Ross Douthat's "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics": Book Review

No, the venerable (and atheist) L.A. punk band does not figure in this learned recounting of how accommodationalists of both major Christian versions, evangelicals, conservative Catholics, and Mainline Protestants have multiplied and dwindled over the past few decades in America. But Ross Douthat strives for a punchy presentation of data which threaten to weigh down his pages. As the token Catholic/ conservative New York Times pundit, his columns benefit from his pithy remarks.

How does Douthat manage the shift to a long-form format? I felt very early on that this unfolded as if a dutiful, well-researched, but rather by-the-numbers tallying of the bull and bear markets as applied to Christian America's gains and losses, among the varying denominations and recent "para-church" endeavors. While I admit I was being educated, as a reader, I wondered if the pace would pick up.

Bad Religion begins with Douthat's refinement of his subtitle. He's not celebrating the demise of faith. His title refers to "the slow-motion collapse of traditional Christianity and the rise of a variety of destructive pseudo-Christianities in its place." (3) The past fifty years finds the orthodox Catholic and Protestant bulwarks eroding, having "entered a state of near-terminal decline." The churches connected most to the past fade; the elite abandons its at least measured sympathy for Christian ideas. Hostility or indifference, as surely this former editor of The Atlantic knows, characterizes this culture.

While the U.S. remains an outlier in its high rates of reported belief among the "advanced" nations, a growing segment of its Christian majority, as it weakens overall in numbers, waters down traditional theology. Conservative or liberal, these factions appeal to the political and pop-cultural marketers. Often "spiritual" without being "religious," some seek a wider set of options for faith. Others distort, in Douthat's estimation, what has been the accepted dogmas and doctrines of conventional churches.

Neither conservatives nor "their secular antagonists" (4) recognize this drift. The religious right blames all flaws on explicitly anti-Christian elements. Secular stalwarts denigrate every form of belief as equally foolish or fanatical. Douthat explores those enclaves of our nation where teachings of Christ "have been warped into justifications for solipsism and anti-intellectualism, jingoism and utopianism, selfishness and greed." (4) Here, neither papal encyclicals nor New Atheists are perused.

For a hundred pages, Douthat takes us through a vanished world of post-war confidence in religion, which fifty-or-so years ago began to implode as accommodationists hastened reforms which wound up, for many believers, leaving them to wonder "why show up on Sunday after all" if the ecumenical denominations earnestly insisted that deep down they were all the same, and that divisive details overcome were all that was needed to satisfy and stimulate the faithful. Yet the accommodationists in Mainline Protestant and Vatican II Catholicism almost immediately found their pews emptying, as the disaffected rejected religion, preferred spirituality, or most tellingly, defected to the evangelicals.

Douthat, writing in 2012, reminds those keen to denigrate evangelical and Catholic voters that now there is no "Catholic bloc." That broke up under Bill Clinton. Both Catholics and evangelicals span the range of income and professions as Americans on average. They both edged ahead, by the 1990s, when it comes to income and education. Long derided as the backward bullies of the rural heartland in the Midwest and South, evangelicals now are likely to fill the megachurches of Sun Belt and Mountain West suburbs and exurbs. While Catholics have only Latino immigration to thank that their totals have not dipped more, a tenth of all Americans have left that Church; these departed would be the country's second-largest faith cohort, if definitions were tinkered with. Evangelicals hold at about 20%. Douthat does not harp on his fact: evangelicals accept "limited inerrancy" rather than slavishly literal readings of the bible which fundamentalists cling to. This means that while science in scripture may be accepted as outdated, that the transcendent truth of God's will remains forever without fault.

"He who marries the spirit of the age is soon left a widower." Douthat quotes Anglican Ralph Inge (106) aptly. As one who grew up in the very first batch of post-Vatican II Catholic children indoctrinated in the "Kumbayah" mindset, I can attest even among kids raised on The Monkees as we watched hippies delay adulthood, that the novelty of guitar mass for hand-holding congregants wore off fast for many with whom I was raised; few of them sustained this fervor well into their maturity.

Given his talent for cultural critique, Douthat documents well this transitional period when the counterculture strove to become the ecclesiastical norm. When he turns to the deconstruction of the Gospels by scholars who prefer the rabbi rebel Jesus to the Pauline redeemer Christ, I feared that Douthat would fumble. This tricky terrain challenges any to keep up. But he remains steady. I liked his comparison of the Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan, Elaine Pagels and Jesus Seminar crowd's "historical Jesus" shorn of his halo to those dogged claimants who assert they've found the "real" Shakespeare. Both "turn out to be masters of detection and geniuses at code breaking, capable of seeing through every cover-up and unpacking every con." (171) No wonder we wind up with conspiratorial Dan Brown. The power of magical thinking and the relativism of po-mo profs blur.

Resisters dig in and strike back against the humanists and their Christian fifth column. Whereas mainstream seminaries diminish, a parallel evangelical and conservative Catholic set of colleges, institutions, and scholars emerge. The alliance between those once damned as papists and their former "holy rollers" foes looms larger, as the fight against abortion and for 'values' rallies both.

As the chronology catches up with recent events, the analysis sharpens. In the wake of the bursting of the 2007 housing bubble, Douthat notes in passing a telling truth. Hispanic, black, and white working class adherents of a prosperity gospel were most likely to have been swept up and over by the burst.

His chapter on this "name it to claim it" proposition, as filtered through Joel Osteen's lucrative ministry, makes God "seem less like a savior and more like a college buddy with really good stock tips." (189) Yet, the author cautions, the "crudeness" of the wealth-theology rhetoric "can obscure the subtlety of its appeal,"for it reassures followers that the sin of avarice can be assuaged by overcoming with stock phrases of credulous tit-for-tat "a simple failure of piety." (191) Rather than send down angels to prove His love for you, Douthat paraphrases, "He can just send you a raise." Similarly, Douthat delves into "financial ministries" and remains nuanced on the suitability of capitalism and its good works undertaken with the donations funding charitable endeavors. I wanted to read more on the megachurch entrepreneurial "outreach" and franchising, but this gets passed over perfunctorily.

Still, he's clever on seguing into the related New Thought-derived business empire. For it shares with the prosperity preachers an emphasis on "the social utility" of belief, an eagerness to define spiritual success in worldly terms, a hint of utopianism, and an abiding naïveté about human nature." (205)

Theodicy nestles not only within the wealth-faith, but in "the God within" predilection inherited from similar concepts of exchange with the powers above. Deepak, Oprah, Sam Harris, Eat Pray Love, Avatar, and even earnest apologist Karen Armstrong demonstrate the profitability of such pitches. Both affirm that humans figured out how the universe works, and how the spiritual forces respond. The "quest for God as the ultimate therapy" dominates. Not "I believe" but "one feels," to paraphrase prescient 1966 psychologist Philip Reiff, cited by Douthat. (230) This generates narcissism, infidelity, and a lack of empathy. The results can be tracked over the permissive period evolving in this purview. We wind up with a "spirituality of niceness" (234) Charting this among youth, as he does, is sobering.

Another congenial solution arrives with a universal God which outlasts petty local deities and clans. Drawing on Franz Rosenzweig and George Steiner, employing promised lands to polarized if both favored tribes, shows Douthat's erudition applied intelligently. Lacking the European penchant for blood-and-soil ties, Americans worship the exceptionalist, "city on a hill" civic religion of patriotism. Messianic, apocalyptic, reactionary crusades such as Glenn Beck's conflate populists with patricians. Paranoia, conspiracy theories, jeremiads of doom invigorate both extremes on the political spectrum. Angst, backlash, hubris, and adulation for whomever occupies the Oval Office produce craven American kitsch peddled for both parties and their anointed leaders ready to rescue despairing flocks.

That penultimate section of the book I found agreeable if not surprising, having lived under Reagan-through-Obama regimes. It's what you'd expect Douthat to expand upon from his columns. I do applaud his "heresy of nationalism" and his distrust of "religious faith" married to "political action."

He concludes with four "potential touchstones for a recovery of Christianity." Global, rootless life may seek an antidote to power plays and exhausted ideologies. Douthat suggests separatists offer a second route, withdrawing from the arena so as to regroup and reflect. Or, the massive movements bringing immigrant churches and missionary zeal back to America from the Third World might energize more at home. Diminished expectations, finally, might restore humility along with rigor.

Being political but non-partisan, ecumenical but also confessional, moralistic but also holistic, and last of all, oriented toward sanctity and beauty. I aver this final aspect may inspire a "saving remnant," regardless of creed, to appreciate the "great wellspring of aesthetic achievement" that unfortunately persists more as relics and canons rejected by most in schools and nearly all in culture.

Literature, architecture, film and television certainly display a dearth of Christian creative achievement. Douthat chides, correctly, that "many Christians are either indifferent to beauty or suspicious of its snares, content to worship in tacky churches and amuse themselves with cultural products that are well-meaning but distinctly second-rate." (291) This muffles the impact of a legacy.

