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Princeton University Press Books in Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America
This wide-ranging series in twentieth-century U.S. political history presents not only works that represent the best of traditional political history but also those that integrate insights and methodologies of social and cultural history, challenge conventional periodizations, and situate the American political experience in a comparative framework.
Joe Bageant: A Yard Sale in Chernobyl
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
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But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke.
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Orcinus - Are Republicans and their thugs killing off the Town Hall as a democratic forum?
When someone's entire purpose in coming out to a town-hall forum is to chant and shout and protest and disrupt, they aren't just expressing their opinions -- they are actively shutting down democracy.
And that, folks, is a classically fascist thing to do.
"The Death of the Novel" and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the "Big, Ambitious Novel" -- Greif 36 (2): 11 -- boundary 2
The category of the "big, ambitious novel," circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form must not start in the 1970s, however, nor with distant forerunners such as James Joyce's Ulysses, but from 1945. After the Second World War, critics and novelists negotiated the sort of literature that would count as great after the end of high modernism, in service of a new humanism. The novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow succeeded stylistically and thematically where Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and William Faulkner's A Fable did not. They offered a new vitality to overcome critics' discourse of the "death of the novel" and probed new forms of human peculiarity that managed fears of the decline of the will of "man." This long history helps to extend our understanding of the origins and significance of interminable and system-centered fictions denounced by critics such as James Wood as mere "hysterical realism." It reorients contemporary criticism of these books to the shared, credible subjects of enforced liveliness and endlessness in narration, and a longer-term questioning of the human in a wider range of American fictions. It also shows how the novelists' apparent betrayal of humanist concerns actually emerged from earlier stages of interaction between novelists and mistrustful critics.
The War We Can't Win by Andrew Bacevich - Commonweal - A review of religion, politics and culture
slacktivist: It must be Job's fault
So when levies break and a city floods and no one with the authority to help comes to the aid of those trapped by the rising waters, we can't bear the idea that something just like that could happen just as suddenly to us. We decide that they, like Job, must have done something to bring this on themselves. We make up stories about violent looting mobs -- opportunists who chose to stay behind and whose fearsome ruthlessness prevents the sending of aid.
pandagon.net - The cops work for you, or they’re supposed to
Victim blamers are often also telling a story about how they personally will never be raped, or in this case, arrested unfairly for doing something totally legal. To blame Gates for being stupid is to say, ”I would never get arrested for breaking into my house, because I have the sort of self-preservation instincts that this man is clearly missing.” People enjoy the illusion of having more mastery of the world than they do, because it makes them feel safe, but it also contributes to an atmosphere where victim-blaming can flourish, particularly in situations that are loaded with racial or gender politics.
New Publications on the Constitution from the American Constitution Society | American Constitution Society
The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) released two important books on the Constitution that will shape the ongoing debate over how to interpret our nation’s founding document and hosted a panel discussion with the authors and other experts on the ideas presented. The lead book, Keeping Faith with the Constitution, articulates a vision of the Constitution and an approach to interpretation that is faithful to the words of the document and at the same time has enabled the Constitution to retain its relevance for each new generation of Americans.
Three Polar Politics In Post-Petroleum America | Corrente
The present break down of political forces follows three different views of this thesis. The first view is that the land casino merely needs to be allowed to run. This is the "Confederate" wing of American politics. The second view is that the land casino can continue longer, but only if carefully managed, this is the "Moderate" view. The third view is that it requires careful management to transition away from the land casino, or the "Progressive" view.
Firedoglake » Where David Cameron Is Now, the GOP Wants To Go in 2012
Technocrats aided their enemies by being dead wrong about Vietnam, inflation, and demographics. While the pain inflicted by these three problems is small compared to their place in myth; it was enough to create core that would identify technocrat with liberal, and thence be induced to vote for massive distribution of wealth upwards.
Lance Mannion: Sarah Palin: In the American grain
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Palin's story was always interesting but it's become important because of her part in the collective nervous breakdown of the Republican party.
The Party establishment, except for Bill Kristol, wants her gone because:
1. The GOP's still a boy's club. To the degree that it's not, it's still a club and Palin was not invited to join and never would have been---she is not their kind of people.
2. She's an embarrassment. The GOP's supposed to be the party of serious grown-ups.
3. She isn't the least bit interested in even pretending to care about the establishment's issues or their interests.
4. She's threatening to take control of a significant part of the base, the angry working class and the religious fundamentalists, that the establishment has worked hard to control and exploit without having to listen to it or grant it real power. This is the big problem Palin has presented them with. Their preferred method of keeping the base in line has been to keep these people so angry and confused that they don't think, they just react, so that nobody ever stops to ask why not a public option or wonders if a carbon tax might work. Palin is doing something else. Taking them and their concerns seriously. She's offering to lead them. Where to and to what end I don't think even she knows, but it's scary to the establishment because it might be into a third party or into a weird and wild place where the Party might as well be a third party. Either way it would be the end of the GOP forever.
Overcoming Bias : Stupider Than You Realize
A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is. This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher. A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.
Why you can't help but care about Brad and Angelina, Part III | Psychology Today
A simple test: If your fairy godmother appeared and offered to make you famous, can you honestly maintain you'd say "no thanks"? The reason you'd take her up on it is that you know that if you were famous you would have achieved what you, and all of us in this society, believe to be the very purpose of life: you would have fulfilled your destiny. Finally, that nagging feeling of being one step away from happiness would go away, because you would have taken that last step.
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