Reflections on a Lost Year

Even for us who haven’t contracted COVID or whose families have been somehow unscathed, 2020 was a lost year.  I struggle to not mourn the loss of familiar routines and pastimes when so many have been infected, or worse, lost loved ones in the pandemic, but sometimes I backslide.  The six-week winter break has begun, the first sustained period off work since we went to remote instruction, leaving me time to ruminate on the situation.

I began the year with a small irony.  On New Year’s Eve, the day China reported its first COVID cases to the World Health Organization, I was on a flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco.  I had spent the previous week in Hong Kong and Macau, sightseeing and eating dim sum.  Many of the people I saw wore face masks, but it really didn’t register since it was East Asia in the wintertime and masking is a common practice. 

I think I started noticing the news reports toward the end of January.  Spring semester began, and I was engrossed in work.  The pandemic cropped up periodically in conversation as the weeks went on.  A few people began wearing face coverings here and there.  News reports told of mass lockdowns in China and police checkpoints in Italy, but it still seemed so far away, so unreal. 

As February gave way to March, you began to see large containers of hand sanitizer in classrooms, offices, and public areas on campus.  There were exhortations to wash hands frequently.  Finally, word came down that we were going to remote instruction.  We were given about ten days to make the transition, and the administration predicted we might be able to return before the end of the term.  I took the news in stride and didn’t change my routine.  When the appointed day arrived, I taught my scheduled classes and went home.  And have stayed there ever since.

I am not proud of my complacency; I am puzzled by it.  I’m normally alarmed by news of disasters on the doorstep, but in this case I carried on nonetheless.  Looking back, I am fortunate to not have been infected or infected someone else.   The widespread resistance to mask mandates even as infection rates are again skyrocketing beggars explanation.

For me 2020 bears an eerie parallel to another lost year, 2000.  The main difference is that 2000 was lost to me and this year was lost to us all.  The two years have a lot in common, though, a controversial presidential election being the most prominent feature.  In my case, I spent that year socially distancing by default.  I was recovering from a near-fatal accident that left me permanently disabled, I was facing the loss of my career as a consequence, and my marriage was imploding.  I was hundreds of miles from home in a military hospital temporarily housed in a bare room in a soon to be demolished annex while my family stayed behind.  Then as now, tedium and anxiety over an uncertain future stalked my thoughts.

Given a choice, I would take this year over that.  I am reasonably healthy now, and the prospect of going broke is not a concern at the moment.  The continuous nausea and lack of appetite from the morphine prescribed for my pain aren’t an issue, nor do feelings of malaise keep me in bed some days.  My biggest headaches are technical glitches. If I get cabin fever, I can always go for a walk and come back feeling renewed.

It’s the uncertainty that’s the worst aspect of the pandemic aside from the disease itself.  What will work and school look like after?   Will travel at home or abroad ever be safe?  Can we even socialize normally after this?  Anthony Fauci summed it up for many when recently told an interviewer the thing he looks forward to most is dropping by a bar for a beer and a burger.  That likely won’t happen anytime soon.   I’m still leery of circulating in public unless it’s necessary.  A few months ago, I thought about marking the anniversary of my accident as I normally do.  I made a dinner reservation at a place with outdoor seating.  As the reservation time grew closer, I began to question the wisdom of going out.  I cancelled and spent the evening in.  No point taking unnecessary risks.

Signals are mixed as to how the future plays out.  Hope and dread don’t settle well with each other, but it’s the prevailing sentiment.  On a conference call with higher education administrators, Dr. Fauci said last week that with widespread immunization students and professors could return to the physical classroom as soon as fall semester 2021.  Then again, there is ominous news of a new mutation of SARS CoV-2 running amok in southeastern Britain which has led a number of EU countries to bar British visitors.  Even as I write, reports of yet another mutation in China are making the rounds.

Nevertheless, the pandemic will subside at some point.  There remains the matter of preexisting ills exacerbated by the crisis.  Social division and a slide toward outright violent conflict won’t miraculously subside just because Donald Trump is leaving office.  We’ve arrived at a point where we are incapable of living together.  The last four tears, and this year in particular, have pulled back the screen to reveal us as a fragmented people seething with hatred and resentment.  I don’t think there is any turning back; the damage is permanent.  We’ll return to a form of surface normalcy, but the dysfunction will persist underneath.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Bloody Shirt

 

As the Electoral College casts its vote, the “Stop the Steal” crowd is doubling down on its baffling inability to accept that their man lost the election.  The hyperbole emanating from social media is disturbing.

