perfidy

This is why the rest of the country thinks we're a joke. From Reason's blog:

"Accessibility for all is very important," says the Web site for the town of Shutesbury, Massachusetts. "Please remember all public events in Shutesbury are fragrance free." 

If you are wondering what "fragrance free" means, there's a helpful explanation here from Ziporah Hildebrandt, chairperson of Shutesbury's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) Committee. If you're planning to go to a select board meeting or visit the public library during Fragrance Free Hours, you should

shower beforehand using baking soda instead of soap and shampoo. Baking soda effectively removes many odors. Change into clothing that has not been dry cleaned or laundered with scented products, especially fabric softeners, and has not been around smoke or fragrances. Rinse contaminated clothes with baking soda. Dry without additives. Wear a hat to contain residual odors from hair products. Wear an uncontaminated shirt over your other clothing. Depending on the event, these measures may be sufficient. Ask others present if your clothing, hair, etc. is a problem. Leave if you cause discomfort to others, or sense that your presence may be a problem. Remember: "An ounce of prevention!" Planning ahead to be free of scents is the easiest and best solution.

The connection between accessibility and fragrance freeness is "multiple chemical sensitivity," a syndrome that, according to Hildebrandt, makes its sufferers vulnerable to "extremely upsetting symptoms as well as irreparable damage" from "just one whiff of many chemicals." Combine this contention with the logic of the ADA, and we may all be forced to go fragrance free one day--not just in government buildings but in any business identified as a "place of public accommodation." Since "just one whiff" is reportedly all it takes to cause "severe pain, fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, respiratory distress and other symptoms," separate sections for the fragrant will not cut it.

Jesus. Good think I had my underarms botoxed, or I'd be a damn pariah! 

FYI, Shutesbury is a small town about fifteen miles north of Amherst, a pretty cool little place like you find in that area where farmers and hippies can coexist in peace. Entertainingly, Shutesbury is governed by selectmen and open town meetings. Question: can barring citizens from town meetings on grounds of fragrance be construed as violating the 24th Amendment? (Probably not, but it's still not right.) 
 

I thought I'd pull this out of the comments section. Thanks to Windy City for the opening volley.

WINDY CITY MIKE: I've spent so much time pointing out the flaws in whiteness with my departmental compatriots that I''d rather not rehash it now. But I'll go on record to say that it''s wrong, stupid, and just another way for historians of ethnic America to brow-beat Irish-Americans, except that everything they say about Irish-Americans is wrong. Race isn't really the big divider in the U.S. It's actually class. Aside from Japanese Americans during WWII, who hates Asians? Seriously. Do people with prejudices fear African-Americans wearing a three-piece suit, carrying a briefcase, and speaking into a cell phone? No. Propagators of whiteness are only trying to deflect attention from themselves because they are members of the middle class or better. That's the group that really has all the privileges they attribute to "whites." White is not an ethnic group. I say to Noel Ignatiev, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and this professor at UMass, get your head out of your ass.

JOHNNY TWO-CENTS: Mike, I disagree. Although class is a powerful, and unheralded, divider in the USA, race still exerts a powerful undertow. Also, despite the great class consciousness shown in the Gilded Age and first part of the 20th century when Frick, Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Morgan formed a brotherhood and the mill workers formed one in opposition, the middle of this century all but wiped out the working-class unity of spirit that I think you would agree is necessary for a true class consciousness. The proud man in overalls was replaced in American iconography by the man in the gray flannel suit, and the so-called working classes have never quite made it back to that status, except on a local scale. However, race retains its power to divide and unite long after the worst abuses took place. To take an easy example, why do you think "In The Heat Of The Night/They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!" is still such a good film? Because it plays upon the mistrust of middle-class African-Americans (suit, briefcase) by certain white Americans. If viewers of the film can't all necessarily agree with that prejudice, it is still familiar enough to resonate with most if not all American viewers. 

When whipped up by demagogues, race can still trump class. Although empirically I agree that people really differ and unite more along class lines, the perceived power of race (what certain marxians would call a "false consciousness') is greater. Long after racial inequality/discrimination/awareness has been minimized, the spectre of race will linger. 

As for whiteness studies, it is of limited usefulness. A few excellent books and articles have been written on the subject that avoid navel-gazing and total self-indulgence, but as I said, the field lends itself so easily to abuse, indoctrination, and dogmatism that it is a dangerous petard to hoist. To coin a phrase. Petard... is that even a word? (Yes, yes I know...)

In closing, I just want to say to you, Mike, that from what I have seen you are 110% correct in characterizing most "whiteness" studies practitioners as having ulterior motives. I do think there's more to it than class, though, namely the famed and notorious white liberal academic guilt we hear so much about these days. Having taken classes in which "whiteness" was a topic of "learning" (enough with the "scare quotes," Johnny!), I can report that class, politics, and race all come together in one big ball of squishy, soggy pointy-headed guilt. 

Finally, what an amazingly provincial concept, "whiteness studies" is! Made by US historians and US cultural theorists for the study of US History by specialists in US History. A bit of a tempest in a teapot, if you ask me. Or at least it should be.

Mike, I'm interested to get from you sources in which whiteness is used to set the Irish apart racially (as opposed to culturally or ethnically) from the rest of society. I'm familiar with "How The Irish Became White," but nothing else.

The Washington Post is running an article today on the new "fad" in academia, whiteness studies. Even better, the program cited is at UMass-Amherst, where I got my advanced smart-person credentials. I remember the advent of "whiteness studies." Since my work tends to address questions of identity, group identity, and that horrible word "othering" I was excited by the possibilities even as I became weary of the dogma. Despite the involuted recursiveness of the very concept (doesn't that just trip gaily off the tongue?) I found the concept of "whiteness," that is, the construction of an explicitly white identity by discernible groups, to be very handy. It can help immensely when trying to understand the finer points of racial dynamics in, say, Murfreesboro in 1885. 

However, the lure of the dark side is strong. David Horowitz correctly points out that the easy, consensus conclusion to draw from women's studies, African-American Studies, and whiteness studies is that whiteness is, predictably, an evil hegemonic force against which no retaliation is unjustified. The UMass class cited in the article certainly seems to move along those lines. The article's lead sentence:

Naomi Cairns was among the leaders in the privilege walk, and she wasn't happy about it.

Oh, lordy. See my comments below, and I'm going to reiterate what I said on Wednesday: "We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles." 

I'll be danged if that doesn't sound better every time I read it! I'm so great.

Once again, Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has posted a very interesting reader comment. The correspondent is someone who can remember the introduction of postmodernism and unorthodox curriculum into the English classroom. He puts it like this: " After 1970, we began to get courses that often strayed a long way from traditional curriculum. The same professor who was catatonia-inducing at noon on The 20th Century Novel shone teaching a non-credit course on film noir seven hours later. Can there be such a thing as a spirit of a profession? If there can be, it was tired of the rigors of scholarship in 1970, and found no joy in its rewards. New and exciting ideas had come into the room, colorfully dressed and flirting madly. 

(A side note. On purely practical grounds, I have to give props to pure-theory academics who start from the premise that nothing has meaning in and of itself, and that nothing is objectively "true." If such is the case, then all the theory in the world is mere solipsism, and the practice of academic theory is a pursuit as pointless, and as sad, as building sand-castles during high tide. By their own lights, day is night, black is white, cat is dog, theory is practice, the map is as good as the territory, and their work is devoid of worth or significance. Yet they get paid for it, sometimes handsomely. A giant scam? Perhaps! Impressive chutzpah? Definitely!!) 

Later in the same post, O'Connor takes to task the baseless "grandiosity" of the critical discipline, arguing that

the increasing shrillness, snobbery, and grandiosity of so much humanist scholarship can be traced directly to the attempt to argue for the social, political, and cultural relevance of the arts. And of course they are relevant--they give meaning, depth, and texture to our lives in precious, priceless ways. But they are not relevant in the ways many scholars insist that they are. 

You cannot discern the ideology of imperialism from Jane Eyre--but there are scores of critics who say you can. You cannot detect a uniquely homosexual literary style in the work of a Walt Whitman or a Henry James--but there are critics who say you can. You cannot argue that a poem or story singlehandedly subverts patriarchal hegemony or that a novel or play may be read as a microcosm of the culture in which it was written. But critics do it all the time, and they do it because they want to make works of art into something they are not. 

Making exaggerated, often irrelevant claims about the relevance of particular works and making those claims stick: that is the work of the professional humanist today. By and large, it's what gets rewarded, it's what gets published, and it's what gets taught.

This is true, partially, but also see commentary sent by the reader cited earlier: "It takes a good deal of effort to become a 'learned person.' You have to value the effort and the goal. If you're going to teach A Tale of Two Cities, you not only have to know the text back to front, but also have a good idea about how Dickens understood the French Revolution, how the book fit with Dickens' other work at the time of composition. . . ." The reader goes on to say how tiring this work is when compared to the sexiness of single-theory teaching. 

Fair enough, but what gets lost in this discussion is that you need both. In small amounts postmodernism can be incredibly handy, but it must support a rigorously, even tiresomely, researched argument. Of course it's not true that you can comprehend the entire edifice of British imperialism from analyzing Jane Eyre, but you can make a start of it. By carefully placing cultural artifacts or moments in their context, and by creatively teasing out hints and rumors of hidden meaning and unspoken motive, you can get very close to the heart and spirit of a time and place. Kipling's writing is an excellent example. If you take him at face value, you get a coherent, yet distorted view of British imperial-era thought. You get Kipling's view. But if you examine the context around Kipling, his writing, his life, and his history, you can use his work as a base on which to build a more accurate picture. 

[begin wankery] To take an example from my own amateurish work: it is possible to discuss the history of African-Americans after Reconstruction by the songs they sang. However of you don't move beyond the texts of the songs, you remain in the solipsistic morass that O'Connor mentions. That happens ALL THE G-D DAMN TIME and it makes me effing crazy. 

For example. Historians who study music tend to treat songs as just sets of words, like poems, ignoring the performativity, probable commercial interest, and audience presence inherent in all music prior to the recording age, and ignoring the possibility that the music-- the notes themselves-- might contain signifiers distinct from, and more important than, any "text." Which of course is monumentally stupid. Yet many historians do just this and elevate the lyrics to the level of concrete, ahistorical artifact, deconstructing them through a theoretical lens while ignoring even the most stupendously obvious contextual clues. This is exactly what O'Conner's on about, and I agree to this point. But, by doing the same po-mo exegesis using a theoretical framework of your choice, while firmly placing cultural artifacts in the context they come from-- economic, social, political, geographic, you can hopefully achieve a deep understanding of American history along dimensions that might othewise remain hidden. Theory then becomes what it should be-- one means to an end. [here endeth thee wankery] 

I agree with Erin O'Connor and all her various correspondents. I just hope that, when academia finally moves back from the high wierdness of postmodernism, they keep the cool stuff and don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

[moreover] n.b. I have made a couple edits to this post for clarity and forcefulness. Hey, meaning is fluid anyway, right?

