the second congress

I've been arguing with Malcolm Harris and others in the comments at Crooked Timber, concerning his post about David Graeber and debt there. You might be interested in the argument. I like Harris, but he has a bad habit of using the idiom of revolution in his role as an advocate for the bourgeois. That's nothing wrong with that kind of advocacy; most media is devoted to it, after all. Certainly most of what I've written in my life is oriented towards the concerns of the middle class, being as it is my own. And here I am, expressing the need to take drastic action to reform tuition and student debt. I am, measure for measure, a creature of a particular establishment. But the language of emancipation matters, and it has to be applied with care.

The question I asked in the comments is one that is very important to me: how many Occupy protesters would, given the chance, immediately swap positions with the bankers they're protesting? I don't trust and have never trusted those protesters who are ultimately agitating against the outcomes of the system rather than the system itself. "The system is wrong" is a constructively critical statement. "The system doesn't hire enough people, or hired the wrong people" is a statement that reasserts the legitimacy of that system. Do I have personal sympathy for those laboring under student loan debt? Of course I have sympathy for them. I am them. And, again, I'm trying to participate in a national conversation as an advocate for helping them and future college students. But where my sympathy lies and where I think political effort should be directed are separate, and no genuinely critical discourse could fail to parse these differences. We are the 99%, but we are not all the same 99%.

The danger for the left-wing is not that it will be met on some battlefield and defeated by the forces of capital and reaction. The danger is that it will be co-opted, deflected, appropriated, misused. I have read and will read with interest Harris's writing on this topic, and I support the broad effort to alleviate student debt burdens. That effort cannot be used to distort our perception of who is on the top and who is on the bottom, the only political question of enduring meaning.

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the anti-authoritarian's authority

You know, I've debated saying a thing or three about this whole Chris Hedges-David Graeber imbroglio, but honestly, I'm just so exhausted. Every time I start trying to write about it, I end up lying down for awhile. Hopefully sooner or later I'll get something out.

Here's one quick thing, though: I wish David Graeber would stop stamping around and announcing how very integral he was in starting the Occupy movement. I'm sure that's true. Good for him. But an anarchist, making an explicit plea against the movement police, in the context of an anti-authoritarian movement... well, there's better ways he could spend his energy than broadly waving at his own authority. It's not just that piece, either. There's such a fussiness to his discussion of his own influence. It's pregnant with a desire to say what he knows better than to say: that he has some sort of ownership over it all.

I'm not an anarchist, and this isn't personally my issue. I don't doubt for a second how important Graeber was to starting Occupy. And I have long found the denial of leadership to be a deeply self-destruction impulse within leftist movements. (The maddest anyone has ever been at me, at an organizing movement, was when I told someone he was a leader. That he plainly was didn't moderate his reaction.) If Graeber wants to assert leadership, he should just do it. Having it both ways, by speaking about the status that gives him authority without speaking in the vocabulary of authority, guarantees that the conversation proceed in an unhealthy manner.

Update: Yeah, I need to elaborate some. Give me today to get something put together.

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google's distractions

I have a post up at the new digs about the endless distractions and annoyances that seem to haunt Google's products, which might be of interest to a broader audience. Check it out. (Don't worry, I won't be cross linking like this often.)

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my piece at Consider, and new ventures

I was asked to write a piece for Consider Magazine, in support of President Obama's recent tuition-control proposal that he announced in a speech at the University of Michigan. So I did. I'll be honest: the venture makes me a bit nervous. But at this point, the challenge that stratospheric tuitions pose to the university and its students is significant enough that I'm willing to put that fear aside. It is time for us to solve this problem, and if we need to get heavy-handed to do it, so be it.

You can read a few more thoughts I wrote on my piece here, and this is why I'm really posting. I've registered FredrikdeBoer.com, and set up a professional and academic website there. For some time, I thought I would keep that completely sequestered from this blog. I'll admit that, at many times, I've come to regret ever revealing my last name online. But as I've said, I believe in accountability for one's statements, and this is the Internet, where everything is forever. There's no sense in hiding.

There is sense in growing. Look: my political positions are what they are. My disposition is what it is. I believe that democracy is about antagonism. I believe that the consequence of rule by the people is that  political disagreements are naturally going to be unfriendly, if they are real and prosecuted well, which is why family and friendship are so important. You know how I feel about this stuff. This is not an apology; for those who don't like the way I interact politically, the bridges have been burned. For those who do, there's no need to apologize. But it's time to evolve. I rarely achieve what I want to achieve here.

I consider myself, at the end of the day, an insanely fortunate person. I am living in a nice place with a beautiful, accomplished, and brilliant woman, with our dog and cat and my books. I've got good friends and great food and dark beer and a warm bed. There isn't much money, but there hasn't been for a long time, and anyway we don't need much. Most of all, I get to do what I've always wanted to do: I teach writing and language, and I get to research about same, and when I'm in my office grading papers or pouring over some recent study, I know how lucky I am. I realized some time ago that many people don't know what they want to do with their lives; I've known since I was thirteen. It's an incredible blessing, and I force myself to consider what a privileged, lucky man I am every day.

What I want is to take this ceaseless push to make myself understood and direct it towards what I want to do and want to be. So I'm inaugurating Interfaces of the Word, my new blog on language and education. It's named in honor of Walter Ong. I wrote a long introductory post for you to peruse. As I say in that post

 I want this blog to consider writing, in many forms and through many lenses. I want to talk about writing I like, or writing I don’t; about trends or fads in writing or writing technologies; about books, articles, magazines, stories…. I also want to give advice for writing and writers, should anybody be interested in taking it. I’d also like to write a book review every once in awhile. I’m not going to artificially restrict myself. If an issue seems interesting and relevant to me, I’ll write about it. But this won’t be a general interest blog. I know myself, and the best way to keep my writing focused and temperate is to engage with issues pertaining to my academic research. 

I also want to consider education, as my primary academic interests revolve around pedagogy. Educational research and journalism are issues of both personal and academic interest to me, and I possess enough professional training and research to write about them with reasonable expertise. Obviously, my focus will mostly be on research in literacy and language, but I will also likely consider education reform efforts and the research concerning them.

This is, obviously, not going to be a high-traffic proposition. But as my critics tell me frequently, neither is this blog. I would rather write something online that is fully myself and fully my own with a small readership than write something with a big readership that duplicated what everybody else was doing. I do hope to fill some of the void left by Alan Jacons and Text Patterns, though Alan and I disagree about almost everything and my blog will be quite a bit different than his. I also recognize that I need checks on myself, ways to control my own anger. That has never been a problem with academics; it has always been a problem with politics. Let's be clear: this is also a part of professionalizing. I need to cool my jets, for self-interested as well as principled reasons. If you'd like, you can feel free to call me a sellout. (Though note that's a term I've never used.) You just can't do it in the comments over there; I'll be moderating those. The comments here will remain, as ever, unmoderated.

L'Hôte isn't going away for good. I've never been able to leave it alone for long, after all. And there will undoubtedly be times when I will feel compelled to speak out about a political culture which I find alienating and wrong. I do hope to channel those feelings into other publications. Perhaps I'll write again for The New Inquiry; I genuinely respect and admire the publication. (The first e-magazine is out now; you should subscribe, for only $2 a month.) But I will continue to write here occasionally, I'm sure. In fact, there's a story I want to tell in this space soon; I've been working on finding the words and the courage for some time. Maybe I'll continue to post a couple of times a week. I don't know, we'll see.

Whatever the case, I rest easy knowing that there are some amazing writers out there who carry the flame much better than I do. I've already told you about my respect for publications like Jacobin. I am thrilled with the rise of someone like Corey Robin, who speaks plainly about power and revolution. I know that Glenn Greenwald will continue to work tirelessly in pointing out impositions on personal liberty of those here and abroad, and in his insistence that Arabs and Muslims are just as deserving of life and rights as anyone else. And I know that, all around, people are dissatisfied with the way things are, and that the order of things cannot always endure. For now, I'm content to tinker quietly in the soft light of the prime of my life.

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if only

... if only someone on the Internet was willing to blog about the influence of the magazine Sassy
... if only someone on the Internet would share their thoughts on Mad Men
... if only someone on the Internet would declare the death of the physical book
... if only someone on the Internet could express skepticism about the future of marriage
... if only someone on the Internet composed a "big think" piece about Gawker media
... if only someone on the Internet questioned whether regulatory agencies are really protecting us
... if only someone on the Internet posted photos of attractive people on the streets
... if only someone on the Internet would consider conservatism-- from a woman's perspective!
... if only someone on the Internet claimed that their old math teacher could solve the education crisis
... if only someone on the Internet asked us all if we've really thought about our own privilege
... if only someone on the Internet provided a forum for white people to talk about their love of hip hop
... if only someone on the Internet praised Freaks and Geeks
... if only someone on the Internet's Twitter feed was really dry
... if only someone on the Internet published long form pieces about what it means to strive as a young hip liberal educated passionate-but-conflicted young thing in today's society, man!*

to be continued.

*think it over first

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day by day in China

Another day, another disgrace from one of the most oppressive societies on earth. Yet more evidence, too, that economic liberalization can exist quite comfortably with political repression and authoritarianism. As if you needed reminding.

Twenty-two years ago today, Nelson Mandela was freed. South Africa was freed by South Africans, with the help of a global campaign of isolation, education, disapproval, and sanction. China, big and populous and poor but powerful, will take a greater effort. That effort is required every day, with constant and principled denunciation. The crucial  message to the Chinese people is that China's future is China's. The question for all of us, as a polity and a government, is whether we can support the self-determination of a people that is truly self-determining, and not dictated by the supposed benevolence of foreign powers. The credibility to oppose authoritarianism must contain within it the rejection of our own authority. There is no path to freedom that travels through Western paternalism, the coercion (whether soft or hard) that has marked all of our liberatory efforts. Only by abdicating our own claims to be the directors of history do we contribute to the genuinely principled goal, the universal suffrage of all mankind.

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credit where due

As much criticism as I have directed at the Atlantic in the past, and as much as I hope to again in the near future, this article by Derek Thompson on the state of marriage and divorce in America is sober, careful, buttressed by reference to responsibly-generated empirical data, meticulously cited, and in my opinion, correct. If you're a young web writer type, this is a good model for the best of the form. Check it out.

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