Worst President Ever

Slate has published a readable gloss on the political life of Herbert Hoover (in office 1929-1933), who is widely considered to be one of the worst Presidents ever. It was Hoover's misfortune to have the stock market crash just seven months into his Presidency, but it was Hoover's choice to take a largely "hands off" approach to economic recovery and social welfare. Unsympathetic to the suffering masses ("Nobody actually starved," he said) and unwilling to let the government prop up relief programs, Hoover became incredibly unpopular and was booted out of office after one term. It was Hoover's successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who would craft the New Deal as the government's response to the economic downturn.

The article begins with this wonderful, and telling, anecdote:

In 1932, the parents of a 4-year-old went to court to change his legal name. Christened Herbert Hoover Jones in 1928, when the commerce secretary and Republican presidential nominee was a national hero, the boy deserved relief, said his parents, from "the chagrin and mortification which he is suffering and will suffer" for sharing a moniker with the now-disgraced chief executive. His new name: Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.

A Porn Bailout, or, What Would Richard Shelby Do?

Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, has been bullish in opposing any form of government bailout for the auto industry. His logic is of the typical free-market, survival-of-the-fittest ideologue. But what would Sen. Shelby say to a proposed $5 billion porn bailout? Alabama is conservative, redder-than-red territory, no doubt, but surely many of his constituents can fess up to not wanting to see the American porn industry go down the tubes.

Larry Flynt, head of Larry Flynt Publications and its flagship publication Hustler, and Joe Francis, of Girls Gone Wild, have been working on a bailout proposal for U.S. porn. Gonzo news source TMZ already tracked down a few Congressmen and one Senator to get their take on the proposed plan, and the signs don't look promising. Still, Flynt is determined to relieve some of the burdens from the porn industry: "People are too depressed to be sexually active...This is very unhealthy as a nation...It's time for Congress to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America."

Overseas the idea of a porn bailout has been met with more welcoming arms. The BBC brought a porn director on air to discuss the actual economics of the industry. Diversification in these tough economic (but bewilderingly hyper-technologized) times seemed to be his Plan B, in lieu of a government bailout of porn.

Following this take on Flynt and Francis's announcement, an Australian writer noted that there would be valuable economic lessons to learn from the U.S. government underwriting porn: "If the porn industry can be saved, the financial sector could be taught Porn Economics, the idea of sales of something people actually want, for the purpose of profit, as distinct from Subprime Economics, the sale of sexless garbage nobody ever needed for the purpose of destroying the global economy."

Back in the States, at least one independent businessman supports the proposed bailout. Glenn Wilson of Shreveport, Louisiana, says sales have been declining at his sex stores, Fun Shop Too. According to a local news source, Wilson would welcome a porn bailout in the hope of sparking sales.

In more promising news, one writer and sex activist notes that, even though the porn industry may be flagging at the moment, independent sex workers are likely to survive the recession without too much trouble. In surveying prostitutes' and escorts' success as advertisers, Carol Forsloff sees a canny ability to navigate tough economic times with drive and gusto -- and a theoretically inexhaustible set of "goods." Forsloff concludes, "So while the boys are asking for a bailout, the women carry on as business women with advertising and the like. The fact that they advertise widely, on their backs, on street corners, in phone directories and on the Internet, likely shows they are better prepared than Flynt and Francis."

I suppose if Richard Shelby and his colleagues reject Flynt and Francis's appeal for a porn bailout, they can always turn to the example of independent sex workers as people who are weathering the recession in the most innovative, business-savvy ways.

How Mike Gravel Lost the Democratic Primary

Well, technically he became a Libertarian. This and other fun facts/memories can be found in Slate's eight-minute slam-bam review of the Democratic presidential primary race.

