Backsliding

Everyone knew it was coming, of course.  That didn’t make the news any easier to accept. 

The U.S. Supreme Court has formally handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, nearly two months after Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion was leaked to the public.  The resulting backlash notwithstanding, it appears the final draft is identical or nearly so to the preview.  There is no longer a nationally recognized right to abortion.  

The extent to which a woman enjoys reproductive freedom now depends upon the state where she lives.  In my own state, little or nothing will change in the wake of Dobbs.  There has been talk of making our state a sanctuary for women seeking safe terminations.  But even then, measures elsewhere such as the Texas snitch law may thwart this particular haven unless the woman doesn’t return home. 

Emboldened by their right-wing supermajority, there is already talk of harsher actions to come.  Clarence Thomas has publicly said it may be time to consider limiting access to contraception. Rights such as same-sex marriage may also be at risk now that SCOTUS has issued a total reversal of what was once considered settled law. 

Despite having won, the right is nevertheless taking refuge in their perennial claims of persecution by a malevolent “woke” left.  Congressional wingnuts are already conjuring specters of a violent backlash to further entrench the hysterical tendencies of the base.  Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (where else?) warned of a potential “constitutional crisis” resulting from a rumored “invasion” of the Supreme Court by the “pro-abortion left.”  (Sorry, Mikey, inciting mob violence is your party’s brand.)  

The decades-long assault on reproductive rights is deeply disturbing to me on a visceral level.  This may read counterintuitively considering men can’t get pregnant (except in emojis).  But the two things I value most are my privacy and my autonomy.  If I insist upon these for myself, then it is only right that I want them for you as well.  Anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive policies limit privacy and autonomy for women of childbearing age, and that is wrong.  

Dobbs is a landmark on the backsliding route our country is traveling.  It is also a warning.  We have arrived at a place where a moderate majority are increasingly subjected to the superstitious fanaticism of right-wing leaders and their legions of scruffy devotees.  It’s sickeningly awful to witness them fouling our nest while our freedoms erode and life in America becomes harder to bear.  We face more grim days such as this.  The darkness is gathering fast.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

New Old Habits

Summer sessions starts on Monday, after a three-week hiatus from work.  Part of me is looking forward to returning to the classroom.  Part of me dreads it. 

I know I’ll be okay once things are going.  But in the days leading up to summer orientation earlier this week I began to feel anxious about leaving the house.  You see, I had not left at any point during the three weeks except to get the mail and take out the trash.  

This had a familiar feel to it.  During the pandemic’s worst phase, I went four and a half months alone at home. I am not exaggerating.  I opened my door only to accept deliveries and to let in technicians from my internet service provider.  My first venture out was to get my first dose of the vaccine (but only after calling AAA to jump start the car I hadn’t driven all winter). 

Fall and spring semesters were partly live and went well. But during the winter break I holed up at home once more and went nowhere ever, reverting to having my necessities brought to me.  I am beginning to suspect the past couple of years have taken a greater toll on my sense of wellbeing than I previously believed.  These days, I do not return home so much as I flee there. 

Some of this is caution.  In spite of being vaxxed and double boosted, and in spite of weekly PCR tests during the school year (all negative!), I don’t want to be infected.  Some of this I can attribute to the breakdown in social norms since the pandemic hit.  It appears to me that the shameless ratfuckery of the Trump years has emboldened every unhinged crank and basement dweller in the country to act out.  The absence of accountability and consequences for their flagrant public misbehavior bodes ill for the common good.  I just don’t want to engage. 

Before the plague arrived, I was only home 24/7 on weekends during the academic year.  Travel was a constant for me in my free time; it was good to escape the shitshow our country was descending into once in a while to clear my head.  My previous life has been stood on its head.  My passport expired three months ago.  I haven’t traveled by air since the very early days of COVID.  I’ve spent exactly one night in a motel, and only then because there was utility work being done on my block and I would be without water for a day.  

I don’t like living as I do now, but I can’t help the situation or myself.  I have developed new old habits.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

It's Happening Here

I find YouTube ads a necessary evil to get free content.  I almost never watch them through.  Last night I saw one that made me watch to the end.

It was a campaign ad.  The candidate was a former student, a MAGA fan who was an unconscionable pain in the ass the whole semester.  He’s running for county clerk, who is also the registrar of voters.

The spot itself was unremarkable though professionally done.  The candidate appears on camera throughout, first as a talking head then in footage of him walking down a farm road with his wife and preschool-age daughter.  He’s as I remembered him, receding hairline, beard, red face, beer gut, etc.  Same lack of an indoor voice. 

His pitch emphasized his military service and his commitment to faith and family.  (The usual conservative campaign ad tropes.)  He also promised to “clean up” the voting process in our county.  As a sometime poll worker in the county, I can assure you with certainty that our polling process is already clean. 

I’m not worried that he will win.  Although the long-time incumbent is leaving office, his deputy is running and appears the most viable candidate of the three in the primary race.  However, I don't like that many of the disturbing trends seen elsewhere are seeping into my community. 

The post-Trump era has not resulted in peace of mind.  Voter suppression efforts across the country are just one facet of what Bill Maher has called a slow-moving coup by the right.  Approximately two-thirds of Americans are white.  They make up three-quarters of registered voters.  To not see an underlying white supremacy behind voter suppression laws is willful blindness.  And yet the opposition flails impotently to stop them.

Trump-era hysteria permeates red state political culture.  Screening proposed textbooks (some of them math!) for “woke” themes or supposed references to Critical Race Theory is a distraction from serious policymaking while inflaming white ressentiment.  The “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida and the pending measure in Texas forbidding parents to seek gender-affirming care for their trans children are solutions to nonexistent problems.  (Concerning the latter, it strikes me funny that the same people who refused to let the government to coparent when it came to masks now support government coparenting transgender kids.)  Adam Serwer got it right; the cruelty is the point.

To add to the darkness enveloping our country, it came to light this morning that a draft majority opinion in the Mississippi 15-week abortion ban case written by Samuel Alito leaked from the U.S. Supreme Court.  It comes as no surprise that if issued as written, Roe v. Wade would be definitively overturned.  Still, I always figured SCOTUS would probably gut Roe rather than overturning it outright.  The Texas snitch law passed last summer was the shape of things to come from our 6-3 conservative majority Court; it’s doubtful there will be a happy ending in this case either.

During his confirmation hearings Chief Justice John Roberts stated that Roe was settled law.  Guess he’s changed his mind.  Despite her open religiosity, Amy Coney Barrett’s limited record of abortion-related rulings offers a faint glimmer of hope but I’m not holding my breath. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas are lost causes.  If one believes Sen. Susan Collins, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh lied about their stance on reproductive rights during their respective confirmation hearings. I look upon this development with unsurprised disgust.  What do you expect from a pig but a grunt?

There’s been some hopeful commentary that the leak will damage Republican prospects for this year’s midterms and may even fend off a GOP (Trump?) victory in 2024.  Don’t hold your breath.  It is more likely that it will further energize and further embolden the base, as will the probable passage of the spate of anti-LGBT bills in the South.  Speculation on both sides of the divide predicts that Republicans will attempt to overturn results in states with Republican legislatures that go Democratic in 2024.  I don’t doubt that such attempts will occur.  Perhaps they will succeed. 

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.  Somewhere along the way, we took our eye off the ball.

 

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Year Three (...and Counting)

 March 13th.  So begins the third year...

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