Links are the currency of blogging. We're fortunate these days to receive a fair number of them, for which we're thankful. But once in a while, a link stands out, a link from another blogger who takes your story, and spins it into something of his own inspiration, something you'd never think to write, or something you simply couldn't write.

I was especially thankful, therefore, to receive a link this morning from Unwashed Advocate, in which the author riffs on my trifle about yet another overbroad law aimed at the Westboro Bigot Church, to tell the little-known history of William Calley after My Lai, the disgusting fashion in which high government officials pandered to Calley's fan club, and the author's meeting with one of the jurors at Calley's court martial: I give you Calley Revisited.

Concerning the higher education bubble and employability, John Leo writes:

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

He implies that those who major in the five disciplines he mentions, or in kindred areas, will need luck since their training and capabilities will not be adequate to pass muster. In short, they "aren't really educated." Well, maybe. But one of these things is not like the others. One of these things just doesn't belong here….

Art history isn't one of the fashionable new disciplines, along the lines of <noun>-studies, that arose in the academic turmoil of the 20th century's latter half. As an academic endeavor, it has historical roots similar to those of psychology and economics: rumblings of inquiry and analysis in the late 1700s, disciplinary differentiation on the continent in the later 1800s, and finally a blossoming between the wars. Even in the United States, the PhD in art history (to say nothing of the undergraduate major) has been around since the 1940s. On a broad definition, art history as a systematic learned endeavor traces back to the monumental 16th-century labors of Giorgio Vasari.

Art history requires facility with languages, engagement with intellectual history, an understanding of evolving technologies of representation and communication, and a grasp of the rich interaction among methodologies and social forces underlying creation, distribution, consumption, and analysis. Maybe some who choose art history desire to look at and laud the pretty pictures — a practice better understood as art appreciation — but many who pursue it do so because doing art history well is hard, and there's pleasure in doing hard things well.

Perhaps the foregoing is true, too, of "gender studies, communications, …pop culture, or …the history of dancing" but I can't speak to that question with authority. (As for the broader anti-humanistic trend, I've called it out before). This much seems true: thinking that the study of art history doesn't provide a "real education" (including, but not limited to, skills valuable to employers) betrays not just ignorance of the particulars but a contempt for the humanistic endeavor in general.

John Leo isn't alone in his trench; it's not hard in excavating the word hoard of today's techno-intellectual cultural backlash to find other examples of sneering disdain. Standing with one foot in the humanities and the other in STEM, I'm disappointed to see complex, mature, and deeply rooted disciplines trashed alongside academic novelties and questionable latecomers, all in the service of a monolithic, pragmatic vision of education as mere job training.

Good luck if your pedagogical vision is limited to empirical and procedural questions of what and how. Why and whether and what to do with paradox and gray– these also matter.

People who have followed recent events concerning Brett Kimberlin — including our coverage here — know that Kimberlin runs a nonprofit organization called "Velvet Revolution."

That catchy name is not original. The brave, principled, nonviolent uprising against the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which led to the overthrow of Soviet dominance there, used the name first.

To learn more about the real Velvet Revolution — and to understand why it is singularly disgusting that Team Kimberlin has appropriated the name — check out a new blog on the topic, and on related topics of righteous defiance of tyranny: Velvet Revolution.

Especially noteworthy: Brett Kimberlin and the Justice of Google.

PERSPECTIVE.

SIX RIDICULOUS LIES YOU BELIEVE ABOUT THE FOUNDING OF AMERICA.

The lies stay in circulation because they advance a "Dances with Wolves" myth of white guilt that's useful to people like Elizabeth Warren, who have as much regard for living Indians as they have for the bacteria that swim beneath Europa's ice.

CALLING KRUGMAN'S CREDENTIALS AS A HISTORIAN into question?

Most important, what Krugman calls the “right-wing mythology” is largely correct: government intervention is responsible for the systematic problems with the US banking system. That, however, is not the same as “bad banking.” Banks, like any other business, make mistakes all the time. Bad banking happens in free markets, but markets provide incentives and knowledge signals that help banks avoid and correct such mistakes. The question is not whether there is or isn’t “bad banking,” but which institutional environment minimizes and corrects it best. What doesn’t happen in free markets are the systematic mistakes that lead to panics and massive bank failures.

The passage I quoted is really a critique of Krugman on political macroeconomy, but there's plenty of room left to criticize Krugman's alt-historical approach, his motivations, really his entire weltanschauung. Read the whole thing.

If the makers of Ganesh v. Hitler, a play set to debut in Melbourne, Australia on September 29, would like to add that line to their playbill, all we ask is that they credit Popehat (but please don't mention that to the Roman Catholics).

According to the playwright, Hitler stole the swastika from the Hindu religion.  And, much as U2's Bono recovered the song "Helter Skelter" from Charles Manson on behalf of the Beatles and Indiana Jones recovered the Ark of the Covenant on behalf of Uncle Sam, Ganesh just wants to steal the swastika back. 

The publicity blurb for Ganesh versus the Third Reich, from Geelong-based company Back to Back Theatre, depicts the elephant-headed Hindu god of prophecy seeking to go one-on-one with Hitler over the swastika.

Rajan Zed, a Hindu statesman from the United States, said Hindus were concerned about the play, which will premiere at the Melbourne Festival.

"The Lord Ganesh was meant to be worshipped in temples and home shrines and not to be made a laughing stock on theatre stages," Mr Zed said in a statement.

"Lord Ganesh was divine and theatre/film/art were welcome to create projects about/around him showing his true depiction as mentioned in the scriptures," said the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism.

"Creating irrelevant imaginary imagery, like reportedly depicting him being tortured and interrogated by Nazi SS, hurt the devotees."

While Rajan Zed, the Hindu statesman from the United States, isn't explicitly calling for censorship, the thought of Lord Ganesh suffering at the hands of Nazis has gotten some Australians, specifically Dr. Yadu Singh of the Council of Indian Australians, calling for censorship:

Depiction of Lord Ganesha in this manner is going to become an Issue in India and among Indians, and is likely to create a controversy between India and Australia, which is unnecessary.

Further more, agencies which receive public funding in Australia, can’t be associating with any action, commentary, documentary or play, which lampoons the beliefs, deities or feelings of people from any religion.

What seems to be lost in the controversy and threats of international incidents is that this is a play about a giant elephant-headed man clobbering Hitler, which is not to trivialize the giant elephant-headed man, nor his divinity.  While the enormity of his crimes can't be diminished, Hitler himself has become so trivialized and diminished that politicians feel no shame in invoking Hitler to describe the Chamber of Commerce.  Hitler is now a comic book character, and a bad one at that.  Despite the playwright's description of the play as:

a “wildly inventive ride through history, where sacred icons and rituals become weapons” and “brimming with humour”.

it probably sucks, just like a bad comic book.

Surely Lord Ganesh is divine enough to withstand such a trifling indignity, even if some of his followers aren't.

HITLER.

And he failed, too. Find out how — and how a British Lieutenant-General succeeded, if only for a month — in this fascinating and entertaining post at Finem Respice.

As longtime readers know, we dabble in alternate history. Well, I do.  Ken's a political science major who thinks history began in 1968. But it's all wanking, as much as the long title of this post.

Still, for those who delight in this sort of wanking as much as I, here's a nifty, if deeply flawed, "counterfactual" of the Second World War with an utterly implausible (yet plausible to Hitler) thesis:

Then, too, what if Poland had agreed in 1939 to join Germany in an invasion of the Soviet Union, as Hitler wanted? If Poland had allied with Germany rather than resisting, Britain and France would not have issued territorial guarantees to Poland, and would not have had their casus belli in September 1939. It is hard to imagine that Britain and France would have declared war on Germany and Poland in order to save the Soviet Union. If Poland’s armies had joined with Germany’s, the starting line for the invasion would have been farther east than it was in June 1941, and Japan might have joined in, which would have forced some of the Red Army divisions that defended Moscow to remain in the Far East. Moscow might have been attained. In this scenario, there is no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and thus no alienation of Japan from Germany. In that case, no Pearl Harbor, and no American involvement. What World War II becomes is a German-Polish-Japanese victory over the Soviet Union. That, by the way, was precisely the scenario that Stalin feared.

Implausible for three reasons: First, it assumes that the Poles would, or could, have caved in to the Nazis, becoming a giant Finland as Hitler wished.  For those who appreciate such things, here's an old Polish joke that isn't derogatory to the noble people of Poland:

Q: A Polish soldier is confronted by a German soldier approaching from the west, and a Russian soldier approaching from the east. Which does he shoot first?

A: The German. Duty before pleasure.

Second, the larger work, which speaks of ways Hitler could have won the war, is flawed because it ignores its central character: Hitler. Hitler was no more capable of doing the "right" thing in war than he was of doing the "right" thing in politics.  A Hitler who could have sat back and let the Prussian General Staff dictate the course of the war to him would never have propelled the National Socialists to power in the first place, nor held power for six years before war, nor have scared the Russians so badly they'd made a deal to give Hitler a free hand, and cheap oil and minerals, while he dealt with France.

Third, the larger work ignores the singular character of Churchill, in his way as odd a man, and every bit as exceptional, as Hitler:

If we agree with Roberts, as we should, that Churchill personally helped lengthen the war by keeping Britain from seeking peace terms after the fall of France, then we are also implicitly saying that, absent Churchill, peace might have been made. The war-winning alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union was sealed only in December 1941, and could not have been achieved had Britain left the war.

"Absent Churchill" is a tall order, in that the man was on the scene.  Removing Churchill takes us from the realm of alternate history into "what if Stonewall Jackson had survived Chancellorsville?" territory: not alternate history, but The Man In The High Castle, or Doctor Who prevents the creation of the Daleks level science fiction.

Still, for those who care, this is some fantastic semi-science fictional wanking.

Via Angus, who in an alternate reality co-blogs with the Governor of North Carolina.

(Hey, I voted for his co-blogger, even if no one else did.)

NEWS FROM 150 YEARS AGO: "Yankees are in desperate need of leadership."

PERPETUAL DOOMSDAY PROPHET PAUL EHRLICH (most famous as the loser of a sucker's bet) whines that the world's worst problem is that there are too many rich people in it. Funny, I always thought the world's biggest problem is that there aren't enough rich people in it.

SIR LATTIMORE BROWN, "THE MOST UNFORTUNATE ARTIST IN THE ANNALS OF SOUL MUSIC," has found peace at last.  After reading his obituary, I'm pretty sure Brown would have been the most unfortunate artist in the annals of blues music.

THE MORGANZA SPILLWAY was last opened in 1973.  This is what it looked like at the time:

Whether or not Louisiana dodges a bullet this time, you could do worse than to donate to the affected area's greater Habitat for Humanity.

There were many ways this old man could have handled his grandson's query about prejudice, a word his grandson was too young to understand. Or even to pronounce.

He could have explained, without being judgmental, why it's best to think of our friends as individuals rather than classifying them as part of an arbitrary group.

He could have given his grandson a short, sanitized history of anti-semitism, explaining why Jimmy legitimately felt ostracized by being classed as "The Other," while, in his grandfatherly fashion, getting his grandson to agree that, as good people, the grandfather and the grandson are above this sort of name-calling and labeling. He could have started his grandson down the right path, to a future in which the boy judged individuals on their merits, rather than by race, religion, or class. He could have made the boy part of the team.

But did the grandfather do that?  No.

Grandpa lowered the boom. He told his four year old grandson, so young that he still lisped, that the boy was an incurable bigot. Beyond redemption. A thought criminal with no hope of reform.

There is a reason the camera fades away in the last seconds of this public service commercial: so as to avoid showing this boy's face as his own grandfather deals a traumatic blow, an emotional punch in the stomach, that will follow the boy to his shame for the rest of his days. There is no way the child will ever think of himself as a decent person after this. Every time this child looks in the mirror, he will hate the face that looks back at him. Whenever he sees his friend Jimmy, he'll be filled with self-loathing.

Kinder that the grandfather had removed one of those hooks from his hat and gouged out the boy's eye.

Today that kid is probably a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, bouncing between parole and prison in a meth-fueled haze, praying to Wotan, in his lucid moments, that the government never connects him to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Thanks a lot, grandpa. And thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, for traumatizing kids with this sort of shit during their After School Specials.