Freedom at Play

Brett Kavanaugh couldn’t stay for dessert. 

This week’s political tempest in a teapot concerns Kavanaugh’s hasty backdoor departure from a Washington, D.C. Morton’s steakhouse after protestors had gathered out front.  (Some accounts claim he was unaware of the demo, but the decision to leave through the back tends to refute this.)  Morton’s management took to Twitter, asserting that their high-profile guest’s right to dine in public had been violated. 

Yes.  And no.  Certain activities noted of late, such as protesting outside officials’ private homes, make me uneasy.  Similarly, I ask myself whether we should condone interfering with their non-official activities (as in the case a few years ago when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Northern Virginia restaurant after its employees objected to her patronage).  However, in the case of sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices, who can serve for life should they choose, there is precious little recourse to publicly register pushback against decisions which adversely affect the liberties and rights of vast numbers of citizens.  

The galling arrogance of the new SCOTUS supermajority, and that of Justices Alito and Thomas particularly, is horrifying when we take into account that its holdings will reverberate in people’s lives for generations. The power of these unelected officials, half of whom were nominated by a president who received a minority of the popular vote and confirmed by a Senate with a majority representing less than half the country’s population, is largely unchecked.  They are well aware of their freedom from accountability, hence their newfound disregard for precedent and stare decisis.  They are fast paving the way to a Christofascist future in which the majority of Americans do not want to live. 

So, misgivings aside I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Kavanaugh’s spoiled evening.  He chose to become a public figure with considerable authority and thus has a lessened expectation of being shielded from public scrutiny.  Yesterday’s near-confrontation sent a message that thousands of unread critical letters, emails, and online posts cannot.  I doubt neither he nor his colleagues care about public sentiment either way, but at least a public protest is visible.  As long as no one is harmed and no property is damaged, citizens should be permitted to gather for political expression.  

Perhaps Mr. Kavanaugh will spend his future evenings quietly at home.  And perhaps Morton’s will court a more respectable clientele.

 

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

 

 

Your Feelings and Mine

 

Fuck Your Feelings

 

That charming sentiment cropped up frequently in the runup to last year’s election and its immediate aftermath, culminating in the Beer Belly Putsch[1] on January 6^th.  It was meant to signal the defiance of real Americans in the face of political correctness run amok, to show one’s allegiance to the way it’s always been done, to trigger the libs. 

The conceit of this maladroit attempt at in-your-faceness is that liberals and progressives actually care about what the alt-right thinks.  They don’t.  

You see, most people left of center reject the legitimacy of the alt-right’s ideas.  It follows that any ad hominem attacks from them aren’t worth taking seriously.  To cite an admittedly puerile retort from my youth, it’s a case of mind over matter.  I don’t mind, because you don’t matter.  

Time to get serious. As a social scientist, I was taught to be a detached observer.  I trust neither emotions nor intuition.  But I’m fully aware that being human means we can never be fully separated from our sentiments, regardless of where one falls on the political spectrum. 

Let me offer an example.  Just before the Iraq War began, several colleagues in my graduate program and I organized a public forum on its implications.  While generally successful, we experienced a few hiccups.  Our intention was to offer an interdisciplinary discussion, pulling in professors and grad students from several departments.  We envisioned a calm, rational dialogue. 

It was wishful thinking.  Both ends of the political spectrum tightened the rhetorical rope around our necks to further their narrow agendas.  There was the activist group who wanted to not only set up a literature table inside the auditorium but a voice on the panel as well.  We grudgingly granted the first but not the second.  They sulkily accepted the arrangement.  Then there was the news crew from the local Fox affiliate who were there to capture the spectacle of a bunch of snotty, unpatriotic college students telling the world how much they hated America. 

That was galling enough, but there were two incidents at the panel which stand out in my mind nearly twenty years later and help illustrate the point I’m trying to make.  

They came when we opened the discussion to audience questions.  One question was more of a statement from an undergraduate who proclaimed the pending invasion would cause millions to die.  While we had already covered the considerable death toll the coalition had imposed on Iraq through its embargo since the 1991 ceasefire, apparently this wasn’t enough for our interlocutor.  When one of us asked just how she knew this was inevitable she keened, “Because I feel it!”  Much of the audience broke into applause. 

The second was an attempt at distraction from the opposite direction.  A middle-aged woman whom last summer's kids would have labelled a “Karen” stood up next to a young man clad in a collared shirt and khakis.  Karen introduced the young man as her son, a soldier recently returned from our adventure in Afghanistan.  How dare we question his sacrifice?  

Karen missed the point, as Karens often do.  She was trying to flip the script with a bald use of sentimentality to justify decisions at the top regardless of their outcome.  She was manipulating the attendees to shift the focus from a sober weighing of consequences to a visceral patriotism nationalism unfettered by facts. 

Our panel did not question the woman’s righteous indignation.  We most certainly did not say to her, “Fuck your feelings.”  We implicitly understood this was a display of sentimentality mistaken for moral certitude.  

And that is the heart of the issue of feelings with conservatives generally.  Most are so certain of their own inherent virtue that their gut reactions—their feelings—are not recognized as such.  To them, they are unerring truths.  

This certainty of infallibility, albeit arrived at emotionally, creates a condition in which conservatives cannot accommodate ideas at odds with their own.  Consider their reaction if you suggested that public policy should not be guided by their belief in a deity whose existence cannot be empirically proven.  Consider their reaction if you pointed out that gun violence is attributable in part to the widespread and poorly regulated availability of firearms.  You would be met with anger and resentment—an expression of feelings even though they would never think to label them as such. 

This is because feelings to those on the right are experienced only by the weak and inferior.  Their own emotions come from a place of certitude and thus are not “feelings.”  Requests to be mindful of the rights and sensibilities of those historically repressed by people like them fall counter to their truth and are thus to be ignored, and if that doesn’t work, to be mocked.  

The whole eff-your-feelings attitude, then, is merely an exercise in denial and projection on the part of a demographic whose social influence is on borrowed time.  Having invested their identities in a received wisdom, any counternarrative poses an existential threat.  Belittling those posing the counternarrative imparts a sense of security. 

So here we are.  I find myself forcing down my feelings in response to yours, forcing myself to be rational in the face of your irrationality, forcing myself into excessive self-restraint.  Perhaps this is what you mean by  “Fuck your feelings.”  

Returning to the third person, it appears conservatives in general and the alt-right in particular are indulging in a paroxysm of unrestraint as a means of bounding and containing threatening social forces.  Perhaps it is still another example of denying these social forces.  It probably doesn’t matter.  Denial postpones but will not avert the ultimate reckoning.

 

 

© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar

 

 

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[1] Credit to Thomas Knapp for the neologism.

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

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

You Anew

I didn’t anticipate writing three posts in a row on the unending furor over public speech.  However, after Roseanne abruptly lost her newly rebooted sitcom over a bizarre late-night tweet I felt I had to cover the same terrain once more.

Free speech has become something of a crapshoot lately.  Offensive statements—and just about anything can be offensive to someone when it reaches a large enough audience—can cut even the most successful public figure’s career short.  Just like that. 

But not all offensive speech is created equal.  Roseanne, for reasons peculiarly her own, tweeted that former Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes.  (Figuratively, I’m sure.)  A furry of apologetic follow up tweets did nothing to save her; Roseanne then compounded the problem by claiming that she wasn’t responsible because the Ambien she took made her do it.

Just as the Roseanne controversy was escalating, Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”  Bee was referring to a photo Ivanka tweeted showing her with her son.  Bee attacked the hypocrisy of the photo while the Trump Administration’s deportation policies separated mothers from their children.  A fair criticism, I thought, though Bee’s choice of epithet was wincing.

So, what’s the difference between the two cases?  Roseanne’s out of a job.  Bee lost a couple of sponsors but at least her show wasn’t canceled.  It’s up to you whether this outcome is fair.  The conclusion you come to probably depends on which side of the Trump Divide you sit.  Take your cue from the top: President Trump expressed regret over Roseanne’s firing; his press secretary, the godawful Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demanded TBS cancel Full Frontal. 

Running in the background are conflicting narratives.  One is that so-called political correctness is unnecessarily ruining people’s lives for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.  The other is that certain individuals are hiding behind the First Amendment to justify hate speech.  Either way, it’s clear words matter.  But to what extent do they reflect or shape belief?

A linguistic theory of sorts, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis even though neither of the men it’s named after ever formally stated it, says that words shape our worldview.  Ideas vary over whether words are merely an influence or are a determinant.  The conceit that one can shape thought through language is controversial but it extends into the current debate over speech.  More on point, there is the matter of whether we can change not only discourse but social relations by changing how we talk about them.

Left and Right alike accuse each other of intolerance.  It’s true that progressives, especially on college campuses, are sometimes overzealous taking on perceived social ills, and I suppose that is a kind of intolerance.  But if both sides are intolerant, what they’re intolerant of differs demonstrably.  Conservatives target people and groups for characteristics they cannot change, such as race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and sexual orientation, or for cultural differences like religion and language.  Progressives oppose behavior and language which diminish the rights and dignity of others.  Conservatives want to preserve existing oppressive hierarchies while progressives want to uplift the oppressed.  

The kerfuffle (or covfefe?) over Samantha Bee’s takedown of Ivanka Trump underscores this polarization.  Ivanka is a privileged woman who enjoys a safe existence while ICE and the immigration courts break up Latino families.  The paradox becomes even more bitter when we consider that the First Daughter is herself the child of an immigrant mother.  How we square the circle of who is worthy in the conservative universe is dependent upon a simple heuristic.

It goes like this.  Whiteness is superior to all other races, but it is particularly superior to the black race.  Masculinity is superior to femininity.  Heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality.  Cisgender is superior to transgender.  The able-bodied are superior to the disabled.  Christianity is superior to all other faiths (except perhaps Judaism).  English is superior to all other languages.  Western culture is superior to all other cultures.  Depending where you fall on any one continuum, you will be fully accepted socially or be otherwise subjected to a range of abuses from verbal insults and microaggressions to the full coercive and punitive power of the state. 

In this calculus Ivanka Trump may be a daughter of an immigrant, but her mother was a European immigrant so that’s okay.  Immigrating to the U.S. the “right way” is particularly important.  A colleague serves in the state legislature, and in her campaign literature she likes to mention her parents were immigrants who “came here the right way” (which is to say from Europe).  The “right way,” if you haven’t figured it out already, is code for Europeans Only.

The alleged weakness of our immigration laws, such as the President’s latest concern over so-called chain migration, is itself subject to double standards.  Please indulge me in a short personal digression.

In graduate school I was a teaching assistant in my university’s teaching and learning center.  Our director was an aging, absent minded woman I’ll call Marilyn.  Marilyn was an inept administrator and, despite being our institution’s alleged subject matter expert, was herself a poor classroom teacher.  Marilyn was in way over her head and quickly became defensive about her work.  Instead of taking the advice of those who suggested improvements, Marilyn began instead to depend on the other grad assistant in the office, an international student from Eastern Europe named Katya.

Katya quickly established herself as Marilyn’s confidant while alienating everyone in the office except Larisa the administrative assistant who was not too bright and also overwhelmed by her job.  Katya managed this because she was dishonest and manipulative and because she was willing to tell Marilyn what Marilyn wanted to hear in the face of contradictory evidence.  Katya would show one face to Marilyn and administrators and clients.  She would show another to everyone else whom she thought were beneath her, which was…just about everyone else.  It’s fair to say I despised her, but when you read what comes next you will see she was a despicable person. 

After a couple of years Katya finished her degree which meant her student visa was to expire.  It wasn’t fair that she was expected to go home when she had become so used to the good life in America.  What was a girl to do?  Enter Tobias, a warehouse worker with an easygoing disposition and oatmeal for brains.  Katya swept him off his feet.  After a whirlwind courtship, they wed just as Katya’s student visa was to turn into a pumpkin.  

Did they live happily ever after? you wonder.  Sure, for the first 24 months.  After that Katya could keep her green card even if she divorced Tobias, which is naturally what she did.  Katya had realized her American Dream by signing a paper and peeling off her panties.  Meanwhile desperate mothers and children are dying in the Sonoran Desert for no better reason than that, unlike Katya, they don’t have the advantage of blonde hair and blue eyes.

Ah, you say, but Katya immigrated the “right way,” even if she did stretch the rules a bit.  Sure, but the chain migration bogey that the Trump base is wringing their hands over can also be construed as rule bending.  Refer to the heuristic I mentioned earlier; if their complexion is sufficiently pale foreigners are not really foreigners.  On the other hand, everyone else is implicitly less human and must be barred, forcefully if necessary, as a consequence.

Conservative hypocrisies are a given in the national conversation.  Progressives are hardly perfect, but they know that self-awareness can guide them through ever-changing mores as we move toward a more inclusive society.  Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Comedy Central’s second annual Clusterfest in San Francisco.  (Think of it as a Woodstock for smartasses.)  The closing act on Sunday night was Jon Stewart, who I’m happy to say is making a return to standup. 

Stewart talked a little about the Roseanne / Samantha controversies and about how his own views have changed as he realized from time to time that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought.  He pointed out that the conservative hysteria about speech being policed is basically bullshit.  Stewart said the only changes he made to his own speech was dropping a few words from his vocabulary and stopping for a moment to think before saying something stupid. 

Is this an argument for the draconian censorship conservatives are so afraid of?  All that is expected is a modicum of consideration of the rights and persons of others.  Not difficult.  Not difficult at all.  And yet for half the country this small concession is a bridge too far.

It may be a bridge impossible to cross for some elements of Trump’s America, however, particularly economically distressed white working-class men.  The establishment has long counted on keeping the masses distracted by setting them against each other.  Referring again to the rules described up-page, straight white males, no matter how humble, have traditionally had an advantage. 

For these whites on the lower end of the economic scale, however, social change is a threat to their slim privilege.  The end of legal segregation in the South is one example of this; the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s was a reaction to this social reordering.  As one man interviewed at the time lamented, “If I’m not better than a n----r, then who am I better than?”  This statement is sad on several levels, the least of which is that it reflects how contradictions in the system victimize everyone on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in some form or fashion.  Basic civility is perhaps a luxury for such people when their “right” to dominate someone even less fortunate is in question.

We’ve only considered public discourse so far.  A thornier question is whether changing minds through changing words can lead to the inferential leap of changing hearts.  It is an open question as to how much we can actually shape character.  Past attempts are an unsettling guide.  Consider the Stalinist era ideal of the New Soviet Man.  A propaganda exemplar more than anything, the NSM nevertheless sought to leverage cultural diversity whilst presenting a single national identity.  If you believe that words can shape thought for the better, perhaps a New American really is conceivable. 

But now that we’ve decided we can shape the ideal individual, that raises the question of how we do the shaping.  Self-monitoring one’s speech is a good step forward, but that won’t work in the absence of social pressure.  Slipping down the logical slope, maybe public struggle sessions reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution would have a salutary result.  It would dovetail well with our penchant for public humiliation as a spectator sport, that's for sure. 

In reality, though, any attempt to coerce good behavior is likely doomed to failure.  By extension, it's not possible to recreate the national character as a whole.  Social engineering ignores the truth that human nature is complex and nuanced even if the idea of free will as it’s commonly conceived of is not literally true.  The best we can do is to improve our own attitudes and behavior towards others in the hope it may encourage others to do better.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

All against All

I was in the faculty workroom doing paperwork when Darrell walked in and slumped into a chair across the table from me.  He looked dejected and worried.

This was unusual.  Darrell, a retired career military man who incongruously wears a utility cover with his customary shirt-and-tie ensemble, normally projects a confident aura.  Whatever was bothering him, I didn’t want to pry.  After exchanging laconic greetings, we sat in silence for a few minutes even though it seemed he really wanted to talk.  Finally, he spoke up.

“I got an email from my department chair.”

“Yeah?  What about?”

“She didn’t say.  I’m supposed to see her Monday at four.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I don’t know…”

“Did something happen?”

“Well…”  Darrell described the uncomfortable reaction he thought he saw from a student in class.  Like most vets, Darrell is a conservative.  During his lecture that morning he put forth his view that the War on Poverty had failed because of the personal shortcomings of the people it was meant to help.  The student’s demeanor became quietly hostile, though s/he said nothing at the time.  Whatever it was, it left Darrell rattled.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I hope so.”  Darrell got up to leave.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Catching up with Darrell a few days later, it turned out the student in question had in fact made a formal complaint.  The ensuing discussion with his chair was awkward.  According to Darrell, she hemmed and hawed and said while faculty have academic freedom we have to be sensitive to phrasing, student sensibilities, etc., etc. 

Predictably, nothing came of the matter.  I’ve been an adjunct instructor longer than Darrell.  I see the department chair’s summons for what it was: A passive-aggressive nonresponse to a student gripe about something which does not merit disciplinary action but still looks to the student as if the college has done something.

While I disagree with Darrell’s views on the subject which brought the complaint, I believe in academic freedom.  These ominous summonses have a chilling effect.  Common sense and good manners dictate a sensitivity to the feelings of others.  However, I have found myself self-censoring and at times avoiding particularly controversial topics even though I teach in a discipline which cannot avoid these completely.  The things I see happening in academia do little to ease my anxiety.

And so I was unsurprised by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education which encapsulates the strife of the campus ideological wars.  The piece documented an incident last fall at the University of Nebraska.  It’s a story without heroes in which almost everyone involved behaved badly.

It began with a student who set up a table on the campus quad.  The student, a recent alumna of a summer training program for young conservative activists, was canvassing for a group called Turning Point USA.  Perhaps you’ve heard of them; they’re the organization behind the “Professor Watchlist.” 

Turning Point encourages students to identify (or target) liberal and progressive faculty.  Having the temerity to speak against corporate malfeasance, pointing out white privilege and denouncing racism and sexism, favoring reproductive choice and LGBT rights, promoting peace over war, suggesting that human activity just might be responsible for climate change, criticizing the Religious Right, and being “anti-Israel,” among other sins, can get a proffie’s name on the Watchlist. 

Back to our budding young activist.  Having set up her table, a university employee reportedly told her she could not disseminate propaganda in that part of campus and that she would have to move to a predesignated free speech zone.  Fair enough, though the employee’s use of the word “propaganda” to describe the student’s activity could only further agitate the rage junkies who would latch on to the ensuing incident as an example of the lefty subversion of ‘Murican values.

Safely ensconced in the free speech zone, a passing doctoral student and English instructor caught sight of the Turning Point table.  Outraged by its presence on what she would later declare to be “her” campus, the instructor made up a picket sign denouncing the student as a fascist. 

Things went rapidly downhill.  As she had been taught by her Turning Point mentors, the student took out her phone and began recording the picketer.  They began circling each other.  At one point the picketer flipped off the student on camera.  She called the student a “neo-fascist Becky.”  She denounced the student as a white nationalist and white supremacist.  She swore at the student.  Finally, the student began to cry.

This was a bit much for another faculty member who had joined the anti-Turning Point picket.  She walked over and tried to comfort the student and gave the student her email address, inviting the student to sit down later to talk about their political differences.  The student packed up her table and left and the incident ended.

Except it really didn’t.  Turning Point posted the video of the incident to its website, which went viral.  The tom-toms sounded throughout the conservative jungle, and soon angry letters and emails began arriving in the offices of Nebraska’s elected officials.  The university president was summoned by the state legislature.  The instructor, a woman in her late forties, was eventually suspended from her teaching duties as penance for her public overzealousness.  And our young conservative?  She’s become the Right’s darling du jour.

This incident was a set piece with strawpersons on both sides: The shrill social justice warrior shouting hyperbolic slogans.  The emptyheaded suburban Barbie hostile to a multicultural America.  Most people are content to leave it at that.  Predictably, there has been little discussion of what this episode means for campus discourse. 

For me, the Nebraska incident exemplifies what can go wrong when political strife in the larger society encroaches on academia.  Both sides are consumed with a righteous indignation.  Neither acknowledges the right of the other to express their views.   Making matters worse, the instructor’s confrontation with the student escalated from a simple difference of opinion to a situation where a grown woman bullied some poor kid to tears (something for which the instructor was unapologetic).  As a result my distaste for everything Turning Point represents conflicts with my deep-seated revulsion toward bullies, tempered by a sour satisfaction in the knowledge that the student Right has its own snowflakes.   

It’s tempting to blame Donald Trump’s political rise for the seeming resurgence of right wing Know Nothingism and the ideological war of all against all, but the truth is that the current campus wars are an extension of the social polarization of the last several decades.  As an undergrad in the 1980s, I remember the sniping over political correctness and speech codes on the one hand and the monitoring of liberal professors by conservative groups like Accuracy in Academia on the other, though this was more rumor than fact at my politically quiescent regional state uni, 

Even now, most educational institutions are backwaters of social consciousness.  It’s surprising whenever any of the community college students I work with express any kind of informed opinion let alone take a side on an issue.  Last semester I was startled when, during an unusually spirited classroom discussion of current events, a student declared that the only answer to our problems was revolution.  Several students murmured agreement.  No one objected.  I nodded gravely, simultaneously pleased and unsettled.  The discussion moved on.  There were no repercussions afterwards.

Sometimes apathy works in your favor.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heads Will Roll

Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December, an item in the news crawl caught my eye.  “Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that. 

I had to think a moment to make the connection, then it hit me.  The reference was to Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform.  That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward the military and veterans.

Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s firing says about the present state of academia.  C-M had already landed himself in hot water before the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.”   He was apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for the Las Vegas shootings.  Switching channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death threats against him and his family.

I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own.  What I have been able to glean is that C-M belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric oversimplifications of complex issues.  Lots of heat, but precious little light. 

These kinds of statements may gain the rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies on the political right.  But they make honest progressives like me wince.  As we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the already precarious state of academic freedom.

I teach at a community college (two of them, actually).  I’m employed as contingent, or adjunct faculty.  No tenure.  No job security.  Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.

My own interpretation of American history and society is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher.  I just don’t express it in short bursts with my thumbs is all.  I am also careful to point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.

I don’t know if this approach is the reason, but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years.  Even my openly conservative students seem to be okay with me for the most part.  It could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting three credits and a grade.   Probably so.  My fingers are crossed that that’s the case and that my luck will continue to hold.

Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism.  However, safeguarding the right of professors to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees in the first place.  As someone who has lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.

Higher education itself is an inviting target, and not just for right-wing media outlets.  This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century ago.  Even as credentialism has swollen the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole enterprise hangs in the air.  (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it, school isn’t really America’s thing.  We just play the game to get what we want.)

The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing else.  We’re doers, not thinkers, so why waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology?  And while we’re at it, why should we listen to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like?  Besides, brains aren’t everything.  In the real world, they’d be working for C students.

(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little.  Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should say a few things about myself.  Firstly, every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And no, I didn’t have rich parents to put me through school.  I worked lots of odd jobs to pay for my studies.  Secondly, while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.

Oh, and my major?  Humanities.)

Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our own ranks.  The trend toward treating students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic inquiry.  We are letting this happen at our peril.  As for me, I’m holding my breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heritage? Or Hate?

We’re told the victors write history.  This was not the case with the American Civil War.

But first, a digression.  I lived and worked in the Southeast during much of my twenties and early thirties, beginning with a stint in Alabama immediately following college.  It was an adventure for a West Coast boy, living an hour’s drive from the nearest freeway.  The slower pace of life aside, I quickly adjusted to my surroundings.

I remember a sense of trepidation in the weeks preceding my move.  I’d never been to Alabama or anyplace else in the South.  The civil rights upheavals of the 1960s were then recent events in our collective memory and I envisioned burning crosses and police dogs lunging at protestors.

I needn’t have worried.  Everyone I met was nice.  Folks you didn’t know would wave to you as you passed on the road.  Perfect strangers would greet you with a smile.  Store clerks would strike up conversations if no other customers were waiting.  When I left three years later, I found I missed the place and the people.  I still experience the occasional pang of nostalgia, though I couldn’t imagine wanting to live there again.

Their pleasantness notwithstanding, there was plenty of support for certain stereotypes of rural Southerners and their sensibilities.  Confederate flags appeared everywhere you looked, flown from private homes and public buildings and adorning the back windows of pickups.  Monuments to Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee occupied more than a few town squares and main streets, not to mention those dedicated to lesser champions of the Lost Cause. 

When people did mention it, they faithfully described it as the War between the States.  Oftentimes they would take pains to make sure you understood that the conflict concerned the South’s defense of the sacred principle of states’ rights and not the unsavory reasons given by outsiders.  And, to punctuate the public relations effort in furtherance of an image of a benign Confederacy, T-shirts and bumper stickers emblazoned with the Battle Flag and the slogan, “Heritage, not Hate.”

The events of the past few days have made me think hard about this particular conceit.  The Confederate flag has been brandished as a symbol of white nationalism and resistance to equal rights for people of color at least since the middle of the last century.  Since the November election, the fringe right and its white nationalist comrades have been emboldened to raise the movement's public profile.  This week’s tragedy in Charlottesville was foreshadowed by the increased media attention right-wing agitators have received since Donald Trump’s election and the semi-respectability such attention confers.

The angry young men with their bulged-eyed shouts of “White Power!” we see on TV are interspersed with the occasional calm, soothing talking head telling us that they’re not really racists.  They’re just standing up for their rights as European Americans in the same way African Americans and Latinos and Asian Americans and Native Americans have.  They just want their own civil rights.  And the Confederate paraphernalia?  That’s heritage, not hate.

None of this would be comment worthy if it wasn’t for this point of view resonating among mainstream whites.  Over the past months I’ve heard veiled approval from acquaintances not just for Trump but for the increasingly high-profile opinions of media figures belonging to the fringe and “alt” right.  The gist of their attitude is that while some of the agitators are rough around the edges, they’re saying what has to be said in the face of political correctness.  

Such low key murmurs of approval among ordinary people surely have not gone unnoticed.  The public pronouncements of our leaders haven't done much to discourage, either.  The President’s bizarre and muddled initial response to the violence at this week’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville can be interpreted as further license by the extremists.

But by now we’ve become desensitized to expressions of extremism.  James Fields, the man who drove his car into the counter-protestors in Charlottesville, openly expressed Nazi sympathies in high school.  They were probably dismissed as drivel from an attention-seeking misfit, but in this case Fields’ thoughts eventually had awful consequences.   

However, most loudmouthed jerks don’t end up committing violent acts on this scale, and murdering whackjobs like James Fields are mercifully rare.  It’s the quiet, well-spoken apologists, the “heritage-not-hate” contingent, who present the greater threat long term. 

Their task is made all the easier because of our collective amnesia.  Memorials to Confederate leaders and the Confederate dead saturate the South a century and a half after the guns fell silent.  Public school history textbooks treat Jefferson Davis as the near moral equivalent of Abraham Lincoln. 

Ditto for Robert E. Lee versus Ulysses Grant.  As recently as the 1980s, a school district in Texas seriously considered adopting a high school history text which insinuated that the slaves were content with their lot.  (Which sounds a lot like claims we’ve heard lately from the far right that African Americans were better off as slaves.)  The subtext that the Confederacy and all it stood for was not all that bad and perhaps good or even noble permeates prevalent views on race and of race relations.

The implications of the current discourse are unsettling.  Charlottesville will fade from memory as time moves on and other, newer tragedies befall us.  But the attitudes which are gradually polarizing the public will have lasting and possibly dire consequences if we don’t craft a compelling counternarrative. 

Because in addition to failing to define a viable alternative to the economic immiseration of the neoliberal epoch, the progressive left is quickly losing what may be its last best opportunity to convince the white mainstream that racial equality is in its best interest.  The lesson from Charlottesville is that time is short. 

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar

Outrage, Conservative Virtue Signaling, and The Vet

Fox News traffics in populist outrage.  It is its forte, its stock in trade so to speak.

It’s not hard to see why.  For one thing, it’s great for ratings.  It stokes the need of its core audience to perpetually seethe with resentment.  One of its specialties is bringing to light the opinions of obscure dissenters no one would ever have heard of had Fox not pointed them out as proof positive that good old fashioned American values are in dire peril of extinction.

This week, the Fox affiliate in Philadelphia aired a story about a Drexel University professor who Tweeted that he wanted to vomit after seeing a first-class passenger on his plane gave up his seat for a service member in uniform.  The network picked up the story, which is now on all the major news nets.

The professor, one George Ciccariello-Maher, had drawn right wing ire a few months back for another Tweet calling for the abolition of the white race.  Ciccariello-Maher claimed his remark was sardonic, but the story of the plane incident began by describing him as an “anti-white Drexel professor.” 

The good professor’s nausea stemmed from the botched coalition airstrike on Mosul last week, which is reported to have taken a couple hundred civilian lives while doing nothing to break Islamic State’s hold on the Iraqi city.  Didn’t the other passengers who thanked the man for yielding his seat know that the uniformed soldier was complicit in this tragedy just by being in the military?

The newsreaders displayed the expected level of disgust at Ciccariello-Maher’s words while reporting the story.  The trolls crawled out of the woodwork in force to leave comments condemning Ciccariello-Maher’s message, with the predictable profanity and malice.  One poster wrote ominously of the “enemies within.”

For me, the report dredged up the usual mixed emotions whenever I read about encounters between progressive academia and the rest of society.  You see, I’m that overeducated, godless, lefty professor your conservative, God-fearing parents warned you against.  But I’m also a veteran.  I understand the passenger’s gesture.  I accepted a number of small kindnesses from people while traveling in uniform over the years which helped make the stresses of being far from home bearable.  As a civilian, I’ve anonymously bought a drink or paid a restaurant check for service members from time to time, particularly if one was traveling through an airport alone.

So, I’m not about to knock the guy who gave up his seat.  The soldier could have been traveling for a number of reasons.  Perhaps there was a family emergency such as a sick relative.  Maybe he was rushing home for the birth of a child.  It could be that he was beginning or coming back from midtour leave or returning from a long overseas deployment.  Regardless of the reason, it was a gracious gesture which I’m sure was graciously accepted.

But let’s take a clear-eyed look at that gesture in the context of how the public views the military.  “Thank you for your service” has become the obligatory affirmation during any encounter with a service member or veteran, however trivial.  Just this afternoon, I was on the phone with my insurance company.  This particular insurer is a well-known company whose clientele consists exclusively of current and former military personnel and their immediate families.  The customer service rep was pleasant and was able to assist me with the issue I’d called her about.  The call ended like this:

“Thank you for your membership with -------, Mr. Scholar, and thank you for your service to our country.”

“Um, thanks…thank you for…for your help.”   

I never know how to respond.  I’ve come to see gestures such as thanking veterans and giving up seats on planes for soldiers as a form of conservative virtue signaling, a little like wearing American flag lapel pins or attaching Christian symbols to the backs of cars.  Membership in the U.S. military has become politicized, a phenomenon which would certainly horrify the founders of this country if they ever found out.

I blame our collective guilt over how we initially rejected the Vietnam vets. Prior to the Cold War, we never had a large peacetime military.  Soldiering was a refuge for petty crooks and ne’er-do-wells in times of peace and a noble calling for citizens in times of war.  The Second World War was the apogee of the citizen-as-soldier ethos, and rare was the family without someone in the services.  The inequities of the postwar draft were impossible to ignore, however.  During the Vietnam era, the poor were shipped overseas by the thousands while their middle class contemporaries hid behind student deferments and exaggerated minor ailments.

I’m agnostic concerning tales of returning Vietnam vets being assaulted and spat upon by “hippies” at airports.  Some I’ve known claim vehemently that this happened to them.   On the other hand, I’m familiar with historical investigations which were unable to identify a single substantiated incident. 

America was split down the middle over vets in the years following the withdrawal from Vietnam.  I recall the repatriation of the prisoners of war in 1973.  My small town put up banners in celebration, though none of the returnees were from there.  (“Mommy, what’s a ‘pow’?” I asked in confusion.)  That was my small town in the rural West.  Out in the world beyond its limits, people thought and believed differently.

The prevailing attitude toward the military and veterans in the 1970s was roundly negative.  The mass media have left an indelible record of the time.  It’s common knowledge that the TV show M*A*S*H was really about Vietnam despite being set in Korea.  The antihero protagonists of Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver were Vietnam vets.  In Black Sunday, a disgraced former POW is goaded into attacking the Super Bowl with an explosive laden Goodyear blimp.  The disaster movie Earthquake featured a psycho National Guardsman who tries to rape a woman he’s obsessed with and a cowardly Army colonel who flees a tunnel in panic at the first sign of collapse.  Even movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter which were praised for their compassionate portrayal of men and families damaged by Vietnam contained a hint of superciliousness.  During my first year or two of high school, visiting recruiters were greeted with smirks, smartass remarks, and the occasional taunt.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, the zeitgeist turned on its head.  Reagan’s cocksure swagger and anticommunism had something to do with it.  Frustration over the Iran hostage crisis and other foreign policy reverses probably did as well.  For whatever reason the Eighties were the Decade of the Heroic Vietnam Vet in American pop culture.  There was First Blood and its sequel Rambo, of course, not to mention any number of Chuck Norris movies.  Platoon played in theaters to rave reviews.  One or more of the main characters in Magnum P.I., Riptide, Miami Vice, and The A-Team were Vietnam vets.  A Rumor of War, Platoon Leader, and The Things We Carried told the grunts’ story to a mainstream which would have scornfully rejected it a couple of years earlier.  Pop songs such “Goodnight Saigon,” “Still in Saigon,” “Born in the USA,” and “Walking on a Thin Line” extolled the travails of the discharged vet in an uncaring world.

This new awareness not only inspired guilt-ridden feelings about vets, but over the military generally.  The Iran crisis made Americans realize that despite decades of propaganda to the contrary there was a lot of pent up anger over U.S. policies abroad.  It also made them aware that future military actions abroad might be necessary and that the burden of these would fall on the shoulders of recruited volunteers.  Americans love the troops because they don’t have to be the troops.  The specter of the draft lurks in the background, particularly during rough patches such as the Iraq War prior to the 2007 surge.  There’s a kind of desperate cheerleading from the mainstream which I trace back to the 1991 Gulf War.  It’s born of remorse over one’s affluence, comfort, and safety when others are facing danger even though few would ever, ever entertain the thought of volunteering or allowing their sons and daughters to do the same. 

There are other symptoms of our collective embracing of veterans.  The sudden anointing of the-vet-as-hero has had its seamy underside.  Rambo gave credibility to the Vietnam Dolchstoẞ myth of the left behind POW.  Despite the black POW/MIA flags flying from the flagstaffs of numerous public buildings and burly biker types too young to have served wearing “You Are Not Forgotten” vest patches, no evidence has emerged proving Vietnam is still holding American prisoners.  What could they gain?  It defies common sense.  Vietnam has had diplomatic relations with the U.S. for over twenty years and the U.S. is an important trading partner.  Why not come clean up front and avoid future friction? 

Another unfortunate side to our hero worship is the rise of the imposter.  Lots of guys have their war stories with a detail or two exaggerated here and there.  That’s one thing.  Telling everyone you were GI Joe with a kung-fu grip when you were really a cook, claiming you received the Medal of Honor or even a Purple Heart when you never heard a shot fired in anger, or accepting veterans benefits when you never served is another matter.   

Why doesn’t anyone call foul on these antics?  Why do they go so long without being caught?  It’s because the public has become intimidated.  Criticizing anyone linked to the military is seen by some people as tantamount to treason.  Hence the uproar over the yielded airplane seat.  The soldier who drew Ciccariello-Maher’s opprobrium in all likelihood had nothing at all to do personally with the tragedy in Mosul.  He is neither villain nor hero.  He’s not responsible for decisions made by the Pentagon or CENTCOM.  He was just a traveler trying to get to where he was going. 

By the same token the hubbub on Fox and elsewhere over the professor’s infelicitous Tweet has a further chilling effect on any legitimate critique of our foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere.  Question our policies or tactics, and you’re disloyal and un-American.  I think that this incident is one of countless symptoms of misplaced guilt masquerading as Americanism.  Perhaps if we had done right by Vietnam veterans in the first place we might have avoided this unpleasantness.  But in light of the heavy doses of propaganda ladled out to us by government and media alike over the past century, I am inclined to doubt it.

© 2017 The Unassuming Scholar