But Is It Good for Harvard (cont.)
Last month political scientists John J. Mearsheimer (Uni-versity of Chicago) and Stephen M. Walt (Harvard) made public an 82-page "working paper" on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," which-purported to describe how a "core" group of "American Jews" are infiltrating "the corridors of power" and "manipulating the media" in order to distort U.S. foreign policy in favor of "racist" and "brutal" Israel. The infiltrators' coreligionists are thus given "a free hand" to "persecute" Palestinians--even as "the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."
Much public reaction to this astonishing document has concerned its authors' apparent . . . um . . . preoccupation with Jewish people. But Mearsheimer and Walt seem almost to welcome that complaint--as evidence that a grand conspiracy really exists. Isn't it standard practice, they write, for "The Lobby" to "squelch debate about Israel" by "suggesting that critics are anti-Semites"? See? See?
No point in feeding these gentlemen's paranoia.
Especially since it's so much more fun simply to point out how craptacular their reasoning is. A tip of The Scrapbook's cap to Near East expert and blogger Martin Kramer ( sandbox.blog-city.com) for his mordant analysis of one particularly fine bit in the Walt/Mearsheimer fine print. "One of the nuttiest passages in 'The Israel Lobby,'" writes Kramer, "occurs in the very first footnote":
The mere existence of the [pro-Israel] Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about. But because Israel is a strategic and moral liability, it takes relentless political pressure to keep U.S. support intact.
"Other commentators," Kramer goes on, "have pointed to the absurdity of this statement, since every conceivable special interest has a lobby in Washington, and they can't all be working against the national interest." Indeed, you can be absolutely sure no professor will make that assertion about one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the higher education lobby. Start with Harvard's own Office of Federal Relations, conveniently described on its own website. There we learn the following: "Harvard's federal relations teams in Cambridge and Washington, D.C., work to maintain a positive and ongoing relationship between Harvard and the Congressional and Executive branches of government."
There you have it, Professor Walt! Evidence that federal support for Harvard is not in the American national interest! If it was, Harvard would not need federal relations "teams" operating out of Cambridge and Washington to bring it about. But because so many Harvard professors are intellectual and moral liabilities, it takes relentless political pressure to keep federal support intact. . . .
But it's not just Harvard. Every major research university, and lots of lesser ones, have offices of "government relations"--in-house lobbies that often keep branches in Washington. . . . For example, the Chicago Tribune reported in January that the University of Chicago has hired the Federalist Group, a Washington lobbying firm, to help it win what is supposed to be a merit-based competition to manage the Argonne National Laboratory. The university is applying political pressure to preserve its established hold on the laboratory. What say you, Professor Mearsheimer?
Dateline NBC's Anti-NASCAR Bias
Concerned that Americans might be engaged in anti-Muslim stereotyping, Dateline NBC producers had an unusual brainstorm: Let's stereotype Americans! More specifically, the class of Americans that enjoys stock car racing.
As we learned last week from Michelle Malkin's blog, NBC sent an undercover camera crew to NASCAR's April 2 DIRECTV 500 at the Martinsville Speedway in southern Virginia. NBC confirmed to an AP reporter that it had sent "Muslim-looking men" to the race "along with a camera crew to film fans' reactions." Apparently those mouth-breathing NASCAR fans (as Dateline imagines them) didn't take the bait. They "walked around and no one bothered them," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston told the AP. Malkin got a few emails from readers who attended the race. "Woody B." wrote that he had noticed the NBC plants: "They never seemed to be going anywhere in particular. To the credit of NASCAR fans, I never did see someone do so much as a double take at their presence." Another reader, "Jerry W.," offered a useful tip to NBC: Try going to the Texas Motor Speedway. "The Texas track is much larger, with grandstand seating for over 140,000 and sufficient room in the infield for, by the track's estimate, 53,000 more people. The track promises to be, if not completely sold out by race day, at least extremely close to it. Much easier to find someone willing to react 'suitably' for Dateline with that size crowd, plus the added 'bonus' of finding such behavior in the president's home state." But our favorite piece of advice came from "Chris S.": "My wife and I attended last weekend's NASCAR race in Martinsville, and had a wonderful time. But if NBC wants to guarantee they get a negative reaction to their 'plant,' all they need to do is put him in a Jeff Gordon T-shirt. The Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans will be sure to give him a rough time! His fans are definitely the most vocal of them all."
English As a Pidgin Language
The Houston Chronicle's Jennifer Radliffe reports on a high school teacher whose activism has landed him in hot water with his bosses: "Rudy Rios was stripped of his duties as junior varsity baseball coach at Chavez High School last week after using a district copying machine to make a flier encouraging Latino students to attend a rally protesting restrictions on illegal immigration.
"Rios, who still retains his duties as an English-as-a-second-language teacher, was copying and distributing a flier that read: 'We gots 2 stay together and protest against the new law that wants 2 be passed against all immigrants. We gots 2 show the U.S. that they aint [expletive] without us.'"
On the evidence, shouldn't they have instead retained him as a junior varsity baseball coach and stripped him of his duties as an English teacher?
A Salute to McHugh
On looking through The Mind Has Mountains: Reflections on Society and Psychiatry, the new collection of essays by Paul McHugh, we're more convinced than ever of the importance of the author's contribution--not just to his own, sometimes troubled medical discipline, but also to the wider intellectual struggles and policy choices to which it relates.
For 26 years head of the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, McHugh has labored to develop a science-based psychiatry that approaches mental illness from a stance he calls "constructive realism"--one that spurns Freudian mystification and presumption, yet confidently asserts that truth can be known. Read this book for sane--make that "wise"--clinically informed discussions of depression, Terri Schiavo, the "recovered memory" wars, treating minds as well as brains, the Hippocratic Oath, Shakespeare, and more. We only regret that we must forgo reviewing the volume, the price we pay for the honor of having originally published several of its finest pieces in our pages.