Major Hassan and Fort Hood

He went mad after being made into a Muslim but he was a Major and psyche counsellor who happened to be of mideast descent. He did not want to go to kill other Muslims like he was constantly told about by traumatized soldiers

Nazi Techniques: Disruption, the Big Lie

The recent attacks on "town hall meetings" by partisans against health care provision reform has as their aim to disrupt and prevent discussion. The basic techniques are those pioneered by the S.A., the Storm Troopers in the early National Socialist movement in 1920s and 1930s Germany.

According to Gordon Craig, Martin Brozat, and other historians, the signal technique of S.A. mobs was to prevent free speech. Shouting down people you disagree with is not, in any fashion, free speech: it is the suppression of free speech. Now, how can the opponents of the free exchange of ideas claim to be exercising their rights to speech? Again, we have to look to the Nazis for the answer: the Big Lie.

Adolph Hitler said that most people can spot a white lie, a fib, a small lie that stays close to the truth. This is because they themselves have told such lies, and understand their function. Hitler's insight was that a huge lie, the exact opposite of an obvious truth, works precisely because most people have no familiarity with such a thing, and cannot imagine that it does not contain some truth. Hence putting a Hitler mustache on Obama, or calling him Hitler, or saying "Obama is the racist, Judge Sotomayor is the racist," or calling Nancy Pelosi a Nazi, or claiming that the Obama campaign insignia resembles the Third Reich's emblem, and that this is somehow significant . . . or, a Rush Limbaugh does, disavowing the larger significance (i.e. "of course" this is not deliberate), but nonetheless saying, "Hey, maybe there is something there . . ." This is again because the Big Lie is so capacious, in its reversal of truth valence, that it has room for affiliation even from people who doubt part of it; in other words, people who mistake it for an ordinary lie, one that stays relatively close to the truth.

So to return to the S.A.'s techniques: let the disruptive meeting-goers tell themselves they are exercising their right to speak freely, as they are told to disrupt and undermine meetings, and some of them will believe it, or believe part of it; they cannot conceive that the reality is the precise opposite: they are the opponents of free speech. It becomes important to call the Democratic leadership Nazis, because this helps immunize yourself against the realization that in fact you are behaving like a Nazi, you are engaged in mob rule, intimidation, and anti-political tactics. Rush can contort himself into claiming that President Obama is a Nazi precisely because President Obama is nothing like a Nazi: that fact alone can then be called up as if it were a camouflage, a clever mask, and the accusation is presented as if it were a revelation. Once the animosity and hatred is tapped, people can believe anything -- or at least, believe part of anything; they can excuse themselves and engage in the worst sort of behavior imaginable.

Now there is a lot of talk about Saul Alinsky and "Radicals' techniques" for getting their voices heard. For the record I believe that whether the Left or the Right does it, acting to stop dialogue, to prevent speech, to disrupt people at the podium and upset them, -- this is not something to be associated with. Anyone today can get a megaphone, literally or figuratively. There is no excuse for stopping speech, if only because free speech is a protected right in our own Bill of Rights. I remember when Lefties shouted down Gen. William Westmoreland at Wesleyan University: that was terrible, humiliating. Lefties need to remember how easy it is for the state to suppress speech in public venues before they pretend they are so righteous that the rules don't apply to them.

That said, when corporations fund gatherings of people to oppose the "socialist agenda" of the government, and claim to be adopting the modalities of an organizer interested in techniques for have-nots to get their voices heard, we are again in the territory of the Big Lie. When at meetings scheduled for transparently PR-related purposes, the disenfranchised speak up, or shout to get attention, they are not suppressing free speech, they are attempting to open the forum to new points of view. This is absolutely not the same thing as corporate-funded lobbying groups organizing people to shout down q-and-a sessions with Representatives. The Right always uses the "techniques" of the Left, but the purposes they put them to are very different. Let's not be fooled. The aim here is: More money in the pockets of the haves, fewer benefits and safeguards for the have-nots.

I am afraid we have not seen the worst of it. We know in this country that the Right falls back on mob rule, on lynchings, as Rep. Todd Akin remarked a few days ago. Lynchings are not a joke. They happened at the hands of enraged white men in the lifetime of many people, and they may happen again.

Professor Gates and Officer Crowley and President Obama

No need to rehearse what "actually" happened, as I was not there. And, to be sure, very few academics who deal with African American studies will want to comment on this in a signed post. I don't know Prof. Gates personally, but I sure know people he knows, and he may very well know (at least) my name. (It's Paul S. Landau.) But I can't resist. So here goes. After all, if President Obama is calling for a conversation, let's not shirk our duties. So I will make a few points -- five in all -- that I think may well escape the mainstream media.

Some preliminaries. All police officers "profile." They profile for race, class, gender, and age. And less tangible traits. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dreaming. I'm not supporting it. That is just the way it is.

Moreover -- and this is a separate point -- all witnesses tell police the race of the people they are reporting if they think they can judge it and they think they are seeing a crime. Just as they would any other "distinguishing features." In my own experience, cops ask this question themselves if it is left unsaid. What victim of a real crime, of any background, could seriously suggest leaving out the race of a suspect in talking to the police, if there is any doubt about it (i.e. we are not in Wasilla)?

Now to my five points.

1. Any male who was young once knows that the police can turn on you even if you call 911 for them. Being white and middle class means being able to "grow out" of this position. If the police are called, and you are an eighteen year old in jeans, and you are not ultra courteous, watch out. I was raised on the upper west side of Manhattan, on 96th street. When the cops came, one kept your head down. On the way to growing up, I was mugged or held up at knifepoint fifteen times by my count. The few times I called the cops, they were likely to tell me to "shut up" while they "did their jobs." If you interrupted them you risked becoming the object of their wrath. Telling a cop off? Saying "Your mama"? Forget about it. You're buying a ticket to the station house.

Now, today, I am 46 years old, so I am a white middle class man, not a white kid. And if I am wearing a suit and tie, and upset about something, and talking to a cop -- this has happened two or three times in my life -- nowadays, the cop is likely to be indulgent and calm. But I still recall the other tone of voice, which meant, if you do not calm down, I can haul your assoff in a heartbeat. Once an officer said as much, to me, as I was relating why the police needed to intervene in an ongoing child abuse situation next door to me in Brooklyn. "YOU calm down." I am sure others have similar memories.

So here is my first point. Being black in America, as far as policemen are concerned, means never being able to graduate to that status that white people all assume. Professor Gates is a black man in America and was treated like a black man in America, not like a 58 year old white man, and not (for sure) like a Harvard professor.

2. Now let's do a thought experiment. Let's pretend Officer Crowley had asked Professor Gates to come out of his house, and Gates had refused, and Officer Crowley, observing Professor Gates' bags, his demeanor, his apparent familiarity with the house, his attitude, his explanation that he had been pushing at his door, -- had divined that this was indeed the professor's home, and simply left. He might have reasoned: "Well, this is his home. It's that simple."

Now suppose that the two black men reported to have been pushing into the home had in fact been robbers who had just happened to arrive before Professor Gates got back from the airport. Suppose they had jammed the door. Suppose they were inside the house, upstairs, caught unawares by the arrival of Gates and Crowley at the front door.

Suppose after Crowley left, they had jumped Professor Gates and killed him.

What would Officer Crowley been able to say in his defense?

