Hillary and the Haters

Last night, I got into a bit of a rant on Rob's blog about the way the press have been portraying Hillary Clinton. Turns out I'm in the good company of Stanley Fish:

February 3, 2008, 8:02 pm
All You Need Is Hate

Stanley Fish

I have been thinking about writing this column for some time, but I have hesitated because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target. That is the agenda of Hillary Clinton-hating.

Its existence is hardly news — it is routinely referred to by commentators on the present campaign and it has been documented in essays and books — but the details of it can still startle when you encounter them up close. In the January issue of GQ, Jason Horowitz described the world of Hillary haters, many of whom he has interviewed. Horowitz finds that the hostile characterizations of Clinton do not add up to a coherent account of her hatefulness. She is vilified for being a feminist and for not being one, for being an extreme leftist and for being a “warmongering hawk,” for being godless and for being “frighteningly fundamentalist,” for being the victim of her husband’s peccadilloes and for enabling them. “She is,” Horowitz concludes, “an empty vessel into which [her detractors] can pour everything they detest.” (In this she is the counterpart of George W. Bush, who serves much the same function for many liberals.)

This is not to say that there are no rational, well-considered reasons for opposing Clinton’s candidacy. You may dislike her policies (which she has not been reluctant to explain in great detail). You may not be able to get past her vote to authorize the Iraq war. You may think her personality unsuited to the tasks of inspiring and uniting the American people. You may believe that if this is truly a change election, she is not the one to bring about real change.

But the people and groups Horowitz surveys have brought criticism of Clinton to what sportswriters call “the next level,” in this case to the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts. These people are obsessed with things like her hair styles, the “strangeness” of her eyes — “Analysis of Clinton’s eyes is a favorite motif among her most rabid adversaries” — and they retail and recycle items from what Horowitz calls “The Crazy Files”: she’s Osama bin Laden’s candidate; she kills cats; she’s a witch (this is not meant metaphorically).

But this list, however loony-tunes it may be, does not begin to touch the craziness of the hardcore members of this cult. Back in November, I wrote a column on Clinton’s response to a question about giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. My reward was to pick up an e-mail pal who has to date sent me 24 lengthy documents culled from what he calls his “Hillary File.” If you take that file on faith, Hillary Clinton is a murderer, a burglar, a destroyer of property, a blackmailer, a psychological rapist, a white-collar criminal, an adulteress, a blasphemer, a liar, the proprietor of a secret police, a predatory lender, a misogynist, a witness tamperer, a street criminal, a criminal intimidator, a harasser and a sociopath. These accusations are “supported” by innuendo, tortured logic, strained conclusions and photographs that are declared to tell their own story, but don’t.

Compared to this, the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity. When the heading of a section of the “Hillary File” reads “Have the Clintons ever murdered anyone?” — and it turns out to be a rhetorical question like “Is the Pope Catholic?” — you know that you’ve entered cuckooland.

Horowitz warns that as the campaign heats up, this “type of discourse will likely not stay on the fringes for long,” and he predicts that some of it will be made use of by Republican operatives. But he is behind the curve, for the spirit informing it has already made its way into mainstream media. Respected political commentators devote precious network time to deep analyses of her laugh. Everyone blames her for what her husband does or for what he doesn’t do. (This is what the compound “Billary” is all about.) If she answers questions aggressively, she is shrill. If she moderates her tone, she’s just play-acting. If she cries, she’s faking. If she doesn’t, she’s too masculine. If she dresses conservatively, she’s dowdy. If she doesn’t, she’s inappropriately provocative.

None of those who say and write these things is an official Hillary Clinton-hater (some profess to like and admire her), but they are surely doing the group’s work.

One almost prefers an up-front hater (although he tells Horowitz that he doesn’t like the word) like Dick Morris, who writes in a recent New York Post op-ed of the Clintons’ “reprehensible politics of personal destruction” (does he think he’s throwing bouquets?), and accuses them of invading the privacy of opponents, of blackmailing and threatening women, and of “whatever slimy tactics they felt they needed.” Morris calls Harold Ickes, a Clinton aide, a “hit man” for the president, and he calls the president “Hillary’s hit man.”

This is exactly the language of the most vicious anti-Hillary Web sites, and here it is baptized by its appearance in a major newspaper.

Horowitz observes that there is an “inexhaustible fertile market of Clinton hostility,” but that “the search for a unifying theory of what drives Hillary’s most fanatical opponents is a futile one.” The reason is that nothing drives it; it is that most sought-after thing, a self-replenishing, perpetual-energy machine.

The closest analogy is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.

Shudder.

And yet another disturbing blow to all kinds of things: kids willing to sell their votes for iPods. The very same kids who walk into our classrooms in the NYU music department...I guess it's great they care that much about music????

Most at NYU say their vote has a price
By: Lily Quateman - Washington Square News
November 14, 2007 07:29 PM EST

Two-thirds say they'll do it for a year's tuition. And for a few, even an iPod touch will do.

