After the Guns Fell Silent

The First World War ended a hundred years ago today.

November 11^th is commemorated each year in our country as Veterans Day.  Most of us treat it as just another welcome day off from work or school.  In spite of our cultural fetishization of veterans and the military, however, the origins of the holiday don’t receive much scrutiny.

In Europe, the legacy of the Great War looms large.  I visited London in the summer of 2014 during the commemoration of the war’s centenary and you couldn’t avoid it.  At home, it received sparse notice from a historically oblivious public.

The war and its aftermath have irrevocably changed the course of events in ways which reverberate into the present.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to us, though.  The President traveled all the way to France for the commemoration yet declined to attend a wreath-laying at the Aisne-Marne cemetery at the last minute due to rain.  He also decided not to attend the scheduled Peace Forum summit.  The optics of this in Europe and elsewhere will be undoubtedly negative.

Then again, Mr. Trump’s opt-out is understandable considering how the people back home view that war and the value they place on peace.  World War I took the lives of 53,000 Americans in combat deaths alone not to mention another 63,000 dead from illness but since it rates only a brief mention in the high school history lessons we slept through, it might as well have never happened.

It is not accurate to say that November 11, 1918 marked the end of the fighting.  That was just on the Western Front.  It dragged on for several more years in various theaters in Europe and the Middle East.  The Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Armenians and British and French and Italians all contended for the forlorn remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Russia was wracked by civil war.  Hungary and Bavaria endured first Red, then White Terror.  The Spartacist Uprising was brutally suppressed; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among the victims.  Marauding Freikorps threatened the nascent Weimar Republic.

Even at home things were far from calm.  The 1919 Red Scare, unlike most other periods of national hysteria over exaggerated threats, had some justification.  It also provoked the usual disproportionate official and public response.  The Palmer Raids (instigated after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer’s house was bombed by unknown assailants) were one manifestation.  The mob killing of Wobbly and recently discharged soldier Wesley Everest was another, as were the mass deportations of socialists and anarchists (Emma Goldman being one of them). 

Unsurprisingly, there was an uptick in racial violence as well during 1919’s “Red Summer” in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The Red Scare’s repercussions were felt into the next decade, culminating with the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it would raise its head once more in the 1940s.

So, the end of the First World War was more preface than conclusion.  The unnecessarily punitive conditions placed on Germany fueled popular resentment, while the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy led to the rise of fascism there and elsewhere in Europe. Lurking in the background was the specter of nationalism.

Depending on your political proclivities, nationalism is either a fine thing or it’s deplorable.  The President is a self-proclaimed nationalist.  Many Americans are, though they misappropriate the word “patriot” to describe their nationalism instead.  Right or left, we’re partial to anything which makes a social statement while requiring a minimal investment of time and money.  Thus, wearing a flag lapel pin or slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on a car qualifies one as a patriot. 

The nationalism I am describing is the move toward ethnolinguistic identity which began in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and would challenge the authority of those dynasties ruling multiethnic states.  Such ideas do animate white supremacist and alt-right activism in this country, but probably doesn’t register as strongly with the rest of the American electorate.  It remains very strong in parts of Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. 

This fact became manifest after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  I personally witnessed the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and am still struck by the scope of destruction to both lives and property they brought.  Those conflicts were something of an anomaly, however.  The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian peoples share a common tongue and racial heritage.  Their national identities are instead rooted in their respective historical religious faiths.  That was enough to plunge them into a war that took roughly 140,000 lives and displaced millions.

That conflict was itself informed by the mass population transfers following the Second World War in Eastern Europe.  A beaten Germany was shrunk to two-thirds of its 1914 territory and split into two mutually hostile states.  Eastern Germans were expelled from their homeland after it was annexed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.  Poles were expelled from their homes in the east after their lands in turn were annexed to the Soviet Union (Poland was actually shifted westward from its 1939 footprint).  Italians were driven from Istria by the Yugoslavs.  The Soviets pushed the Finns out of Karelia.  And so forth.  We can chart the border changes and count the numbers of people involved.  The scale of the human suffering caused cannot be measured.

This is the legacy of the “forgotten” World War.  Few Americans know about it, or care.  This does not negate the profound value of the lesson the twentieth century nightmare can teach us, however.  We ignore it at our peril.

Enjoy your day off, everyone.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

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