Monarchy at the Crossroads: A Brief Assessment

Queen Elizabeth II has finally passed away.  Ninety-six years is a good run for any individual.  And as with so many of us, she was the sole British monarch of my lifetime up to this point.

Our fascination with the British monarchy has had a life of its own; a perennial feature of American pop culture for decades.  In my memory, it didn’t become a thing until the marriage of Charles and Diana.  It wasn’t so much him—then and now his bland persona made him easy to ignore.  It was the sudden glamour bestowed upon this mild-mannered nursery school teacher thrust suddenly into the limelight which caught the popular imagination.  Her divorce from her Prince, her sudden and tragic death, and the lives of her sons have kept the royals in the forefront of our collective consciousness.

But it is not my intention to dissect the royal family as cultural phenomenon.  The monarchy, for all its recently acquired media friendliness, possesses a fraught legacy.   While hardly at the fore of the media coverage, there has been a steady commentary in online media particularly concerning the larger implications of British imperialism.

Much has been written of the rapid decline of the British Empire since the Second World War.  Ensuring the survival of the metropole took precedence over preserving the overseas colonies, and rapid decolonization was a collateral effect once the guns fell silent in Europe.  Not that this was entirely a smooth process; one need only reference the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau, and the Aden Emergency to recognize that Britain sought to maintain its possessions across the globe even as the anticolonial tide washed upon them. 

The vestiges of the Empire survive in the form of the Commonwealth, which is an institution in flux.  For much of its history, the Commonwealth served as a means for Britain to exert soft power over its former subjects.  However, one can also make the argument that principled actions such as the opposition to UDI in Rhodesia and apartheid in South Africa were as much the product of its recently independent members exerting influence over British policy in the court of public opinion.

The nature of the Commonwealth is changing, with countries without a history of British colonialism such as Mozambique and Rwanda coming into the fold.  Similarly, the stance of members toward the monarchy is changing.  Barbados was the latest to break with the Crown and became a republic last year. 

A discussion of the Empire’s decline and fall too often sidestep its origins.  England, and later Britain was arguably the originator of the Western settler state.  Medieval and early modern Ireland was the prototype.  Even though Ireland was the first Commonwealth country to withdraw, the Anglicization of its culture is permanent.  (Gaelic is an official language, but just about everyone speaks English exclusively.  Although there are identifiable cultural differences, the country, at least in the cities, is rather like Britain albeit with a different accent.) 

Consider the rest of the Anglosphere.  Indigenous peoples were displaced and subjected to genocide in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.  English-speaking Europeans form a substantial demographic in South Africa almost thirty years after majority rule.  In other places, they are a minority as they had been during the colonial era.  The only former colony to have achieved a near-purge of European settlers has been Zimbabwe, where one-fifth of one percent of the population is white.

So, the Queen’s passing does mark the end of an era.  It will probably also feed the fascination surrounding the royal-watching pastime.  Whether the new king and the surviving royals can maintain the future relevance of the monarchy is a separate question.  Britain’s future relevance post-Brexit is one as well.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

Interface

It has been many weeks since Mr. Bear last strolled the neighborhood.

Mr. Bear is, well, a bear.  I didn’t name him; my neighbor did.  Each visit from Mr. Bear followed the same pattern.  About an hour after dusk, the neighbor’s dog would start barking.  The porch light would come on, and my neighbor would lean over her deck railing shouting, “No! No, Mr. Bear!  Go away!”  The name stuck in my mind.

Bur anthropomorphizing wildlife is problematic.  My mountain community is at the wildland-urban interface, a potential hazard to both existing ecosystems and the humans encroaching upon them.  My neighbors are bemused by the ursine incursions each autumn, and the foraging animals pose little immediate threat aside from the occasional ransacking of an unoccupied vacation cabin or car whose flatlander owners foolishly left food inside.  But the critters are just one cause for concern.

This region is deceptively picturesque.  The legions of tourists who arrive in the wake of every snowfall ski and snowboard with nary a thought of its occasionally brutal natural history.  Less than a mile from where I sit, a wagon train of settlers stranded by an especially harsh winter lost more than forty of their number to starvation and exposure nearly 175 years ago.  But increasingly it’s been the sparseness of snowfall around these parts that has become troublesome.

I’ve lived up here about twenty years.  The first ten winters were fairly predictable. We would get moderate snowfall from late October through late December, with a week or two to recover between storms.  As one might expect, January and February brought more frequent weather systems and heavier snowfall.  March and April would see a tapering off, though snow in May wasn’t unheard of.  We had to cancel final exams and postpone commencement at the end of one spring semester because a storm had made the roads impassable.

What constitutes a normal winter now is hard to describe.  The snowfalls of 2017-2019 were normal; every other year since 2011 has seen drought conditions.  Last winter was comparatively dry, and yet we had light snowfall the first week of June (the Sunday before summer session began).  Even the summers have brought atypical weather, with windstorms, lightning, and the occasional heavy downpour. 

And then there is fire season, which promises to become a year-round thing with the unusual number of dry winters we’ve had.  Even the good winters of late brought ample rainfall at the lower elevations, which in turn provided fuel in the form of vegetation growth.  The 2017 Napa Valley fire and the horrific 2018 Camp Fire are the shape of things to come.  Some of my neighbors’ insurers agree and have refused to renew their home insurance policies.

My town and the surrounding area haven’t experienced a large-scale wildfire in nearly a century.  We’re about due; it’s a matter of time.  The community’s prepared, at least according to plan. 

But plans seldom come off in an actual emergency.  If a wildfire of the scale and speed of that which ravaged Paradise struck my town, we would see a similar outcome.  My homeowner’s association has put together an evacuation plan in conjunction with the local authorities, which is undoubtedly doomed to failure if put to the test.

I know this from an incident a couple of years ago.  I was going out of town, and I intended to leave early ahead of a major snowstorm.  So did the hordes of flatlanders who had come up for the weekend without consulting the weather forecast.  I live on a side street just off the main drag, which in turn connects to the interstate.  As I loaded my luggage into my car, I noticed a very unusual sight for my lightly trafficked lane. 

It was a long line of stationary cars.  Walking to the end of the driveway, I saw that the traffic jam extended up the street for as far as I could see.  The highway patrol was metering westbound traffic entering the freeway.  The airport I was departing from was 40 miles in the opposite direction everyone else was going, so if I could just make to the main street I’d have it made.  Not having a choice, I got into the car and joined the line.

A half hour later, we had moved less than a hundred feet.  As the wait dragged on, I eventually lost patience.  I’m usually a cautious driver, but cautious wasn’t going to cut it in this situation.  I turned out of the idle line of cars and raced down the shoulder to the intersection.  As soon as I saw a momentary gap in the crosstraffic, I jackrabbited a quick left turn and was finally on my way. 

I later read that many of the out of towners spent that night in their cars, which brings me back to my hypothetical wildfire.  After what I saw during that winter storm, I’m skeptical that the authorities could successfully evacuate the town ahead of a fast-moving firestorm.  The egress routes are too few.  I foresee a repeat performance of the Camp Fire: Some will get away by car, others will flee on foot, and others will be fatally trapped. 

The prospect of disaster is not enough to motivate me to leave, though.  No place on earth is free of risk.  Climate change is making the magnitude of many of these hazards worse, however.  Our inaction on this crisis stems from the seemingly piecemeal, scattered nature of its attendant disasters.  A Florida hurricane causing many millions of dollars in damage is unfortunate, but I don’t experience its effects here on the West Coast any more than drought and wildfire here affect Floridians.  It’s hard to tie such geographically localized phenomena to a single cause, even to those of us who are not denialists.  Barring a sudden, single, widespread catastrophe, we are unlikely to see a concerted effort in this country to address the climate predicament in the foreseeable future. 

In the meantime, I wait at home on the edge of the wild warily watching a changing world.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

I Was Never Here

The thought of disappearing without a trace terrified me as a child.  The idea that one could be here one minute and gone the next with no explanation, the notion of abnegation, was deeply unsettling. 

It’s hard to say what brought it on.  It could have been the times.  The 1970s were a heyday for media-hyped serial killers, several of whom were either never identified (such as the Zodiac killer) or evaded capture for years until advances in forensic technology led to the culprit (as with the recently arrested Golden State Killer suspect). 

It was also a time when, with alarming frequency, kids like me would leave for school, or a friend’s house, or on an errand and never return.  The sudden death of a grandmother when I was still a preschooler may also have contributed to my pervasive feeling of unease.  I’m at a loss to explain it now; I just know it was a preoccupation which darkened a time other people usually remember fondly.

I never really outgrew it.  Instead, my childhood fear morphed into a fascination and even a yearning as I got older.  Historic missing persons cases such as those of Judge Crater and Richard Colvin Cox have held a relentless grip on my imagination.  (I’ve already written about a couple of other cases in this space, namely those of folk singer Connie Converse and poet Weldon Kees.)  Lying in bed during any number of insomnia-wracked nights, I’ve tried to devise ways of escaping and starting over free from the past’s baggage.

Such fantasies aren’t unusual.  For most of us, they are just that and nothing more.  For a few, they have been well-laid plans successfully realized. 

It is generally thought that many adults who “disappear” are merely voluntary absentees.  There is no law preventing this.  If you want to leave, just get up and go. 

It’s a temptation, but one which has been increasingly circumscribed by the Information Age.  Most of the so-called disappearances I’ve read about occurred in a time when you could still reinvent yourself someplace else without fear of being caught.  A couple of recent news items show that despite the volumes of data collected on us it’s still possible to live undiscovered as someone else for a long stretch of time.

Both stories were unusual in that neither man really needed to resort to subterfuge.  The first was that of an Air Force captain who went missing in 1983.  The other concerned a man whose assumed identity was only discovered a decade and a half after his suicide.  William Howard Hughes, Jr., had abruptly left his post in New Mexico shortly after withdrawing a large amount of money from the bank.  Hughes had worked with the space program and held a top secret clearance.  It was conjectured Hughes had defected to the Soviet Union, which was thought to explain why nothing further was heard of him.  Joseph Newton Chandler III took his life in Ohio in 2002, leaving no known heirs.  A private investigator was hired to find any next of kin.

Hughes was found in California last month in the course of a passport fraud investigation.  He had been living under an assumed name for 35 years.  Hughes explained he had been depressed about his career and that’s why he left.  The Air Force plans to charge him with being AWOL.  The investigator in the Chandler case eventually found that the man known as Chandler was actually named Robert Ivan Nichols.  Nichols abandoned his family in the early 1960s, appropriating the identity of a child killed in an auto accident to cover his tracks.

Hughes could simply have resigned from the service and gotten on with his life.  Chandler / Nichols could have just divorced his wife and gotten on with his life.  Instead, each man chose a creative though ultimately troublesome route from an intolerable existence.  Each man had quietly dropped out.

My fascination with unexplained disappearances was rekindled years ago when I came across a book by Robert S. Gallagher titled If I Had It to Do Over Again: America’s Adult Dropouts.  The title is the book’s premise.  Like those of Messrs. Hughes and Nichols, most disappearances are best explained as decisions by rational adults to start anew as someone else.

Gallagher describes a number of such absences some of which have persisted in the popular imagination as well as others more obscure.  There was former child prodigy writer Barbara Newhall Follett, caught in an unhappy marriage, who left her Brookline, Massachusetts, apartment on a dreary December day in 1939 never to be heard from again. 

Then there was Gertrude Jones, who walked away from her Marin County home on a May morning in 1964.  She was last seen by a neighbor on State Route 1.  (Mrs. Jones, alas, was ultimately denied the romantic cachet of the disappeared: Her remains were discovered near her home in 2008.  The cause of death was a broken neck.  Her by then deceased husband, a longshoreman’s union official, is considered the likely murder suspect.) 

Yet another spooky vanishing was that of one Bruce Nelson Campbell, the “Man in the Green Pajamas,” who was discovered missing from his Jacksonville motel room in May 1959, leaving his glasses, wallet, and car keys a day after he had been treated by a doctor for “exhaustion.”   There is also the story of John T. Symes, Jr., a New York banker who left his small town in the autumn of 1963 saying he “had to get away for a while.”  He was last seen by a waitress at a Manhattan lunch counter. 

Perhaps the most interesting of Gallagher’s tales concerns an Illinois salesman named Orja Glenwood Corns, Jr., if only because the author gives us a detailed narrative.   Mr. Corns found himself at loose ends on a sultry July evening in 1948.  His wife and kids were out of town and he had just gotten back from a business trip.  After opening all the windows in his stifling house, Corns drove to Chicago for a night on the town.  Apparently Corns fancied mixing among the demimonde, because he ended the night at a clip joint called the Parody Club on N. Clark Street. 

There he spent the $150 he brought with him (a healthy sum in 1948) and cashed two personal checks to keep the party going.  Corns left in the wee hours and hasn’t been seen since, though his mechanic claimed to have seen Corns driving through Winnetka a day or two later.  The Corns case resurfaced in the news occasionally over the next decade or so, such as when Mrs. Corns divorced her husband in 1954 on grounds of abandonment.  But…no account offered a viable explanation for why he was missing.

A centerpiece of Gallagher’s tome is the famous case of the dropout who got caught: Lawrence Bader, a.k.a. Fritz Johnson.  Larry Bader, a cash-strapped Ohio salesman—why do so many of these stories involve salesmen?—never returned from an impromptu solo fishing trip on Lake Erie in 1957.  He was last seen by Coast Guardsmen offering assistance as a storm set in.  Bader cheerfully waved them on.  His rented boat turned up the next day, slightly damaged, without its occupant.

Less than a week later a debonair gentleman calling himself Fritz Johnson surfaced in Omaha.  Hired as a bartender at the Roundtable steakhouse, Fritz soon became a beloved local character.  He signed his checks solely with the moniker, “Fritz.”  He pulled off charity stunts, such as spending a month sitting atop a flagpole raising money for polio research.  After losing an eye to cancer, he sported an eyepatch further enhancing his dashing persona.  He drove a converted hearse around town and lived in a bohemian bachelor pad.  (Eventually, though, Fritz settled down and married a young lady half his age.)  A skilled archer, Fritz was hired by a local TV station as a sportscaster.  His fame and legend grew.

One can’t hide in plain sight forever, though.  In Chicago on a business trip to a trade show, Fritz was spotted by Lawrence Bader’s niece who approached him and pointed out the resemblance between the two men.  Fritz naturally denied he was Larry Bader.  But further investigation backed up by a matching fingerprint comparison solved the Bader mystery.  Fritz claimed to be mystified; he was an orphan named John Johnson.  Even after a reunion with the family he abandoned, Fritz maintained the ruse.  But he didn’t have long to dwell on the past.  His cancer returned and the Man with the Double Life passed on in September 1966, less than a year and a half after he was outed by his niece.

Even though Larry Bader was caught in the end, his story offers intriguing possibilities.  If you kept your head down, you could probably avoid detection.  Robert Gallagher, writing in 1969, devotes several chapters in his book to various ways one could abruptly cut ties and cover one’s tracks.  Unfortunately, few if any of these would work in the early 21^st century. 