That's what NYU students said they'd take in exchange for their right to vote in the next presidential election, a recent survey by an NYU journalism class found.

Only 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an iPod touch.

But 66 percent said they'd forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU. And half said they'd give up the right to vote forever for $1 million.

But they also overwhelmingly lauded the importance of voting.

Ninety percent of the students who said they'd give up their vote for the money also said they consider voting "very important" or "somewhat important"; only 10 percent said it was "not important."

Also, 70.5 percent said they believe that one vote can make a difference — including 70 percent of the students who said they'd give up their vote for free tuition.

The class — "Foundations of Journalism," taught by journalism department chairwoman Brooke Kroeger — polled more than 3,000 undergraduates between Oct. 24 and 26 to assess student attitudes toward voting.

"The part that I find amazing is that so many folks think one vote can make a difference," Sociology Department Chairman Dalton Conley said. He added, "If we take them at their word, then perhaps they really think votes matter, and that's why someone might pay a year's tuition to buy theirs."

Sixty percent of the students who said they'd give up their vote for tuition also described their families' income as upper-middle or high.

Their reasons for giving up their votes varied.

"At the moment, no candidate who truly represents my political beliefs has a chance of winning a presidential election," one male junior studying film and television at the Tisch School of the Arts wrote on the survey.

"It is very easy to convince myself that my vote is not essential," wrote a female CAS sophomore. "After all, I'm from New York, which will always be a blue state."

Other students wrote that they were disgusted by the thought.

"I would be reversing history — a lot of people fought so that every citizen could be enfranchised," said a female in her second year at the Stern School of Business.

One CAS junior went even further, writing that "anyone who'd sell his lifelong right to vote should be deported."

Lily Quateman reports for New York University's Washington Square News. Washington Square News is partnering with Campus Politico for the 2008 elections.

Another blow to humanities research.

Just imagine: a biography of Julia Clifford in which she must remain nameless!

This from Inside Higher Ed:

Threat Seen to Oral History

In theory, those who face reviews of their work would like to have those processes expedited. But historians are protesting plans to specify that oral history is eligible for expedited reviews by institutional review boards because doing so would establish the principle that IRB’s have oversight of such scholarship.

In the last week, the American Historical Association, along with a number of individual historians, have weighed in with the Office for Human Research Protections, the Department of Health and Human Services agency that oversees IRB’s, arguing that the proposal to cover oral history would hinder many scholars’ work while not offering any important protections to those who give oral history interviews.

Citing a “long and unhappy experience” with IRB’s, the association called for oral history to be exempt from their oversight. In fact, the association said that some readings of current law already exempt oral history, but the language being proposed could have the impact of making such interpretations impossible.

IRB’s are institutionally based boards required by federal law to review experiments with human subjects. The boards were created out of the view that someone needs to be looking out for the subjects being studied in research to minimize risks and make sure that subjects are fully informed of those risks. While scholars in a range of disciplines criticize IRB’s for sometimes delaying work, there is a widespread consensus that they also protect people who need protecting. In medical research especially, ethics experts say that IRB’s have assured that experimental treatments have been tested to appropriate levels with non-human subjects before shifting to people and that those who undergo experimental treatments (or who may end up in a placebo group) understand the risks.

In the social sciences, criticism of IRB’s has been particularly intense, with scholars saying that boards dominated by biomedical scientists don’t understand the risks and rewards of the research projects they are reviewing in other fields. The historians’ criticism fits into this line of attack. For instance, the letter from the American Historical Association noted instances in which scholars proposing oral history interviews were told that they would be approved only if the subjects were anonymous — even though the very reason for the interviews was that the subjects were particular people whose individual stories merited attention.

“IRB’s are applying rigid research criteria that are fundamentally at odds with oral history practices,” said the AHA’s letter.

Many historians question whether IRB’s ever had any reason to be examining oral history. Zachary M. Schrag, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, has been studying the history of IRB activity in the social sciences. The language in the current regulations that has encouraged some IRB’s to look at oral history was adopted in 1998, with the endorsement of major history groups. But as Schrag noted in his comments on the new proposal, those groups endorsed the idea only after “overzealous” IRB’s were applying their standards to oral history projects — which for decades had gone on without such reviews. The hope in 1998 was that by setting out a path for expedited review, the intense scrutiny and resulting delays would end. Schrag also noted that — unlike the biological sciences — oral history has not had scandals or any indications that its conduct poses a risk to subjects.

The idea in 1998 was to encourage some modest oversight to keep IRB’s from doing too much, but Schrag’s letter said that it had the “perverse effect of ratifying the behavior it sought to restrain.”

An official of the Office for Human Research Protections said that many individual historians had written in as well. It is not known when the office will issue a response to the historians who have requested a change.

— Scott Jaschik

G-- D--- P---y P--n.

I was all set to feel honored, or if not honored, then just damned cool: I just noticed I had a couple of site visits from Iceland, which is just a few steps removed in my mind from other top-of-cool places like Greenland and Antarctica ("Top-of-cold," I can hear some of you saying).

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ! They were Googling that unfortunate piano-playing kid with the suggestive name I mentioned months back. I swear, my blog would have half the traffic it does if I hadn't picked up on the tale of Poor Dear P---y P--n (henceforward PDPP, since "The One Who Shall Who Shall Not Be Named" is already taken).

Oh, well. Guess I'll just have to become a more interesting blogger. Or give up and become the repository for information about PDPP. She does live in New Jersey, after all.

The Book I'm Not Reading: various excerpts of Marx's work.

Political Outrage: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Workplace safety has long been one of the issues I get really riled up about, perhaps from seeing Silkwood (1983) at an impressionable age--an era when the Three Mile Island (1979) disaster was a recent memory (especially for one whose mother worked for the company that built the reactor!)--not to mention Chernobyl (1986) and the poisonous gas leak in Bhopal, India (1984), that ultimately killed an estimated 20,000 people. And then, of course, are all the songs about coal mining disasters....

The main sticking point this article discusses is much smaller-scale, though no less cataclysmic for the people involved: fatal lung disease caused by exposure to diacetyl, a chemical used to flavor microwave popcorn and other products. I first heard about the problem in the Milwaukee newspaper while at the American Folklore Society conference last October--the article featured several workers who were trying to collect damages and who were calling for regulatory measures.

Here are a few quotations from the article in this morning's Times, "OSHA Leaves Worker Safety in Hands of Industry." Not surprisingly, Bush and his administration are doing yet more to line the pockets of the rich while fucking over the working classes even more.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

The agency has killed dozens of existing and proposed regulations and delayed adopting others. For example, OSHA has repeatedly identified silica dust, which can cause lung cancer, and construction site noise as health hazards that warrant new safeguards for nearly three million workers, but it has yet to require them.

“The people at OSHA have no interest in running a regulatory agency,” said Dr. David Michaels, an occupational health expert at George Washington University who has written extensively about workplace safety. “If they ever knew how to issue regulations, they’ve forgotten. The concern about protecting workers has gone out the window.”

(snip)

Labor leaders and health experts say those numbers significantly undercount the problem, in part because the Bush administration has reduced the categories of recognized injuries and because many dangerous jobs are now performed by undocumented workers who do not report problems.

Because It's All About the Bottom Line

From this morning's New York Times:

Healing has been hastened in part by a spike in school spirit.

At the Campus Emporium on North Main Street here, workers struggled to handle the backlog of 400 orders for Virginia Tech coffee mugs, footballs, teddy bears, clothing and other gear. On campus, the University Bookstore sold a season’s supply of VT lapel pins in two days last week.

The chants, banners and slogans typically associated with Virginia Tech sports have gained a more emotional currency. At a convocation the day after the shootings, the rousing student chants filled Cassell Coliseum. The nickname for the university’s athletic teams, Hokies, has become a kind of shorthand for a unity that many students said they felt. “After what happened, we chanted, and at that moment, I really felt like I’m a Hokie,” said Ingrid Ngai, 19, a native of Hong Kong.

I don't know what to say.

The full article is here.

Tech article

Ok, y'all--or at least, those of y'all who aren't (a) Rob; or (b) Rob's readers--go to his blog to read what I think is the best article yet about the Virginia Tech shootings.

The Book I'm Not Reading (but must very soon): Elizabeth Povinelli's The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. So far, I'm enjoying it--I just wish I didn't have to write a paper about it!

WTF???

This, from this morning's New York Times...I don't take issue with the article, but with the pro-gun argument that if everyone had a gun, the shooting victims at VT could have fought back--that the problem is not with Virginia law's extremely lenient approach to gun sales, but with Tech's rule against firearms on campus. What?!?!?!?

The Pullet Surprise...

...is not one at all!

Or at least, the Letters, Drama, and Music Pulitzer Prize's outrageously skewed gender imbalance is no surprise. Out of eight winners and two special citations, only two were women--in, again, not surprisingly, biography and poetry. Men, of course, swept history, nonfiction, and fiction--although last year, women got both fiction and nonfiction (and poetry), for a total of 3 out of 9. In 2005, the number was a distressing 1 out of 7. The Pulitzer Prize website makes no mention of any of this.

I'm sure people of color are even less recognized, but of course figuring that out isn't as simple as noting gendered pronouns in the blurbs about each winner.

Luckily, the journalism prizes are much more balanced, at least by sex. Not sure why that is, but I'm glad to see it.

In other, better news--I'm a finalist for a fellowship that would put me at Cambridge for two months next winter! Woo hoo! Now I just have to prepare for the interview, which happens at the butt-crack of dawn on Monday.