Shots in the Dark

“Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.”

—Syreeta McFadden

And case in point: George Zimmerman’s brother, speaking on CNN last night, said that Trayvon Martin was looking to buy guns and become a drug-dealer.

But before linking to that, I have to point out what Robert ZImmerman also said, apparently without the slightest hint of irony or self-awareness:

“There are people that would want to take the law into their own hands…they will always present a threat to George.”

Here’s the rest of the interview. It will raise your blood pressure.

In the Washington Post, Michelle Singletary reports on a new book about rising college costs, College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students. The author is Jeffrey J. Selingo, an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The book reports on the fact that, while a college education gets more and more expensive, an increasing number of students who enroll in college fail to finish.

Part of the reason higher education is in trouble can be traced to the “Lost Decade,” as Selingo calls it. He defines it as the period from 1999 to 2009 when colleges were “chasing high-achieving students, showering them with scholarships to snatch them from competitors, and going deep into debt to build lavish residence halls, recreational facilities, and other amenities that contribute nothing to the actual learning of students.”

Selingo reports that in 2003, only two colleges charged students more than $40 grand; by 2009, that number was 224, and 58 cost more than $50, 000.

Another reason why college costs have increased well above the inflation rate: the increasing blurring of the line between universities and corporations, an evolution I wrote about in Harvard Rules. (As I often said to people, Harvard is much more coherently explained not by thinking of it as a university, but by thinking one of it as a corporation which happens to sell education.)

Sounds like an interesting book. Unfortunately, this kind of tome is a tough sell among the people who should most read it: middle-class parents and high-school kids. But there is something sad about the way that high education in this country is marginalizing itself, slowly chipping away at its own legitimacy—and the leaders of the country’s most elite institutions don’t have a word to say about it.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, essayist Lee Siegel argues that the much-decried decline of the study of the humanities isn’t really such a big thing—and might even be a good thing.

Pointing out that the study of literature at university is a relatively recent (the last hundred years or so) phenomenon, Siegel argues that it emerged as a replacement for religious studies when religion no longer seemed capable of explaining modern life, soared in popularity after World War II as a means of trying to explain the insanity of war, and then became fully radicalized, institutionalized and sterilized after Vietnam.

At the present moment, we are experiencing the rise of new digital pleasures and distractions, the expansion of a mostly visual culture that races far ahead of the imagination, the ubiquity of social networks that redefine the pure solitude once required for reading a demanding book. And in this time of rapid changes in the workplace, life’s great mysteries seem more economic than existential. A digital environment also stresses quantitative thinking, and perhaps that helps explain why the most exciting cultural advances are now in science and medicine.

It is hardly a surprise that in this atmosphere, college students choose to major in fields that are most relevant to the life around them. What a blessing that is on literature. Slipping out from behind ivied prison doors, where they have been forced to labor as evaluative “texts,” the great thoughts and feelings made permanent by art can resume their rightful place as a unique phase of ordinary experience.

Now, for example, Siegel suggests people will read Moby Dick because they want to, not because they have to.

It’s a romantic notion, appealing in some ways, but appealing to stereotypes of radical literary theorists in other ways. Will people really read the great books of history more if they’re not first exposed to them in college? I doubt it. Will the people who do read them get as much out of them? I doubt it. (Moby Dick, in my opinion, is a book that really benefits from a professor who’s studied it and classroom discussion.) Does anyone really have confidence that Ulysses will survive in anything more than a physical sense if students don’t have to read it in a great books course?

Siegel’s essay is a great exercise in counter-intuitive thinking, and it’s certainly thought-provoking. But there’s also a hefty dose of narcissism there: Because I discovered great books on my own and made them an integral part of my life, that is what others will do and what others should do. Maybe in a perfect world.

Gawker calls out the ten worst people on the subway.

You know them (let us hope that it is not “yourself”): the ones who block the doors, the ones who eat Kung Pao chicken, the people who see an elderly person standing near them and pretend to look away so they don’t have to give up their seat…

They should all be Tasered.

I think a post of mine got censored on Facebook. Here’s why.

Last week, I read a NYT profile of New Jersey senatorial candidate Cory Booker that discussed his friendship with that state’s governor Chris Christie. One incidental point caught my eye: Booker, the Times reported, had introduced Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Christie (Zuckerberg had given a bunch of money to Newark schools), and Zuckerberg had helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Christie.

So that struck me as interesting, because Christie, as you may know, is an avid foe of gay marriage, and I was surprised that a Silicon Valley guy, whose company is supposed to be progressive (lean in!), would donate money to an anti-gay politician. (Because let’s be honest, there’s no way that you can be against gay marriage and not be anti-gay.)

So I posted something to that effect on my Facebook wall, or whatever you call it—something about “I wonder how many gay users of Facebook know that Mark Zuckerberg is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-gay Chris Christie.”

For sure, I thought, I’d get a few comments about that—I don’t post a lot because I don’t trust Facebook on privacy issues, but when I do, I always get some comments. And this kind of thing is right up the alley of a lot of Facebook users. And, frankly, I have a lot of gay friends. (I went to Yale, so, you know..)

So I waited for the discussion…and waited…and waited…

Nothing. Not one comment.

That’s strange, I thought. One thousand-plus friends, most of whom I actually know, and not one comment?

And it occurred to me that, since Facebook apparently controls what people see in their newsfeed, maybe it censors posts about Mark Zuckerberg. And so nobody else but me even saw that post.

Anyone out there heard of anything like this before? And is that even possible? Or am I just being paranoid?

Would love any thoughts on the matter…

Politico, the newspaper for inside-the-Beltway junkies, reports that Summers is now considered the leading candidate to replace Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve chair—not Janet Yellen, as has been widely reported. Politico’s story is worth quoting at length.

….many top Democrats close to the Obama White House suggest the leading candidate to replace Bernanke is not necessarily current Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen — as many in the markets expect — but Larry Summers, the outspoken Harvard professor and former Clinton-era Treasury Secretary and senior Obama economic adviser.

Summers is said by those who know him to be in no way campaigning for the job, despite a recent flurry of stories about his potential nomination. His office said he was golfing with no access to a cellphone when POLITICO tried to reach him on Tuesday. People close to Summers say he has settled into his current teaching role at Harvard and is not especially eager to move back to Washington full time.

This last paragraph is so literally incredible—Summers has “settled into his current teaching” (which is what, exactly?)—that it suggests the opposite: Summers is campaigning for the job and is just trying hard (on the golf course with no cell phone? please) to appear as if he isn’t…

But others say that if Obama asks, Summers would certainly agree to serve…

This last bit of diction is a dead giveaway: The word “serve,” in Washington, is used when someone desperately wants a job for reasons of personal ambition but doesn’t want to look either desperate or ambitious, in which case they frame taking the job as a question of public “service” that would, of course, mean great sacrifice on their part but somehow they would manage to do it if the nation called…

In the Washington Post, Greg Sargent reports on the growing consensus among GOP strategists that the party can win by ignoring minorities and increasing its share of white voters.

The emerging case is that Republicans mainly need to do even better among whites — by doing a better job energizing white supporters and by bringing in more “missing” white voters who might be inclined to vote Republican — thus relieving them of the inconvenient need to alienate their base with anything that might persuade Latinos to give their party a second look.

Which may be one reason why Florida senator Marco Rubio is actually declining in popularity with conservative voters—which is probably why he’s pushing a doomed-to-fail anti-abortion bill in the Senate.

Meanwhile in Wisconsin GOP governor Scott Walker signed a bill forcing women deciding to have abortions to undergo an ultrasound. Apparently immune to the subject of irony and personal freedom, Walker signed the bill over the 4th of July weekend.

And the Times chronicles the destructive behavior of the GOP-controlled government of North Carolina.

Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, a 2009 law that was the first in the country to give death-row inmates a chance to prove they were victims of discrimination. They have refused to expand Medicaid and want to cut income taxes for the rich while raising sales taxes on everyone else. The Senate passed a bill that would close most of the state’s abortion clinics.

And, naturally, the Legislature is rushing to impose voter ID requirements and cut back on early voting and Sunday voting, which have been popular among Democratic voters. One particularly transparent move would end a tax deduction for dependents if students vote at college instead of their hometowns, a blatant effort to reduce Democratic voting strength in college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham.

As I’ve said before, all these moves strike me as electoral hara-kiri. But there’s no question they are immensely destructive to the ongoing struggle for social justice and a better, more civil world. This GOP social crusade is the political equivalent of a school shooting. It is the product of a pathology—in this case, a collective dysfunction—which may leave the instigator dead, but will take lots of other casualties before that blessedly happens.

Edmund Morgan died.

My freshman year advisor at Yale, and one of the kindest people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. Not to mention one of the great American historians of the 20th century.

I remember taking Professor Morgan out to lunch at Mory’s—how many modern professors of his stature would agree to have lunch with a clueless freshman—and seeing him bundled up—we used to say, fondly, that he looked a little bit like E.T.—at Yale hockey games. He was a great teacher and a devoted and active member of the Yale community.

Well, he made it to 97 and was still writing into his 90s. So there is that. But I am sad to hear this news.

The WSJ reports that Summers wants the job of chair of the Federal Reserve—according to “friends.”

Which probably means that Summers wants the job very much and, thinking that a semi-public campaign might help him, either told the Journal he wants the job or told his friends to tell the Journal that he wants the job. Given the Summers recently had breakfast with Wall Street Journal editors, I’m guessing the former.

(In fact, the very fact of his having breakfast with Wall Street Journal editors probably constitutes part of a campaign for the job. But Neil Irwin in the Washington Post has an entire column “secret decoder ring” deconstructing this kind of stuff.)

Mr. Summers, a former top economic adviser to Mr. Obama, is speaking, writing, consulting, advising, teaching and still in frequent contact with the president. And some of his friends say he is more than a little interested in the Fed job.

Other than the bit about “friends,” two other things strike me as interesting about that statement. First, the omission on that list of gerund-activities of “investing,” which may be what Summers now spends a plurality of his time on. And second, that line about him still being in frequent contact with the president, which presumably didn’t come from the president. So…one guess who it did come from.

Mr. Summers is widely considered one of the top economists of his generation. He is known for being able to quickly and clearly analyze economic issues, identify the challenges and conceptualize solutions.

“He’s just an incredible combination of smart and caring.…” said Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Smart and caring? Let us not overstate the case.

Gruber, who (it is not mentioned) is a former student of Summers, seems to be a go-to guy for positive quotes about Summers; in 2009, he gushed to The New Republic about Summers’ tennis-playing ability.

“Basically, he hits the crap out of the ball,” says Jon Gruber, an MIT economics professor who began playing with Summers in the late 1980s.…

And in 2007, he told the Times that “I’ve been around some pretty smart people….But it’s a different level with Larry.”

In some quarters, the old rap on Summers hasn’t changed.

“He’s not a very self-aware person,” said Cathy O’Neil, a mathematician who worked with Mr. Summers at hedge fund D.E. Shaw during the Bush administration. “He’s incredibly aggressively competitive, in a kind of…high-school debate champion kind of way.”

But another hedge funder has this to say in his defense:

“Larry is an original thinker, and it’s a lot of fun to work with him,” said Max Stone, a D.E. Shaw managing director and a member of its executive committee.

In all of Summers’ various jobs, this may be the first time that anyone has described him as “fun to work with.” So we can probably translate this remark as meaning, “If you think I’m going to say something critical about a guy who might be the next chair of the Federal Reserve…”

All this aside, would Larry Summers make a good Fed chair? In terms of economic policy, I’m not qualified to say. But I have long thought that the only things keeping Summers from rampaging unchecked were two things: a boss, like, for example, the president; and some level of accountability to those affected by his decisions—like, after much sturm und drang, the Harvard faculty.

As Fed chair, Summers would be as close to not having a boss as he could be in any position of power other than perhaps the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and as unaccountable to the public as you could be in just about any job in the country. He’d also, of course, be in a position of immense power.

I’m not sure this is a promising combination.

As I read more about the 19 “hot shots” who died in Arizona—and it must have been a rough way to go—it struck me that our nation is getting very good at grieving. A bunch of workers die—in a factory explosion, a hurricane, a forest fire—and we have huge memorials for them in sports stadiums, and headlines, and college funds for their kids. But no one ever wonders really what they died for or what their deaths really mean; we’re too invested in the romanticization of the sacrificial lamb.

Thus, in Arizona, 19 men died to protect empty homes that were built in areas prone to fire. They died to keep second homes from burning down. This in a Republican state where temperatures are climbing and the number of fires growing annually, but if you said anything about measures to curb climate change, you’d likely be run out of town on a rail.

Better to romanticize the dead. Because the grieving public believes—or has been convinced—that if you ask questions about why they died, really, you’re devaluing their sacrifice. They’re heroes!

In Texas, people died to make fertilizer as cheaply as possible, and in support of anti-regulatory ideology that does far more to help the owners of factories than it does those who work in them.

And the opponents of regulation come out and say, we love the dead men, but…nothing’s going to change. You know that Rick Perry praises these men dead more than he would if they were alive and agitating for federal enforcement of worker safety laws. (But don’t criticize him for it—he’s “pro-life.”)

In Oklahoma, beautiful children died because Oklahomans don’t believe in regulations such as building codes—not even in Tornado Alley.

All this raises some dark questions. Are you really a hero if you die fighting to save someone’s vacation home? If you’re blown up in a factory that’s part of an unsustainable food chain? If you’re crushed by debris because your state doesn’t believe in regulations that could have saved your life?

Or are you just basically cannon fodder for a certain type of capitalism that’s become as adroit at exploiting your death as it was at exploiting your life?