Why Doctor Bawb Avoids Reading Most Stuff He Already Agrees With.

Chronicle of a journey from youthful
know-it-all to old-fart astonishment.

Reading, hearing or looking at stuff that Dr. Bawb already agrees with is, mostly, boring. Kinda like the picture on the right shows. This is no "Eureka!" discovery to anyone over Age Three who ever went to school, sat in some House of Worship or got married more than three times. We know what's coming and what's coming good or bad, is the Same Old Crap: Long Division and "Whaddaya mean 'Inappropriate?'"

So even while Doctor Bawb's dad was Left and Doctor Bawb remains Left [a reliable sign of having liked one's dad according to one long-time buddy] poring over William F. Buckley's God And Man At Yale brought only "Why are you wasting time reading that crap?" onto my pizza-faced, teenaged head. Mommie Dearest's chiming in with the observation that Buckley and Adolf Hitler combed their hair alike cut little ice. Especially followed up by "I bet HIS mother didn't have to remind HIM to tuck in HIS shirt 50-times a day!" Yes the future Doctor Bawb nearly asked: "Buckley or Adolf?" But dad had serious-ass rules about back-talking. A few years before, during a stupefyingly dull Sunday ride into long-ago-semi rural LA County, Mommie Dearest mused aloud about her sulking, Cerebral-Palsied son stowed in the back seat: "You know, one day maybe he'll become a Farmer." Dad nearly drove off the road. A father-son procedural question was clarified forever that afternoon. Which brings Dr. Bawb's Lefto bad taste to TNR and Jon Chait's

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b smackdown of Naomi Klein's equally Lefto Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Chait beat me to this new "Axis of Evil" beat-down by three or four days. Today Time and the LA Times are whaling the hell outta Naomi for her over-simplified idea of everything like she was Dick Nixon or George W. Bush.

As this screed's title reads, Dr. Bawb stays away from books, especially long books, he's pretty sure he'll mostly agree with if not completely. Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism was a slog but worth it since Pointy-Head Intellectuals generally agreed Hannah's book was pretty definitive on how and why Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Robert Mugabe all got to the same positions. Dick Cheney gamed the system. Hillary always was Nixon in a Pantsuit. so, at least for the present, the US hasn't had a real heart and soul "presidential timber" Fascist since Charles A. Lindbergh in 1940.

TThat's Hermann Goering [far right] presenting Lindy with a Nazi medal on behalf of der Fuhrer during one of Lucky's "fact-finding" trips abroad. When FDR refused to reinstate Lindy's Air Force Commission for our National Hero. This was called "petty jealousy" by the GOP in some book Doctor Bawb was thumbing through at UCLA's Powell Library during his $1.50/hr. "Shelving Years." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh
Nor was Lindy big on the Jews as his SRO address at Madison Square Garden before America First! "If it isn't one thing, it's another," as the late and much-missed Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna would say. Or "THINGS CHANGE!" as today's wildly pro-NeoConservative GOP and Crazy John Hagee-loving AIPAC assuredly will say ad nauseum. So let's go back to Naomi Klein - who along with Gilda and FDR is probably a better all-around human being than any of the aforementioned loons ever thought
about being. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21470 and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Israel_Public_Affairs_Committee and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee.

First, given Doctor Bawb's premise of avoiding books he probably agrees with anyway, cut the girl some slack. She's just 38, good looking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Klein especially for a Public Intellectual [that term's a problem for Shrinks like or unlike Dr. Bawb]. But even on whatever in hell a "World Public Intellectual" ranking is, Naomi's #11 and top female, too.

Before Dr. Bawb bores y'all hopelessly by rehashing a wasted education and career testing at-risk South-Central LA kids and adults, let's spin the USC Grad School "Way-Back" Machine. This bring up a basic Test Measurement variable called The Hawthorne Effect. Put simply, what in THE HELL are we measuring and why bother? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect. To go didactic ever so briefly on y'all, here's what it means: An experimental effect in the direction expected but not for the reason expected; i.e., a significant positive effect that turns out to have no causal basis in the theoretical motivation for the intervention, but is apparently due to the effect on the participants of knowing themselves to be studied in connection with outcomes measured.[6]

Put simply, when Author/Psychologist James Dobson referred to Dr. Joe Nicolosi as "America's leading authority on PRE-GAY [my caps] toddler behavior" Dr. Bawb wondered just how the fuck much USC Grad School has the far-more illustrious Dr. Dobson forgotten? The fact that PRE still means "BEFORE" or "HASN'T EVER HAPPENED" was thrown out as being too complex for Dr. Bawb's mind to grasp. Same thing with Naomi Klein's 11th-Ranked World Public Intellectual: All that means is Ten People got more votes than Naomi from 20,000 readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. Impressive, huh! Here's the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2005_Global_Intellectuals_Poll. [Dr. Bawb welcomes explanations as to how Tom Friedman made #16 on any MTA subway car much less the New York Times or the world].

Naomi Klein SHOULDN'T be getting "piled on" during this or any other week. She's just written a more detailed account of what Willaim Greider wrote in One World, Ready or Not and The Soul of Capitalism.
Or Benjamin Barber's Jihad Versus McWorld. Naomi's even gone and built on Fernand Braudel's magisterial three-volume History of Capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel.
And for this, Jonathan Chait, Time Mag and every other Wanna-Be-On-A-Dumbass-100-Intellectuals-List jumps Naomi's bones.

Sexism? Too easy. If FoxNews can put it on Five-by-Eight Cards and sticks to easy-to-say words, Sean Hannity will handle that. Dr. Bawb's best guess [remember, he AVOIDS 571-page books he agrees with - It's an OLD-AGE thang, see?] is Naomi overlooked Dr. Freud's "Overdetermination" principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdetermination. Economic systems, like Dreams, are determined by any number of factors and NOT just one. Forget Milton Friedman or Leo Strauss or even Neo-Conservatism - the latter of which is desiccating as this is written. You're young, you have your act together and some Jonathan Chait-wannabe is gonna be there to get Andy Warhol's Fifteen-Minutes of Fame. It goes with the territory as Dr. Bawb's own Sweet Bride had to remind him over and over.