"But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them."

"In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes. Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide...."

Writes Jonathan Malesic, in "There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore" (NYT).

I remember "vibes" as a hippie word, so I have trouble seeing how it functions these days in the speech of the young, and so, it annoys me. I wish I'd made a tag for it long ago, so I could could keep track of how it annoys me — at least in its usage by mainstream media. Do non-media young people go around saying it? I don't know. It just irks me when I see it in media.

For example... 

"The backlash against the left was a key part of the 1968 presidential race. Richard Nixon famously ran a campaign on 'law and order'..."

"One commercial featured scenes of protest, as Nixon argued that 'in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies a resort to violence.' Alabama Gov. George Wallace was a lot more direct that year in his third-party bid. While racism was at the heart of his message, he also denounced student protesters as 'silver spoon brats' who advocated 'treason' and said of protesters, 'Some of ’em lie down in front of my automobile, it’ll be the last thing they’ll ever wanna lie down in front of.' The scenes of violence in Chicago outside the Democrats’ 1968 presidential convention, meanwhile, further contributed to the notion that left-wing lawlessness had gotten out of control. It was a nightmare event for Hubert Humphrey’s beleaguered presidential campaign, one where the public overwhelmingly sided with the Chicago police, not the demonstrators. (And, of course, guess where Democrats are holding their 2024 convention: Chicago.)... [I]n November of 1968, Nixon and Wallace combined for 57 percent of the vote...."

Writes Jeff Greenfield, in "Don’t Forget the Backlash to the ’60s/Today’s campus chaos carries a grim warning for Biden" (Politico).

"The Ronna McDaniel Debacle and the Test for Talking Heads."

"I made the move from political operative to media analyst. Here’s how it can actually work."

Writes Jeff Greenfield, at Politico. Greenfield is "a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst" who moved from political operative to media analyst way back in the 1970s.

"Have we ever had a president before this one who so disdains the advice and policies of those who have spent their lives working for the government he leads?"

"Have we ever had a chief executive who is so skeptical of the judgments of career diplomats and military leaders, who rejects the advice of top intelligence leaders, who trusts his family more than those with a lifetime of experience? Yes we have. And his name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.... Throughout Kennedy’s presidency, he came more and more to distrust the received wisdom of the 'permanent government' or 'deep state' or 'military-industrial complex' or whatever term seems apt today. In his case, that skepticism may have saved the planet from nuclear annihilation.... [I]n the reflexive rush to criticize Trump, we risk forgetting the lesson of the Kennedy years: There is danger in relying too heavily on the 'wisdom' of the elders. A president with a well-honed resistance to the certainties of experts and a strong sense of history can be a crucial protection against disaster..."

From "When JFK Was Trump/In the rush to criticize the current president, we risk forgetting the lesson of the Kennedy years: There is danger in relying too heavily on the 'wisdom' of the elders" by Jeff Greenfield (in Politico).

Subtitle of the Day.

Why Trump’s Going to Win on the National Emergency

There’s one arena where the president always succeeds: getting the Republican Party to abandon its principles.

By JEFF GREENFIELD

 

February 15, 2019

At Politico.

Just go after Trump to the extent that you imagine that Fox News would have gone after Obama.

I'm not big on the "imagine if.." approach, but if Obama had done this, it would have been on a Fox News 24 hour video loop. https://t.co/xnIAUINrio

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) January 9, 2018

Here is a video of Trump 'singing' the #NationalAnthem.. He clearly doesn't know the words, yet he thinks Colin Kaeprnick is "a son of a bitch" for kneeling during that very anthem.#NationalChampionship pic.twitter.com/s0K8ZJCJdB

— Remove Trump Now (@KaniJJackson) January 9, 2018

Another thing you could do is just display sanity. Set a good example. Like this:

For those grousing about Trump seemingly not knowing the words to the national anthem: 1) He's hard of hearing and 2) down on the field, the sound bounces around a lot and it's hard to decipher the music. Singing along wouldn't be easy for him.

— Anthony Zurcher (@awzurcher) January 9, 2018

Gloria Steinem is still alive. Let's hear her speak for herself.

I'm reading Jeff Greenfield's piece in Politico, "How Roy Moore’s Misdeeds Are Forcing an Awakening on the Left/Years of excusing Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct suddenly seems morally indefensible":

There's no better illustration of how the ground has shifted than to look at Gloria Steinem’s 1998 New York Times op-ed piece, “Why Feminists Support Clinton.” Published as the Lewinsky story was on full boil, the piece talked not about that story, but about the charges of harassment leveled by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey [but not Juanita Broaddrick]....

“He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life” Steinem wrote of Willey. “She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again.” In her original story, Paula Jones essentially said the same thing. She went to then-Governor Clinton's hotel room, where she said he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers. She refused, and even she claims that he said something like, ‘Well, I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do.’’

“As with the allegations in Ms. Willey's case, Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection,” Steinem wrote by way of excusing him.... It was labeled the “one free grope” theory.

Politico doesn't give us a link for the Steinem piece, but I wanted to add one. I like to see the original text, not just excerpts. I went to the NYT to do a search and something really weird happened. When I typed in the search term "steinem" and added a space, my spelling (the correct spelling of the name) was accepted, but when, after that space, I added "clinton," the word "steinem" automatically corrected to "seinem" (and returned no results). I retested that over and over and it happened every time, at least as long as I stayed in my browser Safari. (It did not happen in Firefox.)

Anyway, I could not get the 1998 op-ed to turn up in the search of the archive. I got many letters to the editor responding to that op-ed, and I got a 2010 reprint — "March 22, 1998: Why Feminists Support Clinton, By Gloria Steinem" — which has the notation "The preceding was excerpted and adapted from a previously published Op-Ed article, for inclusion in a 40th-anniversary issue." Excerpts!

Greenfield continues:

At the height of the Lewinsky impeachment melodrama, Clinton’s defenders always argued that the president’s behavior was a private matter. To this day, you can find references to Clinton’s “dalliances” and “peccadilloes.”

Yes, NYT columnist Gail Collins and my Bloggingheads interlocutor Glenn Loury used the word "peccadilloes" to try to insulate Bill Clinton, as I discussed in a May 2016 post titled "Why does NYT columnist Gail Collins call Bill Clinton's sexual misdeeds 'private peccadilloes'?"

Collins had written "The sex scandal issue isn’t really central, since Americans have a long record of voting for the candidates they think can deliver, regardless of private peccadilloes." I said:

The phrase "the personal is political" means something important in the fight for women's equality. No one who cares about that fight should call the accusations against Bill Clinton "private peccadilloes." A "peccadillo" is: "A minor fault or sin; a trivial offence."...

Private peccadillo. Really, Gail Collins, what do you think the young women of today — women who know sexual harassment and sexual assault are extremely serious — are going to think of your using that word peccadillo?

I added a clip from I discussion I'd had with Glenn Loury in January 2016 about the same use of the word "peccadillo," and I'm going to embed it one more time because I think it improves with age (even the part where the software causes my words to be completely silenced when Loury overtalks and even the crazily distorted skin tone (flaming red)):



If there is one word that revives my anger on this subject, it's "peccadilloes." That's all I'm going to say now, because I've said the same thing so many times, but I just want to underscore what I wrote in the post title.

Gloria Steinem still lives and breathes, as far as I know. She's getting knocked around for what she said (and the harm that she did) 19 years ago. She should step up and speak for herself now.

"The Ugly History of Stephen Miller’s ‘Cosmopolitan’ Epithet/Surprise, surprise—the insult has its roots in Soviet anti-Semitism."

Writes Jeff Greenfield. This caught my eye because I'd just been reading Miller's Wikipedia page and noticed that he is Jewish.

Here's Greenfield:

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality....

One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned [sic] aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms....

ADDED: I was curious about what Stalin actually said, speaking, of course, not in English, but Russian. I found this Wikipedia article, "Rootless Cosmopolitan":

Rootless cosmopolitan (Russian: безродный космополит, bezrodnyi kosmopolit) was a pejorative label used during the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union after World War II. Cosmopolitans were intellectuals who were accused of expressing pro-Western feelings and lack of patriotism. The term "rootless cosmopolitan" referred to Jewish intellectuals. It was popularized during the campaign in a Pravda article condemning a group of theatrical critics....

"I put no stock in 'portents' and 'vibes,' but I can't help wondering if what's happened already this cycle is just a hint of what's to come."

Tweets Jeff Greenfield, the longtime political analyst and author of 13 books.

I can't remember the last time I laughed so much at something that I found funny precisely because of the seriousness with which it was intended.

If you know the podcast "Topics," by the comedians Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, you should understand what I mean when I say that "Topics" is hilarious because of people like Jeff Greenfield.

"I am stunned by the willingness of Senator Clinton supporters to fold everything Bill Clinton is accused of as a private matter."

"You know, philandering is a private manner. What Bill Clinton has been accused of is not, you know, he may be innocent of it but," said Jeff Greenfield on "Meet the Press" this morning.

He ended on a "but" because Chuck Todd broke in with: "Well, and I can tell you, there are some in Clinton world who are very nervous about this, very nervous about this." And a bit later: "[T]he Clinton folks suddenly acted different this week as that became-- you could just see it."

Earlier Todd had played a clip of Sanders going "as close as you're going to hear Bernie Sanders going after the Clintons" and "more than [Todd] expected." What Bernie said was:

Look, Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton, but Bill Clinton did, I think what we all can acknowledge was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable. But I am running against Hillary Clinton, I'm not running against Bill Clinton, though I gather he's been in Iowa recently.

Totally, totally, totally... he went with the 3 "totally"s. Now, I wish Greenfield had been allowed to say a little more, because he was getting critical of the notion that what Bill Clinton did was "a private matter." If he'd gone on — beyond "philandering is a private manner" — he would have talked about how Bill Clinton is accused of rape, which is a very serious crime and thus something in which the public authorities do involve themselves. Or he might have said that what happened with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky happened in the workplace and thus involves the problem of sexual harassment and the equality of women in the workplace. To pass that off as private is to sell out the women's movement.



But somehow Chuck Todd had to break in just to say that the Clinton people are very nervous.

Closing the door on "schlong."

I'll just quote Jeff Greenfield's series of tweets (Greenfield is a long-term establishment journalist, not someone you'd expect to help Trump):

On further review, Trump is right on this. "I got schlonged" is a commonplace NY way of saying: "I lost big time," w/out genital reference.

I've heard it for year, -after tennis games, poker games, bad stock bets.I obviously have a classy group of friends.

[Retweeting] Moynihan said it all the time. Rockefeller too. "You know, Happy, they really schlonged me on this one." Really.

[Retweeting] In 2011, NPR’s @nealconan said the Mondale/Ferraro "ticket went on to get schlonged at the polls.”

So for those of you who assert you've never heard THAT word used the way I did … [Links to "The 'Schlong' Revisionist Analysis We've Been Waiting For?" (a Talking Point Memo piece quoting someone who, like Trump, grew up on Long Island and said "shlonged" was "a pretty commonplace" way to say "thoroughly defeated.")]

The flood of vile, obscene Tweets I've received--after offering note about Yiddish slang--is a depressing sign of the times.

"[I]f you were choosing a state that would abandon the two major parties and elect a one-time professional wrestler governor..."

"... Minnesota might not be high on your list. It’s among our most literate states; its voter turnout is always at or near the top. But in fact, Minnesota has an historical appetite for alternatives....  Moreover, in Jesse 'The Body' Ventura, voters saw something more than the flamboyant showman...
Since voters had the chance to see Ventura as a viable candidate, the normal falloff for a third party candidate did not happen; instead, he won a narrow victory over St. Paul Mayor (and future Senator) Norm Coleman and Attorney General Hubert Humphrey III. Enough voters decided: 'Hey! We can do this!' to shock the political establishment..."

From "What If Trump Wins?/Sometimes voters do break the rules," by Jeff Greenfield.

"If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History."

A book by Jeff Greenfield that's getting a lot of attention this week (with the 50th anniversary of the JFK murder coming up next Friday). I don't know what Greenfield came up with as he broke #4 of my "10 rules for writing about the 50th anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was shot," but the "If Kennedy Lived" fantasy was thoroughly examined by Meade and me in August 2012: