Altered Landscape

A few years ago, I joined an adjunct faculty discussion forum on Google Groups.  More of a lurker than a joiner, I’d read some of the discussion threads if they interested me and ignored the others.

The forum was active for a while, then fell mysteriously dormant for the longest time.  I had pretty much forgotten about it when the moderator sent a message asking if we would be interested in reviving it.  It’s been about three weeks, with more than a dozen messages landing in my inbox each day.  I’m still a lurker, but what’s being discussed is alarming.

There was some tension at first.  In any online forum you always have people who want to stir up drama rather than contribute.  In this case, a row came up surrounding an admittedly ill-advised remark by the moderator describing adjunct working conditions as slave labor.  She was called out by one member.  The moderator apologized for her poor choice of words, but as is so often the case with these situations it was more about the complainant than the complaint itself.  There were more recriminations followed by more apologies. The kerfuffle ended when the offended colleague demanded to taken off the mailing list.

That initial unpleasantness aside, the forum topics have generally fallen into two categories.  The first category consists of anecdotes and advice negotiating the unemployment insurance mess arising from the large numbers of people out of work owing to the coronavirus pandemic.  I’ve mostly ignored these posts since I’m teaching a full (adjunct) load this summer and don’t qualify for UI.

Then again, I should probably pay closer attention.  The second thread has to do with the steep learning curve experienced by my colleagues new to online learning.  Our institution’s campuses will remain closed through at least the fall semester.  Official communications contain dire warnings that faculty who fail to complete the distance learning training course will have their fall offers of employment withdrawn.

This requirement has inspired numerous angst-ridden exchanges.  The fear some of them express is as palpable as the written word allows.  It isn’t as much a matter of mastering the LMS and its bewildering array of features, it’s also the state-mandated accessibility requirement that has everyone—myself included—anxious.

The problem is that this is an under-supported mandate for adjuncts.  We are strongly encouraged to add visual media to our courses, but features such as Camtasia or DIY options like YouTube have godawful self-generated closed captioning.  But you have to have closed captioning to comply with the accessibility requirement.  So, a number of disheartened colleagues have had to resort to manually adding the captions.  This is a labor- and time-intensive process when you’re prepping content for a 16-week class.  Similarly, we are required to convert PDF files into more accessible formats and add “alt-tags” to any images.  Both are also labor intensive though not to the despair inducing extent of creating and properly captioning video content.

Naturally, no course preparation work is compensated under our contract, though there have been vague promises of a stipend for the newbies who finish training and build a compliant course.  Those of us who are established online faculty must submit at least one course for review during the fall.  I have exactly one fully compliant course, a shell I created two years ago and which passed muster but was never assigned to teach.  Like my colleagues, I have my work cut out.

All of this begs an existential question.  Is online instruction the effective equivalent of a live classroom?  The COVID-19 crisis is providing clues.  Since March, I have extensively interacted via videoconference platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting.  Six months ago, I’d only heard of the latter and only then because they underwrite some the programs I listen to on NPR. 

Zoom is the preferred platform at my college, and at first it was kind of cool to attend trainings and department meetings seeing coworkers’ faces arranged Brady Bunch-style on my laptop screen.  The novelty wore off fast.  After a while I found myself switching off my camera, muting my mic, and going about my daily business during trainings where the moderator’s screen was the focus point and active participation wasn’t required.  I don’t think I was the only one.

What we’ve been left with is a shiny tech-dependent version of an old model, the correspondence course.  Back when, these courses were of mixed quality.  Some programs, such as the extension courses offered by land grant universities, were respectable.  Others, most often private outfits advertising on matchbook covers and in the back pages of magazines, had lesser reputations.  A notorious example was LaSalle Extension University, based in Chicago, which thrived in various guises for over seventy years until it folded in 1982. 

The GI Bill and federal student financial aid multiplied the opportunities for abuse.  Some correspondence schools received shameless celebrity endorsements; Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and Phyllis McGinley shilled the Famous Writers School.  The Famous Writers School, the subject of an exposé by Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic, deliberately misled its applicants, 100% of whom were accepted, that these renowned authors would personally evaluate their work.  (FWS continued to feature Cerf in their print ads well after he died.) 

The completion rates for FWS students, many of whom received federal financial aid, were abysmally low.  One FWS official told Mitford that the school wouldn’t be profitable if every student finished.  After Mitford’s article, the Famous Writers School lost much of its enrollment, limped along for a few years, and eventually closed.

Such past abuses notwithstanding, federal financial aid is still a cash cow for unscrupulous for-profit operators.  The occasional scandal, such as the one surrounding Corinthian Colleges, still erupts, while some self-proclaimed institutions of higher education are too big to call to account.  (The University of Phoenix, National University, Grand Canyon University, et al., come to mind.)

There have been precursors of online courses stretching back to the 1950s with NYU’s Sunrise Semester TV program.  My own institution offered two-credit courses built around TV programs for many years.  You watched the episodes at home and went to campus at your convenience to take exams.  (For a few weeks in middle school I faithfully got up at the crack of dawn to watch a series on the history of Mexico.  I found out much later that this was one of the TV courses.)  The college currently has two dedicated cable channels for instruction, but they are used sporadically.

Television wasn’t a panacea, however.  Sunrise Semester was an extension program and the two-credit classes I described weren’t widely accepted for transfer.  But they did afford options for nontraditional students.

A generation ago, the idea of web-based instruction was a dubious proposition.  I first came across it in the late 1990s, when it was part of my job to confirm the accreditation of high schools attended by applicants to our employment training program.  This was merely a check-the-box exercise if they had attended local public schools or established private schools. 

When faced with an applicant enrolled in a private online school, I was in turn faced with a conundrum.  Until then I didn’t know online schools existed.  In fact, there were no accreditation provisions for them at the time.  I phoned the virtual school’s principal, who invited me over to his brick and mortar office to discuss.

The principal was a pleasant older gentleman who assured me that web-based instruction was the future.  Being a) new to the very idea, and b) hamstrung by my employer’s policy that schools be actual places, I offered my skepticism.  He demonstrated one of the courses, navigating through one of the clunky Web 1.0 browsers available then (probably Netscape or Mosaic).  I was at once impressed and unconvinced. 

More than twenty years later I’m just as unconvinced, but I am in the minority it seems.  Considering that community colleges such as mine cater to a wide cross-section of students, a long-term or semi-permanent shift to distance learning might be a welcome change for many.  I strongly suspect that it will be welcomed by administrators as well.  The college can still collect the same tuition and fees with reduced overhead.  Unused facilities could be repurposed and monetized as office or commercial space. 

Even as students at pricey four-year universities are demanding tuition refunds after their classes went remote, trade publications such as Inside Higher Education are predicting that the pandemic will force many community colleges to a mostly online format. 

The paradox is easy enough to resolve.  If I was paying out the nose to attend, say, Columbia, Penn, or Dartmouth, I would expect the experience of campus life at those institutions. For their mostly affluent student bodies college is a social experience, a lifestyle.  By contrast, the largest identifiable subset of community college students just want a diploma.  For older and other nontraditional students, school is just one part of their lives to juggle along with work and family.  This may be disappointing for me and my fellow liberal arts profs, but those are the facts on the ground (and in cyberspace).

There’s just one remaining obstacle to our sudden and perhaps irrevocable shift to remote learning, the digital divide. 

I discovered this in no uncertain terms after we went on lockdown.  Our main campus is suburban and students in the surrounding communities mostly have reliable internet service and cell phone reception.  I teach at two of our satellite campuses.  One is in the well-heeled community where I live.  Even though it’s 85 miles from the mothership most of my traditional-demographic students there are technologically well-connected to the college’s resources.  Few of them fell behind because they couldn’t access the course.

The other campus presented a different story altogether.  While situated in a picturesque small town, a substantial number of students live in the surrounding hills.  Not all of them have reliable home internet or cell reception.  A winter snowfall or summer wildfire emergency could leave them without electricity for days or even a week or two.  A few, but still too many, are homeless and did their work from the campus computer lab before the lockdown. 

Within the first two weeks of the stay at home order, about a third of the class had stopped participating online.  The campus administration attempted to ease the situation by affording wi-fi service in one of the campus parking lots so people could work from their cars or while seated outdoors.  It’s unclear to me whether this helped many students.  Several of my students ended up failing or earning a lower grade than they would have made had on-campus instruction concluded normally.

