Short lesson on how not to argue for torture, i.e. by torturing logic

I have real problems posting more than once a week.  Not that I have nothing to write about, but I am simply lazy.  After teaching in the morning and working on the book in the afternoon, I am completely knackered (as the British say).  Still, what I have been reading this last week has left me continually dismayed by how much the Obama administration is not changing the warring proclivities of the last few presidencies.  But that is not the subject of this post.  In the midst of this dismayed perusing of our objective Jeffersonian media, I ran across this tasty little tidbit today.  It describes a 24 page “missive” that CIA Director Leon Panetta sent to a federal judge, urging the judge not to release information about the treatment of “terror suspects,” because it might divulge information damaging to national security.  When the echoes of “Duh!” stopped resounding off my walls, I decided it might be okay to take the director at his word…so I read on.

That’s when I found this passage from Panetta’s plea, quoted in the same article above:

I have determined that the disclosure of intelligence about al-Qaida reasonably could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence

And since a few of my students seem to be wandering onto the blog, let’s make this a short lesson on how not to argue.

1) don’t write in first person, especially not the singular if you are part of an organization, or group, like “government intelligence” (they’re watching us right now).  First person sounds like personal opinion, which sounds like an unconvincing argument, which in turn sounds like the difference between “like totally” and “friends, Romans, countrymen.”

2) Always use concrete language.  Such statements as,  “reasonably could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage” are far too vague.  Who reasonably suspects whom?  I suspect girls fart sometimes and blame it on their dog, but what is this Panetta guy talking about?  What is reasonable (remember that the idea of a round Earth was once though unreasonable)?  What exceptionally grave damage and to whom?  To the director?  The latter part of that statement reminds me of a line from Liar Liar: “I object…because it’s devastating to my case.”

3)Don’t take a government job and you won’t ever have to dissemble like this.  And no, saying “But CIA director Leon Panetta does it” is not a valid excuse.  If CIA director Leon Panetta slammed your mother into the wall, made her undress, waterboarded her, and then threw her Koran in the toilet, would you?  Really, don’t answer that.

and 4) Confucius says, if you give people jobs in which they have to torture other human beings (or rodents of unusual size), they won’t stop…even if that means they have to torture poor blind justice herself, and put logic in the stocks.

That’s enough for now, though I am sure there is more such grandiloquence to come–I mean from the torture invesitgation, not my own pedantry.  Although using the word pedant is kinda pedantic isn’t it?

The Return of Kitsch

I’ve been away.  I’ve been watching awesome (in the old sense), wonderful (in the older sense) films produced somewhere east of Hollywood, in that artistic world of BLAH.  Yes, that’s right friends, I have seen S. Darko and it was okay.  No, not really good, but it did inspire just enough revulsion in me to make me think of Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp, published all those years ago in pre-hippiedom.  Without ruining any of the plot, I will just say that the “time travel” motif of the movie is taken to almost absurd lengths, the visual spectacle of the show made my nerve endings wither and die, and the acting…oh, I’ve said enough.  But, you know, I think it was just bad enough to qualify as kitsch.  Of course, I am using kitsch and camp interchangeably here and that is not quite fitting, but if you feel like quibbling, leave a comment (if you don’t want to leave a comment, feel free to write down your thoughts and place them ceremoniously up your nose).

But back to S. Darko.  It’s main non-sequitur is at the ending (no, not the very Donnie Darko-esque pastiche of sad character sketches as the credits roll, but the supporting character affected by intergalactic space poop that experiences a massive mood swing to spur the final scene), which might have worked in the original but fails epically in this one, is intended to function under the blanket of the story’s driving postmodern temporality.  Once again, epic fail.  Weird for weird’s sake would be fine if it were used only in the interest of some decadent approach to stimulating our senses…like a mood organ, or a wine tasting.  But me thinks I smell something political under the surface of this blatant disregard for coherence, or the “great thrust of history-type nebulous causes”– it’s as though Fisher were trying to sell us on the Singularity.  No not blatantly political, but something that wants me to find god in the machine, and I can’t even find the machine (why did Henry Rollins just come to mind?).

Okay, so that was a bit of my own non-sequiturian nature showing, and obviously I am having a hard time pulling my thoughts away from the book I am working on about postmodern historiography.  But honestly, could we get back to pure kitsch…I want a film so bad that it is really, really good for the commentary it makes about all things really, really bad.  Is that too much to ask?  Well, I haven’t seen it yet, but I have some hope for Drag me to Hell.  If it’s even half as good as any of the Evil Dead Trilogy, wait if it’s even a quarter the move Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn was, then perhaps we shall see a return of disinterested kitsch.  On that note and as a final thought, remember this one (or am I really that old?–I was 13 when this came out).

