Yearly Archives: 2008

Thomas Frank has written a great book (The Wrecking Crew) that should help drive more nails into the coffin of the conservative movement. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that he doesn’t quite put the stake through the heart, which is really what we have to do with this monster.

The problem is that Tom still accepts too much conservative rhetoric at face value. Conservatives do not dislike government or want small government. They just dislike government policies that are designed to help the bulk of the population. They want the government to redistribute income upward and they are happy to have a government that is as big as necessary to accomplish this task. The stuff about small government and leaving things to the market is just pretty rhetoric they use to fool the kids (i.e. us).

It sounds much better to say, “I want to get the government off people’s backs” than “I want the government to make the rich even richer.” But the latter is the real story of conservatism.

Dean Baker, October 6, 2008, TPM Café Book Club (Talking Points Memo)

I have a more or less good memory of the night Reagan won the first time, in November 1980. The networks called the election early, after the East and Central Time Zone polls had closed, and we went to a club (in Austin, Texas) called Club Foot, to see the Gang of Four. “Sorry to hear about your president,” Jon King, the lead singer, said. It was a fantastic show.

We hated Reagan and the Republican Party. What I did not understand at all, then, was that the Reagan Administration and their Conservative followers would undermine just about everything we were counting on for the future we wanted. In the short run, they gutted the Social Security benefits my sister should have gotten after my Dad died in 1982. Their policies made college more expensive and grants more rare and guns more common. The long run was worse.

They made national health care impossible, set up Cod War struggles in South and Central America and Afghanistan; the latter would lead to the attacks on New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington in 2001. They established the ideology of deregulation that has twice now led to economy-threatening bank collapses, made the airline industry so dysfunctional, and is still disabling government at every level, particularly the public schools.

Baker suggests that the current political and economic mood is ripe for a decisive defeat for the conservative philosophies that have set back our country so far for so long. The Gang of Four has long ago broken up, produced a come back record or two, and then broken up again. It’s been nearly three decades. I hope this time we do really tramp this dirt down, decisively, if not once and for all.

A psychoanalytically inclined friend of mine once told me that you can tell the important dreams not because you know what they mean, but because you can’t get them out of your head. As an anthropologist I’ve noticed something similar about ethnographic fieldwork: You live through moments that immediately seem important to you, but it is only after chewing them over that you realize why. I had one such moment recently that taught me, deep down, that I firmly believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. This insight came to me late last month in the course of having my ass kicked repeatedly by Kael’thas Sunstrider, son of Anasterian, prince of Quel’Thalas, and servant of Kil’jaeden the Deceiver.

Fear and Humiliation as Legitimate Teaching Methods.By Alex Golub

This is one of those ‘academic exercises’ that pop up now and again, perfectly designed to bring out the cynic in my professorial soul. In the end, it’s a circular argument: in a game designed to encourage people to see themselves as violent competitors, people tend to respond to humiliation and fear. As if a game called World of Warcraft would encourage loving cooperation.

The best way to gain publicity and become an academic star is to say things that sound ‘shocking’ to the very staid U.S. intellectual community. I say ‘sound’ becuase in most cases, like Camille Paglia’s wild and wacky ways, nothing said is really particularly unusual outside the ivory covered Puritanical walls. Maybe I am wrong and Golub is simply trying out a rough thesis, poking a stick in the ant pile to see what might happen.

The ‘fear and humiliation’ that he finds pedagogically effective in W.O.W. is nothing new in a competitive, arguably falsely meritocratic education system. Even the nicest teachers are forced to use the ‘fear and humiliation’ of grading; tenure is no bed of roses. Education may not be war, but it’s methods are hardly benign. As he suggests, it’s one important way we all learned how the world worked.