Godwin's Law

When a FB and real-life pal tried to question the overuse of "fascism" in regards to the election of Him, the results were a predictable torrent of "right" (that is, left-) thinking litanies of "outrage." I thought of the non-cosplay stormtroopers (strange as they've been co-opted by Disney into branding, but I might accuse Walt's "happiest place on earth" as a harbinger of fanaticism, pomp and parades.

Many post comparisons to Manzanar, the lagers, the tattoos on the arms, the rallies, the photo of Einstein as if he stood for every refugee. If he was, we'd have benefited by admitting far more into our increasingly sensitive campuses, where the rise of cringing and handwringing a few years ago has led now to crackdowns against any pulled trigger that will nick anyone who's faced discrimination, pain, terror, or violence. Which, in my tally, is nearly all of us. An elevation of victimization raises us to survivors and plaudits. Do we inherit the status of casualties? Is victimization our common identity?

Frank Furedi warns in Spiked:

Holocaust rhetoric relies on reading history backwards. It is an attempt by people to delegitimise their opponents or targets by associating them with the horrors of the past. This strategy is boosted by the fashionable teleological reading of history, which suggests that all the roads of modernity led to Auschwitz. This fatalistic theory of malevolence can be used to indict almost anything that occurred before the Holocaust and treat it as in some sense responsible for the Holocaust. By the same token, treating the Holocaust as the inevitable outcome of otherwise unexceptional things in history that preceded it means that events in the here and now can be held up as precursors of the next Holocaust.

Brendan O'Neill, the founder of the same free-speech fixated, and suitably contrarian (and I often disagree with it, fittingly, over its anti-ecological stance) Spiked concludes on a related subject:

It is a fantasy to claim fascism has made a comeback. And it’s a revealing fantasy. When the political and media elites speak of fascism today, what they’re really expressing is fear. Fear of the primal, unpredictable mass of society. Fear of unchecked popular opinion. Fear of what they view as the authoritarian impulses of those outside their social, bureaucratic circle. Fear of the latent fascism, as they see it, of the ordinary inhabitants of Nazi-darkened Europe or of Middle America, who apparently lack the moral and intellectual resources to resist demagoguery. As one columnist put it, today’s ‘fascistic style’ of politics is a creation not so much of wicked leaders, as of the dangerous masses. ‘Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you’, he says. ‘Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you.’
In short, not leaders but the led; not the state but the people. This, precisely, is who terrifies them. This, precisely, is what they mean when they say ‘fascism’. They mean you, me, ordinary people; people who have dared to say that they want to influence politics again following years of being frozen out. When they say fascism, they mean democracy.

Inevitably, raising Godwin's Law muddies the rhetorical sludge. Those bent on seeing jackboots at every door will invoke accounts of cowed Germans and herded victims. Those opposed to a policy, an administration, or a statement will insist that if the foe is not linked to the despised predecessor, He has won. So we will be rounded up for FEMA camps or Guantanamo Bay or a religious registry.

Those such as O'Neill, Furedi, or me will be dismissed as naive. That this election, this regime, this leader, this time is unlike any other ever and that we will succumb unless the images and icons remain invoked daily to remind us of what we must never forget. The reduction of those heaps of corpses who endured more than hurt feelings or suspect looks or snide comments, the millions in so many outrages beyond the one we all study at least superficially or see when the reliable enemy is mowed down in a Hollywood blockbuster or Oscar-angled art film or documentary attest to an iconic afterlife, both of those rightfully mourned and the persistence of this facile comparison that cheapens.

Michel Houellebecq's "Submission": Book Review

While the release of this book in its original French will be inevitably tied to the article about its author, Michel Houellebecq, featured in Charlie Hebdo the week of the Parisian murders of its staff and other innocents last January, the novel itself merits attention.

Readers of Houellebecq's previous fiction will recognize familiar elements. The discontent of his early middle-aged, educated, ornery French narrators in Whatever and The Elementary Particles repeats. The unease in {Platform} that lust brings to those with sagging bodies and ebbing desire persists. The longing for an escape from a declining European culture returns after The Possibility of an Island with its utopian fantasy, and aesthetic debates dramatized in The Map and the Territory.

After this newest novel's French publication, critics sought to blame, once again, its satirical author. Inevitably, Soumission entered the bestseller charts in first place. Some on the left regarded its themes as needlessly provocative. Many called them racist, appealing to baser instincts among French nationalists. Taken by English-language audiences at more of a distance, these issues may recede.

If treated as another in a series of Houellebecq's jabs at coddled liberal sensibilities, Submission loses some sting. Houellebecq proves rather, once again, he delights in the novel of ideas. He places his narrators within unbearable situations. We then watch them try to wriggle free. Within a French situation where the thought-police seek to patrol the sensibilities of all who reject secular platitudes as much as they may religious ones, the topics Submission investigates enrich its suggestive title.

Suffering from "andropause," our forty-something narrator encounters the steady decline of literature, values, culture and his libido. The teller of Submission is an expert on J. K. Huysmans, who over a century ago startled an earlier French readership with decadent novels, considered "sodomitical" and Satanic. Like Houellebecq, Huysmans' erudition enhanced his fiction's barbed, bohemian contents. Unlike Houellebecq, Huysmans began a gradual conversion to Catholicism; he eventually lived, if in less than austere style, as a lay oblate attached to a Benedictine monastery. Houellebecq had drafted this novel with a template of a protagonist emulating Huysmans' path; this story becomes in the revised version we have its sub-plot. Meanwhile, the main plot dramatizes French Islamization.

For an acerbic author regarded as unsentimental, Houellebecq begins this novel with a tender, if bitter, homage to the power of literature. It channels for the living the voices of the dead. Directly, by no other means, a reader can enter by a book into the mind of its creator, the spirits of the departed.

The narrator loves this quality. In his dissertation on Huysmans, he sums up an outlook in common with Houellebecq. "Even as he grew to despise the left, he maintained his old aversion to capitalism, money, and anything to do with bourgeois values." The professor avers that "the only thing left to people in their despair was reading," but that solace is chosen by far fewer than in Huysmans' era.

Instead, much of the initial action in this fiction, concerned more with lofty concepts than realism or politics, takes place in languid dialogue or heated exchanges between the narrator and a louche colleague at the University of Paris, Steve. The protagonist spars with him often, in "that odd ritual,. part buggery, part duel" that is "conversation between men." When the teller is jolted enough by the violence breaking out as the far-right spars with Islamic factions during the Presidential primary, the empty rural roadscape he sees, static on the radio, a clerk shot dead at a convenience store, feels less real and more contrived. It is akin to horror as glimpsed in a J.G. Ballard novel, drained of emotions.

After all, Houellebecq detaches himself from his narrator--and through him. He leaves enough of the Huysmans-driven plot to move him along, as he attempts a retreat himself at a Catholic monastery. But this fails. He has no deep contempt for his former "fellow believers" who cling to the Church. Rather, he blames "laicism" and "atheist materialism" for the death rattle of Western European values. This critique carries more weight in France than in the U.S. Despite Lorin Stein's flowing translation, readers of Submission distant from the issues that divided France after the Charlie Hebdo shootings and those limits or liberties of freedom to mock any religion may feel that this novel's impact fades.

What international readers, who may be baffled by the dense if understandable references to French media pundits and political maneuvers, are left with is a more classic contribution to a French model. The narrator who employs satire to comment on his homeland from abroad, reporting from a fabled or foreign land, emerges. As Montesquieu's Persian Letters or Voltaire's fiction transported French concerns to imaginary lands, to sidestep censorship and clerical reaction, so Houellebecq places his nameless narrator within a French polity a few years into the future. In Submission to counter a threat by Marine LePen and National Front, other French parties cast their lot with the Muslims. We hear far too little about what follows in practical terms. This lack weakens the novel's impact. Yet the tale-teller laments, typically, the loss of the ability to admire women, now that so many are veiled.

The indulgence granted such a sly teller of edgy commentary enlivens comparisons between French and Muslim mores. Late in the story, the scholar's supervisor--who has converted to the faith that has bought the Sorbonne with Saudi money and rewarded those faculty who give in--links "woman's shamanism to man, as it is described in The Story of O, and the Islamic idea of man's submission to God." The appeal of bonus brides as recruited from two or three female students from the realm of Islam, who are the few remaining who enroll in literature classes at the University of Paris, beckons the narrator to contemplate joining the favored elite of Muslim converts. Huysmans' path diverges from those 120 years later in this French novel, but Houellebecq and his narrator agree. If he submits to God's call, this dissolute intellectual will find favor in the eyes of the pious, and the well-endowed.

We leave this predicament as the protagonist mulls over his choice. Will he embrace "a chance at a second life with very little connection to the present one?" He admits, "I would have nothing to mourn." Christian France is dying. With the nation under Muslim leadership, in a coalition with the Socialists and a center-right party, such are parliaments in a strange land of the near-future, those who wield power and issue paychecks have changed. At this point, the novel sidles away. Submission chooses to remain chary about the full force of such momentous transitions. It prefers to stay coy, and like the delights of the women hidden behind gowns and veils, it retreats into its own fantasy again. (Amazon US 10-20-15; Spectrum Culture 11-8-15 a few days before the [latest] Parisian massacres.)

"The Machine Stops" ed. Erik Wysocan: Book Review

 

This anthology reprints the well-known 1909 novella by E.M. Forster along with ten contemporary contributions from writers pursuing what Donna Haraway coins as "cyber politics". This concerns the struggle for language against a perfect articulation of its communication. Noise and pollution, as Haraway explains in the preface, represent a joy in the "illegitimate fusions of animal and machine".

Forster's "The Machine Stops" follows Vashti and her son, Kuno, in a future anticipating instant messaging and the Internet. Living underground, humans rely on master machine to meet their needs. Kuno confesses to his mother that he has glimpsed a world above the surface where people live free. But, threatened by the penalty of homelessness, Kuno must accept the omnipotence of the Machine, now worshiped as a deity. Its Mending Apparatus, however, begins to break down, and global chaos ensues. The final sentence of the 12,300 word tale illustrates Forster's command of his prose: "For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky."
 
Unfortunately. the modern entries placed after the novella cannot compare to Forster's eloquence. This Halmos edition lacks any introduction or rationale, other than reprinting a few pages from Haraway's 1991 article "A Cyber Manifesto". The contents from today's authors prove uneven.

One promising section is the story "Letters to the Machine" (2014) by Julieta Arenda, Fia Backstrom and R. Lyon. This experiments with typefaces and self-references to document how humans try to evade, with decreasing success, an omniscient surveillance system. One thinks of the increasing monitoring of electronic and personal communication by employers, governments, spy devices, social media and corporations to apply to this fiction, and it is not far from Panopticon fact at all.

Pedro Neves Marquez applies another emerging technology, 3-D printing, to recyclable gun production. "The Liberator" (2014) invents "assassination markets" for those using these weapons, and extrapolates from open-source codes a realm where primitivism, anarcho-libertarianism and the deep Net fight back against multinationals and the security state. Virtual arenas get sabotaged along with real ones. Ecosystems emerge and the Cargills and Monsantos find themselves outwitted.

"#NoHorizon: We Have Never Been How We Became: A Manifesto" (2012-2014) takes up another rebellion, post-Occupy. Jeff Nagy's rambling speculations roam back into the revolutionary Levellers of England's mid-seventeenth century. He links this dissenting movement to Haraway's methodology. Nagy tries to connect John Milton, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Norbert Wiener and Katherine Hayles along a timeline of how humans confront a mechanical power, and how cybernetics through its challengers may resist this apocalyptic or milennarian takeover. But a postscript, after what Nagy perceives as Occupy's failure, cautions. "Occupy made visible the bars of a certain grid of control even if it did not shake them. That grid has now closed around us again, even more tightly." He reasons: "It never opened but it closed again. That is its logic precisely. There's nothing to see here but everything is visible." Nagy's pronouncements may strike some as gnomic, others as tautological.

These three contributions represent the highlights. Seven other entries failed to match their insights. The placement of an editor's name only at the back of the book appears a half-hearted attempt to convince the reader that these transmissions exist as if clandestine or samidzat missives, needing no mediator's intrusion. But their purpose would have better succeeded if the audience were guided to find connections or ruptures between Forster's fiction and the facts and fiction following it here. (Spectrum Culture 1-12-16)

Eric Cross' "The Tailor and Ansty": Book Review

While Eamon de Valera famously judged |"in its general tendency" this 1941 account as ''indecent," years later, the tone of these stories as told by the titular couple from Muskerry in West Cork feels quaint, conveyed from these believers in the fair folk. I found Eric Cross's editorial voice slightly patronizing, as if he was guiding us to a pair of animatronic figures programmed to speak on command their scripted recital. Still, the content, if you can handle the now-antiquated air of the tales told by Tom Buckley and his wife, Anastasia (Ansty).

In Gougane Barra, the earthy life is recounted, whether of people or of animals. Thus Dev's squeamishness. Ansty plays the more curdled to the less ruffled Tailor her partner. Originally published in the well-known The Bell, as fellow Corkman Frank O'Connor reminisces in his 1964 introduction, this take on the imagined and idealized benefits of rural Irish life resulted in the couple being boycotted while Cross' book was debated and denounced by many in the Irish government.

O'Connor also reminds us that the Tailor had a wider range in his native Irish of expression, and that the English is narrower, if still indicative second-hand of his wide-ranging mind and temperament. I'd say it's livelier for readers now than Peig Sayers' tales of woe, halfway to those parodied by Flann O'Brian in his The Poor Mouth, translated from his own Irish, sending-up such rustic ruminations and raw exaggerations. Classified as a biography "as told to," it stirs up blurred fact and lots of fiction.
(Amazon US 11-4-15)

Bradan agus Salman

Chuala Léna agus mé scríbhneoir cáiliúil an tseachtaine seo caite. Chuaigh muid go dtí ar lar ina gCathair na hÄingeal. Chonaic muidsa Salman Rushdie ag an leabharlann lárnach ansin.

Go nádurtha, tá leabhar nua aige a plé. Ach, d'iarraidh muid ach a fhéiceail air ag ár cathair. Go fírinne, ní raibh breá "Na Veársaí 'Ghaire Ghalar Dubhach" go mór. Shíl mé go raibh sé ró-scaipthe.

Mar sin féin, bhi maith muid ag breathnú Rushdie. D'inis sé dúinn faoi an dith de chaint saor in aisce. Chuir sé i gcoinne 'rabhaidh spreagadh' agus géilleadh na chinsireacht san Eoraip 's Méiricea Thuadh.

Thít sé go leor aimnreachtaí. Mheas se go raibh Bob Dole an-leadránach. Chinn sé Bill Clinton an-deas. agus Seoirse Ö Chluaine an-dathúil, mar shampla...aon iontas.

Níos luaithe, d'ith bradan agus gnocchi ina bialann fineáil, "Industriel" ag 6th agus Grand. D'ól leann dubh-bainne ó Longmont i gColorado. Beidh muid ar ais ann nuair atá againn níos mó ama.

Salmon and Salman

Layne and I heard a famous writer this past week. We went to the downtown Los Angeles. We saw Salman Rushdie at the Central Library there.

Naturally, he had a new book to discuss. But, we wanted to go only to see him in our city. Truthfully, I did not love "The Satanic Verses." I thought it was too scattered.

Nevertheless, we liked watching Rushdie. He told us about the need for free speech. He stood against "trigger warnings" and capitulating to censorship in Europe and North America.

He dropped many names. He thought Bob Dole was very boring. He found Bill Clinton very charming and George Clooney very handsome, for example...no surprises.

Earlier, we ate salmon and gnocchi at a fine restaurant, Industriel, at 6th and Grand. I drank milk stout from Longmont in Colorado. We will return there when we have more time.

Ghrianghraf/Photo: Tá muid ag suí ar bhealach ar ais anseo! We are sitting a long way back here!

Unshackling the liberal arts

Chelsea Manning urges: "Read everything. Absorb everything that is out there and act as your own filter. Hunt down your own answers to questions. This is the only advice that is actually worth anything. If you don't read these things yourself, then you can't say that you truly understand what humanity has done, and where we are going. We can't spend our lives getting spoon-fed all of our information every day and then expect to understand our world. Only then will you understand that people are still hurting and dying in the world around us." In this Paper interview, I suspect his fervent embrace of transhuman cyber-utopia, urged on by "Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst; design duo Metahaven, aka Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk; and Web-activist Jacob Appelbaum." As the introduction explains: "Together, they weigh the strictures and possibilities not just of government, but of technology, culture and gender." No surprise, given Manning's transition from Bradley. I am not as confident as these enthusiasts that more tech equals more following one's bliss. Manning and confreres eagerly anticipate that tech will unshackle us all. Like her, I've seen a lot.

When I started teaching "Technology, Culture, and Society" to my students, all tech and business majors, in 1997, we used a textbook. Microsoft had barely moved from 3.1 to Windows 97, long since a relic. I relied on written notes, an overhead after I typed them, a whiteboard to highlight them, and my own exams to test my students' comprehension. We chose, locally, our text. Later, as colleagues joined me to teach this course, I lobbied successfully for an option for each of us to use our own current events materials and historical documents, to keep ever-changing content relevant.

Those teaching this course thrived. My colleagues enjoyed tailoring materials to their own expertise and the interests of their students. As tech changed and events flowed, so the curriculum for this course changed. Each term, I'd revise my readings into a packet, and tinkering with syllabi was a joy. 

As with Manning, I resist being spoon-fed.. Like processed food, some packaged contents seem appealing, but repeated reliance on lesson plans weakens the recipient and infantilizes the dispenser. I relished, when I chose to teach college and so to earn my Ph.D. first, a career that rewarded liberty.

About a decade ago, that freedom ended. A top-down administration took over. Our campus lost any autonomy. We were told all campuses had to use the same books, follow the same lectures, and conduct the same exams. That way, somehow it was reasoned, students could move between campuses, and then the emerging online mode, seamlessly. Also, we were all monitored as in turn we monitored our students, via a proprietary course platform. Designed by a major academic publisher, it guaranteed we selected its titles first, and those we liked more, even if we could not choose them anymore, were abandoned. Faculty had little input; we were told if we wanted to have a say, we ourselves should design the courses. But what worked for me onsite, a term now that along with landline entered the language to differentiate old from new "modalities" of communication and data transfer, did not work even for my colleague teaching the same course. I valued most our autonomy.

A year ago, we hosted a Career Day for students. I attended and took the same quiz as they did. After narrowing down the options from dozens I found the one that matched me best as #1: autonomy.  As the outlier at an institution where everyone teaches and majors in fields not liberal arts, I may have self-selected myself out of the herd. Apparently, engineers, accountants, and managers follow orders.

I now try to adjust to the new system. Systems are in place that track all of us, when and where we log in and out. A Panopticon. Still, I alternate my own materials, showing videos and generating discussion in-class that then follows through to that mandated online. This is a "capstone" course building on past humanities and social science courses, but these dwindle. "My" literature course, the only one left after the film and science fiction electives were oddly cut--given what I have found the natural interests of visual learners and techies--keeps getting cancelled for lack of interest, tellingly.

The technology text may enchant some, but I generate lessons out of venerable vignettes or late-breaking news. I share them and I elicit them. Gradually, some try to speak up for themselves. Students start to learn from each other, rather than only my lectures. I teach fewer hours in front of a class but many more online. I divide my time between two sites now, and also I must teach online. Those courses enroll double or triple my onsite ones, and the workload is exponentially far higher. I lack the limited modification permitted me onsite, and the syllabi and rapid online pace are daunting.

I reflect on this as again I prepare to teach, the most taught of all my courses, once again. I estimate thousands by now perhaps went through it, and after nearly twenty years surely as many students have taken this than even my composition courses? I used to teach it every session, and sometimes twice. Schedules enabling online enrollment decrease its frequency, but I do like hunting for new videos and I often glean from Facebook and the L.A. and N.Y. Times tech articles and lively links.

One of the supervisors from the top visited us recently. I told her of my experiences after a decade of imposed standardization. I concluded by urging that she and her cohort "trust us enough to teach."

How my plea was received I am unsure. I used to hear from my directors that "they would keep such-and-such in mind" before getting back to me. When they rarely did, I wondered how they forgot. Now into my third decade of college teaching, I come to understand what has been left unsaid.

It can be a grind teaching the same courses over and over, now in only eight weeks, sometimes with no pause between terms. My estimation of self-motivated and grassroots design become all the more embedded as I age, and as I keep at it. In every creative way I can, I long to make my courses personal, and designed not to trap students or myself in a mold, but to liberate us for the humanities.
(Photo credit: search for "autonomy" found this ironic image and slogan c/o HP's latest acquisition.)
(P.S. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre at The Pensive Quill for sharing this on his fine site, 9-14-15.)

Christopher Hitchens' "Arguably": Book Review

I miss Hitchens. I used to look forward to his book reviews in The Atlantic, and when I'd pick up an occasional copy of Vanity Fair, his opinions on whatever he found worthy kept my interest. Even if "Why Women Aren't Funny" in 2007 famously fell flat, in re-reading it within this massive anthology of his journalism from the last period of his life, a more sly sense of him putting us on appears.

He reminds me in this compilation of George Orwell, a forebear to whom he nods often. Like Orwell, he takes on literature, popular culture, current events, history, and politics with equal assurance. I cannot think of a writer addressing a wide if educated audience today his peer when it comes to his breadth. He compares 1984 to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall in its prescience as to how a totalitarian system can exert itself and how a Reformation can erupt. He notes the same nom de guerre employed by Edmund Burke and, of all people, Rosa Luxemburg. As a former Marxist and one who knows how Trots work, he nods to how radicals frequently assume the worst possible motive of an opponent is his or her correct one. He notices how Rebecca West's sentences accumulate reflection as do Paul Scott's, so at the price of verisimilitude, a necessary chance for explanation and reflection unfolds.

Hitchens even connects Hitler's efflorescence to the moth found in the throat of a female victim in The Silence of the Lambs. Such a range merits awe. Hitchens rarely strains for the fancy phrase, but the scope of his exploration of how we think, act, and write deserves acclaim, even if you disagree. He shows deftly how Lincoln shifted the way we use the United States itself, from "are" to "is" to portray its unity after the Civil War. Speaking of war, he ends his introduction to West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon by rallying his own allegiance to stand up for a righteous cause. She was "one of those people, necessary in every epoch, who understood that there are things worth fighting for, and dying for, and killing for." (221) However, in 2007 he seems to regret  his support for the first Gulf War.

"I was among those who thought and believed and argued that this example [of U.S. implementation of a "you-fly-you-die zone" over Iraqi Kurdistan] could, and should, be extended to the rest of the country: this cause became a consuming thing in my life. To describe the ensuing shambles as a disappointment or a failure or even a defeat  would be the weakest statement I could possibly make: It feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of betrayal from which there can be no awakening."(521)

These essays and pieces roam widely. They begin with American politics and history. then English literature, observations on mores and manners, foreign policy, "legacies of totalitarianism," and defenses of free speech as PC-speak inhibits bold journalism. He predicts: "Within a short while,--this is a warning--the shady term 'Islamophobia' is going to be smuggled through our customs. Anyone accused of it will be politely but firmly instructed to shut up, and to forfeit the constitutional right to criticize religion. By definition, anyone accused in this way will also be implicitly guilty." He finds presciently in an attempt to alert the world to the danger of letting fanatics shut down the Danish press for cartoons judged offensive in 2007, that "American Muslim leaders" are canny. He cites the NY Times in explaining how PR spin is spun. ''They have 'managed to build effective organizations and achieve greater integration, acceptance and economic success than their brethren in Europe have. They portray the cartoons as part of a wave of global Islamophobia and have encouraged Muslim groups in Europe to use the same term.' In other words, they are leveraging worldwide Islamic violence to drop a discreet message into the American discourse." (706)

While inevitably some entries feel lightweight, or seem already dated as to once-current events they may lack the impact of his more detailed critiques, the collection rewards one's attention. Hitchens strives to answer his critics fairly and patiently, and he keeps alive his measured wit along with a winning sense of his own failings as he struggles to make sense of our world. (Amazon US 4/5/15)

Bernie Sanders at the L.A. Sports Arena

 

Only two domestic-born movements have compelled me in my own life enough to volunteer. In this blog, I have written about my participation in Occupy LA nearly four years ago. Last night, my wife convinced me to accompany her to help out at the rally for Bernie Sanders at the L.A. Sports Arena.

I had only been there a few times. Maybe a circus when I was a kid or with a kid or two, in my meat-munching decades, before I could no longer visit either circuses or zoos.  I attended a graduation held there once for where I teach. My former colleague and I sat high in the back of the bleachers and chatted the whole time, such was the roar of the voices in the cavernous acoustic dome. It's now woebegone, bought as the Coliseum by USC but otherwise little used for much, and no pro sports, for the billionaires want their own stadia, their own branded monuments to greed a mile away.

This is what Sanders opposes. He spoke an hour on the dot to a fervent crowd. My wife and I got folks to register for the mailing list, and among the 213 volunteers who showed up on little notice at 2:30, we were happily a diverse crowd, although one you'd have seen at Occupy or any lefty rally. Still, the vast "demographics" of the SoCal region were represented, and unions, students both shaggy and preppy, frat boys and mohawked gender-benders, Latino families and black activists, people fresh from dressing up for their day job and plenty of paunchy folks in "Feel the Bern" t-shirts rushed to hear him. A genial crowd, and as the LA. Times reported, one stretching back to the Coliseum itself.

Only white t-shirts were left to sell. The organizer lacked a portable microphone and many could not hear him. We ran out of stickers to give to supporters. Only xeroxed b/w handouts in tiny squares cut by hand told the curious about where to go online to learn more or volunteer. But we were informed that all the domains had been bought up, so somehow, those so moved would find an online Bernie. 

My wife and I discussed on the way home, caught in heavy traffic due to the rally, the prospects of what she termed "an exercise in futility." Long before she could vote, she cherished the McGovern '72 jersey she still had. Apropos, I had not voted but once, in '92, for a winning President, and she had a few more notches in her belt as she supported the Democratic candidate in the past three winning elections, whereas I, after the Greens in '94 qualified for our state's ballot, grudgingly backed them.

Not that I am thrilled about everything on the blue side of the ticket. My own left-libertarian leanings clash with a very strict view on immigration legal as well as illegal, tilted if at all towards Canada and Australia's restrictions for age, occupation, and education, rather than our endless chain migration and reunification, which only to me encourages people to enter less qualified for contributing practically to our society and economy; it also meshes with my environmental views and my ZPG bent. Qualities likely to be found hardly at all in my peers. As I say, I'm the only electric car owner who did not vote for our incumbent. Still, I cannot wait for a perfect candidate, and we all compromise when voting.

Getting back to Bernie, I noted the crowd cheered loudly for the young woman speaking of her success who came here "sin papeles," and his platform naturally includes this reform. He also wants to overturn Citizens United, to another loud round of applause. I wondered how the unions who thronged to see him speak would handle that; for me I reckon they and the vexing pension issue do cloud the issue of budgets. I also speculated many of the young Latinos might have been encouraged to attend by their UTLA teachers, for extra credit in civics. If so, it'd nonetheless made a great lesson in participation and spectacle. But if he won, if that is, he'd likely take the income from the fat-cats, in democratic-socialist leaning ways, and redistribute it to make public colleges free, make campaigns publicly funded, and to eliminate overseas tax shelters and the insane military spending we accrue.

He gave his standard stump speech. It was clear, as he inserted along "my home state of Vermont" (although his accent verified his Brooklyn birth), whenever he mentioned L.A. or California. He spoke about five minutes per topic as enumerated below, and it was well-organized and accessible.

His policies raised in me no surprise. Here they are for convenience. He got a thunderous response for berating a government that locks up a kid for pot possession but lets off Wall Street bankers, and certainly this 73-year-old's populism resounded in the arena of 17,500 and 10k more outside.
 
Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, reminds readers in the same paper, after two women purporting to be from Black Lives Matter prevented him from speaking in Seattle last Sunday: "Sanders has charm, but the Jewish socialist transplant from Brooklyn has spent his political life in a state that has only 7,500 blacks. He lacks the vocabulary to appeal beyond the white left. Meanwhile, the black left, an indispensable voting bloc, has no standard-bearer in the primaries and is clearly angry about it. Clinton's most comfortable in the role of elitist technocrat, which is great for fundraising from Wall Street and wooing Beltway journalists, but it's not so useful for wooing voters in a populist environment. Thanks to her husband, she still has goodwill among African Americans. But she lacks the charisma, passion or personal story to excite either the black left or the white left. The woman who left the White House 'dead broke' makes five times the average American's annual income per speech." That is the next challenge, even if Bernie took pains as did the volunteer coordinator to avoid any mention of her or Democrat oligarchs, while castigating of course the GOP.

During a lull before the speech, I read a few pages of Raoul Vaneigem's The Book of Pleasures. This former Situationist refuses to vote in his native Belgium, "In the speaker, listen for the distant echo which declares against him." I suppose that echo last night was not only GOP or HRC, but the few who wonder, as I often do, the anarchist slogan "If voting would change anything, it'd be illegal."

Realistically it's a long shot for Sanders. Pundits keep warning he will hit a ceiling of progressive support and stall. I fear a Ron Paul parallel, from an upstart who channels and crests discontent but who fails to garner delegates; also, a party to whom a fringe contender is anathema compared to a Romney or a Bush, or, again, a Clinton. In the Huffington Post, Michael Brenner cautions an earlier prefiguration: "Sanders might be playing Gene McCarthy to Biden's Robert Kennedy in 1968. Biden is no Bobby Kennedy; but then Hillary is no LBJ." Funny as that was the first election I recall, and my parents debating Nixon and Humphrey's chances, and watching the death reports on MLK and RFK on the black and white tv in our blue-collar house. No wonder I grew up cynical about change.

I have, as I mentioned, rarely or never seen a winning candidate, in my childhood or after I came of age, whom I could trust. I recognized early on Bill Clinton's appeal. In the first Dem debate in the '92 race, I sensed this unknown (to me) would win, even as he was dwarfed among seven contenders. I never, all the same, trusted him very much. By his second campaign, I had tired of his wiliness. His wife, with her fixed stewardess mien and dead eyes (I have heard of two people who met our current president, and they both told me he smiles without his eyes going along with it), fails to fool me.

In Sanders, beneath bluster he keeps his own tempered, diplomatic caution. We were instructed as we volunteered, not to speak of, let alone ill of, the presumed Democratic winner. Bernie went on stage, as his press release verifies, "in a hoarse shout,: to proclaim that 'this country belongs to all of us and not a handful of billionaires. We need a grassroots political revolution.'” I am not sure such rhetoric will withstand the fury with which HRC and the DNC will inflict upon him soon, but for now, as she bides her time, Sanders is making himself hoarse berating those of the other party who claim to defend family values, while, like Hillary herself even if it is not spoken, being funded by plutocrats.

Emotional rescue

My last post covered a Connecticut high school teacher's forced resignation after a student complaint over an explicit Allen Ginsberg poem chosen by a classmate for in-class discussion. Is the situation any different when college courses come under the same scrutiny? When I raised this on Facebook, some asserted that those in their late teens were in AP English, still under the choices the teacher made for them, and despite the aegis of UConn over that material for credit, they were a captive audience. So, consider Edward Schlosser's cri de coeur after nine years at a "midsized state school."

In Vox, he titles his essay "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." (Thanks to an Lisa Flowers for this notice). He starts by noting a shift since 2009. Back then, someone objected to what was perceived as the professor's liberal bias. His supervisor heard him out, and the matter was filed away, and no repercussions reverberated. But now, identity politics reigns. "The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best."

Schlosser tells us that recently, "I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We've seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on." If Edward Said or Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair offend the reader or hearer, they are expunged, lest complaints result in the firing or non-rehiring of what, after all, has grown to 3/4 of American faculty, those lacking protection of or promotion to tenure.

The climate has changed. Racism or ideological factors, rightness and wrongness of ideas in the curricula, dominated earlier complaints. Now, the sensitivity of the student's emotional state matters.

The author locates this transition not so much in the manufactured "outrage" (as I put it) dominating press coverage of incidents as to hyper-sensitive, paranoid students and campus "conduct codes."
He credits the conflation of cultural studies and popular media writers in the media. They desire to "democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom." They peddle a facile "adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience."

After citing some experts, he notes how exaggerated attention to passing trifles becomes. (Consider how much the purported gender roles of the latest Avengers flick are dissected, or I'd add if he does not, today's breathless headlines of Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner's "courage" or a Duggar's disgrace vs., say, the challenges ahead re: global warming given recent, depressing data, or the enduring collusion between bankers and politicians.) "Personal experience and feelings aren't just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it's no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses." As attacks on philosophy or physics by those claiming concepts invented by tired old men express only Eurocentric shortcomings, we cower.  "All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away."

See the article for evidence of this, albeit via Twitter, that Schlosser shares (or he did until the woman complained of threats--that proof has since been removed, although it helped his thesis). This reductive regression reminds me a bit of Alan Sokol's send-up two decades ago in his po-mo hoax to Social Theory. Schlosser reveals his bonafides: "We can't overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn't exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard." Yet he admits, logically, how "we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus." Conservative Catholic critic Anthony Esolen agrees when he states that we cannot equate the ethnic or racial makeup of a person with who he or she is, beyond labels.

I doubt if Schlosser and Esolen would find a lot in common, but if Schlosser as he claims does try to balance liberal with conservative voices in his assignments, I'd hope they could find common ground.
"If we are to know that human being, we should not begin with race or class or “gender,” that category invented by social critics who avert their eyes, prim and prying at once, from the frank and plain reality of sex. We certainly cannot end there. If I say, 'Who is John?' you cannot answer me correctly by saying that he is six feet tall, 150 pounds, with Italian and Irish ancestry on his mother’s side and African American and Latino ancestry on his father’s side, with a family income of such and such a year, voting in such a pattern, living on Maple Street and selling insurance. These are all things about John, but they are not John, the man. It does violence to the man to reduce him to such categories. It is an act of contempt for his humanity. It reduces him, not so that we may get to know him, but so that we can manipulate facts about him while not getting to know him at all. It is a study in subhumanity." So Esolen challenges, in his riposte to the race, gender, class theory overtaking all.

Schlosser tacks firmly to the left. But he accepts that attacking the right, or those who have preceded us and who live among us as the establishment, still have their own place at the discussion. Why push them away, to distance them further, in the spurious pursuit of illogical presumption? In conclusion, he admits: "Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything." I have written about this issue before and continue to because it weighs more heavily against those of us committed to the liberal arts, those who pass on the humanities in a career-driven, bottom-line world.

We are threatened from above by STEM-propelled reforms that seek often, if unintentionally, to shunt aside the "soft" subjects. We are weakened around us by theory-obsessed pedagogues who replace book-learning and critical thinking from close readings and informed discussions with cant and slant. We are faced by those enrolling with us who often have trouble decrypting the clouded messages of what canonical as well as radical texts and sources convey from thousands of years of human thought. Against this, and growing semi-literacy when it comes to print and visual media, we strive to focus on big questions and tough issues, evading easy solutions or prescribed "PC-correct" content.

"Reading Allen Ginsberg, Talking Civil Rights"

Award-Winning Teacher Fired for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem: so writes David Freedlander in the Daily Beast. As I have taught Ginsberg to a diverse cohort  in college and met with varying reactions of disgust, resignation, and acceptance, I wanted to share this article about this memorable lesson. "The poem the student discovered and brought in was 'Please Master,' an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: 'Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.'"As Freedlander places this in context of Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, he also wonders if part of the crackdown is due to discomfort with the gay message, rather than the act itself.

The district ruled that David Olio, a nineteen-year veteran of the South Windsor CT system, showed “egregiously poor professional judgment,” by reading the poem aloud in the AP English class. Many of the students were 17 and 18 years old, some taking this course in conjunction with UConn for college credit. While this, as friends on FB have countered, does not excuse the fact that students had no choice but to listen to the poem, I wondered if the AP context mattered--I got the reply that it did not, and that this showed unwise judgment on Olio's behalf. What would you have done? Hurriedly suggest another poem might be discussed instead? Asked the class for feedback? Refused to talk about it? Those reactions in turn, given our tremulous times, ironically might have singled out Olio as intolerant. Well, one student had complained that he or she could not focus on a test in a another class the day after this poem had been discussed in the AP course. Three weeks later, Olio had to resign.

Freedlander avers: "to call Olio’s reading of the poem a mistake—a poem a student brought to class and asked to be read—is to say the reading of a work by one of the towering figures of 20th-century American poetry is out of bounds. 'Please Master' was written in 1968, just before the Democratic convention in Chicago would erupt in riots. Ginsberg had already been put on trial for obscenity in 1957 for his poem 'Howl,' which with its casual depiction of gay sex and drug use, and lines like 'The asshole is holy,' was considered far outside the bounds of what was considered good taste. A judge, however, ruled that the poem had 'redeeming social importance' and was unlikely to 'deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.' I doubt, having taught "Howl," having shown the innovative (if widely panned) film adaptation, that Allen seduces anyone--at least on the page. His portrayal by James Franco may, but many of my students cringed.

Helen Vendler, one of the nation's leading poetry critics, wrote on Olio's behalf: “Given what students are already exposed to via TV and film, Ginsberg’s poem, which concerns a well-known form of abjection (whether heterosexual or homosexual) reveals nothing new.” Courtney King, a former student and now a planning commissioner, puts it more bluntly. "I mean, if there are parents in town who think their teenagers don’t know what a blow job is, they are sorely mistaken.” She sums it up: “In defense of this whole imbroglio, at least it got people in this town reading Ginsberg.”

My blog title comes from a lyrical fragment I heard back in high school. It was sung by a musician who had an early song banned by the BBC in the late 60's for the f-verb. Al Stewart's "Post WWII Blues" in appropriately Dylanesque homage, from his 1974 song-cycle Past, Present and Future, first exposed me to Christine Keeler, Nostradamus, Lord Grey's phrase about the lights going out in Europe as WWI rose, Warren Harding's middle name, and the Soviet tank battles on the steppes. It's much better than his hits that dominated easy-listening AOR in that decade, be assured. The image caption, expanded, cites Ginsberg: "To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province, your own consciousness." But not too provincial, Connecticut.

Jeremy Hammond's radical morality as a hacker

Edward Snowden and Chelsea/ Bradley Manning are names we recognize. Excoriated as traitors, celebrated as patriots, these two whistleblowers from within the belly of the beast can at least be credited for the NSA's decision this week to cut back some of its phone surveillance. If not for WikiLeaks and related revelations, the Obama administration would have gone on pretending that hope and change created a less draconian governmental presence, and that all was well post-2008 with us, if not exactly post-9/11 threat.

A third name, to me, was new. Chris Hedges in a chapter from the well-titled Wages of Rebellion: the Moral Imperative of Revolt asks: "Why should we be so impoverished that so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?" Not exactly pithy words to fit on a rebel flag or even a bumper sticker, but this issue cannot be reduced to soundbites or slogans. It is vast; it impels.

In 2013, Hedges narrates, he watched in court as Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to the full ten years his charges could earn. "Hammond, then age twenty-six, released to WikiLeaks, Rolling Stone, and other publications some 5 million emails in 2011 from the Texas-based company Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor." Like Manning, Snowden, and the MSM-reviled Julian Assange, Hammond sought to expose what the State wants to hide, in the name of supposed national security.

"The 5 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring, and surveillance of protesters and dissidents on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And perhaps most importantly, the information provided chilling evidence that antiterrorism laws are being routinely used by the state to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none." Hedges explains that for hacking, this long U.S. sentence was one of the toughest ever.

"It was wildly disproportionate to the crime—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience that championed the public good by exposing abuses of power by the government and a security firm. But the excessive sentence was the point." The judge herself has ties to firms that were exposed, and her ruling seems to be compromised by her vendetta, as she appears to have used her power to abuse him.

Hedges asks, aloud, what many wonder: "Why should we respect a court system, or a governmental system, that does not respect us? Why should we abide by laws that protect only criminals like Wall Street thieves while leaving the rest of us exposed to abuse? Why should we continue to have faith in structures of power that deny us our most basic rights and civil liberties? Why should we be impoverished so that the profits of big banks, corporations, and hedge funds can swell?"

Hedges portrays Hammond as a working-class radical, with a punk-rock father who in a Western Chicago suburb had to raise twins alone after their mother abandoned them at three. Hammond picked up a talent for computers early on, and a passion for subversive, non-party politics. A different heartland machine than that which maneuvered Hillary or Obama into the White House, surely.

"Hammond, six feet tall and wiry, defined himself when we met in jail as 'an anarchist communist.' He said he had dedicated his life to destroying capitalism and the centralized power of the corporate state and that he embraced the classic tools of revolt, including mass protests, general strikes, and boycotts. And he saw hacking and leaking as critical tools of this resistance, to be used not only to reveal the truths about systems of corporate power but to “disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.”

Once the FBI's #1 most wanted cybercriminal, Hammond explained his motivation to Hedges from his imprisonment at the FCI Greenville, Illinois, facility. 'I saw what Chelsea Manning did,' he said when we spoke, seated at a metal table in a tiny room reserved for attorney-client visits. 'Through her hacking, she became a contender, a world changer. She took tremendous risks to show the ugly truth about war. I asked myself, If she could make that risk, shouldn’t I make that risk? Wasn’t it wrong to sit comfortably by, working on the websites of Food Not Bombs, while I had the skills to do something similar? I too could make a difference. It was her courage that prompted me to act.'”

Hammond told Hedges how he strove to attain “'leaderless collectives based on free association, consensus, mutual aid, self-sufficiency and harmony with the environment.' It is essential, he said, that all of us work to cut our personal ties with capitalism and engage in resistance that includes 'mass organizing of protests, strikes, and boycotts,' as well as hacking and leaking, which are 'effective tools to reveal ugly truths of the system or to disrupt/destroy these systems entirely.'" But what if the system fights back, as it always does? Hammond knows Chicago history, as at Haymarket in 1887.

Hedges famously criticized some who wanted confrontation at Occupy Wall Street. I found it noteworthy that he allowed at length here Hammond to have his say to the contrary. "Hammond said he was not interested in a movement that 'only wanted a ‘nicer’ form of capitalism and favored legal reforms, not revolution.” He said he did not support what he called a 'dogmatic nonviolence doctrine' held by many in the Occupy movement, describing it as 'needlessly limited and divisive.' He rejected the idea of protesters carrying out acts of civil disobedience that they know will lead to arrest. 'The point,' he said, 'is to carry out acts of resistance and not get caught.' He condemned the 'peace patrols'— units formed within the Occupy movement that sought to prohibit acts of vandalism and violence by other protesters, most often members of the Black Bloc—as 'a secondary police force.'”

"Furthermore, Hammond dismissed the call by many in Occupy not to antagonize the police, whom he characterized as 'the boot boys of the one percent, paid to protect the rich and powerful.' He said such a tactic of nonconfrontation with the police ignored the long history of repression by the police in attacking popular movements, as well as the 'profiling and imprisonment of our comrades.' He went on: 'Because we were unprepared, or perhaps unwilling, to defend our occupations, police and mayors launched coordinated attacks driving us out of our own parks.'" I posted on this blog the photos of the LAPD in hazmat gear, giant trucks destroying the Occupy LA site and I am not sure, given that department's record in dealing with urban protest, if armed defense would be true defense.

Hedges had critiqued Black Bloc, while Hammond champions it. “'I fully support and have participated in Black Bloc and other forms of militant direct action,' he said. 'I do not believe that the ruling powers listen to the people’s peaceful protests. Black Bloc is an effective, fluid, and dynamic form of protest. It causes disruption outside of predictable/controllable mass demonstrations through unarrests, holding streets, barricades, and property destruction. Smashing corporate windows is not violence, especially when compared to the everyday economic violence of sweatshops and "free trade." Black Bloc seeks to hit them where it hurts, through economic damage. But more than smashing windows, they seek to break the spell of "law and order" and the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves.” This smacks to me of rhetoric, but underneath, there lurks a call to real liberty. I sympathize with this perspective, but part of me, however cowed, seems to admit its futility. There always seems, as the Irish situation reveals, a spy in the revolutionary ranks, an agent provocateur.

Facing his sentence, Hammond spoke: “The acts of civil disobedience that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life. I hacked into dozens of high-profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice—and to bring the truth to light." And here, a bit freed of phrases he repeated earlier, I sense an honest, truly "direct action."


The FBI used a hacker to trap Hammond, keeping back doors open so the agency could track Hammond and watch him progress in his exposure. Hammond pled guilty, but he wonders why the corporations and entities responsible for the crimes of the State and of Capital get off free. He claims after his prison stint that nobody should be incarcerated. I think of some madmen and unhinged women behind bars, but perhaps in his anarchist vision, alternative treatment of facilities might be envisioned. For now, he encourages non-cooperation, non-capitalism, and sustained resistance.

I tried to excerpt more here from Hedges’ article. But after I pasted the penultimate paragraph above, my net went haywire. Google’s blog platform froze and then the characters went backwards. The Salon site blared a commercial embedded for State Farm Insurance. Microsoft, where I tried to copy this post so I could edit it, at first refused to allow me to transfer any more of the Hedges column.

I close this, then, prematurely, while wondering at the connivance of the system Hammond fights to fight back, somehow occluded, against even those like me who attempt to disseminate his struggle. I urge you to visit the original interview with Hammond, and to spread the good word and good fight.

Hades and Proserpina

Six weeks ago, I commented in "Free Speech Can Be Scary" about "safe spaces" and the growing inability of certain college students to handle challenges to their worldview, identity, and psyche. Today, I found in my FB feed from an Irish colleague this. She shares my caution that particular elements may well set off sensitive responses, but that education for adults demands they take risks. Apparently, some at Columbia fear, again, the invasion of a student's mindset, based on tolerance and sensitivity.

An op-ed in the student paper summed up a young woman's reaction to scenes of rape in her assigned reading. These upset her, as "a survivor of sexual assault." The article explained how "Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background." Hades' rape of Proserpina, like many episodes in Ovid, is violent, but surely, many passages of beauty also linger.

I share the image of Bernini. If the mythological context is known by the viewer, violence may arise. If not, this might be taken as erotic bliss, foreplay and seduction captured in unforgettable marble. This tension, for me, might better enliven and enrich a classroom discussion or writing prompt, than a fearful rush to eliminate any depiction of nudity or sexuality from my syllabus or a student's view. As Scott Timberg sums this up in Salon: "Why start protecting students from Ovid in a TMZ world?"

To me, "like so many texts in the Western canon" is its own touchy trigger. How much of the humanities and social sciences can be taught and examined if we fear the content? Do we bowdlerize the readings, so as to censor offending passages? Twice when I showed one of many, I recall, "R-rated" features in my Literature and Film course, some Christian students asked to be excused. I was told by my supervisors that I had to grant them this, and I had to come up with an alternate assignment to meet their needs. Further, as another professor I knew had to do, disruptive content itself might be removed, unless the material had no substitute, or there was a way the course guidelines could be met without the specific example. Say, Huck Finn was assigned, but one might, say, replace it with a slave narrative, or an historical account that lacked the n-word trigger event.

Once I taught that novel to a predominantly black enrollment, at another college. As the Net was barely up, and as shortcuts were lacking for hard work, to their credit, they read it but lacked much enthusiasm. One woman loved the Grangerford episode, but for the sappy eulogies that Twain parodied. My gentle efforts to convince her that these were satire failed utterly. I am not sure if it was me, the content in American Literature (which I made very multicultural while also integrating the canon), or the fact they attended one course after another in a group, after work at Bell. Maybe they were tired of each other after so long. Perhaps I seemed elitist, even if I'm from a low-enough "income background" to have received Pell Grants. Among those "of color" of any tinge, the humanities, whittled from a Norton Anthology, must daunt many business and management majors.

That connects with my other posts about a decline of liberal arts. In a Twitter age, we lack attention for stamina. I was told by a dean that the average attention span of a student is 7 minutes, and that at least every 15-20 minutes, we need in the classroom to shuffle it and them about. Like kindergarten?
(Image: Hades and Proserpina, Bernini.)

"Anything to Say?"

Italian sculptor Davide Dormino unveiled three of his statues in Berlin's Alexanderplatz.They depict Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, all vilified in the U.S. by many of my fellow citizens and nearly all of those who claim to represent me as leaders in our government and military. “They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth,” Dormino succinctly states. The piece, titled, "Anything to Say?" invites our participation and perpetuation.

At the Free Thought Project, Jay Syrmopolous notes: "The artwork is not only an ode to the courage of these three whistleblowers, but also serves as a call to citizens to take a stand, as the three are standing on chairs with a fourth empty chair next to them." As this article mentions, it reminds me that a month before, New York City police removed within an hour a statue of Snowden. I think a hologram projection of him was, however, beamed onto the vacant pedestal, an eerie representation.

I'm not much for statues or pedestals. I've always had an iconoclastic streak. But I do, as a teacher of the humanities, appreciate the busts and monuments and public places that do dignify people, past and present, who bring more dignity and less hatred to our world--and promote that among ourselves.

Librarians Strike Back vs. the Evil NSA Empire

Well, The Nation's headline isn't as dramatic, but it does summon up the nature of the battle. Defying time, the May 25th issue is already out, and Zoe Carpenter reports on ""Librarians vs. NSA". My friend and anti-censorship activist Carrie McIntyre posted this on FB, so I was pleased to see it as the cover story. The admissions of Edward Snowden, so well if teasingly documented in Citizenfour, continue to embarrass and confront our government. Whether Bush's GOP or Obama's Dems, the post-9/11 security state is rotten. I champion those brave enough to expose its suppression and to unveil its surveillance. After Snowden and Chelsea Manning, the ability of sympathizers to uncover abuse will surely have been curtailed, but at least we have these insiders who alerted us to the evil, imposed in the name of safety.

I've wondered in my public library if patrons are safe online or in what they check out. Carpenter reports: "Under the Patriot Act, the government can demand library records via a secret court order and without probable cause that the information is related to a suspected terrorist plot. It can also block the librarian from revealing that request to anyone. Nor does the term 'records' cover only the books you check out; it also includes search histories and hard drives from library computers." I know working for an educational institution that our privacy code does not cover any federal investigation. Our government has total power over what it can demand from any of us.

So, what hope do we have for privacy, against unlawful searches and seizures, and for the 1st Amendment? After 9/11, allegations that plotters used public libraries to plan led to a crackdown. The Patriot Act followed suit. "Section 215 allows the FBI to request “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorism investigation, without having to show probable cause that the 'thing' is actually connected to a terrorism suspect. The provision applied to library circulation records, patron lists, Internet records, and hard drives, and it prohibited any library worker who received such a request from discussing it with anyone." Carpenter reports on what mirrors what I've been told in my institution.

Social Justice Bullies

My son and I were discussing a professor at his experimental liberal arts alma mater. She taught a feminist comedy course. She admitted she was open to any humor, but then she denied that rape could ever be funny. For her and her students, she insisted no humor could be found in that action.

Then my son and I joined my wife, and his classmates and me, to watch an Amy Schumer episode that my wife, who'd seen her onstage recently with her female friends, liked. It has gotten a lot of attention for the "last f-able day" actresses (hey, I like that word) commemorate their transition in one skit. But the one preceding it, parodying Friday Night Lights, is funnier: "Football Town Nights."

Even that po-faced and cynically PC-"outrage" clickbait-generating site Salon liked this skit. So that may be progress. The point is, my family and my son's friends from said college, male and female, gathered to watch what their professor judged as the one topic that was forbidden to any comic's repertoire. Not to belabor the point, but Schumer's specialty is the queasy and unspoken, made sexual. She confronts her mostly female audiences with this honesty--and she finds laughs in it.

Aristotolis Orginos the past April 8th at Medium speaks for the generation closer to my sons and their classmates. I am not sure how many of them find laughs in Amy Schumer, but they have been schooled, at least at colleges were Orginos or my sons went, in meticulously parsing any utterance according to strictures which call out any supposed or real, conscious or accidental, "privilege"-claim.

He examines claims of a campus "rape culture," he analyzes the factoid promoted that insists 1:5 women will be sexually assaulted during their university studies, and he reminds us of Orwell's Newspeak as promoted by the media (even if he leaves out Salon). He concludes: "Those who need to hear this message will probably respond that I am 1. too privileged to understand 2. tone-policing the oppressed (and that I shouldn’t tell the oppressed how to treat their oppressors) and 3. really just a closet racist/sexist in a liberal’s clothing." After four years at NYU, he's heard it all before. But, he moves forward to call on his audience to be less timid in speaking up about another type of abuse.

"The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about — one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy — is not admirable." This form of ad hominem attack, Orginos emphasizes, spreads intellectual dishonesty.

He wraps it up by comparing "separate but equal" to the Left's call for "safe spaces." "But the fact of the matter is — anyone unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with under the moral protection of liberalism and social justice are not liberals, are not social justice advocates, and are not social justice warriors; they are social justice bullies."

Greg Lukianoff on April 16th at the Huffington Post criticizes Garry Trudeau. Doonesbury's creator, speaking of privilege, carries a lot himself. Descended from the Dutch founders of New York, prep-school and Yale '70, he emerged from this background to satirize the conservatives, as not one of them, the voice of the hippies as they moved like him into the Me Decade and beyond. Trudeau's comic always struck me, like much of Jon Stewart's on Comedy Central, or shows like MASH, as smug. (However, to its credit, Inside Amy Schumer is also on that network. Just as Fox Network can be edgy too!) Even if Stewart is but a year younger than me, most who champion this orthodoxy that Orginos challenges seem either quite a bit older--as with Trudeau and his hippies, or as with the millennials, quite a bit younger than me.  I guess Schumer's right in the middle, more than a decade older than my sons, two decades younger than me. Although I'm five weeks separated in birth from Obama, I ally with another voice, closer still. Ricky Gervais and I share the same birth date/year.

Gervais also takes on those who claim to act one way and secretly get away with being another. This two-faced nature enlivens his own characters, but it reminds me too of those in power from my generation, if Obama counts, and those from Trudeau's, such as the Clintons. A frequent dissenter to these political powers (and their court jesters Trudeau once, Stewart now) is the conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat. His April 17th column, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege," cites Trudeau's defense of Islam against those who dared to mock it. For they were “punching downward ... attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.

Misattributed to Voltaire, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" still seems good advice. (Even if a variant of this as documented there comes from a source that I doubt few who cite this phrase on the Net would, thus informed, and chastened, affirm.) What Christopher Hitchens predicted when the "Danish cartoons" incited violence has come to pass: any one speaking out against Islamism, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has from first-hand experience, is ostracized.

Demonstrating this reaction, and blaming the victim who blamed others' victimization, six writers declined to attend a recent PEN award for Charlie Hebdo. After quoting various dissenters among the prominent authors, a NYT piece concluded with a particularly credible source. “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” [Salman] Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”

How "powerless" or "disenfranchised" can a significant portion, say 12%? of Muslims, be? That totals hundreds of millions out of 1.2 billion worldwide, plus non-Muslim sympathizers. If they're a "minority," so are Catholics like Douthat, a declining billion out of seven billion, by the way. As no religion worldwide comprises a solid majority in this tallying, what's to claim? Douthat continues: "Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” For: "That phrase, and the critique it implies of 'Je Suis Charlie' solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first 'identify the bearer of privilege,' then 'hold the privilege-bearer responsible.'”

This circles back not only to Origis, but to Schumer. She deflates the force of the rape joke by her parody, as it's repeated in such doggedly stupid terms by such simpletons it loses its hurt. Similar perhaps to how the n-word has deflected racism by those allowed to use it or reclaim it from within their community, or the use of "queer" from within that community (or "Jesuit" for that matter way back!) the subversion and deployment of coded humor by its victims made standard-bearers changes the way the larger community--even if they aren't supposed to be in on the joke or twist--responds.