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.

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.

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.

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.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Emory University.  She was recently named one of 2009’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by UTNE Reader. Her most recent book, Staring: How We Look captures the stimulating combination of symbolic, material and emotional factors that make staring so irresistible while endeavoring to shift the usual response to staring, shame, into an engaged self-consideration.  In the original post below she looks at end-of-life issues and the health care debate.

Democracy thrives on polarized debates, theatrical performances that try to convince citizens about how to spend their dollars and place their votes. Statements get especially extravagant when we are discussing important policy issues that affect such sensitive personal issues as how we take care of each other when we are sick, vulnerable, hurt, or dying. Our recent debate about health care has flared especially intensely about end-of-life and life ending issues. That the inevitable outcome of life is death is a hard pill for us all to swallow. Health maintenance is a more comfortable and cheerful topic for us ever optimistic Americans than the uncompromising truth of our impending mortality.

One of the more vivid concepts to emerge from the health care debate is the provocative concept of pulling the plug on granny. The image of our granny shorn from life-sustaining sustenance, care, and support cuts both ways, calling up tender sympathy in some and tough pragmatism in others. A forlorn granny is code for the larger issue of how to make difficult decisions about not just distributing resources but who we think deserves those resources. In other words, the figure of granny lets us consider who we think of as deserving and valued fellow citizens, of who we want to be in our human community.

One way we frame this is through a cost-benefit analysis about what we imagine to be high or low quality of life. One reason we might pull the plug on granny is that the quality of her life seems low to those of us who are not old sick, or disabled. Moreover, we understand Granny to be using up more resources than she is contributing to society. People on both sides of the healthcare debate have brought forward the most extravagant example from history of where evaluating the quality of other people’s lives can lead. Between 1939 and 1942, the Nazi regime undertook an official euthanasia program. More recently questions of life quality and resource distribution sprang forward with the revelation that a number of grannies and other significantly disabled people at a hospital in New Orleans might have been euthanized during the Katrina disaster. These troubling occurrences, one then and the other now, remind us of the continuing communal struggle to decide what the Democratic premise of equality among citizens might actually mean.

The contemporary British version of our American granny is the physicist Stephen Hawking, whose imagined low quality of life based on his significant disability starkly contrasts with the value of his contribution as a brilliant scientist. Hawking is an exception, of course, to the usual way we consider the grannies of the world. Those who offered up Hawking has an example of a person whose plug might be pulled by a reformed healthcare system were surprised when Hawking claimed that the British healthcare system have provided him with the plugs he needed for a quality life through which he made his important contributions.

The late Harriet McBryde Johnson, who was a civil rights attorney and advocate for disability rights, made public a discussion about plug pulling with the Princeton ethicist Peter Singer, who has advocated euthanizing disabled newborns as a form of moral pragmatism when parents get a child they would prefer not to have. Johnson, who like Hawking lives with significant disabilities, put herself forward in the pages of the New York Times Magazine in 2003 to present the public with the story of how someone we imagine us having a very low quality of life in fact has a very high quality of life. In doing so, she offered us an opportunity to think through how we distribute resources and what a valuable life might be.

People like Stephen Hawking and Harriet McBryde Johnson–as well as our frail grannies, Katrina victims, and disabled German citizens under fascism– remind us that the conversation about who should and should not be in the world– to use Hannah Arendt’s phrase– is an urgent and confusing one today.

Today’s healthcare debate and it’s polarizing icons points to a less dramatic and often unnoticed contradiction between two opposing currents in American culture today. On the one hand is the endeavor to integrate people with disabilities into the public world by creating an accessible, barrier free material environment. On the other hand, is the medical mission to eliminate people with disabilities from the human community. What we might call the “integration initiative” arises from a rights-based understanding of disability and occurs through legislative and policy mandates such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and 2009. In contrast, the “elimination initiative” arises from the idea that social improvement requires elimination of devalued human qualities and cons of people in the interest of reducing human suffering and increasing life quality and building a more desirable citizenry.

This contradiction in beliefs has filled the contemporary American public landscape with both fewer and more people with disabilities. For instance, wheelchair users now enter public spaces, transportation, employment, and commercial culture on a scale impossible before the legal mandates of the 1970s began to change the built environment. At the same time, medical technologies increasingly identify and eliminate through selective reproductive procedures potential wheelchair users born with traits such as spina bifida, which often requires wheelchair use for effective mobility. In another example, people with developmental and cognitive disabilities are now educated in integrated, mainstream educational settings which accommodate their educational needs rather than in segregated institutions. Simultaneously, medical technology routinely selects fetuses with Down syndrome or trisomy 21 in pregnancies to evaluate for termination.

The point is that not just what we do with granny’s plugs but how we imagine granny’s life reaches out beyond the nursing home room and into our shared world, affecting who we are and want to be as a human community.

Last week Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, appeared on The Daily Show.  Below you can watch her interview with Jon Stewart.  Then scroll down and read the top three questions everyone has been asking her since her appearance.

1. Is Jon Stewart as short as they say? I met Jon a few minutes before the show started in the “Green Room,” which is where guests wait before going on air. Basically, so many people told me he was so short that I was expecting a midget to walk in the door. Compared to that preconception, Stewart is not that short! I certainly think I’m taller than him, but his stature didn’t really make an impression. What struck me instead was how quick and smart he is, with an immediate rapid fire patter and stream of jokes. I was also surprised at how he looked different in real life than on TV. There are subtle distortions to the face on camera and in person he was leaner with more defined features. He has mesmerizing blue eyes which I focused on during the interview so I could keep up with what he was saying!

2. What does Jon Stewart say to you after the interview is over and the cameras are still rolling? I wish I could remember! I have no recollection of our last exchange, it was probably some basic thank you’s or pleasantry, and I think he probably helped me step off the stage. By the time I exited the set, I had completely forgotten what we talked about – it must have been a psychological reaction to the high pressure of the situation. Our conversation came back to me in great detail when I watched the show later that evening.

3. Are you mad he plumped the books of two Daily Show staffers at the end of the show? Not at all! It was a huge honor to be chosen for the show and has exposed my book to a wide and enthusiastic audience who might not have heard of it otherwise. There’s nothing like TV for legitimating intellectual production! Seriously, I appreciate that Jon Stewart is both a consummate entertainer and a really smart guy who values books and ideas, and I think his ability to blend humor and serious discussion is a great gift to contemporary America.

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 argues that the coverage of Balloon-Boy wasn’t all bad. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Last week, America came to a stand-still as we stood enraptured by television images of a runaway balloon carrying, so we thought, a six-year-old boy. Flimsy as the silver contraption appeared, we gladly suspended all disbelief that the balloon contained enough helium to be carrying a boy within so we could enjoy the side show. (Just as we did for Pixar’s animated movie, “Up,” which featured an old man who used balloons to move his house to a South American paradise.) So for almost two hours, most of the major news networks displaced all coverage of “hard” news to cover what Latimer County Sheriff Jim Alderman has now concluded to be a “publicity stunt.” And I’m going to argue that this was not a bad thing.

As the Balloon Boy story continued to dominate the weekend news cycle, the president and his advisers continued to deliberate on whether or not to send more troops into Afghanistan, and Senators worked behind the scenes to reconcile two different bills on healthcare. So let it be said that our “watchdog” media will switch its attention as soon as it is thrown an infotaining bone. But this is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we are clear-eyed about the media’s priorities. Instead, I think there is something strangely comforting that we allow ourselves such trivial pleasures. If we do not need an ever-vigilant watchdog, it is because we believe – by revealed preference – that government will mind government’s business, and we can tend to our own. Better no coverage of “hard” news than bad coverage, I say.

And this is exactly what the media did at least momentarily last week even as the President and Congress debated world and country-changing policies. Instead of another round of predictable punditry, or fact-checking of the CBO’s estimates of heath-care reform, we were fed images of a helium-filled balloon shaped like a UFO traversing the Colorado landscape. As we are with car chases, we, and therefore the media, were drawn to the balloon chase like flies are drawn to a light. We weren’t so much interested in the outcome – indeed knowledge of the outcome would have waken us up from our trance – as we were in the process, which was visually enrapturing.

For over a year we have watched a presidential campaign turn into a permanent campaign, and the American public is fatigued. We see this in Barack Obama’s dwindling approval numbers; and we also see it in our captivation by a drifting balloon. We are tired, and we are withdrawing from the public political sphere. The infotaining media detected this, and gave us a welcome reprieve.

And perhaps this is as it should be. Ours is a representative, and not a direct democracy. We vote and delegate; they, the elected officials, decide. The constitutional calendar is very clear that the people speak only every 2, 4, and 6 years. As far as the US constitution is concerned, our voices do not matter when we speak at any other time at the federal level. (Though our voices do matter at the state level where such devices as recall and refederanda are sanctioned by state constitutions.) If we didn’t believe this, than we have to deal with the conundrum that if last year’s elections were held in the second week of September, John McCain would have won. Clearly then, what you and I believed on November 4, 2008 matters much more than what you and I believe in October, 2009 (or September, 2008). Opinion polls may capture majority or minority sentiment at any moment in time, but these sentiments (should) have no import on constitutionally sanctioned officers exercising their delegated powers.

The deliberation of troop increases and health-care reform involve complex proceedings in closed-door war room meetings and conference committees reconciling details many Americans know and care little about. Such decisions make bad television, so maybe we shouldn’t try to force a message into an unreceptive genre lest we alter the message. Maybe those we put in charge should simply be let alone to do their job, for our constitution envisioned and sanctioned a low-effort, Rip Van Winkle approach to citizen participation. Sometimes we care a lot and we participate, but other times we tune out; and perhaps that is just as it should be. Last week, as we sat enraptured by the alleged antics of Balloon Boy, we embraced the implicit satisfactions of a representative democracy.

Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  Her new biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, follows Rand through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to best-selling novelist.   Burns highlights two facets of Rand’s work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government.  In honor of Jennifer Burns’s The Daily Show appearance (be sure to tune in 11 tonight!) we have posted an excerpt below.

“I am coming back to life,” Rand announced as the Nathaniel Branden Institute entered its second year of existence.  Watching Nathan’s lectures fill, Rand began to believe she might yet make an impact on the culture.  Roused from her despair, she began once more to write.  In 1961 she published her first work of nonfiction, For the New Intellectual, and in 1962 launched her own monthly periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. Over the course of the decade she reprinted articles from the newsletter and speeches she had given in two more books, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.  Although she occasionally talked of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned fiction for good.  Instead she reinvented herself as a public intellectual. Gone were the allegorical stores, the dramatic heroes and heroines, the thinly coded references to real politicians, intellectuals, and events.  In The Objectivist Newsletter Rand named names and pointed fingers, injecting herself directly into the hottest political issues of the day.  Through her speeches and articles she elaborated on the ethical, political, and artistic sides of Objectivism.

Rand’s ideas were particularly attractive to a new generation of campus conservatives, who saw rebellion against a stifling liberal consensus as a basic part of their identity.  Unlike older conservatives, many right-leaning college students were untroubled by her atheism, or even attracted to it.  As Rand’s followers drew together in campus conservative groups, Ayn Rand clubs, and NBI classes, her ideas became a distinct stream of conservative youth culture.  Through her essays on government, politics, and capitalism Rand herself encouraged the politicization of her work.  In 1963 she even endorsed a new Republican on the scene, Barry Goldwater, a move that situated her as the leader of a growing political and intellectual movement.

At first look Objectivism may appear a freakish outgrowth of the turbulent 1960s, but it had significant parallels in American history.  Nearly a century before, similar reading clubs and political activism had sprung up around Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a book uncannily similar to Atlas Shrugged, if diametrically opposite politically…

Rand made her network television debut in 1960, appearing on Mike Wallace’s celebrated interview show.  Her dark eyes flashing, she refused to be intimidated by the liberal Wallace and expertly parried his every question and critique.  Her performance caught the eye of Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote Rand a letter thanking her for defending his “conservative position.”  Rand had not mentioned the senator by name, but he immediately recognized the similarity between their views.  Goldwater told Rand, “I have enjoyed very few books in my life as much as I have yours, Atlas Shrugged.”  He enclosed an autographed copy of his new book, the best-selling Conscience of a Conservative.  Shortly thereafter the two met briefly in New York.  Rand followed up this encounter with a lengthy letter urging Goldwater to support capitalism through reason alone.  Although she considered him the most promising politician in the country, Rand was distressed by Goldwater’s frequent allusions to religions.  The Conscience of a Conservative had been written primarily by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, and accordingly reflected the fusionist consensus of National Review.

In her letter to Goldwater Rand hammered on the need to separate religion and politics, a theme that would animate her for decades.  She singled out National Review for special criticism because it was a supposedly secular magazine that surreptitiously tried “to tie Conservatism to religion, and thus to take over the American Conservatives.”  If such an effort succeeded, Rand asked, what would become of religious minorities or people like herself who held no religion?  Goldwater’s response, which reiterated his Christian religious beliefs, was brief yet polite.  Rand had a powerful admirer, but not a convert.

As her depression lifted, Rand began to explore different ways she might exercise cultural influence.  She was newly interested in politics because of her esteem for Goldwater and her dislike of the dashing presidential contender, Jack Kennedy, to her a glamour candidate who offered no serious ideas.  She made her first venture back into political commentary with a scathing attack on Kennedy, “JFK: High Class Beatnik,” a short article published in the libertarian journal Human Events.  In the summer of 1960 she even dispatched Nathan to investigate the possibility of her founding her own political party. It was unclear if Rand saw herself as a potential candidate or simply a gatekeeper for others.  Nathan sounded out a few of Goldwater’s political advisors, who told him that Rand’s atheism severely limited her prospects.  Abandoning that idea, Rand returned once again to intellectual pursuits.  She sent her attack on JFK to the head of the Republican National Committee to be used as needed in Republican publications.

Shaking off her lethargy, Rand now began paying attention to the new following she had gained through Atlas Shrugged.  The book was an instant best-seller despite the largely negative reviews it received.  As with The Fountainhead enormous quantities of enthusiastic fan mail poured in.  Although Rand could not respond personally to ever letter, she was interested in her readers, particularly those who wrote especially perceptive or ignorant letters.  Nathan often interposed himself between Rand and the most objectionable writers, but in the early 1960s it was entirely possible to send her a letter and receive a personal response.  Sometimes she even engaged in a lengthy correspondence with fans she had not met, although her more usual response was to refer the writer to work she had already published.

The Nathaniel Branden Institute both capitalized on and fostered Rand’s appeal.  Nathan used the addresses from her fan mail to build NBI’s mailing list and advertise new courses.  As the lectures expanded into new cities, he took out newspaper advertisements describing Objectivism as the philosophy of Ayn Rand.  In 1962 he and Barbara published a hagiographic biography, Who is Ayn Rand?, which included an essay by Nathan on the fundamentals of her philosophy.  Slowly public perception of Rand began to shift, establishing her as a philosopher, not just a novelist.  The NBI ads and lectures made Objectivism into a movement, a larger trend with Rand at the forefront.