III.


“Every single Jedi is now an enemy of the Republic…” Yes, I know, I’m setting myself up for a fall here. But, given this is the end of a saga I spent countless hours of my childhood adoring (and, strangely enough, the second movie in a month I’ve been anticipating for decades), I’m just going to go ahead and unleash my inner eight-year-old for the rest of the evening. After the last two prequels, I’m not expecting Empire by any means, but Jedi would be nice…

Lost Cause.

Apparently, David Gordon Green’s forthcoming film adaptation of John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is no more. This version, co-scripted by Steven Soderbergh and set to star Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Mos Def, Lily Tomlin, and Olympia Dukakis, was axed (according to Green) because “it didn’t cater to a lot of the cliches or conditioning of contemporary American studio sensibilities.”

Frasier goes mental.

Some strange fanboy news afoot on this day of Sith: Avi Arad announces Kelsey Grammer will play Beast in X3. Also, Angel and Kitty Pryde have yet to be cast, although Maggie Grace of Lost is apparently in the running for the latter. (On the villain side, we already knew Vinnie Jones is Juggernaut.) That’s…weird. But y’know, I could actually see it working.

Star Wars: Episode I.

Eager to try out new experimental weapons systems with dubious names like “Rods from God,” the Air Force looks to Dubya to greenlight space weapons programs. The Air Force believes ‘we must establish and maintain space superiority,’ Gen. Lance Lord, who leads the Air Force Space Command, told Congress recently. ‘Simply put, it’s the American way of fighting.” Hmmm. I might feel less uneasy about all this if this fellow Lord didn’t sound like he’s channeling Buck Turgidson. ‘Space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny,” he told an Air Force conference in September. “Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future.“‘

Catkiller’s Big Day.

Undeterred by the Dem’s last-minute attempt to let less-controversial judges pass through first, Bill Frist initiates the nuclear countdown in the Senate. “‘I don’t rise for party,’ said Senator Frist. ‘I rise for principle.’” That is to say, the principle of seeing all the right-wing fundies line up behind his 2008 presidential bid.

Unpopular chic.

“If a book is conceived with only historiography in mind — with academic disciplinary debates and research agendas dictating the focus and the form — it’s unlikely to succeed in the public realm. If it’s conceived without historiography in mind, it’s unlikely to succeed as scholarship. So, how do we develop what we might call a Goldilocks approach to historiography?” In a very intriguing two-part article for Slate, David Greenberg of Rutgers University makes the case for historians breaking out of the Ivory Tower.

My friends and colleagues here have heard me rant about this on many opportunities — For all the talk of transnationalism and blurring borders in the field right now, the border between academia and popular history remains rigorously guarded by historians who too often equate accessibility with poor scholarship and second-rate thinking. On many occasions, we’ve been told by visiting scholars — including some very big names — that, for better or worse, we’re fated to do “history-professor history” that will have “no effect” on how Americans see their past.

In short, I find this line of thinking very disquieting. Frankly, writing American history tomes that only a rarefied community of scholars will “get” seems to me a rather sad way to spend a life in the discipline. Whatsmore, it’s no accident that right-wing interpretations of the past, be they neo-con or free-market fundamentalism, for example, tend to gain a wider currency in today’s political climate than left-wing ones do. It’s partly because academics on the right seem to have less qualm about popularizing their ideas for a mass audience (and they’ve got more institutions to disseminate them, but that’s another story.)

I find something profoundly irritating about scholars who claim that “ordinary people” will never understand their ideas, and then go on to complain about the nation’s right-wing drift. While it may be hubris to think that any one scholar’s work will make all that much of a difference, it’s still a worthier goal, to my mind, than composing a work of great theoretical insight that’s completely inscrutable to all but those academic elites similarly ordained in the historical arts.