The little world of Edinburg High runs smack into reality, as its coach is put on probation, its star football player (who assaulted a ref and was carted off to jail in front of thousands – millions – now that the incident has gone viral) is out for the rest of the year, and all of its sports programs are also on probation.
The football players gathered in front of the high school right after the assault and petitioned to return to the field asap. They must be really shocked at the severity of the punishment.
But life is for learning. There’s a big world out there – there’s not just the little world of Edinburg where smashing a game official cuz you’re pissed is a little embarrassing but no reason to halt the game or subsequent games. In the big world, the global revelation of criminals on your team is no small matter.
UD excitedly welcomes Tucker Carlson to her old hippie/Joni Mitchell/anti-bourgeois world! UD is, as they say, “from the ‘sixties,” and I guess in the wake of Trump’s destabilizing loss, some former right-wing reactionaries are taking UD‘s leftish path — embracing, as Tucker does, a contempt for traditional institutions, a repulsion away from old people, and a disgust for capitalist status anxiety.
In response to the Epstein Shitstorm, Tucker hits the hippie trifecta:
‘Do people with doctoral degrees have the right to call themselves “Dr.”? If they have the right, does exercising that right make sense, in all situations? If Epstein had wanted to investigate these questions, he could have done so without sprouting new feet like a centipede, finding ways to step in rhetorical dog turds in every paragraph…
What mystifies me is Epstein’s desire to police the use of the title, when he could instead just use it as requested, like a normal person, and contain his disrespect…
In a university environment, insisting on it might be pompous; in an environment where such titles are rare—such as before the name of the soon-to-be first lady of the United States—they make more sense…
If Jill Biden wants to flaunt her Ed.D., who is Joseph Epstein to object? Those letters mean only what they mean. They certainly aren’t more embarrassing than other titles that people use in perpetuity. Ambassadors, I find, tend to call themselves “Ambassador” forever, even if they bought their sole ambassadorship by bundling political donations in Long Island…’
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Wood actually tries to go there, to the arcane competitive arena of title-tossing… I’ve covered the European mania for dottore on this blog…
I’ve never thought much about – or blogged about – my own titlephobia, but for what’s it’s worth:
Les UDs share a refusal to call themselves anything other than first name last name. On our syllabi we are first name last name. On academic correspondence the same. On everything the same. We have available to us, and have certainly seen lots of other people use, Dr. and PhD. For ourselves the idea of using these is embarrassing. We wouldn’t think of doing it. Except in one context.
When we are sending each other, or sending friends, particularly immature and hilarious emails, we sign ourselves with … I don’t know – MA, PhD (Mr UD has two MAs), Doctor Margaret Soltan, MA, PhD, and maybe I’ll add something extra like OBE…
But see we can afford to joke and, as Wood notes, find these things pompous, because we move in an environment where such things are common and we’re a little cynical about them because as with all titles (see Graeme on “ambassador”) some are powerfully earned and meaningful and some are not and the better part of valor is just to avoid them. Plus we were both raised in families full of advanced degrees so we fail to see the shimmer and the glimmer of them. Is this reverse snobbery? I dunno. As I say, this is pretty much the first time I’ve thought about this.
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Actually, to be really really unwisely disclosing, I think for me it’s about as far from reverse or any other kind of snobbery as one can imagine. Like you, I live in my head, and in my head I’m a jerk. In my head I barely made it out of high school and am, au fond, an absurdity. When I read Humbert Humbert’s description of his first wife – “that figure of fun, Mme Humbert” – I pause at figure of fun and feel powerful identification. I just never made it into the adult world, where you take yourself seriously and where there’s a correspondence between the interior of your head and things like titles designating mature accomplishments. My problem, not yours, Dr Biden.
Kiddo, you gotta know when to hold em, and when to fold em. You went ahead and dealt yourself and your newspaper some Joseph Epstein, knowing full well what’s in that deck, and even after the game blew up in your face, you’re still dancing around with the shards of his cards in your bloody digits.
But in your capacity as editor, monkey nipples, you have an obligation to the Wall Street Journal. It’s not like just liking Donald Trump for, you know, yourself. It’s like you publish things that reflect on a whole newspaper. Once having published a damaging opinion piece, nothing stopped you from reviewing your decision, re-reading the piece, and expressing something short of rigid rageful defense of it.
Instead, you argue that no one’s really angry about it outside of a cynical conspiracy of Bidenites. “[T]he Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power.”
Paulie, Mrs Gigot, Honeychild: Your excitement over sinewy macho Jill brandishing a weapon overlooks the national and international overflow of disgust in response to Epstein’s attack on a woman who simply chooses to use the title Dr because she has a doctorate. This here’s a big story (that link is to Team Biden/Paris), and you need to reckon with it, sugarlips.
And as for your conspiracy theory: Let’s say the Biden team did all gang up on you and your boy Epsy in a coordinated effort to do damage. So what? What have you got against coordinated action? Your guys in congress are as one ganging up on Biden – you got a problem with that?
And again – instead of conceding just a tad — not taking the piece down, but conceding just a tad that there might be a small but reasonable connection between what Epstein wrote and the massive anger/disdain/disbelief it has generated, you make a number of dumb statements in its defense that have nothing to do with Epstein’s argument. “She can’t be off-limits for commentary.” Yes, and we’ve all decided Jill Biden must be TOTALLY OFF-LIMITS FOR COMMENTARY. Don’t you, Paulie, or anyone else dare say a word against her!
And finally, just like a woman, you get all teary and so there and I’m too good for this world: “[T]hese pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.” BWAH! What dya say to that ya big bully? (Tosses hankie – er, bloody card – in face.)
Here’s what we say, bubbaleh, and we’re going to try to keep this abbreviated and monosyllabic: There’sadiftweenprov.andcrp.
… are ticking away as we speak, so UD will be quick about this: She knew him rather well at Northwestern University in the ‘seventies. He thought highly of wee UD‘s writing, and indeed was so insistent that she launch a career just like his — freelance person of letters – that he became quite annoyed when UD decided to go to graduate school in English. He seems to have felt betrayed.
I mean, it was all a kind of compliment, and I remember genially taking it as such, even though Epstein was ungenial in his interactions with my twentyish self.
He condescended. I didn’t take it personally, since he (along with his buddy Erich Heller) was, with virtually everyone, snippy and snobby.
Huge numbers of years on, Epstein has gone and been snobby with Jill Biden — though, curiously, back in 2016, he attacked other snobs for being snobby in regard to Sarah Palin, whose cultural superiority he indignantly defended. Same unfortunate background as Biden – public universities, degrees in girl fields – but as the running mate of Epstein’s presidential choice, Palin would somehow have to be pedigreed; whereas, given Biden’s political connections, she’d need to be a mutt. Sarah Palin abundantly deserved the title Vice President, but Jill Biden doesn’t even deserve “Dr.,” and would do better to content herself with There There Little First Lady.
Not much to see here, in other words. By the time they’re in their eighties, most people – especially if they’re cranks – have long been ignored by the world. Joseph Epstein is to be commended for having kept his name on the page, even unto the final petulance. Good boy.
They don’t even name him. (For good measure, his faculty page has been removed from the university’s website.) For a person who cares about status as much as Epstein does, and for a person who believes that he’s famous, this brief no-name dismissal must hurt as much as Trump’s brief no-name Supreme Court dismissal.
Knowing Epstein (having known him long ago), UD anticipates that he is working already on a vindictive short story featuring easily identifiable actors in this Biden episode. After Saul Bellow ended their friendship, Epstein wrote one such story about Bellow; he wrote several vindictive stories about lesser-known people.
[NOTE: I’ve added a lot of material over the last few hours to this post, and will continue to do so as commentary on the president’s failure at the Supreme Court grows. Scroll down.]
From Georgia’s response to this thoroughly rejected grotesquerie:
This election cycle, Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.
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Ben Sasse: “Every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump’s picks — closed the book on the nonsense.”
‘You saw it coming this summer — the astounding moment when the Republican platform became nothing more than a loyalty oath to Donald Trump — an oath of obedience, complete obedience, to Trump. Not even a pretense of policy ideas in it…
So today’s an historic day… [We] can [sometimes] overstate the importance of an event, [but] today was a before and after moment in the life of the nation: 106 members of Congress broke faith with American democracy today. They did something the fascists, the Nazis, the Confederate army, were unable to do. They broke faith with the idea that the people are sovereign.
Democracy definitionally requires one side be willing to lose an election… What we saw today [was a] breaking of faith which followed the poisoning of faith and belief in the system — the American system, the American republic, which has endured since 1776. It was poisoned this month, … and we’re going to live with this now for all the balance of our lives. Because the competition in American politics is now between a democratic party, meaning a party that believes in democracy, versus an autocratic party. And we’ve never seen that.
When you see that many members of Congress breaking faith with their oath [in order to] overturn an election because they don’t like the result, we’re off the reservation to a place that we might not be able to get back on it from. … We’re one election away from losing the country to people who no longer believe in democracy.’
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“His whole life has been transactions and expectations [of a] degree of loyalty, and that’s a total misunderstanding of what to expect from the three justices he appointed, as well as a misunderstanding of [Justices] Alito, Thomas and Roberts. They’re not going to burn down their court to rescue Donald Trump… they’re neither stupid nor crazy. And for them to do what Trump’s asking them to do, they would have to be both stupid and crazy.”
‘“With each loss we get to celebrate the Biden/Harris victory all over again,” Ken Martin, a vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the state party chair in Minnesota, said. “It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.”’
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“[O]ne of our political parties is openly hostile to our entire political system…
This trend represents an existential threat to our system.
… Since the election, the party has only more fully warmed to Trump’s demagogy, moving from the uncomfortable passivity that Republicans used to adopt in the face of his provocations to downright enthusiasm for overturning a free and fair election…
[The Republican party] no longer respects the fundamental basics of our democratic process — voting and the peaceful transfer of political power — let alone good governance.”
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“This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. As Trump’s fraud claims and legal cases have steadily failed, the arguments he has pursued have become more outlandish and absurd, and they have also become more disturbing. Many Republican voters agree, and in refusing to stand up to him and them, Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy…
[T]hese Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic…
Republican officials aren’t afraid of Trump so much as they are afraid of Republican voters. And Republican voters appear to be afraid of democracy.”
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“Sedition is a serious charge, but it’s the right word. Most House Republicans and 17 state attorneys general are standing against the right of Americans to choose their own leaders. As elected officials, they are using the power granted to them by the people to declare that the people should not have such power. Even if they lose this case, this time around, the fact that so many traitors hold elected office in America is a major crisis all by itself.”
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“The health of a democracy rests on public confidence that elections are free and fair. Questioning the integrity of an election is a matter of the utmost seriousness. By doing so without offering any evidence, [the Texas Attorney General] and his collaborators have disgraced themselves.
… This new policy of election denialism … is the latest manifestation of the Republican Party’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies.
… This isn’t really about Mr. Trump anymore. He lost, and his ruinous tenure will soon be over. This is now about the corruption of a political party whose leaders are guided by the fear of Mr. Trump rather than the love of this country — and who are falling into dangerous habits.
… [W]here does a party that rejects democracy go from here?”
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David Frum, in 2018:
“Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
…
Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.”
Botharchitects had a lifelong connection to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and must have had quite a number of encounters. Yet think of it:
1.) Jerzy fought with the Polish army against the Nazis and barely survived the battle; then he barely survived six years of prisoner of war camp.
2.) Philip was a fucking NAZI! A real live Nazi who tried to start an American fascist party and loved him some Hitler! He celebrated the destruction of Warsaw! He attended Nuremberg rallies and it’s clear from his descriptions of his response to them that they made him come! Come, reader. Like have an orgasm.
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UD actually kind of finds it hard to imagine a universe in which these two men exist together; she totally can’t create a clear picture in her head of Cambridge only fifteen or twenty years after the war and ANYTHING civilized being exchanged between these two. Did Jerzy know about Philip’s profound commitment to and delight in the violent destruction of everything Jerzy not only held dear but for which he practically gave his life? “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed,” [Johnson wrote in a letter during the war]. “It was a stirring spectacle.”
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I mean, Jerzy already disliked Johnson because of Johnson’s commitment to postmodernism, to be sure; but can he also have known he was talking to a degenerate, seemingly unregenerate, Hitlerian?? If so, how can he have agreed to be in the same room with him? I’m thinking he must not have known.
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But, well, fascinating fascism and all that. Most people who know about architecture have long known that Johnson was a brownshirted jackbooted antisemite… which is like SOOOO fascinating… SOOOO offbeat and edgy and out there… Oh, Philip, stop it!! (Giggle.)
[L]et us not forget his playbook (or his witticisms), so that we can recognize future versions when they arise: the nihilism and casual dismissal of the human that inspired his dark grids and glass-clad castles. I see traces of those qualities in certain architects who claim to be humanists, but whose work instead celebrates their own grandeur. Philip Johnson wasn’t just a racist and fascist: He was a cultured, rich cad who made us forget our own failings as a country and as a profession.
And it is fascinating to old UD, the way we extend a weird sort of – what’s the phrase everyone’s using these days? – preemptive pardon to people like Gore Vidal (UD loves Vidal and even made a pilgrimage to his DC gravesite, but there’s no denying his Johnsonian ugliness in old age) and Kingsley Amis. And maybe we should extend a pardon. But Philip Johnson was no garden variety bigot; he was a brilliant and principled Hitlerian. He laughed it all away years later and people let him. Look how long it’s taken for the civilized world to start erasing monuments to the fucker.
Must-read opinion piece in the NYT. Here’s the heart of it:
Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
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But should this all be put in the past tense? The shits are still trying to kill us.
A duly constituted state of these United States appoints to a position of responsibility for health-related measures during a pandemic a person who dismisses what he calls “the so-called pandemic” as a vast communist plot AND IF ANYONE AGREES TO BE VACCINATED FOR SO-CALLED COVID THEIR DNA WILL BE REPROGRAMMED TO MAKE THEM A ROBOT OF THEIR CHINESE AND RUSSIAN MASTERS.
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Is Igor Shepherd a doctor? No evidence of that online. He says he picked up something he’s calling a medical degree during his young dark evil days in the Russki military but did anyone in Wyoming check on that? Did anyone in Wyoming check on whether Igor is insane?
Igor is Donald Trump’s Little Edie Beale, a strumpette on the psycho circuit who barks about global conspiracies to debrain your immune system. And someone in our sickest state (in 2016: second highest suicide rate; first in gun deaths; worst traffic fatality rate; highest divorce rate) decided to appoint Igor to an important covid-related committee. They decided to put Typhoid Mary in charge of typhoid-relief activities.
Wyoming has hurriedly shoved Igor under the buffalo chips and won’t talk about it. The End.
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Which makes Igor a very small story amid the much larger story of Big Edie, currently spraying territorial urine all over the faces of our Supreme Court Justices.
But UD thinks Little Edie is a sort of wedge into the Big Edie story. UD thinks the restless mental emptiness of America’s wide open spaces, the rageful giveashittery of portions of our hinterlands, takes you in one of two directions, both utterly captured by Trump. One we know from the Sybil, via TS Eliot’s epigraph to The Waste Land: apothanein thelo. I want to die. Suicide, guns, alcohol amid snowdrifts late at night, helmetless motorcycling… There’s no easier place to off yourself than the heart of the heart of Trump country, and they like it that way because quite a few of them want to die. Donald Trump’s maskless droplets-languishing is fuck yeah.
The other direction? Instead of killing yourself, you kill other people. Like Wyoming’s Igor, you’re a rock-hard paranoid who knows that sooner or later the communists led by Kamala Harris (Trump: “She’s a monster.”) are going to attach your negative posilator to your positive negalator and deactivate your synaptic narcoscopies and all hell will break loose. Get them before they get you.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
