Political psychosis

... I'm seeing it whenever I look in the direction of history as a profession. Political psychosis has a displacing effect. The sufferer loses grasp of topicality and obsesses about party-defined "issues."

Here is an historiographic blog (?) set up by three UCLA history grad students; they should be overflowing with new ideas, reactions to readings, gripes about professors, textbooks, and schools of thought ... it contains almost no history content. It features the lowest grade of tit-for-tat partisan nonsense available. Recycled opinion pages.

If you want to drink the full draft of despair, look at the boilerplate political opinion churned out by professors on History News Network.

Do people become historians because they cannot get into journalism schools? History is an avocation. If politics consumes your waking hours, congratulations! You've found a different avocation. Go forth and master that realm.

If the history profession has become a holding pen for op-ed wannabes, the day of the amateur has arrived with peals of thunder.

Let's show them how to do history, my friends. Not that they would even notice.