The Obama Effect

Fascinating article about what has been called, at various times, the "Bradley effect," "Wilder effect," or the "Dinkins effect," and what could possibly be the "Obama effect." Apparently pre-election polls often overstate the strength of black candidates in the US, because "white poll respondents are reluctant to tell African-American telephone interviewers that they are not going to vote for the black candidate." The effect is also seen when polling data is collected via face-to-face interviews.

The point is made, however, that the candidate does make a difference - "Jesse Jackson was identified as a black leader, Obama is seen as a Senator from Illinois who happens to be black."

Things I've read

A few articles I've found interesting lately:

There and Back Again, by Nick Paumgarten, looks at the phenomenon of the commute in the US. Paumgarten rides along with one woman who travels six and a half hours a day to and from work. He makes the very good point that, for many people, the extra two hours of leisure time granted by the introduction "of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company." What's the point of having that extra time if you spend it in your car, on your own?

Handguns in Roxbury, Tanks in Baghdad, by Wick Sloane, made me cry the first time I read it. Sloane, a writing teacher at a community college in the States, describes what happened after one of his students was shot and killed. Although I think he stumbles a little towards the end when he tries to connect the murder to the financial inequities that exist in the education system, it's an important point to make, and still a moving story.

Philip Weiss examines a new kind of radicalism at Columbia University, in
One, Two, Three, Four, Can a Columbia Movement Rise Once More? Apparently Students for a Democratic Society, one of the most important and prominent student political organisations of the 1960s, has reformed. As Weiss points out though, the Israel/Palestine issue makes everything just a bit more complicated this time around.

And finally, on a slightly more bizarre note,
Girth and Nudity, a Pictorial Mission: Leonard Nimoy (of Star Trek fame) is taking photographs of obese women.

Comic

Nerdy American history comic! Hooray! (found by Crip, who kindly emailed it to me)
Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

"Rewriting the Ad Rules for Muslim-Americans"

Interesting article in the New York Times about attempts by companies to market to Muslim-Americans. I thought this little tid-bit was particularly telling:

Ms. Salzman said JWT [an advertising agency] had little trouble surveying Muslims in Britain, but found it had to clarify at the start of each phone call in the United States that it was not calling from a government agency.

Abortion ban

The US Supreme Court has voted to uphold the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. The decision is "the first in which the court has upheld a ban on a specific method of abortion".

The decision is pretty, well, stupid for many different reasons, not least of which is that Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, "said that pregnant women or their doctors could assert an individual need for a health exception by going to court to challenge the law as it applied to them." Because when you're gravely ill and need a termination, you definitely time to wait around for the Supreme Court to make up its mind. Norma Leah McCorvey, more famously known as the 'Roe' in Roe v. Wade, waited three years for her case to go before the Court. In the meantime, she of course had given birth - bit hard to get access to an abortion when your daughter is 3 years old. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsurg quite rightly points out, this is unrealistic and "gravely mistaken".

Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion is incredible (and yes, I have enough time on my hands now to read dissenting Supreme Court opinions - you too can experience the fun here; the dissenting opinion starts on page 49 of the pdf). She methodically goes through all of her objections to the Court's ruling, labelling the justifications used to avoid including any exception to protect a woman's health "flimsy and transparent". As she so rightly points out,

The law saves not a single fetus from destruction, for it targets only a method of performing abortion...the procedures deemed acceptable might put a woman's health at greater risk.

She goes on to say that

Eliminating or reducing women's reproductive choices is manifestly not a means of protecting them. When safe abortion procedures cease to be an option, many women seek other means to end unwanted or coerced pregnancies.

She's particularly hard on the sections of the majority opinion that seek to 'protect' women and their 'fragile states' from any emotional pain because of the "bond of love the mother has for her child." As she says,

This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women's place in the family and under the Constitution - ideas that have long since been discredited.

She quotes some past Supreme Court decisions that make this evolution in beliefs clear. I particularly liked this one, from the 1873 decision Bradwell v. State:

Man is, or should be, woman's protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life...The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil[l] the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.

I could go on quoting her opinion for a very long time, but instead I'll just leave you with this, her final paragraph:

In sum, the notion that the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act furthers any legitimate governmental interest is, quite simply, irrational. The Court's defense of the statute provides no saving explanation. In candor, the Act, and the Court's defense of it, cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court - and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives.

Super stunt

The Super Stunt: this story is bloody incredible. A group of guys managed to get two vanloads of 'party lights' through ridiculous levels of security at the last Super Bowl, that they then gave out to the audience to spell out a secret message at half-time. Crazy stuff. Make sure you also check out the Michael Jackson credit card prank as well...

