By Michael Corey, June 30th, 2011 
Aside from being human, one of the most interesting things that Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Gays and Lesbians have in common is that a substantial number of voters are biased against voting for members of these socially constructed groups for President of the United States. A recent Gallup Poll and a journal article that is being published in Electoral Studies and discussed in Vanderbilt University’s “Research News” present data and analysis on this issue.
The Gallup Poll covering the period June 9-12, 2011, shows an unwillingness to vote for people with the following characteristics as President: Mormon, 22%; Gay or Lesbian, 32%; and Atheist, 49%. These religions and sexual orientations have substantially higher negatives than other groups tested by Gallop: Hispanics, 10%; Jews, 9%; Baptists, 7%; Catholics, 7%; women, 6%; and Blacks, 5%. Obviously, people can belong to one or more classifications, but the meaning of the survey is clear.
Gallop points out that the bias against Mormons has remained consistently high over decades while there have been steep declines in other categories. Resistance to a Mormon President shows that the largest differences are among different educational groups: college graduates, 12%; some college, 20%; and no college, 31%. Significant differences on Mormons for President were not correlated with gender, age, or religion. Republicans and independents demonstrated less reluctance than Democrats. Those from the East showed less bias towards a Mormon candidate than those in other parts of the country, especially the Midwest. These findings may pose a hurdle for Republican Presidential primary candidates Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman.
The data and analysis presented in the Electoral Studies journal article by Brett V. Benson, Jennifer L. Merolla and John G. Geer, “Two Steps Forward and One Step Back? Bias in 2008 Presidential Election” makes a number of interesting observations concerning religious bias. The data came from two Internet-based experiments run by Polimetrix in November 2007 and October 2008. John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt observed:
“Our data showed that the voters’ increased social contact with Mormons reduces bias among . . .
Read more: What do Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Gays, and Lesbians Have in Common?
By Michael Weinman, June 29th, 2011 
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power and impotence of names. About how much we invest in the practice of giving names—to our children, to the places where we live, to the places where other people live. You’ve heard, perhaps, about the controversial proposal to hebraize East Jerusalem neighborhood names. I’m here to tell you that the real argument is not to be found in this story and the storm in its wake.
 We need to start much further upstream and concern ourselves with fundamental stories about “us” and “them,” for instance, with the figure of a certain rainbow-colored elephant named, in most cases, Elmer —who is a symbol of accepting difference, and the possibility of identifying with, indeed even becoming (for a day) the other. Well, he’s Elmer in English, the language in which the author David McKee first composed him, and allowing for a slight vowel change, he’s the same in various other languages. He’s Elmar in German, for instance. In Hebrew, however, he is “Bentzi,” short for “Ben Zion,” or son of Zion, and in a quite literal way, the most Zionist name one could possibly give or be given. Not only was the rainbow colored elephant’s name hebraized, it was changed to make him a Hebrew figure, i.e.an exclusively Hebrew, exclusively Israeli, figure. To be “Bentzi,” doesn’t only mean not to be Elmer. It also means to be the kind of being that can only be “in the land of Zion.”
It is noteworthy, indeed, worrisome, disappointing, imprudent and counterproductive that powerful voices within Israeli political culture, including Israel’s Parliament, want to change the narrative. These voices want to undercut Arab claims on East Jerusalem (mind you, not Palestinian, as they deny that there is such a thing as Palestinian). Repugnant as this is, I think the change from Elmer to Bentzi is even more significant.
 Why? It seems to . . .
Read more: What’s in a Name? Or, the Political Significance of Elmer
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 28th, 2011 
This week I am proud to be a New Yorker. Our governor and our state legislature, which have not been a source of pride in recent years, distinguished themselves in noteworthy ways.
There was the normal stuff. A timely budget and new ethics law passed without much drama. And there was the extraordinary, a fundamental human rights advance. Marriage is no longer a heterosexual privilege in my home state.
I should add that there are many problems with Governors Cuomo’s approach to our economic problems, in my opinion: too easy on the wealthy, too hard on the poor and public employees. I hope that now that he has established himself as fiscally responsible, he will turn next year to more directly addressing the suffering of working people and the poor. I am not a fan of the economically conservative, socially liberal blend.
In fact, the establishment of the new marriage contract right has both advantages and disadvantages for specific gay couples, as was observed by Katherine M. Franke in a New York Times op. ed. piece. There is less openness about the inclusion of partners in insurance coverage, more restrictions. The marriage option should not become a marriage compulsion. And I am also not sure how progressive this development is. It is noteworthy that the advance of gay marriage ties people to a traditional state sanctioned relationship, something which wise conservatives have noted (including Gary Alan Fine in a private exchange we had). Gays in the military and gay marriage, seen in this light, are important conservative advances. No wonder former Vice President Cheney is a supporter of gay marriage.
Yet, marriage equality is something that is truly significant, going well beyond the details of the marriage contract and political ideology. It formalizes a fundamental advance in human rights and dignity. Another opinion piece in the Times gets at the true significance of the moment, Frank Bruni’s “To Know Us Is to Let Us Love.” He underscores how spectacular the advance is in comparison to what he had hoped for . . .
Read more: Marriage, Equality, and Dignity
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 23rd, 2011 
In his remarks to the nation last night on the way forward in Afghanistan, the leadership style of President Obama was on full view. He presented a clear rational position, addressing immediate concerns with precision and subtlety, placing a simple decision about the pace of troop withdrawals in a larger historical context. It was rhetorically elegant. It was, from a strictly formal point of view, a satisfying speech. It was substantively, though, challenging, concerning immediate military, political and economic calculations.
I watched the address having earlier in the week attended a local organizing meeting of “Organizing for America” (which will soon again become “Obama for America”). The attendees included those who are realistically pleased with Obama’s Presidency, and those who were once enthusiastic, but are now skeptical. I thought about both the skeptics and the realists watching the speech.
An anti-war activist was particularly concerned about Obama’s war policies. To his mind, Obama has continued Bush’s approach, with variations on a deeply problematic theme. While he had listened carefully during the campaign to Barack Obama, as the candidate promised to withdraw from the bad war in Iraq so that we could fight the good fight in Afghanistan, he has still been disappointed by that war’s escalation. He predicted that Obama would announce a minuscule reduction of forces. I recall: 5,000 this summer and 10,000 in a year. He didn’t believe that a real change in direction of an overly militarized foreign policy would be forthcoming.
The announced troop reductions more than double my neighbor’s expectation. But I suspect that he is not satisfied. After all, the announced withdrawal of 33,000 troops by the end of next summer will still leave twice as many troops in Afghanistan than at the beginning of the Obama administration. The Congressional Democrats who are criticizing Obama’s decision are representing broad public judgment that enough is enough in Afghanistan. I should add that I share this judgment.
There were of course no strong opponents of the President at our meeting. Although it is noteworthy that the first meeting I . . .
Read more: Obama on Afghanistan Troop Withdrawal
By Michael Corey, June 20th, 2011 
Memories are not simply about the past. They define the present and shape the future: collective memory making, as Maurice Halbwachs’ influential work demonstrates, personal memories, and iterative interchanges between and among personal, interpersonal, and collected memories. I have been thinking about this on the occasion of the anniversary of a parade in Chicago.
I recently received from someone on a Vietnam War listserv comments and links to Chicago Tribune articles discussing the “Chicago 25th Anniversary Welcome Home Parade” for Vietnam War veterans. Held originally on June 13th, 1986 over a decade after the last Americans had left South Vietnam, the Chicago Welcome Home Parade provided for Vietnam Vets the recognition they felt they were denied upon their return from an unpopular war. The 25th anniversary of the parade was held last weekend, on June 17, 18 and 19, as its original participants are fading away, many no longer able to march.
It is estimated that about 200,000 veterans marched and another 300,000 spectators cheered them on in 1986, a surprisingly large number. In 1985, New York City had a ticker-tape parade in which about 25,000 Vietnam veterans participated. Prior to 1982, when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated, Vietnam Veterans received very little recognition and many rarely talked about the war. The memorials and parades changed attitudes towards Vietnam Veterans and how they felt about themselves.
The Chicago Tribune’s multimedia links capture objectified personal and collected memories, providing insights into interpersonal and collective memories. This year’s anniversary celebration afforded numerous associational opportunities for the participants including a banquet, the display of the Moving Wall, a half-sized replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a ceremony which honored soldiers who have returned from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and an interfaith service held at Chicago’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The organizers believe that no soldier should have to wait . . .
Read more: Memory Making: The 25th Anniversary of Chicago’s Welcoming Home Parade
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 17th, 2011 
As a social critic, I am ambivalent about the power of imaginative action in politics. On the one hand, I think that the power of the definition of the situation is a key resource of power for the powerless, the cultural grounding of “the politics of small things.” On the other hand, I worry about myth-making that is independent of factual truth.
On the positive side, there is the definition of the situation: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This relatively simple assertion, the so called Thomas theorem, was first presented in a study of child psychology and behavioral problems by W.I. Thomas and his wife, Dorothy Swain Thomas. Yet, the theorem has very important political implications, going well beyond the area of the Thomases initial concern, moving in a very different direction than the one taken by the field of ethnomethodology, which can be understood as the systematic scholarly discipline of the definition of the situation.
While researching cultural and political alternatives in Poland and beyond in the 1980s and 90s I observed first hand how the theorem, in effect, became the foundational idea of the democratic opposition to the Communist system in Central Europe. The dissident activists acted as if they lived in a free society and created freedom as a result. A decision was made in Poland, in the 70s, by a group of independent intellectuals and activists to secede from the official order and create an alternative public life. People ignored the commands of the Communist Party and associated apart from Party State control, openly publicizing their association. They created alternative publications. They opened the underground by publicizing their names, addresses and phone numbers. They acted freely. They developed ties with workers and others beyond their immediate social circles. And when the regime for its own reasons didn’t arrest them, an alternative public life and an oppositional political force flourished, which ultimately prevailed over the regime.
The powerless can develop power that . . .
Read more: DC Week in Review: Political Imagination, the Definition of the Situation and Fictoids
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 15th, 2011 
A while ago, I read a frightening piece in The New York Times, on looted weapons in Libya. The hopeful side of the report is that the opposition to the brutal dictator (who has systematically attacked unarmed citizens) is militarily empowered, using the weapons of the dictatorial regime against the dictatorship. But the Times report emphasized the dangers. With arms now circulating outside the formal control of the state, there is a high likelihood that some of them will reach the black market and get into the hands of terrorists outside this zone of conflict. C.J. Chives, the Times reporter examines particularly this dangerous side of recent events there.
Indeed it’s scary. Nihilists of various sorts might obtain missiles that are capable of attacking commercial airliners. As someone who often flies abroad for professional and family purposes, I am particularly concerned. This security threat is very real, Chives reports, because in relatively recent past examples of state arsenals being looted by civilians, Uganda in 1979, Albania in 1997 and Iraq in 2003, the fear has been confirmed.
When I was reading this article, I thought about another circumstance when such fear in the end seems to have proven unfounded, and in which I was peripherally involved. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 led many to worry that terrorists, who had been armed and supported by the Soviet bloc, would become rogue and free floating. Further, there was the fear that their preferred weapons, sophisticated plastic explosives, specifically semtex, might be used in new ways, not disciplined by the logic of the cold war. It was in this context that I became a suspected terrorist.
I was coming home from a two month trip around the old Soviet bloc in the late winter of 1990. This visit would later become the basis of my theoretical travelogue, After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I . . .
Read more: Reflections of a Terrorist Suspect
It was a funny mistake when the folks at Fox used a still of Tina Fey doing her 2008 Sarah Palin routine for their coverage of a story on the real Palin. I’m not sure if Palin’s colleagues – she actually works as a Fox commentator – are clueless, mean-spirited, or just have an interesting sense of humor, but it does make me think about the authentic and the fake.
 Wouldn’t Baudrillard have loved it? For him, it would have indicated the presence of yet more proof that actual people do suffer from hyperrealitis! According to Jean Baudrillard, consumers had long ceased to need originals. Thus, in a world where the simulated version has conquered the real, how many people will have principled issues with the mix up of the person and the parody? Or taking it one step further, how many people have concerns about the authenticity of the real Palin in the first place?
This brings me to the genuineness of political performers. During a recent show, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow served up 12 male politicians whom she placed on a “post-Clinton modern American political sex scandal consequence-o-meter.” Depending on the creepiness of their behavior and the extent to which they might be prosecuted, Maddow measured the cases of Florida Representative Mark Foley, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, VP candidate John Edwards, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer and of course, New York Representative Anthony Weiner, and a couple of others. (For more on Weiner, read Gary Alan Fine’s post.) Did all these gentlemen think they could get away with extramarital affairs, prostitution, lewd conduct, and other such activities? While some of these activities may not be downright illegal, they all reveal little or no moral standards. In many cases, the behavior was not only hypocritical, but also naïve, as the compromising position in which these politicians pushed themselves would one day trip them up. To make matters even more complicated, the hypocrisy is a common element. Among the politicians who are the most vocal about . . .
Read more: The Show Must Go On
By Gary Alan Fine, June 13th, 2011 
Silly season comes early in Washington, along with the steamy weather. It is just barely June, and we are already watching the meltdown of Congressman Anthony Weiner, an outspoken liberal Queens Democrat and a one-time candidate for Mayor of New York City. This disgusting and delightful episode began innocently enough with the question of whether the Congressman sent a photo of his filled-out jockey shorts to a West coast co-ed. She assured us that she was not offended by such japery. Stranger things have happened, even in the New York Congressional delegation. The episode seemed like a pleasant, if erotically-charged, diversion. As Claude Levi-Strauss pointed out in another vein, it was “good to think.” Now we learn that the Congressman has checked himself into the Eliot Spitzer wing to deal with a whimsical mental illness that the DSM-5 might label “cad-atonia.” Weiner may be needy, but psychiatry is not likely to provide a cure.
At the time I marveled at how Weiner made such a hash of his own defense. If he did Tweet young women, admit it as ill-conceived teasing and move on. Taking seriously Weiner’s (at first) plausible assertion that his Twitter account was hacked, I worried about the prevalence of Candid Camera politics. I spoke of those luscious gotcha moments in which politicians were upended by trickery of which conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart and his associate James O’Keefe of the famous NPR-Arab donor sting have become so expert. In this case my suspicions of Breitbart were unfounded. Despite being an articulate defender of progressive policies, it has become clear that the Congressman was a fully engaged politician.
Here is yet another instance in which the cover-up proved far worse than the crime. Early on Weiner was accused of sharing lewd pictures of himself. “Lewd” seemed to be something of a term of art, although apparently there is a photo that is more explicit in the mix. Still, the original photo of filled out briefs, the basis of the scandal, would hardly qualify as foreplay in . . .
Read more: The Weiner Follies: The Personification of Politics
By Vince Carducci, June 9th, 2011 
Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.
Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact. (By contrast, the then prevailing Trotskyite view labeled it a “bureaucratic collective,” a new form of political economic organization that while not purely capitalist was not strictly speaking socialist either.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency is also identified with the emergence of Marxist humanism, which takes its inspiration from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, several essays of which Boggs, who holds a PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr, was among the first to translate into English. Today the bottom-up orientation of the Johnsonite view lives on most closely in autonomism. And indeed, Antonio Negri’s co-author Michael Hardt blurbed the book’s dust jacket as did Robin D. G. Kelly and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic . . .
Read more: Grace Lee Boggs’s The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
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