2008 Woodie Awards
People sometimes complain about the lack of political activism in this country. And indeed, it does appear that large swaths of the population are apathetic or uninformed about political issues. But the problem is hardly that Americans lack the energy to feel passionate towards a topic. We have “special interest” groups for everything – and I mean everything. I’m on the mailing list for a “Left-Handers” club that sends out regular newsletters about all issues pertinent to today’s enlightened Southpaw.
I wonder how much energy could be redirected towards more socially tangible missions – political or not. Of course, everyone is entitled to leisure time and the pursuit of personal hobbies. But, what’s the opportunity cost here? With so many clubs catering to our most beloved hobbies and interests (wine clubs, motorcycle clubs, fan clubs, etc.), it’s no wonder that the (comparatively) dry legal and social matters are forced to take a back seat. As it stands, only a select few political issues seem to get people truly riled up, e.g. abortion.
An example of a subject that would not normally get people excited is campaign finance law. When the story broke earlier today that Tom DeLay was indicted in a campaign finance probe, I couldn’t help but wonder how many people would actually understand what the scandal was about. I certainly can’t pretend to comprehend campaign finance law and the regulations that concern corporate donations. It’s sad that for many of us, the only time such matters pique our interest is when a politician from a rival party gets himself in hot water. In effect, a sort of sensationalist slant is what drives us to stay focused on a story of this nature – rarely is it the sincere desire to understand the legal implications. The energy required for the latter often seems too daunting, especially when it could be used for activities we deem more engaging.
As with most weekends, I was away on another college campus competing at a parliamentary debate tournament. I’ll spare you the minutiae of the event, but suffice to say, debaters incorporate a lot of jargon into their vernacular. A simple word such as “hybrid” can take on an entirely new meaning in the context of a debate conversation (hybrid, n., a team that consists of two members from different schools).
But what I find really interesting are those buzzwords that people like to intersperse in their speeches when they are trying to emphasize a point, e.g. incentivize. I don’t know about you, but “incentivize” strikes me as a made-up sounding term. Spell-check does not even recognize the string of letters which more rightly appear to be a Frankensteinian creation, or “hybrid”, using a common noun and the overly productive suffix “–ize.”
The OED identifies the first appearance of “incentivize” in 1968 when it appeared in the Guardian (a virtual toddler in the grand linguistic scheme). Dictionary.com offers no synonyms for it but, strangely enough, includes a Dick Gephardt quotation to explain its meaning. So, I guess “incentivize” is a word and I can feel less guilty about using it, even if spell-check does not. However, for anyone eager to start using “disincentivize,” be forewarned – it’s not a word . . . yet. Still, people use it any way because it’s all too easy to morph an entity as malleable as language (notice what I did to “Frankenstein”).
So the next time George W. Bush utters a questionable word or phrase, think about our tendency to disobey imposed grammatical rules (what better example than the famous Churchill statement: “ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put”) and instead create new structures and semantic distinctions. But smirk knowingly if you must – after all, it takes a very special politician to have an entire genre of linguistic mistakes named after him (Bushisms).
Just to let everyone know, I will be following the Scopes trial in the next couple of weeks on intelligent design. Well, the actual trial is Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District and was brought forth after the school board in Dover, Pa required teachers to read a statement that says biology is only a theory and Intelligent Design an alternative explanation. The ramifications are important because schools in Kansas, Ohio, and other states have begun allowing teachers to critique Darwin’s theory, and there could be a domino effect whereby high schools and colleges can be infected with this stupidity.
Obviously to an educational institution like Princeton the debate is important. Anyone who believes in intelligent design is selectively ignorant and employs gigantic amounts of wishful thinking. There are mountains of evidence, they just choose not to look. It also limits their abilities and actions to think about the world around them–it’s so limiting it’d be like cutting your hands off.
But to America and its future, the debate is crucially important too. The US is already lagging in its educational standards compared to other industrialized countries. China and India are advancing. And there is still plenty of room to grow the gap.
As an introductory post, I’d like to report on my attendance at a show of the ffmup group at Terrace Club. It was quite a small audience–apparently no one else found the idea of a dry-ice player fascinating. We got there a bit late and found the laptop man at his station, blaring trancy, disjointed tracks of various ambient sounds laid atop one another. It was jarring, yet strangely relaxing (perhaps because I didn’t get much sleep). Then he introduced himself and his cohorts, one of which is (memorably) named Ms. Pancake. She was the dry-ice player; the last member of the group was a young Australian woman with her guzheng, or “ancient harp,” a Chinese import. They made some very bizarre ambient effects and sounds. Young Aussie spent most of the time creatively making use of her instrument, transcending the traditional plucking and picking. I was rather worried for my fellow made-in-China product as she clobbered the body of the zheng with pieces of metal. Meanwhile, Ms. Pancake had set up a portable range (!) and was heating a cymbal on it. She then gripped this heated instrument in potholdered hands and pressed the metal into the smoking block of dry ice, creating very peculiar chirps and squeaks in a range of pitches.
All in all, it was pretty fascinating–though very strange indeed. The trio seemed to try to purposefully lure us on with hints of melody and moments of something recognizable, but then reverted to the same chaos. A shame that more of us students didn’t show up; this was hardcore prog-rock for sure. Maybe this would have been a bit too extreme for most listeners, but getting curious about music and movements is just as important as getting curious about academics or “real-world” issues. Sadly, it appears that little curiosity is manifested here–except maybe for the season premiere of some new “reality show.”
This afternoon there was a Jurassic 5 concert at Lawnparties (which are free outdoor parties with live music at the eating clubs).
It’s nice to see rap whose lyrics I can actually listen to without feeling like a ten year old! (But who still lay down fat grooves) I’m aware that in that very praise lies damnation. You can’t stop but wonder whether a group has failed if it’s main audience is people like me! But Jurassic 5 didn’t sound too much like tame and lame “liberal humanist” rappers. A bonus for me - they managed to echo some of the sounds of old-school rap without sounding too reminiscent - it was pretty fresh.
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I was supposed to go. At the last minute, I decided not to, in large part because I predicted this would happen.
Great Triangle show today. (For those of you outside the university, the Triangle Club is Princeton musical comedy). It was exactly the same as last year (with a few additions from last year’s show), but I still enjoyed it and look forward to it in the future.
Ah, why am I blogging about this?
I’ve always thought that what blogs could do more of is explore the seemingly unexplorable - subjects too banal for formal discussion, too weighty and self-serious for brief talks.
I believe that the Triangle Club, as a Princeton institution whose form has been determined by students for over a century, both represents and helps codify the norms, on a certain level, of Princeton orthodoxy.
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After traveling around Scotland in August, I’ve discovered that I’m quite the nationalist. I would kind of like to see the Scots regain their independence. I’d also like Ireland to be reunified. Moreover, I’d like the Basques to have their own country. Finally, it’s about time we had another decent sized country in North America – Quebec should become its own nation. It’s not that I’m staunchly anti the current states (and state). I guess there’s just a part of me that deeply believes in the right to self determination – the right of a peoples to govern themselves as they see fit and be a sovereign entity if they so choose. People have told me “but Joanna, not every ethnic group can have its own nation.” I guess that’s true and I perfectly see the value of assimilation and the potential for tolerance that lies therein, but then I look at ethnic hodgepodges like Iraq and Yugoslavia. It’s clear that not everyone can follow the US melting pot example. It upsets me that people like the Kurds are expected to stay with the rest because they have resources (namely oil) that the others may not. No one should be coerced into staying in an unhappy union simply because of the material goods one party brings. Some Scottish nationalists think that this is the current situation since they have water and oil which England does not. Listening to people in Scotland made me realize that supporting nationalist groups should not be branded as an act of radical politics. I think it is among the highest forms of a belief in personal liberty. Wasn’t that what the revolutionary wars were all about – our right to be governed as we saw fit? People are wrong to talk about these issues on ethnic terms. Obviously, the groups seeking autonomy will often be of a particular ethnicity – that’s just the way people tend to associate. But the fundamental arguments and underlying reasons have little to do with ethnicity. For instance, if the Scots were to gain independence (just a hypothetical; I’m not saying there is widespread support), I don’t think they’d be turning away people from other ethnicities or expelling people who weren’t strictly speaking, Scottish.
As I announced earlier, this week we’ll be reviewing some new and not-so-new-but-still-timely books here at the PPN over the next week or two. I’d like to start off by briefly discussing Chris Mooney’s just-released chronicle of The Republican War on Science (book website). Mooney will be discussing the book in Princeton, New Jersey on September 19th, but if you don’t live near the University, you can catch him elsewhere.
As I’m sure most readers are aware, the Bush administration’s occupancy of the White House has been very good for the progressive publishing industry. It seems like there’s a new Republican-bashing book being published everyday.
While its title might lead you to believe that it falls within this genre, Mooney’s study is actually in a substantively different category. That’s because he’s not bemoaning the Administration’s politicization of science out of partisan distaste; instead, he’s out to expose how the integrity of the research process and, indeed, the very meaning of “science” itself, are being manhandled by this Administration in a way that appalls many Republicans as well as Democrats. Elephants, as well as donkeys need to read this book, because the right’s politicization of science adversely affects both groups.
Nor is this an indictment of the Republican Party as a whole: as Mooney makes clear, many moderate Republicans, including John McCain, have been fighting against the Administration’s distortions on some of its scientific distortions (in McCain’s case, on global warming). But they’re no match for the unholy alliances the Bush administration has made with unethical corporations and religious conservatives, two groups (albeit with different agendas) that share a fundamental belief that science is good only in so far as they can exploit and distort its meaning to lend an air of legitimacy to their agendas.
Here’s one example of what Mooney’s talking about. In one of the book’s most compelling chapters, Mooney discusses how Intelligent Design advocates (participants in what Mooney terms an “unmistakably a religious movement”) use the language and method of scientists to ‘prove’ theistic and Christian precepts. Mooney’s beef isn’t with the religious beliefs here; in fact, there’s nothing anti-religion in this book at all. His concern is with the twisting of science to justify something that falls outside its purview: “science, which studies only the natural world, can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural or God.”
If you spend a lot of your time in a vibrant intellectual community like a college campus, this book will make your blood boil. This is largely because in these settings, there’s a thorough recognition among students and faculty of all political allegiances that scientific research can help solve many of society’s problems if it is allowed to proceed without inappropriate meddling from politicians, profit-motivated companies, and ideological special-interest groups. The President’s deliberate abuse of science has placed the health and well-being of Americans in jeopardy. It’s sad that that may not have gotten many people to vote against him this past November, but it’s certainly a good reason for thoughtful people to be outraged now.
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