Take for instance the mundane but vital Social Security number.  Gallagher describes how you could dummy up a certified copy of a birth certificate not your own, walk into a Social Security office and apply for a card in that individual’s name.  Until relatively recently this was doable.  I lived my first fourteen years without a Social Security number.  Neither my parents nor I needed me to have one back then.  I finally applied when I was in high school and wanted an after-school job.  My two sons, on the other hand, who were born in the 1990s, were automatically issued numbers a few weeks after their birth.  Nowadays it would look awfully suspicious for a mature adult born in this country to apply for a new Social Security card out of the blue.  (I suppose you could claim to be Canadian, but then you’d have to fake a green card on top of your other deceptions.)

Social media and digital records of our every move have obviated most of the strategies Gallagher covered nearly fifty years ago.  Even then, they were becoming tenuous.  If you fall off the radar today, it’s probably because you have ceased to live.  Going off the grid can lower, but not eliminate, your profile.  And that’s a pity.

I’ve more or less stopped dreaming of walking away and starting over.  Once upon a time, however, my dreams of escape kept me halfway sane.  Living in South Florida in my late twenties, married with a kid and another on the way and stuck in a soul-crushing job which barely left me time to breathe on my own, I would enviously watch the kids on the beaches and in the bars as I drove down A1A. 

At times like these I would lapse into a reverie of a different life.  I knew I could never be nineteen again, and so I set my sights on a less idealistic ideal.  I would drift down to Miami, maybe to the Keys.  I would work as a dishwasher or a day laborer.  I’d live in cheap motels and drink cheap beer in dive bars. 

Then, my cell phone would ring.  (I actually carried one of those goddamned things then.  My boss insisted.)  Or, if someone was in the car with me, they would speak and my pipe dream of living out a Jimmy Buffett song would burst like a soap bubble in a baby’s bath. 

I think that’s how it works out for most of us.  But even if we didn’t have cold feet, the Big Brother corporate state makes the possibility of carrying out an escape nigh impossible.

You could say you were never here, but your footprints would give you away.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

You Anew

I didn’t anticipate writing three posts in a row on the unending furor over public speech.  However, after Roseanne abruptly lost her newly rebooted sitcom over a bizarre late-night tweet I felt I had to cover the same terrain once more.

Free speech has become something of a crapshoot lately.  Offensive statements—and just about anything can be offensive to someone when it reaches a large enough audience—can cut even the most successful public figure’s career short.  Just like that. 

But not all offensive speech is created equal.  Roseanne, for reasons peculiarly her own, tweeted that former Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes.  (Figuratively, I’m sure.)  A furry of apologetic follow up tweets did nothing to save her; Roseanne then compounded the problem by claiming that she wasn’t responsible because the Ambien she took made her do it.

Just as the Roseanne controversy was escalating, Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”  Bee was referring to a photo Ivanka tweeted showing her with her son.  Bee attacked the hypocrisy of the photo while the Trump Administration’s deportation policies separated mothers from their children.  A fair criticism, I thought, though Bee’s choice of epithet was wincing.

So, what’s the difference between the two cases?  Roseanne’s out of a job.  Bee lost a couple of sponsors but at least her show wasn’t canceled.  It’s up to you whether this outcome is fair.  The conclusion you come to probably depends on which side of the Trump Divide you sit.  Take your cue from the top: President Trump expressed regret over Roseanne’s firing; his press secretary, the godawful Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demanded TBS cancel Full Frontal. 

Running in the background are conflicting narratives.  One is that so-called political correctness is unnecessarily ruining people’s lives for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.  The other is that certain individuals are hiding behind the First Amendment to justify hate speech.  Either way, it’s clear words matter.  But to what extent do they reflect or shape belief?

A linguistic theory of sorts, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis even though neither of the men it’s named after ever formally stated it, says that words shape our worldview.  Ideas vary over whether words are merely an influence or are a determinant.  The conceit that one can shape thought through language is controversial but it extends into the current debate over speech.  More on point, there is the matter of whether we can change not only discourse but social relations by changing how we talk about them.

Left and Right alike accuse each other of intolerance.  It’s true that progressives, especially on college campuses, are sometimes overzealous taking on perceived social ills, and I suppose that is a kind of intolerance.  But if both sides are intolerant, what they’re intolerant of differs demonstrably.  Conservatives target people and groups for characteristics they cannot change, such as race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and sexual orientation, or for cultural differences like religion and language.  Progressives oppose behavior and language which diminish the rights and dignity of others.  Conservatives want to preserve existing oppressive hierarchies while progressives want to uplift the oppressed.  

The kerfuffle (or covfefe?) over Samantha Bee’s takedown of Ivanka Trump underscores this polarization.  Ivanka is a privileged woman who enjoys a safe existence while ICE and the immigration courts break up Latino families.  The paradox becomes even more bitter when we consider that the First Daughter is herself the child of an immigrant mother.  How we square the circle of who is worthy in the conservative universe is dependent upon a simple heuristic.

It goes like this.  Whiteness is superior to all other races, but it is particularly superior to the black race.  Masculinity is superior to femininity.  Heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality.  Cisgender is superior to transgender.  The able-bodied are superior to the disabled.  Christianity is superior to all other faiths (except perhaps Judaism).  English is superior to all other languages.  Western culture is superior to all other cultures.  Depending where you fall on any one continuum, you will be fully accepted socially or be otherwise subjected to a range of abuses from verbal insults and microaggressions to the full coercive and punitive power of the state. 

In this calculus Ivanka Trump may be a daughter of an immigrant, but her mother was a European immigrant so that’s okay.  Immigrating to the U.S. the “right way” is particularly important.  A colleague serves in the state legislature, and in her campaign literature she likes to mention her parents were immigrants who “came here the right way” (which is to say from Europe).  The “right way,” if you haven’t figured it out already, is code for Europeans Only.

The alleged weakness of our immigration laws, such as the President’s latest concern over so-called chain migration, is itself subject to double standards.  Please indulge me in a short personal digression.

In graduate school I was a teaching assistant in my university’s teaching and learning center.  Our director was an aging, absent minded woman I’ll call Marilyn.  Marilyn was an inept administrator and, despite being our institution’s alleged subject matter expert, was herself a poor classroom teacher.  Marilyn was in way over her head and quickly became defensive about her work.  Instead of taking the advice of those who suggested improvements, Marilyn began instead to depend on the other grad assistant in the office, an international student from Eastern Europe named Katya.

Katya quickly established herself as Marilyn’s confidant while alienating everyone in the office except Larisa the administrative assistant who was not too bright and also overwhelmed by her job.  Katya managed this because she was dishonest and manipulative and because she was willing to tell Marilyn what Marilyn wanted to hear in the face of contradictory evidence.  Katya would show one face to Marilyn and administrators and clients.  She would show another to everyone else whom she thought were beneath her, which was…just about everyone else.  It’s fair to say I despised her, but when you read what comes next you will see she was a despicable person. 

After a couple of years Katya finished her degree which meant her student visa was to expire.  It wasn’t fair that she was expected to go home when she had become so used to the good life in America.  What was a girl to do?  Enter Tobias, a warehouse worker with an easygoing disposition and oatmeal for brains.  Katya swept him off his feet.  After a whirlwind courtship, they wed just as Katya’s student visa was to turn into a pumpkin.  

Did they live happily ever after? you wonder.  Sure, for the first 24 months.  After that Katya could keep her green card even if she divorced Tobias, which is naturally what she did.  Katya had realized her American Dream by signing a paper and peeling off her panties.  Meanwhile desperate mothers and children are dying in the Sonoran Desert for no better reason than that, unlike Katya, they don’t have the advantage of blonde hair and blue eyes.

Ah, you say, but Katya immigrated the “right way,” even if she did stretch the rules a bit.  Sure, but the chain migration bogey that the Trump base is wringing their hands over can also be construed as rule bending.  Refer to the heuristic I mentioned earlier; if their complexion is sufficiently pale foreigners are not really foreigners.  On the other hand, everyone else is implicitly less human and must be barred, forcefully if necessary, as a consequence.

Conservative hypocrisies are a given in the national conversation.  Progressives are hardly perfect, but they know that self-awareness can guide them through ever-changing mores as we move toward a more inclusive society.  Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Comedy Central’s second annual Clusterfest in San Francisco.  (Think of it as a Woodstock for smartasses.)  The closing act on Sunday night was Jon Stewart, who I’m happy to say is making a return to standup. 

Stewart talked a little about the Roseanne / Samantha controversies and about how his own views have changed as he realized from time to time that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought.  He pointed out that the conservative hysteria about speech being policed is basically bullshit.  Stewart said the only changes he made to his own speech was dropping a few words from his vocabulary and stopping for a moment to think before saying something stupid. 

Is this an argument for the draconian censorship conservatives are so afraid of?  All that is expected is a modicum of consideration of the rights and persons of others.  Not difficult.  Not difficult at all.  And yet for half the country this small concession is a bridge too far.

It may be a bridge impossible to cross for some elements of Trump’s America, however, particularly economically distressed white working-class men.  The establishment has long counted on keeping the masses distracted by setting them against each other.  Referring again to the rules described up-page, straight white males, no matter how humble, have traditionally had an advantage. 

For these whites on the lower end of the economic scale, however, social change is a threat to their slim privilege.  The end of legal segregation in the South is one example of this; the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s was a reaction to this social reordering.  As one man interviewed at the time lamented, “If I’m not better than a n----r, then who am I better than?”  This statement is sad on several levels, the least of which is that it reflects how contradictions in the system victimize everyone on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in some form or fashion.  Basic civility is perhaps a luxury for such people when their “right” to dominate someone even less fortunate is in question.

We’ve only considered public discourse so far.  A thornier question is whether changing minds through changing words can lead to the inferential leap of changing hearts.  It is an open question as to how much we can actually shape character.  Past attempts are an unsettling guide.  Consider the Stalinist era ideal of the New Soviet Man.  A propaganda exemplar more than anything, the NSM nevertheless sought to leverage cultural diversity whilst presenting a single national identity.  If you believe that words can shape thought for the better, perhaps a New American really is conceivable. 

But now that we’ve decided we can shape the ideal individual, that raises the question of how we do the shaping.  Self-monitoring one’s speech is a good step forward, but that won’t work in the absence of social pressure.  Slipping down the logical slope, maybe public struggle sessions reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution would have a salutary result.  It would dovetail well with our penchant for public humiliation as a spectator sport, that's for sure. 

In reality, though, any attempt to coerce good behavior is likely doomed to failure.  By extension, it's not possible to recreate the national character as a whole.  Social engineering ignores the truth that human nature is complex and nuanced even if the idea of free will as it’s commonly conceived of is not literally true.  The best we can do is to improve our own attitudes and behavior towards others in the hope it may encourage others to do better.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Postcards from New York

This past week was my last before the fall semester begins, so I went to New York City for a short vacation.  It was six days well spent, but the trip was not without its interesting moments. 

Here are a few.

Waiting for a Ride

It was nearly two hours after my flight had arrived in Newark, and counting.  I was beginning to despair of ever getting to my hotel.

I’d flown into EWR on the advice of a certain airline with public relations issues.  It touted Newark’s closeness to Manhattan as a selling point.  I took the bait and was coming to regret it.

I had booked a shared shuttle to take me into the city.  I’d given my flight number and arrival time and figured they would be waiting.  How could I have been so foolish?

I quickly learned EWR was an even worse destination than it was a connection.  Following the directions of one of the bevy of red coated guides scattered about the airport, I and my luggage navigated the maze of corridors and escalators and trains to the hotel shuttle waiting area outside the terminal. 

And I waited.  And waited, as various hotel vans came and went with no sign of one from the service I’d booked.

After 45 minutes, it finally occurred to me to ask another redcoat whether I was in the right place.  I was not.  The first redcoat had been in error.

Convinced I would have to swim across the Hudson to get to my destination, I dejectedly made my way back through the maze.  Following the conflicting advice of several more redcoats cost me twenty more minutes before I finally arrived at a customer service desk at the airport taxi stand. 

I presently found myself waiting in line for one of the three customer service reps with one customer ahead of me.  I silently prayed that I wouldn’t get the surly young woman on the far left, who had just run off a guy who asked for clarification of the directions she’d given him with a snarled, “Do you want me to hold your hand and walk you there?” before she resumed playing with her phone.  I could see her point, I guess.  After all, that candy wasn’t going to crush itself… 

The fellow who waited on me called the shuttle company for a van.  He told me the van would arrive in fifteen minutes.

An hour and twenty minutes later, my ride suddenly materialized.  The driver was a gentleman of uncertain south Asian ancestry with limited English.  I was the last passenger and the van was jampacked. 

After a lengthy argument between the driver and a passenger from New Zealand who had reserved her seat by phone on the flight over and lacked the requisite paper receipt, we got underway.

The drive to Holland Tunnel took us through a bleak industrial landscape straight out of the opening credits of The Sopranos.  We crept along in bumper-to-bumper traffic until we finally surfaced in Manhattan.  I’d chosen my Tribeca hotel specifically for its closeness to the Holland Tunnel exit and its presumed ease of access for transportation.  Another mistake.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the aid of GPS, the driver got lost immediately and we spent still another quarter hour meandering through lower Manhattan.

Surrounded by yellow taxis whilst stopped at a red light, I couldn’t miss the ads on the cab roofs.  They were all from the Devil’s Airline touting the convenience of its service to and from Newark.

Ah, the irony…

Chugged

Walking down a street in Tribeca I heard a shout behind me.  Then another.  Someone was trying to get my attention.

Specifically, the guy calling after me was trying to hail me with a rude comment mocking my appearance.  I’m aware of my aesthetic shortcomings, but I still get annoyed when they are pointed out to me. 

So, I turned around and let out an audible groan.  The shaggy Millennial twit accosting me was a charity fundraiser.  You know the kind, lurking on urban street corners intercepting unsuspecting tourists as no self-respecting local would ever respond to their come-ons. 

If you’re not familiar with the phenomenon, large charities have taken to hiring fundraising firms to get pedestrians on city streets to give up their credit card numbers for one-time or (preferably) recurring monthly contribution to the cause.  The people engaged in this practice aren’t idealistic volunteers.  They’re mercenaries, some of whom work on commission.

This particular tool was huckstering for an animal welfare organization.  “You really think you’re going to get money from me this way?” I asked him pointedly.

“Aw, c’mon, bro, you gotta admit it’s funny.  I mean, c’mon!”

“Am I laughing?  Bro?  Think I’d give you anything after that crack, even if I did support your charity?”

Shaggy suddenly got serious, dialed it back a bit, and tried to rescue his spiel.  “Do you support us?  Don’t you like puppies?  Everybody likes puppies.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning away.  “Roasted on a spit for dinner.” 

Shaggy was momentarily speechless.  Finally, he sputtered, “Dick!”

“Takes one to know one,” I said over my shoulder as I walked off.  “Happy hunting—bro!”

#Trumpocalypse

Stepping out of the St. Regis Hotel after lunch, I headed west on East 55^th Street, then turned right and started walking up Fifth Avenue towards Central Park.   

There was a small crowd of tourists clustered on the sidewalk in the middle of the block.  Curious, I joined them to see what the fuss was about.

It turned out we were gathered outside Trump Tower.   What a commotion…a riot of phones and selfies and pointing and oohs and ahs.   Never mind the RoboCop-like police officers with carbines slung across their chests standing next to the doormen.  Never mind the dark-sunglassed suits lurking nearby with fingers pressed to their earpieces.  Never mind the trappings of incipient fascism.  We were basking in the reflective glow of the Narcissist-in-Chief’s gaudy monument to himself.

A celebrity building.  Only in America.

The Connoisseur

Most evenings during my trip, I ended up at a nice little Italian place in the West Village.  The food and service were good, but its main virtue was that it was open past eleven.

Over the course of the week I’d struck up a friendly, bantering relationship with the bartender.  I’ll call him Raffi.  Raffi’s in his mid-twenties, handsome, with freeflowing shoulder length blond hair.  His accented English is charmingly idiosyncratic.  I’m sure the girls all swoon over him.

I was finishing my dinner one night when a customer strode into the bar from his sidewalk table.  He was not happy.  As soon as he set foot indoors, he bellowed at Raffi, “Hey!  Hey!  I wanna talk to you!”

With an entrance like that, I just had to get a look at the guy.  A first glance confirmed my suspicions.  The bellowing man was decked out in the regalia of The Asshole, middle aged white male summer edition:

Flat cap concealing a balding dome? Check.

Salt-and-pepper half beard intended to convey the message that while he’s mature, he hasn’t completely lost touch with his youthful wild streak?  Check.

Two-tone guayabera straining against a noticeable paunch? Faded khaki pants and sandals? Check!

The following exchange ensued:

“The wine you served me and my guests was disgusting! There was sediment in it!”

Raffi smiled appeasingly, “Sir, every bottle has a little sediment.  We can’t—”

“There was sediment!  There was an unacceptable amount of sediment!  It spoiled my palate!  I’m gonna be tasting that sediment all night!”

Raffi tried again: “Sir, we can’t avoid a little sediment—”

“You’re debating me!  Don’t debate me!  I know what I’m talking about!  I know wine!  I’m a connoisseur!” 

He paused a second, his rant momentarily losing its footing.  “I used to be a bartender,” the man continued, hoping this was the cherry on the sundae.  Still, he figured he’d get in a lick or two more.

“I know what I’m talking about!” the man went on.  He paused again, searching for a forceful finale.  “That sediment spoiled my palate,” he finally sulked, just in case Raffi hadn’t gotten it the first time.

“Maybe it was the way the glass was poured,” Raffi ventured cautiously.  “Would you like a new bottle, sir?”

“Yeah, I want a new bottle!  You shoulda offered me one in the first place!”

Bellowing Man had his victory.  And yet he just couldn’t let things go completely.  He still wanted to know why there was so much sediment in his wine.  Raffi, frustrated and seeking to defend his establishment’s honor, strained the remaining contents of the original bottle through a bar sieve to show it wasn’t all dregs.  Raffi was vindicated, but Bellowing Man insisted on the last word as Raffi uncorked a new bottle for him.

“Look, I know you’re just doing your job.  But you debated me.  You shouldn’t have debated me, you know?”  Raffi nodded, knowing any answer might be construed as further “debate.”

Bellowing Man’s tone softened.  “Sorry we got off on the wrong foot.  We can be friends, can’t we?  Friends?”  He then shook Raffi’s hand in a classic bully gesture.

After the guy left, Raffi said to me, “Sorry you had to see that.  I’m sorry he spoiled your meal.” 

Raffi’s apology made me feel even worse for him.  “He shouldn’t have acted that way,” I said with consummate understatement.  “It wasn’t your fault.  He could’ve handled it differently.  Besides, you were right.  Every bottle has a little sediment.”

“Thanks.”  Raffi refilled my glass.  “Let me make it up to you.  This one’s on me.”

I finished eating, paid my tab, and ventured out into the late evening warmth.  I made sure I left Raffi a generous tip.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

They Had It Coming

Be careful what you teach your children.  Certain things you say or do can have lasting repercussions beyond the environs of hearth and home.  A student reminded me of this today.

My college was generous and assigned me to teach a summer class.  It’s an online section.  Conventional wisdom in my field says that students taking online classes need the sort of self-discipline to succeed that those in traditional classes don’t.  I’m learning that a similar principle applies to online faculty. 

And so, each day I steel myself to the task of grading discussion posts and writing assignments.  This week’s topic was whether there was potential today for building an issue-based mass social movement of the magnitude of the Civil Rights Movement or the campus antiwar movement of the 1960s.  Most of the assignments were the usual attempts to answer my question in as few words as the student can get away with and still get a passing score. 

But, as always, a few stood out.  And one in particular raised my hackles, which doesn’t happen very often.  It was from a young lady I’ll call Prudence.  According to her personal introduction post from the first week of class, Prudence is a sixteen-year-old homeschooled Mormon taking the class under the college’s academic enrichment program.  With most of the overtly religious students I get, I simply sidestep debates with them on issues where the student and I would have diametrically opposed positions.

With Prudence, this has become increasingly difficult.  I’ve found myself literally grinding my teeth reading her narrowminded opinions on subjects ranging from healthcare to taxes to jobs, with the inevitable references to her religious convictions as justification.  So far, I’ve refrained from leaving comments on her more out-there assertions.  Normally, I would patiently question any factual distortions or point out any lapses in logic.  But with cultural conservatives, I’ve found that evidence based counterfactuals fall on deaf ears and blind eyes.   

Prudence’s latest missive used Black Lives Matter as an example of a contemporary social movement.  So had a number of other students.  Their positions on the subject varied.  A couple, from self-identified criminal justice majors aspiring to police careers, were mildly critical.  Most tried with varying degrees of success to evaluate BLM in the context of social media and citizen activism.  Fairly typical student responses, in other words.

But our girl Prudence is not the sort of student to mince words or mask her opinions behind a bunch of weasel words.  No sir, she jumped in with both feet.  On Michael Brown, as it happened, whose 2014 shooting by the Ferguson, Missouri police was the catalyst for the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Prudence defended her objections to Black Lives Matter by pointing out that Brown had had a police record.  That is, he’d been in trouble before and so the cops were justified in shooting him.  

Reading this, I took a deep breath as I felt my face turn red.  I stopped there, closed Prudence’s assignment, and logged out of the LMS.  I still haven’t come back to it, though I know I'll have to.

I shouldn’t let an adolescent know-it-all twit get to me like that.  It’s not entirely her fault she is the way she is.  I don’t think Prudence has any idea how her bigoted views are received by anyone outside her social circle.  I don’t think she’s interacted much with people outside her social circle.  

For that, most of my opprobrium is focused on her father and mother.  It is very unlikely she formed these ideas wholly on her own.  Prudence’s rigid beliefs and judgmental attitude toward anyone different from her are much the same as those of past students hailing from certain evangelical Protestant and Mormon families.  Prejudices are inevitably learned at our parents’ knees, but in most families they tend to be more subtle than those Prudence freely expresses and are couched in language not considered blatantly racist by the folks using it.  

All right, let’s move on.  Let’s look at the discourse surrounding police violence against young black men.  Michael Brown had it coming because he had a record.  Oscar Grant deserved to die because he had a record.  Rodney King’s beating to within an inch of his life was just deserts for having had a record. 

It is precisely these attitudes in mainstream white America which has given rise to Black Lives Matter.  American law and American society do not value the lives of American citizens equally, and racial oppression is the original sin in which our country was conceived.  It is deeply ingrained in our cultural fabric that people of color are inherently inferior, and it’s this very premise which lurks in the background whenever whites discuss police violence against them.  Even the act of asserting racial equality in any serious sense puts some of them on the defensive, hence the emergence of All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. 

There’s nothing wrong with either of these propositions in a normative sense.  All lives should matter in principle.  But the way the idea is asserted implies pretty clearly that it is all white lives which matter to the exclusion of those of others.  If one side says Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter is merely a coded retort from the other side saying, “No, they don’t.” 

The white backlash is kind of funny when you think about it.  Black Lives Matter as a movement is approaching the civil rights issue of police violence in a constructive manner.  (I am referring to BLM itself, not to those individuals who have shot at or otherwise attacked law enforcement officers using police violence as an excuse for their crimes.)  Numerous civil disturbances have broken out in response to police actions in the black community, with the 1992 L.A. riots, the violence in Miami’s Liberty City in 1980, the 1967 uprisings in Detroit and Newark, and the 1965 Watts Rebellion being the most frequently invoked historical examples.  By comparison, BLM is a peaceable attempt to address an ongoing issue which never seems any closer to resolution.

I recognize that police work is not easy.  And it shouldn’t be.  The profession requires its members to be men and women of sound judgment and possessing well-developed social skills capable of exercising discretion and restraint in rapidly changing and potentially dangerous situations.  I want to believe that this is the case with the majority of law enforcement officers. 

However, law enforcement is a traditionally conservative (with a small “c”) field.  It has historically resisted change, relying on the fears of affluent whites to slow or head off reform.  When the Warren Court issued its rulings in Mapp v. Ohio, Escobedo v. Illinois, and Miranda v. Arizona, law and order advocates howled with indignation telling the public that the police’s hands were tied by a bunch of Washington bleeding hearts.  (Never mind that Earl Warren was a former prosecutor.)   I would argue that having to cross T’s and dot I’s has professionalized law enforcement and resulted in introducing solid evidence leading to convictions. 

Despite this, the narrative of the besieged cop in a hostile society has persisted since the Sixties.  Richard Nixon capitalized on this during his presidency.  As a kid, I remember the “Support Your Local Police” bumper stickers fastened on numerous cars (often as not right next to the equally ubiquitous American flag decals).  An example of the tenor of the era comes from a 1970 issue of Life magazine whose cover bore the ominous legend, “Cops as Targets.”  By the 1990s, the moral panic over the emergence of youthful, implicitly African-American or Latino “superpredators,” a phenomenon which never materialized, had given rise to widespread support for increased spending for police and new prisons, mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders, and similar punitive policies.

When I say “widespread,” I mean widespread among those segments of American society which are eligible to vote and exercise said right.  Poor people and people of color vote at lesser rates than well-off whites.  These same demographics are disproportionately charged with and convicted of felonies which in several states effectively serves as a bar to the franchise years or even decades after the sentence is served.  Deprived at a seat at the table and faced with a heavy-handed law enforcement presence, how else are communities of color supposed to respond?  Considering the possibilities based on past experience, perhaps we should listen carefully to what these new activists have to say.

I have my fingers crossed that Black Lives Matter prospers and grows as a movement, and that it opens eyes and opens hearts along the way.  Because as long as the white community labors under the assumption that black victims of police violence somehow deserved it, there is and will be no way forward.   

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar