I don’t know how to trust a historian who has no problem whatsoever with bending the facts any way he feels. I’m reading Zinn’s retelling of Columbus’s diary, and I’m really shocked. I’ve read this diary (or, rather, its copy, since the original was not preserved) many times. I have been teaching it for years in my Hispanic Civ course. And even among my Freshman students I have never seen such a careless rewriting of a famous text.

I’m now on page 3. This will be a long 700 pages.

Page 2 of Zinn’s book, and I’m already annoyed. First, we hear the old, boring, idiotic trope that the Catholic Kings sent Columbus on his journey in search of spices. Columbus’s contract with Isabel and Ferdinand is widely available. Why not just read it and see what the actual agreement between the parties was? With a little more research, Zinn could have even discovered that in a highly legalistic state that Spain was at that time, such contracts had a profound importance.

Then Zinn informs us that by the time Columbus came to the New World, Spain had driven out the Moors. This is factually untrue since only the Jews were expelled in 1492. The Muslims were not expelled until 1609-15. And this is an extremely crucial fact for all of Spain’s history.

Then there is a boring disquisition on Spain’s search for gold, with not a single word about the powerful religious drive behind both the conquest of the new lands and the search for gold.

Marxists are so fixated on money that they keep forgetting that very very few people want money for its own sake. Money is always a means to buy something. That something is one’s true motivation. Yet Marxists keep dropping “oh, they just wanted to enrich themselves” like it explains anything.

I will continue reading, though, because my plan to master competing visions of the US history remains in place.

Let me guess what I will encounter on pages 5-15 of Zinn’s book: good, kind, ultra-progressive, super-feminist and profoundly Communist Indians encounter evil, capitalist, sexist Spaniards.

“My sister’s profession is very noble,” I say to N. “The noblest profession of all is that of a doctor, and my sister’s job comes right after that.”

“No,” N. responds. “Your sister’s profession is even nobler than that of a doctor.”

My sister is a job recruiter, in case you didn’t know.

And as an addition to the previous post, here is an example of typical pseudo-progressive hypocrisy. A blogger rants and raves against the horrible, evil, ultra-conservative media and then says the following (emphasis mine):

Terrorism, on the other hand, especially any that we can tie to Islam, has a built-in narrative of “The Other” onto which we can all immediately latch. This was most obvious when the identities of the two bombers were released on Friday and the mainstream media took to calling them “ethnic Chechens,” focusing mainly on their ties to that particularly restless part of Russia and very little on the 10 years they spent living in the US in the post-9/11 era.

Wow, that is so dismissive and insulting that I had to reread the statement three times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. According to this logic, the US was “that particularly restless part of England,” Mexico was “that particularly restless part of Spain,” and Palestine is “that particularly restless part of Israel.”

Even the most aggressive among the Russian nationalists do not claim that Chechnya is a part of Russia. Chechnya is part of the Russian Federation and it used to be part of the Russian Empire. If you don’t see the difference, consider whether you see a difference between England and the British Empire.

And the reason why Chechnya is so “particularly restless” (which is a very infantilizing way to speak of a country, by the way) is that for over 300 years it has been brutalized by the colonial aggressor. As recently as the 1940s, the entire population of the country was displaced and deported. Countless people were murdered in the process. As a result, the pesky Chechens became kinda restless.

I just discovered from The Nation that I’m definitely not a progressive:

Simply put, those who believe that a primary responsibility of government is to try to make the world a more just place—to help those with less power against those with a lot—are progressives.

I never heard such an idea before. Even for my Marxist friends, this is too much out there, I believe. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, Marxist friends.)

How progressive is this idea, though? When I think of a government whose PRIMARY goal is to bring something as vague as justice to the entire world, I immediately think of Bush Jr.’s rhetoric of wanting to make the whole planet “more free” because that is what his religion mandates. Does the true progressive favor interventionism?

And again, if this is the government’s most important role, then I guess the idea is that all domestic problems are put on a back burner while our government chases around the world for an elusive vision of universal justice? How progressive is that, exactly?

As for progressivism being about the desire to “help those with less power against those with a lot,” once again, the idea is too vague for me even to know if I support it or not. How do we measure power? Power in which areas? How can we help somebody AGAINST somebody else? This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me on the simplest level of grammar.

I happen to have a very literal mind that relies heavily on the dictionary meanings of words, so for me “progressive” means,

favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are, especially in political matters.

I believe that the world changes every second and human beings are in a constant process of transformation, which is a fantastic thing. This is why social relations, the laws, the customs, the ways of life should also be open to change and transformation. Since this is what I believe, I can’t imagine a single most important role of the government that would be set in stone once and for all.

What bothers me a lot is the substitution of a genuinely progressive discourse with this wishy-washy feel-good rhetoric that is, ultimately, completely meaningless. I have no idea how one can hope to achieve anything politically if one defines one’s own political movement in these vague but pretty terms of justice, freedom, less power, more power, the family values, the haves and the have nots, etc. Ask anybody whether they want justice and, irrespective of their political persuasion, they will tell you they do. The problem is that people define justice in very different ways.

I also find it annoying that progressives are buying into this Libertarian idea that the central conflict of politics is the role of the government. It is getting to the point where I want to scream every time I hear the word government. This substitution of what we believe with what figures of authority are likely or willing to do is both childish and impotent. Before we proceed to elect the officials who will do our will, we should first define what our will actually is. The articulation of one’s political credo should begin with one’s own convictions and one’s own role, not with what the authorities should do. Otherwise, we get what we are seeing in the political discourse that dominates this country these days, namely, a conflict between “Daddy is too strong and scary” and “Daddy is too weak and cheats on Mommy.”

The definition of progressivism I quoted at the beginning of this post is created along the model of “My politics consist of wanting somebody else to do something I’m too lazy even to define with any specificity.” If progressivism is truly about “advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform,” then it makes sense for progressives to start with changing, improving or reforming ourselves.

The last weeks of the academic year are notoriously hard, so I feel entitled to indulge in my top-secret hobby of reading trashy books. The university bookstore offered a sale on Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships, a book that salivates over the sex lives of famous female writers. Yes, I’m human and nihil humanum, etc.

The book is providing me with a bunch of laughs because of the desperate and painfully earnest way in which its author struggles with understanding how human sexuality works. Here is one hilarious example. The author discusses a long and passionate relationship between Katherine Mansfield and John Murry that was almost entirely devoid of actual sex:

Why should this be the case? As we have seen, neither Mansfield nor Murry were sexually inexperienced by the time they got together. Why should Murry have felt such apparent fear of sex with Mansfield, and why should Mansfield have been so reticent with him?

The author proceeds to offer a series of explanations, ranging from Mansfield’s desire to conceal her previous sex life from Murry to her possible bisexuality. Of course, none of these explanations make any sense. Finally, she asks almost desperately:

Is real desire still possible, even when physical intimacy is absent?

It always embarrasses me to see such depths of sexual ignorance in adults. Of course, it is more than possible for two experienced people to burn with profound desire for each other and still have the most horrible and unfulfilling sex ever. Desire doesn’t guarantee good sex. It is a curious reality of the human condition that, besides desire, you need something else to make sex work. That something is sexual compatibility. And if the compatibility isn’t there, that is not a sign that something is wrong with the passion.

This is the main problem that people face when they get married without having sex first. They believe that if passion and love are there, then compatibility must surely follow. And it just doesn’t. Compatibility can’t be conjured, manufactured, or bought in therapy sessions. It exists outside of our will. For the sexually secure individuals, there is nothing threatening in that realization.

Me: Peter, what possessed you to use Google Translate to translate your final essay?

Peter: Oh. I didn’t know we couldn’t use it.

Me: I gave an hour-long presentation in class on why it shouldn’t be used. We did an activity on the subject.

Peter: Oh. I didn’t understand what you were saying.

Me: First of all, if you don’t understand Spanish, we have a big problem already. And how come you failed to understand the following part of my presentation:

GOOGLE TRANSLATE?

 Peter: Oh. I guess I just wasn’t paying attention.

Please, semester, just be over now.

A student is complaining that I’m persecuting her and that I must have something personal against her. She feels so persecuted by me because I gave her an A.

Seriously, I gave this person an A and she can’t get over it. And you know why? Because the grade wasn’t accompanied by

any praise on the importance of my achievement. Would it have been so hard for you to acknowledge how hard I worked on this?

I’ve seen all kinds of weirdos but this is just the limit.

Let’s now place bets on how many people will be willing to hire this individual.

Ever wonder why the exact same freakazoids who insist on the personhood of cell clusters deny the personhood of actual children?

A couple serving probation for the 2009 death of their toddler after they turned to prayer instead of a doctor could face new charges now that another son has died. 

Herbert and Catherine Schaible belong to a fundamentalist Christian church that believes in faith healing. They lost their 8-month-old son, Brandon, last week after he suffered from diarrhea and breathing problems for at least a week, and stopped eating. Four years ago, another son died from bacterial pneumonia. 

Prosecutors said Tuesday that a decision on charges will be made after they get the results of an autopsy. 

Catherine Schaible’s attorney, Mythri Jayaraman, cautioned against a rush to judgment, and said the couple are good parents deeply distraught over the loss of another child.

Yes, very good parents who keep slaughtering children. Now, sit back and observe the complete lack of outrage on the part of your friend and neighbor who “is a good person and genuinely cares about fetuses.”