I Buy What I Like

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted.  The fast and furious storm of bullshit that is the news forced me into decision paralysis around topics.  But I figure that I can write about current events without discussing the War with Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, Hezbollah, Hamas, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, chronic inflation, Medicaid and SNAP cuts, ICE, cosplaying cabinet members, UFC cage matches on the White House lawn, triumphal arches, painting the bottoms of reflecting pools, that goddam ballroom, and You Know Who.

So, here goes…

I’ll start with the whiskey.  Bourbon.  Woodford Reserve, to be exact.  Even more specifically, the batch purchased by alleged FBI director Kash Patel.  Not content with heading up the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, Mr. Patel wants to be the googly-eyed face of a lifestyle brand.  He’s hawking bottles of Woodford Reserve engraved with his imprimatur.  Kash—sorry, Ka$h—one must carefully safeguard one’s personal branding--has reportedly been giving away these personalized bottles as gifts.  He probably won’t try to sell these due to trademark infringement, but there are other Ka$h tchotchkes to be had.  Seriously.  Just go to https://kashpatel.store. 

Now, it isn’t any surprise if you believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Just look at the long line of products shilled by Patel’s master over the years.  Most of it garbage, but each of these had their eager buyers.  The grift never ends.

But the trend of taking advantage of true believers points up a larger, more prevalent phenomenon.  I think most of us have consumer brands, famous or mundane, that we favor.  For me, there are items ranging from durable goods to breakfast cereals where I will only buy a particular brand. 

In my case, I make these purchases because each of them fulfills a specific need.  What I’m not doing is making some kind of statement.  None of them is tied to group affinity or loyalty to a cause.  I buy what I like.

But for some of us, especially to people who are chronically online, consumer brands have become still another front of the culture wars.  I first commented on this trend a few years ago in this space.  When it came to light that Dan Cathy, the patriarch of the Chick-fil-A family, had spent considerable funds opposing legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, there was a short-lived tempest on both sides of the political spectrum.  Protestors began demonstrating in front of Chick-fil-As across the land.  SUVs carrying real Americans jammed the drive-thrus with those on foot jamming the indoor lobbies.

Chick-fil-A was one of the first times I connected the dots between consumer brands and culture war virtue signaling.  While there are more than a few brands culturally coded as liberal or even left, it’s those attracting a conservative following so strong that any kind of deviation in terms of marketing or brand identity drives some people into conniptions. I can point to several recent examples.

About three years ago, trans actress and influencer Dylan Mulvaney released a video on Instagram featuring a personalized commemorative Bud Light can inscribed “Cheers to 365 days of being a woman.”  True to form, the right wing trolls lost their shit.  In no time flat, Fox and other conservative outlets were fuming that this single social media post was proof of the unstoppable force of insane liberals and large corporations bending the knee to woke ideology.  Calls went out to boycott Anheuser-Busch.

The boycott did have an effect on sales.  Sales of Bud Light dropped by a third over the ensuing weeks.  By many reports, they haven’t fully recovered.  But the news moved on eventually to focus on some other manufactured outrage.  (For the record, I have been boycotting Bud Light my entire life.  Life’s too short for crappy beer.)

Cracker Barrel has had a couple of public relations scrapes of late.  If you’re not familiar with the chain, think of a cornpone Applebee’s.  Attempting to accommodate patrons following healthier diets, the restaurant added a meatless sausage to the breakfast menu.  It did not remove any of the existing meat items.  No matter.  The red blooded meat eaters were horrified that Cracker Barrel, their Cracker Barrel had caved to the soy boys.  The pushback was apparently short-lived.  As of this writing, Impossible Sausage remains on the menu at my local Cracker Barrel.

The other, more recent dustup concerned Cracker Barrel’s logo refresh.  For years, the logo featured a man in overalls sitting next to a barrel.  The old logo catered to both kinds of customer—those who could read, and those who couldn’t.  A few months back, they unveiled a stylized logo featuring just the name in an updated logotype.  Nothing controversial.

I was wrong.  The social media on the right had a fucking meltdown.  Many posters, having discovered Cracker Barrel’s CEO was a woman, accused her of being a woke DEI hire despite her having been in the position for about a decade.  Another lamented that the logo update ruined what he called a family tradition.  (The chain dates back to 1977.  You know, the era of such traditions as disco, platform shoes, bad haircuts, and wide lapels.)  Still another said his elderly parents swore never to eat there again.

Unlike the great Impossible Sausage controversy, corporate quickly reversed course.  As a number of would-be internet wags put it, the faithful got back the cracker and the barrel.  Right-wing outrage has the potential to shape some brands.  It seems that these people internalize brand preferences as identity.  It is much in the way that many of these same folks internalize their affinity with a certain politician as identity. 

Imagine having so little, so few substantial things to hold on to that you have to grasp at the ephemeral to believe you stand for something.  That is the world we live in.

 

 

© 2026 The Unassuming Scholar

Probity

Although I should be paying closer attention, I’ve sporadically followed the January 6^th House Select Committee hearings. Most of the live coverage and commentary I’ve listened to has been from NPR during my work commute. 

As viscerally horrified I was that day, time has blunted my emotions surrounding the incident.  I chalk this up to Trump fatigue.  I’m almost at the point where I say, “Fuck it.  Let ‘em all walk as long as I don’t have to hear about them anymore.”  

It’s not the conduct of the hearings.  Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney are making the best of an awful situation.  The revelations are nauseating but unsurprising.  The parade of in person witnesses and recorded depositions has become a rehashed drone of things we either already knew or suspected. 

Nevertheless, I was struck by Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony the week before last.  Hutchinson was White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ aide in the months and days leading up to January 6^th.  We learned of President Trump’s infantile reaction to Attorney General Barr’s denial of election fraud, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s warning of potential violence in the wake of the January 6^th rally, and Meadows’ strange inaction during the riot, as well as the requests for pardons afterwards.  

There was one thing in Hutchison’s testimony that cleared up a question I had had for the last year and a half concerning why Trump did not march on the Capitol after the rally as promised.  Apparently it wasn’t one of the innumerable cheap pledges he’s made over his career; Trump reportedly lunged at his Secret Service driver after the driver told him he had to go back to the White House.  That was the first actual surprise to come out of any the testimony.  Another was that Trump wanted the metal detectors removed from the rally site so that his supporters could bring firearms since he thought they posed no security threat to him.  It is unthinkable how much worse the ensuing riot would have been had Trump prevailed. 

Like many of the reporters and talking heads covering Hutchinson’s testimony, I was uncritical at first because I was genuinely impressed by her.  She projected a calm self-assurance, maturity, and wisdom beyond her twenty-five years.  I was also taken with her earnestness.  She was quoted in one source as wanting a career in public service, something that resonated with me.  I was a wide-eyed idealist as a young adult, though I soon learned to keep those sentiments to myself because they were often met with eyerolls.  At the time I worked in a position with a considerable amount of responsibility for a twentysomething, albeit far from the levers of power, but which nonetheless comported with my own aspirations. 

The passage of a couple of weeks has tempered my admiration.  I do not doubt Ms. Hutchinson’s idealism (or at least her own belief in it), and I will not criticize her conservative politics.  I can even forgive her cringy dance with Kayleigh McEnany to “Y.M.C.A.” during the 2020 campaign.  However, the White House-aide-as-Capra-heroine narrative does not completely hold up the closer one looks.  Certain questions arise. 

As an undergraduate Hutchinson interned with both Ted Cruz and Steve Scalise, two of the most disreputable people on Capitol Hill.  Surely, she was aware of their reputations before seeking work with them.  Then there is her accepting a position in the Trump White House.  Was it really idealism, or a self-serving determination to get ahead?  Only the most fanatical MAGA nutters, the people who believe Trump was chosen by God to save America from whatever imaginary threat, can truly believe Trump possesses even the slightest shard of integrity.  Then there is her apparent acceptance of an offer to work at Mar-a-Lago post-presidency which was later withdrawn (and has led to accusations from conservative media that her testimony was sour grapes for not getting the job).  

I am not second-guessing Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony.  I believe her to have been truthful with the committee.  However, I question the choices which put her in this position to begin with.  Although she did the committee a service, it does not mitigate her responsibility for being part of a criminal presidency.  Others may vouch for her character, but I am unconvinced. 

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

The Rally Effect Wags the Dog

“The sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”

I sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

We were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news.  The place is a little out of the way, and even in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.

The segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.   Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.  In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against Islamic State in Iraq. 

President Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a threat to American lives.  The unrest in Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone.  Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese Civil War. 

In short, business as usual.  Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at its apex.  And yet the United States and other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while fostering Western-style democracy.  In Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.

Soleimani and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.  Iran has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding.  However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s assertion with a grain of salt.

This isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged a foreign policy crisis.  Bill Clinton was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close.  Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N. weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes.  The Kosovo War for independence was well under way.  And, over the summer, al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. 

You don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national security crisis.  This is arguably one of the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.  (I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore.  But that’s just one of my crank theories.)  It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval numbers actually went up before the trial.  I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the Senate decides to hold the trial.

The timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed by a skeptical media.  The resemblance to the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh. 

For those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century, the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors.  Hilarity ensues.

Wag the Dog was just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering classes.  Even journalists sympathetic to Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.

The killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.  It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know which direction it’s going if it ever did.  But I think that makes scant difference to the base.  Something went bang, and a brown-skinned Muslim was dead.

Which was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark.  I guess I could have provoked an argument by pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial.  But why spoil the prospect of a good meal?  I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu.  The news moved on to another story.  Out of sight, out of mind…for now.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

The Good Fight

There are only a handful of surviving Second World War veterans.  This week’s D-Day commemorations here and abroad remind us, as with those of recent years, that their time with us is short.

Being the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Normandy invasion, the spotlight shone especially bright.  President Trump stood alongside Queen Elizabeth at the celebration in Portsmouth, as actors read from the letters and diaries of those who served and jet fighters performed fly-bys in between rousing song and dance numbers.  Theresa May and Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron each spoke, as did Trump himself.  The Queen gave the closing remarks, praising the resilience of the war generation.

Her Majesty is well aware of the thin strand the living vets represent, linking us in the present with the deeds of the past.  She is herself a Second World War veteran in a manner of speaking, having served in the British army at home during the war’s last year or two (though she returned to Buckingham Palace each evening).  This year’s commemoration will likely be the last to be celebrated on such a large scale.

Here in America, we subscribe to the same mythos surrounding that war.  It was a good fight, we were unquestionably the good guys, and the enemy, particularly the Germans, were evil.  It has been so even before the guns fell silent.  When I was a kid, the WW2 vets were fixtures in the community who shared their stories with elementary school classes and served as community and business leaders.

Sometime in the mid-Nineties, as the veterans began passing away in noticeable numbers, popular culture became particularly laudatory in its treatment of them.  Even as films and literature treated our other recent wars, particularly Vietnam, as morally ambiguous at best, the black and white view of the Second World War persisted.  Five decades after it ended, mythology became hagiography.  Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign was lauded by the talking heads as one last call to service even as they seemed to assume that Bill Clinton, derided by conservatives as a Vietnam draft dodger, would easily win a second term.  The ever-bombastic Tom Brokaw, who himself somehow missed out on his own generation’s war, dubbed those who lived through the war years as the Greatest Generation.

It was at the movies and on cable TV where the mythologizing reached its apotheosis and shaped the narrative in the everyday discourse into the present day.  Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks are of course the main culprits.  Saving Private Ryan and the miniseries Band of Brothers were both technical tours de force and powerful storytelling.  The verisimilitude of the first film in capturing the horrors of combat is striking on first viewing and it still hits hard every time thereafter.  Nevertheless, both works and the volume of derivate films and TV shows following in their wake, engage in cheerleading for an American exceptionalism that we as a nation can’t seem to let go of.

The Second World War continues to resonate because so few of our conflicts have been so morally clear cut.  Only the Civil War, on the Union side at least, possesses the same clarity of purpose in the popular mind.  The others have been mainly exercises in imperialist expansion, large and small.  The Indian Wars aren’t discussed much anymore, even though the genocide of indigenous peoples made America as we know it possible.  Even less is said of our guerrilla war in the Philippines at the turn of the last century.  The Banana Wars involved the subjugation of Latin American states for the benefit of U.S. corporations.

Our military ventures after 1945 are no less problematic.  One could make a case in favor of our intervention in Korea, given the odiousness of the North Korean regime and the fact that Harry Truman shrewdly used the United Nations as a fig leaf for our unilateral butting-in.  By comparison, we sacrificed nearly 60,000 American lives in Vietnam—not to mention the lives of countless Vietnamese—over a pretext so slim that an exchange of diplomatic notes normally serves to settle such disputes as that which led to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

After a brief funk in the late 1970s, we resumed flexing our muscles and making self-serving justifications for it.  The invasion of Grenada, the smallest country in the Western Hemisphere, was justified because the Cubans gave material support to a popular revolution.  The invasion of Panama wasn’t a violation of another country’s sovereignty, it was sort of a law enforcement action to catch a drug kingpin.  But the real turning point was just around the corner.

The 1991 Gulf War brought us into the present era of militarism.  A war fought to make the world safe for Exxon was packaged partly as a media event and partly as a case for ramped up interventionism cloaked as the liberation of oppressed peoples.  (Liberation of the oppressed—just like in the Second World War!)  We are now at the point where more than 70 countries host U.S. military bases.  The public has been culturally intimidated into supporting our ventures abroad, and attempts to debate the matter in the mainstream are a non-starter as a consequence.   

In a college history class, we were assigned to read Empire as a Way of Life by William Appleman Williams.  This was circa 1984, and revisionist historian Williams was somewhat passé even then and he is mostly forgotten today.  That’s too bad.  Empire as a Way of Life is a plainly worded account of America’s imperial adventures as the prominent, recurring theme in American history.  Williams made a moral argument for rejecting imperialism and embracing a renewed role for the United States as an ethical member of the family of nations.

Williams the man was a singular character.  A military brat, an Annapolis graduate, and a Second World War veteran, he left the Navy to pursue an academic career.  (The circumstances leading to this have been described variously as an early retirement for service-related injuries or for those inflicted upon him while participating in a civil rights march in the Deep South.)  By the 1960s, Williams was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in a history department featuring such luminaries as George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg.  Williams was a high-profile participant in the intellectual controversies of the era, opposing the Vietnam War while locking horns on occasion with the campus New Left.

Williams’ career stalled a bit the following decade as the discourse surrounding American history and foreign policy shifted and morphed and his work was nudged to the margins.  He migrated westward and concluded his career at Oregon State University.  Distrustful of large institutions, he continued to argue for a return to decentralized government which mirrored his critiques of U.S. foreign policy.  Williams retired in 1980 and died ten years later.

When the Iraq War was at its height, Williams’ writings enjoyed a minor renaissance thanks to academics like Andrew Bacevich but remain fairly obscure.  However, Williams’ ideas retain a certain authority applicable to our present predicament.  We must face the truth that few fights are truly good fights and address the questions of war and peace in language detached from nationalistic sentimentality.  When this discussion takes place at last, may the spirit of Dr. Williams moderate.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar 

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heads Will Roll

Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December, an item in the news crawl caught my eye.  “Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that. 

I had to think a moment to make the connection, then it hit me.  The reference was to Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform.  That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward the military and veterans.

Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s firing says about the present state of academia.  C-M had already landed himself in hot water before the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.”   He was apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for the Las Vegas shootings.  Switching channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death threats against him and his family.

I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own.  What I have been able to glean is that C-M belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric oversimplifications of complex issues.  Lots of heat, but precious little light. 

These kinds of statements may gain the rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies on the political right.  But they make honest progressives like me wince.  As we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the already precarious state of academic freedom.

I teach at a community college (two of them, actually).  I’m employed as contingent, or adjunct faculty.  No tenure.  No job security.  Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.

My own interpretation of American history and society is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher.  I just don’t express it in short bursts with my thumbs is all.  I am also careful to point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.

I don’t know if this approach is the reason, but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years.  Even my openly conservative students seem to be okay with me for the most part.  It could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting three credits and a grade.   Probably so.  My fingers are crossed that that’s the case and that my luck will continue to hold.

Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism.  However, safeguarding the right of professors to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees in the first place.  As someone who has lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.

Higher education itself is an inviting target, and not just for right-wing media outlets.  This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century ago.  Even as credentialism has swollen the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole enterprise hangs in the air.  (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it, school isn’t really America’s thing.  We just play the game to get what we want.)

The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing else.  We’re doers, not thinkers, so why waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology?  And while we’re at it, why should we listen to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like?  Besides, brains aren’t everything.  In the real world, they’d be working for C students.

(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little.  Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should say a few things about myself.  Firstly, every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And no, I didn’t have rich parents to put me through school.  I worked lots of odd jobs to pay for my studies.  Secondly, while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.

Oh, and my major?  Humanities.)

Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our own ranks.  The trend toward treating students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic inquiry.  We are letting this happen at our peril.  As for me, I’m holding my breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Spectacle

Poking around YouTube, I stumbled upon a doc which had aired on Britain’s Channel 4 a few years ago.  An episode of a series titled How the Other Half Live, the program profiles two families, one affluent and the other poor.

In this installment, the first family is that of millionaire marketing consultant David Abington and his wife Angie.  The Abingtons live in a spacious manse in the countryside with their two young children.  The second is that of debt ridden single mom Caroline Buffery and her daughter, who live in a cramped council house.  The program’s conceit is to compare their lives whilst the Abingtons looked for ways to help the Bufferys.

How the Other Half Live points up the vicissitudes of late stage capitalism.  Mr. Abington, a truck driver’s son with a modest education, succeeded through perseverance and ability.  Ms. Buffery, who gave up an itinerant life as a “New Age traveler” after her daughter was born, earned a criminal justice degree and a master’s in law.  Unable to land a “pupillage” or apprenticeship which would qualify her as a barrister, she works in a betting parlor.  Her schooling has left her with £20,000 in debt she’s been unable to pay down, adding to her woes.

Whatever its producers intended it to be, How the Other Half Live comes out as a bizarre cross between a news documentary and a reality show. Mr. Abington said he was inspired to reach out to a financially struggling family after returning from a vacation.  Traveling in first class, Abington walked with his son George to the rear of their plane.  He said George became visibly apprehensive when they left business class and entered the economy section.

Talk about sheltered.  People living in actual poverty can’t afford air travel, and in my experience the passengers up front don’t look much different from us riffraff riding in the back.  But, never mind.  David and Angie Abington reached out to Caroline Buffery.   

David, who couldn’t place Caroline in a pupillage right away due to the enormous size of the applicant pool, hires Caroline to do legal work for him in the meantime.  Son George and daughter Rebecca become fast friends with Caroline’s daughter Iris, despite their different backgrounds.  And they all lived happily ever after. 

They all lived happily ever after, because that’s what the narrative conventions of these kind of TV shows demand.   It’s certain that this program was partly scripted as reality shows are, that any spontaneity of the subjects was calculated, and that the outcome decided before the cameras started rolling.  The question of whether the Abingtons made any lasting difference in the lives of the Bufferys is unresolved at the end of the hour.   

What is clear is that How the Other Half Live, aside from its obvious reality show tackiness, is that it is part of a long tradition of poverty porn on television.  Poor people make us feel superior, make us feel virtuous by comparison.  Being poor is shameful; in the past when I’ve let my guard down with people I’ve known a while and mentioned I grew up in poverty they would often give me a funny look as if I’d told them I had a social disease.  I’ve since learned not to mention this part of my biography.

Public discourse high and low reflects a trenchant hostility on the topic.  News and political commentary discuss the policy implications of poverty but back away from taxpayer supported anti-poverty programs notwithstanding their ideological stance.  Reading the postings of internet trolls, one can feel a nearly palpable hatred of the poor.  Very little effort is made to analyze the structural, cultural, environmental, and behavioral aspects of the problem.  It’s simpler and much more satisfying to blame the victim.

                                                                                                      

TV programming reflects our cultural attitudes, and depictions of the less well-off or just economically unfortunate cut across decades and genres.  The bathetic How the Other Half Live reminded me in its tone of still another YouTube artifact, this one hailing from television’s so-called Golden Age.  It was a game show, of all things, an installment of Queen for a Day.

Queen for a Day was a daytime show targeted at housewives which had made the leap from radio in the late 1940s and ran into the early 1960s.  It’s an appalling piece of work, perhaps even more exploitive than anything seen on contemporary American TV.   Hosted with cringeworthy smarminess by Jack Bailey, Queen for a Day would call on stage several women chosen at random.  Each would recount their financial problems and tell the host what sort of help they would like to receive from the show. 

The winner was chosen by receiving the loudest applause from the studio audience.  Seated on a throne in a crown and robe and clutching a scepter as the house orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance,” the new Queen was presented with her prizes.  As with Caroline Buffery, we are implicitly assured that the Queen faced nothing but smooth sailing ahead of her.

This particular episode, a kinescope from 1958, is one of the very few which have survived.  True to the show's theme, the contestants each had their own awful bad luck.  One was a single mom whose husband had been killed in a hunting accident.  She wanted to return with her daughter to her family’s home in Ohio and train as a hairdresser.  Another was a military spouse who wanted to build bunk beds in her trailer for her four kids.   Still another was a mother to a bedridden polio victim in a body cast who wanted a hospital gurney so he could leave the house occasionally and a transistor radio to keep him company in his sickroom.  (And if that wasn’t enough misfortune, this lady’s husband was an invalid with a heart condition.)   

The next contestant in the misery parade was a timorous and very pregnant young woman who needed funds to buy inventory for her family's failing grocery store, which she said had a grand total of 64¢ in the till that morning.  (Upon hearing this Bailey took up an impromptu collection onstage, netting a few dollars which he presented to her with flip ostentatiousness.)  Lastly, we were introduced to a mother whose husband was unemployed and also had a bad heart and whose teenage son was crippled by rheumatic fever.  She hoped for a set of encyclopedias and a remodeled bedroom for the boy.

The recent widow was the episode’s Queen, who won a scholarship to beauty school.  The audience acclamation which chose the winner was hard to watch, particularly because I knew that these were regular people and their reactions were real.  The show used an “applause meter” to measure audience sentiment.  Each woman wore an apprehensive expression as Jack Bailey reminded the audience of their wish and awaited their share of applause.  The shopkeeper’s shoulders were visibly heaving from the deep breaths she was taking.

Queen for a Day was pure spectacle, misfortune and redemption as sadistically vicarious pleasure.  We love to see others have their dignity taken from them, as long as we don't give the objects of our contempt too much thought.  In the case of Queen, the contestants’ authenticity is plain to see and this fact adds to the discomfort of watching them share their pain with the viewing public.  The contestants came on stage in their dowdy street clothes and without stage makeup.   A couple of them were visibly wringing their hands as Bailey interviewed them, and they all either stammered nervously or spoke in such low voices that the host had to ask them to repeat themselves.

The fact that each of the women was desperate enough to pin their hopes on winning a game show, especially one with all or nothing stakes, may have overridden any humiliation they might have experienced but it doesn’t make it any more palatable to watch.  I’m actually a bit surprised contemporary TV hasn’t ventured into similar concepts, though attempts to revive Queen for a Day have been unsuccessful.  I doubt it had anything to do with the concept’s lack of subtlety; maybe it just seemed dated or needed a new gimmick to freshen it up.

Still, in a time where the social safety net is wafer thin it’s not hard to imagine equally desperate people today being willing to subject themselves to degradation in front of millions of viewers in exchange for a chance at a prize.  How the Other Half Live strikes me as a marginally more sophisticated form of this tendency.  Social media and our preoccupation with recording every trivial moment on our phones has lowered our inhibitions, though, and Millennials in particular are more willing to trade their self-respect for a little exposure, so the future evolution of these kind of programs will be interesting to follow. 

Television may have reached maturity as a medium.  But it has not lost an iota of its ability to reduce us to rubbernecking at other people’s suffering.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

Fox News traffics in populist outrage.  It is its forte, its stock in trade so to speak.

It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it’s great for ratings.  It stokes the need of its core audience to perpetually seethe with resentment.  One of its specialties is bringing to light the opinions of obscure dissenters no one would ever have heard of had Fox not pointed them out as proof positive that good old fashioned American values are in dire peril of extinction.

This week, the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia aired a story about a Drexel University professor who Tweeted that he wanted to vomit after seeing a first-class passenger on his plane gave up his seat for a service member in uniform.  The network picked up the story, which is now on all the major news nets.

The professor, one George Ciccariello-Maher, had drawn right wing ire a few months back for another Tweet calling for the abolition of the white race.  Ciccariello-Maher claimed his remark was sardonic, but the story of the plane incident began by describing him as an “anti-white Drexel professor.” 

The good professor’s nausea stemmed from the botched coalition airstrike on Mosul last week, which is reported to have taken a couple hundred civilian lives while doing nothing to break Islamic State’s hold on the Iraqi city.  Didn’t the other passengers who thanked the man for yielding his seat know that the uniformed soldier was complicit in this tragedy just by being in the military?

The newsreaders displayed the expected level of disgust at Ciccariello-Maher’s words while reporting the story.  The trolls crawled out of the woodwork in force to leave comments condemning Ciccariello-Maher’s message, with the predictable profanity and malice.  One poster wrote ominously of the “enemies within.”

For me, the report dredged up the usual mixed emotions whenever I read about encounters between progressive academia and the rest of society.  You see, I’m that overeducated, godless, lefty professor your conservative, God-fearing parents warned you against.  But I’m also a veteran.  I understand the passenger’s gesture.  I accepted a number of small kindnesses from people while traveling in uniform over the years which helped make the stresses of being far from home bearable.  As a civilian, I’ve anonymously bought a drink or paid a restaurant check for service members from time to time, particularly if one was traveling through an airport alone.

So, I’m not about to knock the guy who gave up his seat.  The soldier could have been traveling for a number of reasons.  Perhaps there was a family emergency such as a sick relative.  Maybe he was rushing home for the birth of a child.  It could be that he was beginning or coming back from midtour leave or returning from a long overseas deployment.  Regardless of the reason, it was a gracious gesture which I’m sure was graciously accepted.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at that gesture in the context of how the public views the military.  “Thank you for your service” has become the obligatory affirmation during any encounter with a service member or veteran, however trivial.  Just this afternoon, I was on the phone with my insurance company.  This particular insurer is a well-known company whose clientele consists exclusively of current and former military personnel and their immediate families.  The customer service rep was pleasant and was able to assist me with the issue I’d called her about.  The call ended like this:

“Thank you for your membership with -------, Mr. Scholar, and thank you for your service to our country.”

“Um, thanks…thank you for…for your help.”   

I never know how to respond.  I’ve come to see gestures such as thanking veterans and giving up seats on planes for soldiers as a form of conservative virtue signaling, a little like wearing American flag lapel pins or attaching Christian symbols to the backs of cars.  Membership in the U.S. military has become politicized, a phenomenon which would certainly horrify the founders of this country if they ever found out.

I blame our collective guilt over how we initially rejected the Vietnam vets. Prior to the Cold War, we never had a large peacetime military.  Soldiering was a refuge for petty crooks and ne’er-do-wells in times of peace and a noble calling for citizens in times of war.  The Second World War was the apogee of the citizen-as-soldier ethos, and rare was the family without someone in the services.  The inequities of the postwar draft were impossible to ignore, however.  During the Vietnam era, the poor were shipped overseas by the thousands while their middle class contemporaries hid behind student deferments and exaggerated minor ailments.

I’m agnostic concerning tales of returning Vietnam vets being assaulted and spat upon by “hippies” at airports.  Some I’ve known claim vehemently that this happened to them.   On the other hand, I’m familiar with historical investigations which were unable to identify a single substantiated incident. 

America was split down the middle over vets in the years following the withdrawal from Vietnam.  I recall the repatriation of the prisoners of war in 1973.  My small town put up banners in celebration, though none of the returnees were from there.  (“Mommy, what’s a ‘pow’?” I asked in confusion.)  That was my small town in the rural West.  Out in the world beyond its limits, people thought and believed differently.

The prevailing attitude toward the military and veterans in the 1970s was roundly negative.  The mass media have left an indelible record of the time.  It’s common knowledge that the TV show M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam despite being set in Korea.  The antihero protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver were Vietnam vets.  In Black Sunday, a disgraced former POW is goaded into attacking the Super Bowl with an explosive laden Goodyear blimp.  The disaster movie Earthquake featured a psycho National Guardsman who tries to rape a woman he’s obsessed with and a cowardly Army colonel who flees a tunnel in panic at the first sign of collapse.  Even movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter which were praised for their compassionate portrayal of men and families damaged by Vietnam contained a hint of superciliousness.  During my first year or two of high school, visiting recruiters were greeted with smirks, smartass remarks, and the occasional taunt.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, the zeitgeist turned on its head.  Reagan’s cocksure swagger and anticommunism had something to do with it.  Frustration over the Iran hostage crisis and other foreign policy reverses probably did as well.  For whatever reason the Eighties were the Decade of the Heroic Vietnam Vet in American pop culture.  There was First Blood and its sequel Rambo, of course, not to mention any number of Chuck Norris movies.  Platoon played in theaters to rave reviews.  One or more of the main characters in Magnum P.I., Riptide, Miami Vice, and The A-Team were Vietnam vets.  A Rumor of War, Platoon Leader, and The Things We Carried told the grunts’ story to a mainstream which would have scornfully rejected it a couple of years earlier.  Pop songs such “Goodnight Saigon,” “Still in Saigon,” “Born in the USA,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” extolled the travails of the discharged vet in an uncaring world.

This new awareness not only inspired guilt-ridden feelings about vets, but over the military generally.  The Iran crisis made Americans realize that despite decades of propaganda to the contrary there was a lot of pent up anger over U.S. policies abroad.  It also made them aware that future military actions abroad might be necessary and that the burden of these would fall on the shoulders of recruited volunteers.  Americans love the troops because they don’t have to be the troops.  The specter of the draft lurks in the background, particularly during rough patches such as the Iraq War prior to the 2007 surge.  There’s a kind of desperate cheerleading from the mainstream which I trace back to the 1991 Gulf War.  It’s born of remorse over one’s affluence, comfort, and safety when others are facing danger even though few would ever, ever entertain the thought of volunteering or allowing their sons and daughters to do the same. 

There are other symptoms of our collective embracing of veterans.  The sudden anointing of the-vet-as-hero has had its seamy underside.  Rambo gave credibility to the Vietnam Dolchstoẞ myth of the left behind POW.  Despite the black POW/MIA flags flying from the flagstaffs of numerous public buildings and burly biker types too young to have served wearing “You Are Not Forgotten” vest patches, no evidence has emerged proving Vietnam is still holding American prisoners.  What could they gain?  It defies common sense.  Vietnam has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. for over twenty years and the U.S. is an important trading partner.  Why not come clean up front and avoid future friction? 

Another unfortunate side to our hero worship is the rise of the imposter.  Lots of guys have their war stories with a detail or two exaggerated here and there.  That’s one thing.  Telling everyone you were GI Joe with a kung-fu grip when you were really a cook, claiming you received the Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart when you never heard a shot fired in anger, or accepting veterans benefits when you never served is another matter.   

Why doesn’t anyone call foul on these antics?  Why do they go so long without being caught?  It’s because the public has become intimidated.  Criticizing anyone linked to the military is seen by some people as tantamount to treason.  Hence the uproar over the yielded airplane seat.  The soldier who drew Ciccariello-Maher’s opprobrium in all likelihood had nothing at all to do personally with the tragedy in Mosul.  He is neither villain nor hero.  He’s not responsible for decisions made by the Pentagon or CENTCOM.  He was just a traveler trying to get to where he was going. 

By the same token the hubbub on Fox and elsewhere over the professor’s infelicitous Tweet has a further chilling effect on any legitimate critique of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Question our policies or tactics, and you’re disloyal and un-American.  I think that this incident is one of countless symptoms of misplaced guilt masquerading as Americanism.  Perhaps if we had done right by Vietnam veterans in the first place we might have avoided this unpleasantness.  But in light of the heavy doses of propaganda ladled out to us by government and media alike over the past century, I am inclined to doubt it.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar