Paul Soglin: Waxing America

Intellectual Discourse Found Nowhere Else

Again this weekend, after Waxingamerica brought you Borat, Ann Althouse and Dick Cheney, we again add  some semblance of intellectual challenge and diversion with Side  Street.  Go Jody.

Vergewaltigung des Sprachgeistes

...which means the "rape of the spirit of the language", language as it was used in nazi Germany. And we have no shortage of that in America today. "Folk Speak" worked for Adolf and it works for Bush...

Minoso and O'Neil: A Plea For Justice

I suppose it is no coincidence that both stories appeared on Friday:

Negro Leagues great Buck O'Neil takes turn for the worse

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Negro leagues great Buck O'Neil took a turn for the worse late Thursday but was resting comfortably in a Kansas City hospital Friday, friends said.

The 94-year-old O'Neil was admitted to the hospital Sept. 17 with extreme fatigue. O'Neil, one of the driving forces in the creation of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, has lost his voice and can only whisper...

...A former Negro leagues batting champion and player-manager with the Kansas City Monarchs, O'Neil holds many distinctions in his long career. In February, he fell one vote short of induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Hodges, Santo head Veterans Committee ballot

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. (AP) -- Gil Hodges, Ron Santo, Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat are among the 27 players on next year's Veterans Committee ballot for the Hall of Fame announced Thursday...

...No one received the required 75 percent in the first two votes by the new Veterans Committee, in 2003 and 2005. In the last vote, Hodges and Santo received 65 percent, falling eight votes shy.

Holdovers also include Dick Allen, Bobby Bonds, Ken Boyer, Rocky Colavito, Wes Ferrell, Curt Flood, Joe Gordon, Mickey Lolich, Sparky Lyle, Roger Maris, Marty Marion, Carl Mays, Minnie Minoso, Thurman Munson, Don Newcombe, Vada Pinson, Luis Tiant, Joe Torre and Maury Wills...

Minoso and Buck O'Neil, by every imaginable standard, deserve election.  O'Neil for his contributions as a Negro League player and the 'tweener,' Minoso, for all of his contributions.

No Minoso

Minnie wasn't good enough. No, I think his credentials are well established. He was the best left fielder in both leagues during the 1950's after Stan Musial and Ted Williams, and the 9th or 10th best of all time.

He was not a true Negro Leaguer: Maybe.  There is no question that his split tenure between the Negro Leagues and MLB hurts his case.  As a 'tweener' he does not have the career statistics in either league.  More important there are no decent records of his two significant seasons with the New York Cubans.  Hopefully, one day, someone will do the research and produce those stats.

Minoso, a Cuban, had no ethnic or racial base. Perhaps some truth here. While Chicago blacks fully embraced Minnie, as a Cuban, he never received the depth of support nationally as did Jackie Robinson.  It took Roberto Clemente to make North Americans understand what it was like to be Black and Hispanic and play major league baseball. (See Dave Maraniss' new book, Clemente : The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero ).

Minoso also had no national base. Minoso was hurt by the poor relations between the U.S. and his native Cuba.  There was no way of building support in his homeland.  As Fidel Castro said, "While Minnie Minoso is not a friend of the revolution, he will always be welcome in Cuba. He will always be a hero to the Cuban people."  Such sentiments never reached the United States.

One more thing, as long as we're pleading for justice from the Hall of Fame: Buck O'Neil should be elected now by any means necessary.  Change the rules; declare an emergency; whatever. Do it now, before it's too late.

Waxingamerica Demands Bush Grant Borat Interview

Misguided American journalists once again get a Borat-Kazakhstan story wrong. The Associated Press is all over the visit to the United States by the Kazakhstan President, Nursultan Nazarbayev and the inability of Kazakh authorities to deal with the alter ego of Sacha Baron Cohen.

Kazakhs Counter Comic With Ad Campaign :

AP) Gleaming hotels, the region's best pastrami sandwiches and the planet's largest population of wolves: these are things Kazakhs want the world to know about their country -not the outrageous claims of the British comedian who portrays them as primitive and bigots...

...Authorities say the campaign was meant to coincide with President Nursultan Nazarbayev's visit to the United States, where he met with President Bush on Friday. But it also comes as comic Sacha Baron Cohen, creator of a fictional Kazakh reporter known as Borat, was launching a full-length movie based on the character.

...The homophobic, misogynistic, English-mangling Borat - who portrays Kazakhs as addicted to horse urine, fond of shooting dogs and viewing rape and incest as respectable hobbies -has mortified the government of this former Soviet republic...

Meanwhile, on Friday, Borat was denied access to the White House while Nazarbayev slummed with United States President George W. Bush.

The refusal of Bush minions to admit this responsible journalist to the White House grounds is inexcusable.

Mark Green's Plan Would Hike UW Tuition and Wisconsin Taxes

Mark Green made it clear this week that he plans to hike tuition for Wisconsin residents attending the University of Wisconsin, and to increase taxes on Wisconsin residents to pay for the UW. While the cost to the entire UW System in unknown, the effects on just the Madison campus is significant.

If the Green plan went into effect this academic year, Wisconsin undergraduates would see their tuition increase from $6,284 to $7,284, graduate tuition would go up from $8738 to $10,738 and taxpayers would have to shell out more as well to support the UW.

The Green Plan Impact

Tuition Hike: That is a total of $32.52 million additional in tuition from Wisconsin students.                           

Taxe Hike: Wisconsin taxpayers presently paying $406,100,000 would shell out another $27,820,000.

Presently there are 19,233 resident undergraduates at the UW.  There are 9,225 non-residents and assuming Green wishes to cut that number in half to admit more Wisconsin residents,and not touch the Minnesota reciprocity agreement, the shortfall in revenue is approximately $60,339,000.* 

If we take the graduate school, 3005 residents and 5668 non-residents (lets ignore the 168 harmless Gophers) and return to a 50/50 split of in state/out of state, the tuition shortfall is $26,130,000.**

You do the math. Green  would increase the tuition of every Wisconsin undergraduate by $1000 and every Wisconsin graduate student by $2000. That would raise a total of $32,520,000 from Wisconsin students.

And it would still leave $27,820,00 for the Wisconsin taxpayers.

Go Mark Green.

The cost of education is far more complicated than Mark Green would lead us to believe, as is the enrollment issue. Here are some highlights:

• Because the Republicans dropped state support for the UW from 27% to 19% in less than ten years, student tuition has risen significantly, faculty salaries stagnated and buildings have deteriorated.
• Traditionally the UW has charged out-of-state students the cost of their education until the 1990's, when the school was forced to make money off of them as a result of state budget cuts.
• Cutting every out-of-state student and replacing them with an in-state student means someone has to come up with the difference.
• One of the reasons for the UW's outstanding academic record going back to the La Follette era has been the significant number of out-of-state students admitted to the UW which has helped the institution academically.
• The policy of charging out-of-state students a profitable tuition has had adverse ramifications for the entire UW population. Middle class out-of-state students can no longer afford to attend and that hurts the diversity of the campus.

*4612 out of state undergraduates paying $19,233 replaced by the same number of in state students paying $6150. **1332 out of state graduate students paying $28,458 replaced by the same number of Wisconsin graduate $8841 ***$23,845,000 (23,845X$1000) from the undergraduates and $8,674,000 (4337X$2000) from the graduate students.

Dick Cheney's Madison Years

Earlier this week, Paul bemoaned the fact that as a UW-Madison graduate student in 1966-68, Dick Cheney missed a chance to understand how the world works, when he failed to take a course with either George Mosse or Harvey Goldberg.  This is a perfect opportunity to provide WaxingAmerica readers with important historical details about Dick and Lynne Cheney's two critical years in Madison, when the progress of two graduate students' lives would have impacts on all of us today.

Susan Lampert Smith of the Wisconsin State Journal had a piece of the story late last year:

(A) reader... actually went to the trouble of making up fake landmark signs, and briefly posting them, to mark the places Dick Cheney lived when he was a UW-Madison graduate student in the 1960s.

Using information from a book on Cheney by The Capital Times' John Nichols, he set out last fall, during the presidential campaign, to mark Madison's tie to the vice and his "undisclosed locations."

These included North Hall, where Cheney was a teaching assistant in political science in 1966-67, an apartment in Eagle Heights, and an apartment on the South Side, near Penn Park. The commentary on the South Side sign gives you the sense of the rest:

"It was to this building in 1966 that (the Cheneys) brought home their first-born child, a daughter, Elizabeth. Born in Madison General Hospital on July 28, 1966, Elizabeth, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Near East Affairs, served, even in utero, to assure that Cheney spent his UW graduate school days safe from the draft, which was then chewing up American males in the Vietnam meat grinder. Born exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service regulations were changed to only exempt married men with children, Elizabeth served, even before her birth, as the justification for Cheney's fifth draft deferment."

It's time to share the rest.  I was that reader, trying on a role as conceptual artist.  Utilizing addresses found in archived UW student phone books of the era, actual fine artist Mark Harmon and I created and placed our ersatz historical markers.

At Eagle Heights:

It was here in this modest, and since rebuilt, married student housing, in 1967- 1968, that Richard B. Cheney (Nickname: “Dick”) and his wife Lynne V. Cheney, lived in their second and final year as UW graduate students in Madison.  Safe from the draft...and continuing his pursuit of his “other priorities in the 60’s than military service,” Cheney failed to complete his Ph.D. in political science while living here. Then, as now, nearly every country on the globe was represented by the graduate student families living in Eagle Heights.  Perhaps Cheney’s exposure to this diversity of humanity provided a basis for a vow to never live in proximity to these people again.

It was also (presumably) here that Mary Cheney, the second-born child of Dick and Lynne, born on March 14, 1969, was conceived.  Mary served as the director of her father’s successful campaign for re-election in 2004.  Mary’s status as an “out” lesbian forced Cheney to “soften” the administration’s hard-line position on gay marriage for campaign purposes with the claim that “it is a matter that the states should properly decide.”

Outside North Hall:

In this historic UW building, on the fourth floor, Richard B. Cheney served as a teaching assistant in political science in 1966-67. By 1968, Dick Cheney’s forward progress toward a Ph.D. in political science had stopped, as he took a job with Wisconsin Governor Warren Knowles (R.) as the custodian of the “button bag.”  The principal duty of the job was to hand out “We Like it Here” buttons to anyone coming in contact with the Governor.  Cheney’s previous vocational goal, becoming a college professor, evaporated in the white heat of such important government responsibilities.

Perhaps Mr. Cheney had been frightened by the ghost of John Muir, the nation’s pioneer environmentalist, who had lived in North Hall.  Such an experience might explain Cheney’s lifelong dedication to destructive consumption based on fossil fuels,  and his “zero-sum-I’ve-got-mine-so-you-can’t–have-any” economic worldview.

 

The markers spent one day at the appropriate sites and then were removed by the artists.  Before the 2004 election, two of them were in an exhibit of "Patriotic Art" in the window of U-Frame-It on East Johnson St.

 

 

We can only wonder what would have happened if Cheney had not bailed on his PhD program to work as a gofer for Governor Knowles.  Nichols' fine book details Cheney's subsequent escape from Wisconsin, when every other eligible young Knowles staffer declined a Washington-based fellowship with Oshkosh Congressman Bill Steiger.  Cheney jumped at the job, which was considered "a glorified internship."  How Cheney parlayed that position into assisting an ever-increasingly powerful set of Republican officials is a DC story.  Read Nichols' book.

(Lynne Cheney, always the brighter and more accomplished of the couple, completed her UW PhD in English not long after the Cheneys moved from Madison.)

- Barry Orton

Mallatt's Sidesteps Walgreens and Wal-Mart

On Saturday, The Capital Times ran a story, Walgreens won't match Wal-Mart's $4:

..."We are not going to match the prices," Tiffani Bruce, spokeswoman for Walgreens, said Friday from the company's Illinois headquarters.

Neither will Community Pharmacy, a worker-managed cooperative in downtown Madison...

...it costs his shop about $8.50 in labor and overhead costs just to fill a prescription. That does not even take into account the cost of the drug itself, Kilmer added.

Kilmer said Wal-Mart's move devalues the important role pharmacists play in evaluating and dispensing medication.

"They are basically getting paid nothing for their time or expertise," he said.

David Kreling, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Pharmacy School and a pharmacist himself, said his research has found that it costs pharmacies $9 to $10 on average to dispense a prescription.

Mallatt's (technically Mallatt Home Care Pharmacy) on Monroe Street fills our prescriptions. It is real simple: we want the profits to go to someone local, they know everyone in our family, and they are a great neighbor.

I want lower drug prices, especially as I get older. There is a solution to the cost of healthcare in this country, and it is not Wal-Mart driving local pharmacies out of buisness with loss-leaders on generic drugs and it is not Wal-Mart destroying the neighborhood-based pharmacist.

Anyway, where would we get those great costumes for Halloween? No matter what Wal-Mart does, their plastic packaged gear will never match the orginal customes, the make up, and the charming blood and gore that Mallatt's brings to Halloween.

Editor's Note: Attribution

From this point forward, WaxingAmerica posts primarily written by editor Barry Orton will be attributed as such. In the past, these have been few, mostly regarding telecommunications policy, with occasional forays into media silliness or issues.  In the interest of accuracy, I will insert attribution into the appropriate archived posts.  Going forward, a slightly wider range of issues will carry my byline. 

For readers' information, my role as editor here has largely involved punctuation, embellishment of headlines or tone, and standard copyediting.  Sometimes I will suggest a topic for Paul to consider, and more rarely might suggest that a topic Paul is ranting about isn't worth a post.  But otherwise, this is Paul Soglin's blog, and unless specifically signed otherwise, the tone, opinions, and conclusions therein are his. 

-  Barry Orton

Althouse's Fixation on Body Parts Continues

The offending picture:

While I was mulling over the concept of Islamofascism this past week, another Madison blogger laced into  Jessica Valenti of Feministing for her pose in a group photo with Bill Clinton.

Althouse, Let's take a closer look at those breasts :

"Jessica: I'm not judging you by your looks. (Don't flatter yourself.) I'm judging you by your apparent behavior. It's not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing..."

The ensuing debate set off hit counters on all coasts; some even got it right: Blogwars and boobs.

I enter the fray to make two points:

First, this is not the first time that Althouse has focused pointedly at women's bodies. As exposed by us last March 6, 2006, Waxingamerica Declares All Out War On Altmouse , in regards to this from the innocent Olympian, Sasha Cohen:

Althouse: Slutskaya wore pants

As they say on "Project Runway," "too much tootie." Quit aiming that thing at me.

Seriously, I love the Slutskaya unitard approach. It creates an unbroken line and feels coherent with the winter setting, unlike naked-looking legs. And with those flesh-tone tights, you've always got that contrasting strip of fabric across the crotch -- like a sanitary napkin! And it is repeatedly displayed, and we can't help staring at it! Why is that not considered grossly vulgar? ...

Secondly, the astute Jessica Valenti is one of the few in the picture standing properly. As anyone who has been in a class photo knows, everyone stage right stands three quarters flanked to the left, and everyone on the left stands three quarters flanked to the right.

Unless, of course, we all stand flanked right.

Borat Disarms Entire Nation

To prove that all it takes is one lunatic to turn a country upside down, we need go no further than "journalist"  Borat and his impact on beleaguered Kazakhstan. Borat! Meet Kazakhstan's real-life roving TV reporter. And he's not happy:

Suddenly, the war between one comedian and an entire nation-state is getting personal.

Sacha Baron Cohen's creation of Borat, a Jew-baiting, sister-snogging, horse-urine-drinking Kazakh television reporter, has so angered the former Soviet republic that it is fighting back with every means at its disposal - including a local celebrity who calls himself Borat's brother.

So, as Baron Cohen's mockumentary, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, opens in the US and heads to the UK in November, perhaps the strangest feud in the history of light entertainment grows ever more bizarre.

To date, Borat - famous, among other indelicacies, for singing "Throw the Jew Down the Well" at a US country and western bar, and arriving at a film premiere on a wagon pulled by four peasant women - has provoked the Kazakh authorities to ban his website, threaten legal action, make formal protests (though they deny that they will raise the matter with President George Bush) and buy airtime on US television to correct the portrayal of their countrymen as primitives.

Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat's alter ego, (alias Ali G and Jean Girard, Talladega Nights) has managed to ridicule goats, peasants, women, drinking horse urine, a national sport involving chasing a goat's head and just about everything else profound in Kazakhstan.

Now that he has throughly befuddled and confused the Kazakh government, one can only conclude that there is an important moral or lesson here from which both the British and US governments can learn something.

Perhaps the US, Britain and Kazakhstan should recall the old Chinese proverb:

Know your enemy as you know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.

Islamofascism: Why We Are Losing the War

Islamofascism: There is no such thing. The belief that it exists is one reason we are losing the war on terrorism.

Fascism embraces the organic state. Fascism emanated from the amalgamation into modern Germany and Italy of the fragmented districts and tiny states that populated nineteenth century Europe . Fascism is a nationalistic rejection of liberalism, rejection of representative democracy, and the celebration of nationalistic myths.

In Germany and Italy, fascism came to power through democratic elections.

We would not be in this mess if in 1967, when Dick Cheney and I were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin, our Vice President, the architect of the phony war on Islamofascism, had come over to the History Department and attended the lectures of Professors George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg. As Mosse wrote in The Culture of Western Europe:

The real spirit of the Volk must be expressed through a "national aristocracy" and though a leader. An elite would express the shared spirituality of the nation as its "ideal type."...Ideas which have previously been dealt with thus come together here: the organic state, the elite, and the leader. (p 345, emphasis added)

The organic state would allow all to participate through myths, principally of racial superiority. This organic state incorporated a "political liturgy and rites of fascism," which brought everything from uniforms and the arts to the masses. Above all, fascism heralded the triumph of the state.

For a more extensive view of German fascism, there is Mosse's The Nationalization Of the Masses, written in 1975.  Brian C. Anderson's review of Mosse's The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, outlines the cornerstones of real fascism:

"Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." Benito Mussolini...Mussolini’s infamous quote captures the remarkable hubris of fascism, its frightening impulse to rule over every dimension of life (the word is from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods sporting an axe–head that symbolized the unchallenged state authority of Rome)...

... he correctly stresses the crucial role of nationalism...

...These four marks of the Fascist spirit—nationalism and racism, a love of violence and war, irrationalism, and revolutionary presumption—though not exhaustive, help us to understand its appeal during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly where democratic institutions were feckless and resentments bred by World War I festered...

There are many commonalities between the German and Italian fascist of the twentieth century and the present day Islamic terrorists. They reject industrialization, though both utilized the latest industrial innovations for military purposes, and they embrace totalitarianism, myths of superiority, and the expendability of human life.

But Islamic terrorists are not fascists.  They do not embrace the nation state, they do not evolve from an organic state. Their movement is not one that embraces worker's unity, national unity, or myths of Christianity, all essential elements of fascism.

The use of the term Islamofascism is not only incorrect historically, but contributed to the successive military blunders orchestrated by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

They engaged an enemy on the premise that they were battling a nation state. They won a battle defeating the state led by Saddam Hussein, but they continue to lose two greater battles.  They lost the battle to control Iraq, and they are losing the battle to defeat Islamic terrorists. The United States is struggling to control the nation of Iraq.  Our enemy does not need it; they only want to drive us out. There is a difference.

When we toppled the Nazi government of Adolph Hitler, the Germans stopped fighting. They lost the prize; they no longer controlled the state. When we toppled Saddam Hussein, the Islamic terrorists stepped into the void when the Iraqi army collapsed. Islamic terrorists kept fighting, stronger than ever. Islamic terrorists do not need to control the state to advance their cause.

So long as the Neocons rely on the false notion of Islamofascism to inspire support for the faltering Bush policies, we will militarily lose the battle.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

In January, 2004, Patrick Michelson of the George L. Mosse Program In History at the University of Wisconsin, and John Tortorice sent me a gift, a copy of Professor Mosse's Culture of Western Europe.  For too long, I was without this valuable text.  Too bad Dick Cheney never read it.