History 1L The History of Play and Leisure, Spring 2008

So this is the first time I’ve tried this course. I have no idea if the goon squad that runs around looking for allegedly lightweight courses is going to pick up on this one by its title, but at least that won’t be as hilarious a misfire when they picked up on my upper-level course on the theory and practice of world history. I hope it goes without saying that anyone actually looking at the readings will realize this is a substantial course, but if you need further persuasion, just think about the economic and cultural centrality of leisure and games to contemporary global life and then consider the ubiquity of leisure and games in human history. How could you argue against the rigorous historical study of these topics?

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In this course, students will examine both the long-running global history and philosophy of play, games and leisure in human societies and the distinctive modern, post-industrial construction of leisure time and activities. Play is a serious question: there are deep questions about why humans do it and how it has changed over time, and powerful debates about the economic, cultural and social centrality of games and leisure time to modern societies. Do not take this course if you are looking for an easy or casual course: the reading load is often heavy and there are significant writing requirements. Regular attendance and active participation is also required. In some weeks, the seminar will be divided into several groups reading different assignments: in those weeks, you will be responsible for summarizing and describing your reading assignments to the other groups.

History 1L is also a first-year seminar, and we will be working on skills development in writing, persuasive argument, reading and discussion throughout the semester.

Deep Histories

Thursday January 24th
Gordon Burghart, The Genesis of Animal Play, pp.3-20, pp. 45-110
Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, pp. 1-51

Exercise: Skimming for argument, note-taking for discussion.

Thursday January 31st
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, all
Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, pp. 37-70

Exercise: Argument formation.

Thursday February 7th
David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, selection
R.C. Bell, Board and Table Games From Many Civilizations, selection
Alison Futrell, A Sourcebook on the Roman Games, pp. 84-119
Maria Teresa Uriarte, “Unity in Duality: The Practice and Symbols of the Mesoamerican Ballgame”, in E. Michael Whittington, The Sport of Life and Death: The Mesoamerican Ballgame
Tomoko Sakomura, “Japanese Games of Memory, Matching and Identification”, in Asian Games

Exercise: Themes across reading, synthesis of information. Verbal summaries of readings.

Leisure, Time and the Making of the Modern World

Thursday February 14th
Compton Reeves, Pleasures and Pastimes in Medieval England, Chapter Four and Five
Alessandro Arcangeli, Recreation in the Renaissance, selection
Chris Humphrey, The Politics of Carnival: Festive Misrule in Medieval England, selection
Reading TBA on contemplative practices/otium in monastic life
Nancy Struna, People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure and Labor in Early Anglo-America, Chapter Three and Four
Movie: “Tom Jones”

Exercise: Outlining and flow in writing.

Thursday February 21st
John Plumb, The Commercialisation of Leisure in 18th Century Britain, selection
Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, selection
Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era, selection
Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, selection
Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville, selection
Catherine Yeh, Shanghai Love, selection
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time, selection

1st paper due.

Childhood and Play
Thursday February 28th
Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History
Mariam Formank-Brunell, “The Politics of Dollhood in Nineteenth-Century America”, in Henry Jenkins, ed., The Children’s Culture Reader
Selections from Tom Sawyer, The Secret Garden, Little House in the Big Woods

Movie: “Peter Pan”

Revision of 1st paper due.

Sports
Thursday March 6th
CLR James, Beyond a Boundary, Chapter 4
David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round, Chapter 8
Laura Fair, “Football and Leisure in Early Colonial Zanzibar”, in Zeleza and Veney, eds., Leisure in Urban Africa
Emmanuel Akeyampong, “Bukom and the Social History of Boxing in Accra”
Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting, selection
H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights
Movie: “Langaan”

Exercise: Evaluating methodology.

SPRING BREAK

Play, Hobbies and Domestic Life

Vacations and Tourism
Thursday March 20th
Hofer and Jackson, The Games We Played
Steven Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, pp. 23-58
Ekegami, Bonds of Civility, selection
Ruth Lampland, Hobbies For Everyone [1931]
Austen Riggs, Play: Recreation in the Balanced Life [1935]

Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, selection
Pieter Judson, “Every German Visitor Has a Volkisch Obligation He Must Fulfill”

Exercise: Primary sources and historical evidence
Source analysis paper due.

Gambling, Drink and Drugs
Thursday March 27th
Thomas Malaby, Gambling Life: Dealing in Contingency in a Greek City, Chapters 2 and 3
Jackson Lears, Something For Nothing, Chapter 2
David Schwarz, Roll the Bones: A History of Gambling, Part 2, 5 and 6
Emmanuel Akeyampong, Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, selection
Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, Part 3
Zhang Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China, Chapters 5-8
Movie: “Rounders”

Exercise: Formulating research topics

Digital Games: Applying the History of Play

Thursday April 4th
The debate over digital games
Jesper Juul, Half-Real
Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, Rules of Play, selection
Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Chapter 7
Nick Monfort, Twisty Little Passages, Chapter 8

Exercise: Search and other research skills.
Research topics for final paper due.

Thursday April 10th
Experiencing and interpreting games
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games, selection
McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, selection
Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, selection
Stephen Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good For You, selection

Hands-on: Console games

Exercise: Sources and historiography
Source reaction paragraph due.

Thursday April 17th
Themes, Genres and the Development of Videogames
Leonard Herman, Phoenix, selection
David Kushner, Masters of Doom
JC Herz, Joystick Nation, selection

Hands-on: Doom, other computer games and emulations

Exercise: Abstract writing
Abstract for final paper due.

Thursday April 24th
Gamer Culture
TL Taylor, Play Between Worlds
Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-Played Games as Social Worlds
Various machinima

Hands-on: World of Warcraft, Second Life

Thursday May 1st
Iain Banks, The Player of Games
The debate over the future of leisure

Exercise: Discussion of drafts of final paper.

Final 8-12 pp. paper due by 5pm May 9th.

Posted in Academia | 16 Comments

“Fails to Consider”

I was doing a good bit of grading over the Thanksgiving break, and I was once again struck by a rhetorical habit in a lot of undergraduate papers, including some otherwise very strong, well-written ones. Namely, criticizing an author by saying that the author has “failed to consider” some important issue. Occasionally, this is a perfectly reasonable criticism, in which the student is observing that there is some concrete kind of information or knowledge on a particular topic which the text in question should evaluate, could evaluate, is already predisposed to evaluate, but for some reason does not. Sometimes there really are odd, notable absences, gaps, or lacunae.

Much of time, however, what the student really means is, “This text argues against the value of a particular kind of knowledge and I disagree”. I think students avoid saying so because this is a much bolder kind of claim. “Fails to consider” is a rhetorical device that resembles passive-voice constructions: it’s polite, it hedges some bets, and it doesn’t require the student to claim to know anything more than “there are other texts in this class which the text we read doesn’t consider”. I’d rather a student say, “I disagree with the author” than “he forgot to discuss an important issue” even if the student feels tentative about that disagreement. In fact, a well-reasoned description of an uneasy, tentative disagreement can be the basis for a great analytic essay. There are ways in which “failed to consider” is even more arrogant a judgement than “wrong”.

Posted in Academia | 9 Comments

History 88 The Social History of Consumption, Spring 2008

Here’s the current draft of a course I’ve been teaching here pretty much since I arrived. Spruced up here and there, but this syllabus tends to be one of the most architecturally stable of my courses. One thing I always look forward to with this class is the research paper at the end of the semester: each student has to pick a single commodity and write a historical study of it.

This class also has a hidden subtext: in some ways, it’s actually the class I teach with the strongest focus on methodology in the discipline of history: the readings run the gamut from rigorously quantitative economic history to off-the-wall cultural commentary.

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History 88 The Social History of Consumption
Spring 2008
Professor Burke
Swarthmore College

Monday January 21st
Introduction and overview

Transitions to Consumption

Wed. January 23th
Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods, pp. 3-132

Monday January 28th
Lisa Jardine, Wordly Goods, pp. 229-330, pp. 377-436

Wednesday January 30
Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up For Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective” and
Joyce Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought”
In Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods

Monday February 4th
Jan de Vries, “Purchasing Power and the World of Goods” and
Lorna Wetherill, “The Meaning of Consumer Behavior”
In Brewer and Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods

Wednesday February 6th
*T.H. Breen, “The Meaning of Things” and
*Simon Schama, “Perishable Commodities”
In Brewer and Porter eds., Consumption and the World of Goods

The Making of a Consumer Society

Monday February 11th
*Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle For Christmas, Chapter Four
First paper due

Wednesday February 13th
William Leach, Land of Desire, all

Monday February 18th
*Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed, selection

Wed February 20th
*Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving, Chapter 5 and 6

Monday February 25th
*Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, Chapter 2

Wednesday February 27th
*Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, Chapter 4, 5 and 7

Monday March 3rd
*Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit, Chapter 1 and Chapter 5

Begin consumer diaries

Wednesday March 5th
Lizabeth Cohen, Consumers’ Republic, all

SPRING BREAK

Globalization and the World of Goods

Monday March 17th
Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy
End consumer diaries

Wednesday March 19th
Rivoli, Travels of a T-Shirt

Monday March 24th
*Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Chapter 6
*Jean-Marc Philibert and Christine Jourdain, “Perishable Goods: Modes of Consumption in the Pacific Islands”, in Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption
*Mary Beth Mills, Thai Women in the Global Labor Force, Chapter 7

Wednesday March 26th
*Mara Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire, Chapter 5
*Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the United States, Chapter 4

Commodity History

Monday March 31st
Textiles
*Jane Schneider, “Rumpelstiltskin’s Bargain”, in Jane Schneider, ed., Cloth and Human Experience
*Misty Bastian, “Female Alhajis and Entrepreneurial Fashions”, in Hendrickson, ed., Clothing and Difference
*C.A. Bayly, “The Origins of Swadeshi (home industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700-1930”, in Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things

Wednesday April 2nd
Cosmetics
*Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar, Chapter 5 and 6
Consumer diaries paper due

Monday April 7th
Sugar
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power, Chapter 3

Wednesday April 9th
Coffee
*Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force of History, selection
*Brad Weiss, Sacred Trees, Bitter Harvest, Chapter 3
Topics for commodity history paper due

Monday April 15th
Sushi
Sasha Issenberg, The Sushi Economy

Wednesday April 17th
Barbie
Yona McDonough, The Barbie Chronicles
*Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, selection

Advertising

Monday April 21st
*Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion, selection
*Walter Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America, selection
*Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars, selection
“Mad Men”

Wednesday April 23rd
Taschen advertising collections
*Warren Dotz, Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertiser
*Miles Beller, Hey Skinny! Great Advertisements From the Golden Age of Comic Books

Monday April 28th
Things and Meaning

*Joshua Glenn, Taking Things Seriously, selection
John Freyer, All My Life For Sale, selection

Wednesday April 30th
The Debate Over Consumerism

*James Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation, selection
*Juliet Schor, The Overspent American, selection

Final commodity history research paper due May 9th.

Posted in Academia, Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities | 11 Comments

Buy Early, Buy Often

If ever a webcomic deserved stunning marketplace success through the mass purchase of a book edition, it’s this one. I have been annoying everyone at our house with frequent laughter. My daughter is also annoyed that she cannot look at it as the cover seems to promise child-friendly frolics inside.

Posted in Popular Culture | 6 Comments

BTW on Mass Effect

I really am looking forward to playing Mass Effect, especially now that the word on some other big releases this month is mixed. (However: Super Mario Galaxy? Exceptionally fun. One of the best multiplayer set-ups I’ve seen. More to come on that soon.)

However, during the theatrical showing of BSG: Razor, they showed a promo film that’s an interview with Seth Green, who does voiceover work for the game. He doesn’t exactly convey tremendous enthusiasm for the whole thing, but it gets especially fun near the end, where he all but says, “It’s a great thing for those of you who like sitting on your ass for hours with a videogame. Losers.” Memo to self: do not promote my media product via an interview with Seth Green.

Posted in Games and Gaming | 4 Comments

Battlestar Galactica Razor

Saw it last night with some other Swarthmore geeks (you know who you are).

It was good stuff. I guess it had better be, given how long it is until the fourth season begins. (The Sci-Fi Channel really doesn’t seem to know what to do with series, just how to get Mansquito 3 produced…)

Spoiler-protecting invisible text follows for all you normals who just wait for it to be shown on TV or who didn’t want to endure numerous ads for Mass Effect and Zune. (Actually, I was almost as interested in the Mass Effect ad as BSG, but that made me a freak even among the geeks.)

There were a few interesting bits about the Cylon religion here that I found fairly gratifying. Basically, we get a sense that Cylon monotheism may be the result of experimentation begun in the first Cylon-human war in which the Cylons were trying to understand and even become organic life. This process appears to have created a kind of apotheotic machine-human hybrid rather like the basestar-driving bathtub-dwelling hybrids seen in the last season. The “God” of the Cylons has ever since then dwelt in mystery apart from the main race of Cylons. This kind of worked, I thought.

On the other hand, the whole “this has happened before” theme cropped up again and it’s going to need very very specific payoff in the final season of the show to be meaningful. I keep returning to the proposition that either the humans of the colonies or the humans of “Earth” are going to turn out to have been the organic creation of a previous generation of intelligent machines (the Greek-named gods worshipped by the colonials) who then turned around and committed deicide against their creators as the best possible payoff. But if it just turns out to be a kind of banal claim about cylical character of violence, etcetera, that’s going to be seriously lame, like much of the second half of the third season was.

Posted in Popular Culture | Comments Off on Battlestar Galactica Razor

I Never

Via Matt Yglesias, a discussion about Paul Berman’s claims that he opposed the war in Iraq. (Rather similar to Michael Ledeen and Michael Ignatieff claiming the same thing.) I agree with the sneering at Berman’s claims of opposition, but there’s a very precise point to be made about them.

Down in the comments on the Yglesias post, there’s a more detailed series of quotes from Berman’s 2003-2004 writings about Iraq that makes it clear that he did in fact regard the Bush Administration as precisely the wrong set of people to be fighting the war. But it also makes clear that not only did he believe the war to be necessary, but that it was necessary even if the wrong people were fighting it for the wrong reasons.

This is the first bad mistake that Berman and others like him simply can’t seem to understand or admit to. A discretionary “liberal” war undertaken by the wrong leadership is a war you must not fight, it’s not just an unnecessary war but one that does worse damage to the desire to reproduce or spread liberty than no war at all. You simply can’t say, “I’m in favor of this war, but against the way these people are going about it”, because if you’re against how they’re going about it, you’re against this war. This wasn’t a disagreement about a specific plan of battle within an overall war effort, as if we were squabbling about the Gallipolli campaign. What was wrong, and Berman said as much in 2003-2004, was that a profoundly illiberal leadership was claiming to be fighting on behalf of liberalism. Since Berman knew that even then, all of his talk about necessary war at that time and ever since was in many ways an even worse folly than the people who identified with and supported the Administration through and through.

The second bad mistake is a deeper one, and I don’t know that I even expect Berman, Ignatieff, Ledeen or others like them to get it ever, namely, that liberalism isn’t achieved through military occupation in a discretionary war. It’s one thing to use military power defensively, protectively, or even to go after bases or resources of terrorists and insurgents. It’s another thing to think that those kinds of operations can create liberal societies. They can’t. Berman was clear that engaging terrorism was a mostly non-military process that involved connection, dialogue, and most of all the vigorous commitment to living in an open society and demonstrating its strengths to the world. He just doesn’t seem to see that all the promiscuous talk about invasion and occupation that accompanied that clarity cancels it out utterly.

Mostly I’m not wild about the expansiveness of Susan Faludi’s recent arguments about post-9/11 American society, but there really is a kind of dark masculinist underpinning to the folly of Berman and others on Iraq in specific. In his prewar writing, Berman was concerned with his perception that liberalism and secularism was weak, soft, and “cold”, unable to resist the combined power of religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism. Broadly speaking, I think there’s something to be said about the global crisis of the secular state since the 1970s. It’s not quite a god that failed, more like a weak parent who overpromised an ability to make everything better in the face of harsh realities. But that’s just it: adult children both resent and love a failed parent, and find it hard to see that parent laid out naked, its weaknesses exposed. They dream of what it would be like if only daddy or mommy was more masterful and commanding. So there’s an issue there, but the answer to the crisis of secular modernity isn’t to make it obdurate, powerful, strong through the use of military force. The fact that Berman and others thought so (and still do think so) is either an intellectual error of the first order – – or maybe just a more banal kind of male folly.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

FaceBOOK

Last spring, when I was at Google, I threw out a sort of off-the-cuff idea that what we really needed was a Facebook for books, a more intentional, extensive and non-profit-driven version of Amazon’s tools for connecting books through search records.

The more I think about it, the more I really like the idea specifically for scholarly books. The author of a mass-market book is generally more interested in sales (nothing wrong with that), but scholars are more interested in how their book circulates within particular canons, historiographies and so on. Existing bibliographic control systems link a scholarly book with other scholarly books in various ways, as do the bibliographies and citations within those books.

But once a book is published, it doesn’t contain any citational connections to books published after (or often even near-simultaneously) with similar or related works. My views on most existing systems of bibliographic control are known: I don’t think they do a good job of capturing the actual intellectual conversations involving a given book or article.

So seriously, why not nearly the exact interface design of Facebook, only instead of people, books? LibraryThing sort of could do this, but what you really want is for each book to be personified by a single controlling presence, to be “owned” by its author.

So, for example, I’d own the FaceBOOK page for Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. I would send out a “friend” invitation to Maureen O’Doughtery’s Consumption Intensified, published six years after Lifebuoy Men. You would have different kinds of “friends” tagged by the nature of their relation. I’d also send “friend” invitations to books on modern Zimbabwe, books on African material culture, histories of Unilever, histories of cosmetics or other body products. Maybe you’d have a category of “acquaintance” for books that are theoretically or generally related: general studies of globalization, “biographical” studies of commodities in general, comparative studies of the body and beauty in modern societies.

For this to be really useful, authors would have to be somewhat judicious in their use of book-friending, keeping in mind that it’s the book that’s friending, not the author. So I wouldn’t use Lifebuoy Men‘s page to friend any of the books by people I know who work on virtual worlds or digital games, much as I like those people.

Posted in Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 11 Comments

The Unrepresentable

A while back, my colleague Bob Rehak argued that the Harry Potter books appear over time to have been written with an increasing consciousness of their translation to digital special effects.

This is one of the big underlying differences between the way that the original Star Wars films and the Lord of the Rings films hit both geek and popular consciousness. The first Star Wars took the kinds of effects that we’d seen in films like Silent Running and repurposed them to an act of world creation. But I remember when I was a teenager in 1977 how my friends and I all agreed that you couldn’t do a story like Lord of the Rings with this effects technology, no matter how much money you had. We knew it would look cheesy, nothing like what we could see in our minds or even what we saw in the illustrative work of the Hildebrandts or others.

When Bakshi said it could only be done as a cartoon, we agreed. And then Bakshi went and did that goddamn horrible rotoscoping, not to mention making a hash out of the screeplay. I remember my pediatrician asking me in confusion what the hell was going on in that film, which he went to see what all the fuss about this Tolkien guy was.

This is why the Jackson Lord of the Rings was really the killer ap of digital special effects. It didn’t just do one amazing thing, like Terminator 2, it represented a narrative that most people had previously judged unrepresentable in the medium of live-action motion pictures. Lord of the Rings was the Brunelleschi architectural drawings of the new millennium.

So here’s the challenge: what’s still unrepresentable in speculative or fantastic fictions? I can think of a few isolated images or characters that I think are going to pose problems. For example, I think Aslan is going to get harder and harder to get right as the Narnia films go along, because Lewis insists that he becomes more and more ineffable, more and more variable in his presentation. He can’t just be a lion with Liam Neeson’s voice in some of the later books. Proginoskes in A Wind in the Door strikes me as being equally difficult to get right considering how strongly L’Engle insists on impressionistic, felt experiences of his presence and appearance.

I can think of speculative or fantastic fictions that would be hard to represent because of their narrative structure or the scale of the story. (Though the attraction of filmmakers to Phillip K. Dick’s work shows that you could overestimate this issue.) Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep would present a storytelling challenge that effects couldn’t simply surmount, for example.

Any suggestions of fictions that you think digital effects couldn’t surmount?

Posted in Popular Culture | 24 Comments

Future Special Constitutional Provisions, Dershowitz-Style

Can anyone cite me a totally verifiable instance of a ticking time-bomb scenario? Not Alan Dershowitz’ version of it, that requires that you’ve got a super-secret special Israeli source who assures you that it’s totally true but you know, can’t verify it because it’s secret.

Adam Ashforth wrote an interesting book on “official discourse” in South Africa that was primarily about the performative character of commissions of inquiry, but in an aside, he compared commissions of inquiry to torture. The point of both, he observed, is for states to theatrically demonstrate the power to coercively produce information, not the information itself, which in both cases is something that the state usually already knows or in a few cases, doesn’t really want to know that it knows. Dershowitz jaw-droppingly cites the Nazi torture of French Resistance fighters to get the names of other members of their cells as a good example of the effectiveness of torture, but even in that case, part of the point is that for the Nazis, any names were good enough, because they didn’t particularly care if they were the right names. The same is true under a lot of totalitarian regimes: if a person under torture names friends, colleagues, strangers as guilty, it doesn’t matter to the regime whether the charges are true or not. Just send them all to the gulag, because in some measure, everyone’s guilty of opposing the regime.

Whereas the ticking time-bomb scenario, when mentioned by its enthusiasts, depends very precisely for its justification on being absolutely right. Those who cite this hypothetical fiction to justify torture do so precisely because they claim it is an extraordinary case that justifies an extraordinary breach of ethics.

Dershowitz offers that there could be a special provision that allowed the President of the United States to issue a finding justifying a ticking time-bomb torture. I might even find that an interesting idea if two other things followed on it: that the finding would have to be made immediately public (not public later) and if there was no ticking time-bomb, the President would automatically be indicted for committing a crime and subsequently impeached. No matter how much reason he or she had to think that there was just cause for the order. Get it wrong, and you’re gone: that’s matching up the high ethical stakes at both ends.

It’s striking how much people in this Administration want to be personally, legally protected from the consequences of their actions. Shouldn’t people who are taking drastic measures that violate both laws and high principles, actions that they deem necessary even so, have to run the same risks of personal ruin that a soldier has to run when he’s deployed? Why should soldiers be exposed to maiming and death when officials won’t take comparable risks in pursuit of the same cause?

It also turns my stomach to see anyone, of any political faction, seeking special statutory provision for what is basically a fictional or hypothetical scenario. Again, this is the whole point of the Constitution: a prior constraint on the power of government, a firm specification of what it can do and cannot do. The moment you start tacking on a zillion highly specific, largely or wholly hypothetical instances in which the executive has nearly unlimited authority or no constraint, I guarantee you that the executive will find plenty of instances to use that authority. If we’re going to start doing this, let’s add special statutory provisions for what the President is empowered to do in case of attack by extraterrestrials, in the case that supervillains seize NORAD, or in the case that intelligent Nazi gorillas armed with ray guns swarm out of the sewers in major American cities. Also we should have a provision for the temporary transference of executive power to Chuck Norris or Bruce Willis if they are ever riding on a train with cartoonishly-exaggerated terrorists. Because it’s better if the President kicks their ass.

Posted in Politics | 15 Comments