Anyone who still doubts that the madness currently possessing American universities matters to society at large should take a stroll through today’s Smithsonian. The Institution has been transformed by a wholesale embrace of the worst elements of America’s academic culture. The staples of cutting-edge academic “research”-smirking irony, cultural relativism, celebration of putative victims, facile attacks on science-are all thriving in America’s premier museum and research complex, its showcase to itself and to the world. The changes at the Smithsonian are not unique to that institution. Museums across the country have rushed headlong into what may be called the “new museologv;’ based on a mindless parroting of academic fads. But the Smithsonian’s embrace of postmodern theory and identity politics is of greatest import, because of the Institution’s contribution to America’s public identity.

What causes an ideology to completely turn its back on its culture’s past and descend into what  Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey calls “Black Armband History?”

That’s the topic that Theodore Dalrymple explores in The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism. As Dalrymple writes, Why should anyone wish to construct a national history that is nothing but crime and folly?

Limitless guilt being a form of grandiosity, the past commission of great crimes is a consolation for those who have lost power. It assures them that, notwithstanding their loss of the more immediate trappings of power, important, indeed determining, factors in the current situation of the world are traceable to them.

* * * * *

a miserabilist history is a very useful instrument in securing if not a social revolution, then at least a change or expansion of elites.

* * * * *

Bureaucracies must be created to right the wrongs of the past, the very bureaucracies that absorb the newly educated thousands and millions. Miserabilism thus combines business with pleasure.

As we’ve been discussing this week during my idyll at sea, if conservatives ever want to recapture the high ground of culture, just creating an alternative news media is nowhere near sufficient. It has to — somehow — recapture academia, where culture is ultimately created. And destroyed as well.

No, really!

Protesters at an Occupy Oakland meeting Monday voted to deposit a $20,000 donation into a Wells Fargo account. The move comes just days after one of Wells Fargo’s branches was vandalized during a massive downtown demonstration.

An Occupy statement said the money only will be with Wells Fargo temporarily while they work to establish an account with a credit union or community bank. Protesters said it was the easiest way to access the money to bail out people from jail.

Wimps. They should have followed the advice of their hard core occubrethen in Occupy San Francisco — despite that advice increasing their carbon occuprint:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(Our earlier Occupy The Onion post is here.)

And if the GOP holds the House and/or takes the Senate, so will all of the talk of a permanent Democratic Majority. At least until 2017. QED:

•  James Carville, as paraphrased by a US News & World Report headline, April 26, 2009: “Democrats Will Rule Washington for 40 Years.”

• Headline at Newsmax today: “Carville Fears DC Under ‘Total Tea Party Control.”

Forty years flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

Regarding the tulip mania of 2008, Mark Steyn explores “Finally, The Cognoscenti Ask: What Could We Be Thinking?” in his latest op-ed:

The most dismal thing about that David Brooks column conceding that “yes, I’m a sap … remember, I’m a sap … as you know, I’m a sap” was the headline his New York Times editors chose to append to it: “Obama Rejects Obamaism.”

In other words, even in a column remorselessly cataloguing how one of its smartest smart guys had been repeatedly suckered by Obama on jobs, on Medicare, on deficits, on tax reform, etc., the New York Times chose to insist that there’s still something called “Obamaism” — prudent, centrist, responsible — that for some perverse reason the man for whom this political philosophy is named insists on betraying, 24/7, week in, month out, spring, summer, autumn, tax season. You can set your clock by Obama’s rejection of “Obamaism.”

That’s because there’s no such thing. Never was.

“Obamaism” was the Emperor’s new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president.

In part, this is a natural extension of an ever more conformist and unrepresentative establishment’s view of where “the center” is. On issues from abortion to climate change, a Times man or Hollywood activist or media professor’s notion of “centrism” is well to the left of where American opinion is.

That’s one reason why a supposedly “center-right” nation has wound up regulated into sclerosis, drowning in debt and embarking on its last decade as the world’s leading economy.

But in the case of Obama the chasm between soft, seductive, politico-media “centrism” and hard, grim reality is too big to bridge, and getting wider all the time.

But then, the notion of an actual “center” in any meaningful sense left the building about the same time Bill Clinton did. (Actually sooner, given that Al Gore campaigned much further to the left in 2000 than Bill ever did.) As Jonah Goldberg writes today, “‘Centrists’ Are Abandoning Ship,” but “The establishment solution to unpopular liberal policies is still more liberalism:”

President Obama’s failure to fully achieve the liberal agenda and remain popular in the process is fueling dangerous radicalization in the oddest of places: the media establishment, which considers itself the guardian of the political center.

I should say “the so-called center,” because one of those most tedious — yet meticulously maintained — fictions is the claim that the establishment is, in fact, “centrist.”

If you’ve ever met these people and talked to them about how they see the world, heard them give a college commencement address, read their books, or endeavored to find out the political views of their spouses, you’d have all the evidence you need to learn that the establishment’s centrist facade is so much Potemkin poster board.For example, remember the media obsession with the cockeyed fantasy that Obama was the next FDR? Go back and watch some of those late-2008 and early-2009 episodes of Meet the Press. The guests were so giddy about the prospect they looked like six-year-olds at a birthday party ordered to sit still while the clown got ready to make balloon animals.

But Obama is not an FDR, nor a Lincoln, nor a liberal Reagan. At this point he’s simply hoping not to be a Carter. And that’s fomented establishment despair. Tina Brown, editor of both the Daily Beast and Newsweek, recently let it slip on MSNBC (a trifecta of establishmentarian liberal media outlets!) that she thinks Obama “wasn’t ready” for the job in 2008.

And just in from the left side of the aisle, via Jacob Heilbrunn (who wrote plenty of mythological prose himself about Obama at the HuffPo back in the day), in addition to not being, Lincoln, FDR, JFK and RWR, he’s no Harry Truman, either:

The new revelations in Ron Suskin’s book about Obama being ignored by his own advisers only compound the sense of unease surrounding the Obama presidency. Now we are promised, as Robert Merry and Paul Pillar note in their stimulating essays, a new Obama, one on the fighting lines of Truman. Merry notes that it is the record, not rhetorical flimflam, that will count when voters assess Obama. Part of the trouble with Obama may simply be his inexperience. It would be hard to think of anyone more different than Obama and Truman. Truman served and saw fierce combat in World War I. He commanded men in battle. The corruption of Kansas City politics probably helped him to prepare for dealing with Stalin in the postwar era. Truman was also a student of history—in retirement he wrote a history of the Roman empire. Obama, by contrast, refused to attend the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But why do you need to know history, when everyone around you is telling you that you are history? As I’ve written before, the problem for Obama wasn’t just, as he told a biographer at the peak of hopenchange fever that “I actually believe my own bulls***,” it’s that he believed everyone else’s, too.

See also: most important lesson from Animal House:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of course, given the symbiotic relationship between the MSM and BHO, he could say the same thing back to the people who elected him. And in a way, he is. 

Initial reports say approximately 12 dead, at least 30 injured. Here’s NBC’s report:

A plane crashed into a seating area Friday at the annual Reno air races on Friday, and officials told local media at least 30 people were seriously injured.

The accident happened just before 4:30 p.m. during the National Championship Air Races at the Reno-Stead Airport, KTVN-TV reported.

Witnesses told KTVN that planes in the Unlimited race were ascending when one aircraft started to nose-dive and then crashed near a spectator stand in the southeast corner. KTVN said the aircraft was a World War II-era P-51.

An official described the scene to KRNV-TV as “a mass-casualty situation.”

Reno Nevada’s KTNV-TV says that nearly 40 were admitted to nearby Renown hospital. Breaking News Online adds:

The accident happened at around 4.30 p.m. local time when a P-51 Mustang known as the Galloping Ghost, being flown by Jimmy Leeward, crashed into a seating area during the air race. Local officials said there were multiple fatalities and critical injuries, but no specific numbers were immediately available.

“It’s just like a massacre. It’s like a bomb went off,” Dr. Gerald Lent, who witnessed the crash, told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “There are people lying all over the runway. One guy was cut in half. There’s blood everywhere. There’s arms and legs.”

“Reno NBC affiliate reports 12 people died in plane crash in Reno,” Ann Nyberg of Connecticut’s WTNH-TV adds via Twitter.

Update (7:30 PM PDT): “3 Including Pilot Dead After Crash at Air Races,” Reno’s KTVN reports. I’m not sure if this is an early report, but most sources are now revising the fatality count downward from the NBC tweet above. In any case, the key news in this post is several paragraphs down — and not surprisingly, is being highlighted by Matt Drudge: the pilot was 80 years old:

Authorities say race pilot Jimmy Leeward has died after a crash at the Reno Air Races. This weekend’s races are also canceled.

Three people are confirmed dead, and another 21 people were admitted to Renown Regional Medical Center. The Associated Press reports 75 people were injured.

Northern Nevada Medical Center says they currently have 8 patients: 5 in serious, 3 in good condition.

The plane crashed in front of boxseat rows A & B.

Concerned family members should call 775.972.6663 and Air Race staff is working to locate and establish the status of all involved.

Witnesses say Leeward’s plane, the Galloping Ghost, was about 400-500 feet in the air when it nosedived and crashed at the Reno-Stead Airport around 4:30pm.

Our reporter Chris Ciarlo says the P51 Mustang was third in contention during the gold heat when the crash happened.

A memorial for the 80-year-old pilot will be held at the Galloping Ghost hangar at 1pm Saturday. He’d been a pilot since he was 14 years old.

More as it comes in.

Update: Now the pilot’s age is being listed at 74.

Update: from Michael van Poppel of Breaking News Online, this CNN iReport photo, which vividly shows the doomed P-51 just moments before impact.

As usual, I was struck by the miracle of it all — but the miracle is visibly fading. The irrigation system is one of the wonders of the world, and a tribute to the can-do California in which I grew up, a spirit that created a mighty state out of a couple of coastal enclaves and some good weather. But now, thanks to the “environmentalists,” much of it is in disuse, in the name of regression. The great military bases and defense infrastructure, which once made California synonymous with patriotism and productivity, are dead or dying.

In their place has come you-know-who, led by their wretched governor, Jerry Brown (California has been ruled off and on by the Brown family since 1959, and this is Jerry’s second stint in the office), who sees his job as managing decline, choking paradise with taxes, regulations, and a stupefying number of state commissions, and driving the productive class away. In the end, the state will be down to where it began — San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, without an interior to feed them and water them — and that will be that.

Once in the Bay Area, or back in L.A., the moral and spiritual rot is less visible, and the Napa Valley looks better than ever; wine is something that sells in good times and in bad. But I can’t shake the feeling that this is all some dreadful family-tragedy novel — not by Steinbeck, who, for all his social consciousness, understood what had gone into creating California out of a Spanish mission trail, a gold rush, and a great natural port — but by Faulkner: The story of a state who wanted sons, and her sons destroyed her.

Yes, these days, drunk with power, California politicians seem three sheets to the wind.

Of course, they’re fitted sheets; by law in California, they have to be.

* Or an Oakland harpsichord recital, as Zombie notes; a particularly appropriate instrument for a state approaching its death rattles.

Update: While we’re breaking out the old 45s, “All We Are is Dust in the Wind,” suddenly comes to mind, unfortunately.

I believe it was Mark Halperin (IIRC; google fails me) who pronounced in 2004 that the media could not give a “balanced” coverage of the Democratic and Republican positions, because one was obviously true and the other obviously a lie.

John Kerry now picks up that particular ball. Video at the link; here’s the transcript:

“And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.”"It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”

This is akin to that cretinous hag Froma Harrop, who is in charge of the “Civility Project” to improve political discourse, asserting that it’s okay when she calls her opponents terrorists and Al Qaida bombers that it’s not incivil because it’s actually true.

The last resort of liberals, confronted with evidence of media bias, is always to smugly claim “The truth has a liberal bias.”

Preparing the battlespace, as Instapundit often remarks. The media of course wants to cover the 2012 elections in as biased a fashion as politically effective (push it to the limits without going so far over the line that the public sees it for what it is); every presidential cycle some liberal Democrats step forward to offer some sort of a jackass intellectual defense for doing so, in case the media couldn’t think of one themselves.

And yes, that was indeed Mark Halperin in 2004:

An internal memo written by ABCNEWS Political Director Mark Halperin admonishes ABC staff: During coverage of Democrat Kerry and Republican Bush not to “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable.”

The controversial internal memo obtained by DRUDGE, captures Halperin stating how “Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win.”

But Halperin claims that Bush is hoping to “win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.”

“The current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done,” Halperin writes.

Halperin’s claim that ABCNEWS will not “reflexively and artificially hold both sides ‘equally’ accountable” set off sparks in St. Louis where media players gathered to cover the second presidential debate.

Halperin states the responsibilities of the ABCNEWS staff have “become quite grave.”

In August, Halperin declared online: “This is now John Kerry’s contest to lose.”

What a dick. But seriously, as the Anchoress perceptively noted last year, the media’s strategy in 2008 was much the same in 2004, except that Obama was a much more glamorous candidate than Boston-based retread John Kerry.

Which brings us to Virginia Postrel’s new column, and a reminder that glamour (particularly when spelled old-school style like that, as Virginia is wont to do) requires distance to maintain. Obama’s Slurpee-sippin’, Republicans in the back of the bus rhetoric last year did much to take the polish off his image. Is it possible to be a glamorous Alinskyite rhetorical bomb thrower? It’s not an image that seems consistent with being the president.

James Pethokoukis asks, “Can Obama’s 2012 hopes survive 9%+ unemployment?” The elite media will give it the old Ivy League try to greatly increase his odds. Because all media battlefield prep boils to two words, as my PJM colleague Andrew Klavan once said:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I just got off the phone with a source on Capitol Hill who has spent the past few days trying to convince Republicans to vote for a debt ceiling hike.

He told me that the biggest obstacle he faces has been “market complacency.”

“Frankly, a bit of panic would be very helpful right now,” he said.

As he explained it, lots of people in Washington, D.C. expected that this would be a week marked by panic in the markets. Stocks would tank. Bonds would get clobbered. The dollar would do something dramatic. And all of this would help convince reluctant lawmakers that they had to reach a compromise on the debt ceiling.

“We were following the script from 2008. When the market collapsed after TARP failed, that spooked everyone enough to get them to fall in line. We thought the same thing would happen this week,” he said.

Instead, the market has just been on a quiet, non-panicked slide.

Stocks have sold off by a couple of percentage points, but nothing that indicates a real fear trade in the works.

Perhaps because, according to this report, the Obama administration has already assured them that would be no doomsday crisis in August.

Related: An Insta-reader notes that America exceeded the debt limit in 2009. The Professor notes in response, “It wasn’t a such big deal back then, but I guess that’s because both houses of Congress were controlled by Democrats.

Elsewhere, as Hot Air paraphrases Byron York’s new article at the Washington Examiner, “Hey, remember when Obama, Reid, and Durbin opposed raising the debt ceiling?”

Finally, Stacy McCain spots “The Man With No Plan [Accusing] House Republicans of Irresponsibility.”

Frances Piven could not be reached for comment.

Smoke belching from Asia’s rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur’s cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

It’s sort of the equivalent of Al Gore’s 2007 Live Earth concert: the only way we can fight the effects of global warming is by having as much of it as possible. Which may have inspired John Holdren’s Dr. Strangelove-esque scheme he floated past AP in 2009 to launch rockets full of pollution into the upper atmosphere.The AP reporter who interviewed was apparently far too in the tank not to burst into laughter on camera. Fortunately though, Jim Treacher had the appropriate response: that whole “‘Obama is a megalomaniac’ thing is such a ridiculous right-wing smear. By the way, now he wants to take over the weather.”

No wonder, as Steve Hayward writes at Power Line, “Climate Change Has Become the ‘Dead Parrot Sketch’ of American Politics.”

But when will Washington’s Joke Warfare against the American public finally come to an end?

Found via Ultra Swank, here’s the preview clip for ABC’s new fall show, Pan Am, about which Wikipedia says…

Pan Am is a television series centered around the iconic airline Pan American World Airways during the 1960s. The period drama, from former ER writer Jack Orman, will focus on the pilots and flight attendants working for the world-famous airline in 1963.

The series, produced by Sony Pictures Television, was picked up by ABC in May 2011 for the 2011–2012 television season.^[1] Sony licensed the rights to the Pan Am name and logo from Pan Am Systems, a New Hampshire-based railroad company that acquired the Pan Am brand in 1998.^[2]

You can see exactly how this series was pitched in a network meeting, can’t you? “OK, Mad Men is a hit on AMC. I mean, it’s not a big hit, but it’s a cult hit, and it’s copping all the big awards, and all my friends are talking about, even if it doesn’t quite play in the hinterlands. But still, maybe we could have a cool sixties series of our own. Unlike those cheapskates at AMC, we at ABC can afford to have decent special effects. The skies the limit. Sky? Airlines, that’s it! We’ll do a show about how swanky the airlines were back then. And how sexist. I mean, they called flight attendants ‘stewardesses’ back in those barbaric times, and they were all women! And all the pilots were all men! Sexist corporate bastards.”

In that sense, Pan Am is perfect. They had a huge building on Park Ave., where, as James Lileks noted a couple of years ago, is “60s corporatism at its most confident, complete with rooftop heliport so the execs can come and go without laying the soles of their expensive shoes on the common walk of the street below.” At least until 1977, when a Pan Am helicopter did a header off the roof and slammed down on the street below.

Of course, that’s a metaphor for sixties optimism in general. There was a very limited timeframe between JFK’s death and the, arguably even worse American hell of 1968, when both RFK and MLK were killed. Also that year in the business world, the Penn Central merger occurred, a shotgun marriage between two of America’s biggest railroads, whose bankruptcy two years later would be a stalking horse for the purgatorial 1970s.

In the mid-’60s, American optimism somehow soldiered on past JFK’s death and into LBJ’s Great Society, and the business world felt this as well. Tom Wolfe called ’80s bond traders “Masters of the Universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities. But setting aside how bad-ass the airline’s pilots felt, imagine how powerful a Pan Am executive felt when, as the clip above highlights, he flew into the rooftop heliport above Park Ave., and then flew back out to the Pan Am terminal at JFK.

In terms of that, the new series’ digital effects runs rings around Mad Men’s rather limited budget, which only allows for very limited views of a very stylized version of mid-’60s New York, this is sixties swank fully realized. But whereas Mad Men has gotten four seasons worth of episodes, due to Don Draper, its Gatsby-as-everyman main character, is there enough meat in this series format to get it beyond 13 weeks?

I suppose we’ll find out soon enough. Cool CGI, though.