Author Archive for Dara Lind

Alberto Gonzales: Oblivious with Good Reason

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 0 Comments

Josh Patashnik at The Plank:

…immigration judges aren’t minor backroom bean counters; they’re responsible for conducting formal court proceedings to determine what should be done with aliens who have been apprehended by federal authorities. Yet the former attorney general of the United States admits that he literally didn’t know how they were being screened and selected by people under his direct supervision… It’s particularly disappointing that someone with extensive experience practicing law in a border state would have so little regard for selecting qualified immigration judges.

It is indeed pretty horrifying that an Attorney General was (or pretended to be) ignorant about the hiring portfolio of one of his employees, regardless of what that hiring portfolio included. But the situation is a little more complicated than Patashnik admits.

In fairness, I don’t blame people who haven’t been spending their days at immigration court for the last few weeks like I have (it’s so I can write one of these, though I doubt it’ll attract the attention of future generations of oppo researchers) for not understanding the bizarrely nebulous relationship immigration court has with the DoJ (through the Executive Office of Immigration Reform, which employs judges) and the Department of Homeland Security (Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and ICE all have some role in referring cases; prosecutors are employed through ICE as well).

Suffice to say that it’s undeniably true that the DoJ hires immigration judges, but immigration court itself is a weird melange of departmental responsibilities. It’s not that the division of labor is unclear, at least in terms of the system: one of my sources explained to me that a 2003 law provided summary clarification by listing all the cases in which the phrase “at the discretion of the Attorney General” should be replaced by “at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

At the level of individual cases, there’s often some wiggle room regarding whether a case should be handled judicially through EOIR or administratively through CIS. That’s to be expected, but the push-and-pull doesn’t stop there. To cite just one example, hearings for detained individuals are held in a courtroom in ICE offices; cases for non-detained individuals are heard across the street, in a courtroom at EOIR offices. The same ICE attorneys and EOIR judge preside at both.

At the federal level, of course, it’s clear that more emphasis and resources are being placed on immigration court on the ICE end than the EOIR end: think how many people might have been involved in planning the Postville raid, and then think of the understaffing of immigration judges. Furthermore, ICE initiatives like Operation Streamline, which are currently overwhelming federal (criminal) judges in border states, were designed to decrease the caseload on immigration judges — making EOIR even more secondary to immigration proceedings. (This is also why, contra Patashnik, Gonzales’ legal experience in a border state didn’t make him automatically more likely to pay attention to immigration judges as Attorney General.)

Clearly, there were broader failures in corporate culture at the Department of Justice under Gonzales. But the obliviousness regarding immigration judges speaks just as much to another paradigmatic failure: the tendency of the federal government to treat immigration exclusively as an issue of Homeland Security despite its roots in Justice, to the extent that the latter is forgotten entirely.

I’m well aware that in some anthropological circles it may be considered compromising my fieldwork to blog about it during the period I’m in the field, even though most of this information is publicly available through other means and none of it is confidential. I’m also well aware that in some anthropological circles the question of “relevance” is paramount, and relevance doesn’t wait for formal peer review. Besides, I’m an undergraduate. Cut me some slack.

This Charming Man

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Across The Pond and Arts
. 1 Comment

I am to Maureen Dowd columns as kids with drunkard nursemaids are to whiskey: my grandmother used to clip her columns and mail them to me during the Starr Report years. (I turned 10 years old in 1998, so the politics and sex were every bit as exotic as the snark.) So while I’m sure that my blood ought to be boiling at the faux-intimacy of her column today (and its totally vapid Homer references), I’m instead gushing over the insight she’s given me into New Toryism, as revealed by Barack Obama’s party favors:

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Radiohead, I concede, is a fairly safe choice in general and for Obama in particular: it’s the sort of act that a man whose passions are for jazz and the Stones would find to be intriguing and worthwhile, though he might admire it more than he liked it in the end. (I’m assuming Cameron chose In Rainbows rather than, say, Hail to the Thief.) But the other two are legitimately inspired choices. I find Gorillaz to be consistently underrated and just plain fun — furthermore, by turning up the bass a bit more than Radiohead does, the songs are probably a bit more likely to hit Obama’s sweet spot.

And the Smiths? That’s just a matter of consciousness-raising, man. Though I’m concerned that Mr. Cameron may be trying unfairly to influence the veepstakes.

Admittedly, Reggie Love is the man responsible both for keeping Obama’s iPod hip and for presenting gifts to foreign dignitaries, so Cameron might have someone equivalent on his side. Still, though, someone out there in Toryland has very good taste — yet another thing major parties here would do well to emulate.

The Real Reason Why I’m Glad Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

In the vein of Withywindle’s dream (which I think of less as “alternate history” than “blogger fanfic”), here’s my fantasy as to what happens next:

  • Ta-Nehisi immediately (within 2 weeks) gets into a multi-day mano-a-mano with Ross Douthat. The topic is preferably something sprawling and cultural that isn’t covered much in Grand New Party.
  • When the exchange fails to subside within a day but instead gets more heated, Ross’s comment-purging interns find themselves working overtime on the more overtly racist comments, but opt to leave those that just say “soft-headed affirmative-action beneficiary” in place.
  • Among many posts on the Left using the argument to reopen the question of whether conservatives have souls, someone at Firedoglake writes a post that all-but calls Douthat a racist. In response, Reihan quickly composes and records a song called “Some of my Best Friends Are Ross Douthat.”
  • Impressed, Ta-Nehisi posts the video on his blog. His readers are mollified (or just hypnotized by Reihan’s exceptionally round head; it’s not clear which).
  • The blogosphere finally moves on from the flareup, but Ross and Ta-Nehisi continue to be spirited and influential philosophical adversaries. Ross pulls fewer punches. Everyone links to Marc Ambinder less. The world is a better place.

Why I’m Glad That Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

I’m not exactly surprised that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the Atlantic blogroll (I know, no one else is, either) but I’m absolutely tickled pink about it.

I say all the time that there aren’t any bloggers on the Left who seem to care about culture, but Ta-Nehisi is absolutely the exception: he posts for the sake of narrative rather than the sake of fact-checking, and he weaves cultural logics and socioeconomics together so well that he makes it look easy. I’d call him “Gramsci to Yglesias’ Marx,”  but aside from the inaccuracy of the political comparison there’s the little matter of hegemony.

You see, unfortunately, I suspect that the reason he’s gained traction among liberals for writing about culture is that “he has a culture to write about” — which is to say that the culture of urban black America is subaltern and therefore readily noticeable, whereas that of white America and/or the American mainstream and/or coastal elites is not, i.e. hegemonic. It’s not that the blogosphere lacks cultural self-consciousness — to the contrary, bloggers relish in self-caricature regarding their personas virtual (see also: Cheetos Experiment) and actual (see also: Stuff White People Like). But that’s a far cry from using personal narrative, or talking about codes of behavior and social norms — that is to say, writing about culture the way Ta-Nehisi writes about culture. The implication is that growing up African-American in Baltimore is a unique experience, a perspective worth reading, in a way growing up somewhere else isn’t: that the dominant culture is in fact predominant, even universal.

Just last week, Ta-Nehisi’s response to David Brooks warned against calling a middle-class “economic” phenomenon “cultural” when it hits a lower class. Fascination with West Baltimore as “a culture to write about” among white, coastal policy bloggers is the flip side of the same coin. I hope that this isn’t actually why the blogosphere likes Ta-Nehisi; maybe his reception when he makes the move to the Atlantic will definitively prove me wrong.

In Defense of a Fluke

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 18, 2008
in General Scholarship and Navel Gazing
. 5 Comments

Impressively, in the last few days I’ve been chided both for failing to recognize the divine jazz-like looseness of blogging and for failing to recognize the requisite statistical rigor of blogging. The former accusation is harmless enough; the latter is the same argument used since time immemorial to wave aside cultural criticism on the whole — indeed, any knowledge that isn’t quantitatively generated — and that’s a problem.

It’s impossible to gather enough data to meet statistical standards while understanding the context that generated each point in that data. That’s the purpose of statistics in social science: to create discrete phenomena out of messy reality in an attempt to generalize where generalization is helpful. But generalization will never get you more than a few good options for what circumstances generated that data, a few strong correlations (which, the statisticians so ceaselessly remind us, is not causation). If you want to talk about not just the what but the why, you need to venture into conjecture anyway.

And conjecture based on those same generalizations doesn’t draw from nearly as deep a knowledge base as knowledge based on more comprehensive understanding of particular situations. Maybe those situations are anomalous — though in this case, the fact that I was using personal experience to illuminate a broader statistical study whose results lined up with that experience indicates that “fluke” is putting it strongly — and they’re certainly statistically insignificant. But until we can invent statistics to explain connections we don’t yet know exist, we’ll never be able to use them to explain social forces and cultural trends, only to record them after the fact like starlight on an Earth-bound telescope. Cultural criticism is by its nature tentative and speculative and flexible, but to say you can only explain a phenomenon after you’ve zoomed out too far to really examine it is missing the point entirely.

Overstretched, or Kicked Upstairs?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 17, 2008
in General Scholarship, Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 18 Comments

David Broockman thinks Kay Steiger’s post on women in academia could be turned into an argument against affirmative action. Maybe that’s true, but only because I think she infers too much too readily. Here’s the gist:

Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various “service” commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research…I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.

On the face of it, I can see why it’s easy to read this as a simple affirmative-action narrative. But I’m surprised that Broockman didn’t pick up on the fact that the affirmative-action motive is inferred, and start thinking if there might be something else going on. Especially because he’s in the Yale Political Union, where a similar phenomenon takes place, and there is very definitely something else going on.

You see, the YPU on the whole doesn’t have anything close to gender parity, at least among active members. And at any given debate, women are much less likely to speak than men are. But the Union’s executive board has represented something pretty close to a 50/50 split during the three years I’ve been around, and the top three positions have been held by more women than men during that time.

But here’s the result, as in Steiger’s example: while women end up running the show — managing, that is — men are able to devote themselves to success in the field as the field itself defines it (for Steiger, research; for the YPU, debating prowess), and therefore continue to be labeled “leaders”. This is only progressive in the same way that, say, thanking a housewife for the hard work she does is progressive: it’s nice to have the recognition, but it’d be nicer to acknowledge that maybe she’d rather be doing something other than housework.

But even to get the acknowledgment, women have to get noticed and taken seriously, which is tricky in an environment where they’re underrepresented. And often, the way to get noticed and groomed for leadership is to get things done, and get them done well. It’s hard to mount an impressive track record in intellectualism as a freshman, because intellectualism doesn’t lend itself to track records; it’s much easier to hang posters and organize events and do other things that mark one for “management.” Like female academics, they get siphoned out early and therefore miss the chance to get everything they can out of the environment they’re in.

So I really can’t see this as a reason to oppose affirmative action, but rather to ensure that the pools from which candidates are selected are of equal size, so that women don’t feel the need to “prove themselves” in male-dominated settings. Much more importantly, though, we need to recognize that in plenty of fields (academia, sure, but what about advertising? Programming?) many of the roles that get marked as “service”, “management” or “administration” aren’t positions of authority in the least; rather, the managers are those who keep things running so that other people can do what they came to the field to do in the first place, and get all the glory in the long haul.

I’m all for specialization, but let’s be honest about it. Appointing a junior academic to the position of program coordinator, regardless of gender, isn’t a promotion but a qualitative job shift. I think many of the problems that affirmative action hasn’t fixed or has exacerbated might be addressed if we stopped thinking purely in terms of organizational flowcharts but also in terms of social capital or personal fulfillment. And I certainly think that the trends Steiger notices might begin to reverse if tenure committees et al. had it brought to their attention that their actions were the ivory-tower equivalent of telling their daughters: “Oh, no, little girls can’t be doctors. Why don’t you pretend to be the Head Nurse instead?”

Illicit: not the same as illegal.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 14, 2008
in Ladies
. 2 Comments

Helen asks:

We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old’s experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?

I disagree. I think the question is: Why should it be permissible to invent a law that doesn’t exist for the purpose of shaming an individual whose behavior you feel to be immoral? It’s pretty clear to me that that’s what the clerk was doing — at very least, she was under a misapprehension and didn’t reconsider it in the face of contrary evidence — and in fairness, Helen hasn’t tried to argue otherwise. However, she seems to treat it as of a piece with anything else the clerk could have done: lecturing the girls, handing them a Bible, telling them her register was closed, etc.

I think it is probably true that the transgressing legal norms carries much more shame than transgressing social ones in contemporary America, so it’s likely that nothing the clerk could have done would have been as likely to be effective as what she did. But it seems to me that the right answer in the long term isn’t to appropriate the force of the law — especially when it doesn’t actually exist for this purpose — but rather to reinforce social norms so that they have comparable force.

This is especially true in this situation, when the would-be customer had an advocate with her who actually knew the rule, and therefore “defeated” the clerk by proving her wrong. Had the clerk kept her reaction within the realm of the social, the defender would have looked much more silly and petulant in writing her post — “How dare they judge us at all?” — and Helen’s response would be entirely justified. As it was, the post reads as much of triumph as of righteous anger: “They tried to lie to my friend; luckily, I was with her, and I knew the facts!” It’s extremely difficult to shame someone once she feels you’ve conceded the moral high ground to her.

70% Torture. Wash with Like Colors, Cold Water Only.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 12, 2008
in Politics
. 3 Comments

Like Yglesias and Schwenkler, I find the fact that a supporter of torture would make a shirt joking about waterboarding to be viscerally horrifying. But I really don’t see the sale of a T-shirt on one of dozens of sites selling conservative memorabilia as tantamount to identifying support for torture with conservatism. Furthermore, I think that divorced from that context — as it would be when worn — the product itself is a perfect vehicle for the “coming to grips with the horror” that Yglesias discusses.

First of all, remember that almost 70% of Americans believe waterboarding is torture. The reason that this sentiment doesn’t metastasize into an opposition to American operatives using the technique is twofold: some of those who believe it to be torture also believe its use is justified on suspected terrorists; and public discourse centers on the concept and related legislation rather than the actual, current practice (which is deliberately quiet and remote, especially for Americans who don’t consume media compulsively enough to be intimately familiar of what happens in Guantanamo or secret prisons). I suspect that the latter is the more pervasive force: it’s easy to forget going about daily life that torture is something my government does. Being confronted with that fact unexpectedly is like taking a punch to the stomach.

And that’s what I suspect this T-shirt would actually end up doing. It addresses waterboarding directly, as a practice, not introducing the mitigating factors of terrorism or national security. A “You can’t understand a terrorist until you’ve taken him waterboarding” shirt would be a different thing entirely; that would in fact aid in the othering of “enemy combatants” and inculcate an embattled-but-triumphant mindset (two preconditions, in my opinion, for taking pride in the desecration of the human body to begin with). But a shirt that merely declares “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” is likely to meet with vague curiosity as passersby try to figure out where they’ve heard that term before, followed swiftly by recognition and attendant revulsion. It turns the flippant euphemism of the word back on itself.

Maybe the shirt is, in fact, an illustration that you can no longer call yourself a true conservative without supporting torture — though, again, I don’t necessarily see why that would be true. I’ll take derision of those who find torture unpalatable over an attempt to make torture palatable any day. And if those who see someone walking down the street wearing this shirt are reminded of the fact that their government does things of which they don’t approve as a result, I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

Admittedly, this is coming from someone who talked for a while about putting up recruiting posters for Club Waterboarding and seeing if anyone got the joke.

We Are All Mods Now

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 11, 2008
in Arts, Extemporanea and History
. 6 Comments

For all the hullabaloo about how 2008 is the new 1968 (a narrative that’s turned, conversationally at least, from “The Democrats will eat each other alive!” to “Generally Transformative Cultural Change and the Rise of Youth Movements”), it’s becoming impossible to notice that pop culture’s new mine for nostalgia is the period that 1968 destroyed: that of 1962-66, more or less.

