Wellstone Remembered

There are some good reflections on Wellstone up today. Predictably, The Nation focuses on his political stands and has recycled his writings for the magazine. Also predictably, some of the most gracious portraits come from ideological opponents: Mickey Kaus has a lovely item on Slate and John J. Miller has a generous article on National Review.

The New York Times, however, has an obit that sums Wellstone up in more vivid detail:

"Mr. Boschwitz [Wellstone's incumbent opponent in 1990] spent $7 million on his campaign, seven times Mr. Wellstone's budget. To counteract the Boschwitz attacks, Mr. Wellstone ran witty, even endearing television commercials produced without charge by a group led by a former student. In one ad, the video and audio were speeded up, and Mr. Wellstone said he had to talk fast because "I don't have $6 million to spend."

Who can think of a senator they'd work for free for? Wellstone's political style was, at first especially, amateurish in the best possible way. His style suited his politics, a leftism of a type that owes more to Whitman, Eugene Debs, and the early days of the New Left than it does to the scolding austerity of Naderism or anything reeking of Europe. He was far left, to be sure, but one could no more imagine him burning an American flag than one could imagine Jesse Helms publicly swallowing a goldfish. He was likely to be mistaken, but he was not given to moral preening or McKinney-esque hysteria.

I like to think that these were the reasons he was the liberal's liberal in the Senate. It's very hard to love Ted Kennedy's trust-fund paternalism, and harder yet to love Barbara Boxer's ear-piercing manner, but it was hard not to at least think highly of Wellstone and to see the virtues of a rare liberalism in him above all others.

I just lost perhaps my best-ever post because of a site maintainence problem, which touched on Arts and Letters Daily (it's back, thank heavens), Iraq, Buster Keaton, and Johnny Paycheck. But I would have felt like a heel for posting it anyway once I found out that Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash today.

When Wellstone first ran for the Senate in 1990, I was living in northwestern Wisconsin near the Twin Cities. We got more Minnesota media than Wisconsin media, so my family watched the race pretty closely. I was only 11 at the time, but my political consciousness was forming, and Wellstone's campaign was an inspiration. He was clever, scrappy, and the darkest of dark horses. He swooped out of nowhere (actually, the political science department of Carleton College) to unseat a sitting senator, and we loved him for it.

I met Wellstone once, briefly, many years ago. For me--and some of you can surely appreciate this--it was like meeting a great baseball player. I have no idea what he was like, but he always managed to convey an air of decency, and I've never heard anyone question the honesty of his positions or the purity of his motives. Sadly, this is saying a lot. He'll be very fondly remembered and very, very badly missed.

I had to spend today writing an article on The Junkers for Casey and preparing for a mentor training at Loyola University (for my actual real job!) so I have had to leave today's web content largely untouched. That shall be rectified tomorrow.

In the meantime, check out the Junkers, especially their Marxian heartbreak anthem "It's Hard to Win a Woman (When You're Workin' for the Man)":

It's a deadly dialectic
And my love life's apoplectic
A case study of oppression for the books.
And it's sure infuriatin'
How my labor's alienatin'
But on the other hand, it could just be my looks

For you Latin-reading Junkerphiles, I'm told that the working title for this song became the group's motto: Laborando amare non possum. Think abou it.

Dan Savage Strokes, Slaps Fans

Is there yet a man (or woman) among us who does not believe that Dan Savage is the shit? He was good as a mere sex guru, but recently he has diversified his portfolio impressively. His broadsides in The Stranger about AIDS and the war are a great antidote to the standard lefty preening, and unlike most public liberals, he has a sense of humor.

So I made sure to get to Border's over an hour before his reading last night. A half hour before he came on, the reading area was overflowing, and I could almost hear dozens of hipsters saying to themselves, "this is the last time I'll be early for anything." But the man didn't disappoint, reading excerpts from his new book Skipping Towards Gomorrah and digressively answering a truly catholic array of questions.

Throughout he was clearly unafraid of pissing off his audience. He took the Left to task for misunderstanding Islamic terrorism, saying, "If Osama bin Laden has me and John Ashcroft in a room, bin Laden would kill me before he'd kill Ashcroft. I hate John Ashcroft, but the damage he does can be repaired. John Ashcroft is like Barbara Walters: he can be endured. Islamic fascism cannot be endured, it can only be fought."

He seldom stayed on the original topic, often pausing to ask what the question was and once adding, "that's what smoking pot does for ya." My favorite moment came during his lengthy takedown of gay pride parades (he would drop the pride element and just have a big gay Mardi Gras). Rightly pointing out that pride ideology prevents people from being ashamed of shameful things, he said:

"Everyone, gay and straight, does things they should be ashamed of. I'm a Catholic, I know this. If you're a grown man, a 40-year-old man running around in a lime green thong, you should be ashamed of yourself."

Everyone laughs uproariously.

"If you've got AIDS and you fuck a man in the ass just because he let you, you should be ashamed of yourself."

Dead silence. That audience would not have let Bill Bennet or Pat Buchanan say such a thing, and I think rightly so. After all, for Bennet or Buchanan, there is no such thing as ethical gay sex, so their accusations are irrelevant. But they did just sit there and take a short, brutal lecture from Dan, coming as it did just seconds after one of his biggest laugh lines of the night.

When someone pushed him to talk about Iraq, it was a credit to him that he refused to get into a pointless and probably ill-informed debate, so he just said, "I want to direct all of you to an article in The New Republic by Johnathan Chait, called 'The Liberal Case for War.' I won't say anything else about it." My friend Casey helpfully held up his copy of the issue and Dan pointed it out for everyone to see.

The first chapter of the book is online, and the chapter on lust is excerpted in The Chicago Reader. When I'm done with the book I will inform you all of its failings, but for the moment it comes highly recommended. O'Reilly, Hannity, and the rest of them need some better company on the best seller list.

Not to be a jerk about it, but an important distinction I would draw between Nietzsche and DeMan or Heidegger is that the former was long dead by the time Mein Kampf was written. The heavily and horribly redacted versions of his writings that informed Nazi ideology account for his vague association with the Third Reich. In the cases of De Man and Heidegger, it's rather the reverse: the individuals were known to be directly associated with Nazism (institutionally), which clouds our understanding of their work. Any inference of anti-Semitism on Nietzsche's part would have to come from his work, because no one suggests that he was personally a Jew-hater based on biographical information; he's personally suspect because of his work. If we approach the work of De Man or Heidegger with a priori suspicion, it would have to be because we know in advance that they were Nazis.

I don't have any good ideas about how to approach questions of intentionality and biography with philosophers. I do think, however, that it bears mentioning, just to check our own reactions. Students of Heidegger ought to consider why he thought of himself as the Nazi ideologist, right? Or is it totally irrelevant?

In Defense of Heidegger-Bashing

I think I might have mistranscribed some quotations marks when I excerpted Ron Rosenbaum's article for the Observer. It was Rosenbaum, not Lang, who editorialized that Heidegger is "beloved to distraction by postmodernists (and Hannah Arendt)." That's a cheap shot, but it's Rosenbaum's, not Lang's.

As I saw Lang's point, it wasn't a critique of Heidegger's philosophy. I got no implication that it is or was essentially Nazi in any way, although he himself certainly claimed it was. Rather, the point seemed to be that Heidegger himself, as a person, represented a hitherto unique form of evil.

As far as I know, there is no dispute over whether Heidegger purged the German universities of Jews and hostile thinkers (including his erstwhile friend Husserl). There is no doubt, as far as I know, that he was himself a card-carrying Nazi. No defense of his philosophy should ever be confused with commentary on his loathsome character (or, to be fair, vice-versa). After all, Rousseau was the scum of the earth; Marx despised the handful of working people he allowed himself to encounter; Sartre was a coward in the face of Vichy and the Soviet Union. None of these facts make a bit of difference vis-a-vis the validity of Romanticism, Marxism, or Sartre's version of existentialism, but they ought not to be ignored simply because they could be misconstrued that way.

So to get back to the matter at hand, I think it's fair to say that Rosenbaum was making a cheap insinuation (postmodernists like an unabashed Nazi, thus they are tainted with Nazism), but Lang was not. Rather, he was making an entirely fair argument that Heidegger himself was a particularly evil man, which he was.