Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an the 40th birthday of the internet.

I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live.

At 7:00 pm on Oct. 29, 1969 UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who organized the internet’s first day, had one of his programmers, Charley Kline, send a message from his computer at UCLA’s engineering school to his colleague Bill Duvall, who was sitting at a second computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto. Kline typed LOG, one slow character at a time, and Duvall’s computer was to supply the IN to form the complete command, login, which would connect the machines. Duvall was also connected by telephone to Kline, and he reported each letter as it got through. First the “L,” then the “O.” But when Klein typed the “G,” the Stanford computer crashed. That makes LO the first electronic message.

A month later, the University of California at Santa Barbara joined the first computer network, called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Network, and in December, the University of Utah was added. Eventually the loose configuration of computers at research facilities around the country, and then around the world, came to be called the internet, or as Dr. House would have it, the interweb.

120 years earlier, Henry David Thoreau, skeptical of the telegraph — which we sometimes refer to in retrospect as the Victorian internet — wrote in Walden, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The telegraph succeeded despite Thoreau’s complaint, but Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor, thought Bell’s telephone was just a pretty toy. Morse was convinced that no one would want an invention that was unable to provide a permanent, written record of a conversation. These minutes from a Western Union meeting clarify concerns that no one would use the telephone to communicate anything important: “Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form. . . . We leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.”

And so not everyone was excited when UCLA spoke to Stanford. Kleinrock has noted the almost prophetic nature of that first message, “Lo,” as in “Lo and behold.” But except for programmers, most people in 1969 had little use for one computer, let alone two hooked together. What could these machines — electronic brains or electronic toys — possibly have to say to one another?

The internet may be 40 years old today, and no one reading this post would dream of starting their day without checking email, Facebook, and one or more online news sources, but until the 1990s few people used the Net. For all anyone knew, it was little more than a series of tubes.

In the time-honored tradition of distrusting new communications devices, in those early days computer giant IBM and telecom monopolist AT&T saw no future for networked computers and refused to bid to develop that first Interface Message Processor. In order for the internet to spread, they reasoned, managers would have to type. Even computer programmers wrote with pencil and paper, not on their mainframes, which were designed to crunch numbers, not words. Typing was for secretaries and the odd hunt-and-peck writer who didn’t have access to the typing pool.

Several things helped the internet take off when it finally did, not in 1969 but in the 1990s. Affordable, user-friendly personal computers, like the 1984 Apple Macintosh; easy-to-use email programs like Eudora (1988) that worked like word processors; and browsers like Mosaic, launched in 1993, which enabled ordinary people to search the web without a computer science degree. Without those developments, the Net would have remained the province of researchers and nerds instead of a welcoming home for almost 1.7 billion people around the world, everyone from honest citizens like you and me, to stalkers and spies, dollar-hungry marketers, hate-mongers, pornographers, and Nigerian scammers.

Talking about the internet’s birthday, Kleinrock told CNN, “We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust. . . . I knew every user on the Internet in those early days.” Back in 1969 no one suspected that the internet would even have a dark side. But no one knew, either, that along with “What hath God wrought,” and “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” and “Fiat lux,” “LO” would go down in history as the start of a great communications revolution whose dark side is but a minor annoyance compared to the enlightenment and the fun-filled hours it brings to us, and allows us to bring to others.

And no one suspected, back in 1969, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of computers would produce, not “Hamlet,” but HamBASIC.

Peggy Pascoe is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians: the Lawrence Levine Prize for the best book on American cultural history and the Ellis Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy or American institutions. In the post below she looks at the actions of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.  Read her previous OUPblog post here.

Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.

Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies , Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.

Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”

“In some parts of this country,” a friend of mine commented wryly, “it’s still the 1930s.” For most of American history, Bardwell’s refusal to marry an interracial couple would have been standard public policy. Laws against interracial marriage were, in fact, America’s longest-lasting and most fundamental form of race discrimination.

After the first such law was passed by the colony of Maryland in 1664, miscegenation laws thrived for the next three centuries. By the 1930s, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.

Courts justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage. Judges claimed that because the laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites “equally.” Like Keith Bardwell, they persuaded themselves that equality somehow demanded that public officials refuse to marry interracial couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court exposed the absurdity of this line of thinking in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Ever since the Loving decision, refusing to marry an interracial couple has been—and despite Bardwell’s protestations, still is—a clear denial of constitutional rights.

In the forty years since Loving, there has been a historic turnabout in public opinion; today most whites and blacks tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage. There has also been a steady increase in interracial marriages, which now number in the millions. According to some estimates, in 2005 as many as 7% of American married couples were interracial, though the number of marriages between whites and blacks stood at a much more modest 422,000.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.

In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at local elections. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As we follow the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, and the special election for the 23rd congressional district in New York (NY23), the debate has overwhelmingly been about whether or not these races are wind vanes for the electoral weather to come.

So some thoughts in this vein, before the main point of this post. Obama is campaigning hard for NJ Governor Jon Corzine because he needs to show errant Democratic members of Congress that he still has coat-tails. If Corzine pulls off his re-election bid, members of Congress seeking a presidential endorsement in 2010 will at least think twice about voting against the president in 2009. If both Creigh Deeds and Corzine lose (and in the former’s case, it is practically a foregone conclusion) in their respective gubernatorial races, then the rationale for party unity suffers and it is every politician for her/himself here on out. If this happens, Obama will face an even more recalcitrant Democratic aisle of Congress than he does now.

Meanwhile, with the exit of Dede Scozzafava from the race in NY23, the conservative movement looks set to shake up the Republican establishment, as Sarah Palin has promised. The soul-searching of the Republican Party continues; may the most powerful faction win.

Notice that none of these observations pay any attention to local concerns and local consequences. The significance of these races is entirely predicated on their potential impact on the balance of power in Washington, DC. When the punditry agrees without acknowledging that they do, their consensus is worth examining. There was a time when all politics was local. When the media establishments were not yet centralized in a few major outlets and the coverage of issues nationalized. A time when voters came out to vote for candidates at the local and state levels. Such races did not depend on huge television advertising budgets or endorsements by nationally elected officials, and they were not seen merely as divinizing tea leaves for the future but as important contests in their own right.

Today, voter turnout for local and state elections is paltry, and turn-out off-year elections is abysmal. An army of national media, however, has descended in Virginia and New Jersey and even in upstate New York, to cover the races not for the benefit of local and state residents, but for the impact it will have on the balance of power in Washington. Even conservative, states-rights oriented politicos understand that all local politics is national. (The revealing contrast is the high turnout for national elections in Europe and the low turnout for elections to the European parliament owing to the different balance of power between the center and its confederal parts in Europe.) Power resides in Washington, not in states, cities, or communities, because Washington’s potential reach into every state and locality is extensive. Even those who want to invert this balance of power have been compelled to concentrate their attention and energies to the Federal City. We are all Federalists now.

Politics is no longer local because the return to turn-out is minimal at the state and local levels. In the 19th century, local party workers toiled to get the vote out because there were patronage jobs to be earned if their candidate won. Parades, torch-light processions, rallies, barbeques, banners, buttons, and insignia got people worked up and ready to go to polling booths. Contrast this level of enthusiasm for a 22 year old voter in Virginia who had voted for Obama last year. “Politics is boring,” he said. “I know Obama is making changes, but it takes so long to make things happen.” And that is why he is probably not going out to vote next Tuesday.

The lesson to be learned in next week’s contests is not what they will predict about the future, which will be endlessly debated even if only time will tell, but what they reveal about the transformation of American democracy, which time has already told.

By Edward Zelinsky

Because the rate of inflation for 2009 has effectively been zero, the Social Security Administration has announced that Social Security payments will stay flat for 2010. In response, the Obama Administration has asked Congress to send every Social Security recipient an additional $250 in 2010.

This is a bad idea. The Administration’s proposal is both unfair and misfocused.

Many Americans would be delighted to have the same deal as Social Security recipients, namely, the identical cash income in 2010 that they received in 2009. To millions of newly unemployed Americans, that looks like a good deal. Not as good as being president of a bailed-out bank, but still a good deal.

For 2010, the salaries of many Americans working in the private sector are frozen or reduced. In countless cases, compensation decreases are taking the form of fringe benefits eliminated or reduced, for example, the termination of employers’ 401(k) contributions.

As the latest saying goes, for these working Americans, flat is the new up. It is inequitable for federal taxpayers to finance $250 checks in 2010 for Social Security recipients with stable incomes, but not for the working and unemployed Americans whose incomes have declined, often precipitously.

And this is before we consider the tax-free nature of most Social Security benefits.

To illustrate, compare a young married couple with a retired couple receiving Social Security benefits. Let us suppose that both of these families have annual incomes of $20,000. The members of the hypothetical young family have minimum wage jobs while the retired family receives yearly Social Security benefits of $20,000.

While the nominal, pre-tax incomes of these two families are identical, the younger couple pays FICA taxes of $1,530. In contrast, the retired couple receives all of its Social Security payments tax-free. Thus, on an after-tax basis, the younger family has substantially less income per person than the older couple.

If federal checks are to be sent to either of these couples, the younger family is the more deserving recipient. Neither of these families is rolling in dough. However, there is no reason to target federal largesse to the retired couple rather than the young working family, with the same nominal income but which pays FICA taxes on all of its income.

In effect, the younger family would, by its FICA tax payments, finance the $250 checks the President wants to send to seniors.

The Administration has suggested other programs for 2010 which make more sense than the proposed $250 check to Social Security recipients. The Administration has advocated that, in light of the poor job market, unemployment benefits be extended and that so-called COBRA subsidies also be prolonged to help the unemployed purchase continuing medical insurance from their former employers. Both of these suggestions are compelling. Indeed, the COBRA subsidy should be made permanent.

If the federal fisc provides additional relief beyond this, Congress should expand the earned income tax credit for 2010 to relieve low-income working families, like our hypothetical younger couple, of some of their tax burden.

In contrast, the proposal to send all Social Security recipients $250 is ill-conceived. This proposal is not fair to working and unemployed Americans struggling with reduced incomes and tax obligations. This proposal misdirects the focus of federal assistance. When it comes to the $250 checks for seniors, Congress should just say no.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an article from Seed magazine claiming that soon we’ll all be authors.

Researchers are predicting that Twitter is going global: in just four years, everyone on the planet–some 10 billion people–will be tweeting.

Writing in Seed magazine, neuroscientist Denis G. Pelli and graphic designer Charles Bigelow (he co-designed the Lucida font) find that the internet has brought us to the brink of universal literacy, and we’re also fast approaching universal authorship: “Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish.”

To illustrate this writing revolution, Pelli and Bigelow have assembled what can only be called an “authorgraph,” a chart plotting the number of book authors from the middle ages to the present, and the far greater number of authors using new media–blogs, Facebook, and Twitter–since the year 2000.

The researchers find that only 50 authors published a book in 1400 (a serious undercount). Then, thanks to the printing press, which came on line in the 1440s, book publication grew steadily over the centuries and peaked at just over a million book authors per year around 2000.

In contrast, the new genres enabled by the internet have shown massive growth in authorship over a far shorter time span. Pelli and Bigelow observe that before the printing press it took a scribe a year to produce a bible, while today you can tweet or update your Facebook status in seconds. They conclude, “The new media are growing 100 times faster than books.”

But comparing books to tweets leads to skewed figures. Plenty of writers in the age of print wrote not books but songs, poems, news articles, chronicles, laws, essays, and plays; they too must be considered authors (and of course scribes copied bibles, they didn’t write them, so they don’t count as authors). And, since books are still a presence in the internet age, we should remember that even in the age of Google and Wikipedia it still takes an author a year or more to write a book (yes, there’s Sarah Palin’s four-month wonder Going Rogue–but I’m only counting books with actual content).

That’s not to deny the impressive impact of the internet on authorship. Pelli and Bigelow’s figures show that blogging takes only five years to go from 60 bloggers to a million. Then social media sites take off, and Facebookers jump from an initial 50,000 to 75 million in just four years. Twitter authorship grows even faster, exploding from10,000 tweeters to a million in only three years and no end in sight–and here’s where Pelli and Bigelow go off the rails: “Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013.”

Even hard-core fans of the internet must realize that’s just not going to happen.

I too have made the claim that because of the internet, everyone’s an author. Computers and the internet mean that more and more people are creating text and publishing it, and the internet has shown a robust ability to connect writers with readers in ways we never before imagined.

I’ve said more than once, as well, that thanks to the digital revolution, all you need to be an author is a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks. But my claims are hyperbolic.

Assuming that by “everyone” we mean people all over the globe, then we’re far from “nearly everyone” reading, and farther still from “nearly everyone” publishing. Pelli and Bigelow concede that authors today constitute 0.1 percent of the world’s population (according to their standards, an author is someone whose text reaches at least 100 readers, a number which excludes many bloggers and tweeters), but they’re optimistic that “Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.”

That’s going to take a lot longer than four more years. True, the internet opens the possibility of authorship to the other 99.9% of the world’s 10 billion people, but first many of them will have to survive infancy, find a source of clean drinking water, learn to read and write, acquire a computer, find a reliable source of electricity, and, oh yes, locate an internet service provider. That’s assuming they’re motivated to become authors in the first place. And they live in a country where the government doesn’t block Twitter.

And even if all that happens, we’ve still got to increase the capacity of Twitter to handle all that traffic without triggering the fail whale, and we’re still a long, long way from the day when there are enough Starbucks so that everyone will have a place to sit and tweet–plus somebody’s gotta make the latte.

Harm de Blij is the John A. Hannah Professor of Geography at Michigan State University. The author of more than 30 books he is an honorary life member of the National Geographic Society and was for seven years the Geography Editor on ABC’s Good Morning America. His most recent book, The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, he reveals the rugged contours of our world that keep all but 3% of “mobals” stationary in the country where they were born. He argues that where we start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with our chances of overcoming obstacles in our way.  In the article below he looks at Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Hamid Karzai’s victory in Afghanistan’s disputed presidential election has created a diplomatic and strategic dilemma that is producing some troubling commentary by American officials and much strident criticism in the media. The Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, in an interview from Kabul on Face the Nation on October 19, stated that the U.S. is facing strategic decisions “without an adequate government in place.” Vice President Joe Biden has been unsparing in his disparagement of Karzai, whose government and family are linked to corruption and drug dealing. In an October 14 column in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman laments the “tainted government” of Afghanistan and the “massive fraud” engaged in by President Karzai to secure his re-election, arguing for a runoff to secure a more “acceptable” government to replace the one now in power, so as “to stabilize Afghanistan without tipping America into a Vietnam.”

Comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam are frequently drawn these days, but the two contingencies are starkly different. Yet what happened in Vietnam in 1963 suggests caution in Afghanistan today. At that time, South Vietnam was in turmoil as the Viet Cong were gaining in remote northern rural areas; 12,000 American “advisers” were supposedly training South Vietnamese forces to shore up the South’s defenses. South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, facing growing Buddhist resistance marked gruesomely by public self-immolations by numerous monks, was unpopular with American policymakers. His autocratic methods, reputation for corruption, and harsh response to his religious opponents elicited severe criticism from American leaders and pundits. When President Diem asked the United States government to reduce the number of American advisers in his country, he lost what little support he retained in Washington – and found his political base weakened at home.

On November 1, 1963 a military coup carried out by soldiers, some of whom had benefited from the presence of American advisors, overthrew President Diem, who was summarily executed. In official and media commentary in the United States afterward, Diem got little obituary solace. In South Vietnam, a so-called revolutionary council took power and inaugurated a fateful period of more compliant association with American policymakers.

American insistence on an electoral runoff in Afghanistan and Washington’s apparent belief that President Karzai’s opponent, if victorious, would form a less corrupt government may be misplaced. The rules of political, social, and economic engagement in Afghanistan that have prevailed for centuries will not be changed by an electoral runoff that may not only fail to alter the outcome but could risk chaos arising from the rekindling of hopes dashed and buried by Karzai’s victory. Afghanistan remains a deeply-divided country in which warlords, tribal chiefs, insurgents, brazen criminals, and a small cadre of courageous Kabul-based progressives are just some of the parties looking for their piece of the action; not for nothing do international monitors rank this as one of the world’s most corrupt societies. Karzai, with his merits as well as faults, has come to symbolize and stabilize the state; foreigners forcing a runoff may leave him either victorious but severely weakened or defeated with no guarantee of a superior successor. Add to this the alternate prospect of an adversarial “power-sharing” government and an ongoing political crisis, and it appears that one lesson of Vietnam, at least, is going unheeded.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Sarah Palin. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Last Thursday, former Governor of Alaska endorsed Conservative Party candidate, Doug Hoffman, over Republican Party candidate, Dede Scozzafava, in New York’s 23rd Congressional District’s special election. This is a pre-book launching publicity stunt, leaving no doubt that Sarah Palin is Going Rogue. She has now erased all remaining speculation that she retains personal political ambitions, at least within the Republican Party. Ironically, it is not Barack Obama who has become a self-centered celebrity, but Sarah Palin, who is wowing the conservative crowd with her personal, anti-party appeal. Celebrities are most popular when they stand beyond and outside party – consider the sharp dip in Oprah Winfrey’s popularity when she campaigned for Obama – and this is exactly what Palin has done. On Facebook, she explained her endorsement of Hoffman: “Political parties must stand for something. When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of “blurring the lines” between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections. Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party’s ticket.” Palin must know that her support of the Conservative candidate will split the Republican vote, and could end up giving the election to Democrat Bill Owens. If she had wanted to play the endorsement game without stepping on anyone’s shoes, she could have thrown in her support for the Republican candidates in the NJ and VA gubernatorial races, but she hasn’t. Instead, she has become the Frankenstein maverick the McCain campaign created, biting the very hand that fed her. Here is how she concluded her Facebook note: “Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.” Palin doesn’t so much stand for Doug Hoffman as she stands against “the Republican establishment,” fanning the conservative sentiment that the Republican Party performed poorly in 2008 not because it had become too conservative but because it wasn’t conservative enough. Hers is the anti-median-voter theory of elections, better read as the ideological theory of losing elections. Palin is going to drive the legitimacy crisis of conservatism if she continues on this road. Harold Hotelling and Anthony Downs have showed us that in single-member districts moderate parties targeting median voters win elections. This is a mathematically provable proposition. That is why Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty are not weighing in on the New York race, because they are trying to do exactly what Sarah Palin is accusing the Republican Party of doing – blur the line between conservatism and Republicanism so that they can appeal to as many potential primary voters as possible should they choose to run in 2012. Ideologues (and celebrities) do not care about winning elections, and Huckabee and Pawlenty want to keep that option open. There was a time when liberals were proud to be liberals, and that spelt the beginning of liberalism’s end. Pride and ideological purity drove liberalism’s legitimacy crisis, as will be the case for modern conservatism’s demise. Democrats, folllowing the lead of the “third-way” Bill Clinton, learned after the excesses of the War on Poverty not to stand on ideology alone – which is always extreme and uncompromising – but also on programmatic commitments that could appeal to the median voter. Sarah Palin would not remember it, but there was a time, at the turn of the 20th century, when “conservatism” was a bad word coterminous with “stand-patting.” She is in danger of recycling history, not that she cares, because she has a personal agenda, not an institutional one. When a party allows those who do not care about winning elections to speak for its base, it courts trouble. Behind every anti-Republican establishment hurrah Palin provokes is a voter ready to Go Rogue on election day. Republicans, beware.

LeeAnna Keith teaches history at Collegiate School in New York City. She is the author of The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction. In the article below, Keith reflects on the role race may have played in the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama.

Even the most outspoken critics of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize have hesitated to suggest that President Obama was rewarded simply for his good looks. He won the prize “for awesomeness,” at least, according to Republican objectors, who have hesitated to introduce race in their prize critiques. As a student of the history of racial violence in America, however, I embrace the taboo notion that the Nobel committee tapped Obama because he is black. As a symbol of overcoming prejudice, the first black president of the United States embodies an ideal of peace in a still turbulent world.

Commentators have chided the committee’s citation, with its references to diplomacy, multilateralism, and confronting climate change, as being less like a summary of accomplishments than an agenda for the future. Less often, they have noted the committee’s second consideration, that “only very rarely” has a person “captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future” in the way that Obama has. This is veiled Norwegian racial commentary, an acknowledgment of the president’s dazzling personal profile against the backdrop of America’s unjust history.

The racial dimension of the award was not lost on African observers. Kenyans are celebrating the recognition of a “son of Africa” who has inspired the world. In the spirit of “Ubuntu,” South Africa’s president explained, Obama’s mission “celebrates our common humanity.” The Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu credited the award with helping people of color around the world to “walk a little taller.”

“What I actually want to say is, yippee!” exulted Tutu.

Americans should embrace the honor just as unequivocally, and also recognize the prize as recognition of the American electorate’s contribution to the cause of peace. Like Obama, Americans as a society have not yet managed to blunt the force of conflict, weaponry, and planetary degradation. We have made only tentative steps toward repairing our country’s image in the eyes of the world. With the election of Barack Obama, however, the United States transcended its four-hundred year history of racial violence and suppression. We set a standard of openness and opportunity to amaze the world.

Violence as an alternative to political inclusion and equity persisted even in Obama’s lifetime. He was born in the era of the Freedom Rides and church bombings, when a majority of white southerners opposed equal opportunity and a minority dedicated themselves to murder and intimidation. The efforts of white supremacists in the 1960s continued the long tradition of racial violence in the American South, brutality that emerged first amid the desperate struggle of chattel enslavement. Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize helps us to understand slavery as an act of war, the companion of countless sins in the seizure, transport, and management of captives. In behalf of its monstrous cause, the U.S. slaveholding interest persisted in one of history’s most costly wars, claiming the lives of more than 600,000 North and South.

As demonstrated in the history of the Colfax Massacre, the killing of more than one hundred armed African American men in Louisiana in 1873, the violence and repression persisted in the aftermath of Emancipation. The establishment of blacks as voters and as aspirants to elected offices had met the most fierce resistance of the White South establishment. Allied to the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups, white voters wrenchingly contorted U.S. democratic practices to exclude the terrorized African American electorate.

White supremacy became the special project of government in southern communities and elsewhere: a monopoly on opportunity enforced by legal and extralegal means of black disempowerment.

In the Age of Obama (and his parents), black people and their allies initiated a hopeful reversal of this painful legacy. Americans of his mother’s generation perceived the alternative of cooperative engagement between the races. None pursued this kind of mutuality with more enthusiasm than Stanley Ann Dunham, and no one, by most measures, yielded better results.

Dr. Dunham was educated by anthropology and courted in Swahili and the King’s English by Barack Obama, Sr. Emboldened by the 1960s, Hawaiian Style, and university romance, they lived the principle of love, not war. Best of all, Obama’s mother enlisted her steadfast and resourceful parents, ordinary white folks, in the project of raising her mixed race son in an atmosphere of peace.

White Americans’ ability to repeat the cognitive and emotional leap that the Dunhams achieved has sustained a growing culture of acceptance of and mutual benefit by blacks and whites. Inspired by black leadership, including the first two black American Nobel Laureates, Ralph Bunche and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Americans in Obama’s lifetime have constructed a civil society more than a world away from the Colfax Massacre and other acts of racial violence.

The inauguration of President Obama only weeks before the Nobel deadline was an act of joyful concord that remained fresh in the minds of Norway’s committee of five through the first turgid months of disengagement from the George Bush Era. Obama calls for diplomacy and cooperation in international affairs. Having presumed to overcome symbolically the legacy of racial hatred, Obama’s America might reasonably expect to win the world to the audacity of hope.

Strengthen democracy and human rights around the world by setting an example? Peace Prize Committee to Americans: Yes, you can.

The National Book Award nominees were announced earlier this week. Kudos to all nominees, especially to our friends & compatriots at the nominated University Presses. I am glad to see the great good wisdom of the nominating committee at the NBAs. Congratulations aside, it is tradition here in the OUP publicity dept to host a little friendly contest to see who can pick the most NBA winners. This year I am inviting our blog readers to join the fray and send me your picks.  Details below.

Please note there is a point system in this contest. Correct picks in Fiction and Non-fiction will each receive 1 point each, 2 points for a correct pick in YA literature, and 3 points for a correct pick in the Poetry category. Please, only one submission per person. Send your entry to publicity.us@oup.com.

In the event of a tie, all entrants with the highest score will be placed in a raffle for prizes. Prizes include a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition), the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. One prize per player. I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I feel is trying to game this friendly competition. Awards are announced on November 18th. Winners here will be announced on November 20, 2009. Good luck.

FICTION (1 point)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION (1 point)
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2 points)
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

POETRY (3 points)
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Jennifer Fisher, is Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders with Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College.  The book offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate.  In the original article below Fisher looks at the Tom DeLay’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”  You can watch the video of his appearance here.

It would be easy to say that Republicans shouldn’t dance because they are out of step with the times, so I won’t say that. Exactly. But sometimes, dance metaphors are really useful—like when you’re confronted with the image of former house majority leader Tom DeLay, who shook his booty as a contestant on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars.” It has to make you wonder if dancing doesn’t always reveal more than we suspect it might. It’s true that the popular TV series has traditionally been used to boost the image of fading or disgraced “personalities,” along with some merely adventurous athletes and soap stars, but this had to be a first. It was not only a moment designed to sell the products in commercials between the action (because it is, after all, television), it was one to make us ponder who should be dancing and who should not, bless their publicity seeking hearts.

I used to get a big laugh when I invited my dance history students to imagine a world in which then-president George W Bush had to study dancing in order to look powerful on the ballroom floor. That’s what world leaders from Louis XIV to George Washington had to do, in an age when a manly image did not exclude the wearing of silk brocade breeches and mastering the art of the pirouette. Alas, guys just don’t dance now if they want to be taken seriously as world leaders—they have to keep both feet on the ground, like John Wayne would have if he’d held elected office. A shame, really. Leaders in many locations in Africa, of course, have always danced to look powerful, taking up space, keeping their own rhythm, ruling a whole bunch of people not afraid to move.

But in today’s American political climate, nearly every man fears looking dorky while dancing—just picture Bush in that youtube clip trying to “get down” with between an African drummer and dancer on Africa Malaria Day. It’s no wonder it’s impossible for my students to imagine a conservative man in a suit who can let his hair down and boogie in flashy clothes like John Travolta. Could a solid but goofy looking Republican dip his partner? Let his backbone slip? Bust a serious move? The very idea was hilarious. And yet, in an odd twist of fate, this fantasy became reality on “Dancing with the Stars”. Tom DeLay actually became the poster boy for Republicans gone wild. When he made his first entrance as a contestant, wagging his nether regions and playing air guitar to the strains of “Wild Thing,” it was hard to know where to look. Maybe the intent was to look fun and vulnerable. He only succeeded in looking out of step.

Of course, because there is always a need for “news of the very weird” somewhere between the real news and the sports, we had been prepared for the event. Journalists must have burned the midnight oil winnowing down the number of catch phrases to describe it—“Republican Steps Left,” “The Hammer does the Hustle,” and, more to the point, “DeLay dances back into the limelight.” After all, no one mistook Delay’s decision to compete on a TV dance competition as a bid to master another skill or find his next career as a comedian. “Dancing with the Stars” is all about gaining visibility for the “stars” (the personalities) and, for the producers, it’s all about selling products with personal tales of triumph over the odds. Very quickly, dance metaphors in the press pointed to the real subject—partisan politics and a possible comeback for the disgraced politician. “DeLay dances all over the leaderless GOP,” one said after DeLay was interviewed, and “Delay cha-cha-ing back into the GOP fray.”

Stephen Colbert came up with a joke about how DeLay “gerrymandered” the bones in his feet in preparation for the competition—not a great laugh but a reminder about the fact that the former congressman had been accused of gerrymandering schemes and was indicted by a Texas grand jury for breaking campaign finance laws. “DeLay is no wild thing,” his reviews said, and surely they were referring to his terpsichorean skills rather than trying to counter the allegations that shadowed his political career. Or were they?

In the process of covering this painful (for dance lovers) DeLay dance debut, a lot was revealed about perceptions of dance, as well as the fear most men have of dancing. A few examples: An ABC interviewer started out by pointing out that DeLay’s daughter is a professional dancer, but DeLay himself was a very serious guy, so how did he put the two things together? Strike one for the seriousness of dance. But that wasn’t the point. DeLay answered that conservatives can also let their hair down and have fun. Strike two—we’ve all seen Bush wave his hands in imitation of dance and Obama sway with the instincts of the adept, so we know not everyone has success letting their hair down. Strike three was a rhetorical slip when Delay responded to, “Why go on Dancing with the Stars?” He said, “I love dancin’, I’ve been dancin’ all my life—I haven’t danced for about 20 years, but I love dancin’.” Yes, congressman, but are you or have you ever been a member of a dancing party? Dance-wise, he should have taken the fifth before he proved so inconsistent a witness.

But, you say, give the guy a break—he gave dancing a try, big-time. At least you might have said that after seeing him struggle in that “Wild Thing” number (check youtube if your stomach is strong). Does that make him part of that maverick breed of American men who don’t care about the “real men don’t dance” stereotype? It’s a very brave category of individualists who choose to dance despite the obstacles for men. It takes a man who is secure of his masculinity to let go of the iron man mentality and embrace his softer, more bodily articulate side. Now, they are brave, bucking macho trends and creating new visions of what men can do. Is Tom DeLay one such guy? Nah. In a pre-show interview, DeLay exhibited the classic timid male fear of sequins and pink and, although there was much kidding about developing his “feminine side,” this seems more of a gimmick that a growth experience for the man who’s house when he was a bachelor used to be known as “Macho Manor.”

You want to give him credit for wearing a sequin lined vest for his first cha-cha appearance, and for the sheer nerve of risking choreography in an arena where he couldn’t hide his incompetence. But then you feel an agenda somewhere, based on the knowledge of DeLay’s past views and inflexibility. Somehow, his dancing doesn’t look like he’s learning how to go with the flow or make a move in the right direction. It looks a whole lot more like faking it to get attention. “The body never lies,” Martha Graham said famously. But the jury is still out on that one.