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Amor Mundi 1/10/16
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
What We Cling To
Adam Gopnik investigates why some pasts are more available than others: "The most persistent mistake that historians and politicians have made in analyzing the modern world is to imagine, again and again--a fallacy shared by liberals and Marxists alike--that people will pursue their own economic interests in preference to their ideological fixations. They don't. They never will. Nationalist ideology has been a much stronger force in the modern world than class interest. This dates at least to the memorable moment when the Great War began and socialists throughout Europe were sure that transnational class-consciousness would trump nationalist war fever. It didn't. It never has. The better question may be what divides our past so radically between the things we remember and the things we don't. It may be that the general force of anxiety that affects everything in modern life is also responsible for the way our pasts get divided. The truth about modern life is that it creates enormous anxiety at every moment. It's like a traumatic force that suppresses some memories and refuses to suppress others at all. Our past is divided between the archival and the available exactly because it is so quickly past--so rapidly dissolved in confusion. We all want to stop the process of traumatic change from happening, and sometimes we do it by forgetting everything, sometimes by remembering almost too much. The Beatles linger; other bands unduly fade. (Do we really need to remember 'Mr. Moonlight' or 'Don't Pass Me By?' We do, though.) When he was running for President the first time, Barack Obama got into some trouble for saying that people in small towns that had lost manufacturing jobs 'cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them' as a way to explain their frustrations. It was impolitic, but, with a crucial proviso added, true: we all are clinging to something, if no more than an app at our Beatle-loving fingertips." Gopnik is right that people cling to fantasies over and above their interests. Nationalism is at times one of those fantasies, but as Hannah Arendt points out, nationalism, while dangerous, is nevertheless limited by national boundaries. As bad as nationalism is, the real danger in the modern world is when coherent fantasies are ideological and transnational. This is part of what she means by the total domination of totalitarianism, when fantasies expand eternally with the aim of overrunning the world.--RB
The Critic-in-Chief
Edward Mendelson praises President Obama's college-age criticism of T.S. Eliot: "Obama sees that Eliot's conservatism differs from that of fascist sympathizers who want to impose a new political hierarchy on real-world disorder. Eliot's conservatism is instead a tragic, fatalistic vision of a world that cannot be reformed in the way that liberalism hopes to reform it; it is a fallen world that can never repair itself, but needs to be redeemed. Behind this insight into Eliot's conservatism is Obama's sense that the goal of partisan politics is not the success of one or another party or program, but the means by which private morality can be put into action in the public sphere. So the liberal Obama can respect the conservative Eliot, because both seek what are ultimately moral, not political, ends... Obama asks his friend, 'You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?' Instead of isolating Eliot in some social, ethnic, or sexual category, instead of hearing in him the voice of political or ideological error, Obama finds a deep ambivalence that might be felt by anyone, just as Kermode sees Eliot's 'shudder' as a special case of something felt by everyone. And instead of making an assertion to his friend about her own ambivalence, Obama asks her a rhetorical question, because no one can be certain about someone else's inner life, though sympathy makes it possible to guess. Having first placed Eliot in his historical and literary context, then having pointed to what is unique in him, Obama ends by showing how he speaks to any individual reader who pauses to listen. This is what the finest literary criticism has always done."
The Color of the Sky
Dai George writes about the upcoming T.S. Eliot Prize and Citizen by Claudia Rankine: "The T. S. Eliot Prize carries serious money (£20,000, the most of any single poetry prize in the UK) and serious bragging rights. The list of its past winners doubles as a one-stop index of poetic celebrity on this side of the Atlantic: David Harsent, Carol Ann Duffy, Don Paterson, John Burnside, and Sinéad Morrissey take their places alongside a host of other stars in the contemporary British firmament. In recent years the prize has also acted as a lightning rod for minor controversy. David Harsent's win last year led some observers to suggest that an oligarchy was rigging the system, dishing out prizes among its members while a growing constituency of smaller presses and their poets are effectively disenfranchised. One doesn't have to travel too far down the road of conspiracy and recrimination to recommend the sober, factual analysis of Fiona Moore, a poet and blogger who has done valuable work crunching the numbers to prove how far British poetry prizes have to go before they can claim to represent the full breadth of an increasingly vibrant and diverse publishing ecosystem. The representation question feels particularly urgent this year since the favorite has to be Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, a book that scrutinizes how black men and women--particularly black American men--are diminished and violated every day. It would seem a woeful category error to invite comparison between the serious, insidious brutality exposed in Citizen and this rarefied anxiety over how a book by a black woman will fare in competition for a literary prize that reflects the white cultural establishment--would seem so, were it not for the fact that Citizen confronts the white British literary establishment in its very text. In a passage titled 'August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan,' Rankine restages an encounter between her multivalent 'you' and 'A man, a novelist with the face of the English sky--full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear briefly.' They are talking at a party in an expensive house in Hackney, the borough that erupted into violence during the 2011 London riots. The casus belli for the riots was, ostensibly, the police execution of the unarmed Duggan, and our craggy, well-meaning novelist wants to know if Rankine would ever write about this moment of specifically British racism. His question, apparently innocent and engaged, turns into one of those flare points of estrangement that Rankine captures with gut-churning precision: Why couldn't he write about it himself? 'How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions, the recognitions, the disappointments, and the failures that exploded in the riots too foreign?' Rankine pulls off a great, and slightly risky, technical feat when she turns the novelist by degrees into first 'the man made of English sky' and then simply 'the English sky.' By conflating him with the low-key melodrama of English weather, Rankine risks demeaning the novelist as an exotic 'other' himself, an object defined by the clichés of his homeland. But this transition to 'sky' works precisely because it enacts the inverted prejudice that prejudice provokes: the blankness, the zoning out from particularities, the reflexive withdrawal that occurs when someone feels unexpectedly isolated by racial assumptions."
Rage in America
Over at Esquire, they have published one of the most fascinating surveys of the year. (OK, it is only January.) "American Rage" is an exploration of how angry we are and who is angry at whom. The results are worth considering: "LET'S BEGIN WITH THE BIG REVEALS: Half of all Americans are angrier today than they were a year ago. White Americans are the angriest of all. And black Americans are more optimistic about the future of the country and the existence of the American dream. There are depths and dimensions, dark corners and subtle contours to our national mood, and setting aside the issue of who actually has a right to be angry and about what--these pages are neutral territory; everyone is allowed their beef--we found three main factors shaping American rage. EXPECTATIONS: Are you disappointed? Do you feel stifled and shortchanged and sold a bill of goods? Then you're probably pretty angry. Consider the white men and women in our survey: From their views on the state of the American dream (dead) and America's role in the world (not what it used to be) to how their life is working out for them (not quite what they'd had in mind), a plurality of whites tends to view life through a veil of disappointment. When we cross-tabulate these feelings with reports of daily anger (which are higher among whites than nonwhites), we see the anger of perceived disenfranchisement--a sense that the majority has become a persecuted minority, the bitterness of a promise that didn't pan out--rather than actual hardship. (If anger were tied to hardship, we'd expect to see nonwhite Americans--who report having a harder time making ends meet than whites, per question three--reporting higher levels of anger. This is not the case.) Indeed, despite having what many would consider a more legitimate case for feeling angry, black Americans are generally less angry than whites. Though they take great issue with the way they are treated by both society in general and the police in particular, blacks are also more likely than whites to believe that the American dream is still alive; that America is still the most powerful country in the world; that race relations have improved over the past eight years; and, most important in the context of expectations, that their financial situation is better than they thought it would be when they were younger. Their optimism in the face of adversity suggests that hope, whatever its other virtues, remains a potent antidote to anger." And one further note: "Seventy-three percent of whites say they get angry at least once a day, as compared with 56 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans get angry at least once a day, as compared with 67 percent of Democrats. The least angry household-income brackets: the very rich ($150,000-plus) and the very poor ($15,000 and less). The most angry: the middle of the middle class."
From the Mouths of Babes
Mark Edmundson wonders at the fact that profanity seems to have the most power when children are the ones with the foul mouths: "I suspect that the swearing of kids cracks open illusions for adults. When a mom overhears her beloved child swear for the first time, her heart contracts until it feels like it will disappear. But imagine how she feels when she overhears a son or daughter who not only curses, but is truly adept at profanity--someone who summons up what Shakespeare might have been, if he decided to become practiced in the art of the headlong cursing symphony. And who knows, lover of language that he was, he may actually have created such compositions from time to time. What if mom hears her little boy, not long out of Pampers, still in shorts, reel off a euphonious string of curses that sounds like the work of a top sergeant in rage at his recruits? What's lost then is the myth of innocence. Suddenly your child has become a kid. And what better way for the child to rebel against his period of confinement as a child than to become an adept curser? It's not like having sex just at puberty, or holding up the neighbors with a wooden gun and scampering away with a wallet and a purse. But it really can create a gap, a true facture, between the self that was and the self that now is. The first time you hear your beloved 10-year-old say motherfucker: well, on that day something changes. Why does it disturb us so? I suppose something called parental narcissism is involved. We want the child to be perfect. We want the child to avoid all the wounds and disappointments that we suffered. We want the child to be without flaws. (For surely we had our flaws.) The child is a sort of second chance for us--a way to approach life another time and this time to get it right."