Although Arizona’s 11 presidential electors cast their votes earlier today for Joe Biden, the Arizona Republican Party retweeted a post from one of the true believers proclaiming, “I am willing to give my life for this fight.”  The AZ GOP appended the comment with its own: “He is.  Are you?”

I want to shrug off rhetoric like this.  Four years ago, I would have simply responded with an eyeroll.  Events since then, and particularly in the past year, make me take it seriously.  It isn’t that I expect mass violence to break out, though months of confrontation between Trump supporters and civil rights activists gives cause for concern.  Inflammatory statements like this tweet are bound to motivate some crazy fool to act on them.

During the countdown to Inauguration Day, expect the heavily surreal political atmosphere to thicken into a pall.  The astounding refusal of the “base” to accept the outcome in the face of contrary evidence reflects a complete break from reality.  Their fealty to a morally bankrupt man has morphed into a quasi-religious cause, with gestures such as the AZ GOP retweet being akin to the waving of a mythic bloody shirt.

Fortunately, I can socially isolate and don’t have to chance the possibility of face to face discussions with these people.  But I did learn the sentiments of some of my students since November 3^rd from their discussion posts and written assignments.  Several of them asserted the election was illegitimate, that votes weren’t counted, that dead people and the “illegals” cast votes, and so forth.  It’s annoying to read this tripe, but I resolved to remain professional (and keep my blood pressure down) by choosing not to engage.  I did the same in my live classes before we went remote, even when the Trumpies became more vocal as the election cycle got closer.

It’s too soon for me to worry about personal confrontations on campus or elsewhere, being that the pandemic has entered another lethal wave.  (That said, another brand of irrationality will cause some of us to refuse masks or to receive the vaccination once it becomes widely available, thereby prolonging the crisis.)  I have the luxury of watching events unfold from my living room.  But we need to learn to live together once the dust has settled, and there is a feeling somehow that a line has been crossed.  Don’t expect the violence of words and of deeds to abate after January 20^th.

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

What Next?

Synopsis: Biden won.  This changes nothing. 

It appears Joe Biden has won the presidency.

I wish I could be more satisfied with the outcome.  The past four years have been demoralizing for anyone who aspires to living in a just and equitable society.  But that doesn’t mean a new administration is going to undo the social damage wrought by its predecessor.  The past few days have not been reassuring.

People on both sides suffer from cognitive dissonance.  Predictably, the “base” is crying that the election was “stolen,” that ballots voted for the President were destroyed or misplaced through the malfeasance of “crooked” poll workers, and so forth.  Their opponents can’t believe that the President wasn’t defeated by a wider margin.  A news article quotes a Planned Parenthood official as registering shock that Biden didn’t win by a landslide, an outcome she found “hurtful.”

These examples show that we live within our own self-constructed ideological bubbles, abetted by the multiplicity of media outlets we curate so that we’re always told what we want to hear.  This tendency predates cable news, the internet, and social media, though.  An apocryphal story made the rounds after Richard Nixon’s 49-state sweep in 1972 in which film critic Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon won because no one she knew voted for him.

Presidential elections are as much about political theater as they are about choosing a chief executive.  They are occasions in which our beliefs and prejudices acquire a performative aspect reflected in the presumed attributes of our favored candidate.  But the 2016 election didn’t have an “off” switch.  This year’s probably won’t, either.  The pervasive anger amongst us that had bubbled just beneath the surface of our national life festered over and won’t be easily contained simply because we’ve replaced the individual at the center of the phenomenon.

Journalists and social scientists struggle to comprehend what animates the President’s most fervent supporters.  I don’t have that problem.  My life has been torn between two conflicting identities, one of which I chose and one that I was born into.   I grew up in a rural, white, working class milieu.  My formative years were steeped in the beliefs and attitudes championed by the base.  The minority of the white working class interested in politics shifted to the Republican Party in 1970s and 80s, even though its policy preferences were manifestly against their interests.  Donald Trump’s populism electrified those who had been seething in silence for decades as social and economic change left them in the dust.  It tapped into their collective id and forced it to the top.  Trump’s defeat will not tamp it down.

People on the left are inclined to use the epithet “fascist” indiscriminately.  Godwin’s Law often haunts the rhetoric.  However, the heightened saliency of populist sentiment since Barack Obama’s election does have fascistic overtones.  Fascism has many definitions, but I will use the characteristics described by Umberto Eco as my analytical model for Trumpian populism.  Eco fused the various strands of fascism into a unified concept he labeled Ur-Fascism.

The first trait Eco identifies is the cult of tradition which holds that tradition (the “way it’s always been done”) is all that’s needed and nothing new needs to be tried.  It’s manifested in an uncritical adherence to fundamentalist Christianity and an evocation of a quasi-mythical past when America was “great.”  The latter conjures up images of a postwar era in which white males dominated the social, political, and economic discourse, and women and minorities knew their place.  A desire for tradition by implication rejects a multicultural society.

The second is a rejection of modernism in the form of Enlightenment era rationalism.  It is the misapprehension that science and religion, which attempt to answer different questions, are diametrical opposites.  An open rejection of science around critical issues ranging from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a symptom, along with denial or a belief in magical thinking pertaining to how they might be addressed.

The third is the cult of action for action’s sake.  Action without recourse to critical thinking is valorized, and is a facet of anti-intellectualism and the rejection of science.

The fourth is the belief that disagreement is treason.  Everyone must believe and act in lockstep, and dissent is not allowed.  Both Trump and his supporters have used the word treason to describe opposition to the President and his administration.

The fifth is fear of difference.  Where to start? 

The sixth is an appeal to middle class frustration.  This is characteristic among the suburban rather than the redneck contingent within the base, though it’s just as applicable to blue collar anxieties.  Automation, globalization, and industrialization in the developing world has rendered traditionally well-paid, low-skilled work obsolete.  Right to work laws, anti-union policies, and the gutting of defined benefit pensions championed by the same Republican politicians they enthusiastically support have further eroded their economic security.  This realization has yet to penetrate, so their frustration will continue to be aimed at the usual suspects (minorities, “illegals,” and the like).

The seventh is obsession with a plot, or an entrenched belief that there is a vast conspiracy against them.  This is pretty much QAnon’s whole schtick, though it’s generalizable to the alt-right as a whole.  You have to marvel at the sort of imagination that could concoct and believe the premise that there is a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the Democratic Party leadership who engage in the sex-trafficking of children, and that only Donald J. Trump can put an end to the horror.  There a long, sorry tradition of conspiracy theories in American culture, but the ones being spread by the alt-right are in a singular category.

Number eight is a self-contradictory view of the enemy.  Our opponents are strong so we must fight them, but we will prevail because they are so weak.  (Repeat this a few times, and it will make sense.)   The base is told that liberals and progressives are weak, and yet they are insidiously powerful.  (Refer to the previous paragraph.)

Contempt for the weak is the tenth characteristic.  Closely related are the eleventh and twelfth, which are heroism and machismo.  There is a streak of male supremacy within the base that they conflate with Americanism.  Their ideal is a white, hetero cis-male who is ready and willing to mete violence against those they perceive as inferior.   Gun culture is intimately interwoven with each of these notions.  The presence of armed, camo clad men at urban protests and rural disaster zones presuming to assert authority they do not legally possess reflects a contempt for the values of civil society and for those who don’t have the balls to flout them.  It goes without saying that women and the non-gender conforming cannot embody these values and must be marginalized.

The thirteenth characteristic is selective populism.  Populism should arise spontaneously, from the bottom up.  Paradoxically, a strong leader is needed to articulate and implement the collective will.  Democratic institutions which obstruct the leader’s will also oppose the true sentiments of the people and are therefore illegitimate.   From the promise to “drain the swamp” to the demonization of congressional leaders opposing him, Trump and his base have evinced this occurrence in a manner without precedent.

The final trait is a proto-Orwellian newspeak.  Reduce ideas to catchphrases.  Reduce nuanced issues to dichotomies.  Shape the discourse through narrowing the political vocabulary.

My analysis so far begs the question of why a formal party organization has not emerged on its own to advance the alt-right movement to power, rather than using the Republican Party as its vehicle.  The answer is twofold.  A key reason which worked against the radical change sought by the base are the checks and balances provided in the Constitution.  Personality was a contributing factor; Donald Trump was indifferent to the intricacies of administration and was perhaps a bit lazy to boot.    

The other reason that the Republican Party itself hasn’t adopted an overtly fascistic platform or that a fascistic third party hasn’t arisen is rooted in the nature of political parties in the U.S.  Our two major parties are coalitions of interests whose constituent components may not have a 100% commonality of interests but rather follow mutually acceptable policy preferences born of compromise.  Strongly ideological parties such as those in European parliamentary systems have never succeeded here.

Those facts are cold comfort and do not undo the polarization of the past four years.  A Biden-Harris administration is not likely to bring the country together, and the fact that the Vice President elect is a woman of color will provoke the alt-right to further rhetorical excess against women and minorities.  A new administration won’t solve systemic racial inequality or the police brutality problem, so the protests will go on with the greater potential for confrontations with armed “patriot” vigilantes. 

And there is still the possibility of Trump refusing to accept the election results and barricading himself in the White House after he’s lost all of his legal challenges while his supporters take to the streets.  A coup is a remote prospect, but Trump can still cause quite a ruckus on the way out.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  Even if he goes quietly, the damage is done.  His presidency may have been a failure, but Donald J. Trump has put his permanent stamp on American political culture.  Whatever comes is next will not be sweetness and light.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Some Headlines

Americans Surge to Polls: ‘I’m Going to Vote Like My Life Depends on It’ (New York Times)

Millions of Mail-in Ballots at Risk in Battleground States (Wall Street Journal)

Study Links Trump Rallies to More than 700 COVID Deaths (Politico) 

With Election Day Looming, an Anxious Nation Hears Rumblings of Violence (Washington Post)

Boards of Election: Fearing Violence, Washington Prepares (Agence France Presse)

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightoot Unveils Security Plan for Election-related Civil Unrest, Urges Peaceful Protests (Chicago Tribune)

Self-Professed 'Proud Boy' Arrested After Allegedly Threatening to Blow Up North Dakota Voting Location (Newsweek)

ICE Agents Told to ‘Be ready’ to Protect Federal Property and Quell Protests on Election Day (Business Insider)

Protests Won’t Be Enough to Stop a Coup (The Atlantic)

Voter Suppression Keeps Students from Polls (USA Today)

In Florida, Voters of Color and Young Voters Have Had Ballots Flagged for Possible Rejection at Higher Rates than Others (Washington Post)

Voting 2020 Updates: Police Pepper Spray Voting Rights Marchers in North Carolina (USA Today)

2 Florida men Accused of Stealing Mail-in Ballots from a Post Office Box (Business Insider)

Berlin's Madame Tussauds Put its Wax Trump Statue in a Garbage Bin Just Days Before US Election (Business Insider)

Think of the Children!

 

At first glance, they looked like any other group of Trump supporters demonstrating for their president.  They were predominately women and kids, maskless naturally.   A pretty typical news photo featured these days on the website of our local newspaper. 

Something in the story’s headline caught my eye.  These people weren’t actually demonstrating for the president or in solidarity with trigger-happy cops.  No, they were demonstrating against child trafficking. 

The ostensible premise for the demo seemed righteous enough until the spokeswoman for the group explained it to the reporter covering it.  They weren’t wearing masks for the commonly given reasons, such as “freedom” or the mythical Americans with Disabilities Act exemption.  Instead, they claimed mandatory masking facilitated child sex trafficking. 

This got my attention and made me read further.  It isn’t that I hadn’t heard this argument before, it’s just that it appears to be garnering increased media attention.  An article on The Intercept website this morning further piqued my curiosity, tying this latest moral panic to QAnon.  QAnon has advanced from the realm of heavy-gutted, gammon-faced, bearded white men to white stay at home moms in yoga pants. 

The manufactured crisis surrounding organized child sex abuse rings has a storied past.  I came of age during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, during which a number of innocent adults were prosecuted and convicted for their alleged ritual abuse of kids in their care.  The best-known example was the McMartin preschool case, which dragged on for years amongst intensive media coverage.  

It began with allegations from a mother with mental health and substance abuse issues.  A credulous district attorney’s office investigated.  A child therapist coaxed lurid stories from young ones who had attended the family-owned daycare featuring secret basement passages and animal sacrifices, which prosecutors accepted at face value.  The resulting trials received national attention. 

Fortunately, the McMartin trials resulted in no convictions.  The charges were eventually dropped.  However, the McMartin family lost their livelihood.  Their daycare was sold and torn down.  It did not have a basement. 

A basement figured prominently in a latter-day child abuse conspiracy theory that almost got innocent people killed: Pizzagate.  Pizzagate originated in an email hacking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta.  The texts of the emails first made their way onto WikiLeaks.  From there, they became a front-and-center topic in the wingnut universe aided in no small part by Alex Jones and InfoWars. 

Somehow, certain readers of routine communications among Clinton campaign staffers saw something deeper at work.  References to pizza became coded references to child sex trafficking.  Along the way, a Washington, DC pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong, became the focus of this nefarious plot, though other businesses were implicated as well.  Comet Ping Pong allegedly had a tunnel network running from its (nonexistent) basement through which the Clinton sex slave ring moved their victims.  As the autumn of 2016 progressed, Comet employees and patrons were harassed by the believers. 

What happened next was a consequence of Jones’ audience trolling.  His on-air persona depicts him as a voice in the wilderness; he frequently tells his followers he can’t do it all alone.  He can’t fight the darkness by himself.  And so, a couple of weeks before Christmas 2016, a deluded nutter named Edgar Welch decided to “self-investigate” Comet Ping Pong.  Armed with an AR-15, Welch drove to DC from his North Carolina home.  Along the way, he recorded a “goodbye video” addressed to his daughters explaining what he was about to do. 

What he did could have been considerably worse.  No one was injured by the three rounds Welch fired into Comet Ping Pong.  Finding no child sex slaves, he exited the building and surrendered to the police waiting outside.  He is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense and assault with a dangerous weapon.  Welch’s soulmates in the alt-right disavowed him, calling the Comet Ping Pong shooting a “false flag” operation designed to discredit them.   

This brand of wingnuttery has been a part of the social landscape since forever, but it gained quasi-respectability in ‘90s when all kinds of absurd rumors swirled around Bill and Hillary Clinton.  It became more accepted during the Obama years.  The Trump upset in 2016 brought its adherents to the forefront. 

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising to find that a belief in conspiracies has gone mainstream.  The Intercept article reflects how far it has penetrated the consciousness of ordinary, otherwise reasonable people.  It is no longer outlandish to believe Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against well-connected pedos, that climate change is a hoax, that the Chinese concocted the coronavirus in a secret lab, that vaccines cause autism, that mandatory masking in public encourages human trafficking, that the survivors of the Newtown and Parkland shootings were really “crisis actors,” that Black Lives Matter is led by Marxists, that antifa is an actual organization, that the Democratic Party is part of the radical left, and so forth.   

The internet democratized access to information.  In the process, it has given respectability to uninformed opinion by making it ubiquitous.  It has also made traditional print journalism economically unviable; the shift to online content rendered full-time reporters redundant.  The concomitant decline of investigative journalism created a vacuum filled by innuendo and rumor.  Post-truth has become real.  

But as the Bard said, the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.  Americans are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  We routinely substitute our personal judgment for empirically established facts.  We scorn science in favor of our own self-serving conception of “common sense.”  Worse still, we ignore the lessons of history and willfully support the counterproductive polices of our political and business leaders. 

The protest moms are undoubtedly sincere in their convictions.  Too bad they ignore the real threats to our future generations.

 

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

From Within

This week marks six months of confinement for me.  Winter has turned to spring to summer and now to autumn.  From within four walls I’ve watched the world sink into madness.

The worst of it has been the senseless loss of people murdered simply going about their daily lives – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.  Then there are all the other maladies afflicting us at the moment.  The alt-right’s escalating provocations against civil rights protesters has made me increasingly uneasy as the November election draws nigh.  Wildfires are running amok in my part of the country, leaving the air thick with smoke and staining the sky an ominous orange hue.  Then there’s the pandemic, which shows no sign of abating and has already added several more months to my sentence now that my college has decided to stay “remote” through spring semester.

There are all kinds of things I could do outside which carry little or no infection risk, but I feel unmotivated.  Perhaps a more accurate description of my mindset is that I’m suffering an uncharacteristic agoraphobia that has gotten worse with time.  I miss being with others even as I dread any human interaction.  I pass the days in a state of free-floating anxiety.  I’ll doodle around the LMS for a couple hours, grade assignments, answer student emails, and violate the sanctity of my own home each Monday holding my required office hour on Zoom.  I’ve come to detest Zoom nearly as much as I’ve come to hate the phrase “unprecedented times.”

Watching the societal breakdown beyond my front door is my main pastime.  Divisions which seemed intractable before March have morphed into insurmountable fissures.  As events careen into bounded chaos, some verities about contemporary politics are made clearer. 

The first is that so-called post-truth politics have become the norm, at least on the right.  The “base” at this point will uncritically believe any crazy assertion put forth by the President, administration officials, or their pundit toadies.  Some examples from this week alone point up the trend.  There is the claim from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services official Michael Caputo that he received death threats because of his collusion with Trump to suppress information concerning the coronavirus pandemic.  Caputo then doubled down, stating there were left-wing “hit squads” ready to stage an armed insurrection to stop the President’s reelection.  He then advised people to “buy ammunition.” 

Another batshit statement that seems to have originated from a northwestern firefighting official and has since gone viral on Facebook is that “antifa” started the wildfires in Washington and Oregon.  (I’m amazed at how Facebook has gone from being a mindless timesuck for teens and twentysomethings to a mindless timesuck for aging wingnuts.)   

If the origin of the antifa arson rumor is true, it can only erode trust in public safety workers.  Law enforcement seems particularly fertile ground for the QAnon conspiracy fad, though we’ve only had small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clues.  In July, the NYPD union president gave an on-air interview to Fox News with a QAnon coffee mug visible in the background.  Last year a Broward County sheriff’s deputy was photographed greeting Vice President Pence with a QAnon patch visible on his tactical vest.  Another unnerving trend is the appearance of the Punisher logo on tactical police vehicles, no question about the intended message there. 

The juxtaposition of QAnon and other alt-right phenomena with the agencies tasked with keeping us safe is troubling.  Right-wing hysteria over Black Lives Matter and antifa illustrate the true role of policing.  The right has all but conceded that law enforcement’s mission is not about protecting and serving all citizens equally, but to defend the propertied classes and act as an occupying force dedicated to enforcing white hegemony.  

The personality types disproportionately drawn to law enforcement reflect an authoritarian streak as it is.  Some are cruel or indifferent to cruelty.  For instance, I recently had a student who had just gotten out of the military.  She was beginning work on a criminal justice degree with an eye toward joining the local police department after graduation.  During a classroom discussion about Abu Ghraib and the Detainee Treatment Act, I noted that torture is considered an ineffective interrogation technique.  My student countered that her NCOs had taught her differently.  It appears my student and her sergeants had slept through their mandatory Geneva Convention trainings.  It also left me asking myself just what kind of police officer she would be.  I suspect I’ll be reading about her in the news someday.  

The valorization of armed violence is as old as American culture.  To be more specific, it’s armed violence by Christian white males that we glorify.  Let’s consider the attitudes of the police to the rise in vigilantism.   The 17-year-old boy who shot three protestors in Kenosha, killing two, walked unchallenged through a police cordon carrying a semiautomatic weapon.  He seemed to be under the delusion that he was there to assist law enforcement, and the nonchalant attitude of the cops did nothing to dissuade him.  After the shooting he walked away, again unchallenged, got in his car, and calmly drove home to Chicago.   

Part of me wants to make allowances for the Kenosha shooter’s youth.  But what can we say about the motives of his adult defenders?  President Trump claimed the shooter acted in self-defense, never mind that the fact he came armed and was presumably looking for trouble.  Then there’s the legal defense fund started on a “Christian” fundraising platform which has netted nearly $1 million so far.  The soliciting organization is #FightBack.  This lovely band of trolls proclaims their mission is to “fight back for [a] forgotten America,” notwithstanding the high media profile of said forgotten.  

Time for an aside.  It comes as no surprise that Christian groups are rallying to the shooter’s defense.  Christianity of the evangelical Protestant strain is inextricably bound up with the American right.  The various churches may differ in theology, but their shared ideology emphasizes exclusion and punishment to a degree that can be construed as poorly veiled white supremacism.  Considering that the months of protests arose from civil rights abuses against people of color, their support for a killer of protesters causes the veil to slip further.  

Back to the vigilante problem.  As we have seen, law enforcement has no problem turning a blind eye if they use force against their own preferred targets.  And the problem isn’t new.  George Zimmerman’s acquittal of murdering Trayvon Martin foreshadowed much of what we’re currently seeing.  Of course, being white doesn’t afford absolute protection against violations of civil liberties and civil rights by both official and non-official actors.   

The militarized response to the protesters has emboldened the aggressive element always present among the political right.  One example from this week’s news involves an NPR news crew covering the Oregon firefighting effort.  They were run off public land by armed men who did not identify themselves and probably had as much authorization to be near the fire zone as the reporters.  Another example are reports that armed men are setting up unauthorized roadblocks along evacuation routes, potentially endangering evacuees.

Although isolated incidents, they demonstrate entitlement on the part of civilians being allowed to intimidate their fellow citizens with impunity.  The official stance toward the proliferation of paramilitary “patriot” groups resembles that of the German authorities toward the Freikorps immediately following the First World War.  Rather than being sanctioned for their extralegal actions, they are regarded as allies in preserving the existing order.  As we stumble blindly toward the November election, this stance carries the potential of emboldening further violence against vulnerable populations regardless of the outcome at the polls.   

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Altered Landscape

A few years ago, I joined an adjunct faculty discussion forum on Google Groups.  More of a lurker than a joiner, I’d read some of the discussion threads if they interested me and ignored the others.

The forum was active for a while, then fell mysteriously dormant for the longest time.  I had pretty much forgotten about it when the moderator sent a message asking if we would be interested in reviving it.  It’s been about three weeks, with more than a dozen messages landing in my inbox each day.  I’m still a lurker, but what’s being discussed is alarming.

There was some tension at first.  In any online forum you always have people who want to stir up drama rather than contribute.  In this case, a row came up surrounding an admittedly ill-advised remark by the moderator describing adjunct working conditions as slave labor.  She was called out by one member.  The moderator apologized for her poor choice of words, but as is so often the case with these situations it was more about the complainant than the complaint itself.  There were more recriminations followed by more apologies. The kerfuffle ended when the offended colleague demanded to taken off the mailing list.

That initial unpleasantness aside, the forum topics have generally fallen into two categories.  The first category consists of anecdotes and advice negotiating the unemployment insurance mess arising from the large numbers of people out of work owing to the coronavirus pandemic.  I’ve mostly ignored these posts since I’m teaching a full (adjunct) load this summer and don’t qualify for UI.

Then again, I should probably pay closer attention.  The second thread has to do with the steep learning curve experienced by my colleagues new to online learning.  Our institution’s campuses will remain closed through at least the fall semester.  Official communications contain dire warnings that faculty who fail to complete the distance learning training course will have their fall offers of employment withdrawn.

This requirement has inspired numerous angst-ridden exchanges.  The fear some of them express is as palpable as the written word allows.  It isn’t as much a matter of mastering the LMS and its bewildering array of features, it’s also the state-mandated accessibility requirement that has everyone—myself included—anxious.

The problem is that this is an under-supported mandate for adjuncts.  We are strongly encouraged to add visual media to our courses, but features such as Camtasia or DIY options like YouTube have godawful self-generated closed captioning.  But you have to have closed captioning to comply with the accessibility requirement.  So, a number of disheartened colleagues have had to resort to manually adding the captions.  This is a labor- and time-intensive process when you’re prepping content for a 16-week class.  Similarly, we are required to convert PDF files into more accessible formats and add “alt-tags” to any images.  Both are also labor intensive though not to the despair inducing extent of creating and properly captioning video content.

Naturally, no course preparation work is compensated under our contract, though there have been vague promises of a stipend for the newbies who finish training and build a compliant course.  Those of us who are established online faculty must submit at least one course for review during the fall.  I have exactly one fully compliant course, a shell I created two years ago and which passed muster but was never assigned to teach.  Like my colleagues, I have my work cut out.

All of this begs an existential question.  Is online instruction the effective equivalent of a live classroom?  The COVID-19 crisis is providing clues.  Since March, I have extensively interacted via videoconference platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting.  Six months ago, I’d only heard of the latter and only then because they underwrite some the programs I listen to on NPR. 

Zoom is the preferred platform at my college, and at first it was kind of cool to attend trainings and department meetings seeing coworkers’ faces arranged Brady Bunch-style on my laptop screen.  The novelty wore off fast.  After a while I found myself switching off my camera, muting my mic, and going about my daily business during trainings where the moderator’s screen was the focus point and active participation wasn’t required.  I don’t think I was the only one.

What we’ve been left with is a shiny tech-dependent version of an old model, the correspondence course.  Back when, these courses were of mixed quality.  Some programs, such as the extension courses offered by land grant universities, were respectable.  Others, most often private outfits advertising on matchbook covers and in the back pages of magazines, had lesser reputations.  A notorious example was LaSalle Extension University, based in Chicago, which thrived in various guises for over seventy years until it folded in 1982. 

The GI Bill and federal student financial aid multiplied the opportunities for abuse.  Some correspondence schools received shameless celebrity endorsements; Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and Phyllis McGinley shilled the Famous Writers School.  The Famous Writers School, the subject of an exposé by Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic, deliberately misled its applicants, 100% of whom were accepted, that these renowned authors would personally evaluate their work.  (FWS continued to feature Cerf in their print ads well after he died.) 

The completion rates for FWS students, many of whom received federal financial aid, were abysmally low.  One FWS official told Mitford that the school wouldn’t be profitable if every student finished.  After Mitford’s article, the Famous Writers School lost much of its enrollment, limped along for a few years, and eventually closed.

Such past abuses notwithstanding, federal financial aid is still a cash cow for unscrupulous for-profit operators.  The occasional scandal, such as the one surrounding Corinthian Colleges, still erupts, while some self-proclaimed institutions of higher education are too big to call to account.  (The University of Phoenix, National University, Grand Canyon University, et al., come to mind.)

There have been precursors of online courses stretching back to the 1950s with NYU’s Sunrise Semester TV program.  My own institution offered two-credit courses built around TV programs for many years.  You watched the episodes at home and went to campus at your convenience to take exams.  (For a few weeks in middle school I faithfully got up at the crack of dawn to watch a series on the history of Mexico.  I found out much later that this was one of the TV courses.)  The college currently has two dedicated cable channels for instruction, but they are used sporadically.

Television wasn’t a panacea, however.  Sunrise Semester was an extension program and the two-credit classes I described weren’t widely accepted for transfer.  But they did afford options for nontraditional students.

A generation ago, the idea of web-based instruction was a dubious proposition.  I first came across it in the late 1990s, when it was part of my job to confirm the accreditation of high schools attended by applicants to our employment training program.  This was merely a check-the-box exercise if they had attended local public schools or established private schools. 

When faced with an applicant enrolled in a private online school, I was in turn faced with a conundrum.  Until then I didn’t know online schools existed.  In fact, there were no accreditation provisions for them at the time.  I phoned the virtual school’s principal, who invited me over to his brick and mortar office to discuss.

The principal was a pleasant older gentleman who assured me that web-based instruction was the future.  Being a) new to the very idea, and b) hamstrung by my employer’s policy that schools be actual places, I offered my skepticism.  He demonstrated one of the courses, navigating through one of the clunky Web 1.0 browsers available then (probably Netscape or Mosaic).  I was at once impressed and unconvinced. 

More than twenty years later I’m just as unconvinced, but I am in the minority it seems.  Considering that community colleges such as mine cater to a wide cross-section of students, a long-term or semi-permanent shift to distance learning might be a welcome change for many.  I strongly suspect that it will be welcomed by administrators as well.  The college can still collect the same tuition and fees with reduced overhead.  Unused facilities could be repurposed and monetized as office or commercial space. 

Even as students at pricey four-year universities are demanding tuition refunds after their classes went remote, trade publications such as Inside Higher Education are predicting that the pandemic will force many community colleges to a mostly online format. 

The paradox is easy enough to resolve.  If I was paying out the nose to attend, say, Columbia, Penn, or Dartmouth, I would expect the experience of campus life at those institutions. For their mostly affluent student bodies college is a social experience, a lifestyle.  By contrast, the largest identifiable subset of community college students just want a diploma.  For older and other nontraditional students, school is just one part of their lives to juggle along with work and family.  This may be disappointing for me and my fellow liberal arts profs, but those are the facts on the ground (and in cyberspace).

There’s just one remaining obstacle to our sudden and perhaps irrevocable shift to remote learning, the digital divide. 

I discovered this in no uncertain terms after we went on lockdown.  Our main campus is suburban and students in the surrounding communities mostly have reliable internet service and cell phone reception.  I teach at two of our satellite campuses.  One is in the well-heeled community where I live.  Even though it’s 85 miles from the mothership most of my traditional-demographic students there are technologically well-connected to the college’s resources.  Few of them fell behind because they couldn’t access the course.

The other campus presented a different story altogether.  While situated in a picturesque small town, a substantial number of students live in the surrounding hills.  Not all of them have reliable home internet or cell reception.  A winter snowfall or summer wildfire emergency could leave them without electricity for days or even a week or two.  A few, but still too many, are homeless and did their work from the campus computer lab before the lockdown. 

Within the first two weeks of the stay at home order, about a third of the class had stopped participating online.  The campus administration attempted to ease the situation by affording wi-fi service in one of the campus parking lots so people could work from their cars or while seated outdoors.  It’s unclear to me whether this helped many students.  Several of my students ended up failing or earning a lower grade than they would have made had on-campus instruction concluded normally.

The funny thing is that we’ve been aware of the tech gap for a very long time.  The Clinton administration floated the idea of providing laptops to low-income families twenty-five years ago.  In the present, my state’s governor has pledged to remedy the digital divide problem but obviously that can’t happen overnight.  The deficiency’s implications for education, K-12 and higher, are damaging.   

The folks who tout technology as the answer to all of society’s problems conveniently omit how unevenly these solutions benefit people.  I happen to find the altered landscape of online instruction among COVID-19 discomfiting.  But for those who cannot scale the suddenly heightened obstacle of the digital divide will have deep implications, not just for them but for our society as well.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar