Afghan Unrest

More than a decade into the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan, it seems we're still learning (or relearning) hard lessons.  This time it's the alleged burning of the Koran by troops at Bagram airbase, and the results have been tragic.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind...

Faculty Meeting at Snowflake College

I like to think I’m someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.  Unfortunately, I’ve pretty much been ordered to.

It’s time for the semiannual faculty meeting at Snowflake College, a perfunctory affair held each semester the week before classes begin.  The agenda never changes: Although most of the folks in the room are returning faculty, the meeting is a review of basic administrative procedures, library hours, operating the classroom audiovisual equipment, etc.  

The main draw for me is that 1) It’s a paid training, and 2) The college provides dinner.  Three hours’ pay and free food?  Just for sitting and listening?  I’m there, dude!  I don’t care how many times I’ve heard this stuff.

As the sign-in sheet is passed around, Dean Kimpossible outlines the evening’s program.  She introduces the new faculty and the courses they’ll be teaching, offerings which afford our students opportunities for personal growth to augment such perennial favorites as Eidetic Portrait Painting, Indonesian Tribal Dance, and Tantric Navel Gazing.  Kimpossible solemnly reminds us it’s precisely this sort of curriculum that makes Snowflake College uniquely suited to educating a new, more discerning generation of students.

Kimpossible recognizes a few of the returning faculty, most notably Professor Duckie, the Most Popular Faculty Member at Snowflake.  A twentysomething only in his third year teaching, Duckie is beloved by faculty, staff, and students alike.  Rumor has it he’s gotten more chili peppers on Rate My Professors.com than any other prof at Snowflake, ever.  He invites his students to send him friend requests on Facebook.  He’s agreeable and apparently charismatic which of course gives everything he says added weight.  The fact that you could wade through his deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet is something that seems to have escaped almost everyone in the room, which goes to show that cultivated superficiality will get you far even in academia.

After sitting through several pro forma presentations by our colleagues, the dean shifts the topic to academics.  Kimpossible’s teaching philosophy is informed by her recruitment brochure vision for Snowflake: Carefree youth in dreadlocks and tie dye playing hackeysack on the front lawn before traipsing off to tatami mat weaving class.  And so we’ve now reached that point in the evening’s proceedings where Kimpossible takes a moment to share her views.  We raise our metaphorical paper cups and prepare to drink the rhetorical Kool-Aid:

“Our students are ‘digital natives.’” (Translation: They’re adept at texting and updating their Facebook pages in class, and yet somehow can’t figure out how to access the course’s online content.)

“Our students don’t want to be lectured.  They are ‘knowledge explorers,’ and your job is to be their guide.”  (They want to do the least amount of work for the highest possible grade.  Your job is to be engaging and entertaining.)   

“Our students are idealistic.”  (Ideally, they would spend all their time on the ski run while Daddy and Mommy pay their bills.)       

“Our students have a different orientation toward work than our generation.”  (They don’t like it.)

“Our students know what they want and live by their values.”  (They have an exaggerated sense of entitlement and will angrily confront anyone who challenges it.  And that includes you, my dear professor.)

At this point Kimpossible pauses a beat, then delivers the punch line:

“Of course, you are responsible for maintaining Snowflake College’s high academic standards.”

Ay, there’s the rub!  Since our students’ exceptionalism is axiomatic, standards are pretty much moot.  I’d like someday to walk into my classroom and not feel like I’m in that Twilight Zone episode about the bratty kid who banishes the grownups he doesn’t like to the cornfield. 

Wait, we’re not quite finished yet.  Kimpossible closes the proceedings by reminding us why we’re all here.  She reads us an email from a student who recently transferred to Big State University:

           “Hey, Kimpossible!

           “Just wanted to tell you how I’m doing now that I’m at Big State. 

“The teachers here don’t care about students.  They’re not cool like at Snowflake.

“They expect me to come to class and do homework and stuff.  This jerkwad professor wouldn’t let me make up an exam even though there was six inches of fresh powder on the slopes and I had to go snowboarding that day.

           “It totally sucks here!”

Kimpossible pauses dramatically to make sure the full meaning of this travesty sinks in. 

“‘It…sucks…here!’” she intones slowly.  “Always remember how special it is at Snowflake.  I’m proud we can provide such a nurturing environment…and I’m thankful we have such students!” 

And with that, we’re dismissed for the evening.  Welcome to another semester at Snowflake College!

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

A Lament for a Lost Movement

I was born and raised in a “blue” state, and I live there still.  However, I also spent my childhood in a small rural town.  Coming of age during the Reagan era, I absorbed a lot of the conventional wisdom of the time.

Given my upbringing, it’s no surprise I developed progressive views relatively late.  But having lived through the past decade, I’m amazed that more people haven’t turned leftward.  In fact, I’ve been hard pressed to find a place where my neighbors share my ideas. 

For the last few years I’ve lived in a mountain resort community where I teach at the local college.  When I first arrived in Treetop (not its real name), it seemed like just the nice, free-thinking sort of place I’d been searching for.  I hoped to find friends who thought and felt as I do.  I thought it might be the where I’d realize a long-nurtured ambition to start a free alternative school.  I yearned to breathe free in the clean alpine air.

Treetop does have a reputation for having a free-spirited, youthful, alt vibe.  What I discovered underneath, however, was a pretty typical small town, right down to the weekly Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions Club breakfast meetings.  The conversation at the wine and cheese parties differs little from what you’d hear in the suburbs.  Town ordinances ensure that one downtown building looks much like all the others.  

I shared my misgivings with an acquaintance, telling her I wished Treetop was more socially progressive.  She was taken aback.  “But Treetop is very progressive,” she protested.  “We have snowboarders, artists, and yoga studios.  I listen to NPR and read The Huffington Post every morning!”

I didn’t bother to argue.  While Treetop isn’t exactly the kind of place Sinclair Lewis would have satirized, neither is it a refuge for aspiring bohemians or dissidents.  My exchange with the neighbor underlines an important fact of American political life.  Progressivism is a fringe movement, probably more so than at any other time in our history.  Oh, we have a loose cultural tolerance we call liberalism.  But being a liberal is largely a matter of style over substance, just another meaningless fashion statement.  I blame this on the legacy of the 1960s.  More precisely, I blame it on people taking away the wrong lessons from that era.  The individualistic, do-your-own-thing, let-it-all-hang-out countercultural ethos seeped into the mainstream without transforming the soul of “square” society.  This is why you have kids today with long hair, tattoos, and body piercings who vote Republican and unabashedly seek business careers.   

The biggest roadblock to reviving progressivism is our essential, small “c,” conservatism.  We don’t like change.  We stubbornly believe individual initiative and hard work conquer all.  Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, we think the system is basically fair and should stay the way it is.  Most importantly, we don’t want to lose whatever social and economic privileges we’ve managed to hold on to.   In short, our national narrative and decades of propaganda have convinced us progressivism just isn’t a good idea.  It helps explain why the Occupy movement has failed to take off.  It hasn’t been police repression or official harassment.  It's been public skepticism and apathy.

So, what’s the solution?  In my humble opinion:

What we need is a compelling counter-narrative.  We need to take back the symbolism and heroes of our past.  We need to remind ourselves of the taken for granted gains made by our forebears.  We must let go of our preconceived notions.  This is easier said than done, but I believe it has to happen.  It may be a bridge too far to win over older generations whose members feel they have too much to lose.  Perhaps we can count on the open mindedness of youth to rebuild the movement.

To build a future movement, we have to look to the past.  We must revisit the experience of the 1960s New Left, the political movement that faded into historical oblivion even as the decade’s music and fashion became cultural icons.  Our goal should be nothing short of a revival of the New Left.   This next New Left must not simply engage in activism.  It must win the cultural war against reaction and corporate hegemony.  It will have to rely on moral suasion to remake our basic cultural values.              

This last charge – to fundamentally remake our collective beliefs – is the most critical and the most difficult.  I’ll mull the possibilities in a future post.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Not Concerned

It seems Mitt Romney has suffered another slip of the tongue. 

This week he told an audience that he was "not concerned" about the very poor because they had a social safety net to rely on.  Apparently he meant to emphasize his commitment to making things better for the middle class. 

All the same, his infelicitous choice of words was quite telling...and perhaps even calculated.  Romney's utterance reflects the long-held bias of American voters against the impoversished.  The Puritan belief that the poor somehow deserve their plight because of their moral unworthiness is alive and well, and Romney is simply walking the well-trod path followed by Republican politicians since Reagan.  Brace yourselves for more of the usual right-wing drivel of how we should help the less fortunate by cutting the programs that keep them afloat...       

Stay in Touch, Okay?

The first in an occasional series

The name on the email seems vaguely familiar.  Giselle Jones?  Is this someone I should know?  A moment passes, and then I remember she is a student who took my intro to it all class maybe three, maybe four years ago.  My curiosity is mildly piqued.  I open the message:

“mr. scholar,

“u have to send me a copy of your fall 2007 syllabus.  i took ur class at snoflake and now im in college in utah and my adviser wont transfer the credits from ur class without a syllabus.  she says its the only 1 i need all my other classes r ok.

“i called big campis and they said u didnt work at snoflake anymore and i was really confused so i e mailed somebody else i don’t remembir her name i dleted the msg and they said u were still there.

“she said she would tell u to send a syllabus but u never did and now im e mailing u.  i need this rite now ok?

“giselle jones”                 

I search my memory a moment and recall forwarding a copy of the Fall ’07 syllabus to an administrative assistant who had requested it on behalf of Ms. Jones.  I am certain that the admin followed through.  While the life of the mind at Snowflake College* leaves much to be desired, I’ve never known our support staff to drop the ball.  I suspect the shortfall is on the student’s end.   I wonder which college she’s transferred to, and why Utah?  I conclude that Giselle is either a devout Mormon or she’s majoring in skiing. 

I reply:

           “Dear Ms. Jones,

“I’m sorry you haven’t received your requested copy of the syllabus.  The person with whom you spoke at Big Campus is in error; I am still employed at Snowflake College.  You could have avoided any delay by contacting me directly.

“I’m sending you the syllabus as an attachment.

“Regards,

“Unassuming Scholar”

I click “Send” and decide this is the end of this episode.  Ms. Jones and I will each live happily ever after. 

Nearly two weeks later Ms. Jones replies, perhaps to thank me for my kind assistance.  Alas, the news is not what I had hoped for:

“i cant open ur file.  i really need this now.”

Ah, another “digital native” who can’t figure out the most widely used word processing program in the world!  Just to make sure, I open the file on my computer.  No problems there.  I respond,

“Ms. Jones,

“My apologies.  Perhaps there was a glitch that prevented the file from opening.  I’m resending it.  Please let me know if you have any further problems.

“Sincerely,

“Unassuming Scholar”

Still another two weeks pass.  At this point, I figure the matter is at last closed.  And then, another missive from Ms. Jones,

“mr. scholar,

“ i still cant open ur file.  why dont u send me the rite 1?  My adviser needs ur syllabus asap or i dont get credit for ur class and i cant graduate on time.

“i cant believe this.  ur the worst teacher ever.

“giselle jones”

I take a deep breath, suppress the urge to tell her to go piss up a rope, and carefully prepare my response.

“Ms. Jones,

“Flattery will get you nowhere.  Nevertheless, I have cut and pasted the requested syllabus into this message rather than attaching it as a Word file.

“If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to tell you.  You’re on your own.

“Cheers,

“Unassuming Scholar”   

It’s been a month now and there hasn’t been any further word from my erstwhile student.  No news is good news, right?   And yet first thing every morning I peer warily at my email inbox…   


* A tip of the hat to the blog College Misery (http://collegemisery.blogspot.com) and its much-missed predecessor, RateYourStudents.com.       

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Deportee

On this day in 1948, an airplane chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California.  The accident, commemorated in the Woody Guthrie poem, “Deportee,” took the lives of 28 Mexican migrant workers who were being involuntarily repatriated.  The victims included:

Julio Barron

Manuel Calderon

Francisco Duran

Santiago Elisandro

Rosalio Estrado

Bernabe Garcia

James A. Guardaho

Severo Lara

Elias Macias

Jose Macias

Tomas Marquez

Louis Medina

Manuel Merino

Luis Mirando

Martin Navarro

Ygnacio Navarro

Roman Ochoa

Ramon Perez

Apolonio Placentia

Ramon Portello

Guadalupe Ramirez

Alberto Raygoza

Guadalupe Rodriquez

Maria Rodriguez

Juan Ruiz

Salvadore Sandoval

Jesus Santos

Wrapped in the American Flag?

It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly nine years, but I vividly remember the night the Iraq War began. 

I was in graduate school at the time, and I was walking with a friend toward the University Union to have a cup of coffee.  As we approached the door, a woman thrust an antiwar leaflet at us – “Stop the invasion!”  My friend waved her away.  As we walked off she hissed, “Fascists!”

I was taken aback, and a little bemused.  The leaflet lady didn’t know me, of course, but I had spent much of that week engaged in various campus activities concerning the impending conflict.  I’d participated in two antiwar demos already and had been part of a panel symposium on the war and its likely consequences.  But the epithet stung.

For many in the American left, “fascist” is a catchall label for people and ideas they oppose, a word thrown around much in the way right-wingers so often did with “Communist” in earlier generations and do with “anti-American” and “terrorist” today.   All these terms can be thought-terminating clichés.  But remembering that encounter all those years ago outside the University Union has made me reflect on what fascism is and whether it could take root on American soil.

This is a worrisome question that has recurred in times of social ferment since the 1930s.  In fact, we often allude to it in everyday discourse—consider the popularity of the reductio ad Hitlerum as a rhetorical device.  However, since 9/11 there has been particular cause for concern.  In spite of the best efforts of civil libertarians to raise the alarm the American public as a whole has been remarkably quiescent in the face of the PATRIOT Act, no-fly lists, increased surveillance, ever-tightening airport security measures, and a policy of extrajudicial killings abroad.  Although Americans have unprecedented access to news and information most seem to believe ignorance is bliss.     

As they did in many Western countries, various fascist movements took hold in the United States in the years before the Second World War.  While none of them had large memberships or gained widespread support, the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts are still mentioned in histories of the time.  Similarly, demagogic public figures such as Huey Long, William Dudley Pelley, and Fr. Francis Coughlin were characterized by their detractors as fascist. 

After the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it became socially unacceptable to openly espouse fascist ideologies.  However, the anti-Communism engendered by the Cold War represented the sort of sociopolitical reaction that too often aped fascism, albeit loosely.  To this day, currents of fascist tendencies run beneath the surface of American political discourse.

Fascism is one of those elusive concepts that form in the eye of the beholder, as we saw in my opening anecdote.  But we do have a few good rules of thumb for recognition.  For instance, Umberto Eco points to characteristics such as preoccupation with tradition, anti-intellectualism, intolerance of dissent, xenophobia, middle class fears of economic distress, populism, and the need for an external enemy to provide unity.  Stanley Payne identifies like attributes, among them the belief in a need for strong political authority, anti-liberalism, and anti-Communism. 

Certain character types may be particularly attracted to fascist ideas, such as the authoritarian personality described by Hannah Arendt.   Similarly, Richard Hofstadter’s description of American anti-intellectualism incorporates fascist tropes such as resentment of cosmopolitan urbanites and foreigners.  The American preference for practical pursuits over the contemplative life is reminiscent of the pronouncement of Benito Mussolini’s in-house philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, that while fascism wasn’t opposed to intelligence per se it was emphatically against intellectualism.

While we like to see ourselves as individualists, and while our national self-image is largely built on this belief, there is a strong current of conformism and deference to authority in our daily lives.  I don’t think this is case just with blue collar red staters, either.  Training in the top-down group ethos begins early regardless of social background, whether we recognize it or not.  Parenting practices may range from strict, “Because I said so” demands for unquestioning obedience to presenting a narrow range of “choices” to follow, but few parents teach their kids to be truly autonomous.  Starting in elementary school, we sit in orderly rows reminiscent of soldiers in ranks.  By high school, our teachers and administrators choose our leaders and heroes for us; they seldom if ever rise from below.  We’re also told, sometimes overtly, sometimes by default, who doesn’t fit in and should thereby be socially excluded. 

As adults our work is often highly structured.  We attend church much more frequently than our brethren in other Western countries -- a belief in revealed religion is not normally conducive to independent thought.  Our heavily corporatized media presents a homogeneous viewpoint that doesn’t challenge the status quo.  The propaganda function of the mainstream media is well-documented and we can’t blame it all on Fox News or AM talk radio, either.  Minor editorial differences aside, news content varies little from source to source.  Rarely do we ever see or hear progressive views.   

And so we're always ready to rally ‘round the flag.  Patriotism is defined as unquestioning support for our leaders, politicians of all ideological stripes sport flag lapel pins as a silent protest of their loyalty, and anyone who questions the direction in which the country is heading clearly “hates America.”  The chilling effect on dissent over the past ten years has been significant; peer pressure and deference to authority has become the norm.  While we look away from the acts of the powers that be, we focus all the more on the powerless.

The current economic crisis has the middle class groping blindly for culprits.  Not the obvious ones, mind you.  Since your typical suburbanite feels a stronger affinity for CEOs, hedge fund managers, and investment bankers than for the poor and marginalized, it’s the latter whom he blames for the subprime mortgage meltdown.  In his mind it was Democrat-imposed legislation forcing banks to lend to low-income borrowers, particularly minorities, that pushed us down the slippery slope to disaster.  In this climate it’s no surprise that James O’Keefe’s prank on ACORN resonated with conservatives and that President Obama’s past work as a community organizer raised hackles during the 2008 campaign.  It’s probably best for him that he didn’t try to organize immigrants.       

Nativism is alive and well in America, as a cursory look at recent events shows.  It’s hardly new, though.  The escalating war on immigrants, documented or not,  reflects a cyclical phenomenon in our history stretching back all the way to the Know-Nothings of the early nineteenth century.  But despite the progress we tell ourselves we've made since the Civil Rights Movement, the enactment of SB 1070 in Arizona and HB 56 in Alabama lays bare a decidedly ugly vein of bigotry.  Another example is our exaggerated fear of Muslims and people who are or are perceived to be Middle Eastern.  Racial profiling in general is a result of a deep-seated fear of people unlike us.            

The phrase, “people unlike us” may well apply to the so-called Red/Blue state divide though this is hardly a new development.  The rapid urbanization of American society a century ago engendered a deep-seated distrust of cities among rural and small-town people.  For them cities were breeding grounds of sin and magnets for un-American elements.  The Scopes Trial, rural support of Prohibition, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s were all signs of a emerging social chasm that has persisted to this day.           

Another hint of a latent fascism shows in how we’ve constructed our national identity.  Our society valorizes toughness and violence.  It isn’t just our penchant for action films, first-person shooter video games, and other escapist pastimes.  It’s interwoven in our heritage of conquest and global hegemony.  The cult of strength also reveals a certain misogyny—if masculinity is good, its inverse, femininity, is implicitly bad for its presumed weakness.  Moreover, this bias is reflected in statements from our national leaders.  President Bush’s taunt to Iraqi insurgents to “Bring it on” played well with the public, despite the backlash from his political opponents.  When Donald Rumsfeld claimed “weakness is provocative,” he was not just pointing out the need for a strong defense.  He was expressing a contempt for those who fail to live up to the ideal of the taciturn lone hero of our popular self-imagination. 

I suppose we don’t notice these tendencies as we’re a steadfastly apolitical people not given to reflection.  We’re put off by the drone of daily coverage in no small part because we aren’t offered any real choice with the two major parties.  We vote—that’s the extent of our political activity.  Otherwise, we tune out.  Without any meaningful outlet for involvement we turn inward to our private concerns.  Because we’ve largely abandoned the public sphere, the vacuum has been filled by those who don’t have the public good as their priority.  And their manipulation of public sentiment puts us at risk of being ultimately complicit in our own oppression.   

Do I believe that the United States is fascist?  Of course not.  Do I believe that our country has the potential to become fascist?  I believe that we're susceptible given our cultural proclivities.  If and when fascism does come, it won’t be with banners, black shirts, and jackboots.  Sinclair Lewis’ pronouncement is as prescient now as it was 75 years ago: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar