““I can build a motorcycle, I can fly a model airplane, I can throw somebody out of a bar, I can wrestle a pig and I can program a computer…”

Most professional associations of academic disciplines rather markedly avoid Vegas as a venue. Despite what gets said by some sociologists in the IHE article, that can’t be about cost. Las Vegas is consistently one of the cheapest airfares in the country from almost any location within the United States. It has a huge price range of accommodation, particularly if you’re willing to stay somewhere a bit away from the Strip. There are way more beds at affordable prices in Vegas than in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, the perennial favorites of most of the big disciplinary associations. In the current recession, which has had an especially sharp effect on Vegas, I would think that most professional associations could negotiate deeper discounts than in any other major American city with a large range of hotels and services. If you really wanted to do graduate students and adjunct faculty who may need to attend a professional meeting to be interviewed a favor, you’d put the meeting in Las Vegas every single year. I’d even bet that at least some hotels or conference centers in Vegas gouge less on providing projection services or wireless connections to presenters. It would be nice to attend a major professional meeting where presenters aren’t left to scrounge for their own presentation technology, as has happened at some of the meetings I go to, because “it’s too expensive for the association to deal with”.

So take cost off the table. What’s the problem with Vegas? Some of the sociologists interviewed by IHE complain that Vegas is more complicit in the exploitation of women, the reproduction of capitalism, or the exploitation of low-wage workers than other possible venues. It’s odd, you know. I’ve attended big professional meetings in San Francisco, New York and Chicago where the main hotel venue is right around the corner from one of several red-light districts or businesses without hearing that this makes that venue unacceptable. I’ve been to New Orleans for meetings, both pre- and post-Katrina, in hotels right on the edge of the French Quarter, where solicitations to come inside sex-related venues are found in plenitude, drunken young men harass women, and gambling is right nearby. Philadelphia will soon have yet more gambling near its downtown. If you’re so upset by capitalist excess that you don’t want to go to your professional meetings, I assume you always complain when the meeting is in New York.

I’m not saying that you have to like Vegas as a destination. I have weird, conflicted feelings about it as a place, like many people do. I straightforwardly like some things about it (the restaurant scene is great, I like poker, and there’s some beautiful places to hike nearby.) I personally dislike the timeless, adrift feeling of most of its internal architecture, which is totally intentional. But that’s the problem with this whole story: that it should be a non-story. Meaning, that it’s fine to say, “Look, I find this is a creepy place, that’s just me, I have more fun or prefer or enjoy another venue,” in which you admit that at least one of the reasons why you attend a professional meeting is because you enjoy the venue. And in which you admit you are drawn to some aesthetics and not to others, that you find some places pleasurable and not others. I can completely sympathize. I didn’t attend one professional association meeting once because it was in Gary Indiana. Not because I object to Gary for political reasons, or believe there is something uniquely critique-worthy about it. Because I didn’t want to go there. That’s all. Nothing grand, nothing I’d make a fuss about, no sentiment that I’d care to soapbox about.

For some reason, this really reminds me of a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Describing his father’s commitment to being “Conscious Man”, he writes “To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”

I don’t think the academics who go beyond personally disliking Vegas as a venue to argue that there’s something structurally or institutionally wrong with being there are Conscious People in quite this sense. It’s more that they think performing Conscious Personhood is a necessary affect of their professional identity, like a psychoanalyst’s couch or a physician’s lab coat. Vegas is like TV: it presents a surplus of meanings that can’t be accepted or enjoyed as such, that allow no escape into some safe meeting ground between bourgeois academia and the Authentic Masses. It’s all small talk, it pre-empts profundity.

Which, honestly, might be a good reason why more academic conferences ought to be there.

“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this — we know what you are doing, you canâ€t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the presidency of the Security Council this month.

Ali Bongo Ondimba, you say? Son of the recently deceased Omar Bongo, one of the most fabulously corrupt heads of state on a continent famous for fabulously corrupt heads of state? The Ali Bongo Ondimba who is following in his father’s illustrious footsteps in more ways than one?

That quote from Bongo is to cynicism what a black hole is to an ordinary sun: it punches a hole straight through the fabric of ordinary cynicism into a new realm of absurdism.

There are days where I think John Bolton may have had a point about the United Nations. As an institution, its operations often don’t stand markedly apart from the character of the state regimes which compose its membership, even when its rhetorical commitments might suggest otherwise.

So last week, during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, there was this statement, quoted in the New York Times:

“Of course you want to set up a system where an institution dreads the day it happens because management gets whacked, shareholders get whacked and the board gets whacked,” said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. “But you don’t want to create a system that raises great uncertainty and changes what institutions, risk management executives and lawyers are used to.”

We got to the brink of a global financial meltdown that was demonstrably a result of the system that institutions, risk management executives and lawyers were “used to”. We’re still clinging to the edge of the abyss, in fact. But here we have the people whose practices got us all into that mess talking to the people who went ahead and allowed it to happen, and the resulting consensus seems to be a big thumb’s up to go ahead and do it again. So yeah, I have a sick, uneasy feeling that fifty years or a hundred years hence, that quote is going to be a great example of willful blindness to the icebergs dead ahead.

This despite the fact that in this weekend’s profiles of the candidates, Nutter claimed that “The Lockhorns” was one of his two favorite comic strips (Doonesbury the other). Readers of the Comics Curmudgeon would doubtless be properly horrified at this choice.

I’m always fascinated by how candidates use these kinds of questions about favorite books, movies and so on to market themselves to particular demographics. I assume Nutter doesn’t actually like “The Lockhorns”, for example, but probably some kind of research shows that some slice of the voting population does, so he strategically mentions it. (Higher odds that he actually likes Doonesbury, but that could also just as easily be a way to signal to white liberals that he’s their guy.)

The other candidates largely made equally strategic choices. One of the key stories in this campaign has been the jostling for the African-American vote, which has produced some pretty nasty jabs from time to time, largely suggestions by Chaka Fattah and Dwight Evans that Nutter is somehow inadequately black. The current mayor, John Street, who has a long-time adversarial relationship with Nutter, has supported that attack. So Fattah and Evans largely used their favorites lists to try and connect with African-American voters. (Fattah mixes it up a bit with Robert Ludlum and Grey’s Anatomy as favorites.)

However, occasionally some real weirdness enters into the picture when a candidate has to list favorites, often because he or she isn’t thinking politically about the question. Say, when Mitt Romney said Battlefield Earth was one of his favorite books. Sometimes this kind of weirdness is pretty revealing about the candidate.

I think in the mayoral race, one of the things that made my eyebrows go up was Fattah’s choice for favorite quotation. First, he quoted himself. Second, here’s the quote: “Life-changing opportunities change and transform lives”.

Listing your own words under “quotations to live by” suggests you have an ego problem. It might be understandable if you were a really gifted wit or stunning orator. I can kind of see Martin Luther King saying, “Well, I kind of liked that bit about ‘I have a dream’, you know?” or Winston Churchill asking his aides, “Can I list that thing about how in the morning I will be sober but that lady will still be ugly? I thought that was pretty clever.” But, “Life-changing opportunities change and transform lives”? That’s like the director of the IRS wanting to list a paragraph from the 1040 as his favorite quotation.

It makes me think that Fattah’s a pretty undemanding boss to his speechwriters. Some more quotes they could probably add to his speeches: “When the sun is out, it is often quite sunny.” “Refrigerators generally keep food frigid”. “People praying at church makes churches a place for prayer.”

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School, 1981.

“Critical theories are particularly sensitive to the kind of philosophic error embodied in positivism. It is perfectly possible, the members of the Frankfurt School will claim, for persons with woefully mistaken epistemological views to produce, test, and use first-order theories in natural science, but this is not the case with critical theories. There is a close connection between having the right epistemology and ability to formulate, test and apply first-order theories which successsfully produce enlightenment and emancipation. For this reason positivism is no particular obstacle to the development of natural science, but is a serious threat to the main vehicles of human emancipation, critical theories. One basic goal of the Frankfurt School is the criticism of positivsm and the rehabilitation of ‘reflection’ as a category of valid knowledge.” p. 2.

Re-reading Data Trash briefly after pulling it down for cataloging, and finding myself profoundly annoyed all over again. You want a book that demonstrates the excesses of theory (while sometimes offering seductively cool-sounding quasi-literary flourishes that basically mean nothing), this is a good example.

“Advertisements are sunshine reports for reclining flesh. The body electronic finds its mirrored double in their panoramic, but frenzied, scans of the crash body as it moves from flesh to virtuality. Not scenes of a future yet to unfold, but of a semiurgical, virtual past that the electronic body has already experienced. Certainly not a machinery of solicitation for manipulable masses, but a bio-apparatus of dissuasion for virtualized flesh. A ‘strange attractor,’ advertising is a massive defensive armature created by the mediascape to win back virtualized flesh to the logistics of desire. However, the bio-net of advertising must fail because the body electronic has already vectored along the vapor trail of virtual reality, leaving behind only a brilliant, because ghostly, halo-effect marking its disappearance from earthly space.” p. 36

Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier
“The notion that African boundaries were drawn in a haphazard manner and arbitrarily enforced is deeply embedded in perceptions of the colonial past and is often construed as the underlying cause for the troubled state of the continent today. It is distinctive in being shared by laymen and by informed commentators alike. It is, however, a commonplace that at once says too much and too little–too much because it underestimates the extent to which European boundary-makers were guided by indigenous precedents, and too little because it obscures the reality that the practical significance of colonial boundaries varied over time.”