What was the Nobel committee smoking?

If you know me and read this blog, then you know that I strongly support President Barack Obama, even though I don't always agree with him. I would love to see Barack Obama achieve many of the goals he has laid out: withdrawal (not just a draw down) of U.S. troops from Iraq, peace in Afghanistan, the closing of Guantanamo Bay and a U.S. that adheres to international human rights law, increased global dialogue as part of diplomacy, increased understanding between different religious communities, and the elimination of nuclear weapons. I believe that he could accomplish some of this in the next fifteen years as president and as a past-president, but I'm not sure that his mere presence on the world stage is enough to deserve the Nobel Prize. More than that, I think it ill-advised for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to any sitting president in charge of a major military power (U.S., China, Russia, Israel, etc.) unless they really have brought about total world peace in the last year. But the U.S. has the largest military of any country in the world and is fighting a war on two fronts while Guantanamo remains open. Barack Obama is not a private citizen as Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were when they won their Nobels. He is the leader of the United States of America, in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and that office should not be rewarded.

That said, Barack Obama gave a terrific and gracious speech this morning. He seems to recognize that he hasn't earned this honor yet, and hopefully the Nobel Peace Prize will spur him on in pursuit of peace, nuclear disarmament, and dialogue as he suggests.

Even though I don't think that he deserves it quite yet, the U.S. should reckon itself lucky to have a president that others find symbolic of the ideals of peace. After eight years of war-mongering leadership, that is a pretty fantastic change. Felicidades to us!

Melrose Place, 1992. What happened?

When I was in New York last month, I ran across several ads on bus stops and phone booths for the new Melrose Place. These ads had charming, subtle catch-phrases on them, like "Tuesday's the new hump day" or "Tuesdays are a bitch." I admit, I didn't recall the old Melrose Place to be a particularly subtle series, but I thought these ads were tacky even by Melrose Place standards.

Because I hadn't seen the original Melrose Place since I was a child, I decided to watch the first season for free on CBS.com. I was shocked to discover that the show didn't actually start off as the crazy prime time soap opera filled with wicked villains that existed in my memory. The characters were full of ordinary brokenness, sad childhoods, unfulfilled dreams, and lots of ABC after-school special plotlines. The show starts with the sexually harassing boss that gets sued in the end. The offending harasser was not even a resident at Melrose Place; it's one of the poor young residents who has to cope with being harassed by her boss and rescued by her roommate. When some of the characters do something bad, it's out of stupidity or irrationality or accidental cruelty, but deep down they are all good people capable of apologies and redemption. Even the doctor, Michael Mancini, whom I remember as viciously evil, is just a kind of goofy and insensitive husband in those first episodes, capable of being devoted and loving when required. And the sex, well, there was some sex early on, but it wasn't exactly steamy. And the show tried to tackle serious topics like discrimination against Matt because he's gay, tensions between African American and Anglo Angelenos in the wake of the riots (the show first aired in 1992), domestic abuse, student loan repayment in a weak job market, and twenty-somethings lacking health insurance. It was amazing to see that the characters were realistically struggling to make ends meet. Of course, virtually none of the original characters could live in the apartment complex now in a much more expensive Los Angeles (even in a recession). A taxi driver, a receptionist, an aerobics instructor, a waitress, a mechanic.

So how did Melrose Place go from the ABC after-school special for twenty-somethings to the prototype of soap opera? I don't know; I haven't watched that far into the show. I do wonder if it's when Heather Locklear shows up, but I also wonder about what caused the shift (besides the beautiful blonde vixen). Was it a move to get better ratings? Or did viewer tastes change leaving behind the 1980s and moving into the 1990s? Was it about Bill Clinton and the end of Reagan-Bush; did the change in presidents signal a change in era, a higher desire for steamy subplots and catharsis watching truly wicked villains? What about 90210? Was 90210 a family-friendly drama once upon a time too that became the master of melodrama only after a while?

I haven't seen the new show; I doubt it's premiered yet. But the ads suggest that it will start out with high melodrama, outrageous villains, and plenty of sex from day one. What was the shift in popular culture that accounts for the very different series starts?

