Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Straw men can’t even throw pies!

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 26, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 3 Comments

Conor Friedersdorf may have threatened to steal my microphone, but I’d like to point out that in quoting and straw-manning me his post actually had the opposite effect: spreading my thoughts greater distances than they would otherwise have covered.

That said, I clearly don’t mean to say that “any action or performance is justified merely because of its physical medium.” It’s just that unlike, say, Ezra Klein (who does the best job I’ve seen of illuminating the hazards involved), I don’t see pie as a particularly violent or inappropriate form of protest. Friedersdorf’s claim that throwing pies contains “less content” than speech only makes sense if you measure content in terms of verbal nuance; I’d wager it certainly got more people to think about Friedman’s global reputation and actual value than a few halfhearted shouted slogans would have. (In fact, of course, they did throw pamphlets in addition to pie, and most bloggers haven’t mentioned the pamphlets; I rest my case.)

And if Friedersdorf is right that “prominent speakers aren’t going to address college audiences if there is a likelihood that they’ll get a pie in the face,” we need to breed our public intellectuals to be less wimpy. The verbal criticism they take from their peers on a regular basis is far worse, so their fear of pie in particular must come down either to expecting that they can expect reverence in a public-speaking setting (not only incorrect but fairly elitist: “the poor rubes can’t say anything that would challenge me“) or their frustration at getting pie on their suits. (Which is also unacceptable because most of them don’t seem to own suits worth the care.)

As far as the public debate and subsequent mic-stealing hijinks are concerned? Bring it on, Friedersdorf. I know the place. You set the date. May the best interpretive ballet win.

…or like a pie to Tom Friedman’s face.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 24, 2008
in Extemporanea, Media and Politics
. 3 Comments

As a member of an organization that dutifully defends the dignity of its high-profile guest speakers, I find Matt Yglesias’ anti-pie commenters to be woefully off the mark. It’s just a pie. It did no lasting damage to Mr. Friedman (sadly, The Mustache remained completely untouched). To call it “thuggery” or certainly “fascist” isn’t just escalatory, it’s just plain wrong.

As someone whose two main fields of study are performance and civil society, I find the consensus in this country that the only acceptable public action is speech to be incredibly disturbing. Pieing someone in the face doesn’t meaningfully “prevent” him from speaking, and registers your disapproval (and more specifically, in this case, eagerness to show up a self-styled Man of the World for the buffoon he is) much more effectively than an op-ed in your student paper can. The public sphere is inhabited by public bodies, and the way they behave influences the thoughts we feel able to express, let alone comfortable expressing; to exclude bodily action from acceptable public expression is to resort to a dualism that I hope we’ve moved past by now. Mind and body are products of each other; just because we call them “talking heads” on television doesn’t mean you can only be a public figure from the neck up.

I’ve made this point before (including, ironically, in an op-ed in my student paper), but never for something so obviously harmless and effective as a pie to the face. Action — and especially performance — is a legitimate contribution to public discourse. Get over it.

Quick hit. Like a rubber bullet in Seattle in 1999.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 24, 2008
in Extemporanea, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention and Media
. 1 Comment

Posting will likely be light until about mid-May (it’s the end of the semester and I, for one, have about 60 pages in research papers, if I’m lucky). I’ll log in later this weekend to direct you to some distractions, but for the moment I just wanted to point out the following:

If you redirect the beginning of globalization so that it turns inward and introspective, you get blogalization.

I think there’s actually some legitimate significance to this. I’ll write the essay someday.

Epistemological Mess: Is Yale itself engaging in a “creative fiction”?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 21, 2008
in L'affaire Shvarts, Media and Yale
. 0 Comments

Apparently it was easier to blame the student for being sensationalistic than the institution for being careless.

The blogosphere seems to have taken the University at its word, dismissing l’affaire Shvarts as a hoax; as the controversy continues to unfold, though, the school’s position has become increasingly convoluted, and I’d like to spend some time pointing out some cracks in its story. After all, since when do bloggers take a press release at its word, or treat an “official Administration statement” as unambiguous truth?

More…

Keep off the grass and out of the news!

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 19, 2008
in Extemporanea, L'affaire Shvarts, Media and Yale
. 0 Comments

I don’t want to post on Aliza Shvarts qua Aliza Shvarts. But it’s obviously impossible to be on campus and ignore the controversy, especially because our admitted-students recruiting event (called Bulldog Days) is coming up at the beginning of next week — right as the exhibit is slated to open, in fact. In wondering how the heck Yale’s going to avoid total trainwreck, I’ve started thinking about the failures of narrative when appropriated by an institution to obscure or explain multivocality and diversity in the community it represents. (While I use Yale as an example for convenience, the relationship between the University and the students is largely analogous to that between state and nation.)