Here is a bilingual post in Postmodernist Newspeak and English.

Newspeak: Clearly, the subjectivism inherent within the phallocentric blanc homme heteropatriarchy permits agency only to the center of power, in which the oppressive repression of the other is carried out philogically, but the physical realm exists only imaginatarially through agency-oriented cultural constructivism.

English: White guys suck. They are mean to people who are not also white guys.

Newspeak: Denying objective reality is imperative. Only through the lens of the subjective cultural construction do we see the nature of othering. In the mind of the beholder, that which is unreal to the cultural outsider exists. Should the other appear as phantasmagorically unnontransparent humanitas, they are what they appear in the mind of those who other them. But the other other condemns their action as criminal to oppress the other who is othering the other.

English: It's okay to kill other if you think it's okay to kill other people. This is a sneaky way for Postmodernists to cloak their true selves. They're actually Nazi sympathizers finding a justification for the actions of their ideological forbears. We call this moral relativism. It is more colloquially known as bullshit. The term bullshit may also be applied to most assertions in Newspeak.

Newspeak The hibernophallopoliticocentric realm of Chicago others all others supercallifragilisticexpialodiciously in hibernophalloterrorstic logocentric NotreDame-esquely brusqueintadorial combat against peace-centered maternaturuallineally impetuous matro-divine/anti-hibernophillac militaristic industarial complexity.

English ?????????????

I believe that most postmodernists stuck a monkey in a room with a PC and published whatever the chimp banged onto the keyboard.

First, thanks to Mr. Bad Thoughts for continued readership and commentary. I would like to expand a debate he and I have engaged regarding American generations. I will post a recent comment here in full. 

From: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: 

"I would not challenge your delineation out of hand. However, I would point out that when conservatives use the term 'boomers' they are referring to a group of people who have certain experiences from the 60s that involves the questioning of 'traditional America.' Many of the people who are part of the 'boomers' you described are too young to have had meaningful experiences of the 60s; they were a more conservative (or at least much less liberal) generation. Gen Xers, on the other hand, seem to be better characterized by disillusionment with both 60s liberalism (which they largely got from their parents) and Reaganism (the quick wealth scheme having dried up by 1988.)" 

To respond to the second sentence, what conservatives do is their problem. On that score the conservatives to whom you refer are quite incorrect. I, however, made it abundantly clear that the Baby Boomer generation is split between what Nixon referred to as a "small vocal minority," a handful of people who were involved in counter-cultural activities, and the great majority of them who were not. What I refer to as counter-cultural activities is what you, I assume, refer to as "the questioning of 'traditional America'?" That is fine. 

In the above quoted comment, you seem to argue that the Baby Boomers who were not involved in counter-cultural activities were too young to do so? Then, everyone who was between the age of 16 and 26 between the years 1965 and 1972 were all involved in counter-cultural activity/the questioning of traditional America? I disagree very strongly. Many people, or Straights, if you will, were of contemporary age with counter-culturalists/questioners, or Freaks if you will. To explain further, plenty of 21 year old Freaks protesting the war in 1969 were spit on by an even greater number of 21 year old Straights. I will certainly concede that members of the Baby Boom generation who were pre-teens or early adolescents between 1965 and 1972 missed out, and I'm sure many of them adopted more conservative viewpoints than late-teen/early adult Freaks during the same years. But understand that most people in their late-teen/early adult years between 1965 and 1972 also adopted conservative viewpoints. The bottom line here, and listen carefully, is that a very, very small minority of Americans in their late-teen/early adult years between 1965 and 1972 were involved in counter-cultural activities. The majority of them, like most Americans, were in the middle of the road, or to the right of center. Even when American society polarized in 1968, very few young people were counter-culturalists. Most polarized in the opposite direction. 

Thus, I doubt that most Gen Xers received "60s liberalism" from their parents. First off, most people alive in the 1960s really weren't left of center and engaging in counter-culture; that was a small number of people. Second, it doesn't make sense chronologically for Baby Boomers to have all of their children in Generation X. I can't offer hard quantitative evidence in the form of census data, but I'm not convinced that the majority of Generation X members are the product of Baby Boomer parents. Some, certainly. But in my own case, I'm the product of two pre-boomers, and I was born toward the end of my Generation X 1960-1977 chronolongical definition. I was then raised by one of the aforementioned pre-boomers and a very, very early Boomer. A small sample, but nonetheless one example contrary to your argument that Generation X is, correct me if I'm wrong, overwhelmingly a product of Boomer parentage. Is that your assertion? 

Let's review. A typical white middle-class person born in the first third of the post-war Baby Boom, between 1946 and 1950/1, would be entering their socially acceptable child-bearing age between the years 1971 and 1976. That places their first round of children in Generation X, true. But their second round of children, roughly three years after the first, would fall between 1974 and 1979. Stay with me here. Thus, the second round of children for even the first third of typical white middle class early Boomers, should they fall in the years 1978 and 1979, enters the realm of Generation Y, or echo Boomers. The second third of the typical white middle class Baby Boomer, born between 1951 and 1955, enter their socially acceptable child-bearing age between the years 1976 and 1980. It is thus possible for the second third to have Generation X children in 1976 or 1977, but more likely to have them in 1978, 1979, and 1980, all within the Generation Y period. Their second round of children, if typical, falls squarely within Generation Y between 1979 and 1983. For the final third of the typical white middle class Baby Boomer, 1956 to 1959/60, the first round of children are likely born between 1981 and 1986, well into Generation Y territory, to say nothing of the second round. 

