On a Sunday evening, I gather my dogs, pour a glass of wine, fire up the grill, and repair to the deck with the Sunday New York Times. For a conservative, this is a guilty pleasure. But this week, I am afraid, it caused me to lose my religion.
A recent e-mail exchange with our Dean raised the following question: What team is a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers supposed to hate? This was the provocative statement: “My distaste for the Cubs meant that, even if the White Sox had lost to the Brewers this weekend, I could have seen something good in the matter.” Surely, to hate like this is to be happy forever. But who can we despise? And who will detest us?
The easy answer is the Cubs, but I have bad news. They are just not that into us. During last July’s four game debacle at Miller Park, I overheard a Cubs fan say that it would take years before he could hate us like he hates the Cardinals. Ours would be hate unrequited. Oh, sure, they might call and ridicule us when St. Louis isn’t around. We’d be just any port in a storm.
One tricky situation faced by many academics is how to respond to criticism of their work that the scholar does not believe is accurate or justified. A lot of scholars, in my opinion, don’t do this very effectively. The less effective responses are those in which the author is clearly indignant or angry. A reader who is not intimately familiar with the details is, I think, moved to conclude that the amount of emotion correlates to the degree to which the criticism has met its mark. I’ve always thought that the more persuasive response is one of faint bemusement—faint, because if the tone is openly mocking, that risks the perception among readers that the target did not take the criticism seriously enough.
This is all a long prelude to a quote I’ve come across today from one of my favorite writers, E.P. Thompson. (I’ve actually used Thompson in a legal writing class before to demonstrate that the rules of good paragraph structure transcend disciplines: IRAC is not just something made out of whole cloth by legal writing professors.) Here’s Thompson responding to criticisms of one of his articles in a book by Mark Harrison:
Harrison also pronounces that my article “has a number of shortcomings, which will be examined more fully in chapter 6.” Since chapter 6 does not mention my article, and the shortcomings are identified nowhere else in the book, I am still waiting for the blow to fall.
Zing!