Dartblog

When one reads through a few thousand entries, a year starts to look like a very long time. And indeed 2005 was an eventful one. From the ephemera of French ambassadorial confontations, BBQ narcissism, pizza delivery guy tip advice, abandoned strip mines, Sean Penn’s journalism make-believe, the Hanslickian study of human attractiveness, my ignorance of Vanessa Carlton, The Most Annoying Person in the World, organic food, Porky Pig’s bigotry and Whoopi’s expurgation, the reductionist Coca-Cola haters, King Kong, John Kerry’s jury duty which reached no decision, what the internet has wrought upon quotage, and New Yorkers’ general outrage at the Transit Worker Union’s deathgrip, to more substantive and serious things, it was a good year for blogs in general too, with their collective import—which was called into question once the rough-and-tumble of the ‘04 election cycle faded into the background—undeniably growing. The Guardian saw fit to attack me, after all.

FROM HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—

In Dartblog’s niche market, it was (though my first) a banner year. On the last day of January word came that Todd Zywicki, George Mason law professor and Volokh Conspiracy blogger, would run for trustee of Dartmouth College by petition. At the time I was hardly interested in the micropolitics of the College but, as elections sometimes do, Todd brought issues to the fore that people scarcely knew existed. That he put out a distinct and clear platform and then reached out to Dartmouth blogs was proof enough that he was doing something different. The next day, a friend e-mailed to note that Peter Robinson, former Reagan speechwriter, author, fellow at the Hoover Institution, and National Review Corner blogger, was also running as a petition candidate.

The race was a mess, as this and approximately 17,928 other posts make plain. I had, months earlier, made perfectly clear to friends and in saying ‘no thanks’ to the Dartmouth Review that the execution of intracampus politics seemed often conspiratorial (in the sense that underhanded machinations might be inferred from the tiniest of gestures), always juvenille, and generally based upon molehill-to-mountain transformations. As the campaign pressed on, through illicit maneuverings, convenient “oversights”, ad hominem attacks on decent people, and massive politicization from a left-of-center faculty and student body that saw any vocal conservative presence as a threat to the academy itself, it became evident that the Review’s use of words like, “establishment” and “pro-administration” were not rhetorical toys but formative of a cant that very accurately described two competing visions for Dartmouth.

Despite lost e-mails, hidden evidence, and too-much-more to recount, Robinson and Zywicki won decisively. The election reached all corners of the blogosphere, from Roger L. Simon to Glenn Reynolds to Scott Johnson at Powerline and the trustees’ homes chez Volokh and the Corner. The Weekly Standard, National Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and others reported on the election. And more significant than the national press coverage were the e-mails—almost a dozen per day, at one point—from alumni of all ages and backgrounds expressing (mostly) support for change. Later in the year, another slate of petition candidates ran to fill the executive board, and they were subject to the same tawdry calls of “right-wing” by a set unable to respond effectively to the arguments themselves. And, with only those present in Hanover able to vote, they lost by a margin of one hundred votes.

The political fracas became even more heated—and will continue to singe into this new year—as plans were revealed for a new Dartmouth alumni constitution, which, I wrote, contained discriminatory language and gerrymandering tactics intended to work specifically against future petitioners. Now a February meeting has been called to lower the standards of ratification for the constitution. It’s a fight whose underpinnings confirm in the worst way the accusations levied here and elsewhere against “the establishment,” and it is far from over. No one incident in memory has folks as piqued as this one: not even the nationally-recognized faith contretemps which began when Noah Riner invoked Jesus Christ in his convocation speech.

Then there was the “Lost Film Festival,” an anti-American frenzy which involved my school paying a bearded and not-very-lucid man with a Powerbook to play some MPEG clips on a projector. Some sought to justify the September 11th attacks.

The 2005 US News and World Report college rankings were released, and I published them. Washington Monthly also did its first-ever rankings, which sought to uncover which institutions contributed most to the common good, and I posted the details thereof as well.

Blogger Mr. Chang and Meredith Wilson, et al. completed their “Iraqi Kids Project,” sending clothing, shoes, and other essentials to kids in Iraq.

The Dartmouth published a holocaust denial and refused to retract it. The College’s web development department created a neat blog and photo aggregator called Viewpoints. It netted some rabble-rousing posts from student blogs and was promptly ordered shut down from high above. I sighed. Months later, with no fanfare, it returned hermetically sealed from the outside world. Strangely, its name was not changed from “Viewpoints” to “The Viewpoint.”

1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE—

With the sole exception of Chief Justice John Roberts, 2005 was a fright for the Bush administration. His re-election may have offered him political capital. It may well have reflected a mandate. What it did not afford Bush was a license to stop fostering the tenuous war resolve of the American people. For at least eight months, though, the White House was as silent as the Nautilus in the North Sea. The speeches coming from the communications department were, in general, of a high caliber. But they retained a tinge of Rose Garden strategy, leftover from the campaign season. To be fair, there was due cause for Bush to hold himself far above his critics: for the first two months of 2005, world events seemed to ossify around a freedom which seemed to most observers to ring straight from Baghdad. In February I sang the praises of arrogance—the arrogance of believing all people crave and can shoulder liberty. Then came a slew of lead editorials from the world’s bastions of anti-Iraq War protestation. The New York Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Boston Globe, and others all printed various versions of ‘Perhaps Bush Was Right.’

But the Summer brought Cindy Sheehan, her absolute moral authority, and a sudden attempt at reanimating antiwar sentiment. Sob stories in the media, like that of Communist Italian reporter Sgrena—the first in a seemingly endless line of left-wing activists who ended up getting kidnapped or killed by the enemy they purport to understand—offered yet another reason not to report on shifting and adapting military strategies, victories by both Coalition and Iraqi Security forces, the return of water and electricity, the proliferation of free media outlets, the booming economy and stock market, discovieries of multiple mass graves and weapons stockpiles from Hussein’s rule, or even to offer significant election coverage.

Prison scandals, which were few in number and which resulted in swift prosecution of those responsible, led antiwar groups like Amnesty International to accuse America of running a Gulag system. Amnesty quickly recanted its claim, but the damage from a group so outrageously blinkered that it forgot Saddam Hussein’s prisons actually did resemble the Gulags, had been done. The Willy Pete story, which came a half-year later, followed a similar, if shorter trajectory.

Some inanity spilled into the Senate. First Dick Durbin compared American behavior in Iraq to that of the Nazis. Then John Murtha said that our soldiers are incapable of winning and cannot last much longer. The former apologized. The latter proceeded to vote against a subsequent Senate resolution recommending immediate withdrawal.

In recent months, as the rhetoric from the White House becomes louder and more responsive (even contrite at times) and as it becomes clear that ad-hoc Islamic fundamentalists are not in fact defeating the United States military, his poll numbers have rebounded and centrist Democrats are becoming more popular. Fathers of victory are multiplying. The situation isn’t so far from our nation’s early years. If things proceed apace, a replay of the heady opening months of 2005 may lie in the offing, as opposers patch the hole where their core should be with expediency.

RUMORS RUMORS ARE NO FUN—

In January it was said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might be captured or dead. In November it was said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might be captured or dead.

ELSEWHERE IN THE ACADEMY—

The Larry Summers imbroglio, the Ward Churchill boondoggle, the Solomon situation.

IF MUSIC BE THE FOOD OF LOVE—

Economist Tom Bozzo, who is against Social Security privatization but for high-fidelity audio reproduction, tested my allegiences when President Bush likened his plan to the iPod. We also discussed the tribulations of maintaining a classical collection on the iPod. My favorite soprano was reunited with my favorite bass-baritone, while a British store used the music to disperse loitering whippersnappers. Herr Beethoven was rediscovered, in part. A musician rails against my use of scare quotes around “experimental music”. `

EAST SIDE BABEL—

Names were named and money followed as the small contingent of people interested in unraveling the massive fraud pressed on in spite of a silent press and stonewalling from the Secretariat. After being implicated in the malfeasance himself, I wrote that Kofi Annan is in no position to give pep talks. Nor, after impeding (with, we now know, financial motivation from the dictator himself) the war in Iraq, is the organization as a whole in a position to claim that they are owed further monies from what is already their largest national backer. Congress quickly passed bills denying the UN further funding unless real reform takes place. As UN officials and European politicos and media folks continue to find themselves implicated in the Oil-for-Food mess, what comprises ‘reform’ is going to balloon very quickly.

The copious chicken embryos that pock the organization’s collective face did not, however, prevent it from attempting to co-opt control of the internet. Bipartisan backlash stateside, however, stopped the effort on the very first day of the Tunis conference. I told one story about why ‘internationalization’ doesn’t suit the internet.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS—

In 2005, among other frivolities, the AP offered its worldwide audience and member media outlets such breaking news items as the contents of Karl Rove’s garage, a musing on whether it was right for President Bush, upon re-election, to be inaugurated, and just about everyone took the day off from being a journalist when the President choose the giant gold lionhead doors instead of the obviously incorrect smaller brown doors with handles.

HURRICANE KATRINA—

WWUS74 KLIX 282139 from NOAA augured monstrously for the oncoming storm. In the end it caused minimal direct damage. The catastrophe was infrastructural. Even that did not stop the entire tragedy from being blamed on Bush and, eventually, the imputed racism of all America. Loftier commentators assumed the racism and took it as a cue to call for a utopian city to be built by Uncle Sam. To which suggestions I replied, “Governments that have tried to overcome the people’s collective power to choose how they live have generally been toppled by the United States of America.”

REMAINING ON THE TASK LIST—

We still need to put one voice behind ‘One China.’ We still need to dig from the dusty corners of history why marriage was invented in the first place, and agree that judges do not hold society’s answers. We still must hear constant and loud denunciation of fundamentalist Islam by mainstream Muslims in Western democracies, and we must understand the raw power of that ideology. We still need to be worried that “safe, legal, and rare” might be an impossibility. We must subject collective security to an audit. We ought to similarly audit capital punishment, which affords us a discrimination of which only nature herself is rightly possessed.

But most of all, we need to build something on Ground Zero.