Stanley Fish is the David Broder of academics

[BurtWorm]

The epitome of old fartery:



http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/do-you-miss-him-yet/?hp

March 8, 2010, 10:15 pm
Do You Miss Him Yet?

By STANLEY FISH



I know you’re not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.

What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people. The other 290 or so said things like “No way”; “Are you kidding?”; ”Are you mad?”;“What a ridiculous and insulting premise!”; “I’ll miss him like a rash”; “This must be a satire”; “Bush is a sociopath”; “George Bush has destroyed this country”; “History won’t forgive him”; and (a popular favorite) “I hate the man.”

Well it’s a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush’s rehabilitation are beginning to pop up. One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota. Occupying the right side (from the viewer’s viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture. Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: “Miss me yet?” The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don’t.

...

[tularetom]

1. Should we know who this Fish person is?

And besides the fact that he seems to have been conscripted into the bush history rewriting army, why his opinion matters?

Just the fact that the NY Times published this drivel shows how far that rag has sunk.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. He's the Morris Zapp of real life

An article about him from 1999: http://www.slate.com/id/1004257/

I'd heard of Zapp long before I'd heard of Fish. The Zapp character is a self-important clown, who may be intelligent, but thinks that the sun shines out of his arse so brightly that he ought to be put on a pedestal to enlighten the world. And he will say anything to be controversial. Lodge gives Zapp some personal integrity - he helps any down-trodden characters that he actually knows; but if the Zapp character is what a friend get from basing something on Fish, then I wouldn't bother reading any of his writing.

[QC]

6. That is a fantastic book! n/t

[BurtWorm]

7. Fascinating essay.

Makes Fish sound more interesting than he's been lately. Lately he's just been an annoying old fart.

[RandomThoughts]

2. Social control is based on length of memory verse amount of crap.

If society can have history rewritten in 2 years, then any group only has to wait and do not wrong during that time, and they can emerge with a complete make over.


I see rewrites almost every day in the news where they change the story of what happened in the past. Then they repeat it as if it is true.

And they do that to us that pay attention on this site, how long do you think it will take for low information voters to forget about his war crimes?


Sometimes it is difficult not to resort to thoughts of nihalism to fix things, thinking about manipulations like that is one of the toughest.

[Skink]

3. come in with a little nuance and see what happens.

[QC]

5. This is not a recent development: Stanley Fish has been a fraud for decades now.

I remember first encountering him in grad school, back in the 80s, when people were raving over him, and marveling at what a transparent bullshit artist he was.

He's still one of the highest paid academics in the world, though.