Eyes Open

I underwent my first faculty evaluation for an online class last year.  We’re evaluated by our department chair every four years; my last eval was pre-pandemic when I was mainly teaching in a live classroom.  These evaluations, on ground or online, include an anonymous student survey on their take on my performance.

It’s easier for me in a live classroom where I can gauge the students’ reactions to me in real time.  I can pretty much predict how they will describe my performance.  Online, I’m blind.  So, it was with a frisson of trepidation that I read over the survey comments.

The written comments are optional, which means they are usually left by students who either love you or hate you.  The latter category of comments included a disparaging description of me as “woke.” 

Woke is a funny choice of a snarl word, since it never really caught on among liberals and progressives.  The only occasion I remember using it in the classroom was a few years ago.  I had slept poorly the night before, and that day’s talk was not one of my best.  After a couple of stumbles, I paused and apologized and told them why.  I facetiously remarked that I should be more woke.

No, woke the way it’s used by conservatives is just part of their funhouse mirror vision of how they think people to their left are.  In the case of the critical student, he (it was probably a he) meant that I had failed to cater to his prejudices.  Concerning the course, there is really very little ideological content.  If my material has a flaw, it is that it is maybe a little more rah-rah about the status quo than I actually feel about it.  If it is woke in this student’s estimation, it’s likely it’s because I acknowledge the existence of non-whites, that we took our land from its indigenous occupants, that slavery and Jim Crow actually happened, that police violence is visited most often on Blacks and other people of color, that LGBTQ people have rights, and so forth. 

It is disconcerting for me the way each of us lives within our own media-driven ideological bubbles.  I grew up in an era where there were only three television networks (four if you counted PBS), most moderately large cities had at least two daily newspapers, AM talk radio was fringe, and the internet was in the future.  There was already a deepening rift between left and right, but there weren’t cable news and social media to channel extremist ideas unrooted in fact.  I am sure that the present climate of mutual mistrust explains the distaste for my classroom statements among some of my distance learning students, and that the quasi-anonymous online environment where teacher and student will never meet personally emboldens them to proclaim their beliefs with little concern for their potential offensiveness.  Pity.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Cultural Desert

My dwindling “Saved” queue is finally at zero.  My music streaming service updated its site and now offers fewer of my favorite musicians and tracks.  My preferred podcast platform is going dark at the end of August.

It seems that some of the best cultural experiences the internet offers are drying up.  The hardest hit for me is Netflix’s discontinuing its DVD service.  The funny thing about that development was its streaming service offered better content 10-12 years ago.  Particularly during the time when Netflix partnered with Starz, I could access all kinds of obscure titles in streaming format such as films produced by the East German studio DEFA.  As Netflix transitioned into content creation, its streamed titles interested me less and the reason I continued to subscribe was mainly for the DVDs.

I’m not sure what I will do now.  I read recently that TCM had cut its staff.  Programming quality there seems to be slipping, and I watch that channel less frequently than I did before and during the pandemic. 

A casual reading of recent news coverage surrounding our culture industries points to COVID as a culprit.  Movies and music helped me through the lockdown, and I know I wasn’t alone.  When it came to music, I listened to familiar favorites, discovered new artists, and fell in love all over again those I hadn’t listened to in ages.

The spike in demand for streamed music increased the value of copyrights owned by songwriters and recording artists while yielding comparatively little return in the form of royalties, which in turn led to what I will call The Great Catalog Sell Off of 2021.  (Bruce Springsteen was reportedly the biggest winner, receiving more than a half-billion dollars for his body of work.  The buyer was Sony; I think they can afford it.) 

The passing of copyrights from what must have been scores of songwriters and recording artists into the hands of a narrow range of new owners is ominous.  It’s true that owning the rights to numerous catalogs afford economies of scale which make streaming profitable in a way it would not be for individual artists.  But it also means that un- or less-profitable artists or their works are more likely to be withdrawn.  I hope this prediction is wrong, but my tapered listening diet of late is anecdotal evidence in that direction.

Time was, there was money to be made from “long tails” marketing to a clientele who wanted niche goods and services.  Online commerce would lower the transaction cost incurred selling to small groups of customers.  I used to believe that.  But like a lot of conventional wisdom, this may not have been true in the long run if ever.  With the growing trend toward concentrated ownership in media, less mainstream consumers will be shut out.

Concentration of ownership in any industry is not a good outcome.  It compels media platforms and outlets to dumb down and reduce the diversity of content available to the viewer or listener.  In the business world, you have to positively spin changes even when they don’t benefit or work against the consumer.  I’m not convinced and you shouldn't be either.  New is not necessarily improved. 

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Spectator Sport

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time.  I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003.  I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces.  The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on.  The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety.  I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it.  The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome.  The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold.  One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off.  Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program.  I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner. 

Part of me wanted to believe that last part.  But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq.  I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences.  Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution.  The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it.  Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support.  Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years.  We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal.  It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on. 

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention.  Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures.  Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones.  Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders.  The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency).  The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever.  Iraq ranks low on many human development indices.  (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students.  There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes.  Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time.  Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.).  Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

Projection

Justice Alito is afraid.

The author of last summer’s holding in Dobbs said this week that the leaking of the decision draft in May exposed his fellow justices (the right-wing ones, anyway) to risk of assassination. 

One can partly attribute this rhetorical drama to conservatives’ self-importance.  Conservatism is rooted in the belief one is intrinsically better than other people.  Putting oneself above others leads to self-aggrandizing ideation.  Having said that, we have to look at who is victimizing whom in the long-Trump pandemic.  Aside from the incident of an antifa protestor killing a Patriot Prayer militant in Portland in 2020, there are few credible examples of lethal left-on-right violence in recent years.

Before Dobbs I saw Samuel Alito as I regarded other run of the mill conservatives in high places, something resembling a pebble in my shoe.  His low public profile in the past led me into a grudging acceptance of his presence.  Since the May leak, Alito’s outspoken assholery has become nearly intolerable.  We have learned much of his character in past months.  Alito strikes me as an angry, embittered man with antediluvian views who poses a threat to the personal liberties of tens of millions of Americans.

But it isn’t Alito’s hyperbole that prompted me to write this.  The attempted murder of Paul Pelosi in his San Francisco home yesterday is the worst example of right-wing violence since the January 6^th insurrection.  The accused is, unsurprisingly, a Trump-troll whose activism was previously limited to shitposting on social media.  News reports indicate the assailant planned to hold Pelosi hostage until his wife returned from Washington.  Pelosi was able to dial 911 during the home invasion and the police promptly responded, but not until after the attacker fractured his skull with a hammer.

The attack on Speaker Pelosi’s spouse is the latest incident in the trend of escalating far-right aggression since 2016.  As I write, a group of self-proclaimed militiamen (i.e., armed cosplayers in camouflage) are on trial in Michigan for plotting to kidnap and murder governor Gretchen Whitmer.  The ambiguity of Donald Trump’s statements on such incidents from the “good people on both sides” assertion after Charlottesville to his instruction to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” before the 2020 election constitute a tacit endorsement of illicit force directed at other Americans.  Statements by other Republican leaders, such as Lindsey Graham’s prediction of “riots in the streets” if Georgia prosecutors dared to indict Trump for his attempted election fraud simply add fuel to the fire.  Last summer’s YouGov / Economist poll reporting more than 40% of those polled believe a civil war is likely in the next decade is probably a reflection of the ratcheting bombast emanating from Republican politicians.    

And yet, to hear them tell it, these same pols are the victims.  Alito’s drama queen fears of assassination have manifested in little more than Brett Kavanaugh being forced to cut short a night out when a few protestors showed up outside the restaurant.  To the last individual, Republicans at all levels whine about imaginary stolen elections while shamelessly advocating and instituting policies designed to exclude minority voters in future contests.  Delusional imaginings of violence meted by antifa and other lefties ignore the very real threat from the right.

There’s a word for this: Projection.  Push your faults and your misdeeds on your opponents.  That’s what is happening here.  Call it for what it is.  Call out the offenders.  May the truth win the day.

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Free Ride

I must say that the latest stunt out of MAGA-dom is inspired, though not in a good way.  Busing and flying immigrants from Florida and Texas to blue states has the optics of a raised middle finger liberals.  Fox and other right-wing news outlets are portraying it that way. Less unhinged sources highlighted the outpouring of kindness toward the new arrivals in communities like Martha’s Vineyard. 

No story is that simple, notwithstanding one’s ideological lens.  We know that the migrants were promised jobs, housing, and gifts at their destination.  Some were misled about these destinations; the Cape Cod contingent thought they were going to Boston.  Others seemed to have known their itinerary in advance and saw an opportunity to travel someplace they wanted to be; one man got off his bus in Chicago and was met by family.

I’m sure each family or individual concerned had their motives for going along.  It does appear that many were deceived.  Outside the MAGA-verse, there have been comparisons to the “reverse Freedom Rides” of the early 1960s.  I thought I knew my Civil Rights Movement history, but I was unaware of them until now.  This bit of near-forgotten right-wing ratfuckery was orchestrated by the New Orleans White Citizens Council as retaliation for the SNCC- and CORE-organized Freedom Rides against racial segregation in the South.  Black families were bused to northern states with the promise of housing and jobs only to discover upon arrival that they had been had.  The campaign subsequently spread to other southern states. 

The idea was to overload social welfare systems up north, point out the imputed hypocrisy of civil rights advocates, and demonstrate to the displaced Black people that they were better off in the segregated South.  Similarly, the ongoing drive to offload Latino migrants onto blue states and sanctuary cities is intended to punish those who have the temerity to view these people as human beings possessing human dignity.  (The immigrants seem to have been indiscriminately targeted; El Paso bused 223 migrants to New York City many of whom were Venezuelan refugees.  Venezuelan-Americans, like Cuban-Americans, tend to favor Republican candidates.  Looks like the GOP successfully alienated a bunch of future voters.)

One key difference between then and now is that the Louisiana legislature refused to fund the 1960 campaign while the Florida legislature appropriated $12 million in support of the current effort.  (Governor Ron DeSantis has pledged to spend every last dollar.)  I am unsure of the cost to Texas taxpayers of Greg Abbott’s mischief, though indications point to private donations. 

One wrinkle is that this caper could actually benefit the receiving communities.  Many of the immigrants may be eligible for Temporary Protected Status.  If granted, those with TPS will be legally able to work.  While I’m not familiar with the labor economics of the various destinations, let’s assume that they are having the same hiring troubles as the rest of the country.  The arrival of the migrants may help alleviate labor shortages in at least some places.

Like all the other wingnut shenanigans of the last six-plus years, the bus-off will be superseded by even barmier escapades.  I’m not sure what they are meant to accomplish.  They’re not “triggering” or “owning” the libs.  All they’re doing is jerking each other off as they become less relevant over time, a development that cannot happen soon enough.

  

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar 

Monarchy at the Crossroads: A Brief Assessment

Queen Elizabeth II has finally passed away.  Ninety-six years is a good run for any individual.  And as with so many of us, she was the sole British monarch of my lifetime up to this point.

Our fascination with the British monarchy has had a life of its own; a perennial feature of American pop culture for decades.  In my memory, it didn’t become a thing until the marriage of Charles and Diana.  It wasn’t so much him—then and now his bland persona made him easy to ignore.  It was the sudden glamour bestowed upon this mild-mannered nursery school teacher thrust suddenly into the limelight which caught the popular imagination.  Her divorce from her Prince, her sudden and tragic death, and the lives of her sons have kept the royals in the forefront of our collective consciousness.

But it is not my intention to dissect the royal family as cultural phenomenon.  The monarchy, for all its recently acquired media friendliness, possesses a fraught legacy.   While hardly at the fore of the media coverage, there has been a steady commentary in online media particularly concerning the larger implications of British imperialism.

Much has been written of the rapid decline of the British Empire since the Second World War.  Ensuring the survival of the metropole took precedence over preserving the overseas colonies, and rapid decolonization was a collateral effect once the guns fell silent in Europe.  Not that this was entirely a smooth process; one need only reference the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau, and the Aden Emergency to recognize that Britain sought to maintain its possessions across the globe even as the anticolonial tide washed upon them. 

The vestiges of the Empire survive in the form of the Commonwealth, which is an institution in flux.  For much of its history, the Commonwealth served as a means for Britain to exert soft power over its former subjects.  However, one can also make the argument that principled actions such as the opposition to UDI in Rhodesia and apartheid in South Africa were as much the product of its recently independent members exerting influence over British policy in the court of public opinion.

The nature of the Commonwealth is changing, with countries without a history of British colonialism such as Mozambique and Rwanda coming into the fold.  Similarly, the stance of members toward the monarchy is changing.  Barbados was the latest to break with the Crown and became a republic last year. 

A discussion of the Empire’s decline and fall too often sidestep its origins.  England, and later Britain was arguably the originator of the Western settler state.  Medieval and early modern Ireland was the prototype.  Even though Ireland was the first Commonwealth country to withdraw, the Anglicization of its culture is permanent.  (Gaelic is an official language, but just about everyone speaks English exclusively.  Although there are identifiable cultural differences, the country, at least in the cities, is rather like Britain albeit with a different accent.) 

Consider the rest of the Anglosphere.  Indigenous peoples were displaced and subjected to genocide in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.  English-speaking Europeans form a substantial demographic in South Africa almost thirty years after majority rule.  In other places, they are a minority as they had been during the colonial era.  The only former colony to have achieved a near-purge of European settlers has been Zimbabwe, where one-fifth of one percent of the population is white.

So, the Queen’s passing does mark the end of an era.  It will probably also feed the fascination surrounding the royal-watching pastime.  Whether the new king and the surviving royals can maintain the future relevance of the monarchy is a separate question.  Britain’s future relevance post-Brexit is one as well.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

This Looks Familiar

Fall semester begins tomorrow.  Not that I, my online students, nor my colleagues can do anything about it. 

You see, the college website is down.  Has been since yesterday.  After a day and a half of silence, IT finally took to Twitter to explain the matter.  

For the second time in eighteen months, the college has fallen victim to a ransomware attack.  The last one delayed the end of Spring semester by more than a week.  This one will probably delay the Fall term for who knows how long.  A temporary page assures students they can access their classes and contact their instructors via the LMS.  This instructor accessed the linked backdoor LMS login page.  The LMS rejected my password as invalid.  Funny, it worked before.  I tried to rest my password.  The password reset page is down.   

You would think the administration (and our IT folks) would’ve learned from last time.  Just like last time, the response was slow and the messaging unclear. Just like last time, the college has retained the services of a “third party consulting form.”  Maybe it would be cheaper to just pay off the hijackers and be done with it. 

Maybe they should just hire the hijackers.

  

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar