Don't Ask Me!

The Real Obama analyzes Reagan Revolution

2008-01-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Clinton Machine spun me yesterday, right round, right round...until I saw what Obama did say in an interview in which he ANALYZES and interprets why Reagan and the Republican Party APPEARED to contest the conventional welfare state wisdom during the 80s and 90s, I believed the Bill and Hillary spin machine that Obama had praised Ronald Reagan.

The Real Obama Quote

Now if you look at the video above, you'll see that Obama is saying that Reagan was able to crystallize and ride public discontent, turnin the country away from (I'm adding this -- Keynesian economic policies) welfare state bureaucracy driven social solutions to the appearance of a dynamic entrepreneurialism that Bill Clinton did not fundamentally disagree with. Obama is saying, but in perhaps too subtle a way that a moment for a real change of direction in government has arrived where a political RETURN to progressive economic policies can be made, and that Hillary won't be able to make good on it. Obama says that he isn't invested in the political struggles of the 60s and that he can galvanize cross-party consensus in much the same way Reagan did.

It's hard to encapsulate in a 30 second sound bite -- but the Clintons are acting as if they are "encapsulating" Obama's position -- they're playing dirty and if that's that they think they need to do, we need to denounce it. If my experience in academia holds, those post 68 Boomers, the Clintons will not cede their false vanguardist position to younger, less radical peers who are less ideologically impatient and dishonest.

my plug for Obama

2008-01-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

I've come back to blogging to make the following plug for Obama -- I do this as a private citizen, exercising my right to freedom of political expression. Many have expressed ambivalence about his lack of substance and experience.

I concede some part of truth to those objections. That said, I will say that Obama represents the first possibility of a radical remaking of the Democratic Party. He talks about the powerful ethics of national unity and the positive potential of solidarity rather than the language of "pride" and ethnic difference. He represents the real possibility of breaking the back of the identity politics of cosmetic diversity in Democratic politics, which has alienated the white working class, as well as young people, and he has at least in rhetorical terms, taken on progressive national affirmation, and progressive political renewal.

I know the Devil is in the details and the Democratic Party is a juggernaut. Nothing is going to move it quickly. But with Edwards populist economics and Obama's rejection of divisive and false "pride" -- we may see some hope for political mobilization.

And yes, I am no fan of Hillary's establishmentarian politics. I read that her campaign spent 2 million dollars polling Iowa, which barely boasts more than two million inhabitants...

break from blogging

2007-07-09T06:58:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of shutting down the blog...life and writing have gotten the upper hand...as well as a new office "Director the UCI Humanities Center": I don't want to compromise the voice here, but I also don't want my readers to mistake any statements I make here as emanating from that office.

Thank you to my readers! And feel free to email me and send me stuff you think will be of interest. I will do my best to reply and respond. I hope to finish the manuscript -- Modernity and its Discontents by December!

LOL theo

2007-06-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

2008

2007-06-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

belong 2 who?

2007-06-15T10:19:00.000-07:00

pwnerer!

2007-06-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a little crazy

2007-06-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

around here and I am working end of the quarter grading as well as trying to get Seymour Hersh to campus (money, money, money, money) and negotiating with a proposal for a Human Rights and Media initiative here at UCI. As of July 1, I will be assuming the directorship of the Humanities Center. I push to finish my book on Academic populism. So blogging will be sparser than ever --

I take my battles to the corridors. Enjoy the weather! On the Orange Coast, it has been unusually cool! We have also decided that feminism is code for sexy. I was back at the MOCA show, "Wack!" at the Temporary Contemporary in downtown LA when I found myself alone with two very focused men in a room filled with images of Throbbing Gristle. They were definitely writing dissertations on the stuff -- if you know what I mean...

OC to hell and back

2007-05-28T19:38:00.000-07:00

intolerable tolerance

2007-05-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

Tolerance is the new slogan under which we are supposed to fight against intolerance, but these two terms are strangely enough not antonyms. In tolerance is the other idea of an alway already intolerable other that we have to learn to "tolerate" not accept or even more dangerously -- question. Tolerance only asks that we aspire to a greater level of repression, whereas I think the problems of racism and intolerance, or even of deep mutual antagonisms can only be addressed with a stronger statement: No tolerance for Intolerance!

There is a campus campaign for tolerance here and while I would like to endorse tolerance, I feel as if it doesn't even come close to getting at the heart of the matter -- which is dealing with the different passions of the student body and their different beliefs as a sphere of political contradiction and conflict that should a public airing!

world subway graphic

2007-05-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

Fake is the New Real.. Check it out. It's very cool, gives you a comparative picture of public transport and density, from Seoul to Moscow to LA...

a brighter tomorrow?

