Obama and our post-modern race problem

Shelby Steele has an interesting column on "Obama and our post-modern race problem." A quote providing the meat of it:

...Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not—not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

But this mask comes at a high price. When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken.

The above reminds me of one of my favorite essays ever, Edith Efron's "Native Son" on Clarence Thomas. If you have not read it, then you should set aside what you are doing and go read it now. Period.

Going back to Steele, while his analysis on how Obama's "bargainer" approach has influenced his entire approach to politics, there is one paragraph with which I do have a serious quibble:

Our new race problem—the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is—has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

I agree with Steele on the underlying merits of Obama's economic policies, of course. At the same time, the real issue here does not seem to be how Obama's racial background has uniquely influenced him, but rather that he is doing what nearly any other Democratic politician would do in his place. Tragically, nor do the Democrats have any real monopoly here on economic ignorance. Need I remind anyone that Mike Huckabee seems equally clueless about the pernicious effects of government spending, and that plenty of Repubilcans voted for the bailouts? Part of the problem is that Obama faces the same bad incentives that nearly all other politicians do. Steele's piece would be stronger if he teased this out more.

Very good sentences

I am not sure I would be this kind (See generally Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man (2008)):

"Hoover is one of the tragic figures of modern times. No one illustrated better Tacitus's verdict on Galba, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset(by general consent fit to rule, had he not ruled).

- Paul Johnson, Modern Times

Sorry for the repeated Paul Johnson quotes. I am only on p. 241 out of 736 (there's more, but all index and footnotes), so they may continue for a while. Also, Pnin is grading, and it's too windy in D.C. for me to feel like going outside. So I'm resigned to prodigious Earl Grey consumption and reading a 700 page book that I've wanted to read for awhile, but would not have time to make a dent in were it not for the long weekend/my better half being resigned to his large piles of exams. Not, however, that any of the above is entirely bad.

Shooting an Elephant

I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.

-- George Orwell, "Shooting An Elephant," 1936

I found this lovely Orwell essay
in my RSS reader and was ashamed to admit that I had never read it before. So here it is, along with a picture of an elephant from the Seoul Zoo. (Constant Readers may be aware of my affection for elephants, and so they may understand why I find Orwell's conclusion sad if lovely.) I don't know whether I agree with the thrust of Orwell's argument myself, so whether the statement above is correct I leave as an exercise for the reader.

Very good sentences

"Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik? There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network."

-- Paul Johnson, Modern Times

Latest round of kitchen adventures -- I have a giant bag of pears from Trader Joe's edition

1)Sort of made up (it's a loose riff on something Martha Stewart did years ago): lamb shoulder chops, which I made on New Year's Eve for the senior Pnins.

Mash up half a stick of butter; several tablespoonfuls of mustard; dried tarragon; dill; and a little thyme in the food processor. Mashing with a potato masher or fork will do if you don't have a food processor. Smear butter/mustard mixture on shoulder chops. Add salt, if desired. Roast in oven at 30 minutes (or however long your butcher tells you; obviously, things will vary according to size and thickness.)

Verdict: went over well with Pnin and the senior Pnins, who are visiting for a few days.

2)Cooks Illustrated pear salad. The original calls for walnuts, but Pnin doesn't eat them. It's fine without, in my view...

2 pears (red, preferably), ripe but firm, halved, cored and cut into 12 wedges
3 tablespoons lemon juice from 1 large lemon
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 tablespoons walnut oil
1 1/2 quarts arugula , stemmed, rinsed, and dried
3 ounces Gorgonzola cheese , crumbled [I used Stilton -- it's quite good with it]

a. Toss pear wedges with 1 tablespoon lemon juice in medium bowl; set aside.

b. In small bowl, slowly whisk oils into 2 remaining tablespoons lemon juice to make vinaigrette; season to taste with salt and pepper.

c. Toss arugula with vinaigrette. Place a portion of dressed greens on each plate. Arrange pears over greens, sprinkle with cheese and a generous grind of pepper. Serve immediately.

Verdict: excellent! Both Pnin and senior Pnins appreciated.

3)Smitten Kitchen pear bread. I did not include any vanilla because I had already used a half bottle of vanilla in the cranberry cake mentioned a few posts ago. Probably a slight loss. But it was easy and came out well.

