The Case of the Missing Mojo

In the film, “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), Dr. Evil assembles his minions around a long conference table to inform them of his latest plot. “As you know,” he begins, “every diabolical scheme I've hatched has been thwarted by Austin Powers. And why is that, ladies and gentlemen?”

“Because you never kill him when you get the chance and you're a dope?” sneers Scott, his estranged teen-aged son.

“No, because Austin Powers has '’mojo.’”

Number Two, Dr. Evil’s chief male henchman: “Mojo?”

Frau, his chief henchwoman: “Yes, mojo. The mojo is the life force, the essence, the libido, the ‘right stuff.’”

“It's what the French call a certain ‘I don't know what,’” Dr. Evil adds.

And indeed, using a time machine, Dr. Evil goes back to the 1960’s and steals Austin Powers’ mojo.

Apparently he also stole mine, because around 2000 I realized it was gone.

This isn’t funny. Stop laughing.

If Austin Powers’ mojo was the power to defeat evil and get laid, mine was the self-confidence and joy in my profession that had allowed me to be a productive research scholar.

At first I had trouble getting people to believe me. My therapist thought I was being self-critical. But she humored me by referring me to a colleague who dealt extensively with instances of blocked productivity. He started off by asking me to tell him about what I had managed to publish in the past five years. I told him. He almost literally kicked me out of his office.

“You’re more productive than 75 percent of the people at OSU!”

So he was of no help. But I knew I was in a lot of trouble.

I had several book projects already in the production pipeline: three co-edited volumes and a book on the Overland Campaign during the Civil War. But once they appeared, there was nothing behind them.

I still don’t know what happened to my “mojo.” However, I did find an outlet that stopped me from being crippled altogether.

In December 2003 I began to keep a blog of sorts, although I had heard only vaguely of blogs and had never actually seen one. So my “blog” was actually a series of linked web pages, which I wrote mostly for myself—I had no idea that anyone could read it because I wasn’t sure how anyone could even find it. A year later I got a proper blogging platform (Blogger). I called it “War Historian,” which soon moved to a WordPress platform and became “Blog Them Out of the Stone Age,” and eventually obtained something of a following. But that lay years in the future.

In the beginning, I called my assemblage of linked web pages “Interrogating the Project of Military History,” (henceforth IPMH) and at this point my walkabout went online.

I’m glad that happened when it happened. Because it enabled me to report and reflect in detail on a colleagues’ readings course I had asked to audit informally. The colleague was Claire Robertson (now retired), whom Rush would term a Feminazi; and the course was “Women, Colonialism, and Sexuality.”

The posts over the next few days will be drawn from IPMH. And trust me, they will provide us a useful lens through which to examine this “Is Rush a racist” question. Of course, the question itself is trivial. It’s the larger issue of the clash between new conceptualizations of gender, race and class, on the one hand; and people who resent the hell out of them, partly because they were bound to piss some people off--that was actually kind of the point; and partly because of the way these conceptualizations have entered the public discourse in a way that has pissed and still pisses off a lot of people, occasionally including myself.

But it is possible that some things are worthy of engagement, even if they piss us off. Maybe because they piss us off.

So stay tuned. You’re going to find this Feminazi course fascinating.