Proper protocol in similar cases is for the officer to inspect the house to make sure no one had broken in.

Would Officer Crowley have been able to say, "Professor Gates is black, and the reported intruders were black, so it was natural to assume they were the same people"? No. Would he have been able to say, "Professor Gates is an important man, and made a lot of noise, so I thought it best to leave"? No.

4. Suppose Professor Gates were white, and had (against probability) been reported by a witness as a possible b&e at a residence. Suppose he had lost his temper and refused to obey the cop. Suppose he had mentioned the cop's mother.

Should the officer smile and put away his cuffs, stroll back to his squad car, and say, "Well, he's white, so he's probably okay?"

5. Finally the human dimension must be considered here. Professor Gates is a man of whom much is expected, on a daily and even hourly basis. He lives in that peculiar high-pressure world reserved for very prominent academics of color. His every move is scrutinized. He was just returning from a work-related journey in a foreign country. He was tired. Professor Gates was not surrounded by aids or family, but was traveling alone. He had no helper save his cab driver. Now for the first time in a long while he was inside his home, his castle, protected by the sanctity of privacy.

Let's go a bit further. Note that Professor Gates has had hip replacement surgery, and walks with a cane. He had just spend twelve or fourteen hours on an airplane -- coming back from China -- and had then waited for his baggage. He may well have been insomniac and uncomfortable on the plane. He may even have been in physical pain. Hell, I have been in pain after a similar a flight from Africa.

Please imagine being him for a moment. Imagine coming up to your door and finding you could not get the key to work, the frame had swollen, the thing would not open. You can't get in. You ache. Finally, you get inside your house.

Now imagine that a police officer comes to your door and demands you step outside, acting like you are an intruder in your own home.

Imagine that he does not accept your Harvard ID, that he demands you speak to him respectfully, that he demands further identification, that he takes out a pair of handcuffs. He's not treating you like a middle aged white man, he's treating you like a youth; he's not treating you like a black Harvard professor, he's treating you like . . .

like a black man is in fact so often treated in America.

We live in a paradox

we academics, I mean me, rather: All my information comes from the digital interface, but my sole desire is to create the artifact the book. I read an article on Tonga Christian conversion in the Journal des Societies Oceanistes, and it is there, permanently, irretrievably, forgottenly, but there. The old yellow pages heavy and shiny.

Actually I am reading books. I am still reading Against the Day, the monumental and awesome Thomas Pynchon book, which I had to put away after a while when I realized the Chums of Chance and the retreat into altered history and the buzzing Lovecraftian beings without pathos were not all going to be explained, but were parallel threads overleaving themselves with each other. I do understand what the novel is up to, finally, (p. 657 or so). The doubling that time is weirdly involved with: the alternative realities in all of us, the reversals of contemporary virtualities by repositioning them in history differently.

And Van Dieman's Land, by James Boyce. A little bit. But mostly it's -- let's go to the INTERNET! EBSCO, JSTOR, etc. etc.

Who can keep up?

Moravians in the Eastern Cape, 1828-1928: four accounts of Moravian mission work on the Eastern Cape frontier
By Friedrich Rudolf Baudert, Timothy J. Keegan
Published by Van Riebeeck Society, The, 2004
ISBN 0958452229, 9780958452229

Colin Rae's Malaboch: The Power of the Book in the (Mis)Representation of Kgalui Sekete Mmalebh

Author: LIZ KRIEL a
Affiliation: a University of Pretoria,
DOI: 10.1080/02582470208671417
Publication Frequency: 4 issues per year
Published in: South African Historical Journal, Volume 46, Issue 1 May 2002 , pages 25 - 41

Wittgenstein is remarking on this passage in Frazer’s Golden Bough:

“At a certain stage of early society the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an incarnation of a deity, and consistently with this belief the course of nature is supposed to be more or less under his control’ (Frazer, Golden Bough, 168 [iii, 1]); Ludwig Wittgentstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” I, 1931 (MS 110), and II, ca. 1948 (MS 143), in Philosophical Occasions, 1912-1951.

Acknowledging that perhaps some of Ellenberger’s and Breutz’s

retrieved ancestral brotherhoods and fatherhoods were constructed over time, provokes a new strategy. Instead of following out each “tribe” from start to finish, let us take some of their components deliberately out of order: removing them from their never-fully-consistent chronology.

In the winter,

In the winter, the mornings would often be leavened by the acrid smoke of wood-buring fires, dogs barking, babies crying, and cocks crowing.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

Only in South Africa, corresponding to the apparent homogeneity of the Central Cattle Pattern, have the Matebele, crocodile, and ha-rotse (as Hurutshe) been grasped as tribes, with little conceptural room left for alliances or other forms of mobilization.

Thank you to Karen Milbourn

Thank you to Karen Milbourne for alerting me to the tradition that “Toka” and “Subiya” (tribes), of the Ngamiland inland delta, told the passing “people of Kololo,” Sebitwane, that the Luyi or Luyana speakers to the north were “a people rich in cattle who inhabited swampy places with many rivers.”  This was apparently bena beluizi or something like it which became “barotse” (without first passing through balozi?): The gist is that “-luizi” meant all that, “a people rich in cattle . . .” etc., which is plausible if taken loosely: for being rich in cattle, in a place of many rivers, was exactly what all rozi - rotse associations aspired to, and “-luizi” may have been a variant therein.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

When Samuel Broadbent shot a guinea hen out of the sky, “delighting” (not astonishing) chief Sefunelo, the chief “made the sound of the report, and with his hand the action of the falling bird” . . .

The “dynasties” and “titles” among Rozvi-connected chiefs in David Beach’s reconstructions of Shona political history,

and the new “peoples” or “the earliest tribes” (the Bahurutshe, Barolong, etc.) in South Africanist anthropology, are in this reading part of a single, larger phenomenon, with different levels of wealth and stability.

And Christianity

only grew with acolytes decades later, when deploying the same vocabulary on behalf of genuine leaders became absurd or criminal.

Later, with the growth of amakholwa Christian communities south

the Thugela River, “Natal Kaffirs” of Fingo (mfengu: refugee) background, Zulu came to have a broader meaning still, and led by teachers, clerks, and venders, it became a subnationality, with vital connections to the house of Cetshwayo, yet subject to the stresses of urban and rural divisions and gender conflicts.  Such struggles over the speakings of “zulu” redefined the word further, and by the late 1910s it had become an ethnicity, independent of any royalist connection, as royalist Zulus tossing sand in graves with their spears might nonetheless be Christians in good standing.

ONGOING: EXCISED FOOTNOTE TEXT FROM MS., "POPULAR POLITICS IN THE HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, 1400 - 1948"

Robert Moffat, Apprenticeship at Kuruman: Being the Journals and Letters of Robert and Mary Moffat, 1820-1828 (ed. Isaac Schapera)(London: Harrow, 1951).

 

Thomas Arbousset, Voyaqe d’exploration aux Montagnes Bleues (Paris: Societe des Missions Evangeliques, 1933), 90; Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, 261.

We are in a blur in the middle of the imperial century,

the nineteenth century, observing it as if from a moving train. 

In South Africa “ancestor” did not indicate a “kind”

of “supreme being” (as in the strongest god of a pantheon, or a “remote God”); nor a projection of a principle (light, air, fire), a first ancestor, or any supreme personhood at all to great heights or potency as a controlling figure, power, or central symbol.  There is a little evidence counter to my hypothesis here, notably Lichtenstein’s early (Foundations, 1807) understanding of modimo as a remote and distant deity; and Chidester, Savage Systems, 182.  But the term did not mean the creator of the elements, earth and the heavens.

Records show

Records show there were several prominent names which crossed the road from Barolong to Coloured in this period.

Rush Limbaugh

Fascinating to watch him with Hannity.  The latter is sweating, giving a little smile that says, "I am yours," telling Rush he was quoted out of context, boy that's typical, from their last interview, and perhaps Rush meant something more subtle than "I want Obama to fail."  He said so much more given the full context . . . Do you care to comment?  Rush then repeated he wants Obama to fail.  Meaning, he now says, he wants Obama's economic interventions to fail, he wants his supreme court nominee to fail.  He has nothing against Obama "personally."

When Rush says, I love this country, and gives examples of his friendship for the people and their ways, his tone of voice somehow suggests he feels he is doing his country a favor.

When he says, "I have all the answers," he is making fun of himself because he does radio, where you have to talk all the time, as a pundit on crack, because he knows he's Jeff Crest the radio voice guy, and the rest is too good to be true.

A performance, like apparently Lou Dobbs is?  A life as performance?  Is there another guy there too, a quiet and reflective man?  Hardly seems like it.

Rush tells Sean Hannity . . .

Sotomayor is a racist because she said being an hispanic woman would make her a better judge than a white man, according to Rush.  Then, Rush said, perhaps I'll change my mind about Sotomayor if she'd vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, something "very important to me."  Because she is Puerto Rican and Catholic, and they tend not to like abortion, so that's a possibility, and if so, Rush would support her even after the racism thing.

So, being an hispanic woman might make her a better justice after all.

Or am I missing something?

Rush calls Obama "racist"

Rush Limbaugh today called Obama "the worst racist" of them all, a "reverse-racist" if we are going to be nice about it, and his new Supreme pick is also a "racist."

Rush is like the old man in the TV room growling at the rabbit-ears, fond of saying irresponsible and provocative things with nasty overtones, or the guy on his fourth slow beer at a small town bar, sitting back and crossing his arms with a stupid smirk.

The kind of guy who thinks that white people are suffering as a group in this country.

Let this be the hope of the GOP, so a new party representing conservatism and restraint and a more Libertarian attitude toward the law can bloom in the space behind it.

We're With You, Pakistan

Irony dies when a bomb in a car kills 23 Lahore shoppers and wounds over 300.  This constant war will not go on forever, and those who died were just trying to live like I do, in an urban milieu where men and women go outside and are not hidden away, go openly to a market, converse without fear.  We are with you, Pakistan, fighting for the rule of law and the attempt at intellectual mastery of our problems, the attempt to maintain equal rights for all citizens, the respect for religious pluralism, your court system, your people not ready to give in and permit the rule of the clerisy and the armed young men in their thrall.  You are on the front lines.  We are wounded with you.

New York Times lead story / internet headline: 11:57 am, 5/21/09

Obama's speech.

Let's see how fast this changes now that Cheney's stepped all over it saying choking prisoners by pouring water down their throats is not torturing them.  He insists on the euphemism, "enhanced interrogation," building on the already awful modality of putting prisoners in cold rooms, keeping them awake, dousing them in cold water, making them stand for hours, etc. etc. physical punishments that the CIA meted out.

I'll check back.

Still Obama.  Candy Crowley called it "enhanced torture techniques" just now.  Good for you, Candy.

12:20 pm and Cheney now pushes his head above the fold, under the headline, "Dueling speeches . . ."

Proposed Courses at the University of Maryland

In the interests of drumming up support for forthcoming courses, I propose the following.

Hist. 124: Africa through Wikipedia

Students read and critique Wiki pages devoted to some aspect of Africa — from Leo DiCaprio's eternal role in Blood Diamond, to Winnie Mandela's soccer club, to Ogoni oil lease demands in the Niger Delta, to Tanzanian drug transshipment.  Students then recheck Wiki to see if the truth has changed while they were writing their final composite amalgam papers.  The final submission is an e-mailed work in progress for which the entire class collaborates from their mobile devices.  As an electronic text, it is then thrown away or assimilated to another text, and the students collectively receive an A.

Hist. 3981: Transnational constants: Breathing, eating, drinking, walking, washing, unmentionabling

The class looks at wide continuities and contextualizes "change over time" as just one facet among many other more important ones, like getting a good night's rest.  Each professor selects a country or region, and offers a single fact differentiating/assimilating a "constant" (C) into the "Big Story" (BS).  Each student is responsible for a term project locating their own daily habits in a matrix of continuity.  We supply the conclusion of the class in advance, so those without the hours or know-how to follow the class in real time will not suffer.  It is: "People are different, people are the same."  Students receive an A.

Hist. 800: Gender in the History of History

This course pools the talents of the entire staff.  Each professor writes a thirty page summary of their field, drawing out the continuities and ruptures in the way sex-role-performance in society has been dealt with by previous scholars over time, and the way each him or herself is part of that history.  Using only the internet accessed in their free time, students merge the documents into one big document, and then edit them to fashion a master chronology of events (CE) roughly sixty to seventy pages long.  Random words and phrases are then chosen from the document and memorized for the test, which is a practice exam only.  All the students receive an A.

MSNBC on "The Family": the Sexualization of Christ

The Family as a cult, as a suicidal sinkhole, as a unification of God with f***ing (see below).

As i wrote last May:

Flight 3407 over Buffalo

The flight that went down in Buffalo with ice on its wings: the transcript of the final words in the cockpit predictably include presumably "SHIT" (alt. "FUCK") and "JESUS CHRIST." We are told that the co-pilot said, "I don't know anything about icy conditions or de-icing." And then the pilot said, "I've never been on the stick," meaning, I've never got this plane out of a stall with the stick, one assumes.

After these confessions, the plane stalled and wobbled twice and then made a bee-line for sea level on Elm Street.

But that is not so far in the released transcript I've seen. There is just normal sounding airline talk. What's on record however does however raise some questions, especially in light of the unprinted material released by NY1 above.

22:00:23.2

HOT-1

had a guy that worked in there. had an odd accent to begin with. and uh

College Station Airport is uh owned and operated by the university-- uh

the Texas A and M university.

22:00:37.8

later . . .

you know we had a a controller down in Houston. uh he was known as

Mister Happy.

21:58:37.7

HOT-2

oh yeah.

21:58:38.4

HOT-1

guy was just he was-- had a perfect personality for the being a controller.

he never let anything rattle him. and he just all just all bubbly type a type a

guy. he retired-- just to let you know how he-- how well respected he

was um he retired and he had they published where his retirement party

was. there was pilots from Continental Colgan pilots Chautauqua

Expressjet you know the main carriers there in Houston.

21:59:09.2

HOT-2

oh that's cool.

21:59:12.3

HOT-1

they all went to go see you know Mister Happy and everything but but

that's where I got the bent wing pencil jet.

21:59:19.6

HOT-2

it's where what?

21:59:20.6

HOT-1

that's where I got the bent wing pencil jet uh name from.

I was interested to find on line a commendation for Axe from Houston, who talked like that: "Bent-Wing Pencil Jets" for XRs. I wonder who left this note, who ERfly is?

HOT-1

it's-- it's like moms SUV or minivan. you know the soccer van uh you

don't have to fly with your hands and your feet. you just fly with your

hands.

21:44:59.2

HOT-2

yeah.

21:44:59.5

HOT-1

once you-- once you flip the auto-- uh the yaw damp on and autopilot on

it's solid as a rock.

and

21:45:05.2

HOT-2

works the rudders for you.

21:45:07.1

HOT-1

yeah it works rudders for you. it's all coordinated.

INTRA-AIRCRAFT COMMUNICATION AIR-GROUND COMMUNICATION

TIME and TIME . . .

and then earlier, also:

21:46:55.6

HOT-1

you know home with your husband to to take care of all that kind of stuff.

INTRA-AIRCRAFT COMMUNICATION AIR-GROUND COMMUNICATION

TIME and TIME and

SOURCE CONTENT SOURCE CONTENT

DCA09MA027

CVR Factual Report

Page 12-34

21:46:59.6

HOT-2

exactly yeah it's just gonna depend where we're at when that happens.

but I-- I mean I'm not-- I'm not in such a hurry to upgrade. I've got very

very very good connections at Alaska.

21:47:10.4

HOT-2

oh cool.

21:47:11.2

HOT-2

Alaska's the only major I'd want to go to.

21:47:13.2

HOT-1

yeah.

21:47:13.5

HOT-2

just because I don't want to commute my whole life...so um once I do

upgrade you know once once Alaska starts hiring I don't-- I mean I don't

necessarily have to have a thousand hours PIC. I need to have some PIC.

21:47:25.7

So: WHO wants to transfer to Alaska, a cold-weather region? And what led to the co-pilot being on the flight? What was all that talk about? Is it normal to screw up like this? Of course, one might say, what do I expect: "Executing proper maneuvers at the proper moment, but the technology appears to be failing." Best not to judge before getting all the facts. But aren't these the questions reporters should be asking?

OKAY, toward the end . . . we all know it got bad, but that's also on FOX NEWS. Sorry, I'm not a ghoul, there's no link.

Longtime readers (I think there are four of you) will know that I do not like to use the actual words and people in the news, but to write in a lax and undeniably annoying way using the wrong words so as not to be searched. Then I tried putting Ben Stein in a heading, and no one clicked up my counter (well, twenty people or so). Thus I learn I am writing a pebble stumbled upon once in a while like a wrong number. A private bulletin board . . .

Taylor and the Future of University Education

Re the Taylor essay in the New York Times, really, how odd it is that theology is still a subject in modern secular universities.  With only the most indirect application to the world as it is experienced by real people, the medieval subject has been caught in an identity crisis since Nietzsche remarked that its inclusion in the humanities is a conundrum beggaring any attempted explanation.

The weaving of doctrinal fantasies must, sure, be leavened with lace, bells and whistles, images and video-projects. Who otherwise would wish to write about purely ideological disagreements, the kind Marx said cannot actually have a discernible history?

Who would not rather make a multi-media presentation about Hans Kung or Zoroaster or the famous three-Jesus-fingers or two-Jesus-fingers controversy?

"In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text."

"Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure."

"Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs."

"Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological . . ."

I know about water.

Did you learn about the history of water management and other resources?

No, about the water of history management, and the watering of other resources, with a strong theological slant. You know there is no more history department.

Have you noticed time getting away from you?

It's four o'clock, again, four in the afternoon, time for a cup of coffee.  The coffee again.  I am always making coffee, it is always this time, four, then it will be head on the pillow time again.  It is always all the times.  It is always the coffee, the driving the same routes, the progress by inches in making the redundancies go away and the chronology as solid as possible.  No balance or sanity is possible until it is done.  What gets sacrificed for a big attempt, a large effort, made out of the darkness, not in the middle of a seminar, one consisting of watching words on a screen for thousands of hours, if not balance

Rozi ness

To continue a conversation with myself about evidence and argument and ethnicity:

Conveying relief.  Whew.  Not that I am provided with cover, but that my obvious sins have been corrected before the graver ones are revealed.  I mean, the obvious sins in my argument in my second chapter corresponding to the flood inward of an idea of heightened interest in place and defense and wider alliances/bigger chiefdoms, called rozi.  I had to decide whether to go against JV and say, "I believe it is based on Shirazi," and so dates back to Great Zimbabwe, which is then ipso facto apparently suggested as having hosted a "Shirazi" dynasty, etc.   You get the picture: it looks from a distance like walking into the Hamitic Hypothesis volume two.  Even so, I can't get out of my mind the odd coincidence of relatively rare r --- names.  Even so.  Even so, I gave up.

Gone is everything that can't be shown without a thorough survey of Shona and Setswana and Sesotho usages a la the Schoenbrun and Ehret and JV approach.  Yet it turns out that the disagreement between Ehret and JV is bigger in JV's view than their agreement, and they are the masters of the lexicostatistics etc. approach.  Let me put this delicately: I have some . . .  problems with establishing proto-meanings for conceptual words etc. with their approach.  But I grant it is great for sheep and goats and types of sorghum.

So I've just saluted them all from afar now, so to speak, in my revision.  Now, all I say is something that JV has no objection to in principle: the argument that rozvi - rozi - rotse is a continuum of phenomena, that the continuum bridges Shona-"highveld" i.e. Tswana - Sotho - Pedi languages, that Shona v. S.A.'n highveld has been overemphasized to create a false image of tribal organization on the highveld.  And the twin-court reading of oral tradition.  So it is much shorter now . . .

To return now to this commentary.  The historian always has to ask him or herself, "What do I believe actually happened."  This is very important.  If that cannot be answered honestly, you cannot go forward.  I believe that ethnicity has blinded scholars to wider shared phenomena and that rozvi - rozi - rotse are related, but developed differently in different places.  I accept that Shona ZCP sites are more complicated than highveld settlements as lines written in mud and stone.  But I do not accept the binary: Shona developed civilization of ZCP in Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe, while plus sa change highveld settlements were and remained tribes.

The same kinds of associative devices productive of a torwa could make alliances into brotherhoods in the language of the highveld, and even alter genealogies.  That much I learned in Lerala years ago.  When one considers that writing freezes memory, we have to assume there is a palimpsest and that the usual rules of less clarity and richness in the middle period is followed i.e. the "hourglass."  There is a trans-ethnic kind of phenomenon, where blood descent has blinded historians of the SA and Zim elevated agrarian towns' relationships and mutual intercourse, showing the complexities of the development of forms of self-rule.

Most of all that there was a real politics operating that reached back before extant tribes, and that real ancestors were recollected all the time by highveld chiefs and their minions, and that genuine wisdom about the past and so the future was contained in their oral traditions.  This leads to the argument re motebele.

Re Michelle Marsh NPR Interview re Cuba and Race

Old Post:

Eye on the NBC Olympics' Coverage -- Part I -- Cubans are Again Revealed to be Black People

It is so fortunate that we get to call call them "Cubans," since, "some black people descended from the field slaves in sugar esates" is not as nice. And wouldn't it seem odder than even it does now, were we to rename them thus, when their Olympic teams come and kick our a** ?

Wikipedia

The fear, the fear to say anything against the collective wisdom! Our modern God!

Way before Nicholson Baker it was not cool to talk against Wikipedia as a researching scholar.

So I'll do it.

How often do I encounter the student gaze that says: Why is your particular selection of material, stories, illustrations, and texts, being given to me instead of the story I find elsewhere, like on Wikipedia?

The God of Democratic Knowledge!

Because we dabble in knowledge according to a more ancient formula than popular acclaim. Alright, a medieval formula.

If you look up Harar, on Wikipedia, you learn about an ancient crossroads town in Ethiopia still with its city wall or "jubal," and you learn that they throw meat to the hyenas outside the city walls for sport.

All in all I like the entry. I don't know whether it is really all so, but I suspect it is.

You look up Ndebele, on the other hand . . .

There is a serious problem here. It's asinine.  Way behind the basic research that's gone on for two decades, etc. So is the answer a GoogleBooks search?

All Hail Google!

From the students, the question is, If your story is better than the common story, Dr Whoever you are, why hasn't it been distilled and made available to me already in one set of copy-able texts or texts and images (aka "the internet"), -- -- why, in short, is what you are selling not already popular enough to be bought wholesale and be published and accessible at the touch of a button?

As part of "the knowledge out there," the objective facts about so many things that just "are"?Because isn't that the way things work? No? Does that mean you are an elitist?

Dr. Landau, isn't what everyone thinks happened more important than what you think happened?

Dr. Landau, isn't what everyone else thinks happened what I should be learning, because that's what the rest of the world is going to "test" me on? -- and what do you mean by speaking about subversive knowledge?

Really the virtual reality of consensus information is extremely vulnerable to being "twisted" or "bent," as Roland Barthes said about complex packages of already-known symbols which "depoliticize" the world.

Oh, did I say Wikipedia?  Their short and clear analysis of Barthes's book somehow misses this point.

The Democracy of Right! Ionesco, come back.

"The real story" is . . .

How far ahead of the curve can a University history lecture course on Africa take us, for understanding the history of the continent in some meaningful way? -- That a website or a website "slide and lecture" web course can't do better? In a world of immediate "information" without provenance, without speakers, without implications for speech, without any requirement to read to the end of the page?

We are based on text. Wikipedia is a post-print age concept: a palimpsest of a 360 degree bubble lens wrapping the earth in words.  It is not a text.

So there it is now.  Robert Darnton, they bought you out with that library.  I'm selling harder than ever, and I still refer to our "library," but I hear the roar getting louder, the police boats are catching up.

Pit stop number one: Publish book.

Pit stop number two: Stop caring.

On Board the Banville with the Barbary Pirate 1609/2009

They said to the Barbary pirate, We are not going to let you go.

Isn't it pretty obvious, that the answer to why things got tense, is, the man who came aboard the US boat to "negotiate" was told, "You are not going anywhere."

Meaning, "We are not going to negotiate: you are to be treated like a common criminal in the midst of a criminal act."

No wonder the "situation got noticeably worse," as the admiral said earlier, when it did.

The situation got bad because it became clear to the pirates with the captain in the lifeboat and the man on the Banville that they were not going to be offered safe passage away from the flotilla, to which, even then, they were under tow.  On a line, like a fish.

Immediately the captain's life was correctly adjudged to be in danger and they killed the three pirates.

Y

After Y, another part of the day begins.  I glance at my watch: 5:00 pm.  Y came about quite because a martini or two in the evening proved insupportable.  I am a migraine headache target with any kind of alkool (p. 44), it turns out, even the Reservoral or whatever it is in it.  Unless I absorb an Advil (Pain Free Living!) and a two tall glasses of water, and then . . .

Y offers no panacea, but then there are no panaceas.  On the other hand, you can't be a champion swimmer who drinks, not really; and you can't be a functioning white collar creative pedagogic scholar father husband homeowner if you are depressed or (see above) sleep deprived.  Sadly for me, virtually a nondrinker, they say, yes they do, that up to three drinks per night boosts your memory and wards off Alzheimer's Disease. Or maybe not.

A neurophysics person once told me that it is still not entirely clear how alcohol affects human cells, or exactly what it is doing.  I was surprised.  Isn't it well known if f*cks you up?

No one who treasures the necktie and the right to have people in central Africa killed in the name of commodity imports, is going to be pleased with the anti-bullshit factor in a little Y.  They would much, much rather that the men drank, drank to forget, forget, forget.

Yes, investigate

And, solve the Kashmir crisis by pressuring India, so we can stop Nuclear Pakistan from backing the Taliban and simultaneously drawing Indian aggression leading to another major war.  Then, investigate and prosecute the criminals in our government who ordered torture so we can get this behind us.

My state of mind

Every day, actually, since 9/11, but more as I get older: that the world could turn to shit in a blurry, fire-filled instant, and I would not even have enough time to give it meaning.

Nelson Mandela is still alive because . . .

Perhaps because he was in good shape, and then, just when his fighter's muscles would have begun to turn to fat, were he to have led his country as a free man, he was forced to live for 27 years as an adult with a low-protein, low-calorie diet, and daily physical labor. Notwithstanding the evil of it, Madiba's resulting TB, etc.  One cannot imagine President Zuma living into his 90s.

Writing about Van Onselen's The Fox and the Flies for the South African Historical Journal

The third time, may be the last. After a very friendly review I wrote as part of a collective of reviewers, about John Iliffe's book, Honour in African History, among whom was Clifton Crais, who wrote a distinctly less plaudit-laden review, I was asked to review The Fox and the Flies, by van Onselen, either alone in a review essay or as part of a group. I said I would be pleased to do it as a review essay. I am sure the idea was to send the review of this book out to a person disposed in a kindly fashion toward Van Onselen. I was indeed friendly in my disposition, and one can check my blog below. But as I read the book in question, it became clear to me that something was not working very well. The same plodding rhythm that gave a quotidian feeling to The Seed Is Mine, the biography of Kas Maine, was irksome in this biography of Joe Silver, the South African kidnapper, pimp and thug.  His life was not leading anywhere.  The scenery was great, but the character in it was strangely dead.  The reason for this was, Van Onselen had become convinced that the true identity of Silver (i.e. that of Joseph Lis, of Kielce, Poland) was "Jack the Ripper," that, in fact, it was Lis who had done the Ripper killings.  So he intuited a psychopathology for Silver's later life, thereupon. 

I wrote about the book, and the effect on the action and focus of the book of Van Onselen's understanding that Silver was the Ripper; and then, I evaluated that evidence, and refrained from any unnecessary criticism beyond that. I did however compare his previous treatments of the same material. And I asked questions any social historian would ask, about the "vice trade" and the parameters of "whiteness" in turn of the century Johannesburg, and so on.

When I'd first submitted a draft, a somewhat inferior and less careful version of what the South African Historical Journal ended up publishing, I was presented with a commentary from an unknown reader who appeared to me to be gate-keeping in a really obvious way. I was pushed to clarify that I was not accusing Van Onselen of anti-semitism, which I duly did. (CvO is not an anti-semite.) I was pushed toward some unknown rhetorical point about "global" connections and other matters, voiced as if to suggest I entirely recast the argument and structure of my review-essay. I made a few more changes and clarifications, and then said (e-mailed) something like, "Look. It appears someone over there does not want to publish my essay but it is not going to change that much. Maybe he or she should write their own review."