While naysayers will dismiss Bad Religion as stale superstition or sinister priestcraft, open-minded audiences concerned with the stability of a post-Christian polity will benefit from this balanced judgement from within the Christian intelligentsia, and they may concur that those two terms are not oxymorons. Douthat backs his side, but he's poised, professional and alert to all in the faith game.

P.S. Pp. 152-3 collect a deft summation of the paradoxical models of Jesus that believers affirm and scholars may debate. This exemplifies journalist Douthat's knack for mediating scholarship for a wider readership. I admit that many who'd benefit from his book will never hear its timely message.

Sure, there are places I'd have preferred more elaboration. For instance, the tacit influence of Teilhard de Chardin on Vatican II, to me at least, is a fascinating aside begging for more. But on key topics as how evangelicals adopted the pro-life campaigns of Catholicism even as its own members dissented, or how the excesses of flower-power liturgy hold up, if in retrospect to those of us who as youngsters barely recall them (like me) or weren't around yet (like the author), are worthwhile. Certainly his judgment that those who chased reform wound up a half century on looking as if graying curators of  dated curios, overseeing a little attended museum (I extend his metaphor) rings true, when one does the math on the evaporation of vocations to those very orders that figured the only thing holding them back from really appealing to more young men and women was more Bob Dylan, far fewer hymns. (Amazon US 11/3/17 a bit altered)

Ritual as the habitual

To follow up my last post, I opened up over breakfast the NYT "T" Sunday supplement. Glossy testament to consumer lure, this pulp alternates homage to jewel-bedecked or heel-fitted beauties with a few articles, mostly about designers and the fourth homes they inhabit in venerable or exotic locations. Still, sometimes in rapidly skimming the pages, I find a bit of  lit-crit or cultural comment.

Emily Witt contributes a "Sign of the Times" column, "The Year of Magical Thinking." You can figure how many ads this has in that my print copy has this at page 63 as the first "journalism" inside. She begins by noting the palo santo fragrance wafting all over the Brooklyn bars and gallery openings. She credits its "sudden popularity" to a "yearning for ritual and ceremony in everyday life."

While my workplace lacks rose quartz crystals in any colleague's cubicle that Witt offers as examples of "believing in magic," I have for a few years now pinned up on one wall a few Tibetan prayer flags to brighten my grey space. They lack any wind to carry their petitions skyward, unless I turn on my little fan in the summer when the a/c fails. I have no idea how many whom I know have an I Ching app on an iPhone, but I know of a few cyber-friends who trust their star signs and trust in charts.

Witt claims: "It is no longer taboo to toss aside skepticism and trust the unverifiable." Perhaps in NYC, but certainly my Catholic friends and family never stopped this, at least on the surface and for many, within their souls. But as Witt explains, the "lack of religious faith so prevalent in our age is an anomaly in history." She continues: "Magic, which usually does not demand faith in a particular deity, or the sometimes exclusionary imperatives of organized religion, allows people to access a sense of the miraculous on the level of the quotidian. The desire to submit to the cosmos, to believe in phenomenal occurrences and to blame a late subway on the trajectories of stars across the firmament comes from a deep-rooted, perhaps inherent human interest in surrendering to destiny." Well-stated.

About "appeals to reason," Witt rationalizes that the holidays can put this perpetual debate in perspective. Without "losing common sense," we indulge in the hanging of mistletoe, the wrapping of gifts, the tree of green cut or the hanukkiah of wicks lit, the wreath of Advent and the solstice candle. Even more party-going signals our draw towards celebration in dark nights. "All the better to partake in these rituals informed by a deep faith in the existence of miracles." And for those of us within which we witness this battle between brain and spirit, soul and mind, we too capitulate to tradition.

P.S. An image search for "ritual" emanates into, first, lots of shadowy pentacles, circles, and candles. Not a big fan of this band, but I figured this connected with the roots around me, born in East L.A.

Randal Doane's "Stealing All Transmissions": Book Review

 
How did the late '70s arrival of The Clash to a nation they loved and who loved them, in Randal Doane's phrase, jostle the privileged perch granted FM free-form radio and long-form rock journalism in American popular culture? Doane attempts to answer this complex topic in a few pages. He matches an affection for what was pitched as "the only band that matters" with a professor's determination to apply theory and scholarship about popular culture to the band's American impact.

FM radio crackled with battles between disco and new wave, Steely Dan or the Eagles. Guitar heroes Van Halen threatened Boston and Kansas. Pre-packaged rock radio in syndication, and then MTV, took advantage of alternative rock trends. The Clash and other punks rallied to break down barriers on air. Doane's examines, circa 1978-81, a brief success by the underdogs against the suits. Even if The Clash was signed to CBS. That band marketed its message as widely as possible. The result (as this reviewer can attest) is that many younger listeners picked up guitars and books, inspired by not only the "molten" noise of early import singles, but the Clash's lyrical range and cultural references.

A dean at Oberlin College, Doane combines academic critique (and its concomitant tendency to lapse into seminar-speak) with livelier glimpses from his formative years as a fan growing up in Stockton, California. He enriches these youthful reminiscences with an imaginative journey. He invents a quest narrative, following the figures narrated over four sides of London Calling as that album's storyline follows dreamers and schemers from the band's hometown across the sea to success or failure in Manhattan. (I note as an aside that the first box-set retrospective issued by the band is called Clash on Broadway, a location which fits both London and New York City, even as it emphasizes the latter.)

Doane straddles the boundaries between fan and critic throughout this study. He analyzes the music industry as a Clash historian, and as an often discrete investigation into the state of American rock radio in the 1970s. He documents the struggle on FM stations between AOR, disco, hard rock, and the new wave upstarts. These were often marketed by Sire Records and eager labels, some indie, some subsidiaries of the majors, who allied with the bands which claimed to challenge the system. Of course, they also aspired to chart success and lucrative tours. This bifurcated presentation, by not only the bands in their clash of ambitions but Doane's staggered structure of his chapters between those on The Clash and those on radio, weakens this as a cohesive thesis. However, considering particular chapters apart from this diffused presentation, Doane's attempt to analyze The Clash within an American moment as the 70s leapt into the 80s provides a useful perspective of the band's impact. It draws upon books by Clayton Heylin and Jon Savage, integrating their research with his own predilection for New York City area rock stations. This case study looks into how they did or did not play the Clash, and rivals or colleagues from both local and British punk and new wave scenes.

This book is enhanced by backline roadie Barry "The Baker" Auguste's introduction. He conveys the changing fortunes of a band gradually if seemingly suddenly, for one behind the scenes, lifted from clubs to theaters to arenas by its third album, London Calling. This book does not delve very far into the mid-1980s phase of the line-up. Instead, Doane sticks to the first three albums, and he shows what worked and what did not on the various domestic and import versions of their incendiary self-titled debut, and the more, uh, diverse, follow-up, Give 'Em Enough Rope, produced by Blue Oyster Cult associate Sandy Pearlman. As for the sprawling triple disc, the what to me felt the never-ending experiments of Sandinista!, brisk coverage is given. Doane marvels at it, as diehard fans tend to do.

Tellingly, he offers no real attention to their more mainstream album, the last one with their steadiest line-up, Combat Rock, and none to the album made by Joe Strummer, Paul Simenon, and new recruits to replace Mick Jones and Topper Headon, the widely disdained Cut the Crap. It would have been intriguing to follow the fortunes of the band: their tours, their radio play, and their LP sales. Certainly one wonders how The Clash, once they topped the charts, dealt with their long-term prospects. It's a relevant example of the music industry's own determination to encourage or ignore a band. Yes, the band's saga during their global roller coaster of the 1980s has been covered before. But Doane stops the story early on, preferring to end while the band anticipated greater fame in the U.S. and beyond.

Given this wistful denouement, Doane's study offers a muted celebration and a cautionary tale of how rock radio and promotion U.S. markets tried to fend off, ignore, or embrace us, then-scattered and once few, fans of punk and new wave. Even if the academic tone slows his pace, Doane places The Clash within their attempt to break into the American market. Best of all, his diligence and scrutiny  reminds readers about when such inventive music, combative attitudes, and intelligent lyrics (well, some of the time) mattered for millions of fans growing up then. Today, the hit-and-miss history of the one punk band which made it big as arena rockers endures. And, professors grow up to be fans, or in my case, reviewers. For, the Clash were the first "real" band I ever saw, in March, 1980, at the Santa Monica Civic. They arrived hours late, but nobody (except for punctual me) seemed to mind. (Spectrum Culture 9-7-14)

Richard Kieckhefer's "Magic in the Middle Ages": Book Review

This book meets the needs of advanced students who need a introduction to this topic. Richard Kieckhefer specializes in medieval belief systems, so he is suited for this difficult subject to summarize in 200 pages. He examines magic as a "crossroads" where high and low, clerical and folk, popular and learned cultures intersect. He stresses a difference, however, between natural and demonic models.

He reminds us on pg. 16 that our data is tainted. Those attacking magic tended to record their critiques. Those practicing it tended to hide their lore from the persecutors and the client alike. And for the illiterate, their attitudes are difficult to recover, given the power of the elite over this knowledge, used both to suppress and to spread practices often outside the ambit of the Church. Yet here, too, overlap occurs, for clergy sought to learn secrets, and rituals involving magic took elements from the dominant as well as the indigenous suppositions still surviving from paganism and classics. Islam disseminated its own concepts, and so did alchemy, nascent science, and astrology. The author gives a cogent account of the last category; he captures the appeal of love charms well on pp. 81-3. (I cite the 1990 ed.)

"Historians can set up all the conceptual walls they want, but they should not be surprised when medieval people flit through them, like ghosts." (18) Magic was not the province of women, monks, or physicians. Kieckhefer follows distribution as a "common" type over much of medieval Europe.

Yet as he concludes, he turns to the witch hunts of late medieval and early modern times, and he notes how women were made vulnerable to attack. They lacked the power men had to resist, when the clerical and legal institutions were arrayed against them, and when suspicion by neighbors heightened the precarious condition of a local healer, a midwife, an herb-gatherer, or a quarrelsome village scold.

These everyday events were exaggerated into terrors perpetrated as a conspiracy of devil worshipers was imagined, and when those putting trust (and this itself is hard to measure) in spells or potions, charms or amulets, fearful of exposure, gave over the weaker among them to save their own skins. Reading Kieckhefer, as a counter to the more sensationalized depictions of this era, or the more romantic fictions, a balance for the reader will arrive, and one may want then to explore this deeper. (6-13-15 to Amazon US.)

Caption the flag

I entered the grounds where I work today. Small Stars-and-Stripes flags dotted the verges of the lawn, a scarce green in this hundred-degree heat wave in my drought-plagued State. I wondered if there were three-thousand or so, but it was probably a tenth of that. A security guard stood in the driveway, taking pictures of them on his cellphone, flags among the beds of pansies which are cared for, next to an empty fountain.

At the meeting I attended, the convener opened with a moment of silence. She commemorated those who had died "helping other people" that day, and those who were the victims. She did not mention the millions who have died before and after this Patriot Day, in the name of vengeance rained upon 19 perpetrators, "death from above," let alone the fatal fraction of that morbid total among those from hereabouts who volunteered or were sent to fight overseas. I teach, as I often report here, those returning from places far hotter than here, and of the state mentally or physically many are in. They are welcomed here to study, and often lauded.

I asked a few vets if they would recommend joining to others. I recall one who vehemently, if calmly, insisted against anyone he knew ever doing so. One of my best students now has in the past left class or been unable to attend as waves of gloom and inner pain leave him unable to motivate himself. I have taught amputees, those with plates in their head or their backs, and those unable to go to sleep. Some must move around, or sit in a way they are trained to cover a room and not turn their backs. Others find it difficult to stay still in a chair due to their injuries, or to focus and escape their demons.

I have been reading a lot of left-libertarian perspectives lately. They seem to echo my own concerns. We get caught up so rapidly in the rush to judge, the compulsion to curse, the joy of fulmination.

The juggernaut of aggression, the grievances, the culture of complaint drives us, even more than in 2001, as we rush to social media and smartphone cameras to upload our laments. As I heard, after a fine dinner of salmon at the nearby Industriel (sic), which I recommend by the way, Salman Rushdie spoke at the L.A. Public Library last night about the "freedom of expression" he noted the enemy in the West. Not Muslim immigration so much as "the victimizers acting as if they are the victims." Those who inflict offense claim they are offended. Trigger warnings create cowed citizens. He also compared intractable contentions such as Israel and Palestine to "contested narratives." Ones that cannot be reconciled. I feel increasingly estranged from those who claim to speak for and to lead us. I live in a nation whose "civic religion" of mottoes, pledges, and slogans disorients my own spirit.

As in the recession in 2008, I wondered post-9/11 if American triumphalism would subside. We all know that it did not. Obama replaced Bush jr., but the drone attacks and the trumped-up victories, as when he appeared to take credit for the Navy Seal raid that killed Osama bin Ladin, rogue scion of the dynasty our dollars supported as surely as they do the Saudis who escaped blame then heaped on Iraq and Afghanistan, also our former cronies in skulduggery, continued "our" Great Game abroad. 

