Having finished the dissertation, for the first time in nine years I find myself with a summer of reading whatever I want, history or otherwise. So....can anybody recommend a good and user-friendly book on the history of the earth and/or the universe? I'm basically looking for physics/geology-type stuff that simultaneously proves informative and intelligible to non-science people like myself. Any suggestions are welcome.
I admit, I've been gone way too long. I'd like to blame the dissertation, teaching, job apps, etc., and that's been the legitimate reason in no small part, but to many, that's not a good enough reason. That said, after many threats to return to blogging, the dissertation is in and I feel I can finally write about things not-dissertation-related, and do so guilt-free. At the same time, I also feel it's time to fess up - my real name is not Mr. Trend. It's Colin Snider.
This TPM piece got me thinking. They ask, what in the world happened to Arizona? In 2008, it seemed on the verge of swinging to the Democrats and perhaps would of had the Republican nominee not come from the state. Today, not only has it passed a racist and unconstitutional immigration bill, but a whole series of other insane right-wing bills.
But did anything happen to Arizona in the last 18 months that would so drastically change Arizona politics? No, not really. And I will get to that in a minute. But what I found most interesting about the piece is how big national news organizations, including progressive blogs, are so tone-deaf to local issues. I'm not really blaming them for this; I understand their interests and their audience. But the intense focus on national issues and national legislation gets in the way of subtlety and context. TPM thinks Arizona was becoming a more progressive state because they almost voted for Obama. But is a vote for Obama and a vote for racist anti-immigrant statues really that much of a discontinuity?
Progressive sites (and the media more broadly) love repeating Tip O'Neill's mantra that all politics are local. O'Neill was right about that. But the national news media doesn't really understand what that means. More broadly, I don't think today's Democratic party really understands much about what that means.
Arizona has been one of our most secretly right-wing white supremacist states for a long time. There's a reason a guy like Barry Goldwater came out of Arizona. Although the state actually created a very progressive state constitution in 1912, soon after statehood, conservative elements took over. These people essentially thought of Mexicans like white people in the South thought of blacks--cheap exploitable labor with no right to civil liberties or human rights. They rounded up Mexican-Americans, including American citizens, and kicked them out of the country during the Great Depression. They lobbied to ensure that New Deal labor legislation would not cover farm labor. When they needed Mexican labor again after World War II, they pushed for the Bracero Program, which allowed for guestworkers from Mexico. But they treated those Mexican farmworkers like slaves, often not paying them, allowing them to die of heat stroke, putting them in substandard housing, etc.
On top of this, after World War II, Arizona began attracting crowds of old retirees, centering in new Phoenix suburbs like Sun City. These people from other parts of the nation had no experience with Mexicans, but they clearly saw race in terms of white supremacy and had little problem entering into Arizona's established race relations.
But just because these people are racists doesn't mean they approve of the war in Iraq or weren't disturbed by the financial collapse. And it doesn't mean they don't believe in New Deal economic policy. It's quite simple to vote for Obama but also vote for a Republican state legislator who stirs up local fears about immigration, gun rights, or abortion. It might not make sense to a partisan like myself, but millions of people do this.
But what seems self-evident to me does not to those who focus obsessively on national political trends. Arizona has suffered from economic crisis more profoundly than most states. But most of those legislators in Arizona weren't elected as a response to that crisis. Most have been there for a long time, passing these crazy bills. But before 2009, they were vetoed by Governor Janet Napolitano. But when Obama picked Napolitano to be Secretary of Homeland Security, right-wing Attorney General Jan Brewer took over, giving the crazies power where it really counts.
I think modern Democrats do a particularly poor job understanding the importance of local politics. Republicans get this. They understood how to build a conservative movement beginning in the 1950s--take over the school boards and local offices and work up from there. They still do a better job of mobilizing people for local elections than Democrats. Some of this certainly has to do with an easier to reach demographic. But a lot of it is institutional. Look at the Democratic Party before Howard Dean's 50 state strategy. The Democrats were just punting half the nation, not only on a national but a local level. When I lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, the local Democrats never bothered running candidates for many offices. They thought--why bother, it will just hurt our influence with the Republican officials.
Moreover, Democrats, including the big progressive blog sites, look at local trends through national eyes. This leads to the kind of misunderstanding we are seeing in analysis of Arizona. When Tom Daschle lost his senate seat to John Thune, it wasn't South Dakota voters rejecting Daschle's policies. It was that they were pissed because they felt Daschle had abandoned his home state, in fact claiming Maryland (I think) as his home state on some tax form or some such thing. When Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley to replace Ted Kennedy, some of that had to do with right-wing organizing, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that Martha Coakley ran the worst campaign in modern memory. These things are local. Looking at them through the lenses of national politics can help us find interesting trends, but they provide little understanding for what's going on in a particular place. When you get to the level of state legislatures and ballot initiatives, the national lenses provide almost no understanding at all.
A site like TPM can find people who do understand the local scene. There are many excellent sites dedicated to local politics. Each state has several. Some are great, such as Texas' Burnt Orange Report. I will say though that these sites often get caught up in the hothouse atmosphere of politics and don't provide a lot of room for analysis and understanding.
