The Kerry Regime The difference between a military campaign and a political campaign is that a military campaign has occasional pauses. Massachusetts senator John Kerry traveled to Peterborough, N.H., last Wednesday for another meet-and-greet to further his presidential candidacy. He spoke so deliriously that one fears he’d eaten some bad scrod.
According to the Manchester Union-Leader, Kerry said, “I voted to give the president to have a legitimate threat of force for the reasons he gave: to go to the United Nations and form a coalition. This president failed. It was a failure of diplomacy. We need not only a regime change in Iraq, but also in the United States. We need a president who will respect the institutions we have built up over many years.”
Does the senator know what “regime” means? It’s not a synonym for “the guy in power.” It refers to the whole of a society’s political-cultural system. Is it the entire American system that a Kerry presidency intends to overthrow? No, if we’re to believe the crocodile tears he shed over “the institutions we have built up over many years.” But yes, if we’re to believe the doubts Kerry casts on the Supreme Court’s “error in its decision in the year 2000” that gave George W. Bush the presidency. If truth is the first casualty of war, then coherence may be the second.
So corrupt are our institutions, in fact, that the senator has begun looking outside of the country for counsel. “I talked to leaders of a number of countries last week,” he said, “that told me they lost all confidence in the administration.” Our hearts go out to those countries. Maybe the senator should run for president of one of them.[img nocaption float=”right” width=”470″ height=”424″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]1069[/img]
Arming Saddam
Two things stood out in the excellent April 2 dispatch from Najaf, Iraq, filed by the New York Times’s Jim Dwyer. There was the headline, “Cheers and Smiles for U.S. Troops in a Captured City,” which one had not expected to read in the Times. And there was this delicious kicker: “American troops found that the fleeing Baath Party and paramilitary forces had set up minefields on roads and bridges leading out of the city. . . . Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that the mines had been made in Italy, said, ‘Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce.'”
As it happens, Colonel Deluca’s point had just been made by the inimitable bilingual blogger and illustrator known as the Dissident Frogman (http://thedissidentfrogman.now.nu). He produced this chart (see left) with data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
Roar, Moron, Roar
There is continued fallout from the now notorious March 26 Columbia University antiwar teach-in at which assistant professor of anthropology “and latina/o studies” Nicholas De Genova called for a Saddamite victory over U.S. imperialism–and “a million Mogadishus” in the process. Many people on the Columbia campus itself are rather upset with young professor De Genova. The alumni relations office is being “barraged” with angry phone calls and e-mails by graduates threatening to withhold their pledges and bequests. University president Lee Bollinger announces himself “shocked” by De Genova’s phraseology, which he believes “crosses the line.” De Genova’s boss, anthropology department chairman Nicholas Dirks, says he’s “personally appalled.” History professor Eric Foner calls De Genova “idiotic.” (Which is nice, we suppose, except that Foner, one of the teach-in’s principal organizers, appears to think that his event was otherwise quite intelligent. First-person press accounts of the affair do not substantiate this judgment.)
Be that as it may. The Scrapbook is primarily concerned about the disposition of Professor De Genova’s job. All the usual right-wing kooks–as all the usual left-wing kooks have dubbed them–are demanding that Columbia, as punishment for the “Mogadishus” line, drag Nicholas De Genova’s lifeless paycheck through the streets of Morningside Heights. The university says it will not do that; De Genova’s grotesquerie, Lee Bollinger explains, is a “free speech” expression protected by “the First Amendment.” The Scrapbook cannot agree with either side in this dispute.
Bollinger is supposed to be a First Amendment expert, but he seems not to know what that amendment actually requires. Our Constitution is clear: State, local, and federal authorities are forbidden from interfering with Nicholas De Genova’s property interest in a faculty salary simply on account of the fact that he’s an idiot. However: Our Constitution would stand silently aside–hell, it would probably hold his coat–if Lee Bollinger decided to fire De Genova’s ass . . . and then up the rent on his apartment.
On the other hand, there’s academic freedom to consider. And university-faculty labor contract fine print to worry over. And the AAUP and the ACLU would sue. And what would the Chronicle of Higher Education say, for goodness sakes? All in all, The Scrapbook figures it’s just not worth Columbia’s trouble to can the guy just for thinking like a bloodthirsty Stalinist.
But the “idiotic” part of it is quite another question. On March 31, De Genova wrote an angry letter to Spectator, the Columbia campus newspaper, complaining that its reporting on the teach-in had “succeeded to quote me” out of context and in an “inflammatory manner”–the apparently proper and non-inflammatory context being that “imperialism and white supremacy have been constitutive of U.S. nation-state formation and U.S. nationalism.” De Genova’s self-penned academic biography reads as follows: “My ethnographic research explores the social productions of racialized and spatialized difference in the experiences of transnational Mexican migrant workers within the space of the U.S. nation-state. More specifically, I examine transnational urban conjunctural spaces that link the U.S. and Latin America as a standpoint of critique from which to interrogate U.S. nationalism, political economy, racialized citizenship, and immigration law.”
“Succeeded to quote me,” he says. Jeez, the man can barely speak English. Why doesn’t somebody fire him for that?
