Now that Ah-nold has endorsed John McCain, we eagerly await John McClane’s alter ego to fill out the Planet Hollywood trifecta. (Sylvester Stallone effectively came out for McCain during an interview promoting his most recent gorefest.)

We know Chuck Norris is in the Huckabee camp, but where’s Romney’s muscle? (Rumors that he’s hours away from gaining the endorsement of the guy who played Thug #2 in Sin City have not been confirmed.)

I’ve often wondered about the strangely verbose and self-important irrelevance of contemporary universities. Think about it. In 1968 the universities were at the center of political and social ferment. Students were in the streets. Professors such as C. Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, and Herbert Marcuse were articulate and influential voices in the public square. The New Left and the universities seemed ready to unite into a potent force.

Yet it did not come to pass. To be sure, our universities remain ideologically committed. Recent studies confirm what everyone already knows—professors are overwhelmingly men and women of the Left, especially when it comes to disciplines in that have to do with the study of culture. But this ideological homogeneity is now hopelessly irrelevant to contemporary politics. Professors lecture and write in an idiom that is, shall we say, obscure. When marginality gets down and dirty with the hyper-alterity of a trans-gendered discourse that (re)figures the identity of the hegemonic Other, it turns out that nobody is listening. Add institutionally imposed multi-culturalism, which is goofy when its not morally offensive, and you have the perfect recipe for irrelevance.

How did it happen? I used to have my own explanations, but recently I met with a friend at Starbucks. What she had to say shocked me. As she carefully laid out the story of corruption, bribery, and intrigue, I learned that the take-over of the universities by postmodern discourse was a Right Wing Conspiracy!

My friend won’t let me reveal her name, but I can say that she knows her way around the conservative power brokers in Washington. She wouldn’t let me tape our conversation. She won’t even let me take notes. So I’ll have to do my best to reconstruct her account . . .

It all started in the Nixon Whitehouse. The Watergate scandal was reaching it climax. Everybody in the administration felt that the end was near. Most were in survival mode. But a small coterie was more forward looking. In the early summer of 1974, H. R. Haldeman organized a Friday night group of young, iron-willed conservatives. They met over drinks at the Willard Hotel. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were regulars. They talked through their predicament. They all agreed that the tide was going out. It was the damned Liberal Establishment. They controlled the media. They controlled the Foundations. They controlled the universities. Cheney in particular was very pessimistic. “We’ll never recover,” he often moaned, “The Idea Crowd is against us.”

One night Henry Kissinger stopped by for a drink. He heard the diagnosis, and he agreed that the future was not bright. But on one point he rejected the prevailing gloomy mood. “Gentlemen,” he said is his coy way, “do not overestimate the professors. They are very cheaply bought.” Dumbfounded, Rumsfeld and Cheney asked. “You mean that we could pay them to become conservatives?” Kissinger chuckled, and then observed, “Enemies can rarely be made friends, but they can often be made ineffective. Bread and circuses. Bread and circuses. It’s the tried and true way.” After those words, Kissinger downed his scotch and soda and left the group scratching their heads.

That very Saturday, Rumsfeld went jogging with some college buddies from Princeton. One was an English professor at Georgetown. He talked about a new book by a French academic. Rumsfeld remembers the moment well. “What in the hell are you talking about?” he asked with a tone of aggressive dismissal. “Look,” his friend said, “this guy Derrida may catch on.” Suddenly Rumsfeld saw it all clearly. This Derrida fellow made no sense at all. What if he DID catch on? All the Leftist professors would become incomprehensible.

After showering, Rumsfeld called Cheney. They met with Haldeman, who immediately grasped the genius of the plan. Haldeman set up a meeting with Richard Scaife to secure funds. They swung into action. Their agents approached Steven Muller, the newly appointed President of Johns Hopkins, and with discrete contributions ensured that the English and French department took the “right” course of development. $5,000 here and there secured further translations of Derrida’s work. An outright bribe of the chairman of the English Department at Yale cleared the way for the dominance of J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. The stage was set.