I used to wonder why Yale always decided to reseed the grass on the quads right before Bulldog Days. Didn’t it create undue hassle to have the quads blocked off and force the already-confused kids to take the long way? This year I’ve finally figured it out: it’s less about taking care of something that had to be done in the spring, and doing it at a particularly inconvenient time, than a way to protect the fragile April lushness of New England grass from hundreds of overenthusiastic high-school feet. It’s more important to Yale that prefrosh have a good image of the campus, aesthetically speaking, than that they have a good experience of being able to use its spaces; they’d rather have a bunch of awed spectators eager to enter the mystery than give them a taste of Yale life that will get them hooked. It’s a preview, quite literally speaking.

That’s certainly one way to do public relations: super-choreograph the experience so that it’s closer to watching a performance of a community than engaging with the community itself. After all, participating in reality on the ground level has a way of giving the lie to any officially-imposed narrative and instead exposing the much more polyphonic truth. (I say this coming from a discipline that has fairly notorious trouble keeping its theory under control — the anthropologists themselves know that everything’s subordinate to the facts on the ground, but the public/laity want easy and broadly applicable answers.) It’s not just a matter of avoiding the risk that a high-schooler left to his own devices will stumble onto something unsavory, but avoiding the risk that a high-schooler will leave campus overwhelmed and confused, unable to assimilate the thousands of experiences to which he’s been subjected into an understandable whole. That’s what narrative is for, anyway.

The problem is that this year, Yale doesn’t have control of its own narrative to begin with, to say the least. (In fact, if you want to get cute about it, it doesn’t even have control of the narrative that’s disrupting its narrative.) So the official, University-endorsed, Bulldog Days-performed image has to go mano a mano with the image glimpsed through the dust surrounding the media fracas — an image of a school without moral mooring, academic oversight, or the epistemological authority to tell its own students what is or is not real. It’s a risky proposition, especially if it turns out that Aliza Shvarts wasn’t lying and Helaine Klasky was. Like any totalizing force, narratives are brittle things, and they should never be opposed to facts — that’s the definition of “bad spin.”

Ironically, at the moment the community of Yale’s student body isn’t as multivocal as usual — Aliza Shvarts is the single topic of conversation to an extent that I’ve never seen (no, not even when we found out about the Taliban dude). But, given that Yalies have the attention span of gnats and Bulldog Days has a more luminous pull than any porchlight, that won’t necessarily be the case in a few days’ time. While the admissions officer has to respond to the “But don’t you kill babies?” question with “Not really…” and hope that his explanation is sufficient, the student has the luxury of conceding that someone does but continuing “But also, people do x, or y.”

I understand that equating Shvarts with the captain of the varsity crew team trivializes the controversy, but it’s obviously true that neither is more representative of Yale. Narrative, with its eye-chart prioritization, has to promote one or the other, and it’s not clear which will prevail. So the general rule holds: it’s better to rely on community, polyphony and ground-level involvement — lived experience — than institutions, official narratives and a performance that prohibits its audience from being any more than spectators.

McCain of Corioles: “The place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.”

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 18, 2008
in Literary Factions and Politics
. 7 Comments

Some analogies are so perfect that it’s almost a relief to find that someone’s made them before. This afternoon it occurred to me that John McCain is Coriolanus; when I rushed to the oracle Google to validate my claim, the entrails of the search results read “Yes, and?”

Of course, the problem with dramatic analogy in particular is that people look at the plot first, and therefore assume the comparison must have some sort of predictive power. But I could never picture McCain leaving the Romans for the Volsces, whether you take the Volsces to be the Viet Cong, the Democrats or the terrorists (of course, if the last, he wouldn’t even know which camp to get directions to). If the Coriolanus, the work, is the central criterion, the modern-day equivalent wouldn’t be John McCain but rather his buddy Joe Lieberman. In order to figure out why just knowing how the last play ended won’t tell us how this one will pan out, it’s more illuminating to look at Coriolanus, the character — and more particularly, the role he plays in the broader drama of Roman politics versus the role that has been crafted for John McCain over the course of this election and his career.

And by role I mean the label “war hero.”

