Tejas freedom…

Submitted without comment from our friends in Texas:

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

“We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

…

The three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities, including Mr. de la Teja, a former state historian. The reviewers appointed by conservatives include two who run conservative Christian organizations: David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, a group that promotes America’s Christian heritage; and Rev. Marshall, who preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgments on the nation’s sexual immorality. The third is Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good — and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good — and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

“America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers. “There appears to me too much politics in some of this,” said Lybeth Hodges, a professor of history at Texas Woman’s University and another of the curriculum reviewers.

the words she knows, the tune she hums…

Submitted without comment:

The point of Satanic rock was to scare the Normals while fucking with the minds of its pimple-faced, predominantly male (nerdoid) audience, who needed to create a counter-world, with counter-morals and counter-aesthetics, to empower the nerdoids against the cooler, more successful jocks. But metal had its rivals for the hopelessly angry nerdoid: punk, hardcore and metal’s own competing mutations. The competition forced metal’s leading edge to metamorphose into harder, faster and more violent forms, reaching its apex with the rise of Death Metal in the mid-80s. Death Metal was as violent, Satanic and musically inaccessible as metal could go, or so it seemed.

And here is where Norway, the comic straight-man character in this dumb, bloody saga, comes in. Norway is not only a completely humorless society (it banned Monty Python’s The Life of Brian for being too offensive, leading to ads in rival Sweden boasting that the movie was “so funny it was banned in Norway!”), but worse, a deeply oppressive society, in a recognizably bland, caring, pious, Social Democratic way. Which raises an interesting question: Do boredom and blandness “count” as real suffering, and if so, do they justify murder the way other forms of oppression make murder seem a likely, even understandable response? The Black Metalists of Norway think so.

The humor and empty boasts inherent in Death Metal were lost on Norway’s youth. They took Death Metal literally, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t “evil” or “authentic” enough. There were too many “poseurs.” And more important, too few genuine corpses for a scene that claimed to be so obsessed with death and violence. So Black Metal offered up one of its own as its first sacrificial corpse: the lead singer of Mayhem, who ingeniously had changed his name to “Dead,” offed himself with a shotgun. His friend and lead guitarist, Euronymous, discovered Dead’s brains splattered all over their apartment. So the first thing Euronymous does is run down to the village store to buy film, run back, snap a whole bunch of photos of Dead’s corpse, boast to all his friends about it, then call the cops. Now that is fuckin’ cool, dude.

…

Where as the nerdoids in Lords of Chaos were vainly trying to recapture the lost, centuries-old glory of their Viking ancestors in a diminished modern Norway, uber-nerdoids Richard Perle and David Frum seem hell bent on destroying contemporary America’s glorious imperial war machine right at the very peak of its power. Their plan for leading America, lemming-like, over the cliff of self-destruction is laid out in their sparsely-worded manifesto, An End to Evil. The title alone shows how very Black Metal these grown-up war nerds are.

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The roof is on fire…

It hurts me to write this post but Gil Troy is full of shit.

To wit:

Wow, the descent from “Yes We Can” to “I screwed up” has been rapid – and unnerving. It hurts me to write this post. Like the millions who were in Washington on Inauguration Day, and the billions who watched around the world, I want Barack Obama to succeed, America needs Obama to succeed. But as American patriots – and as historians – we cannot be so blinded by our hopes and his charms that we overlook the truth. Obama’s Keystone Kops Cabinet farce would be funny if it were not so tragic. His utter failure to put together an effective team without getting so much egg on his face plays to one of my greatest fears about Obama. As an academic who has never been an administrator (beyond one year as department chair), I wondered how he, with only minimally more administrative experience, could take on one of the most complicated executive jobs in history. So far, the results are depressing.

Let’s imagine what would have happened had George W. Bush entered the White House, with one nominee for Commerce Secretary already withdrawn because of an investigation the most basic background check should have uncovered. All we would have heard about was Republicans’ corruption and Team Bush’s incompetence. Imagine it was followed by a trio of tax slobs, topped by a new Commerce Secretary from across the aisle who realized a week after his nomination that he and the administration were incompatible. (One wonders, did it take that long for Judd Gregg to realize that he was a conservative Republican and that the Republicans lost, he was being hired by a Democratic president?) And then, to top it all off, imagine if one of the tax slackers, who, by the way, was now in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, whose services were so in need his careless paperwork was overlooked, launched a critical financial program in such a nervous, vague, hamhanded way, the stock market plummeted after his presentation. This personnel trainwreck would have created a Tsunami of contemptuous laughter, particularly among reporters, pundits, and comedians.

Obama hasn’t caught shit for his appointments? I’m not sure if Dr. Troy has been watching the same cable news as I have been – Obama’s been taking it from all corners. And comedians haven’t been making fun of him and his personnel problems? Has Dr. Troy not been watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?

As for “liberal bias” of the media, it seems to be going the other way for Obama – as in the “liberal press” seems to be holding him to a much higher standard than they held George W. Bush for much of his administration. The list of incompetents and people with dubious backgrounds that the media and Congress rubbed stamped is quite long (for example: anyone Bush appointed to run the Justice Department).

As for this bit:

Careful analyses of the 2008 presidential campaign will discover a systematic bias in favor of Obama. His story was fresher, more compelling, and thus less scrutinized than Hillary Clinton’s, John McCain’s, or the other also-rans. Even some journalists have admitted in retrospect that many reporters liked Obama, loved the idea of Obama, and frequently gave him a free pass.

I have one thing to say: I know that I’m only a lowly grad student but Dr. Tory show your fucking work. Do not just assert such sweeping claims without quoting anybody or any study. I mean – fuck – he could have found something on FOX News in like two seconds.

But that wouldn’t fit the narrative would it?

UPDATE: Point, set, match…

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Like the lost catacombs of Egypt only God knows where we stuck it…

Did you know that Howard Zinn has destroyed the historical profession?

No? You didn’t? Larry DeWitt would certainly like you to think so.

Before I get started on what DeWitt is arguing exactly, I think an important cavet is in order. I would be remiss if I did not note an important intellectual debt I owe Zinn and his People’s History of the United States. I read that book in my senior year of high school and it was a like the intellectual version of a smack in the face. Zinn’s work changed the way I viewed the world & history and – using hindsight – I would not have gone to down the path towards grad school without that experience. Of course, my politics and historical point-of-view have shifted in the years since that formative experience – I am first to note the numerous problems with Zinn’s book(s). Yet I would remiss if I did not mention this important experience at the beginning.

Ok. On to DeWitt.

Thankfully, for our purposes, DeWitt notes his main problems with Zinn in a very straightforward way:

In my view, the traditional intellectual values of truth and objectivity in historical scholarship are being steadily eroded by the backwash from the passing through our profession of the “postmodern moment.” I typically identify five forms of this erosion: 1) Skeptical Postmodernism; 2) Multicultural Postmodernism; 3) Political Postmodernism; 4) Subjective Postmodernism; and Textualist Postmodernism. Zinn is a practitioner of Political Postmodernism, which views a central purpose of historical scholarship as being to advance one’s political agendas. All of these forms of postmodern declension have one thing in common: they all seek to undermine the intellectual values of truth and objectivity in historical scholarship.

Post-Modernism, of course! DeWitt needs to be careful he in that he does not conflate his categories. Zinn is certainly a post-modernist in his skepticism and overt commitment to scholarship as a political act but he is not a “multi-culturalist” in the sense that most people (especially conservatives) think of it. His Marxism prevents it. Zinn’s multiculturalism is the multiculturalism of the proletariat – uniting all workers in their pan-cultural oppression. (This of course, leads to the question of who exactly are “the People” in the A People’s History?)

Anyway, DeWitt argues that Zinn’s post-modernism stands in contrast to how history has been (and should) be practiced:

Traditionally, historians have assumed an obligation to strive for a fair and balanced account of the past. In a word, we thought we had an obligation to strive for objectivity in our histories.

Zinn in contrast “seek[s] to undermine the intellectual values of truth and objectivity in historical scholarship.” To DeWitt it doesn’t matter “that earlier generations of historians may have failed to honor the ideal of objectivity” because he feels that their basic value system still retains its worth. Because without it we are left with an “intellectual sewer” of “biases”.

As he puts it:

In insisting that history ought to be pursued with the aim of recovering objective truth, I am not demanding perfection in historians any more than I am expecting to find it anywhere else in life. I am only expecting that historians strive, to the best of their abilities, to provide a fair and balanced account of history, and that they remain open-minded enough to periodically adjust their point-of-view when they notice their failings in this effort. But if one starts with the aim of pushing a political agenda, then neither fairness or balance, nor open-mindedness, nor willingness to correct one’s errors, are ever likely to be in evidence.

Dewitt’s supposed “checkmate” thought experiment is this:

[I]magine that Newt Gingrich (a former university professor of history, recall) were to give us his reader of American history from the bottom-up. No doubt, it would feature stories of historical actors whose actions somehow rebounded to the greater glory of the Republican Revolution and to such sainted figures as Ronald Reagan. Would Zinn and company find this agreeable? But if this kind of selectivity is fair game for Zinn, it is as well for Gingrich.

The thing is such a book already exists. And it is terrible (I have read it) and actually more intellectual dishonest than Zinn’s. Why is it more intellectually dishonest than Zinn’s A People History? Because the authors of A Patriot’s History are – like DeWitt – trying to be “objective” in their history and provide a “fair and balanced” approached to their subject. The authors of A Patriot’s History share DeWitt’s belief that:

Indeed, what an honest and balanced history looks like is one that includes both [history from the bottom up & "traditional" history] simultaneously, in their proper proportions. Getting things in their proper proportions means, among other things, not misrepresenting a small achievement as a large one or a large one as being of no importance.

The fundamental question is how the hell do we decide what exactly is the “proper proportions” for things to be in? Because such things are absolutely not self-evident. Human beings are not “god”, they are not unable to step outside of themselves and make “objective” – “neutral” – value judgments. Whatever value judgments a human being makes – historians included – are mortally “compromised” by their own value systems and historical time and place.

Historians are constantly – and necessarily – making choices about what to include and what to exclude in their histories. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that – it is necessary. But the question is how are those choices made? Those judgments are fundamentally political – perhaps ideological would be a better word. Even historians making such choices “objectively”  are being political. The great contribution of post-modernism to history is the understanding that objectivity is in and of itself an ideology with its own assumptions and biases. (I think there was a famous book written about this)

Because of this it is best for historians to be honest and forth right and show why they make the choices they do and not hide behind the smoke screen of objectivity. Zinn – despite his countless problems as a scholar – is at least honest about where his scholarship is coming from. The man and his books are Marxist through and through. It would be nice if other historians – like Larry DeWitt – where as honest with their ideological assumptions as Zinn. It would lead to a more honest and open debate.

Think of the children!

What would the children think if they saw Buzz Aldrin punch some crazy conspriacy theory guy in the face?

Laugh, most likely.

“…and lava.”

Submitted without comment…

…timely though, I think.

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Terror and hope…

Here is Paul Krugman on Hardball both scaring the shit out of me and giving me some hope about our economic situtation:

Krugman does a good job of correcting Matthews when he goes off on his tangents and gets the facts wrong about the Great Depression.

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Someone once said something about a club…

So I was thinking, why don’t we try and get a book or discussion club going over the winter? What I mean about this that all of us contributors read/view the same thing and then we each do a post on it. We also invite any of our readers (if there are any) to contribute too.

Some suggestions of topics:

Since Dark Knight is coming out soon we could do watch that and read the Killing Joke and compare them. They have some serious similarities but I think important differences.

Or maybe we could do something on Dune, I’ve been looking for an excuse to reread that book for awhile.

Maybe, we do something Star Wars – we could read Traitor and Betrayl and talk about the nature of the Force and morality in the Star Wars universe.

We could read a history book too – or something philosophical – or whatever. I’m up for suggestions.

What does everybody think of my (crazy?) idea?

Gordon fucking Wood…

Over at the Edge of the American West, Ari has a list of five books that “explain” American history (pre-1876). The list is as good as any – arbitrary but insightful. I’m familiar with all but one of the books on his list and I find his inclusion of Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution to be both interesting and strangely funny. It seems that no matter how hard one might try, there is simply no way to escape that book.

As you may or may not know, I’m in grad school studying history and – honestly – you can’t escape Wood and Radicalism. Most people, even those who love the book, admit that it’s – at best – incomplete. At worst the book could be said to ignore huge swaths of people – women, African-Americans (especially) Native-Americans – of Early America and one can’t help but almost forget that slavery existed after the Revolution. So, even though the book is admittedly deeply flawed – in one way or the other – why do people keep coming back to it? Even people who deeply disagree with it’s premise and/or conclusions?

Is it because Wood’s prose is very readable – at least in Radicalism - and thus easy to assign in both undergrad and graduate level? Probably. Is it deep down that because most Americans – even those most critical of America -  want to find something radical about our revolution? Maybe. Is it because Wood’s simple and straightforward thesis – America goes from monarchy to republicanism to democracy in one easy breezy sweep of history – is so easy to “write against” and critique? Quite likely.

I find Wood to be such annoying figure in modern early American historiography – he’s insightful but frustratingly close minded. He managed to write a book – ok, a collection of edited essays – about the Founders that was not hagiography nor boring but instead provocative. Unlike Joesph Ellis, for example. But he also spent a good portion of that book – and his latest – endlessly bashing and degrading cultural history.

His central arguments in about early American history seems to be:

1. The last fifty years of early American historiography has been pretty damn good…
2. But there is too much of it!
3. And there is too much gender/race/class in modern historiography!

There is an elitist element that someone – especially someone who is not going to graduate school at Harvard, Yale, or Wood’s Brown – can’t help but detect in Wood’s sweeping denoucement of the multipicity of voices in the American historical profession. It – almost – seems that if you aren’t a graduate of one of the big name institutions – the Ivies, UVA, William and Mary, Stanford, etc. – you’re using up intellectual air that could be better spent; like by Wood’s graduate students. And his attitude towards gender, race, and class in history (especially gender) is that – man, that shit should have stopped with A Midwife’s Tale and an Unredeemed Capitive. Which is just closeminded and – again – elitist.

So, I think that Wood is at once one of the most interesting and the most frustrating early Americanists today. More often than not, my frustrations with him out weight how interesting I find him. Yet I still keep coming back to his work. Why?

Mirth…

I’m in a terrible mood. Not only am I still pissed about Bill O’Reilly’s little video – discussed below – and the new Bond film was boring and painfully lame. Thus destroying my renewed faith that we might see something – any fucking thing – new from the Bond franchise after the solid turnaround Casino Royale.

Anyway. Edge of the American West put me in a better mood with this.

Which can be blamed on this:

Hilarious and mood lifting.

And hey there was a volume three and four that I haven’t seen before. Score!