Chicken

This week, politics and consumerism converged to produce another culture war spectacle.

It happened after Dan Cathy, the CEO of fast food chain Chick-fil-A, publicly announced his opposition to same-sex marriage and his financial support of the Family Research Council (an organization designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) came to light.  This should not have come as surprise to anyone familiar with the Cathy family’s reactionary politics.  The resulting uproar, however, is bound to leave ears ringing for weeks to come.    

No sooner did activists call for a boycott of the chain than a group of Christian wingnuts declared a day in support of Chick-fil-A.  (“C’mon Amanda!  C’mon Billy an’ Tammy Sue!  We’re havin’ dinner at Chick-fil-A, ‘cause that’s what Jesus wants us to do!) 

The sight of long lines of SUVs idling in drive thru lanes competed with scenes of gay and lesbian couples staging “kiss ins” outside Chick-fil-A franchises on the cable news networks.  The absurdity reached its nadir a couple of days ago when a man in Tucson berated a hapless Chick-fil-A employee for Dan Cathy’s sins, then posted a video of the incident on YouTube.  (Which promptly went viral, causing the gasbags on Fox News to gleefully accuse the guy of bullying.) 

What fun.  Forty-three years after Stonewall and nearly thirty-four years since the martyrdom of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, we are nowhere close to common acceptance of LGBT civil rights.  The most frustrating problem for progressives is the waffling of Democratic leaders, which too often borders on moral cowardice. 

Take, for example, President Obama’s recent statement in support of same-sex marriage, a reversal of his position during the 2008 election campaign.  Obama didn’t come right out with an unambiguous declaration of support.  Instead, he relied on Vice President Joe Biden as a stalking horse.  Given Biden’s habit of verbal missteps, it would have been easy for the White House to distance itself from him had his pro-same-sex-marriage remarks, offhandedly dropped during a TV interview, provoked a media backlash.  When the response seemed favorable, Obama, surely needing LGBT votes in November, revealed his apparent change of heart. 

With friends like these, the equal rights movement stands to make scant progress.  The truth is that Obama’s reversal and the proposal to add a plank in support of same-sex marriage to the Democratic Party platform are merely symbolic gestures.  Should the Republicans keep their House majority after the election, they will probably be even less than that.  As long as the Defense of Marriage Act remains law, individual states will retain the prerogative to deny same-sex couples marriage and other family rights.  At present perhaps the best hope lies in the Supreme Court granting certiorari in the Perry case and subsequently overturning California’s Proposition 8.  However, there are far too many “ifs” in this scenario to raise anyone’s hopes. 

There are occasional sign of progress, such as the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy.  But outside the major urban areas, out where the “real Americans” live, it might as well be 1955.  LGBT activism is mostly concentrated in cities with significant gay and lesbian populations, making it a matter of preaching to the choir.  Thus, it is incumbent on those working within the political process to effect change.  And as long as the party that claims dedication to equal rights fails to take a stand against the benighted mores of a past era, we will all in some way remain in darkness.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Promises to Keep

Mitt Romney’s overseas tour this past week has provided glimpses at how he might perform as diplomat-in-chief if elected.

Some of the stories are merely interesting anecdotes, such as Romney’s complaint that Britain was too crowded or his amicable meeting with former Polish president Lech Walesa.  The most telling highlight of the trip, however, was his fundraising speech in Tel Aviv concerning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Romney’s address was a cringe-inducing string of verbal missteps.  In short order, he endorsed a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran, supported Israel’s claim to Jerusalem as its national capital, and strongly implied that the reason the Palestinians were poor compared to the Israelis was due to Arab cultural inferiority.  While the speech undoubtedly played well for certain audiences, on the balance it was an embarrassment.  Its most grating element was Romney’s use of the pronouns “we” and “us” for the United States, as if he had already won the election and had the right to speak on behalf of the American people.  Most irksome of all, however, was the underlying assumption that the U.S. will unconditionally support Israeli foreign policy regardless of Israel’s actions.  Coming on the heels of the Obama administration’s $3.1 billion military aid guarantee for the coming year, Romney’s latest foot-in-mouth episode merely points up a long-running syndrome in U.S. foreign policy.

The alliance with Israel has proven an expensive and counterproductive one for the United States.  Simply put, many of Israel’s hostile Muslim neighbors supply us with oil.  However negatively Arabs, Persians, and other Muslim peoples are perceived in this country, a negativity which taps into the American view that certain cultures are superior or inferior, we are heavily dependent upon the strategic natural resource they control.  One cause of this state of affairs is that American policy toward Israel is formed by the confluence of powerful lobbying groups such as AIPAC, the political preferences of frightfully ignorant red state Evangelicals who believe Israel’s reestablishment fulfills biblical prophecies of the Second Coming, and neoconservative policymakers who still believe the U.S. can remake the Middle East in its own image.  An added dimension is the mirroring of Israeli and Americans' respective self-images.  Israeli exceptionalism is a first cousin to American exceptionalism, at least in practice.  When you are building a city on a hill, you don’t concern yourself with the rights of people who get in your way. 

It's not hard to see, then, why the story of Israel resonates with American conservatives.  European settlers, fleeing religious persecution, convinced they are on a divine mission, land on a foreign shore believing they have arrived in the promised land.  Driving out the indigenous population, sometimes by guile, more often by force, the settlers come to consider any real or perceived opposition as further justification of the righteousness of their cause.  The new nation’s self-identity becomes an ideology, any criticism of which, no matter how justified, brands the critic as disloyal or worse.

The events of the past decade have only served to further muddle the issue of human rights in Palestine.  American politicians of all but the most progressive stripe accept without question the premise that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is a bulwark against Islamist militancy in the Middle East.  Support for Israel has transposed the culture wars at home on the Middle East.  One argument used by cultural conservatives to bolster their advocacy of stronger U.S.-Israeli ties is that Israel is essentially a European nation, an outpost of a culture much like ours sited in hostile territory.  In other words, the courageous Israelis are holding back the barbarians at the gates.

Arguments centered on cultural essentialism are risky at best.  And by no means is U.S. support for Israel the sole reason for anti-Americanism in the Muslim world.  American backing of corrupt, oppressive regimes in the the Arab states, Iran, and Central Asia during the Cold War contributed heavily to Islamist militancy, along with decades of Western exploitation of Middle Eastern petroleum resources.  The rest of the world does not share America’s historical amnesia, least of all in this most contentious of the world’s regions.  When Romney accuses Iran of testing America’s “moral defenses” (whatever that means), he is pandering as much to the prejudices of Republican voters at home as he is trying to rally Israeli sentiment for a new Mideast war in furtherance of corporate interests. 

The past record of the more extreme elements of the Palestinian independence movement often overshadow legitimate discourse over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.  While American memories are short, we can always count upon Israel and its advocates to refresh them.  The decision last week to not include a commemoration of the 1972 Munich massacre in the opening of the London Olympic games stirred up a welter of controversy over whether we have forgotten this and sundry other anti-Israeli atrocities at Palestinian hands.  However, history is used to further subjective, collective ends.  Consequently, in the West Palestinian history is ignored while the heroic Zionists are lauded.  Valorization of the Israeli experiment pushes aside fundamental questions concerning the nature of the experiment.   

Israel faces an existential dilemma.  It can be any two of the following but not all three: A Jewish state, a democracy, and Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel encompassing all of the Levant as defined in Israel’s declaration of independence).  A solely Jewish democracy excludes non-Jews by definition.  Likewise, so does a solely Jewish Eretz Israel.  A democratic Ertez Israel would have to extend equal rights to its Arab majority, thereby obviating its Jewish character.  The frequent claims of Israeli leaders that Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy fully equal social and political rights fail on the premise that Israel is the Jewish homeland.  By definition, a non-Jew must be a second class citizen in a Jewish state. 

Bearing in mind this last premise, of the numerous solutions proposed for the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the least-worst outcome is the two-state solution.  Even this course of action has multiple variants depending upon the political proclivities of the advocate.  The one that would provide a rough approximation of fairness is an Israel within its pre-1967 borders, a Palestine consisting of the West Bank and Gaza, and Jerusalem as a neutral corpus separatum as originally set out in the 1947 UN partition plan.  A rough approximation of fairness, however, in no way translates into justice for displaced Palestinians after more than sixty years of being deprived a national homeland.

In any case, prospects for a fully sovereign Palestine are chancy if not unlikely.  Any two-state plan accepted by Israel and the U.S. would surely place restrictions on the Palestinian entity’s ability to trade freely and provide for its self defense, essentially rendering it an Israeli dependency.  Furthermore, it’s not as if the Israelis haven’t considered the two-state solution on their own.  According to Tom Segev in his history of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the Israeli leadership at one point considered a preemptive declaration of a Palestinian state led by hand-picked Arab notables.  Under the right conditions, the United States and Israel could achieve a significant propaganda coup while preserving the status quo via creation of a dependent, co-opted Palestinian state.

It is unlikely any kind of equitable solution is viable in Palestine because, frankly, the two most influential players don’t want one.  The long-term undercurrent of Israeli policy, particularly that of Netanyahu’s and of previous Likud governments, has been to marginalize and remove any vestige of Arab self-determination in the remaining Palestinian territories.  This is a process that has been supported, albeit incrementally, by successive U.S. presidential administrations.  Israel has been a third-rail issue in American politics for decades and any politician on the national stage must step carefully so as to avoid causing offense to the constellation of interest groups which advocate for Israel.  It’s important for a non-incumbent presidential candidate to establish his or her positions early on while avoiding the appearance of policymaking from the rostrum.  With this in mind, Mitt should keep any further promises to foreign leaders to himself until after he’s won the election. 

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Sad but True

From:  Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Date:  Tuesday, July 24, 2012 12:04 AM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  Plz read this – fall student

Hey, im going to be in your 3-hour class tuesday/thursday this fall.  I have a big problem though these last 4 classes this semester are the only ones i need and the only way i can do it is if tuesday/thursday i have a class from 530-645 at the tech center. So i took your 3 hour class knowing ill probably be a few minutes late but its the only way ill be able to get my degree. I haven't fully registered i wanted to shoot you an email to make sure this ok. I don't want my grade to be affected because of this. I take my grades very serious and am really worried it'll be affected this semester because of that. Please get back to me and let me know. I took the 3 hour class so i wont miss too much of class.

brad porter

Sent from my iPhone

From:  Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Date:  Thursday, July 26, 2012 9:12 AM

To: Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Subject:  Re: Plz read this – fall student

Brad,

I understand your predicament and I don't want to discourage you.  However, habitual lateness to class will pose a problem as we cover a lot of material in the course and I try to make the best use of the time we have.  We will have quizzes and homework due at the start of each class meeting, and we will also do participation-based activities that are a significant part of your final grade.

I recommend you enroll in another section or defer your graduation until spring semester if there is a scheduling conflict.  Meeting with your academic advisor to go over your options may be helpful.

Regards,

Unassuming Scholar

From:  Brad <bigfluke@umail.com>

Date:  Friday, July 27, 2012 2:22 AM

To: Unassuming Scholar <scholar@snowflake.edu>

Subject:  RE: Re: Plz read this – fall student

So…your saying i shouldnt take your class?

Sent from my iPhone

Objects

I’ve just finished rereading Frank Norris’ novel McTeague.

McTeague and its author are mostly forgotten today, perhaps because the book was published in 1899 and Norris died several years later at the age of 32.  It’s an engrossing story, depicting a world that is at once quaint and antiquated, yet familiar.  McTeague presages later, naturalistic works such as Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (though not nearly as prolix or dense). 

Comprising a compact 186 pages, McTeague not only tells the story of its ill-starred protagonist, an ignorant, self-taught dentist, but it also captures the social milieu of lower middle class San Francisco at the turn of the last century.  Reading Norris’ spare yet richly evocative prose, I’m struck by such details as how little everyday speech patterns have changed and even at how many familiar consumer products sold in 1898 are still around today.  The novel is remembered partly thanks to commercialism.  In a city ever ready to commercially exploit its heritage, literary or otherwise, it’s not surprising that a fair-to-middling tourist bar named McTeague’s Saloon now stands at the putative Polk Street site of its namesake’s dental parlor.  I rather doubt that this is how Frank Norris wanted his work to be remembered, though I suppose it’s better than not being remembered at all.

The theme of McTeague is that of materialism’s corrosive effect on human relationships.  McTeague falls for Trina, a patient who is his best friend’s girlfriend.  McTeague wins Trina over and they are married.  As luck would have it, Trina has just won $5,000 from a lottery ticket sold to her by McTeague’s dotty neighbor.  Trina’s former suitor Marcus is seemingly more put out at losing the five grand than at losing the girl.  Marcus eventually leaves town, but not before reporting McTeague to the authorities for practicing dentistry without a license. 

Unemployed, McTeague must live off the interest from Trina’s small fortune and her income from selling scrimshaw to a relative’s toy store.  Trina’s miserliness grates on McTeague, who pines for their past affluence.  Their relationship deteriorates into McTeague physically abusing Trina.  Ultimately, he steals the modest savings Trina had hidden away in their flat and deserts her.  Permanently disabled by McTeague’s mistreatment, Trina must take a job as a live-in charwoman at a kindergarten.

McTeague, now a vagrant, learns Trina has withdrawn her $5,000 principal and goes to get what he believes is his fair share.  When Trina refuses to help him, McTeague beats her to death and flees empty handed.  On the run, pursued by a posse, McTeague is caught in Death Valley by none other than Marcus.  Fighting over the last of McTeague’s water, McTeague bludgeons Marcus to death.  Before Marcus expires, however, he manages to manacle himself to McTeague.  The novel ends with McTeague stranded in the desert, shackled to a corpse, and presumably not long for this world himself.

A parallel subplot concerns McTeague’s unbalanced neighbor Maria Macapa, the one who sold Trina the winning lottery ticket.  Maria claims to have come from a wealthy family in Mexico and says she still possesses a gold service owned by them.  No one believes her ramblings about her alleged riches except the neighborhood junk man, Zerkow.  The two marry.  Eventually, after realizing Maria’s story is just that, Zerkow murders her in a foreshadowing of McTeague’s own pyrrhic vengeance.   

McTeague resonates because there is so much that is familiar in it, even at a century’s remove.  Norris hits a lot of the right emotional chords as well, such as the nearly palpable anxiety McTeague experiences in his desire to get things just right to impress Trina and her family during a night out on the town.  The dialogue is natural, and the expressions and speech rhythms of the time do not sound at all stilted to the contemporary reader.  Even familiar household brands make an appearance, reflecting the then-emergent consumer society.

The deeper reason for my own fascination with McTeague is that it is part of a rich body of literature that cuts across genres.  Societies create personalities peculiar to them, and McTeague represents an American archetype.  A striver, McTeague aspires to a higher station than that to which he was born.  Ascending the social ladder carries with it the risk of falling, however.  McTeague’s professional indignities and loss of employment late in the story provide the kind of anxiety-inducing scenario that is the stuff of our own nightmares. 

It’s important to remember that McTeague had an advantage in his work not many people have in a postindustrial economy.  He had a specific, “hard” skill.  Never mind that he didn’t have a license, in a time when dentistry consisted mostly of pulling rotten teeth McTeague was a skilled practitioner.  Nowadays most of us work at the kind of jobs Sartre called “vocations of opinion” in which our reputations are predicated as much on social as on occupational skills.  We sell ourselves, not our abilities.  This is why McTeague’s fall from grace hits all the harder for the reader.  Deep down, we all fear being exposed as frauds.

The fear of exposure is the fear of loss: Lose your job, lose your stuff.  There is no worse fate in a consumer culture.  McTeague and Trina were as obsessed with possessions as anyone today.  Frank Norris certainly wasn’t the first to make the observation and was hardly the last: Cupidity as fatal flaw permeates American popular fiction.  Often, it’s offered in the guise of black comedy—Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian and Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses come immediately to mind—but the message is communicated clearly. 

We’re happy captives of commodity fetishism: Fateor, ergo sum…I own, therefore I am.  Probably even in Norris’ era true personal individuation was becoming a thing of the past; our personalities have become mere agglomerations of consumer preferences.  Moreover, the partial migration of commodity fetishism (or perhaps the social analogue of Lacan’s objet petit a) to the virtual sphere has fomented a wholly new form of false consciousness.

If you think that last statement is exaggerated, consider: Most personal Facebook pages contain “Likes” for consumer products, films, books, foods, vacation spots, restaurants, and pop stars.  Social media are an essential part of promotion, and by clicking a button you not only signal your preferences to your friends, virtual and otherwise, but to advertisers as well.  Its dynamics underscore the transitory, instrumental nature of relationships.  We’ve come to the point where our very personalities are commodities.  We are in representational symbiosis with the things we own and use, and thanks to Facebook, friends themselves become a commodity to be acquired, with success evinced by the number of people who “friend” us.  (Quantity, you see.  More is better.  You don’t even have to have met the person to be friends.)   

That isn’t true of everyone, to be sure.  The more perspicacious among us are not comfortable with the pressure to sell out, an occasional literary trope shared by works as diverse as Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying and the Green Day punk operetta American Idiot.  The mundane tragedy of course is that one ultimately has no choice but to play the game.  In the end, we adapt (or, more accurately, succumb) to our environment.  Every life ends up being a corrupt bargain; a corrupt society can only help but produce corrupt people.

What we are left with is a populace composed of individuals lacking the sensitivity and insight necessary for true self-expression, spiritually stunted, befuddled by political and corporate doublespeak, oversated with media distraction, and stultified by religion.  Things appear to have changed little since Frank Norris penned McTeague.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that this largely forgotten gem of American literature continues to resonate across a century and a decade.  It’s also a reminder that nothing is new and that the good old days never were.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

It’s a Mean World

Awoke this morning to learn of last night’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, tragedies hit much closer to home emotionally than they did in the past.  They also ratchet up the rhetorical framing of tragic events.  Even the normally levelheaded David Sirota has called the Aurora incident “terrorism,” even though there does not seem to have been a political motive behind the act.  Sometimes a lone nut is just a lone nut.    

Perusing reader comments on the web news coverage, I noticed many of them said they missed how carefree life was for kids in the 1970s when they could walk to school or ride their bikes down the block alone without fear of harm.  Obviously, these folks missed something.  It’s easy to forget that the 1970s were the era of the Zodiac killer, Son of Sam, and John Wayne Gacy.  The Charley Project has profiled numerous open missing person cases.  The largest number of these cold cases is in the 1970s.   Violent crime rates spiked from the mid-1960s through the following decade.  

The problem is that too often we look at the past through rose-colored glasses.  The FBI assures us violent crime has declined since the 1990s.  There should be no reason to doubt this, though statistics are always open to interpretation.  If true, even the causes are elusive with everything from video surveillance of public spaces to the delayed demographic effect of legal abortion held out as reasons why.  Still, you’re probably safer walking down a city street in the middle of the night than you would have been a few years ago.

Why, then, the frisson of horror we experience after mass killings?  Certainly the randomness of it makes us uneasy.  But the odds of it happening to you are exceedingly slim compared to mundane causes of death like traffic accidents or lifestyle-related diseases.  The root explanation, it seems, may be in what social psychologist George Gerbner called “Mean World Syndrome.”  The mass media have zeroed in on violence because it gets people’s attention and boosts ratings…“If it bleeds, it leads,” as an old journalism adage has it.  When you see enough real-life violence on TV or on the web, you begin to believe the whole world fraught with dangers. 

It’s hard to reason with unreasoned fear.  Explaining it as an example of the construction fallacy, that a single incident or even a small number of them do not explain the state of the world doesn’t help.  This is a matter of emotion rather than logic.  Until the media report the news responsibly and refrain from sensationalism, it will continue to be a mean world for all of us.

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

You can’t say Mitt Romney doesn’t understand his audience.  In a fundraising speech this week Romney said the Republican Party is not the party of the rich, but of those who want to be.  

Mitt got it half right: The GOP is the party of the rich.  It just happens also to be the party of the greedy from all walks of life...

Learning Less Ordinary

The San Francisco alternative education scene continues to thrive.  The University of the Commons has completed its first round of free courses in the Mission District, with more to come.  Information is at http://www.uotc.org/wordpress/.

Meanwhile, The Fools’ School plans to hold a weekend symposium July 21-22 at The Emerald Tablet in North Beach; details at http://foolsfolio.wordpress.com/.