Over the course of the next decade, the cabal of conservative conspirators continued to advance their plans. In the late 1980s, after using leverage to ensure the appointment of Stanley Fish at Duke, large amounts of money convinced the President of Duke to hire an entire team of postmodern deconstructionists away from Johns Hopkins. It took less cash to convince the careerists at Emory to buy the Hopkins French Department. Elite schools all over the county quivered with anxiety. Nobody wanted to miss the wave of academic fashion.

Pretty soon the conspirators didn’t need to do anything other than pay hush money to the Old Guard liberals. It was important that as few people as possible in academia speak out against the high and mighty theorizing of the postmodern gurus. Measures were taken to keep David Reisman silent. Secret donations were made to the New Republic so that Leon Weiseltier would wink at the growing literary irrelevance of contemporary study of literature. Not to leave anything to chance, they found a truculent Straussian with a record of opposition to the New Left to write a diatribe against postmodern academic culture. Alan Bloom so obviously a “bad guy” that all the “good guys” felt as though they had to defend postmodernism – or at least not give the appearance of agreeing with a retrograde reactionary like Bloom.

The conspirators were so successful at suppressing establishment liberal criticism that, as my friend reported, her contacts were disappointed when Richard Rorty went after the irrelevant academic Left in Achieving Our Country (1998). Why couldn’t he just keep up the impression that he was a pomo, multicultural fellow traveler? Nearly all the other liberals in academia did. But at least it came too late. That was even truer for Todd Gitlin and his pointed criticisms of postmodern political navel gazing in The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006). Now the pomo crowd is the new Old Guard.

“It all became too much for me to bear last week,” she said. “I was at a dinner at the Union League Club in New York. Rumsfeld and Cheney were there. It was a secret event to celebrate their success in discrediting the universities. Hilton Kramer gave the toast. I’ll never forget what he said: “Tonight we celebrate the stupidity of the professoriate. We’ve succeeded beyond our wildest imagination. Ignorant of the great books, overburdened with theoretical self-importance, professors these days can’t think their ways out of Target shopping bags. And, dear friends, it’s so easy to hit them with that bull’s eye draped over their heads.’”

As her account of the conspiracy drew to a close, my friend started to cry. “I just can’t believe that conservatives deliberately destroyed the intellectual integrity and moral authority of our universities.” I mumbled half-hearted words of comfort, and I tried to convince her that the whole account sounded somewhat unlikely. She wouldn’t hear me, and she left disconsolate. I sat sipping the last bit of my coffee, wondering, could it really be true?

Or is that bloggers who blog about Karl Barth? In any event, there’s a second annual conference scheduled for June, and Der Evangelische Theologe is calling for digital papers.

Imagine, though, if Barth did have a blog.

“Scientific dogmatics must devote itself to the criticism and correction of Church proclamation and not just to a repetitive exposition of it. But I think this YouTube video sums it up best . . .”

On Monday, Nathaniel wrote about college endowments and proposed legislation. The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy debates the question, “Should colleges be required to pay out a percentage of their endowments?” here.

So, last night, I took my daughter to her first live college basketball game—Georgetown vs. St. John’s, at Madison Square Garden.

She told me it was the best game she’d ever seen, which is a little bit sad—I’m such a bad father!—because the playing was pathetically lopsided. Georgetown was up 41-14 at halftime and, in truth, the game wasn’t even as close as that hopeless score seemed to show.

Even Faith, a diehard Hoyas fan who brought her stuffed Georgetown mascot to the game, was rooting for St. John’s to do something—anything—when the score reached 31 to 5 after fifteen minutes of play. Worse, all five of St. John’s points had come on free throws. The team’s first basket came with around 4:30 left in the half. Everyone in the arena stood up to cheer when St. John’s Justin Burrell finally hit a bank shot to break the ice-cold streak.

Faith reminded me, though, of perceptions I had forgotten over the years. Well, not forgotten, exactly, but stopped paying attention to. The excitement of a crowd, the ear-bending noise of the public-address system, the nearness of people in the neighboring seats, the distraction of the strolling venders with their cotton candy, peanuts, and beer.

After you’ve seen a lot of games in high-school gyms and college arenas and professional domes, you automatically correct in your mind the distortions of the view you get of basketball on television. But Faith had only watched games with me on screen, and she was struck by the facts that I forget to warn her about: The players are so big, she said in awe, and the court seems so small. It’s true—the court on television always seems bigger than it really is, and we lack perspective for the players’ size. You forget, until you see it in person, what it means that Georgetown’s center, Roy Hibbert, is more than seven feet tall.

Anyway, a sleepy cab ride back from the Garden, and home to bed, with the Georgetown mascot tucked in beside her. A blowout like this game would not have been my choice for her first live game. But better that than a Georgetown loss. Hoya Saxa!

Amanda, the story you linked to caught my eye this morning, selfishly, because the cancer medication that was contaminated and caused the paralysis–methotrexate–is one of the drugs I take (though for arthritis, not cancer, treatment). But I don’t know if pro-lifers should be jumping on this tragic story and using it as another stick with which to whack the abortion industry. You mentioned that you were “reminded, yet again, of the double standard that seems to exist for the abortion industry.” But what in the Times report, other than that the same company makes RU-486, made you think this accident is somehow linked to pro-abortion forces? It seems to be linked to shoddy production standards in China. You closed by noting: “Once again, it’s a question of women’s health and well-being, and once again, it’s not the pro-lifers who don’t care.” But why force this into a pro-life / pro-choice dichotomy. As the Times story notes, the contaminated medication was for cancer; the abortion pills weren’t affected. In fact, the abortion pills were made in a seperate factory an hour away from the one where the accident took place. The Times went on to note:

But in a statement, the agency said the RU-486 plant had passed an F.D.A. inspection in May. “F.D.A. is not aware of any evidence to suggest the issue that occurred at the leukemia drug facility is linked in any way with the facility that manufactures the mifepristone [RU-486],” the statement said.

The director of the Chinese F.D.A.’s drug safety control unit in Shanghai, Zhou Qun, said her agency had inspected the factory that produced mifepristone [RU-486] three times in recent months and found it in compliance. “It is natural to worry,” Ms. Zhou said, “but these two plants are in two different places and have different quality-assurance people.”

You asked “why was the F.D.A. afraid to identify the maker of the abortion pill.” The Times says it was because of “security concerns stemming from the sometimes violent opposition to abortion.” Pro-lifers probably don’t like being reminded of this, but there have been some bad apples in the barrel, and they’ve done some terrible things, like bomb abortion clinics. Imagine what might have happened had the F.D.A. publicly announced, back in the early part of this decade when the debates surrounding RU-486 were fierce, the name of the company selling the drug to the U.S. Protests and boycotts, certainly, but is it that inconceivable that someone would have used a deadly utilitarian calculus to conclude that taking out one drug-production plant would eliminate RU-486 from reaching the hands of thousands of abortion clinics?

Why hasn’t the F.D.A. been more forthcoming? Probably to save face, and to wait til they have all the facts in. But, again, this doesn’t seem unique to abortion or the abortion pill. What happened when the Times asked the F.D.A. if the Shanghai Pharmaceutical Group exported other drugs to the US? “After repeated requests, the agency declined to provide that information; it did not cite a reason.” Could it be because other drugs from the company are on our shelves and the F.D.A. isn’t certain of their quality? Could it be because the F.D.A. was only willing to take the risk with this company with the abortion pill? We just don’t know yet.

I guess I’d just caution pro-lifers to resist the urge to use any story where a tragedy occurs that is somehow connected to abortion as a chance to score culture-war points. You’re right, there’s definitely a lot of fishy business going on with the abortion industry, F.D.A. regulations, and RU-486 in particular. But there just doesn’t seem to be good reason, at the present moment, to be making such a strong link between this incident and that debate.

Almost 200 Chinese cancer patients have been paralyzed by contaminated drugs, says a New York Times article today. And seeing that it’s hard to buy anything that doesn’t boast a “made in China” gold label, it’s not particularly surprising that the same drug maker exports to America. To be precise, Shanghai Hualian is the “sole supplier to the United States of the abortion pill, mifepristone, known as RU-486.”

This recent medical tragedy was probably just an accident, said a Chinese pharmaceutical official, but it follows in a long series of catastrophic oversights and corruption: “In the last two years, scores of people around the world have died after ingesting contaminated drugs and drug ingredients produced in China.” And, if that doesn’t sound bad: “Last year, China executed its top drug safety official for accepting bribes to approve drugs.”

And where was America, meanwhile? “Because of opposition from the anti-abortion movement, the F.D.A. has never publicly identified the maker of the abortion pill for the American market,” the Times reported, and even now the F.D.A. refuses to say whether other US drugs come from the Chinese company.

We may hope that no more Chinese patients will be affected, and that no American women have been hurt by this incident either. But I am reminded, yet again, of the double standard that seems to exist for the abortion industry: the repeated failure of many abortion clinics to meet basic standards of medical hygiene; the hasty approval of early contraception pills, now known to be highly toxic; the lack of proper education about the physical—not to mention psychological—consequences of abortion.

Why was the F.D.A. afraid to identify the maker of the abortion pill, and, knowing the Chinese company and its history, why would the “anti-abortion movement” react with alarm? Once again, it’s a question of women’s health and well-being, and once again, it’s not the pro-lifers who don’t care.

This New York Times article on Washington think tanks.

This article in the current issue of the Weekly Standard on the connection between religion and the death penalty. I’ve been called “religious” once or twice in the past, but, not being a supporter of capital punishment, I don’t quite fit the mold described in the article. It’s still well worth checking out. A taste:

But it can be said that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed by a religious people. The reasons for this are not obvious. It may be that the religious know what evil is or, at least, that it is, and, unlike the irreligious, are not so ready to believe that evil can be explained, and thereby excused, by a history of child abuse or, say, a “post-traumatic stress disorder” or a “temporal lobe seizure.” Or, again unlike the irreligious, and probably without having read so much as a word of his argument, they may be morally disposed (or better, predisposed) to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant–that greatest of the moralists–who said it was a “categorical imperative” that a convicted murderer “must die.” Or perhaps the religious are simply quicker to anger and, while instructed to do otherwise, slower, even unwilling, to forgive. In a word, they are more likely to demand that justice be done. Whatever the reason, there is surely a connection between the death penalty and religious belief.

And this special to the Daily Standard on President Bush and his African AIDs policy. An excerpt:

Even the president’s most vitriolic critics call his HIV/AIDS policy a remarkable achievement. After Bush signed PEPFAR into law, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ripped it as “a war on condoms.” But Kristof has since praised the initiative, and a recent Times story called it “the most lasting bi-partisan accomplishment of the Bush presidency.” Democratic Senator John Kerry labels the program “a tremendous accomplishment for the country.” And Paul Zeitz, executive director of the liberal Global AIDS Alliance, believes Bush has ignited a “philosophical revolution” in America’s commitment to combating global AIDS and poverty.

That’s no embellishment. The Times article noted, with obvious embarrassment, that before the Bush initiative hardly 50,000 AIDS patients overseas were getting U.S. assistance. The unmentionable fact is that Bill Clinton–despite a robust economy, budget surpluses, few international crises, and eight interminable years in the White House–never seriously contemplated how America might help the developing world tackle the AIDS pandemic. The plight of AIDS orphans barely appeared on the Clinton radar screen. But if Congress approves the next round of funding, HIV/AIDS treatment will reach 2.5 million people, probably prevent 12 million new infections, and help care for about 5 million orphans and at-risk children. So much for the liberal record on social justice.

