I have made a decision this semester to retire my long-running “Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracies in American History and Culture” course, at least for a while. My heart has been less and less in it since 9/11 and even more so since the start of Iraq War.  Conspiracy theories and some real conspiracies obviously were involved in both of those events and their aftermaths, but they also make me too sad and angry to adopt the bemused, frankly 1990s-based  perspective that the course really requires.

The students in it also seem to have changed, or at least the times have changed around them. I spend 98% of the lecture time debunking conspiracy theories or analyzing them as historical texts, but increasingly I have come to feel that students are taking it for all the wrong reasons: sometimes because they want to believe in conspiracy theories themselves, but more often because they want American history and culture to be a kind of pop-culture lark they can use to while away some spring afternoons.

It’s the same sort of fundamental un-seriousness that is wrecking our current political process. Did I mention that my class is generally full of seniors and juniors from MU’s journalism school, which I am told is very highly regarded and certainly seems to find media jobs for most of its graduates?

Via a reader blog at Talking Points Memo, I just found one of the better summary descriptions of this un-serious attitude and its consequences for the presidential race. The piece comes from a local columnist in Terre Haute, Indiana. Terre Haute is not much of a place to look at or try to find a place to have dinner in, but it did help bring the world Eugene Debs and Larry Bird, so it has a certain tradition. The column is posted in full below, some after the jump.

STEPHANIE SALTER: Election 2008: What would the Trilateral Commission do?

TERRE HAUTE — A friend who teaches in public school here in Indiana was appalled not long ago when an e-mail from a colleague went out to everyone in the school’s cyber-address book.

The subject of the e-mail was Barack Obama and how he is “secretly” a radical Muslim bent on destroying the United States from within. A widely circulated pack of lies — e.g., he took the oath of office holding a Koran — the e-mail boasts that its contents are verifiable on the legitimate myth buster, snopes.com, which is the opposite of true.

At least my teacher friend’s colleague didn’t send out one of the popular e-mails that insist Obama shows all the signs of being the antichrist.

I wish I could say I was kidding, but I can’t. I live in the United States of America — a country in which most people are alleged to be literate — and I am about to participate in a historic presidential primary. But I am starting to wonder if some of my fellow citizens have a grasp on reality, let alone the issues.

A jihadist? The antichrist? Oh, for God’s sake.

Before anyone is tempted to play the region card, don’t. Indiana has no exclusive claim to people who are spending time this spring telling one another that Obama is a jihadist and/or the antichrist. Google offers about 2.25 million hits on the latter subject. (Mercifully, renunciations are part of the volume.)

The hearty existence of these and similar crusades points up a reality of contemporary American life: We are divided between the people who are inclined toward conspiracies, superstition, black-and-white explanations, pigeon holes and cheap sentimentality masquerading as “patriotism” — and the people who are not so inclined.

While many of those with an aversion to investigation and critical thought processes identify themselves as “conservatives,” there are liberal conspiracy theorists aplenty to demonstrate that twisted thinking is an equal opportunity affliction.

To see lefty conspiracies on display, one only need read the wild and crazy ideas about why a HuffingtonPost blogger shared her personal impressions of the Obama fundraiser in San Francisco, now known as “Bittergate.” The most popular: Hillary Clinton secretly paid her to do it.

Even among people who don’t buy Trilateral Commission plots, there is a decided intellectual shallowness in fashion this year. Across the land, from the blogosphere to the town hall meeting, too many axes are grinding and too many enemy camps are hunkered down. Among people of both major parties and many minor ones, 30-minute policy statements have been freeze-dried into four-word catch phrases, and complex humans have been reduced to cut-out characters who wear halos or horns.

Last month, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York columnist actually cited leftover waffles and french fries as evidence of Obama’s inability to connect strongly enough with voters to vanquish Clinton from the Democratic race.

In the same essay, the columnist referred to Clinton’s continued quest of the nomination as “the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” and called her criticisms of Obama “emasculating.”

Half-eaten waffles, sci-fi movie characters and sexist stereotypes? Is everything, including a presidential race, just another variation on Simon Cowell or the “Left Behind” series?

Eight years ago, millions of voters chose as president a former boozer who “seems like he’d be fun to have a beer with.” Didn’t we learn anything about the dangers of superficiality from this reversal of style over substance?

What in the world has happened to our B.S. detectors? We can’t find enough obvious differences among presidential candidates that we must resort to misogynistic name calling and invisible ties to al Qaida or Satan?

Why can’t we just use what is before our very own eyes?
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Per the historian’s creed, it does pay to actually check the primary source before spouting off about something.

There was an AP story this morning headlined “Colorado resolution compares Indians’ deaths to Holocaust.” (I have posted the text of the story after the jump.) While I actually tend to support official apologies and reparations and such, I started to write post complaining about the needless, Ward Churchillian provocation of dropping the H-word on every event in human history where a lot of people got killed. It seemed like the kind of thing that was more likely to engender anger, misunderstanding, and cynicism than heightened awareness of real historical crime.

The only problem with the post I was going to write was that it was the AP that dropped the H-word, not the Colorado legislature. The story seemed to be missing a real money quite, so I looked up the resolution in question. It turned out to be a rather mild piece that referenced the Holocaust only as one of several cases of ethnic genocide that Colorado lawmakers had already memorialized. Here’s an excerpt:

21 WHEREAS, The Colorado General Assembly has recognized and
22 memorialized the victims of genocide in Europe against the Jews, in the
23 Middle East against the Armenians, and in Africa against the Sudanese;
24 and

25 WHEREAS, A common element in genocide is the creation of a
26 myth that the victims are in some way not part of the human family; and

27 WHEREAS, This element was present in the European treatment
28 of the American Indians, as well; now, therefore,

29 Be It Resolved by the Senate of the Sixty-sixth General Assembly
30 of the State of Colorado, the House of Representatives concurring herein:

31 (1) That we, the members of the General Assembly, express our
32 grief at the millions of deaths of American . . .

Now, I don’t fully endorse the accuracy of every historical interpretation embedded within the resolution, but it seemed quite reasonable and unobjectionable as such things go. It was the Associated Press headline, which ran in newspapers across the country, that turned the resolution into something Euro-Americans could be offended by, Jews and gentiles for their own reasons.

This story is today’s example (of one of them) of the media’s habit of finding or creating racial little scabs to pick. Whether born of laziness or malice I could not say, but the chief effect of little offenso-nuggests like this is to give middle-class white readers further reasons to feel huffy and complacent and self-serving in their views of American society and American history.

Gosh, thanks, AP!

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Travel and end-of-the-semester workload issues have kept me off of here a little longer than expected. Regular blogging will resume soon!

. . . from the state that brought you President James Buchanan (who recently lost his one historical distinction, the Worst President Ever crown, to the current illustrious occupant), Lincoln’s corrupt & incompetent war secretary Simon Cameron, Boss Matt Quay, Boies Penrose*, Frank “I’m so tough I’m gonna make Attila the Hun look like a f—-t” Rizzo, and the MOVE bombing, just for starters. It’s been (almost) all downhill since the state inaugurated competitive presidential politics by swinging to Jefferson in 1796. In 1800, the Federalists in the state senate stopped a state presidential election from even being held.

Actually just looking up some of the guys listed above, I realized how hopeless this was for Obama from the beginning. I do wish Hillary luck with those Rizzoheads in November. She will need them once she finishes completely alienating younger voters (than 50!) and the African-American base.

Harvard’s Theda Skocpol recalls Hillary Clinton’s deep connection with ordinary working-class voters circa 1995:

But what is clear in both in my memory and my notes is that there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices — usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

I vividly remember at the time finding it impressive that Bill Clinton (not Hillary Clinton) showed real empathy for the ordinary people whose motives and supposedly misguided choices were under analysis. Ironically, just as Barber reported, Bill Clinton was the one who combined analysis and empathy, much as Obama himself did in his full San Francisco remarks.

I think this whole angle of “gotcha” politics about snippets of speech transposed from one context to another is ridiculous and pathological for democracy in America — and I cannot fathom why the Clintons or George Stephanopoulos are descending to this dirt, not to mention the guilt-by-association crap. It is particularly despicable of them to criticize Obama for the sort of observation/analysis that was routine in and around the 1990s Clinton White House. And I cannot help but feel there is a psychological edge of pure envy in Bill Clinton’s attacks: Obama is empathetic and charismatic as well as smart, just like Bill was back then, in those so much better days!

I doubt Theda Skocpol remembers me — I have not really had any occasion to contact her since leaving grad school — but her “American Political Development” seminar class was quite crucial to me at the point when I was just starting to write my dissertation. Not that it is easy to tell that in terms of how my work has evolved; I was the only student doing anything remotely early American in that class, but it was very bracing and helpful to encounter some other scholars with broad interests in American politics, an article that seemed to be in short supply among the historians I had met up to that point.

Skocpol was also quite a Clinton fan/fellow traveler back in the 90s, so her take on Hillary’s late conversion to ersatz lunch bucket politics really means something.

Far be it from me to be an ungracious host, but I must demur from commenter Election Watcher’s correction of my generational terminology below.

I can’t stop people from using “Generation Jones” for the immediate post-Baby Boomers if they like. However, as I wrote in an earlier comment, “Generation X” was indeed coined to describe the born-in-the-60s, grew up in the 70s, began working in the 80s group of which Barack Obama (born 1961) and myself (born 1964) are members. Douglas Coupland, author of the original Generation X book, was also born in 1961. Looking a few things up, it also turns out (as I suspected) that the two most prominent purveyors of Seattle grunge rock, so heavily associated with Gen X, are in the same age group: Kurt Cobain was born in 1967, the same year as my younger brother, and Eddie Vedder in 1964, the same year as yours truly. The key experience in common here is having been too young to directly participate in any of the 60s movements or their fallout. It’s prosopography, baby!

That brings me back to Obama and the Weathermen. The story of his association will former Weatherman Bill Ayers is a little less flimsy than I originally assumed — there was apparently a state senate campaign event at Ayers’s home — but the terms of it are interesting generationally. In the recent debate,

Obama replied that Ayers was a neighbor and acquaintance. “The notion that . . . me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn’t make much sense,” he said.

Who did or said what to whom back in the day was just not relevant. My reaction exactly to any number of academic situations I have run into regarding old radical antipathies and controversies.

Let me close by saying that I really hope I don’t have to wait longer than January before my generation gets its first president.

Do Hillary and the Hillaryites really not see that they are being set up? A Generation X-er like myself, Barack Obama was a still a kid during the late 6os/early 7os period when the Black Panthers, Weather Underground, and other revolutionary radical groups stalked the Earth, gaining far more publicity than adherents and inserting themselves into they not how many future pointless political debates. Yet somehow Obama becomes a a card-carrying Maoist because he sat on a Chicago community board with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, many years later when Ayers was a respected academic. So when ABC and its former Clintonista anchor George Stephanopoulos smuggle a “spider-web chart” type question about Ayers from Sean Hannity on to a national TV debate, Hillary agrees that yes this is a serious issue, working to keep the campaign in the Baby Boomer Reflux mode that she thinks helps her.

Where does she think this sort of campaigning will go from here if she does happen to win the nomination? Having thoroughly alienated the black voters who make up the Democrats’ surest base and have turned off millions of young Obama supporters, does she not realize that she will have put the GOP in position to attack her on the same grounds she now attacks Obama, only with months of new reinforcement for the image of the Democrats as ROTC-bombing Maoist radicals? Does not she not remember that there is actually more substantive material to base such attacks on in her case because she was actually there in the supposed bad old days? While Obama was still in elementary school, she was an adult, living in places like New Haven and Berkeley and involved with various forms of radical politics, such as working at a law firm that defended various Panthers? Clinton’s no radical either, but she was a lot closer than Obama’s board seat.

It is not surprising that Obama was a little less sharp than usual in the ABC debate. As I can attest from any number of department meetings and academic gatherings, it ain’t easy being inside someone else’s psychodrama. He had a quite deft comment, gesture actually, about the debate today.

I have had a number of thoughts about this past ridiculous week of campaigning, but frankly have not been able to get any of them all the way written out for just being so angry about it. Here we have Iraq spiraling and the world economy disintegrating before our eyes, among other major developments that are posing serious threats to our way of life and the stability of the world. Yet our presidential campaign has become yet another opportunity for various millionaire urbanites in New York and Washington to pretend they are just folks for the benefit of the rubes out in flyover land. Possibly because they themselves really are so very ignorant, and proudly so, of anything that does not appear in their products (and much that does), the mainstream media’s devotion to the pose of belligerent, self-satisified regular joe is truly boundless. Then they turn around and project that same abstraction on the rest of the country, and convince each other they are really talking to and about the Average American. As though they would talk to a such person in they unlikely event they encountered them at a social event.

The question would not be whether Bill Kristol or Maureen Dowd or Charlie Gibson or the Monster of the Middle Way herself are really “in touch” with the perspective of church-going small town working people but rather whether they have any connection to or personal knowledge of it whatsoever. Through his Kansas roots and generally less wealthy background, Barack Obama has a little bit more, though probably only a little bit. His now-infamous “bitter” comment arose from something few of his national media critics or opponents would ever bother with, an attempt to actually understand the perspective of other people in other socioeconomic strata in a specific way, even when it does not necessarily lead to a preferred conclusion and involves admitting that even Average Americans can have negative feelings that depart from MSM stereotypes.

The best analysis of I have seen of what substance of any this recent tiff has was by Sam Stein in the Huffington Post. It is quite even handed despite the source.

To me the overreaction of the entire media and most of the political structure to the “bitter” comment shows that Obama must have been on to something. The only thing that cannot be allowed is any sort of genuine alternative to the current conventionalities about culture and economics. Obama opines that there might be one — a sentiment perfectly cognizant with Christian practice as many of us understand it, and with the longstanding missionary practice of providing food and other economic assistance to groups they were trying to convert.

Those who have convinced themselves that Hillary’s mastery of policy somehow makes her more progressive are kidding themselves. Her whole rationale at this point is that you have to be a Republican to beat the Republicans, something that has never been true but only seemed like it was after she and her husband screwed up their first administration so badly and lost control of Congress. It is however a point that the Republicans and many other enemies of good, responsive government, want to make sure that the media and the voter accepts completely.

Apologies for the blackout over the past few days. We were hosting an out-of-town guest who was in for a conference and it seemed a bit obnoxious to have my laptop out all the time, and impossible to have it out while driving back and forth to Kansas City, at least under my present technical limitations. I look forward to the day when in-dash voice blogging software comes standard with every sensible compact car.

The occasion for the visit, or one of them, was a long-overdue memorial event for my late colleague Noble Cunningham, one of the greatest political historians of the Early American Republic and one of the most prominent ever employed by my present institution, the University of Missouri. General readers are most likely to know Noble for what is generally considered the best short scholarly biography of Jefferson, the Pulitzer-nominated In Pursuit of Reason. (Ignore the trolls on Amazon, but also don’t expect heavy coverage of many topics that have dominated discussions of Jefferson in the last 20 years. Noble’s Jefferson was a politician, an administrator, and an enthusiast of the Enlightenment, which of course he was.) I may post the remarks I made here when I have time to clean them up a little, but for now I will confine myself to posting a link to an only somewhat inaccurate local newspaper report of the event. The credit for organizing the whole thing should really go to my student Steven C. Smith, with special thanks to my friend Andy (Andrew W.) Robertson of CUNY for being the special out-of-state guest speaker.

Finally, in tribute to Noble’s love for Jefferson, I will throw in a slightly cheeseball portrait of the present writer that the university publicity people took a while back, posing me with the campus Jefferson statue — doesn’t everyone have them? Near the same spot is now also found a tree and plaque dedicated to Noble Cunningham. I had kind of been suppressing this little bit of personal Jefferson kitsch, but anything for you, Noble.

Is this America’s first “Golden Shield” memo? Jefferson thought so. Are the S of M and I being grossly unfair? In fairness, it was George Washington that Hamilton used as his “aegis.”