Historical Image of the Day

Chief Justice Morrison Waite and his fine beard.

Appointed by Ulysses Grant in 1874, Waite served for 14 years. Like many of Grant's Supreme Court nominees, he worked to roll back racial protections for African-Americans. This makes me wonder why Grant's supposed belief in racial equality has improved his standing among both historians and progressives. Almost all of his judicial choices were terrible on race and you'd think that in an age when we pay so much attention to judges generally and the Supreme Court especially, people would take this into account. Those who promote Grant's presidency point to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which he signed. But his own judges, including Waite, overturned the law in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). So I have yet to see a compelling case for the argument that Grant was a good president on racial issues.

The twin problems of anonymous and unmoderated

When I was researching my paper on open-source journalism last year, I often cited a concept from Axel Bruns’ Gatewatching, which I think sums up the advantages of Internet-powered, grassroots information sharing better than anything else: that online stories are not complete in themselves, that they are “unfinished,” and this allows news and information to be shaped by a variety of different players. In other words, it is an ongoing conversation.

I’m sure we all agree that the particular allure of new media is not just the original news post, but also the comments that follow, the re-posting and linking, the agreement, the refutation and the animated discussion that springs from one blog post in a series of hyperlinks, setting off ripples around the blogosphere. Hence, by that philosophy, everything counts as a “response,” even the acts of re-blogging and anonyblogging, which have particularly caused problems to the unique design of the blogging platform, Tumblr, which as Wired puts it, is a “blog with a very short attention span.”

One of the big controversies to hit the new media world in the past week is the banning, and subsequent un-banning of Anonybloggers at Tumblr. Tumblr, which is “twitter with pictures” is an awesome concept because it allows people a way to aggregate a large amount of information in one space. I haven't experimented with it yet, but I know Sarah uses it a great deal.

Despite all its advantages, unfortunately for Tumblr, what it also allows one with a snarky bent of mind to do is – easily, quite lazily – follow someone else’s tumble log, and re-blog everything the person posts, adding one’s own commentary – that can often be nasty, mean, even malicious. Since this was getting out of hand, Tumblr’s founder decided to censor certain blogs, thus sparking a huge debate about Internet censorship. Not surprisingly, within 24 hours, he was forced to lift the ban, because quite simply, there is little place for censorship in this distributive, democratic, new media world.

But should it be OK to simply castigate and mock a chosen target for no good reason except that technology allows you to do it? Some commenters have suggested that one way to avoid this kind of meaningless, controversial, and often hurtful mockery of others – without suppressing speech – would be by banning anonymity in specific sites.

As one commenter said on the lede post’s discussion:

“If you want to stop anonymous harassment, simply stop the anonymity. While we have a right to privacy, anonymity isn’t the same thing; it’s speech without accountability, and it’s what’s emboldening these bitter spite-bloggers anyway.”

Another commenter, like many others, suggests moderation:

“Briefly speaking, moderation has been a critical community management tool on the Internet.....moderation and enforcement allows the target audience to continue using services in comfort and peace without constant disruption or reworking of community functions. Many Internet communities owe their existence to skillful moderation practices.”

It is true that spammers and imposters can often be prevented by simply allowing users to identify themselves and create profiles, and if that doesn’t work, by moderating what they say. But then again, one of the advantages of the Internet is to be able to get important information out there even if it were done from behind a celluloid curtain.

A debate, no doubt, that will go on for as long as the Internet exists.

Cleaning house

Roland Burris needs to resign.

What possible benefit is there to him staying on as a U.S. senator?

The downside is obvious-- an unelected appointee, placed in power by a tainted governor, who is now changing (or, at the very least "massaging") his story about his involvement with said governor. All to fill a seat vacated by a new president that is trying to put out about a hundred fires and keeps getting set back by the personnel problems (and yes, I know the setbacks are largely due to media spin on what have been mostly minor issues, but that really doesn't matter, since it's out there and people are noticing). My question remains-- what possible benefit is there to keeping him? Loyalty? Forget it. We had eight years of government operating like a fraternity on academic probation. There is little reason not to pressure him to resign-- seriously, I don't even care if he did or did not do anything inappropriate. The problems we face that demand the Obama administration's full attention and public support are much larger than Roland Burris. Being in the Senate isn't a right, especially since he wasn't elected anyway. There mere whiff of impropriety is enough for me-- that he's singing a different tune this week is enough.

The Republicans lost in 2006 in large part due to scandals-- Cunningham, Foley, Craig, Abramoff, Delay, etc. Lately, there have been far too many democratic scandals. If it keeps up, even Obama's squeaky-clean reputation is going to suffer. No single elected official's job is more important that the economic recovery, healthcare reform, or green energy. If kicking Burris to the curb saves one union job in Wisconsin, it's worth it. There can't be second chances because the stakes are too high. Burris fucked it up by not disclosing everything to begin with, and now is a distraction. If he really cares about the kinds of changes Obama campaigned on, he'll do a Daschle and bow out. Otherwise, he needs to be forced out by his own side, publicly, loudly, and with little mercy.

Happy 67th Birthday Internment Camps!

On this date in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 placing Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.

I usually call them concentration camps in my classes. There are important differences of course because American concentration camps and German death camps. But they both share the facts of taking people based upon their race and locking them up away from society to preserve the nation from a vague threat. We usually call them internment camps to separate them from what was happening in Nazi Germany. But I think calling by their real name has great value.

At the same time, it's also important to note that we seem to have learned some valuable lessons by this horrible mistake. After September 11, while there were individual attacks on Muslims and people who vaguely looked like they could be Muslims, including some murders, there was not a nationwide attack upon them. There were some on the right Michelle Malkin who wanted to repeat the mistakes we made in World War II, but the idea was widely discredited. Given the atmosphere of fear and the scary administration we had at the time, I was pleasantly surprised to see Muslims treated, if not good, significantly less bad than the Japanese were after Pearl Harbor.

Crisis of Masculinity Blogging: I Wish It Were 1882 Edition

Certainly one of the most fascinating issues with masculinity worriers is their obsession with the past. Usually this manifests itself in one of a couple of periods. The Progressive Era is a favorite, with poser masculinity worriers idealizing poser masculinity worriers of the past like Theodore Roosevelt. The 1950s Rat Pack era of Old Hollywood and Old Vegas is another favored time--Hefner, Sinatra, Wayne, cigars, and the like. And then there's the super retrograde types who wish it were medieval olde-timey days where you could rape any wench who walked your way, probably in a haystack or something. Sometimes though, masculinity worriers who are really trying to think through these things go to more obscure ideas of manhood. Such is The Art of Manliness who, while they are typically obsessed with the Progressives and the 50s, also have a weird thing with ideas of the Gilded Age.

Gilded Age masculinity was based largely on Victorian Era moderation, upright living, and hard work. All of this would lead to financial success, ultimately the definer of middle class masculinity. This is classic Horatio Alger pull yourself up by your bootstraps thought. Worthy men achieved because they took the temperance pledge and were good role models. That in reality they were visiting prostitutes in red-light districts, eating prodigious amounts of food, gambling, and drinking on the side was brushed under the rug.

But I can see how certain masculinity worriers would look to this period as a model. It reinforces ideas about individual economic success without government assistance in ways that many white men find very appealing. It is a rejection of our supposed sex-crazed culture, even if, as Foucault shows so vividly, the Victorians were at least as obsessed about sex as we are. It eschews drugs and alcohol and values being a good father. Probably the most prominent modern-day masculinity worriers who embraced Gilded Age ideals were the Promise Keepers, who combined evangelical Christianity with 19th century ideas of manhood in a late 20th century context.

So the Art of Manliness is warning good men to avoid "over-stimulation," which sounds like it is taken right out of a 1890 book on the evils of meat and masturbation. While the advice given on the site often sounds incredibly innocuous (increase your attention span! don't eat ice cream too much!), it's really very much about self-denial and repression of instincts, both sexual (note: the next post in this series will take on this link directly) and otherwise. At the end, if men are repressing their instincts, it follows that women must as well, and return to Victorian norms of femininity, which these men think they would like very much.

Grade Expectations

This New York Times piece about students verbally demanding high grades is making the rounds. The problem with this article is that it ignores a major problem--grade inflation. Too often professors will give students very high grades for very little work because they don't want to deal with conflict. Sometimes they don't care about teaching, particularly survey courses. So students do get As and Bs for doing very little work in some of their courses and then come to expect it in all of their courses. When I was a TA, I literally had professors give students higher grades than they had earned for precisely this reason. Once I had an actual confrontation (nearly physical and he was big and I was actually getting a bit scared) with a student who absurdly claimed that I had something against him and that he didn't want me grading his final. That he did this in front of the whole class while they were taking the final was even more infuriating. In response, the professor just decided to give him an A so he wouldn't cause problems.

What's interesting is that I have not had this problem at all at the private school where I presently teach. I assign a lot of work here. And I expect a lot. But I also find that most of the students are up to the task. They perform well, they live up to expectations, and they get a B or higher. But at a public school, demanding a lot is going to lead to bad course evaluations because it is out of line with what they are required in other classes. Still, I think if you are up front with students and show that you care, many will respond positively. As Whiskey Fire says,

Look, if a student shows up in one of my classes all the time, does all of the reading, takes notes, asks questions, writes drafts of papers, fixes errors and accepts challenges -- well, yeah, she'll get at least a B.

The reason for this is that such a student will very likely have learned something from the course.

Perhaps this is my silly community college perspective cropping up here, but I have this crazy belief that hardworking students can learn things from me, and that this might lead to an enhanced ability to perform certain academic tasks over the course of a semester, thereby leading to better grades. Wacky!

What the Times article does is blame the students. It reeks of the typical "faculty talking about how stupid their students are" conversation. And these conversations never cease to annoy me. The students are not stupid. Maybe they are not engaged, but most are bright (or at least bright enough to claw through and get a degree) young people.

Rob has more

Historical Image of the Day

Oliver Wendell Holmes. One of the most important judges in the history of the Supreme Court and a member of the mustache hall of fame, if such a thing existed.

It Has Been Brought to My Attention that America Has Some Great Authors Who Do NOT Live on the East Coast

Between Erik's (very fair) comments in this post, and this NY Times editorial on Wallace Stegner today, I've become aware that I've never really read much "great" literature from authors from the west. There are many reasons for this, both professionally (I almost never picked up any fiction before completing comps), as well as my own neuroses (I rarely read anything by living authors, with Philip Roth being the major exception) and tastes (I just don't care about fishing, so something like A River Runs Through It seems like something that would bore me - yes, it may be about other things besides fishing, but everybody presents fishing as a major recurrent narrative structure in it, and I just don't care). Hell - I don't usually buy into the "East Coast bias" conspiracy theories (particularly in sports - nothing was as satisfying last year as hearing West Coast writers say, "nobody picked the Angels because of East Coast bias!", and then watching the Angels, who were highly overrated in a terrible division, get ousted in the first round), but in the case of literature, I think upon reflection that you could at least make a decent argument of regionalism and coastal snobbery. I may even be a product of that publishing snobbery, to some extent. Sure, I've read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (one of my all-time favorites), and I'm aware of Larry McMurtry (whose books also seem uninteresting to my tastes); I've read a bit of Willa Cather (in high school), and I'd like to read Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy and The Road sometime. All in all, though, I just don't know who the west's "great" authors are.

So, to our readers who know more about this than I do......which authors from the West should I (or anybody else) read?

Bottled Water

The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a hack right-wing industry group that puts out propaganda for some of our more wretched industries. Today, they take on environmentalists for opposing bottled water. It's almost not worth going into the breach and attacking them. But the bottled water industry is so loathsome and the product so worthless, that I can't help myself.

Unless you live in the developing world, there's no reason to drink bottled water. Even if you do live where you have unsafe water, there are plenty of cheap filtering systems, including just boiling it and then cooling it. So 99% of the time, theres no reason for bottled water. And everyone over the age of 30 remembers the days before bottled water. I remember when I first saw bottled water--I must have been 8 or 9. Somehow I managed to survive without it. The environmental costs of using massive amounts of plastic and fuel to bottle and move this water are quite significant. Nonetheless, for CEI, enviromentalists are a bunch of wackos attacking an angelic industry.

