Glorifying the Doofus
Kung Fu Panda is the story of a martial arts fanatic named Po who's not very bright, in poor physical condition, but has a dream. He accidentally ends up being crowned the Dragon Warrior to fight a big battle, and is taught by serious warriors who have been training for years. He wins because he's lucky and has heart. Similarly, the guys in Tropic Thunder are actors thrust into a real dangerous situation. They also appear to be nincompoops put into extraordinary circumstances. And Monk is clearly deranged, with numerous neurotic symptoms, although his brilliant deductions solve the crimes. His perspicacity seems as accidental and unnerving as his neuroses.
Unlike previous movies and tv shows with a similar theme (i.e. Karate Kid), the characters do not improve in intelligence or mental health as part of the story. Po does not get into condition or become more suitable as a warrior. The character flaws remain, and changes come via the external world. The other warriors come to appreciate the panda, Monk is enabled by his co-workers, and the actors become famous because their reality documentary wins an Oscar.
This approach fits right in with reading I've been doing regarding the decline of knowledge among Americans. Anti-intellectualism is now cool. According to Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, young people in particular don't mind that they know little factual information pertaining to citizenship or history. I haven't yet figured out whether that particular point is OK or not. My approach to history is not based on the retention of factual information, but rather the application of historical skills like interpretation and analysis. As I've read the book, two things have occurred to me. First, there's no doubt that students know less about everything than they used to. Second, parents who grew up during times of deprivation or war tend to want their kids to have an easier life. This has happened -- the current generation of young middle-class people have a high standard of living, to judge by their pasttimes. Each generation hopes that the next generation will not have to work as hard. 
Schoolwork is hard work. It has been the method by which each generation has gotten ahead of their parents: earn a college degree, get a better career. And the opportunity to do so in this country has continually expanded for the last century. Access has become more important than anything, as the dream of mandatory schooling for everyone has become reality. Most middle class kids expect access to college, and a degree as a ticket to a job. College is a process, a series of hoops, not necessarily a learning experience or a place to obtain knowledge or wisdom. It's like Po entering the Jade Temple, where the real scholars are, those who have worked hard, are talented, have earned their place. Naster Shifu has to adapt his teaching methods to the panda, using food as a motivator. Only then can the student rise to the level necessary to win.
Why is it so cool to be anti-intellectual? I think it's the intensely social nature of our society. Modern technologies are all about connecting people to each other, often in ways that have nothing to do with the transfer of knowledge. Connections in and of themselves are the point. It's not the content, it's the connection. Po succeeds because not only does he win, he connects with his competitors and teachers, becomes appreciated by the community. The Tropic Thunder documentary gets public recognition. Monk wins his cases and is known around town.
All the same, I am concerned about the loss of characters who improve themselves, learn something, and turn to the intellect as a means of solving problems. The stories must be satisfying, or they wouldn't be so pervasive. Perhaps we're all at some level a doofus. And we want to believe we'll come out on top anyway. But I'm not sure where actual education stands if there is no motivation to improve oneself.
A Tale of Two Scorpions
I haven't been to the Queen Mary since I was a child, so this summer I decided to go. But before I even got onto the big boat, I saw a large sign saying Russian Scorpion, referring to a Soviet submarine where I could actually go aboard. I was so excited I didn't care much about the details, like how the sub got to the U.S. or when.
Sometimes you just have to immerse (or in this case submerse) yourself in history, without intellectualism or analysis. I've had that feeling of being where the history was before. The first time was probably when I went to the Yorktown battle field.
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| Flickr photo: Ken Lund |
The Scorpion was much bigger than I'd imagined a Soviet sub to be, although it apparently could host a crew of 78. It seemed to have countless rooms and stations. Whoever got it ready for the public had helpfully (not) made all the dials and handles unworkable. But they had realistic lighting and some audio of the kind of sounds you'd hear, and it was easy to realize in every room that there was just a metal hull between you and the water. 
Everything was larger than I thought it would be, especially the officer's mess. It looked like something out of The Hunt for Red October. Everyone there was convinced it had been used in the movie (and there was even a photo of Sean Connery in the gift shop), but I can't find any evidence that it was used for the film. At one point walking (well, walking isn't the right word for maneuvering my person through those round hatch things every 20 feet) through, I turned to the guy behind me (who was about my age) and said, "Would you have thought 25 years ago that we'd be in Long Beach touring a Russian attack sub?" It seemed incredible.
Oh yeah, the other scorpion. This one, like the sub, was officially dead, but nevertheless surprising. The San Elijo campus of MiraCosta is situated between a bluff and a wildlife lagoon that links to the sea. I have been working there since 1989. We have lots of wildlife, of course: 
I've seen snakes and rabbits and lizards and hawks and sandpipers. There are egrets and herons down at the bottom of the parking lot, standing on one leg in the water-filled ditch next to the road. But until last week I'd never seen a scorpion. Evidence for global warming as far as I'm concerned.
But don't tell anyone! Almost a decade ago, I watched as official personnel chased a raccoon with intent to kill. And now, we have this rodent trap near my building. The rabbits have mostly disappeared (there used to be lots of them coming out late in the afternoon to nibble the grass -- now you only occasionally see a few pellets). I never saw any rodents there at all, but since the traps came, there are fewer snakes (I assume they have nothing to eat), and so fewer hawks (I once saw one carry a snake off). The lizards are still there, two types of them now, but a lot of wildlife are gone. So don't tell about the scorpion -- just avoid the little field in open-toed shoes.
The Gated Past
"We live in a gated community."
"Oh? I could never live in a gated community. I'd be afraid I couldn't get out!"
"Oh! I like it. I feel safer when it's gated."
One of the women is Japanese, and was a child when the U.S. invaded in World War II. The other is a Polish Jew, who as a child was imprisoned in five different concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
Who do you think was on each side of this issue?
Cop or Mom?
As with the seat belt law, here's another one designed to make sure people do what they should do anyway. And now police are burdened with having to watch for drivers not buckling up and chatting on phones. I would much rather they get quickly to the scene of a crime, or monitor the crosswalks near our local school, where idiot drivers practically run over kids' heels every morning in the crosswalk. In fact, when I requested a patrol be sent there between 8:50 and 9:00 am on a weekday to witness this dangerous behavior, I was told there weren't enough officers to do that. Evidently they're needed for chat check instead.
Yep, this is a rant. The seat belt and cell phone laws are designed to make you do what you would do anyway if you'd listened to your mother. If you have or had a mom, she likely told you to be careful, do things the safe way. That's what most moms do. If you listened to your mom, you'd always buckle your seatbelt. You would not use the cell phone while driving, nor would you do what I consider the more hazardous "while driving" behaviors: arguing with your spouse, crying as you sing to that sad song on the radio, eating a hamburger, or putting on makeup, none of which is against the law...yet.
Grownups, however, by virtue of their advanced age, do not have to listen to their mother. So they drive like idiots, do unsafe things, endanger kids in crosswalks, etc. BTW, there is no law about the crosswalk thing. Apparently it's totally OK to start moving your car while a pedestrian is still in the crosswalk, so long as you came to a complete stop at the stop sign first. Nevertheless, I'd bet your mother would tell you it's not a safe thing to do.
Blacks versus Women, again
The pitting of women against AfricanAmericans is not a new thing. As the Civil War was drawing to a close, arguments occurred over whether or not freed slaves should be given the right to vote. Many white, middle class women had been fighting for the vote for a long time, and making headlines since the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Why should uneducated freedmen get the vote, and not educated, intelligent women? They would have to wait over 50 years to be able to vote nationally for President.
At the time, there were several arguments against giving women the right to vote. One claimed that, marriage being the staunch tradition it was, wives would only vote the same as their husbands. Another claimed that, female biology and psychology being what it was, women's votes would be emotionally-based rather than reasoned. The overall perception of women was similar to the view we have of children today: they are to be protected because they are not full adults yet. No one would think of allowing a 10-year-old to vote, not matter how well-read and intelligent that child is. (Except me, as it turns out. I was very frustrated by being unable to vote since I was 11 years old, when I first started working on political campaigns. I know several children who are more versed on the issues than many adults I could name.)
The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, forbade infringing upon the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or having been a slave. Certainly freedmen were not welcomed at the polls in many places, and the KKK and other organizations infringed upon that right through intimidation. But this amendment had little affect on females. The Fourteenth Amendment, however, did: it said that all people born/naturalilzed in the U.S. were citizens who could not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process. In some states, married women could not own property -- was this not a violation? In 1872, suffragists brought cases to court to show that voting was a right or privilege (as the Amendment put it) of citizens, and therefore they should be able to vote. A UMKC law page gives a brief summary of the fight to the Nineteenth Amendment.
Given the history, it is not surprising that there should have been resentment on both sides of the Democratic Party campaign, and that accusations of sexism and racism would appear. It's important to keep in mind that, as with the Fifteenth Amendment's right to vote, laws do not dictate how people feel. There will be any number of Americans who do not want a black (or worse, half-black) President, just as there are any number who did not want a woman. There will be some who, despite a candidate's positions on important issues, cannot vote for someone who personifies something to which they object, even if that objection is not conscious. And it will be, I fear, more Americans than one might think. I've heard a great many people saying how far we've come, and while that's true, old resentments and habits of hatred or suspicion do not simply disappear.
Jefferson and Postmodernism
He very politely invited me to actually read his book, and said he thought I might really like it. I was abashed. I know better than to criticize a text based on its review. I should have read his book myself before attacking it, and I accordingly tendered my apologies. It took quite a while for the college library to obtain a copy (few other libraries seem to have it), but I got it. And now, I'm afraid I was right in the first place, and if this is postmodernist history, it's going to be a long, miserable slog to the next paradigm shift. I almost didn't make it out of the Prologue.The Prologue in many ways suffices to support my criticism all by itself. The author creatively presents a day in 76-year-old Jefferson's life during the year 1819, revealing to us the great man's thoughts, concerns, and physical condition. I have never seen an author less in love with his subject. This fictitious presentation of Jefferson gives us a man no one would want to know.
Crawford's Jefferson is physically feeble; the author seems at pains to point out Jefferson's infirmities, none of which are particularly rare in older men. Jefferson is "helped into the saddle" (xxiv) -- of course, most gentlemen were, even if healthy. We are introduced in only the third paragraph to the discomfort caused by boils on his buttocks. [In spite of this Jefferson somehow manages to gallop off for a four-mile ride to be by his wounded grandson at the end of the Prologue (xxviii).]
Jefferson's private life is portrayed as ridiculously pampered and sheltered from reality. The "tea and coffee with warm mufffins, served in the dining room" (xv) seem to appear only to make his painful butt condition ridiculous in such comfortable surroundings. Jefferson had an "insatiable appetite for books" (xx) and is shown as preferring ancient history to unpleasant news from his own time. Upon receiving a book of Thucydides, he is quoted as writing a friend that he could "slumber without fear, and review in my dreams the visions of antiquity" (xx). Thucydides, of course, is pretty heavy going, not part of "pleasing reveries" as the author claims. And the perplexities of Greek history were in fact very similar to the difficulties of the early 19th century. His biographer may have missed this point; I doubt Jefferson did. To Jefferson, the acquisition of knowledge was an intense recreational activity, not an escape from reality. Reading history, as any historian knows, serves the purpose of increasing ones understanding of the present.
Benefiting from intellectual cultivation requires mental focus. Yet throughout the Prologue, Jefferson's attention appears to shift suddenly beyond unpleasant thoughts and philosophizing on difficult subjects, to more pleasing and ordinary topics. A passage marking Jefferson's concern over slave mothers not being allowed to spend much time with their babies is followed by one describing his "great delight in sharing his enthusiasm for Nature" with his own pampered grandchildren, and his knowledge of what would bloom next in the garden. (xviii-xix). Surely this portrayal is an invention of the author. Jefferson's intellect was of extraordinary depth and expansiveness, as is very marked in Jefferson's own writing. The narrative here seems determined to portray a Renaissance man as nothing more than a mental gadfly, or an unmedicated case of ADHD.
The issue of slavery appears, of course. When Jefferson goes out to survey his lands "applying, whenever necessary, the small whip that he carried" (xxiv) it is inclear whether this application was to human slaves or his horse. The next paragraph says he had a habit, noted by a visitor, of shaking his whip at slow-working slaves (xxiv-v). When his concern about slavery is noted, it turns out that the problem is slaves who cheat his estate (xvii-xviii). The thoughts about slave mothers and their children proves to center on the issue of efficient slave reproduction. These passages seem calculated to reveal the cruelty inherent in the slave system, and to hold Jefferson to presentist standards of abolitionism and guilt. This has always been a temptation with Jefferson, because he wrote a passage in the Declaration accusing the king of slave trafficking, yet he owned slaves himself. His views, like the economic and humanitarian issues of slavery, were deeply complex. They cannot be summarized in supposed imaginings about good slaves, bad slaves and breeding.
Crawford's main thesis is that Jefferson, in his declining years, was economically delusional. Regarding the conviction that his neighboring planters should adopt more scientific farming methods to alleviate agricultural depression, "[w]ishing would make it so, Jefferson believed -- that and purposeful activity". He then goes on to describe how a determined cheerfulness was necessary in the face of such issues, making purposeful activity something for another day. Throughout the book, Jefferson's concerns about his own finances are repeatedly put aside due to unrealistic Candide-like optimism, until he departs the scene leaving his family in poverty. Incompetent at handling financial matters he might have been, but Jefferson as pollyannish and simplistic simply doesn't jibe. He should not be mocked for believing agriculture would solve his financial woes. His agrarian republicanism may seem utopian in today's post-industrial world, and certainly he struggled with rising commercialism, which he saw as less virtuous than farming. His philosophy was in keeping with many who historically viewed the connection to the soil as the foundation of republicanism (remember Cato?), and commercial interests as presage to imperial and dictatorial government. This controversy arose again in 1819, when the continual imperial ambitions of Britain threatened, and the northeast was becoming increasingly industrialized at the expense of agricultural interests.
In much of this book, Jefferson's own words are used out of context, and for Jefferson that context was huge. In a way, his context was the entire Enlightenment and the rationalist mindset it represented. Unfortunately, the author's own intellectual ability and felicity of expression appear to be below that of his subject. Jefferson wrote and expressed ideas beautifully, but is given no opportunity to expose the farce in this book; his views are reduced to discrete quotations from various sources, with the author creating the themes of Jefferson's life. The quotations are invariably short, and his concerns described in simplistic terms (i.e. Jefferson "worried about slavery"). The effort to use colloquial phrases to add immediacy and modernity to the narrative is problematic, since it makes the 19th century language sound overly quaint. Enlightenment rationalism comes off as an antiquated way of looking at the world, rather than something sprung from educated and scientific minds after centuries of unexamined traditionalism and superstition in everything from politics to natural philosophy.
I do not mean to imply that Dr. Crawford is a bad historian. The passages throughout the book (ok, I read more than the Prologue) about the economy of the time are excellent. His focus on the building tensions which would much later lead to civil war (sectionalism was a major concern of Jefferson's, and this is noted) are so clearly written I wanted to lift them to give to my students. He may even be a fine biographer, but I would rather read a work about someone he likes. Good biographers place deficiencies of character into a sympathetic context, instead of inserting misdirected sympathetic elements into a narrative degrading the subject. So why was this approach used?
Reducing historical figures by showing them "warts and all" has been a professional sport since the 1960s. It is of value in offsetting mindless hero-worship. It lets us see that people of the past were flawed, just as we are. But in doing so, it should also demonstrate that those of us who are flawed can still aspire to make a difference in the world, hold to ethical principles, and even lead a nation of great diversity and contrast. Postmodern perspectives see such goals as themselves flawed. Biographies that serve no purpose but to make us sneer at their subjects and feel superior do worse than tear down straw men. They make the very values represented by their subjects the stuff of ridicule, as if the ideas themselves have no clothes. This is the postmodern perspective, to see values as socially constructed, deeply contextual, and thus inherently relative. To put Jefferson in such a setting is to remove him from his own, and diminish his usefulness to us. Thus I find Crawford's book not only a disappointment, but disturbing as an example of postmodern historical biography.
The Declaration of Independence in Wordle
Ludlow Massacre
Politics and Culture After the Great War slideshow
Mortage Madness
You know if you read my stuff that I'm a political radical in a lot of areas, and really believe the government's role is to make sure that people are provided with basic health care, food, clothing and shelter. But a $400,000 cracker-box palace that somebody bought when they couldn't afford it in the first place does not qualify as "shelter".
I understand that historical arguments have been made for bailing out mortgages, which happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s. 
But the Great Depression was caused by multiple weakness in the economic infrastructure of this country, and in particular the backing of loans to buy stock. Stockbrokers increased the number of loans backed by businesses (with no collateral) and decreased those backed by banks (which required collateral). John Kenneth Galbraith explored five reasons for the Crash of 1929:
- unequal distribution of income
- weak corporate structure
- poor banking structure
- bad international trade balance
- poor state of economic intelligence
What's happened here is that people without enough income applied for loans they couldn't afford, and got them. Home ownership is the American Dream; it is not a political or social right. Adjustable rate mortgages are gambling; one bets that your income or the housing prices will go up and make it OK once the payments increase. People who avoided this game will now have to help pay for those who "played" the housing market, figuring they could buy a house with a low payment for five years, then sell the house and make money. These weren't people buying a home; they were buying a house, hoping the market increases would make them money with very little effort. They invested poorly, were ill-informed, took stupid risks with their money and housing. I'm sorry.
Why was this allowed to happen? The socialist in me says lack of government regulation over mortgage lenders. They had notoriously loose standards for a loan, not checking income and outsourcing application underwriting. Allowing businesses unfettered license was a problem in the 1920s and it's a problem now -- that much is a historical trend. We now have continual pattern of the government not regulating businesses, then having to bail out businesses after things go wrong. [I know I sound like a disgruntled taxpayer, or even a (gasp!) conservative. Or worse, John McCain.]
Alan Greenspan disagrees. He sees a much larger, historically founded phenomenon known as a "bubble". Greenspan's analysis of the crisis, written in December, cited "speculative fever". This is where people and institutions begin creating riskier investments in response to perceived rising prosperity. He blames low-priced exports from developing countries, a decline in interest rates, rising stock values and home valuation, and "the expectations of rising prices" [italics mine]. He claims that even if low ARMs had not been available, people would have still gotten mortgages, but I really don't think there would have been the large number of bogus applications without the low introductory rates of the ARM. For years in San Diego, people were talking about how they bought their home for this amount, and the value had tripled or quadrupled. Looked like the same two-bedroom suburban tract home to me, and I knew it wasn't worth that much in real money. I warned of a crisis coming, as the year fives began to kick in. Sometimes I hate being right.
I'm a historian, teaching history at MiraCosta College in southern California. No one has ever asked me to write a blog.