The funny thing is that we’ve been aware of the tech gap for a very long time.  The Clinton administration floated the idea of providing laptops to low-income families twenty-five years ago.  In the present, my state’s governor has pledged to remedy the digital divide problem but obviously that can’t happen overnight.  The deficiency’s implications for education, K-12 and higher, are damaging.   

The folks who tout technology as the answer to all of society’s problems conveniently omit how unevenly these solutions benefit people.  I happen to find the altered landscape of online instruction among COVID-19 discomfiting.  But for those who cannot scale the suddenly heightened obstacle of the digital divide will have deep implications, not just for them but for our society as well.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Oh, no! It's Antifa!

The protests over the killing of George Floyd continue across the country.  In some cities, widespread rioting and looting have occurred.

One of these cities was Sacramento, where the losses have been estimated at $10 million.  City officials have been quoted as saying that “outside agitators” were to blame.  Arrest records demonstrate otherwise, with the majority of those taken into custody being locals.

The vague catchall “outside agitators” has a familiar ring.  It came up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement as organizers worked to build solidarity against Jim Crow.  It came up again during the antiwar protests of the 1960s.  (I once visited a military museum where the narrative for its Vietnam War exhibit solemnly informed us that the demonstrations were provoked by agitators in the pay of the Soviets and Red Chinese.)  Now we are hearing it in the context of this week’s uprisings.

The agitators in this case are reputed by sundry sources to be the mysterious and menacing “Antifa.”  Conservative media for the past several years have conjured the specter of a frighteningly monolithic force of exceptionally well-organized fanatics poised to strike at the American heartland. 

The references have been sporadic until now.  The Tweeter-in-Chief, needing to be on the cusp of whatever flight of fancy has seized the “base” at any given moment, messaged that he would issue an executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization, an authority he does not possess, although reality has never stopped him from such sweeping proclamations.

Coming back to the situation in Sacramento, local news outlets reported yesterday that some residents in the suburbs had called law enforcement reporting suspicious activity they thought was protest-related.  Posters on social media platforms such as NextDoor stoked anxieties cautioning residents to be on the lookout for phenomena such as stacked rocks or bricks, individuals carrying water bottles filled with “a non-water substance,” and (my personal favorite) antifa who “like to dress up like wannabe ninjas, all black and face masks and usually carrying a backpack.”

The fears mostly proved unfounded, with only a few scattered street corner demonstrations.  People in those communities were probably more at risk from “patriots” who like to dress up like wannabe soldiers, all camouflage and all too often brandishing firearms. 

All of this begs the question of what is everyone from the White House to Fox News to suburbanites so worked up about.  Let’s keep our feet firmly planted on terra firma, shall we?

Firstly, antifa is short for “anti-fascist.”  Aren’t we supposed to be against fascism?  Nothing wrong there ideologically.

The next important thing to keep in mind is that hierarchical organization is antithetical to the antifa movement.  Antifa groups span a wide political spectrum, though they have certain shared values such as opposition to capitalism and discrimination.  Much of antifa activity appears to consist of information sharing and ad hoc confrontations with far-right agitators, such as those at the 2017 Unite the Right rally.  Many of them dress in dark colors as an expression of solidarity, and the masks afford protection from being identified as targets for retaliation.   

Antifa isn’t even a new movement.  I remember talk of antifa when I was an undergrad thirty years ago though I never knew anyone involved.  It has gained prominence since the 2016 election in large part because the far-right has become emboldened by a Trump presidency.

The relative tolerance for the far-right among white suburban Republicans is because it says things they agree with but are inhibited from expressing themselves on account of the thin veneer of civility remaining in the national discourse.  Consider some of the reasons the suburbs emerged.  Folks certainly wanted to escape the crowding of big cities, but just as importantly they didn’t want share their neighborhoods with people of color.  Redlining and restrictive covenants kept out any upwardly mobile African Americans and Latinos.

Even after these racist practices were outlawed decades ago, income inequality has kept suburbia predominately white.  However, slow as progress has been, acceptance of a multicultural society is growing.  Antifa’s perceived threat to people living outside the urban core, then, is purely symbolic.  It openly stands up to white suburbanites’ last best hope for preserving their way of life without getting their own hands dirty, whether that takes the form of President Trump’s dog whistle rhetoric or the overt militancy of neo-Nazis and Klansmen.  This is even more true of genuine mass movements like Black Lives Matter which may actually lead to dismantling the repressive structures people of color have confronted throughout the nation’s history.

But you needn’t worry for now, dear suburbanite.  Antifa isn’t interested in suburbia.  They aren’t coming for your tract houses and SUVs.  Not today, anyhow. Nor are they coming for your tacky strip malls, big box stores, and megachurches.  Don’t lose sleep over the fate of Walmart or Chick-fil-A for the time being, or that of your kids’ Little League games and your backyard barbecues.  This is a long-run struggle over hearts and minds, of how we define ourselves as a society.  You may wish it away, but a reckoning will be upon all of us soon enough.  It’s a question of being part of the problem or the solution.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Distancing

It looks as if we’ll have to spend a few more weeks holding our distance. 

The White House has extended the social distancing period through the end of April as COVID-19 infection rates soar and the death toll mounts.  So much for business as usual by Easter.

Aside from the drawbacks of “remote instruction,” to use the fashionable euphemism for teaching while campuses remain shut, my day-to-day is similar to that of summer.  It’s no hardship staying in.  I have enough food on hand, I’m getting enough sleep, and I don’t have to commute. 

Which doesn’t mean I’m not following the rapidly developing narrative surrounding COVID-19 or am unaffected by it.  I know I’m okay having self-isolated for over two weeks.  I am very thankful that no students or colleagues have tested positive (at least as far as I’m aware).  Our county of just under 100,000 residents has only a dozen confirmed cases as of yesterday and no deaths to date.  Our community hospital assures us it can meet the challenge posed by the outbreak.  But what we’re reading in the news, not to mention listening to the ominous drumbeat of the 24-hour TV news cycle, is enough to wear the strongest nerves.

A month’s worth of cautious self-assurance that we will weather the crisis and move forward all the stronger is beginning to wane.  My reluctance to venture out is growing.  I’ve postponed shopping for today’s wants in favor of actual needs down the way.  Even a week ago I would have said I wanted to stay home to avoid other people’s craziness rather than the coronavirus itself.  Now I’m planning my next outing to make as few stops as necessary, to buy packaged and canned goods rather than fresh produce, and then to go straight home and wash my hands.  Thoroughly.

And yet, there are many signs of normalcy.  Neighbors come and go.  One story in my newsfeed offered that 2/3 of us are still showing up for their “essential” jobs.  I live near an interstate, and in the middle of the night I can hear semi traffic in the distance.  (Another story in my feed quotes over-the-road truckers as saying they’re working more efficiently now there are fewer cars on the roads.  That means retail outlets are surely being stocked. Someone should tell the toilet paper hoarders.)

But in the midst of all this are the numbers.  Dr. Fauci’s prediction that 200,000 may die in the U.S., the ventilator and testing kit shortages, and the swath the disease is cutting in the hardest hit places like Italy and Iran ratchet anxieties. 

The media provide mixed signals which contribute to the confusion.  Local news broadcasts are as chipper as ever.  Commercials still run for businesses those affected by shelter in place orders can’t patronize, automakers still try to sell us new cars and insurers car insurance, and TV programming remains its inane self.  On the other hand, the “shelter in place” installments of The Daily Show, purportedly recorded from the homes of Trevor Noah and other cast members, fall a bit flat trying to wrest humor from current events.  (The past couple of weeks have reinforced my belief that standup and sketch comedy only work in front of a live audience.)

So, it’s pretty tough right now to know what to think or feel.  Then again, some people are quite certain as to how to react.  Although my mountain resort town has respectfully urged visitors to stay away, feedback from other communities in the region indicates a more aggressive stance.  People in one town are pressuring law enforcement to set up checkpoints on the roads leading in.  A Facebook post suggested slashing the tires of out of town cars.  One local official told a reporter she was afraid someone was going to get shot given the xenophobia prevalent in her county.

As far as they’re concerned, the folks coming uphill won’t be kept from the second homes on which they pay taxes.  One part time resident who couldn’t leave her high-powered gig to shelter out here offered her place on Airbnb, advertising it as a place the prospective guest could wait out the crisis in safety.  The listing was quickly taken down after a backlash.

The official who worried people might get shot isn’t being dramatic or alarmist.  In my state, gun shop owners have demanded the governor classify them as essential workers, with the vocal support of assorted Friends of the Second Amendment.  Firearm and ammunition sales have spiked in the last month.  Soundbites and article quotes give the impression some of the purchasers are eagerly anticipating a breakdown of order.

Fear can be a useful response.  It’s what allowed our prehistoric ancestors to survive, and it can do the same for us.  The important thing is to temper fear with judgment and reason.  Unless you’re directly faced with an existential threat and must act immediately and decisively, there is time for risk analysis. 

Certain habits born of experience help, too.  I’ve been able to stay home for seventeen days and counting because I came home to a full cupboard, fridge, and freezer.  As a kid that was not always the case, so my routine as an adult is to augment my weekly food shopping with staples or household items that haven’t run out but will in coming weeks.  I wasn’t planning on being confined at home and I did not buy in hoarder quantities.  But I had enough to last long enough to minimize outside contact during the first part of the crisis.

Naturally, there were and are a few underlying assumptions.  One was that I would have essentials like running water, electricity, and gas.  (Check, at least so far.)  Another is that retail businesses will stay open and properly stocked.  (We’ll see.)  And so, while I’m naturally cautious I probably would be in a bad place if a full-scale catastrophe struck.

So would you, most likely, though the preppers would be happier than pigs in shit should the unthinkable occur.  There is an unspoken faith in the systems that sustain us.  The COVID-19 pandemic is causing people to question for the first time whether they are robust enough to get us through and not just those on the fringes.  I am very reluctant to entertain the possibility of a disease-driven societal collapse reminiscent of The Stand.  However, even a partial, temporary collapse such as that after Hurricane Katrina multiplied across several regions would shake public confidence to the point where we might see our society permanently transformed and not in the way armchair idealists like me would prefer.

Some of what’s happening was foreseeable and thus preventable, and some of it not.  The New York Times reported this week that the federal government had contracted with a medical device startup back in the late aughts to manufacture a reserve supply of respirators to meet a potential emergency; following a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers and attempted contract renegotiations this never came to pass. That was an attempt at foresight, sabotaged by corporate capitalism though it ultimately was.  The novel coronavirus, as the name implies, was not specifically foreseen and could not have been because we cannot predict evolution.  But if plans had gone as planned, we would have had a better response to COVID-19 than we’ve had.

Past experience with numerous outbreaks affords a roadmap—H1N1 in 2009, SARS and MERS before that, the 1967 Hong Kong flu, not to mention the big daddy of ‘em all, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19—but hindsight is myopic.  Or if we do remember the epidemic spectre, it tends to be PR embarrassments such as the 1976 swine flu fiasco.  Then there’s the fact that both culturally and a matter of business practice we plan for the short to mid-term but seldom for the long haul.

I don’t know what to make of it all. I’m just holed up in my modest abode waiting for the next development.  There’s some distancing you can’t pull off. 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Remote

It’s been a week.  I’ve been cooped up indoors for a solid week.

Like so many others, I’m self-isolating in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Along with a comparative few lucky enough able to do so, I am working remotely.  I’ve left the house only to check the mail and take out the trash.  So far, I don’t mind.  My habits are solitary, so the social distancing thing is pretty much a given.  Better to stay home than to deal with a paranoid public outside my front door.

I’d said so long to last Thursday’s evening class telling them that we’d interact online for the next two or three weeks, the timespan quoted by the administration.  As of midweek the duration has been extended until semester’s end (right before Memorial Day).  I’ve seen the last of my students; from now on our relationship will be virtual.

I’m ambivalent toward online instruction.  My summer classes are usually distance learning, leaving me free to check in from wherever which means I can travel on my own schedule and not necessarily on semester breaks alone.  (Not that I’ll be traveling anywhere anytime soon…) 

But in person classes work best in my experience.  Liberal arts subjects are narratives, and it’s hard even with recorded lectures to sustain a narrative with any life in it online.  All you’re doing, really, is presenting bare facts, and students are paradoxically more likely to ask questions in a physical classroom than by email or LMS message.  Online discussion boards are stilted and inhibit meaningful dialogue.

The abrupt shift to online only has caused the predictable heartburn among colleagues and students alike.  As one student put it last week, “If I wanted to take an online class I would’ve signed up for an online class.”

It’s for our own good, of course.  And we’re all in it together, albeit in cyberspace.  But it’s not the inconvenience that worries me about my students’ welfare.  There’s the obvious; I want them all well.  But the local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, and my younger learners (and not a few of their elders) typically work in hospitality. While they undoubtedly have lots of time now to devote to my class, they’re not earning what they need to pay the bills.

There’s a lot of that going on.  Daily unemployment claims in my state doubled over the last two days.  Meanwhile surreal headlines commingle the horrible and mundane; one from yesterday’s CNN newsfeed read “U.S. Death Toll Hits 149; Dozens of Malls Close.”  Conflicting messages about the crisis continue to shake confidence.  And when there is uncertainty in a crisis people start to behave unpredictably.

The examples of erratic behavior are mounting so fast you need wings to stay above them.  A middle-aged Brooklynite got in a shouting match with a bunch of twentysomethings congregating outside a bar.  He felt the patrons should have stayed home.  One woman was quoted in a news report as being too scared to buy gas because she might pick up coronavirus from the pump handle, evidently forgetting she could have just gotten a couple of paper towels from the dispenser to avoid skin contact.  People without symptoms insist upon wearing face masks in public despite pleas from health officials to refrain from doing so.

Then there’s the panic buying and hoarding.  Fortunately there hasn’t been any of that locally; on my last trip to the supermarket everyone was shopping normally.  But you hear the stories.  There’s the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of course.  There are the nervous suburbanites clearing shelves of pasta, rice, and beans as if in anticipation of a siege.  Then there are the enterprising folks who roam from store to store buying up scarce items looking to sell them at a premium on Amazon.  Just today a senior citizen was robbed in a parking lot of the bag of groceries she was carrying.  I had to read that last story twice to believe it.

It’s easy to get a laugh out of panic buying when there’s no credible evidence of impending shortages.  But there are vulnerable people already adversely affected by the abrupt economic downturn who could be made to suffer further, people who don’t have the financial resources to meet price increases in household necessities.  At this point there are local food banks forced to cut back on their operations due to the quarantine policies, and the one serving students at my college has closed for the time being.

Economic divides become more evident in crises.  The online editions of the Business Journal ran an article today—behind a paywall, naturally—with the headline, “The Rich Confront the Virus: ‘Do I Quarantine in the Hamptons?’”  The opening line, the only one publicly visible, reads with nary a touch of irony, “Even in an age of inequality, a global pandemic can be a great—and terrible—leveler.”

Normally I’d dismiss such a fatuous pronouncement with a harsh laugh if it didn’t echo a tidbit a student shared with me.  The student works as a livery driver shuttling well-to-do seasonal residents from our small airport to whichever mountain aerie is their home away from home.  That afternoon she had driven a family arriving from the Bay Area.  People with means tend to be unguarded among the servant class, and these were no exception.  It was a younger family with school-aged kids, and one parent remarked to the other that it was a good thing the schools had closed since they could “wait out” the “craziness” seizing San Francisco and other cities.

This student is both observant and perceptive, and she was startled and amazed by their choice of words.  She was disturbed by their obliviousness.  They believed themselves above it all and had decided to take an extended ski vacation while civilization broke down elsewhere.

I’m not so surprised.  We’ve been on a slippery slope toward apocalyptic thinking for a long time.  Whether this is due to the disproportionate cultural influence of evangelical Christianity or plain and simple self-absorbed fear is hard to say.  It’s probably a little of both.  Community is a thing of the past.  As Robert Putnam put it, we’re bowling alone.  COVID is making us even more suspicious of each other than usual.

Returning to the vacationing family, they would surely be indignant at what their driver did once she had safely delivered them at their destination.  She thoroughly cleaned the car’s interior with disinfectant.  It probably never occurred to them that they could possibly pose a threat to anyone; it’s the rest of the world that’s the threat.  Remote, indeed.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar 

The Rally Effect Wags the Dog

“The sonuvabitch got what he deserved.”

I sipped my drink and grunted, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

We were sitting in the bar at a local restaurant, watching the TV news.  The place is a little out of the way, and even in the midst of ski season it was devoid of customers except for me and the other guy as we waited for the kitchen to open.

The segment we were watching dealt with the targeted killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.   Soleimani, as you undoubtedly know by now, was the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.  In recent years, he has been a key player in Iran’s support of Syrian strongman Bashir al-Assad and a leader of Shiite militias in the war against Islamic State in Iraq. 

President Trump’s justification for ordering the killing was that Soleimani posed a threat to American lives.  The unrest in Baghdad in past weeks, which included an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, is simply the latest symptom of the power vacuum created by the 2003 invasion and should have been little surprise to anyone.  Similarly, Iran has actively meddled in regional politics as far back as its support of Hezbollah in the 1980s Lebanese Civil War. 

In short, business as usual.  Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon exist at the intersection of a number of religious and ethnic groups making national unity impossible absent a one-party state with a strongman at its apex.  And yet the United States and other Western powers assume they can maintain order and security while fostering Western-style democracy.  In Iraq’s case, the U.S. withdrawal in 2011 practically ensured its Shiite-majority government would become a client of Iran.

Soleimani and the Iranian leadership doubtlessly welcomed the deepening of anti-American sentiment among Iraqis.  Iran has engaged in state-sponsored terrorism in the past and Soleimani’s high-profile presence in Iraq was not encouraging, his role in defeating ISIS notwithstanding.  However, I’m inclined to take Mr. Trump’s assertion with a grain of salt.

This isn’t the first time a U.S. president facing an impeachment trial has leveraged a foreign policy crisis.  Bill Clinton was one lucky so-and-so as 1998 drew to a close.  Saddam Hussein had threatened to expel U.N. weapons inspectors, triggering U.S.-led airstrikes.  The Kosovo War for independence was well under way.  And, over the summer, al-Qaeda made its international debut by detonating car bombs outside our embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. 

You don’t want to change commanders in chief in the midst of a perceived national security crisis.  This is arguably one of the reasons the Senate merely censured Clinton.  (I think, too, that the Republicans would have preferred not to have gone into the 2000 election facing an incumbent President Gore.  But that’s just one of my crank theories.)  It didn’t hurt that Clinton’s approval numbers actually went up before the trial.  I haven’t seen this week’s polls, but the White House is surely counting on the rally effect to further cement Trump’s apparent acquittal whenever the Senate decides to hold the trial.

The timing of Clinton’s sudden emergence as a quasi-war leader didn’t go unnoticed by a skeptical media.  The resemblance to the recently released Dustin Hoffman movie Wag the Dog was uncanny and was frequently invoked as the impeachment trial drew nigh. 

For those of you who have never seen a movie made before the turn of the century, the plot goes like this: An unpopular president facing defeat at the polls cooks up a hoax war with Albania on the advice of his spin doctors.  Hilarity ensues.

Wag the Dog was just okay as a comedy, but the film’s conceit wasn’t lost on the chattering classes.  Even journalists sympathetic to Clinton invoked its title when discussing how foreign policy had suddenly become so important to an administration more concerned with domestic issues.

The killing of General Soleimani was handled in the maladroit, hamfisted fashion typical of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.  It’s so all over the map it doesn’t know which direction it’s going if it ever did.  But I think that makes scant difference to the base.  Something went bang, and a brown-skinned Muslim was dead.

Which was probably what my bar companion meant with his remark.  I guess I could have provoked an argument by pointing out the nuances of Middle Eastern politics, or that if Soleimani had committed war crimes he should have been afforded due process and put on trial.  But why spoil the prospect of a good meal?  I sipped again at my drink and perused the menu.  The news moved on to another story.  Out of sight, out of mind…for now.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Don Quixote

Here’s an item from today’s newsfeed: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-attacks-windmills-in-speech-to-conservative-group-i-never-understood-wind/ar-BBYfIpV?ocid=spartanntp

Further grounds for impeachment…or commitment?