Taking It All In

The weeks since November 8^th have had a surreal aspect.  The impending Trump presidency is something which, on some days, I can’t believe is happening, and on others I face with mingled resignation and dread.

When I met with my 4 p.m. section on Election Day, the idea that Trump would win still seemed farfetched.  So farfetched that I played the clip from The Daily Show in which Trevor Noah reflects back on Trump’s first term on Election Day 2020.  The class laughed knowing such a thing was unthinkable.

I spent the first part of the evening working on an online course I’m scheduled to teach in the spring (which is a whole other source of aggravation I won’t get into right now).  Around 8 p.m., I took a break from my academic toils and clicked on the POLITICO website to check up on the election returns…and felt my stomach tighten.

I leaned  out my office door into the hallway and saw one of my students, an activist, chatting with a group of people.  I urgently waved her into my office, and she and the others clustered around my desk.  For the next hour, as students filtered in and out, we watched disbelievingly as Clinton fell farther and farther behind in the electoral vote count, at which point I decided I couldn’t watch any more.

Not having eaten since breakfast I dropped by a Mexican place on my way home.  Dining alone, I grabbed a seat at the bar. 

Naturally, the TV was on, and several of the patrons were weighing in on the news.  At one end of the bar, a paunchy middle aged white guy, three sheets to the wind, loudly proclaimed he was glad Trump won because he’d send all the illegals back to Mexico.  (Given that half the folks in the room were Latino/a, the fact no one took a swing at the jerk said volumes about them.  At least they were civil.) 

At the other end of the bar a woman, equally inebriated, was weeping and shouting that Trump was going to take away her right to choose.  I made a point of leaving after hastily finishing my dinner.

The next day, I felt fine.  Then I remembered the day before.  At work I was hard pressed to explain the result.  After all, like a lot of people, I found it unlikely a year ago that Trump would ever attain the Republican nomination let alone the Presidency.  Asked by a colleague at a holiday function what I thought of The Donald, I scornfully answered, “He’s a buffoon!”  When a student last fall kidded me about leaving the country if Trump was elected I borrowed a line from the movie Office Space and said, “Why should I leave?  He’s the one who sucks!”  It seemed funny at the time.

Eleven, twelve months later my institution’s mental health counselors were announcing their office was open for drop-in visits by students overwhelmed by the election results.  At first I thought this was a bit of an overreaction, but reconsidered when I remembered that those people who had borne the rhetorical brunt of Trump’s campaign rhetoric—immigrants, women, gays and lesbians—might feel a trifle vulnerable right about now.

Still, some of the student antics I heard about from my fellow proffies did make me shake my head at how they took advantage of the climate of worry.  My favorite was that of the student who asked his professor for credit on a missed assignment.  The reason?  The student had to marry his boyfriend before President Trump ended same-sex marriage.  He offered cell phone photos of the nuptials as evidence.  I found this example amusing, because nothing short of a constitutional amendment could overturn the Obergefell decision and I doubt SCOTUS would reverse itself.  It was even more amusing when I learned the student was a poli sci major and should have known better.

For my part, I told my students the same thing I’ve been telling everyone else who has asked me how best to get through the next four years.  Don’t sit back and let circumstances get you down.  Get involved in those causes you may feel are threatened by a Trump presidency.  If women’s reproductive rights are at stake for you, volunteer with Planned Parenthood or similar organizations.  If it’s immigrant rights, work with groups seeking to protect them.  Contribute to the ACLU.  Just…do…something.  This is not a time for sitting on your hands.  Remember that you have agency.

There’s not much more I can add to this advice.  Please consider acting upon it.  And for God’s sake be vigilant after January 19^th.  Let’s hope our fears prove unfounded, but be prepared for the worst.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

End of an Era

The passing of Fidel Castro has evoked mixed feelings for me.  Initially I felt a sense of disbelief, as if he might last forever as a living, breathing museum piece legacy of the Cold War.  Fidel was a presence on the world stage for my whole life, and so his death struck me in the manner that, say, the demise of Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly will when that time comes. 

Before Americans were taught by their leaders to fear and hate Muslims, they feared and hated Communists.  Cuba, so close to the United States, was a particular source of unease.  Our mainstream news media played up the Castro regime’s repressiveness, enthusiastically echoed by politicians and the exile community.  That Fidel did not go the way of the leaders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, that it was not until after he stepped aside in favor of brother Raul that Cuba began the first tentative steps on the road toward capitalism already trod by China and Vietnam, caused consternation among American leaders.

On the other hand, Fidel’s death has elicited laudatory retrospectives of his life, thought, and work among progressives.  I tend to view him in terms of his whole record.  By his own admission he was a dictator, albeit a “sui generis dictator.” His regime had an abysmal record on civil liberties.  It repressed and persecuted the LGBT community.  Castro was perfectly willing to foment nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union.  His emptying the jails of Cuba’s worst criminals during the Mariel boatlift was hardly a laudable gesture, either.

Notwithstanding all this, the Cuban Revolution was a net gain for Cuba.  For the first time, Cuba was a fully sovereign nation.  The revolution broke the grip of American corporations and American organized crime on the economy.  It brought about a fair distribution of wealth.  It placed agriculture in the hands of the people who worked the land.  It led to Cuba having the highest literacy rate in the Caribbean as well as having its best educated populace.  Most importantly, it made quality healthcare universally available, an endeavor at which the United States has failed miserably.

The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “Special Period” did result in some dents in the revolution’s edifice.  Raul Castro’s willingness to make concessions to the neoliberal order is worrisome though inevitable.  As the country reopens to American investment and tourism one sees the specter of pre-1959 Cuba slowly rising like a miasma.  (Ironically, during the era when the CIA toyed with a number of novel ways to assassinate Fidel, he shrugged off the threat by saying that if he were to die the United States would then have to contend with Raul and “he’s even more radical than I am!”)  I wonder what Fidel may have thought of the first signs of his work being undone.  Did he acquiesce to this process?  This seems unthinkable to the point of cognitive dissonance.

And so, Fidel’s death represents a further loss of hope of preserving the gains of the Cuban Revolution.   I suppose all there’s left is the prospect of playing roulette and blackjack at the Havana Hilton for the first time in generations.  Bring on the Yanqui tourists!

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

The New Reality (Show)

In the age-old struggle between the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms, bet on the Yahoos. 

For once, I am at a loss for words even though I’m not quite surprised.  The next four years will be interesting, to say the least.

Home of the Brave

I almost missed this story.  I only found out about it from a New York magazine piece linked on Longform.

There was a mass panic at New York’s JFK airport last week which led to stampedes in Terminal 8.  It appears to have been instigated by waiting passengers cheering Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold medal win in the 100-meter dash.  Their applause echoed in the terminal, which sounded like gunfire to people further down. 

When a woman reportedly shouted that she saw a gun, passengers began running for their lives.  In their panic some dropped objects such as their phones; the resulting clatters sounded like more gunfire.  One group ran out a door and onto the tarmac outside.  Another hid in an unused jet bridge.  TSA workers at one inspection line fled their posts.  Misinformation and panic were undoubtedly amplified by flurries of texts and tweets.

It took several hours for Port Authority police to restore order and for normal operations in Terminal 8 to resume.  Other terminals had been evacuated, adding to the confusion.  And yet, hours after the incident happened, news outlets had moved on to other stories, which is why I learned of it via Longform.

It’s a sign of the times.  Elements of story were all too familiar.  When a terrified woman in a hijab, separated from her family by the unreasoning herd fleeing for safety, cried out in fear and reached out her arms to her child it caused one gaggle of passengers to erupt in a renewed paroxysm of panic.  Because everybody knows all Muslims are terrorists, all of them.  I'm a bit surprised that the Second Amendment crowd didn't take to the airwaves afterwards claiming the stampede was still another reason we need an armed public (even though anyone with the merest shred of sanity would see it as still another reason why an armed public would be a terrible idea).  Considering that the incident took place in NYC, I'm even more surprised that Donald Trump didn't tweet or soundbite about how we have to restrict Muslim immigration to the United States.

I can only imagine what would have happened if the panic had occurred in Texas, let’s say, rather than cosmopolitan, multicultural New York City.  The mom in the hijab might well have been set upon by the crowd, perhaps thinking themselves the earthbound equivalent of the heroic passengers of Flight 93.  Incidents like these make me want to barricade myself in my house with a month’s supply of essentials not to venture out unless absolutely necessary.  Not from fear of Middle Eastern terrorists, but from fear of my own people whenever I venture out in public.

We are a greedy, superstitious, and paranoid lot sorely lacking in self-awareness.  Once I was asked by a Canadian acquaintance to describe my compatriots in a single word, completing the sentence “An American is ___________.”  With scarcely a thought I replied, “Oblivious.”  And in few areas are my people more oblivious than in their understanding of the world.

Nearly fifteen years since 9/11 and the declaration of a Global War on Terror, after two disastrous incursions into the Muslim world with a third in progress, we live perpetually on edge.  Despite this we still believe that despite our hostility toward whole faiths and entire peoples we will someday succeed in making ourselves absolutely safe.  This is a false hope.  Even if we prevail against Islamist terrorism, we will still experience acts of terror by perpetrators with different motives.  Terrorism is a political tactic, and it is as old as politics itself. 

So why do we still cling to the delusion we can one day be safe for good?

One reason is the emergence of security theater since the September 11^th attacks.  Aside from the Boston Marathon bombings there haven’t been any major incidents involving a non-firearm mass casualty device in the U.S. since 2001.   Notwithstanding this we’re constantly on edge.  It was understandably worse in the first years following 9/11.  Eight weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, an American Airlines flight departing JFK crashed in Queens shortly after takeoff.  While the cause was later found to be rudder failure brought on by an overreaction by the pilot to wake turbulence, media speculation immediately centered on terrorism.  (It didn’t help that a Palestinian militant group claimed credit for the crash immediately afterward.)

The 2001 anthrax attacks took place around the same time.  Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to the offices of two U.S. Senators and several news outlets killing five people and sickening 17 others.  (It would be nearly a decade before it became known that a researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, was responsible and that his motives were personal.)   Throughout the fall of ’01 and into the following year the media ran stories of people trying to obtain military gas masks and creating so-called “safe rooms” in their homes.  At one point I read an article on this topic in which the quoted expert’s sole credential was that she had been a producer of the 1995 film Outbreak, which portrayed a fictional epidemic caused by a military bioweapon.   

It was in this atmosphere that Congress and the Bush administration created that bureaucratic Frankenstein’s monster known as the Department of Homeland Security.  A mishmash of formerly independent executive branch agencies and agencies formerly belonging to other cabinet departments, DHS is a model of bureaucratic inertia.  (One need only consider FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina to recognize this.)  It is also a font of questionable policies, particularly in the arena of air travel.

Remember the color codes?  You know, the ones depicting the terrorist threat levels.  It was called the Homeland Security Advisory System.  There were five levels, running from Low Risk (green) all the way to Severe (red).  We were only at red once for a few weeks in 2006, and it only applied to incoming flights from the UK.  The level reached High (orange) several times between 2002 and 2004 though never again on a general basis after that.  (There were a few partial oranges after that.)  The default state, as the advisory at the airport’s entrance would inform travelers most days prior to the demise of the advisory system in 2011, was Elevated (yellow).  Never during the system’s existence was the country ever at Guarded (blue) or Low Risk status.

I don’t think anyone really knew exactly what any of these states actually meant.  In fact, that’s why the system was eventually abandoned.  It was just a meaningless way to reassure an anxious public.  Fox News Channel, which practically held itself out as an arm of the government during the War on Terror’s first years, was the color system’s most assertive proponent, ostentatiously displaying the day’s threat level at the bottom of the screen just above the crawl and near the FNC hologram superimposed over the American flag in the lower right corner.  (My antipathy toward Fox hardened into its present state in those days.) 

The climate of fear simmers in the background of our lives, stoked by a cynical desire for ratings on the part of major news outlets, only to boil over suddenly into mindless fright.  That is what I find intriguing about the American character.  We love to beat our chests, hold our index fingers aloft and proclaim, “We’re Number One,” and moronically chant “USA! USA!”  (This last was a fixture on The Jerry Springer Show, often chanted by the studio audience whenever the menagerie of cretins guesting on the program that day would suddenly erupt into violence.)   Yet when danger approaches we scatter blindly and helplessly.

It doesn't help that Americans seem to suffer, individually and collectively, from the Dunning-Kruger effect.  It's especially strong in conservatives.  Registering Republican apparently makes one an automatic expert on national security even when the person is an insurance salesman or dentist who never served with the armed forces or been part of an intelligence agency.  Believing we are in the loop, that we are active participants in this epic struggle against the terrorists and other boogeymen who lurk in the shadows reinforces our sense of control.  Again, this is particularly the case with xenophobic conservatives who already have strong authoritarian tendencies.  

In some respects the tenor of the War on Terror’s beginnings remains.  “Security moms” are a quotidian feature of American life in 2016 in the way “cocooning” at home with the family and driving them around in an SUV to ensure their safety were in the early 2000s.  We idolize Navy SEALS the way we did first responders a decade ago.  We still tear up and sing along with Lee Greenwood.  And still we are as skittish as a kindergartner on her first day of school.

Just watch the news coverage of the JFK incident if you don’t believe me.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

And So It Begins...

You’re checking your email.  It’s the week before the semester begins, and you’ve neglected your messages as of late.  It’s summer break, after all.

Buried in the middle of your unread messages is one from a student in your summer class last month at Verdant Meadows Community College.  The subject, predictably, is “Grade?”

From: Lindy (annoyedstudent@me.com)

Sent: Friday, August 5, 2016 3:21 am

To: Unassuming Scholar

Subject: Grade???

Mr. Scholar,

I’m emailing you directly because you haven’t answered my Whiteboard messages.  Why haven’t you lowered the points possible on Whiteboard for homework and participation like you promised?  Checking my grades, my percentage is 89.2%.  You said you’d round up the points and you didn’t!

Please get back to me ASAP.

Lindy Smith

Ah, the sense of entitlement is strong in this one, you think.   You’re not sure which to curse first—the Whiteboard feature which renders student grades as percentages and cannot be disabled by the instructor, or the grade-grubbing student.  ASAP?  You kick yourself, having once more forgotten the new rules of the higher ed game.  In a time when students slip off to Cancun or the Bahamas midsemester with nary a word to their profs only to rematerialize weeks later wanting to know if they missed anything, no faculty member dare take time off or be unavailable ever.

However, you know there really isn’t a problem.  Perhaps the young princess has seen her final grade report in the intervening two weeks and has discovered everything’s okay after all.

You dash off a short reply:

From: Unassuming Scholar (scholar@vmcc.edu)

Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 12:15 pm

To: Lindy

Subject: Re: Grade???

           Lindy,

As I said in class, count the points and ignore the percentages.  With the extra credit you submitted, you finished with an A.

Prof. Scholar

You figure this should be the end of it.  But it never is.  The response pops up within minutes.

From: Lindy (annoyedstudent@me.com)

Sent: Friday, August 19, 2016 12:24 pm

To: Unassuming Scholar

Subject: RE: Re: Grade???

           Mr. Scholar,

I’ve been waiting for your answer.  Why did you take so long?  I don’t understand your explanation.

Just so you know, I posted a review of your class at [That Website Which Shall Not Be Named].  People need to know how unfair you are.

Lindy

Now you are simply flabbergasted.  Positively gobsmacked.  You marvel at your ability to inspire ingratitude.  While you couldn’t care less about the bad review she said she wrote, since as a professional you are accountable to your colleagues and institution and not to the personal opinions of the “customers” in the classroom, you do wonder how such allegedly intelligent people cannot understand a simple arithmetic concept you’ve explained time and again to every section each semester.

On the other hand, you would be most interested if this particular student lodged a complaint with your department.  “I got an A, and I’m outraged!”  That would be one for the books.

But you wouldn’t be surprised one bit if she did.  The new academic year is upon us.  You can only wonder what new horrors it will bring. 

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

No Good Deed

You checked your messages after arriving home from a week out of town.  The first one hit you like a sucker punch to the solar plexus.

The message was from the dean’s administrative assistant at Snowflake College.  Specifically, it was from the executive dean’s office at the Quartz City campus.  Quartz City up until now had been the unblemished bright spot in your teaching itinerary.  The students are bright and inquisitive, and you get along great with your teaching colleagues and the classified staff. 

You are informed that Dean Stacy would like to meet with you in person to discuss an “incident” involving you several weeks ago while you were an evaluator at the Quartz City early college high school’s senior project presentations.  One of the other judges, a local community member, had made an allegation about you.  Please call back at your earliest convenience to schedule an appointment.

While you were expecting this, your heart sank nonetheless.  It has become the inevitable cost of doing business.  You’re good at your job, and although you are maybe a touch unconventional in your presentation most of your students like or are at least accepting of your teaching style.  You also are well aware that not everyone finds your personality appealing.  It even elicits hostility from a few individuals from time to time.  Your openness tends to leave you vulnerable to those whom you politely refer to as jerks and to people with issues.

Your accuser appears to straddle both categories.  You know what the charges are, since he pulled you aside after the first day’s presentations and told you what he thought.  (You are thankful that at least what he accused you of did not involve a student.)  Unnerved, you got away from the guy as quickly as possible and lay awake in bed most of that night trying to figure out what the hell had happened.  Before leaving campus that day, you made sure the school secretary scheduled you for a panel other than the one this son of a bitch would be participating in during the next day’s session.

You return to Quartz City the next day to find yourself beckoned into the principal’s office.  The principal, a dark, serious young man, informed you that an allegation had been made.  You deny it as a matter of course, a trifle annoyed by the principal’s condescending demeanor.   You have found through experience with your sons’ schoolteachers that many of them not only talk down to kids, but tend to do so with adults as well.  This gentleman seemed to have lost sight of the fact that you and your fellow college instructors are supposed to be the value added by an early college high school. 

The principal stiffly thanked you for volunteering your time after informing you ominously that he had to inform Dean Stacy of the allegation.  The rest of the day went mercifully well in spite of its awkward beginning.  Several of your former students shook your hand afterward, and introduced you to their parents.  They had heard great things about you and were glad to finally meet you.  One mom even told you her son had chosen your field as his major after taking your class. 

All this notwithstanding, the next couple of weeks were clouded by the accusation against you as you wait for the other shoe to drop.  Naturally, as all bad news seems to in your life, it fell when you were not quite at your emotional best.  In this case, the news arrived after you got home near midnight, jetlagged and facing the glum prospect of waiting all the next day for the airline to recover your inevitably lost baggage.

You call Quartz City the following morning, schedule your appointment with Stacy, and then spend the next couple of days rehashing events in your head trying to make sense of it all.  You consider yourself a man of integrity, and you become rattled and indignant whenever someone calls your character into question.  Your task now is to avoid appearing rattled and indignant.  However, your resentment festers.  Your family has had some degree of association with Snowflake College for nearly forty years.  You’ve taught for them for more than ten.  You gave your time freely and this is what happens?  You seriously consider never giving Snowflake another unpaid second of your time again.  You have already resolved privately to exclude the college foundation as a beneficiary of your will when you found out it had taken money from a certain real estate developer who has lobbied and worked to run public schools like private businesses.   Maybe you should just show up and just teach your scheduled classes from now on.

The distraction of your resentment notwithstanding when the day of the meeting arrives, you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.

Stacy, a tall, rather elegant woman around your own age, smiles warmly when you walk into her office, motioning you to a seat at a conference table.  You’ve never had a discussion with her beyond ordinary small talk, so you don’t know quite what to expect.

Stacy opens the discussion by coming right to the point: “So, tell me in your own words what happened.”

You take a deep breath and tell the story as calmly and clearly as you can.  You relate how you were seated next to your accuser at the first day’s panel.  You describe how, upon finding out the man was a former Marine you mentioned you were a veteran yourself.

“Oh, you’re a veteran!” Stacy exclaims.  “Thank you for your service.”  You smile awkwardly in reply. 

You never know how to respond to this, because thanking vets profusely for their service and describing them as “heroes” even if they were cooks or truck drivers or personnel clerks has become a social obligation of late.  You pride yourself on not having become what you call a “professional vet,” someone whose whole existence, like that of the high school football hero who never is able to recapture his past glories, centers upon that one fact in their lives.

Your accuser is just such a guy.  You’re all too familiar with the breed: overfed, loud mouthed, and jockeying constantly to be the alpha male in every situation.   He regaled you during the breaks between presentations with tales of his storied career as GI Joe with a kung fu grip, before his back gave out on him.  (If it isn't their knees, it’s their back.)  He tells you he’s active in the American Legion, AMVETS, the VFW, the DAV, and the rest of the alphabet soup of veteran’s organizations.  He tells you he served on the county veteran’s affairs commission.  He offers to help you upgrade your disability rating, a result that you know is between unlikely and impossible to achieve.  All the while your eyes are darting across the room looking for someone to catch your eye and rescue you from this blowhard’s narcissistic monologue.

Wincing slightly at the unpleasant memory, you continue your account.  You also point out your unblemished teaching record and your excellent classroom evaluations. 

Stacy, her head attentively tilted slightly to one side, pauses a beat before speaking.  “I see.  You know we have to take these allegations seriously, even if they’re unfounded.  Principal Nathan investigated and could not find any evidence against you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Yes, and when I called the man—”  Stacy laughs slightly, then continues, “and I don’t even remember his name—“

“That’s all right.  I do,” you reply with a wintry smile.

Stacy goes on, “Anyway, he wasn’t very convincing and some of what he said contradicted what Nathan had told me.”

“That’s because it didn’t happen.”

“I’m sorry about all this.  In any case, since it occurred while you were off contract no mention of this incident will go into your personnel file.”

“That’s a relief.”

“You know, we really value the efforts of adjuncts like you.  Did you know I started out as an adjunct?”  Yes, you know.

The conversation wends on for a few more minutes before petering out.  At the end comes something you don’t expect.  As Stacy shakes your hand before you leave, she thanks you for coming in.  Then she says,

“Please don’t let this incident discourage you from volunteering with Snowflake College in the future.”

While you reply with a smile and a nod, a solitary thought runs through your mind:

Never again.  No fucking way.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Current Events, Old Attitudes

“They never tell you the whole story.”

This sage observation came from a student sprawled in a seat towards the back of the room in the minutes before class was supposed to start.  A couple of weeks into the summer session, I had learned a few points of his backstory.  Recently discharged after six years in the Marines, Mitch is back in school working on a criminal justice degree.  He’s the student vet from central casting, right down to the shaved skull and sleeve tattoos.

Mitch was holding forth on the recent demise of Alton Sterling at the hands of police.  Mitch was of the opinion Sterling had it coming.  “He was resisting arrest, you know.  If he hadn’t been such an asshole he’d still be alive.  It’s not like it was his first run-in with the cops.”

A couple of students sitting nearby nodded in agreement as I sat at my desk going over my lecture notes and pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping.  One of them said, “He shouldn’t have provoked them.”

The other student remarked, “Those people don’t have any respect for the law.”

Those people?  This discussion was beginning to raise my blood pressure, but I kept my mouth shut.  The next exchange wasn’t much better.  Mitch was also taking an introductory sociology class, it seemed, and he wasn’t too enthralled by the subject matter.

“Yeah, the professor was goin’ on about ‘white privilege’ and how bad minorities have got it here.  He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.  Nobody I know’s privileged.”

Billie, another student sitting near the group, bobbed her head emphatically.  Billie is another “mature learner” in the class.  Rather diminutive and weather beaten in appearance with a number of missing teeth, I would guess she’s in her early thirties though she looks years older.  Billie chimed in with a short, harsh laugh, “Yep.  I’m white and I don’t have no privileges either.”

Up to this point I’d found Billie kind of endearing.  She's enthusiastic about the class and while she isn’t a natural student it's clear she's a hard worker.  My initial impression of Mitch and the other two students had been positive as well, but as has been so often the case with me the more I get to know someone the less I tend to like that person.  I’m a hopeful misanthrope, I guess.

After class, I found I was still disturbed by the overheard discussion.  Should’ve minded my own business, I kept saying to myself.  Alton Sterling was no saint, that’s for sure, but that did not justify his being summarily executed in a convenience store parking lot in the middle of the night.  I recall similar remarks after the Rodney King beating and the murder of Oscar Grant: The guy was an ex-con, a troublemaker, it was just a matter of time. 

Yes, it is true Alton Sterling was breaking the law when confronted by police.  And, yes, it appears he was carrying a gun (though the record’s unclear as to whether he had brandished it as the phone tip claimed or had pulled it on the officers).  Sterling’s selling CDs was an effort to support himself and his family, other legitimate occupational pursuits being closed to him because of his criminal record.  It probably wasn’t a good idea for him to carry a gun, but, as the NRA folks like to point out, they’re the best protection from anyone who wants to do you harm.  Maybe he acted aggressively toward the officers, which is never the desirable course of action in such encounters.

None of this should matter.  It was incumbent upon the officers to deescalate the situation.  Tasering Sterling alone should have brought the confrontation to a rapid and nonlethal conclusion.  (I’m not a fan of law enforcement’s use of tasers but in this instance it was preferable to what happened next.)   I won’t try to guess at what the officers were thinking, but it’s pretty clear that for many whites following the story they acted appropriately.   

As I wrote in the preceding post, we are making dismal progress on race in this country.  Common white reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement make this quite clear.  Leaving campus the day of the overheard conversation I found myself behind a vehicle (an SUV, naturally) with a bumper sticker which read “Police Lives Matter.”

I agree.  The lives of police officers do matter.  And so do those of the citizens they are paid to protect, all of them.  I also mentioned in my last post that many whites seem to interpret Black Lives Matter as an anti-white movement rather than as a protest against the daily brutality which arises from the police occupation of the black community.   It all comes down to mindset.

A post by Steve Martinot on the Counterpunch website summarizes the problem quite nicely.  Police are in the community, but they’re not of the community.  The resulting “us vs. them” worldview empowers law enforcement personnel to act aggressively toward the most vulnerable citizens.  Add to that the influence of the police lobby in state legislatures and Congress, and there is little political will to hold departments accountable for incidents of police violence. 

There is a dimension of social class in where folks fall on the blue-on-black violence issue.  My students at Verdant Fields Community College are predominately working class, even though like most people who share their station in life they would probably insist they are middle class.  I’m often reminded of Jonathan Rieder’s 1960s study of the blue collar residents of Canarsie, Brooklyn.  Rieder noted that his subjects were contemptuous of liberals in part for their perceived masochism, for their tendency to blame white Americans for the country’s ills and America for those of the world.  The students in my classroom undoubtedly feel the same way.

However, I would argue that the white working class suffers from its own brand of masochism.  While I’ve managed to cover my origins with an admittedly thin veneer of culture, my neck is still as red as theirs.  I’ve experienced the full range of their attitudes, paradoxical as they are.  Working class Americans, despite their surface attitude of independence and rugged self-reliance, worship authority and its exercise.  That is, they favor authority which has the means of wielding violence on earth (police and the military) as well as in the afterlife (the God of evangelical Christianity).

One authority they emphatically reject is academic or intellectual authority.  The prevailing culture is infused with an admixture of practicality and blind faith undergirded by an inchoate anger and a desire to punish.  The treasured national myth of equality is belied by differences in ability (not to mention the family wealth of the 1%), though no one is inclined to accept this.  The knowledge held by my colleagues in the humanities and social sciences aren’t “real” knowledge to their students.   If it can’t lead directly to turning a buck, it isn’t worth knowing.  This outlook reminds me of a passage in Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting with Jesus where he describes a real estate agent he knows who is functionally illiterate but is nevertheless prosperous.  Why bother learning to read above grade school level if you don’t have to?

Which brings me back to the students’ comments concerning white privilege.  For them, white privilege isn’t a “thing.”  It’s just a bunch of bullshit made up by a bunch of overeducated smartasses to insult and undermine everything they know to be true.  The popularity of a certain internet urban legend is instructive.  A strawman college professor announces to his class that there is no God.  When challenged, the professor tells the students that if there was a God, He would strike the professor down right where he stood.  The professor is then punched out by an ex-Navy SEAL in the class who proclaims to the godless academic that he’s a Christian, Navy SEALs being the right-wing heroes of the moment.  (Fifteen years ago the God-fearing student would have been an ex-firefighter.) 

Good luck trying to get them to understand that their attitudes are part of the larger race relations problem, or just to understand their attitudes period.  As far as they are concerned, blacks and other minorities have already been “given” too much as it is.  They fail to grasp that such statements imply that people of color deserve to be second-class citizens.  It’s probable that few of them care.  They’ve made up their minds, and you can’t change them. 

Ever. 

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

In Memory of Mr. Deadwyler (…and Others)

On a day slightly more than fifty years ago, a young black motorist was stopped by the LAPD.  His name was Leonard Deadwyler.

Mr. Deadwyler had led the police officers on a 50-block pursuit before stopping.  He had good reason: His pregnant wife Barbara was in labor (though this later turned out to be a false alarm).  The officers were unimpressed by the young man’s urgency.  One of them, 23-year old Jerold Bova, leaned inside the car’s driver side window, gun drawn, to discuss the matter.

In his haste, Mr. Deadwyler had neglected to take his car out of gear.  The car edged forward a bit.  Officer Bova, thinking his suspect was making a break for it, fired his gun into the car, killing Mr. Deadwyler.  Bova claimed at the coroner’s inquest that his weapon discharged “accidentally.”

This tale from the distant past has a sickening familiarity about it.  As everyone knows by now this week has witnessed the senseless-to-inexplicable shooting deaths of two young African American males at the hands of the police.  Alton Sterling of Baton Rouge was selling CDs outside a convenience store when accosted by the police, supposedly after Sterling had threatened an anonymous tipster.  Much like Leonard Deadwyler, Philando Castile was shot dead in his car by police in a Minneapolis-St. Paul suburb during what should have been a routine traffic stop.  

The Deadwyler incident happened less than a year following the 1965 Watts Rebellion.  Popular reaction to the shooting was comparatively muted, though there were a few street disturbances in protest.  Thomas Pynchon, in his own inimitable style, wrote of the Deadwyler case in the West Coast edition of The New York Times.  Pynchon portrayed the image of a black Los Angeles as an unwelcome intrusion upon the popular culture notion of an LA of palm trees among opulent houses with well-manicured lawns overlooking pristine beaches teeming with well-scrubbed blonde haired, blue eyed youth. 

It’s a point hard to argue with.  The mainstream view of America remains very much a white perspective.  People with dark complexions still scare the living daylights out of millions in white society, not to mention the very thought of anything connected with Africa.  (Don’t believe me?  Just recall last year’s Ebola outbreak when a Liberian man thought to be infected with the virus was reported to have visited a Texas school.  Within minutes of the media report the streets around the school in question were jammed with polo shirted and khaki wearing tract house dwellers in SUVs anxious to save their precious spawn from the dark peril lurking among them.) 

Pynchon wrote that black encounters with white America entailed a plethora of negative presuppositions on each side; it’s pretty clear that this is as much the case in 2016 as it was in 1966.  Even as the Obama administration draws to a close it is still a mistake to claim we live in anything close to a post-racial society.  Two years after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and a little over a year after Freddie Gray died in the back of Baltimore police van, it doesn’t seem as if minority communities have made any progress in their relations with law enforcement.  In fact, an already deep chasm has merely gotten deeper.  The Black Lives Matter movement has raised the hackles of certain Americans, further deepening the racial divide and, I think, implicitly increasing their support of cops involved in the deaths of African American citizens.

I’ve had several conversations with white acquaintances on this subject in the past year, one of whom was a retired police officer, and none of them wanted to have a serious discussion concerning law enforcement’s lack of accountability in incidents of police-on-citizen violence.  Each person I spoke with misinterpreted the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as meaning the only lives which matter and that those of police officers somehow do not.  There was a strong undercurrent of besieged white privilege in their words, leavened with a more than a hint of resentment. 

The killing of five Dallas police officers by Micah Johnson in response to the deaths of Sterling and Castile can only make us more apprehensive.  It also underscores how little we’ve learned from decades of such incidents.  A half century ago Barbara Deadwyler was widowed and left to raise her son on her own.  At the televised inquest, featuring a young Johnnie Cochran channeling questions on Mrs. Deadwyler’s behalf to the witnesses via the investigating deputy district attorney, Leonard was portrayed by the police as being responsible for his own death.  The autopsy report said that Leonard had an improbable blood alcohol level of .35 when he died.    

His wife struggled with the question of guilt long after the inquest cleared the officers involved and a wrongful death lawsuit against the LAPD was lost in court.  Fourteen years after her husband’s death, she was described in a story published in The Washington Post as struggling to make her way in the wake of the tragedy.  Mrs. Deadwyler admitted that she blamed her son for his father’s death for a number of years. 

The blame for many if not most of police shootings of unarmed people of color then and now actually lies with mindset.  Law enforcement in minority communities resembles a military occupation; the community’s residents in turn perceive themselves as living under occupation.  The militarization of policing reflects an entrenched self-perception of law enforcement personnel as being under constant treat of attack. It doesn’t help that for the last twenty years the Department of Defense has made surplus equipment, including semi-automatic rifles and armored vehicles, available to state and local police agencies.  The siege mentality which has taken hold among law enforcement, bolstered by its military trappings, can only lead to trouble should there be any challenge, real or imagined, to their authority.  I get nervous every time I see a police cruiser in my rearview mirror, and I’m a law abiding middle aged white guy driving a late model car.  God knows what was going through Philando Castile’s mind when he was pulled over. 

Compounding the problem is that police violence against people of color is that it appears to have given license to white civilians who suspect minority individuals of criminal activity; one need only remember the controversy surrounding George Zimmerman’s stalking and murder of Trayvon Martin several years ago to recognize this.  The Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils may be thought figments of a vanished past, but racism itself is alive and thriving.  Half the country still cannot come to grips with the fact that a black man is President.  A thinly disguised rhetorical code has replaced the white hood, manifested in doubts over Mr. Obama’s religion or national origin and allusions to his early work as a community organizer. 

Much like the epidemic of school and workplace shootings, the use of excessive force and the wrongful killing of citizens by law enforcement has become so commonplace as to scarcely merit notice.  And why not?  We are products of a violence worshipping culture.  Might makes right, or at least it does in the stories we’re told through literature, movies, and TV.  Whoever shouts loudest wins the argument.  If something bad happens to you, it’s your own damn fault.  Sterling and Castile were probably asking for it, right? 

Until our collective mindset toward race and violence shifts, we can look forward to a bleak procession of more victims in the months and years to come.

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar

Another Reason I'm Glad the Academic Year is Over

Campus shootings (and shooting sprees generally) have become so commonplace that I don’t usually bother to comment on them.

But yesterday’s incident at UCLA, in which a former graduate student killed an engineering professor and one other person before killing himself, caught my attention.  You see, one of the shooter’s reasons for killing the prof was over a grade he had received from the victim.

According to news reports, the professor was well respected and actually popular with students and staff alike.

There but before the grace of God go I…

Mondo Cane

As if we needed any more insight into our national character, this item from Reuters provides us with still another clue.

A 7 year old boy returning from a vacation with his terminally ill father suffered an attack from an allergy to dogs soon after boarding a flight with the cut-rate airline Allegiant Air.  As father and son were removed from the plane the other passengers broke into applause.

Give me convenience or give me death, I guess.  And the smirking, unsympathetic remark from the flight attendant who escorted them out that dogs were on every flight just underscores the odd relationship Americans have with their pets that puts them above the welfare of other human beings.

It’s one more sign that we are gradually losing our humanity…

Quiet before the Storm...

Brace yourselves.  The 600 lb. gorilla has entered the room.  The Iowa caucuses are tomorrow.

After all the fuss of the candidates' debates over the past few months, it's hard to remember that we are at the threshold of the parts of the presidential race which count.

I'm already weary of it.  It's a long way to November 8th.

Loops & Boomerangs, Jedi & Trogs: Thoughts of a Freeway Flyer

Inservice training week is over.  Convocation came and went.  And I can breathe somewhat easier now that all my scheduled classes are a go for Spring semester.  Now all there is is the nervous anticipation of what to expect when I return to work on Monday.

The latter part of the semester break found me in a kind of groove.  (A groove for me is like a rut, just not as dismal.)  We’ve had a let-up from the constant snow we experienced since before Thanksgiving, and the sunlight through the windows has been a most welcome sight.   I’ve spent my days cooking soups and stews for sustenance and catching up on my writing. 

The past weeks have had a pleasantly monotonous quality, the house quiet as I sit at my desk tapping away at the keyboard.  When I needed company, I would play “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out on an endless loop.  When that no longer appealed to my ears, I’d play The Beta Band’s “It’s Not Too Beautiful” instead. Or perhaps Eric Reed’s instrumental version of “An Englishman in New York,” interspersed with “Poinciana” by Ahmed Jamal.

I’m going to miss this peaceful interlude.  This week’s trainings included a department meeting, where I was pleased to learn that Snowflake College was going to tackle the problem of declining enrollment by borrowing a page from the for-profit vocational “colleges.”  The counseling staff would plan a student’s curriculum from start to finish with a goal of finishing up within two to four years.  (We are, after all, a two-year college.) 

At first, this was good news.  A plan!  Administrators actually providing leadership!  Why, the president had gone to the length of appointing a task force to tackle the challenge! 

Then came the details.  In order to place students on predictable schedules, the times of day courses are to be offered will be “rationalized.”   In other words, general ed courses will be offered mainly in the morning and early afternoon while major or career training-specific classes will be offered primarily in the late afternoon and evening.  That didn’t faze me, until the other shoe dropped.

Paradoxically, it wasn’t the move toward making students ready for the local workforce that was the bad news.  Rather, it was the plan’s effect on the four-year transfer students which got everyone’s attention.  Permit me to set up the background: My discipline is in the social and behavioral sciences.  The “service course” my department provides for gen ed fulfills the same transfer requirements of the state unis in our region as a similar course in one of the humanities departments.  Students may choose a two-course sequence in the humanities or mix-and-match one course each from both departments.

The cannibalization of enrollment this overlap already causes is a problem for my department.  And for me.  Treetop, my “home” campus, which programs its own schedule, often places my section(s) on the same day and time block as the other department’s sections.  The campus administration is quite open about its preference for the instructor of the competing course, so I get shafted by them pretty regularly.  What I didn’t know before attending the department meeting is this is a reflection of attitudes in Snowflake’s administration as a whole.

Matt, our chair for this academic year, a bespectacled fellow about my own age with a dry sense of humor, explained that our department’s offerings weren’t included in the gen ed course package planned for the initiative.  Almost in passing, he added a colleague had mentioned that an unnamed administrator had suggested that our department, even its gen ed course, were unnecessary and that the humanities folks could do the job we’ve been doing.

Matt’s words were met first with disbelief, than with a clamor to identify the administrator.  Anita, our department’s only other tenured professor, a lady with a strong personality and a well-earned reputation for getting things done, promised she’d get to the bottom of this and raise some Cain in the process.  We part-timers murmured among ourselves as to what the implications would actually be.

We needn’t have asked.  Each of us knew the score.  The existential threat for us adjuncts is now two-fold.   If the rumor is true, we won’t jockey about to get class assignments anymore because the assignments will be nonexistent.

This isn’t what I bargained for ten years ago when I got an out-of-the-blue email from my graduate advisor telling me Snowflake College needed a last minute hire to teach a class.  I’ve covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of the adjunct’s life in this blog.  But it just seems the stakes for survival in this trade have gotten dicier as time goes on.

I have my own private narrative for what I do.  As a “freeway flyer,” a part-timer who divides his time among several campuses and institutions, I’m struck by the variations in students and institutional cultures.  I’ve even come up with a taxonomy not only for my classes but my commutes.  Days where I start from home in Treetop, teach at one campus (or two if the evening brings me back to home campus) are “loops.”  Days where I drive to Verdant Fields Community College, forty miles to the east of home then double back on my tracks to teach at Snowflake’s Quartz City campus, which is fifty miles west of home, are “boomerangs.” 

Boomerangs can be particularly stressful.  Last spring I taught six sections.  Three out of four of my instructional days were boomerangs.  That semester I drove 550 miles per week.

This semester, all my days will be loops.  But that still leaves the question of the kind of students I’ll have.  All my sections are day sections, which means even at VFCC many of them will be traditional four-year transfer students.  Even then, I know the personality of each section will vary.  The section whose students show the best attitude and aptitude will be my “Jedi class.”  (I’m not a Star Wars fan; I just made the label up on the spot one day and the kids were really pleased when I called them that.)  The section I find most trying is my “Trog class.”  (As in “troglodyte.”  I don’t share this appellation with them.)  I’ve had very few semesters where I haven’t had one of each.  

The colleges themselves have their strong and weak points.  Snowflake pays better than VFCC.  On the whole, Snowflake students are better prepared for college work.  Despite its large size, VFCC has a sterling support staff for adjuncts who do their utmost every day to make sure we instructors have what we need.   The administration at VFCC is fairly supportive of teaching staff, whereas at Snowflake, as you may have gathered already, the higher ups tend to be autocratic.  (There are exceptions—the folks at the Quartz City campus are wonderful.)   If only I could combine the best elements of both and eliminate the long drives, I’d be content.

In the meantime, I hope for the best even when this is getting ever more elusive.  Now, if only that flutter in my stomach would just go away…

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar 

Unread Books

In August 1974, a middle aged woman named Connie Converse packed some belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle and drove away from her Michigan home.  She has not been seen or heard from since.

The event never made the news at the time.  Her family, which had been out of town on vacation when Connie left, did not report her missing.  She had left them letters explaining her absence.  Connie had shown signs of discontent for a while and had hinted she might go away.  There wasn’t much to hold her down anyhow.  She was single, and her position as managing editor for a prestigious academic journal had just been eliminated after it moved its base from the University of Michigan to Yale.

Connie would have remained unknown to the world outside her family and friends but for the discovery of a remarkable set of artifacts.  During the 1950s Connie had tried to make a go of it in New York City as a singer-songwriter.  She met with limited success.  She had difficulty finding acceptance for her music.  It didn’t fit into the formulaic pop genre of the era.  The nascent Greenwich Village folk scene favored traditional ballads and protest songs.  A friend secured an appearance for Connie on Walter Cronkite’s CBS morning show in 1954, but nothing came of it.

The friend, Gene Deitch, was an animator by trade but his hobby was making sound recordings.  And so, at Deitch’s home in Westchester County, Connie performed her songs for posterity.  They were not heard again until 2004 when Deitch was invited to share his recordings on the public radio program Spinning on Air.  Connie’s witty and personal songs touched a nerve with the listening public.  Beginning in 2009, several editions of her compilation album How Sad, How Lovely have been released.  (There are a number of postings of the album on YouTube.  Here’s one.)

Connie eventually gave up on being a professional musician, settling into an obscure existence.  (The best known member of the Converse family was her younger brother Philip, who coauthored a seminal text in my field of academic endeavor.)  But the restlessness seems to have remained.  By any measure, Connie (née Elizabeth) was a remarkable individual.  The daughter of a strict Baptist minister, Connie chafed at her small town New England upbringing.  Graduating high school with top honors, she followed her mother and her grandmother before her to Mount Holyoke College where she excelled.  After two years, she quit.

It just happened to be music where Connie wanted to make her mark.  However, she was also a gifted painter, sculptor, and prose writer.  Her lyrics give voice to the frustrations brought on by the straitjacket of social convention inhibiting middle class women in midcentury America.   “Roving Woman” is a particular favorite of mine.  Connie sings of going to bars alone and playing poker with men at a time when respectable dining establishments with saloons would only seat accompanied ladies at dinnertime.  Ladies by themselves in standalone watering holes?  Scandalous.

Connie’s private life was a mystery even to those closest to her.  Her brother Phil recalls never meeting a boyfriend.  (He conceded in an interview before his own death that she may have been a lesbian.)  Photos of Connie in her thirties portray a slightly enigmatic figure.  Bespectacled, fair haired, she was a pretty but ordinary woman.  Her expression reveals little and inspires idle wonder rather than answers.

Aside from the accounts of the people in her life, and the letters she sent to them when she vanished, Connie herself didn’t say much about the mounting frustration her unmet potential caused her.  In an attempt to alleviate her discontent, family and friends pooled their money and sent Connie on a six-month sabbatical in Britain the year before she fell out of sight.  Her mother took her along on a vacation to Alaska to help Connie snap out of her funk.   

To no avail.  Connie had already lost her academic publishing career.  Her doctor then delivered the news she would have to have a hysterectomy.  Brother Philip suggested that this may have deepened her depression since it precluded having children, though at age fifty this would have been a remote prospect. 

So wither Connie Converse?  Philip believed that she was a suicide, driving off a bridge to her death since her car was never found.  (So much for the vaunted buoyancy of the original VWs.)  It does appear to be the most satisfying explanation.  Her Social Security number has not been used since 1974 nor her death reported.  No claimed sightings of her have ever been verified.  If alive, she would be ninety years old.  It’s possible, though unlikely given that Connie was a heavy smoker and drinker. 

The only parallel I can find with Connie’s disappearance was the presumed 1955 suicide of a contemporaneous artist, the poet, novelist, songwriter, filmmaker, and painter Weldon Kees.  Kees left his San Francisco apartment on a summer afternoon never to be seen again.  His car was found on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, keys in the ignition.  Kees, too, had been depressed in the weeks before going missing and had spoken of wanting to kill himself.  Then again, he had also mentioned decamping to Mexico so who knows?  No body was ever discovered, which gives us license to speculate.

My thoughts on Connie Converse?  I think in her lifetime she suffered the pains of the gifted and sensitive who go unappreciated.  She was an unread book on the shelf, gathering dust.   It’s strange and poignant, though, that a true polymath such as she should have waited forty years after her departure (real or metaphorical) to finally be noticed by critics and a mass audience alike.  We can chalk some of this up to the limits on women her generation experienced.  Perhaps her art was simply out of synch with her times.

I find the lack of reaction to her leaving a bit disconcerting but perhaps reasonable given she had voluntarily absented herself.  We are all at risk of falling through the cracks despite the panopticon nature of our monitored public spaces and the migration online of personal relationships.  I’m reminded particularly of the bizarre demise of Joyce Vincent, the woman who died suddenly in her London flat in 2003 while wrapping Christmas presents and watching TV not to be discovered for another three years.  No one seemed to have noticed her absence.  She was estranged from her family but was an attractive, vivacious woman popular with her co-workers.  Surely she had friends who might have checked up on her.  But it was only when her rent was sufficiently in arrears that the authorities entered the apartment only to find Joyce’s skeletonized remains. 

Joyce Vincent was yet another unread book.  It's a pity there are so many, many more resting on the shelves.

  

© 2016 The Unassuming Scholar