Exhibit A: Mad Men. How do you produce a second season of a show so dominated by the aesthetics of the period that keeps the content fresh without sacrificing the self-absorption (not to mention those exquisitely lit costumes)? Move the action ahead from 1960 to 1962, of course! Incidentally, it’s my suspicion that the forward shift will mitigate what I perceive to be the actors’ biggest weakness, but I’ll explain that theory further once it’s had the chance to be proved or disproved by the new season.

Exhibit B: Schlitz Original 1960s Formula. Tragically, the ads I’m seeing in bus kiosks in Minneapolis don’t seem to be posted anywhere online (the official site for the beer only has ads up to the 1980s, which is probably better marketing). They’re nostalgia-soaked triptychs — “The Cars Were Cooler/The Girls Were Hotter/The Beer Was Better”, with accompanying illustrations — whose central image is a a perfectly vintage sex kitten, complete with flipped hair and heavily lined eyes. (The alternate version is a little more aggressively reactionary: “The Music Didn’t Suck/The Athletes Didn’t Cheat/The Beer Was Better”, also not available online.)

Exhibit C: The music video for Beck’s new single, which Adrian has been kind enough to embed in this post. It’s 1966, maybe: only the tiniest bit psychedelic and utterly mod-tastic. The palette! The Factory-esque cinematography! The dress-on-wall geometric action!

I only wish I could tell you why the period’s become so popular, or which of our own attributes we recognize in it. Is it the glorious artificiality and cult-of-celebrity that a worship of new media promotes? (Edie Sedgwick might have been the first celebutante.) The allure of a counterculture that was hedonistic but not nihilistic? The recognition that the traditional 20-year nostalgia cycle would bring us around to the late 1980s, which (as I understand it) was a very ugly time? Further evidence of alliance between the Boomers and Gen-Y against Gen-X?

Post theories, examples and counterexamples here.

I refuse to use the term “Millennials” on this blog. It may be chronologically true but the associated traits bear little to no resemblance to the reality of my generation.

Blogosphere Happy Hour

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 10, 2008
in Extemporanea and General Scholarship
. 1 Comment

Poulos has a bathtubful of good advice on tap regarding imported beers (I can publicly agree with his recommendation of Delirium Tremens because I drank it in Quebec and therefore legally), while Noah finds common cause with George Will over the beverage’s fundamentally therapeutic nature.

Personally, I bristle a bit at this paragraph of Will’s piece. Admittedly, I think he broaches the issue as delicately and critically as possible, but this is the sort of semi-scientific assertion that so usually gets presented as proven fact in the MSM that I’m not confident his readers will mirror his skepticism:

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Or maybe it has to do with the circumstances under which alcohol was introduced to those populations. If, as Will suggests — heck, asserts — earlier in the column, beer production was tied in Eurasia to the settlement of cities, it seems logical that the concurrent rise of new forms of nutrition and new social circumstances in which to consume them might have caused the two to become interwoven. Even the development of social conventions around alcohol, let alone the concept of an inherently public “drinking space” (pub culture, etc.), would have presented significant external constraints on immoderate consumption individually, and enabled the “teaching” of proper consumption intergenerationally.

When alcohol was introduced to peoples who hadn’t been exposed to it generations earlier, by contrast, it was presented as just another foodstuff or commodity and stripped of the social context that had made its consumption manageable. Without the publicity and contextualization of Eurasian alcohol consumption, of course native individuals were more likely to be harmfully immoderate in their use of the stuff. (This actually happened in the other direction as well — think about the difference between use of the peace pipe and Europe’s early-17th-century tobacco mania.)

I’m sure that in reality it’s some mix of both; I just wish the scientists would stop being so reductionistic about things, especially when such reductionism shades toward social Darwinism. It’s also an interesting cautionary tale about the introduction of alcohol to populations unfamiliar with it and who lack the proper public context to consume it moderately: such as what happens to college freshmen every year, for example.