The Ash Twins Blog

The following excerpt is drawn from David Bromwich’s Politics by other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking, pgs. 23-26. It describes an extraordinary example of the potentially dangerous effects of encouraging people to define themselves in terms of their ethnic origins.

The smaller, the tighter, the more disciplined and bigoted the group, the stricter its claims of conformity are likely to be. The consequence for education is frequently that a given way of teaching a group-affiliated subject gains enough coercive prestige to drive out alternative ways of teaching the subject. This would be rotten even if it were new talent driving out old. It is by no means always that. A story in the New York Times of January 2, 1991, reported the fate of Robert C. Smith, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University who for many years has taught a course in Black Politics. He faced competition in the academic year 1990-91 from an apparently similar course by Oba T’Shaka, professor and chairman of Black Studies. Both scholars are black — a point whose relevance will become clear in a moment. Once the conflict emerged, the Black Studies department refused to crosslist Smith’s course. It then instigated or condoned — the article does not make clear which — a harassing attempt to discourage students from taking his course at all. The first day of class, Smith found himself confronted by a well-organized contingent of black students, who stood up in a mass, jeered and shouted over his lecture, placed banners at the front of the room, and urged other students to continue the protest and intimidation by assembling at the teacher’s home. Of forty-five who showed up on the first day, five remained to take the class for credit; on the last day, Smith toasted the survivors with a bottle of champagne. The most disheartening single detail of the story is that all thirty-five of the black students who had started the course were “persuaded” to drop it. The five who stayed were white political science majors.

Intellectually, what can have been at stake between the two courses in conflict, to prompt the black-studies sectarians to use their power so jealously? Smith, the political science professor, taught a version of black politics that stressed the history of American communities in the post-Civil War period. T’Shaka, the black studies professor, taught a version that stressed Afro-American roots and the uniqueness of black experience. One must do a little translating here, as usual with the New York Times. Smith evidently seeks to establish how some members of American society, who have long been oppressed and whose politics range from reformist to dissident, still share with others a political order in which they may want to claim the rights of participants. T’Shaka, by contrast, to judge by the extracurricular statements that are quoted, has an interest in showing that a complete difference from American life is inscribed in the very origins of black experience. Where origins are understood to govern destiny, this means that the imperative of black culture is to constitute itself as wholly separate from Eurocentric America. These differences help to explain the tactics adopted by one side. The success of the campaign against Smith owed less to its cogency than to the presence, in command in the second course, of a chairman whose department claimed moral authority over the subject matter of both courses. Still, in a quarrel like this over issues of intellectual substance, reasons must be given, and it is interesting to see what the reasons were. “There was no control,” complained Professor T’Shaka of Professor Smith, “over the quality” of the teaching of black politics by a professor of political science. Smith’s course, the article went on to paraphrase T’Shaka’s verdict, “might have too much of what he called a traditional perspective and might not sufficiently represent the Afro-American point of view.” Very noticeable here is the assumption that there is just one Afro-American point of view. But what is a “traditional perspective”? I think the phrase means: Smith was likely to be too well in touch with current scholarship on American politics by scholars outside the controlling framework of black studies. From the point of view of mere knowledge, this may seem an uncomplicated virtue. From the point of view of a department whose interests are taken to coincide with the interests of a community, it is an unpardonable crime against the community.

Smith received support to continue his course from administrators at San Francisco State — a move that will seem unusual to anyone who has surveyed comparable incidents elsewhere. They gave no vibrant signals of rhetorical commiseration to the offended “community,” and did not try to talk the besieged scholar out of taking his stand. His own judgment of the case afterwards was simply that “it is very difficult to oppose black people without being called racist.” This is an alarming judgment to come from a black professor, a pioneer of his subject, who had fought hard to get black politics accepted as a topic within the study of political science. Very different, but as instructive in its way, was T’Shaka’s defense of confining such studies in the future to departments specially designated according to race. Asked for his rationale, he compared the study of different races, “Afro-American, native American, and La Raza Studies,” to the accepted separation of such discrete branches of science as biology, chexmstry, and physics. That the varieties of human beings named by T’Shaka ought to be seen as presenting objects of study as different as genes, molecules, and the laws of thermodynamics presents an interesting problem for the university curriculum. It also marks an important pragmatic test for the anti-Enlightenment slogan now current in the academic left. For the slogan says: “There is no such thing as Man. We study the different kinds of men and women.” The firm line that T’Shaka draws is an outcome that adherents of the slogan generally find acceptable.

New York Times Editor Sam Tanenhaus has a nice article about Texas’s struggle over the history curriculum, in which one finds the following interesting discussion of changes in the production of historical texts about our country:

It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children — not, as in the past, college students — whose minds are being fought over today on such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of increasingly bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy.

In “The American Political Tradition,” published in 1948, the historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that the fad for popular history at the time was evidence of “national nostalgia” — an effort not to understand the past, but rather to evade the present. “This quest for the American past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than of critical analysis,” he surmised.

As it happens, a good deal of contemporary popular history is more critical than in Mr. Hofstadter’s day. But it is presented through an ever-narrowing aperture.

The late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” depicts the United States as an epic of oppression in which the privileged abuse the downtrodden. Conversely, “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, describes the New Deal as a calamity that wreaked havoc on the American economy.

The two books seem to have captured the spirit of the moment; both are on The New York Times best-seller list. Both are also, in effect, counternarratives. They seek not to revise but to displace more familiar histories and are utterly different in tone from older popular histories like the Daniel Boorstin trilogy “The Americans,” and William Manchester’s two-volume work, “The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America.”

For all their dissimilarities, Mr. Boorstin and Mr. Manchester convey the impression that America, despite its diversity, is a nation whose citizens share the same essential values, at once democratic and aspirational. But to read these newer books is to inhabit two utterly different Americas that have almost nothing to say to each other.

This Nation article from last month chronicles the pervasive contamination of television news by lobbyists and other parties with interests that are not disclosed to viewers:

President Obama spent most of December 4 touring Allentown, Pennsylvania, meeting with local workers and discussing the economic crisis. A few hours later, the state’s former governor, Tom Ridge, was on MSNBC’s Hardball With Chris Matthews, offering up his own recovery plan. . . . The first step, Ridge explained, was to “create nuclear power plants.” Combined with some waste coal and natural gas extraction, you would have an “innovation setter” that would “create jobs, create exports.”

As Ridge counseled the administration to “put that package together,” he sure seemed like an objective commentator. But what viewers weren’t told was that since 2005, Ridge has pocketed $530,659 in executive compensation for serving on the board of Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear power company. As of March 2009, he also held an estimated $248,299 in Exelon stock, according to SEC filings.

Moments earlier, retired general and “NBC Military Analyst” Barry McCaffrey told viewers that the war in Afghanistan would require an additional “three- to ten-year effort” and “a lot of money.” Unmentioned was the fact that DynCorp paid McCaffrey $182,309 in 2009 alone. The government had just granted DynCorp a five-year deal worth an estimated $5.9 billion to aid American forces in Afghanistan. The first year is locked in at $644 million, but the additional four options are subject to renewal, contingent on military needs and political realities. . . .

In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning series for the New York Times about the Pentagon’s use of former military officers–many lobbying or consulting for military contractors–to get their talking points on television in exchange for access to decision-makers; and in 2009 bloggers uncovered how ex-Newsweek writer Richard Wolffe had guest-hosted Countdown With Keith Olbermann while working at a large PR firm specializing in “strategies for managing corporate reputation.” . . .

Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials–people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests–have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens–and in some cases hundreds–of appearances. . . .

As the recession slammed the country in late 2008 and government bailouts followed, lobbyists and PR flacks took to the air with troubling regularity, advocating on behalf of clients and their interests while masquerading as neutral analysts. One was Bernard Whitman, president of Whitman Insight Strategies. . .

According to its website, Whitman Insight Strategies has worked for AIG to “develop, test, launch, and enhance their consumer brand,” and continues to assist the insurance giant “as it responds to ongoing marketplace developments.” . . . During a September 18, 2008, Fox News appearance to discuss Sarah Palin, Whitman proceeded to lambaste John McCain for proposing to “let AIG fail,” saying that this demonstrated “just how little he understands the global economy today.”

On March 25, 2009, in the midst of a scandal over AIG’s executive bonuses, Whitman appeared on Fox News again. “The American people were understandably outraged about AIG,” he began. “Having said that, we need to move beyond anger, frustration and hysteria to really get down to the brass tacks of solving this economy,” he advised the public. In neither instance was Whitman’s ongoing work for AIG mentioned.

Another person with AIG ties is Ron Christie, now at the helm of his own consultancy. While working at Republican-leaning firm DC Navigators, now Navigators Global, from 2006 through September 2008, Christie was registered to lobby on behalf of the insurance giant, lobbying filings show. During that period, AIG shelled out $590,000 to DC Navigators.

On September 18, 2008, Christie went on Hardball to discuss the government’s response to AIG’s near implosion days earlier. He was introduced only as a Republican strategist. As Chris Matthews mocked a presidential press conference on the financial crisis held earlier that day, Christie interrupted to say President Bush was “smart to have gotten a former person from Goldman Sachs who is a very bright man, who understands the markets and liquidity.” Christie was referring to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who had once been the chair and CEO of Goldman Sachs and who played a pivotal role in the AIG bailout. “This is not a political sideshow. This is putting the right person in his administration to deal with this crisis,” Christie said.

Bigger players were on AIG’s payroll, too: shortly after receiving its first bailout, in 2008, AIG hired PR mega-firm Burson-Marsteller to handle “controversial issues.” In April 2009, B-M hired former White House press secretary Dana Perino, already an established TV pundit. A month later she was picked up as a contributor to Fox News, where she has had occasion to discuss the economic meltdown.

This past July, for example, Perino joined a roundtable on Fox Business Network’s Money for Breakfast, which briefly noted her affiliation with B-M but neglected to mention its link to AIG. When a fellow guest commented that AIG had been “highly regulated” before the crash, Perino pounced, suggesting that current financial reform efforts demonstrate how “Washington has a tendency to overreact in a crisis.” When Gary Kalman of USPIRG suggested that regulations had, in fact, been rolled back for decades, Perino scoffed, “I don’t think there are many business people who would actually agree with that.” . . .

Terry Holt, once a spokesman for the Republican National Committee and for House minority leader John Boehner, has also been, on and off since 2003, a lobbyist for the health insurance trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans. . . .

On March 5, 2009, Holt, introduced simply as a Republican, told MSNBC anchor David Shuster that the Obama administration was “going to, you know, cut Medicare benefits for something like 11 million seniors to start this big healthcare reform project.” By October AHIP [Holt's client] was running ads in several states against the health reform bill that asked, “Is it right to ask 10 million seniors on Medicare Advantage for more than their fair share?”

Holt also made several appearances to discuss healthcare policy on CNN, where his affiliation with insurers was cited on several occasions, starting in September, though not during a September 14 appearance on The Situation Room, when Holt discussed healthcare reform efforts. The network subsequently experienced a small scandal in October when blogger Greg Sargent revealed that political analyst Alex Castellanos, a frequent commentator on CNN, had been helping craft attack ads for AHIP–including the one that referred to the “10 million seniors” losing Medicare benefits–while discussing healthcare policy on air, identified only as a Republican strategist. . . .

On September 24, 2009, Dick Gephardt appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Meeting, where he labeled the public option “not essential.” Gephardt was asked by host Dylan Ratigan to discuss healthcare reform in light of his experience as a Congressman during the Clinton effort in 1993 and now simply as “an observer through this process.” There was no mention of his work advising insurance and pharmaceutical interests through his lobbying firm Gephardt Government Affairs, nor any mention that Gephardt is a lobbyist for NBC/Universal.

