Remembering the March on Washington

As we look back today on the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech, PBS is airing the documentary The March.  It’s viewable online at http://video.pbs.org/video/2365069476/.

Chilling Effects

The Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for his role in the WikiLeaks scandal.  Meanwhile, Julian Assange remains at bay in the Ecuadoran embassy in London and Edward Snowden has found temporary refuge in Russia.

The years since 9/11 have not been good for government transparency.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with public acquiescence in any official measures purported to fight terrorism, have emboldened American officialdom to act with a secretive heavy-handedness unseen since the dark hours of the Cold War.  Manning should thank her lucky stars she wasn’t convicted of the charge of aiding the enemy.  Judging from the comments seen on various news sites, Manning would have been put up against a wall and shot if the court of public opinion had had jurisdiction. 

Manning’s real crime, as with those of Assange and Snowden, was that she embarrassed the powers that be.  It’s that simple; the emperor does not like to be told he’s naked when he’s convinced himself he’s clad in the finest robes.  Footage of U.S. helicopters lobbing Hellfire missiles into residential neighborhoods undermines the claim we’re fighting for freedom from terror.  The government’s aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers, past and present, notorious and obscure, has created a chilling effect on dissent.

A crucial point no one excoriating Manning, Snowden, and Assange can substantiate is whether any U.S. or coalition military personnel were directly harmed as a result of the WikiLeaks revelations.  The combat videos have undermined the military's image, to be sure.  The many thousands of diplomatic cables address mainly mundane affairs, with the occasional embarrassing observation or admission.  But the true threat is to the classification regime itself.  Official secrecy creates its own incentive to hide even innocuous information from the citizenry, not to mention the ability to cover up possible war crimes.  Secrecy permits us to go about our lives blithely unaware of the brutal deeds routinely carried out in our name.  It lets us believe our hands are clean.

Manning seems to elicit a rage in people which Assange, Snowden, and the myriad other players in the WikiLeaks drama do not seem to inspire.  The reader comments I’ve seen on Yahoo!, Reuters, AP, et al., leavened as they are with the sadly inevitable homophobic slurs and prison rape jokes, leads me to conclude that the real animus springs more from the transgressiveness of Manning’s persona than his misdeeds.  The underlying logic runs like this: No wonder she’s a traitor to her country, she’s a traitor to the masculine military ethos, to the very ideal of masculinity.  It calls to mind the “Commies and queers” witch hunts of the McCarthy era, when homosexuality was considered both figuratively and literally subversive.

This single aspect of the Manning case reveals an ugly truth of American culture.  We are a society of playground bullies.  The strong pick on and exploit the weak.  Manning is the kid whose lunch money was stolen, whose ass was lashed by snapping towels in the high school locker room, who has gone throughout her life forced to submerge her very identity under the crushing weight of heteronormativity.  A lifetime of having to choke down one’s rage every day takes its toll.  It is exceedingly difficult to feel loyalty to an order which denies you your basic humanity.

No matter—It won’t be long before Chelsea Manning fades from public memory.  Our collective amnesia will permit us to preserve our belief in our national virtue.  It will be easy to forget because America is populated with consumers rather than citizens.  We readily, perhaps too eagerly conflate abstractions such as “freedom” and “democracy” with material placebos.  Forced feedings at Guantanamo?  Unarmed villagers massacred?  No worries; the people in charge know what is right and it’s not up to us to question them.  Besides, we’ve got the latest SUV in the garage, the house’s value has gone up over the past year, and the kids each have a brand new iPhone 5.  All is well and right with the world.

God bless America!

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

In Memory of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot - August 3, 1913

Today marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Wheatland Hop Field Riot. 

The uprising stemmed from the brutal working conditions imposed upon itinerant farm workers harvesting hops at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, California.  An influx of job seekers, whose numbers far exceeded the number of positions available, drove down the already slender going wage.  The workers who were taken on, many of them women and young children, performed heavy physical labor for 12 hour days in triple digit heat.  Despite the temperature, Durst did not provide water to the workers but instead sold them an acidic beverage to slake their thirst.  Shade and adequate toilet facilities were also lacking.

Facing a strike over low pay and poor treatment, Ralph Durst called in the Yuba County district attorney and sheriff’s deputies to quell the unrest.  The inevitable confrontation led to the sheriff’s contingent firing into the crowd after it resisted their attempt to arrest Industrial Workers of the World organizer Richard “Blackie” Ford, who was addressing the strikers.  At least one worker in the crowd fired back.  When the smoke cleared, four people lay dead: the DA, a sheriff’s deputy, and two workers.  Scores of other people were injured.

As so often happened during the labor struggles of the era, California Governor Hiram Johnson called in the National Guard to restore order for the bosses.  Ultimately, Ford, fellow organizer Herman Suhr, and a number of the other laborers present were apprehended and questioned.  Many of them were beaten or otherwise abused during the interrogations.  One suspect killed himself in his jail cell.

In the end, Ford, Suhr, and two others were bound over for trial on second-degree murder charges in the death of the district attorney.  Ford and Suhr were ultimately convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.   When Ford was paroled in 1924, he was promptly indicted for the death of the sheriff’s deputy only to be acquitted at trial.  Soon thereafter, Suhr was pardoned and set free.  

Let us not forget the workers killed and wounded that day, nor should we forget the IWW organizers Herman Suhr and Blackie Ford who were unjustly imprisoned for their efforts on behalf of labor rights.  An injury to one is an injury to all, then and now.

Solidarity forever.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Not Guilty...But Hardly Innocent

Well, it’s official: Murder is now legal in the State of Florida, at least if your victim’s complexion is darker than yours.

The George Zimmerman verdict last night did not come as much of a surprise.  Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law offered Zimmerman a fairly solid defense for last year’s killing of Trayvon Martin.  A cursory look at this morning’s TV and online news offered the expected.  Conservatives are lauding the jury’s verdict as justice done, while liberals and progressives lament the result as another step backwards for race relations in America.

George Zimmerman is an unlikely hero by any standard.  The pudgy, sad sack cop wannabe has had a checkered past which includes charges of domestic violence and assaulting a police officer.  The fact that Zimmerman killed a minor who was simply taking a shortcut home should have rendered him wholly unsympathetic in the eye of the public.  But the hard truth is that we haven’t achieved the postracial society some pundits had hailed after the 2008 presidential election.

In fact, little seems to have changed for the better. Trayvon Martin’s murder calls to mind the lynchings of the pre-civil rights era.  His crime was being in the wrong place—an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood—at the wrong time.  Zimmerman had followed Martin, despite instructions to the contrary from the 911 operator, because he knew that there would be few real consequences from confronting the “suspect.”

The not guilty verdict proves that we indeed live in George Zimmerman’s America.  As the well-off retreat into gated communities, as we rely increasingly upon private security and high-tech gadgetry to safeguard our homes and property, and as paranoia envelops our culture, it’s perhaps too easy to justify the killing of a suspicious person.  It doesn’t help that our ingrained taste for gratuitous violence enables us to excuse murder, particularly when the law (and trial juries) sanction it. 

Mr. Zimmerman may be not guilty in the eyes of the law…but he is hardly innocent.  And neither are we.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar    

Stultus Valley Days - III: Family Style

Daily life in Stultus Valley was defined primarily by its dense, overlapping web of familial ties.  One of the first questions invariably uttered by the natives when meeting someone new was, “Who are you related to?”

Extended family provided Valley dwellers with the sort of security ordinarily afforded by employers and public agencies in the broader world.  When minor disasters hit, such as summer wildfires and winter blizzards, folks sought the help of relatives rather than that of the county or the Red Cross.  A few extended families ensconced in the rugged draws of the surrounding hillsides were so self-sufficient you rarely saw their ilk in town.  It was probably just as well that the rest of us didn’t venture into those parts very often.  A lot of the people living along the rutted dirt trails supplemented their slender incomes by growing weed or, more ominously, cooking meth.    

Regardless of social circumstances, the Valley exerted a strange, centripetal pull on its natives.  I remember the case of one young lady who was fortunate enough to earn a full-tuition scholarship to a good private liberal arts college.  After graduating, she worked several months in Washington as a White House intern.  Most new college graduates would have parlayed these accomplishments into a solid job or getting into a competitive graduate program.  Instead, she returned to the Valley, unemployed, to live with her mentally ill mother and rehab failure father.  Family is family, after all, even when they poison your life.

It's little surprise, then, that kinship in Stultus Valley frequently took on an ugly cast.  In fact, domestic dysfunction was one of the Valley’s few spectator sports.  The first incident which comes to mind took place on my very own block.  My next door neighbor then was James Hall, the Stultus County sheriff.  James was a tall, burly man whose physical stature belied a teddy-bear personality.  James’ nice-guy demeanor and approachableness resulted in a steady stream of constituents coming to his front door with some grievance or other.

Early one morning, around threeish, I was roused from a sound sleep by a godawful ruckus.  This was unusual; the very best thing about Linden was that it lacked the street sounds you’d have to put up with elsewhere.  Ordinarily the only thing you heard in the dead of night was the occasional hooting of owls. 

A peek out the living room window gave me a front-row view of unfolding events.  The source of the commotion was a diminutive middle-aged woman shouting and pounding on Sheriff Hall’s front door.  Cattycorner across the street was a young man in handcuffs being led by two deputies to a cruiser parked at the curb, lights flashing.

I recognized the guy.  He was the unemployed live-in boyfriend of the checkout clerk at Linden’s hole-in-the-wall grocery, recently discharged from the military after a tour in Iraq.  It appeared that he’d taken exception to something his boo had said, evincing his displeasure by first beating, then choking her.  Fortunately, she managed to get away long enough to dial 911.  Before the cops arrived the boyfriend, this heroic combat veteran, called his mommy for help.

And so there she was, at this ungodly hour, demanding that Sheriff James Hall, clad in but a t-shirt and sweatpants and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, order his deputies to release her only child.  James, often too accommodating for his own good, normally afraid of losing even one vote on Election Day, this time put down his bare foot and said no. 

Mom was apoplectic.  “I’ll have your badge for this!” she screeched, as if she could somehow invalidate the will of the Stultus County electorate with her unbridled wrath. 

Peering through the drapes, taking it all in, I suddenly realized the harridan having an emotional meltdown on James’ front porch looked awfully familiar.  After a moment, I remembered who she was.  She was Belinda Marinero, the new administrator for the county domestic violence prevention program. 

If it hadn’t been for the harrowing ordeal her son’s girlfriend had just suffered at his hands, I would have laughed at the irony.  Not that I was surprised that someone in the Marinero clan had gotten into trouble.  One of the few entertainments in a town like Linden was the county court docket published biweekly in the Valley’s only newspaper, The Stultus Rooster.  The name Marinero appeared often, this one charged with burglary, that one with public drunkenness, another with assault, etc.  Word had it that there was a Marinero relative in state prison for manslaughter.  Still another was in the county lockup, indicted for child molestation and awaiting trial.  I guess you could say that being a Marinero held a sort of rural outlaw cachet, but I wasn’t terribly impressed.

Back to Belinda: I’d met her only once, and that was enough to form a bad impression.  About a week earlier, I’d attended a board meeting for the town community center.  Since it was noontime, a few folks arrived early to have lunch first.  When I got there, Karen, the center’s director, was sitting at the table with a companion who was wolfishly devouring what looked like fettucine alfredo from a takeout container.  The woman was fiftyish, haggard, with badly dyed auburn hair and a heavily lined, vaguely simian face. 

This, I was told, is Belinda.  Belinda ceased her pasta slurping long enough to nod and say, mouth still full,  something along the lines of, “You’ll get to know me soon enough,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

It wasn’t long before I found out.  Belinda’s personality matched her swinish table manners.  I was at the meeting to discuss a recent study commissioned by the state concerning risk factors for child and spousal abuse.  The study found that these risk factors included low levels of educational attainment, economic distress, and substance abuse. 

All of this was pretty boilerplate stuff, conventional wisdom to anyone working in social services.  I was merely the messenger, of course, but Belinda seized upon my report as a personal affront.  She tore into me with an unexpected fury, red faced, voice increasingly strident, telling me with a near-murderous intensity that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.  Why, her rat bastard alcoholic ex-husband left her when little Jacob was still crapping his diapers, leaving her to support the family on a cocktail waitress’ salary.  She didn’t need some overeducated smartass telling her she was someone who might abuse her kid.

The room fell silent.  I’m seldom at a loss for words, but Belinda’s unprovoked, hate-laden tirade left me speechless.  Karen, normally quite friendly towards me, fixed me in a hard stare.  These people were exceedingly tribal, and I’d been in town long enough to know I was alone.  As the outsider, I was wrong.  Knowing it would make things worse if I actually tried to reason with Belinda, I simply closed my report and the meeting moved uncomfortably on.

I’d mostly put the incident out of my mind until young Jacob decided to use his girlfriend as a punching bag.  And what happened to the star-crossed couple, you ask?  About what you’d expect, actually.  The district attorney didn’t press the case against Jacob with much zeal.  After all, you don’t want to jail somebody who’s related to half the county and is Linden’s one and only Iraq war vet. 

In the end, Jacob was merely fined and given a year’s unsupervised probation.   Shortly thereafter he moved back in with the girlfriend, who was overjoyed to have him back. 

A true story, sadly.  But that’s what family means in Stultus Valley.     

Next Installment: The Business of Stultus Valley is…?   

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

 

Commencement! (2013 Edition)

Following a long, grueling week of grading term papers and final exams, after dealing with C students who received B’s from me in a moment of compassion weakness and were outraged they didn’t get A’s, and in the wake of tidying up a couple dozen end-of-semester administrative loose ends, it is now my dubious privilege to take part in that end of year ritual at Snowflake College, commencement.

Unlike other institutions, we keep it simple.  The attire is business or business casual, depending on your sartorial inclinations.  We don’t fuss with formal academic dress, which is a good thing for me because my gown has been gathering dust in the back of my closet for nearly ten years and, quite frankly, I don’t remember how to don the master’s hood.  I can’t fully explain why I bother to attend each year, except that it reassures me that the travails of the year are finally ended.  It’s also an opportunity to remind my colleagues—and the dean—that no matter how unpopular I am I’m not going away of my own free will.

Although each year’s commencement is much like the ones before it, there’s always some small wrinkle to arouse my easily-stirred ire.  A few days ago, an email circulated among the faculty.  A colleague proposed that we surprise Dr. Kimpossible before the formal part of the ceremony by honoring her for gracing the dean’s office these past few years.  The idea was for each of us to walk on stage and say a single word which described her before walking off.  The message suggested adjectives such as “funny,” “innovative,” “compassionate,” “visionary.”

Words not suggested were the ones circulating in my own mind, words like “flaky,” “superficial,” “condescending,” and “single-minded.”  Reading the email, I knew there was no way in hell I could go through a charade like that.  Harboring no desire to kiss Kimpossible’s ample posterior, I choose to arrive just as the surprise tribute was ending.   I take advantage of the prolonged cheering to unobtrusively seat myself at the back of the faculty section.

Predictably, Kimpossible is overcome by this demonstration of collective sycophancy.  “Thank you, thank you,” she murmurs, tears trickling slowly down her cheeks, casting nods toward the faculty seats as if to acknowledge each of her loyal subjects one by one.  As she gives the opening remarks, Kimpossible makes sure to punctuate them with a couple of carefully placed stifled sobs just in case anyone has failed to notice how deeply moved she is. 

Kimpossible takes a moment to recognize those faculty members who “went above and beyond for our students and inspired the campus community.”  Unsurprisingly, the names are the same as last year’s and provide Kimpossible with an opportunity to get in a plug for the Mavens and Intuitions speaker series.  And so, Professor Duckie gets a pat on the back for his presentation “Disney’s Song of the South: Racism or Just Good Old Fashioned Bigotry?” while Professor Jan is lauded for her talk “Subversive Sex Objects: Belly Dancing as Resistance to Patriarchy.”  The audience applauds vigorously as Kimpossible hugs Duckie and Jan, brushing still more tears from her face.

Of course, Kimpossible would be remiss if she didn’t acknowledge the hard work of the Macaroni Picture Club in decorating the room for commencement.  Please indulge me a digression:

Art is a particular preoccupation at Snowflake.  We have a well-resourced visual arts program run by professors with impressive vitae.  The annual campus art show is a major community event, and our students avail themselves liberally of Snowflake’s art class offerings.  I don’t just mean the art appreciation courses which are an essential part of a balanced general ed diet.  Our learners don’t want to talk about art; they want to make it and so the various oils, watercolors, drawing, ceramics, sculpture, and graphic arts classes consistently run wait lists.  The classroom halls are jammed with people with canvases tucked under their arms.  Student works adorn hallways and offices.

We even tap into students’ artistic proclivities in classes having little to do with visual art.  For instance, Kimpossible requires the “knowledge explorers” in her Introduction to Mesoamerican Mythology class to make phallic objects out of clay.  I must confess I was a little startled the first time I saw people carrying handmade renditions of erect penises through the halls.  All in the name of academic inquiry, I suppose.  

Encouraging self-expression is a good thing, to be sure.  What I find risible is how seriously some of these kids take themselves.  They can’t all be competent, let alone good.  Much like mathematical or writing abilities, artistic talent varies greatly from person to person.  Nevertheless, I frequently hear students proudly discussing their “art,” as if calling it that makes it so.  It’s too bad the No Child Left Behind law doesn’t mandate testing for self-esteem.  Today’s public school graduates would score off the charts. 

Meanwhile, the ceremony drags on.  Grads stride across the stage to collect their diplomas while Kimpossible shares interesting tidbits and inspiring facts about each: Misty made bead necklaces to send to starving children in Darfur.  Gareth continued to teach downhill skiing to tourists during the peak of the Christmas holiday despite a sprained ankle.  Kelsey courageously tweeted and updated her Facebook status while she and her family were trapped in a six-hour traffic jam during the New Year’s Eve blizzard.  And so on.  We’re also treated to a preview of their post-graduation plans, things like backpacking through the Carpathian Mountains, bungee jumping in Greece, and getting exotic body parts pierced and tattooed.

As the graduates pass before us, I ponder the changes in the student body during my teaching career.  Kimpossible likes to point out Snowflake’s countercultural flair, jokingly calling herself the “Queen of Hippie Hill.”  The truth is that precious few of our kids possess anything resembling the counterculture ethos.  I miss the days when students would casually drop by during my office hours and talk about stuff such as the theme of solitude in Hesse’s Steppenwolf or the viability of a gift economy. 

That time has passed, to my regret and dismay.  Nowadays, you’re more likely to hear the word “hippie” applied to the kidult hacky sack players and ski bums loitering on the quad than to the genuine free spirits possessing a quick intellect, an accepting character, and a capacity to discern and embrace the world’s wonders.  As with so much in Kimpossible’s universe, appearances trump substance.

Diplomas conferred, the ceremony draws to an end.  Last year, the only part of commencement worth sitting through was the sign language and singing performance from the special needs kids in the adaptive living program sponsored by the college.  They were so sweet and guileless that their performance was a sure antidote to the cheesy sentimentality which characterizes virtually every special occasion at Snowflake College. 

No such luck this time.  Instead, we go straight to the obligatory slideshow projected on the mezzanine wall.

Kimpossible is the Mistress of Montage.  Campus events at Snowflake invariably end with slideshows of inspirational stock images culled from the internet, mated with upbeat pop tunes.  This time the slideshow is set to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.”  Kimpossible had given a series of talks on LGBT issues, and rather than make up whole a new montage it appears she recycled the one from the lectures.  Still, this is far better than the closing from a couple of years ago, when, instead of a montage, we were treated to that YouTube video of the dancing guy around the world.

“Thanks so much for attending this morning’s ceremony.  Please stay for the reception.  And don’t miss this afternoon’s showing of The Secret by the New Thought Club!

“Have a blessed day!”

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Best wishes for a safe and pleasant summer break to all my fellow toilers in the groves of academe, wherever you may be. 

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

I Am the Law, So I Won

Even as the news arrived that former Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla had died in prison, we learn that his contemporary counterpart in Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, may go free after that country’s Supreme Court overturned his genocide conviction and ordered a partial retrial.[1]

Ríos Montt, one may recall, ruled Guatemala during the most vicious period of its long-running civil war during the early 1980s.  His staunchest ally was the United States; President Reagan praised him as a “man of integrity” committed to “social justice.”

The kind of social justice Ríos Montt promoted in Guatemala was, shall we say, very selective.  Even the CIA expressed concern over the mounting death toll as US- and Israeli-supplied and trained troops took the lives of numerous civilians in such atrocities as the Plan de Sanchez Massacre.  Although the campaign against URNG guerrillas took center stage and was used to justify excesses in the name of establishing “democracy,” Ríos Montt’s administration pressured poor farmers and indigenous Mayans to give up their support for the guerrillas and pledge their loyalty to the state.

The result was a swath of destruction which put Billy Sherman’s March to the Sea to shame, with hundreds of villages razed.  The population escaping death in the attacks was left homeless and bereft of means of subsistence.   Now, more than thirty years later, Ríos Montt faces at least the possibility of being held accountable for his actions.  As his case returns to trial, we (and his thousands of victims) should be cautiously hopeful for a just outcome.  But, while times have changed for the better throughout Central and South America, we must also remember that having been the law for so long, these aging military rulers expect, and too often receive, a large measure of deference from their civilian successors.   

Don’t be surprised when Ríos Montt goes free.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] Apparently, the Supreme Court upheld the conduct of and the evidence submitted at the trial through April 21^st, but quashed subsequent proceedings.