The Hippolytic

Well, I feel obligated to post something on the painfully neglected Hippo Blog. Signs of the new school year are foaming up from the cracks of my inbox and subconscious, which reminds me that we will have to churn out yet another mind-blowingly good issue of the Hippolytic. Stand back. It's going to rock.

And since this is the first post in about six months, I'll do a quick and dirty Hippo News Update.

1. Spring semester 2005: Hippos 3 and 4 hit the newstands. In March (?) we hosted a block-busting screening of Steven Greenstreet's film This Divided State. (Check out the video mini-doc about the event, which features the Editor In Chief looking foolish.). In April we host a poorly attended but intelectually rigorous debate against the Yale College Republicans. We win decisively in the sense that Al Jiwa admitted publicly that that much of the Bush administration's record is indefensible. The Hippo turns one-year-old. We say farewell to TC, Casey, and other senior Hippolytes.

2. Summer 2005: the Hippo crew represents in droves at the Campus Progress (www.campusprogress.org) conference in Washington. David Corn gives us props for being sexy. Ishaan flies a desk at The Nation. The Hippo crew retreats to the four corners of the Earth to ponder the deep questions of Politics, and prepares for another blistering semester at Yale, and another Year of Hippo Domination.

After the Election. The Hippolytic on the rise. Sarah's NYTimes Watch.

On the Hippolytic.
Our second issue came out. It's beautiful. In other recent news, Sam conducted an amazing interview with Howard Zinn, and the Hippolytic received a funding grant from CAP.



On the New York Times.

I have vowed to read the New York Times, the front section especially, from cover to cover, every day from now on.

Some highlights so far:
On the day after Kerry conceded, NYT op-ed page mentioned twice Hilary in 2008. It also twice connected conservatism in America with the word "jihad."

Today, Kristof and Brooks both rip it out. Kristof advocates a Democratic move towards the center a la Blair's New Labor. Didn't we already have that in Clinton's 1990s Democratic Party? Brooks explains that the values-vote is a myth. I'd never want to bother arguing over competing statistics from varying think tanks, but is right to locate the source of our defeat in a long term failure at consolidating power on the left.

"Mobilizing the base would mean nominating Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008 and losing yet again. (Mrs. Clinton has actually undertaken just the kind of makeover that I'm talking about: in the Senate, she's been cooperative, mellow and moderate, winning over upstate New Yorkers. She could do the same in the heartland ... if she had 50 years.)


I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation. But it's not. It involves compromising on principles. Bill Clinton won his credibility in the heartland partly by going home to Little Rock during the 1992 campaign to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled convict named Ricky Ray Rector."--Kristof


"The reality is that this was a broad victory for the president. Bush did better this year than he did in 2000 in 45 out of the 50 states. He did better in New York, Connecticut and, amazingly, Massachusetts. That's hardly the Bible Belt. Bush, on the other hand, did not gain significantly in the 11 states with gay marriage referendums.


What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition"--David Brooks

2004ward

The First Hour
After spending seven hours in Concord, I know it as green, manicured lawns, a shiny gold dome marking the legislature's headquarters, a room in the basement of the NEA, and thick lentil soup that supposedly comes from a coffee shop. In the morning, Emily and I walk through Concord, past the shiny stone of the capitol buildings and past a cluster of flower beds that jut upwards in tribute to New Hampshire's war heroes, and reach 4 Park Street. Draped like a welcome banner above the doorway, a single word, chiseled into the stone--PATRIOT--heralds us into the summer of 2004.
In the New Hampshire Citizens Alliance office, we hover in the front room, until someone (Bill?) scoops us up, introduces us around, and shows us the office we'll be sharing with Don (and the other 2004ward kids). Bill tells us Sam, our only contact so far, is in an interview, and before we even meet her, we tag along to the NEA basement for "WorldView" training.

We set up tables and chairs, milking every inch of table, setting up every chair. "Last time, we had 40 people," Aaron explains. "This time we're expecting more." I guess that Aaron is the youngest NHCA person--after business school, he worked in accounting for 2 years, before throwing his heart into the Dean campaign and having it stepped on. He's worked with NHCA ever since Dean tanked, for three months, but the other organizers, Caroline, Claire, are just stepping into NHCA as well, five weeks, three months ago.

"So would you say that you're progressive?" Aaron asks me. I guess I'm progressive. Am I progressive? "Just wait til you're in a room full of progressives. It's an amazing experience...it's just that everyone is so intelligent."

I wedge myself into a corner, and in come the progressives, slowly but surely. I meet Alexa, the trainer from the Grassroots Policy Project, a short blond Million Mom March woman, who's throwing a Tupperware party on Friday, John from the Alliance of Retired Americans, Aaron's parents...Everyone fills out name tags, and under each name is an assocation, NAMI, Planned Parenthood, Clean Water, NH Children's Alliance. Most of these people, I'm told, are state legislators. New Hampshire's legislature, a body of 400 representativees, is the third largest legislative body in the English-speaking world, after the British House of Commons and the US Congress. Most of the legislators are also retired: they couldn't otherwise afford the time (9 months out of a year) or the salary ($100 for the entire gig). They grab bagels and small cartons of soup (lentil goes the fastest) and settle in.

Progressive WorldView Training

Diego, one of the trainers, starts off by quoting Kevin Phillips. A critic of the Bush administration, Phillips worked for Nixon and fit together the pieces of today's right-wing powerhouse. He said power is "the ability to tell people what the problem is, who's responsible, and what to do about it."

Simply, the ability to construct reality for other people. Power allows you to sift the world through a strainer that you designed. Only certain grains falls through--the ones you decide people should know. The right-wing can answer these questions of power with a narrative of values, freedoms, ideals that stretch across their specific interests. Pro-lifers can side with the NRA, because they can see what they have in common. Apparently, progressive quibble across issues.

I understand the complaint about the issues-based structure of the left. The Democratic party is accused of the same sin--they talk about specific issues, but they have no underlying themes.

We learn about the insidiousness of the right-wing worldview and how it has enough influence now that it drives the way that we, even in a closed communities of progressives, talk about our own passions and beliefs and issues. We look at their szujet, the plot into which they can plug every story: a triangle of Extreme Individualism, Anti-Government Solutions, and Market Domination. We write our own narrative around our own values--Justice, Community, Democracy and Freedom. And we practice framing issues into that story, instead of the one that we're handed, the conservative agenda that we want to fight.

I'm skeptical about the terms of the narrative we're creating. Like any good Lit major, I'm worried that it's not meta enough. Justice, community, democracy, those are just key terms that are up for redefinition, uprooted seaweed caught in the push and push of the tide. I don't think anyone in that room would want to coopt Extreme Individualism or Market Domination, and there must be some progressive meta-narrative that matches those polarized, yet vague terms. What do we have that they don't want?

I can forgive the GPP people for not pushing their narrative far enough, though. I love what their saying. When, at 10 a.m. I looked up at the word "patriot" emblazoned on my building, my gut wrenched. Patriot has become a dirty word to me, because in mainstream dialogue, I disagree with everything it stands for--and I feel guilty about that, the same way I feel guilty for disdaining anyone who flies an American flag on their house. Today, I'm thrilled about America and democracy and the potential that I'm not so out of touch with America. I want to call my dad and explain to him that when he reads the newspaper, notes all the same infringements by the government on what he believes is right, and wonders why no one else sees what he does, he's unnecessarily isolated. People do see the same things as he does, he's just not connected to that community. And if this is more left than the majority of America, the mainstream discourse is certainly more right than the majority of America.

501(c)(3)

When I tell my mother and my friend Chaitanya about "WorldView" training, they laugh, because I had told them that NHCA is necessarily non-partisan, based on its registration with IRS as a 501(c)(3) organization. After today, I realize that non-partisan does not mean apolitical. I'd rather work on these issues than work for Kerry. Yes, "JohnKerryIsADoucheBagButImVotingForHimAnyway"(.com), but, beyond that, this is more important. When we were doing training in New Haven, Jared said to me, "Imagine if we had 100% voter participation." If Bush wins the election, I will sob, I will be enraged, and if Kerry wins, I will be relieved. I don't want to campaign for Kerry, though. Already this seems more important--how people participate in the election, how people feel about our country. {I don't know why people object to jargon, I love jargon}--Electing Kerry is throwing corn into the mouths of hungry people, registering voters is teaching them how to farm. This is...sustainable democracy.

U.S. soldiers being shipped home.

Yes, yes, this drivel seems even funnier a year later. And, yes, it is rather pointless to harp on these two, or any of Yale's proto-Daniel Pipes, but still, the hubris involved in writing this rubbish, is, well, kinda impressive. -k

Postwar Delusion at Yale
by Eliana Johnson and Jamie Kirchick
FrontPage Magazine
April 11, 2003
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=7227

On the evening of the historic day that Baghdad fell, Yale held a forum of professorial invective against the statesmanship that brought it about. Without skipping a beat, Yale's anti-war professors, who yesterday claimed to oppose war in the interests of the Iraqi people, have now moved on to expressing lunatic conspiracy theories. Wednesday, we attended a "teach-in" sponsored by the Yale Coalition for Peace, the Muslim Students Association, and the Students for Justice in Palestine, among other groups. The panel of speakers included professors Ben Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Ellen Lust-Okar of political science, Dmitri Gutas of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Glenda Gilmore, the C. Van Woodward Professor of History and University Chaplain, Rev. Frederick Streets.

While Kiernan led off the discussion with predictable condemnations of our "unelected president," it was Gutas and Gilmore who stole the show. Although the two stopped just short of decrying the deposition of Saddam Hussein, they couldn't help themselves from promulgating vicious conspiracy theories aimed at their intellectual opponents. Rather than engage in reasoned debate about the merits of a war in Iraq, Gutas launched a (now trite and tired) stink bomb, backed by the likes of luminaries like Congressman James Moran and Pat Buchanan, at the cabal of Jewish conspirators he blames for the war. And although the focus of the panel was purportedly the war in Iraq, Professor Gilmore disregarded the topic, choosing to speak instead about herself and her victimization at the hands of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Gutas advanced the anti-neocon cant, maintaining that the true goal of the war is an Israeli takeover of the Middle East. The American victory in Iraq, following Gutas' logic, will lead to Israel's "expansion over the local population." But it's not the Bush administration that is controlling United States policy towards Iraq, according to Gutas. It's a cabal of neoconservative, fiercely pro-Israel ideologues. Gutas named Bill Kristol, Paul Wofowitz, Richard Perle, and any other Jew he could think of as the initiators of the war in Iraq. The ideology of "these people," according to Gutas, is solely responsible for U.S. policy. Jews have hijacked the Bush administration and are gearing foreign policy towards Israeli (rather than U.S.) interests.

For Gutas to say that the actions of President Bush and his Cabinet, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, are controlled by the Jewish community is an outrage. Not one of those individuals is Jewish; nor is British Prime Minister Tony Blair; nor is Prime Minister Aznar of Spain. To accuse these leaders of taking orders from a minute portion of the population –"these people," Jews - who are divided on the issue like all Americans, is to employ an ancient anti-Semitic technique which harkens back to the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Not one of the speakers on the panel thought his comments were worth questioning, and it was especially disheartening to see University Chaplain Rev. Jerry Streets watch in silence.

Gutas' indictment of neoconservatives did not empty his arsenal of vituperative rage. He also challenged the veracity of the Bush administration's desire to democratize Iraq. He maintained that the United States actually seeks "the maintenance of despotic regimes." Call us naïve, but is it not Gutas, Gilmore, and the rest of the anti-war left who seek the maintenance of despotic regimes? And is it not the Bush administration, and specifically the neoconservatives, who seek to depose despots of Saddam Hussein's variety?

Professor Glenda Gilmore, in the smug, self-righteous fashion that characterizes a large component of the anti-war movement, found it difficult to discuss anything but herself. Gilmore's comments were devoted entirely to decrying the supposed international conspiracy launched by right-wingers like Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Pipes, intended to "shut you up and to shut me up." Gilmore reached her startling conclusions following the scathing reception her controversial October 11 column in the Yale Daily News received. Gilmore seemed dumbfounded that her statements would elicit such a harsh response. One of the more inflammatory sentences read, "Bush's National Security Strategy makes the United States an imperial power in the most sinister sense of the term, and Congress' resolution will finally and unabashedly give George W. Bush the job he seems so sure he deserves: emperor."

In one breath, she listed the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Lynne Cheney, as elements of a "pre-planned" plot to squash her political speech. The right-wing campaign, according to Gilmore, is "targeted at anti-war professors" and aims to silence her and anyone else who raises a peep of protest about Bush or the war. She protested Daniel Pipes' labeling of her as "Hating America," though not once in her tirade did she mention the last line of her column, "We have met the enemy, and it is us." It is certainly difficult to understand how Pipes could construe Gilmore's comment as anything but a symptom of a deep and abiding hatred of America.

Wrongfully assuming that the audience was filled with antiwar students, Gilmore found herself at a loss for words when her tenuous reasoning was accidentally exposed to critical questioning. It became clear that Gilmore was never in fact silenced. The opposite occurred; her views were exposed, disseminated, and legitimately criticized by those who disagreed with her. Coming from the insulated world of leftist academia, Gilmore assumed that criticism and denunciation of her vitriol was evidence of a conspiracy against her. Rather than present well-developed or coherent arguments against the war, she filled her allotted time attempting (successfully) to elicit pity from her audience. It was a spectacle of self-aggrandizement.

Perhaps more than anything else, Yale's anti-war "teach-in" shed light on the divide between the hawks and the doves that grows as American success in Iraq increases. While pro-war students have been vindicated by the liberation of Iraq and were rightfully ebullient on Wednesday, a common trope of the professors and their sycophantic followers in the student body was that a quick and easy military operation in Iraq should not be equated with a victory in the war. On one of the most momentous days for America since September 11, few positive comments about our military victory were heard from the faculty panel.

Indeed, the conspiracy theories espoused by Gutas and Gilmore are a symptom of the hateful bitterness that characterizes the campus left in the face of American success. As Wednesdays' panel demonstrated, vicious prevarication has become a substitute for honest argumentation. The jubilant celebrations in the streets of Baghdad, the crushing of Saddam's Stalinist regime, and the kisses from Iraqis on American soldiers' cheeks, undermine the words of Ivy League professors who purport to defend the interests of the people of Iraq from American military might. We thought liberals would rejoice at the sights we saw Wednesday in Baghdad. But when liberals become at best nonchalant and at worst conspiratorial at the scenes of an oppressed people rising up in joyous celebration due to their new found freedom, they are no longer liberals. They are nihilists.

Eliana Johnson and James Kirchick are freshmen at Yale University and members of Yale College Students for Democracy

So, I procrastinate tonight by sifting through the comic relief of the right-wing 'academy'. This is a year old, but still, quite hilarious. Have a laugh. -Kanna

Too Few Yalies Know Arabic? Don't Lose Sleep
by Martin Kramer
MartinKramer.org
May 9, 2003
http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/

Niall Ferguson, the historian who goes back and forth between New York University and Jesus College, Oxford, had an essay entitled "The Empire Slinks Back," in The New York Times Magazine the weekend before last. After describing himself as a "member of the neoimperialist gang," he questions whether Americans have the staying power to maintain a far-flung empire in places like Iraq. It's a good question, and I share his doubts. It's his solution that's dubious.

Ferguson writes that in the British empire, "colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated, frock-coated mandarins." He then asks:

How many members of Harvard's or Yale's class of 2003 are seriously considering a career in the postwar administration of Iraq? The number is unlikely to be very high. In 1998/99 there were 47,689 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilizations. There was just one, lone undergraduate senior majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies). If Samuel Huntington is right and we are witnessing a "clash of civilizations," America's brightest students show remarkably little interest in the civilization of the other side.
Actually, it's not remarkable at all. Britain's brightest students, even at the height of empire, didn't show much interest in other civilizations either. The Oxford historian D.W. Brogan wrote this in 1937: "The history of the Overseas Dominions has for many persons a very faint attraction....there may be full agreement that someone ought to know about them; but the normal attitude is that the someone is always someone else."

Those mandarins-to-be in Oxford didn't study the Bhagavad Gita or immerse themelves in Persian and Arabic poetry. They read Aristotle's Ethics and studied Greek and Latin history, philosophy, and literature ("the Greats"). These were the firm foundations of their own civilization, and this was the education that sustained them as they trudged through jungles and across deserts. Empire is about defending and disseminating your own civilization. If you aren't fully persuaded of its manifest superiority, you won't bear up under the rigors of governing hostile peoples in unfriendly places.

Forty years ago, the Oxford orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb (who also spent a few futile years trying to bring Harvard up to speed) complained of how the British government "dismissed any proficiency in Oriental Studies, or even the knowledge of an oriental language, as irrelevant to its interests and useless, or worse than useless, as a qualification for the recruitment of its officers." Worse than useless? Gibb alluded here to an attitude in the halls of power that rested on no little experience: persons too knowledgeable in their ways and languages might see things rather too readily from their point of view. And knowledge, turned into sympathy, could paralyze.

Since Ferguson chose Yale, here's an example from Yale of how cultural knowledge can be trotted out to rationalize inaction. If you were a student there over the past two years, you would have heard the following pearls of wisdom from Dimitri Gutas, chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and professor of Arabic. On bombing Osama and the Taliban during Ramadan: "Because there is this resentment there, the bombing during Ramadan will be seen as an additional insult. It will be interpreted as such by the ideologues and seen as such by the moderates, the ones that America should be trying to win over." On bombing Saddam and his minions in Baghdad, last month: "How would we feel now if Rome was being bombarded and was in imminent danger of being destroyed? Basically this is the kind of resonance that Baghdad has in the Islamic world. It is going to be a huge wound to the soul of over a billion people on this earth."

So as a member of the elect one percent of Yale students enrolled in a course on the Near East, you would have learned all the historical and religious excuses for not dropping guided munitions, even on the worst of the lot. Why is this better preparation for exercising power than, say, the baseball team?

It is because of professors like these that I'm skeptical about Ferguson's recommendation. He argues that the only way to pry Americans out of their stay-at-home insularity is to inculcate knowledge of places like the Middle East in the elite universities.
Where, then, is the new imperial elite to come from? Not, I hope, exclusively from the reserve army of unemployed generals with good Pentagon connections. The work needs to begin, and swiftly, to encourage American students at the country's leading universities to think more seriously about careers overseas—and by overseas I do not mean in London. Are there, for example, enough good scholarships to attract undergraduates and graduates to study Arabic?
This seems to me to be a particularly bad example of how to recruit an imperial elite. At the best universities, students who major in Middle Eastern studies do learn languages, but they also get indoctrinated by a professoriate that is dead-set against the exercise of American power against anyone for any reason. This sort of preparation is more likely to produce a human shield than a proconsul. Middle Eastern studies in America, as presently constituted, are worse than useless to the defense of American interests. The U.S. government's decision, after 9/11, to double the number of scholarships in Muslim languages will only mean that in the next crisis, there will be even more "experts" urging us to stay home, lest we enrage the "Arab street."

The United States doesn't need a lot of new grads to explain "why they hate us." What it needs are people who are so persuaded of its mission in the world that they are prepared to undergo some hardship and risk to advance it. I happen to think that calling that mission "empire" just gets in the way. But whatever the mission is called, its bearers have to be persuaded that it is the worthiest of causes. That demands cultural self-esteem and self-mastery—the true purpose of an elite education. It doesn't require a working knowledge of Arabic.
Note: Articles listed under "Middle East Studies in the News" provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique.

Hippolyte's Harem

That would be us. Me. You. We all. Indeedy. Hello all. Check out, at The Atlantic Monthly Online, on the bottom right hand side of the page, under "flashbacks" the article on Iraq from 1979.

ps If you know html, you can use it in your posts. Makes nicer links, can stick in images, play with format, etc.