Prisons and the Profit Motive

Clarence Page at the Chicago Tribune has a good op-ed about the two Pennsylvania judges who pleaded guilty to sentencing thousands of children to jail in exchange for $2.6 million in kick-backs from for-profit prisons.

Prisons plus the profit motive do not make for good public policy.

What a Gun Does in Mexico Stays in Mexico

New York Times article today explains how the drug war in Mexico is fueled by smuggled guns from the United States. The core of the story is this sentence:

The gun laws in the United States allow the sale of multiple military-style rifles to American citizens without reporting the sales to the government, and Mexicans search relatively few cars and trucks going south across their border.

Big point: our wocka-wocka crazy gun laws, which suggest some worrying things about the priorities of our population but do not usually result directly in Beirut-style violence, have their worst effects not in our country but abroad.  Kind of like our frat boys.

Robot Armies

Baber's AA-12

Nice article in the New Yorker by Evan Ratliff on robot weaponry. Apparently, we’ve got the hardware but the military remains cautious about deploying it. Jerry Baber, the subject of the article and the inventor of a number of combat robots, says that the soldiers on the ground are all anxious to get robots out there (possibly the first time workers have actually sought to have their labor replaced by machines) but the Pentagon continues to wonder if we are indeed ready.

The key to Baber’s robots is his AA-12 gun, a fully automatic shotgun (most shotguns have way to much problem with recoil to be automatic). Baber “believes that the AA-12 is the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.” After he perfected it, he was overwhelmed with orders (even though the guns cost over $10,000) but he “decided that the gun was too powerful to sell outside the military.” Baber:

I don’t want that on my conscience–something I created going out and killing people all over the damn place. I am not worried about what it does over in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s fine.

It’s hard to know what to say about a viewpoint like this, other than to remark on the obvious cognitive dissonance. It seems to me that we are going to encounter moral stupidity of this sort more and more often as we move from labor-intensive warfare to capital-intensive warfare. In labor-intensive warfare, one can expect casualties on both sides. In capital-intensive warfare, it is drones, robots, and high-flying planes versus soldiers (or, more often, civilians). The apex of this must surely be the Bosnian war, where NATO forces suffered only two casualties during the war and well under five hundred in the aftermath, mostly due to land mines.

Thus far, the anti-war left in this country has mainly focused on the number of U.S. soldiers dying in Iraq. That number, however, is extraordinarily small given the duration of the war–it is around 4,250. Compare that to the nearly 100,000 individually confirmed Iraqi civilian deaths and survey-based estimates for total violent deaths in Iraq since the war began that go well over one million. Once we start getting Baber’s robots in the field, you can expect those ratios to become even more skewed. We are going to have to start becoming much more comfortable with a moral calculus that registers the cost of war not in terms of our own soldiers lost, but in terms of foreign peoples killed, some of whom will be killed by robots.

Bard College Fires Professor for Having an Opinion

Bard College has just dismissed Joel Kovel, who holds a post as Distinguished Professor of Social Science. Kovel had an appointment outside of the tenure system, but he has been at Bard since 1988 and is a well established and well respected scholar. His book White Racism (1972) was nominated for a National Book Award.

Kovel’s explanation, which I am inclined to credit, is that he was fired for writing a controversial book, Overcoming Zionism, with the University of Michigan Press. According to Kovel’s statement, which is available here, both the president of Bard and one of the faculty members on the committee whose evaluation of Kovel led to his dismissal are strong Zionists. Kovel also reports having had an endowed chair taken away from him by the president of Bard three or four weeks after Kovel started publishing articles criticizing Zionism.

Historian Ron Radosh trumpets Kovel’s firing as “a victory for sanity in academia” and accuses Kovel of shoddy scholarship. But Radosh and Kovel are on opposite sides of many ideological fences, Radosh being a neocon and Kovel being a Marxist. For my part, I have met Kovel a few times through his daughter and have always found him to be a pleasant guy. This strikes me as a very bad move on Bard’s part.