4)Bittersweet chocolate and pear cake. We haven't tasted yet -- it's for a friend of Pnin's who's visiting family in D.C. for the holiday -- but I'm guardedly optimistic. I was a bit weirded out by the instruction to beat non-separated eggs together for such a long time. I was also using a hand mixer, which may have thrown off the stirring time. And you kind of need a second person to stir the browning butter while another is whipping the eggs -- unless, of course, you have a stand mixer.

On not being able to understand Strauss

Many people choose their political views not rationally, but largely for tribalist reasons. Rather than identifying first principles and adopting coherent policy views that flow from them, they instead think "Of what political tribe would I like to be a member?"

I am somewhat unusual in that, while most people pretend they are arriving at their views rationally, I acknowledge my irrationality and tribalist tendencies. Which brings me to the point that I often think that I want to be in the Straussians' tribe. First, I don't want to be part of a tribe full of people who are too distastefully stupid or embracing of stupidity. That requirement excludes most of the populist strains of conservatism. Second, I do not want to belong a tribe that is too large. There's a line in Ibsen somewhere about how it's always safer and in better taste to be a minority (I think in Enemy of the People, but I am a failure at the Internet). So, given where I live and my educational background, that excludes most moderate liberal tribes.

True, that still leaves a few far left tribes -- the people whom I called Montagnards --but I realized early on in university that I can't get along with Montagnards. True, their detachment from and frustration with everyday life often expresses itself as a kind of charming naivete. But it also can be insuffferable. Sometimes it really is the better part of valor to stop fretting about patriarchy and just blend in by wearing lipstick.

So that leaves me essentially with a tiny handful of intellectual right of center tribes to choose from. Despite my title, the Randians no longer work for me. And I confess I have always felt a certain attraction to the Straussians. I have always perceived them as oh so smart, condescending, distant, and aloof. I suffer from all these flaws, of course, yet the Straussians view these qualities as positives, which is fantastic. I have decidedly mixed feelings about modernity*, also, and generally support any intellectual movements which valorize ancient cultures.

Still, the biggest stumbling block to becoming an actual Straussian is that I find everything he has written impenetrable. This may be because life circumstances compel me to do much of my reading on the Metro, and Natural Right and History is just poorly suited for the Metro. I understood individual words, of course, and even how to put them together into sentences. But try to figure out what argument the sentences added up to, and I would be lost. So I read with interest reports about a new book on Strauss's life. Maybe, with the help of secondary sources, I can actually figure out Strauss. Of course, I suspect I'll still opt to stay in my tribe of plain vanilla Hayekians with some Tocquevillian impulses. We are a nice tribe in some ways: we are friendlier and more welcoming, and I feel less stupid within my current tribe than I would if I tried to surround myself with Straussians.

*My ideal society would have modern medical and computer technology, but 1930s fashion sensibilities and also intense education in the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. Phones would exist but be largely unnecessary, having been superseded by e-mail and other text-formed forms of communication. Indeed, text-based communication would largely have eclipsed the need for actual speech of any kind. N.b. that that would mean that there would be no need for small talk, ever, but people would have very real and warm friendships cemented by sending each other long, witty, literate multi-paragraph letters.

How much doom and gloom should lawyers feel about our profession?

Can someone, somewhere attempt to write a balanced essay on the job situation of new law school graduates and the extent of the alleged employment crisis? Yes, there is an entire cottage industry of disenchanted non-elite law grads blogging about how cruelly they were misled and how unhappily indebted they are. I read them and then scroll down to the comments, which are a mix of "Amen, brother!" and "Actually, I went to a similar school and found relative financial stability doing family law/real estate closing/working at the DA's office." Also, while rants like the ones linked to on ATL can be bitterly funny, I'm skeptical about taking them as gospel truth.

I do have a vested interest in trying to figure out this all out. After all, I'm about to marry a law professor, I work for another one, and so I'm surrounded by their kin whenever I attempt to socialize. (I'm also not really competent at socializing with most normal people, but that's another story.) So I sometimes find myself wondering if the entire American legal education market is really on the verge of going belly-up each time I shell out $4 for a whole wheat boule at Whole Foods. These thoughts rarely stop me, however...

Some scattered thoughts and some questions:

1)I may be wrong, but I don't think young lawyers from non-top -schools fretted about these problems to nearly the same extent in, say, 1975. Sometimes the angry bloggers make it sound like parents are pushing law school debt on their kids out of some kind of misguided prestige-uber-alles false consciousness narrative. I doubt that; I suspect that what's really going on was that law school simply was a much better financial bet when they were young than it is now. After all, parents have every incentive to want their children to do what's financially good for them in the long run. But I haven't seen many people attempting to explain why there's such a gap between parental perceptions and reality. In fairness, both Bill Henderson and Larry Ribstein have made some admirable attempts to date, but I suspect there's still a wide field open for occupation on this one.

2)Relatedly: do things ever improve for these people? If you gut out the miserable 40K job and actually pick up some skills, do things eventually get better? Do you actually make more money?

3)Is the problem worst in a few markets? Constant readers know that I grew up in a small red state city. I went to its fanciest private high school, which was full of local legal eagles' kids. I applied to a few of those firms 1L summer. When I went through lawyer bios, there were a very small number of Penn grads and the like, but most went to Temple, Villanova, Widener, or what have you. I'm sure that most of the V100 firms that interviewed at my school would also scoff at the types of cases they worked on. But the lawyers' kids I knew growing up generally had nice houses, cars, etc. So is the trick just to consider more small markets?

Relatedly, does that mean that the law schools which are most vulnerable are the low-ranked schools in very large cities?

4)How far up is the problem? My law school typically ranked around 20 in U.S. News; we weren't in the vaunted magic circle of the T14, but we were far up enough in the rankings that comparing our situation with fourth-tier grads doesn't make much sense either. The conventional wisdom was that the top 1/3 could get Biglaw offers fairly easily, and plenty of people who were slightly under that cut-off but had something else nice going for them still could do pretty well. Yet I had a few classmates with low-ish grades who spent the last two years of law school in a cold sweat, wondering if they'd ever find permanent, paying legal jobs that would let them pay off their loans. The "You must have known what you were getting into when you accepted a fourth-tier school" reasoning perhaps shouldn't apply to these people. But, again, how many of them will figure out in five or ten years that they were worried for naught?

Sometimes, the ATL commenters say things that all schools below 14 should be shut down. I suspect that's absurd. But even if it is, how far up are schools vulnerable?

5)I'm not sure how much better many prospective lawyers would do in some other fields. I saw this study on Tax Prof Blog a few months ago and found the numbers looked way off. When I was hunting for work in mid-2004 right after I graduated from college, there were lots of D.C. non-profits and magazines eager to hire people with roughly my background into jobs with titles like "research assistant" or "editorial assistant." Most of these opportunities paid in the low to mid 30s. Hill, entry-level gallery jobs, publishing, and fancy prep school teaching all pay worse than that. The big firms that wanted paralegals with credentials similar to mine all paid $37,500, with perhaps another $20,000 or $30,000 in overtime on top of that. Of course, those jobs generally dead-ended at... law school... after two years. I should note that several Wachtell attorneys told me that their paralegals typically raked in around 90K, but again, same problem with the job dead ending in law or other grad school after two years.

I know, I majored in something useless. While I forget if my undergrad institution is 9th or 11th in U.S. News (it's usually either one or the other), classifying myself as an also-ran in collegiate academic competition feels a tad harsh.

I had one close friend from college who graduated with honors in computer science who went onto a top graduate program. He made $57,000 in his first job out of college. That's still short of even "Solid Performer" according to Schlunk.

Yes, there is investment banking. These people do commonly get in the 80 to 90 range. But investment banking can be quite hard to get even from very good schools, especially depending on the economy. People who are shy/not particularly good at exuding a certain kind of charm in interviews, even if they had econ degrees and good grades in them, sometimes struggled.

6)Will night programs emerge as the way to go for most students outside the very top schools? You can keep your job while you're in law school, so you have some positive cash flow. Your opportunity costs are $0. (Unless you would have worked a night job instead of going to law school, of course, but most people who have college degrees don't take on second part-time jobs.) And if you have poor grades after a semester or two of putting forth your best efforts, so that it looks like you can't recoup your investment, you can still walk away with much smaller debts than otherwise. And if you finish but can't find paying legal work right away, you still have other paying work to tide you over until you do. Part of me hopes they are, since that leaves Pnin's school especially safe...