But there are scholars removed from the political atmosphere who do understand the history and culture of places. I am no expert on Arizona, but there are several states I do know pretty well where I could provide useful analysis. And there are a lot of people like me out there who could do a great job. Rather than asking out loud what has happened to Arizona, why not go find someone who can tell you?
So I guess Haloscan, which has run our comments since the blog's beginning, is going away in a couple of weeks. So I have to get a new comments system. Haloscan recommends paying $12 a year for JS-Kit, but that's a terrible system. For you bloggers out there, what are you doing about this? What system do you use?
I've been working on a "best-of-the-decade" list of music for an upcoming post for a while, a feat that I originally thought wouldn't take too long. Yet the more I get into it, the harder it gets, and the difficulty's origin is simple: I underestimated the "oughts." I don't know why I'm surprised, but there was a lot of excellent music made over the past 10 years. To quote Ron Burgundy: "This is hard!" Stay tuned.
I'm not going to self-nominate, but if any readers think that this blog is one of the best history blogs on the web or that a particular post from the last year was really great, and you wanted to take the time to nominate us for the Cliopatria Awards for best history blogging, I wouldn't object.
Michael Allison, a political science professor at the University of Scranton, has a new blog called Central American Politics that is well worth checking out for those interested in Central America and Latin America more generally.
While my annoyance with the blogspot site has declined significantly since the early years of the blog (among other things the site wouldn't allow us to post for 2 months because of technical problems), their new rule of a maximum of 2000 labels for our posts is really annoying. Not because it's entirely unreasonable, though I don't see what difference it makes to them. But because it is arbitrary and post-dated--we have currently used about 3300 tags in the five years this blog has existed. So in order to use any new tags, which I in fact need for organizing photos for teaching, I have to go back and eliminate about 1300 tags plus some more for future growth. Looks like it'll be a fun weekend!
As I mentioned before, I'm relocating from New York to New Mexico, starting the 2000 mile drive tomorrow. I will miss New York some, but not as much as I thought I would - if the gross inequalities between cost of living and money I earned weren't a frustration big enough to help me say goodbye to NYC, then the movers charging almost 3 times what they said it would cost and letting me know this only after the truck was loaded definitely made the departure from New York less bittersweet. I expect my second go-round in New Mexico to not be as love-hate (though they may be false expectations). At any rate, I don't have internet up in my new place yet, either, so blogging will be light from me for the next couple weeks.
Last week, Erik and I were discussing a set of posts we're planning for the end of the year that offer our top albums, movies, and other "bests" of the decade. As should always be the case with pointless list-making, I have given it way more thought than the subject should ever have merited, and, looking back at the last 10 years, there have been some remarkably great movies (but I'm not going to say which ones - that's what the year-end list will be for, so you'll just have to wait). And I was thinking, "you know, for all the proclamations of great film-making in other decades, this decade arguably has been as good as any previous decade."
Apparently, I'm not alone in thinking this. While I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call the 2000s a "golden age" of cinema, it's not because I think other decades have been "better," but rather because any notion of a "golden age," contemporarily or in the past, just reinforces false nostalgia that tends to lead to people overlooking what's great presently. And I certainly wouldn't call Joel Schumacher a "popmeister" - "shitmeister" seems far more appropriate for his dreck. Movies can be silly and fun and popular and Hollywood driven, but still be excellent - just ask Sam Raimi or Judd Apatow.
All that notwithstanding, though, this decade has just reminded me why I hate when people look back to the 60s or 70s (or 40s) as when cinema was "really good." The only reason we've forgotten the "Transformers 2" of those eras was because, like any lowest-common-denominator crap, it has been flushed away over time. And when people harken to movies by Scorcese, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, etc., fine - yes, they directed amazing, artistic, all-time great movies. But look at the last 10 years - Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Fernando Meirelles, Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, Wes Anderson, Ang Lee, P.T. Anderson, Charlie Kaufman......and I'm undoubtedly forgetting many others, or haven't yet seen some movies that are almost certainly artistic masterpieces ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" springs immediately to mind).
All of this is to basically say, I wish people would acknowledge how great current cinema not only can be, but is. Among the many minor aggravations in life, the canonization of previous decades or eras at the expense of current artistic production, be it musical, film, photographic, literary, etc., is garbage. Thinking about how many all-time great films have come out of the last 10 years only reinforces that.
Rob has yet more (and unfortunately real-life) evidence that Republican opposition to national health care due to a "government bureaucracy" that would only make the health care slower and more tortuous is completely naive and stupid.
Best of luck next week, Rob. And may the litigation-prone wife end up not only filing, but winning. If nothing else, it will help for the college fund down the road.
Not to brag, but my Honduras post was picked up by the New York Times. Which is kind of nice.
Also, in case you are wondering what I am doing online so much in Central America, sometimes this happens. A couple of things are unexpectedly closed and you find yourself with extra time on your hands. There will be times in coming days that I won´t be around a computer at all. Take what comes your way I guess.
There's been some concern that Haloscan is losing comments.
So if anyone would care to drop a comment in to check, I'd appreciate it.
We can make this a comment contest. Wittiest comment gets a free year's subscription to Alterdestiny.
Since we are still close to the New Year, I have some hopes for the blog.
I hope that I write more about environmental issues and that I find an audience for those posts. I also hope that I can find a way to write about music without sounding like an idiot.
I hope Lyrad writes more about football, music, comics, and movies.
I hope Yann writes more about Santo, music, and New Mexico.
I hope AnthonyS writes more about food and classical music. He is a composer after all. When are those albums coming out?
I hope Trend writes more about how much he owes me for shaping his musical tastes. And how I am his hero. I also hope this gets a suitable reaction. In all seriousness, I do hope for more baseball posts throughout this season and also more random music observations, which are guaranteed to annoy people and thus get comments.
I hope Sarah J writes more about feminism, politics, and everything else. Not that she isn't already doing this. I just enjoy those posts a lot.
I hope Karthika writes her long-promised tennis posts. I'd also like hear more about India if she cares to write about that stuff.
Mostly I hope that this year is awesome for everyone.
An adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University was fired this week for posting the names and grades of his students on a blog. The professor was trying to humiliate them after catching people plagiarizing.
Katherine Haenschen at Burnt Orange Report calls this "a worrisome precedent." I'm not so sure. This person was an idiot who deserved to be fired. Anyone who publicly humiliates students by name and gives out personal information about their performance is not fit to teach.
On the other hand, certainly the issue of blogging and the academy is on my mind. I blog under my own name. There is a risk involved. Theoretically, a school could google my name, see that I have a blog, and consider that too much of a risk to hire me. I hope this doesn't happen. I try to be professional here. I occasionally talk about teaching. Usually this is to work out a question or issue I am having, but occasionally I am frustrated with students. I would never ever give a name or any personal information. But it is a fine line. Being on the job market right now makes me nervous about everything I write.
Haenschen doesn't defend the said professor either; rather, her concern is that the story was spun so that it seemed he was fired for blogging rather than for violating professors' privacy. Instead of cracking down on plagiarism, TAMIU fired the professor. Personally, I think both sides are right here. Too often, by which I mean virtually always, universities are extremely lax on issues of plagiarism. I have an enormous problem with it. My sense is that professors just don't want to be bothered and don't care enough about teaching to deal with it. I now teach at a school that does it take seriously. It still happens, but it is nice having institutional support to fight it.
Nevertheless, the guy needed to be canned. Freedom of speech battles seem to always take place over cases where the person in question has done a loathsome thing that is hard to defend. And while TAMIU did not handle the matter particularly professionally themselves, there is no excuse for not canning his butt.
I haven't blogged much in the past few days, not because I haven't wanted to, but with the job interview and the end of the semester, I just haven't had time. I do plan on getting a bunch of stuff out soon though.
But it doesn't help that I am so sick and tired of the obsessive coverage of the Democratic primary. I think this serves to show that I am not really a political junkie. I am into politics, but I am long past feeling that bloggers' constant discussion of the issue has become tiresome. On my RSS feed, for a long time I was reading 80-90% of the posts, even if I was just skimming most at best. Now it is down to about 40% and has been for a few weeks. It's because I have almost stopped reading most liberal political blogs. True junkies are like addicts and it is unhealthy.
There are so many important issues going on in the world--Iraq, climate change, poverty, fuel prices, housing, etc., etc. But 3/4 of the posts on these blogs are dissecting the differences between Obama and Clinton and boosting the candidacy of their favorite.
Many of the same blogs reporting obsessively on the race are complaining about the lack of media coverage in Iraq. Well, you know, couldn't we be focusing on this? Didn't a significant amount of reporting about the war and all the terrible things the Bush administration has done come from the blogs. We are ignoring Iraq too now so we can parse the phrases of people who have slept 5 hours in the last month, figuring out what we can use against them.
Am I the only one who is bored out of my mind at this point? Not that I even wish the race was over necessarily. Hillary certainly has every right to stick it out, even if she really can't win. If Obama was losing, most of his supporters would be hoping he would stay in, much as Clinton's supporters are now. But I am just bored senseless.
The race is important. But not nearly as important as the general election. People should be writing about the primary of course. But they are numbing my brain at this point. It's just not interesting to write 40,000 posts about the subject at the expense of every other issue on the planet.
People can blog about whatever the heck they want to and it's not my place to tell them to stop it. But can we at least keep this race in perspective? These are two candidates who stand for almost the exact same things. 90% of their platform is the same. It's about personality, race, gender, age, etc.
I guess the questions I have to these bloggers writing obsessively about this stuff is this: Do you really think that the primary is that much more important than all the other issues going on in the world? To what extent should people be discussing this primary in such detail while ignoring the rest of the world?
I don't know, maybe I'm just bitchy. This post sucks because I don't feel that I'm articulating my thoughts well. But I'm just really frustrated and I feel that my spirit is being sucked away every time I read another post on how horrible Hillary is or how this or that state didn't matter.