Where are you when we need you, Frost?

A short post today.  I am road-weary and have seen the entrails of too many airports and shuttlebuses these last two weeks.  Complain, complain.  As I walked through the Atlanta airport, my (almost) final destination, the other day and as I was trying to sort out what I was going to do with the rest of my life (or at least the near future), I found myself reflecting on that old Robert Frost poem.  You  know the one “I took the [road] less traveled by,\and that has made all the difference”–that one that you probably read in high school.  Well, it applied to the professional decisions I was trying to make at the time, but then another thought occurred to me, another ironic meaning of the poem.

I found myself WALKING the entire length of the Atlanta airport, and if you know the airport you know it takes a long time to get from terminal C to baggage claim.  Why walk?  Because after all the crowded airplanes, crowded shuttle buses, not to mention all the little colds and infections I caught from my students last semester, I just didn’t want to be crammed on that tram that would drop me off in 2 minutes at baggage claim with hundreds more people.  So now for my realization–maybe Frost was just a misanthrope (I’m sure this interpretation isn’t original, but it was new to me).  He took the road on which he would be certain to encounter fewer people, and perhaps the “difference” in his life was not entirely positive, was in fact that of a recluse.

Of course, there’s a lesson in that, too, to not do as he does.  Meet new people, shake their hands, hell!, wipe their noise for them if they’re interesting enough–don’t end up like Howard Hughes.  Life’s too short.

Okay, enough cheese for the day (would you like some whine with that?).  Two final thoughts: I am a bit disappointed in this particular Obama decision.  However, I am somewhat proud of students at my alma mater (ra ra for lina lina) for showing some backbone and protesting (not for resorting to violence, but at least they were passionate about something–perhaps the students are starting to withdraw from their SOMA).  Nada mas, Saludos!!

Interdisciplinary Anatomical English

I found a bright spot today among the usual discussions of abolishing tenure, an article that explains how St. John’s University in New York has converted 20 instructors into tenure-track Assistant Professors.  The article does an excellent job of describing the effects (that I can only imagine) on the faculty, mostly the psychological advantage of having a little job security.  That security is one thing that detractors of the tenure process too often forget–many insinuate that the tenure process is merely a way around performance evaluations that are a staple of the business world.  However, in academia, one must remember that an untenured faculty member is not entirely evaluated based on his or her performance after initial hire anyway, at least those evaluations that students turn in every semester are not the basis of whether we get to keep our jobs or not.  The main criterion, unfortunately, is money.  And in a setting in which one’s future depends on the investment of an endowment by faculty-turned-administrators who do not necessarily have training in said investment strategies, there is literally no job security for instructors not on the tenure track.  In other words, the business world is ruining academia.  If we did not rely on Wall Street (see Harvard’s endowment loss, or Washington and Bernie Madoff, etc.), then perhaps university faculty could have the chance to regulate its own personnel.  As is, we are at the whim of the market…and then the business-minded have the gall to tell the University how it should be run!

Obviously, this ray of light from St. John’s has not had an overly positive effect on me.  Maybe it is because of the Catholic mission of St. John’s–not that I am opposed in any particular way to Catholic Universities…I myself attended one as an undergraduate.  I cannot help, however, but remember the recent controversy over Notre Dame’s invitation to Obama to speak at commencement.  Apparently, a group of bishops (and students) are outraged over Obama’s abortion rights history and feel he should be uninvited.  Perhaps it is wrong of me to conflate the two schools (one is Holy Cross and the other Vincentian), but I would have to see St. John’s invite Obama without protest before I was mollified.  Still, there is perhaps a divide at either of those universities between administration and faculty–in fact, this divide seems to be the main feature of the discussion about tenure today.  So, I must admit that I am not so disappointed in the institution of the academy (as a community of faculty) as I am with people in general.

