Just in case you’ve missed “The National Parks”…

Shame on you. It’s really good. Lucky for you though, you can still watch it online. Since I had to teach last night, I just started Episode 3 now.

Next up: The Pure Food and Drug Act?

So what do conservatives have against the landmark achievements Progressive Era? Apparently everything, as John Debyshire of the National Review has now decided that he is against female suffrage. The radio transcript and summary is at Think Progress:

COLMES: We would be a better country? John Derbyshire making the statement, we would be a better country if women did not vote.

DERBYSHIRE: Yeah, probably.

Derbyshire reasoned that we “got along like that for 130 years.” Colmes countered by asking if he also wants to bring back slavery. No, Derbyshire responded, “I’m in favor of freedom personally.” Colmes noted that freedom didn’t extend to women’s right to vote, however. Derbyshire said, “Well, they didn’t and we got along ok.”

It’s one thing to attack the Progressive Era in general, especially if you want to take cheap shots at Margaret Sanger (or anyone else who’s still controversial), but when you start attacking the foundations of democracy itself you look really out of touch. White men got along when women didn’t vote, but denying the vote to women on the basis of gender is why most women didn’t get along well at all (since it took the vote to get the kind of legislation passed that improved the status of women in society the most).

What I can’t get over though is just how politically stupid this argument is. Just because women are more liberal than men now doesn’t mean they always will be in the future. Of course, supporting the removal of their franchise certainly isn’t going to bring converts to the conservative cause.

If Derbyshire wants to offend half the population that’s his right, but I say why not go for everybody? 100% of the population eats. Therefore, I can’t wait to see the conservative case against the Pure Food and Drug Act.

So why didn’t they occupy the president’s office?

So a building on the campus of a major American university has been occupied for four days and I have to read Marc Bousquet to hear about it? Bad media. Here’s Marc:

During last week’s massive 10-campus walkout, several dozen students and workers occupied…the Graduate Student Commons at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), issuing statements frankly acknowledging their intention to escalate the conflict, and to initiate some actual thought about the role of higher education in the economy.

Like Marc, I find parts of their online manifesto, “Communiqué from an Absent Future,” very compelling, especially since it’s so obviously influenced by the Port Huron Statement. This, to me, is the best statement I’ve seen on a problem that bugs me no end:

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for most, the level of employment we obtain while students is the same that awaits after graduation. Meanwhile, what we acquire isn’t education; it’s debt. We work to make money we have already spent, and our future labor has already been sold on the worst market around. Average student loan debt rose 20 percent in the first five years of the twenty-first century—80-100 percent for students of color. Student loan volume—a figure inversely proportional to state funding for education—rose by nearly 800 percent from 1977 to 2003. What our borrowed tuition buys is the privilege of making monthly payments for the rest of our lives. What we learn is the choreography of credit: you can’t walk to class without being offered another piece of plastic charging 20 percent interest. Yesterday’s finance majors buy their summer homes with the bleak futures of today’s humanities majors.

But then the authors have to go and taint a critique that could start a world-changing debate that they might actually win with a call for action that will get their whole movement red-baited out of existence so fast it will make their head swim:

We must begin by preventing the university from functioning. We must interrupt the normal flow of bodies and things and bring work and class to a halt. We will blockade, occupy, and take what’s ours. Rather than viewing such disruptions as obstacles to dialogue and mutual understanding, we see them as what we have to say, as how we are to be understood. This is the only meaningful position to take when crises lay bare the opposing interests at the foundation of society. Calls for unity are fundamentally empty. There is no common ground between those who uphold the status quo and those who seek to destroy it.

No social movement will succeed in the longterm unless it has a critical mass of support, and shutting down the University of California – Santa Cruz or any other university will instantly prevent that from happening. If the occupiers of the Graduate Student Commons really believed in “preventing the university from functioning,” they would have taken over the president’s office, not the Graduate Commons. They’re obviously doing this for publicity (not that there’s anything wrong with that), but if they’re going to do something for publicity there’s no reason for them to issue a manifesto that’s more radical than they are.

The Battle of the Somme.

I’ve been looking for WWI combat footage this morning and this is by far the best I’ve found:

Wow. Just wow.

