A few years ago I was at a happy hour with a few coworkers in DC. One girl brought along her boyfriend who came from his job across town at the Justice Department. I asked him what he did over there, and it turned out he was working in John Ashcroft's office as some kind of legal underling.
Here was a guest from a parallel universe, drinking Miller Light right across the table from me. I wanted to learn more about the kind of people who would willingly show up every day to such a work situation, so I drilled him with questions. The basic gist of those questions was: "what's it like to work for John Ashcroft?" his boiled down answer was, "it's really something to work for someone who has such principles, who sticks to his convictions."
Being really open minded at the time, I mulled this over. There was something to say for a person who has principles. Reasonably, I may not agree with someone else, but having a belief system that consistently guides their actions is intriguing. There is something that could be learned from this.
A few weeks later I was having lunch with my dad. I retold the story to him, remarking on how this whole idea of sticking to principles had gotten me thinking. My dad's characteristically terse answer was,
"yeah, well his principles suck."
In the weeks and months that followed, my thinking underwent a 180 degree paradigm shift. I was trying to make an internal peace with my political enemies through some kind of sportsmanlike respect. This was the mindset of a loser. Such thinking was a distraction from the real moral reasons of why we choose sides in society.
John Ashcroft principles did suck and probably still do.
I'll go further. Conservatism sucks. After these elections, there is much talk about how if only the Republicans had stayed truly conservative, they would have retained the permanent majority they'd planned out. Well, the permanent majority sucks. Who wants that? It sounds like a phrase Mao would use, or the power players in Mexico's PRI... Hell, the Duma and Politburo back in the USSR were run by "permanent majorities." Weren't we fighting against that not long ago?
But I digress. Conservatism sucks because they have galvanized themselves with economic principles that sound good on paper, but are really about stacking the rules in favor of the exorbitantly wealthy. It sucks because they draw from a form of religious fundamentalism that believes (though quietly) that anyone who is not exactly like them is going to burn in hell. It sucks because it offers peace and justification to the mindset of the selfish. It sucks because of the archaic and disproven approaches it offers for social policy in every arena from law enforcement to labor. It sucks because of the mean-spirited, arrogant and self-centered thinking at the center of all of the complex beliefs of the theoretical conservative society.
And history proves that conservatism sucks. In any long term sense, conservatives always lose. Think of the great conservative causes of old. Jim Crow laws, ownership and voting rights exclusively for white men, civic marraige, and really any threat that industry and progress posed on their genteel, isolated lives. With enough hindsight, conservatives will always be looked back on as the barbaric old-timers who wish for the days when they could lord over others with impunity, when high morality and poverty conspired to make everything stay the same for generations, where technological and social advancement could proceed at a snail's pace for fear of retribution or a lack of protection against failure. Even today, its diehards are almost all the same old white men they have always been. They don't care about you. Look at places where conservatives dominate, like Afghanistan, Iran, or Mississippi.
The Republicans lost because they were too conservative. It was nothing else. People don't want what they were trying to offer, and were sick of the rabid push-button moralizing employed to distract them from this basic truth. Politicians drifted away from their original mission set out by Newt Gingrich and others precisely because, one by one, their ideas were simply not politically feasible. Those ideas were not politically feasible because people didn't want them, because they mistakened a set of principles for a set of policy solutions. People want a balanced budget more than tax cuts. People believe there is value to the services that government provides, and that their elected officials' mission should be to enhance and expand that value, not to dismantle these cornerstones of civilization for the sake of some preindustrial beliefs from the nobility about freedom. People want rational approaches to our social problems, not kitchen table psychology or bully demagoguery.
Here are some examples: Health care an issue? People just need to pay more out of pocket and the market will sort it out. Crime? Just hire Marriott to build more prisons and tighten up on law enforcement. Poverty? Let them eat cake. Jobs? Market. Education? Market, oh, and more standardized tests. Terrorism? Kill 'em all, forget the constitution.
They were wrong. It's time to govern and get on with things. Forget American conservatism as we've known it. It's an allergic reaction to change, not change itself.
Burrrp. That feels better.
Anyone got an Alka Seltzer?
Monday, November 20, 2006
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
My Love-Hate Relationship with Emory
As a guilty pleasure I've always been a sucker for things like News of the Weird and university police blotters. When no one's looking, I'll set aside the mourning for our nation's social problems and salivate over a good episode of COPS on CourtTV. Having a look at someone else's problems is entertaining, even a bit therapeutic.
Occasionally, the problems of a community can take a strange turn, like the arrest of an affluent housewife on prostitution charges, or a car full of Eagle Scouts busted for trying to score a sackful of something bad at one of the drive-by drug stores scattered across America's ghettos. University blotters routinely run stories of the kid who got hypothermia while running across campus naked on acid, or the dormroom that was searched because of bad smells wafting out, only to discover a menagerie of miserable iguanas, boas, hamsters and guinea pigs.
For a conoisseur of this sort of information, these edgy tidbits are entirely absent from the Emory University student paper, the Wheel. Unlike their unoriginal and uninspired (though well-written) columns on world events, or the vapid (though descriptive) articles on the hardships of "hooking up" on campus, this is not the editor's fault. The ugly truth is that there is no edge at this school. The Emory police blotter has the usual thefts of expensive laptops, the weekly occurance of some 19 year old kid who gets woken up by campus cops passed out on a picnic bench, or the guy who got a ticket for driving in an area off-limits to private vehicles, and that's it.
For me, the impact of this problem is negligible. I am a graduate student, safely isolated most of the time on the far end of campus, surrounded by a cohort of like-minded (though diverse) public health students. But I love the Emory School of Public Health, and am thankful for the opportunities that the university as a whole has granted me. I believe that a lot of new, positive energy to our nation's university research and theoretical base can come from its expansion, but I am afraid they're missing something crucial: interesting kids.
Here is an actual entry from the Emory blotter:
A 19-year-old female student reported property damage on Oct. 19 at 11:30 a.m. She was attending an event at the corner of Asbury Rd. and Dickie Dr. An Emory First Responder unit was parked on the street, and when it drove away it rolled over a $1,700 Burberry bag. Inside the bag was a $60 Chanel eyeglass case and a $2 Arizona iced tea. Damage to the bag included black tire marks. The student incurred a small injury trying to remove the broken iced tea bottle from the bag.
Emory is a school with at three towering cranes on its horizon, a series of five- ten- and twenty-year plans, and one of the biggest endowments out there. Its schools of medicine and the sciences, business and law are all at the top of their game. The undergraduate program offers a number of exciting opportunities and tracks beyond the standard liberal arts model, such as pre-nursing, public health, pre-law, and an undergraduate business school. The facilities are world-class; walking across campus for the first time, I was amazed at the overall beauty of the place. Emory recently recruited Salman Rushdie to a 5-year appointment, and is going through the motions of transforming itself from a very good school to a top-ten Harvard-Princeton-Yale institution. But I think there's something they're missing in all of this.
Go to Harvard, Columbia or Cornell, and you'll see students who look like they have something to say, something to contribute. You'll see kids with some identity beyond the AP classes they took, their golf game, or the soccer team the made. You'll see kids in black-rimmed glasses, kids who look like they're in a rock band, or like they have some identity beyond cold preppy superiority, or the desperately polished dancing bear act many performed to get into a good college, and through imprinting, cannot stop now to save their life.
Go to one of the Ivys and you'll see big scarry lesbians, militant African American kids with dreads and dark sunglasses, waify artists, mad scientists and tortured intellectuals. These categories are almostly entirely missing at Emory. Even though kids from all of these schools come from the same background (myself included, though there wasn't a snowball's chance in Georgia of them taking me out of high school)-- the overeducated and extremely affluent, it seems like Emory made the play only for the ones who wear baseball caps and polo shirts (male of female).
Emory undergrads care more about money and are more likely to flaunt it than their peers. Regardless of whether the average Emory parent can afford it over the average Cornell parent, their kids are more likely to be given the keys to a new BMW SUV with Connecticut tags, and to slam the door with confidence as they pull up to their dorm, strutting in new designer jeans. These kids need to be exposed to others, to be called out on their boring tastes, or else they'll grow up to be as shallow and conformist as their clothes and cars profess. Emory needs some edginess before it will ever generate anything remotely close to the intellectual energy of its older, more distinguished competitors.
As part of their ambitious planning process, Emory's administration needs to think a little less about money and a little more about culture, or they'll never break the top ten.
Occasionally, the problems of a community can take a strange turn, like the arrest of an affluent housewife on prostitution charges, or a car full of Eagle Scouts busted for trying to score a sackful of something bad at one of the drive-by drug stores scattered across America's ghettos. University blotters routinely run stories of the kid who got hypothermia while running across campus naked on acid, or the dormroom that was searched because of bad smells wafting out, only to discover a menagerie of miserable iguanas, boas, hamsters and guinea pigs.
For a conoisseur of this sort of information, these edgy tidbits are entirely absent from the Emory University student paper, the Wheel. Unlike their unoriginal and uninspired (though well-written) columns on world events, or the vapid (though descriptive) articles on the hardships of "hooking up" on campus, this is not the editor's fault. The ugly truth is that there is no edge at this school. The Emory police blotter has the usual thefts of expensive laptops, the weekly occurance of some 19 year old kid who gets woken up by campus cops passed out on a picnic bench, or the guy who got a ticket for driving in an area off-limits to private vehicles, and that's it.
For me, the impact of this problem is negligible. I am a graduate student, safely isolated most of the time on the far end of campus, surrounded by a cohort of like-minded (though diverse) public health students. But I love the Emory School of Public Health, and am thankful for the opportunities that the university as a whole has granted me. I believe that a lot of new, positive energy to our nation's university research and theoretical base can come from its expansion, but I am afraid they're missing something crucial: interesting kids.
Here is an actual entry from the Emory blotter:
A 19-year-old female student reported property damage on Oct. 19 at 11:30 a.m. She was attending an event at the corner of Asbury Rd. and Dickie Dr. An Emory First Responder unit was parked on the street, and when it drove away it rolled over a $1,700 Burberry bag. Inside the bag was a $60 Chanel eyeglass case and a $2 Arizona iced tea. Damage to the bag included black tire marks. The student incurred a small injury trying to remove the broken iced tea bottle from the bag.
Emory is a school with at three towering cranes on its horizon, a series of five- ten- and twenty-year plans, and one of the biggest endowments out there. Its schools of medicine and the sciences, business and law are all at the top of their game. The undergraduate program offers a number of exciting opportunities and tracks beyond the standard liberal arts model, such as pre-nursing, public health, pre-law, and an undergraduate business school. The facilities are world-class; walking across campus for the first time, I was amazed at the overall beauty of the place. Emory recently recruited Salman Rushdie to a 5-year appointment, and is going through the motions of transforming itself from a very good school to a top-ten Harvard-Princeton-Yale institution. But I think there's something they're missing in all of this.
Go to Harvard, Columbia or Cornell, and you'll see students who look like they have something to say, something to contribute. You'll see kids with some identity beyond the AP classes they took, their golf game, or the soccer team the made. You'll see kids in black-rimmed glasses, kids who look like they're in a rock band, or like they have some identity beyond cold preppy superiority, or the desperately polished dancing bear act many performed to get into a good college, and through imprinting, cannot stop now to save their life.
Go to one of the Ivys and you'll see big scarry lesbians, militant African American kids with dreads and dark sunglasses, waify artists, mad scientists and tortured intellectuals. These categories are almostly entirely missing at Emory. Even though kids from all of these schools come from the same background (myself included, though there wasn't a snowball's chance in Georgia of them taking me out of high school)-- the overeducated and extremely affluent, it seems like Emory made the play only for the ones who wear baseball caps and polo shirts (male of female).
Emory undergrads care more about money and are more likely to flaunt it than their peers. Regardless of whether the average Emory parent can afford it over the average Cornell parent, their kids are more likely to be given the keys to a new BMW SUV with Connecticut tags, and to slam the door with confidence as they pull up to their dorm, strutting in new designer jeans. These kids need to be exposed to others, to be called out on their boring tastes, or else they'll grow up to be as shallow and conformist as their clothes and cars profess. Emory needs some edginess before it will ever generate anything remotely close to the intellectual energy of its older, more distinguished competitors.
As part of their ambitious planning process, Emory's administration needs to think a little less about money and a little more about culture, or they'll never break the top ten.
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