As Seen on TV

Toward the end of last semester, I got an email from my department chair.  Well, not exactly from my department chair, whose messages are usually brief, often cryptic missives set from his iPhone. This email was a forward from a disgruntled applicant in the part-time faculty pool at Snowflake College.  Apparently, I was being asked to address his concerns.

The applicant wanted to know why he hadn’t been hired.  Reading the attached c.v., I learned his chief qualification was a master’s degree from a well-known online graduate program which is well known because it advertises on TV.  No classroom experience.  He once attended the state Republican convention as an observer.  He was a veteran who earned a Good Conduct Medal.  And that was about it.

I pondered the gentleman’s situation for a while, then wrote an answer choosing my words carefully so as not to offend.  I told him the academic job market was tight due to falling enrollment, and to seek other avenues to beef up his resume until things got better.  After clicking “Send,” I fretted that maybe I was a little condescending but he wrote me a rather gracious reply a few days later.

The incident got me to thinking.  As I’ve written in earlier posts, I’m not a fan of online education in general.  I look askance at those programs which advertise heavily.  So, I was gratified when Corinthian Colleges shut down a couple of years ago after years of investigation into its shady business practices, and was pleasantly surprised when ITT Tech abruptly ceased operations late last year. 

Our belief in our own shrewdness and common sense notwithstanding, we’re babes in the woods as consumers.  We will believe any claim as long as it’s stated authoritatively enough.  We’re told that studies beyond high school, which for most people means job training tarted up as “education,” is essential to getting ahead.   Public community colleges such as the ones I work for absorb much of the demand.  However, many folks can’t spare the time for in-person schooling due to work or family obligations.  That’s where the “virtual classroom” comes in.

Distance learning is an old idea.  Online classes are the latest manifestation of the correspondence course, which emerged in the late nineteenth century.  For generations, correspondence courses afforded its ambitious students the opportunity to learn everything from shorthand to TV repair to law.  Traditional universities had their own correspondence programs; living in a small rural town growing up it was common for people to take agriculture courses via our land grant university’s highly regarded extension program.  Britain’s Open University is considered a very successful experiment in affording higher ed to those excluded from it in the past.

Enrolling students who in an earlier time would never have considered college is big business.  P. T. Barnum would approve of the business model: Raise unrealistic expectations, take the money, then move on to the next bunch of suckers.  Speaking of P. T. Barnum, his latter-day incarnation faced controversy last fall when the revelation that Trump University had defrauded its students led the news for a couple of hours before the next lurid Trump tale took its place.  TU wasn't an online program, but it welshed on its implied promise that at least some of the proffered seminars would feature The Donald himself.  That particular example is an outlier, but many consumers are being sold a pig in a poke just the same when it comes to their postsecondary schooling options.

I suppose my sour attitude on this topic has been aggravated by the fact that I’m teaching an online course for the first time this semester.  It’s an honor on its face.  It’s a brand-new course, never before offered at Snowflake College, and I was given a free hand in its design and content. 

It’s not anything all that grand in practice.  The subject is the one in my discipline with which I have the least experience.  Except for a couple of hybrid classes which went dreadfully, I’d never taught anything but in-person lecture courses.

I got the job for two reasons.  The first is that my department has never seen me as the ideal public face of Snowflake College, in spite of consistently good student evals.  But they can’t force me out due to seniority and would prefer me to teach online as a consequence.  The second is that the new course is required for the transfer AA degree in the discipline but several of my colleagues already teach specialty courses they’d rather concentrate on instead of piloting a new one.  Since I like paying my bills and having a place to sleep, I accepted the assignment.

Its petty annoyances aside, I prefer the personal touch of an on-the-ground class.  I get to know my students as people instead of as names and email addresses.   My principal contact with the online students is to post brief comments on their discussion threads and written work and to troubleshoot the inevitable glitches with the LMS.  (These are more numerous and more consequential when the class is online than with in-person classes where I use the LMS mainly for posting study notes and grades.)  The absence of feedback in an online class is offputting for me.

