Embarking on my more scholarly career...
I've been reading two books, lately...
Joe Nye's Soft Power...which is brilliant, by the way, when you get the chance:):)...
And Robert Beattie's Nightmare in Wichita, detailing the case of our own homegrown serial killer in Wichita, Kansas, the BTK Strangler, Dennis Rader...a book that, I agree with Robert, just may well have helped smoke that little weasel out of his hiding spot...since BTK resurfaced after publicity about Beattie's book...likely to get proper credit for his work and to get his version of his gruesome history out for the public to see...
Joe's book is brilliant...and I wanted to spend the day at the WSU research library with policy journals and scholarly books all day, researching international policy and whatever else came up during that study time...but the library is shut down, today, for whatever reasons...so I didn't get a chance...I'm at the 21st and Hillside Wichita Public Library instead...reading and researching the best I can in a public library rather than in a university library, where all the best scholarly resources are at...
I want to start writing more work for my scholarly interests, more formally...and I'm wanting to research for that task...the university world has all kinds of formalities that I'm sure folks will want to see before they pay attention to ideas...so I'm gonna start writing in that way to get some articles and books published at some point, I'm decided...
But I have to say...to all the naysayers I encountered who thought that leaving school was a bad idea...
That I'm totally convinced, at this point, that there is something to spending some time in the real world...and not just having your head in the clouds...and it was one of the best decisions I made in my educational and scholarly career...Tom's opinion on the matter, notwithstanding:):):)...
It was an inconvenient time to do it, for sure, for everyone involved...but goddamn if I wasn't tired, at that moment, of having an advisor arrogant enough to think that newer and better ideas came from professors or advisors riding students to finish their programs...rather than students taking whatever freedom necessary...to develop newer and better ideas...and if that means that my life and his life gets inconvenienced, then so fuckin' be it...because the ideas are/were/will forever be far more fuckin' important than any fuckin' grant...and if you don't believe that, then you shouldn't be in a fuckin' university, in my book...because you're gaming the system for all the wrong fuckin' reasons...I just think Tom got used to that outlook...and I wasn't buying it...because school and an education actually mattered to me...and I wasn't going to treat it with less respect than it deserved...
I don't care what you call yourself...radical...liberal...conservative...Communist...Christian...theocratic...Socialist...anarchist..
I don't care what the fuck you call yourself...
You don't fuckin' decide for me how my ideas get developed...and how my education pans out...I will decide those things, thank you very much...and your input will be appreciated and duly taken...but will not decide the final direction of my education, thank you very fuckin' much...
Why people in universities can't take freedom of thought nearly serious enough too much of the time, I will never know...
But I will take it that seriously and more until you do...
Joe Nye's book is really, really good...Joe's breadth of knowledge of so many international policy events, trends, ideas, thinkers, and the political climate for ideas is really impressive...
But what really makes Joe's ideas stand out is their boldness and their broad potential for application...
There are tons of really great thinkers that Joe cites in his work...
But what stands out in Joe's work is that he has developed ideas with broad scope...and which make sense...Joe's work on soft power has been praised by conservatives like Robert Kagan, Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft because it is really top notch work...Joe is a liberal, I believe...statements like, "American soft power is eroded more by policies like capital punishment or the absence of gun control, where we are the deviants in opinion among advanced countries," seem to both endorse gun control and oppose capital punishment, implicitly...and to overestimate the degree to which European opinion of American policies should matter to us, I think...I oppose capital punishment and gun control and I think that is the best position on both issues for all kinds of reasons that I've gone into depth about and can do so again at another point...and I want the best policies, whether Jacques Chirac, Angela Merkel, Tony Blair, and any other leader or nation's population likes those policies or not...
I don't agree with Joe all the time...nor do I agree with any thinker all the time...but Joe's work is uniquely strong among policy thinkers, I think, as is Benjamin Barber's, because of the breadth of both of their work and the potential applications that each of them has in a variety of different situations...Joe's work is a better guide for those seeking to use authority wisely, I believe...and Benjamin's is better work to understand the reactions to that authority and the kind of decentralized participatory democratic opportunities that might better account for the concerns of a ever-freer and more democratic world...Robert Kagan's and Henry Kissinger's work are excellent corrections to too much utopian thinking on the left about America's ability to abandon its sovereignty and autonomy and strategic self-interest to multilateral international institutions or to an overly optimistic view of forced collaboration -- which is not real collaboration at all -- in international institutions, like the U.N., especially when those institutions leave a lot to be desired, too often, with whom they let set their agendas, as is the very good case of conservative criticism of countries like Syria setting human rights policies in the United Nations...Kagan's work, in particular, is an excellent correction to the notion that matters of authority and sovereignty don't matter in an often chaotic world where actors in bad faith threaten innocent lives...Kissinger and Kagan, both, are far too cynical in their machinations around the use of power, both for my tastes and for America's interests, I believe...but they are both becoming less so, which is just right by me:):):)...
Joe's work rationalizes liberal power, too much, I believe...and Benjamin's work is an excellent and better correction to the notion of centralized power, liberal, conservative, or otherwise, on so many issues, I believe...though some kind of monopoly on the legitimate use of the hard power and force is still needed, I believe -- privatized prisons and security being a permanent and legitimate use of private power, I believe...though still needing to be subservient, I believe, to public power vested in law enforcement and the courts, despite their many, many flaws -- and I think most people would agree and which I highly doubt that Benjamin would seriously disagree with...Benjamin's focus is just more on the world, at large, than is Joe's, rather than more on governments' use of power, as is Joe's...
But the big difference between Joe and Benjamin's work and Henry and Robert's work...is that where Robert and Henry are consistently borrowing from others' ideas very good ideas...Benjamin and Joe are actively developing newer and better ones...and that is what makes them stronger thinkers, generally, I believe...even as Robert's and Henry's corrections are powerful and important ones, much of the time, I believe...
The more I deal with people who don't take thinking seriously around the most important issues we face...the more I appreciate everyone who takes the thinking seriously...with or without new and original ideas as great thinkers like Joe Nye and Benjamin Barber bring to the table...
Developing new ideas is hard work...and the hardest work, as a young scholar, used to be all the nay-saying from folks too lazy to come up with newer and better ideas of their own...now, I realize...there are leaders...and there are followers...and those folks are followers, much of the time...so as much as they bitch about how there is nothing new under the sun...they generally enjoy the sunlight, once you show them the way...
There are just some of us who are busy showing the way...while others bitch about how there's no other path...
Plato's Allegory of the Cave...how much more I appreciate it and Anthony Gethiel's Honors' English class my freshman year at Wichita State...
The challenge of the 21st Century...is that people can't be dragged from the cave to see the sunlight...because they just find their way back to the cave, which is furnished with cable TV and Cheetos, these days...people have to find their own way out of the cave and into the sunlight...to see the difference between the shadows and the light of reason...
Goddamn it's good to be back in Wichita...I love my hometown...and I love the university where I first fell in love with the world of ideas...I would love to teach at a third tier, no-prestige University like Wichita State, someday...if for no other reason than to be around folks who love ideas for their sake...because they aren't making a lot of money off of them, that's for sure...and where conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, peacefully cohabit in a really very excellent political sciece program at Wichita State, and learn things from one another, if you can believe that (one conservative professor, Ken Ciboski, taught this really excellent comparative politics class that I so thoroughly enjoyed while I was there and still learn more from -- as I review the textbooks from that class, periodically -- each time I revisit what we learned there)...and, in a lot of ways, I would prefer it to the fucked up world of scholarly fame and prestige that takes over peoples' egos, I think, too much, at places like KU and Harvard and Stanford and Yale and Berkeley and a million other places where a lot of really great thinkers live and work...
If my ideas are worth a lick, people will find me, I'm sure...and if not...then it's a pretty good sign that I should look into carpentry or something more up my alley:):):)...
I've got some books to read and some sources to track down, everyone...
Oh...and I want to take a moment, thinking about the WSU research library, to thank our head extemper, Brian White, at Wichita State and now a really fabulous forensics coach at Kapaun Mt. Carmel in Wichita, Kansas, for introducing me to the really pretty impressive scholarly journal and periodical collection at Wichita State University, while the Wichita State extempors were building one of the better sets of extemp boxes (a collection of research articles for domestic and international policy speeches in intercollegiate competitive speech and debate) in the country...I fuckin' love that library, and Brian more than any other person really introduced me to everything it had to offer...
Brian was and is, by the way, one of the first and smartest conservatives that I ever got to know, really well, and someone who gave me first-hand knowledge, at a fairly young age, of how smart conservatives can be...and how much a young liberal kid had to learn about the world...and someone who persuaded me -- along with our more socially conservative speech and debate coach, Chris Leland -- to vote for George Bush, Sr. in my very first election...not a bad vote, though I think Bill Clinton turned out to be a better President...but a really fine Republican President I think more today than I did, then...and for Kansas Republican Eric Yost, unfortunately, for Kansas Attorney General...who turned out to be one of our shittier Attorney General's, I think...but a pretty straight Republican ticket in 1992...and most of the credit for persuading a pretty strong-minded liberal Democrat to vote that way in that year goes to my friend, Brian, who is still one of the smartest and most decent conservatives that I have ever met in my life...
I have a whole lifetime of policy thinking and writing to get a head start on, this Christmas vacation...so I guess I better get on that...
Have a great week, everyone:):):)...
Love,
Ben
