The Algiers Motel Incident: Part 2 - Three Dead

Inside the Algiers Motel manor house annex, Carl Cooper, Michael Clark, and Lee Forsythe had been listening to music with Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy.  A sudden gunshot from outside broke a window, causing the occupants of the annex to retreat to what they thought was safety. 

What happened next is rife with conflicting statements and conjecture, as the aftermath of traumatic events inevitably are.  The ad hoc team led by the cops stormed into the annex.  The first casualty was Carl Cooper, who was shot dead in a first-floor room even though he was checked in to a third-floor room. 

Responsibility for Carl’s death was never established, though he was felled by a shotgun blast in which the shot was consistent with the type of shotgun then carried by the Detroit police.  No one in the raiding party ever admitted to being the first to enter, claiming Carl was already dead when they arrived.

The group advanced into the building, rounded up the occupants, and moved them into a downstairs corridor.  The officers lined them against the wall and struck each in turn, demanding to know who had fired the shots and where the gun was. 

Pulling Roderick Davis from his brace position along the wall, a patrolman threw a knife to the floor and ordered Roderick to pick it up.  Understandably wanting to avoid being shot by the police in “self defense,” Roderick refused.  After beating Roderick, they moved on to Michael with the same result followed by Lee. 

It got uglier pretty fast.  Patrolman Senak was enraged that Juli and Karen, two white women, were socializing with black men.  Senak forcibly stripped the two, and shouted abuse at them: “Why you got to fuck them?" he demanded.  "What’s wrong with us, you n----r lovers?”

Senak then decided to ratchet up the terror.  Roderick Davis was pulled away from the wall and hustled into a nearby room.  National Guard Warrant Officer Ted Thomas went with them.

After shutting the door Senak ordered Roderick to lie face down on the floor.  Senak fired his weapon into a wall, then winked at Thomas.  Thomas stepped out of the room.  A patrolman asked him if Senak had killed Roderick, and Thomas said yes.  Michael Clark was led into the room next and told to lie on the floor.  Depending on the account, either Thomas or Senak fired into the ceiling.  Returning to the corridor, Senak bragged, “I killed them two motherfuckers!”

At this point the girls urged their companions to tell the officers where the gun was, and told the officers that its owner, Carl, was already dead.  According to later court testimony this was about twenty minutes after the police and soldiers had entered the annex.  Challenged as to why it took her or anyone else so long to mention the pistol and its late owner, Juli Hysell responded simply that they were scared.

That’s reasonable enough.  Patrolman Senak was not appeased, however, and asked who wanted to go into the room next.  Naturally, there were no volunteers.  Patrolman Ronald August was handed a shotgun, and he then pulled Auburey Pollard from the line.  They started toward the room where Roderick and Michael had been taken, when WO Thomas, not wanting to give away the game, said to go to a different room.

Accounts differed as to whether August actually knew what had just happened was a game.  Thomas, whose trial testimony established much of what occurred in the annex, recalled that Senak said something to August as he handed him the weapon but wasn’t certain whether Senak had made the situation clear.  In any case, Thomas went with August and Auburey into the room.  Thomas saw August fire his weapon and Auburey crumple to the floor dead. 

Although Thomas testified he was frightened by the shooting, other witnesses have him leaving the room grinning.  “That n----r didn’t even kick!” he crowed.  That said, Thomas would testify he decided to take his team and leave the motel at that point, telling Senak that what the police was doing inside was their business and not his or his men’s.  Using renewed gunfire on the street as an excuse, most of the raiding party hastily left.

Except Thomas ended up staying after all.  We next find him in a room with Patrolman August, Juli, and Karen.  One of the patrolman in the annex asked Thomas and security guard Melvin Dismukes to escort the girls, who were injured and mostly unclothed, to their room in the main hotel building next door, where they were told to stay put until curfew ended at 5:30.

As for the remaining prisoners in the annex, the police, their own curfew notwithstanding, ran them off with the threat that if they stayed they too would be killed.  They were led out past Auburey Pollard’s lifeless body; up to this point, the youths had thought the execution game was simply a sick joke.  Told to run for their lives, they did.  A couple of them ran several miles away from the Algiers without shoes.

Fred Temple, however, wasn’t afforded the chance to escape.  Patrolman Robert Paille shot him dead, allegedly in a struggle over Paille’s gun. 

None of the deaths at the Algiers Motel were reported to Detroit police homicide detectives by the patrolmen, despite this being required by regulation.  Instead, it was the motel’s own private security who found Carl Cooper, Auburey Pollard, and Fred Temple and contacted the authorities.  

The coroner’s office removed the bodies in the early morning hours of July 26th, but the detectives called to the scene decided that with sporadic gunfire still going on in the street it wasn’t safe to stay.  A knife was found in the annex, but no firearms or expended cartridges.

That morning, the news media were told by the police only that the boys had been killed in an exchange of fire between snipers and themselves.  It would be several more days before hints of what had actually taken place began to surface.

Next: The Aftermath

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar 

The Algiers Motel Incident: Part 1 - The Setting

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Algiers Motel Incident.

The Algiers Motel Incident was itself one episode of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion.  Probably any randomly chosen incident of the many of its kind from that era would have sufficed to provide a parallel to current attitudes and events surrounding race in America, but the unnerving physical and psychological brutality exerted by law enforcement upon unarmed suspects in this instance makes it particularly relevant now.  Race relations, which since Ferguson have been at their ugliest point in decades, seem to have gotten even worse in the wake of last November’s election which has emboldened those bigots who might have been a bit more circumspect before.

More than at any time since the 1960s, conservative politics have become openly entwined with white identity.  Rhetoric surrounding public safety has morphed into thinly veiled calls for the armed oppression of communities of color.  Black Lives Matter in particular has become a focal point of opprobrium for those who wish to preserve white supremacy.  (Cue the anguished protests: “I’m not a racist!”  Hmmm…if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…)  

In the present climate, it is not difficult to imagine an episode like the Algiers Motel Incident happening in 2017.  With this in mind, I've decided to examine the event with an eye toward a fuller understanding. 

The murders of July 25 - 26, 1967 at the Algiers Motel were a cause célèbre for a while.  Journalist and historian John Hersey published a book in the months afterward which remains the best single account.  The accused police officers and a private security guard were inevitably tried and were inevitably acquitted.  Eventually the matter was forgotten by the public.

There has been renewed interest of late, however.  There is a well-curated website, Algiers Memory, which gives a fairly detailed rundown on the people and events.  Most notably, though, director Kathryn Bigelow has completed a film, Detroit, which is a dramatized recounting of what happened at the Algiers Motel.  The movie opens with a special premiere in that city today and will see general release early next month.

To grasp the violence of the Algiers Motel incident, it's important to know the larger events surrounding it.  The Detroit uprising began on July 23^rd.  Like numerous other civil disturbances then and now, Detroit’s began with a confrontation between police and civilians.  Early Sunday morning, the police raided an unlicensed drinking club, or “blind pig,” on 12^th Street.  Given the late hour, the officers figured there would only be a few people present.

In fact, there were over 80 individuals celebrating the return of two local men from Vietnam.  The officers unwisely decided to arrest the lot of them.  Of course, they weren’t prepared to move a large number of prisoners downtown so they called for vehicles.  This necessitated a wait, which meant there was time for a crowd of onlookers to gather.  Predictably, these folks were not favorably disposed toward the cops. 

Tensions rose, and someone chucked a bottle at a police officer.  As with the precipitating incident of the Watts uprising two years earlier, a drunk driving stop gone awry, the raiding officers were able to disengage before things got really bad.  Their departure didn’t quell the mood of the people in the street, who then began breaking windows and looting stores.   Over the ensuing two days, the city was convulsed with such violence that Michigan governor George Romney—yes, Mitt’s daddy—called out the National Guard to restore order and requested federal troops from President Lyndon Johnson for good measure. 

When things quieted after July 27^th, 43 people were dead.  All but ten were black.  Coming right on the heels of the Newark riots, the 12^th Street uprising stood out in what would be remembered by some as the Long Hot Summer of 1967 which saw more than 150 urban disturbances across the United States.  (I say “by some,” because it really points up the myopic, narcissistic cultural memory of white Americans that they are more apt to remember this time as the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury than for the racial oppression and urban violence which were its true hallmark.)

What made the Algiers Motel murders such a notorious episode was its calculated viciousness.  While much police brutality is probably spur of the moment and adrenaline-fueled, the officers who responded to reports of gunfire near the motel turned their encounter with the suspects into a terrifying game which left three murdered and five others badly beaten.  

The shooting deaths of two Detroit officers the day before undoubtedly put the police on edge.  It did not help that the 8,000 National Guardsmen sent to help restore order were from predominantly white suburbs and rural areas.  Few of the guardsmen had combat experience and as a group were not adequately trained to handle civil disturbances.

The Algiers Motel itself seemed at first glance to be an unlikely venue for what transpired.  Several of its occupants that night had checked in because it seemed to be a safe place to hunker down and wait for everything to blow over.  It was true that the Algiers stood in a neighborhood gone to seed along a stretch of Woodward Avenue where disreputable people were known to do disreputable things.  But it hadn’t always been that way.

The motel had been built in the heady, optimistic days after the Second World War.  Detroit was a thriving, vibrant manufacturing and cultural center then.  It was a place to visit, not avoid, and the visitors needed clean and inexpensive lodgings.  Before Holiday Inn and other family-oriented hotel chains claimed their business, mom-and-pop outfits like the Algiers needed a theme, or gimmick if you will, to bring in the paying gentry.  Hence, the Arabesque name and trappings.  A picture postcard from its respectable period shows a clean, tidy two-level structure with late model cars in the parking lot and happy families relaxing around the swimming pool with the motel’s road sign with its palm tree motif in the foreground.  

By 1967, the Algiers had its best years behind it.  At the time of the incident it had acquired a reputation as a hot-sheet motel frequented by sex workers and drug dealers.  The main building had been supplemented by an annex in the form of a neighboring three-story house, the so-called Manor House, the owners had purchased several years earlier.  It was in this annex where the victims of the Algiers Motel Incident were staying on the evening of July 25^th.

This is the first cast of characters, the people staying at the Algiers Motel: Carl Cooper, aged 17, and his friend, 19-year-old Auburey Pollard.  Also staying in the annex was 18-year-old Fred Temple.  Fred had been at a concert at the Fox Theater on the evening on the 23^rd featuring Martha Reeves which had been cut short because of the unrest; Fred was friends with several members of a lower billed act called The Dramatics.  All three youths were waiting out the violence at the motel before going home.

During the day, friends and acquaintances of the young men had joined them at the Algiers.  Michael Clark, Lee Forsythe, and James Sortor were Carl and Auburey’s friends.  Fred’s friends from The Dramatics, Roderick Davis and Cleveland Larry Reid, were there as well.  Two older men, Robert Greene and Charles Moore, were also checked in.

A bit more problematic given what would take place was the presence of two other motel guests.  Two white girls, Juli Hysell and Karen Molloy, both 18, had checked into the Algiers with their last dollar and cent.  Later accounts had it that the police thought Juli and Karen were prostitutes.  Trial testimony established that they were recent cosmetology school graduates on a celebratory road trip.  In any case, the two young women became reliant on the generosity of their new friends in the annex for their meals and incidentals.

The group spent the day at the motel pool, shooting craps, and lounging in the annex watching TV.   At some point late in the evening, Carl began to play with a starter pistol.  He brandished it, frightening Lee, before firing a blank round.  The report from the pistol sounded like real gunfire out in the street.  This attracted police attention to the vicinity of the Algiers Motel.

Now, on to the second cast of characters, the force which responded to the call of shots fired.  Patrolman David Senak, 23, became for all purposes the leader of the raiding party.  “Snake” Senak had earned a reputation as a go-getter during his brief tenure with the Detroit police.  He specialized in plainclothes vice work busting hookers and johns.  He also possessed a misogynistic streak.  When asked by John Hersey whether he thought women were less moral than men, Senak answered with a question of his own: “Who gave who (sic) the apple?”

With Senak were patrolmen Ronald August and Robert Paille, along with a contingent from the Michigan State Police.  Further support arrived in the form of a National Guard detachment led by Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas, who was a factory worker in daily life.  They gained additional backup from an armed private security guard at a grocery across the street from the Algiers.  His name was Melvin Dismukes.  The men cautiously approached the motel annex, weapons drawn.

Next: Three Deaths

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar 

Spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

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

Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

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