Then there’s the odd cliquishness surrounding the distance learning people at Snowflake.  I took a preparatory training—online, of course—last summer.  We were hectored to drop our old-fashioned classroom personae.  We were informed in no uncertain terms that distance learners are different from those taking boring old traditional courses.  They don’t want a “sage on the stage,” we were told, they want a “guide by their side.”  The training was scattershot, but by August I felt ready to tackle the course shell.

Actually, I was ready well before that but the online programs director was out most of the summer due to a personal emergency and so did not create a shell until there were less than two weeks before the mandatory first review.  Add to that the fact I was creating course content from scratch and you can imagine how the first review went.  The evaluators, one a nutrition professor and the other a kinesiology ( ! ) professor, were not at all complimentary of my frantic efforts of the previous fortnight.  Much of it was nitpicking over the wording of certain passages in the syllabus and the absence of something they referred to as “instructor presence.”  Nutrition Proffie was especially scornful, concluding with a damning, “This instructor is not ready for the distance learning program.”  Ouch.

I pled for mercy with the program director who was partly to blame for the situation in the first place and got a re-review a few weeks later.  The course passed and now here I am.   Eight weeks in, and there have been only a couple of minor hiccups.  My fingers are crossed for the second half concluding successfully.

I’ve acquired a few insights concerning online classes based on my newfound experience.  Simply put, they’re a cash cow even for not-for-profit institutions like Snowflake College.  Once the 40-seat course was announced in January, it filled and waitlisted within days.  I was deluged with pleading emails from students desperate to add.  When the dust settled two weeks into the term, I still had 40 students but had experienced a turnover during the add/drop period of close to 20%.  When I read the discussion thread where I asked the students to introduce themselves, I learned nearly a third were not majors in the discipline at all despite the course being specifically intended for transferring majors.  No matter, they paid their fees, right?

Now we’re at the midpoint of the semester, a certain number have abruptly stopped submitting work.  A few more turn in stuff sporadically.  Several never attempted any work at all, which means I’ll have to cut them before the drop deadline so it won’t be my fault for their failing the class.  No matter, Snowflake College will keep their money anyway.

I’ll spend the next couple of months catering to the remaining, disembodied students who have persisted.  (Actually, a couple are students who took a class with me before whom I see around campus.  Even then, it’s hard for me to connect their online presence to our occasional real life interaction.)  I’ve been given my schedule for the next academic year.  I will be teaching the new course again in the spring.

Brick and mortar institutions benefit from e-learning because the ancillary costs are lower.  They still have to pay an instructor, true, but online classes reduce demand for physical facilities such as classrooms and offices, as well as saving on expenses for facilities maintenance, utilities, and campus security.  On the other hand, it creates opportunities for the burgeoning administrative class to advance their interests at the expense of students and the professoriat alike.

Back to the existential questions surrounding online instruction.  I’ll say what I’ve said numerous times on this subject.  For a growing segment of the public, higher education is a dumbed-down commodity hawked by cynical hustlers to take their money in exchange for goods of questionable value.  Even for the comparatively small number of students possessing the self-discipline to complete an online degree, the credential may not get them as far as they hoped.

Even in the much-maligned liberal arts, which do not have any immediately practical application and are thereby presumed to be readily communicable in the online format, distance learning has serious shortcomings.  Discussion threads facilitate peer-to-peer communication, but the asynchronous nature of the discussion hinder the sort of in-depth dialectical analysis of abstract ideas needed to foster critical thinking.  (Not that critical thinking is a skill particularly desired by employers, mind you, but I was always told that this was the lasting value of a liberal arts education.)   Real time classroom discussions are essential to an in depth understanding of the curriculum.

None of this is hinted at in the TV ads for University of Phoenix (the reigning king of nontraditional higher ed), National University (“national” despite U of Phoenix having greater market penetration), Southern New Hampshire University (my favorite—who knew tiny New Hampshire had an identifiable southern region?), and Grand Canyon University (for Christofascists wanting an online experience that won’t challenge them or their superstitions).  There are others as you know, but these are currently the worst offenders. 

I think of the spurned applicant from time to time.  How does a person lacking experience in mainstream academia but possessing the requisite paper qualifications break in let alone survive in a game whose nature he in no way understands?  It’s bad enough when your paper says you’re qualified in a particular field like my own where the economics of the game lead many well-qualified individuals to move on to more lucrative work.  But what if you have a degree in, say, nursing or clinical psychology without much (or any) field experience?  I’ve read of cases like these, where the students couldn’t find work in their chosen vocation and yet were stuck with crippling student loan debt.

Caveat emptor, some might opine.  The casualties of the education bubble are no different than those of the housing and tech bubbles before them.  The distinction is that while the previous market crises involved the relatively affluent and educated who should in fact have done their due diligence, the prey of the higher ed hucksters are more vulnerable and easily manipulated.  I doubt if this factored into their moral calculus, however. 

It’s just business, they’d say.  True, but it’s a shameful one,

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

  

A Visit from Red State America

After running errands yesterday afternoon, I dropped in at a wine shop I occasionally frequent.  Sampling a few bottles trying to decide upon a purchase I struck up a conversation with the shopkeeper, Michelle.

Treetop’s a small town, and it doesn’t take long after moving here before half the people you see look familiar.  You also make a chatting acquaintance with folks working at the local businesses.  Michelle’s one of these acquaintances, and she made casual conversation with me in between waiting on other customers. Once we’d exhausted the usual topics, such as the weather, our respective weekend plans, and the press of tourists taking advantage of ski season, our talk drifted to politics.

Treetop has its share of Republicans, the Kiwanis and Rotary crowd, but I’ve heard few people of any persuasion around here speak favorably of Donald Trump.  Given the town’s public face as a freethinking home for artists and New Age devotees enjoying the good life, this isn’t surprising.  The conventional wisdom is that Treetop is a blue island in a red, albeit libertarian, sea.

Having last seen each other before the election, Michelle and I were quick to voice our mutual horror at the outcome.  She told me of a very awkward family holiday gathering where the pro-Hillary relatives bickered with the pro-Donald.  I told her I was the only member of my family who supported Clinton, though I didn’t think very many of them actually voted.

Seated a few stools down was a tourist nursing a glass of Prosecco.  He was a fireplug of a guy in his late twenties with a bushy beard and camouflage ball cap.  He ignored us, listlessly fiddling with his phone.  He ignored us until Michelle made an offhand comment that some of the Trump supporters she’d talked to seemed pretty closed minded.  Or something like that; it didn’t register as anything to respond to with more than a vague nod and an “Mmmhmm.”

Beardie jerked up his head and snapped at Michelle, “People like you can afford to think like that.”

Michelle was startled, and stammered that she hadn’t meant any offense.  Beardie would not be appeased so easily.

“Look,” he said. “You don’t see what it’s like for Americans.  You’re educated, making a good wage plus big tips, living in a place where nobody sees what’s going on in the real world.”  Michelle fidgeted uncomfortably, while a young couple in parkas and snow pants gazed sidelong at us from the far end of the counter.

“Well, there are different perspectives, don’t you think?” I said in a feeble attempt at shifting the discussion.  No dice.

“I know things you don’t,” proclaimed Beardie.  He went on to tell us that he worked as a contractor in cyber operations.  We didn’t know the threats surrounding the country.  Obama was weak on national security and made America vulnerable to its enemies.  Only Donald Trump could make us safe. 

I considered throwing Trump’s statement that he didn’t need daily intelligence briefings because he’s so smart at Beardie, but thought better of it.  Instead I said that Trump won because he preyed on working peoples’ fears and resentments.  It’s globalization, automation, and offshoring which are behind their troubles, which are beyond the ability of any president to fully remedy.  Meanwhile, Michelle used my futile effort at reasoning with the guy to slip away and wait on a new customer.  

At least I was able to change the subject, or at least spin it in a different direction.   Beardie retorted, rapping his knuckles on the counter for emphasis, “You know who’s responsible for dividing this country…Obama!  Everything was just fine until he was President!”

“I’m pretty sure this country’s been divided longer than that.  In fact, it’s been divided as long as I can remember.”

“No, it wasn’t!  No, it wasn’t!  It was Obama!  I know things you don’t!”  Yeah, I think you said that already.  This fellow’s nearly half my age, and he’s learned so much.  I guess I should have been awed, but I just wasn’t feeling it.

“I’m not a dumb guy,” Beardie went on.  “I went to UCLA.  I work in cyber ops.”  Yes, you mentioned that, too.  By this point I was reduced to enduring his verbal onslaught until he spent himself, fervently hoping this point would come sooner than later.

“Obama endangered this country by letting in all the illegals.”  Really?  The former Deporter-in-Chief would be mighty disappointed to hear this.

“And it’s not just the Mexicans.  You should’ve seen Washington after the Women’s March!  Trash everywhere, water bottles, paper, they have no respect for themselves or anybody!”  Hmmm, you must never have been to a rock concert or street parade.  But, okay.

“And they burn the American flag!  The women, the illegals, the Bernie supporters, they all burn the flag!” 

That’s interesting.  I’m fifty years old.  I’ve lived and traveled in countries where Americans aren’t particularly popular.  And I have never, ever seen Old Glory desecrated in my presence.  I begin to point this out, but Beardie cuts me off.  After all, the winner of any debate is the one who shouts loudest, right?

Beardie continued to lay into his country’s adversaries, real and imagined.  “They don’t know how good they have it.”  Who?  Liberals? Women? The “illegals”?  He didn’t say.

“They take out student loans and use the money to take vacations and spend their time going to demonstrations.  Then when they’re unemployed and stuck with student debt they expect me to support them with my taxes!  Thirty percent of student loans are used just for vacations and cars and clothes!  Can you believe that?”

“Wait a minute,” I managed to interject, “thirty percent?  Where’d you get that statistic?”

It seemed like a reasonable question, but Beardie looked at me as if I’d gored his sacred cow.  He’d quoted a fact.  I should just accept it at face value.  Just like he accepts the facts, true or otherwise, spouted by his idol.

Beardie stammered a couple of seconds, then said, “Scarborough.  I heard it on Scarborough’s show.  You know who Scarborough is, right?” 

As an insomniac, Morning Joe on MSNBC has been staple early morning viewing.  So, yes, I know who Republican congressman turned news host Joe Scarborough is despite being a brie-snarfing, rosé-swilling anti-Trump pantywaist.  Still, I find it hard to believe that Beardie got this from MSNBC or any other mainstream news outlet.

I began to say as much when Beardie’s phone buzzed.  Holding up an imperious finger to silence me, he answered and almost immediately began yammering agitatedly.  A moment later he threw a twenty on the counter and, still unleashing a verbal torrent at whoever was on the other end, hurried out the front door.  (Must’ve been a ultra top secret cyber ops matter.)

As the door slammed shut, Michelle, the young couple from the ski slopes, and I stared at each other mutely for a moment.  What the hell just happened?  One of us finally spoke up.  We talked awkwardly about the previous few minutes, then moved on to other subjects.  A pall hung in the air, though, and after a few minutes I paid and left.  As I walked out, I saw Beardie leaning against a wall still braying into his phone.  He ignored me as I walked past.

You might think I’m making up this vignette, or at least exaggerating.  But it happened nearly verbatim.  Trump’s devotees object to being stereotyped as bigoted and stupid.  The reasonable part of me wants to believe that this is in fact a stereotype.  But when a piece of confirming evidence manifests itself right in front of you, you can’t ignore it. 

Who needs strawmen when you have Trump supporters like this?

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar 

Counting Blessings

I awakened late on Friday morning with an odd sense of unease. 

Looking at the clock, it read 9:15…a quarter past noon on the East Coast.  Then, the realization came: The new President had been sworn in a few minutes earlier.

In a time of uncertainty, one should count one’s blessings.   The new semester starts tomorrow.  Rather than dwell on things such as the low enrollment in a particular section or the unfamiliarity of the new course I’ve been assigned to teach, I can look back on a fall term that wasn’t half bad.

Oh, I complained enough at the time, commiserating with colleagues as weary as I.  My 9:30 section lacked enthusiasm, while attendance lagged in my 12:30.  I felt in October the way I usually felt in March.  Stuff like that.

On the other hand, the semester lacked a lot of the usual irritants.  Not a single student complained about their final grade.  Not one.  That by itself borders on a miracle.  Good things happened, too: I had an article accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal (my first!).  I slept well for the most part, and the vague sense of malaise I’ve felt for the past year and a half has lifted somewhat.

I can’t say I’m fully charged for the spring term, but there is hope nonetheless.  Let’s face the days ahead with a similar sense of hopefulness.

Taking It All In

The weeks since November 8^th have had a surreal aspect.  The impending Trump presidency is something which, on some days, I can’t believe is happening, and on others I face with mingled resignation and dread.

When I met with my 4 p.m. section on Election Day, the idea that Trump would win still seemed farfetched.  So farfetched that I played the clip from The Daily Show in which Trevor Noah reflects back on Trump’s first term on Election Day 2020.  The class laughed knowing such a thing was unthinkable.

I spent the first part of the evening working on an online course I’m scheduled to teach in the spring (which is a whole other source of aggravation I won’t get into right now).  Around 8 p.m., I took a break from my academic toils and clicked on the POLITICO website to check up on the election returns…and felt my stomach tighten.

I leaned  out my office door into the hallway and saw one of my students, an activist, chatting with a group of people.  I urgently waved her into my office, and she and the others clustered around my desk.  For the next hour, as students filtered in and out, we watched disbelievingly as Clinton fell farther and farther behind in the electoral vote count, at which point I decided I couldn’t watch any more.

Not having eaten since breakfast I dropped by a Mexican place on my way home.  Dining alone, I grabbed a seat at the bar. 

Naturally, the TV was on, and several of the patrons were weighing in on the news.  At one end of the bar, a paunchy middle aged white guy, three sheets to the wind, loudly proclaimed he was glad Trump won because he’d send all the illegals back to Mexico.  (Given that half the folks in the room were Latino/a, the fact no one took a swing at the jerk said volumes about them.  At least they were civil.) 

At the other end of the bar a woman, equally inebriated, was weeping and shouting that Trump was going to take away her right to choose.  I made a point of leaving after hastily finishing my dinner.

The next day, I felt fine.  Then I remembered the day before.  At work I was hard pressed to explain the result.  After all, like a lot of people, I found it unlikely a year ago that Trump would ever attain the Republican nomination let alone the Presidency.  Asked by a colleague at a holiday function what I thought of The Donald, I scornfully answered, “He’s a buffoon!”  When a student last fall kidded me about leaving the country if Trump was elected I borrowed a line from the movie Office Space and said, “Why should I leave?  He’s the one who sucks!”  It seemed funny at the time.

Eleven, twelve months later my institution’s mental health counselors were announcing their office was open for drop-in visits by students overwhelmed by the election results.  At first I thought this was a bit of an overreaction, but reconsidered when I remembered that those people who had borne the rhetorical brunt of Trump’s campaign rhetoric—immigrants, women, gays and lesbians—might feel a trifle vulnerable right about now.

Still, some of the student antics I heard about from my fellow proffies did make me shake my head at how they took advantage of the climate of worry.  My favorite was that of the student who asked his professor for credit on a missed assignment.  The reason?  The student had to marry his boyfriend before President Trump ended same-sex marriage.  He offered cell phone photos of the nuptials as evidence.  I found this example amusing, because nothing short of a constitutional amendment could overturn the Obergefell decision and I doubt SCOTUS would reverse itself.  It was even more amusing when I learned the student was a poli sci major and should have known better.

For my part, I told my students the same thing I’ve been telling everyone else who has asked me how best to get through the next four years.  Don’t sit back and let circumstances get you down.  Get involved in those causes you may feel are threatened by a Trump presidency.  If women’s reproductive rights are at stake for you, volunteer with Planned Parenthood or similar organizations.  If it’s immigrant rights, work with groups seeking to protect them.  Contribute to the ACLU.  Just…do…something.  This is not a time for sitting on your hands.  Remember that you have agency.

There’s not much more I can add to this advice.  Please consider acting upon it.  And for God’s sake be vigilant after January 19^th.  Let’s hope our fears prove unfounded, but be prepared for the worst.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

End of an Era

The passing of Fidel Castro has evoked mixed feelings for me.  Initially I felt a sense of disbelief, as if he might last forever as a living, breathing museum piece legacy of the Cold War.  Fidel was a presence on the world stage for my whole life, and so his death struck me in the manner that, say, the demise of Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly will when that time comes. 

Before Americans were taught by their leaders to fear and hate Muslims, they feared and hated Communists.  Cuba, so close to the United States, was a particular source of unease.  Our mainstream news media played up the Castro regime’s repressiveness, enthusiastically echoed by politicians and the exile community.  That Fidel did not go the way of the leaders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, that it was not until after he stepped aside in favor of brother Raul that Cuba began the first tentative steps on the road toward capitalism already trod by China and Vietnam, caused consternation among American leaders.

On the other hand, Fidel’s death has elicited laudatory retrospectives of his life, thought, and work among progressives.  I tend to view him in terms of his whole record.  By his own admission he was a dictator, albeit a “sui generis dictator.” His regime had an abysmal record on civil liberties.  It repressed and persecuted the LGBT community.  Castro was perfectly willing to foment nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union.  His emptying the jails of Cuba’s worst criminals during the Mariel boatlift was hardly a laudable gesture, either.

Notwithstanding all this, the Cuban Revolution was a net gain for Cuba.  For the first time, Cuba was a fully sovereign nation.  The revolution broke the grip of American corporations and American organized crime on the economy.  It brought about a fair distribution of wealth.  It placed agriculture in the hands of the people who worked the land.  It led to Cuba having the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean as well as having its best educated populace.  Most importantly, it made quality healthcare universally available, an endeavor at which the United States has failed miserably.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “Special Period” did result in some dents in the revolution’s edifice.  Raul Castro’s willingness to make concessions to the neoliberal order is worrisome though inevitable.  As the country reopens to American investment and tourism one sees the specter of pre-1959 Cuba slowly rising like a miasma.  (Ironically, during the era when the CIA toyed with a number of novel ways to assassinate Fidel, he shrugged off the threat by saying that if he were to die the United States would then have to contend with Raul and “he’s even more radical than I am!”)  I wonder what Fidel may have thought of the first signs of his work being undone.  Did he acquiesce to this process?  This seems unthinkable to the point of cognitive dissonance.

And so, Fidel’s death represents a further loss of hope of preserving the gains of the Cuban Revolution.   I suppose all there’s left is the prospect of playing roulette and blackjack at the Havana Hilton for the first time in generations.  Bring on the Yanqui tourists!

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

The New Reality (Show)

In the age-old struggle between the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, bet on the Yahoos. 

For once, I am at a loss for words even though I’m not quite surprised.  The next four years will be interesting, to say the least.

Home of the Brave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar