Another One Bites The Dust: On The Richard Blumenthal News And The Politics Of Mendacity

What is it with lawyers this week? It wasn't bad enough for your favorite Radical to be read out of the community of queer scholars yesterday for reductive identity politics by a hotshot New York law professor who does not hide her sexual orientation (which could be described as....?) There is worse news, at least for the people of Shoreline.

This morning, I scooped up the paper of record from my front porch to discover that Richard Blumenthal has lied by omission and commission about his military service during the Vietnam war. Is this a crime? No. But whether by commission, omission, or inference, coyness around stigmatizing issues -- such as evading military service to promote one's career -- is, as Tennessee Williams' Big Daddy would say, "mendacity!"

As we historians are aware, it is also sleazy. As in the even more puzzling case of Pulitzer Prize-winning Joseph Ellis, I don't think anyone has ever asked Richard Blumenthal if he served in Vietnam: he just offered it up.

Blumenthal has responded to the New York Times "that he had misspoken about his service during the Norwalk event and might have misspoken on other occasions. 'My intention has always been to be completely clear and accurate and straightforward, out of respect to the veterans who served in Vietnam,'" he said.

The yuck factor on this is pretty high, and the political costs may be too. While this event is dissimilar to the Spitzer call girl scandal (in that lying is only a crime under certain circumstances), it demonstrates a similar contempt for voters that will be hard to put aside on election day. Other than the fact that there seems to be a whole generation of ambitious white men who are now embarrassed by the strings they pulled to evade Vietnam (which is why I took particular delight in Dick Cheney's unbuttoned and nasty honesty when he snapped that he had "better things to do" than fight in Vietnam), it is stunningly arrogant that Blumenthal thought he could leave the misimpression that he was a combat veteran and not get caught eventually.

For those of you who don't keep up with Connecticut politics (and why should you? The intricacies of political corruption in the Nutmeg State are so difficult to follow that it is hard to remember which mayor was indicted for what), Blumenthal should have been a shoe-in for Christopher Dodd's open Senate seat. But this is a real blow to an already troubled campaign, because here we have another driven and competitive man who -- by lying about something essentially unimportant -- now appears to have contempt for all of us. The outcome of this may be that a state that perpetually returns a veto-proof Democratic majority to its own legislature, and where even many of hte Republicans are still liberal, may soon be represented in Washington by two conservatives: Joe Lieberman and Linda McMahon, the founder and CEO of the fantastically successful pseudo-sports league, World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc..

It is a puzzle what is wrong with Blumenthal. He has been a good attorney general for twenty years, and was believed to be unbeatable. But his campaign has been uninspired and clumsy: this is just the latest and most boneheaded manifestation of a candidate who doesn't seem to know what he is doing. And while The Daily Caller is claiming that this information about Blumenthal's false claims to comba service was fed to the Times by a McMahon campaign that is functioning like a well-oiled wrestler, my question is: why shouldn't the McMahon people have revealed this? Why turn the stigma back on them?

Ask the Radical: Blogging and The Untenured Academic

Leaving the country often has the happy effect that people stop sending email to me almost entirely. Why sabbatical doesn't accomplish this I do not know, particularly given the vivid bounce-back I composed this time around. Only the chair of my department removed my from the distribution list in September, but I am pleased/dismayed to see that now everyone else has too. Perhaps while I was still state side some secret hope was cherished by many colleagues that I would, in fact, come to advertised meetings of various kinds? If so, I am happy to say that they have not taking to dashing their brains on the flagstones in despair that their coy invitations have gone unanswered.

Since arriving in Cape Town, South Africa, the most sustained correspondence I have had to date is with a group of very capable people who are taking care of my affairs (dog and house) while I am away. We have been in correspondence about the circumstances of a mysterious "alarm event," as ADT Security calls it which, as it turns out, was probably caused by my efforts to draft-proof the front door. But that is all.

Anyway, the lack of email allows me to catch up on messages I have failed to respond to all fall, either because they were too complicated, or because I was ambivalent about them in some way, or because I didn't know what to say. For example, the following questions were asked by a graduate student who heard me and several other bloggers do a panel several months ago. Since there is no point responding to the actual person (as the date of the assignment s/he wanted the information for is long past) I will answer these questions publicly:

1. What are the challenges non-tenured professors face when deciding to keep a personal blog?

Not using the blog to: a) spend most of your time venting about the oppressive condition of being you; b) publish humorous pieces that are just another way to express your boundless rage at those who offend you; c) say witty things about your students that portray them to a national audience at their most foolish and naive; d) waste so much time blogging, reading blogs, commenting on blogs and checking your Site Meter that you don't write anything else; and e) blog constantly about your cats (even though they are very cute and do twee things to distract you from working.)

2. What were your main concerns before you exposed your identity on your blog?

Unfortunately, I had no concerns. This is why I made a some critical errors (see 1a, 1b,and 1c above) that required varying levels of apology to others. I probably would have done d) and e) as well, except that I write about eight hours a day when left to my own devices, I no longer participate in memes, and I have no cats.

3. Do you think that blogs should be considered, in any respect, when a professor has yet to attain tenure?

Since the discipline in which I hold tenure (history) has barely dealt with electronic publishing at all as part of the promotion process, and also has a mixed record on how it regards pre-tenure scholarship published to a trade audience, I would hope that we would not start having a conversation about blogs that was not preceded by one that addressed these other critical issues. But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. Would I hold a blog against someone? Sure! If I was certain that a person had been caught in a huge bloggy lie -- plagiarism, seducing people on line by pretending to be someone else, and masquerading as a variety of different, malicious sock puppets on their own and other peoples' blogs are three examples that come to mind -- it would cause me to wonder about that person's general integrity and scrutinize other aspects of the tenure case a bit more carefully for similar flaws. It has been my unhappy experience that people who lie don't just do it in one context, and they tend to keep doing it. I stumbled onto the website of someone whose first book was plagiarized in the manuscript stage (although when this was pointed out, innocence was claimed and the problems were at least partly rectified.) Many years later, the web page was full of flamers about said person's personal history that were entirely irrelevant to scholarship but that fabricated a far more dashing past than the individual actually had. Honesty in personal relations strikes me as equally, if not more, important than scholarly integrity, since in most of our daily work we count on people to be honest in all their relationships.

