the late 1990s, we were all supposed to be dot-com millionaires and owners of zillion-dollar homes in Redmond, Washington or Palo Alto, California.  Of course, most of us conformed to neither stereotype or expectation–but the media narrative was so much more entertaining if it was focused on the extremes.

Most of the horse$hit being shoveled at us in these articles is historically inaccurate, because these stories are laboring so hard to convince us that there’s something truly new and unique about the rising generation of adults.  I suppose that might be the case one day–but color me unimpressed with the truthy goodness I’ve seen so far.  From the New York Times magazine story, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”

• “[M]arriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.”  HONK!  Check your Stephanie Coontz, who has explained already about how mid-20th century ages at first marriage were artificially low compared to the rest of American history, and your basic demography among free people in colonial America, where the average age at first marriage was mid-20s for women and later 20s for most men.
• This article goes on to ask some good questions about whether or not young adulthood should be recognized as a special new stage in life, but it never asks whether or not the “five criteria” of adulthood on page 1 (“completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child”) actually describe adulthood beyond a particular narrow, middle-class vision of heterosexuality.  (Hint:  when at least 10% of the population can’t legally marry, it seems pretty dumb to include marriage here.  I’m just sayin’.)
• Downey’s article on the “generational collision” uses as his “evidence” a scene from a Gen-X classic, Office Space (1999), to make a point about Gen-Y employees, who by definition would be at their oldest 17 when that movie was made.  (Most people date Gen Xers as people born between 1961-81, and Gen-Y as 1982-2002.)
• Navarette’s article is a long complaint about the absence of “work ethic” among Millennials, “especially for the hard jobs their parents and grandparents did a generation or two ago.”  Yeah, I’ve never heard that before.  I’m sure those second-generation Irish kids of the mid-19th century who didn’t have to work as domestics and draymen were criticized for looking to get into policework or to keep their own houses instead.  Those Italian and  Jewish kids who didn’t have to be grocers or factory seamstresses were considered “soft” for wanting to finish high school and maybe go to CCNYor Hunter College, too.  Not having to work like your parents and grandparents is the American dream, pal!  Get used to it. 

These articles will dry up once the economy gets going again, and instead they’ll highlight the ridiculously huge salaries that a few Millennials will make because they happen to have the skills or aptitudes required by the new economy.  Meanwhile, enjoy the old farts making fools of themselves–and please add links to other stories you’ve seen like this.  Although I officially qualify now as an old fart, I’ve been impressed (for the most part) by my students of the past decade.  They do a lot more volunteer work than people of my generation, and they’re much more apt to be ”joiners” than we ever were.  It’s probably a good thing that Gen-X is a pretty small generation–we’re in our 30s and 40s now, and what have we given the world other than Timothy McVeigh, some decent grunge and hip hop, and our carefully honed cynicism and joylessness?

After a few years of watching the academic job market collapse into a seeming death spiral, I also started to wonder whether my “full disclosure” strategy of trying to scare off prospective graduate students was adequate. I started to entertain the possibility that if the problem was too many qualified applicants for too few jobs, then perhaps the responsible – even ethical – course of action would be for me to stop contributing to the oversupply of applicants.

So, a few weeks ago I revised my departmental web page to include the following statement: “Notice to prospective graduate students: I will not be accepting new students in my lab for the indefinite future.”

.       .       .       .      .       .      

I think academia shares many of the classic elements of a social trap: It is in most faculty members’ and departments’ best interests to recruit a lot of graduate students. Churning out Ph.D.s is one of the major metrics of departmental “success.” Departments need graduate students to teach their classes, and faculty members need them to run their labs. Yet, as in any social trap, when everybody acts in their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues. I have served as chair or co-chair of 13 Ph.D. students in my career, a number I’m guessing is typical of most research faculty. Population growth of that magnitude is a Malthusian melt-down in the making and simply isn’t sustainable. We’re not creating enough academic jobs to absorb all those Ph.D.s, and in today’s economy, applied jobs are disappearing as well.

The comments on her article at IHEare all over the place–from people accusing her of deciding not to do part of her job and of patronizing grad students, to people who applaud her decision.  After all, she stands to lose prestige among her colleagues in her university as well as within her profession generally if she doesn’t work with Ph.D. students.

My department doesn’t have a Ph.D. program, but we have a strong M.A. in public history as well as a department with research emphases in environmental history and U.S. Western history that seems to do well by our students.  Our students have been admitted to Ph.D. programs at Southern Methodist University, UCLA, and Notre Dame, for example, and our public history grads are fully employed.  Even my former M.A. thesis students who didn’t concentrate in public history have jobs they enjoy, which is a big relief.  And now that we have the funding to provide most of our graduate students T.A.-ships for two years, that means that many of our students can get a free M.A. degree and be fully employable as a public historian, which seems like just about the least exploitative graduate program around.  (Most History departments with Ph.D. students treat the M.A. students as cash cows, because they usually pay full tuition and are not eligible for T.A.-ships or other graduate fellowships.) 

So I’m just fine with training our M.A. students, and will participate as fully as I can in our graduate program.  There’s a real limit to that, since I’m neither an environmental nor a U.S. Western historian, but there are a few people who are interested in my fields in every class.  I’m not working nearly as hard with graduate students as some of my colleagues, but I reap the benefits of a T.A. whenever I teach a large survey class.  But I’m also fine with Harris’s decision not to accept Ph.D. students–after all, nous devons cultiver notre jardins, n’est-ce pas?  (As the Isley Brothers have taught us, “it’s your thing, do whatcha wanna do!”)

If you teach in a department that grants graduate degrees, have you (like Harris) re-thought your work with graduate students?  What do you think about Harris’s decision, whether you teach graduate students or not.?

Walsh focuses on Schlessinger’s curious victimology and her willful misunderstanding of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so.  She writes,

Like a lot of right-wingers lately (see the so-called “ground zero mosque” demonizers), Schlessinger shows a poor grasp of what the First Amendment does. It protects us from government abridging our speech rights; it doesn’t protect us from other Americans deciding we’re racially divisive idiots when we use the word “n!&&er” 11 times in a a single exchange with one caller. . . .

Then there’s the claim [on King's show that] she can’t be “helpful and useful” under the current circumstances, which seems to indicate she can only be “helpful and useful” if she can use the word “nigger” 11 times in one of her rants without being criticized. Schlessinger has gotten away with being “helpful and useful” in all her homophobic, sexist, right-wing glory for almost three decades. It’s amazing this single run-in with American decency has finally made her retreat.

But this wasn’t Schlessinger’s first major on-air meltdown that p!$$ed people off–her first meltdown was back in 1999-2000, when she claimed that homosexuality was a “biological error.”  This led to a major consumer boycott and resulted in the cancellation of Schlessinger’s then-fledgling TV show.  All of this is important context for understanding her resentment of “interest groups” who might “attack affiliates and attack sponsors” (as she said on King’s show last night.)  It’s happened before–and she’s probably correct that it may well happen again.  Something else that’s happening again is that Schlessinger is claiming that her First Amendment rights are being violated.  Excuse me–I missed the clause in the First Amendment that says no one could say that you’re an idiot.  Hey–the First Amendment protects their speech too, dammit!

Comments like this are so dumb, they burn.  And speaking of burning:  they’re like the letter to the editor I read in the Dayton Daily News a decade ago commenting on a case in which some people had torn down and burned someone else’s gay-rights rainbow flag.  The reader complained that since liberals like (U.S.) flag burning, how dare they complain about anyone else burning a flag?  (Here’s a hint, numbskull:  you can do anything you want but it has to be your flippin’ flag!)

Why do I know about Dr. Laura Schlessinger?  I’ve listened to her for fourteen years even though she doesn’t go a day without attacking feminism, blaming it for all social ills, or saying something spectacularly nasty about feminists.  (Call it opposition research, plus my longstanding loyalty to the “agony aunt” columns in the newspaper.  If you want to feel like you’ve really got it together, just listen in on Laura’s show–you’ll see that you’re not so bad off.)  Her schtick is that she decides what the caller’s problem is without hearing too many details, and without expressing much compassion.  She’s right that people’s problems aren’t that unique, but her cruelty can be breathtaking to hear sometimes.  Her treatment of the caller in the “N-word” incident isn’t special–she talks over other callers and gets very, very angry when they don’t immediately agree with her or (worse) try to engage in a conversation with her instead of meekly listening.  These people don’t understand Laura’s performance:  it’s all about her being right, all of the time, so no wonder she not only got the “N-word” call wrong, she got angry and screamed it eleven times.  Classic Laura!

Schlessinger is nothing if not a chamelon who aims to reflect her times, not to lead them (or “teach, preach, and nag” us, as she used to say.)  Longtime listeners from her early days in L.A. remember that she was once the only talk show host to give relationship advice to gay callers.  I’ve been with her from the days in which she was reasonably gay-friendly (ca. mid-1990s), to her rightward turn during the impeachment of Bill Clinton and the (s)election of George W. Bush in 2000 (and the anti-gay imbroglio), through her militantly religious turn after 9/11, to her current incarnation in which she’s still vicious about working mothers but she has started taking gay callers and gay relationship questions.  (A few years back, she must have gotten some consumer research indicating that she had become too nasty.  The years 2002-06 were the high point of her anger and aggression, I think.) 

Over the years, she’s converted to Orthodox Judaism (and she’s insisted that her husband do the same), then she’s converted to Christianity, and now (I think) she doesn’t espouse any particular beliefs on the air.  She changes her ideas more often than most people change the batteries in their smoke alarms–kind of like how old Hollywood stars used to get married again just to keep their names in the papers. 

Schlessinger will survive this latest setback, and she’ll reinvent herself again as she always has.  Sadly, I’m sure there’s a large audence for racial ressentiment these days.  (Now wasn’t that fair’n'balanced?  I got through a whole post about the self-appointed Family Values guru without remarking on her adulterous nudie photos!  Talk about a chameleon.)