Differences & Repetitions

Today I ran across an intriguing story from the New York Times. Mostly it’s about the political strategy presumptive Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin used when she ran for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska back in 1996. She turned the tables in the election by sidestepping more run-of-the-mill local fare such as sewers and snow removal. Instead, she campaigned on so-called “wedge issues” including abortion, religion, and gun rights. With these she unseated a three-term mayor and became a polarizing political figure in the process.

Even more compelling to me than all this, however, is the interest she expressed as mayor of Wasilla in banning some books at the local library. The Times has this to say:

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

In 1996, Ms. Palin suggested to the local paper, The Frontiersman, that the conversations about banning books were “rhetorical.”

I wish the Times had provided some indication as to which “morally or socially objectionable” books Pain expressed an interest in banning. For my part, I consider book banning to be undesirable, even in cases where the books in question constitute unpopular speech. I suppose that makes me a good liberal–not in the sense of someone who endorses a left-wing politics per se, but rather in the sense of someone who holds fast to at least some of the tents of liberalism.

What truly fascinates me about the issue of Palin’s interest in book banning, though, is the synergy it seems to share with right-leaning religious groups who in recent years have attempted to get books such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter (of course there are many others) off of public library shelves. There are plenty of people who say books don’t matter much anymore–that they’re a medium in decline, that they’ve been edged out by television and the internet, etc. If that’s true, then why all this interest on the part not only of the Christian right, but indeed of other groups, to ban them? Or, why all the outcry over Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison’s 2006 swearing-in ceremony, in which he used not the Christian Bible but instead the Koran to consecrate his oath of office?

I don’t have concrete answers to these questions as yet; they do open up some interesting future directions for my research. For now, though, I will say this: the Palin book-banning controversy, coupled with the other examples I mention above, suggest that print (and printed books in particular) is far from dead. If anything, print remains a lightning-rod for the some of the most important social controversies of our time.

Occasionally I ask friends of mine to contribute a guest post to D&R. This one comes to you courtesy of my good buddy Ronald Walter Greene, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota and resident of the Twin Cities, a.k.a., ground-zero of the Republican National Convention (RNC). Things seems to be getting pretty dicey up there in terms of how authorities are dealing with the protests and the protesters. What follows is Ron’s report from the front.

Starting first with disrupting the Poor Peoples Campaign on Thursday (http://www.tc.indymedia.org/2008/aug/poor-peoples-campaign-sets-bushville-harriet-island) and targeting the RNC Welcoming Committee on Friday and Saturday (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/) the repressive state apparatus (RSA) has been busy arresting, intimidating and shaking down folks throughout the Twin Cities. The most visible act of the RSA is the preventive detentions of Monica Bicking, Eryn Trimmer, Luce Guillen Givens, Erik Oseland, Garrett Fitzgerald, and Nathanael Secor—The RNC 6—on probable cause holds. Show your solidarity by phoning the Ramsey County Jail at 651-266-9350 and demand their release.

Today (Sunday August 31) Twin Cities IndyMedia along with the National Lawyers Guild and Communities United Against Police Brutality filed a motion for an emergency restraining order against the police for intimidating and confiscating video equipment and cellular phones used to document police misconduct: http://www.tc.indymedia.org/2008/aug/press-conference-today-motion-mergency-restraining-order-against-police. Refusing to yield to a climate of fear, the Vets for Peace march took place today. Nine were arrested after some left the main march and climbed a security fence to “point out the utter failure and futility of war and the suffering that results from it”: http://www.twincities.com/allheadlines/ci_1035928.

To join in the fight against the RSA at the RNC Call St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 and the Mayor of Minneapolis R.T. Rybak at 612-673-2100 in Minnesota, or 612-673-3000 outside of Minnesota. And join the September 1 March on the RNC to Stop the War: http://www.marchonrnc.org. Folks gather at the State Capital at 11am. Be There or Be Square!

MEMORANDUM

TO: The Republican Party

FROM: Ted Striphas

RE: Gov. Sarah Palin (R, Alaska), VP Candidate

Courtesy of last night’s Colbert Report comes this pithy segment against “elitism.” And no, it’s not against elitism per se. Instead, it’s directed against a political culture that impugns relativism, only then to turn around and assail those who appear to have a modicum of intelligence or expertise. The segment’s about the charge of elitism, in other words, and its disingenuous use. Brilliant (elitist?) stuff. Enjoy.

Well, I really blew it on Super Tuesday. In a post on February 5th, 2008, I wrote:

Today, one of my students asked me where he could vote in Indiana’s Super Tuesday primary. He was despondent when I told him that Indiana doesn’t vote until May–about a week before Guam, and long after the Presidential nominations probably will be sewn up.

Who would have predicted back then that the primary season would still be going strong (for Democrats, anyway) come May? I hadn’t, clearly, and I pretty much had resigned myself to having essentially no say in who the Democratic nominee will be. I’m thrilled, therefore, about this Tuesday’s Indiana primary. I hear it’s the first time in 40 years that the state will play a meaningful role in the Presidential nominating process. It’ll truly be an historic day.

It’s interesting to have experienced two significant Presidential primaries now–one at the front end of the process, the other, at the back end. In 1992, I was living in New Hampshire, home of the nation’s first primary. The Democratic field was wide-open, and the state was abuzz with a dozen or so candidates. The late Paul Tsongas was the front-runner at the time, and I saw him deliver a speech at the UNH Memorial Union Building. The smallish room, where I often heard local bands play, was drab and poorly lit. Tsongas looked fine, but he was neither especially well-appointed nor particularly well-groomed. There was a decent turnout for the event, which was simple and straight-forward: he showed up, we clapped, he spoke, we clapped again, and we all went our separate ways. I vaguely recall that Tsongas seemed to have lacked energy. I’m sure there must have been some media presence, but no doubt the reporters were spread thin, given the size of the field that year.

Fast-forward to 2008. Last Wednesday, I attended a rally for Barack Obama at Indiana University’s Assembly Hall. This is the IU basketball stadium. If you know anything about basketball in the state of Indiana, you should have some sense of the size of the event. The venue wasn’t exactly filled to capacity, but it was close. Pretty much the only empty seats were in the nosebleed section. The floor was so densely packed that EMTs carted off three or four Obama supporters who, needing fresh air and a reprieve from the heat, had fainted. (In a particularly kind-hearted gesture, Obama tossed his own water bottle into the crowd, to help keep others from passing out.) The whole event was carefully choreographed, all the way down to the homemade looking signs that Obama’s campaign staff had provided to the group selected to sit behind him on stage. There were also a capella groups, who entertained us during the two-and-a-half hour lead up to the event, and inflatable beach balls, which the audience knocked around as though were were at an arena rock concert. Oh–and did I mention that among the throng of reporters, there even was a correspondent from The Daily Show? He stood out because of the glittery blue cape he wore over his suit jacket.

As for Obama, he didn’t look like someone who’s been campaigning for 18 months, that’s for sure. He showed up in his shirt-sleeves, and though his appearance may have seemed somewhat relaxed, it nonetheless didn’t appear too casual. That is, to me he still read, “politician,” and commanded just that sort of attention. His speech may have begun at 9:00 p.m., yet he seemed as fresh and as energetic as if he’d begun speaking at 9:00 a.m. The rally concluded not only with resounding applause, big smiles, and lots of audience glad-handing, but also with Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” blaring over the stadium PA.

It would be easy enough to wax cynical about how spectacular last week’s Obama event was, compared to the Tsongas rally I attended 16 years ago. But what, after all, would be the point of that? Indeed, what’s remarkable to me is how much more audience minded Presidential campaigns have become over the last two decades. Sure, a lot of it may be gimmicky, but I’m nonetheless stuck by how invested people seem to be in this particular Presidential election. To put it simply, I don’t recall people being as interested in a Presidential nomination–or politics writ large–in my entire adult life. This is a welcome breakthrough indeed.

Surely this resurgent interest in politics has everything to do with the many serious issues facing not only the United States but also the world today. But those issues can easily seem abstract absent certain techniques to get folks riled up about them. Though I’ve not had the good fortune of attending a Clinton rally, that’s surely what I saw at Obama’s.

Tuesday’s your day, Indiana, the last you may have in a looooooong time. Make it count, an keep the momentum going!

Google often celebrates holidays and other major events by changing the look of its home page. At Thanksgiving, for example, you’re likely to find pilgrims gallivanting, or perhaps an unfortunate turkey or two running for their lives. Valentine’s Day usually means hearts and all that mushy stuff, St. Patrick’s Day brings shamrocks and leprechauns…you get the drill. Well, today, Google’s usually white background has been turned black in an effort to raise awareness for Earth Hour–an event designed to curb global energy consumption and raise awareness about global climate change.

Let me say that I’m behind the Earth Hour event. It’s a fantastic idea, and I’d love to see its principles institutionalized. (It does make me wonder, though, about the prospects of Earth Day, which is a different event celebrated every April, getting downsized to a mere hour–but that’s a topic for another post.)

However welcome Google’s promotion of Earth Hour may be, I still find it strange for two reasons. First, I read a fascinating article by Ginger Strand called “Keyword: Evil–Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity,” which was published in the March 2008 issue of Harper’s. There, she notes how Google’s new server farm, to be built in The Dalles, Oregon, will consume about as much power in a given day as the entire city of Tacoma, Washington. Second, though I’m grateful to Google for plugging Earth Hour, the company gives no indication that it’s planning on unplugging anything itself. It offers this statement instead:

Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

Much as I respect Google–one of the most heavily-trafficked websites on the internet and host of Differences & Repetitions via Blogger–and its decision to promote Earth Hour, I’m sad to say its doing so seems more like carefully calculated corporate greenwashing than it does a genuine effort to cultivate environmentally sustainable practices. To point out the obvious: turning a computer screen black is not turning it off.

In addition to extinguishing all our lights for an hour, how much more of an impact could we make if we unplugged everything–lamps, toasters, computers, even Google itself (yes, YouTube too)–for an hour?

This is the first in what I hope will be a periodic series of guest-posts…. –t

I am one of many millions of Americans who, like Dick Cheney, have a defibrillator/pacemaker implanted in their chest. The neat little device not only miraculously regulates your heartbeat and, if necessary, shocks you out of arrhythmia (mine has never fired, but others have told me it feels like getting kicked in the chest by a horse), it also manages to throw off the usual rhythms of airport security. Since it’s metal, the defibrillator sets off the detector, but you can’t very well remove it and put it in the gray tray. Not unless you want to all get all “priest from the Temple of Doom” on their asses.

The required alternative is to go through a pat down. Now that I’ve had perhaps a hundred of these, I could probably run the training session: 1. Check the passenger’s boarding pass. 2. Tell her or him to stand on the mat with the two footprints. 3. Tell her or him to spread their arms. 4. Ask them if they would prefer a “private screening.” 5. Inform them when you will be “touching sensitive areas” and that you will “be using the back of my hand.” And so on.

I find airport security, and particularly the post-9/11 version of airport security, extremely troubling and pointless. So I decided a few months ago to get some t-shirts made with the Fourth Amendment printed on the front and back. For a while, I didn’t feel like I was up to wearing them. What if I got stopped? (Sometimes I said to myself, “This trip is too important to wear it.”) What if people asked questions and I was tired and didn’t feel like talking? I have been traveling a lot and not enjoying it very much.

Anyway, I finally got up the nerve to wear the shirt a couple weeks ago. I found it strange that I was so nervous and self-conscious about wearing the Constitution. Yes, the shirts are not very fashionable and rather wordy. They demand a lot from the public. But more than that, I felt like I was doing something wrong – like I was getting the Constitution through security.

All in all, the trip from Baltimore to Baton Rouge and back again was pretty uneventful. Some passengers commented on the shirt – the completely drunk woman who sat next to me on one of my flights read it out loud and said: “OK! OK!” Other comments from passengers and people working the food places at the airport were mostly positive. When I went through security the first time, a TSA guy running the checkpoint, who from his accent seemed to be a first generation immigrant, tried making conversation: “Hmm … De Fourdth Ah-mednt-ment.” Out of nowhere and to my own surprise I said, “Yeah. This tells you why all of this is illegal.” He didn’t seem to care much. But as I spread my arms in the little fishbowl area among the scanners, his underling did give me an especially brisk pat down.

An interesting post I thought I’d pass along from the Environmental News Network….

Want to get a new book but worry about its environmental impact? Worry a little bit less. With the help of Eco-Libris, you can plant a tree for every book you buy or read.

Says Raz Godelnik, an Eco-Libris co-founder, the company works with readers, publishers, writers, bookstores, and others in the book industry to balance out the paper used for any book by planting trees. About 20 million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper to be used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. Eco-Libris raises awareness about the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provides book lovers with a simple way to do something about it: plant a tree for every book they read. Ten dollars will cover tree planting for ten books.

To date, Eco-Libris has balanced out over 24,000 books, resulting in the planting of more than 31,500 new trees! Kedzie Press is collaborating with Eco-Libris in a “Million Tree-A-Thon” initiative to plant one million trees for one million books by the end of 2009.

The Eco-Libris program is being offered by some local bookstores; otherwise, it’s easy to participate on-line.

Thumbs up, Eco-Libris.

You can read my interview with Eco-Libris here.

I don’t usually make a habit of devoting blog space to conservative figures, much less to one the New York Times recently called “the architect of modern conservatism.” I believe conservative policies on the whole have been extremely detrimental for the nation and the world. As such, I tend to reject them, along with their underlying philosophies.

I didn’t always, though, and I owe my political turn around in part to William F. Buckley, Jr., who passed away late Tuesday night.

I grew up in a Republican household–a very Republican household. My father was quite active in the New York Republican party at both the local and state levels. I recall accompanying him to a smoky Republican party headquarters one cold November night in the early 1980s, where we cheered the victories of “our” candidates. The community in which I was raised also was staunchly Republican. It was something of an enclave in this regard, since New York State on the whole tended to be more Democratic, at least, at the time.

Most of my friends’ parents were Republicans, and most of my friends knew nothing else but. Consequently, we considered ourselves to be junior members of the Republican party, the inheritors of the GOP. We campaigned for aid to the Central American Contra insurgency during our mock-government conventions. We thought Ollie North, with his perfect posture, crisp uniform, and sad eyes, had been wronged by the liberal establishment. We celebrated the Reagan-Bush landslide of 1984, and in 1988, some championed the cause of the next Republican administration by affixing Bush-Quayle signs to their lockers at school.

We all knew a few, simple things. Democrats or, worse yet, Progressives, obviously were Communist loving softies who wanted to tax the nation into bankruptcy. They also wanted give all sorts of breaks to groups who clearly didn’t deserve them. At least, that’s what we all believed, swept up as we were in the rising tide of the Reagan Revolution.

My father passed away in 1986, and thereafter, my maternal grandfather became more of a presence in my everyday life. He, too, was an arch conservative. (His father had been a federal court judge, however, whom Franklin Roosevelt had appointed to the bench.) When I headed off to college, in 1991, my grandfather worried. He was a prodigious reader of conservative publications and was well aware of the culture wars taking place around that time on college campuses. He also knew U.S. colleges were “bastions of liberalism,” and so he wanted to do what he could to shield me from almost certain ideological indoctrination by the left-wing thought police.

His solution was to subscribe me to the conservative news magazine William F. Buckley had founded in 1955, the National Review. Every two weeks a new issue arrived at my dorm room. I recall thumbing through most of them, more or less interested. Some I read quite intently. One contained a fascinating book excerpt that asked what would have happened had the U.S. not entered the Second World War. Another issue contained a story in which the author argued that the South African anti-Apartheid movement really was a Communist front, and that it should be resisted by the United States at all cost.

It was with the latter article that I began to recognize something was wrong. Why in the world would anyone advocate sustaining Apartheid? This was racism–bald, state-sanctioned racism. How could “godlessness” or “collectivism” be worse than that type of injustice? And how could someone associated with the “party of Lincoln” maintain such a position? Despite my questions, I continued to hold fast to my Republican ideals and passed off the article as one bad apple amid an otherwise okay bunch.

I proceeded to take a political science class during the second semester of my first year at college. The professor was an avowed conservative who had been educated at Georgetown. We read What I Saw at the Revolution, a political memoir penned by Peggy Noonan, Reagan’s most famous speech writer. The Professor liked my work and even told me that it reminded her of the kind of thinking she used to encounter at Georgetown. I was proud of that compliment, and even prouder when I earned an A in her class. At the end of the school year, I happily reported to my grandfather that colleges–at least, the one I was attending–maybe weren’t great bastions of liberalism after all.

And then it happened. In 1991, Rodney King, an African American man, had been beaten by a group of police officers in Los Angeles, following a traffic stop. The acquittal of all but one of the policemen by a mostly white jury, in April 1992, prompted a wave of riots in L.A. All, clearly, was not well with race relations in this country. I’d seen the infamous videotape of the beating many times. Though I knew there was some room for interpretation–the NR had told me so–it was crystal clear to me that the officers had well exceeded the amount of force necessary to subdue Mr. King. And they were all white.

What horrified me beyond the verdict and the violence, though, was a mailing I received during the summer of 1992: a solicitation of support for the Sargeant Stacey Koon legal defense fund. Koon was one of the ringleaders of the beating, and here I was being asked to help him out. I wondered for a moment why I had received this mailing, when it dawned on me: Koon and his buddies must have gotten my name and address from the National Review.

That was the turning point. I knew then conservatism wasn’t for me. There was no going back. And I have William F. Buckley, Jr. to thank for this, my political awakening. Surely it wasn’t the one he would have endorsed, much less have expected, but for this reason, he’ll never be the “architect of modern conservatism” for me. If anything, he and his magazine helped demolish my conservatism and pave the way for my progressive education.

So thank you, Mr. Buckley, and godspeed.

From today’s Inside Higher Ed:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has of late been pushing charges that Barack Obama plagiarized some phrases in his campaign speeches.

But what about one of Clinton’s favorite phrases: “Solutions for America”? It’s the name for many of her campaign events. Today will feature “Solutions for America” rallies by the campaign in Ohio, and the phrase has appeared as backdrop for many campaign rallies. It turns out, however, that an organization other than the Clinton campaign has the rights to the phrase.

“Solutions for America” is the registered trademark of a University of Richmond program with the Pew Charitable Trusts to help local communities work on a series of social problems. The emphases of the program — promoting child health, reviving neighborhoods, creating jobs — have considerable overlap with Clinton campaign themes.

This one’s a bit vexing, honestly, as I can see the potential for overlap and, hence, for “confusion in the marketplace”–a primary rubric by which trademark infringement is supposed to be assessed. Here’s the rub, though: aren’t we talking about two categorically different things here? Isn’t Clinton’s use of “Solutions for America” a slogan for a political campaign–something that shouldn’t, in theory, exist in the marketplace per se? Now, I understand there’s a tremendous marketing dimension to Presidential campaigns, but isn’t the end of all that supposed to be about elected leadership and public service, not buying and selling? Or has politics become so commercial that we cannot but conflate the two anymore?

Anyway, you can read the complete article here.