Two of my distinguished colleagues - one also a husband, the other also a friend - have managed to beat me by seconds in the run for posting thoughts on the Atlantic Community. This is the second time today that men, tall men, have topped me. Now I must respond, and I can just as well announce that this post will be feministic in tone. Before I go on, however, I’m beginning to suspect that Stuart, the website editor, may be getting more than he bargained for when he asked the former (me) and current (Steen and Bent) musketeers at Aalborg U to contribute to the blog. Before I go on - here comes the second however - it should be mentioned that both Steen, the friend, and Bent, the husband, are feminists. This means that I’ll use their examples of beating women instrumentally. Steen, we’ve almost lost to Tromso (I leave out the diacritics), but he has changed his mind in the last minute and accepted a position at Aalborg U. I hereby congratulate him for coming up in the world. This means that he will get to beat about in Bent’s company, and as Bent has just announced, there’ll be a chance to revisit the whole concept of ‘beat’ breathlessly and beatifically. While they won’t miss a beat where their teaching and researching is concerned, I am bound, for now, to feel off beat, as academic life at Roskilde U runs its course as it always has, with men at the wheel and women tagging along, if they ever get noticed. Which they do, drum-wise. Today I’ve been told that upon someone’s objection to the lack of women working in the international basic studies programs, the response was this: yes, but the two working there are very feminine. Being one of them, something struck me: what does that mean?
I’m preparing for my first session of my own course: ‘I’ is another: autobiography across genres, and as I look through video material on the internet for my introductory lecture, I come across the new Bob Dylan film I’m not There. I’ve missed its running in Denmark, so I have to settle with watching some trailers.
I find myself humming to the lines ‘how does it feel’ from Dylan’s well-known tune Like a Rolling Stone. What attracts me to Dylan is that he knows how to die: rolling in the uber cosmopolitan haystack. The hair says it all; whether it’s Cate Blanchet’s hair as Dylan’s, Richard Gere’s as Dylan’s, or the up-and-coming, yet now gone already, Heath Ledger’s hair as Dylan’s, it’s all the same to me. The reason why Dylan became an icon is because he always managed to be another, and these ‘others’ that play him now, are thus the others of others. I suspect that this is what the title of the movie hints at. I try to take notice as a woman, and I ponder a line that another feminist and academic man has served me today, toppling me over: “it is only mediocrity that saves one from celebrity”. It occurs to me that I’m surrounded by feminist males who see me not only because I dye my hair for them, but also because I make an effort not to be there where the feminine, in other men’s schemes, only serves to celebrate the arrogance of presence. On the other hand, it also occurs to me that my dylanesque/rimbaudian/other absence was felt in the remarks of the students I try to teach something about the importance of the visual in American studies. Last semester some female students said that my looks are smashing. Some males said that my sense of style beats everything. Beats me why. In my own off-beatness, I must be beat.
Hello all, my name is Steen Christiansen and Stuart kindly invited me to contribute to this blog, which I am grateful for. My primary interest is in the way culture and aesthetics intersect and influence each other, and this will probably the subject of most of my posts. Here, however, I will briefly sketch a view of blogging.
The blogging medium is a difficult beast to get a handle on, as it feels more transient than more traditional media such as journals, papers or magazines. Its cultural status is also lower than a journal, since it requires very little to initiate a blog.
However, a blog has something which no journal can ever have: immediate reader feedback, for better and worse. While one can submit responses to articles and opinions, it will inevitably take longer than posting a comment on a blog, and equally longer for further responses from the original author. This is where the blog really shines, and is also the best indicator of a blog’s successful status. High-profile community blogs such as Long Sunday have a very engaged reader/writer relation and often the boundaries between reader and writer are blurred - prolific commentators may be as significant as official contributors.
A successful blog differs from a journal in the way that it needs more than just readers - it needs active readers who will participate and extend the posts that come from regular writers. In this way, a blog becomes more like a forum for further ideas to develop; by blogging one’s thoughts, one gains the opportunity for others to reflect on them. I hope this will happen here.
2007 was a very good year for Kerouaciana. Not only was it the 50th anniversary of the publication of his break-through novel On the Road, but it was also a year marked by many new scholarly initiatives and publications, media products and artistic productions of various kinds, and not least a full blossoming of Internet attention to the old King of the Beats.
Ever since an American teaching assistant named Norman decided not to lecture on Shakespeare but to have his students at Aalborg U. read Kerouac instead, I’ve personally been hooked on the spontaneous bop prosody of Jack. Like most migrant workers Norm didn’t hang around very long, but I still owe him a good deal of gratitude for a reading list including not only two Kerouac novels, On the Road and Dharma Bums, but also Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey and Joseph Heller…
This semester I am offering an elective course at Aalborg U. called “The Beat Generation Revisited”. You are all cordially invited to tag along. The course has its own website, and I have collated links to some of my many Beat Generation writings at the bottom of the page. The course itself is quite basic in that we only use one reader, Ann Charter’s Portable Beat Reader, which has all the essentials but naturally mostly in excerpts. But in accordance with the Aalborg U. project based learning model, I hope that students will spend the latter half of the coming semester writing projects on Beat related topics.
One obvious project would be to look at the spate of publications that came out last year, the jewel of which has to be The Original Scroll version of On the Road. Unfortunately Penguin didn’t actually publish the legendary manuscript in scroll form, so what we get is still a square traditional book, and not a neat little roll of teletype paper…
For scroll fetishists I recommend this little article and the video pasted below…
What is good about the new edition is that not only are there very comprehensive introductiory essays (100 pp.), but the text itself has all the real names of the cast of characters: Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Bill Burroughs etc., instead of the rather silly pseudonyms Kerouac was forced to use in the original published version (Dean Moriarty?!?). Furthermore we get a more breathless punctuation style in this version which emphasizes the speed of Kerouac’s prose style (not unrelated to the speed he reportedly ingested while typing the scroll), and we also get a version that is not edited by Malcolm Cowley who, without consulting Kerouac, made some cuts in the manuscript in the original Viking Press 1957 edition.
To supplement the reading of the scroll version, I recommend that one consults Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 which covers the period of composition of Kerouac’s first novel The Town and the City and of On the Road. I am not too keen on the editing done by Douglas Brinkley for this edition, but I suppose he did what he could with the budget and time allocated to the project. What I am missing is more of the paratext (doodles, drawings, marginalia) Kerouac adorned his notebooks with, and actual plates reproducing more of the notebook pages (the ones that are there are tantalizing). That said, I respect Brinkley for the archival work he has done and for the working out of what Kerouac actually scrawled in the apparently increasingly illegible notebooks. The problem is also that there are so many other notebooks left behind by Kerouac that this publication only makes a small dent in the available stuff.
The two volumes of Kerouac’s letters, edited by Charters are also invaluable companions to a new reading of On the Road. Volume 1 covers 1940 to 1956 (and thus the composition of the novel), but you’d also want vol. 2 for references to the battle of getting On the Road published in the first place.
Finally, I’ve enjoyed watching What Happened to Kerouac, a mid-1980s documentary which finally came out on DVD in 2003, as a companion piece to going on the road again with Jack. In this film all Kerouac’s friends, lovers, wives and literary peers speak about aspects of remembering ‘Memory Babe’ as Kerouac dubbed himself. Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke and Burroughs are only some of the colourful male figures we meet in the film, but Edie Kerouac Parker, Carolyn Cassidy, Ann Charters, Diane Di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Jan Kerouac and other women voices supply a much more provocative take on Kerouac (and his mother!)
The course will end with a look at some of the many Internet sites celebrating the Beat/Kerouac legacy. First and foremost among these is Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks, but did you know about the Kerouac House project in Florida with its rotation of writers-in-residence? Or Beat Angel - the independent fim based on a play titled Kerouac: The Essence of Jack? Or the French project, Memory Babe: A Tribute to Kerouac, that you can still participate in?
Several months ago, McCain was virtually on life support, so what happened? David Nye chalks it up to Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.
1.9 million people turned out for Republicans vs 1.7 million turnout for Democrats. This is the first primary/caucus this cycle where Democrats did not turn out more voters than Republicans.
* Lower Democratic turnout could be due to delegates not counting towards the convention. However, Florida has been a fairly solid Republican state and generally conservative.
A democrat has only won 2 of the last 8 general elections in the delegate rich state, Carter ‘76 and Clinton ‘96.
Female voters continue to be a factor both for Clinton and generally as a voting block. 59% of Democratic voters were women, compared to 44% Republicans. This has been the general trend in all primaries. The general election could see the highest number of female voters ever (should Clinton be the nominee). The question then is how many more men will go out and vote against her?
Also, Clinton is pleading with the Party to have the Florida delegates counted at the convention.
I’ll never forget when I heard the Danish Ambassador to Washington say McCain was his kind of politician. I’m not quite sure what he meant.
But one thing seems certain with Giuliani dropping out of the race, there is no longer room for social liberals/moderates in the Grand Ol’ Party.
Finally, John Edwards finished with a decent 14%, all things considered. This is one of the many reasons I hope he stays in the race.
One of my “hobbies” as it where, is studying and reflecting upon political imagery. This image here reminded me of a photo I saw last June on Michael Shaw’s blog, Bag News Notes.
Shaw has a new piece at American Photo, “Campaign Visuals in the Age of Facebook.” In it, he interviews photographer Stephen Ferry to discuss this photo which resembles a “Facebook mashup.” Ferry says his photo captures what he calls the, “Facebook zeitgeist.” He explains the action of the photo thus, ” this is a photograph of a transmission: from subject into camera and from camera onto the Web.”
I’m intrigued by the act of transmission and how transmission is reconceptualized within a digital culture. In the Ferry photo, the subjects are both Obama and a “fan taking a photo” ready for immediate upload onto Facebook or some other online social media. In this image above, there are also two subjects, but they are not Hillary and the person shooting the video. The “real” Hillary is blurred, the campaign sign is even upside down. However, the digital image of Hillary is clear and focused which is connected to the video camera being held by an anonymous hand. The two subjects are thus machine and digital image, even the human hand is secondary. From this perspective, the image portrays a postmodernization of political campaigning. It’s the political reflection of TIME’s 2006 person of the year as the new citizen journalist. The digital transmission onto the Web is naturally assumed.
However, this image for me captures more than just the “Facebook zeitgeist.” It also reflects the shift away from the hierarchical broadcast model of information transmission to the decentralized network model of inter-subjective community driven “transmission.” Perhaps this could be called the era of post-broadcast politics. The centrality of the camera’s view finder, which invites everyone into the role of transmitter reinforces this shifting narrative. What do you think?
UPDATE: Matt Stoller has an article in the Nation, “Dems Get New Tools, New Talent,” where he analyzes the impact of internet technologies on Democratic campaign organizing.
We are in the middle of a massive wave of campaign innovation, led by organizers who will eventually spread outward to every nook and cranny of progressive politics. The larger significance of this architectural revolution in progressive politics isn’t clear, but it is the first sustained challenge to the dominance of television and direct mail in the political system since those media displaced urban party machines in the 1960s.
Here are 14 questions among 100 currently used in a US citizenship test. To pass, one needs to answer 7 or 8 of 10 questions correctly. See how many of these you know. You can check your answer by clicking for the next page:
An interesting project of history writing through music appeared last September. It’s a 3 CD compilation of American songs stretching from 1492 to present day. Added interest in the project may be offered by the fact that the executive producer of the compilation is former Attorney General, Janet Reno…
Reno has this to say about the rationale behind the project:
I think they [students] can learn more about their country, I think they can be inspired by what they hear, from some of these songs. They can remember when they are facing adversity that people were able to overcome terrible situations in their life and in the history of our country. When you think about it, the Depression, which this project talks about in clear detail, was such a dark cloud over this nation. I remember my mother’s stories of the Depression. If my mother could carry a tune she would have composed one of these songs that talks about the Depression, because it was so much a part of her life. And then to come out of the Depression into World War II, into the greatest war we have ever had, and to face the challenge of the atomic bomb, ever present after that war, gives us a sense of the challenge we face. But it’s also there to say, “Look, we did it, we can overcome, we can get past this time in our history.”
Reno says a few things similar to this in a short Washington Post interview which also has a mildly humorous tone to it (comparing her selection to a hypothetical “John Ashcroft presents American history in song”-disc)…. Mainly the interview shows her firm belief in the songs as a great new type of teaching material in a history or American studies class.
The set itself consists of three ‘colour-coded’ discs: Red, White and Blue - natch’… The Red disc starts with a First Nations perspective (”Lakota Dream Song”, later leading to the “Trail of Tears”) but quickly moves into Puritan territory with a number of hymns, and then into independence times and nation building celebrations. It covers the 1492 to 1860 period. The White disc (19861- 1945) starts with Civil War tensions, covers reconstruction times and the final westward expansion, moves into the 20th century with its end to isolationism and WWI participation - only to turn homeward and trace the Great Depression era and the US’s slow spiral back onto the international scene during WWII. Finally, the Blue disc (1946 - present day) takes us through Cold War times, the Countercultural upheavals of the sixties, the gender wars of the seventies, the renewed focus on racial matters in both those decades and beyond, the repercussions of AIDS in the eighties, the ecological awakening, the chilly wake-up call of 9-11 (perhaps not best represented by Alan Jackson’s simplistic song), and finally a return to the First Nations voices and tears (Scott Kempner’s cover of Johnny Cash’s “Apache Tears”).
The voluminous 24 p. booklet (available here as a big PDF file), replete w. wonderful historical photographs has good cover notes which highlight the thematic complexes covered by the songs: Unity (division), War and Peace, Work, Family (home and away), Faith and Ideals…
The programmatic statement at the beginning of the folder could in fact be a quote from the call for papers for any major conference in American Studies (compare w. the theme of the upcoming EAAS 2008 gathering):
The United States has always been an extremely diverse nation, peopled by different nationalities and ethnicities. Some of the songs on this album explore the great American paradox E Pluribus Unum, the mosaic of one nation created from many different cultures. Music has allowed even the most disenfranchised to speak up and be heard– that peaceful dissension that is at the heart of the democratic process.
Not surprisingly, war and anti-war songs are featured prominently on the CDs. Some were originally stirring, recruiting, morale boosting efforts, some already from the onset questioned the wisdom of war as a conflict solving means in general. As the liner notes point out:
During wartime, songs become means of persuasion, of rallying public support, and of providing comfort. Songs document the patriotism, propaganda, and protest that have accompanied every one of America’s major military conflicts.
Virtually all the war related cuts on this set show a critical distance from the artists’ side to the material, continuing a long tradition for oppositional thinking on the part of folk musicians and songwriters. It is not incidental that outspoken pacifists and anti-war agitators such as Woody Guthrie (writer of 3 tracks, including “Reuben James”) and Bruce Springsteen (2 tracks, including “Youngstown”) have a massive presence in this selection (fellow spirits such as Dylan and Neil Young have only one song each represented).
Similar tensions between celebration and opposition are detectable in the selection of songs depicting work, the changing conditions of labour and the organization of workers in unions. The human consequences of the change in the forms of work (due to industrialization, and later de-industrialization, for instance) or migration and immigration are traced in songs such as “Peg and Awl”, “Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat” and “Deportee”, whereas “Rosie the Riveter” puts a more positive spin on work (as a woman’s patriotic chore). The recovery work of finding some of these tracks is impressive, but precedents can be found in the work of earlier musical archaeologists such as Ry Cooder.
The strengths of the liner notes (co-written by the excellent scholars of the Center for American Music at the U. of Pittsburgh) should be stressed, including their insistence on historical context, reclaiming the proper frames for songs that we otherwise might consider moribund and cliched chestnuts (such as “Home on the Range” or “Happy Days Are Here Again”). This, coupled with the contextualization the notes provide for innovative performances of ‘problematic’ songs such as the racially charged “Dixie’s Land” (the fragile version by The Mavericks emphasizes loss and grief over bravado and parochial nostalgia and is as far from a rebel yell as one can imagine), works to greatly enrich the set, both for the casual listener and for the teacher/scholar who wants to use the set professionally.
My favourite of the three individual discs has to be the Blue one, also because it covers my own main research area, the 50s and 60s and their aftermath. Here the oppositional focus is at its strongest with must-includes as “Little Boxes” (a scathing if naive critique of suburban conformity - subversively performed by ex-homeless troubadour warbler Devendra Banhart) and “The Times They Are A Changing” (which still has a pointy message to a number of wanna-be presidential candidates: Come senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall). The bluegrass version here by the Del McCoury Band is quite successful and somehow channels Pete Seeger more than it does Dylan. It’s nice to also hear new versions of Neil Young’s “Ohio” (indictment of the guilty in the Kent State Massacre) and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” (an early instance of eco-criticism in song). The talent on these two tracks, Ben Taylor (son of James Taylor and Carly Simon) and Anthony David, respectively, is considerable. The fellow-feeling which is the positive complement to the critique of the will-to-power and -empire is fairly represented by sing-along numbers such as “Get Together” and “This Land Is Your Land” (John Mellencamp’s strongest effort in a good while - and he includes the politically divisive, radical verses of Woody’s song too!).
Overall, the music is predominantly folk- and what is now known as ‘Americana’-tinged, but almost all American genres are represented to some extent (with the rather surprising exception of jazz (unless one counts Andy Bey)): Blues, Gospel, bluegrass/Old Time, soul, funk, hip hop, brass band, classical/opera, musical, vaudeville, Latin, rock ‘n’ roll, Country (and Western! Yeeih-hah)… you name it - Reno’s guys and gals got it. But it is the singer/songwriter who is in focus, and therefore guitar-driven performances, whether acoustic or electric, predominate. African-American performances are prominently featured on all 3 discs, and esp. Bettye LaVette shines in her powerhouse rendition of the AIDS-melodrama “Streets of Philadelphia”, whereas the funk and hip hop efforts seem less relevant, perhaps because James Brown and Grandmaster Flash are hard to beat at their own game (”Say it Loud”) - but then so are Dylan and Cash… The feminist strand in American culture, on the other hand, is showcased well by performers such as Martha Wainwright, Janis Ian, Suzy Bogguss (actually her “Rosie The Riveter” is quite jazzy) a.m.o. Latino culture is not numerously represented but of course touched upon in Guthrie’s “Deportee” (and comes through strong in the Norteño arrangement of Old Crow Medicine Show) and weirdly mediated via a recording made in Slovenia of Alejandro Escovedo’s “Wave”, featuring independent singer/song-writers Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman (of The Walkabouts fame)…
Highlights of the first two discs include:
Blind Boys of Alabama whose rendition of communion hymn “Let Us Break Bread Together” is full of impeccable 4-part Gospel harmonics.
John Wesley Harding’s hilarious arrangement and performance of “God Save The King” where the middle part has a brass band spiralling out of control into atonal and jarring disharmonies mirror the secession from the old empire perfectly.
Harper Simon’s “Yankee Doodle” version features a wacky, syncopated march time signature interlaced with neo-folkie and alt-rock guitar sounds, reminding us of the satirical (British army) origins of the song which originally poked fun of Washington’s rag-tag militia recruits…
Take 6 do a terrific barber shop version (allowing the last stanza to go mildly discordant) of “Star Spangled Banner”, one of several more or less official ‘national anthems’ featured on the set (others include “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “This Land Is Your Land”…)
Minton Sparks’ insistent Southern drawl in her reading of the Seneca Falls Conference “Declaration of Sentiments” - the feminist equivalent of the Declaration of Independence and the Communist Manifesto all rolled into one…
Marah’s folk-punk rave-up version of “John Brown’s Body” is exactly as irreverent as one needs to be with tainted material such as this… - in contrast to Joana Smith’s sugary but sincere “Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Otis Gibbs‘ version of “The Farmer is the Man” is the closest thing to progressive redneck singing you’ll ever want to hear…
Judith Edelman’s whispered intensity in “Sleep, My Child/Schlof Mayn Kind” and its eerie accompaniment reminds us that not every Jewish child made it out of Europe to sleep easy on American shores.
Jim Lauderdale provides a workingman’s bluegrass version of “Seven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat” that’ll please even a purist.
There are several good resources providing background to the project:
NPR has a couple of good interviews - one with Reno and her niece’s husband Ed Pettersen (who co-produced the set), another with just Reno talking about her personal connection with some of the songs… From this site you can also access 5 tracks form the set, including Harper Simon’s (that’s Paul Simon’s son, btw) “Yankee Doodle Dandy” version…
If one prefers to befriend the set through MySpace this is also a possibility (how does one actually develop and maintain a friendship with a CD?). From the MySpace site one gets the superb contributions from Bettye LaVette (”Streets of Philadelphia”), Devendra Banhart (”Little Boxes”), John Mellencamp (”This Land Is Your Land”) and Andrew Bird (whistler and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire) for free. There are also two ‘the-recording-of’ videos worth watching - esp. Jake Shimabukuro’s ukulele rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever”!!
The links above, and more are collated at the record company’s site for the release.
The set is highly recommended and will no doubt be the topic of future conference papers at American Studies conferences… Go ahead and scoop me if you want - there is plenty for everyone here.
Senator Dodd has threatened again to filibuster the telecom bill which would grant immunity to telecommunications companies which aided the Bush Administration to conduct illegal electronic wiretaps. A presidential order, signed in 2002, was a clear violation of the FISA law. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, came into law as a result of the Watergate Scandals under President Nixon. FISA is meant to prevent the government from conducting domestic intelligence against American citizens and confirms the constitutional requirement that the government attain a warrant.
The Fourth Amendment states;
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In December of last year, Dodd threatened to filibuster the legislation and Reid temporarily backed down.
Dodd objected to the motion to proceed to the bill early this morning and remained on the floor for almost ten hours, taking a stand for the rule of law and the Constitution with his statements throughout the day. At approximately 7:30 P.M. Majority Leader Reid announced the FISA reform bill would be pulled from the Senate calendar and reconsidered in January.
The press release goes on to state;
“Today we have scored a victory for American civil liberties and sent a message to President Bush that we will not tolerate his abuse of power and veil of secrecy,” said Dodd. “The President should not be above the rule of law, nor should the telecom companies who supported his quest to spy on American citizens. I thank all my colleagues who joined me in fighting and winning a stay in the rush to grant retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies who may have violated the privacy rights of millions of Americans.
Senator Edward Kennedy speaking last year against telecom immunity on the Senate floor. Kennedy was one of only a handful of Senators to support Dodd last year.
Dodd was then still a presidential candidate and received a significant amount of press coverage, aided by citizen journalists. The other democratic candidates took a stand in support of Dodd, which no doubt added momentum to the cause.
It is January and Reid has returned to the FISA amendment legislation as promised. Dodd is no longer a candidate and their is less reporting coming from the MSM. A simple Google search will bear this out. The activist blogosphere however is on fire. So far, only two candidates have come out with statements supporting Dodd, John Edwards and Barack Obama.
In Washington today, telecom lobbyists have launched a full-court press to win retroactive immunity for their illegal eavesdropping on American citizens. Granting retroactive immunity will let corporate law-breakers off the hook and hamstring efforts to learn the truth about Bush’s illegal spying program.”It’s time for Senate Democrats to show a little backbone and stand up to George W. Bush and the corporate lobbyists. They should do everything in their power — including joining Senator Dodd’s efforts to filibuster this legislation — to stop retroactive immunity. The Constitution should not be for sale at any price.”
Obama
“I strongly oppose retroactive immunity in the FISA bill. No one should get a free pass to violate the basic civil liberties of the American people - not the president of the United States, and not the telecommunications companies that fell in line with his warrantless surveillance program [… T]hat is why I am proud to stand with Sen. Dodd and a grassroots movement of Americans who are standing up for our civil liberties and the rule of law.”
Hillary has thus far been silent. A filibuster is a long and difficult process and Dodd would need his fellow Senators to support him by asking long winded questions, allowing him time to rest.
It’s unclear what Edwards can or will do to actually help Dodd and it doesn’t seem Obama will leave campaigning in South Carolina to actually lead or “unite”.
A filibuster, or “talking out a bill”, is a form of obstruction in a legislation or other decision-making body. An attempt is made to infinitely extend debate upon a proposal in order to delay the progress or completely prevent a vote on the proposal taking place.
Senator Dodd’s office yesterday released the following;
“Few things are more detrimental to this country than the erosion of and attack on the civil liberties we enjoy. This isn’t a Democratic issue or a Republican issue; this is an American issue. If after debate, the Senate appears ready to pass legislation granting telecom providers retroactive immunity I will use any and all legislative tools at my disposal, including a filibuster, to prevent this deeply flawed bill from becoming law. More and more, Americans are rejecting the false choice that has come to define this administration: security or liberty, but never, ever both. For all those who have stood with me throughout this fight, I pledge, once more, to stand up for you.”
I sure miss Dodd’s presence in the Democratic race. His presence helped draw attention to the core constitutional issues he was fighting for, much like Edwards’ presence has brought attention to issues of economic justice. Dodd is also one of only a handful of senators working on legislation to restore the writ of Habeas Corpus, the cornerstone of Anglo-American civil liberties.
It’s just accepted knowledge that the Bush Administration has over the last seven years gutted the constitution. But everything he achieved was passed into law with the complicit support of Democratic members. In 2006, the Democrats took back both houses and things were expected to change. Yet Dodd is not only fighting Bush but his own party’s leadership, Harry Reid.
Harry Reid — who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush’s demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster — went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned “retreat,” and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.
To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster.
The Democratic led Senate has accomplished absolutely nothing towards rolling back the unconstitutional legislation passed by the previous Congress, let alone push forward its own agenda. How exactly will a Democratic presidency change the formula in DC? All three leading candidates, (with the exception of Senator Dodd when he was in the race) have not actually led on anything. Obama and Clinton after all are still supposedly serving in the Senate. The blogosphere will be ablaze as will liberal and progressive organizations like the ACLU and Moveon.org. I admire Senator Dodd for his courage. But how could it ever get to the point that a minority faction coup within the Democratic led Senate must fight its own party leadership to uphold basic fundamental constitutional rights? Perhaps an outpouring of grassroots activism will lead to action from the candidates or other members of the House and Senate. Perhaps the blogosphere can influence media coverage which at the moment is focused on the cat fights between Obama and the Clintons. There is something terribly rotten in Washington and its not just George Bush. There must be more important “business” to attend to in Switzerland.
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Two of my distinguished colleagues - one also a husband, the other also a friend - have managed to beat me by seconds in the run for posting thoughts on the Atlantic Community. This is the second time today that men, tall men, have topped me. Now I must respond, and I can just as well announce that this post will be feministic in tone. Before I go on, however, I’m beginning to suspect that Stuart, the website editor, may be getting more than he bargained for when he asked the former (me) and current (Steen and Bent) musketeers at Aalborg U to contribute to the blog. Before I go on - here comes the second however - it should be mentioned that both Steen, the friend, and Bent, the husband, are feminists. This means that I’ll use their examples of beating women instrumentally. Steen, we’ve almost lost to Tromso (I leave out the diacritics), but he has changed his mind in the last minute and accepted a position at Aalborg U. I hereby congratulate him for coming up in the world. This means that he will get to beat about in Bent’s company, and as Bent has just announced, there’ll be a chance to revisit the whole concept of ‘beat’ breathlessly and beatifically. While they won’t miss a beat where their teaching and researching is concerned, I am bound, for now, to feel off beat, as academic life at Roskilde U runs its course as it always has, with men at the wheel and women tagging along, if they ever get noticed. Which they do, drum-wise. Today I’ve been told that upon someone’s objection to the lack of women working in the international basic studies programs, the response was this: yes, but the two working there are very feminine. Being one of them, something struck me: what does that mean?