When The Radical Hits The Road: Dispatches From The People's Republic Of Berkeley

Every time I fly to the left coast and feel this disoriented I try to remember that getting from Shoreline to San Francisco back in 1848 took between six and eight months, depending on whether one went overland or took the water route. Of course I feel disoriented: I deserve to feel disoriented, since it is actually absurd to travel that far as fast as I did.

Where am I? Why am I here? Oh.

Well, I'm in Berkeley, where I have never been before, although I have visited San Francisco about four times, and every time I do I phone Mrs. Radical and say, "We've got to move here." Actually, she made the same phone call to me a few months back. And while the part of Berkeley I am in (at least so far) doesn't seem as spiffy as the parts of San Francisco I have been in, the short walk from the hostel where I am staying to Telegraph Avenue was a reminder that there are some places in the world that have not been homogenized and upgraded for the wealthy. I walked by People's Park, which is still decorated with a home made sign, and where they have not fenced in the grass to keep people from hurting it by sitting down and reading a book. There seem to be a fair number of homeless people living there as well, something that is no longer allowed in Tompkins Square Park, a similarly radical and communal space on the Lower East Side of New York during the 1960s and 1970s.

The other thing they have on Telegraph Avenue is culture. I searched "Berkeley" at Indiebound before I left, and this place has nineteen independent bookstores. Nineteen. There are twenty-eight in New York (but that is counting all the Museum bookstores), and there is exactly one in Shoreline, home of a world-class university -- pardon me, two, if you count the used book store operated by the Bryn Mawr College alumni association. And having only walked five blocks of Telegraph, already I have found two record stores. They sell actual vinyl, as well as CD's. I have also located three head shops, which have in the window an impressive collection of bongs, a variety of products to clean the bong, and so on. I took a look around and I do not think finding something to smoke in the bong would really put a person out either.

Oh, yeah. And if there was any doubt in my mind that I wasn't in Kansas anymore Toto, after eating a great Mexican dinner for peanuts at Mario's La Fiesta, I walked into Moe's Books and William Vollman was giving a reading from his new book Imperial.

Everything smells of patchouli. Decades of patchouli.

Anyway, back to business. I am here to do some research for the next three days, and then go to another history camp (a different history camp than the one I attended last summer.) So more about that later. But let me just say: if you are reading this, and you are a friend of mine, and you ever hear that I am considering buying a ticket on Southwest Airlines, please remind me that on the five hour flight from Big Regional Airport to Las Vegas, the chief of the flight attendants performed an ongoing stand-up comedy routine. I missed much of it, thanks to the Bose noise canceling headphones that I had buyer's remorse about three weeks ago but now am thanking the Goddess and Dr. Amar G. Bose for. But the half hour at the beginning of the flight and the half hour at the end of the flight were agonizing, perhaps more so because the man next to me was working on his computer, and had his left elbow jammed in my side; and the (very large) man behind me had his enormous, bare foot up on my other armrest.

What is it about men and space?

Oh I know, my conservative critics will say that I want socialized this and socialized that, but that I have no taste for the volk. Well, I have to admit that my occasional distaste for The People does give me pause: the jolly camp counselor routine is not my bag, nor is the dirty foot in my face thing something I would endure again without delivering a carefully prepared speech to the offender. But I'll tell you one thing: Southwest knows how to get people where they are going, and on time too. In fact, they might want to consider hiring Zenith grad Herb Kelleher to run national health care, because every time he tinkers with his business model it works better. For example, I still find it disconcerting not to have an assigned seat, and I have always hated standing in those lines. On the other hand, you have to queue for every airline. And because the lines to board Southwest planes are no longer free-form (everyone has an assigned place in line, which means seating is first-come, first-serve and people settle where it is easiest once the best seats are full) people become naturally more orderly and rational in how they board the plane. I have never seen planes loaded as efficiently as the two I was on today. It literally took about twenty minutes from the time they started to load to the moment the plane pushed off from the gate, and because they still allow you to check one bag free, there wasn't the added hazard on each end of worrying about whether someone was going to drop a suitcase on your head. Furthermore, although other airlines allow you to pick a seat (aisle, please) it is simply the illusion of choice, unless you are in business class or first class, since more often than not your seat changes on the day of the flight and you end up sandwiched between two babies. So having an assigned seat is actually faux privilege; and certainly not a privilege worth fighting for if Southwest can get me in a seat, any seat, more efficiently and get me to my destination on time.

So that assigned seat is kind of analogous, if you think about it, to the increasingly fragile privilege having private health insurance. Maybe you get what you need, but because other people are being treated in the emergency room, your local hospital goes bankrupt. Or you pay through the nose to make sure you are protected from catastrophe, but then they deny coverage for this and that, and you just pay, and thank your lucky stars that you didn't need an experimental brain transplant or something that would be really expensive and force you to live under a bridge.

I think some folks down on Telegraph Avenue may have already had uninsured brain transplants: I'm going to inquire into that tomorrow when I mosey down there for breakfast, but it sure looks like it.

And then off to the archives. Wish me luck.