The Virtual Stoa

One of the gloomy things about visits to America is hearing my far-better-informed-than-myself friends explain to me why they think W is going to win the forthcoming election, when I’ve tended to take the view all year that he can’t possibly pull this one off (for various reasons, but especially for some of those listed by Nathan Newman back in January).

The immediate feelings of gloom, however, are partially offset by this priceless new Bushism: speaking in Missouri, W. claimed that owing to the threat of legal action,

“Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”

Video clip here (via, via).

While staying at the Sheraton hotel in Chicago at the APSA, I had the television on from time to time in the morning before I went out and in the evening after I came in, tuned to CNN (when I wasn’t trying to catch up with baseball news), with the result that I flew back to England knowing an awful lot about the moment-by-moment progress of hurricane Frances across the state of Florida, and (in comparison) a quite trivial amount about the atrocities in Beslan.

I’m catching up now.

Over here, if you haven’t seen it already.

Bastille Day brings comfort to objectively pro-French Presidential candidate John Kerry with today’s instalment of the Electoral Vote Predictor after eighteen new statewide polls have been published. Splendid!

Because liberals are hotter, apparentlly.

Over here (but possibly not if you’re at work).

If you haven’t read it already, do go and have a look at “Sex Tips For Red State Girls” over at the New York Times, before they stick it in their archive and make you pay for it in a few days time. It’s all about tryin’ to make a livin’ sellin’ vibratin’ sex toys and other useful things in the Bible Belt.

Thinking of people who didn’t get where they are today by knowing the difference between foreign countries, everyone’s favourite Iraq analyst Juan Cole has a nice reminder of candidate Bush’s knowledge of foreign affairs back in 2000.

Good pick, good pick. He’s younger, quite a bit shorter, and will help put states like North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia into play for the Democrats. As I said, a good pick.

Bloody obvious one, though. What took him so long?

Well, we sort of had a plan to go and see the sun rise at Stonehenge tomorrow morning on Midsummer Day, just because a friend sort of offered us a lift. But that offer of a lift fell through, and it’s not going to happen, which may or may not be a shame. I don’t know.

I haven’t been to Stonehenge in a while. But I have been to Carhenge much more recently, in the Summer of 2000, and Carhenge is really quite something.

Andrew Sullivan quotes a chunk of Ronald Reagan’s 1967 rhetoric on race in America, and concludes that “Yes, Reagan was a skeptic about legislating tolerance. But these are not the words of a racist”.

So let’s juxtapose Reagan’s words with the symbolic politics of where he chose to say what he said on these kinds of subjects. Here’s Roger Wilkins, on American telly the other night:

Well, Reagan was an incredible combination of a person who was very optimistic, upbeat, but underneath there were some really ugly parts of his politics.He was, I said once before on this program, he capitalized on anti-black populism by going to Philadelphia, Mississippi, for example, in the beginning of his campaign in 1980. Nobody had ever heard of Philadelphia, Mississippi outside of Mississippi, except as the place where three civil rights workers had been lynched - in 1964 - he said “I believe in states’ rights.” Everybody knew what that meant.

He went to Stone Mountain , Georgia , where the Ku Klux Klan used to burn its crosses, and he said “Jefferson Davis is a hero of mine.” He was rebuked by the Atlanta newspapers - they said we don’t need that any more here.

He went to Charlotte, North Carolina one of the most successful busing for integration programs in the country and he said I’m against busing and again the Charlotte papers rebuked him.

And the impact of that plus his attacks on welfare women, welfare queens in Cadillacs, for example. And his call for cutting the government. He didn’t cut the government; the military bloomed in his time. But programs for poor people diminished entirely and America became a less civilized and less decent place…

That sounds about right.

Average Gallup two-term presidential approval/disapproval ratings (gaps computed from unrounded numbers, so these may not add):

Eisenhower 65/21 (gap: 44)
Reagan 54/36 (gap: 17)
Clinton 55/37 (gap: 18)

[via lbo-talk]

Take the quiz: “Which American City Are You?”

You are under-world power and old-world tradition.
You get the job done and it’s better if nobody asks how.

I saw Polly Toynbee’s article in the Guardian the other day, which discussed the link between inequality and obesity, and was inclined to nod along sagely, not just because it was a nice piece of social democratic propagdanda, but because it fitted with my anecdotal experience. In the years I lived in America, there was a stark contrast between the middle-class students who inhabited the campus, who were hardly ever fat, and, in particular, the working-class teenagers who worked at the check-out desks of the local supermarket, who were often extremely fat.

Now, American bloggers and some of their friends didn’t like what they found in Toynbee’s piece and said so here, here and, most recently, here. And, for all I know or care, Toynbee’s article may very well have contained various mistakes, misrepresentations, sloppinesses, etc. But the power of anecdotal experience meant that these critiques didn’t quite shake my opinion that she was probably onto something important enough to warrant further discussion. And that’s one reason why it’s good to see Matthew Turner’s number-crunching in support of the Toynbee Thesis, or at least a part of it.

UPDATE [5pm]: Chris Lightfoot weighs in.

Not that the Virtual Stoa’s got a one-track mind, or anything, but Martin raised a good point in the comments to the post below: why hadn’t I linked to the now-legendary page on Antebellum Parasexuality? Well, there it is, and VS-readers who are keen to learn about farmyard sex in the pre-Civil War South can now follow the link to the 1998 discussion and enlighten themselves in the company of some of the leading students of American Studies.