Addendum: After posting the above I received a polite note from Leon Botstein, President of Bard, in response to an e-mail I sent. Botstein reminded me that Kovel was not fired, at least not technically. He had been on a five-year contract. “In consultation with faculty, Bard elected not to renew Kovel’s contract because, like all colleges, it faces severe fiscal restraints and is doing everything it can to preserve the employment of its full-time faculty.”  Bard is “sorry and astonished” at Kovel’s allegations, “which have no basis in fact.” Botstein also sent a letter to Kovel, since made public, in which he wrote to Kovel, “I am delighted that you hold views that many consider wrong or dangerous. You are not as controversial as you would like to believe.”

Someone is clearly lying here. Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP, has expressed “concern about the recent nonappointment of Professor Joel Kovel” and suggests that Bard should follow due process in hearing Kovel’s grievance. He also suggests that an AAUP investigation may be necessary. One hopes that, either through an impartial hearing at Bard or through an AAUP investigation,  we can get to the bottom of this.

Mezzo Piano: Softly Comes the Revolution

Fritz Machlup, in his remarkable book, The Production of Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962), remarks of the arrival upon the epistemic scene of a new sort of knowledge, “unwanted knowledge,” bits of information that are best ignored but that “stick . . . like wads of chewing gum to the shoe soles of unhappy pedestrians and resist all efforts to remove them.” This may seem like a strange and obscure category of knowledge, comments Machlup, but in fact much of the economy–the advertising sector–is dedicated to generating and transmitting unwanted knowledge. As a proportion of GDP, our investment in unwanted knowledge is high. And that investment is effective. As an exercise, try, over the course of a month, to see how little information you can manage to pick up about the lives of the tabloid celebrities, about Apple’s newest product line, about all of the shitty new movies that you have no intention of seeing. You will find that ignorance, like virginity of a red-state governor’s daughter in the spring time, is a nearly impossible state to maintain.

Of the daily invasions into our cognitive space, the most effective intrusions, remarks Machlup, are musical in nature. “Earworms,” the fragments of melody that loop over and over in our heads, are so difficult to escape that for some people, according to Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia (2008), they become a debilitating condition. Jingles aside, it seems that unwanted knowledge always benefits from the proper sonic setting. Muzak is the best example of this: sound that puts us in the mood to shop. For an illustration of the extraordinarily suggestive power of music and sound, think of what it is like to watch a movie, especially a schmaltzy movie, without the sound. Scenes that would be tear-jerkers become transparently silly. Sound can, if properly used, disable our critical faculties with remarkable efficiency.

Luckily, there is a solution: ear plugs. I propose ear plugs, with at least 70% seriousness, as not only a tool for better living but also as a significant contribution to the development of radical consciousness for mature mass societies. Ear pluggism sets forth from the proposition that humans are, sadly, physiologically ill-equipped to do battle with the forces of advanced capitalism. Advertisers and product designers (two professions now nearly identical) have learned that nothing distracts us so well as shiny objects and catchy melodies, and they have littered the landscape with distractions. Such an environment is stupefying; to the person of average constitution, shopping is now far easier than thinking. In these days, purposeful sensory deprivation becomes a political act. Too much of our progressive political tradition has been preoccupied with sharpening our senses–”enlightening” our minds, seeing “through” various lies, etc. What is needed is, rather, a retreat from our senses, into our minds. Ear plugs achieve this effect perfectly. Half deaf, one gains a certain distance from one’s environment that is surprisingly peaceful and productive. Robbed of its full sonic range, the world becomes less like a darkened movie theater and more like an open book–available for consultation, but easily ignored. Even sights and smells lose their immediacy when the world is soft-pedaled. And with this sensory alienation comes criticism, an ability to perceive things, not through the body, but through the mind.

Hearers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your jingles!

learning how to do my part

The following talk is posted on Fordham Law School’s events calendar.  Somehow I feel like I’m not going to walk out of this thing with any workable pick up lines, althought it may teach me how to solve racism.  Too bad you two are already married or you could join the cause.

Why the Black Community Need Black Women to Marry White Men

Date(s): 03.26.09 | Thurs 
Time: 12:30pm 
Location: Law School Room 430B&C 
Speaker: Richard Banks 
Affiliation: Professor, Stanford Law

Richard Banks of Stanford Law will present his paper entitled “Why the Black Community need Black women to marry White men.”

Dwight Macdonald, We Miss You, Part 1 of 14

I have been leafing through the journalism of Dwight Macdonald (1906-1982) for the past few months and have an ever-growing affection for the main. Highlights of the Macdonald ouevre are The Root is Man (1946) and “The Responsibility of Peoples” (1945), I suppose, but, like Orwell, Macdonald is to be treasured for the little things. In fact, Macdonald is quite like Orwell: lucid, caring, curious, and above all sane. Orwell wrote for Macdonald’s journal, politics, but then again so did Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Bataille, McLuhan, Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills (those were the days!).

Anyway, I have just now looked at Macdonald’s essay “On the Psychology of Killing” (1944). Macdonald discusses the increase of reports of neuropsychiatric disorders among servicemen. It seems that WWII was not only maiming bodies, but it was destroying minds (sound familiar?). Macdonald, however, thinks this is “cheering news”:

I should be concerned if the N. P. rate failed to increase sharply within the armed forces. Is it unreasonable to speculate that, blocked from political expression, outraged human nature seeks out this back door, so to speak, of protest? . . . May we not assume that a good proportion of them were simply too sane to fit into this lunatic pattern of total war?

I wonder if Macdonald’s words could be of any solace to the many people who suffer from PTSD.  Whatever its virtues, there is indeed something insane about war–to be affected by is not an indication that you are weak, but that you are still human.

Corrigendum: Orwell did not write for Macdonald’s journal politics; he wrote the wartime “London Letter” column for Partisan Review, where Macdonald was an editor. Nevertheless, they corresponded frequently and enthusiastically, with Macdonald declaring Orwell to be “my kind of guy.”

Racism: It’s Not Personal

This is in response to Ron Ron’s post, below.

Although I’m sure none of this would be news to Hollinger, Einhorn, or Martin, I think that these discussions can almost invariably be clarified by making the distinction between personal and institutional racism. Here is how Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton parse it (they call use the term “individual racism” to refer to what I call “personal racism”) in their still-useful book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967):

When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individualism racism, widely deplored by most segments of society. But when in that same city–Birmingham, Alabama–five hundred black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.

It seems to me that the overwhelming fact about racism in the United States since World War II is that personal racism has decreased enormously while institutional racism remains strong. So, we just elected a black president, white people rarely use the n-word, and if you are applying to Harvard your application is probably helped, not harmed, by your being black. On the other hand, it is undeniable that we still live with racial apartheid and that blacks lag far behind whites in almost every indicator of welfare we have.

My understanding of Hollinger’s position is that he thinks we have largely got beyond personal racism and that we should no longer accept its terms (i.e., we should discard “identity politics”). This is how he begins the epilogue of Postethnic America:

No industrialized nation has so large a percentage of its population in prison as does the United States. And no such nation is producing so many mixed-race people. These two facts about the United States are not directly related. Yet they bear mention together because of the antithetical implications these two realities have for a postethnic America.

Mixed-race people are an emblem for our conquest of personal racism: we have literally loved each other so much that our old categories of race no longer apply (this is Bulworth’s “voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction”). Our black-heavy prison population is an emblem of the presence of institutional racism or, more generally put, the failure of our society to provide opportunities for those on the bottom, regardless of race. Too often, the two truths symbolized by our mixed-race and prison populations are simply lobbed at each other (“Racism is dead!” “No, it’s not!”).  But those two truths are not contradictory.

It seems that one of the most effective ideological props in bolstering economic and racial apartheid is the declaration that because personal racism has declined, all racism behind us, and any failure of black people to achieve must have something to do with their genes, culture, or attitudes. So that’s an argument for the Martin/Einhorn position. But Hollinger also has a point: when we dig in our heels and insist that racism is thriving in our society, we often end up turning toward shrill identity politics that fracture our intellectual landscape and make it harder for us to address the real structural problems, which are racially inflected but which are not entirely racial in their origin. There may indeed be some tactical advantages to insisting on an “explicitly black politics” but there is also something a little nineteenth-century about continuing to draw bright racial lines where few actually exist and where, as we have seen from Obama, race and racism can mean very different things depending on where you fall in the class pyramid.

Obama and the Future of Identity Politics

Post-ethnic Obama?

This evening I went to a panel discussion put on by the Berkeley History Department on the significance of Obama’s election. The most interesting part of the event was an exchange between one of the speakers, Professor Waldo Martin, and an audience member and colleague, Professor David Hollinger. Martin was the third and most ambivalent speaker, and I think also the most emotional. He prefaced his talk by joking that although normally he spoke mostly of the cuff, he had prepared the entire speech tonight because otherwise he feared he wouldn’t “make much sense.” The talk itself he began by noting his own “failure of imagination.” As someone who had come of age during the “late Jim Crow era” and identified as part of the subsequent black power generation, he explained, he had not believed that the election of a black man to the presidency was possible in his lifetime.

Martin’s main point, however, was that Obama’s election did not signal that the struggle for racial equality was won. He used terms like “white power structure,” “white supremacy,” and “white racism”–I think very deliberately to emphasize that these terms were still relevant. He pointed out that Obama was not really a black leader because he did not represent black people specifically, and that for this very reason it was as necessary as ever to sustain an explicitly black politics.

As part of this argument, Martin alluded to the views expressed in his colleague David Hollinger’s controversial book, Post-Ethnic America, which came out in 1995 and is subtitled “Beyond Multiculturalism.” That book argued that identity politics was ultimately a dead end and tried to imagine a “post-ethnic” basis of identity. Martin, of course, was highly skeptical of the premise, contending that identity politics would continue to matter. After the talk Hollinger, who sat at the back, stood up to comment. With his typical diplomacy, he immediately seized on Martin’s somewhat uncertain tone and many qualifications of his views. “I particularly admired Waldo’s courage and typical display of intellectual honesty,” Hollinger said, “in admitting that he believed the election of a black president impossible.” Hollinger then said that part of the reason Obama had, in fact, won, was that there were people out there who could imagine a black president. Further, that was precisely what Hollinger and others like him were trying to do, that is, identify the signs of racial progress in order to embolden all of us to strive to eliminate the remaining barriers to racial equality, and thus to redefine the very meaning of race.

Interestingly, Martin did not respond, but allowed another presenter, Professor Robin Einhorn, to do so. Einhorn tried to enunciate clearly what she took to be Martin’s position: every time people start talking about progress in the fight against racism, she explained, others are ready to declare victory and go home, thus effacing the continuing importance of the issue. In other words, and this is certainly what Martin was saying, every progressive step potentially opens the door to regression and often does. In effect Einhorn was saying to Hollinger that, whatever it is you think or hope your are doing by claiming to get past race, your claims will end up as grist for the mill for those who simply want the issue of race to go away.

A Theory of Hipster Fashion, Male Variety

From the Dept. of Obvious Once You Know It:

I recently hit upon the key to male hipster fashion. The tattoos, mustaches, trucker hats, mullets, PBR, Western-style shirts–it’s classic white working class, just with tighter jeans and fixies. Give him some Buddy Holly glasses and Joe the Plumber could probably do all right for himself at a Williamsburg loft party.

The obvious question is: why? I don’t think it’s like the adoption of the Afro in the 1970s, which was a conscious celebration of “hillbilly” black culture as a form of black pride.  The white college grads who go onto high hipsterdom seem to have nothing but scorn for actual working-class whites. So why style themselves after them? I understand that irony is the warp and woof of hipsterdom, but could that really be the entire explanation?

Your theories, please.