PEPFAR’s success is partly a result of Bush’s decision to mostly bypass bloated and corrupt U.N. bureaucracies and deliver assistance directly to community and faith-based organizations (a concept still resisted by many in the U.S. Agency for International Development). About 80 percent of PEPFAR recipients are indigenous, grass-roots groups: the “armies of compassion” that Bush has extolled since the first days of his administration. In countries such as Uganda, faith-based clinics, supported by local ministers and imams, are crucial in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Unlike many AIDS activist groups or U.N.-sponsored programs, they can effectively challenge risky behaviors that help spread the disease-from prostitution to illicit drug use.

By sheer force of will, Bush has orchestrated the most successful partnership of government and international civil society in memory–what is emerging as a medical Marshall Plan for Africa. Presidential hopefuls such as Barack Obama might never admit it, but PEPFAR sure looks like “change we can believe in.” Yet, thanks to media indifference and political cynicism, most Americans will never hear the redemptive story of Tatu Msangi, her daughter, or anyone like them, despite their legions. Why disturb the deranged caricature of Bush that shapes the narrative of the liberal establishment?

. . . may be this.

People are aghast when I tell them I have never seen a single episode of the cartoon, which seems to have been on since Uncle Miltie was causing gender confusion back in the days when doctors did cigarette commercials. And my resistance is by no means due to some anti-TV elitism; years ago, a friend once asked me why I had two TVs along the same wall in my studio apartment. I replied, “Well, what if I look over there, then turn back this way?”

I just don’t care for cartoons. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: They’re simply not real—like, say, Dwight K. Schrute is real. They’re just stick figures that are flipped by a camera lens real fast to make it appear as if they’re moving. What’s up with that?

TVs are for watching reruns of The Bob Newhart Show, anyway.

Barely a week goes by when I don’t recommend Jody’s “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano” to someone—it’s one of my five favorite pieces ever to run in
First Things. I did so at a dinner last night when the conversation turned to the divisions that still exist among American Catholic clergy. My friend was lamenting how a priest told her husband that if the two of them wanted to live together before marriage, it would be just fine. I would say that this attitude seems fairly common among many of the priests I’ve encountered, at least in my little corner of Washington, D.C.

My friend then showed me the bulletin from her new church, St. Stephen Martyr, near Georgetown. In the bulletin, Fr. Edward Filardi notes, concerning the Sacrament of Marriage:

Please call or come by the parish office with inquiries. Six months preparation is required. Living together before marriage is sinful, harmful to future marriage, and a cause of a scandal.

It’s pleasing to note that there are still a few hard-liners left, even at this late date.

I commute to work on the NYC subway system every day, a routine no longer subject to the provisions enumerated in the UN Convention Against Torture owing to a jurisdiction dispute. One of the ways the Transit Authority mollifies those of us trapped into favoring it with our custom is to post “poetry” over our heads, along with advertisements for dermatologists only recently released from prison.

Co-sponsored by Barnes & Noble and a homeless man named Earl, the “poems” are intended to have a calming effect on an otherwise unruly cast of New Yorkers one delay away from storming the conductor’s box like mutinous French guards on Bastille Day.

Last evening, as I was wending my way under the East River, I read the following adventure in versifying:

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.
            —Vera Pavlova (b. 1963)

Now I know that to parse a poem as if it were a syllogism is to commit a category error, but the structure of this beauty invites some kind of logical unpacking. Let me give it a try:

If I desire never to ride the subway again,
I will regret having to ride the subway.
If I regret having to ride the subway,
I will recall the regret of having to ride the subway.
If I recall that regret of having to ride the subway,
I no longer have to regret riding the subway.
If I no longer have to regret riding the subway,
There was no reason to desire not to ride the subway in the first place.

Amazing, huh? In but a few fleeting lines, all contradictions are reconciled, all tensions are relaxed, all questions answered, all complaints rendered moot.

Now if only I could figure out what the hell it means . . .