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down in the easy chair

Random things I am thinking about this morning instead of working on my dissertation:
  1. This stinks. Why are we losing all the good people all at once? To Michigan? MICHIGAN? Why on earth would anyone want to spend the rest of his/her academic career in a place that is a) cold, b) no, seriously. it's really cold, and c) willing to lose a game on a really stupid play instead of throwing a hail Mary like the good Lord intended? Whatever. Doug Laycock is one of my academic heroes. He'll be missed.
  2. Sometimes the spread of American culture is such a bad thing.
  3. Harold Bloom is a mean old man who's brilliant, no doubt, but that brilliance is mitigated by some other, um, shall we say less-than-ideal personality traits. At Yale, he would hand back papers to his undergraduates with no comments except for "Admissions error" at the top. I have zero respect for anyone who would ever crush a student like that. Ethics Daily seems to like his new book, though.
  4. Bull Moose thinks we are Israel. We are not Israel. Not least because none of our territory is in disputed status (okay, with the possible exception of a few yahoos in West Texas or northern Idaho, no one questions that American territory is, in fact, American). Bull Moose should read neo-con Aaron Friedberg's In the Shadow of the Garrison State, which explains in great detail exactly how we are not Israel because we did not become a garrison state (loosely defined by me as a country in which security concerns trump all other rights and privileges) after World War 2, despite all Truman's efforts to the contrary. The great Texan John Lewis Gaddis assigned my seminar to read this book two weeks after 9/11, the same week that I had to go to the Hartford airport for the first time since the tragedy, and that whole experience got me thinking something I am still convinced of today: that security is important, but that respect for the law and individual rights are almost always equally and often more important. Spying on citizens without a warrant is bad! We are not Israel!
  5. They want to save the disco-riffic East German Parliament building? Huh. I will make a plug for scenic Berlin, though. I visited three years ago, the week that the Iraq war started, and was surprised at what a wonderful, safe, exciting city Berlin is. They have fabulous museums and lots of history (Nazis and Communists and Reunification, oh, my!). Plus it's cheap for Europe.