I Was Never Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

For the Bible Tells Me So

The Trump Administration’s policy of separating detained “illegals” from their children apparently now has the endorsement of The Man Upstairs.

In a speech late last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited Romans 13: 1-3 as justification for the detention policy.  Actually, Sessions quoted the Apostle Paul out of context.  Paul did enjoin Christians to obey the temporal authorities as they would the spiritual; but he tells them to welcome strangers as well.

The Bible is notoriously open to interpretation.  In the various news stories about Sessions’ speech, we’re reminded that the same passages were used to justify slavery in the United States and that the Lutheran clergy drew upon them to instruct Germans to acquiesce to Nazi policies.  Normally, Godwin’s Law would make me hesitant to mention the latter fact.  However, the passive role of churches in 1930s Germany has received considerable attention from contemporary historians and so bears special mention here.  Given the xenophobic bent of our own Christian Right, the invocation of Romans 13 in this controversy is unsurprising.

Donald Trump’s appeal to religious conservatives is, well, puzzling.  As Bill Maher once described him, Trump is the world’s “least godly man.”  He’s dishonest, crass, profane, proud to the point of hubris, unkind, uncharitable, and bigoted.  Then again, maybe that’s why he’s appealing.  Some of the angriest, most resentful people I’ve known have been evangelical Protestants who proclaimed their faith in Blue-Eyed Jesus at every opportunity.  These folks are livid at the social changes of the past few decades and would love to see the calendar turned back to 1955 with everything that that implies.

Evangelicals have a particularly strong authoritarian streak which turns to the Scriptures for justification even while cloaking it in the Christian message of love and forgiveness.  An uncle used to like to quote Isaiah 1:18 to me.  “Come now; let us reason together,” it begins.  (Lyndon Johnson also liked to quote this particular phrase to his political opponents.)  “Though your sins be of scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”  So far, so good; this sounds like the Message I recall from Sunday School.

But let’s remember that this is the vengeful God of the Israelites speaking and not Jesus of Nazareth.  The next verses are downright chilling, for you are given no alternative.  “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land / But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword…”  Yikes!

I always wondered why my uncle always left the second part out.  It spoke so strongly to his conservative values, and he was a gun-loving, pickup driving, blue collar Nixon and Reagan man.  A kickass line like that should have appealed to his overbearing, my-way-or-the-highway nature more than its namby-pamby preamble.

For the denizens of Walmart-like megachurches, the thought of an action hero God is undoubtedly a selling point.  (An impromptu Google search tells me that there are actually action hero movies and comics marketed to Christians.)   Their resort to fantasy is understandable, since their fictional conception of a God-fearing U.S.A. is dissolving like a wet tissue.  Media chimeras such as the “War on Christmas” help them maintain a relentless sense of grievance.  And the presence of people with darker complexions speaking a language other than English is a reminder the country has changed and is changing still.  Tie all these factors—authoritarianism, revealed religion, an aversion to change, and xenophobia—and Mr. Sessions’ claim sounds convincing.

The White House is standing by its man, despite the President’s recent complaints about Sessions.  Sarah Sanders, when confronted with the Attorney General’s remarks at a press conference, retorted that “it is very biblical to enforce the law.”  (Well, she is a preacher’s daughter after all.) 

At least on this issue, the administration is presenting a unified front.  But Sessions' and Sanders’ pronouncements ring hollow when we hear of nursing mothers being separated from their babies, children being herded en masse into cells, and families being unable to ascertain the whereabouts of detained relatives.  We are witnessing an appalling lack of empathy for the less fortunate, and I have a sinking feeling that there is a dead silence on that subject these days in our houses of worship.  If so it’s a damning commentary on our society’s character.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

You Anew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

All against All

I was in the faculty workroom doing paperwork when Darrell walked in and slumped into a chair across the table from me.  He looked dejected and worried.

This was unusual.  Darrell, a retired career military man who incongruously wears a utility cover with his customary shirt-and-tie ensemble, normally projects a confident aura.  Whatever was bothering him, I didn’t want to pry.  After exchanging laconic greetings, we sat in silence for a few minutes even though it seemed he really wanted to talk.  Finally, he spoke up.

“I got an email from my department chair.”

“Yeah?  What about?”

“She didn’t say.  I’m supposed to see her Monday at four.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I don’t know…”

“Did something happen?”

“Well…”  Darrell described the uncomfortable reaction he thought he saw from a student in class.  Like most vets, Darrell is a conservative.  During his lecture that morning he put forth his view that the War on Poverty had failed because of the personal shortcomings of the people it was meant to help.  The student’s demeanor became quietly hostile, though s/he said nothing at the time.  Whatever it was, it left Darrell rattled.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I hope so.”  Darrell got up to leave.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Catching up with Darrell a few days later, it turned out the student in question had in fact made a formal complaint.  The ensuing discussion with his chair was awkward.  According to Darrell, she hemmed and hawed and said while faculty have academic freedom we have to be sensitive to phrasing, student sensibilities, etc., etc. 

Predictably, nothing came of the matter.  I’ve been an adjunct instructor longer than Darrell.  I see the department chair’s summons for what it was: A passive-aggressive nonresponse to a student gripe about something which does not merit disciplinary action but still looks to the student as if the college has done something.

While I disagree with Darrell’s views on the subject which brought the complaint, I believe in academic freedom.  These ominous summonses have a chilling effect.  Common sense and good manners dictate a sensitivity to the feelings of others.  However, I have found myself self-censoring and at times avoiding particularly controversial topics even though I teach in a discipline which cannot avoid these completely.  The things I see happening in academia do little to ease my anxiety.

And so I was unsurprised by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education which encapsulates the strife of the campus ideological wars.  The piece documented an incident last fall at the University of Nebraska.  It’s a story without heroes in which almost everyone involved behaved badly.

It began with a student who set up a table on the campus quad.  The student, a recent alumna of a summer training program for young conservative activists, was canvassing for a group called Turning Point USA.  Perhaps you’ve heard of them; they’re the organization behind the “Professor Watchlist.” 

Turning Point encourages students to identify (or target) liberal and progressive faculty.  Having the temerity to speak against corporate malfeasance, pointing out white privilege and denouncing racism and sexism, favoring reproductive choice and LGBT rights, promoting peace over war, suggesting that human activity just might be responsible for climate change, criticizing the Religious Right, and being “anti-Israel,” among other sins, can get a proffie’s name on the Watchlist. 

Back to our budding young activist.  Having set up her table, a university employee reportedly told her she could not disseminate propaganda in that part of campus and that she would have to move to a predesignated free speech zone.  Fair enough, though the employee’s use of the word “propaganda” to describe the student’s activity could only further agitate the rage junkies who would latch on to the ensuing incident as an example of the lefty subversion of ‘Murican values.

Safely ensconced in the free speech zone, a passing doctoral student and English instructor caught sight of the Turning Point table.  Outraged by its presence on what she would later declare to be “her” campus, the instructor made up a picket sign denouncing the student as a fascist. 

Things went rapidly downhill.  As she had been taught by her Turning Point mentors, the student took out her phone and began recording the picketer.  They began circling each other.  At one point the picketer flipped off the student on camera.  She called the student a “neo-fascist Becky.”  She denounced the student as a white nationalist and white supremacist.  She swore at the student.  Finally, the student began to cry.

This was a bit much for another faculty member who had joined the anti-Turning Point picket.  She walked over and tried to comfort the student and gave the student her email address, inviting the student to sit down later to talk about their political differences.  The student packed up her table and left and the incident ended.

Except it really didn’t.  Turning Point posted the video of the incident to its website, which went viral.  The tom-toms sounded throughout the conservative jungle, and soon angry letters and emails began arriving in the offices of Nebraska’s elected officials.  The university president was summoned by the state legislature.  The instructor, a woman in her late forties, was eventually suspended from her teaching duties as penance for her public overzealousness.  And our young conservative?  She’s become the Right’s darling du jour.

This incident was a set piece with strawpersons on both sides: The shrill social justice warrior shouting hyperbolic slogans.  The emptyheaded suburban Barbie hostile to a multicultural America.  Most people are content to leave it at that.  Predictably, there has been little discussion of what this episode means for campus discourse. 

For me, the Nebraska incident exemplifies what can go wrong when political strife in the larger society encroaches on academia.  Both sides are consumed with a righteous indignation.  Neither acknowledges the right of the other to express their views.   Making matters worse, the instructor’s confrontation with the student escalated from a simple difference of opinion to a situation where a grown woman bullied some poor kid to tears (something for which the instructor was unapologetic).  As a result my distaste for everything Turning Point represents conflicts with my deep-seated revulsion toward bullies, tempered by a sour satisfaction in the knowledge that the student Right has its own snowflakes.   

It’s tempting to blame Donald Trump’s political rise for the seeming resurgence of right wing Know Nothingism and the ideological war of all against all, but the truth is that the current campus wars are an extension of the social polarization of the last several decades.  As an undergrad in the 1980s, I remember the sniping over political correctness and speech codes on the one hand and the monitoring of liberal professors by conservative groups like Accuracy in Academia on the other, though this was more rumor than fact at my politically quiescent regional state uni, 

Even now, most educational institutions are backwaters of social consciousness.  It’s surprising whenever any of the community college students I work with express any kind of informed opinion let alone take a side on an issue.  Last semester I was startled when, during an unusually spirited classroom discussion of current events, a student declared that the only answer to our problems was revolution.  Several students murmured agreement.  No one objected.  I nodded gravely, simultaneously pleased and unsettled.  The discussion moved on.  There were no repercussions afterwards.

Sometimes apathy works in your favor.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heads Will Roll

Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December, an item in the news crawl caught my eye.  “Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that. 

I had to think a moment to make the connection, then it hit me.  The reference was to Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform.  That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward the military and veterans.

Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s firing says about the present state of academia.  C-M had already landed himself in hot water before the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.”   He was apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for the Las Vegas shootings.  Switching channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death threats against him and his family.

I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own.  What I have been able to glean is that C-M belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric oversimplifications of complex issues.  Lots of heat, but precious little light. 

These kinds of statements may gain the rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies on the political right.  But they make honest progressives like me wince.  As we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the already precarious state of academic freedom.

I teach at a community college (two of them, actually).  I’m employed as contingent, or adjunct faculty.  No tenure.  No job security.  Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.

My own interpretation of American history and society is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher.  I just don’t express it in short bursts with my thumbs is all.  I am also careful to point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.

I don’t know if this approach is the reason, but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years.  Even my openly conservative students seem to be okay with me for the most part.  It could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting three credits and a grade.   Probably so.  My fingers are crossed that that’s the case and that my luck will continue to hold.

Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism.  However, safeguarding the right of professors to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees in the first place.  As someone who has lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.

Higher education itself is an inviting target, and not just for right-wing media outlets.  This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century ago.  Even as credentialism has swollen the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole enterprise hangs in the air.  (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it, school isn’t really America’s thing.  We just play the game to get what we want.)

The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing else.  We’re doers, not thinkers, so why waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology?  And while we’re at it, why should we listen to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like?  Besides, brains aren’t everything.  In the real world, they’d be working for C students.

(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little.  Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should say a few things about myself.  Firstly, every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And no, I didn’t have rich parents to put me through school.  I worked lots of odd jobs to pay for my studies.  Secondly, while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.

Oh, and my major?  Humanities.)

Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our own ranks.  The trend toward treating students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic inquiry.  We are letting this happen at our peril.  As for me, I’m holding my breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Monday, 3:15 p.m.

“Okay, that’s it for today’s class.  Please review Chapter 5 for Wednesday.”

A hand goes up in the front row.  “Mr. Scholar?”

“Yes, Aubrey?”

“Thursday’s Thanksgiving.  Are we having class Wednesday?”

Requiem for a Spectre

If you’re under forty, you were raised to fear Middle Easterners and Muslims.  For my generation, the bogeyman was communism.

This week marks the centenary of the October Revolution.  Strangely, the anniversary has attracted little comment in the media which is funny when you consider how large the U.S.-Soviet rivalry loomed over 20^th century history.

The Cold War was, in retrospect, more about national rivalry and global power politics than ideology.  While it’s true that the collectivist ethos of the former socialist states was inherently antagonistic to Americans’ individualistic worldview, the East-West standoff was really about global hegemony on both sides. 

Still, throughout my childhood and youth my teachers and the media played up the threat evil communism posed to our freedoms.  Atrocities such as the Cambodian genocide were offered up as proof of the ruthlessness of communist rule and what might befall us should they succeed in their goal of defeating the United States.

This statement, which seems overly dramatic from today’s perspective, would have been credible to a number of people when I was a kid.  Once, in a high school history class, the teacher asked us what was the goal of the communists.  A student in the back of the room promptly answered in a loud, emphatic voice, “The goal of communism is world conquest!”  No one disputed him.  The teacher appeared pleased.

This was in the early 1980s, when President Reagan was doing his level best to antagonize the Soviet leadership.  Anticommunism had become conflated with “patriotism,” and the popular rhetoric ignored realities on the ground.  The Sino-Soviet split had occurred twenty years earlier.  The recently concluded Vietnam War was more about national sovereignty than communism, a truth recognized by many scholars from its start though clearly not by most Americans and their poliicians.

We have a tenuous relationship with truth that goes back much further than the current debate as to whether we’re living in a “post-truth” era.  Our thinking tends toward either/or, black and white reasoning.  We categorically reject any evidence which contradicts our narrative, however manifest it may be to a less partial observer.  This tendency becomes pernicious when it results in defining ourselves not by what we are but by what we are not.

This is a recurring theme.  In our first century or so, we were not those corrupt, rotten Old World aristocrats.  During the Cold War our alliance with the Soviets against the Axis was forgotten as we proclaimed to the world that we were most certainly nothing like those godless commies.  Today, we are not those Muslims who hate our freedom, but this is a topic for another time.

Back to the dialectic between a free, virtuous America and a totalitarian, evil Soviet Union.  If you were with us, your country was a “democracy” and part of the “Free World.”  If you were not, your country was either enslaved or untrustworthy.  This fiction ignored two things.  First, many of the regimes in the so-called Free World countries were in fact corrupt and repressive.  Secondly, whenever the people of one of these countries dared assert their right to self-determination the U.S. and its allies would step in to stymie the attempt—witness the examples of Guatemala, Iran, Chile, East Timor, and Nicaragua.

All this sidesteps the question of the merits of the Soviet experiment, however.  Putting aside the chaos of the Civil War and the totalitarian excesses of the Stalin years, there were aspects of it which compare favorably with the capitalist West.  Many of the ills of capitalist economies were less manifest, such as fluctuating business cycles and unemployment.  The regime at least made the effort to attend to its people’s essential economic and social needs.  The state ideology encouraged the collective welfare over narrow self-interest. 

That last item probably doomed the system in the end.  The citizens of the Eastern Bloc were less interested in political freedom than in Levi’s and rock music.  During the so-called Era of Stagnation between the mid-1960s and the advent of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s economic planners struggled to meet popular demand for consumer goods.  Appeals to the collective good fell on deaf ears when people stood on line for soap and razor blades.  Some Soviet clients, most notably Hungary, managed to satiate consumer demand.  Others, like Romania, were economically inept and politically crooked.

Watching from afar, the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath did seem breathtaking at the time.  The West was vindicated.  It wasn’t long before the downside became apparent, however.  Ethnic conflict in Russia and other former Soviet republics.  Terrorism.  Economic turmoil.  Organized crime.  Vladimir Putin.

The Soviet Union did not fall for the reasons we use to congratulate ourselves.  It wasn’t the absence of freedom or because of the Reagan administration’s military build-up.   It was that our comparatively free market was more efficient than their planned economy.  What was portrayed as a clash of ideologies ended on a disappointingly prosaic note.  Then again, it doesn’t matter as we’ve long since moved along to newer, suitably evil enemies.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar