• Who is Callista Bisek Gingrich, and why does she appear to be a strangely convincing Mad Men-era historical reenactor?  Ariel Levy offers some insights:  “She does not seem like a forty-five-year-old, or at least not like a forty-five-year-old of this era. She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife, even in her downtime. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962.”  (My theory:  it’s all in the coiff.  She may have been a wash-n-wear kind of gal back in the day, but once you’re spending that kind of time and money on an oddly unfashionable hairdo, you’re all in.)
• From the right Alana Goodman argues that the Stepford Wife persona doesn’t actually make voters forget she’s Newt’s third wife.  Rather, it makes the Gingrich marriage appear even stranger and more off-putting.  I think the public should leave the spouses of the candidates alone, since after all they’re not running for anything, and if their wives or husbands win they won’t not be offered a paid position in the government.  But Goodman is probably right that the deadeye Pat Nixon impersonation is only going to invite unwanted speculation.  And those of you on the left may well think it only fair play given the ugliness that Michelle Obama has had to deal with, which has been clearly and persistently racialized. 
• Who would have thought that Mommie would turn out to be one of the more interesting and powerful First Ladies on the Republican side?  Give me Nancy Reagan any day, in her off-the-shoulder Galanos gown over Nixon or Barbara or Laura Bush.  Cue the Dynasty soundtrack!
• In “Who in God’s Name is Mitt Romney?” Frank Rich argues that the mystery in the riddle wrapped in the enigma that is Willard Mitt Romney is in fact his religion, which although agressively evangelical is also famous for keeping its secrets and sacred rites to members only.  Romney has devoted a great deal of his time and treasure to the Latter-Day Saints in his lifetime.  Until he finds a way to talk about his faith more specifically and openly, Rich argues that Americans on the left, right, and center will continue to see him not as a man, but rather as as a disturbingly lifelike hologram of a presidental candidate.
• I don’t know if that’s true, but it has worked in the recent past when candidates have explained to the voters what their beliefs are and how those beliefs jibe with their politics.  (See for example:  John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.)
• With Romney on an anemic rise and no plausible challengers to his right , it’s no wonder that many on the right are praying for a “Sweet Meteor of Death” to rescue them from a Romney run in the fall.  Too funny!  I’ll say this about the 2008 Dem primary:  as nasty as that got, I don’t think any but the most die-hard Obamabots or Hillary Clinton fan boys and girls were praying for planetary devastation so as to save them from having to support the other candidate’s nomination.  Keep your eyes on the prize, my Republican friends!  There’s always the chance that the Eurozone will pull the U.S. economy off a cliff again, and/or that Sweet Meteor of Death will strike.  Remember, think like Ronald Reagan:  sunny optimism, sunny optimism!

My advisors had always told me that there is something about being a black male in academia that attracts well intentioned but often embarrassing special attention from some white faculty. I had not experienced this while at Little College because my professors seem to have been the most socially conscious, social justice oriented and culturally sensitive teachers ever. They were never patronizing or imposing and always critical but kind. Indeed, there were other professors at Little College who were known for being inappropriate or “too much” but I never studied with them. I was not prepared to not have this happen in graduate school, however.

.       .      .      .      .      .      .      

Prof. X is not so much inappropriate as he is overly paternalistic. Prof. X wants to “rescue” me intellectually, which is both nice because he is supporting my work, but weird because sometimes he talks down to me. In class, Prof. X points to me when he discusses any and all things “African American.” (This I can at least understand because my work is on the African American family but it has become a running joke in the class because he doesn’t realize he does it.)

Prof. X once asked me if I played basketball because I’m so much taller than him. I told him I used to play football. In front of the whole class, Prof. X then proceeded to tell me how he graciously helped (almost rescued) his previous inner city black student-athlete from his inability to read and write and guided the young man to become a multiple fellowship award winner (Fulbright, White House Internships etc.).

Hathaway’s experience is probably all too common given the absence of faculty of color on most faculties, let alone in top graduate programs.  As I recall, I worked with three black faculty in my decade-long college and graduate school career and no other faculty of color, compared to dozens of white faculty. 

Hathaway’s commentary is also a fascinating sociology of whiteness, particularly with respect to a major quirk among white faculty-types today:  obligatory dog companionship at all times.

I confess I’ve never been a dog person. Before I went to Little College, I had never known a friendly dog and I never knew anyone who had a dog. As a child I was taught to run or at least stay far away if I saw a stray dog because it probably had rabies or would attack me. (My Jamaican parents were convinced that there was something fundamentally different in American dogs as distinct from the dogs they owned “back home.”)

My parents and I thought it was crazy and sort of funny that on my freshman move-in day, a number of dogs were roaming the dorm halls and resting on the couches because a few students had brought their pets to see them off. (My father concluded that this was evidence of Little College’s “liberal” policies.) So, imagine my surprise when I visited my first year advisor’s office during freshman orientation and realized that her dog stayed in her office!

Advisor: Are you okay with dogs?
Me:……Sure…….

She lets the dog out of the pen and I sort of freeze up in my seat as it walks to me, sniffing my shoes and my bag. At this point I’m only half listening while my advisor is introducing herself because I’m trying to look as comfortable as possible around a dog that has quickly grown fond of my book bag. I missed most of what she said in the meeting but that day I learned that dogs are part of academic life.

Those of you who have been affiliated with a college like Hathaway’s will understand what he means.  In addition to a White Thing, the dog fetish must be a SLAC and elite school affectation–teaching at a public Aggie means that the only animals on my campus (aside from the occasional service dogs and Seminar, my commuter horse) are the patients in the off-campus Vet School emergency department and the ones hanging upside down in the Animal Science building awaiting their appointment with the meat cutting students.  In other words, animals have their uses here–and hanging out in faculty offices ain’t one of ‘em.  (And this is not the case because we on the faculty aren’t white, of course.  Like pretty much everywhere but at HBCs, we are overwhelmingly a white faculty.)

Go read the whole thing.  Good luck, Herlin Hathaway, and dog bless.

People sure are prone to weather-induced hysteria. This kind of hype used to be confined to the local teevee news channels, but I guess the Weather Channel has made it mainstream.

(More substantial blogging will resume in the near future.)

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President John Tyler, 1841-45

I clicked on this link over at Politico yesterday, as it was billed as “Tyler’s Grankid:  Newt’s a ’jerk‘.”  Who the hell is Tyler, I wondered?  Surely not President John Tyler (1790-1862).  Could anyone alive today really have a grandparent who was born in the eighteenth century?

Most Americans think Newt Gingrich is a jerk–that’s hardly news.  It seems to me that the bigger headline should be that Tyler, who after all ran for Vice-President 172 years ago and became President in 1841 upon the death of William Henry Harrison, still has two living grandchildren!  That’s some pretty solid DNA he passed on, for a dude who was referred to in campaign slogans limply as just, “Tyler too!” 

Take that, Tippecanoe!

Whiplash, the Rodeo Monkey

Hope all of you and your critters are hanging in there.

Today’s post is brought to you by the letter Z.  Before the era of big game hunting in Africa gave us Z for Zebra, a “zany” was frequently used to illustrate or exemplify the use of the letter Z in children’s alphabet primers.  This beautiful colored illustration is from The Child’s Colored Gift Book, with one hundred illustrations (London and New York:  George Routledge and Sons), by Edward and George Dalziel.  I found this image originally at Eek She Cried, but you can see the whole book with two different illustrated children’s alphabets, and more, at Archive.org.  Isn’t it just perfect (for American political history purposes) that it’s riding one exasperated-looking ass? 

Z for Zany was probably more common in eighteenth century alphabets.  Is that where Mitt Romney hails from, the eighteenth century?  It’s not just that he has no apparent command of modern political invective, and he’s now running against the master of modern political invective.  Every time he opens his mouth, he seems to confirm that he really isn’t of our time, place, or planet. 

Mike Huckabee must be kicking himself that he didn’t run.  A conservative populist like Huck–think Pat Buchanan minus the racism–could potentially mop the floor with Barack Obama next year, but all the Republicans have got at this point is the chilly and profoundly strange Romney, and the bloviating fool Newt Gingrich.

What struck me about this melee is the nakedly racial ressentiment of Vendler’s critique.  (Vendler is a white Harvard professor of poetry, Dove is a black poet and scholar at the University of Virginia.)  Although Vendler doesn’t say so, she is a Wallace Stevens scholar, and she’s apparently outraged that Dove’s choices meant that Stevens must share space in this volume with unworthy “multicultural” poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and others of the Black Arts movement.  Here’s Vendler:

Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets with hyperbole. It is legitimate to recognize the pioneering role of Gwendolyn Brooks, just as it is moving to observe her self-questioning as she reacted to the new aggressiveness in black poetry. But doesn’t it weaken Dove’s case when she says that in her first book Brooks “confirmed that black women can express themselves in poems as richly innovative as the best male poets of any race”? As richly innovative as Shakespeare? Dante? Wordsworth? A just estimate is always more convincing than an exaggerated one. And the evolution of modern black poetry does not have to be hyped to be of permanent historical and aesthetic interest. Language quails when it overreaches.

What is this, a flashback to 1988 and the Western Front of the Culture Wars:  Battle of the Poetry Canon?

And, it’s just comical when a Harvard University professor wonders where the American poetry ”establishment” might be, and mocks the concept of an “establishment” in her comments on Dove’s analysis of the Black Arts movement:

We’re back to that “poetry establishment” again. The members (whoever they are) of this so-called “establishment” “entrench” themselves (as in a war) and, implicitly racist, appear “whitewashed” like the “whited sepulchres” denounced by Jesus. How is it that Dove, a Presidential Scholar in high school, a summa graduate from college, holder of a Fulbright, and herself long rewarded by recognition of all sorts, can write of American society in such rudimentary terms?

We pulled you off the plantation and let you into the “establishment,” Rita Dove!  Apparently, it’s like Fight Club:  The first rule of the “establishment” is you do not talk about the “establishment!”  Rita Dove is a very bad, very unworthy ingrate, isn’t she?  What a disobedient daughter!  What an undeserving recipient of establishment largess!  Dove, in her reply, comments on how racially reductive is Vendler’s analysis:

It is astounding to me how utterly Vendler misreads my critical assessment of the Black Arts Movement, construing my straightforward account of their defiant manifesto as endorsement of their tactics; she ignores a substantial critical paragraph in which I decry the fallout from the movement (“Against such clamor and thunder, introspective black poets had little chance to assert themselves and were swept under the steamroller,” I write in my introduction) and instead focuses on that handy whipping boy, Amiri Baraka, plucking passages from his historically seminal poem “Black Art” in which he denigrated Jews, thereby slyly, even creepily implying that I might have similar anti-Semitic tendencies. Smear by association…sound familiar? I would not have believed Vendler capable of throwing such cheap dirt, and no defense is necessary against these dishonorable tactics except the desire to shield my reputation from the kind of slanderous slime that sticks although it bears no truth. (I could argue equal opportunity offensiveness by having printed Hart Crane’s “A liquid theme that floating niggers swell”—but perhaps that makes me racist as well.)

In the same breath, Vendler—no slouch when it comes to lumping poets together by race—makes quick work of dismembering Gwendolyn Brooks, dismissing my description of Brooks’s “richly innovative” early poems as “hyperbole,” perhaps because I dared to compare those poems to “the best male poets of any race.” Evidently the 1950 Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Ms. Brooks to award her the prize in poetry, at a time when there was little talk of diversity in America and the expression “multiculturalism” had yet to enter the public discourse. Analogous praise today, however, amounts in Dame Vendler’s eyes to nothing but “hype.”

(Full disclosure:  I was alerted to this smackdown by a close relation of Dove’s.)

I’m sure that anthologists of twentieth-century poetry in the middle and at the end of the twenty-first century will make different choices than Dove made.  I’m sure that an anthology of nineteenth-century American literature published in, say, 1911, would have been quite different from one published at the end of the twentieth century.  Dove freely admits that she aimed for breadth over depth in her effort to anthologize the twentieth century, but maybe that’s part of the reason for Vendler’s evident pique.  Vendler responds to Dove’s anthology as though Dove is proclaiming once and for all that she has compiled a definitive statement on Literary Truth and Beauty, whereas Dove herself is much more modest about what she can possibly accomplish barely a decade after the close of the twentieth century:

“From [Dove’s] choices no principle of selection emerges,” Vendler grouses, and at last we arrive at the crux of her predisposition: in her system, an anthologist must have an agenda and is expected to drive that agenda home, sidelining her enemies and promoting her preferences with no attempt at impartial judgment. Actually, I am proud that no principle of selection emerges. My criterion was simple: choose significant poems of literary merit. That these poems happen to illuminate the times in which they were crafted should come as no surprise; that the stories they tell of the twentieth century have many intersections and complementary trajectories is fortuitous, a result of having been forged by and reacting to shared sensibilities.

Dove’s goals seem to me more about providing a collection of useful primary sources for literary historians of the future to sift through and analyze.  That doesn’t strike me as a bad way to go about compiling an anthology so soon after the closing date of the twentieth century, but then, I’m a historian and neither a poet nor a literary scholar.  What do the poets and literary scholars among you have to say?

Via The Daily Beast we learn that Newt Gingrich has called for the repeal of child labor laws and for children to perform the janitorial work in their schools.  At Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government!  I’m not kidding–there’s a video at the bottom of the linked story.  This makes his 1994 proposal to bring back orphanages look almost responsible and moderate. (Gingrich’s recent thoughts on child labor makes Michele Bachmann’s comments from an earlier debate this summer look positively prescient!)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but by my lights that’s really slapdash janitorial work.

What is it with these Republicans?  They respect life until it achieves a third grade education, and then it’s down to the mines?  Why don’t they just cut out the middle man and, in the words of the old Dead Kennedys song, “Kill the Poor?”

Via RealClearBooks, we learned recently that he’s got a new book called The Origins of Political Order, and unsurprisingly, he is completely wrong again.  But you have to admit that it’s pretty cute that he has more in common with Karl Marx and with the first generation of Soviet historians than his modern peers because of his unshaken, dumba$$ theory of history’s inevitable destination.  Reviewer John Gray asks,

[H]ow could laws of history underpin human progress when views about what constitutes progress are so ephemeral and so divergent? Some human values are universal and enduring, but ideas of progress come and go like fashions in hats. Theories of convergence reflect disparate and incompatible ideals of human betterment. What all such theories have in common is that they have come to nothing. None of the regimes that was believed to be the near-inevitable end point of modern development has emerged anywhere in the world. 

Fukuyama shows no sign of being discouraged by this record of failure. The faith that the world is set to converge on a single type of government is central to his view of things, pervading this bulky and tiresome book of nearly six hundred pages, the first of two projected volumes. The same faith animated the celebrated essay that he published in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, called “The End of History?,” in which he proclaimed that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy” is “the final form of human government.” To any detached observer at the time, it was perfectly clear that history had not stopped but resumed: like the past, the future would be shaped by ethnic and religious conflicts and resource wars, while more complex types of ideological conflict would replace the cold war stand-off.  Yet three years later, when Fukuyama published a book-length version of his claim, called The End of History and the Last Man, the question mark attached to the essay had disappeared. Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose monumental eulogy to Stalin’s Russia, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935), appeared in later editions with the question mark removed, Fukuyama was completely confident that a new era in the history of humanity had arrived.

Like, no doy!  How do books like this get published and taken seriously?  (Personally, I think it’s an occupational hazard of doing extremely old-fashioned political and diplomatic history, but YMMV.  No one with any familiarity with archives or with the experience of creating new knowledge can escape being amazed by the role of chance and contingency in history.)  Read Gray’s whole review–it’s pretty windy on the first page, but the next two are actually about Fukuyama’s book and so are much more effective. 

Personally, I say that Fall Break (next week for us) and an enormous cocktail (tonight!) are the end of history.  At least they sound more believable to me than the notion that liberal democracy is truly where the world is spinning.