Clubbed: Fun and Games as a Faculty Advisor

Wanting to do my part for Snowflake College, I volunteer to sponsor a campus club.  Not just any club, mind you, but the local branch of the Snowflake Student Association.      

Enthused, I tackle my new responsibilities.  The Student Association is supposed to fund campus life programs.  But, alas, our group has no funding to share—a true existential quandary.  At Snowflake’s Big Campus, revenues come from additional student fees. 

I try to explain the situation to Dean Kimpossible, who is visibly bored two sentences into my pitch and cuts me off telling me she won’t even consider raising fees at our small outpost.

Next, I seek counsel from Jim, my counterpart at Big Campus.  Jim’s a gangly fast talking fellow who seems never to have heard the adage that we each have one mouth and two ears and should use them proportionately.  He isn’t much help.  Oblivious, he asks me how we’re distributing our funds.  

I eventually give up trying to make anyone in charge see that without a steady, dedicated revenue stream the organization cannot possibly do its job.  For now, I remain undaunted.  Perhaps with enough car washes and bake sales we can keep the group afloat.

And so I lay out the fiscal situation at our weekly meeting and describe our options.  The group is small, well-intentioned, and ineffectual.  Most of them are typical college students, afflicted with learned helplessness, coddled by anxious, hovering soccer moms, their minds molded by No Child Left Behind era pedagogy.  Accustomed to structured social lives and curricula where the answers to the exam are fed to them in advance, they’ve come to expect the grownups in their lives to do the heavy lifting.  I shouldn’t complain, though.  At least they’re here.  If they need an occasional nudge to take the initiative, I’m all right with that.

The association president, who ascended to her lofty post by default because no one else wanted the job, is a lumpish, pasty faced young woman I’ll call Jessica.  Jessica is a business major whose stated career goal is to be an entrepreneur.  Whether she means “entrepreneur” in the prosaic sense of owning a small business or in the think-big sense of becoming a corporate gangster is something I haven’t been able to suss out.  Frankly, I’m afraid to ask.  

Jessica is an only child homeschooled by evangelical Christian parents, which means she has zero social skills and does not play well with others.  A vulgar self-promoter with more ambition than brains, she is narrow-minded, insolent, and frequently disrespectful toward me and her peers.  Jessica’s principal achievement as president has been to run off the two most knowledgeable group members, reentry students who did not cotton to a nineteen year old ordering them around.  Her leadership style relies heavily on delegation—meaning the group does the legwork while Jessica takes the credit, a practice that will undoubtedly serve her well in her chosen vocation.  In short, Jessica personifies everything I loathe and it’s all I can do to keep my patience with her.   

No sooner do I describe our predicament than Jessica, whose sole work experience to date has been bagging groceries at a supermarket, begins to lecture me on how I don’t understand business.  I cut in abruptly, leaving her agog at my effrontery.

“This is not a business, Jessica.  We’re not talking Fortune 500 here; this is a startup campus club.”

“But, Unassuming—’’  (It’s “Unassuming,” you see.  Not, “Mr. Scholar” or “Professor Scholar.”  Evidently one of the perks of being President—or being Jessica—is that you’re on a first name basis with your faculty advisor.)

“But, nothing, Jessica. You’re unnecessarily complicating the issue.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

My equanimity reaches its end.  I snap, “That’s enough, Jessica!”

Jessica looks stunned, as if she’s been slapped.  She’s silent a moment, then quavers, “You’re mean!”  It occurs to me this is undoubtedly the first time anyone has ever told her to shut the hell up.   The rest of the group stares awkwardly at their feet and says nothing.   

The meeting soon fizzles out with nothing resolved.  The next bake sale is on Monday.  If they’re lucky, maybe they’ll clear $35 or $40…

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Your Freedom or Your Life

A news item has made the rounds this week: A woman in Illinois was jailed for failing to pay a medical bill arising from cancer treatments.  The amount?  $280.

Since we’re bringing back debtors’ prisons, maybe we should dig up Charles Dickens while we’re at it…

Under Every Bed

I made a faux pas in class the other night. 

Discussing how news coverage affects perceptions of events, I compared headlines describing a Baghdad bombing attack.  One described the incident as Shiite on Sunni violence.  The other (from Fox News, naturally) merely said that terrorists had killed a number of people.  My point was that the American media tend to throw the T-word around indiscriminately, and that this inhibits our issue knowledge.

After class a group of students came up to me, a couple of them Iraq war veterans.  They took exception to what I had said.   Didn’t I know Iraq was the frontline of the war on terror?  Without waiting for an answer they walked off, muttering bitterly among themselves.

I suppose I should have explained myself better, but I don’t know how I could have.  Things have calmed down considerably from the collective paranoia immediately following 9/11, but I still can smell a whiff of latter day McCarthyism in the air.  One thing that hasn’t changed in our national debate over the war on terror is its proponents’ preference for mutually exclusive, either/or arguments, encapsulated in George W. Bush’s dictum, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.”    

Deep down, I’ve always feared that Saul Bellow moment that would get me fired.  I don’t kid myself about where I stand with my students.  To them I’m just another service worker, a Starbucks barista minus espresso machine and tip jar.  That’s why they’re sometimes upset when I tell them things they don’t want to hear.  I’ve made a few genuine gaffes I’ve regretted, but I believe what I teach.  It is my responsibility to ensure my students at least know there are alternatives to the conventional wisdom, even if they choose not to accept them.

I’ve alluded before to our propensity to embrace policies wrapped in the flag.  We love freedom, which we define as sharing the same beliefs as everyone else and deferring to authority.  It’s hardly a surprise, then, that we have no problem with practices such as extraordinary rendition, drone killings, and the denial of habeas corpus and due process rights even when the suspects are U.S. citizens.  Because, you see, they’re terrorists, and we will never be safe as long as even one is left.  No real American would question the necessity of fighting them or the means.  Our leaders always know what’s right and it’s not your place to question them.

Many post-9/11 policies have been more symbolic than substantive.  A case in point: Driving to the airport where I live, approaching the passenger terminal there used to be a sign on a light post announcing the current “security advisory” level.  I never fully understood what this was supposed to mean.  Yes, I’d looked up the definitions of the various security advisory levels on the Department of Homeland Security website and understood what they meant in principle.  But really, what did level Yellow, or Red, or Mauve, mean to me or anyone else reading the sign driving by?   The truth is that someone in charge was trying to convince us that they were doing something so we would feel more secure.   

Are we more secure?  Maybe, maybe not.   There hasn’t been an attack on American soil since 2001, and you can make a case that this has been due to increased security measures.  But is this cause or correlation?  Only time will tell.  This is one situation where I actually hope I’m wrong, and that the security obsession has made us safer.  Because we’ve been down this road a couple of times already.

I came of age during the Cold War.  I grew up believing Communism and the Russians and Chinese were bad.  This is because that’s what I learned from my family, my teachers, and from what I saw and heard in the media.  On the whole, though, it was a mild, watered-down anticommunism I was exposed to.  The worst excesses of anti-Red hysteria happened before I was born.  The Smith Act, HUAC, loyalty oaths, blacklisting, and summary firings of so-called security risks were among the excesses of the time, and there is no credible evidence that any of these measures made the country safer.  Decades before that, the Palmer Raids, mass deportations of immigrants, and the Schenck decision after the First World War set the stage for the Cold War national security state whose legacy we live with today. 

I do not dispute that the Soviet Union and “Red” China posed a military threat to the United States in those days.  Nor do I dispute that there are in fact individuals, organizations, and countries that seek to do us real harm today.  What I question is our malleable definition of “terrorism.”  While I accept the general meaning of terrorism as violence meant to create fear in furtherance of political goals, I also know governments are apt to apply the label only to that political violence which works against them. 

Let’s consider some past examples.  South Africa imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.  (He remained on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2006.)  Rhodesia’s army used the recruiting slogan, “Terrorism Stops Here!”  The Germans summarily executed captured partisans as terrorists during World War II.  And the military regimes in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil imprisoned hundreds of their opponents on terrorism charges in the 1970s.

