Historiann

The media are at it again–announcing the discovery of another ”new” cultural “trend,” that is, and publishing a series of “You Kids Get Off My Lawn” type articles complaining about young people these days.  It’s the Great Recession, or the Second Great Depression, or whatever–so there’s another panic about the extension of childhood to age 30 and what’s-wrong-with-kids-these-days.  Sometimes today’s 20-somethings, who are the children of baby boomers, get the advantage of more sympathetic press coverage–see this New York Times magazine article, for example.  But a lot of this nonsense is pretty hostile, and unfairly harsh on a whole generation of Americans, like these cranky rants published today in the Denver Post:  “Generation Y Bother” by Ruben Navarette, Jr., and “A Generational Collision is Coming”by Tom Downey.  Guess what?  The rising generation is optimistic, idealistic, and isn’t professionally settled–GASP!!!  And old farts in their 40s on up feel free to condescend to them.  Thank goodness the media is on this story.

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?  Continue Reading »

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I’m sure that if you care, you’ve already heard about the extremely strange racial tirade that has apparently ended (for now) Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s radio career.  This article by Mary Elizabeth Williams sums up Schlessinger’s angry outburst at a caller in which she screamed the N-word eleven times.  Joan Walsh at Salon writes that last night on Larry King, she announced that she’ll leave the airwaves when her contract ends at the end of this year because she wants to “regain [her] First Amendment rights.  (Check out those links–they include both audio and video richness for your full and complete understanding.  Go listen to the audio link in the Williams story–don’t miss the part where she says that it’s ironic that there are so many people complaining about racial discrimination when we have a black President!  Priceless.)

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– Continue Reading »

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• The Bennet campaign is stamping their tiny little feet in frustration at that New York Times story about “Senator” Michael Bennet’s advocacy for taking taxpayer money to the track with him, but the Times sticks by its story.  It published a correction and an addendum this morning, but only on two minor points:  on the history of Bennet’s relationship with Tom Boasberg, and to note that one of the sources is a supporter of Bennet’s primary challenger Andrew Romanoff.  (Apparently, it’s not worth mentioning that Boasberg has been sending out talking points from him office to distract from the NYT story, and is an open supporter and maxed-out donor to his former boss Bennet.)  Sorry, “Senator” Wonderbread:  if your bet had won and you had made money for the Denver Public Schools, you’d be tooting your own horn pretty loudly.  But since you bet on the wrong horse, it’s somehow dirty or wrong to point that out?  That’s not evidence of your poor judgment, somehow?  That’s politics, friends.  Can’t take the heat?  Get the f^&k out of the kitchen, “Senator.”  Big girls don’t cry–we pull up our panties and get $hit done.
• Tenured Radical asks for some advice in dealing with sexual and romantic revelations found in the personal papers of a Famous Feminist in the 1970s.  She asks:  “What to do with past life shockers? Would anyone be shocked by them really? What, if anything, do they contribute the history of radical feminism I am working on? Do they amplify the atmosphere for my reader that will better evoke the period? Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I’m thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn’t want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn’t want me to know?”  Great questions–especially that last one.
• For-profit colleges and universities are clearly fraudulent peddlers of hope to people who have been ill-served by their public secondary educations and the current U.S. economy–but will anyone do anything about them?  Continue Reading »

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Hot & fresh, but ya might get burned!

Howdy!  Here’s a roundup of some interesting conversations happening on the interwebs this week.  There’s real stemwinder of a rant at the end, friends, so click “continue reading” only if you think you’ve got the guts.

• Echidne has a great roundup of her own about periodic marriage panics.  She notes, “[t]he panic is always about women. Men never panic about marriage, never, but women do. And so does the society in general.”  Which is your favorite fake marriage panic statistic?  Mine is the one from the late 80s about how unmarried women at age 40 have as much chance of being married as being blown up in a terrorist attack.  (That one was funnier before 9/11/2001, I guess.)  The media and culture at large always worry about heterosexual women who don’t marry, but instead of asking what it is about marriage that some women don’t like, they assign the blame to the women.  Cherchez la femme, mes amis!  Toujours, cherchez la femme!
• Could someone please explain to me how anyone could have possibly thought the author of Oleanna to be a “liberal?”  Apparently, David Mamet believes his plays are popular because they refuse to “coddle our preconceptions” and instead “shock us into seeing the world as it really is.”  Mamet’s “reality” is apparently a world in which sexual harassment is something imagined by neurotic, malign young women and a tool by which they oppress men.  I’ve said it before, and I’m darned sure I’ll say it again:  I’ve got yer tool right here, pal.
• Knitting Clio has a brief summary and comment on the fake outrage of the internets this week, women who achieve pregnancy through IVF and then have abortions.  Continue Reading »

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Writing about L’Affaire Shirley Sherrod and the $h!tstorms over ideological purity in the American Left and how it’s infected the Right, Tenured Radical then brings it all back to the world we know and love:

I would also observe that this is not just a political problem, it’s a cultural problem. It is the kind of $hit that occurs daily on blogs: blogger writes a six or seven paragraph essay, and some a$$hat latches onto a sentence out of context, gives it a hateful spin, and writes a “comment” that is actually just a personal attack intended to discredit the blogger wholesale. The idea? Who cares about ideas? You would have to read the whole post to grasp the ideas!!!! How much easier just to move on to the next blog, knowing that the writer is exactly the putrid idiot you knew s/he was before you started reading.

Ah, yes:  memories!  Click on over there for the Airplane joke, if not for the intellectual stimulation.

Another connection in all of this, as Knitting Clio pointed out in the comments over at Tenured Radical,  is how easy it is to demonize women, especially women of color (like those who speak just once hypothetically about wise Latinas, f’rinstance), and discredit them as authority figures, whether they’re merely self-published writers or members of the current Presidential administration.  Somehow it’s all too easy to believe that a woman needs to be disciplined or even humiliated for shooting her mouth off again, and it’s all too difficult to believe that she’s deserving of due process, a fair hearing, or even of a complete reading of her professional opinions and accomplishments.  Continue Reading »

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I sure am envious of you folks out in California this election season.  I think the race between Meg Whitman (R) and Jerry Brown (D) will be one of the few worth watching, if only because I’d be waiting and hoping for a reporter to ask Brown about this classic from 30 years ago:

“You will jog for the MAS-ter race, and always wear the happy face. . . The hippies won’t come back, you say?  Mellow out or you will pay!”  Ah, if only Jerry Brown were elected President in 1980. . . (For those of you born either before 1960 or after 1980, that’s the Dead Kennedys, fronted by Jello Biafra, performing “California Über Alles.”  I’m assuming that the rest of you Gen X-ers will just play through.)  Continue Reading »

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Go read this account of reading the reviews from a recent grant application, in which Female Science Professor was thanked for not including the fact of her sex in her BI (Broader Impact) statement:

In one review of one of my recent proposals, I was thanked by one reviewer for not mentioning myself or other women involved in the project as a broader impact. The reviewer was very happy to see that my proposal was therefore not obviously biased against men.

OK… you’re welcome.. but you know what? Even if I wrote in the BI section that the proposed research involved female investigators and therefore in some way helped broaden the participation of an underrepresented group, this does not demonstrate bias against men. It would be stating something that is part fact (I am the female PI whether I mention it in the proposal text or not) and part opinion (my involvement in research broadens the participation etc.); no men were excluded or oppressed to produce this proposal.

So the message is, “don’t tell us how we should think about your sex.  We saw your first name, we have our own ideas, and we can use that information however we like.  We don’t like having our privilege checked, don’t'cha know!”

This reminds me of reading the reviews of my NEH grant application (unsuccessful!) for my first book project, Continue Reading »

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Check out Lara Logan’s comments on Michael Hastings’ reporting on General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone last week.  She says: 

“Michael Hastings, if you believe him, says that there were no ground rules laid out. And, I mean, that just doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me,” she said, adding that she knows McChrystal’s staff and McChrystal doesn’t have a history of interacting with the press. “I mean, I know these people. They never let their guard down like that. To me, something doesn’t add up here. I just — I don’t believe it. “

So far, no one–neither the General nor his staff of Lost Boys–has said that Hastings’ reportage wasn’t accurate.  There’s always going to be some carping and jawing when someone gets scooped, but all you have to do is read Hastings’ article to see why he was privy to a lot of talk and behavior that Logan never saw in her years on the war beat for CBS in Iraq and Afghanistan.  From “The Runaway General:”

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides. 

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.” Continue Reading »

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And why in the h-e-double-hockey sticks are we talking about George Washington?  Again!  (Like we haven’t done that enough for the past 250 years?)

I subscribe to an ancient technology called a “listserv” on early American history.  (You can read it in HTML digest form here.)  It’s mostly totes boring, and only rarely does it address stuff I’m interested in, but wev:  that’s why I have a blog, friends!  In any case, Jesse Lemisch wrote in yesterday to announce Gordon Wood Jumps the Shark!, and linked to a book review in the New York Review of Books in which Wood gets all cranky.  (Someone, alert the media!)  Now, I can attest to the fact that Wood is a perfect gentleman one-on-one, but in the 1990s, more than once I saw him angrily denounce and insult in person and in print, as Dorothy Parker would say, the gamut “from A to B”, of late eighteenth century political historians.  So, getting exercised about Gordon Wood being a big ‘ol meanie is . . . getting exercised about Wood being Wood.

Lamentably, the book review Lemisch links to is for subscribers only, and I’m not going to pay 6 bucks to read it.  (Feel free to do the homework yourself!)  But, the book in question that allegedly has Wood so angry is The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon by John Ferling.  John Ferling writes very glossy, somewhat gossipy, but on the whole completely inoffensive narrative histories about the so-called Founding Fathers.  (I once made the mistake of assigning a book of his in my American Revolution class.  We had absolutely nothing to talk about that week.)  I find this whole fracas a little strange:  a book whose subtitle is “The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon” is insufficiently worshipful of Washington?  Using both Genius and Icon in the title isn’t filiopietistic enough?  Lemisch’s comment on Wood’s review is “Calling Parson Weems! Back to the ‘fifties: sounds like another instance of what David Waldstreicher calls ‘Founders Chic.’”  Continue Reading »

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I’ve got lots to do today, but if you don’t, go read this definitive takedown by Echidne of Hanna Rosin’s silly article on “The End of Men,” in which she argues that woman domination is just around the corner because women outnumber men in the workforce and in college these days, and because a certain demographic of prospective parents actually prefer daughters to sons.  ((Yawn.))  It’s too bad–I thought she had a pretty great radical feminist critique of the cult of breastfeeding last year.  I wonder what happened to the writer who was asking what had happened to all of her professional, well-educated women friends, when their husbands seem to be doing just fine and running the world as usual?

Here’s a little flava both of Rosin’s article (in italics) and Echidne’s critique.  Apparently, women are running the world now:

Next comes the major thesis which is written so that even the simplest misogynist can get its relevance;

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

I hate this shit. I hate it, and having to go bang my head against the garage door. Women in the past could not specialize in flexibility and nurturing behavior. They were first fucking gatherers/hunters and then fucking farmers who worked from dawn to dusk and past it. They were not prehistoric Victorian housewives and men were not prehistoric Rambos or whatever the newest killer hero is called: They, too, worked their asses off all day long, most of the history. I hate intellectual laziness and nastiness. Continue Reading »

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