Highlights include:

*Hillary Clinton's tearful plea in New Hampshire: "I just don't want to see us fall backwards"
*Barack Obama's Somali garb photo
*John Edwards's speeches about his father and the mill he worked in
*Bill Richardson's beard

A Looming Aide

Here are my and Lorien Olive's (of Roadkill Politics) comments on this article from the Times, about Barack Obama's top aide (and Duke graduate), Reggie Love. The article strikes both of us as trafficking in stereotypes about black masculinity in describing the invaluable work that Love does for Sen. Obama; but we advance different interpretations about how, exactly, it does this. Send us your own thoughts on this and Lorien's blog.

KN: After reading the story and giving some thought to its title, I remembered the author mentioning that Love is 6'5'', a good three inches taller than Barack Obama. The title likely references this fact, but that doesn't necessarily make the use of the phrase "loom over" judicious: it still rings of someone figuratively "pulling the strings," and it no doubt reduces Love's complex personal story to his height and athletic build.

For me, the undertones of sexual tension between Love (oh, what a name!) and Obama are expressed most clearly in the author's extensive description of their sports/workout routines. There are the basketball games on primary days, the morning hours spent at the gym, and a rather admiring description of Love's athletic prowess (benching x number of pounds). But more than all of this, I found the description of their end-of-a-campaign-day routine of watching SportsCenter on ESPN to be most intriguing. The prose almost makes it seem as though Obama and Love share a hotel room when they "unwind before bed" and watch ESPN. The detail of Obama flossing his teeth while lying down and watching TV is almost too intimate, a touch of voyeurism that happens to be mediated through Love's eyes.

To be fair, this homoerotic bond over sports is not particularly shocking -- with its attendant locker-room antics and penis/sex metaphorizings, this bond is probably the most common form of homoerotic male bonding that our culture affords. This fact makes it difficult for me to determine whether the author's description of Love is any more racialized than other accounts of tight-knit male-male work relationships. I suspect that it isn't, with the caveat that Reggie Love's body is given an inordinate amount of attention in the piece, and usually at the slight expense of Obama's body (Love is taller, stronger, and more "fit," according to the author). Now this dynamic -- comparing black bodies as though they were specimens of athleticism and not political power-brokers -- is most certainly racialized, and that's where the real problem of this piece lies.

LO: Yeah, I agree, but I think that it is the special attention to the body that makes the piece carry a suggestion of carnality. Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention in the past, but I don't remember any other personal assistants being popularly known as "body men." Maybe they are by campaign insiders, but this is the first time I have ever heard that term in the mainstream press. Also I think that even if bonding over sports is a pretty typical thing to discuss, there is something that just didn't feel quite right about how the article describes their relationship. I mean it would be like if they ran an article about Hillary's "body person" pampering her, giving her manicures, and unwinding with a romantic comedy every night. Or McCain's "body person" giving him an enema, a sponge bath, and playing a game of Scrabble with him before bed. Anyway, I just don't hear any other stories that are similar to this one in relation to any of the other candidates, so maybe that's just sort of what makes me suspicious. I also don't like the way that they downplay the work that he does, as if the only thing that a former (black) college athlete could contribute to a political campaign is the equivalent of a butler or low-level service worker. This seems to, perhaps unintentionally, emphasize the hierarchy between educated, light-skinned, elite blacks such as Obama (who is exceptional somehow) and other blacks who do not share his unique cultural/ethnic background who will continue to be confined to service, sports, and entertainment roles, despite the possibility of having a Black president. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it, but I think that this is also what unsettled me.

Roadkill Politics

Lorien Olive has started a new blog that tackles recent political news stories from a white working-class perspective. It's called Roadkill Politics, and as Lorien makes clear in her first post, she started her blog in response to the controversy surrounding Barack Obama's comments on the "bitterness" of white working-class voters in Pennsylvania, leading up to that state's important, possibly decisive, Democratic primary on April 22, 2008. Where Hillary Clinton and a number of commentators have criticized Obama for his supposed elitism, Lorien sees an opportunity to engage with white working-class politics -- not as a liberal or populist sound byte but as a complex, multifaceted domain of interests which usually gets reduced to the low expectations of the redneck or hillbilly bumpkin. Indeed, in Lorien's words, politics-as-usual "reduces [working-class whites] to a voting bloc to be stereotyped and wooed for the political purposes of individuals, a practice that has been and continues to be used to address all marginalized populations in this country, and is equally despicable in its every iteration."

In a more recent post, Lorien takes on Hillary's staged camaraderie with the very working-class folk whom she had accused Obama of denigrating. Lorien asks whether Hillary's performance of having shots with "the guys" is itself a demonstrable form of denigration (via pandering). Between Obama's ruffling some feathers with his comments and Hillary's insincere identification with working-class folk, I'd say at least Obama gives us a set of political questions to debate and work through -- whereas Hillary leaves us with a bad episode of Roseanne.

In another post, Lorien deconstructs bloggers' comments on Michelle Obama's presence on the campaign trail, which range in racist content from patronizing liberalism to vilifying condemnation. Lorien critiques bloggers' comparison of Michelle Obama to Omarosa (of Apprentice fame), suggesting that an old stereotype from the halcyon days of radio (Amos 'n' Andy) is in wide circulation these days among those who feel threatened by the figure of the "uppity" black woman. Here Lorien's thoughts on the intersection of race, class, and gender in American politics and culture remind me of the work done by Stuart Hall during the dark days of Thatcherism and Hortense J. Spillers' radical and much-understudied political essays "Inauguration Day 2001" and "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date."

Check out Roadkill Politics and have fun perusing Lorien's thoughts on sundry political topics. It's an engaging read, and you're sure to find lots of stuff in there to mull over, say amen to, and otherwise engage with as a politically curious person.

Cruising or a Wide Stance?

Slate's popular Explainer column presents a few clarifying points about Sen. Larry Craig's (R-ID) indiscretions in a men's bathroom stall at the Minneapolis airport in June. Take a gander at the experts who contributed to the column -- you'll have to read on to draw the connection between U.S. Senate history and colorectal advice: "Explainer thanks William Leap of American University, Don Ritchie of the Senate Historical Office, and Robert Theobald of Comprehensive Colorectal Care."

Absolut Showdown

The BBC reports on a brewing conflict in the European Parliament: the "vodka-belt" countries (the Baltics and Finland, Denmark, and Sweden) want Parliament to accept a stricter standard for what can be counted as "vodka" in the spirits market. They're pushing for this in response to the wine-producing countries of France, Italy, and Spain (with Britain thrown in there for good measure -- goodness knows no good wine is produced there) increasing their stake in the vodka market, despite producing the spirit from such non-traditional ingredients as sugar beet, citrus fruit, and grapes. The vodka countries' representatives insist that the overall quality of the spirit is diminished when other countries veer away from using traditional ingredients such as potatoes and grain. As one Finnish representative put it, "[The vodka belt countries] produce 70% of the EU's vodka, and we consume 70%, so we know what we are talking about."

An interesting aspect of this battle is how the voting blocs cross traditional Eastern and Western European political alliances. The wine countries are of course solidly Western European. But the so-called vodka belt pairs former communist states such as Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with the equally vodka-loving Scandinavians; their bloc is also supported by Hungary and Slovenia. The battle over how to define "authentic" vodka-production is thus a matter of who's doing the drinking.

How the votes will fall is hard to predict. Acknowledging the split votes based on region, agriculture, and drinking traditions, another Finnish representative makes the astute point: "This is a battle of the vodka belt against the wine belt... In between lies the beer belt, which will get to decide."

The American Creed

While living and traveling in Peru and meeting people from different cultures and backgrounds, I was led to reflect on what might be described as the "character" of the American people. I wasn't forced by my friends and acquaintances to "defend" what it means to be an American; rather, conversations about European politics (Finnish parliamentary elections, the French presidential election, etc.) and Peruvian development inspired me to compare American attitudes toward government, education, and civil society to those of other nationalities. It was an open debate.

My Finnish friends in particular provided me with an interesting set of ideas about government, education, and civil society that stood in contrast to what I think is the predominant "American" view of such things. Finnish students and professionals alike remarked that while their country's very high taxes are at times a personal nuisance and too often mismanaged, the common, public good that those taxes ultimately serve is worth 1) the nuisance, and 2) the effort to reform government to become more fiscally efficient.

The socialist-style Finnish system applies a graduated income tax to its citizens so that the wealthy are responsible for paying more taxes (relative to their income) than the poor and working classes. And to be sure, there's the usual discontent among the middle and rich classes about social welfare -- the perception that many poor and working-class Finns don't do their part in finding gainful employment or in trying not to live off the state. Despite these very real social and economic problems, however, my Finnish friends told me that most well-off Finns continue to believe that it's ultimately a good thing to buttress the country's infrastructure and social networks with their taxes.

Hearing this made me ashamed to be an American. I knew instinctively that such a view of the common, public good was/is utterly foreign to the vast majority of Americans. Perhaps it wasn't always so. Or maybe this has always been the case in a country that prides itself on its individualist ethos and cult of self-determination. What I do know is that the American creed of every man (or: nuclear family unit) for himself was perfected during the Reagan Revolution, the late-'70s to mid-'90s social and political movement that, among other things, valorized private enterprise and unfettered capitalism at the expense of public institutions, social welfare, and, specifically, the very idea that the country's tax burden would be shared by all citizens.

One truly sad result of this long period of dismantling the bonds of our civil society is that many well-off Americans actually feel victimized by the government when it tries to raise their income tax (which of course is modest compared to those paid by citizens in other "First World" countries). Even worse is how well-off Americans tend to feel victimized by the poorest sectors of society -- those who don't earn a living wage, who need to work three jobs to make ends meet, and need I mention "illegal immigrants"? The poor: whom the well-off characterize as morally and culturally deficient leeches, in so many words. The poor: whose socioeconomic poverty is somehow their fault, and theirs only.

It's this cult of victimization that's uniquely American, it seems to me. The well-off Finns have their complaints, sure. But at least many of them are able to distinguish a problem of social inequality (the poor needing help and the state mismanaging the system that distributes "help" to the poor) from a basically personal feeling of resentment, which, as Nietzsche reminds us, is the other face of self-righteousness (the poor are themselves deficient and so offend "me" by taking "my" money).

But why take my word for it? Durham's weekly news magazine The Independent cites this quotation from a recent article in the daily newspaper The News & Observer:

"The last thing I want to do is put more money into education, because I don't want to pay for something I never use."
--Bob Williamson, 46, a childless real estate executive from Wake Forest, quoted in an N&O story about how a majority of Wake County residents who don't have children oppose new taxes to help the schools keep up with growth.

So goes the American creed.

[For: Katri, Maria, Tiia, Lissu, Laura]

Almost Infamous

The BBC's Matt Frei wrote a humorously observant article on this week's prominent celebrity jailings. Paris Hilton checked herself in at a Los Angeles county jail to serve 23 days for multiple DUI arrests. For his politically motivated "outing" of Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby was sentenced to 30 months in jail and ordered to pay $250,000 in fines. Paris and Scooter will serve time for different offenses, then, but it may become apparent that they share a peculiar quality among fallen celebrities: the ability to use the media's fascination with their infamy to orchestrate their resurrection.

As a celebutante, Paris has from the very beginning endured waves of criticism, attack, and targeted vitriol. Her incarceration is perhaps seen by many as the capstone to a profoundly reckless "personal" life -- one spent sun-bathing in the ego-feeding limelight of the public's mass-mediated attention. And yet Frei makes the point that Hollywood jail-time has the potential to redeem a fallen star's cachet: "It is the preparation of a new role and the script is predictable: the contrition, the return journey to honesty, the charity work, the book deal, the vegetarian recipes, the jailhouse fashion line, the cult of self-improvement lapped up by the attendant media, a stint squirming on Oprah's couch." When it comes to stars, we seem to take (perverse) pleasure in seeing them fall, repent, and eventually rise again.

Scooter's case is more complicated, owing to his being on the side of an unpopular administration and the figurehead of a disastrous, win-at-all-costs, war-mongering ideology. He is a minor figurehead, yes -- a bobblehead, if you will. But Scooter is a necessary figure; his crime is a discrete, punishable component of what is in fact a mind-boggling galaxy of Bush/Republican foreign policy foibles.

Will Scooter have the same chance at redemption that Paris surely will? It depends. He could fade into obscurity after he finishes serving his sentence, electing to quit this media/political business once and for all. (A Paris Hilton sans fame and/or infamy is quite unthinkable, on the other hand.) Scooter could also remain indefinitely infamous should Bush grant him a presidential pardon. Or he could go the way of so many former criminals and victims: becoming a Hollywood writer/producer. Scooter has already made clear his hope that his soft-core pornographic novel The Apprentice will one day be made into a movie.

If Scooter does get to make his movie at some point in the not-too-distant future, perhaps his path will cross Paris's once again and she'll get to play the leading lady (or mistress). Now that would be a Hollywood coup worth Netflixing.

Politics & "News": Update on Hawaii's SCR 83

My friend Matthew Lopresti wrote me a few days ago to update me on the status of the Hawaii State Legislature's SCR 83 (see my previous post for information on this resolution). Unfortunately, SCR 83 didn't make it to committee, even though the state senator in charge of the committee, Clayton Hee, seemed to be in support of having the resolution heard among his colleagues. According to Matthew, the issue was that not enough people had written to their state senators (and not just Sen. Hee) about the resolution. This, at least, is what Sen. Hee relayed to Matthew once it became apparent that the resolution would die in the back rooms of our capitol.

Yet in his note to me Matthew raises a crucial point: how could broad-based support for SCR 83 be effected if mainstream media outlets refused to cover this piece of legislation until it became "newsworthy"? On the one hand, SCR 83's fate in committee was premised on public awareness (support, rejection, debate) of the issues. Yet our dominant media outlets, which are still largely responsible for shaping public awareness of the issues, wouldn't talk about SCR 83 unless it reached the floor of the Hawaii State Legislature.

It's a classic double-bind: without public support, a bill dies; but a bill won't be picked up by the media (which, again, shapes public opinion) unless it makes it to the floor. See how it works? It's suspicious-sounding all around, as though both politicians and the media were in cahoots as to what issues actually get heard by the public. Look at it this way: if the only bills that make it to committee/the floor are ones that supposedly have broad-based support anyway (without the media's attention), exactly how/where is genuine public debate of the issues happening? Where, in other words, are the outlets for bold pieces of legislation that seek to foment public debate of the issues?

Based on his experiences with SCR 83, Matthew frames the problem this way: "So, one thing I've learned from this is that things at the Capitol work with some degree of reverse causation. A bill or resolution is only heard in committee if they know it is going to pass on the floor. I was foolish enough to think (and believe what I was told) that if we can just get it heard, there can then be debate on the floor, in the media, and in the community - since the media said they would only cover the story to inform people about SCR83 if the committee was actually going to hear it. I was thus duped into thinking that local media was actually concerned with serving the betterment of democracy by informing the people of ways they can have a voice because I'm sure they were 'in the know' that if its heard in committee, its passing is already a foregone conclusion - hence my rant on the blog about their only concern being sensationalism."

Nicely put, and I'd simply stress Matthew's point about systematic (i.e., bureaucratic) political work being a foregone conclusion, a consensus-assuming practice that passes itself off as democratic deliberation. Note also, of course, the mainstream media's role in the matter: in lieu of coverage of such items as SCR 83, we've got "human interest" pieces and "health tips" and "market watch" and sundry forms of "news" that really only confirm "your" individual tastes and "your" individual lifestyle. News, in other words, has become a passing conversation with your friendly next-door neighbor: a pleasant little diversion; not the stuff of open, deliberative debate.

Hawaii's SCR 83 & Anti-Faculty Sentiment

A good friend of mine, Matthew Lopresti, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Hawaii Pacific University, recently helped spur discussion in Hawaii's State Legislature about a resolution that would ask the U.S. Congress to consider impeachment hearings against President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney. The text of the Senate Concurrent Resolution 83 (SCR 83) can be found here.

SCR 83 was introduced by Matthew's state senator, Les Ihara, a Democrat serving the Kapahulu, Kaimuki, and Palolo districts in Honolulu. SCR 83 has garnered some national attention through the Internet, but mainstream media outlets--even local outlets in Hawaii--have been mostly silent about the issue. Matthew has been tireless in his efforts to spread the word about this important piece of political expression; this past Friday the 13th was the deadline for the Hawaii Senate's Judiciary Committee to decide whether or not to consider SCR 83. Although I'm not sure about the outcome of that Committee's meeting on Friday, I will post an update as soon as I get the facts.

According to Matthew, online responses to his political work have been almost entirely negative. On one Hawaii-based political blog, Matthew has been attacked not simply for his editorial letter in support of SCR 83 (as far as I know, this letter was the only "coverage" that SCR 83 received from the mainstream media) but also for his status as a teacher and scholar at a university. It's this latter form of attack that continues to concern me as someone who believes scholars should not shy away from making serious intellectual and political contributions to/in the public sphere. One commentator, without so much as addressing the merits or demerits of SCR 83, claims that university professors should not have tenure, and that they "should be held accountable and responsible for everything they say." Another, writing as an "HPU alumni [sic]," claims s/he's "deeply disappointed that a Hawaii Pacific University Professor is behind this ignorant Resolution." And "kapena" goes so far as to say, "I am aware of people like you in academic circles who think and truly believe you have a more learned opinion than the rest of us...just because you're employed at an educational 'place of learning.'"

Wherever they come from (I'm not quick to assume these are "just" reactionary conservatives we're talking about here), I think responses such as these index increasing suspicion of the role and purpose of higher education in U.S. society. In fact, quite often these attacks have very little to say about the topic at hand. Rather, they are more insistent in pointing out two things: that university faculty 1) have an elitist, "liberal" bias against the will of the majority of Americans, and thus 2) should not involve themselves in social and political affairs beyond academia.

The first claim confuses "liberal" political soapboxing with what I conceive as the intellectual practice of critical thinking. Needless to say, the claim doesn't have an adequate answer to intellectuals' demonstrated commitment to critical thinking, even under seemingly "friendlier" regimes of power (i.e., the Clinton era, "blue" states or districts, etc.).

The second claim expresses the somewhat dumbed-down fear of higher education itself: whom it serves, what it's meant to provide, and so on. It seems to me the real threat of professors' social and political expression in the public sphere resides not in their particular "liberal" beliefs but in the very fact that higher education could mean something beyond what the corporate university is supposed to legitimate: the paying customer, or student--his/her professional drives, his/her "sense of self," his/her readiness to enter the "real world." So it seems to me that as more and more professors move between the academic and public spheres (not least aided by the Internet), there are those who will insist that faculty shouldn't express what they believe (and, goodness knows, even go so far as to say that what they believe is related to their vocation of critical inquiry) but should only serve their disciplines and their charges (i.e., students) in the disinterested realm of scholarly professionalism.

Duke faculty, graduate students, and instructors are all too familiar with these sorts of issues, particularly given the fallout from the Duke lacrosse case (which topic--the fallout--merits a very long blog entry of its own). I raise the issue here, in view of Matthew's participation in the SCR 83 push, in order to highlight how common anti-faculty sentiment really is in our country. What's this sentiment about? Is it unique to our polarized political times? (I happen to think aspects of it are unique, while others have been exploited by reactionaries many times in the past.) Why is intellectual public culture so much at odds with certain people's understanding of the mission of higher education? What's the relationship between anti-faculty sentiment and American institutions' taking up various modes of privatization (from profitable online course programs to lucrative endowment deals to scientific copyright contracts...)? At least this scholar wants to keep the conversation going.