Athena

?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
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In my grad student days, I enjoyed a couple of very wine-laden (for me, at least) dinners with Judith Butler. Salon reports (that I learn this from Salon indicates how out of it I am) that she's come out with a book on lit theory and 9/11.

The reviewer in Salon makes a probably unintentional pun about the author of Bodies that Matter:

Back in the late '90s, Butler appeared as the embodiment of postmodern thought to both conservative and liberal critics alike. The immense success of "Gender Trouble" and the appeal of her analysis among college students (there was even a fanzine, Judy!, printed in her honor) made her a favorite target in the media and among fellow academics, who may or may not have envied her popularity. [Hit-you-over-the-head emphasis mine]

Like the question she complained about: "what about the body, Judy?" (She found the cutsey Judy that people often called her in print to be infantilizing.)

The pull-quotes for the article (ack, not actually pull quotes, but some kind of precis, and I can't think of the term-of-art for it) proclaim:

Gender-theory superstar Judith Butler takes on 9/11 and its aftermath in a new book -- written in clear English! But the task of postmodern theory, she argues, is more crucial now than ever.

I love the "written in clear English" bit. It such a fence-sitter on the part of the reviewer. Butler has been famously taken to task for writing "obscure" and "tortuous" prose (I don't think this is true), but what does it say when the first thing the reviewer does it laud her ability to write in "clear English"?

It's a sort of non-denial denial.

Can't wait to get my hands on the new book.

And, oh, for all my somewhat-irrelevant commentary on the intro to the article, it's good to see a "pro-theory" article after so many mainstream press articles about the supposed academic flight from theory.

It's hard to say if it's better when they ignore you or when they pay attention to you.

Oh, a bit of gossip. Condolezza Rice, a Bush-sized intellect if there ever was one, took some kind of inexplicable hatred to Judith Butler, whose work I can't imagine she ever read. Rice did more damage to the intellectual life of Stanford than you can possibly imagine.

And now she's doing it to the nation.

After having given me what I thought was the ultimate insult, calling me Maureen Dowd, Quizilla has decided the celebrity that I'm most likely to marry is... oh god.... Justin Timberlake.

Please send large monetary donations to console me.

You are going to marry Justin Tiberlake. He has a
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Which male celebrity are you going to marry? (14 choices now!!)
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I blame Palmer, for having posted a different quizz or her blog and making me go to Quizilla in the first place.

As Slavoj Zizek points out, we at least have this to be thankful for:

(In the same way, the fact that U.S. forces did not find weapons of mass destruction is a positive sign: A truly “totalitarian” power would have done what cops usually do—plant drugs and then “discover” the evidence of crime.)

From useless! worthless! insipid!

The rumor mill says that Gephardt’s chief aide has been rushed to his side by private plane, indicating that he will be announced as Kerry’s running mate tomorrow. And every last bit of enthusiasm I had about the election is being sucked out of my body.

If true, so much for the Quayle imperative.

Hogblog just got so badly slammed with comment spam that his site was taken down for a while. Scary. He's had to turn off comments.

Also from Hobblog: weird cher trivia.

I have a dead blog that is spammed every day, and since I no longer have access to it, I can't even turn off the feature that sends me an email every time a comment is posted. (Of course, I'm using a filter now; otherwise my email account would be useless.)

Wonder how long it will be until you have to read and enter one of those non-computer-scannable word graphics in order to post a comment.

I have fallen. I used to be the only search result returned in google for American Sodomy Day. Now I'm the second in the list behind ABC news.

I am, however, the first in a list 1,520 responses to the search string Bush Solar Anus.

Just came across this June 9 piece from Rod Dreher, an ultra-right wing columnist who has written for the National Review, The New York Post, and is now a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. He and I were in high school together in Louisiana together, when he was, at least by local standards, a moussed-out, Flock-of-Seagulls screaming liberal.

His ideological conversion, needless to say, came as a great shock to many of us who knew him, and once resulted in the cancellation of the Christmas gathering we had had each year since leaving high school, when the host, who was Rod's mentor and former high-school teacher, found out that Rod had actually voted for George W.

Old Ray-O owns up to some portion of past in a column yells:

Coming of age in the Reagan era: Conservative shocker: I was a teenage Reagan hater!

Rod and I -- a few other fellow travelers -- founded the Students for Mondale group at the newly-opened Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. Rod relates this story and our attempt to campaign in the small town of Natchitoches, Louisiana:

As a conservative, I wish I could say that I have fond memories of the Reagan years. Alas, it was my bad luck that the Reagan presidency coincided with my adolescent rebellion. My dad loved Ronald Reagan; everybody we knew in our small Louisiana town did. Therefore, I thought Mr. Reagan was a clod, a fraud and a right-wing nut.

I confess it now: I was a Teenage Reagan Hater.

In 1984, I helped found a Students for Mondale group at my high school. There were six of us, and we stood in the parking lot of the Dixie Dandy supermarket one Saturday trying to pass out Mondale/Ferraro bumper stickers. From the reactions of the shoppers, we may as well have been handing out doggie doo on a stick. Which only confirmed to smug little me how hopelessly idiotic people were.

Only 6 of us? I remember more, but no matter. He's right about the reception we got when we tried to hand out the Mondale stickers. (Then again, they might have been reacting to his multicolored hair.)

He follows this with a cut-and-paste conclusion that we were all just a bunch of uppity, deluded kids more interested in showing off our intelligence and proving our superiority than we were in actual politics. Ok, you could tell this is what the final paragraph would be just from reading the cutesy mock-horror headline.

The facile dissection of our motives is, of course, irksome, such as his claim that our political leanings were more driven by our silly adolescent needs than any kind of real understanding or reflection -- just an inane desire to display our "masterful [sic] intelligence."

Buy my lord, Rod -- did you really have to say that Ronald Reagan, unlike us, was a "rigorous" thinker?

I'll admit that Reagan had some admirable qualities that I, like Rod, were blind to at the time. But I doubt that even Peggy Noonan could manage to make such a claim about Regan's intellect with a straight face.

Here are the relevant graphs:

I regret not having appreciated Mr. Reagan when he was in power, but maybe I learned a more useful lesson for having despised the great man in his day. I will never forget how driven my crowd was to prove our masterful intelligence and moral superiority, and how that emotional need formed the basis of our politics. How what I called thinking was merely the shabby redeployment of my adolescent prejudices. That says nothing about liberalism as a philosophy, but it does reveal something important about a style of politics and habit of mind all too common across the ideological divide.

Lazy contempt and facile scorn for one's political opponents can be oh so satisfying, but it's no substitute for rigorous thought, firm moral conviction and a warm human touch. Mr. Reagan had all three, and the drama of his life and our times shows how much getting these things right matters. I came to see that late, but doing so, I pray, has made a real difference.

Rod and I might have done stupid things back then, like tying to induce psychedelic experiences by eating several boxes of nutmeg -- we got that one out of Rod's copy of The Anarchist Cookbook -- but I don't think even that merits the Ronald Reagan comparison.