For the past couple decades, bottled water had been growing in popularity as an environmentally preferred choice and as a healthy beverage alternative. Yet in recent years, environmental activists have begun attacking its value and quality. The activists’ claims do not hold water, yet, based on those claims, they are promoting bans, taxes, and regulations on bottled water—taking the Nanny State to a whole new level. The following analysis counters this “new wisdom,” questioning the justifications for this new assault on consumer freedom.

The public has freely turned to bottled water as an alternative to drinks with calories, for convenience, freshness, and whatever other reasons they themselves find worthy. Misinformation spread by activists should not determine who can access this product. People who do not like the product can make their own choices. They should not have any right to make them for the rest of us.

Similarly, the public's embracing of canned meat products in 1905 because of their "convenience, freshness, and whatever other reasons they themselves find worthy" clearly showed why something like the Pure Food and Drug Act is just another example of a "Nanny State" placing unnecessary regulations on industry. Same with DDT and other agrochemicals. Oh Nanny State, when will you stop oppressing us with your concern for safety and waste products? Not to mention your unnecessary capitalization?

Via Grist

Throwing Their Hats into the "Racist of 2009 Ring" - Sean Delonas and the New York Post

While Florida Republican State Committeewoman Carol Carter made a strong bid for "racist of the year" for these comments and the fake-apology that followed, she already faces stiff competition. The New York Post published today this horribly racist cartoon by Sean Delonas. And just as inexcusable is the content of the cartoon is the Post's "apology," which says the cartoon is simply "parody" (it's not) and that Al Sharpton is just a "publicity opportunist" (he may or may not be, but that has nothing to do with how horribly racist the cartoon is). It should go without saying that America is anything but a "post-racial" society; if anything, the only post-Obama conclusion we can draw thus far is that horribly racist comments will be followed by equally-offensive faux-apologies that reveal no amount of contrition or regret whatsoever.

Structural Barriers

The structural barriers the nation faces to economic recovery are massive and just beginning to be realized. First among these problems is that we don't actually make anything. We are such a consumer economy that unless people are buying at ever greater rates, the economy collapses, as is happening now.

Via Pat Garofalo, here is Robert Reich:

One big reason we are in the crisis we are in, apart from the meltdown from financial markets, is that consumers have run out of money. Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of this economy, and after the housing bubble burst, consumers were back to where they were before the housing bubble, which was not a very happy place. […] The bursting of the housing bubble really cut of the last coping mechanism that many consumers had, and that was going into debt. If they can’t borrow any more and have to rely on their sinking wages, the entire economy is in trouble, because there’s just simply not enough demand out there.

Precisely. How do we get out of this situation? Garofalo suggests unionization. There's no question that's a big step. But companies have been leaving the U.S. to get away from unions for 40 years now. How do you stop that?

I think there are several good ideas, all of which would be a pretty radical shift away from current economic policies.

First, you limit company profits. As Reich points out,

If American workers were rewarded for 100 percent of their increases in labor productivity between 1980 and 2008 — as they were during the middle part of the 20th century — average wages would be $28.53 per hour — 42.7 percent higher than the average real wage in 2008.

This money has gone to the shareholders of the companies. While everyone recognizes the need of companies to make some sort of profit, the sheer greed that has dominated the US at least since Reagan must stop. Companies have to be forced, by government law, to work for their employees as well as shareholders.

Second, the federal government has to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and make it easier for people to unionize. Ultimately, there's not that many more jobs that can be outsourced. If we unionize many of the jobs we have, we can add a tremendous amount of money into the economy.

Third, the government must pass regulations limiting how companies can treat workers and nature overseas. Companies leave because there are incentives for them doing so. Mexicans and Cambodians and Guatemalans need jobs too. But they need living wages. And they need safe environments. So force companies to treat those workers with dignity and nature with respect. Figure out what a living wage is in Honduras. Then pay those workers that wage. At least a minimum wage equivalent to that in the United States. Whatever $7 an hour equals in Honduras, that's the minimum wage for those workers too. This isn't protectionism, but it does give companies some incentive to stay in the U.S. Workers making more, whether in Honduras or Michigan, add money to the economy though consumption. They are going to buy US goods.

In any case, an economy based entirely on consumption is no longer tenable. If people aren't consuming, the economy collapses. Either we have to find ways to move more money to people so that they can continue to consume or we have to find other structures on which to base our economy. One of the great problems that led to the Great Depression was overstocked goods. Companies produced huge amounts of consumer goods. But because of overproduction, consumer debt, and a general economic downturn, people stopped buying those goods. That led to huge stocks and no reason to produce more. This led to unemployment which led to even less consumption. It took 12 years to get through this cycle. Here we are again in a very similar situation. We rely almost entirely on consumers for our economic machine and they don't have any money to consume because we've funded this on debt for the last 15 years. So no one buys anything and we have huge stocks of goods and rising unemployment all over again.

I am very pessimistic about this.

The United States, circa 2009

What is this photo? Some operation in Iraq? Police looking for a radical in Latin America? A crack house bust?

Nope. This photograph, named the World Press Photo of 2008, is of a family being evicted from their home in the good ol' USA.

Via Terance Heath

Class warfare at its finest.

Presidental Rankings

Noon says most all of what needs to be said about the C-SPAN presidential rankings. It's a pretty worthless exercise to begin with and when you include William Henry Harrison and James Garfield in your count, both of whom served less than a year, it's hard to take it very seriously. These lists also tend to glorify popular presidents over a realistic analysis of what these people did in office in the context of what opportunities and challenges they had. On top of that, most of the voters are presidential biographers and often love their own subject. It would be more useful I think to poll a bunch of non-presidential historians, but people who would take the job seriously.

A few points were interesting. George W. Bush starts out low at #36 and despite the claims of Cheney and the boys, he's just going to drop. That one of the presidents below him is Harrison is absurd and should just be thrown out. That leaves us with Fillmore, Harding, Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and Buchanan. Fillmore and Harding were bad, but it's hard to argue they were as utterly disastrous as Bush. There are no doubt some conservatives on that list who are probably bumping Bush more than they should.

Wilson has taken a bit of a drop from the last poll in 2000, a direct result of Bush's Wilsonian foreign policy being shown as laughable as Wilson's was. That it's only from 6 to 9 reflects how little these rankings change at the top because of the iconic status of the presidents. Grant is a big riser, from 33 to 23. That's largely a reflection of his attempts to ensure African-American civil rights, which is all fine and good except that he totally failed to do so, that he allowed corruption to dominate his administration, and that he presided over the Panic of 1873 with very ineffectual results. Clinton is also on the rise, from 15 to 10, a nice slap in the face to Bush. I'm not sure I agree with this because on the economic front, many of the problems of the Bush administration started under Clinton. So I wonder how this will hold up in the long run. Still, compared to the last 8 years, the previous 8 look pretty sweet. Interestingly, John Adams barely moved, showing the limited influence of David McCullough to change people's minds. I actually think Adams was a somewhat better president than this, largely because he did peacefully give up power to the opposing party in 1801.

A couple of years ago, I did my own ranking of 10 best and worst presidents. Might be worth revisiting if I want to waste some time.

Historical Image of the Day

Supreme Court justice George Shiras and his impressive mutton chops.

Out of Pennsylvania, he was appointed by Benjamin Harrison in 1892 and served until 1903. His impact on the court seems pretty unnotable except for casting the deciding vote in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company (1895) which ruled the income tax unconstitutional.

Film Review--Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Last week for DVD Verdict, one of my assignments was a four-film collection presented as part of the TCM Classic Films series, specifically in this case, romantic comedies. I had seen none of the films and, because of word limitations and the general tone of the site, doing full reviews of each film is impossible. Instead, I'll do that here. All four films star Katherine Hepburn, tow star Cary Grant, and two star Spencer Tracy. I'll go in chronological order, so we begin in 1938 with Bringing Up Baby.

Katherine Hepburn + Cary Grant + a leopard = hilarity. This is the equation that makes the king of screwball comedies and I'm most struck by how funny and how sweet the film has remained in the seventy years since its release. In 1938, however, it wasn't so much known this way. Hepburn was part of the group that the studios dubbed "box office poison" and, maybe at the time, they were right, though I have a hard time believing it. The film wasn't the bomb it had been purported to be, but it was not a huge hit, especially given the names in the cast and crew. We are a country, however, that will make films like Shakespeare in Love and Titanic super hits, so what do we know.

We begin with a bespectacled Cary Grant sitting atop the skeleton of a brontosaurus. He comes down to talk to his assistant about what he must do tomorrow. First, he must pick up the just discovered final bone in his four year dinosaur restoration and, second, he must get married to his assistant. The scene is stuffed with innuendo; his assistant/fiance telling him in no uncertain terms that this marriage is simply a culmination of their working relationship and nothing, not even a honeymoon, will get in the way of his research. His look of unsurprised dismay is priceless, but he promptly heads out for a golf game with an attorney who, if he plays his cards right, may be able to secure a million dollar grant for his museum.

The action really begins at the club during his game when he finally meets Katherine Hepburn. Her persona would be solidified a couple of years later as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story and she is playing anything but that character. Here, she is a ditz to end all ditzes, totally self-absorbed and totally fun-loving. She steals his golf ball and steals his car and Grant loses the attorney while chasing after her trying to get his stuff back while she sits there not caring. He agrees to meet the attorney later at a restaurant and, when he arrives, Hepburn is there, too. She is doing some stupid trick, flicking olives into her mouth and drops one on the floor, just in the path of Grant. He slips on it, falling on his top hat, resulting in the following classic exchange:

-I'm so sorry! Oh, hello....you're sitting on your hat.
-I know it
-That's silly. Get up. I'm awfully sorry. I couldn't be more apologetic, really.
-Well, I might have known you were here. I had a feeling just as I hit the floor.
-That was your hat.
-Look at it. Look.
-Yes, well it's too bad, isn't it. Well, Joe here was showing me a trick and the olive got away.
-First you drop and olive and then I sit on my hat. It all fits perfectly.
-Oh yes, but you can't do that trick without dropping some of the olives. It takes practice.
-What, to sit on my hat.
-No, to drop an olive. Now, if your going to be angry with me, what can I do?
-Go away!
-No, I was here first. [he walks away in a huff]

While he hates her right now, she's already fallen in love with him and begins her pursuit, culminating the next morning with a call to his house to help her with "Baby," a leopard her big game hunting brother has sent her. She has mistaken him for a zoologist, so he is the only one who can help her with a wild cat. He's about to hang up when she feigns being attacked by Baby, and he jumps to save her, in spite of his marriage that afternoon. We can clearly see that he's fallen for her as well, even if he can't. All of this in only the first fifteen minutes of the film! From here, she takes him to her aunt's house where the comedy really gets going.

I've gone into enough plot already, but suffice it to say that the resulting mistaken identities, farcical chases and general craziness is some of the funniest stuff I've seen in some time. Hepburn's determination and manipulative sweetness is absolutely charming and, though she'd never play this kind of role again, her performance is appealing and memorable. Grant is far less a heartthrob here than I'm used to and, instead, he plays this sap with relish. At one point, at the aunt's house, Hepburn steals his clothes so he can't leave and he's forced to put on a frilly bathrobe where, of course, he meets the aunt who has just come home. He opens the door for her:

-What do you want?
-Who are you?
-Who are you?!
-Well, who are you?!
-What'd'ya want?
-Who are you?
-I don't know. I'm not quite myself today.
-Well, you look perfectly idiotic in those clothes.
-These aren't my clothes.
-Well, where are your clothes.
-I've lost my clothes.
-But why are you wearing these clothes?
-Because I just went gay all of a sudden!

His little hop while saying that final line is perfectly flamboyant. This would be the first time "gay" was used in this context in Hollywood, though the remark would only serve to make the aunt believe he's completely crazy.

Situationally, the film is utter chaos, often as reminiscent of the Marx Brothers as anything, but this anarchy is held tightly in check by director Howard Hawks. His direction is very straightforward, featuring exceedingly long takes that let the performers pull their lines and pratfalls (which they perform themselves) with a realism that is virtually non-existent in film today. This is testament to the actors' abilities and Hawks' trust in them, which all works to near perfection., While I have a general disdain for animals in film, it is really pretty well-done here. I certainly can't guarantee that no animals were harmed in the making of the picture (there was certainly no ASPCA on the set), the leopard lends a fairly innocuous level of danger and the dog who steals the bone (of course) is a total pro and is the same terrier who plays Asta in the Thin Man films. He's no Rin-Tin-Tin, but he's pretty good.

Honestly, there's a little bit of bloat in the second act; they spend a little too long building for jokes that have minimal payoff. It could be about ten minutes shorter, I suppose, but those ten minutes are a small price to payu for one of the finest screwball comedies ever conceived. If you've never seen Bringing Up Baby, do yourself a favor and watch it; it's a hell of a lot of fun.

[Next: The Philadelphia Story]

Shameless Self-promotion blogging: The Economic Crisis as Security Concern

Another piece of mine went up at Global Comment this weekend.

Those “Oh my god, the Bush era is over” moments are getting fewer and farther between now as the Obama administration settles in.

The easy-to-accomplish changes have happened, and now the hard work has set in. Congress fought bitterly over the economic stimulus plan, and a second nominee for the Commerce department has dropped out before confirmation hearings.

But in the car Friday morning, I had one of those moments where I pounded the steering wheel and cheered for the voice on the radio again.

The voice this time belonged to the new director of national intelligence, retired four-star admiral Dennis Blair. And what he said was, “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications.”

The director of intelligence, the person in charge of keeping the United States safe from external threats, said that the economy is the biggest security concern.

read on.

Also, my partner in crime Matt has a great piece up there about Avigdor Lieberman and the Israeli election.

People Who Clearly Know Nothing About Films Should Avoid List-Making

There are so many easy things to pick apart on the movie-equivalent of this ridiculous music list a few years back. Let me just say that, no, The Dark Knight is not "conservative" - you clearly missed that entire bit about surveillance and "this is wrong" and "no man should have this much power". And Brazil's criticism and portrayal of "national-security scares, universal police surveillance, bureaucratic arrogance, a callous elite...and government use of torture" hardly renders it a paragon of conservative virtues. And just because people still discuss Red Dawn doesn't mean it's great - people still discuss Manos: Hands of Fate, after all...

The Peace Progressives

Rob needed a bit of extra time to get his review of the last chapter of Herring's From Colony and Superpower so we are waiting until next Sunday to discuss the next chapter. In his reply on the 1920s last week, he discussed the Peace Progressives. They were a group of lawmakers (largely Republicans from rural states) who believed in world peace and fiscal responsibility. Rob notes:

they made the (almost heretical in the current political climate) connection that weapons cost money, and that the interest of small government is best served by tight limitations on the size of military forces. The pursuit of international routes to peace (Kellogg-Briand Pact, for example) abetted the interest in fiscal responsibility by reducing the need for large military establishments. I think it's odd that this combination (preference for low tax, low domestic expenditure, low defense expenditure) seems to occur so rarely in the American political context; perhaps the development of the military-industrial complex served to capture pro-business (such that the term has any meaning...) legislators, or the perceived threat of communism helped purge Republican party doves?

An interesting point. These Peace Progressives, many of whom became the "isolationists" of the 1930s who tried to stay out of World War II, have been unfairly vilified. Their actions made perfect sense at the time--it seemed that ending war was possible. They didn't respond particularly well to the rise of Hitler and Japanese militarism, but they were also supported by a lot of people in this country. It's highly unfair to accuse them of not foreseeing the rise of Nazi Germany and to laugh at the peace treaties of the 1920s.

I do want to caution though about taking the Peace Progressives as some kind of model today. It sounds great--I'm for peace and I'm a progressive! I'll write more about this, probably tomorrow, particularly in the context of the Progressives of the 1900s and 1910s, but I'm seeing a lot of people on the left starting to identify with these older movements based on the common ground of name and a shared desire to reform. That's fine, but these movements don't provide us much guidance for the present. The Peace Progressives were responding to the disaster of World War I and the violation of Washington's Farewell Address, two issues with virtually no relevance for the present. As I said in my post on the 20s last week, the decade feels like the last gasp of pre-modern America colliding with a young and headstrong moderism. A lot of people, importantly from rural states, were uncomfortable with much of this, including an activist US foreign policy that consistently embroiled the nation with conflicts around the world. As Herring points out, the Peace Progressives did help end the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua, avoid war with Mexico, and cut off funds for naval construction. Surely the first two of these things were very good and the last is ambivalent.

Of course Rob's point remains valid. Almost no one will call for a reduced Defense Department budget. Despite our severe financial problems, this sacred cow cannot be touched. Rob is certainly an expert of absurd military programs, but I'm sure if people started seriously discussing it, Republicans (and many conservative Democrats too) would use a strategy that combined calling Democrats soft on terrorism with saying that the military provides a lot of jobs. The latter point is true but at a very high cost rate per job. Soldiers don't get paid a lot but planes and submarines are insanely expensive for the amount of jobs they create. Barney Frank is arguing for a reduced military budget in The Nation and he is a pretty powerful guy. But he's also a voice in the Congressional wilderness on this issue.

Unintended Consequences

One of the big themes of environmental history is unintended consequences. No matter what we do, nature is going to respond in ways that we don't expect.

However, in the present, is it too much to ask for that people actually think through the consequences of their actions? The case of Macquarie Island is a perfect case in point. Like many islands, Macquarie has been deeply affected by in the introduction of non-native species. Rats and snakes have ripped through native bird and small mammal communities in Hawaii, the Aleutian Islands, and throughout the world. Pigs have had incredible effects as well.

In recent years, scientists and activists have moved to eliminate some non-native species from islands. In general, I think this is a good thing. Islands hold a lot of endemic species. Although many have gone extinct because of human intervention (killing, introducing non-native species, settlement, agriculture), some are trying to hold on. So it seems like it would make a lot of sense to get the cats off Macquarie. The cats were killing the birds. So in 1985, Australian scientists launched a successful program to get rid off them.

The problem is, if you are going to get rid of one non-native species, doesn't it make sense to try and get rid of them all? Or at least all the mammal species? Because with the cats gone, the non-native rabbits took over, denuding the island's plant cover quickly.

“Our findings show that it’s important for scientists to study the whole ecosystem before doing eradication programs,” said Arko Lucieer, a University of Tasmania remote-sensing expert and a co-author of the paper. “There haven’t been a lot of programs that take the entire system into account. You need to go into scenario mode: ‘If we kill this animal, what other consequences are there going to be?’ ”

Well, duh! How do all these programs go through with this simplistic notion of getting rid of one species and not thinking through the ecosystem? This is really incredible. The article discusses many more examples of this as well. Sometimes it is complicated. For some birds such as the Southwestern willow flycatcher, their native habitat has been so destroyed that they actually rely on non-native salt cedar for survival. But in a lot of other cases, a combination of shallow thinking and poor judgement (and quite possibly financial constraints to be fair), have led to disasters like Macquarie. On that island, a new plan is about to be enacted to wipe out rats, mice, and rabbits. Hard to do, but at least the scientists claim to be preparing backup plans in case things don't work out and trying to think through the long-term ecological effects of these changes.

Historical Image of the Day

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field.

Field was a justice from 1863-97, the second longest tenure of any associate justice. Although named to the court by Lincoln, Field played an important role in turning the focus of the court away from black rights and toward protecting big business. He dissented in Munn v Illinois, allowing states to regulate railroads within their borders. He opposed the graduated income tax, anti-trust laws, and the Interstate Commerce Commission. He also sided with the majority in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Despite my intense dislike of almost every major decision Field made, he had a fine beard.