2007-05-11T16:12:00.000-07:00

A bright and happy Asian-American family is looking into the sunshine of a brighter tomorrow through organic consumerism… wow! Brought to you by Chank Diesel.

What would Deleuze Say? What would Jesus Do?

2007-05-09T14:39:00.000-07:00

Just returned to the office from a bruising fight with myself to control my impulse to fight with a famous feminist Deleuzian on campus giving a series of lectures.

She kept saying, "Well I don't know what Deleuze would say if he were here, but..." followed by explanations of why Deleuzian philosophy offers the best account of singularity, the event, the unpredictable...and surpasses Marxism and feminism..and structuralism because they are basically predictive processes...but listening to this mode of philosophizing makes me wonder...Uh...is that like asking, "What would Jesus do?" when we encounter moral dilemmas -- when we encounter philosophical problems, we say, "What would Deleuze say?"

It seems that Deleuze would say that he is for radical openness, being for art and against a plan. The most political question is, "What can a body do?" Hate on liberalism. Laugh at it actually...That's what a body can do...

What can Jesus' body do? That is the question!

Maybe the power of Deleuzian philosophy is that it produces such negative responses in me! Instead of a quiet afternoon in the office, I encounter this allegedly immanent mode of philosophizing whose pure positivity and refusal of critique leave me holding the ugly bag of negation, channeling the crotchety spirit of some old fashioned dialectician with bad knees, an assemblage of populist tics, laughable reservations, untimely, angry, debased, vengeful, confused, outraged by its contempt for "translatability" or even communicability, its arcana, its smug sense of overcoming critique AND science, its "pretend" erudition. Every single encounter with Deleuzians has evoked some of these emotions in me...passions actually, a passionate desire to fight what I have to admit, I feel is a kind of charlatanism and therein, I must in some way concede lies its power, which for me is entirely negative.

This Deleuzian relied on Deleuze's erudition to found his authority. He has allegedy read everything.

Toy Choice

2007-05-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend was complaining about the "toy university" where we teach. I don't take such a harsh view since I used to teach at Cog in the Machine University, and frankly, I prefer the more playful one.

I began to invent "My Toy Life" "My Toy Husband" "My Toy House" as a way of dealing with this diminutive sense of our world, and realized that in the end, under late capitalism, our choices are consumer choices -- Mac or PC, Verizon or Sprint, Nike or Adidas?

let me make a few totally presumptuous connections

2007-05-04T21:17:00.000-07:00

between the blond mother with the three year old I saw at an Irvine Community Park today and the fact that the USS Nimitz is steaming into the Persian Gulf. Republican politicians count on the indifference and ignorance of their constituents and their supporters. Witness Orange County, Gucci sunglass wearing, Paris Hilton-channeling citizen mother who let her toddler feed cheerios to a pair of ducks. She and her toddler referred to the one with the brilliant green head as the mommy duck, and to the duller, brown one as the daddy duck. "Give some to the daddy!" she said. The seven year old friend of my six year old told her politely, "That's not the daddy duck. The daddy duck is the one with the greenish blue head, but the mommy duck has a bluish feather on her wing." She looked at him and said in with a flatliner's inflection, "Really?" Her perfectly made up lips and the red riibbons on her high heeled espadrilles matched, and her hair was so beautifuly highlighted that she must have just figured that the more colorful duck had to be the female duck, decked out in the best ducky finery to attract a well-endowed, and financially fit male.

I said in my best National Geographic commentator voice, "Yes, isn't that funny? The male ducks have to win over the female ducks with the colorful plumage." Ha. Ha. Ha.

She confirmed my worst fears about this region of California that we live in -- and I hate to be anti-fashion or anything like that, but the more expensive the outfit, the dumber the wearer...Actually, she looked as if she were trying to get a role on the next Real Housewives of the OC...a show that demonstrates to me everyday that the worst fears of Allan Bloom have come to pass, but not because of the PC Left...It's worked out very well for a political class that hopes to dupe us all into indifference...an unpopular war seems to be in the throes of begetting a disastrous continuation. Animal Planet has replaced stodgy documentaries with TEN MOST EXTREME PREDATORS so you can NOT even learn any natural history from television. You end up with an E! channel count down...TEN BEST CELEBRITY BODIES....

green elitism

2007-04-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

Lewis Black ranted about it on Comedy Central...celebrities are tryiing to convince us that they can save the world by preaching about their virtuous green lifestyles...Consumerism as the way to liberation, consumerism as the path to political solidarity. Of course they tell us that while we're buying our bamboo shirts, we should be writing to our congressmen, but why is shopping green so much more fun than political analysis -- restriction of Hummers on the streets and more stringent exhaust regulations would go a lot further than my changing my incandscent bulbs to fluorescent (which I am doing anyway)....but I hate being told by Richard Gere and supermodels that they take army showers! It's the new holiness, the new virtue! And check out Treehugger where you can get many ideas for eco-conscious shopping sprees.

I admire the Tillmans and Jessica Lynch

2007-04-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen the testimony, read about it here here .

student loan scandal continued...

2007-04-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

Andrew Cuomo on the student loan industry: "``Our investigation has revealed an unholy alliance between lenders and many trusted institutions of higher education. Part of the reason the practices we have uncovered have been able to flourish nationwide over the past several years is because the U.S. Department of Education has been asleep at the switch." From The New York Times `Our investigation has revealed an unholy alliance between lenders and many trusted institutions of higher education. Part of the reason the practices we have uncovered have been able to flourish nationwide over the past several years is because the U.S. Department of Education has been asleep at the switch.''

If you have followed the Sallie Mae scandal, you'll see that the Federal Government was Sallie Mae's biggest backer in the early nineties. Sallie Mae earned $1.95 billion dollars in interest on student loans it made last year.

Here is the very lame proposed "code of conduct" that Congress hopes to pass, "The code would ban lenders from paying colleges in exchange for being designated a preferred lender. It also would ban lenders from paying for trips for financial aid officers and other college officials. Lenders also would not be allowed to pay college employees to serve on advisory boards."

How about not making higher education costs a source of speculative income for carpetbaggers profiting from middle class students yearnings for higher learning?

feeling for my crazy Asian American brother...

2007-04-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

don't I know the immigrant trials and tribulations story? The feelings of total humiliation? I remember being rejected by Yale Comp LIt's Ph.D. program...couldn't speak about it for years. Just felt a kind of seething rage and resentment...I was accepted by CUNY's Ph.D. program in French. I couldn't apply to grad school again, the risk of rejection was too great.

I still have lingering feelings of --"I wasn't good enough for that Ph.D. program" that are exacerbated by colleagues' asking "Why did you go to CUNY after Yale?"

Umm...because I only applied to two graduate schools and I couldn't risk another rejection -- psychologically I was too fragile...up until that point, I had done everything right...I was walking a tightrope of symbolic legimitization...Perhaps Cho shot everyone up at Virginia Tech because it wasn't Princeton, where his sister had gone to college...THAT'S how much it means for immigrant parents to have that Ivy League monikor behind which to hide...

yellow person's burden

2007-04-20T13:38:00.000-07:00

the minority person who explodes onto the national media scene is always a metonymic stand-in for all other members of her race/ethnicity. This works for the scholarship student as well as the hardened criminal. We never get to be ordinary, and we never get to be singular. This is bad, but is it as bad as some fates? No.

Those of you familiar with this blog know that I am no fan of identity politics demands for "better representation" or for an end to stereotypes. I have always tried to keep my focus on economic justice and to argue that culturalist arguments are distractions from more fundamental relationships of exploitation, but with the Virginia Tech shootings, I am once again reminded of how Asian Americans in the media do affect the everyday lives of Asian Americans.

Ethnicity of Virginia Tech

2007-04-19T14:08:00.000-07:00

shooter makes us all deal with "diversity" in a new way...as you can read in the LA Times . Korean-American leaders in LA felt the need to denounce the shootings in Virginia and speak of reconciliation, which just goes to show that Asian-Americans, including Korean-Americans still feel as if we live on the knife's edge of backlash. No white people or more specifically, no white suburbanites apologized for the Columbine shootings. Crazy white people ido not make news like crazy minorities do because there are always so many beautiful, tawdry, heroic white people to distract us. But with so few of my racial confreres in the media spotlight (admittedly there are more today than when I grew up) one psychotic kid can come to stand in for all of us. I myself fell into this kind of thinking when I began speculating about Asian-Americans and mental health...Then I realized, this is ridiculous, think of Oklahoma City -- was there a lot of hand-wringing on the part of rural Americans about undermedicated conspiracy theory addled paranoiacs and their fantasies of destroying the US government?

The bigger question is why some one who had been declared mentally ill was able to buy guns legally. Thirty-two people would still be alive today if Cho had not had access to firearms. That is what is crazy about this whole thing -- American gun laws....

Ban Student Loans....

2007-04-16T13:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a more detailed analysis of the economics of student loan wherein according to Ted Rall, "an essential public service like education" has been transformed into "a profit-based loan-shark business creates too much temptation to poorly paid, easily corrupted college administrators and corporate greed monsters alike."

I agree whole heartedly with Rall's point, EXCEPT the point about college administrators being "poorly paid." As far as I can tell, a college administrator makes 30% - 50% more than a college professor. Under the present regime, one cannot be GREEDY enough. As far as I can tell, the more well paid you are, the greedier you become!

As Rall points out, retired Al Lord, CEO of scandal ridden, price gouging Sallie Mae paid himself $225 million over the last FIVE years: there is no cut off point after which one says, I've had enough of the cookie. I'll kick back and give back. Meanwhile, middle class kids pay over $800.00 to financeCarpetbagging IS the name of the game. Let's not cry alligator tears for USC, Columbia and Johns Hopkins financial aid officers, although the level of their profiteering is dwarfed by the greed of those at the top. Everyone can use 100K.

Rall suggests and the ONLY presidential candidate who seems to realize this is John Edwards -- that Banks and private credit agencies should be banned from making student loans to begin with!

Oh, by the way, Student Loan Xpress's corporate parent is CIT group, a former subsidiary of Tyco -- you remember Tyco?

And by the way, to all those out there who have praised Buffet and Gates for their philanthropy, the rich could not give back ENOUGH money as far as I am concerned. They're hoping to put a fig leaf on economic injustice that has taken on gargantuan proportionsm, and the do-gooders are still showing us that ONLY capital can talk and walk...

greed and the $60 billion student loan industry

2007-04-15T19:59:00.000-07:00

Everyone has assumed that the student loan industry is a necessary feature of higher education funding, but this simply isn't so. And it simply isn't necessary that private companies as has been recently reported have managed to lobby and bully their way into dominance over federally funded programs. The scandal might focus our outrage on a few specific cases, but it is the general notion of contemporary indentured servitude that middle class students must enter into in order to get their mortarboards that should truly give us pause.

A debt-ridden student body is an anxious student body: student radicalism of the late 60s was largely due to a certain amount of middle class economic confidence. This of course had a sent of contradictory consequences for the student movement, but as the French figured out after 68 that large public universities should be riot proofed by prison like archicteture, the US found out that economic pressure on the middle class was just as effective at preventing students from asking the harder questions.

You've got to be greedier and greedier just to keep up with the Bushes these days that it is very hard to think of activism as a viable extra-curricular activity, especially when you are owing classy outfits like Student Loan Xpress five figures when you get that BA.

student loan scandal

2007-04-11T21:25:00.000-07:00

The student loan scandal is so instructive as a parable for our the ethos of Bush II America. The sheer balls of the student loan structure in this country is amazing.

Reagan and Republicans after him (and to a lesser degree Clinton) rip apart Federal support for higher education by gradually reducing the Pell Grant and federal student aid system even as college tuition grows at astronomical rates, but the federal government in order to promote "personal responsibility" encourages students to take out loans to pay for ballooning education bills by paying the interest on these loans while said student is in college. Strangely enough the interest the government is paying to student loan granting agencies such as Citibank is not questioned at all...

And new agencies spring up like this very shady enterprise Student Loan Xpress specializing in student loans, from which Financial Aid officers at Columbia, USC, and Johns Hopkins profited in stock holdings and consultation fees even as they are advising the students at their home institutions to take out loans with -- you guessed it, Student Loan Express. New credit instruments I believe is what it is called and these instruments allow undergraduates to fall into near six figure debt in order to finance a college education that will guarantee them a toehold in the upper middle classes where in order to survive they can ride the razor edge of ethical behavior in order to pay for the lifestyles advertised in the New York Times Magazine.

Higher education has become a profitable racket. Burdening twenty two year olds with crushing debt has turned out to be a very lucrative prospect for University Administrators.

This whole story should shake us to the core, but I am afraid that the ones who should be shaking with rage, our students are not tuning in...

pyjamas in public

2007-04-06T13:43:00.000-07:00

People, students in the OC and at UCI like to wear pyjamas and pyjama like clothing in public. To be dressed in a suit when confronting an ugg boot shod, flannel pyjama, or juicy couture wearing Other is be be apprehended as "corporate slave" -- whereas the one in sleepwear enjoys the freedom of dreaming in public, or lolling about in an endless bed.

It's as if rich ladies who shop in clingy velour workout suits and students wearing pjyama bottoms are slothful rebels against a regime of spatial differentiation.

How square to wear day clothes in the day!

How could such people know the pleasures of illicit love, the pleasure of being undressed in the dark when they are at all times ready for bed or the next casual hookup?