Both take their war heroism as their heritage: Coriolanus is Marcus Brutus before the battle of Corioles rechristens him in blood, and as Bill Kauffman points out in his excellent essay (which I’ll return to later; h/t Helen) McCain points out that “the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.” But for Coriolanus, it’s the “war” part of “war hero” that is important. His fealty is to blood, and by blood he determines his loyalties to men: both those who spill his blood (such as the Volscian general, Aufidius, whose dialogue with Coriolanus rivals 300 for martial homoeroticism) and those of his blood. His mother, Volumnia, rivals Lady Macbeth for the best role for a mature female actress in Shakespeare, and the scene in which she shames him out of attacking Rome at the head of the Volscian army is downright thrilling. And John McCain has no Volumnia.

It’s because the lesson of John McCain’s battle wounds, more psychological than sanguinary, wasn’t to adopt war as his mantle and armor, but rather the second half of the epithet: “hero.” McCain’s straight-backed honor is born of war, but it’s greater than that, and his loyalty isn’t to blood or battlefields but to honor itself. “Senator McCain’s loyalty is not to any particular American place but rather to a bureaucratic institution (the military) and an abstraction (the American Empire),” Kauffman writes. I’m not so sure that these are the loci of his loyalty, but rather conduits to it — wet nurses or governesses, if you will. The military raised McCain as a ward of Honor, just as Volumnia raised Coriolanus as a ward of Mars.

Believe me, it’s quite tempting to see a man who treats the mortgage crisis as callously as his analogue treated famine, or who genuinely seems uninterested in matters domestic, or who sings “bomb, bomb Iran” in the Senate, as a purely martial being. But the maverick doesn’t seem to have the ties of blood and brotherhood that characterize those who live for war; allegiances and emnities will shift for him, because his guidance is the north star of Honor. It’s not just fighting or even fighting for, it’s fighting through.

Which, of course, might be the other explanation for the Shiite-Sunni mixup — they know which they are, and they can sort it out on their own time. John McCain has other things to do. The brittleness of the man in politics living for something as solitary and antipolitical as war or honor is a parallel that does hold, whether the fight he’s daydreaming about as he sits squashed in the Senate chamber takes place on a real battlefield or a moral one.

To be honest, though, the most fun parts of the parallel are picturing Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as the tribunes — the self-proclaimed “voices of the people” who are by far the most political animals in the play.

Performance art stops a beating heart.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on April 18, 2008
in Extemporanea, L'affaire Shvarts, Politics and Yale
. 0 Comments

The consensus (or, at least, my firm conviction) is that Aliza Shvarts can’t possibly have done what she said she did. If abortifacient herbs were that easy to come by and use, the abortion debate would be pointless. (Also, she is registered on the Yale website as an English major, which makes the story a wee bit implausible.)

Of the two cases (She Did It/She Didn’t Do It But Claims She Did), I think the latter is actually worse. There is a coherent worldview which holds that abortion has no moral content, and so making abortion art is no worse than making wisdom-tooth-removal art or appendectomy art. Helen points out that she’s making a statement about “what happens when you turn your body into an instrument of politics,” and as long as we ignore the moral question that’s true.

However, claiming to have done it in order to excite controversy? Evidence not of art based on moral and political convictions with which I disagree, but of being a deeply bad person.

Jake refers to the incident as “tarnishing Yale’s reputation in front of millions, if not tens of millions, of people.” It is, admittedly, depressing when Yale’s presence on the national stage is dominated by things like this, but the cool stuff does have some presence on the ‘tubes.

Google Wars: Embarrassing vs. Awesome

  • “Aliza Shvarts”: 11,900
  • “Sex Week at Yale”: 20,700
  • “Yale Mafia”: 649
  • “Yale Political Union”: 9,910

“Party of the Right” has more hits than all the above combined. Make of this what you will.

Arts, Shvarts…

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on April 17, 2008
in Extemporanea, L'affaire Shvarts and Yale
. 1 Comment

I had a half-finished post about the Shvarts Affair, but it has all been for nought: it wasn’t true.

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art

Next revelation: Ann Coulter is actually a radical lesbian performance artist whose public persona is an elaborate statement on the nature of femininity and the American political sphere.

Blogging LaGuardia

Published
by
Dara Lind
on April 9, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 3 Comments

I know it’s bad form to overrule the declarations of one’s blogmates, but I, at least, have no intention of taking the rest of the week off. (Not least because I need to justify borrowing Nicola’s laptop for the trip.)

Let me tell you, folks, it is a great day to fly American Airlines.

Luckily, I’m not flying to Madison in an MD-80, so my flight’s all right. But it’s always fun to be tangent to a news story. The discrepancy between the huge crowds at the check-in desk and the empty waiting areas by the gates finds a ready explanation; you get to explain to the passenger sitting next to you why his journey from Sao Paolo to Raleigh has unexpectedly dropped him off in New York; when a mispressed button causes the intercom to announce “Oh no she didn’t…that’s not what I told her at all,” passengers chuckle to each other to “give them a break, it’s been a rough day.”

The sought camaraderie of airport terminals is more noticeable than in most public places full of solitary strangers, maybe because it’s not really a familiar environment to anyone involved. (And it seems to me that the more regularly someone flies, the less likely he is to strike up a conversation with the person facing him in the waiting area.) Everybody has his own reason for flying, and it’s usually important that she be on this particular flight — so the flight is a conduit for dozens of particular narratives. In the air, the cohabitation of these narratives gets oppressive: with neither elbow room nor escape route you can’t keep other people’s lives from bleeding into your own (unwanted small talk, unruly toddlers). But a terminal isn’t so claustrophobic: the fact that a passenger can walk away makes the fact that he doesn’t that much more meaningful, of course.

Travel crises do a lot to bring this out, in a we’re-all-in-this-together sort of way. But at the same time, any obstacle or antagonism reinforces each passenger’s belief in the importance of his own narrative. Personal significance, professional significance, plain old urgency: all of these are invoked with an air of ruffled indignation and the conclusion that “This can’t be happening to me.” But arguing one’s way through the security line means putting one’s own narrative ahead of other passengers’, quite literally, and I’m uncomfortable with that.

Nicola read me a Chesterton quote last night that, sadly, I can’t find online, about how liberating it is for men who live by (and for) rules to feel that they are fighting in anarchy, antagonized as the dandelion fights against the world. I appreciate the romance but think this sad puffed self-importance of air travel may be the flip side of the coin.

Don’t take sides with anyone against the family.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on April 8, 2008
in Yale
. 1 Comment

In the Times magazine, Ehud Havazelet has a beautiful and heart-wrenching meditation on his son, a high-school friend, growing up:

Walking home from dinner the night before, as he was discoursing on Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals,” I couldn’t resist telling him to tie his shoe. There is nothing unusual about all this — though every parent has perhaps felt the uniqueness of its poignant sting: Who will take care of him now?

Outside, patterns emerged dependent on the shuttle schedule. Women were usually in plenty of time; men rushed, hair still wet. Some boy was invariably last, running after the bus, disheveled, inexpertly dressed, maybe a half-eaten Pop-Tart hanging from his mouth as he flailed at the bus already moving from the curb.

One of these boys, misreading the time perhaps, was early. He bore a slight resemblance to my son, curly-haired, with the same calculated slovenliness in dress, his backpack half-open. He sleepily approached a group of three young women waiting for the bus, groomed, alert, ready for the day.

They saw him and immediately went to work. One buttoned his shirt, one patted and tugged his hair into place, one zipped the backpack so nothing would tumble out. They gave him the grief he deserved, and one leaned up to kiss his cheek. It was all I could watch. Moved, obscurely relieved, wondering who these young ladies were, and how I could introduce them to Michael, I got up, closed the window and went off to shower.

Growing up and going to college is the slow process of moving from the care of parents to the care of friends. Mom and Dad are, of course, only a phone call away, with advice and consolation, but the shoulders I cry on now smell of cigarette smoke instead of my mother’s perfume.

It is at once a liberation — a friend tells me that my skirt is awfully short but never “don’t you dare leave the house like that, young lady” — and a constriction. Friends care for us, but the responsibility goes both ways. We take care of them in a way that we may one day take care of our parents, but not now. Friends show weakness and depend on us; they were never the godlike beings who explained, and appeared to control, the world.

As we grow up we realize that our parents are only human, that they don’t have all the answers, but they’re older. They know more. And we are, somehow, still theirs — as friendly as we may be, the relationship is never one of absolute equality. They’re adults, and though it may not be the one we take they know a path.

With our friends we are all lost together. None of us are quite certain. We live in a strange bubble, out of the nest but not yet on the wing, and we need each other more than ever.

Poulos called us the Yale Mafia, and the more I think about it the more I like the phrase. It is about family.

Also! There will be no posting here or on the Reactionary Epicurean Blog from Wednesday night to Monday morning. Dara is competing in the Jeopardy! College Tournament, filming in Madison, WI, and we are going to cheer her on.