Of course, not every Baby Boomer is typical, white, or middle-class having children when it's socially acceptable and common. Biology often runs counter to those things, and there are always exceptions. But typically, most Baby Boomers, with the above chronological number crunching in mind, are having Generation Y offspring. 

Here endeth the lesson.

From today's bleat:

As for Orrin Hatch and his remarks about blowing up the computers of people who download pirated files: I’ll just say that I think he's made mostly of molded plastic, there's a pullstring in his back, and the RIAA fingerprints are all over the big white ring. I won't listen to any of these guys blather about computers or the Internet until they have demonstrated on film that they can install some RAM, burn a CD (shiny side down, you say?), tell me what HTTP and URL stand for, prove they know how to get the source code for a webpage, and know better than to click "Yes" when asked if the computer should always trust data from Gator Corporation. 

His remarks about remotely destroying computers that download copyrighted material is just grampa blather. The computers are stealing music! The cars are frightening the horses! The Kaiser took my dog! [my emphasis] It would be amusing if these people didn't have the power to pass thick stupid laws crafted by aides, lobbyists and other gnomes hauling up heavy buckets from the deep sooty mines of legalese. Of course the people who vote them up or down don't actually read them; they get the gist from the title. . . . I

 know, I know - he was just talking off the top of his head. But if someone is talking about, oh, women's pay relative to men, and they say off the top of their head "can't the girls just stay home and put up preserves?" - well, it shows what they really think. Off the top of one's head means when I reach for an idea, this one is the closest. For a reason.

Now, my story begins in 19-dickety-two. We had to say "dickety" cause the Kaiser had stolen our word "twenty". I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles. 
 

I'm sure you've all heard about this already, but I'm all for kicking someone when they're down. From CNN: Your News Source:

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Legal experts have said any such attack would violate federal anti-hacking laws. 

"No one is interested in destroying anyone's computer," replied Randy Saaf of MediaDefender Inc., a secretive Los Angeles company that builds technology to deliberately download pirated material very slowly so other users can't. 

"I'm interested," Hatch interrupted. He said damaging someone's computer "may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights." 

The senator, a composer who earned $18,000 last year in song-writing royalties, acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers. He endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer." 

"If we can find some way to do this without destroying their machines, we'd be interested in hearing about that," Hatch said. "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize" the seriousness of their actions.

I see... so if his dog takes a dump on my lawn, I will have the right to kick the heck out of it, to teach him a lesson in turn, right? 

[moreover] Dude... when word of this gets around to the script-kidz, Orrin Hatch's site is gonna be sooo 0wn3d. 

[moreover once over]... So what about THIS, Mr. Senator Man? 
 

While all of you are flapping your gums about generational divides, when everybody knows that everything that's really worth learning on that subject comes from TV's "The Wonder Years," I'm going to re-address Brookheiser's remarks on the teaching and learning of history. 

I'm going to start with a discussion that has been ongoing over at Critical Mass. Though the discussion started with a piece on the decline of graduate study in the humanities, reader responses touch on Brookheiser's point. 

Let me excerpt one reader comment here in its entireity:

I have been teaching at [Prominent Private University] for the last two years, and I have been able to see the effects of this relativism on the undergraduates here. They are genuinely bewildered about what, if anything, counts as knowledge. One example that stands out for me: I taught a "Topics in Theory and Criticism" course this last quarter. The usual approach to such a course here is to pick a flavor (Marx/Marxism, Queer/Gender, New Historicism/Foucault, Cultural Studies/Raymond Williams, etc. etc. etc.), read a series of that flavor’s theoretical/critical texts, and then read a more traditionally literary text or two through the lens of the chosen flavor. It seems more than a bit template-driven. 

I tried to do something different—though hardly groundbreaking—with my course: take an historical trip beginning with Plato and working through the various paths that begin there and have ended up here (in the various flavors). I had to adapt the course on the fly, because I was supposed to be teaching a flavors course of my own, so I created a Classical vs. Renaissance theory course into which I snuck all kinds of other stuff "off-syllabus." I thought the class was going miserably—it was sometimes quite difficult to get students to talk about the material we were covering—and I was sure that the approach I was trying was failing. On the last day of class, I got an ovation (there's something that's never happened before). I didn't understand what was going on until a few days later. 

Several students came to see me during office hours to tell me that they had never taken a course quite like this one before. What they had expected was a template-driven, "here's how we apply ****ist theory to texts" approach, because that is how all of their classes are taught in the English department here. I still have a little trouble believing this, but according to my students, this course was the first time they had been asked to analyze the intellectual and/or historical bases of the critics themselves. They had gone into an English major thinking that it was going to be something about literary knowledge, aesthetics perhaps, maybe even history and social context, but none of the ones who spoke with me had been prepared for what you describe as the framework of "deconstructing race and gender, critiquing the concept of subjectivity, and theorizing culture." 

Not a single one of these students had ever read a piece of "theory" or "criticism" earlier than the 1960s (with the exception of one who had been asked to read a short excerpt from Marx). They simply had never been asked to do anything other than "imitate without understanding" (to paraphrase your post). Some of these students will enter PhD programs next year. [PPU] is quite fond, in fact, of taking people straight from a BA into its own PhD program (I was an exception to the general trend). The just barely-post undergraduate students who come here are then immediately put through an Introduction to Graduate Study class that is essentially no different from the template-driven "flavor" courses I describe above (my own here was Marx and Marxism). 

It is painfully obvious to me now that such students are simply not prepared to do much of anything but accept what they are given (or reject it without knowing exactly why or how, or even what the myriad alternatives are). Graduate "education" in a humanities discipline like English seems to be primarily about indoctrination and self-replication. By the time these students are ABD, knowing Foucault backwards and forwards while knowing almost nothing at all about Nietzsche or Plato (not to mention Shakespeare or any number of other "canonical" figures) is not at all uncommon in my experience. Grandiose maneuvers without any background for them - that's the graduate (and undergraduate) "education" I have come to know.

Sound familiar? Sure does to me!! An English student who does not read Shakespeare, or a History student who does not read Gibbon (or, if you like, Foner, Hofstadter, Elkins & McKitrick, Levine...), is like a physics student who can't add two numbers. The humanities in general are suffering terribly from an overuse of postmodernism, and it's turning out a generation of students who are functionally illiterate in their chosen fields. Rather than learn the generalities and overarching themes, students skip straight to what Brookheiser in another context calls "units, floating in ahistorical space." After all, it's much easier to use Foucault to rip an article to shreds than it is to develop a nuanced, deep understanding of the history and traditions you are a student of. We all know what happens when college students get ahold of Big Ideas That Explain Everything. For a padawan learner such weapons are not, only for a Jedi are they. Mmm, yes. If you give a student Foucault, Hamlet is only about sex. If you give a student Marx, King Lear is a parable of Capitalism. These tools are powerful, but they are also crutches, and in the wrong hands lend themselves easily to arrogance, narrowness, and false first principles. 

I must applaud Mike, a real, working teacher of History, for successfully working actual stories into his coursework. That should happen more often. Of course, since I am advocating a "first A, then B/ first walk/then run" approach to education, I suppose I have not sufficiently interrogated the linearity of my pedagogical ideology. Or something. 

All three of us here are former students of Wilson Hoffman. Three cheers for Wil Hoffman! Huzzah!

Since there have been quite a few comments on the Generations discussion, I thought it might help to expand the discussion in another post. First, some definitions. People disagree as to the exact lines between generations, and pinning down exact years is difficult. It is also quite possible that in such a format as this, people will argue ad infinitum about when a generation begins and ends, who their children are, etc., etc. Generations, after all, are not defined only chronologically but also by the events and times through which they lived. 

So I'll offer this scale of American generations. The World War II generation constitutes people born between about 1910 and 1926; those who were old enough to serve, for men. For women, those birth dates put them about at the right age to work in a munitions plant, doing difficult industrial labor. 

Boomers are typically the children of the World War II generation. The term baby boomer, after all, refers to the population explosion that occurred during the post-war period and was at least in part the result of G.I.s returning home from service. They were born, about, between the years of 1946, and I would argue, until about 1959 or even 1960. Members of this generation were not necessarily, "hippies," a media invention that constitutes a less than apt term. People describing themselves as "hippies" were probably not actually the kind of person many think of when the think of the Sixties generation, or Sixties people, or Sixties this, that, or the other. The Baby Boomer generation was divided, to put it as simply as possible, between Freaks and Straights.

Baby boomers who actively participated in counter-cultural activities, such as drug use or political activism, were Freaks. They were, as Nixon put it, "a small vocal minority." Their numbers were extremely small. The vast majority of boomers were not these so-called hippies, again, a media invention term, but wore their hair short, abstained from drug use (until marijuana became largely acceptable in the early Seventies), heckeled, and spit on anti-war protesters. They were Straights. They, as the vast majority of baby boomers, did not burn their draft cards, but either served or received college deferments. But most Boomers did not publicly oppose or protest the war. In sum, perhaps 1 out of 100 members of the Boomer generation actually participated in 1960s counter-culture. 

The members of Gen X, mostly, fell between the Boomers and their children, about between the years of 1960/1 and 1977. The children of Boomers, particularly those who are white and middle class, as Gen Y, or Echo Boomers or whatever you want to call them, followed in the years after 1977. Thus, a person born in 1955, say a white middle-class Boomer, would be having children between about 1977 and up to 1990. Therefore, Gen Y can most certainly be the children of Boomers. Like to go further back? A person born at the start of the Boom in 1947, also white and middle-class, could, and many did, have children in the second half of the 1960s. Now this would place those children in Gen X. But think about it. A person born in 1947 could also be having children until 1982, if not later, placing those children within Gen Y. 

It's not a perfect delineation, and I never said it was. There are exceptions. There is overlap. Generations do not act as a single unit. They are not monolithic. Quite the contrary. Perhaps more posts will follow on this subject, but I'll throw these definitions open to debate for now.

So, as my generational delineations (not perfect with overlap) have not yet been challenged in the comments field, I'll continue. 

Let's give the benefit of the doubt to those who use the term, "hippie," and what they mean by that. Let's say they are applying the term to that small segment of the Boomer generation who were Freaks, actively involved in counter-culture activities. People who were actively involved in counter-culture might have been less likely to inculcate their children with a sense of entitlement, so the notion that Freaks gave their children a sense of entitlement is incorrect. 