We're Gonna Make It Through This Year
Mensah Demary praises the New Year's Resolution: "New Year's resolutions attempt to correct that which has gone awry. It often doesn't, in part because New Year's resolutions are abandoned so often that their abandonment is woven into American culture. A local newscaster speaks over stock footage of round bellies jiggling on treadmills in gyms, and, at the end of the segment, offers a reminder that it's okay if resolutions are forgotten, because there's always next year, and no one achieves their resolutions anyway. Failure is assured, or implied. But while New Year's resolutions are absurd, they are not without value. That the tradition even exists at all engenders a frame of mind necessary for personal change: Thinking about resolutions means I'm thinking about improving myself. I do need to return to the gym to remove the flab once and for all; I could also resolve to call my mother more often, or take a flight south to see her for the first time in four years; I might decide to write difficult essays that take me out of my head, my comfort zones, even if they won't garner any immediate shares, or likes, or favorites. Expanding my reading tastes is a worthwhile resolution; I could certainly stand to read more often, which would mean less time for other things, such as Twitter, but this would be a small loss, a trifle to relinquish, since social media has become anathema to my artistic pursuits. (I would rather be known as a bad writer than a good tweeter; this is a realization that is so baffling to me, and unexpected, that I've been unable to do anything about it except to sit with it, turn it over, and find the lie in it, if it exists.) I could be a better sibling to my brothers and sister, as well as a better uncle to their children; I could turn to God as I deal with my mortality; I could stop wasting my money on the latest gadgets and take-out lunches, and any money saved could then be used to see more of the world with my partner. We could go to South America, or Central America, and I could peck out some words on my laptop at the beach, brushing sand away from my keyboard; I could look at the tapestries and churches, the sculptures and the jewelry, all the details my partner sees and points out; we could forget to take photos and instead resolve to remember it all, to use both of our minds to remember this one, singular trip for ourselves, and keep all of it in our heads and offline; I could finish my book, and make a note in the acknowledgements that the book was written on a trip with my partner, who reminds me of black love, of black friendship, of black power, black excellence, black family, Blackness with a capital B; I could resolve to taste more varieties of bourbon, to give gin another chance (but only one more chance), and to continue to laugh at all the wrong times, at all the wrong things; I could resolve to be even more absurd."
Non-Professors Teaching Non-Students
Ron Srigley offers yet another condemnation of the modern university. But unlike most, he identifies what kind of universities he is writing about. "A word about which universities I have in mind, because not all universities are the same. I wish to speak about third- and fourth-tier Canadian schools that are primarily undergraduate institutions. Historically, these schools have had few graduate programs and have focused their curriculum on the liberal arts and sciences. Today they are abandoning this tradition at an alarming rate in favor of professional programs like engineering, nursing, education, and business. As they stand, these schools are about as similar to, say, the Claremont Colleges as pickled eggs are to Coquilles Saint-Jacques. They're both universities, but ... So just to be clear about my subject, I'm going to be talking about the pickled eggs." Srigley writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which raises the following question: Why should we readers of the LARB care about the failure of lower-tier Canadian colleges? He answers that one, too: "But one more thing before I begin: Why should you, parents of students at Claremont or Stanford or one of the UC schools, care? What's it to you how these universities are faring? Perhaps you shouldn't care. But I think it might be good for you, for two reasons. First, it's always good to think about the less fortunate. It can make you more merciful, because you see how fickle fate can be and how, social capital notwithstanding, one or two slight turns of the screw either way could have caused things to turn out quite differently. It can also build community and even create more equity because seeing others' misfortunes tends to make us less inclined to add to them. But second, and more to the point, the disease from which my university suffers, yours does too. It's not as bad where you are, stage one or two as opposed to stage four, but it is recognizably the same disease, and its just as aggressive: administrative bloat, student illiteracy, lots of 'student experience' but very little 'student intelligence,' dumb and dumber no longer a bad Hollywood joke but the unacknowledged consequence, if not the principle, of higher education. If you think I exaggerate, please read on. The university education you save may be your child's." And this is too good not to include: "During one class a couple of years ago, I dimmed the lights in order to show a clip of an interview. The moment the lights went down I saw dozens and dozens of bluish, illumined faces emerge from the darkness. That's when I understood that a lecture or discussion is now only one of several entertainment options available to students in the university classroom. Given the way the game is played, lectures and discussions rank well below Facebook or Tumblr. You can't get mad at them for this, not like in the old days. 'Hey, you, pay attention! This is important.' Say that today and you won't hear anger or shame. You'll hear something like: 'Wha...? Oh, sorry sir. My bad. I didn't mean anything.' And they don't. They don't mean anything. They are not dissing you; they are not even thinking about you, so it's not rebellion. It's simply that the ground has shifted and left you hanging there in empty space, like Wile E. Coyote. Just a few more moments (or years) and down we'll all tumble. These people look like students. They have arms and legs and heads. They sit in a class like students used to do; they have books and write papers and take exams. But they are not students anymore, and you are not a professor. And there's the rub."
Featured Events
HAC Virtual Reading Group - Session #17
HAC members at all levels are eligible to participate in a monthly reading group led online via a telecommunication website by Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center.
For questions and to enroll in our virtual reading group, please email David Bisson, our Media Coordinator, at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Friday, February 5, 2016
Bluejeans.com, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation
Jazz, as the modern art form that lays claim to improvisation, situates music in a productive tension between individual freedom and a mysterious yet sentient order. As do modern theories of liberalism in politics, Jazz insists both on the individual liberty of each that is through fidelity to common truths, recognition of traditional customs, or embrace of collective ends is rendered compatible with a larger inter-subjective order. Freedom as an art of improvisation means that men are free only insofar as they act in ways that are both free and constrained. This is very much what Hannah Arendt means means when she writes that "Men are free-as distinguished from their possessing the gift of freedom- as long as they act, neither before nor after; for to be free and to act are the same." In this evening on "A Taste for Chaos: The Hidden Order in the Art of Improvisation," we bring together leading thinkers and musicians to explore the nature of improvisation and the art of freedom.
Free & Open to the Public
Monday, February 15, 2016
László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Learning from the West African Ebola Epidemic: The Role of Governance in Preventing Epidemics
"Learning From the West African Ebola Epidemic" is a one-day conference in New York City exploring the hypothesis that building public trust in effective organizations is essential for fighting health crises such as Ebola. The conference is grounded in the Global Health Security Agenda that seeks to accelerate progress towards a world safe from infectious disease.
Specifically, the Global Health Security Agenda seeks to
- Prevent avoidable epidemics;
- Detect threats early; and
- Respond rapidly and effectively.
Combining social science and political actors with leading scientists and Ebola specialists, we will explore the Ebola epidemic and its consequences as a case study to explore how educational, governance and healthcare resources can be better deployed against future outbreaks. The conference is sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center, Citizen Science, CCE, and the Ford Foundation in collaboration with the Honorable Dr. Wilmot James, South African MP and the Carnegie Council for Ethics In International Affairs.
To learn more about and register for our conference, please click here.
Free & Open to the Public
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Carnegie Council for Ethics & International Affairs, NYC, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
Vita Activa - The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
Roger Berkowitz, Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, will be participating in the opening of the new film, VITA ACTIVA - THE SPIRIT OF HANNAH ARENDT, Directed by Ada Ushpiz, taking place at the Film Forum in New York City.
About the Film: A brand new documentary about one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. The German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt caused an uproar in the 1960s by coining the subversive concept of the "Banality of Evil" when referring to the trial of Adolph Eichmann, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine. Her private life was no less controversial thanks to her early love affair with the renowned German philosopher and Nazi supporter Martin Heidegger. This thought provoking and spirited documentary, with its abundance of archival materials, offers an intimate portrait of the whole of Arendt's life, traveling to places where she lived, worked, loved, and was betrayed, as she wrote about the open wounds of modern times. Through her books, which are still widely read and the recent release of Margarethe von Trotta's biopic Hannah Arendt (also a Zeitgeist Films release) there is renewed interest in Arendt throughout the world, especially among young people who find her insights into the nature of evil, totalitarianism, ideologies, and the perils faced by refugees, more relevant than ever. Watch the Trailer.
Wednesday, April 8, 2016
Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street West of 6th Ave., New York, NY, Time TBA
On OCTOBER 20-21, 2016 we will host our ninth annual fall conference: "How Do We Talk About Difficult Questions?: Race, Sex and Religion on Campus". We'll see you there!
Thursday and Friday, October 20 and 21, 2016
Olin Hall, Bard College, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
From the Arendt Center Blog
This week on the Blog, Wolfgang Heuer notes how it is worth analysing the different forms of violence and asking why and how they transgress various boundaries to approach omnipotence in the Quote of the Week. Sir Joshua Reynolds comments on the lengths to which a man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2015 student opinion contest. Finally, we appreciate the annotations Arendt made to her copy of Nisbet's "Social Change and History" in this week's Library feature.
Leading Students Into the World
**This post was originally published on November 12, 2012**
By Ellen Rigsby
"The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child, it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world."
-- Hannah Arendt, "A Crisis in Education"
Teachers must lead their students into the world. They are qualified to do so because of their knowledge of the world as well as their ability to teach others that knowledge. There is an inherent conservatism enmeshed in the activity of teaching. That conservatism comes from simultaneously needing to protect children who are learning care for the world from being damaged by it and from needing to protect the world from representation by the child who does not yet understand it.
Amor Mundi 8/3/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Andrew Sullivan, pivoting off of a reader's response to an appreciation of Montaigne, offers thoughtful comments on conservatism in the contemporary political environment: "What motivated both Montaigne and Oakeshott was a preference for 'present laughter' over 'utopian bliss.' Yes, reforms may well be necessary; yes, there are times for collective action; but a political regime that leaves people alone in their consciences and allows us the task of ordinary living is the best regime. In that sense, Montaigne was stranded in the wrong country. While France was convulsed with the blood of religious conflict, England was benefiting from that very politique Queen, Elizabeth I. As for our time, an attachment to a fixed ideology called conservatism (which is currently suffused with the zeal and passion Montaigne so deeply suspected) or to an ideology called progressivism (which increasingly regards most of its opponents as mere bigots) does not exhaust the possibilities. A disposition for moderation and pragmatism, for the long view over the short-term victory, for maintaining the balance in American life in a polarized time: this remains a live option. You can see how, influenced by this mindset, I have had little difficulty supporting a Democratic president as the most conservative figure, properly speaking, now on the national stage. You can see why I have become so hostile to neoconservatism whose unofficial motto is 'Toujours l'audace!' And you can see why, after an important reform like marriage equality, I am deeply suspicious of those on the left seeking to remake society in its wake and to obliterate bigotry in our time."
One week after he published a masterful review on the promise of liberal Zionism that was written before the latest war in Gaza, Jonathan Freedland returns to his theme and wonders whether the facts on the ground have exhausted the possibilities of liberal Zionism: "For nearly three decades, the hope of an eventual two state solution provided a kind of comfort zone for liberal Zionists, if not comfort blanket. The two-state solution expressed the liberal Zionist position perfectly: Jews could have a state of their own, without depriving Palestinians of their legitimate national aspirations. Even if it was not about to be realized any time soon, it was a goal that allowed one to be both a Zionist and a liberal at the same time. But the two-state solution does not offer much comfort if it becomes a chimera, a mythical notion as out of reach as the holy grail or Atlantis. The failure of Oslo, the failure at Camp David, the failure of Annapolis, the failure most recently of John Kerry's indefatigable nine-month effort has prompted the unwelcome thought: what if it keeps failing not because the leaders did not try hard enough, but because the plan cannot work? What if the two-state solution is impossible? That prospect frightens liberal Zionists to their core. For the alternatives to two states are unpalatable, either for liberal reasons or for Zionist reasons. A single state in all of historic Palestine, dominated by Jews but in which Palestinians are deprived of the vote, might be Zionist but it certainly would not be liberal. A binational state offering full equality between Jew and Arab would be admirably liberal, but it would seem to thwart Jewish self-determination, at least as it has traditionally been conceived, and therefore could not easily be described as Zionist."
David Bromwich reviews the documentary film Ivory Tower and questions the anxieties plaguing academia as well as the technological fixes that so many believe can save it. "A fair number of the current complaints derive from a fallacy about the proper character of a university education. Michael Oakeshott, who wrote with great acuteness about university study as a 'pause' from utilitarian pursuits, described the fallacy in question as the reflection theory of learning. Broadly, this theory assumes that the content of college courses ought to reflect the composition and the attitudes of our society. Thus, to take an extreme case that no one has put into practice, since Catholics make up 25 percent of the population of the United States, a quarter of the curriculum ought to be dedicated to Catholic experiences and beliefs. The reflection theory has had a long history in America, and from causes that are not hard to discover. It carries an irresistible charm for people who want to see democracy extended to areas of life that lie far outside politics. An explicitly left-wing version of the theory holds that a set portion of course work should be devoted to ethnic materials, reflecting the lives and the self-image of ethnic minorities. But there has always been a conservative version too. It says that a business civilization like ours should equip students with the skills necessary for success in business; and this demand is likely to receive an answering echo today from education technocrats. The hope is that by conveying the relevant new skills to young people, institutions of higher learning will cause the suitable jobs to materialize. The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, believes this, and accordingly has pressed for an alternative to college that will bring the US closer to the European pattern of 'tracking' students into vocational training programs. Yet the difficulty of getting a decent job after college is probably the smaller of two distinct sources of anxiety. The other source is the present scale of student debt."
Dan Piepinberg points to digital artist Cory Arcangel's new book Working on My Novel, an aggregation of tweets from people claiming to do just that, as a symptom of a peculiar cultural moment: "it's the story of what it means to live in a cultural climate that stifles almost every creative impulse, and why it so often seems we should stop trying. Arcangel suggests there's something inherently ennobling in trying to write, but his book is an aggregate of delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion-every stumbling block, in other words, between here and art. Working captures the worrisome extent to which creative writing has been synonymized with therapy; nearly everyone quoted in it pursues novel writing as a kind of exercise regimen. ('I love my mind,' writes one aspirant novelist, as if he's just done fifty reps with it and is admiring it all engorged with blood.)"
In a review of Cubed, Nikil Saval's history of the office, Jenny Diski considers the way that the pleasures of the office, and those of the idea of business, mask the reality of what is produced by office work: "But the actual work, what needs to be done with all the desirable sundries, the reason for them, wasn't clear. Obviously mostly it had to do with paper. Books were kept and letters written, loose-leaf papers filed. But what the letters were about, what was written in the books that were kept, wasn't even vaguely known. Some instinct kept me from demanding detail, perhaps because of a correct suspicion that the actual business of business was the very least of the pleasures of the office. What is done in offices, to generalise, is pretty boring and derivative, being at the hands-off service-end of those other places of work where things got made, mined, taught or sold. Work that is always about something other than itself. Paperwork. Allowed to play, I typed 'Dear Sir' at the desk on the huge typewriter, sitting high on the chair, legs dangling. And ended 'Yours Faithfully' ('Sincerely' only after a named 'Dear' - I learned that very young), after which I squiggled an elaborate signature that bore no relation to the alphabet. In the space between I let my fingers run riot over the keys, to produce a gobbledygook body of the letter that probably made as much sense to me as most of the real correspondence would have. The accoutrements and contraptions of the office were the delight, the actual commerce remained not so much a secret as an unwanted answer to an uncompelling mystery. Like the most extraordinary couture, Alexander McQueen's designs, say. You delight in and admire them, gorgeously and dramatically displayed in the videos of professional mannequins on runways, but you don't want to see them in everyday action, being worn disappointingly as clothes, in real life, to dull receptions or dinners without the special lighting and the right pose (how many frocks are designed to be sat down in?), by people who have them only because they are rich."
The New Yorker has put its whole archive online for free, for a limited time (of course). Over the next few weeks, we'll be combing the archives, finding articles worth your attention. This week we point to John Hershey's poignant account of what happened when American war planes dropped the atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, an article that took up an entire issue of the magazine and has also since been published as a book.
Our membership challenge ended this past week. Overall, we received 106 memberships and raised over $12,000. Thank you to all of our members for making this year's challenge a huge success!
Didn't know about the membership challenge? You can always become a member here!
October 9-10
The Hannah Arendt Center's annual fall conference, The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?, will be held this year on October 9-10!
Registration is now OPEN! You can register here!
Want to know more about the schedule of the conference? Please click for details here!
Learn more about the conference here.
This week on the Blog, Lance Strate discusses Arendt's thoughts on the loss of the public realm in the Quote of the Week. Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein provides this week's Thought on Thinking. We look back on a lecture Douglas Irvin delivered in 2012 on the origins of genocide in our Video Archives. And Roger Berkowitz observes how radical viewpoints perpetuate the conflict in the Middle East in the Weekend Read.
National Security and the End of American Exceptionalism
Back in September, Russian President Vladimir Putin called out President Barack Obama for carrying out a foreign policy based in American exceptionalism. Around the same time conservatives in the GOP argued that President Obama was abandoning American exceptionalism, pushing a secular and even socialist agenda that leads him to apologize for American greatness. According to Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, "The survival of American exceptionalism as we have known it is at the heart of the debate over Obama's program. It is why that debate is so charged." Mitt Romney repeated this same line during his failed bid to unseat the President, arguing that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." American exceptionalism—long a sociological concept used to describe qualities that distinguished American cultural and political institutions—has become a political truncheon.
Now comes Peter Beinart who writes in the National Journal that the conservatives are half correct. It is true that American exceptionalism is threatened and in decline. But the cause is not President Obama. Beinart argues that the real cause of the decline of exceptionalist feeling in the United States is conservatism itself.
The core of the first part of Beinart's argument concerns a generational shift regarding the place of religion in American society. That younger Americans are fundamentally changing their attitudes toward religious life is a theme Beinart has written about often. In short, one pillar of American exceptionalism has been its religiosity. America has long been the most religious of the western democracies. But the current younger generation is an exception.
For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom." But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as millennials age. In 1970, according to the World Religion Database, Europeans were over 16 percentage points more likely than Americans to eschew any religious identification. By 2010, the gap was less than half of 1 percentage point. According to Pew, while Americans are today more likely to affirm a religious affiliation than people in Germany or France, they are actually less likely to do so than Italians and Danes.
Beinart's point is that the younger generation is less religious and thus less tied to one of the core components of American exceptionalism than previous generations of Americans. That he is right is apparently beyond dispute. And it is not unimportant.
The deflation of religion removes one of the pillars that has long-distinguished American life. For Tocqueville, religiosity was necessary in a democratic country, as it gave the people a moral language to restrict the unimpeded longings of individualism. Religion also feeds the confidence and sense of purpose lends to the American project its jeremiad-like quality. And this is nowhere better illustrated than in Philip Freneau's 1795 poem "On Mr. Paine's Rights of Man:"
So shall our nation, formed on Virtue's plan,
Remain the guardian of the Rights of Man,
A vast republic, famed through every clime,
Without a kind, to see the end of time.
The religious roots of American exceptionalism are well established and form the central argument of Deborah Madsen's book American Exceptionalism. Madsen traces the doctrine to 17th century Puritan sermons and poetry, including Peter Buckley's famous "Gospel-Covenant sermon" that proclaims,
We are as a city set upon an hill, in the open view of all the earth; the eyes of the world are upon us because we profess ourselves to be a people in covenant with God, and therefore not only the Lord our God, with whom we have made covenant, but heaven and earth, angels and men, that are witnesses of our profession, will cry shame upon us, if we walk contrary to the covenant which we have professed and promised to walk in.
According to Madsen, this religious sense of distinction and purpose translated easily to a rationalist project as well. Benjamin Franklin embraced the exceptionalist rhetoric but covered it in a rationalist patina, arguing the "providence" is a "rational principle that controls the operation of the world." For Franklin, American newness meant that it was "unhampered by the complexities of European history and unburdened by a sophisticated class system and structure of inheritance." Thus, Madsen writes, America "offered an unrivalled opportunity for the establishment of a democratic society based on rational principles…. Franklin represents the American errand as the creation of a secular state that is purified of the corruption of European politics and a social structure based on inherited title."
By the time Abraham Lincoln addressed the nation on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the vision of the United States as a unique and exemplary democracy marked by a distinct approach to freedom and equality had established itself in the nation's psyche.
The United States of America was understood not simply to be one country amongst many, but it was "a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The survival and success of the United States was hardly a local matter, but was a grand experiment testing whether "any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure." Americans understood that America mattered as an example for the world.
Seymour Lipset summed up the idea of American exceptionalism in his 1996 book American Excptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword.
The United States is exceptional in starting from a revolutionary event, in being "the first new nation," the first colony, other than Iceland, to become independent. It has defined its raison d'être ideologically. As historian Richard Hofstadter has noted, "It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one." In saying this, Hofstadter reiterated Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln's emphases on the country's "political religion."
For Lipset, the "American Creed can be described in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez-faire." Exceptionalism, he argues, doesn't mean American is better than other countries. It means that America "is qualitatively different, that it is an outlier. Exceptionalism is a double-edged concept."
There have always been opponents of what Godfrey Hodgson calls The Myth of American Exceptionalism. And there is the question of how fully different races and classes have embraced the idea of American exceptionalism. But overall, the myth has had some basis in sociological reality. Americans were more religious than other democratic and liberal states. Americans believed they had more economic mobility, and saw their country as the first truly multi-ethnic and multi-racial democracy; one that developed in fits and starts towards an ideal of equality over 200 years.
So what does it mean when this idea of American exceptionalism is in retreat? Beinart traces the increasingly suspicious attitudes of the young to traditional tenets of American exceptionalism in foreign affairs and also in economics.
When conservatives worry that America is not as economically exceptional anymore, they're right. A raft of studies suggests that upward mobility is now rarer in the United States than in much of Europe. But if America's exceptional economic mobility is largely a myth, it's a myth in which many older Americans still believe. Among the young, by contrast, attitudes are catching up to reality. According to a 2011 Pew poll, young Americans were 14 points more likely than older Americans to say that the wealthy in America got there mainly because "they know the right people or were born into wealthy families" rather than because of their "hard work, ambition, and education." And as young Americans internalize America's lack of economic mobility, they are developing the very class consciousness the United States is supposed to lack. In 2011, when Pew asked Americans to define themselves as either a "have" or a "have-not," older Americans chose "have" by 27 points. In contrast, young Americans, by a 4-point margin, chose "have-not." According to the exceptionalist story line, Americans are all supposed to consider themselves "middle class," regardless of their actual economic fortunes. For seniors, that's largely true. According to a 2012 Pew study, they were 43 points more likely to call themselves "middle" than "lower" class. Among young Americans, by contrast, the percentage calling themselves "middle" and "lower" class was virtually the same.
Perhaps the most interesting generational change Beinart identifies is what he calls the loss of American civilizational self-confidence, which he ties to our loss of religious feeling.
[A]s conservatives suspect, Americans' declining belief in our special virtue as a world power really is connected to our declining belief in our special virtue as a people. And the young are leading the way. A 2013 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that while almost two in three Americans over 65 call themselves "extremely proud to be American," among Americans under 30 it is fewer than two in five. According to a Pew study in 2011, millennials were a whopping 40 points less likely than people 75 and older to call America "the greatest country in the world."
Young Americans, in fact, are no more "civilizationally self-confident" than their European counterparts. When Pew asked respondents in 2011 whether "our culture is superior" to others, it found that Americans over the age of 50 were, on average, 15 points more likely to answer yes than their counterparts in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain. Americans under 30, by contrast, were actually less likely to agree than their peers in Britain, Germany, and Spain.
It is easy to worry about the effects of the loss of exceptionalism in America, but hard to deny the truth that America is, today, increasingly less exceptional than in the past. Beinart is worried and rightly so. For what would a country be that had no common ideals? It would be a geographic entity held together by fear and bureaucratic inertia.
So Beinart holds out the hope that, in the end, Americans will reinvigorate their mythic exceptionalism. His prescription is a war on inequality that will return our faith to America as the land of economic mobility. If we can break down the Republican coalition with the plutocratic one percent and between Republicans and religionists, we could re-inspire both religious and economic exceptionalism that have undergirded so much of the progress toward social and racial justice in American history.
What Beinart's hoped for return of American exceptionalism forgets is that historically what most distinguished America from other nation-states in Europe and elsewhere was its uniquely federalist and decentralized and constitutional structure—something that has long been abandoned and is a distant memory in today's national security state. Not only Tocqueville in the 19th century but also Hannah Arendt in the 20th century saw in the United States a unique and exceptional country, one that for Arendt was fundamentally different from all European countries. The difference, for Tocqueville, was in America's incredible multiplication of distinct power centers at all levels of government and society. Arendt agrees, arguing,
The great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny and the same.
Arendt understood that what truly made America exceptional was its decentralized system of power, that the states did not surrender their powers to the Federal government, but that that Federal government should check the powers of the states and the considerable powers that still remained with them. By multiplying power sources, the American constitutional republic created a system that both prevented one sovereign power from acquiring tyrannical power and, equally importantly, insured that local power structures would persist that would give individual citizens reason and incentive to engage in the American practice of democratic self-government.
Arendt's love for America, as she expressed it in her last interview, was for a country that refused to be a nation-state. "America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time understanding this simple fact." As a country and not a nation, America was comprised of a plurality of persons and groups that each could found and support their own institutional bases of power. Politics in America had no center, but proceeded according to the contest of local and dispersed groups. And what unites all Americans is one thing: "citizens are united only by one thing, and that's a lot: that is, you become a citizen of the United States by simple consent to the Constitution." The Constitution in the United States is not just a scrap of paper. I it "a sacred document, it is the constant remembrance of one sacred act, and that is the act of foundation. And the foundation is to make a union out of wholly disparate ethnic minorities and regions, and still (a) have a union and (b) not assimilate or level down these differences." It was this view of the United States as a country that did not require the assimilation or leveling down of meaningful differences that so impressed Arendt. It was American pluralism free from a nation-state that Arendt found so exceptional.
In the same interview, however, Arendt expressed her fear that the exceptional American pluralism that she found in the country was coming to an end. And the culprit, she identified, was the rise of the national security state.
National security is a new word in the American vocabulary, and this, I think, you should know. National security is really, if I may already interpret a bit, a translation of "raison d'etat." And "raison d'etat," this whole notion of reason of state, never played a role in this country. This is a new import. National security now covers everything, and it covers, as you may know form the interrogation of Mr. Ehrlichman, all kinds of crimes. For instance, the president has a perfect right… the king can do no wrong; that is, he is like a monarch in a republic. He's above the law, and his justification is always that whatever he does, he does for the sake of national security.
Arendt expressed a similar worry about the rise of a national security state in American in 1967, when she wrote:
There is no reason to doubt Mr. Allan W. Dulles' statement that Intelligence in this country has enjoyed since 1947 "a more influential position in our government than Intelligence enjoys in any other government of the world,' nor is there any reason to believe that this influence has decreased since he made this statement in 1958. The deadly danger of "invisible government" to the institutions of "visible government" has often been pointed out; what is perhaps less well known is the intimate traditional connection between imperialist policies and rule by "invisible government" and secret agents.
If American exceptionalism is about religious freedom and religious passion, if it is about equal rights to participate in government, if it is about populism, and if it is about a moral vision of a "government of the people, by the people, for the people," then American exceptionalism is incompatible with the increasingly large, centralized, and bureaucratic security state that has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Whether the security sought is national or economic security, the demand that a central government secure our freedoms lives in tension with the basic desire for freedom understood as self-government. It is the loss of that American tradition more than any other that underlies the waning belief of Americans in their exceptionalism. And for that loss, both parties are at fault.
While Beinart misses the connection between national security and the decline of American exceptionalism, his presentation of that decline is convincing, important, and troubling. His essay is well worth your time.
Arnold Gehlen on Arendt's The Human Condition
Arnold Gehlen,"Vom tätigen Leben (Hannah Arendt)", Merkur Vol. 159 (1961) 482-6.
The conservative anthropologist Arnold Gehlen fell out of favor in post WWII Germany largely due to his support of the Nazis: he joined the party in 1933 but continued to teach after the war following a "denazification" process. However, with the recent rediscovery of thinking influenced by philosophical anthropology in Germany, his work is again becoming important. Gehlen can be seen as one pole of a broader debate about the relationship between the abstract qualities of humans and their environment. Gehlen's signature idea describes man as a "deficient being" (Mängelwesen) who develops culture, including technology in the broader and narrower senses, as a kind of armor for survival. Man's physical weakness ultimately forces him to create his own environment, but this is more a sign of the constant threat he is under rather than an opportunity for great progressive changes.
Peter Sloterdijk, a major figure in the re-emergence of philosophical anthropology has pressed the issue with his recent description of culture as "human zoo" that houses mankind. For Sloterdijk, man is a beastly creature, one who has over centuries struggled to tame himself with cultural ideals and the brute force of laws. As mass society has dissolved the cultural bonds of humanism, Sloterdijk writes, man is increasingly forced into the cages of a human zoo.
Gehlen was likely drawn to Arendt's work by the broad scope of her history of civilization. He was interested in where humanity came from and where it is going. Some of these aspects might seem speculative, and indeed Arendt's celebration of the Greeks and criticism of modern life continue to be fiercely criticized while her more technical innovations in terms of action and judgment garner broader acclaim (even if they still lead to debates over specifics). From a certain point of view, Gehlen's Arendt is an thinker of a grand narrative and his review makes us ask about the value of such stories even when we are skeptical of their ultimate validity.
Gehlen's forgotten but broadly positive review of The Human Condition offers a balanced evaluation of the book and a snapshot of it long before scholars built up the Arendt we know today of "action," "natality," and "judgment." In terms of method, Gehlen praises Arendt's "ideological abstinence." Her sobriety in relation to established political frames of reference tended to get her in trouble during her lifetime, especially from her Left- leaning friends for her critique of Marx (despite her explicit remarks on her appreciation of his work). While Gehlen's phrasing may have something of the coy conservative in it, I think is it a fitting way to describe her point of view. The independence of her work can be seen as a commitment to analysis that resists getting carried away by the overblown and often underdefined notions of the day.
Positively, Gehlen refers to Arendt's "magnificent and dire analysis of contemporary scientific-technological culture and its massive biological repercussions." If philosophical anthropology inquires into the connection between the human environment and life, Arendt offers an update by specifying the technological dimension of culture. Saying she connects it to biology per se is a provocation on Gehlen's part though it is one worth considering. Much work remains to be done on Arendt's use of philosophers of science and her critical contribution to this field. Her engagement goes well beyond the better known references to Heisenberg and Whitehead in the Human Condition, as her references to such thinkers as Adolf Portmann in the Denktagebuch shows.
Towards the end of his review, Gehlen criticizes Arendt for placing too much emphasis on the power of philosophy to influence history (at the expense of social forces). Here I do not think he makes a fair criticism and suspect that his reading was unduly influenced by Arendt's association with Heidegger. It's interesting though that Gehlen's conservatism also puts emphasis on the social, though without the progressive hopes of the Enlightenment tradition from Hegel to Marx and Habermas.
In a footnote to Chapter 5 of The Human Condition, Arendt appeals to Gehlen's major work Man: His Nature and Place in the World as the source of the scientific work that grounds her argument. There she directly engages essentialist anthropology and rejects it, but does not give way to mere metaphor. Instead, I argue that she develops natality as a concept that works from within rather above: it cannot do without real birth but isn't limited or determined by this empirical reference.
-Jeff Champlin
See: Jeffrey Champlin, "Born Again: Arendt's "Natality" as Figure and Concept," The Germanic Review 88(02), May 2012.
For the Sake of What is New
"Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world."
-Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Education
In the central and perhaps most provocative passage of her essay on The Crisis in Education (1958), Arendt thrice repeats the same word: to preserve. This should not be surprising, in the context of her presentation of the thesis that "education must be conservative." Education must be carried out with a "conservative attitude" in order to preserve the possibility for something new to arise.
Arendt thinks little of educators and professors who issue directives to their pupils about what actions they should undertake to change the world. The responsibility of the educator is more to bring a "love for the world" into the seminar room. Whether the tutor wishes the world to be different, better, or more just should be inconsequential. It is his job to represent the factual world as frankly as possible. One cannot do more and should not do less. This love for the world forms the basis for "newcomers" to take the chances of their new beginning into their own hands. Seen in this way the tutor must be "conservative" (in relation to the state of the world), not in order inspire "progressive" action but rather to enable new beginnings that cannot be planned or calculated. And so says the full quote about education that must be conservative: "Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world."
A few lines earlier Arendt distinguishes between this innovative "conservative attitude" in education and conservatism in politics. Political conservatism, "striving only to preserve the status quo," ultimately leads to destruction: if people do not undertake renewals, reformations, the world is abandoned to decay over time. Immediately after this second use of "to preserve" Arendt uses the word a third time. Since the world is shaped by mortals, it is at risk of becoming as mortal as its inhabitants. "To preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants," Arendt writes, "it must be constantly set right new." The "capacity of beginning something anew" appears according to Arendt principally in action, which is the capacity that has "the closest connection with the human condition of natality"—"the new beginning inherent in birth," Arendt writes at the same time in The Human Condition (1958).
Aren't these three very different meanings of "to preserve"? Can this single word really convey all these nuances? Only when one consults the original German version of Arendt's essay does the scope of distinctions become clear. The Crisis in Education is the English version of a lecture Arendt gave in 1958 in Bremen, Germany, translated by Denver Lindley.
The conservative stance in politics, which is "striving only to preserve the status quo" is said in German to seek to "erhalten." This is very similar to the English to preserve, to conserve, to maintain. Yet in the next part, where education is said to be the way "to preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants," this protection of the world against mortality is called in German "im Sein halten," literally "to hold or to keep in the state of being." The point here is not any physical preservation of the world, nor any quasi-metaphysical or Heideggerian elevation of the "world." Arendt's German wording rather suggests that the philosophical is to be found in the world, which she understands as something that emerges from the space in-between people: the in-between of the many and diverse. Finally, the task of education to be conservative and to "preserve" the revolutionary in every child is called "bewahren" in the German version, i.e., to retain and perpetuate, literally: to keep true—to keep the newness true.
"Erhalten," "im Sein halten," "bewahren"—these differentiations of the "conservative attitude" of education that Arendt develops in German on the conceptual level must be conveyed through context in English. This does not mean that the English is deficient. Rather, it demands that the reader reflect on the particularity of each appearance of "to preserve." Arendt's German text lends the direction of these reflections important impetus.
Likewise, a decisive conceptual impetus for Arendt's German lecture comes from the English. In the middle of the passage on the conservative attitude in education, she quotes an English line from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "The time is out of joint. O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right." The literary citation is not tasked with illustrating a theoretical reflection. Arendt thinks and writes with the poetic thought of this verse. In the German lecture she uses an unusual construction, saying that the world must be (newly) "eingerenkt"—it is the German equivalent of "to set it right," if one reads "joint" literally as the joint of a body; the usual translation of "out of joint" is "aus den Fugen," where "Fuge" has more the connotation of "seam," "interstice," or "connection." In this way Arendt answers the English literally and therefore newly in German. She gives her text a "figurative posture," which advocates for a plurality of languages. This can also be understood as a political gesture against the totalizing assertion of one homogenous language (of truth, of philosophy etc.).
All of this is possibly less revolutionary than the "newness" that each child brings into the world. And yet a reflection of it is brought "as a new thing into an old world." In addition, Hamlet's line "that ever I was born to set it right" being placed in the charged context of Arendt's thoughts on natality (the human condition of being born, which equips every newcomer with "the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting") challenges both perspectives on action: Is Shakespeare's Hamlet more capable of taking action than we usually think? Is Arendt's "newcomer" more bound in his or her actions than we typically assume? Arendt's mode of writing preserves an educating esprit for her readers.
—Thomas Wild, with Anne Posten
Leading Students Into the World
"The teacher's qualification consists in knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it, but his authority rests on his assumption of responsibility for that world. Vis-à-vis the child, it is as though he were a representative of all adult inhabitants, pointing out the details and saying to the child: This is our world."
-Hannah Arendt, "A Crisis in Education"
Teachers must lead their students into the world. They are qualified to do so because of their knowledge of the world as well as their ability to teach others that knowledge. There is an inherent conservatism enmeshed in the activity of teaching. That conservatism comes from simultaneously needing to protect children who are learning care for the world from being damaged by it and from needing to protect the world from representation by the child who does not yet understand it.
The culture wars have resulted from the loss of a unitary cultural world that serves as an authority for tradition. This loss of authority is often taken for an inability to teach now that (in the case of The United States) the western tradition is not seen as the only measure of educational truth. Nonetheless, we can still know a world that is, for lack of a better word, post-modern, and teachers can still represent that world to students. The complexity of our world is that it does not share a single culture or tradition and that the authority of the public realm, which rested on these things, is gone. But simply because our world is not tethered to a single idea (such as the polis of Ancient Greece) or to the cultural authority of one city (such as the Roman Empire's ties to Rome), does not mean we are unable to represent it to students.
To represent the world, though, we have to understand it, in the old sense of standing in for the world—of being its representative. If the world is the world of things, then the teacher who understands the world is the one who can bring it before students for them to learn it. This process of understanding is "loving the world" according to Arendt.
A few weeks ago, Roger Berkowitz discussed another Arendt quote from "A Crisis in Education" in which Arendt equates the process of education to loving the world. In that post, Roger wrote that as teachers we must exclude our judgments of non-reconciliation (e.g. Arendt's choice to condemn Eichmann to death so that the world no longer contains something that we cannot love) in the process of education because those moments are not about loving the world, but about shaping it or acting in it. The process of education must be protected from these kinds of judgments because they are different modes of being human. In the same way that we cannot think and will at the same time, we cannot divide ourselves from the world while trying to represent it to students. Judging is a different task from understanding.
The authority of teachers lies, at least in part, in their ability to understand and to set aside judging. That is, teachers have a special authorial role in presenting the world to students.
We may have lost the permanence and reliability of the world as a singular, recognizable culture, but this is not the same thing as the loss of the world. We still have the "human capacity for building, preserving, and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us," as Arendt writes in "What is Authority?" Teachers, qualified teachers, use this human capacity for preserving the world to show students how the world works, so that students may graduate and take their place in the world.
Taking up the activity of caring for the world belongs to all adults, but the task of representing the world belongs uniquely to teachers as a kind of authorship. Authority here has two senses, the first underwritten by the second: First, the teacher's authority comes from the sense of a right conferred by their recognized social position. Second, this social authority is underwritten by the teacher's authority as a qualified author: Teachers create a work or a set of plans that is then read or built by others. This combined educational authority is the authority of the teacher.
By representing the world to students in its richness (that of all adult inhabitants) the teacher preserves the world for its future adults by showing it to students as it is. The key is to present the world in such a way that it is both true to the teacher's expertise and yet still recognizable to the students as having a place for them. This requires a careful balance between the teacher's expertise and the students' newness. This way of representing the world is a creative act that enables students to end their education and care for the world in the new ways that they create.
Not all people can manage this balance. Arendt acknowledges that teachers can teach without learning and students can learn without becoming educated. The teacher must have expertise to offer and the student must be willing and able to learn.
But when it comes to reform, however, Arendt insists tha neither of these things can be judged well from outside of the educational process itself. She suggests that subject experts and teaching experts can best judge the process of education. This may sound self-serving as those with the most at stake in education are the ones who should monitor its progress. But to think otherwise is to misunderstand Arendt's feeling that decisions that stand outside of the realm of politics should be made by experts.
For Arendt, this is a conceptual distinction between the realm of democratic politics in which decisions about government are made by citizens and the realm of social policy in which non-political decisions are made by experts in their respective fields. Teachers are the experts who know the world well enough to represent it to students. Excellent teachers are the ones who need to monitor the process of education. Nonetheless, expertise is not the same thing as authority in this case.
-Ellen Rigsby


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Au Shucks, Au No, Au Crap, Au Whatever You Want To Say, it's Au Not So Good. Au contraire mon frere, it's auful. On Friday night, in a meaningless at-bat in a meaningless game in a meaningless season by the lowly Diamondbacks team, lowly's meaning: less, Paul Goldschmidt entered the game as a pinch hitter and was plunked* (*trademark Eric Plunk), and now has a broken hand. Au, c'mon, can't we have anything nice? Au, guys and four girls, it's au so bad. Am I au right? Au, sadly no, I'm not au right; shizz has gone pear shape and au wrong. Maybe I shouldn't have paid retail for this word 'au;' now I feel compelled to use it so auften. Aufortunately, Goldschmidt is droppable in redraft leagues. Here's hoping he's fine for next year. Au please. Anyway, here's what else I saw this weekend in fantasy baseball:Please, blog, may I have some more?
Scott Feldman
You: Pete Nice, did you say we should start Marcus Stroman this week at Boston and at Houston?
Jay(Wrong): You DON'T have to answer that question!
Me: I'll answer the question! You want advice?
You: I think I'm entitled to…
Me: YOU WANT ADVICE?
You: I WANT THE TRUTH!
Me: YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
[Jay's Note: My mother always wanted me to be a lawyer…] Guys, we live in a fantasy baseball world that has risky matchups, and those risky matchups have to be taken on by writers who have to suggest two-starting inexperienced young pitchers with 95 mph-plus fastballs. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Guru? You, Sky? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly imagine. You worry about Stroman, and you curse the Blue Jays. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Stroman's road performance, while thus far in 2014 has been kind of crappy – 17 hits in 16 IP with a 4.41 ERA and a 1.47 WHIP – will improve with time. And Stroman's existence, while excitingly intriguing but also slightly scary, can help your fantasy team. You don't want this advice because deep down in places you don't talk about at baseball games and fantasy drafts, you want Stroman on that hill. You need Stroman on that hill. We use words like FIP and K/BB ratios. We use these words as the backbone of a fantasy team trying to win something: Stroman's 3.11 FIP places him in the Top 20 of all MLB pitchers and his K/BB per 9 ratio of close to 6.00 makes him an ownable pitcher, not a streamer, according to Dr. Grey Albright PhD. You use these things as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to readers who rise and sleep under the blanket of the very information that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up Stroman, and set your lineup. Either way, I don't give a damn who you grab off the wire for two starts this week.
You: Did you order the two-starts for Marcus Stroman?
Me: I did the job…
You: DID YOU ORDER THE TWO-STARTS FOR MARCUS STROMAN?
Me: YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I DID! AND HERE'S SOME MORE TWO-START PITCHERS FOR NEXT WEEK!Please, blog, may I have some more?
The Oakland A's have been the team to beat in the first half of 2014. They own the best record the majors, their offense, which is comprised of a ragtag bunch of misfits from the other side of the tracks, ranks second among all teams in RBIs and total bases. They lead the league in ERA and WHIP, and they just upgraded their rotation with the acquisition of Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel, all without the help of fat Jonah Hill. You don't need Andy Serkis' acting school to show you you'd be a real monkey to doubt these guys. They've been just as good from a fantasy perspective. Josh Donaldson, Brandon Moss and Sonny Gray have carried over their success from 2013, and Jesse Chavez, Sean Doolittle and the two-headed catcher platoon of John Jaso and Derek Norris have all been first half surprises. So which A's can you hitch a ride on for some second half fantasy glory? Jed Lowrie (2-for-4, RBI) can get real hot, real quick, and is currently on a seven game hitting streak, with multi-hit performances in six of those games. You might want to scoop him up before he explodes, or gets injured again. Similarly, Stephen Vogt (3-for-3, HR (4)) has been excellent since receiving everyday at bats and is slashing .435/.480/.652 over the past two weeks. He's got an 11 game hitting streak (six multi-hit games in that span) and two homers in his past three days, and that catcher eligibility makes him extra valuable. P. Diddy says Vogt or die, so you should grab Stephen while he's still just under 30% owned. We may be through a little over half of the fantasy season so far, but there's still plenty of time to ride the Oaktown bandwagon to some fantasy glory, at least until they get to San Antonio. #keeptheAsinOakland!
Here's what else happened in fantasy baseball Friday night (*All-Star Edition*):Please, blog, may I have some more?
The Cubs. The lovable losers. The trade first and ask questions later…ers…
Say what you want about what the Cubs are doing, but I liked their blockbuster deal with the A's. John Kruk was slamming it on Sunday Night Baseball (while my boy Rick Porcello got a bitch slap of regression), but then again I'm a Brewers fan and not a Cubs fan!
Last year, the Cubs sold Scott Feldman for current pickup of the year nominee Jake Arrieta. So that's one thing they've done right! Both the Shark and Jason Hammel weren't re-signing, and this ridiculous emergence from Arrieta eases the pain of rebuilding a rotation.
But we don't really care about Wrigley politics, we just want some nasty stats on our fantasy teams. Arrieta has been absolutely unbelievable (only Clayton Kershaw has been better the past month) and he had back-to-back no-nos through 7 prior to Sunday's start. How legit is this breakout? Is Arrieta a sell high? I've seen the highlights and bits of some of the previous starts, but I wanted a deeper look into his stuff and decided to Profile how he looked in yesterday's great outing against the Nationals:Please, blog, may I have some more?
James Jones has appeared in this column before, but his three steals against the Padres last week opened the eyes of fantasy players in all formats. It shouldn't have been too much of a surprise given who those steals came against though. The Padres are one of the worst teams in the majors at holding baserunners and on that particular night it was Tyson Ross on the mound. Ross is currently leading the major leagues in stolen bases allowed (21). He's got a big red target on his back for those of us in daily leagues looking to deploy SAGNOF types. If you look at it as a rate, the Padres hurler is giving up about a steal for every five innings pitched. Ross is scheduled to face the Diamondbacks this week, so even fringy players like Tony Campana might be worth a shot for a stolen base. Week to week we give you the best and worst teams to run against, but looking even closer at the individual pitchers can be helpful for daily lineup changes. Hey Mike, I wish we had a tool for that! I hear you, friend. Check out the SB Rates vs. SP tool. It will give you the stolen base against data for each pitcher in 2013. Here's a quick rundown of the best arms to run against in 2014 fantasy baseball…Please, blog, may I have some more?
As always, probable pitchers are subject to change. For a look at all fantasy baseball streamers, click that link.
Everyone got all excited last Wednesday because Bartolo Colon hit a double in a game that he also won. Obviously, this was worthy of some attention given the fact that Colon is 41, bears a close resemblance to "Big P*ssy" Bonpensiero, and the fact that he twirled eight innings of one-run ball en route to the victory in St. Louis, which is not an easy place to pitch. Lost in all of that was the fact that Terry Collins took Colon out heading into the 9th at only 86 pitches. Unless Colon asked to come out because his mummy arm was falling off, I just don't get it. It's another one of those robot moves that make baseball managers so infuriating. Oh, it's the 9th inning and we have a lead of three runs or less, time to bring in the closer. Nevermind that we don't really have a closer, and that the closer of the night is Jenrry Mejia, whose birth certificate was typed up by someone who liked to eat peanut butter at their desk. Nevermind that the backup plan for that is a guy (Dana Eveland) who has a different hat on in his fantasy baseball profile photo. Well, Mejia almost blew it, which would have not only cost the 700-year-old Colon a well-deserved victory but would have also pissed off fantasy managers everywhere, including right here. Except for a few turdlet pies, Colon has been surprisingly sturdy in 2014. Maybe it's not so surprising given his strong performance in the telling strikeout per walk category, where he's at 5.3, good for sixth right behind Stephen Strasburg. It would have looked really silly, but I almost put Bartolo in the first tier, with starts in his cavernous home against Oakland and continues in Pittsburgh, where teams just don't score a lot for some reason. He's only 36 percent owned in Yahoo, 37 percent owned in ESPN. He's definitely worth a spin while he's going good, especially at Citi Field.
Here's some more two-start pitchers for the week:Please, blog, may I have some more?
As always, probable pitchers are subject to change. For a look at all fantasy baseball streamers, click this link.
Up until now, Two-Startapoola 2014 has kind of resembled a post-taco feast fart party, where you're trying in vain to wave away the pervasive stench cluttering up the lower tiers but that cloud of doom just won't move.
But this week there is absolutely no shame in being down in the lower Second Tier or even the Third Tier.
Former aces who had fallen on hard times, like Yovani Gallardo and Josh Beckett, finally have their shtuff together, some of the pitchers who sucked earlier in the year (Brandon McCarthy, Jake Odorizzi) have gotten way better, and the Twins finally set their rotation so they don't have the same guy pitching twice in the same week. Which means at least one less garbage starter in the system. You think Ron Gardenhire had us fantasy geeks in mind when he set up his real-life Twinkie pitching lineup this week? Me neither.
Anyways, have yourself a look-see at what the fantasy gods have sent down for us…Please, blog, may I have some more?
When it comes to DFS play nothing can kick you off your throne quicker than a cold streak. And I hit one last week. Playing daily fantasy sports can be a fun, lucrative and an absolutely maddening endeavor. No other sport has as much variance on a nightly basis. I often wonder why I put myself through this athletic sadism. Ok, I know why. I like
pain the competition, I like the cash and I love baseball. Over the past week, your humble-but-nonetheless-royal Guru has had plenty of competition, not so much cash and nowhere near the love I deserve as I went just 23 for 40. I may be no draft king, but the bankroll increased a bit and I'm inching closer to a winter of fun in the sun. The problem is I may have to pass on Cancun and head to Coney Island. Hopefully, I have a little left over for the bail bondsman. If you want to join me poolside just hit the DraftKings link and you'll get a free ticket for a contest with your first-time deposit. The winner of that contest gets entry into our $500k Showcase with a $100k top prize – that's a lot of banana daiquiris. Also, if you haven't fired up the DFSBot yet, check it out. It's a great tool for your bag of tricks that'll give you an advantage over the competition. I used it Monday for some Tim Lincecum love that banked big for me. Believe me, I needed it.
Over the last few weeks, I've shared some of my strategies when playing DFS baseball. If you missed them you can give a look here, here, and here. This week, let's talk a bit about managing the budget. On DraftKings you get 50K to spend on two pitchers and eight positions. I usually spend 18- 22K of that on pitching which doesn't leave a lot of room for mistakes with hitters. One of the questions I get asked a lot is if it's okay to leave money on the table when constructing a team. I say, unless you're a seasoned DFS shark, it's best to spend to the cap or real close to it. I never leave more than $500 on the board and there are three reasons for that: 1) No projections are 100% accurate. Sorry, DFSBot, you're good but no one's that good. 2) More often than not your "optimal lineup" will be wrong. Ha! I know this sounds negative, but play DFS awhile and you'll realize that not spending that leftover $800 will hurt. I found this out on Monday when I didn't spend up for pitching and went with Tyler Lyons – he gave me -11 points. Yes, negative 11! 3) Finding cheap players that produce is necessary to win, but players are in the bargain bin for reason. If you see a player that usually has a high price tag is suddenly cheap there's probably a reason for it – he has a bad matchup, he's unlikely to play or he's hurt. I saw a lot of people grab Mark Teixeira on Monday because the price was right in a great matchup. Unfortunately, he ended up not playing which left some people with a big fat zero.
With all that said, we have just eight games on the evening slate, a number of aces on the mound and some weather to pay attention to in St. Louis and Cincinnati. Here's your dirty turbaned Guru's lineup for Wednesday's 5/14 contests on DraftKings for 2014 Fantasy Baseball. Good luck, cheers.Please, blog, may I have some more?
As always, probable pitchers are subject to change. For a look at all fantasy baseball streamers, click this link.
Welcome to the "Wacky World of Sports!" I'm your host, Wax Winkingdale. This week we've got some weird, wild stuff for you. First up we're catching up with a bit of silly from last month, when Andrew Cashner played left field for one batter in an extra-inning game for no real reason at all. Whoa, that Bud Black is one crazy guy! And really smart too. Much smarter than Tony LaRussa. [Ed. Note — With less drunk driving to boot!]
Next is more madcap fun from San Diego, where a dinosaur threw out the first pitch before a game last Wednesday against the Royals. And no it wasn't Steve Garvey! So who was the catcher for this zany occasion? Why it was the Swinging Friar, the team's mascot. And oh look, the baby T-Rex is on the attack – he heard Friar and got the wrong idea!
Perhaps the weirdest story of the week comes to us from Toronto, where fantasy experts continue to disrespect a pitcher with a 6-1 record, 1.91 ERA and a 1.17 WHIP. Regression, they INSIST, is coming for Mark Buehrle as certain as winter is coming for Jon Snow and everyone else in the Seven Kingdoms. One writer said this is because Buehrle is lucky, noting, among other things, his small Home Run to Fly Ball ratio, favorable FIP (Field Independent Pitching) rate and weak K/9 rate. So Buehrle is lucky because he gave up fly balls and not home runs? There's no skill in that? Guess he was lucky when he threw a perfect game too. And, OKAY, Buehrle doesn't get a ton of strike outs, and I guess good things are happening when balls that he throws are hit, and that maybe those good things won't continue happening if balls continue to be hit and not missed by batters. Given all that, by the FIP measurement Buehrle's ERA would be more in the All-Star zone (low 3's) and not exactly Cy Young territory (under 2). I don't think this did the best job of illustrating his point. I'm not really sure how much stock I put in something that looks like this anyway: "FIP = ((13*HR)+(3*(BB+HBP))-(2*K))/IP + constant." Sounds like Mr. Kowalski's boring-ass algebra class, not analysis of a sport. There's a lot of writers a lot smarter than me who use these numbers to make valid points. There's even more who wank off to print outs of these formulas in the same way that White Goodman rubs one out with a slice of pizza. Here's my analysis: Buehrle has been excellent, and even though his track record indicates that this isn't normal, it's also very possible that he will have the career year the Blue Jays thought he was going to have when they splurged on free agents before the 2013 season. Or at least a career first half. I think we will know which way this is going to go after this week, as Buehrle draws the Angels at home and a trip to the gauntlet in Arlington.Please, blog, may I have some more?
Happy early Cinco de Mayo, my tequila-fueled Razzaholics, and welcome back to the Razzball Lounge. We men of letters have donned our sombreros and gathered to celebrate whatever the hell Cinco de Mayo is – hey, I went to a school for dysfunctional teachers in Maine and the only Mexicans we ever saw were picking blueberries and turning John Deere's into lowriders. We are also celebrating the Razzball revolucian! Yes, Razzball Radio launches this week with Señor Nick, who is currently transporting illegal video equipment across the border as we speak. Good stuff! As we gather in the lounge downing shots of Patron we look back at the first month of the season. There have been hot starts from new meat – Jose Abreu, Charlie Blackmon and Chris Colabello. There have been early season slumps – Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder and Adam Jones. And every team is battered and broken with Clayton Kershaw, Bryce Harper, Chris Davis and 422 other players on the disabled list. There's plenty to celebrate and plenty to berate in the lounge today. Bellying up to the bar we find Sky wondering why he drafted a team that is completely on the disabled list. "Hey, at least Nick Punto is healthy!" *throws up on floor* At the jukebox we find Jay Wrong playing "Mexican Radio" for the 23rd time. "I'm on a Mexican radio, whoa! I just picked up Bobby LaFromboise on waivers!" *bottle smashes above head* New to the Razzball Lounge is stat-boy Dano and his big book of facts who we have strung up from the ceiling for some human piñata-style hazing. "Did you fellas know Babe Ruth's career wOBA was .510?" *WHACK!* Coming out of the ladies room is the one and only Tehol Beddict clad in just his Sears poncho. "Hey, guys I've set up a cock fight out back." Tehol, where are the roosters? "Whaddya mean roosters?" And here at the pool table is your-humble-but-nontheless-guapo Guru. *adjusts turban, closes eye, aims cue, banks eight-ball off three rails, licks salt, downs tequila, sucks lime,* Viva la Jam or Cram!Please, blog, may I have some more?


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Taylor Swift wins a lot of awards, so you'd think she'd be used to it by now. However, if this supercut from Vh1 Blog Editor Rich Juzwiak is any indication, Swift never thinks she's gong to win anything, ever. Either that, or she's been practicing saying "what?" in the mirror at home every night. Don't believe us? Watch this ridiculous amount of clips showing Swift looking completely shocked for various reasons. You won't believe what she can't believe. (Via Best Week Ever)
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The Typhoon Lover: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (Paperback)
Usually Ships in 1-5 Days
A young woman with a foothold in two cultures, Rei Shimura has gone wherever fortune and her unruly passions have led her throughout her chaotic twenties. Now, after the streamers for her thirtieth birthday celebration have been taken down, the Japanese-American antiques dealer and part-time sleuth finds herself with an assignment to find and authenticate an ancient Middle Eastern pitcher that disappeared from Iraq's national museum.
The piece is believed to be in the hands of a wealthy Japanese collector, whose passion for beauty extends to Rei herself. But when a devastating typhoon hits Tokyo, Rei is trapped with the object of her investigationand with much much more than the fate of an ancient pitcher at risk.
About the Author
Sujata Massey was a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and spent several years in Japan teaching English and studying Japanese. She is the author of The Salaryman's Wife, Zen Attitude, The Flower Master, The Floating Girl, The Bride's Kimono, The Samurai's Daughter, The Pearl Diver, and The Typhoon Lover. She lives in Minneapolis.
Praise For…
"A sometimes tense but always gripping story."
-Mysterious Women
"Sujata Massey's latest whodunit has it all--great plot, exotic settings, and a mature protagonist."
-India Abroad magazine
"Most enjoyable."
-Baltimore Sun
"Tidy, swift entertainment....[Rei] stands out as one of the most appealing characters in an ongoing series."
-Richmond Times-Dispatch


text: Close Drivers Who've Started Indy, Daytona 500 0 0 More 0 0 0 View Gallery Next Previous Next Streeter Lecka/Getty Images Kurt Busch Kurt Busch will start 12th position in the 2014 Indianapolis 500, joining this list of drivers who have competed in both the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. More importantly, Busch will attempt to race in the Indy 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on the same day. Only John Andretti, Tony Stewart and Robby Gordon have attempted The Double, and no driver has tried since Gordon in 2004. Only Stewart has completed both races. 1|23 Nick Laham/Getty Images; Tom Strattman/AP Tony Stewart 2|23 Donald Miralle/Getty Images Robby Gordon 3|23 Mark J. Rebilas-US PRESSWIRE John Andretti 4|23 Marc Serota/Getty Images for NASCAR Dario Franchitti 5|23 Stephen A. Arce ASP/Icon SMI; Al Behrman/AP Juan Pablo Montoya 6|23 John Biever/SI Al Unser Jr. 7|23 Andrew Weber-US PRESSWIRE Danica Patrick 8|23 John Harrelson/Getty Images for NASCAR Sam Hornish Jr. 9|23 AP AJ Allmendinger 10|23 Tom Whitmore/Getty Images for NASCAR J.J. Yeley 11|23 Tom Strattman/AP Steve Kinser 12|23 Manny Millan/SI Tom Sneva 13|23 Raul de Molina/AP Tim Richmond 14|23 Heinz Kluetmeier/SI Janet Guthrie 15|23 George Brich/AP Bobby Unser 16|23 Heinz Kluetmeier/SI Al Unser 17|23 Eric Schweikardt/SI Donnie Allison 18|23 AP Mario Andretti 19|23 RacingOne/Getty Images A.J. Foyt 20|23 John G. Zimmerman/SI Johnny Rutherford 21|23 Eric Schweikardt/SI Cale Yarborough 22|23 Walter Iooss Jr./SI Bobby Allison 23|23 Next up More Sports Photos from the 2014 Indianapolis 500, where Ryan Hunter-Reay (right) passed Helio Castroneves (far left) on the final lap to win in the second-closest finish in history, by 0.060 seconds. 16 2014 Indy 500 Best Shots May 25, 2014 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 More Recommended Galleries Racing In the very first 500-mile race, Ray Harroun gave the automotive industry one of its greatest safety innovations when he rigged a mirror above the dashboard of his race car so he could see oncoming traffic. By doing so, he did not have to use a "riding mechanic," which gave him an advantage in the race. Though he still needed a relief driver, Harroun was in the cockpit for the last part of the race and drove to a 1:43.00 margin of victory over Ralph Mulford. Harroun retired after the race, claiming 500 miles was "too long." "It's too dangerous," he said. "That race was the worst I was ever in, see?" 15 Greatest Indy 500 Moments 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 More Racing Esquire TV's Car Matchmaker Spike Feresten hitched a ride in Honda's Fastest Seat in Sports with Verizon IndyCar Series legend Mario Andretti. 10 Celebrities at IndyCar's GP of Long Beach 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 More Racing Some pretty impressive hardware on four-time NBA champ Horace Grant's fingers, there (Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers). I didn't want to tell him I had five Indy 500 starter rings…I mean, who's counting?! 16 IndyCar's James Hinchcliffe at the 2016 NBA All-Star Game 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 More


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i hate bat's
1402 designs
$10,000 prize
nice work
$ scarecrow nice!!!
did batman hit him? lol nice!!!
so cute and lovely..i love the colors..GREAT JOB..HIGH FIVE!
Nice concept :)) great design
Bat star to the cone :P