Cultural Desert

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

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

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

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

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

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  But it also means that un- or less-profitable artists or their works are more likely to be withdrawn.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

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

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

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

New Old Habits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Year Three (...and Counting)

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

Who Is This For?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

Year Two

 March 13th.  The first day of the second year.

Reflections on a Lost Year

Even for us who haven’t contracted COVID or whose families have been somehow unscathed, 2020 was a lost year.  I struggle to not mourn the loss of familiar routines and pastimes when so many have been infected, or worse, lost loved ones in the pandemic, but sometimes I backslide.  The six-week winter break has begun, the first sustained period off work since we went to remote instruction, leaving me time to ruminate on the situation.

I began the year with a small irony.  On New Year’s Eve, the day China reported its first COVID cases to the World Health Organization, I was on a flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco.  I had spent the previous week in Hong Kong and Macau, sightseeing and eating dim sum.  Many of the people I saw wore face masks, but it really didn’t register since it was East Asia in the wintertime and masking is a common practice. 

I think I started noticing the news reports toward the end of January.  Spring semester began, and I was engrossed in work.  The pandemic cropped up periodically in conversation as the weeks went on.  A few people began wearing face coverings here and there.  News reports told of mass lockdowns in China and police checkpoints in Italy, but it still seemed so far away, so unreal. 

As February gave way to March, you began to see large containers of hand sanitizer in classrooms, offices, and public areas on campus.  There were exhortations to wash hands frequently.  Finally, word came down that we were going to remote instruction.  We were given about ten days to make the transition, and the administration predicted we might be able to return before the end of the term.  I took the news in stride and didn’t change my routine.  When the appointed day arrived, I taught my scheduled classes and went home.  And have stayed there ever since.

I am not proud of my complacency; I am puzzled by it.  I’m normally alarmed by news of disasters on the doorstep, but in this case I carried on nonetheless.  Looking back, I am fortunate to not have been infected or infected someone else.   The widespread resistance to mask mandates even as infection rates are again skyrocketing beggars explanation.

For me 2020 bears an eerie parallel to another lost year, 2000.  The main difference is that 2000 was lost to me and this year was lost to us all.  The two years have a lot in common, though, a controversial presidential election being the most prominent feature.  In my case, I spent that year socially distancing by default.  I was recovering from a near-fatal accident that left me permanently disabled, I was facing the loss of my career as a consequence, and my marriage was imploding.  I was hundreds of miles from home in a military hospital temporarily housed in a bare room in a soon to be demolished annex while my family stayed behind.  Then as now, tedium and anxiety over an uncertain future stalked my thoughts.

Given a choice, I would take this year over that.  I am reasonably healthy now, and the prospect of going broke is not a concern at the moment.  The continuous nausea and lack of appetite from the morphine prescribed for my pain aren’t an issue, nor do feelings of malaise keep me in bed some days.  My biggest headaches are technical glitches. If I get cabin fever, I can always go for a walk and come back feeling renewed.

It’s the uncertainty that’s the worst aspect of the pandemic aside from the disease itself.  What will work and school look like after?   Will travel at home or abroad ever be safe?  Can we even socialize normally after this?  Anthony Fauci summed it up for many when recently told an interviewer the thing he looks forward to most is dropping by a bar for a beer and a burger.  That likely won’t happen anytime soon.   I’m still leery of circulating in public unless it’s necessary.  A few months ago, I thought about marking the anniversary of my accident as I normally do.  I made a dinner reservation at a place with outdoor seating.  As the reservation time grew closer, I began to question the wisdom of going out.  I cancelled and spent the evening in.  No point taking unnecessary risks.

Signals are mixed as to how the future plays out.  Hope and dread don’t settle well with each other, but it’s the prevailing sentiment.  On a conference call with higher education administrators, Dr. Fauci said last week that with widespread immunization students and professors could return to the physical classroom as soon as fall semester 2021.  Then again, there is ominous news of a new mutation of SARS CoV-2 running amok in southeastern Britain which has led a number of EU countries to bar British visitors.  Even as I write, reports of yet another mutation in China are making the rounds.

Nevertheless, the pandemic will subside at some point.  There remains the matter of preexisting ills exacerbated by the crisis.  Social division and a slide toward outright violent conflict won’t miraculously subside just because Donald Trump is leaving office.  We’ve arrived at a point where we are incapable of living together.  The last four tears, and this year in particular, have pulled back the screen to reveal us as a fragmented people seething with hatred and resentment.  I don’t think there is any turning back; the damage is permanent.  We’ll return to a form of surface normalcy, but the dysfunction will persist underneath.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Think of the Children!

 

At first glance, they looked like any other group of Trump supporters demonstrating for their president.  They were predominately women and kids, maskless naturally.   A pretty typical news photo featured these days on the website of our local newspaper. 

Something in the story’s headline caught my eye.  These people weren’t actually demonstrating for the president or in solidarity with trigger-happy cops.  No, they were demonstrating against child trafficking. 

The ostensible premise for the demo seemed righteous enough until the spokeswoman for the group explained it to the reporter covering it.  They weren’t wearing masks for the commonly given reasons, such as “freedom” or the mythical Americans with Disabilities Act exemption.  Instead, they claimed mandatory masking facilitated child sex trafficking. 

This got my attention and made me read further.  It isn’t that I hadn’t heard this argument before, it’s just that it appears to be garnering increased media attention.  An article on The Intercept website this morning further piqued my curiosity, tying this latest moral panic to QAnon.  QAnon has advanced from the realm of heavy-gutted, gammon-faced, bearded white men to white stay at home moms in yoga pants. 

The manufactured crisis surrounding organized child sex abuse rings has a storied past.  I came of age during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, during which a number of innocent adults were prosecuted and convicted for their alleged ritual abuse of kids in their care.  The best-known example was the McMartin preschool case, which dragged on for years amongst intensive media coverage.  

It began with allegations from a mother with mental health and substance abuse issues.  A credulous district attorney’s office investigated.  A child therapist coaxed lurid stories from young ones who had attended the family-owned daycare featuring secret basement passages and animal sacrifices, which prosecutors accepted at face value.  The resulting trials received national attention. 

Fortunately, the McMartin trials resulted in no convictions.  The charges were eventually dropped.  However, the McMartin family lost their livelihood.  Their daycare was sold and torn down.  It did not have a basement. 

A basement figured prominently in a latter-day child abuse conspiracy theory that almost got innocent people killed: Pizzagate.  Pizzagate originated in an email hacking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta.  The texts of the emails first made their way onto WikiLeaks.  From there, they became a front-and-center topic in the wingnut universe aided in no small part by Alex Jones and InfoWars. 

Somehow, certain readers of routine communications among Clinton campaign staffers saw something deeper at work.  References to pizza became coded references to child sex trafficking.  Along the way, a Washington, DC pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong, became the focus of this nefarious plot, though other businesses were implicated as well.  Comet Ping Pong allegedly had a tunnel network running from its (nonexistent) basement through which the Clinton sex slave ring moved their victims.  As the autumn of 2016 progressed, Comet employees and patrons were harassed by the believers. 

What happened next was a consequence of Jones’ audience trolling.  His on-air persona depicts him as a voice in the wilderness; he frequently tells his followers he can’t do it all alone.  He can’t fight the darkness by himself.  And so, a couple of weeks before Christmas 2016, a deluded nutter named Edgar Welch decided to “self-investigate” Comet Ping Pong.  Armed with an AR-15, Welch drove to DC from his North Carolina home.  Along the way, he recorded a “goodbye video” addressed to his daughters explaining what he was about to do. 

What he did could have been considerably worse.  No one was injured by the three rounds Welch fired into Comet Ping Pong.  Finding no child sex slaves, he exited the building and surrendered to the police waiting outside.  He is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense and assault with a dangerous weapon.  Welch’s soulmates in the alt-right disavowed him, calling the Comet Ping Pong shooting a “false flag” operation designed to discredit them.   

This brand of wingnuttery has been a part of the social landscape since forever, but it gained quasi-respectability in ‘90s when all kinds of absurd rumors swirled around Bill and Hillary Clinton.  It became more accepted during the Obama years.  The Trump upset in 2016 brought its adherents to the forefront. 

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising to find that a belief in conspiracies has gone mainstream.  The Intercept article reflects how far it has penetrated the consciousness of ordinary, otherwise reasonable people.  It is no longer outlandish to believe Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against well-connected pedos, that climate change is a hoax, that the Chinese concocted the coronavirus in a secret lab, that vaccines cause autism, that mandatory masking in public encourages human trafficking, that the survivors of the Newtown and Parkland shootings were really “crisis actors,” that Black Lives Matter is led by Marxists, that antifa is an actual organization, that the Democratic Party is part of the radical left, and so forth.   

The internet democratized access to information.  In the process, it has given respectability to uninformed opinion by making it ubiquitous.  It has also made traditional print journalism economically unviable; the shift to online content rendered full-time reporters redundant.  The concomitant decline of investigative journalism created a vacuum filled by innuendo and rumor.  Post-truth has become real.  

But as the Bard said, the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.  Americans are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  We routinely substitute our personal judgment for empirically established facts.  We scorn science in favor of our own self-serving conception of “common sense.”  Worse still, we ignore the lessons of history and willfully support the counterproductive polices of our political and business leaders. 

The protest moms are undoubtedly sincere in their convictions.  Too bad they ignore the real threats to our future generations.

 

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

From Within

This week marks six months of confinement for me.  Winter has turned to spring to summer and now to autumn.  From within four walls I’ve watched the world sink into madness.

The worst of it has been the senseless loss of people murdered simply going about their daily lives – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.  Then there are all the other maladies afflicting us at the moment.  The alt-right’s escalating provocations against civil rights protesters has made me increasingly uneasy as the November election draws nigh.  Wildfires are running amok in my part of the country, leaving the air thick with smoke and staining the sky an ominous orange hue.  Then there’s the pandemic, which shows no sign of abating and has already added several more months to my sentence now that my college has decided to stay “remote” through spring semester.

There are all kinds of things I could do outside which carry little or no infection risk, but I feel unmotivated.  Perhaps a more accurate description of my mindset is that I’m suffering an uncharacteristic agoraphobia that has gotten worse with time.  I miss being with others even as I dread any human interaction.  I pass the days in a state of free-floating anxiety.  I’ll doodle around the LMS for a couple hours, grade assignments, answer student emails, and violate the sanctity of my own home each Monday holding my required office hour on Zoom.  I’ve come to detest Zoom nearly as much as I’ve come to hate the phrase “unprecedented times.”

Watching the societal breakdown beyond my front door is my main pastime.  Divisions which seemed intractable before March have morphed into insurmountable fissures.  As events careen into bounded chaos, some verities about contemporary politics are made clearer. 

The first is that so-called post-truth politics have become the norm, at least on the right.  The “base” at this point will uncritically believe any crazy assertion put forth by the President, administration officials, or their pundit toadies.  Some examples from this week alone point up the trend.  There is the claim from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services official Michael Caputo that he received death threats because of his collusion with Trump to suppress information concerning the coronavirus pandemic.  Caputo then doubled down, stating there were left-wing “hit squads” ready to stage an armed insurrection to stop the President’s reelection.  He then advised people to “buy ammunition.” 

Another batshit statement that seems to have originated from a northwestern firefighting official and has since gone viral on Facebook is that “antifa” started the wildfires in Washington and Oregon.  (I’m amazed at how Facebook has gone from being a mindless timesuck for teens and twentysomethings to a mindless timesuck for aging wingnuts.)   

If the origin of the antifa arson rumor is true, it can only erode trust in public safety workers.  Law enforcement seems particularly fertile ground for the QAnon conspiracy fad, though we’ve only had small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clues.  In July, the NYPD union president gave an on-air interview to Fox News with a QAnon coffee mug visible in the background.  Last year a Broward County sheriff’s deputy was photographed greeting Vice President Pence with a QAnon patch visible on his tactical vest.  Another unnerving trend is the appearance of the Punisher logo on tactical police vehicles, no question about the intended message there. 

The juxtaposition of QAnon and other alt-right phenomena with the agencies tasked with keeping us safe is troubling.  Right-wing hysteria over Black Lives Matter and antifa illustrate the true role of policing.  The right has all but conceded that law enforcement’s mission is not about protecting and serving all citizens equally, but to defend the propertied classes and act as an occupying force dedicated to enforcing white hegemony.  

The personality types disproportionately drawn to law enforcement reflect an authoritarian streak as it is.  Some are cruel or indifferent to cruelty.  For instance, I recently had a student who had just gotten out of the military.  She was beginning work on a criminal justice degree with an eye toward joining the local police department after graduation.  During a classroom discussion about Abu Ghraib and the Detainee Treatment Act, I noted that torture is considered an ineffective interrogation technique.  My student countered that her NCOs had taught her differently.  It appears my student and her sergeants had slept through their mandatory Geneva Convention trainings.  It also left me asking myself just what kind of police officer she would be.  I suspect I’ll be reading about her in the news someday.  

The valorization of armed violence is as old as American culture.  To be more specific, it’s armed violence by Christian white males that we glorify.  Let’s consider the attitudes of the police to the rise in vigilantism.   The 17-year-old boy who shot three protestors in Kenosha, killing two, walked unchallenged through a police cordon carrying a semiautomatic weapon.  He seemed to be under the delusion that he was there to assist law enforcement, and the nonchalant attitude of the cops did nothing to dissuade him.  After the shooting he walked away, again unchallenged, got in his car, and calmly drove home to Chicago.   

Part of me wants to make allowances for the Kenosha shooter’s youth.  But what can we say about the motives of his adult defenders?  President Trump claimed the shooter acted in self-defense, never mind that the fact he came armed and was presumably looking for trouble.  Then there’s the legal defense fund started on a “Christian” fundraising platform which has netted nearly $1 million so far.  The soliciting organization is #FightBack.  This lovely band of trolls proclaims their mission is to “fight back for [a] forgotten America,” notwithstanding the high media profile of said forgotten.  

Time for an aside.  It comes as no surprise that Christian groups are rallying to the shooter’s defense.  Christianity of the evangelical Protestant strain is inextricably bound up with the American right.  The various churches may differ in theology, but their shared ideology emphasizes exclusion and punishment to a degree that can be construed as poorly veiled white supremacism.  Considering that the months of protests arose from civil rights abuses against people of color, their support for a killer of protesters causes the veil to slip further.  

Back to the vigilante problem.  As we have seen, law enforcement has no problem turning a blind eye if they use force against their own preferred targets.  And the problem isn’t new.  George Zimmerman’s acquittal of murdering Trayvon Martin foreshadowed much of what we’re currently seeing.  Of course, being white doesn’t afford absolute protection against violations of civil liberties and civil rights by both official and non-official actors.   

The militarized response to the protesters has emboldened the aggressive element always present among the political right.  One example from this week’s news involves an NPR news crew covering the Oregon firefighting effort.  They were run off public land by armed men who did not identify themselves and probably had as much authorization to be near the fire zone as the reporters.  Another example are reports that armed men are setting up unauthorized roadblocks along evacuation routes, potentially endangering evacuees.

Although isolated incidents, they demonstrate entitlement on the part of civilians being allowed to intimidate their fellow citizens with impunity.  The official stance toward the proliferation of paramilitary “patriot” groups resembles that of the German authorities toward the Freikorps immediately following the First World War.  Rather than being sanctioned for their extralegal actions, they are regarded as allies in preserving the existing order.  As we stumble blindly toward the November election, this stance carries the potential of emboldening further violence against vulnerable populations regardless of the outcome at the polls.   

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Altered Landscape

A few years ago, I joined an adjunct faculty discussion forum on Google Groups.  More of a lurker than a joiner, I’d read some of the discussion threads if they interested me and ignored the others.

The forum was active for a while, then fell mysteriously dormant for the longest time.  I had pretty much forgotten about it when the moderator sent a message asking if we would be interested in reviving it.  It’s been about three weeks, with more than a dozen messages landing in my inbox each day.  I’m still a lurker, but what’s being discussed is alarming.

There was some tension at first.  In any online forum you always have people who want to stir up drama rather than contribute.  In this case, a row came up surrounding an admittedly ill-advised remark by the moderator describing adjunct working conditions as slave labor.  She was called out by one member.  The moderator apologized for her poor choice of words, but as is so often the case with these situations it was more about the complainant than the complaint itself.  There were more recriminations followed by more apologies. The kerfuffle ended when the offended colleague demanded to taken off the mailing list.

That initial unpleasantness aside, the forum topics have generally fallen into two categories.  The first category consists of anecdotes and advice negotiating the unemployment insurance mess arising from the large numbers of people out of work owing to the coronavirus pandemic.  I’ve mostly ignored these posts since I’m teaching a full (adjunct) load this summer and don’t qualify for UI.

Then again, I should probably pay closer attention.  The second thread has to do with the steep learning curve experienced by my colleagues new to online learning.  Our institution’s campuses will remain closed through at least the fall semester.  Official communications contain dire warnings that faculty who fail to complete the distance learning training course will have their fall offers of employment withdrawn.

This requirement has inspired numerous angst-ridden exchanges.  The fear some of them express is as palpable as the written word allows.  It isn’t as much a matter of mastering the LMS and its bewildering array of features, it’s also the state-mandated accessibility requirement that has everyone—myself included—anxious.

The problem is that this is an under-supported mandate for adjuncts.  We are strongly encouraged to add visual media to our courses, but features such as Camtasia or DIY options like YouTube have godawful self-generated closed captioning.  But you have to have closed captioning to comply with the accessibility requirement.  So, a number of disheartened colleagues have had to resort to manually adding the captions.  This is a labor- and time-intensive process when you’re prepping content for a 16-week class.  Similarly, we are required to convert PDF files into more accessible formats and add “alt-tags” to any images.  Both are also labor intensive though not to the despair inducing extent of creating and properly captioning video content.

Naturally, no course preparation work is compensated under our contract, though there have been vague promises of a stipend for the newbies who finish training and build a compliant course.  Those of us who are established online faculty must submit at least one course for review during the fall.  I have exactly one fully compliant course, a shell I created two years ago and which passed muster but was never assigned to teach.  Like my colleagues, I have my work cut out.

All of this begs an existential question.  Is online instruction the effective equivalent of a live classroom?  The COVID-19 crisis is providing clues.  Since March, I have extensively interacted via videoconference platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting.  Six months ago, I’d only heard of the latter and only then because they underwrite some the programs I listen to on NPR. 

Zoom is the preferred platform at my college, and at first it was kind of cool to attend trainings and department meetings seeing coworkers’ faces arranged Brady Bunch-style on my laptop screen.  The novelty wore off fast.  After a while I found myself switching off my camera, muting my mic, and going about my daily business during trainings where the moderator’s screen was the focus point and active participation wasn’t required.  I don’t think I was the only one.

What we’ve been left with is a shiny tech-dependent version of an old model, the correspondence course.  Back when, these courses were of mixed quality.  Some programs, such as the extension courses offered by land grant universities, were respectable.  Others, most often private outfits advertising on matchbook covers and in the back pages of magazines, had lesser reputations.  A notorious example was LaSalle Extension University, based in Chicago, which thrived in various guises for over seventy years until it folded in 1982. 

The GI Bill and federal student financial aid multiplied the opportunities for abuse.  Some correspondence schools received shameless celebrity endorsements; Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and Phyllis McGinley shilled the Famous Writers School.  The Famous Writers School, the subject of an exposé by Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic, deliberately misled its applicants, 100% of whom were accepted, that these renowned authors would personally evaluate their work.  (FWS continued to feature Cerf in their print ads well after he died.) 

The completion rates for FWS students, many of whom received federal financial aid, were abysmally low.  One FWS official told Mitford that the school wouldn’t be profitable if every student finished.  After Mitford’s article, the Famous Writers School lost much of its enrollment, limped along for a few years, and eventually closed.

Such past abuses notwithstanding, federal financial aid is still a cash cow for unscrupulous for-profit operators.  The occasional scandal, such as the one surrounding Corinthian Colleges, still erupts, while some self-proclaimed institutions of higher education are too big to call to account.  (The University of Phoenix, National University, Grand Canyon University, et al., come to mind.)

There have been precursors of online courses stretching back to the 1950s with NYU’s Sunrise Semester TV program.  My own institution offered two-credit courses built around TV programs for many years.  You watched the episodes at home and went to campus at your convenience to take exams.  (For a few weeks in middle school I faithfully got up at the crack of dawn to watch a series on the history of Mexico.  I found out much later that this was one of the TV courses.)  The college currently has two dedicated cable channels for instruction, but they are used sporadically.

Television wasn’t a panacea, however.  Sunrise Semester was an extension program and the two-credit classes I described weren’t widely accepted for transfer.  But they did afford options for nontraditional students.

A generation ago, the idea of web-based instruction was a dubious proposition.  I first came across it in the late 1990s, when it was part of my job to confirm the accreditation of high schools attended by applicants to our employment training program.  This was merely a check-the-box exercise if they had attended local public schools or established private schools. 

When faced with an applicant enrolled in a private online school, I was in turn faced with a conundrum.  Until then I didn’t know online schools existed.  In fact, there were no accreditation provisions for them at the time.  I phoned the virtual school’s principal, who invited me over to his brick and mortar office to discuss.

The principal was a pleasant older gentleman who assured me that web-based instruction was the future.  Being a) new to the very idea, and b) hamstrung by my employer’s policy that schools be actual places, I offered my skepticism.  He demonstrated one of the courses, navigating through one of the clunky Web 1.0 browsers available then (probably Netscape or Mosaic).  I was at once impressed and unconvinced. 

More than twenty years later I’m just as unconvinced, but I am in the minority it seems.  Considering that community colleges such as mine cater to a wide cross-section of students, a long-term or semi-permanent shift to distance learning might be a welcome change for many.  I strongly suspect that it will be welcomed by administrators as well.  The college can still collect the same tuition and fees with reduced overhead.  Unused facilities could be repurposed and monetized as office or commercial space. 

Even as students at pricey four-year universities are demanding tuition refunds after their classes went remote, trade publications such as Inside Higher Education are predicting that the pandemic will force many community colleges to a mostly online format. 

The paradox is easy enough to resolve.  If I was paying out the nose to attend, say, Columbia, Penn, or Dartmouth, I would expect the experience of campus life at those institutions. For their mostly affluent student bodies college is a social experience, a lifestyle.  By contrast, the largest identifiable subset of community college students just want a diploma.  For older and other nontraditional students, school is just one part of their lives to juggle along with work and family.  This may be disappointing for me and my fellow liberal arts profs, but those are the facts on the ground (and in cyberspace).

There’s just one remaining obstacle to our sudden and perhaps irrevocable shift to remote learning, the digital divide. 

I discovered this in no uncertain terms after we went on lockdown.  Our main campus is suburban and students in the surrounding communities mostly have reliable internet service and cell phone reception.  I teach at two of our satellite campuses.  One is in the well-heeled community where I live.  Even though it’s 85 miles from the mothership most of my traditional-demographic students there are technologically well-connected to the college’s resources.  Few of them fell behind because they couldn’t access the course.

The other campus presented a different story altogether.  While situated in a picturesque small town, a substantial number of students live in the surrounding hills.  Not all of them have reliable home internet or cell reception.  A winter snowfall or summer wildfire emergency could leave them without electricity for days or even a week or two.  A few, but still too many, are homeless and did their work from the campus computer lab before the lockdown. 

Within the first two weeks of the stay at home order, about a third of the class had stopped participating online.  The campus administration attempted to ease the situation by affording wi-fi service in one of the campus parking lots so people could work from their cars or while seated outdoors.  It’s unclear to me whether this helped many students.  Several of my students ended up failing or earning a lower grade than they would have made had on-campus instruction concluded normally.

The funny thing is that we’ve been aware of the tech gap for a very long time.  The Clinton administration floated the idea of providing laptops to low-income families twenty-five years ago.  In the present, my state’s governor has pledged to remedy the digital divide problem but obviously that can’t happen overnight.  The deficiency’s implications for education, K-12 and higher, are damaging.   

The folks who tout technology as the answer to all of society’s problems conveniently omit how unevenly these solutions benefit people.  I happen to find the altered landscape of online instruction among COVID-19 discomfiting.  But for those who cannot scale the suddenly heightened obstacle of the digital divide will have deep implications, not just for them but for our society as well.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Alone Together

The past months have been instructive as we endure an unforeseen emergency which has yet to show any sign of letting up.  If we believe the more pessimistic predictions, the future will be permanently altered and not for the better.

This is the third major crisis the country has faced in less than twenty years.  First there was 9/11, which itself came on the heels of the tech meltdown.  Next was the bursting of the housing bubble.  Now it’s the wide swath cut by an unseen killer bearing the awkward moniker SARS-CoV-2.

Being slightly north of fifty, I’m alarmed at the increasing frequency of these calamities.  Life in America has never been entirely secure for average people, but the worst thing I witnessed in my first three and a half decades were the stagflation and oil shocks of the 1970s.  Even if you throw in the domestic turmoil over Vietnam and Watergate, the difficulties of that era seem positively quaint in retrospect.

A sense of unity is essential for a society to meet extraordinary challenges.  What that means is a matter of one’s personal worldview, however.  For me, the closest example that comes to mind is Britain during the Second World War.  Confronted with an existential threat and living through years of material hardship, the British people met the challenge with plucky cheerfulness. 

A quick glance at your newsfeed or cable news will show instead that the fissures plaguing us before coronavirus have only deepened.  This should be surprising to no one.  The cultural and economic wars experienced by the past two or three generations have left us so divided the divisions may be irreparable.

Material satiety has done a lot to paper over these differences, but this has become less feasible as time has passed.  After the attacks on New York and Washington, George W.’s advice was to go shopping and visit Disney World.  We did, and the downturn quickly passed.  If you stayed employed through the Great Recession you probably came out okay; many of those who didn’t had yet to fully recover before the COVID-19 anvil landed on them.

Economic pressures are indisputably a factor driving the reopening controversy on the part of laid off workers and small business owners who abruptly lost their incomes.  But the great cultural divide in American life overshadows the coronavirus response as it does everything else.

A closer look at the news since March brings this conclusion into 20/20 focus.  Three and a half years of “fake” news accusations and “alternative facts” has made the discourse (if you can call it that) a bit unreal.  A local news channel interviewed churchgoers defying a closure order a couple of weeks ago.  One worshipper said he wasn’t concerned about the pandemic since for him it signaled the beginning of the End Times.  Another said he wasn’t worried because God would shield him.  Neither wore face masks.

Face masks have become an unlikely bone of contention of late.  If the opinion pieces I’ve read are any indication (and the President’s own statements echo this) it’s that being required to cover one’s face is a sign of weakness.  It is a form of forced submission, and so to go without a mask is an expression of one’s manhood.

Asinine?  Emphatically yes.  But there may be an added dimension to the pushback over masks.  An article in The Atlantic proposes that the reason so many white males on the Right reject masking is that it makes “vice signaling” difficult for them.  Put differently, covering their faces makes it less likely for them to receive credit for any public mischief they commit.

Vice signaling, as you’ve probably surmised, is the flipside of the conservative snarl phrase “virtue signaling.”  The MAGA contingent wants the world to witness its bad behavior and dares us to do something.  In the social media age, however, this can entail blowback as we have seen on recent two occasions.  Sadly, but unsurprisingly, both involve the deaths of black men.

The stalking and murder of Ahmaud Arbery is notable in that the perpetrators were so sure they would suffer no consequences that one of them recorded it on his phone for posterity.  The death of George Floyd at the hands (or, more precisely, knee) of a Minneapolis police officer this week was caught on camera by several onlookers.  One would think that the nauseating procession of public violence against people of color over the years would inhibit would-be race warriors and law-and-order thugs, but no.  Not only have they been emboldened, but they want the notoriety of going viral.

The Arbery and Floyd killings perversely demonstrate that while so much of our world has been upended some things do not change.  But as horrific as these deaths are, the extent to which the pandemic has disproportionately harmed minorities demands even more attention.  Not only are they more likely than whites to have the kind of underlying health issues making them vulnerable to COVID-19, they are less likely to have health insurance and are more likely to work in the essential jobs necessary to keep the country’s head above water.  The soft violence of social inequality will do far more harm to people of color over the pandemic than any random attacks on their young men. 

Throughout it all, I’ve been hunkered down at home.  I am one of the fortunate ones whose bosses have commanded to work from home.  I have ventured out twice since early March, once to the supermarket (before dumping my shopping needs upon gig workers via Instacart) and once to the bank.  Each time the world looked normal albeit with lighter traffic.  Everyone I interact with, few as they are and mostly limited to neighbors and the aforementioned delivery drivers, has been normal and even pleasant. My risk of infection is very low.  By all rights my only enemy should be boredom.

Yet, I continue to look at the world with trepidation. The antics of the Trump administration, its disingenuous minions, and its unhinged supporters have become less amusing and more appalling as this year’s election draws near.  I’ve assuaged my frustration with and distaste for daily life with occasional travel abroad, the future prospects for which are now remote.  Weeks of confinement, while tolerable, has also heightened a state of anxiety that sometimes drifts to the edges of paranoia. 

I thought I was immune to this; who knew?  I can’t be alone.  It’s our new normal.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Distancing

It looks as if we’ll have to spend a few more weeks holding our distance. 

The White House has extended the social distancing period through the end of April as COVID-19 infection rates soar and the death toll mounts.  So much for business as usual by Easter.

Aside from the drawbacks of “remote instruction,” to use the fashionable euphemism for teaching while campuses remain shut, my day-to-day is similar to that of summer.  It’s no hardship staying in.  I have enough food on hand, I’m getting enough sleep, and I don’t have to commute. 

Which doesn’t mean I’m not following the rapidly developing narrative surrounding COVID-19 or am unaffected by it.  I know I’m okay having self-isolated for over two weeks.  I am very thankful that no students or colleagues have tested positive (at least as far as I’m aware).  Our county of just under 100,000 residents has only a dozen confirmed cases as of yesterday and no deaths to date.  Our community hospital assures us it can meet the challenge posed by the outbreak.  But what we’re reading in the news, not to mention listening to the ominous drumbeat of the 24-hour TV news cycle, is enough to wear the strongest nerves.

A month’s worth of cautious self-assurance that we will weather the crisis and move forward all the stronger is beginning to wane.  My reluctance to venture out is growing.  I’ve postponed shopping for today’s wants in favor of actual needs down the way.  Even a week ago I would have said I wanted to stay home to avoid other people’s craziness rather than the coronavirus itself.  Now I’m planning my next outing to make as few stops as necessary, to buy packaged and canned goods rather than fresh produce, and then to go straight home and wash my hands.  Thoroughly.

And yet, there are many signs of normalcy.  Neighbors come and go.  One story in my newsfeed offered that 2/3 of us are still showing up for their “essential” jobs.  I live near an interstate, and in the middle of the night I can hear semi traffic in the distance.  (Another story in my feed quotes over-the-road truckers as saying they’re working more efficiently now there are fewer cars on the roads.  That means retail outlets are surely being stocked. Someone should tell the toilet paper hoarders.)

But in the midst of all this are the numbers.  Dr. Fauci’s prediction that 200,000 may die in the U.S., the ventilator and testing kit shortages, and the swath the disease is cutting in the hardest hit places like Italy and Iran ratchet anxieties. 

The media provide mixed signals which contribute to the confusion.  Local news broadcasts are as chipper as ever.  Commercials still run for businesses those affected by shelter in place orders can’t patronize, automakers still try to sell us new cars and insurers car insurance, and TV programming remains its inane self.  On the other hand, the “shelter in place” installments of The Daily Show, purportedly recorded from the homes of Trevor Noah and other cast members, fall a bit flat trying to wrest humor from current events.  (The past couple of weeks have reinforced my belief that standup and sketch comedy only work in front of a live audience.)

So, it’s pretty tough right now to know what to think or feel.  Then again, some people are quite certain as to how to react.  Although my mountain resort town has respectfully urged visitors to stay away, feedback from other communities in the region indicates a more aggressive stance.  People in one town are pressuring law enforcement to set up checkpoints on the roads leading in.  A Facebook post suggested slashing the tires of out of town cars.  One local official told a reporter she was afraid someone was going to get shot given the xenophobia prevalent in her county.

As far as they’re concerned, the folks coming uphill won’t be kept from the second homes on which they pay taxes.  One part time resident who couldn’t leave her high-powered gig to shelter out here offered her place on Airbnb, advertising it as a place the prospective guest could wait out the crisis in safety.  The listing was quickly taken down after a backlash.

The official who worried people might get shot isn’t being dramatic or alarmist.  In my state, gun shop owners have demanded the governor classify them as essential workers, with the vocal support of assorted Friends of the Second Amendment.  Firearm and ammunition sales have spiked in the last month.  Soundbites and article quotes give the impression some of the purchasers are eagerly anticipating a breakdown of order.

Fear can be a useful response.  It’s what allowed our prehistoric ancestors to survive, and it can do the same for us.  The important thing is to temper fear with judgment and reason.  Unless you’re directly faced with an existential threat and must act immediately and decisively, there is time for risk analysis. 

Certain habits born of experience help, too.  I’ve been able to stay home for seventeen days and counting because I came home to a full cupboard, fridge, and freezer.  As a kid that was not always the case, so my routine as an adult is to augment my weekly food shopping with staples or household items that haven’t run out but will in coming weeks.  I wasn’t planning on being confined at home and I did not buy in hoarder quantities.  But I had enough to last long enough to minimize outside contact during the first part of the crisis.

Naturally, there were and are a few underlying assumptions.  One was that I would have essentials like running water, electricity, and gas.  (Check, at least so far.)  Another is that retail businesses will stay open and properly stocked.  (We’ll see.)  And so, while I’m naturally cautious I probably would be in a bad place if a full-scale catastrophe struck.

So would you, most likely, though the preppers would be happier than pigs in shit should the unthinkable occur.  There is an unspoken faith in the systems that sustain us.  The COVID-19 pandemic is causing people to question for the first time whether they are robust enough to get us through and not just those on the fringes.  I am very reluctant to entertain the possibility of a disease-driven societal collapse reminiscent of The Stand.  However, even a partial, temporary collapse such as that after Hurricane Katrina multiplied across several regions would shake public confidence to the point where we might see our society permanently transformed and not in the way armchair idealists like me would prefer.

Some of what’s happening was foreseeable and thus preventable, and some of it not.  The New York Times reported this week that the federal government had contracted with a medical device startup back in the late aughts to manufacture a reserve supply of respirators to meet a potential emergency; following a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers and attempted contract renegotiations this never came to pass. That was an attempt at foresight, sabotaged by corporate capitalism though it ultimately was.  The novel coronavirus, as the name implies, was not specifically foreseen and could not have been because we cannot predict evolution.  But if plans had gone as planned, we would have had a better response to COVID-19 than we’ve had.

Past experience with numerous outbreaks affords a roadmap—H1N1 in 2009, SARS and MERS before that, the 1967 Hong Kong flu, not to mention the big daddy of ‘em all, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19—but hindsight is myopic.  Or if we do remember the epidemic spectre, it tends to be PR embarrassments such as the 1976 swine flu fiasco.  Then there’s the fact that both culturally and a matter of business practice we plan for the short to mid-term but seldom for the long haul.

I don’t know what to make of it all. I’m just holed up in my modest abode waiting for the next development.  There’s some distancing you can’t pull off. 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar