I've always gotten a little paralysis in restaraunts with huge menu selections. I tend to brand loyalty so I don't have to make too many decisions; my shopping choices for basic commodities are very price-influenced. This is how I avoid the problem of having too many choices, which apparently isn't as good for us, or the economy, as free-marketeers seem to think.

So naturally, the plethora of Democratic candidates has left me with some ambivalence. There are a few with strong records, a few with good ideas, a few who are just whacko for being in the race (these are not mutually exclusive categories, either). I live in what may be the most irrelevant state in the Union, so it's not like my opinion matters too much, but I like to have one. Fortunately, through the wonders of e-mail forwarding, a solution came to my inbox: a Web Quiz. AOL/Time-Warner put it together, and it's current (i.e. no Gephardt), and includes both Democratic and Republican candidates (OK, only one Republican, but lots of Democrats). You can choose to do the quiz and select only from one party, but that's no fun: it's much more entertaining to take the chance that you might match up to someone you didn't expect. Alternative party ("Third" party is such a bad term, when there are so many of them) candidates aren't on the list yet, which is disappointing. They say that after the primaries are over, they'll add them, but I'm sure there are other parties that already have candidates selected.

The quiz runs through questions about a variety of policy issues, then lets you weight those issues, and gives you a percentage match to the candidates. How did I come out? OK, I'll tell. Two of my top three were unelectable: I had a perfect match to Kucinich and a 94% match to Sharpton (which is your first clue that there aren't enough questions on the quiz). George Bush was at the bottom with 6%, which I think underestimates the areas of agreement between us, but certainly captures how I feel about him as a candidate. The lowest Democrat was Lieberman, in the low 70s. Edwards, Clark and Dean were in the 80s (ascending order). And I had a 95% match with John Kerry, who I've always liked as a Senator.

These results aren't too surprising (Sharpton's ascendancy aside), which suggests to me that the poll is reasonably well constructed. This raises an interesting possibility. What if we did away with the tortuous primary process, and instead did some kind of national party poll, aided by a selector quiz like this, with ranked-preference voting? Then the nominee would indeed represent the will of the party membership. For example, I could vote for Kucinich, followed by Kerry and Edwards (in spite of the higher matches for Dean and Clark, I don't think either of them would really be their own president). Then the lowest vote-getter's votes would be distributed to their voter's second choice, and my vote for Kucinich would become a vote for Kerry. The top three or four could go to the convention, unless there was a clear majority victor before that.

The technology exists to make this work, and work pretty well. How many special interests would it violate to have a reasonably open and rational process?

(It occurs to me that State of the Union addresses are as close as Americans get to those multi-hour Politburo performances. Let’s hear it for the free world!)

But where was the Space Program? A friend told me that there was no mention of the final frontier. I got a transcript, searched it, and he was right! One week from the announcement of the next great expansion of the Final Frontier, and the trip is over.

This gives lots of ammo to those critics who saw the Mars Project as a way to kill off NASA. They could be right. Killing NASA would fit with the neo-con desire to move weapons into space. That’s harder to do when civilians are floating around up there.

(To be fair, the neo-cons have had help. A lot of the momentum within the military for expanding space forces developed during the Clinton Administration.)

So we kill Hubble, hand the Space Station to the Europeans like a landlord leasing an apartment to students, (“Sure heat is included, and the windows hardly leak”) and leave most of our space activities deep in a black budget somewhere. No dreams, except dreams of power.

Postscript: It looks like Bush is going to increase the budget . It is still odd, though, his not mentioning it. Any thoughts?

I was reminded of the Fichtner Principle when reading a recent Chronicle of Higher Education ,article regarding a program for “diversity” cluster hiring at the University of Arizona. A campus “diversity committee” has proposed “recruiting not just one or even two diverse faculty members as isolated ‘targets of opportunity,’ but rather a critical mass of diverse professors who have shared intellectual interests." “Diversity,” therefore, becomes little more than a mask to ensure ideological conformity among the new faculty.

The plan is part of a broader emphasis on diversity in hiring at the U of A, one that envisions a university in which “diversity” rather than academic quality becomes the primary motive for hiring, promotion, and tenure. According to the diversity plan of the campus, in faculty personnel matters, “In order to make significant progress in creating a more diverse faculty and a campus that truly embraces diversity, the advancement of diversity must be established as a primary indicator of quality.” Until diversity, the report concludes, “is included in the institutional family of primary indicators of quality, other indicators will continue to trump it – especially in the hiring of new faculty.” The U of A contends that “this does not mean lessening our commitment to excellence in research and teaching,” but such a claim is absurd: research and teaching, according to the “diversity” plan, will have to meet an ideological litmus test before being judged on their quality. Indeed, the plan argues, “Depending upon the discipline,” new faculty should be required to “conduct research and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on the importance of valuing diversity.”

The U of A is one of two major universities (Virginia Tech is the other) that has committed itself to implementing the diversity theories of Harvard Education School researcher Cathy Trower. In a talk at Chicago summarizing her findings, Trower listed a variety of subtle developments in the academy that she contends undercut efforts at diversity, including the “single-minded devotion to professional pursuits” and excessive value placed on research. “To compound the problem,” she continued, “some members of the majority, for reasons of self-interest or self-defined notions of ‘quality,’ are reluctant to grant newcomers a toehold.”

According to the Trower/U of A worldview, traditional academic conceptions of quality—peer-reviewed publication, lecture-and-discussion style teaching—is a negative. Colleges instead should stress fidelity to a particular ideological agenda in their hiring processes.

There are a couple of ways to approach the Trower analysis. The first, of course, is that it envisions a radically different type of university, one based on the promotion of a specific ideological agenda, and designed to train a generation of social activists rather than teach students knowledge from traditional academic disciplines.

There is also, however, another way to approach the Trower agenda: it is little more than an updated version of the Fichtner Principle. It’s no coincidence that no prestigious research university has adopted this approach to hiring. For mediocre scholars, however, it must be awfully tempting to pretend that the assault on quality is not a case of second-class departments making third-class hires, but instead a commitment to “diversity,” as if, somehow, Trower is correct that the only way to produce a “diverse” faculty is to abandon a commitment to quality scholarship.

Take a look at this story about Winston Churchill and his companion, Charlie. As King said,"Longevity has its place." Long live Charlie!

Attrition rates among graduate students in the humanities and the need for reform in graduate education are important recent themes at Critical Mass and Invisible Adjunct. Tim Burke looks sympathetically on the complaints, but suggests that some grad students should just ..., well, attrit.

When administrators do not defend free speech rights in academic communities, it's a problem. When they are the ones obstructing freedom of speech in their communities, they should resign. The Mobile Register carries a good article about ham-fisted attempts to suppress freedom of speech at the University of Alabama. There is more on the story at Liberty & Power.

The sense of loss when thoughtful speech goes silent, even momentarily, is a good reminder of the necessity of defending and supporting it. Two of my favorite blogs, Invisible Adjunct and Moby Lives, are on temporary hiatus and life is the poorer for it.

Historians of the Movement have long sensed the centrality of the church to the struggle, but how the hope for freedom was sustained in the difficult first half of the 20th century has been poorly documented. That is what interested me in creating the Vernon Johns Papers Project. Hardly representative of Afro-Baptist preachers of his generation, Johns was Martin Luther King's predecessor as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Both erudite and crude, he was an off-spring of extra-ordinary violence, who never repudiated violence as a means of achieving freedom. An erudite early sermon, "Transfigured Moments", appeared in a book of sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others; his advocacy of violent means to achieve freedom is a more complicated and personal story. Here is a deeply flawed biography of Johns. No wonder the biographer had such trouble with the only person who was involved in both the struggle toward Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. His papers were twice destroyed, so I am publishing the Vernon Johns Papers. [Does that sound like a non sequitur or what?] He is one difficult subject and I am one tenacious researcher. We have met our match and we are us.

Howard Thurman was one of Vernon Johns's more amiable friends. Again, hardly typical of Afro-Baptist preachers of his generation, Thurman was a mystic seer and we will learn much more about him and his influence from the Howard Thurman Papers Project. Even two atypical subjects cannot represent the typical, but they can point to the"representative" in the Emersonian sense of the word. If not a typical Afro-Baptist preacher of his generation, King was its representative in that sense. For 15 years now, the Martin Luther King Papers Project at Stanford has been teaching us about its subject. Easily the largest and most generously funded of any project cited here, it has the most sophisticated website. Unfortunately, it has deleted a highly useful"search" function, which allowed me to search on-line documents and publish "Quoting, Merging, and Sampling the Dream: Martin Luther King and Vernon Johns" (subscription only). You'll need to write a very big grant application if you want that kind of research done now. King Project researchers will do it for you for $125.00 per hour. [It says that's negotiable, but King-related efforts long ago learned that being a non-profit doesn't mean it should be unprofitable.] The Malcolm X Project at Columbia seems still unclear about what and when it will publish from the papers of Malcolm X.

Some of the net's sources on particular movements are more useful than others. The Greensboro Sit-Ins and the Albany, Georgia, Civil Rights Museum sites are good examples of these. Documentation projects, such as the Ralph Bunche Civil Rights Documentation Project at Howard University and the Civil Rights Documentation Project at the University of Southern Mississippi are generally more helpful to scholars. The latter's transcripts of oral history interviews with civil rights activists are especially useful.

Forty years of grim reaping has taken its toll, but Civil Rights Movement Veterans is the best place for locating survivors for interviews, reminiscences, and speakers. In a real sense, the Movement continues. Two important resources in that respect are Christopher Edley's Civil Rights Project at Harvard and, of course, a blog, Silver Rights. Its proprietor really should credit Connie Curry's book and its subjects for his title, but some civil rights activists were always more litigious than others and intellectual property rights have long been in play.

Someone, somewhere should be keeping score. I love science fiction and fantasy, particularly that branch of science fiction that really tries to extrapolate into the future: experiments with history, when they're done well. One of my prized possessions is a collection of short stories that does just that: experiment with the future of sport and competition. The Science Fictional Olympics, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh, includes some fine fiction: my personal favorite stories are probably Arthur C. Clarke's elegant"The Wind From The Sun," about the thrills and drama of solar sail racing, and"Prose Bowl," by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, which postulates head-to-head competition between pulp fiction writers, complete with penalties for split infinitives and mixed metaphors. I loved that story before I ever heard of poetry slams, or Japanese poetry competitions or renga (group-written linked verse), or the Delphic Games (like the Olympics, but they included competitions in poetry and song as well as athletics), and I think underlies my interest in these forms of competitive public authorship.

But the Cassandra award of the day is shared by two stories on a different subject. The intense but gentle"A Glint of Gold" by Nicholas V. Yermakov, and the more broadly funny"The Mickey Mouse Olympics" by Tom Sullivan both postulate a future in which genetic manipulation turns high level athletic competition into a form of competitive science. Yermakov's story focuses on the human (well, mostly human) costs of single-purpose people. Sullivan's story even includes international agreements against genetic manipulation, though the US and USSR (OK, they didn't see that one coming) are clearly violating it with abandon, and Disney is the primary sponsor of the Olympics, since nobody else can afford the facilities; the punch line really is a punch line, being about boxing. You can even read them as a sequence, with Sullivan as a sequel to Yermakov.

Silly, unlikely stuff, I hear you say? Not according to the NYTimes Magazine story about"Mighty Mice." It seems that a little genetic manipulation can turn ordinary lab rats into over-sized, eternal-youth, muscle-mice, and these techniques are within the grasp of skilled, not necessarily brilliant, technicians and doctors. That would be in addition to all the steroids and supplements and stimulants and oxygen-training that already take remarkable athletes and turn them into freakish over-achievers.

This raises all kinds of questions: What is the entertainment value of barely-human athletes? For me, chemical enhancement takes the drama and reality out of a sport, and turns it into an"arms race" (it's hard to talk about this without a few puns creeping in), but for others it might make it more personally achievable and therefore more relevant. What are the limits of human potential, what is the dividing line between human and ubermensch, and does it matter? (Robert Heinlein's Friday is partially an extended meditation on that subject as well; there are many others, of course.) Where do you put the asterisks in the record book? Single stars for super-trainers; double-stars for steroids; triple-stars for gene therapies; four-star notations for specially-bred? Or do you just establish separate lists, and separate leagues? There is the matter of intellectual property rights: if gene therapies or gene manipulations for athletes are commercially developed, who owns the athletes when they're done and who gets credit for their achievements? (Imagine an update to Sullivan: the Monsanto Manipulators against the Pfizer Pfixers, two teams of scientists pitting their carefully engineered teams against each other in an range of events, stock prices fluctuating with the success or failure of the"athletic products.") What is the balance between risk and reward: if you could climb Mt. Everest without special equipment, but would only live to be 14, would it be worth it? Really? And, in the immediate present, what about the ethics of the athletes and trainers who are already calling scientists to sign up for procedures that have never been tried on human beings before.

The things we do to ourselves.....

My brothers have a passion for Death Valley and the area around it. I have spent less time there than they have, but it impresses me, too. Beautifully desolate as it is, what interests me most is actually the human landscape, past and present, that it contains, the stories restlessly lost within its boundaries.

I think in the end the reason that I myself am drawn more to the sensibility of the humanities as a historian than the social sciences is that I want the history I write and read to be attentive to and engaged by the idiosyncratic experience of people like the singer at the Amargosa Opera House.

My current book project is a series of essays about the lives of three Zimbabwean men who were born in the early 20th Century and died in the 1980s. The main thread running through the essays is my feeling that I need to write about their lives and choices in individualized, particularized ways, and not to turn them into typified, representative sketches of collectives or groups the way that social history in Africanist scholarship often does, or the way that social science usually aggregates particular experiences into patterns and structures. It’s not that it is invalid to do those things—in fact, it’s necessary and of course I do it myself as a scholar and intellectual, all the time and without apology.

It’s just that I regret it when history as a rhetorical form or intellectual discipline doesn’t make room for the particularity and peculiarity of experience as such. Once when I presented a short summary of my current project to a group of social scientists, one smiled and said, “So you are studying outliers, that can be useful.” Well, yes and no. To study individual stories, or idiosyncratic communities and narratives, as outliers is just another way of typifying them, relating them to a norm or representative population. In a way, I’m arguing that all historical experience is an outlier, that we can find in it something that has to be understood for itself, of itself—but that also can be understood by relating it to what any of us live and do in our lives. Sometimes it takes a life strange to your own life, in all its individuality, to make you realize just how strange even your own life and history are.

Death Valley brings that home, somehow. It’s not just the lonely opera houses, or the obvious ghost towns on its fringe. One afternoon near there my brother, father and I drove out some miles from any settlement on a barely visible dirt path between the mountains, and eventually happened to glimpse a nearby hillside that had a cave or hole at the top. We clambered up about 300 feet to find that we were looking at a homely, crude mineshaft that had clearly been hacked out by no more than two or three men at some point in the last 120 years. It didn’t go down very far, we could see that, but it was still a few years’ worth of work. We could see a few old signs of the work of the unknown prospectors left scattered around. It was pretty clear that they had found nothing of value. A few men shivered through cold desert nights in the winter and blazing heat in the day the rest of the year to dig out some rocks from a desolate mountainside in the middle of one of the great wastelands on the planet.

Maybe one of them left his bones or his spirit or his hopes at the bottom of that hole, or maybe they just shrugged and moved on, unbothered and unruffled by time and labor that could for me be nothing but pointless suffering. I can’t say. I’ll never be able to say. But I’d hate to simply bury that hole inside of a whole, or to lose that opera house to the tender care of a poetics inadmissable in the practice of history.

His essay—which centers on a commemorative statue for a man who is both a founder of El Paso and a killer of natives—got me to thinking about the Confederate flag and my own internal conflict concerning it.

When I grew up in Texas I was taught to honor the Confederate flag. It was almost on a par with the U.S. flag and the state flag. (Whenever you pass through Texas, just look at the number of Lone Stars flying.)

I did not think of the flags this coherently, but as a kid all three signified different tableaus of the same courage. The Alamo, a Confederate charge, Normandy. They were all in some way a part of the same world of military honor; so each flag symbolized that common honor.

Even when I went to college (Fall 1970) and became far more aware of the Civil Rights movement, my respect for the flag continued. But that attitude ran into new challenges. The anti-war movement stuck question marks on most of my adolescent military visions. Also I had friends who disliked the flag viscerally, who saw in each one a redneck bigot’s vision of America. I chose not to argue, largely because I thought they might be right. By then I knew much more about slavery. Still my heart did not quite agree.

It was only in 1988, when I started my Ph.D. work at South Carolina that I really began to think my friends were right. The USC is adjacent to the state capital, and proudly atop the capital, the Confederate flag flew.

There was no romanticizing that context. The flag went up there early in the Civil Rights movement: a way of saying no to the North, no to Blacks, and yes to oppression and the antebellum heritage. Of course, time had passed between then and my arrival. The racial realities in 1988 South Carolina were far better—though hardly untroubled—than the situation when the flag was first unfurled there. Still it was there, and it was wrong that it was there.

That sense of wrongness only increased as my doctoral studies taught me far, far more about slavery, about the New South and Jim Crow, and about the truly bleak southern landscape of much of the 20th century. No flag with that sort of history should fly over a seat of government of a state in which so many descendants of the enslaved and the oppressed still dwell.

So, I had finished my conversion and flag was now anathema to me in any public place, right?

Not quite. There’s still a bit of a spark in my heart for it. In part that’s just a bit of childhood that I can’t or won’t let go. In part it may be something else, a reluctance to give up something that I long associated with things that are good: honor and the willingness to value some things more than life.

Is it possible to celebrate the good in something bad, without celebrating the bad? Sure. Can that be done with the Confederacy and its flag? Someday, perhaps, but not now, when the legacy of slavery and the century of struggle over freedom is well within living memory (if not still going on). The misuse of the love of that flag by individuals and groups truly dedicated to hate confirms that.

But when I see people who are not using it for hate’s sake, who see in it what I once saw (and still glimpse), I feel a bit of kinship, right or wrong.