Enemies in a Lifeboat

 

“Alright then, we are two nations.”

John Dos Passos, The Big Money

 

Dos Passos was referring to the ideological divide surrounding the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti nearly a century ago.  The statement could just as easily apply today. 

As we approach a third year of pandemic, the divisions in our society have become a gaping wound for all the world to behold.  Its successive waves have limited physical mobility making escape from the social upheaval a distant vision.  I’ve long dreamed of becoming an expat in my retirement, but the desire to travel the world has morphed into an urge to flee and not look back.  Unfortunately, that is no longer feasible for most of us.  And as time goes on creeping political repression may make it even less so. 

In the aftermath of the “stolen” 2020 presidential election, we are entering what Jason Stanley terms the “legal phase” of fascism.  Much of this is happening at the state level given the narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, though the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court will almost certainly enable these enacted and pending measures.  Restricting voting rights, limiting the right to publicly protest, gerrymandering which further entrenches Republican legislators in red states, and the de facto purge of anti-Trump Republicans in Congress and statehouses are all calculated to pave the way for the Orange Führer’s triumphant return in 2024.  (To further raise alarm, it has come to light that Boeing and Pfizer were among the corporations and trade groups which donated $8 million to Republican lawmakers who voted to decertify the 2020 electoral results.)  

Nor has the past year mitigated the threat of right-wing extremists or self-appointed “good guys with guns” taking the law into their own hands.  While the verdict in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial may signal a renewed intolerance of vigilantism, the not guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case is disturbing.  (One reason I suppose the jury was inclined to acquit was that Wisconsin’s “stand your ground” law doesn’t apply to public spaces.  By initially attempting to flee a confrontation with an armed protestor, Rittenhouse was arguably fulfilling his duty to retreat.)  The brazen, high-profile antics of so-called militias give further cause for concern.  

Misinformation exacerbates the divide.  It helps further what Bill Maher has called the slow-moving coup.  Social media fueled hysteria over mostly nonexistent threats surrounding gun control, vaccines, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Critical Race Theory, and so forth.  It also promotes anti-science attitudes and misinformation about COVID, leading to lowered vax rates and increased spread each time a new variant emerges.  

It is no wonder that Donald Trump loves poorly-educated people.  They are the most susceptible to the message and the least likely to understand how our constitutional system actually works.  While affluent, educated suburban whites supported Trump as well, it is the unruly mass of working class whites who pose the more immediate threat.  Gullible and hostile and ready to accept any sort of bullshit shoveled at them as long as it caters to their anger and prejudices, they are the most liable to resort to mob activity. 

What we are seeing is a progressive normalization of ignorance and rage-fueled rhetorical and physical violence, fueled by social media.  At its worst, this violence has taken the form of looting in cities to violence against protestors.  Legal consequences fall differently depending on the person and the offense.  One year on, few of the participants in the January 6^th Redneck Riot have suffered any meaningful punishment for having attempted to overthrow the government.  Most of the convictions have been for trivial crimes such as trespassing, rather than for sedition.  Had it been, say, a Black Lives Matter protest, the penalties would surely have been swifter and more severe. 

To quote Dos Passos again, “They have taken the words of our fathers and made them slimy and foul.”  Watching the recent New York Times documentary on the riot, possibly the most complete dissection of the event so far, we behold scenes of self-proclaimed “patriots” confronting law enforcement officers demanding they uphold their oaths to the Constitution notwithstanding they were doing exactly that.  At the risk of repetition, it was these “patriots” who sought the disruption of the very government prescribed in the Constitution. 

The transposition of surreality over mundane normalcy characterizes the present moment.  Life goes on as usual, but with a pervasive sense of dread.  And I am beginning to think there is (admittedly anecdotal) cause for worry.  A couple of years ago, just before the pandemic, I took a trip to Europe.  Not only was the flight delayed without explanation for nearly two hours after boarding, but we had to submit to two separate document checks before boarding.  Perhaps it was only a routine security precaution.  Perhaps it was a harbinger of future restrictions on Americans traveling abroad.  

Which brings me back to my deep-seated wish to check out of the mess our country has become. I fear my contrarian opinions may make that more difficult if not impossible as time goes on with the prospect of even more repressive measures.  I’ve learned having money of your own confers freedom, freedom which includes leaving home.  Security legislation since 9/11 has given the federal government greater oversight of bank accounts.  All of mine are in the U.S., which means my assets can be frozen or seized by the authorities on the slenderest of pretexts.  Goodbye, freedom.  Our sweet land of liberty may well become a lawless place where mobs of heavy-gutted, bearded white men armed with guns and superstition are calling the shots and where decent people will have no means of escape.  

More than ever in our contemporary history it has become a matter of us and them.  We are seemingly locked in a death embrace with our enemies at home and escape may no longer be no longer an option.  There is scant cause for optimism.

 

 

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Patriot Day

 

As it must every year, September eleventh has arrived once more. 

Cue the inevitable scab-picking that occurs on each 9/11 anniversary.  Even at this remove, it is difficult to believe it actually happened.  Watching the live coverage that Tuesday morning I clearly remember the abrupt sickening feeling when I watched the second plane strike the South Tower, turning what at first looked like a bizarre accident into a chilling blow to our presumed safety and security.  

I don’t think it does much good, though, to commemorate the day as MSNBC did for several years after when it rebroadcast the news coverage of that morning in real time.  The National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have repeatedly run 9/11 documentaries in the last few days in their own annual ritual.      

At some juncture, we must take a sober, detached view of the event.  After twenty years, we owe ourselves that much.  This is particularly true to me when I consider that a significant number of my students nowadays were born after the fact.  For them this catastrophe is a terrible, but abstract historical event.  Gen Z views 9/11 with the same emotional detachment my generation has toward Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination.  These events were terrible, but not in a way they can access emotionally. 

True to form, we made heroes of a few.  Twenty years later, the victims the public holds in its collective memory are the participants in the Flight 93 passenger rebellion.  While we mourn the Pentagon victims and the first responders who perished at the World Trade Center, we mostly mourn them as a faceless mass absent individual personae.  (If you doubt this, I challenge anyone who wasn’t a family member, friend, or coworker of any of these people to identify any one of them by name off the top of their head.)  The unresolved deaths of Sneha Anne Philip, who may or may not have been at the WTC when the towers fell, and Henryk Siwiak, who was the only murder victim in New York City unconnected to that day’s attacks, hold some public interest but they are outliers. 

Tellingly, we almost never acknowledge the deaths of the workers—receptionists, security guards, cleaners, maintenance personnel, food service workers, among others—whose very lives seem almost to have been beside the point for the public.  This is because in the warped calculus of American values, the lives of ordinary workers count for less than those of a few businessmen. 

Consider the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died while their boss was out of office to enroll his daughter in kindergarten…and consider how many CF employees would liked to have been with their own children that Tuesday morning.  The boss was appropriately contrite to the media, of course, but that does little to mitigate his privilege-borne guilt.  And it is the privilege divide which bounds the narrative of that day. 

I think in particular of the so-called “Falling Man” caught in the famous photo taken by Richard Drew outside the North Tower as people trapped on the upper floors jumped to their deaths rather than be incinerated.  Drew tried for years to identify the man, to no avail.  Drew surmised that Falling Man was probably a cook or kitchen helper as he was wearing a white shirt and checked pants.  Aside from this detail, there were scant clues to Falling Man’s identity. 

Unlike Falling Man, many of the executives who died lived charmed and fulfilling lives, save for their final hour or so.  By contrast, the Falling Man was someone they would have ignored: a person of color, very possibly an immigrant, working at a low-wage service job the main purpose of which was to ensure their own convenience.  Even if he had been positively identified at the time of his death, it’s unlikely that Falling Man’s wife would have been invited by President Bush as a special guest at the 2002 State of the Union address. The Falling Man was deemed expendable twice over—first by his capitalist masters, and then by the militants who took his life.  He is an anonymous cipher in the larger narrative.  

