The Color of Politics (February Reading)
Mar. 5th, 2008 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseThree nonfiction, one reread (fiction). Victory to the nonfiction resolution.
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (Alexis De Veaux): Nonfiction. Academic biography of a unique "black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior". Footnotes abound.
What's kind of intimate about semi-contemporary biography is the follow-up. You can google people and find out, say, what Lorde's kids are up to. This is deeply weird to me.
Frances Clayton: this is not her story. This is not the story about the white woman who got her psych PhD in '54 and had tenure at Brown (De Veaux p97) in 1956. Tenure! This is not a brainless woman! And she gave up tenure to move to New York City and be Lorde's partner. This choice of love over career astonishes me every single time I run into it.
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
or is. -Between Our Selves, Lorde
3/21/79
she said
it's not enough being
different
you have to cherish it, too.
If I was to wait
until I was
right and proper
before I spoke my mind
I'd be sending holographic messages
on a ouija board
little cryptic complaints
from the other side. -attached to a letter to Mary Daly, 6 May 1978
Lorde is a feminist, but not the "second wave" white middle class crew. At all. Find the complete Master's Tools essay for Lorde tearing into white middle-class women smug about their lofty position (or celebrating a milestone, take your pick). Lorde annoys everyone: take her appearance at the July 1980 International Festival of Women Artists.
Lorde the outsider: identifies as not of the group; the black woman in the white lesbian bars; the lesbian in the feminist black sisterhood. The Caribbean-identified American-born. Politics of difference are either Lorde's recurring theme or the theme De Veaux chose to emphasize, showing Lorde struggling with and reveling in being the odd one out.
Spirits
of the abnormally born
live on in water
of the heroically dead
in the entrails of snake. -from "October" (1980)
This was long and dense, and I'm mostly disappointed that it pretty much skips life between 1986 and her death in 1992. Why?
Mirabile (Janet Kagan): Reread. Light, sweet and funny, with wacky SF biology and a grumbly old woman protagonist. Consistent worldbuilding across a series of short stories, tessellated into a novel with thin framing device grout. Strongly rec'd for charm.
I am in fierce denial that Kagan passed away on 1 March 2008, several weeks after this latest reread. I can't mourn the woman, having never met her, but it makes me sad that I'll never be able to say, "hey, I read your fiction, and it's cool." Kagan wrote exactly three books that I know of, and though they are cute and fluffy bordering on cotton candy overdose, you will have to pry those crumbling paperbacks from my hands against my most strident protests. I think that's a good eulogy for an author.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Adrienne Mayor): Nonfiction, like the title says. Great idea, lousy execution. Mayor clumps her cites at the end of paragraphs or ideas. If you want to draw a line between "Arabic sources report[ing] great stocks of naptha were stored in Byzantine churches" during the Crusades and 2003 BS about Saddam Hussein sticking WMDs in Iraqi mosques, you have to work a lot harder than bare-faced assertions: I want to see a breakdown of the religious and political implications. Did political authorities or priests stick this naptha in churches? (see p137, HC) Was it even there, or were 11th - 13th century Arabs as gullible as contemporary Americans? Also, Richard Preston's thriller nonfiction fails as a good source to cite (p141 and elsewhere). This is a cute idea, but Mayor didn't pull together the primary sources to make this really amazing and cool. Mayor failed to go deep enough when drawing lines from the ancient to the contemporary; take the Archimedes mirror scheme compared to modern experiments with mircowave or heat devices. (For bonus points, note the criticism of same, p218 - 219. What does criticism of contemporary shenanigans have to do with ancient biological or chemical weapons?)
Some moments stood out: vinegar and fire; naptha as a concept, elepants scaring the dalights out of the uninitiated. Single best sentence in the book:
Conclusion: this needed to be 50 pages shorter or 200 pages longer, in smaller print.
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman): Nonfiction. Presents hypothesis that New Deal legislation flattened America's economic profile - the poor got less poor, the rich got less rich - that this was a good thing, and that the rich or super-rich have been in bed with a number of other unhappy splinter groups trying to undo this so they can be really really rich like the Good Old Days (19th C).
There is a special phrase in my vocabulary. "Oh come the fuck on" means I have lost a little respect for you. To preserve the illusion that this is a PG-13 safe space I will be abbreviating it to OCtFO for the rest of this review. Basically, I expect my nonfiction to be exhaustively researched and embedded with footnotes proving you did your homework. So perhaps I find any book with less than, oh, 20 pages of footnotes kind of fluffy. Also, OCtFO: five to thirty footnotes per chapter is not a valid argument! Not for a hypothesis about the interplay of the hands of government and economics across decades. It's the blind men and the elephant argument: pick your data and you can paint as pretty a picture as you please, with an unknown correlation to reality.
(As a tangent, this is why I call BS on social and political sciences. You better show me your error bars when your "experimental data" is all statistics.) Krugman is compelling, but his arguments rest on some shaky stats. When he uses tables, as he does when arguing about party polarization, he offers limited data sets - see page 73 (hardcover) for the party overlap/crossover stats for three Congresses from a 77 year period - which makes me suspect data-picking for best effect. Or see his arguments for expanding government-sponsored health care, where he spends nearly a page describing a poll without describing the size of the polled group or error margins of the methodology (see page 175). I'm not impressed by this. While refuting statements that the Democratic Party was percieved as weak on defense, he again cites polls without giving size or error numbers (page 184).
Copyedit note: chapter 10 is called "The New Politics of Equality" in the table of contents and the chapter header, but in the footnotes is called "The New Rules of Equality" (vii, 198, 282). This amuses me.
What does not amuse me are the comparisons of the state of the US to the state of European countries with no acknowledgment of the issues facing European countries. In light of the US's struggles with illegal immigration, I am curious to know how the EU nations Kruger looks to for health care inspiration are coping with their own immigration issues.
I guess I really want a scientific paper out of this. I want the liberal side to bend backwards demonstrating that the conservatives may have one or two points, and here's how the libs separate them from the illogical and hateful things the reactionaries are saying. (I am am too appalled by James Watt's "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent" comment to let it go without saying: what the heck, Watt. Please tell me there were extenuating circumstances that make that anything but a checklist of your failure as a human being.) I also want someone who will pander to my radical side and consider that "values issues" might be "bread and butter issues" (p191) intricately linked with economics and how Americans choose their values. Would Americans rather have comfort or opportunity? Opportunity for what? How do you define "happiness" and "opportunity"?
I applaud Krugman for saying that race is a factor in American politics (duh), but I'm less impressed by the assumptions he shows when he says, "One key message of this book, which many readers may find uncomfortable, is that race is at the heart of what has happened to the country I grew up in." I would like to believe that Americans know race is an issue: wiki suggests that just under 74% of the US is white, which implies that about 1 in 4 isn't, and that's too high to shove under the table. I am worried that my "yeah, duh" reaction demonstrates a poor grasp of people not like me: you know, the other 95% of the US that isn't kept up at night wondering if being mean to her black Kenyan immigrant housemate is racism or justified frustration that he still isn't grasping this "shared household chores" concept. Also, notice the Lorde bio I'd finished two books before starting this one. Despite Krugman's callout to racial issues, he displays some insensitivity to the matter: when talking about urban crime in the '60's and beyond, he says, "...there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It's true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a 'multiplier effect'..." (p88) I wish to call attention to the jump from "young urban black males" to "crime" without breaking down the statistics to establish that this is actually the case. I am not up on crime stats for the '60s, but it's worth considering that "walking while black" may have been a factor in the arrest or detainment statistics of that era, especially in conjunction with the civil rights movement which was roaring along at the time.
There's some things Krugman does that are worth noting. He pulls together an argument that streches across nearly 80 years of American politics, and makes it sound reasonable. He left me with a lot of people and incidents to look up (what I forget is that the '95 federal shutdown could have affected me), which means he was engaging my intellect. However, this is also a weakness: he makes sweeping statements I would like to see followed up in greater detail. ("Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age." Could you support this statement with names, budget figures, Superfund rulings, please? p159) The fact I'm this het up about it says that Krugman is doing something interesting with ideas, though I'm annoyed he's written an idea book instead of an idea book underpinned with fact after fact after fact.
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (Alexis De Veaux): Nonfiction. Academic biography of a unique "black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior". Footnotes abound.
What's kind of intimate about semi-contemporary biography is the follow-up. You can google people and find out, say, what Lorde's kids are up to. This is deeply weird to me.
Frances Clayton: this is not her story. This is not the story about the white woman who got her psych PhD in '54 and had tenure at Brown (De Veaux p97) in 1956. Tenure! This is not a brainless woman! And she gave up tenure to move to New York City and be Lorde's partner. This choice of love over career astonishes me every single time I run into it.
for the embattled
there is no place
that cannot be
home
or is. -Between Our Selves, Lorde
3/21/79
she said
it's not enough being
different
you have to cherish it, too.
If I was to wait
until I was
right and proper
before I spoke my mind
I'd be sending holographic messages
on a ouija board
little cryptic complaints
from the other side. -attached to a letter to Mary Daly, 6 May 1978
Lorde is a feminist, but not the "second wave" white middle class crew. At all. Find the complete Master's Tools essay for Lorde tearing into white middle-class women smug about their lofty position (or celebrating a milestone, take your pick). Lorde annoys everyone: take her appearance at the July 1980 International Festival of Women Artists.
The festival's forum on lesbian identity and politics was the first international panel at which Lorde explicitly presented herself as black feminist lesbian, offering instructive analyses for defining one's self as "other" in an oppressive society. By doing so, though, she believed that she'd alienated some of the European and American women when she introduced racial issues, and she'd alienated some of the African women when she discussed the historic realities of lesbians.Women gets orange juice in your mint julep and mint in your screwdrivers.
Lorde the outsider: identifies as not of the group; the black woman in the white lesbian bars; the lesbian in the feminist black sisterhood. The Caribbean-identified American-born. Politics of difference are either Lorde's recurring theme or the theme De Veaux chose to emphasize, showing Lorde struggling with and reveling in being the odd one out.
Spirits
of the abnormally born
live on in water
of the heroically dead
in the entrails of snake. -from "October" (1980)
This was long and dense, and I'm mostly disappointed that it pretty much skips life between 1986 and her death in 1992. Why?
Mirabile (Janet Kagan): Reread. Light, sweet and funny, with wacky SF biology and a grumbly old woman protagonist. Consistent worldbuilding across a series of short stories, tessellated into a novel with thin framing device grout. Strongly rec'd for charm.
I am in fierce denial that Kagan passed away on 1 March 2008, several weeks after this latest reread. I can't mourn the woman, having never met her, but it makes me sad that I'll never be able to say, "hey, I read your fiction, and it's cool." Kagan wrote exactly three books that I know of, and though they are cute and fluffy bordering on cotton candy overdose, you will have to pry those crumbling paperbacks from my hands against my most strident protests. I think that's a good eulogy for an author.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Adrienne Mayor): Nonfiction, like the title says. Great idea, lousy execution. Mayor clumps her cites at the end of paragraphs or ideas. If you want to draw a line between "Arabic sources report[ing] great stocks of naptha were stored in Byzantine churches" during the Crusades and 2003 BS about Saddam Hussein sticking WMDs in Iraqi mosques, you have to work a lot harder than bare-faced assertions: I want to see a breakdown of the religious and political implications. Did political authorities or priests stick this naptha in churches? (see p137, HC) Was it even there, or were 11th - 13th century Arabs as gullible as contemporary Americans? Also, Richard Preston's thriller nonfiction fails as a good source to cite (p141 and elsewhere). This is a cute idea, but Mayor didn't pull together the primary sources to make this really amazing and cool. Mayor failed to go deep enough when drawing lines from the ancient to the contemporary; take the Archimedes mirror scheme compared to modern experiments with mircowave or heat devices. (For bonus points, note the criticism of same, p218 - 219. What does criticism of contemporary shenanigans have to do with ancient biological or chemical weapons?)
Some moments stood out: vinegar and fire; naptha as a concept, elepants scaring the dalights out of the uninitiated. Single best sentence in the book:
The most famous example occurred in Britain in 55 BC, when the Britannis' chariot-horses fled at the sight of Julius Caesar's monstrous war elephant covered in iron scales and clanging bells emerging from a river with a tower of archers balanced on its back(p199).
Conclusion: this needed to be 50 pages shorter or 200 pages longer, in smaller print.
The Conscience of a Liberal (Paul Krugman): Nonfiction. Presents hypothesis that New Deal legislation flattened America's economic profile - the poor got less poor, the rich got less rich - that this was a good thing, and that the rich or super-rich have been in bed with a number of other unhappy splinter groups trying to undo this so they can be really really rich like the Good Old Days (19th C).
There is a special phrase in my vocabulary. "Oh come the fuck on" means I have lost a little respect for you. To preserve the illusion that this is a PG-13 safe space I will be abbreviating it to OCtFO for the rest of this review. Basically, I expect my nonfiction to be exhaustively researched and embedded with footnotes proving you did your homework. So perhaps I find any book with less than, oh, 20 pages of footnotes kind of fluffy. Also, OCtFO: five to thirty footnotes per chapter is not a valid argument! Not for a hypothesis about the interplay of the hands of government and economics across decades. It's the blind men and the elephant argument: pick your data and you can paint as pretty a picture as you please, with an unknown correlation to reality.
(As a tangent, this is why I call BS on social and political sciences. You better show me your error bars when your "experimental data" is all statistics.) Krugman is compelling, but his arguments rest on some shaky stats. When he uses tables, as he does when arguing about party polarization, he offers limited data sets - see page 73 (hardcover) for the party overlap/crossover stats for three Congresses from a 77 year period - which makes me suspect data-picking for best effect. Or see his arguments for expanding government-sponsored health care, where he spends nearly a page describing a poll without describing the size of the polled group or error margins of the methodology (see page 175). I'm not impressed by this. While refuting statements that the Democratic Party was percieved as weak on defense, he again cites polls without giving size or error numbers (page 184).
Copyedit note: chapter 10 is called "The New Politics of Equality" in the table of contents and the chapter header, but in the footnotes is called "The New Rules of Equality" (vii, 198, 282). This amuses me.
What does not amuse me are the comparisons of the state of the US to the state of European countries with no acknowledgment of the issues facing European countries. In light of the US's struggles with illegal immigration, I am curious to know how the EU nations Kruger looks to for health care inspiration are coping with their own immigration issues.
I guess I really want a scientific paper out of this. I want the liberal side to bend backwards demonstrating that the conservatives may have one or two points, and here's how the libs separate them from the illogical and hateful things the reactionaries are saying. (I am am too appalled by James Watt's "I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent" comment to let it go without saying: what the heck, Watt. Please tell me there were extenuating circumstances that make that anything but a checklist of your failure as a human being.) I also want someone who will pander to my radical side and consider that "values issues" might be "bread and butter issues" (p191) intricately linked with economics and how Americans choose their values. Would Americans rather have comfort or opportunity? Opportunity for what? How do you define "happiness" and "opportunity"?
I applaud Krugman for saying that race is a factor in American politics (duh), but I'm less impressed by the assumptions he shows when he says, "One key message of this book, which many readers may find uncomfortable, is that race is at the heart of what has happened to the country I grew up in." I would like to believe that Americans know race is an issue: wiki suggests that just under 74% of the US is white, which implies that about 1 in 4 isn't, and that's too high to shove under the table. I am worried that my "yeah, duh" reaction demonstrates a poor grasp of people not like me: you know, the other 95% of the US that isn't kept up at night wondering if being mean to her black Kenyan immigrant housemate is racism or justified frustration that he still isn't grasping this "shared household chores" concept. Also, notice the Lorde bio I'd finished two books before starting this one. Despite Krugman's callout to racial issues, he displays some insensitivity to the matter: when talking about urban crime in the '60's and beyond, he says, "...there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It's true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a 'multiplier effect'..." (p88) I wish to call attention to the jump from "young urban black males" to "crime" without breaking down the statistics to establish that this is actually the case. I am not up on crime stats for the '60s, but it's worth considering that "walking while black" may have been a factor in the arrest or detainment statistics of that era, especially in conjunction with the civil rights movement which was roaring along at the time.
There's some things Krugman does that are worth noting. He pulls together an argument that streches across nearly 80 years of American politics, and makes it sound reasonable. He left me with a lot of people and incidents to look up (what I forget is that the '95 federal shutdown could have affected me), which means he was engaging my intellect. However, this is also a weakness: he makes sweeping statements I would like to see followed up in greater detail. ("Veterans of the Environmental Protection Agency have told me that the Nixon years were a golden age." Could you support this statement with names, budget figures, Superfund rulings, please? p159) The fact I'm this het up about it says that Krugman is doing something interesting with ideas, though I'm annoyed he's written an idea book instead of an idea book underpinned with fact after fact after fact.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-06 05:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-06 11:54 am (UTC)In other news, I'm 366 pages into The Race Beat (http://www.amazon.com/Race-Beat-Rights-Struggle-Awakening/dp/0679403817) and it's rocking my world. There are more than 100 footnotes for some chapters, many to articles and other documents contemporaneous to the civil rights movement. Now that is satisfying nonfiction.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-06 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-07 11:02 pm (UTC)As a tangent, this is why I call BS on social and political sciences.
this reminds me of my recent experience reading about music psychology-- I found the more careful drier book waaaaaaaay more interesting and satisfying than the floofy pop one. Once work settles down maybe I'll get around to posting the rant on that one :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-08 07:52 pm (UTC)Also, I remain unconvinced by the "vast right-wing conspiracy". Either it's a conspiracy, and has connotations of small group activity, or it's vast, and therefore isn't a conspiracy. I would be more impressed by about 300 pages illustrating the vast Republican Party machine of fear and intimidation than a few sweeping statements and catch-phrases. Yeah, the GOP's probably corrupt, but how much better are the Dems?
Anyway. Politics make me mad and stupid and a little self-contradictory.
I look forward to reading about your music psych book experiences - I think I'm with you on the dry-and-careful vs pop. If I want fluff or floof, I will read that new Laurie King novel I got from the library.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-10 08:54 pm (UTC)...yeah. Politics makes me want to roll my eyes and beat my head against the wall. Mostly because it is filled with people who, while otherwise rational, argue in extremely annoying and impassioned ways about subjects for which not enough data exists (or can be twisted both ways!) to justify a clear-cut solution, plus which those arguing are almost always starting from a different set of assumptions (both factual and "what-we-think-is-important") but don't realize it, thus complicating the whole mess.
Um. Not that politics makes me mad either, or anything. :)
Somehow I've landed in a situation where about half the people I know and respect are conservatives, and the other half are liberals. Makes it kind of hard to demonize either side...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-10 11:58 pm (UTC)Somehow I've landed in a situation where about half the people I know and respect are conservatives, and the other half are liberals. Makes it kind of hard to demonize either side...
You are doing what I want to be doing. I keep getting hung up by a "conservative <=> Republican <=> that incompetent in the Executive branch" chain of association. This is unfair, but a recognizable consequence of hanging out in Liberal Central (college, Maryland, etc). I refuse in the abstract to throw out an entire political party worth of people, but I need to educate myself so I'm not as ignorant about where they're coming from.