Mishra, "Memory Failure", in the LRB.

In March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

...Such was the ‘unprincipled political gamesmanship’, as Primo Levi called it, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known. A strategic philosemitism, parasitic on old antisemitic stereotypes but now combined with sentimental images of Jews, flourished in postwar Germany. The novelist Manès Sperber was one of those repulsed by it. ‘Your philosemitism depresses me,’ he wrote to a colleague, ‘degrades me like a compliment that is based on an absurd misunderstanding ... You overestimate us Jews in a dangerous fashion and insist on loving our entire people. I don’t request this, I do not wish for us – or any other people – to be loved in this way.’ In Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (2020), Daniel Marwecki describes the way that visions of Israel as a new embodiment of Jewish power awakened dormant German fantasies. A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marvelled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth’, who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish’. Commenting on Israel’s successes in the 1967 war, Die Welt regretted German ‘infamies’ about the Jewish people: the belief that they were ‘without national sentiment; never ready for battle, but always keen to profit from somebody else’s war effort’. The Jews were in fact a ‘small, brave, heroic, genius people’. Axel Springer, which published Die Welt, was among the major postwar employers of superannuated Nazis. 

There's a lot more. This is small but it made me laugh. 

...What then of Germany’s much lauded culture of historical memory? Susan Neiman, who wrote admiringly of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Learning from the Germans (2020), now says she has changed her mind. ‘German historical reckoning has gone haywire,’ she wrote in October. ‘This philosemitic fury ... has been used to attack Jews in Germany.’ 

Nirit Sommerfeld was threatened with arrest in 2019. 

I had an email exchange with Neiman after she published her piece on Jacob Taubes . 

"In 1945 Hannah Arendt wrote that “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” She was wrong. Apart from a handful of German philosophers—all Jewish except Brentano—philosophy ignored the questions the twentieth century had raised again."

She was right. It's the subtext of everything in post-war Europe. Philosophers are pedants and pedantry is garbage. The history of pedantry, like the history of anything else, is scholarship. 

Post-war Germany was a culture of autism and denial. Nostalgia for the present.

de Man, Robbe-Grillet, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, On the Natural History of Destruction, The Tin Drum, Crabwalk, Deutschland im Herbst. everything, every fucking thing.

I won't post her response, but it wasn't enough. 

Longing for reconciliation indeed. The Taubes piece—a perverse discussion of a perverse man— previously here. 

And Leiter is a fan. I wonder what he thinks now.

Remember Jason Stanley who also never got the point. And does he now?

It's been fun watching left intellectual Germanophiles try and fail to come to terms with this crap. 

Neiman's new piece is here. I haven't read it yet.

---

I'd forgotten Deborah Feldman.

on the natural history of destruction/nostalgia for the present

Hajo Holborn, "Achievements and Prospects of German Democracy", Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 1955) JSTOR,  cited by Krieger

Everywhere bureaucracy has multiplied but nowhere as much as in Germany. Allied military government liked to work through the civil service rather than through political parties. The Bonn system has extended the scope of the judiciary and of the government service tremendously and in Germany these two professions are staffed by the same type of civil servant. The Bonn constitution like all the new state constitutions contains grandiose catalogues of civil rights which go far beyond anything known in the United States. The experiences of the arbitrariness of Nazi rule have created in Germany a great belief in judicial procedures. But many of these civil rights are mutually incompatible and a settlement of conflicts calls for a political decision rather than a juristic opinion. One says in Germany that the Rechtsstaat has become a Justizstaat, a government by justices rather than a government by law. Meanwhile, the administration is busily occupied in determining the claims which the new legislation has granted to practically every imaginable category of human being, and all these claims are justiciable. The main contacts between the hard-working German and his new state are the pleadings of his private claims before an official behind a desk.

German bureaucracy is organized as before 1933. The university diploma is the entrance ticket to a career in the higher service and admission to the university depends in turn on the graduation from high school. Except for some beginnings in Hamburg, Hessen and West Berlin, class privileges in higher education have not been broken. Allied military government utterly failed to broaden the social base of the civil service and of the "academic class" in general. Some changes have taken place. The idea of Rechtsstaat does not appear any more as a matter of course and as something that can easily be combined with any other political order, including totalitarianism. But while, therefore, totalitarianism and militant nationalism are being rejected, a positive belief in democracy as the only method that can assure the permanent security of the rule of law in our age is extremely rare. Democracy, or, as one would say among these groups in Germany, the "rule of parties" (Parteienstaat), is not a guarantee of freedom. On the contrary, it is argued that the democratic volonte generale can produce the suppression of all law and freedom. In this line of thought national socialism appears more as a consequence of the French Revolution than as a reaction to it, and this explains, too, why academic historical thought centers so largely on Bismarck.

It is true, however, that this has not led to an openly reactionary attitude or to militant nationalism. Both the judiciary and the general civil service have shown a more cooperative spirit toward the Bonn government than they did to the Weimar Republic. But parliament and parties are eyed with suspicion by the great majority. Germany's most eminent philosopher of education, Theodor Litt, wrote recently: "A champion of democracy must be conscious of the odds against which he is struggling and the dubious support which he can expect from the present state of public life and the average thinking of his fellow citizens."' The Rechtstaat ideal has come back and come back in greater strength. In the historical and social setting of Germany it is not likely to lose its authoritarian overtones altogether, but it has become noticeable that the authority of the government is being enforced with a firmer hand than in the days of the Weimar Republic, even against the industrialists.

Ever since I was a kid, and then later, with Richter and Polke, and Kraftwerk, and reading Böll, reading and watching Fassbinder, Herzog, Germany in Autumn... Wings of Desire was released two years after Signal Germany on the Air. Gursky. It's useless even making a list. I'm not sure when I came up with the thought that postwar Germany was autistic, but I made the comment to a woman whose family charts the history of the 20th century in Germany, or at least the high bourgeois, German and Jewish, with all that implies, and she agreed. Marcel Reich-Ranicki said that the only German he ever met who fully understood the significance of the Nazi era to the Jews was Ulrike Meinhof. It made me laugh.

At some point in the 90s I wrote the title for an essay "German Culture and the Banality of Democracy". It makes sense I'm repeating things from 2002

"One says in Germany that the Rechtsstaat has become a Justizstaat, a government by justices rather than a government by law." The need for truth and the hatred of politics

I interrupted a pompous 20something art aficionado/theory-hack who was describing the work to a friend in terms of "the abject", to say that the best way to understand Polke was to think of Herzog or any well educated German man born during the war and now alone in the desert, or in the jungle, or at sea, or on the ice, tripping on acid and screaming lyric poetry into the void. The pompous kid looked over his glasses and said, "I'm not familiar with his films."

The British boy on the left writes an article about the German man on the right, and it comes out about as you would expect.

Updated, for fun this time.

Reed wrote songs about junkies on the corner.

"You know. I'm glad that we met man
It was really nice talking
And I really wish there was a little more time to speak"

Every time I hear that voice I think of a man I knew 35 years ago. I hear Jimmy Santulli, alias James Jubert. I'm pretty sure he's been dead for a long time. 

"Weird Alex" Pareene is weird in his own little world.

 

About the time Reed did the ad campaign for Honda, in 86 or so, he was asked to do something for a public service campaign for HIV prevention. He refused, saying he'd never been safe, and he was still alive.

I had dinner with Legs McNeil and a few others at some point in the mid 90s. It may have been after the premier of the film mentioned below. Or it could have been for Billy Name. Billy was there. McNeil went off on political punk. He hated it. He's a moralist.  Moralists are conservative by definition. Genet opposed prison reform because it made him who he was. I've said it before, in the same general context.  John Waters and Mike Kelley agreed, they both still loved the Catholic Church. John's a conservative. I've said that before too. And then there are the Quines 

It's still hard writing for an American audience.

The discussion of Dune and Star Wars among pseudo-leftist pundits is a corollary to Trumpist rage: varieties of childishness. And these overlap with the fanboys and fangirls of the cinematic fanboy Todd Haynes. The film critic on a website for "democratic socialists", named for anti-democratic moralists, violent political puritans, celebrates self-identified heirs of de Sade and Huysmans.

Haynes now has a tag. Haynes, Mad Men, and the nostalgia of Americans for their own childhood, or fantasies of others' youth. "They are not intellectuals, but occasionally dream that they will be. That is their secret ambition." 

Liberals and liberalism, and the whig history of the demimonde.

The Velvet Underground, like most of the self-identified avant-garde were pretentious. Pretension is defensive posturing, signaling insecurity. Lou Reed always got high on his own supply, and he was an asshole. But sometimes fuckups get something something right, describing complexity honestly, That's the basis of a large percentage of what's called "modern art". 

Picasso in 1906 is flying blind. In 1916 he's full of shit, a poseur, but still struggling. The need for easy answers, the indulgence in and struggle against kitsch, lying —to yourself and others—vs honesty,  becomes the conflict between art and pose, rebellion and its marketing.

All the albums I put out after this are going to be things I want to put out. No more bullshit, no more dyed hair, faggot junkie trip. I mimic me better than anyone else so if everybody else is making money ripping me off, I figure maybe I better get in on it. Why not? I created Lou Reed. I have nothing even faintly in common with that guy, but I can play him well, really well. 

All of this is in the context of conservatism, and an honesty that undermines intention. People who say "conservatism is the new punk rock" are right. Punk rock was always self-destructive.

I've repeated this quote from Candy Darling enough. “I’ve been up all night alone, wondering about my identity. Trying to look for an explanation for living this strange, stylized sexuality."

I'll add another, about the lover Reed dumped, from Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk.

p. 155

Eileen Polk: Everybody hung out at Max's, and then the New York Dolls played their famous show in drag at the 82 Club. I started hanging out there. The 82 Club was a famous drag-queen bar on Fourth Street, around the corner from CBGB's, which wasn't happening yet. I started going to the 82 Club real early on and made friends with all the drag queens. That's where I met Rachel, Lou Reed's girlfriend. Rachel was a drag queen who was very feminine and really nice. The drag queens liked me, but Rachel was especially nice. One night when she was really drunk she told me that she could never be a guy because she had such a small dick. Then she showed it to me, and it was really small. I said, "That's okay, Rachel. That's okay." And she said, "Well, it better be, because I make a better woman than I do a man."

Then she met Lou Reed, and he was the man of her dreams. Apparently it was love at first sight. Rachel told me, "I've met Lou Reed! I've made it! This is it! I knew this was gonna happen! Something good was gonna happen to me, and this is it and I'm in love!" She was just ecstatic.

Lou would just sit in the corner and Rachel would keep everyone away from him. She announced to everyone, "I don't want anyone near him. I don't want anyone to talk to him. He's mine." And everyone respected that at the 82 Club. All the other drag queens stayed away from him, and all the women did too. Rachel said, "He's mine," but she didn't threaten anybody. I felt like everybody wanted something good to happen for her. And when it did, everyone was happy.

p. 206 

Mary Harron: We all went off to the Locale and none of us had any money and we couldn't order food. I remember Lou Reed ordered a cheeseburger because I was so hungry. Lou was with Rachel, who was the first transvestite I'd ever met. Very beautiful, but frightening. But I mean definitely a guy: Rachel had stubble.

Legs and John were chatting with Lou so I sat next to Rachel, and I asked her what her name was—him, what his name was—and he said, "Rachel."

I thought, Right. That kind of shut me up for a bit. I think I actually sort of tried to make conversation with him, but Rachel wasn't talkative. I think that was the sum total of our conversation.

A review of Halston, on Netflix 

This is not a new lane for Murphy, and once again it seems revolutionary — how rare to make an entire five-episode series dedicated to amplifying such a sour, cynical note — until one realizes there is nowhere for this story to go. Certainly the notion that the modern history of gay life is one as colored by repression and self-loathing as much as by the power of expression is a rich vein throughout Murphy’s work. Just last year, he produced a feature film remake of “The Boys in the Band,” the 1968 play that is the ultimate theatrical howl of isolation and pain. Previously, Ben Platt in “The Politician” and Darren Criss in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” played queer men driven by ambition that looks a lot like misdirected rage.

I went to school with the director. He was a screenwriter for I shot Andy Warhol, directed by Mary Harron, quoted above. And both films have the same producer, Christine Vachon, who went to school with Haynes, and has worked him from the beginning of his career. One of my closest friends at the time was a consultant on the Warhol film; we went to the premiere. At some point after that I remember Callie saying, dryly, that it was still safe to assume every homosexual was self-hating until proven otherwise—for Boys in the Band see The Queer Art of Failure and How to be Gay, both from the second decade of this century. Vachon also worked with Cindy Sherman on her only, failed, film; Sherman's work documenting not homosexual but female self-hatred. The absurdity is the lie they tell themselves—if indeed they do—that they're liberal. Maybe it's more that earnest liberals claim them as their own. Liberalism has turned self-hatred, for some, into self-affirmation.

And this brings us back to science fiction,  the geek art of failure unacknowledged, building worlds rather than observing this one. 

Krugman in 2021

The blogger John Rogers once noted that there are two novels that can shape the lives of bookish 14-year-olds: “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Lord of the Rings.” One of these novels, he asserted, is a childish fantasy that can leave you emotionally stunted; the other involves orcs.

Well, I was a bookish 14-year-old, but my touchstones were two different novels: Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” and Frank Herbert’s “Dune.”

Many social scientists, it turns out, are science fiction readers. For example, quite a few experts on international relations who I know are fanatics about the TV version of “The Expanse.” I think it’s because good science fiction involves building imaginary worlds that are different from the world we know, but in interesting ways that relate to the attempt to understand why society is the way it is.

 Angus Deaton, Dani Rodrik and John Quiggin, and Krugman in 1996

At the deepest level, opposition to comparative advantage -- like opposition to the theory of evolution -- reflects the aversion of many intellectuals to an essentially mathematical way of understanding the world. Both comparative advantage and natural selection are ideas grounded, at base, in mathematical models -- simple models that can be stated without actually writing down any equations, but mathematical models all the same. The hostility that both evolutionary theorists and economists encounter from humanists arises from the fact that both fields lie on the front line of the war between C.P. Snow's two cultures: territory that humanists feel is rightfully theirs, but which has been invaded by aliens armed with equations and computers.

Any systems engineer knows that efficiency in a system is in inverse proportion to stability.

Krugman indulged a fantasy; his preferences were founded in aesthetics before they were founded in ethics: he rationalized a desire, wanted to believe an absurdity, defended it as science and mocked anyone who opposed him as irrational. 

This is really interesting — how Just In Time set the stage for the supply-chain mess https://t.co/WR0FRTGRa5

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 1, 2021

The only thing interesting is that he didn't learn from his mistakes.

How is the philosophy behind Asimov's Foundation less authoritarian than The Fountainhead? Krugman conflates art and illustration, and art and science, "truth and lies".  His link on The Expanse is to Drezner, indulging the horse-race model of political science and IR, the academic origin of the model of journalistic "objectivity" and passivity. Both Krugman and Drezner imagine statements without subtext, themselves without subtext. Their intellects are brittle, though Krugman is "intelligent". The only thing interesting about Dune is how it describes the desires and fantasies of its makers and its audience, and civilization on earth in 2021.

Tagged The Pictures Generation, the aestheticized politics of 80s art, made in the shadow of something worshipped and feared—hated—indulging reaction as radical. That's the mix that turns conservatism into fascism.  Needless to say I have more sympathy for Candy Darling and Rachel Humphreys, who's buried in Potter's Field, than Lou Reed. I have sympathy for them as people.

I want the illusion.
Do you want the illusion or do you want the illusion to be real? 
What’s the difference?
One means that you have an appreciation of the arts. The other means that you’re a fascist.

Art makes the world more interesting than it is. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

Living your life as art, and imposing your art on others is more than authoritarianism. Authoritarianism only demands that you behave a certain way. It doesn't demand that you believe. Coerced belief is the definition of fascism. I think Foucault was trying to construct a new conservatism. Neoliberalism ain't it.

[I've used this one before.]

I've made so many riffs on monarchists and monarchism, on liberalism, on the left, and right.

Jean-Marie Straub's film, below, was on Jonathan Rosenbaum's top 10 for 2020. In the link above [reaction as radical] he refers to Sirk and Fassbinder as "more defeatist than progressive". The man in Straub's film is reciting Georges Bernanos. It's hard to get more defeatist than Bernanos. The film is dedicated to Godard.

I added new tags for Herzog, and Richter and Polke and Fassbinder.

This is funny.  [The formatting at New Yorker page is terrible. I've made things clearer]

"WERNER HERZOG INSULTS HIS BETTERS"

On the occasion of a complete retrospective of Werner Herzog’s films at the Pompidou Center, in Paris, Le Monde published, today, an interview with the director, which contains the following unpleasant response to a question from the critic Jacques Mandelbaum:

You’re usually counted, alongside Werner Schroeter or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among the directors who launched the new German cinema in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Do you agree with this? 

[WH] It’s a factual and technical coincidence. In reality, I never participated in any of their collective projects, I never shared their ideas, which I found mediocre, and I wasn’t friends with them. I grew up poor and worked in a factory, and considered them petits-bourgeois who played with the idea of world revolution and whose political analyses seemed absurd to me. At the time, I was considered a fascist for this. So I’ve always been solitary and isolated in my work.

It’s true that there was a lot of casual talk of revolution at that time; but nobody who loves the cinema remembers Fassbinder for his political views or cares very much about them. Fassbinder is an artist of enduring significance, and his “Berlin Alexanderplatz”—and not only that series—is greater than anything Herzog has done. 

And Schroeter, a true visionary who has worked more or less under the radar for forty years, knows the real meaning of professional solitude and isolation. His 1991 film “Malina” has an ecstatic ferocity that is in a different league from Herzog’s self-righteous sarcasms.

"...nobody who loves the cinema remembers Fassbinder for his political views or cares very much about them."

If you can't feel the reactionary sensibilities in Fassbinder, the taste of fascist shit, you miss the point.
Richard Brody is an idiot fop.

All art is "political". Politics has nothing to do with "intent".

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte
repeats of repeats of...  because I was in the mood.



Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

I think of Fassbinder

I experienced the modern version of The Floating World for the first time in the late 90's, at a small private party in a rented room on the lower east side. I said to someone it felt like Limbo as an airport lounge in 1974. The soundtrack was Air, and I amused myself a bit more by deciding that Prada was Halston in brown.

The effect is akin to a narcosis that not only slows but regulates motion. It's Chaplin's Modern Times at 5 frames per second, with the gears wrapped in fine silk: aestheticized anesthetic motion. The rhythms, bass and snare and little clicks invite improvisatory response, touches of free will in a rigidly deterministic world. At 1:20 when the strings come in and at 1:29 when they modulate and the plane begins to glide across the screen I get a shiver of aphasia.
And the the scream at 0:26 is Hitchcock.





Voodoo Lounge, Las Vegas. 4 AM, Feb, 2008

Doris Days, To Ulrike M,  I:Cube, Adore,  FC Kahuna, Hayling

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte

old and new.



Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

I think of Fassbinder

I experienced the modern version of The Floating World for the first time in the late 90's, at a small private party in a rented room on the lower east side. I said to someone it felt like Limbo as an airport lounge in 1974. The soundtrack was Air, and I amused myself a bit more by deciding that Prada was Halston in brown.

The effect is akin to a narcosis that not only slows but regulates motion. It's Chaplin's Modern Times at 5 frames per second, with the gears wrapped in fine silk: aestheticized anesthetic motion. The rhythms, bass and snare and little clicks invite improvisatory response, touches of free will in a rigidly deterministic world. At 1:20 when the strings come in and at 1:29 when they modulate and the plane begins to glide across the screen I get a shiver of aphasia.
And the the scream at 0:26 is Hitchcock.





Voodoo Lounge, Las Vegas. 4 AM, Feb, 2008

Doris Days, To Ulrike M,  I:Cube, Adore,  FC Kahuna, Hayling

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte

Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

Doris Days- To Ulrike M.
I think of Fassbinder

[a repeat from October 08]

Running out of things to say, again.

Smart questions for stupid people:
What's the relation of this to this
[more here]

What's the relation of a NY Times review of a Martin Kippenberger exhibit to the debate within the American Philosophical Association over discrimination against homosexuals (limited specifically -and pathetically- to whether or not universities that have policies viewed as discriminating should be allowed to post on the APA's jobs page?

The simple answer concerns the relation of rationalism to optimism and the desire, institutionalized as an unacknowledged requirement, to see yourself in the best light at the expense of any understanding of your position in world (outside your imagination.)

It just occurred to me, embarrassingly late, that this is just another a debate over multiculturalism in the academy. But it's not like anyone can question the notion of accredited Christian Universities so all that's left is the fight in a subsidiary organization in one field in the humanities: over who can post on the philosophy department version of craigslist.
It's like drawing a line in the sand, on your living-room floor.

Read the Kippenberger article and if you know the work or knew the man himself, and some of you did, compare it to what you know and to the following simple thumbnail sketch:

Kippenberger was a German who hated Germans, a fan of America who hated America, a lover of high art who hated snobbery and a lover of popular culture disgusted by vulgarity. He hated celebrity but wanted to be and became one. He lived a suicidal life and saw himself as dying for our sins, but knew what he was doing and knew his sense of tragic humor would amuse us and allow him the glorification he needed. And he was an asshole. But the communication is what lasts, not the melodrama. Pieces could be powerful -precise though you'd never know how the precision came about- charmingly nihilist, or pathetic. His last works were elegiac hippy utopianism, and lovely for it. His direct antecedent in German culture would be Fassbinder and his offspring for Europe at large might be Houellebecq, though the relation of the democratic to the aristocratic arts makes things more complex.

Jerry Saltz of all people is a little better.

The APA hubub reminds me of debates over academic "freedom": the pretense that some socially constructed orders are absolutes not out of formal or structural/social necessity but because of some higher moral standing.
Idealism and democracy don't mix. And any defense of democracy must defend it for what it is not what you want it to be.

As always: the rule of law exists to oppose the rule of reason/ the rule of reason will always become the rule of the reasonable/ the rule of the reasonable will always become the rule of unreason.
---

"One of the most important aspects of this debate is in what sort of image we wish to create of our field..."

A small minority of your membership is bigoted. I would expect nothing else.

As you've just admitted your interest is not principle or logical consistency but politics, and the shallow politics at that of optics. "What will the [gay] neighbors say?"
The issue for you is less discrimination against others than your own self-image. That's why they call it "liberal guilt." But I think students, even homosexual students, are smart enough to know where they're not wanted, and that your energy would be better used telling them they're welcome where you are than feeling shamed by association with idiots from whom you can easily separate yourself.

If you were interested in principle you'd search yourself for lapses, down to your foundations, and face them. Then you'd be able to recognize those situations such as this one where casuistry is the only option. No I don't think we'll be able to remove accreditation from Wheaton College, or Pepperdine, or Bob Jones University, any more than we could remove it from Harvard Business school (though it and others like it are equally deserving.) Pick your fight: know what and why you're fighting and whom you're trying to help, and decide what best serves your goal.

Intentions alone mean nothing. Rationalism unchecked serves nothing more than narcissism and by its own rules can't even recognize the fact, as you can't recognize that the only interests you're focused on with right now are your own.
And I shouldn't have to explain to a philosophy professor why popularity is not a good foundation for an argument.
---
Even this is about prestige.
Actual logic is secondary, because in this case the only applicable logic is worldly.
That's what amazes me.

Warnung vor einer heiligen Nutte

Listening to the second in a series of mixes by the house DJ at a boutique hotel in Paris and wondering at the first track. Looking it up and realizing both what should have been obvious and how it makes perfect sense.

There I held a trembling hand
Seeking shelter in strange apartments
Til the day they turned her in
Being Judases of nowadays

Doris Days-To Ulrike M.
I think of Fassbinder

The problems of being a christian evangelist from the US in an Islamic country: 

"N.S. baby." My father's version: 'no sympathy. 

Has there ever been an evangelical movement not linked to economic and political expansion? 

[Rereading years later the article is almost comic]

From Richard Bernstein's review of of Amos Elon's new book on the history of the Jews in Germany:

"But [German acceptance] was not to be, because the conformist tyranny that Germany was unable to put into the past (until the Allied conquest of World War II)[sic] is exactly what prevented the emancipation of the Jews."

How does war end "conformist tyranny"? Did the Civil War end it for the American South? The diplomatic courtesy is silly. The Germans never understood democracy and don't understand it now.

[see Jason Stanley]

Again and again over the past 50 years democracy is described as necessary for Germany as castration is seen by some as necessary for a sex offender. But the underlying assumption, the banality of democracy, is never opposed. Germany is an autistic country, emotionally numbed by the past and actively engaged in the production of production, of order, engineering and design, unable to create a new emotional order out of the physical world. Gerhard Richter, the country's most famous living artist put it well when he described why he believes in nothing: for Germans belief is dangerous.

But one can still wonder, why not 'believe' in democracy?

Examples of this struggle abound in German culture since the war. Since when did Fassbinder ever believe in democracy? Watch Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire and listen carefully to the conversation between the two angels sitting in the car in an automobile showroom. Even Heinrich Böll is more a celebrant of martyrdom than democracy.

Finally it's conformity, not democracy, that's allows Germans, and Europeans generally, to express their dislike for this war. Do readers here understand the irony?

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I've always thought of democracy as politics, mixing high and low. I hadn't come to terms with the number of people who can only refer to belief as something ideal, so that even their belief in democracy or republicanism becomes anti-political. Theorists aren't practitioners.

Democracy is game with rules, like chess. Chess has no foundation in "truth" Chess is secular.