It seems that Google Books now has every issue of LIFE Magazine ever published. There goes a good day and a half out of my life.

“She turned me into a newt!”

Hey, I’m famous!

The new issue of Academe covers what I did last summer as President of my AAUP chapter:

“The Summer Institute completely changed the way I look at my university during these troubled times,” said Jonathan Rees, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo and first-time attendee, in summing up the weekend. “I learned what questions to ask and how best to get answers.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Most Progressives were actually interested in governing.

Via Firedoglake, I notice that David Broder seems to agree with a lot of right-wing crazies that the (historical) Progressive Movement was somehow wrong-headed. To do this, he quotes and paraphrases someone from the right-wing Hudson Institute in his Washington Post column:

[William Schambra] traces the roots of this approach to the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when rapid social and economic change created a politics dominated by interest-group struggles. The progressives believed that the cure lay in applying the new wisdom of the social sciences to the art of government, an approach in which facts would heal the clash of ideologies and narrow constituencies.

Really? What about the Prohibitionists? The white slave fear mongers? Heck, I don’t think Jane Addams even fits that description. More:

“In one policy area after another,” Schambra writes, “from transportation to science, urban policy to auto policy, Obama’s formulation is virtually identical: Selfishness or ideological rigidity has led us to look at the problem in isolated pieces . . . we must put aside parochialism to take the long systemic view; and when we finally formulate a uniform national policy supported by empirical and objective data rather than shallow, insular opinion, we will arrive at solutions that are not only more effective but less costly as well. This is the mantra of the policy presidency.”

Historically, that approach has not worked. The progressives failed to gain more than brief ascendancy, and the Carter and Clinton presidencies were marked by striking policy failures.

Thinking ahead is Un-American? Boy are we in trouble then. Besides, look at the history here: seven years of TR and eight years Wilson makes 15 years. That’s an awful lot of time to control the presidency and that figuring doesn’t count the influence of Progressives on the state level. And on what planet can Carter or Clinton ever be considered progressive?

It’s Broder’s criteria for success, however, that I think is most telling. If a movement isn’t ascendant, he thinks it’s somehow failed. Progressivism wasn’t about gaining control; it was about actually making government work for people. What does David Broder have against the Pure Food and Drug Act? The Clayton Antitrust Act? The direct election of senators? The income tax? [I'm sure the Hudson Institute would love to kill that last one, but responsible people would have to come up with an alternative way to make up the revenue and there is none.]

Unsuccessful in their efforts to roll back the New Deal into nothing, the right wing crazies have decided to start attacking the Progressive Movement in order to undermine the case that government can do anything right. Progressives were interested in legislative achievement, not power. They’re being demonized now because they are the original regulators, and when they were around America needed regulation badly. Turn that around and an awful lot of people are going to suffer needlessly.

But just you wait, the more Obama tries to change things for the better, the further back they’ll go trying to undercut the reputation of past reforms. I look forward to the day when Glenn Beck discovers the Articles of the Confederation.

Oh no!!! The pointy-headed intellectuals are running the country!!!

If America is really being run like a university, then the working class must be the adjuncts. At least President Obama wants to give them health care.

PS to Victor David Hanson: the only people working at most universities who can afford to take three months off every year are the administrators whose jobs won’t allow it.

Luna Park (Sydney) in red.

What amazes me about the dust storm in Sydney is that it rained harder than cats and dogs almost every day in the month of May while I was there. Where did all that water go?

Update: My friend Greg in Sydney says the drought is inland and the wind is blowing the sand all the way to the coast. It’s just like the Dust Bowl!

Second Update: From City of Sound:

The dust came from South Australia, via the distant mining town of Broken Hill. The distances involved here are indeed vast. The dust cloud covered half of New South Wales and then stretched 600km up the coast to Queensland, where it would later appear in Brisbane in an altogether yellower guise. It had travelled around 1500km to get to Sydney, dropping millions (billions?) of tons of dust over the east coast.

It’s almost beyond comprehension that the dust filling the air is from that far away; that you’re inhaling South Australia. It’s akin to the notion that you’re constantly breathing in detritus from the Big Bang.