Lunatics in history

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

This guy sounds like my kinda lunatic! Here's the bio that came with the results:

Born in England sometime in the second decade of the nineteenth century, you carved a notable business career, in South Africa and later San Francisco, until an entry into the rice market wiped out your fortune in 1854. After this, you became quite different. The first sign of this came on September 17, 1859, when you expressed your dissatisfaction with the political situation in America by declaring yourself Norton I, Emperor of the USA. You remained as such, unchallenged, for twenty-one years.

Within a month you had decreed the dissolution of Congress. When this was largely ignored, you summoned all interested parties to discuss the matter in a music hall, and then summoned the army to quell the rebellious leaders in Washington. This did not work. Magnanimously, you decreed (eventually) that Congress could remain for the time being. However, you disbanded both major political parties in 1869, as well as instituting a fine of $25 for using the abominable nickname "Frisco" for your home city.

Your days consisted of parading around your domain - the San Francisco streets - in a uniform of royal blue with gold epaulettes. This was set off by a beaver hat and umbrella. You dispensed philosophy and inspected the state of sidewalks and the police with equal aplomb. You were a great ally of the maligned Chinese of the city, and once dispersed a riot by standing between the Chinese and their would-be assailants and reciting the Lord's Prayer quietly, head bowed.

Once arrested, you were swiftly pardoned by the Police Chief with all apologies, after which all policemen were ordered to salute you on the street. Your renown grew. Proprietors of respectable establishments fixed brass plaques to their walls proclaiming your patronage; musical and theatrical performances invariably reserved seats for you and your two dogs. (As an aside, you were a good friend of Mark Twain, who wrote an epitaph for one of your faithful hounds, Bummer.) The Census of 1870 listed your occupation as "Emperor".

The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco, upon noticing the slightly delapidated state of your attire, replaced it at their own expense. You responded graciously by granting a patent of nobility to each member. Your death, collapsing on the street on January 8, 1880, made front page news under the headline "Le Roi est Mort". Aside from what you had on your person, your possessions amounted to a single sovereign, a collection of walking sticks, an old sabre, your correspondence with Queen Victoria and 1,098,235 shares of stock in a worthless gold mine. Your funeral cortege was of 30,000 people and over two miles long.

The burial was marked by a total eclipse of the sun.

Is that a flying pig?

Shock! Horror! Hilary Clinton's running for president! No-one saw that one coming...

the Iraq War as Star Trek

"There are Klingons in the White House! Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to war!"

I want this guy as my representative.

Underpaid Americans and over-drugged Irish

There's an article over at the BBC about the American minimum wage that's equally fascinating and horrific. Right now in the US the minimum wage is a US$5.15 an hour ($6.58 in Australian dollars). Right now I'm getting paid almost 4 times that, and while I realise I'm horrendously overpaid for what I do, I got far more than that when I was 16 and working in retail. The figure hasn't gone up in ten years in the States; the Democrats want to raise it up US$7.25 by 2009, but this will only make it $9.27 in Australian dollars, still far below what I was making in grade 10. The woman featured in the article, Gina Walter, does a job very similar to the one I had back then, but she has to eat off paper plates because she can't afford the water bill if she washed her dishes every night. I know there's a "working poor" in Australia as well, and that trying to live off our minimum wage is not exactly easy either, but I'm sure to women like Gina Walter what we get paid in this country would seem enormous.

Urgh. Enough of that depressing topic. Here's a weird story for you: apparently 100% of banknotes in Ireland have traces of cocaine on them. Make of that what you will!

US Elections

Democrats Take Control of House. Hell yes! This is the best news I've heard in a long time...

Presidential elections website

Very quick update with some linky goodness before I absolutely must, without a doubt, start doing some work:

The Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections was recommended to me yesterday by one of my lecturers, although the recommendation was prefaced with the statement "the guy's obviously a bit of a nutter", a statement which was seconded by another lecturer today. Having had a look, this Dave Leip is clearly a little bit OCD, but in a good way, because his obsession has resulted in such an insanely useful website (if you're into U.S. elections...which I am!). The data goes back all the way to 1789, and the notes that accompany each year are really interesting and helpful. I had been wondering about the election of 1864 (how do you run an election during a Civil War?), and not only did this website answer my questions about that, I've learned quite a few other cool things too.

Well, cool for me anyway. I realise that this blog is quickly turning into a continual (one-sided) discussion about American history, but I'm enjoying writing about it, so I don't really care that much if people are not enjoying reading about it!

I'd like to thank...

I have a rather strange obsession with the acknowledgements pages in non-fiction books. Usually they're just your standard list of helpful librarians, colleagues, and critics, with a heartfelt thank you to family members at the end. Which is, you know, fine. I still find them a rather fascinating insight into how a book gets written, and occasionally you'll come across some real gems. Like this story:

Writing the history of African America from outside, indeed from halfway around the world, has many pleasures, and not the least of them in recent years has been trying to explain to the immigration officials at LAX or SFO, hypervigilantly guarding the United States, exactly what it is that an historian on a research trip does. Shane White has been the recipient of much gratuitous advice at American airports about how to write history. One immigration official, on being told that the Australian academic was flying on to New York, barked back, "There's history out there," pointing in the general direction of downtown Los Angeles or conceivably New York in the far distance. "Go and do it!" Shane White still occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night wondering about that little exchange.

-- The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, by Shane White and Graham White, p.231.

Also in The Sounds of Slavery is this rather strange little thank-you:

In particular, we would like to thank...Stephen Garton, a fine golfing companion until he became dean.

I also quite liked this brief digression into a discussion of endnotes vs. footnotes:

Generations of Captivity grows out of generations of scholarship which have made the historiography of slavery one of unrivalled richness. I have acknowledged my debt to that long tradition - and the men and women who made it - in the footnotes, which for reasons that confound logic no longer reside at the foot of the page.

-- Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, by Ira Berlin, p.363.

In older books, you'll often read quite effusive praise of the ladies (never men) in the university typing-pool who turned handwritten chapters into proper manuscripts. Here's an example:

Mrs. Anne Granger, Mrs. Janet Villastrigo, and Mrs. Rebecca Davis, who had the unenviable task of deciphering my script, cheerfully typed several drafts of the manuscript.

-- The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, by John W. Blassingame, p.ix.

Authors often use the acknowledgements section to thank those who read drafts of the book. Not usually very interesting, which is why I found the following intriguing, especially as Kenneth M. Stampp wrote one of the most influential books on slavery, The Peculiar Institution... well, at least until Fogel and Engerman wrote Time on the Cross, probably one of the most controversial books ever written on slavery, if not all of American history.

We wish particularly to acknowledge our debt to Kenneth M. Stampp, who provided us with forty-one single-spaced pages of commentary.

-- Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, p.267.

After Time on the Cross was published in 1974, Fogel went on to write Without Consent or Contract, published in 1989. In that book's acknowledgement section, there was this lengthy testimonial to a particular colleague:

Marilyn Coopersmith, the administrator for our slavery project from 1966 until the present, not only efficiently coordinated the many aspects of data collection and analysis, sometimes personally searching distant archives for useful data, but provided a drive and enthusiasm for the work that infected everybody associated with the project. Perhaps the best assessment of her contribution was the one made by Albert Fishlow in April 1973, when he and Robert Gallman spent a day providing me with their detailed criticisms of a draft of Time on the Cross. At the conclusion of our session, deeply appreciative of all that I had learned from their many points, I offered to supply them with copies of our computer tapes, adding that Engerman and I wanted to compete, not by hoarding the data, but by trying to be more thorough in the analysis of them. Fishlow cocked back his head for a moment and said: "Who are you trying to kid, Bob? You know that unless you also give us Marilyn Coopersmith it won't be a fair contest."

-- Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, Robert W. Fogel, p.418.

Marilyn Coopersmith got a mention in Robert Fogel's Nobel Prize biography (he won for Economics in 1993), which I guess is one of the ultimate acknowledgements possible.

So yeah, acknowledgements. Fascinating! All of these are just taken from books I read for my most recent essay, but I've seen some other fantastic ones as well. Anyone got some favourites of their own?

(Yes, this is a nerdy obsession to have. But you know what? I really don't care...)

So I like a disgusting joke now and then...

...as long as it has an edge of history nerd.

I've been laughing at this on and off all week, so I thought I'd share it with the world. This appeared in the satire section of Woroni, the ANU's student newspaper, under the heading "Build Your Vocab."

Boston tea-bagging, n., A sexual act, a variation on the well-known act of tea-bagging. One sneaks up on one's sleeping lover, carefully drops one's balls into the sleeping lover's mouth, and then screams, "No taxation without representation!"

I know as a joke it's pretty immature and disgusting, but I've been desperately trying to think of a way to casually drop this into one of my American history essays for days now. So far no success, but I will persevere...

Ok, back to work. Urgh.

Things in the life of me

Neck still sore, but it is getting better. I went back to the physio today, which will make that the second time this week, and the ninth time this year. And I'm going again on Monday. My normal physio is on holiday at the moment, and I swear I paid for at least a few nights accommodation of his trip all on my own. Because he's away, it does mean that I'm currently seeing another guy, who I'm not terribly crazy about, and not just because he put me in this traction machine today. Not a particularly comfortable experience, but I survived.

So yeah, not a lot of work has been done this week (read: none), so I'm starting to freak out just a little about how I'm going to get everything done before exams, especially considering that I've only been on the computer for about half an hour this evening, and already I can feel the start of that wearily familiar creeping stiffness. Thank god for my absolutely fabulous politics lecturer, who has pretty much given me an indefinite extension on my essay, which was due on Tuesday. Now I just have to somehow find a way of doing a 2,500 word history essay, an enormous IT assignment, and a group-work project management assignment without once again collapsing in a heap of very undignified pain. *Sigh* I guess it'll get done... somehow....

But! It's not all doom and gloom in my neck (ha!) of the woods. I just found out that Natalie and I have just secured the third and final housemate of the House of Fun (tm) for next year, which is tops. Now we just need to find a house, which I'm sure will be the easiest part of the entire enterprise.

How about some linky goodness?

Here's a McSweeney's List for all the nerds out there: St. James Parish Sewing Club Members Whose First Names Sound Like Programming Languages - "Fortrannah."

Recently I've been enjoying Ferule & Fescue.

Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme (kinda) live-blogged the premiere of their new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Some more links for the nerds: Google has launched Google Code Search, but from my cursory examination, I still think codefetch is one of the greatest things ever invented if you want to search for code examples. (Pretty cool aside: my previous comments about codefetch are still up on the codefetch blog, right below a testimonial from Matt Haughey of metafilter fame.)


Jason Kottke's got a list of books on the Civil Rights movement to go along with the documentary Eyes on the Prize which I mentioned earlier this week. I would heartily second Taylor Branch's trilogy on America in the King Years, an incredile set of books, as well as Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home. I'd also suggest An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young, and Allen Matusow's The Unraveling of America, which although isn't just about Civil Rights, has several good chapters on the topic (I've mentioned the book twice before, here and here).

Alrighty. That should do for tonight - Natalie's coming up for tea, and there is not a single clean mug in my entire room.

Eyes on the Prize

PBS in the US is currently showing the 14-hour documentary Eyes on the Prize, a history of the American civil rights movement. I tried desperately to find a copy of this earlier in the year, to no avail, so I'm insanely jealous of those people in the States who can watch it over the next few weeks. The transcripts are available on the website, which I guess is the next best thing, but I'd still love to see the actual thing.

I have more to talk about (including this week's Monday Madness questions), but I re-injured my neck yesterday, so writing this entry has pretty much used up all the time I can currently spend using a keyboard without collapsing in pain. Again. To say that I'm sick of this could possibly be the biggest understatement of the millennium.

Experts and idiots

Stephen Colbert, of Daily Show fame, has a hilarious article in this month's Wired magazine, entitled Be an Expert on Anything. With tips such as "Use the word zeitgeist as often as possible" and "Get an honorary PhD", there's something for everyone.

I've got a post floating around in the back of my brain on (not) hating America, inspired in part by this, but mostly by my continual frustration by the blind anti-Americanism I continually encounter in the course of my American Studies major... but I'm off to Melbourne in an hour or so to see Bron do her thing in a play (hooray!), so it'll have to wait.

Sufficed to say that I'm so utterly sick of this automatic, reflexive hatred of the US that seems so 'hip' with so many Australians. It even comes up in my history class this semester, which is fucking ludicrous, seeing as we're studying the American Revolution. I mean, can you separate out your dislike for George W. Bush for one hour while we have a look at the Declaration of Independence? I mean, I know you can't compartmentalise history, but I think it's far more important to look at how the development of the US has meant that the current situation in the US is possible, rather than going the other way and imposing your narrow-minded opinions on the Founding Fathers.

Huh. That went a little longer than I intended. I guess I'm more pissed off about the subject than I thought! More coherent thoughts to (possibly) follow...

Little Rock student newspaper

Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was the centre of one of the most important events of the American Civil Rights movement, when nine black students tried to enrol for the 1957 academic year. Initially the students were prevented from enrolling by a racist mob and the Arkansas National Guard, but eventually President Eisenhower ordered the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to protect them, and the 'The Little Rock Nine' studied for a year at the High School, before it was closed in 1958 so as to avoid integration.

