Who (what?) do you vote for?

Tacitus has a thoughtful post in response to Kos's assertion that "victory by any Democrat is better than victory by the best Republican." Tacitus finds this moral idiocy, and instead argues that a good Republican is better than a sordid Democrat, a good Democrat better than a sordid Republican (the semanticist in me wonders whether this might just be an issue of extension versus intension).

I'm inclined to agree with the substance of Tacitus's post; I'd much prefer an unselfish, thoughtful president (or representative, senator, governor, etc.) than a mean-spirited corrupt one.

I'm not sure, however, that the anecdote Tacitus provides really proves his point. Back in 1994, he had the opportunity to meet both candidates for the governorship of South Carolina. After meeting the two, he decided that he preferred the gracious [Democrat] Theodore to the crass [Republican] Beasley. Here's the thing. I think it's absurd to vote for someone based on how friendly and personable they are. You vote by your principles and whether someone is capable of implementing those principles.

What's odd is that the second point of Tacitus's post appears to contradict the first. "I am Republican because I adhere to certain principles. These stay the same, wherever the party may go. At the moment that a Democrat better embodies those principles, that Democrat receives my vote."

My guess is that Beasley's principles better matched Tacitus's back in '94. Yet by his first argument, he wouldn't have voted for Beasley. So that's the question. Do you vote for principles or a good person?

(To be sure, this is a false dichotomy, but these two positions are, to a certain extent, contradictory. Tacitus is generally smart enough to recognize things like this.)

Footnotes!

The comments responding to Keiran Healy's post on Schama drifted into a discussion of footnotes, endnotes, and citations in general. This gives me the perfect opportunity to outline my preferences on citations (some of which are shared by CT commenters). Writers who have me in mind take heed! In no particular order:

Parenthetical citation blows. It interrupts the flow of the text and doesn't provide enough information to know what's being cited anyway.

Footnotes are better than endnotes. It's incredibly annoying to have to flip to the back of the book to find a citation. Again, I want my reading experience to be as smooth as possible. It's far easier to recall your spot on the page and read a footnote than flip through the book and hold the original page.

That said, if you're going to use endnotes (which, understandably, makes books look more accessible to general readers), be sure to include the range of pages covered at the top of each page of notes. Without it, you can open to the middle of the endnotes and not even know which direction to turn to in order to find the note you're looking for.

Please include a bibliography independent of the notes. It's okay to omit some of the publication information if you're going to be citing a given source lots of times. But don't make me find the first citation of it to figure out just what it is. Besides, readers like me might be interested in the sources you used without caring exactly how you used them.

That's it. Is it so hard to make me happy?

UPDATE: Oh, and lest you complain that footnotes and endnotes are a pain to format, I urge you to get with the times and use Endnote or some similar software. Who knew that keeping track of references and footnotes could be so easy?

The post in which I make a sweeping generalization on higher education based on two guys whose names start with "Sch"

I learned something from the comments to this Invisible Adjunct post. Someone asked whether the fact that Simon Schama doesn't have a PhD is relevant in discussing Schama's call for historians to write more for the general public. Turns out that "once upon a time, a doctorate wasn't necessary to get an Oxbridge fellowship. Indeed, if you were clever, you went straight to that (think Sir Richard Southern, for example) after undergrad and writing a book or highly-regarded article or two." In other words, doctoral education wasn't necessary to move on in academia.

That got me thinking. Marge Murphy's introduction of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. a few weeks ago here at Swarthmore revealed that Schlesinger's undergraduate honors thesis on Orestes Brownson was published soon after his graduation. Perhaps, back in the good ol' days, undergraduate education did a whole lot more in terms of preparing individuals for academic success. Go to a good university, get a bachelors degree, and you're set. Might the quality of undergraduate education have diminished in the past 60 years as more people go off to college? Might graduate education now be what undergraduate education used to be?

Okay, I'll come clean. I don't think that's what's happened. For one thing, Schlesinger's a special case. Scholars like him don't come along very often. I doubt many of his classmates had their theses published. Also, it helps when your father is Arthur Schlesinger.

Plus, the British system of higher education is considerably different from the American system. Whereas here in the U.S., most people go off to college with barely formed ideas of what they plan on studying, in the U.K, you apply for a particular course right from the start. In that respect, disciplinary specialization begins much earlier. That might account for why British PhDs take approximately three years to complete (in theory) compared to the five to seven years that's more typical in the U.S. (if anyone knows better, please feel free to correct me).

So I'd be shocked to find that my speculation is anywhere close to the truth. There's probably a point somewhere in this post about the danger of drawing conclusions from a limited set of data.

UPDATE: Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber addresses (in a serious way) the shift towards PhDs in British higher education.

I, apparently, can't get enough of Mel Gibson

The following is from a New York Times Magazine article that Aidan Finley kindly forwarded to me:

Gibson is widely known in traditionalist circles, and he has made no secret of his religious affiliation. "I go to an all-pre-Vatican II Latin Mass," he told USA Today in an interview two years ago. "There was a lot of talk, particularly in the 60's, of 'Wow, we've got to change with the times.' But the Creator instituted something very specific, and we can't just go change it." More recently, the Italian newspaper Il Giornale reported that Gibson made a "scathing attack against the Vatican," calling it a "wolf in sheep's clothing."

It's things like this that make it impossible for me to take Gibson seriously. For him to claim that "the Creator instituted something very specific, and we can't just go change it" completely ignores the fact that the Catholic Church has evolved and changed from its conception. There's no such thing as the "pure" Church that Gibson sees himself preserving.

More evidence to support the idea that he's not so smart...

Teaching (the history of) science

In discussing this list, Eszter Hargittai of Crooked Timber ponders the fact that people don't know much about scientists or the history of science.

To remedy this failing, Eszter wonders if teaching some history of science in high school science might do the trick. Some commenters have suggested otherwise, claiming that "an emphasis on history of science would further weaken high school instruction on the scientific method."

I'm not sure the two are mutually exclusive. It seems to me as if the scientific method might be best taught in the context of its historical development. I'm failing to come up with a good example off the top of my head (this is what happens when you haven't taken a science class in over three years...), but I can tell you this: I remember from 10th-grade biology that Watson and Crick used x-ray crystallography to determine the structure of DNA. I doubt I would have remembered the technique used without remembering the scientists that used it.

I'm not arguing that science class should become the history of scientists, but I fail to see why the history of science can't be incorporated into the high school science curriculum.

Engaging the public in history

I'm never quite sure whether I agree with Tim Burke so much because I've taken a class with him and happen to find him tremendously engaging or because of the strength of his arguments. A combination of the two, no doubt. In any case, this entry on historians engaging the public (commentary on Simon Schama's thoughts here) addresses some of my fears about ivory tower academicism and some possible solutions. The short version: academic historians should be expected (and trained!) to engage the public about history. As it stands, academic historians are primarily concerned with writing for other academic historians. In the words of David Starkey, "A lot of books have become rarely animated footnotes. In fact, they should really be written upside down, with the footnotes at the top and a drip of text underneath. Footnotes aren't new, but what is new is our worship of them."

Tim's point about the value of monographs and how they allow large-scale syntheses that appeal to a wide audience to be written bears reiterating.

What I'd like to add to this topic is that general readers have a real interest in history. And, as Rosenzweig and Thelen's The Presence of the Past reveals, Americans are fascinated with the past, even if the elements of the past that interest them the most are local and personal details that they can relate most closely to. My point is that there's a wide market for history in the public sphere. Far better for well-trained an academic historian who have a thorough knowledge of the scholarly literature to write a widely accessible book on a given topic than a history hack who happens to write well. History should be presented to the public by those who know history best. If that requires a new skill set to be taught in grad school, as Tim suggests, bring it on.

Gibson: Dumb but crafty?

Though I suggested last week that Mel Gibson may not be the most intellectually engaged guy around, if this comment left by Larry on Calpundit is any indication, Gibson certainly knows how to play the publicity game.

The gist of it: Gibson engineered the controversy over The Passion. He sent a copy of the script to a group of biblical scholars to review. Their report, which pointed out numerous historical inaccuracies, was sent to Gibson and only Gibson. Icon (Gibson's production company) then accused the group of scholars of stealing the script and Gibson accused Jewish organizations of attacking his movie.

Something tells me Gibson's not the selfless guy concerned with showing the world what Christian love is all about he wants us to think he is. Perhaps he has some other motives as well.

Technology update

As you might notice, no loss for words now has trackback capability (thanks to Atrios for pointing out Haloscan's increased functionality).

A few posts should be forthcoming in a day or two... tune in soon.

More Mel

After seeing Diane Sawyer's interview with Mel Gibson last, I reached three conclusions about Gibson and his soon-to-be-released film The Passion of Christ. First, Mel Gibson is not antisemitic. Second, he has good intentions. Third, through either ignorance or stubbornness, he entirely misses the thrust of the critiques made of Passion and is failing to engage with those critiques.

The first two are related and are certainly worthy of discussion and debate. But I'm going to restrict myself to the third point: Gibson's failure to understand the substance of what his critics have said. Two examples should suffice.

Much has been made of the allegedly antisemitic depictions of Jews in Passion. Critics have argued similar portrayals of Jews in passion plays have a long history of instigating violent actions by Christians against Jews. Gibson's response was that he saw Schlinder's List, which cast Germans in a less than positive light, and he doesn't hate Germans. Such a glib analogy misses the point. It's not that negative depictions of Jews are in of themselves bad (though, I'd imagine that most people would agree that's the case). The problem is that negative depictions of Jews have, throughout history, led to antisemitic behavior. To ignore this is to ignore the fact that antisemitism is still present in the world. To put an even finer point on it, Catholic antisemitism still exists (a former roommate, proudly Catholic, once assured me, before learning that I was Jewish, that Jews killed babies for their blood).

One theme that is nearly constant in Gibson's promotion of the film is that his account is based on the Gospels. While he's admitted that Passion is his interpretation of the last 12 hours of Jesus's life and therefore not the only possible narrative, Gibson is also quick to point out that his source is the Gospels, plain and simple. He believes in the veracity of the Gospels and he believes in the truth of his depiction of Jesus's last hours.

There's one problem: Gibson didn't restrict himself to using the Gospels as a source. Gibson freely admits, for example, that he drew on the visions and writings of Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German Catholic nun of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I have no problem with Gibson drawing on non-biblical sources. I am troubled, however, by Gibson's claim that Passion is as historically accurate as possible. The visions of a nun who lived 1700 years after Jesus do not count as valid sources for those interested in historical authenticity. Gibson would do far better to admit that his film draws on a wide variety of sources and that it might get some of the details wrong.

None of this is to suggest that Passion is a bad movie. I expect it to be gruesome, disturbing, and of middling quality. There's virtually no way for it to live up to all the hype.

Instead, Gibson's responses to critiques of his film reveal him to be a charming guy who makes moderately enjoyable movies but lacks the ability or willingness to discuss in any substantive way the issues Passion raises.

On a side note, was anyone else struck by Gibson's words towards the Pope? Hardly respectful, especially coming from one as ardently and professedly Catholic as Mel Gibson.

Marco Pantani, dead at 34

According to cyclingnews.com, Marco Pantani was found dead in an apartment in Rimini. The details of his death are unknown, but rumors will no doubt swirl that it was related to use of performance-enhancing drugs. Deaths of cyclicts are always met with such speculation, and I suspect that Pantani, given both repeated allegations of cheating and his fame in the cycling world, will garner a storm of attention.

Pantani will likely be remembered most for his astonishing performances in 1998, winning both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France, a rare feat that, with increasing specialization and focus on individual races, is unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

His reputation will forever consist of healthy doses of respect (probably the best climber of his generation) and suspicion (his expulsion from the 1999 Giro while wearing the leader's pink jersey and just days away from victory). In an ideal world, the cycling community will eventually learn if, and to what extent, Pantani did use EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs and thus be able to better judge his accomplishments. I have no clue whether that'll come to pass.

UPDATE: Here's story on Pantani in La Repubblica (in Italian).

I guess I'm damned, too

So here's something to ponder. Mel Gibson's Passion comes out soon. Gibson, and others, are promoting it heavily, seeing it as an evangelical tool. Supporters are not restricted to Catholics. Billy Graham, for example, has endorsed the film.

Billy Graham is the American evangelist par excellence. I don't know his denomination or the theology he teaches, but he's always struck me as firmly in the American Protestant tradition (if I had to guess, I'd say he's a Southern Baptist).

Mel Gibson doesn't think much of non-Catholics. In fact, Gibson wholeheartedly believes that his wife, whom he describes as "a saint... better than" he is, is going to hell. Her sin? She's Episcopalian. The fact that she "prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus" is irrelevant since, there is "no salvation for those outside the Church."

I wonder whether Graham knows where Gibson thinks he's headed...

Thoughts on Schlesinger

Arthur Schlesinger was everything I had hoped he would be and more. He's got the look of the aged, eminent historian down pat, complete with bow tie and striped shirt.

But the important stuff was what he had to say. His two strongest points dealt with the role of war-time dissent in American history.

First, he argued that there must be open and frank debate before going to war. There is no more momentous decision a nation can make than to initiate military conflict, and to do so without extensive public discussion is fundamentally undemocratic.

Second, Schlesinger showed that opposition to the president and the government as whole has been a hallmark of American discourse during wars, from the Revolution onwards. For the Bush administration to conflate unyielding support of the nation when it's at war is to ignore centuries of patriotic Americans who have spoke out in opposition to a long list of conflicts.

Patriotism, in Schlesinger's words, is living up to a nation's ideals. To cast away freedom of dissent is undemocratic, unpatriotic, and un-American.

Schlesinger at Swarthmore

This is incredibly short notice, but there's always a chance someone at Swarthmore will read about it and be intrigued.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. is presenting a lecture, "Patriotism and Dissent in Wartime," at Swarthmore College tonight at 7:30* in the Lang Performing Arts Center. Schlesinger has won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards as well as serving in the Kennedy administration and teaching at Harvard and the City University of New York.

In short, he's about as eminent a(n) historian as the United States has. If at all possible, I urge to come.

*There are flyers around campus that say the lecture begins at 8:00. I honestly don't know what the correct time is, but if you're going to go, you should probably get there early.

How on earth do you screw up pasta?

My first year at Swat, I looked forward to dinner on Wednesday and Sundays. To the extent that the dining hall was ever exciting, that excitement came from pasta bar.

But something's changed (or, perhaps, I'm idealizing the pasta of days gone by). Because now the pasta sucks. Overcooked, undercooked, you name it, they've done it.

Now, I've never cooked for hundreds of people, so I'm sure there's a certain added difficulty that comes from making such large proportions of pasta. I have, however, cooked for 30+ people and still managed to cook pasta the right amount of time.

It's not that hard, folks. Salt some water, get it boiling. Add the pasta. Stir occasionally. Stop cooking after the number of minutes given on the box.

That's it. There's no reason to consistently make bad pasta. And ruining Sunday night dinners for me.

Tongues and cold metal objects

At Wawa (a local convenience store, for those readers not familiar with the Philadelphia area) today, I bought one of Snapple's Elements drinks, which looks to be their entry into the energy drink market.

I hadn't had one of these in a while, at least a year and a half. The taste seems exactly the same.

The bottle, however, has changed. Out with glass and in with metal. Yes, a metal bottle. It's remarkably lightweight, but it's still metal. Which brings me to the point of this entry. Along the bottom, there's a warning in the form of a little picture. It's the typical circle with the line through it. Inside the circle: a guy sticking his tongue out to touch the bottle only to have some sort explosion occur at the moment of contact.

This is bizarre for a few reasons.

First, I never would have thought to stick my tongue to the bottle. But, after seeing the picture, I just couldn't resist the temptation. And no, my tongue didn't stick.

Second, the contrast between the picture and the bottle is minimal. It's practically the same color... the picture happens to be in matte, while the bottle is rather shiny, but it'd be rather easy to miss the warning completely.

Third, if they were that concerned about people getting their tongues stuck to the bottle, why make a metal bottle at all? The futuristic look kinda counteracts the emphasis on natural ingredients that's found on the website.

Besides... it wouldn't be the end of the world if your tongue did get stuck. A bottle's a whole lot easier to warm up than, say, a flagpole.