Mass disasters point up societal values.  Much like the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians who have died since 2001, the fates of 9/11’s working class victims simply aren’t relevant.  They are the losers of the neoliberal world order, fated by their informed personal and cultural inferiority to live in service to the wealthy and their managerial underlings.  If they die, well, there’ll be more to take their place.  New York, Kirkuk, or Kandahar…it’s all the same story.  

We have been told that the attacks brought out the best in us.  Perhaps so.  It also brought out the worst.  The immediate aftermath of the attacks set the stage for an assault on freedoms in the name of freedom.  There were the ham-fisted official measures such as the PATRIOT Act to be sure, and the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and “extraordinary rendition.”  But many signs were more subtle, because they were socially imposed.  It’s natural to seek solidarity in a time of crisis, but in the autumn of 2001 wore on some of it was clearly forced.  Whether it was bank tellers fired for refusing to wear an American lapel pin or the harassment of Muslim schoolchildren, the reactionary response to the attacks produced a chilling effect.  

This chilling effect was reinforced by popular culture.  Numerous TV shows, particularly if they were set in New York City, referenced the attacks.  This was understandable, but white working class culture dialed the sentimentality up to eleven.  From Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” to the renewed popularity of that godawful Lee Greenwood song, to the bombastic tributes to the troops at sporting events, the years immediately following 9/11 inspired either a sense of inspirational unity or one of disorienting alienation. My own initial shock rapidly gave way to the latter.    

As the last Americans left Afghanistan, I could only wonder at the futility of it all.  Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror, what was it all for?  What do we say to the thousands of Gold Star parents?  How do we ameliorate the rise in racism and xenophobia that has persisted into the present?  The answers are elusive for us all.  Unfortunately, it appears 9/11 may become still another tragedy whose lessons will go unheeded.

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Who Is This For?

I’ve been back in the classroom the past two weeks, albeit on a mixed, online / in-person basis.  I’m pleased to report that mask compliance is 100%.  Can’t vouch for the vaccination rate, though, since until a few days ago we were on the honor system. 

I continue to be amazed at the news reports of confrontations over mask mandates and the willful ignorance of governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis when it comes to the health of the citizens they purport to serve.  The Delta variant surge, particularly prevalent among the unvaccinated, should by now have put the fear of God in the most trenchant skeptics. 

For my part, I have gradually been easing myself into something resembling normal life since May.  I never bought into the Hot Vax Summer hype, and my public forays have been characterized by an abundance of caution.  Over the past months I’ve resumed routine, taken for granted activities such as grocery shopping, regular haircuts, and the occasional restaurant meal.  I even went to a concert a few weeks ago.  The difference is that I masked whenever required, washed my hands scrupulously, and, most importantly, waited a least a week at home before venturing out again. 

That is not an option for me anymore now that my on-campus presence is required at least two days a week between now until mid-December.  My nervousness aside, I look forward to normal.  But the mask and vaccine refusal problem pose a direct threat to reopening.  Although the loudest voices opposing COVID-related public health measures claimed they want reopening to happen sooner than later in the interest of the small-business economy, the resisters have actually prolonged the crisis.  Part of me wants to shrug my shoulders and chalk it up to Darwin but there are still people whose welfare is at risk. 

I’m referring to those who cannot or are not eligible to be vaccinated.  Amongst the hysteria surrounding the return to the classroom we hear from parents saying they won’t vaccinate their kids after its authorized for them because children can’t get COVID.  (They most certainly can.)  Anti-vaxxer stupidity was just one more bit of irrationality to scoff at before the pandemic, but being that we are in the midst of the worst public health crisis in a century it’s downright anger-inducing.  Confrontations over campus mask mandates still make the news.  COVID woo is still reeling people in; last year the CDC reported 4% of those asked had ingested bleach as a prophylactic measure.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this is still going on. 

Just once, I wish level heads would prevail.  But irrationality knows few bounds in this culture, and the adults seem to have left the room.  As the coronavirus spreads and mutates on account of this irrationality, the crisis will go on and the damage will mount.  The light can be seen at the end of tunnel.  We just have to walk in the right direction.

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Indecent Interval

The U.S. has dispatched troops to Kabul to evacuate American personnel in anticipation of the Afghan capital’s imminent fall. 

So ends our two-decade intervention in Afghanistan.  Looking back, the present endgame was inevitable.  It was typical American hubris to believe the United States could bring order among an unconquerable people.  That assumption, of course, arose from America’s historical amnesia.  We never learn because we never remember.  

The misbegotten idea of American exceptionalism also played a part in bringing about this latest debacle.  The experience of the British and the Russians were irrelevant to the extent they were considered at all.  That we helped facilitate the latter’s defeat likely skewed perceptions of our chances of victory. 

Not that any of this was in the forefront of the discourse surrounding the decision to intervene.  The 9/11 attacks were a fresh, raw wound in the fall of 2001, with the events of that day endlessly replayed and rehashed on the cable news networks.  A national adrenaline rush in anticipation of unknown horrors yet to come combined with a collective grief blocked rational discussion.  When the invasion began that November, it seemed victory was in sight despite the Bush administration’s warning that the War on Terror would take many years.  (This was about the only prediction they got right.)  

We are easily distracted, and issue saliency is perishable.  In this case, it was the lead up to the Iraq War and the grueling stalemate which ensued that shifted our attention from the Afghan War.  By 2009 matters had deteriorated to the point where the incoming Obama administration ordered a “surge” comparable to the one implemented in Iraq a couple of years earlier.  It was deemed successful, but was really a Band-Aid on a fatal wound. 

Now we are back to square one, with nothing to show for it.  The Taliban have taken Kandahar and Herat and it’s only a matter of time before they are in the capital.  I’m seeing visions of people lining up to board helicopters on the U.S. Embassy roof. 

Comparisons to the fall of Saigon are inevitable, though the North Vietnamese exercised a bit more decorum than the Taliban.  Hanoi observed a “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal and launching its campaign to take the South.   The Taliban began to aggressively sweep the country even before U.S. forces had fully withdrawn.  The execution of the withdrawal raises eyebrows, with troops abandoning bases shared with Afghan government forces in the dead of night.  I’m sure that did wonders for morale.  The Afghan National Army is collapsing just as surely as the ARVN did in 1975, but more rapidly. 

The return of the Taliban as Afghanistan’s masters does not bode well for human rights, particularly women’s rights and the rights of ethnic minorities.  There will undoubtedly be retribution against the Taliban’s enemies much as there was when they came to power the first time in 1996.  In any case Afghanistan will become even more unpleasant than it already is.

But as always, the American public is scarcely aware anything is happening outside its hermetic world.  It’s true that there are a lot of serious distractions at the moment, but even if things were “normal” it’s unlikely anyone would pay attention.  Our failure in Afghanistan is destined to be another foreign policy lesson unlearned.

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Soft Underbelly

It’s been quite a week.

The semester ended Friday.  I naively thought I would have grades in before the weekend was over, giving me time to decompress before summer session begins.

If only.  My institution’s data management systems—website, email, LMS, everything—fell victim to a ransomware attack last Wednesday.  I wasn’t too concerned at first, and some of my colleagues didn’t seem to be either.  (Though one prof on the faculty Google Groups site speculated whether a “pissed off student” might have been behind it.)

Services have been partially restored but I’ve been getting desperate emails from students saying they can’t access the LMS, even though other students were successful.  It doesn’t matter right now; grade rosters are still unavailable.

This is a localized problem, of course.  A cyberattack on a community college is of little interest elsewhere.  But it’s part of a pattern.  The recent attack on the Colonial Petroleum pipeline disrupted the southeastern economy for days, and news of other ransomware attacks have become more frequent in the media.

Before 9/11 focused attention on the terrorism threat, there were a number of articles discussing threats to critical infrastructure apart from Y2K.  Infrastructure was arguably less software dependent twenty years ago, but a policy focus on resiliency and redundancy seems to have fallen from public notice.

Perhaps we should take heed before the severity of attacks result in real and lasting damage.

 

Update 5/27/2021 Business Journals - "Expert View: Colleges Could Be Prime Targets for Cyberattacks This Fall"

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Headlong into the Past

 

It was only a coincidence, but a fitting one just the same.  This past week, I’ve been bingeing The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu.  Absently scrolling through my newsfeed as I watched, one headline caught my eye.  The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari in a case involving a Mississippi statute banning abortion after the first fifteen weeks of pregnancy. 

While such a story is troubling under normal circumstances, the ideological shift of the federal judiciary to the right during the Trump administration provokes outright angst.  Before 2017, any ruling re Roe v. Wade was tempered by a reluctance to overturn it outright.  For instance, when Chief Justice John Roberts was undergoing his confirmation hearings in 2005 he noted that Roe was settled law. 

But perhaps not for much longer.  The influx of right-leaning judges into the federal courts, together with the new conservative SCOTUS supermajority, puts that into question.  A president’s lasting legacy are his judicial appointments.  In that sense, Donald Trump has created a threat to hard-won rights that will persist years after his tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is a funhouse mirror version of a right-wing utopia.  More to the point, it’s a reflection of present-day phenomena which, on a slippery slope, might result in something like it.  

Life in the postrevolutionary theocracy of Gilead is chockfull of slightly tweaked aspects of daily American life in 2021.  We have militarized law enforcement and omniscient public surveillance.  There is a growing tolerance of officially meted punishment in the guise of justice, with “othered” minorities particularly singled out.  Politicized evangelicals influencing public policy.  Propaganda and misinformation substituted for news.  

The series was especially prescient with Gilead’s backstory.  In the series universe, a terrorist attack against the White House and U.S. Capitol led to rule by decree by a cabal of religious fanatics. The Great Redneck Riot of January Sixth was an eerie evocation of an otherwise unthinkable event.  (Imagine what could have happened if the rioters had been organized…and planned ahead.) 

The rest of the quasi-fictional nightmare could be made more real through the law courts.  Central to the narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale is an unspecified environmental disaster affecting fertility rates.  Women who could still conceive were rendered as property, stripped of their old identities and forced into reproductive servitude to the male “commanders” who govern Gilead.  Although The Handmaid’s Tale is speculative fiction, it is also food for thought in the face of a gradual erosion of the personal rights gained by women over the past century.  

Concerning the pending abortion case, an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade seems attainable for the first time.  SCOTUS has bounded and further refined the legal protections afforded by Roe, but until now they remained comparatively slight.  No longer. 

Although it has no direct legal bearing on how the case is argued and decided, public opinion’s effect on politics cannot be ignored.  Over time I’ve detected a worrisome trend among my students, particularly the working class white males.  They are quite forward with their anti-abortion stance and their taste for authoritarian policies.  I think I know why.  Populist conservatism’s appeal stems from the feeling that the economic immiseration of white workers and America’s supposed loss of greatness is the result of our abandoning traditional values.  Traditional values which privilege men and subordinate women and people of color.  Things will get better if we just turn back the calendar.  After all, that’s what Jesus wants, right? 

The three most recently appointed justices were chosen with right-wing policy objectives in mind.  The views of Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are no secret.  The touchstone issue, the long-running litmus test for the conservative base, is abortion. This in turn is prompted by a retrograde worldview informed by evangelical Christian tenets.  Taken literally, biblical law affirms ideas which privilege some and abuse many.  

Here is what is at stake.  Several states have enacted six-week abortion bans; a few more have passed bills imposing an outright ban in anticipation of Roe being overturned.  Should the Mississippi law be upheld, as it very well may, then we have taken the first step in rolling back equal rights for women.  We all must ask ourselves if this is the kind of society we want to live in.

If you want a nightmare vision of what that society may end up looking like if present trends persist, watch The Handmaid’s Tale. 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Your Feelings and Mine

 

Fuck Your Feelings

 

That charming sentiment cropped up frequently in the runup to last year’s election and its immediate aftermath, culminating in the Beer Belly Putsch[1] on January 6^th.  It was meant to signal the defiance of real Americans in the face of political correctness run amok, to show one’s allegiance to the way it’s always been done, to trigger the libs. 

The conceit of this maladroit attempt at in-your-faceness is that liberals and progressives actually care about what the alt-right thinks.  They don’t.  

You see, most people left of center reject the legitimacy of the alt-right’s ideas.  It follows that any ad hominem attacks from them aren’t worth taking seriously.  To cite an admittedly puerile retort from my youth, it’s a case of mind over matter.  I don’t mind, because you don’t matter.  

Time to get serious. As a social scientist, I was taught to be a detached observer.  I trust neither emotions nor intuition.  But I’m fully aware that being human means we can never be fully separated from our sentiments, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. 

Let me offer an example.  Just before the Iraq War began, several colleagues in my graduate program and I organized a public forum on its implications.  While generally successful, we experienced a few hiccups.  Our intention was to offer an interdisciplinary discussion, pulling in professors and grad students from several departments.  We envisioned a calm, rational dialogue. 

It was wishful thinking.  Both ends of the political spectrum tightened the rhetorical rope around our necks to further their narrow agendas.  There was the activist group who wanted to not only set up a literature table inside the auditorium but a voice on the panel as well.  We grudgingly granted the first but not the second.  They sulkily accepted the arrangement.  Then there was the news crew from the local Fox affiliate who were there to capture the spectacle of a bunch of snotty, unpatriotic college students telling the world how much they hated America. 

That was galling enough, but there were two incidents at the panel which stand out in my mind nearly twenty years later and help illustrate the point I’m trying to make.  

They came when we opened the discussion to audience questions.  One question was more of a statement from an undergraduate who proclaimed the pending invasion would cause millions to die.  While we had already covered the considerable death toll the coalition had imposed on Iraq through its embargo since the 1991 ceasefire, apparently this wasn’t enough for our interlocutor.  When one of us asked just how she knew this was inevitable she keened, “Because I feel it!”  Much of the audience broke into applause. 

The second was an attempt at distraction from the opposite direction.  A middle-aged woman whom last summer's kids would have labelled a “Karen” stood up next to a young man clad in a collared shirt and khakis.  Karen introduced the young man as her son, a soldier recently returned from our adventure in Afghanistan.  How dare we question his sacrifice?  

Karen missed the point, as Karens often do.  She was trying to flip the script with a bald use of sentimentality to justify decisions at the top regardless of their outcome.  She was manipulating the attendees to shift the focus from a sober weighing of consequences to a visceral patriotism nationalism unfettered by facts. 

Our panel did not question the woman’s righteous indignation.  We most certainly did not say to her, “Fuck your feelings.”  We implicitly understood this was a display of sentimentality mistaken for moral certitude.  

And that is the heart of the issue of feelings with conservatives generally.  Most are so certain of their own inherent virtue that their gut reactions—their feelings—are not recognized as such.  To them, they are unerring truths.  

This certainty of infallibility, albeit arrived at emotionally, creates a condition in which conservatives cannot accommodate ideas at odds with their own.  Consider their reaction if you suggested that public policy should not be guided by their belief in a deity whose existence cannot be empirically proven.  Consider their reaction if you pointed out that gun violence is attributable in part to the widespread and poorly regulated availability of firearms.  You would be met with anger and resentment—an expression of feelings even though they would never think to label them as such. 

This is because feelings to those on the right are experienced only by the weak and inferior.  Their own emotions come from a place of certitude and thus are not “feelings.”  Requests to be mindful of the rights and sensibilities of those historically repressed by people like them fall counter to their truth and are thus to be ignored, and if that doesn’t work, to be mocked.  

The whole eff-your-feelings attitude, then, is merely an exercise in denial and projection on the part of a demographic whose social influence is on borrowed time.  Having invested their identities in a received wisdom, any counternarrative poses an existential threat.  Belittling those posing the counternarrative imparts a sense of security. 

So here we are.  I find myself forcing down my feelings in response to yours, forcing myself to be rational in the face of your irrationality, forcing myself into excessive self-restraint.  Perhaps this is what you mean by  “Fuck your feelings.”  

Returning to the third person, it appears conservatives in general and the alt-right in particular are indulging in a paroxysm of unrestraint as a means of bounding and containing threatening social forces.  Perhaps it is still another example of denying these social forces.  It probably doesn’t matter.  Denial postpones but will not avert the ultimate reckoning.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

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[1] Credit to Thomas Knapp for the neologism.