Javanese metallurgy

Hope you had a good weekend. If it didn't go that well, you might take some consolation from the fact that it still may have been more enjoyable than the past few days have been for dozens of interns at Fox News, talk radio and the Republican National Committee.

Those kids probably expected to do whatever passes for fun in such circles, but their plans were spoiled by the recent attention drawn to the posthumous publication by Duke University Press of an arcane anthropological dissertation on the role of blacksmithing and other cottage industries in an Indonesian village.

That new book, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, happens to have been written by Dr. Ann Dunham, the late mother of President Barack Obama. And that means if you're Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Steele or John Boehner, then you need to be against this book and everything it may or may not stand for.

So this weekend, while the rest of us were doing whatever it is we were doing, the interns of all these right-wing luminaries were busily scouring Dunham's dissertation, highlighters in hand, looking for anything that might be distorted, misquoted, misrepresented or otherwise cast in an unflattering light if taken out of context and tossed sideways before the public as something insidious, invidious, socialist or secretly Muslim.

We probably won't hear the full story until years from now, but I'm predicting that this hastily ordered "opposition research" fishing expedition in the president's mother's dissertation will produce at least one convert. Most of the interns — unquestioning true believers — will do their best to stick to the parameters of the assignment, highlighting words and passages that might be made to sound frightening to a reflexively xenophobic and anti-intellectual audience. But somewhere, in some sub-basement of Fox News or Heritage or one of the other such institutions of the noise machine, some lonely intern is finding himself or herself surprisingly fascinated by Dunham's description of village life and of the exotic, challenging and rewarding calling of the field anthropologist.

And somewhere down the line, perhaps, Duke University Press will be publishing that former intern's own dissertation, exploring the eerie similarities between the tribal animosities and fetishes of some remote people group and the practices of their former bosses at Fox News.