Images from the crisis are pretty famous - one in particular, of student Elizabeth Eckford, is extremely well-known (you can see it here). While looking for a copy of that photo, I came across the website of the 40th anniversary commemoration of the events of 1957, which leads (eventually) to the point of this post. I find the entire Civil Rights movement absolutely fascinating, but for obvious reasons you usually only hear the story of the African-Americans who were engaged in attempts to end segregation, not of those white Americans who lived in the South. Which is why the anniversary site is so interesting, because it includes articles from the Little Rock Central High School student newspaper, 'The Tiger', from the period of the segregation crisis.

If nothing else, the articles show that while there may have been racist mobs outside of the school, there were students who supported the process of integration. The Editor urged students to "prove that America's youth has not "gone to the dogs" that their moral, spiritual, and educational standards are not being lowered." Certainly the student-body as a whole was not overwhelmingly or completely welcoming to the nine new students, but it's interesting to read of the perspectives of white students who were intimately involved in the integration crisis, and important to remember that not all of the south at that time was racist.

My mind on freedom

On Monday I handed in an essay for my American Sixties history course, focusing on the impact of television. As much as I absolutely loathe writing essays, I really enjoyed doing the research for this one, perhaps because I got to focus on two pretty disparate topics: the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968.

Anyway, as part of my research for the essay I watched all of the absolutely wonderful documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. Towards the beginning of the documentary there's a bit on how many students started out in the civil rights movement, before moving onto bigger and more radical things. The film has a fantastic soundtrack, but one song in this section got stuck in my head for days - 'I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom', sung by the SNCC Freedom Singers. Desperate to hear it again, I did a bit of searching, and came across Sweet Chariot: the story of the spirituals, a project from the University of Denver, and the actual point of this post.

It's a really interesting site, with lots of information. Best of all, however, are the many many music samples you can listen to, including I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom (the version of This Little Light of Mine on that page is also wonderful). Highly recommended: have a look around and a listen!

Canadian = communist

I'm currently doing research for an essay on the impact of television in America in the 1960s, focusing in part on the role it played in the Vietnam War. Which is how I came across the fantastic quote below, found in Chester J. Pach, Jr.'s chapter 'And that's the way it was: the Vietnam War on the network nightly news', from The Sixties: from memory to history, edited by David Farber.

Morley Safer was a CBS correspondent who, in 1965, filed a report about a US search-and-destroy mission in Cam Ne. In the report Safer questioned the way the mission, and the war as a whole, was conducted. Unsurprisingly, Safer immediately came under fire from several quarters, including the President, which is where the following bit of gold comes from.

Even more vehement than the official criticism of Safer's reporting was the attack on his integrity. Leading the assault was Lyndon B. Johnson. "Are you trying to fuck me?" Johnson asked caustically in a telephone conversation with CBS president Frank Stanton. "Your boys shat on the American flag." The president was convinced that Safer was a communist, but an investigation proved only that he was a Canadian.

Anti-Canadian, Anti-Communist gold! Take note, people: according to LBJ, Canadian = Communist. Watch out for your children. The fun continues, as officials try to argue that being Canadian means you can't provide a 'balanced' outlook on the war:

"Well, I knew he wasn't an American," Johnson sneered. "Why do you have to use foreigners to cover that war?" inquired Bill Moyers, an aide to Johnson, of another CBS correspondent. Canadian birth was reason enough for Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, to demand Safer's relief. "I think that an American reporter," Sylvester wrote Friendly, "would be more sensitive" to the need for "balance" in reporting U.S. actions in Vietnam.

I'm sure you'll all be glad to know that Safer did keep his job with CBS and wasn't deported for being communist/Canadian, although Pach does provide evidence that Safer did moderate his tone after the incident, and actually started carrying a gun when in Vietnam out of fear that "an accident" might befall him.

In other less-entertaining news, my fucking tooth has started hurting again. I finally went to the specialist yesterday to have a root canal, but he must have agitated it or something because I'm in rather large amounts of pain right now. I'm supposed to go back in September so the root canal can be finished (he only did one out of the three roots on Tuesday), but I'm thinking I might give them a call tomorrow to see if they can't fit me in a little sooner! I'm so over this whole thing, and can certainly think of better ways I could be spending my days. Especially when the procedure on Tuesday cost me $857!! I can definitely think of better ways to spend that kind of money...