Blaming the faculty yet again

So I'm not completely sure what it is about professors that makes other professionals despise them so much. Maybe it's their narcissistic smug superiority, a characteristic that makes me despise spending time with many academics. Whatever it is, it may lead to the end of what's good about university life, because it seems like activists from the "liberal media" through to conservative bloggers are determined to make college faculty members into hyper controlled high school teachers, with no time for research or the life of the mind. Only teach what we can measure empirically. We live in a society that has fallen so in love with corporate capitalism, even though it has royally screwed most of us at least as often as it has helped us, that we refuse to allow that there are things we do, like police, healthcare, and education that probably shouldn't be profit driven.

Today, the New York Times questioned why college tuition goes up even in a recession, and never goes down. This is certainly a question I would like an answer to, but I'm baffled as to why the New York Times focuses the first part of the article on how cutting university costs is so difficult because of those pain-in-the-ass faculty (instead of wealthy donors or over-paid bureaucrats, let's say). So, damn those faculty because they fight for a life of the mind, for intellectual engagement that may not have tangible measures, like profit, but has other measures of success. So damn those professors for keeping us from cutting the art budget, which is expensive and brings in no wealthy donor alums.

On the other hand, let's never question why most private colleges spend so much money on sports, when very few sports are a profit revenue except at large schools (most $50,000/year small private liberal arts college spend a lot of money on sports that they certainly "lose" money on; though personally I think it's good the students have the sports to play and engage them physically. I think it's often money well spent, but it's not "profitable."). And let's not question that schools need large bureaucracies and overpaid bureaucrats, or that parents expect their children to have access to top-of-the-line technology, and professors are all expected now to teach in powerpoint and online. No, instead, let's question the comparatively small part of college and university budgets that pay for faculty to take research leave, or let's focus on the fact that professors only teach a few classes a semester. Surely they can teach more classes.

Of course, most faculty, even those at liberal arts colleges where they only teach two or three classes a semester, work 60 hours per week between teaching, working with students, and service to the university; that doesn't include their research time, which they are expected to do to get tenure (which most people working in the academy can no longer aspire to because 50% of professors teaching teach as adjuncts or contract laborers, and not as these tenured faculty anyways), but which the New York Times seems to think is fun hobby work that doesn't really make faculty into better teachers (yeah, I would certainly prefer learning biology from a sixty-year-old professor who still teaches from the biology textbook he learned from forty years earlier in graduate school). And they certainly don't get paid what a less well-educated lawyer or corporate executive gets paid. And the only reason a college professor teaches (especially in the sciences) instead of doing something else more lucrative is to have time in the winter, the summer, and every seven years to do more research, to keep up with their field. So, let's just eliminate the incentive for great scholars to teach as well, and maybe that will fix the university system in this country that we all think needs so much repair. Wouldn't it be better if all those smug brainiacs went and worked in finance too so we could tank the world economy that much faster next time?

And one more thing, I like how the New York Times and others care about the high cost of quality private education now that it is pricing upper middle class students how and hitting their pocketbooks. Twenty years ago, even public education became beyond the reach of much of the lower middle class, but now we have to fix these super expensive private schools because well-to-do parents may have to send their kids to the local public college instead.

Universities do cost more than they should, and there are a million reasons for that, a million things that could and should be changed about that, but why are faculty the first targets of all criticism? They are not likable people, but they are more often than not, hardworking and caring teachers whose research life makes them better at teaching students. There is another danger about really good faculty as James Baldwin observed a long time ago; if they teach too well, then yes, people do tend to question the things about society that are unjust or don't work. So, maybe we should pay faculty less to teach more. Maybe then everyone in this country will get the quality of education that will truly make the U.S. the idiocracy it is already becoming. Well at least we won't have to talk about those pain-in-the-ass, life-of-the-mind faculty since they will no longer exist.

Dick Cheney is a War Criminal

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the former Vice President is a war criminal, and he should be brought to justice. This past Sunday, Dick Cheney took aim again at the Obama administration's investigation of CIA abuses. In his comments (see today's New York Times piece for a rundown), Cheney freely admitted that he knew about waterboarding as a general technique, and that he supported officers who used unauthorized techniques because they did so to protect the U.S. Cheney also claimed that the Obama administration's investigation was partisan motivated.

How about responsibility motivated? Normally I'm a fan of complexity, but there is no gray area on this issue, and if you think there is, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for you (and by hell, I mean I hope you accidentally go for a hike in a civil-war-torn part of Pakistan and get kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban). After millennia of countless human cruelties, the Geneva Conventions set up a framework for how we can treat prisoners of war (and I don't care how you class the people interrogated by the CIA, they deserve to be treated the way you would want to be treated if you were captured). Torture is wrong. It is wrong when done to U.S. citizens, and it is wrong when undertaken by U.S. citizens.

First, we have the fact that "enhanced interrogation techniques" achieve limited success, even in the rare "ticking-time-bomb scenario." The most successful long-term interrogation techniques involve making someone feel safe, not abused. I don't know about you, but I would say anything you wanted me to if you started waterboarding me, whether it was true or not. Second, Cheney, and that weaselly Dianne Feinstein (see Los Angeles Times piece today) both suggest that this investigation may harm the U.S.'s current fight against terror. As far as I can tell, things like Abu Ghraib increased hatred of the U.S. and thus made terrorist recruitment that much easier. Perhaps if we proved that we were a country that respected international law, that we're willing to hold our own citizens accountable (no matter how wealthy or powerful), then we would gain back some of the international respect lost in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. In both of those locations, people were detained and abused because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's right, U.S. interrogators didn't just torture terrorists, they also just tortured random people. Obviously Cheney defends these torture techniques (and they are torture, whatever words he uses) because Cheney never has to worry about an al-Qaeda operative capturing and torturing him, unlike our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who do have to fear these things. Ultimately, however, whether abusive interrogation techniques work is beyond the moral point. That Cheney is willing to justify torture policy proves that he is precisely the imperialist barbarian, the Great Satan, that al-Qaeda recruits against, and it proves just how much he believes himself to be above international law. The U.S. Constitution is based on the premise that, unlike medieval European monarchs, no person in the United States, including the president and vice president, should be above the law. We haven't always honored that ideal, but in a case as clear cut as this, we should.

Some have advocated for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will lay bare the tragic mistakes of the Bush administration. I would be happy for such a thing to work through what lower level interrogators did at the behest of and with the support of the Bush administration's Justice Department, but for someone like Cheney, we have no choice but to prosecute him for his crimes against a Constitution he swore to defend. And as punishment following such a case, Cheney should be delivered to the Hague and made to answer for his crimes before the International Criminal Court, because his crimes were not only against the citizens of the U.S., but against those citizens of the world who were detained and abused while they were, unlike Cheney, not guilty.

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On a side note, I am terrible at smiling in photographs, but I have always been amazed that in Dick Cheney's official White House photo, for which you know they took at least 200 shots, that this leer was the closest to a smile he could approximate. I mean seriously, the man is his own cartoon.

Saint Teddy vs. Saint Junípero. I vote for Teddy.

Yesterday I blogged my sorrow over the loss of Ted Kennedy. Reading Religion Dispatches today, I realized this may have a lot to do with my U.S. Catholic background. Frances Kissling describes Kennedy as a Catholic we could canonize because he really did take up the fights for social justice, even when they were unpopular. Kissling linked to another blog post in America: The National Catholic Weekly that pointed out how special Kennedy was to U.S. Catholics, many of whom have pictures of the Kennedy family hanging in their homes next to the cross. My birth name speaks to my mother's love for the Kennedy clan. So yes, my fondness for Ted Kennedy no doubt owes to my U.S. Catholic context.

Was Kennedy a saint? Yesterday, I would have answered, certainly not. Yet today's Los Angeles Times reminded me that all it takes to become a saint is a little bit of luck and a really good campaigner. The fight to get Junípero Serra, unintentional co-perpetrator of genocide (and just because it's unintentional doesn't make it okay), canonized lives on. The founder of the Alta California (the contemporary state of California) mission system in the late eighteenth century, Serra was one intense character. He regularly whipped himself with chains, beat himself with a stone and a crucifix, and burnt himself with flaming candles. Publicly. As a follow-up to sermons to get his point across; a congregant actually died while trying to imitate Serra during a Mass. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Serra had no problems with the use of corporal punishment against indigenous Californians in his missions. These same missions basically imprisoned thousands of native Californians, and Serra strove his whole life for their spiritual and cultural conversion, which maybe some people think is a good thing, but I quite disagree (and so does Native American scholar and theologian George Tinker in his book Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide). Serra is one official miracle shy of sainthood, and there is a Panamanian artist, Sheila E. Lichacz, who says she can prove the venerable Serra saved her life. People have fought for Serra's sainthood since shortly after his death when Francisco Palóu, his confessor, friend, and pupil, took up the cause for Serra's sainthood in his hagiographical biography published in 1787.

Palóu's work coupled with the fact that California became California are the only reasons that anyone discusses Serra's sainthood. If Serra had spent his whole life in the Sierra Gorda, we would not have this conversation; it's just so California can have a saint. Fr. John Vaughn continues the fight to this day, telling the Times that you just can't judge someone from the eighteenth century by our standards. His rebuttal being that the Founding Fathers had slaves. And they did, and no one is fighting for Thomas Jefferson or George Washington to be declared a "saint," which, as scholar James Sandos points out to the Times, is a category for someone whose holiness can transcend time. I think Jefferson's owning slaves would disqualify him for sainthood, but at least with him, as with Ted Kennedy, I would say that the long-term effects of his work have indeed made the world a better place. I'm not sure that is saintly "holiness." Yet, we should all be grateful that Jefferson and Kennedy lived the lives of public service they led. I just can't say the same thing about Serra. I don't think we're better off for his life of service, and the Catholic Church should be ashamed to canonize someone just because he was a religiously devout man (unless they want to send the message of rah rah, religious mania and genocide) who happened to found missions in a now wealthy and famous place. Of course his religious devotion was more in an al-Qaeda-style maniacal character (Mike Davis made that comparison first, not me); Serra hoped to die a martyr (his words) converting indigenous Americans, and his main goal in life was the spiritual and cultural conversion ("conquista," conquest, would be the actual word Serra used in his own writings) of indigenous peoples. Conquest is not now, nor should it ever be again, viewed as saintly behavior. Worse than that, to make Serra a saint is to insult anyone on this continent descended from indigenous Americans by spitting on the graves of their ancestors.

So, today, do I think the late Edward Kennedy is a saint? Given this information about Serra, I say, let's fight to canonize Ted Kennedy. Surely politically minded, Irish American Catholics deserve their own icon as much as California does. I'll get started on the hagiography. My mother would be the first to testify to the miracles he wrought in her life. Plus we probably already have an image somewhere, making him easy to pray to for aid. Sure, he killed one person in a car accident, but if Serra can be a candidate for sainthood in the face of a 90% drop in native Californian population in the eighteenth century, I think one person in a car accident is no big deal. So here's to Saint Teddy in 300 years!

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Image of Junípero Serra comes from the PBS page, New Perspectives on the West. Kennedy's image comes from Kissling's Religion Dispatches essay.

I'll miss Ted Kennedy

It is not often that I really care if a U.S. senator lives or dies (a cold statement I know, but really, I don't find them to be a terribly admirable crowd). For the last year, we have all known that Ted Kennedy only had a short time to live, that soon John Kerry would be the senior senator from Massachusetts. Still, living a day without Ted Kennedy in this world has been sadder than I was prepared for. I join the rest of the liberal wing of this country in mourning a great legislator. For all of my life (he had been a senator since well before I was born), Kennedy was a uniquely powerful senator, championing legislation that helped people, and fighting with backbone while other Democrats cowered in corners. I think he was an admirable senator despite some significant human shortcomings, especially in those years before I was born. Ted Kennedy's passing does truly mark the end of an era (not just because he was a "Kennedy"), and some of us miss him already.

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Picture from abc.com's slideshow of Kennedy through the years.

When walking around New Jersey is a crime and other strange news

Yes, that's right, Bob Dylan got stopped by New Jersey police just for walking around a neighborhood and killing time before the show. Apparently, he was super polite and everything, but I want to know, when did taking a walk become the kind of suspicious activity that requires the questioning of a 68-year-old man?

Oh, and one other random piece of news today, I was not the least bit surprised to see Charles de Gaulle top an informal internet survey of worst airports to sleep in. While I think Paris is a great city and that people in the U.S. should make fewer jokes at the expense of French citizens, I have to admit, Charles de Gaulle is hands down the worst airport I have had to travel through. I was also not surprised to see Amsterdam near the top of the list; that is one super nice airport (which is kind of ironic since Air France is an infinitely better airline than KLM).