Likewise, Tom Daschle dropped by MSNBC on May 12 and July 2, 2009, and NBC’s Meet the Press on August 16, 2009. At each appearance he discussed healthcare reform with no mention of his work on behalf of lobbying firm Alston & Bird, which advises insurer UnitedHealth Group. . . . [O]n January 11, the former Senate majority leader returned to MSNBC to discuss healthcare with Andrea Mitchell. In the nearly ten-minute interview, his insurance work went unmentioned. . . .

At times, it begins to seem as though the problem is beyond fixing, an unfortunate but unavoidable reality of our media and political landscape, in which the lines between public service and corporate advancement are so blurred. It is clear that the pressure applied on the networks so far has not resulted in systemic change. Even in the aftermath of increasing scrutiny–particularly after David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning exposés in the Times–General McCaffrey continues to appear on television without any caveats about his work for military contractors. As Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald has observed, none of the networks involved in the scandal have ever bothered to address Barstow’s findings on air, and they noticeably omitted Barstow’s name from coverage of the 2009 Pulitzers. “It’s almost like a mysterious black hole that this issue, which is enormous, is getting no attention from the offenders themselves,” the Society for Professional Journalists’ ethics committee chair Andy Schotz told me recently.

We discussed David Barstow’s article on the Tea Party movement in a previous post. Barstow, a New York Times reporter, spoke at a conference that I attended last Thursday. I summarize his words here.

While Barstow is best known for his work on the Pentagon military analyst propaganda program, the subject of his speech was journalistic access to government information. He said in his speech that  the Bush administration took radical steps to stonewall journalists that were trying to get information about government activities. FOIA requests were to be delayed as long as possible, and any provisions allowing agencies to withhold information were to be construed broadly. For the military analyst program, for example, Barstow and Times lawyers endured two years of litigation to get access to documents that were, by the law on the books, public record. Dick Cheney, meanwhile, wouldn’t even tell reporters relatively innocuous things like where he would be at various times, or how many people worked in his office.

The unavailability of public documents about government officials forces journalists to cultivate cozy, conflicted relationships with anonymous government sources in order to gain any timely information about government activities. This was a crucial part of the strategy where, for example, Bush officials leaked to the New York Times that Iraq’s aluminum tubes were for nukes, even though several groups of nuclear scientists had already told the government that they couldn’t be used for nukes. The journalists didn’t have access to those documents, though, so they just reported the leak. Then Cheney goes on Meet the Press that Sunday and says, “Look, the Times is reporting that Iraq has nukes.” Citing the Times gives the assertion a sheen of objective authority, notwithstanding that it was probably Cheney or one of his aides that anonymously talked to the reporter.

The good news, according to Barstow, is that Obama has done away with a lot of these stonewalling tactics. A lot of government data has been put online or is being put online. Another reason to be pleased with Obama, notwithstanding his failures to end the war and close Guantanamo, can be observed in the following video. See, especially, the part beginning at the 6:00 mark:

The other interesting aspect of these populist movements is that their bedrock premises are irrational. I can’t help but empathize with these just-plain-folks being shaken out of their anesthesia and wanting to stick it to the man. I think this emotional resonance draws people in to the cause.

Unfortunately, the movements’ plans for improving society are informed by obvious falsehoods (take your pick: global warming is a hoax, Barack Obama is a terrorist, death panels, socialism would lead to societal destruction+the current government is moving towards socialism, etc etc etc). This situation should prevent a reasonable person from supporting their cause. For those within the movement, emotional support comes first, and belief systems come second. Individuals become involved for emotional reasons, and take on the beliefs of their compatriots. Tragically, these belief systems are fundamentally corrupt.

Commentators in the public sphere (like Glenn Beck) may not induce the original emotion to become a part of these movements (socioeconomic loss is probably a major origin), but they do perpetuate the emotional intensity. They also perpetuate and introduce novel false premises, which prevents the movements from developing into an engine for social change. The corporate interests which drive the intellectual castration of these movements benefit from the castration, as they are motivated to maintain the status quo (from which they are profiting handsomely).

I read some articles this week about the Tea Party Movement. The first was in the New York Times by David Barstow (previously mentioned on the blog). The second was sent to me by my dad, from prisonplanet.com.

The excessive emotion in these debates is fascinating. Subjects as innocuous (to me)  as meteorology, clinical diagnosis, or income taxes gain an emotional charge that I would think would be reserved for coup d`etats or CEOs making billions of dollars a year.

There is a strong bias in the sort of person who becomes an actor in the public sphere, and I think the main selection factor is emotion. Subjects to which people can develop a strong (usually negative) emotional response gain dramatically disproportionate traction in the public sphere.

Why bland subjects like the average temperature of the Earth can become so emotionally charged is an important question. Is it due to the fact that we do not really have anything to complain about, so as a society we manufacture things to argue over? Are these debates instead manufactured by corporate interests to disrupt engagement of actual legitimate social problems (e.g. corporate greed)? Or are human beings cognitively unable on average to understand (and take a position on) genuine social problems, and thus debate simpler issues instead?

The scariest possibility – and most reasonable to me – is that the last two reasons are major contributors. The upside is that debates in the public sphere do not accurately represent public opinion. These issues that appear so important to those involved are paltry in the long run, so these raging debates probably don’t influence the course of history too drastically.

The following is an excerpt from Stone (2004) about the Pentagon Papers:

Although most of what was in the study was common knowledge, it shed important light on key aspects of America’s involvement in Vietnam. It documented, for example, that at the end of World War II President Truman had rejected urgent appeals from Ho Chi Minh for American assistance; that while the 1954 Geneva conference was still in session, the United States was actively planning paramilitary operations in Saigon against the North; that President Kennedy’s “advisers” in Vietnam had not merely advised the South Vietnamese but had participated directly in military operations; that the U.S. government had knowingly publicized false South Vietnamese intelligence reports about the extent of Communist infiltration; that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been rammed through Congress under blatantly false pretenses; and that the U.S. government had concealed from the American public the fact that extensive bombing of North Vietnam had done little to impair the Communists’ military capacity, but had killed tens of thousands 0f Vietnamese civilians.

Why wasn’t this paragraph in my U.S. History textbook?

This 2009 paper by Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh discusses “the GDP Paradox,” which refers to the popularity of GDP as a measure of social welfare. GDP, which stands for “gross domestic product,” is defined as “the monetary, market value of all final goods and services produced in a country over a period of a year.” There are two main problems with using it as a measure of happiness, however, as I explain briefly:

1. GDP measures the money paid to purchase a good rather than the benefit accrued for using the good. This means that the relative happiness (“social welfare”) gained from different goods might not be equivalent to the relative prices paid for them. GDP only measures the latter. For example, my dad, brother, and I only had to pay $10 each for Civ 4, but that has given the three of us many many hours of happiness. Meanwhile, a relative spends $10 on a shitty gift that gives you zero happiness. These goods have different welfare value, but GDP treats them as equivalent.
2. GDP excludes externalities. Pollution is a good example. Two countries might have identical GDP in terms of how many manufacturing goods they sold, but they might have different levels of pollution. In the polluter country, people get cancer more often, which by most accounts significantly reduces happiness. But that difference is not included in GDP. In fact, purchases of the medical gizmos used to help the people with cancer would count toward GDP. So the less-happy country would have higher GDP.

Two other examples:

1. The military-industrial complex.The USA’s massive arsenal doesn’t really generate happiness for anyone, and generates death for thousands of others. But the $~1 trillion a year in our defense budget is counted in most measures of GDP.
2. Public vs. private media. Frontline is the best news show and generates immeasurable happiness in entertainment as well as sociopolitical effects. But it counts zero toward GDP. Fox News is ruining everything but its ad sales count toward GDP. (By the way, Fox is the most trusted source by Americans, according to opinion polls.)