The last six years have been kind to the perpetrators of Antebellum Parasexuality and both continue to go from strength to strength: Martin has recently been elected a Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St John’s College, Cambridge and knows a great deal about the deep metaphysical structure of contemporary theories of egalitarian justice; Dominic has recently had his first book, Eugene McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of Postwar American Liberalism, published by Random House, and has some alarmingly good literary representation.

But they’re still both Very Naughty Boys.

A useful resource, from the New York Observer.

Not so long ago they were issuing gay and lesbian marriage licenses just up the road from where I used to live in San Francisco, California (and in the exact spot where Jo and I were married all those years ago); and at midnight last night they started issuing marriages just round the corner from where I used to live — for a much longer period of time — in Cambridge, Mass.

With luck, the other towns in the US that I’ve never set foot in might begin to follow suit…

Smart or happy? detects a gay Republican not-so-subtext in Bob Woodward’s new volume on whatever it is that Bob Woodward writes about these days.

A friend writes from somewhere in East Asia: “Just finished Against All Enemies, which is rather terrifying. I thought you might like (or, rather, be horrified by) this snippet about the FBI’s reaction to the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo tube: Clarke writes:

By now I had enough experience with CIA and FBI to doubt that they would ever have heard of the Aum. I was not disappointed. Except for press reports from the previous twelve hours, they had nothing in their files on the Aum [...]“How can you be so sure there are no Aum here, John [O'Neill, FBI representative to the Counterterrorism Security Group], just because you don’t have an FBI file on them? Did you look them up in the Manhattan phone book to see if they’re there?”

“You serious?”, O’Neill asked, not sure whether I was being funny. When I assured him I meant it, he directed his deputy to leave the conference room and call FBI New York. A while later the FBI agent returned to the room and handed O’Neill a note.

O’Neill glanced at it and said “Fuck. They’re in the phone book, on East 48th Street at Fifth.”

“The rest of the book is pretty terrifying too - it had me up almost until dawn this morning.”

Here’s some news:

On Monday, April 19, Columbia University’s teaching and research assistants are going out on strike for recognition of our union, GSEU/Local 2110 UAW. The demand of the strike, which was called by an 80% majority vote, is that Columbia agree to recognize the union based on a card count (a majority of TAs and RAs working this semester have signed union cards). The strike follows two years of legal delays at the National Labor Relations Board, where Columbia is relying on the Bush appointees to overturn the previous ruling that gave graduate employees the right to organize.

Picket lines will be up from 8:30 am to 1 pm every day at 116th and Broadway. Not sure there are any VS-readers in NYC, though.

Back in 1997 when I was teaching City of God for the first time to a bunch of American undergraduates, I remember trying to elucidate aspects of Augustine’s idea of the peregrinus by telling them that for them, as good citizens of the republic, 15 April should be the happiest day of the year, the day on which they make a significant sacrifice on behalf of the republic (res publica debet esse carissima, etc.), and, in so doing, strengthen the foundations of their lives as free citizens; whereas I, as a non-resident alien, or peregrinus, could justifiably resent having to pay taxes to the Feds.

I don’t think I persuaded them.

Does W. always use the phrase “bring to justice” as a straightforward synonym for “kill”, or is it just my overheated imagination at work again?

[Question prompted by the most inarticulate part of his press conference last night, which led me to this 2002 interview, which prompted various memories of his use of the phrase in the past.]

You should go and hang your head in shame
The way you tried to ruin my name;
You even tried to put the blame
On me when all along ’twas you…
You was breakin’ every sacred vow,
You didn’t worry where or how;
I hope that you are payin’ for
The way you left me cryin’ here alone and blue.With your fast talk and your smile so sweet
I let you sweep me off my feet;
I thought my life would be complete
To have you for my very own…
Like a sailboat with no wind around
I had no power to to turn you down;
You had your way with me till you
Retired and went your way and left me here alone.

What a shame the way you made me fall,
I gave my heart, my soul, my all
And answered to your lovesick call
And hoped some day I’d be your wife…
But the only thing you gave to me
Was bitter tears and misery;
I may be wrong but - seems to me - that
You should pay for what you’ve done ‘cos you have ruined my life.

The only recording I have by Wilma Lee Cooper is of her singing “You Tried To Ruin My Name”, which is on O Sister: The Women’s Bluegrass Collection, a compilation disc that was released to cash in on the popularity of bluegrass, roots, etc. music in the wake of the excellent film O Brother Where Art Thou. And it’s a fantastic recording. Now I know next to nothing else about her — not even what year this recording was made — apart from what it says on this page here. So if any readers of this page turn out to be Wilma Lee afficionados, please tell me in the Comments what it is that I need to know about her and her music, and which records (if any) are worth trying to acquire.UPDATE [12.20pm]: Not quite true. I see that my iPod also contains a recording of “Are You Walking And A-Talking For The Lord?” by Wilma Lee & Stanley Cooper and the Clinch Mountain Clan, which came off the Columbia Country Classics (The Golden Age) Volume 1 disc.

It’s February’s news, isn’t it, but I’m pleased to say that we’ve finally posted Jerry Threet’s account of his wedding to his partner Seth at City Hall in San Francisco over at The Voice of the Turtle.

As he concludes: “I am married to Seth through a process sanctioned by an agency of the state of California. Now, just let any person try to tell me I am not. As our President is so fond of saying, ‘Bring it on.’ When you come after my family, you should expect some resistance.’”

Here’s a happy image, generated by my pseudonymous colleague and international man of mystery Nasi Lemak: it’s a graph of the ten-poll moving average of W’s approval rating since he took office, and some shrewd observers reckon they can spot an underlying trend…

(Follow the link for the detailed graphs, with more legible axes, etc.)