Tolerating Nepotism

Thanksgiving is upon us and that food, football, and family. During this family-centered holiday, I have that false friend of family and clear enemy of meritocracy on my mind: nepotism.

You would think that in the twenty-first century United States with our fair hiring laws and our HR departments, that nepotism would be squashed. It's not the case. Now having famous relatives can open doors for you (I'm looking at you new TV journalist Chelsea Clinton). Of course, some genuine genetics may be in play here and success can buy access and bring with it knowledge of how to succeed in a field. Those are all good reasons why some families succeed in some fields over generations.  Neither do I have a problem with handing a private business down from father to daughter.  Even so, in certain venues - especially sports, religion, entertainment and politics - the practice thrives. Here is an incomplete list of examples.

Religion:
Rev. Robert Schuller founded the Crystal Cathedral and now his daughter Shelia Schuller Coleman is the head of the congregation. Her brother was ousted from preaching the "Hour of Power" service in 2008. Even in nepotism you can get the hook.

Rev. Billy Graham (93 years old this month) earned world-wide fame over the second half of the twentieth century as an evangelist. His son Franklin took up the reins of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association while his daughter has her own ministry in Raleigh, NC.

Joel Osteen, a mightily successful televangelist based in Houston, TX, took over Lakewood Church when his father John Osteen -Lakewood's founder - died.

Football:
Football is especially a family affair: Ryans, and Harbaughs, and Bowdens, oh my! At least most of those folks found success working for someone other than their fathers. The same has not been the case so far for the following men.

Joe Paterno's son Jay is the quarterbacks coach after seventeen years with the Nittany Lions.
Steve Spurrier is the head coach of the Carolina Gamecocks. His youngest son played wide receiver for him, but his oldest boy, Steve Jr., is his receivers coach.

The there is the family Shanahan. Daddy, Mike, has a Super bowl pedigree and as a result he could hire his son Kyle as offensive coordinator. The rumors out of the Washington Redskins organization is that everything that goes wrong with the offense is someone's fault who isn't named Shanahan.

Politics:
I used to like to joke that J. Strom Thurmond, Jr. was the most qualified lawyer in South Carolina to be named US attorney for the state...who also happened to be named Strom Thurmond. Speaking of families in politics, G. W. Bush appointed him during his first term.

Similarly we had the appointment of Michael Powell by Bill Clinton in the 1990s.  Bush raised this con of Colin Powell to chairman of the FCC before he had turned 40.

No doubt some of these folks are worthy of their positions, but are we to believe that merit alone got them these positions? Were Thurmond and Powell more qualified than all the people in their fields who had twenty years of experience over them? No, of course not, and hardly anyone is pretending that anything but nepotism is at work here.

Those are examples that come to mind, but I am open to hearing from others with more and better cases of ongoing nepotism.

All The President's Beer

The White House Ferments Its Own

Over the weekend a typical tempest in a teapot story ran out out of D.C. about the President having a beer with the newest Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Dakota Meyer. Meyer's story, like all the MOH holders is stirring and humbling to read about and yet the news somehow turned to a picture of Meyer and Obama having a beer together.

Some of Obama's critics latched on to a photo of the shared beer as a manipulative photo-op. It's hard to blame folks' cynicism over the use of fellow citizens in this way (although perhaps we should remember that Reagan pioneered this in his State of the Union Address), but it turns out Meyer asked if he could have a beer with the President.  They didn't allow the press there it became a twitter-fest from one picture.

It's not as if Meyer needed to be any better, but I really admire the fact that when the White House called to finalize the ceremony arrangements he asked if he could talk with the President over drinks. Fantastic.

Brewmaster POTUS
As a result of the latest beer summit is has come out that Obama bought a home brewing operation and had it installed in the White House. Meyer and POTUS drank a Honey wheat beer together. Apparently the White House staff chefs run the homebrewing operation and they have been quietly serving it at gatherings such as St. Patrick's Day. So this isn't exactly the honey brown beer we used to brew in my buddy's basement. Even so, as a beer aficionado I feel a little better represented in D.C. as a result of this news.

Potential Names for White House Home Brews
You know how some homebrewers get pretty clever with their own labels. Well imagine what you could do with White House Home Brew:
State Dinner (Anti) Imperial Stout
POTUS Pilsner
Lincoln Bedroom Honest Ale
Madison's British Smoked Beer
Washington Monumental Mead
Oval Office Bock
Press Corps (UP)I.P.A.
Land of the Free (High Gravity) Rye Pale Ale


The possibilities are fun to contemplate.
Cheers!

Deep South Dispatch #7: The Bubba Abides

Being back in the South for part of the summer has also brought back the opportunity to hear Bo (or Beau) used as a personal pronoun between men. As in: "How you doin' Bo? I ain't seen you in ages!"

I think the derivation of Bo is from the French Beau although my wife disagrees. She thinks that like Bubba, Bo is easier for little children to enunciate than is 'brother.' Okay, now we've let the Bubba out of the bag. One morning at the Liar's Club (breakfast of retirees and semi-retirees that mon pere attends) I heard one septuagenarian fella say "Thank you Bubba" to a business friend. It struck me that Bubba and Bo play a really important linguistic role. If you call someone Bubba or Bo you must know them and like them. It is a term of masculine endearment like 'Mon ami'.

Buddy, is essentially the same as Bubba in origin and use but seems to be pretty widely used throughout the country.

Dude versus Bubba and Bo
It strikes me that outside the Deep South Dude is often used this way. Dude can  say - I know you and you know me and we are cool with each other so that we can be informal. Of course Dude is proven to be a shape-shifting word as seen in the inspired ad below. For the record, Uncle Stumpy and I used to play this Dude game out in our college dorm room or in the cafeteria before the ad compaign. I only wish we could have made money off of it.

Now, can you use Bo or Bubba or even Buddy this way? You wouldn't say: "Bubba, what the heck is that smell" unless you know the guy pretty well. I think Bubba is used in neutral or positive interactions not in accusatory ones. Unless the person has Bubba as their full-time nickname, which, of course, happens quite a lot.

I think Bo is even more flexible in its usage. If you are at a gas station and a guy you don't know pulls up and is blaring his music you can, within the socially accepted but unspoken code, say: "Bo, dial it down."

Wikipedia says Bo is short for Dude. This is wrong. It is a different word performing much of the same function and I would bet you a box of Little Debbie oatmeal cream pies that Bo, as I'm writing of it, has been in use longer. I think that Dude as we use it now took off from Fast times at Ridgemont High. Whether the writers had heard it used that way or invented the new usage I don't know, but I am only a hammock (in teh winter an armchair) linguist and not a professional.

The ubiquity of Dude is such that in Beaufort, South Carolina there is a free newspaper for men called Dude.  It seems to me that this does not make Dude more southern and it really leans on that older use of the word.

There may be a linguistics paper that already covers this. On the other hand, like our Dude bi-play in college, maybe others have thought of this but I am writing it down. I know. I still won't make any money off of it.

Jim 2-10

Deep South Dispatch #6: Most Influential South Carolinians

My students and I have had a joke in which I bring up a historic person and ask if they know where the person was born and they guess South Carolina. I bring this up to illustrate my personal obsession which might be diagnosed as South Carolina exceptionalism.

I can't help it, I take note of people who are from South Carolina like Joe Frazier, Lauren Hutton or Kevin Garnett. Recently I have been mulling a top ten list in this vein: who are the most influential living people from the Palmetto State?


It will sound too pretentious to say I had a methodology for this. It is more of a parlor game, but I did come up with a few ground rules.

• The person must be living and either born or raised in South Carolina.
• The breadth and depth of the individual's influence is of paramount importance. Mere fame for a long time isn't enough. Demonstrated influence counts. Sorry Chubby Checker, but don't stop twisting.
• The person's influence must be felt beyond the borders of the Palmetto State. Sorry Mayor Riley.
• A candidate for the top ten needs to have been around long enough to prove she or he has lasting influence: sorry Aziz Asari but keep going!

The Short List

Ben Bernanke
Charles Bolden
Stephen Colbert
Pat Conroy
Jim DeMint
Marian Wright Edelman
John Edwards
Leeza Gibbons
William Gibson
Joseph L. Goldstein
Lindsey Graham
Fritz Hollings
Jesse Jackson
Young Jeezy
Jasper Johns
Sallie Krawchek
Andie McDowell
Kary Mullis
Chris Rock
Darius Rucker
Armstrong Williams

If you have an opinion on who should make the top ten let me know.

Performance Enhanced Scholarship: Put an Asterisk By That Pulitzer

With the revelations of performance enhancing drug use in football and baseball and even the move by the genteel Professional Golf Association to test for drugs we have begun a new investigative series to determine how pervasive this problem has become in American society. Today we examine higher education and the scandal of Scholarship Enhancing Drugs or Vita-mens.

Take the case of assistant professor Jason L. who teaches at West Midwest University: “  I knew to get a tenure track job in the humanities would be tough and at some point I started cutting corners. Throwing papers down the stairs is where I began, but eventually I went on the juice.” To produce articles at a rapid-fire rate she went on a designer scholar drug known in academic circles as “the Plato.”  

The Plato and the Newton have been traced back to a business in the Philadelphia area called Philly Drugs Incorporated or PhDInc. They are under federal investigation at this time. No one from PhdInc would comment on rumors that they are exclusively in the business of producing what academics are increasingly asking for in the corners of the faculty lounge.

As in sports, some aging stars turn to this unethical assistance because they are obsessed with pushing their careers into Hall-of-Fame heights. Such is the case with Dana Gooden, the former Rasputin Chair of Biochemistry at Pacific Ivy. Haggard now, and looking far older than her 61 years, she has shocked the higher education community with the revelations in her new memoir, Doping My Way Through  the Ivory Tower.  “I became obsessed with beating Professor Bacon’s record for grant dollars. Younger colleagues began to attract more funding than my lab and so I turned to both the Plato and the Newton.“  She did close the grant gap, but an asterisk has been prominently placed on the door to her lab.

Throughout higher education there is fear of a loss of credibility and a concern about who will be held accountable. Deans and provosts are being called before grand juries and asked what they knew and when they knew it.  Professor Gooden’s dean has responded to her memoir with a public statement: “I should have been more suspicious and certainly, when safety goggles appeared too small for her head, that was a potent sign."

These stories can turn tragic. The scholars’ drugs have side effects akin to ‘roid rage called “Bloom-ing”. In most cases the loss of emotional control results in fits of anger, a sense of persecution, and a certain faith in the decline of Western Civilization. The most destructive version is colloquially dubbed “going Nietzsche.”

In sports,  a definite  trickle-down effect took place as college athletes witnessed the spread of Human Growth Hormone, Steroids and their ilk in professional athletics, so too on the academic side.  Brett S., now a senior at a prestigious university in the South has known the ups and downs of Scholarship Enhancing Drugs. “Oh, man, I started on the memory enhancers, Elephant pills we called them.” Brett had an adequate first year of college, but he decided that he needed the Dean’s List. “I went from an intellectual weakling who barely knew who Hegel was to offering verbatim quotes from Ulysses in class.” After three terms he peaked and has been clean so far this year. “I’ll never forget that first surge of being able to remember what I read…it was like having a superpower.”

Until a Vita-men testing regimen is put in place it seems unlikely that many offenders, student or professor are likely to be caught or deterred.  With no system in place we could not estimate how wide-spread this problem is in America’s colleges and universities.  One clue comes from a former employee of PhDInc,  Dr. Fu Koh  who worked in the historical division,  “I don’t really want to go on record here, but let’s just say that some these folks are wearing out the elbows of their tweed jackets awfully fast.”

Deep South Dispatch # 5: Get These #%#^#! Snakes Out of My Tree Stand

It seems unfair that snakes can climb. Is it not enough that they slither quickly and swim like water serpents?

This past weekend the Old Flesh and Blood and several of his hunting club members had a workday on the plantation. This time of the year that means a circuit of the existing tree stands to check for needed repairs or maintenance.

The OFB, despite a spot of arthritis and near septuagenarian status, climbed one of the stands to its platform some sixteen feet off of the ground. To his surprise, but not delight, he was met there by a coiled and alert eastern diamondback rattlesnake sitting in the back corner. He hollered down to the hunters on the ground and they tossed a handgun up to him. BANG. He got the ### snake off his ## # treestand.

The pistol turned out to be a .410 (a bore size and not a gauge as you may know and may care). In other words, this handgun uses shotgun shells -- a fact not anticipated by our shooter in this case who was quite focused on the snake. It short, the pistol kicked like a mule and caused an injury to his trigger finger. After a search they found part of the snake (tail with rattles) nearly fifty feet away. High brass shells at near point-blank range will do that to a snake up in the air, won't it?!

Deep South Dispatch #4: Raising a Southern Child in Exile

On a beautiful Central Pennsylvania day, when my oldest son was about two years old, I had an experience that nearly fried my chitterlings. My kid bopped into the room and said “Hey, you guys!”

            “Guys”?! To what does that even refer? Why is my own flesh and blood speaking in the northern neuter tense with all the accompanying jarring rhythms? Where was the dulcet “Y’all”?

The pain lingers. Adding insult to injury, a so-called friend looked at my wife and me inquiring, “You do realize you’re raising a Yankee?”

 I could, as of that moment, no longer live in denial.

            I began searching for answers. But before I could devise a plan of action a second harrowing event occurred: we traveled back to South Carolina for Christmas with my kin. Back in the bosom of family, my mother one morning tried to get my son to eat grits.

“Yankees don’t eat grits!” he firmly announced. Right then I knew that I had to take control of the situation.

            Initially we came to Pennsylvania for employment. It seemed harmless at the time. Before we had a child I told myself that I was yet another expatriate forced to leave the land of my birth, South Carolina’s Lowcountry, but that I was gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of it because I lived in exile.

            Like many before me I now wish to raise my child in the ways of the old country – I want him to be Southern – in the best sense of what that can mean. Now I am in the midst of an 18-year project to raise a southern children within the North. Here are some of my rules for bringing up a Southerner above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Rules

¨      The Leadbelly Effect: It’s never too early to start making your child Southern. Although research on the so-called “Mozart Effect” remains inconclusive, take no risks and play or sing to your child in utero and ex utero. One is never too young for Hank Williams, Bessie Smith, Dizzy Gillespie, Patsy Cline or Bill Monroe.

¨      Sports Do’s: Expose your child to football.  The pigskin sport is enlightened, it emphasizes athletic prowess (although shield their eyes from the Big Ten). Help develop her vocabulary with key phrases like: “rammer, jammer, yeller hammer, Roll Tide,” “Root Hog” and by enunciating the invisible ‘p’ in Clemson.

¨      Sports Don’ts: Shield your child from hockey. It is nasty, brutish and any sport on ice is unnatural.

¨      Food: Culturally you are what you eat (unless you are a postmodern, in which case Indian cuisine just means it’s Tuesday night and Wednesday you will use a recipe from your Basque cookbook). Southern cuisine is at the heart of southern history and culture – the intriguing synthesis of Europe, African, Caribbean, and American styles and foods. My wife has said that this fusion, at its worst, produces vegetables that are cooked to death and taste like meat. I think she mean that as a criticism.

¨      Hand’s On: Nothing is more important than extended and frequent visits to the South. You owe it to your child to have them know the smell of and feel of a tidewater marsh and a bayou (and when they are old enough, a French Quarter street on a Saturday night). I have managed to have my kids in the South for about four weeks each year of their life. When my oldest son turns twelve next year he will have spent a whole year of his in the South.

¨      Geography: Can the kid identify a building’s city by its photograph: “Port city, old stucco, bit French…N’awl…wait you almost had me – Mobile!” Make sure that when you say the family is headed to L.A. for a week she assumes rightly you mean Lower Alabama.

I have been thinking we Southern expats might benefit from creating something like the Alliances Francaises for French or the Goethe Institutes that dot major US cities and promote German language study and culture. Call them Faulkner Institutes. They could offer after school and summer programs to promote this agenda. One can readily see the value of core courses such as “A History of the Southeastern Conference;” “The Swamp in Southern Literature;” “Southern Accents and Dialects 101;” “Hymn Studies 1: From Spirituals to Sacred Harp.” Advanced classes would involve deeper plunges into topics like “The Sheriff in Southern Myth and Movies,” and “Modern Agriculture From Mules to Massey-Fergusons.”

The skeptical among you (Missourians) will ask, does it work? There are promising signs. A few years ago my eleven year old had the temerity to say to his Bama born and bred mother “the problem is that you aren’t southern enough.” At that moment it seemed to work too well. I am proud to report that he now eats grits, drinks sweet tea and claims that when he grows up he want to move to South Carolina and live on the family farm.

Our first-grader, though, has some distance still to travel. After laboring hard to get him to change his style of address he recently met me half-way with: “hey you all guys!”

OMG: Old Media Guilt from Forbes.com

My editorial that appeared at Forbes.com's Booked blog earlier this week.

OMG: Old Media Guilt

Mar. 1 2011 -

Posted by Raquel Laneri

Cover via Amazon

Hopelessly devoted to your mass-market paperbacks, or an early adapter of the Kindle? In the following piece, history professor and author James Tuten wrestles with guilt over falling in love with his e-reader — and muses on the future of reading and publishing.


OMG – I love my Kindle. There, I said it. As a historian, I know well the musty scent of book mold wafting up like some pheromone of erudition from a long unopened tome. The dimly lit stacks of a library are among the most delightful places in the world for the likes of us.

As the sort of people who are on a first-name basis with librarians, historians and English professors, are thrilled to hold a new book, to crack the binding and break it in like a new pair of shoes.
Yet when I have traveled lately by plane or car I have found it remarkably convenient to take the Kindle along instead of two or three printed books.


I have used it to download free copies of books that are out of copyright like The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Art of War, Life on the Mississippi and Moby Dick. I have purchased newer but less exalted books too. It doesn’t strain my eyes. It’s easy to carry.  Household harmony has improved too as I never steal my wife’s bookmarks anymore. The Kindle marks for me.

Lately, though, in conversations about technology and gadgets, the talk will turn to e-readers and I find myself embarrassed to admit I have a Kindle.

I suffer from OMG. No, not the adolescent texting shorthand, but something that strikes to the very hearts of many people over 40: Old Media Guilt. It strikes me nearly every time I purchase something for my e-reader.  Sometimes when I slide the switch to settle in for a good read I feel the clammy hand of OMG seizing my conscience. Why, why am I turning my back on the books, magazines and yellowed news clips that nurtured me?

In my town I can’t get a major newspaper delivered to my door. Most days I get one while I am out and about, but on Sunday morning I used to always go out to the store and pick up a Washington Post or New York Times. Now, if I am in a hurry, or if it’s really cold out, I read it online. I never see all the articles that way, of course. I see far fewer ads (which, to my surprise, I miss a bit), as they seem easier to ignore online.  The online version has only three things going for it: It’s free to me; I don’t have to leave the house to get it; and I can easily e-mail or post an article I like.

It comes at the price of more bibliophile guilt, though. It reveals the killer inside me. I am helping to kill newspapers.  I really like journalists too. They are among the most interesting people I have known, and yet I am doing my part to send them to the unemployment line.

When I enter a bookstore, where I have spent idyllic hours, the guilt pangs are strongest. Today it looks as though bookstores are doomed by e-readers with not only independents disappearing but the big box chains already retrenching. The recent demise of the venerable chain Borders is the most recent evidence of the slow death of bookstores. In the coming decades more readers like me will commit the ultimate betrayal and go digital. This is all the more sad to me because my first book was published this past fall and each of the book signings I gave was co-sponsored by a different independent bookstore.

When magazines die in their print form, like American Heritage or Paste, and I find I am following them more closely than ever in their online-only afterlives — yet I get the OMG.
At its worst, my guilt takes me to a dismal bed where I am visited by the ghost of Media Future. In this apocalyptic world there are no brick and mortar book stores, public libraries have lost all funding and closed, all books are published in a digital format, newspapers are written by untrained hacks with no editing taking place, and book signings then would be dimly remembered.

At least there would be no more waiting in a slow-moving line to get 30 seconds in front a celebrity author. Authors need not risk catching a cold from the grubby book-signing attendees. Instead, an in-demand author like J. K. Rowling could hold virtual signings from her castle with fans all over the world.

So get ready, you can be a pioneer collector of digital first-editions.

Revisiting and Revising the Anniversary Gifts List

Recently I celebrated a wedding anniversary with my wife and it got me thinking about the lists of gifts associated with different anniversaries. The practice of associating specific items like silver with the twenty-fifth anniversary is quite old in Europe and certainly started before the modern era. A quick glance at the list shows you that some items are no longer practical: you can’t really give ivory anymore after all. For that matter, just try giving your wife tin at your tenth anniversary and see how that goes over.

On the web you can find a pretty good explanation of the history of these gift associations at About.com http://marriage.about.com/od/anniversariescelebrations/a/annivhistory.htm. The upshot is that Emily Post listed some of these and the current lists are attributed to compilers at the Chicago Public Library. The Modern list, as you might guess from a study of it, is the invention of the trade association of jewelers in the US back in the 1930s. It too is out of date and, of course, emphasizes jewelry.

So, I propose a new list for the twenty-first century. It assumes affluence tastes but so did the traditional list.

Traditional                 Modern                      Jim’s 21^st Century

1st Paper                    Clocks                         Smart phone

2nd Cotton                 China                           Gore-tex         

3rd Leather                Crystal                          Espresso maker

4th Fruit, flowers        Appliances                    Kayak

5th Wood                  Silverware                     Trip to Peru

6th Sugar                   Wood                           Antiques

7th Copper, wool       Desk Sets                     Sub-zero Fridge

8th Bronze, pottery    Linens or Lace               Calaphon set

9th Pottery, willow     Leather                          Leather furniture

10th Tin                     Diamond                       Sub-zero fridge

11th Steel                  Jewelry                          Feng Sui consultation

12th Silk, linen           Pearls                            Viking range

13th Lace                  Textiles or Furs              Catamaran

14th Ivory                  Gold Jewelry                 Home renovation

15th Crystal               Watches                        Plastic surgery

20th China                  Platinum                        College Tuition

25th Silver                  Silver                            College Tuition

30th Pearl                   Diamond                       College Tuition

35th Coral                  Jade                              Jade – Jade is cool

40th Ruby                   Ruby                             Viagra

45th Sapphire             Sapphire                        European cruise

50th Gold                   Gold                              Hip Replacement

60th Diamond             Diamond                        Headstone

                                               

I don’t mean to throw cold water on things with my headstone choice but let’s be practical. In the 21^st century most Americans marry in their mid to late twenties. So taking the median male age of slightly over 27 years – you are really not interested in a diamond at the 60^th anniversary party so much as a practical stone of a completely different sort.

Deep South Dispatch #3: Of Golf and Gators

On Golf
In an ill-fated moment of adulthood I decided to take up golf. I should have known better. My father used to say that every golf course was a waste of a good pasture. My father-in-law  who tried to get a round a week all year long immediately warned me: "golf is a cruel mistress." A few years of pursuing the sport and, well, I can now say I know the truth of that axiom. The cruelest part of golf is that it is a bit like gambling. Every now and then you roll double sevens and it feels so good you have come back.

On Gators
I don't remember how old I was the first time I saw an alligator. They lived in the ponds of the plantation that surrounds our family farm. They lived in the neighboring Salkehatchie Swamp. To me a swamp without a gator population is no swamp at all. When I think alligators I recall with a certain nostalgia the one I nearly ran-over in the wee hours of the morning while driving home from the Charleston airport having just returned from France. There I am skidding to a complete stop with my headlamps lighting up the big fella shuffling across River Road in Beaufort County.  I thought to myself: Monsieur we are not Paris anymore.


Golf and Gators
Golf and gators come together these days everywhere within Alligator mississippiensis's range. So in a pretty good swath of the coastal Deep South you find gators putting the hazard in water hazard. In a recent story from The Coastal Observer they recount how 83 year-old golfer Galer Wright wound his way to the conclusion of a round at the Heritage Plantation course at Pawley's Island in October 2010. On the 18th hole Wright hit his approach short and his ball arced toward the pond protecting the green when - thunk - his ball bounced off a sunning gator and plunked down on the green leaving him a twenty-foot lag putt to the hole. Sadly, he three-putted.

The gator took no offense at the intrusion and stayed as he had been.