I earlier wrote that surprisingly this year's AHA convention was not strongly focused on the purported sins of the Bush administration. Well, I was wrong. According to bloggers at the convention several neutrally titled sessions turned into anti-Bush diatribes. Even one on the problems of making classified documents available to scholars turned into a "Bush is worse than Putin" rant. The worst apparently was a "well attended" session on "hubris" and "irrationality" in foreign policy at which Carolyn Eisenberg, from Hofstra, chided her colleagues for not being partisan enough, and then launched into a rant in which she equated Iraq with Vietnam, asserted that Nixon and Kissinger were madmen, and portrayed Rumsfeld as insane and Bush as his puppet. This is what passes for scholarly analysis in today's AHA. Oh, by the way, the audience gave her a rousing ovation at the end of her talk. Maybe I won't make it to the Philadelphia meeting next year after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment