The Bad Writing Contest (h/t David Thompson) ran for only three years (1995 to 1998). The rules, as Thompson points out, were clear as day, but the writing clear as mud:

The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.

Here are some examples. It beggars belief that a man or woman, who eats, drinks and perhaps loves, could sit down and write this:

If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.

Professor Rob Wilson did in 1997. There's more, and worse:

This year’s second prize went to a sentence written by Homi K. Bhabha, a professor of English at the University of Chicago. It appears in The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994):

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

This prize-winning entry was nominated by John D. Peters of the University of Iowa, who describes it as “quite splendid: enunciatory modality, indeed!”

Ed Lilley, an art historian at the University of Bristol in the U.K., supplied a sentence by Steven Z. Levine from an anthology entitled Twelve Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton University Press, 1996):

As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (”Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

There is probably more bad writing around now than there was ten years ago. As mediocre college students are taught by mediocre and semi-educated college professors, fewer people know how to write coherently, let alone well. It is a pity the contest had to end, but perhaps today there would be too many winners. Then again, academics who write like the above probably believe that All Must Have Prizes.

Boris Johnson, bless him, is considered a bit of a toff because he went to Eton. However, he went to Eton on a scholarship, and is probably less of a toff than many Labour supporters. Etonians are not all the same; as Charles Moore points out, there are two kinds:

The growing power of Islam in Britain has forced the British public to learn more about its component parts — Sunnis and Shiites, Deobandis and Barelwis, and so on. By the same token, I feel it is time for a more thorough understanding of Etonians as they start their reconquista of our country. They divide into two groups — Collegers and Oppidans. At any one time, there are only 70 Collegers and more than 1,200 Oppidans, but Collegers are scholars and represent the original purpose of the foundation, so they have an importance beyond their numbers. Collegers tend to live off their wits, Oppidans off their inheritance. Oppidans are more relaxed and confident, Collegers more twitchy and more original. Collegers make better companions at high table, but you would rather go into the jungle with Oppidans. George Orwell was a Colleger, James Bond was an Oppidan. Just because Collegers and Oppidans are both Etonians, it should not be supposed that there is a natural alliance between the two. David Cameron is a typical Oppidan of the top class. Boris Johnson is a typical Colleger ditto. That, in essence, is all you need to know about them. (I am a Colleger, by the way, so my witness may be considered tainted.)

Charles Moore may be right about Etonians, but he's wrong about Islam. The divisions of Islam are far less significant than the division of Muslim and Infidel.

At Contentions, Jen Rubin reports that Barack Obama, the King of Righteous Indignation, is righteously (actually, risibly) indignant over a "smear" by John McCain — namely, McCain's factually true (and totally understandable) observation that Hamas wants Obama to be president.

Remarkable. On a plane ride to Chicago, I caught up with our Mark Hemingway's superb article, "A Curious Kind of Friendship — Barack Obama's dubious record on Israel," in the current print edition of NR. There are gems throughout the piece, but Mark starts out discussing the Hamas endorsement:

When asked about the endorsement, Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, was flattered that Hamas compared his candidate to JFK: "We all agree that John Kennedy was a great president, and it's flattering when anybody says that Barack Obama would follow in his footsteps."

And an excellent, spirited response it is, from Mark Salter:

First, let us be clear about the nature of Senator Obama's attack today: He used the words 'losing his bearings' intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue. This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning.

We have all become familiar with Senator Obama's new brand of politics. First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity. It is called hypocrisy, and it is the oldest kind of politics there is.

It is important to focus on what Senator Obama is attempting to do here: He is trying desperately to delegitimize the discussion of issues that raise legitimate questions about his judgment and preparedness to be President of the United States.

Through their actions and words, Senator Obama and his supporters have made clear that ANY criticism on ANY issue — from his desire to raise taxes on millions of small investors to his radical plans to sit down face-to-face with Iranian President Ahmadinejad – constitute negative, personal attacks.

Senator Obama is hopeful that the media will continue to form a protective barrier around him, declaring serious limits to the questions, discussion and debate in this race.

Senator Obama has good reason to think this plan will succeed, as serious journalists have written of the need for 'de-tox' to cure 'swooning' over Senator Obama, and others have admitted to losing their objectivity while with him on the campaign trail.

Today, Senator Obama is complaining about comments John McCain made about a senior Hamas advisor stating that Hamas would welcome Senator Obama's election as president. Indeed, on April 13th, senior Hamas political advisor Ahmed Yousef said, 'We don't mind – actually we like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance.'

The McCain campaign has never suggested that Senator Obama supports Hamas' agenda, but it is more than fair to raise this quote about Senator Obama because it speaks to the policy implications of his judgment.

Just today, the president of Iran, whom Senator Obama wants to meet with unconditionally, called the state of Israel a 'stinking corpse.' Iran is the paymaster and state sponsor of Hamas.

In his victory speech this week, Senator Obama stated that 'wisdom' is meeting with our enemies, including  Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korea's Kim Jong Il, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Raul Castro. John McCain couldn't disagree more. Rather than giving tyrants and dictators the prestige of meeting with an American president, John McCain will instead meet with the champions of human freedom around the world and opposition leaders fighting for liberty .

We understand why Senator Obama doesn't want to engage in a debate over leadership and judgment with John McCain, but the American people demand that debate take place.

These are serious times that call for a serious debate on the profound issues facing our future. John McCain is ready for that debate and we hope Senator Obama will one day get serious and join it.

Opening Sequence

Waiting For The Train

The Final Shootout

Sheb Wooley is the first rider in the opening sequence of High Noon. He's also famous for novelty songs like Purple People Eater and parodies like I Walk The Line (as Ben Colder).

"Ben Colder here." "Why it ain't been colder here than anywheres else."

To:  U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

The American people condemn the May 8, 2008 decision by the majority of the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in rejecting Congressman Peter Hoekstra's amendment to the 2009 Intelligence Authorization Act (H.R. 5959), which was intended to "prohibit the intelligence community from adopting speech codes that encumber accurately describing the radical jihadist terrorists that attacked America and continue to threaten the homeland."

Moreover, the American people call for those members of the Committee who opposed this amendment to publicly account for and explain their vote.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

 

No, not one of those Indians. Not a member of the American Indian tribe in the Upper Valley for whom Dartmouth, or the Charity School that preceded it,  was first established in 1769  by Ebenezer Wheelock, as a vox clamantis in deserto – postcards will now be passed around of  white-bricked buildings high on the right bank of the Connecticut River. Not the place whose early non-graduate, John Ledyard, after whom the boathouse is named, became the most well-travelled man of his time. 

Not those Indian-Americans who have been showing up at Dartmouth, as students or faculty members, whose most famous example is no longer Dinesh D'Souza but the much funnier and smarter and more humorful Mindy Chokalingam (in arte  Mindy Kaling, because her original name might provoke sword-swallowing mirth among those who are always on the lookout for such stuff), now both an actress and script-writer for "The Office," who in this past week's episode loyally product-placed a green Dartmouth shirt on potential client of Dunder-Mifflin, who finally succumbs after an afternoon of golf  to Jim's sweet persistence, the same persistence that helped him woo and win Pam.  

No, this is the story of another American Indian, not an American Indian and thus intended beneficiary of Wheelock's college upon a hill, and  not even a chokalingesque Indian-American,  but  someone who sounds as if she started in India,  ended up in America, as a teaching fellow in English at Dartmouth, and has mastered, not literary analysis or the transmission of literary culture, but become devoted to the kind of thing that provides grist for well-deserved  wall-street-journal or even new-criterion mockery. Imagine bits and pieces of Edward Said, Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, Hamid Dabashi, and Homi Bhabha, blended in a mental osterizer, add American-style readiness to litigate the obviously unlitigatable, and you get what you find in the story by Joseph Rago that appeared in The Wall Street Journal last week. 

Here's the story:

Dartmouth’s Hostile Environment, by Joseph Rago:

Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.

Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."

The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.

Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."

The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.

After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.

Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.

Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.

That said, even at – or especially at – putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.

I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.

Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.

The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.”

What heartens the most in this tale, as its teller suggests, is the role of the students. And these students do not appear, from the story, to be Professional Young Conservatives of the appallling Dinesh-D'Souza variety, but rather, people simply no longer willing to put up with the kind of nonsense -- scientific truth as a "social construct" -- that long ago should have been shown the door or never allowed to enter in the first place, but that continues because so many of its practitioners and votaries are well-ensconced in tenured positions, and owe their livelihoods to such stuff, and carefully continue to hire and promote those who are in the same racket, or at least not contemptuous of what they do. Thus do university faculties of literature and other soft fields continue to reflect the crazinesses, long since exposed (see Ibn Warraq’s demolition of Said’s “Orientalism”), the fashions of ten or twenty or even thirty years ago continue drearily to drive students away from words and from reading, and university administrations avert their eyes. There is hope, hope that alumni, properly informed, will withhold contributions – and hope that students, here and there finally fed up, as the students of this teacher at Dartmouth were finally fed up, and decided not to take it any more.

Perhaps students of literature could start going on strike, carrying detailed lists of complaints:  No more sabbaticals in Bellagio! No more trading of blurbs and back-slapping references! No more ignoring office hours! No more offering pet theories! No more offering an important course every third year, or teaching four or six hours a week! No more making a subject of tangential interest into a seminar topic, only because you want to "work out" your ideas about your next book! No more this, and no more that! No more theories of literature! No more crap of every kind!

Yes, I have a dream. Someday in this great land of ours, in university classes on literature it will again be 1955.

Robert Malley told The Times he had regularly been in contact with Hamas, which controls Gaza but is listed by the US State Department as a terrorist organisation. Such talks, he stressed, were related to his work for a conflict resolution think tank and had no connection with his position on Mr Obama's Middle East advisory council.

“I’ve never hidden the fact that in my job with the International Crisis Group I meet all kinds of people,” he added.

But Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr Obama, responded swiftly, saying: "Rob Malley has, like hundreds of other experts, provided informal advice to the campaign in the past. He has no formal role in the campaign and he will not play any role in the future."
--from this news article

Malley is an Arab, presumably not a Muslim but rather, a Syrian islamochristian in his origins and formation (just like Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of Ba’athism), and that deeply-felt identity should have been obvious (it certainly was to me), from a number of things, including his ever-so-slightly-off English. He is careful to hide this as best he can, or at least tries to make sure that the question does not come up, is not brought to anyone’s attention, and in this he exploits to the fullest the deliberate misunderstanding that the name "Malley" sets up in readers and auditors, for that name "Malley" (Mallah? what was or is the Arab?) most usefully -- for his purposes -- apophonically echoes the name "O'Malley" with its sure-and-begorrah hint of County Galway. Look at Malley's self-description put up at the web-page of the International Crisis Group, where he is careful to note that his two languages are “English” and “French” but he makes not the slightest mention of knowing Arabic. But surely he does. One knows why he chose to leave it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2z1UXr1tpc