So yesterday I got the journal issue in the mail (they sent two copies), with a thank you note from Cynthia Kros.  In the journal, the review essay is there, followed by Jonathan Hyslop's first "book review," which is of the same book, CvO's Fox and the Flies. My essay is twelve pages long. Hyslop's is four. I wonder, did Hyslop see my review essay in advance, over there in the University of Witwatersrand, and indeed comment to me under the cloak of anonymity, asking for more than I could deliver, before drafting his review?  And if so, would that be why Hyslop's essay reads as if it were a response to my essay?

Hyslop's argument is for the importance of the book insofar as it is a portrait of Joseph Silver and his milieu over an extended period of time.  My essay addressed the evidence for thinking Silver a psychopath, for thinking him befuddled (tertiary syphilis), for thinking him The Ripper. Most of all my essay was about what happens to the framework and the interpretation when Silver's actions are made reflective of an unarticulated young manhood spent in the alleys of Whitechapel, London town, cutting and hacking at women in the coal fog.

Hyslop also suggests Silver may not be the Ripper by the evidence van Onselen presents and makes his own criticism (of the book's length and style) that (at least in the finished version of the essay) I did not.

The chair's secretary called me to ask for the link that would take one to the essay.  I told her I did not think the University of Maryland subscribed to the South African Historical Journal electronically.  It is a Taylor and Francis journal we pay to collect in print form.  I then sat down in my office and did a search and found that I had "Open Access," a green light, to journals published by Taylor and Francis as a UMD user, according to what I could see on screen, and so I opened up the most recent issue, issue 61, 1 (2009), and I could indeed open Eric  Worby's essay and others in the issue.  Only my own essay was "not available" for Pdf. or any other viewing outside the abstract.

The chair's secretary then e-mailed me with a link that indeed did deposit my essay on the screen, followed by a banner proclaiming the UMD right of way.  I couldn't figure out how she navigated there.

Today that link no longer brings the article, just the blocked abstract page.  One has to get onto the site after signing in as a registering user, and then search the journal for Landau, and then toggle on that.  Otherwise my essay is off limits.  Again, this link works only if you are all signed in:

Here for Landau essay on Jack the Ripper.

Even if we did subscribe to Taylor and Francis journals, the electronic reader can only see Hyslop's response, not my provocation.  Fix that, hey, SAHJ?  In all fairness, after letting Hyslop re-proclaim Van Onselen's importance, don't bury the point of view you found obnoxious but somehow fundamentally sound on factual and interpretive grounds.

Thanks, SAHJ!

Win Ben Stein

Very nice man.  As usual, generous, interested in others, one forgets even to say, "how are your family doing?" etc. as he is usually asking the questions.  Has zero confidence in the TARP expenditures, says (on TV, in the NYT, also) that eliminating mark-to-market rules would have accomplished just as much with no cost to the taxpayer.  How sad, if this is so. 

Oh, you, bearded man on the Glenn Beck program

You will look very outmoded in your video footage you saying one world government is not possible not in our constitution not lawful, when, in about two hundred years, we finally figure it all out and get serious

Planet of the Apes Conundrum

Why does Taylor understand his predicament as an inversion, in other words, understand that apes were ruling men, and not grasp that he had to still be on earth, for this basic observation not to be nonsensical? Because, the audience is being told, this world is not our world, it is a fantasy world in which it makes sense for Taylor to feel this way. 

The movie, the audience assumes, is an allegory: the signifying order is not that of real time, anywhere. Otherwise how could we not already know where we were? In this place, what looks like apes are not; what look like humans are not . . . they are aliens!  Thus to call them apes makes the movie about a realm detached from the real continuum of experience we understand to be operating in scifi movies.  Because in this signifying order, Taylor does not know he is on earth.

Then the end of the film reveals that we are on earth after all, the whole time, and that our framing was wrong. No allegory, this was a science fiction movie after all!  This causes vertigo.

Now you see racism is revealed as such: he hated apes even though he had no idea where he was.  Even though, of course we knew, we sort of knew the whole time.

The context-independent hate is prejudice, racism. The same problems that were destructive of America in the 1960s destroyed her for good-- we were fooled by the Black astronaut's scientific curiosity, so out of stereotype's range, we felt we were in a post racial world -- the forces that drowned Liberty, are in Taylor wherever he goes.

Kenya meltdown

The assassination of 2 human rights advocates means Mwai Kibaki will supervise a huge bloodletting without compunction.  It is as Bernard Porter in the LRB (if you subscribe) says, except, Porter sometimes seems to embrace a weaker version of the prejudices he dismisses in his accounts. There is nothing special about Africans in the world community that makes them "culturally" susceptible to bad government or fraud. It is not only just that the "it is our turn to eat" framework was violated by Kibaki, as Porter has it. It is not only that tribalism was no big deal and then became a big issue under Daniel Arap Moi.  It is that the state is disfunctional to civil society in Kenya, as it is in many postcolonial African countries. The state must be an impartial arbiter, not a slouching leviathan looking to first one, then the next tribe. The looking to first one and then the other tribe is the problem.

We in the United States have to act now.  Today is the time to punish Kibaki's government with measures now, not after a massive slaughter and ethnic cleansing in the cities, no government aid, no more loans, no nothing. Only save travel, the role of human beings going from one place to another, learning about where they are. And medicine so as not to wound the hurt. Other than that no more money. Stop Mercedes from selling Kenyan governmental officials white Benzes. Stop the liquor companies. Prevent the Kenyan bottle company from getting materials from the West. Stop the auto parts. No more container ships.  No more computer deals. No more US money handed over to the forty-person fake cabinet. Just as in 1907, when Casement and Morel reported about the Congo atrocities, publicize the killing of innocents.  Do it now before it gets really really bad.

Reorient the trade to countries that do not attack and kill their own citizens. A very simple rule.

Teaching and Lecturing at a State University

Not a surprise, small devices are creeping into the classroom and being turned on and off while I am "lecturing." (What they hell is that?) Listen, I hate everything new. I don't like not being able to double-space after a full stop when writing these words. But anyway.

Observing a colleague's class, I found myself noting how many students were checking their e-mail, hand-held phone logs, or browsing dietary web sites.  Not that there was a mile-a-minute information overload, but there's participating and there's coasting and whittling away at the time and then abruptly getting up and leaving.

In my class, at the height of my lecture -- my lecture -- on the "red rubber" scandal in the Leopoldian Congo, in which Sudan and other policemen and merciless Kurtzes riding them made a dent in the idea of unregulated "free trade."  Really slavery and labor theft and butchery and terrorism.  Somewhere around the end of the lecture and it is true the class was pretty spellbound at the picture of the boy with his hands cut off, a fellow at the very very back of the class -- the place were guys seem to stroll in and out late in the class period -- pulls out his PDA and starts thumbing the keys.

I told him to put it away. When it dawned on him that I was talking to him, I said, "Yes, I am that kind of professor."  And then I seemlessly finished, calm as a sea urchin.

I hate.

I hate rudeness in my face. I hate having to be the one to "educate" in this way: Yes, it is unacceptable to do as you are doing in a classroom.

I asked Bernie C. about this, my Jewish history professor hallway neighbor. He sees no difference between devices, lap tops, or young women dressing inappropriately, necessarily. He also feels that lecturing is a pre-print culture, medieval form of conveying information that is on the way out. Easy for him to say. He's already thinking about retiring in a few years. Why not just make videos, he says, and the students can run them over and over at their leisure.

I'm sure some young people learn better outside the lecture format.  But isn't the point of the lecture format also to teach students to be able to hear a presentation and draw the important points from it, writing down these points, and combine them with readings, to form a body of knowledge that can be verified?  Why is listening to a person speak about something a vanishing mode, to be replaced by data in words and pixels?

Is everyone insane?

Most heinously Evil ad in the world

Chevron has an ad campaign designed to look like a public service, asking people to conserve energy. Now, why would an energy company -- aka an oil company -- want to reduce people's energy usage? They don't.  

Take a look at the ads more closely.  Every single one pairs a face, i.e. "everyman," you, me, etc., with a pledge, and the pledge in every case negates itself or deflects actual transformation.

"I will leave the car at home more often." Everyone knows people act according to habit.  Here we are asked to leave the car at home once a week, maybe once a month.  Whew.  Every third Tuesday, maybe?  Hard to plan that out with the kids and work and all.

Consider an alternative ad: "I will sell my car and take public transportation."

But there is a more important point here.  The Chevron ads collectively are an attack on the actual politics of activism and public pressure.  It looks like a campaign, but it's somehow strangely ineffective, enervating.  "That's all that can be done?" part of us asks, or feels.  "To ask people to make a small change, that they won't make, that I won't make."  It's all so pointless to conserve energy, much less to change public policy or reorient Americans to sustainable lives.

That is the hidden purpose of the Chevron ads.  They are like white noise amped up to high volume when someone is trying to speak.  They are the "they" masquerading as "us."  Their true meaning is to offer a babble of voices that bore, slightly irritate, annoy.

Public citizenship, environmentalism, and self sacrifice: this is what it looks like, boys and girls. It's crap.

Stupidest ad in the universe (and above, Evilest ad in the unviverse)

The antihistamine commercial where the dad comes down and dusts off his old fishing rod, and says he hasn't been to that favorite fishing spot, "a river that runs through a field, a field with pollen."  Some moron figured that the ads with fields of wildflowers meant hayfever, and not a river, so they needed to have the field.

Few rivers run through fields.  The field would be a wetland, or there would be river banks. Small streams tend to run in vegetation.  Fields that weren't wetlands would be plowed to the river bank.

So in the end the father and daughter are shown walking through a forest and then standing and fishing on a brownish green CGI "field" with a CGI "river" put through it and vanishing into light savannah in the distance.  The edge of the "river" looks like a flat silver knife edge.  It's like an idiot dream.

Book contract for Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400 - 1948

Cambridge University Press, New York.

The "Syndics'" caveat or proviso was that the revised ms. be read by a reader selected by the press, but this will be one of the previous readers, and I am following advice.

I'm secretly very happy but I'm keeping the feeling from myself as a neurotic kind of self-punishment.  Now and again I realize for a moment.

All I have to do is take away the textual self-obfuscations and reveal what remains, undistorted.

Huffman is to be praised more than contested.  The point must be to acknowledge the greatness of Great Zimbabwe and other northern states while sharing in the traditions and heritage and effects of the rise and fall of same. People in South Africa rose and grew from the injection of organization represented by the ha rotse and later the rolong order.

This corresponded to similar kinds of authority north of the Limpopo, in the Zimbabwean highlands, of the Rozvi (rozvi).  There was a single loan term and a shared way of doing things, despite the difference in ethnicity ("Tswana" vs. "Shona").  There are other such shared ideas and terms, and one example is "ini" meaning little, a suffix.  One links the grasslands of the east with the highveld in a partnership of unequals, which as I show structured brotherhood (putative) among chiefs settling together in "twin-court" settings.  These are Motebele and Motebeyane, or Tebele and Tebeyane, or similar.  This is the paradigm within ha rotse ("Hurutshe") as well as Crocodile and so on lineages on the highveld in South Africa.  This is the ini connection again (in the form, ane: diminutive version of, i.e. "junior court").

Revised 3/26/09

AIG reveals deep cracks in what Americans believe they will take

The AIG crisis shows that Americans will tolerate much more self-abuse than previously  thought.  We can continue to fail to articulate the real contradictions in our political economy, and say things like, "those darned bankers!", when the real issue is not the bankers.  Sure, the bankers are robbing the taxpayer, but we have to continue to PAY them to rob us, indeed, to give the handgun and point it at OURSELVES, so they can buy bigger boats and have chauffeurs and travel first-class.  WHAT THE F - - - ?  What is going on?

The bankers and brokers and traders would much, much rather hold onto their huge bonuses than not hold onto them.  In fact, once they get that money, they'll fight for the rest of their God-given lives to keep it!  That's because they thought they were going to get it, and they like money, just like you and me.  They would rather have that money even if it meant the bailout failed, which they probably feel is a bigger issue than piddly them, FAILED, and brought the entire country into a Depression, because they could always argue it was structural, no one parts with wealth voluntarily at those masses.  No one.  Would you?

So railing against this gigantic concrete edifice of obviousness, that's the way forward somehow?  What frustration are we expressing, besides our realization that we have no view, that we can't ignore the obelisk, that it blocks our path?  That we are looking at the incommensurability of capitalism with the public weal?

Ten years north of the Orange River

Ten years north of the Orange River a story of everyday life and work among the South African tribes, from 1859-1869 By John Mackenzie: "How should I answer to Khari if I changed the of the town said Sekhome to me on one occasion when we were conversing on this subject . . ."

How should I answer.

Swimming

Through the unheated hallway briskly, running on the blue plastic corrugated map.

Exchange pleasantries with Fowad.

Goggles spit on and affixed.

Into the cool blue water. I swim easily, falsely, the Australian crawl because I am not out of breath yet. It is a 90 lengths to a mile pool. I swim the first lap in good form, breathing once on every third stroke on alternate sides. My kick is lousy, mainly to elevate my feet. It's a poor expenditure-of-oxygen-to-velocity part of my stroke, so I economize. Not unrelatedly, when I am rounding my fourth length, lap number two, I am already looking forward to the transition at the end of length five. Because in fact I am fucking out of breath and pushing it just to maintain a brisk form and not start waving at the water and rocking from side to side like a little boat bath toy.

My switch over is to the breast stroke. I can do the breast stroke forever, certainly for a mile (though it would take me almost an hour). I breast stroke happily back to Fowad, sitting on a plastic chair reading a tabloid. I go back to the crawl from the wall to the shallow end. It is not only that I am at this point most comfortable moving from breast stroke to crawl every 25 meters (or whatever the pool is). The fact is, I am better swimming the crawl well toward the shallow end, where the upward slant of the floor tiles give the impression of greater and greater speed. This makes the finish very easy. In contrast, swimming the crawl while almost out of breath moving toward Fowad and the deep end, is to see the tiles move more and more slowly under one's gaze, and feel like a flounder with its eye migrating around so it can stop wallowing and lay still.

After a while I start enjoying it, or almost. About lap fifteen or seventeen, when it is clear that I am going to cover my half mile in a twenty or so minute period. Then I start fantasizing about 27 laps, the 1 KM mark. Most often if I have time to do more than forty lengths (which I call half a mile) I will do fifty, not fifty four. I have not yet swum a mile at the JCC pool.