Without going into details about the chaotic and somewhat unorthodox (by traditional definition) circumstances in which I was brought into the world and raised, I was ultimately raised by an early Boomer very much involved in counter-culture and political activism during the late 1960s, and a pre-boomer who was of course, not. The early Boomer to which I refer made his position clear. When I came home with a story of some injustice perpetrated against me by the evil teachers, fellow students, and/or school administration, ending with the phrase, "and that's not fair," the response was, "Who the hell ever told you life was fair? Your mother? She's wrong. Get used to it." [There's some poetic license here, but the gist should come across.] 

Now I realize this is anecdotal, and a small sampling group to say the least, clearly, this was one Boomer who did not choose to inculcate the child he raised with a sense of entitlement. I think those who were involved in counter-culture actually walked away jaded, disappointed, and ultimately, pessimistic. The vast majority of Boomers who didn't have the guts to take a stand, or took one against those who did, are the ones who I think came away with more of a sense of entitlement. 

As I wrote before, Gen Y has demonstrated a sense of entitlement, and I think one reason is that in a lot of cases, their parents have inculcated them with it. But that's not the be-all-end-all. So did children's television programming, and the other things I discussed (please see previous post). Nothing is monocausal. Hell, being Americans has inculcated a lot of these kids with a sense of entitlement. As to whether or not Boomers are still raising kids, if Gen Y has been in college for a period measured in years, they're not really being raised now, are they? 

Finally, unlike Scarborough, who wavers between making me laugh and raising my blood pressure exponentially, I have no hatred for people previously involved in 1960s counter-culture. Quite the opposite. I grew up idolizing one of them, and still do to this day to a great extent. They tried to change the world. They didn't succeed, but the deck was significantly stacked against them. But I think they fought one helluva good fight, and my hat's off. Matter of opinion, of course, and that's mine. I'll smile and nodd at others. 

Power to the People. 
 

I'd rather go this route than the comments field. Brookhiser is clearly discussing secondary education, but there is an even greater problem in the universities. Many U.S. courses in the IT have also abandoned politics whole-hog. Having taught U.S. history for the first time this past spring, I did find that a social and economic focus with a dash of culture was more suited to the subject, because it's meatier. American political history can get pretty boring. I would have to disagree with Brookhiser specifically as it relates to U.S. history, that students prefer a political focus. My most popular lectures are those that deal with popular culture and the social implications of the industrial revolution. It says so in my evaluations. 

But Brookhiser has some points, and this deals with the entire abandonment of political history I've witnessed. To ignore political issues entirely ignores one of the most important aspects of American history. Here I will toot my own horn. My students know who George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Marshall, and Abraham Lincoln were, to name just a few, and what they did. It's absurd to cut the politics out entirely. They're critical. 

This is even more true of a European survey course, having taught those as well. In my American survey course, a history of one nation over a maximum of about 250 years, I emphasize social and economic aspects, little culture, while still giving appropriate weight to political aspects. My European survey courses, as a history of 50+ nations or dynastic states or empires or regions or whatever, over a maximum of 5,000years, pursue a political focus while still granting appropriate weight to social, cultural, and economic aspects. Best thing to do is to balance out all the interests, and don't ignore important stuff. Nonetheless, the social and cultural effects of the industrial revolution make a big bang there too, especially the time I brought my fiddle and played tunes to give a hands-on demonstration of agrarian rural Irish culture. They loved that bit. 

Ergo, politics, economy, society, and culture make history. They are intertwined. It is possible to deal with all of them, even in a survey course, and particularly in the one nation 250 years format.

Boomers have exhibited some sense of entitlement, as Steve correctly argues. I would say, though, that Gen Y has the biggest sense of entitlement I've ever seen. As we three are members of Gen X, I don't think we ever really expected easy and rich lives. Prophetic in my case, to say the least. We were born amidst the Vietnam war, the subsequent economic collapse, including an energy crisis, and a general spirit of malaise. We were the first generation raised by single mothers. We were the first latchkey kids. We lived with the constant threat of a nuclear holocaust that could potentially have wiped out all life on earth. We were told by media, teachers, and our parents, "You're screwed," in so many words. What media, teachers, and our parents specifically told us was, "You will be the first American generation to do worse than your parents." 

So why is Gen X an aggregate ranging from ennui to nihlism while Gen Y thinks the world owes them a living? Like any historical explanation, it's multi-faceted. Gen Y knows little of hard economic times. They know nothing of the Cold War and the threat of human extinction. If you say the words, "the wall came down," they think you're referring to, "that old band? What were they called? Purple Frood?" 

But for the issue at hand, Gen Y are the children of boomers. Gen X are the children of pre-boomers, those born not after World War II, but perhaps during. Or, we are the children of people born during the Great Depression. The message from our parents was, "Life isn't fair. Suck it up." Boomer parents have communicated to their children, "The world is your oyster. You are special. You can be anything you want to be." 

As a result, while teaching Gen Yers at a certain Jesuit institution, I was confronted with rage and tears whenever students received Bs or even B+s in lieu of As. One student called me an asshole, in front of the class, because I gave her a B on a paper despite carefully explaining what was required for an A, and that what she did merited a B. But according to the Gen Y folk, when I did grant As (grant hell, sometimes I hand them out like lollipops; I'm a grade inflater), I still failed to recognize their special contribution to the human race. 

Some of my current students, however, at a city college, have criticized me through course evaluations for being too easy on them. They don't have the sense of entitlement. Why? They're at a city college. Life has not been so kind to them. I see my role as a corrective to that, but not to toot my own horn. Most of my current students aren't Gen Y either, but a little older. The bottom line is that Boomers have inculcated their children with the notion that they are perfect, special, and oh so precious. A former mantra of our generation was, "Life's a bitch. Then you die."

Mark Kleiman weighs in on last week's incident in which Colorado law enforcement used the threat of RAVE Act prosecution to stop a pot-legalization concert. His is an interesting opinion, and one rarely heard in the blog-o-sphere.

Maybe Glenn [Reynolds] is right: perhaps the new law was a bad idea. Certainly, it gives lots of discretionary power to a Justice Department whose current leadership has consistently abused the powers entrusted to it, as when it tried to use the DEA’s power to revoke the licenses that physicians need to prescribe controlled substances to nullify Oregon’s assisted-suicide law. If the DEA really did what it has been accused of doing in this case – which seems plausible, though at the moment the only available accounts are from sources hostile to the DEA – that can’t really be called surprising.

But the target of the law – the growing use of MDMA (“ecstasy”) – is a genuine, and potentially large, problem, and the law has, in my view, a better chance of doing something about that problem than most drug-policy initiatives have of reaching their targets. Here’s why I think so:

Starting in the mid-1990s, MDMA emerged rather suddenly from the alphabet soup of recreational chemicals to become what is now probably the second-most-widely used purely illicit drug, behind cannabis. . . .The current MDMA initiation rate is higher than the cocaine initiation rate ever was: cocaine peaked at about 1.5 million new users per year.

Even more troubling, what used to be a distinctively “European” MDMA use pattern – multiple doses, every night, every weekend – has become much more common here, and that more dangerous pattern is closely associated with “raves”: all-night dance parties with a mostly youthful clientele and a set of musical styles conducive to trance-dancing.

MDMA is a highly reinforcing drug; it induces in many users a strongly positive emotional state that lasts for several hours. But it has one very peculiar characteristic: its capacity to produce that state typically wears off with repeated use. Virtually any drug will create a tolerance: that is, over time higher doses will be needed to generate the same biological effects. But the diminished effects of MDMA cannot be recovered by using more of the drug: that’s the peculiar characteristic. . . .

That being so, neither the fact that the RAVE Act will tend to discourage some socially responsible actions by rave operators (such as providing “chill-out” rooms, encouraging the distribution of information about the risks of MDMA use and how to limit them, and allowing on-site pill-testing) nor the risk that the law will be abused, as it seems to have been in the Montana case, suffices to convince me that it will do more harm than good.

I can imagine a radically different approach to MDMA policy, based on harm reduction via dose and frequency limitation, that might have better overall results, but I can’t imagine getting such a policy adopted in the current political climate. If the practical alternative to the RAVE Act was drug policy as usual -- a little more law enforcement, longer sentences for dealers, and inventing fancier lies to tell the children -- at least the RAVE Act stands out from its background as having some chance of not being a complete waste of effort. . . .

The bare assertion by Glenn’s friends at the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism that “The RAVE Act has no valid law enforcement purpose” fails to convince.

While agree with Kleiman that MDMA is a big problem, and a dangerous drug, I can't get behind his analysis of the situation. Drugs are ALREADY illegal. More laws aren't going to make them more so. (How much more black can you go? None. None more black.) Worse, Kleiman underestimates the collateral effects of the law, and probably isn't aware of others.

I have attended, well, if not exactly raves, then parties that would be raves if more people were present. I had a wonderful time, and did not take Ecstasy. Part of my enjoyment hinged on the existence of the "chill-out" room. I could go sit in blue-lit quietness, relax, and most importantly DRINK WATER. My point? That classifying the presence of chill-out rooms as a priori evidence of drug use is illogical, and discouraging party planners from setting up such a room is a health risk to all present. They exist for all dancers to get away from the heat and rehydrate, not just the damn drug users. Furthermore, organizations like Dance Safe, who offer drug-testing to partygoers to ensure the purity of the doses, have done a WHOLE lot of good. Keeping them from doing their job will just make matters worse as party-drug use goes further and further underground, and adulterated drugs go undetected. Think bathtub gin-- it's bad news.

Moreover, no objection to the RAVE Act has touched on what I find most regrettable. Let me tell you a story. I have a good friend, let's call him Zippy, who has been promoting concerts in his hometown since he was fourteen. Mostly, these concerts have been scuzzy local teenagers playing music for other scuzzy local teenagers. In the process, Zippy has learned a lot of skills: marketing, negotiation, basic contracts, event planning, how to obtain licenses and security through legitimate channels, crisis management, and a bucketload of chutzpah. Even more, Zippy was instrumental in creating a "scene" in his hometown-- a network of people and events that focussed the energy of that class of teenager who would otherwise be off sniffing glue, vandalizing, and getting into adult-size trouble. Many of the kids at these shows came away with ideas of their own. The experience has taught Zippy a lot, contributed money to the local economy, improved the quality of life in his community, and actually helped the children (think of the children!).

But forget all that. Zippy has gotten out of the local-concert business forever. Why? Because, over the years there have been some incidents. Crackpipes in a crowd. Pot being sold on the premises. Underage drinking. And although Zippy always took steps to eliminate this behavior, hiring off-duty policement as security to patrol the crowd, and letting it be known that no such behavior would be tolerated, things happen. After years of rising police pressure, the RAVE Act has been the final straw. Now that Zippy knows that he could serve a long felony drug rap just because some dumbass kid brought meth to one of his shows, he's done. Never mind his work keeping the kids off drugs. Never mind his conscientious approach to security. He fears that one slip-up could land him in Mandatory Minimum-land. In his assessment, the risk is now too great, so he's done.

This is the kind of undetectable collateral damage the RAVE act can and will do, and why I am foursquare against it. If Zippy-- who has contributed a great deal to his community-- quits for fear of prison, then something is wrong, I think. The RAVE Act is dangerous, wrongheaded, overreaching, and stupid.

A bit like using a neutron bomb to take care of a rat problem in your basement.

It was only a matter of time:

An agent of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) used threats of RAVE Act prosecutions to intimidate the owners of a Billings, Montana, venue into a canceling a combined benefit for the Montana chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and Students for Sensible Drug Policy last week.
The RAVE Act, now known officially as the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act, championed by Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), was ostensibly aimed at so-called raves, the large electronic music concerts often associated with open drug use, but was so broadly written that opponents argued it could be applied against any event or venue where owners or organizers did not take sufficiently repressive steps to prevent drug use. Opposition to the bill stalled it in the Senate last year, but this year Biden stealthily inserted it into the enormously popular Amber Alert Bill, which passed last month and was signed into law by President Bush.

While the Billings event was advertised as a benefit concert for two local groups interested in drug law reform -- not as a drug-taking orgy -- it still attracted the attention of the DEA. On May 30, the day the event was set to take place, a Billings-based DEA agent showed up at the Eagle Lodge, which had booked the concert. Waving a copy of the RAVE Act in one hand, the agent warned that the lodge could face a fine of $250,000 if someone smoked a joint during the benefit, according to Eagle Lodge manager Kelly, who asked that her last name not be used.

What? The RAVE Act? Used as a bludgeon to chill legitimate political speech? Noooooo...

This outrageous abomination will be with us until some promoter with the stones and resources to actually get hit with a RAVE suit takes it all the way to the supremes. When it happens, I hope it's some pre-law hippie with a flair for public spectacle and an ear for media spin. That would be sweet. In other news, Senator Biden remains an a-hole.

Amazon is reporting that it has received over one million orders for the new Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix book, due out June 21. That's twice the number it received for number four, H.P. and the Goblet of Fire. I personally can't wait for Amazon to ship mine, so I have mine on reserve at the local Borders.

Geek Press points to this excellent Primer on Boston-area English. Excerpts:

• Westa Wihsta: Terra incognita; beyond the bounds of civilization. (For the uninitated, Worcester is about an hour west of Boston, which is about half an hour farther than most Bostonians would dream of driving without packing a lunch and reserving a hotel room).
• Irish Riviera: The South Shore, extending from Nantasket Beach as far south as Sandwich on the uppa Cape, with its cultural center in Scituate.
• Packie: Wheah you buy beah.
• PSDS:What you get when you want to wear earrings. Reuven Brauner submits the following similar examples: We saw BSNDS at the zoo in Franklin Park. We bought it at CS and Roebuck's. Mother always said, "Don't forget to wash behind your ES." The Boos and GS got to Mantle. PS are a juicy fruit. Crying causes TS. This car VS to the left.

Even more than people think, New England is home to about a million localized accents and vocabularies. If you know what you're doing, you can tell someone from Saco apart from someone from Kennebunk, and neither of them sound a THING like a Gloucesterman, much less an aging stylene from Revere. Get me drunk. Ask me to do my Noath Shoah thing. You'll love it! Entertainment! 

Further proof that "homeland" sometimes stretches no farther than a man's eye can see. 
 

Via a whole slew of links I followed comes this 2001 CNN article about the isolation and mistrust of government in the hills of North Carolina.

Historians say that if western North Carolinians have chips on their shoulders, they have a right. "People in that area have been cheated out of everything, starting with the Indians and continuing with the white settlers," said Jane Brown, an instructor in history and anthropology at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.

Read on: it's a good point. Let's also not forget that the region has a long history of armed rebellion against various authorities such as the Regulators of the late 18th century rebelling against the English Crown, and a great many hill folk opposing the Civil War and the Confederacy. It's a region that has long chosen its own path.

Buckethead-- when are you ever on your meds?? Haw!

On visceral distrust of the government: when's the last time you were stopped by the cops and didn't wonder for a minute if you were going to be harassed this time? Happens to me every single time, even though I've only been harassed once. It was a bogus traffic stop for what we used to call "country line dancing" when the cop thought my hippie hair looked suspicious.

[Moreover] The history of tax rebellions in British America and the USA is a long and fascinating one that I need to read more about. Anyone know a good text on this subject? I've read most of the major histories of frontier rebels in the US, but not all tax rebellions were frontier rebellions, and vice versa, and the frontier stuff doesn't cover any of the great revenuer/moonshiner battles of the 19th and 20th centuries.

[Moreover, once over] I love NASCAR racing. Love it. Don't watch it as much as I should, but love it. Did you know stock car racing in the South got its start because the best moonshine smugglers liked to find out who was the fastest driver among them? In a way, tax rebels and rumrunners are indirectly responsible for one of the most popular and lucrative spectator sports of our time. Nifty! History at work! And it's loud, too!