But should I really be surprised?  Even at my own disappointment?  Last week, I watched this humble blog receive more hits than it had in a couple of months, and the reason appears to be the title and tags of my last blog post “Lady Liberty IS naked under that toga.”  The tags of the post included “nude” and “nudity,” and these appear to have attracted those using random search engine terms.  Now, at first this popularity of my last post appears to be wholly unrelated to my above discussion of tenure and business, but I assure you there is a direct relationship.  In business terms, I think, the academy is not marketing itself to students in the correct way.  And doing so might help us to earn the respect of the business world to a greater extent.  There are currently no supermodels used in college recruiting videos, and when a student poses in Playboy many universities still consider censuring the student.  This treatment appears to be the wrong tack, and I have a modest proposal.

Instead of suppressing students’ baser instincts, perhaps the academy ought to offer courses in which students do nothing but chug beer and toss corn nuts at scantily clad models (or whatever it is that MOST students want, because it sure isn’t learning to think critically about the world around them).  Of course, then businesses would have no basis for judging candidates for entry-level positions.  How does one consider the qualifications of a major in “Beer Nut Butt Bouncing”?  Still, that choice could be the test itself.  Those students who actually want to learn something about literature or whatever could do so, others could gawk at the naked people, and those that don’t want to do either could go to Pat Robertson’s University and NOT study Darwin. As the system exists now, fellow academicians, we are passing relatively uninterested students in our classes that are going out with their business degrees and siphoning away university endowments.  So how about it?  Interdisciplinary Anatomical English to the rescue!

Lady Liberty IS naked under that toga…

Since even some of my favorite bloggers occasionally post about topics as tangential to academia as college sports (and not even the good ones), I feel justified in writing this.  But I am not concerned with the pampered, gigantic-headed, recruited-since-seventh-grade football, basketball, and baseball players.  Rather, I take up for a real sport–ultimate frisbee.  I know what you’re thinking, how is getting really baked and throwing a frisbee around considered a sport (I say we put in blotter!)?  But the folks on the University of Oregon ultimate frisbee team have taken the sport to a new olympic level.  According to Fox Sports, on April 11th the team decided to “go skins” against their opponents (who weren’t wearing shirts) and lost their pants and underwear.  Now, c’mon folks, I have heard of risking life and limb for one’s sport, but this is taking it to an entirely new level.  That these players would knowingly put that particular appendage in harm’s way demonstrates amazing commitment to their sport, and places the sport in the long (stop, you dirty minded people) tradition of olympic athletics in the nude.  Those lobbying to have ultimate frisbee in the 2012 olympics should be thrilled.

Aside from the overtly physical dangers, though, think of the social ramifications of this decision (I mean, it gets COLD in Oregon).  EGO, or Eugene Gentleman’s Organization as the team likes to call itself, is breaking down social barriers.  No longer will the latent homo-eroticism of college athletics hide behind the tough facade of pads and jerseys and slapping butts coming in and out of the game.  Ultimate has become the Phyrne of college athletics; may her assets be laid bare for all to judge her in the open.  When EGO member Eli Friedman (on the EGO site) tells us that he respects fellow teammate Eli Janin’s “cross-training technique– Hang-outside-sorority-and- fondle-balls,” we need no longer ask “Whose balls?”  At the bottom of the EGO homepage is a picture of the captains, Dusty Becker and Steve Kenton, in a brotherly embrace.  Given their penchant for stripping down, one might be tempted to wonder if they in fact have any clothes on in that picture–but no more!  It no longer matters and I, for one, applaud their openness.  They are, in fact, opening doorways to people who would normally not feel comfortable in competitive sports environs and, thus, I hereby dub them the ALLY sport of the year (on behalf of all us ALLY’s).  Take that women’s field hockey!

Finally, I would like to get a little more serious and defend their actions of April 11th for a moment.  First, in their defense, I would say that the players do not generally wear helmets.  Couple that with the short-term memory loss occasioned by their “drink” of choice, whether it be rolled or baked into delicious half-time brownies, and they probably don’t even remember being naked.  How then, can we reasonably punish them?  There’s a reason that when one clicks the “History” tab on their website, there is nothing there.  Think about it.  The other rather compelling defense one might make for the team is that being as far out of the way as they are in Eugene, OR, they were probably and quite simply unaware that America’s national pastime is putting sticks in our derrieres, not playing nude sports.  Honestly, America, does the sight of male genitalia offend you that much?!?  The fact that Borat was a blockbuster success would say otherwise.  To the spectators who complained about the team’s frisbee-match-turned-naughty-cabaret-show I have just one thing to say: grow up!  In no other supposedly “free” country in the world do people freak out this much over nudity.

That is all, I shall return to more academic topics in the future.  I leave you with one final image.