Let’s consider a few more examples, along with the oft-disparaged cliché, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  The Zionist groups Irgun and Haganah waged a campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder against the British authorities and Palestinian Arabs prior to the formation of Israel.  Were they terrorists or freedom fighters?  Anti-Castro exile Luis Posada Carriles and his associates planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner, causing it to crash with no survivors.  Was he a terrorist or a freedom fighter?  The Nicaraguan Contras killed judges, doctors, and labor leaders in their insurgency against the Sandinistas.  Terrorists or…?  You get the idea.

I’m not necessarily arguing moral equivalency here.  But the distinctions can get pretty blurry.  I’ll stipulate once more the definition of terrorism I gave above.  It’s a threat we have faced for several decades from a variety of sources.  The main difference is that since the Berlin Wall came down the Islamic terrorist has supplanted the communist as national bogeyman and all-purpose enemy.  Where we once faced an ideological foe, we now face a poorly differentiated set of religious militants.  Confronted with that fact, it’s a short leap to conflate the relatively small number of militants with hundreds of millions of their coreligionists.  In fact, popular support for the war on terror is largely rooted in anti-Muslim, anti-Middle Eastern bigotry.  Why bother telling Sunnis apart from Shiites, or Arabs from Persians, Turks, Kurds, et al., when you can just hang a single label on them and leave it at that? 

As Americans we have internalized fear and suspicion as our default approach to the rest of the world.  Coupled with our penchant for reductionist thinking, I wonder if it will be our own undoing.   Until we can consider our national security challenges rationally, we will continue to look for monsters under every bed.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar  

   

High Seas Parable

The centenary of RMS Titanic’s sinking has come and gone, replete with the obligatory glut of TV documentaries and news specials.  James Cameron has released a new 3-D version of his 1997 film.  And, predictably, there have been essays and articles published in numerous periodicals both high- and low-brow commemorating the milestone.

Why does Titanic hold our fascination so many generations later?  There are two main reasons, I think.  The first is that it underscores the hubris of technology.  The ship was heavily publicized at the time as being “practically unsinkable.”  Then as now, people trusted expert judgment (and advertising claims).  Then as now, people were horrified when the occasional technical failure resulted in a large body count.  Today, we are as willing as ever to roll the dice on any number of potentially risky technologies in our daily lives, whether it’s driving, air travel, or using our cell phones, just to name a few examples.  We accept and live with the everyday possibility of what Charles Perrow called “normal accidents” because of the considerable net benefits to our overall quality of life.  Undoubtedly, Titanic’s passengers made the same cost-benefit assessment each of us makes when we, say, buy a plane ticket.  Sure, there’s always the possibility of a crash, but what are the odds?   We trust, as they trusted, that we will be conveyed safely to our destination.  For them, their dice roll came up snake eyes and we can only think, “There but for the grace of God…” 

The other, probably more significant reason is the sheer human drama of the disaster.  It makes us ask ourselves how we would have behaved under the circumstances.  Titanic’s passenger list represented a cross-section of society.  Rich and poor lived parallel existences in a relatively small space.  Even in extremis the ship’s classes endured separately (and unequally).  First and second class passengers, particularly women and children, survived at higher rates than their fellow travelers in steerage.  Clearly since the ship’s lifeboats didn’t have the capacity to hold the full complement of passengers and crew, not everyone had an equal chance for survival.  Had Captain Smith’s “women and children first” order been carried out faithfully, however, the steerage survival rate should have been higher than it was.  Theories as to why it wasn’t range from the ship’s officers’ arbitrary decisions as to who got into the boats and who didn’t to the physical barriers that confined steerage passengers to certain areas of the ship.

In any case, we tend to remember the deaths of the first class passengers and the legends that have grown around them.  One distinction then that we would surely not see now is the manner in which the wealthy, society’s imputed leaders, conducted themselves in the face of death: Isador Strauss and his wife…John Jacob Astor…Benjamin Guggenheim and his manservant returning to their stateroom to change into evening dress so they could die attired as gentlemen.   Each of them behaved in a unselfish manner worthy of comment and emulation.  There were exceptions to be sure; White Star Line president J. Bruce Ismay departed early and spent the rest of his life in disgrace.

The point here is that despite the social Darwinism of the age, your betters were expected to sacrifice in the clutch.  If the Titanic disaster happened in 2012, more likely than not the Koch brothers, Jack Welch, Larry Ellison, Eli Broad, and Rupert Murdoch would be the first to climb into the lifeboats, women and children be damned, and Fox News, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg would tell us it was fair and right.  Even plutocrats with more benign reputations—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and George Soros come to mind—would  be quick to escape, and without a second thought at that.  (As for the immigrants below decks, they’d probably be considered even more expendable now than they would have been a hundred years ago.) 

One similarity between 1912 and 2012 is the preoccupation with celebrity.  We traditionally ignore the less prominent victims of mass tragedies.  When we do attempt to put a face on the faceless, as we did in response to the national pathos in the wake of 9/11, we do so in a tone deaf manner. We project our desires and aspirations on the famous.  That might be at least one reason why some aspects of the Titanic disaster-as-morality-tale fail to resonate nowadays.  One example comes to mind; Lady Duff-Gordon’s lament to her secretary about a “beautiful nightdress gone” echoes in the cluelessness of today’s 1%.  (Duff-Gordon was one of the foremost couturiers of her time, so perhaps she can be forgiven the insensitive remark.)  

Another, related facet of the tragedy is that it may well be one of the first manifestations of the “global village.”  Titanic was at no point seen as an isolated event, but as a story that drew the masses together in mass mourning.  The Titanic narrative was a postmodern phenomenon from the start, the reification of an object à la Baudrillard.  Its symbolic value transcended the literal from the moment the first distress calls went out; Titanic as synonym for all shipwrecks accords its sign value.  To borrow and twist a cliché associated with Moby Dick, a ship isn’t always just a ship.  Powerful myths sometimes subsume their base objects.  The Titanic myth will evolve and transmogrify over time, the story framed such as to suit the sensibilities of the moment.  It will endure as a timeless narrative of the powerful and humble alike, a morality tale on the high seas that nevertheless serves as an all-purpose metaphor for the vicissitudes of modern life.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

George Zimmerman’s America

After several weeks of speculation, Florida authorities have finally decided to bring charges against George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Nearly fifty years after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, we are still deeply divided on racial lines.  The emotionally charged rhetoric and media posturing surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting is depressing evidence that we have a long way to go before we move beyond the mutual suspicions that undergird race relations in this country.

The worst part of it is that Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman have each become depersonalized symbols of our collective fears and resentments.  One side protests the mainstream media’s perceived maligning of Zimmerman’s past, such as publishing a booking photo from an old arrest and its use of a photo of a younger, more innocent-looking Martin.  The other side objects to the presumed racial profiling of community watch programs, the potential for abuse built into Florida’s “stand your ground” law, and the easy availability of firearms in our society. 

On one level, the nitpicking over what has or hasn’t been properly explained or disclosed merely shows the tenuous nature of publicly accepted truths in the media age.  It demonstrates deep antagonisms in the national discourse, but little else.  As for the rest of the affair, it's unfolding according to the unwritten script for these things.  The media spectacle was probably inevitable.  Considering where the incident occurred, the prosecutorial dithering leading up to Zimmerman’s arrest was unsurprising.  In the coming months, we’ll observe seemingly endless pretrial motions and then sit through the trial itself.  Once the verdict’s in, there will be howls of indignation and cries of vindication.  After the clamor finally dies down Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman will become yesterday’s news, forever consigned to being a historical footnote or the answer to a trivia question.

Concerning the question of whether Zimmerman acted reasonably, I suspect a wide swath of the public believes he did.  At least in principle: Reuters reports the majority of people it polled support laws permitting use of deadly force in self-defense.  While I don’t want to digress on our national love affair with guns, it goes hand-in-hand with the assumption that it’s okay to direct violence at people deemed “suspicious.”  A corollary to this premise is that anyone harmed as a result is to blame for their fate.

We’ve been down this path before.  When Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers during a routine traffic stop the media continually reminded us of King’s past criminal record, as if this somehow justified his abuse at the hands of the authorities.  In a similar vein, Fox News has aired claims that Martin had “assaulted” Zimmerman, which, even if true, blithely sidesteps the fact that Zimmerman had stalked Martin down the street prior to the confrontation.  Even Zimmerman’s neighborhood watch group has said its policy is to call the police when spotting a suspicious person rather than trying to apprehend him personally.  When you consider Zimmerman’s own record of violent behavior, which includes assaulting a police officer, that he would act on impulse to trail Trayvon Martin is unsurprising.  

Florida, its diverse population notwithstanding, is hardly known for racial tolerance.  During the Jim Crow era Florida witnessed some of its worst racially-motivated atrocities, including the Rosewood massacre of 1922.  Contemporary race relations aren’t much better—consider the Liberty City riot of 1980, the Tampa riots of 1989 and 1992, and the St. Petersburg riot of 1996, all of them responses to white-on-black violence.  Frequently the victims of the violence are young men.  Even today, long-ago cases of black youth killed by white cops or vigilantes resurface: Several years ago, the 1967 shooting of 19-year-old Martin Chambers by a Tampa police officer was reinvestigated on the suspicion it may have been unjustified.

Florida is one of several Southern states which deny full civil rights such as the right to vote to convicted felons (who are disproportionately minorities), even after their sentences have been completed.  Florida incarcerates African-Americans at higher rates than the national average.  Florida law also imposes substantial employment and educational barriers to released prisoners, compounding the problem of reintegrating them into law abiding society.  One can infer that Florida’s civil order is rooted in an implicit racism that makes every black person, and particularly every black man, a suspect.  But Florida, or the South for that matter, are hardly unique.  It’s endemic in our national culture.

Like it or not, we all live in George Zimmerman’s America.  It’s an America where one’s very human worth is determined by one’s race, wealth, and social status.  It’s a country where the authorities will take their time investigating a killing or bringing charges against the perpetrator when the victim is a young black male.  The post-racial society heralded by some commentators upon Barack Obama’s election has not materialized.  Perhaps it never will, at least in our lifetimes.  It’s just as unlikely our casual acceptance of gun violence will go away.  It’s but a matter of time before the next Trayvon Martin meets his demise, and the cycle of recriminations with begin again.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar  

A Day in the Life

It’s Monday.  Monday is a light day for me, with only a single evening section.

4:45 p.m. – I arrive on campus, ease my car into a parking spot, and head into the classroom building.  The building’s quiet as there aren’t many people about for the day classes.  The admin assistant at the front desk waves hello to me as I walk in.

5:00 – The start of my office hour.  I come in a few minutes earlier than usual because a student emailed me earlier in the day.  He has to meet with me before class—it’s urgent, he tells me.  No problem, I reply.  I’ll be glad to meet with you.

5:15 – No sign of the student.  I’ve checked my email and reviewed my class notes for the evening.  I turn my attention to a few remaining homework assignments from last week that need grading.

5:35 – The last of the papers are marked.  Still no sign of the student.  I begin to aimlessly surf the web.  A You Tube clip briefly holds my attention.

5:40 – I’ve given up on the student coming in.  The afternoon lull has begun to lift as daylight fades and students and faculty arrive for evening classes.  A light snow is falling outside, and a narrow band of white begins to frame the borders of my office window.  I watch transfixed as the snow falls past.

5:55 – There’s quite a bit of activity now.  My office is next to the faculty work room, and the sounds of footsteps, muffled voices, opening and closing doors, and the whir of the copier meld into an amorphous drone.  Aroused from my window gazing reverie, I halfheartedly start a game of blackjack on my computer.

6:10 – Time to head to class.  With a resigned sigh I gather my books and papers, lock my office, and walk down the hall.  

6:12 – The classroom seems rather empty, with maybe eight or ten people lolling in their seats.  There are officially 27 students in the section.  Four or five went AWOL weeks ago and I don’t even count them as part of the class anymore.  Shaking my head, I switch on the classroom computer, load my presentation, and arrange my notes.

6:14 – The student who just had to see me during my office hour shuffles in.  I ask him why he didn’t stop by.  He shrugs listlessly and sits down.  A few more people file in behind him and take their seats.

6:15 – The appointed class start time.  As I open with this week’s announcements, I’m interrupted by a clutch of stragglers.  They’re impervious to my dirty stare.

I hand back last week’s homework and collect this week’s papers from those who bothered to write them.  Despite the generally lackluster quality of the submissions, I attempt to put a positive spin on things: “I’ve noticed a substantial improvement in your essays,” or something like that. 

6:20 – Announcements made and homework returned, I begin my lecture.  As I speak, my eyes survey the class.  It’s a fairly typical cross-section of Snowflake College’s “knowledge explorers.”  There are a few “mature learners” (i.e., those older than 25), as well as a couple of high school students earning college credits.  The quotidian demographic are the ones commonly referred to as “millennials.”   

In the front row, to my left, are Jeremy and Matt.  While I find both of them excruciatingly annoying, Jeremy is by far the more abrasive.  Not that I fully grudge him his shortcomings.  I, too, was once eighteen, spotty-faced, and childish.  The main difference is that I didn’t disrupt my professors’ lectures with inane chatter unrelated to the class.  Matt is quieter than his boyfriend, probably his only virtue.  Unlike some of their peers, they attend class faithfully.  I suppose I should be more careful about what I wish for.

Also sitting in the front row is Jackson.  (Just so we’re clear, Jackson is his first name.)  Jackson is a slow talking, slow witted boy who invariably sports Wranglers and cowboy boots.  He added the class late, telling me up front he didn’t want to be here and that he was only going to college to make his parents happy until he can join the military.  Jackson talks a lot about his career ambitions.  He’s dismayed at our withdrawal from Iraq but looks forward to taking on the terrorists in Pakafghaniran, or wherever it is we’re fighting right now…that is, if he doesn’t shave his head and climb a water tower with a rifle first...    

Lurking in the geographic center of the room are Britney and Tiffany.  B & T are normally quiet during class, absorbed as they are with answering texts, sending tweets, and otherwise fiddling with their phones.  They’re both bright enough, though not exceptionally so, and they could be “A” students if they would only bother to apply themselves.  Sitting cattycorner to their right is Linda, a gaunt, middle aged redhead who is mutely perplexed by her surroundings. 

And then there’s Todd…a petulant fellow with bad skin and a bored-with-it-all demeanor.   The inevitable product of years of self-esteem programs in public school, Todd treats the class as an unjust waste of his time.  When Todd looks in the mirror every day, he sees the center of the universe.  When I look at him, I see a pimply little weasel.  I suppose it’s a matter of perspective.  

Oh, wait…I have to pause here.  Madison just walked in the room!  He slouches past me, muttering something about having had to work late.  Madison is a diminutive youth who, if you dressed him in green, would be a dead ringer for a leprechaun.  His androgynous name caused a couple of embarrassing moments at the start of the term.  Madison sidles over to an empty seat, sits, and promptly lays his head down on the desk.  He’ll remain in this position, unmoving, his face in a small puddle of drool, until class ends.  

Let’s see…where was I?  Three of my best students ever actually sit in the back row.  Steve, Paul, and James are in their late thirties or early forties.  Each brings a wealth of real-world knowledge and common sense to the table.  Their comments and writing are clearly reasoned and articulate.  Students like them are the main reason I haven’t quit teaching in a fit of black despair.

Melissa is seventeen, the youngest member of the class, and she’s probably the student I admire most.  Melissa is an only child helping care for her chronically ill single dad while working part-time, attending high school, and taking college classes at night.  These challenges have made her just a bit more self-disciplined, not to mention kinder and more considerate, than her peers.  I wish someone would clone her.

Ashley sits in middle of the far right row, near the door.  A stereotypical tree-hugger in Birkenstocks at first glance, she’s the antidote to the run of the mill student.  Quiet and insightful, I always look forward to Ashley’s in-class comments and her well-written essays.

I’ve just described the standouts, of course.  The rest are faces without names or names without faces.  Over time, they’ll all fade into undifferentiated fragments of memory and I’ll wonder why I let them get on my nerves so.  At least, I hope so…

9:20 – I’m back at my desk.  I check my email.  Sandwiched among the belated excuses from absent students is a message from Jessica, the student association president.  The very thought of her triggers a twinge in my duodenum.  I delete the message unread and lean back in my chair. 

9:45 – A soft knock on my half-closed door.  I awaken with a start.  It’s the building security guard.   “Hey, Unassuming, you about done?  ‘Cause I gotta lock up.”

“Yeah, okay,” I mumble.  I pull on my coat and grab my briefcase.  I make my way outdoors.  My car and the security guard’s are the only ones left in the lot.  Driving slowly through the accumulating snow, I head home.    

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

In Memoriam – Joe Bageant

Joe Bageant died a year ago last week.

I never knew him personally, but I felt his loss nonetheless.  I discovered Joe’s writing sometime early in the reign of Bush the Second.  I was immediately drawn to his straightforward, often blunt commentary on the death of the American dream and the power of hierarchy in our supposedly classless society.  For my money, Joe Bageant was hands down the pithiest observer of America’s debased mores during the ‘aughts. 

A son of rural northern Virginia, Bageant dropped out of high school to enlist in the Navy.  Building a career as a journalist and editor, he only began writing political commentary during his last decade of life after returning to his hometown.  His first book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, was a sharply-focused snapshot of blue collar America that looked beyond the hackneyed trailer park-country music-NASCAR fan trope.  His subsequent effort, Rainbow Pie, described his childhood.  Probably only Jim Goad has done a better job as chronicler of folks from the other side of the tracks.

Bageant did have his flaws.  He tended to idealize his redneck neighbors while downplaying darker elements of their lives.  Sometimes he overreached in his efforts to humanize his subjects.  One example was his essay, “Mash Note for the ‘Girl with the Leash,’” about convicted Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England, averring “she never had a chance.”  (For her part England has shown a decided lack of contrition, saying in a recent interview her victims got “the better end of the deal.”)  On the whole, though, Bageant drew his characters with nuanced lines, allowing them to rise above the stereotypes.

Also, the recurring point in his writing—our country is not and never was a true meritocracy—was wholly valid and cannot be emphasized enough.  The Matthew Effect is very real, and there’s a small but visible segment of the population who were born on third base believing they’ve hit a triple.  Meanwhile, the rest of us just hope for a turn at bat.  The fundamental truth is that one’s origins profoundly affect one’s life chances.  And life chances matter, not least in terms of material success.  Some of us overcome adverse circumstances, many of us do not.  The negative traits we popularly associate with the poor are partly a response to immiseration, of being stuck in a corner you can never seem to get out of. 

Understanding is not excusing, however.  Bageant reminded us often that the American working class has been committing slow suicide.  The dirty secret of the Republican Party’s triumph was that it appealed to working class whites’ prejudices to get them to vote against their own interests.  By pandering to blue collar biases conservative policymakers have been able to mask the broader implications of their goals, which is to harness the forces unleashed by deregulation and globalization to create an appropriately servile underclass. Social marginalization is the sine qua non of the process: In this narrative the poor suffer from a fundamental flaw, undisciplined offenders against the Protestant work ethic.  (Charles Murray’s latest polemic is just one of many volleys fired in the propaganda war on the disadvantaged, with the twist that this time Murray is now blaming poor whites rather than blacks for their lack of economic success.)

Joe Bageant knew, as did Pierre Bourdieu, that economic capital correlates with social capital.  Opinion makers in our culture (as in all cultures) tend to reify their beliefs, obviating any relativism of taste and social positioning.  Joe also knew that dominance on the narrative field reflects the real dominance in socioeconomic relations.  It’s for this reason, among many others, that we should remember his work.

Rest in peace, Joe.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Too Soon?

Seems I may have been a bit premature lauding Tucker Max’s rehabilitation.  He’s in the news yet again.  This time he’s offered a $500,000 donation to Planned Parenthood.  The catch is they would have to name a women’s health clinic after him.  Unsurprisingly, PP turned him down...