The T-Word Revisited

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the arrest of Dzhokar Tsarnaev on terror charges, I thought it appropriate to repost an entry from last year:

Under Every Bed

I made a faux pas in class the other night. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar  

Burying Thatcher, Exhuming Neruda

Margaret Thatcher is dead.

She is dead and I'm once again reminded of the saying that while the good that people do dies with them the evil they've done lives on. (Or something like that.) Together with her ideological soul mate, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher was largely responsible for leading the global shift toward neoliberalism during the 1980s. True to her legacy, Thatcher is to receive a state funeral at public expense even as austerity measures in Britain have scaled back student aid and public assistance for the poor.

While official Britain prepares to bury Thatcher and right-wingers mourn the world over, in Chile a judge has ordered the exhumation and autopsy of diplomat, statesman, and poet Pablo Neruda. Neruda died in 1973 of what was believed to be complications from prostate cancer several weeks after the Chilean military overthrew the elected administration of socialist President Salvador Allende.

Opponents of the military regime in Chile, which was presided over by Augusto Pinochet, a man much admired by Margaret Thatcher, have charged that Neruda's death was caused or hastened by the military due to Neruda's left-wing politics and support for Allende. If this was the case, Neruda's demise would be simply one more murder among the thousands committed by the Chilean military in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 coup.

It's hard to say what will be accomplished by reexamining Neruda's death, save to quiet the historical record. That Neruda's life and career ended as Thatcher's career was on the rise is a bitter juxtaposition. Neruda was a man of humane letters, with all the connotations that that adjective carries, as well as a leader who sought peace and justice for those whom it was in short supply. Thatcher, on the other hand, represented the backlash from a lower middle class opposed to social change, petty, grasping, resentful people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The Iron Lady was in fact no lady, but rather a crass bounder who believed that the public good demanded enriching oneself at the expense of others.

The world will be a better place when it produces more Nerudas and fewer Thatchers. But while Neruda’s memory lives on in the hearts of progressives, it is Thatcher’s which will cast an ominous shadow over the world for a long time to come. For that we are all the poorer.

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

 

Stultus Valley Days - I Make a New Start

First post in a recurring series

I got an email a while back from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a long time, informing me that a mutual acquaintance from Stultus Valley had passed away. 

Stultus Valley…God, hearing that name takes me back!  I’d only lived and worked there a short time, less than two years in all, but the experience left a lasting impression.

I landed in Stultus Valley after the Great Recession very nearly ended my academic career before it could begin.  I was working toward my doctorate at a research university when budget cuts eliminated my teaching fellowship and with it my ability to cover tuition and expenses.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to land an adjunct position that would have kept me in the game for the time being.

Since I enjoy eating and having a roof over my head I clearly needed to get a job, even if that meant getting a “straight” job.  Fortune soon smiled upon me.  Scouring the interwebs for a viable situation within a 50-mile radius of where I was living, I found one.  On Craigslist, no less.  It was a civil service post with a social services agency in a town called Linden.  I’d never heard of Linden even though it was only 48 miles away according to Google Maps. 

A few mouse clicks later I discovered Linden, population 650, was located in the remote Stultus Valley.  Remote…and yet still within my geographical distance criteria.  Intrigued, I uploaded my resume. 

To my great surprise, I was notified just days later that I had received a civil service exam waiver and when was I available for an interview? 

My luck held as I made my journey through a light snowfall to Linden.  The interview was brief, but pleasant.  I’d gathered what scant data I could concerning Stultus County and its social services programs and used it to good effect answering the questions posed to me. 

I’m not much of a charmer usually, but I clearly made a good impression that day.  Within an hour of leaving the interview, I got a message on my voicemail telling me I’d landed the job.  As it was the best (and only) prospect I had at the moment, I accepted.  What else was I going to do?

And so, inside of two weeks, my life changed completely as I blindly followed my chosen course.  I withdrew from graduate school and moved into a rented house in Linden. 

I started off with enthusiasm and hope at my new job.  My naïve optimism soon foundered as I got to know my new neighbors, a breed of folks I found at once strange and familiar.  Stultus Valley and its residents were to leave a lasting impression, memories which I now feel compelled to revisit.

Next installment: Meeting the Neighbors

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Feeling the Pain

The Cyprus bailout is going forward, with a modification or two.  Fortunately for Cypriot workers, their bank deposits will be safe, at least for now.   The imposed deposit tax will apparently only affect large accounts.

Meanwhile, the banks in Cyprus remain closed…

Austerity

The European Union and the International Monetary Fund have agreed to assist the cash-strapped government of Cyprus with an emergency infusion of € 13 billion.

Naturally, there are strings attached.  In this case, the austerity measures demanded by the EU and the IMF include a 10% forfeiture of savings bank deposits.

The bankers and politicians fail.  Innocent people pay the price, as they have throughout the global economic crisis.  First, they lose their equity in stocks and in their own homes.  Now they are being penalized again for their own hard work and thrift.

And so the greatest wealth transfer in modern history continues apace.  How soon before austerity comes home to roost in the United States?  How will we respond? 

I truly want to believe that there would finally be a backlash against the plutocrats, a true occupation of Wall Street, but I cannot.  Sadly, the public will do what it’s done since 2008.  It will blame the Democrats, shiftless welfare cheats, and spendthrifts who owe more than they can ever pay.  In the end our false consciousness, our willingness to be capitalism’s useless idiots, will be our undoing.  We’ll lick our masters' boots even as they kick us into our graves...

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Please Back Off

I’ve just finished watching Won’t Back Down, last year’s movie about parents who defy the odds to improve their kids’ education.

Won’t Back Down, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businessman Philip Anschutz, promoted by Michelle Rhee, and touted by conservative school “reform” advocates, makes its point in a predictably hamfisted fashion so that even the densest teabilly Wal-Mart shopper can figure it out.  I thoroughly hated it, as I expected to.  The story was inspired by a real-life incident a couple of years ago where parents used California’s parent-trigger law to convert a failing public school into a charter institution.

The producers signed a raft of well-known names for the project.  Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Jamie, while Viola Davis plays Jamie’s ally, Nona.  Clearly the project was well-financed, considering they also brought on Ving Rhames and Holly Hunter. 

Despite the strong cast, I was underwhelmed by the acting.  There was very little chemistry among the actors, and I just wasn’t convinced by their performances.  Also, and I can’t explain why, the Gyllenhaal siblings have always rubbed me the wrong way.  And so I couldn’t help but chuckle at thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal, a paragon of liberal smugness, cynically accepting the lead role in a right-wing propaganda flick.  Really, Maggie?  Did you need the money that badly?

Back to the film: Jamie is a plucky single mom who works two jobs while raising a daughter with learning disabilities.  Frustrated by her little girl’s lack of progress in school, she joins up with burned out elementary school teacher Nona after discovering a loophole in the law which allows parents and teachers to take over a school if it is failing.

Gyllenhaal and the scriptwriters self-consciously strive to imbue Jamie with an air of blue collar authenticity.  Jamie speaks in malapropisms while letting her daughter watch TV and munch Snickers bars after school.  She’s awed by Nona’s neatly kept home.  Her sense of boundaries is poor at best as she importunes parents, teachers, and administrators alike to do what’s right for her daughter. 

Won’t Back Down is a mostly conventional buddy film / fight-the-system tale.  Predictably, it concludes with the obligatory corny feel-good scene I remember in every Eighties inspiring teacher movie from Stand and Deliver to The Dead Poets’ Society.  But that’s not its worst sin.  At least twice in the film, Jamie quotes Gandhi’s purported aphorism, “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” as justification for her efforts.  It’s like when wingnuts such as Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck quote Martin Luther King; it just comes off as vaguely sacrilegious.

At its heart, Won’t Back Down is an odious anti-union, anti-public education screed.  Throughout the movie, Jamie and Nona are stymied at every turn by two-dimensional cardboard cutout foes in the form of a sclerotic school bureaucracy, a do-nothing board of education, and a union which protects incompetent teachers through tenure.  (A “job for life after two years,” as one character puts it, perpetuating a cherished conservative myth.)  Unionized teachers, we’re given to understand, have no incentive to educate beyond collecting their inflated taxpayer underwritten salaries.  

While Won’t Back Down is a poorly made hack piece which will be soon forgotten, I wish I could say the same for the movement that spawned it.  We are on a slippery slope toward school privatization and teacher deprofessionalization because of the moneyed conservative forces working toward this end.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one well-known culprit.  The Walton Family Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation are two others.

But the worst of the rogue’s gallery of charitable foundations, to my mind, is the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.  Mr. Broad, who made his fortune in insurance and by building innumerable subdivisions of tacky tract houses, did what any other egotistical plutocrat would do when faced with the prospect of paying taxes.  He simply donated a fair chunk of his wealth to a charitable foundation he created then devoted himself to doling it out as a means of wielding power.  Among its programs, the Broad Foundation sponsors an “academy” to train school administrators for the new reality of K-12 education, which is that public schools must produce a uniform “product” regardless of students’ widely varying individual aptitudes.  The test will tell: Poor scores equal unemployed teachers.

Eli Broad suffers from the same conceit other wealthy individuals share.  Because he was successful at business, this makes him an expert in every other field of endeavor.  This is especially true when it’s a service provided by the public sector.  As we all know, government’s sole raison d’être is to siphon off the hard earned wealth of job creating entrepreneurs.  Therefore, it can only be made efficient when business people either privatize, or at least apply private sector practices to, government work.  (Never mind the non sequitur underneath this assumption; there’s no moneymaking potential in taking the liberal arts courses where you would learn what one is.)

The Broad Foundation is gradually making inroads into higher education.  My alma mater recently opened a new field house built with money donated by the Broads.  To my deep distaste, the president of the endowment foundation of the college where I work is the CEO of a real estate development company owned by Eli Broad.  I believe these are harbingers of a larger trend.  It won’t be long before pressure is brought to bear on college presidents and boards of trustees to scale back or eliminate general education requirements and non-vocational majors in favor of the University of Phoenix model of workforce training.  It’s never a good idea to encourage the life of the mind when the kind of people you want working for you are narrowly trained technicians who don’t ask a lot of probing questions.

If there is a hell, I hope there is a special corner reserved for Eli Broad.  As it is, the evil he’s done in his lifetime will be perpetuated through his foundation.   And I am not one of those progressives who put their faith in the secular eschatology of revolution.  Sometimes the bad guys win.  The hardest part is when everyone around you is convinced they’re the good guys and are cheering them on to victory.

Just like in Won’t Back Down. 

     

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar

Don't Call Your Soul Your Own

The customer service policy of UK-based quick-service dining chain Pret à Manger has made the news this week.  Hardly Page 1 stuff, but interesting in its way.

Apparently, Pret à Manger enforces cheerfulness among its employees by sending a mystery shopper to each outlet once a week.  If the anonymous visitor is greeted with sufficient obsequiousness, every worker at the store gets a cash bonus. 

How nice.  Because, after all, I know I want to be treated slavishly whenever I stop in someplace for a cup of coffee.  A fleeting encounter in the bustle of the day with someone I’ll likely never meet again, an exchange forgotten by me almost as soon as it ended, becomes an elaborate three-minute playlet of manners in which the other person’s livelihood depends upon how well he or she projects friendliness.

“Pret” arrived in the States a while back, I’m told, but it has yet to open any stores on the West Coast where I live.  But the chain’s effort to extract the last drop of cheerfulness from its low-wage workforce, described in The New Republic by Timothy Noah, demonstrates late capitalism’s quest to not simply claim their employees’ physical and mental labor but to take hold of their inner lives as well.  (It comes as little surprise that McDonald’s--home of the original McJob--owns an equity share in Pret.)

I like courteous service as much as anyone.  I enjoy dealing with friendly people, provided the friendliness comes from the heart.  But even as civility erodes to nothing, it appears that its last remnants survive within the plastic confines of the food service industry.  Still, I'm not sure if the Pret model is universally appealing.  It certainly isn't for me.  I’m more partial to the efficient, even detached, service at the old school joints I haunt when I’m in the city.  Places where the waitstaff are clad in white jackets, the lighting is low, and the paneling dark.  Aside from the occasional night out, however, I prefer to dine at home. 

But Pret’s customer service policy is a manifestation of a broader trend in the service industries in which so many of us now toil and a dark harbinger of things to come.  No telling how this affects the worker internally.  Kids sick?  Not feeling well yourself?  Bills past due?  Car trouble?  Fight with your spouse?  Your dog died?  Tough luck; you’ll just have to smile and accept your lot as a member of the servant class. 

The work I do has its own emotional labor demands.  But I can’t imagine having continually to contort my affect so as to best please each individual I come in contact with.  

Timothy Noah is undoubtedly correct when he observes that this push toward agreeableness favors women over men given the lifelong cultural pressure on the former to be pleasing to others.  My ex-wife, the product of a culture where emotional reserve is considered a virtue, loves to mock American women’s exaggerated emotiveness.  (“H-i-i-i-i-i!  How are y-o-u-u-u-u!  It’s so good to s-e-e-e you!”  Always makes me laugh.)  Such displays can hardly be sincere, even among friends.

However, sincereity isn’t really the point, then, is it?  Good management practice nowadays dictates exerting as much control over the workers’ lives as can be legally managed.  There’s an element of dominance and submission creeping into the workplace that was unimaginable a generation ago.  And why not?  After all, self-actualization in our society is fully achieved only when one is in a position to exploit others.

And so the Pret à Manger story is simply another installment of a long-running drama in our economic race to the bottom.  Its main plot thread is trivialization of the individual.  The truest expression of depersonalization is when we are asked to alienate not only our time and skill, but our inner selves in the bargain.  The day will soon be upon us, I’m afraid, when we can no longer dare call our souls our own.  

  

© 2013 The Unassuming Scholar