I make a great show of the last lap and swim the crawl without breathing for the last eight strong strokes, and hop out without using the ladder. I get my towel and 750 dollar glasses. Fowad says, "So how is it Paul. How's he doing?" Who, I sometimes ask. "Obama." Okay, I say. He's got a tough job. We discuss Madoff. I point out absurdly that he took advantage of other Jews, even imitating a Jewish matron I heard complaining on the radio. Fowad shows me Bernie Madoff's black and white profile, his hook nose. "You see." Yes, I say. Look at my profile: and I am only half Jewish. We share a laugh, me and the Moroccan lifeguard at the Jewish Community Center, who knows that Obama is a Muslim and once you are a Muslim you can never turn back, and so has his doubts. But he kind of likes Obama. He's not "doing so bad."

I get into the steam room. It takes about twenty minutes to heat up, and it shuts down if not fiddled with every fifteen minutes. I.e. it's a Jewish steam room. Today I got lucky and the temperature was at 115, a once in a month occurrence. I sat and steamed and read the Washington Post best I could, the print from the reverse side showing through in the wet.

I know all the men in the locker room at this point by sight. I remember about half their names. I used to swim later by a half hour, and there was Paul the financial guy and his wife, who swam together. There's Mike who wears flippers and backstrokes just about a stroke behind my speed. There's a woman who really swims, a fast half hour on the right (1.5 M. shorter) lane. Bye bye. There's a big guy who sticks to the crawl the whole way whom I lap every ten or so.

In the locker room there's a few guys who work out and change about that time. An older financial guy who teaches for a pittance in his retirement. It is much better to exchange views with such people when your penis and overflowing belly are visible. That way, there is only the pretense and farce that can be mustered out of nothing in the conversation, no bullshit stemming from a suit or hidden nipples and so on.

I love old Jews, and loved changing in the locker room in the YMHA on 92nd street years ago with the old handball players. Those guys are all dead now. They would be in their 100s. But I was scared of them then. You saw a couple of tatooed numbers, not many. Mainly thin guys with tits. I remember one man with a hanging weeping willow bonzai hanging between his legs under his hunched over form. Yiddish uptown accents, all gone now. These were the men who you felt you should know, but you did not know, they were foreign. They were New York.

President Obama Pardons Bernie Madoff

CBS Chicago Affiliate Breaking News

"We can't choose our partners in this time of crisis"

. . . etc. "Unfortunately some of the very same people who got us into this mess are going to have to help get us out. If that means elevating Bernie Madoff to a central oversight position . . ."

Rant about February

Not a good month. For me or for us all.

First let me bitch about my class. Let's call 'em as we see 'em. I have offered two intersecting lectures in which I situate Frederick Lugard, the author of Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa, and no, don't let me know if I've misquoted the title, I'm writing purely off the cuff here, and the introduction of Indirect Rule, capitalized, as a concept, follows from this. Lugard accompanied a "Company" militia into Buganda to "stabilize" a complex situation involving Muslims and Christians and a Kingship. Later on, he ruled as governor over the Sokoto Caliphate established by Usuman ("Fulani Jihad" etc.), which had produced the "Hausa-Fulani" aristocracy.

Through Lugard's experiences we look at what Lugard says and does theoretically, i.e. first, "rule through emirs," second, his understanding of naturally-entitled races, and third, the ahistorical and anti-hierarchical idea of ethnicity. (It derived from the necessity of naturalizing the rule of chiefs, creating natural domains of uncontested underlings locked into place. See Martin Chanock.) One effect: permitting and tolerating the perpetuation of slavery in N. Nigeria (Sokoto Caliphate etc.)

So on the exam, after having delivered these lectures, which included another lecture devoted to the history of the Great Lakes kingdoms up to the end of the nineteenth century, including Buganda/Uganda, and after having projected these words on the screen in the dark in giant POWER POINT LETTERS,

I gave an exam with the following question or something like it, amid other "short answers," viz., Frederick Lugard author of Indirect Rule went from a stint militarily in B________ or U__________ (4 letters.)

That's right. I made a mistake: GANDA is five letters. Anyway, here's the end of my little complaint for February re this question on the midterm exam in a class in which every single reading is a computer click away from appearing on their screens.

Not a single student in the sitting class of 75 raised their hand to say, "Professor Landau, I noticed that the answer to the question seems to be five letters, not four."

Not a single person. Not one person in the class both a. knew this enough to do so, and / or b. got this right, and c. were willing to point it out to me in either case.

Only twenty more years of teaching to go.

All right, about this month. Look, there is nothing nice about sliding down into a smaller, more "realistic" economy. The GOP keeps saying Obama will make us into France or Sweden, but that's a BEST CASE SCENARIO. Why can't we see that in the end, Americans are going to have to be driving small, light-weight, perhaps inflatable electric and gas/electric vehicles, if not now, then in the next ten twenty years? With portable engines but top speeds of fifty miles per hour and slow acceleration?

Okay, enough about my love for my car. But the sinking ship that is the economic boom subsiding . . . the money that inflated the market until '99, then went into real estate; the tail end of those buyers were those who couldn't afford to pay off their mortgages unless their properties continued to accelerate to higher and higher values.

Next up is my landlord parking-space rear neighbors, who own three or four parking spaces on this side of the alley. They did not like my telephoning five times over two weeks checking up on why the promised cleaning crew had not come, the crew that they'd called after I reported that another homeless person's SHIT with TOILET PAPER had not been cleaned up in the parking lot DIRECTLY BEHIND my house. Well, the response of this neighborly company, Potomac Development Corporation, has been to send me a Boist diagram of our and the surrounding properties in the block, showing that they own the property up to the very rear of our easement rear yard / deck, and so, they can put up hedges or even a WALL if I persist in . . .

Swinging my gate out over their property, it appears.

In other words, they want no access, or at least alley-access, to my property from the rear. At the least, they've cancelled my ability to enter my own property from their -- "their" -- parking space properties. If they choose they could shut me in further even as an emergency egress. At the very least, the message is: Lay off, and change your f * ing gate. Thank you. I'm glad I called you on your missing cleaning crew not cleaning up the homeless persons' faeces, and that you allow me usually to deal with the cast-aside used condoms, to report the rats caught in the waste bin in the rain, to report the sofa and construction off-scouring left in the alley off "their" parking spaces. My reward: "You can't have free access in the alley anymore."

Because they can. Just like companies can dump thousands of employees and then say they are "investing in their people."

The rear opening onto the alley predates their purchase of those easements (if a landlord friend is right) or property, because it goes back at least fifty years. I remember the rundown but nonethless discernible shape of the rear yards before my neighbor's property was sold, and my neighbor grew up there. The rear yards opened up at their backs onto the alley from her childhood. That was the understanding we had of the property when we bought it, and it remains mine now.

Anyway let me end now after two I am sure irritating premature PUBLISH POSTS. Today I introduced the third point I take away from Lugard: his understanding that successful rulers in Africa as elsewhere in the world had to take something away from their citizens. They had to tax them.

If they did not take regularly and predictably from their citizens, their citizens would have no stake in the direction of the state. They would resist further attempts to tie them therein. One whole part of the Dual Mandate was to mentor native peoples (races), so they might develop their better sons into small aristocracies leading the way forward for their tribes and peoples . . . and ultimately those men demanded to control the state, Nasser's and Nkrumah's and P'Bitek's and Armah's and Dangor's and Achebe's generation. Indirect Rule contained the seeds of its own destruction.

One key element of these four (yes, 4) Lugardian postulates, was the squashing of hierarchies in fact relied upon, into pancakes of ethnic groups.