The mandated duties managers insist upon, the erosion of the work-life balance, the wage stagnation, ecological devastation, the stifled possibilities that billions of us have who want to contribute to a better life for all creatures, not only our own (thankfully I guiltily admit today) air-conditioned nests. All these stir within us. During the day, we may be distracted, but how many at night wonder what 9/11 added up to, fourteen years on? My sons can barely recall it, and I now teach a generation that includes incoming students who would have been barely out of diapers on Sept. 11th, 2001. Soon enough, like the Civil War and Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco quake of '06 and the Shoah, we will lose the living links with dramatic rescues, heartbreaking recollections, and a scent of sudden death.

Until the next time. Living in Los Angeles, that may be natural or artificial. A new show, a pre-quel, takes place near me in El Sereno, a largely Latino neighborhood, as the Walking Dead zombies stir.
All deny it officially, but those more vulnerable or streetwise sense the media and political lies. I don't need to scrawl a highlighter to make the allusion. When George Bush at the time rose as he had to, reassuring us, he also encouraged us to get out there and spend, lest our national will falter and our economy--after all those Made in China flags were sold--sputter. My older son recalls reading a David Foster Wallace essay, as I had, about being with his relatives in Illinois the day after 9/11. Where did all those displays of patriotism, on fabric, fluttering from cars and from porches, come?

Like the once-ubiquitous "three-peat" {TM} Lakers pennants from cars, you rarely see the national flag flown. It's intriguing that the "NorCal" contingent seem to have popularized the State's Bear Flag. I always liked it, even if the forty-day or so California Republic was more akin to a (right-wing) libertarian attempt at getting back at los Californios than a true-sons-of-liberty attempt at equality. The poor grizzly on it is the only one left, as the "expansion" obliterated is as surely as dodo and passenger pigeon. No flag seems perfect. I have a liking for a few in my magnet collection at work, and I admit I display Quebec out of a sneaking liking for its stubborn separatism, and New Mexico for its Zia sun's simplicity and beauty; as a kindergartner my favorite reading was, precociously, a booklet Flags of the World given away by a bourbon company. Maps and flags, yes, divide us, but I remain fascinated by both manifestations of the divide and conquer, cheer for the home team, school spirit that deep within us is so difficult even for those who strive for equality and liberty to overcome.

"Every innocent person affected by the bombs we drop, the aid we provide to oppressive governments, the injustices we condone, becomes another potential terrorist. Save lives, overseas and at home—take your power out of the hands of the politicians and the terrorists they raise. Let them know they can't count on your silence." "Your Leaders Can't Protect You But They Can Get You Killed"  This 2006 statement (click for pdf) closes by quoting Tom Paine: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” Image: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Howard Zinn.

Molly Crabapple's "Shell Game"

According to Kristen O'Regan, this is "A New England"; I located this with no idea what it was in a search for Occupy artwork. You can read more about street art in "Agora-phobic" at Guernica.

Animal's Marina Galperina explains that the painting I share here features "modern feminist icon Laurie Penny surrounded by protesting foxes and police hound dogs."  Animal shows all nine images of "Shell Game," conveying feminine imagery in a grand-mock Victorian Empire storybook style. It reminds me of a surprisingly tiny image I saw in London at the Tate , "The Fairy Fellow's Master-Stroke" by Richard Dadd. Not in its direct color, but in the wealth of detail filling the intricate canvas.

Dadd went mad. It is as maddening to consider how little impact the frustrations of ordinary people have against what idealistic anarchists call "impossibilism," the notion that resistance and revolt can overthrow our corrupt system keeping us in debt to bankers, cowed by lawyers, fearful of police, coddled by media and entertainment bent on distracting us, but convinced the next election=change.

I composed this after a week of legal upheaval. Obamacare upheld, Confederate battle flags taken down, and same-sex marriage approved. Argue as some may, decades of progress have paid off. Yes, many grumble at the imposition of federal power. Most, on these and other matters, reason that as with slavery and patriarchy, superstition and bigotry, we must evolve away from outmoded strictures.

Yet, how quickly will liberation happen? I sympathize with principled populism, but its long-range success seems co-opted by those elected. Ever more dependent on an unjust economic and political regime combined to make us compliant by measures at work, cameras in public, and data as tracked, how can we fight such ubiquitous power? The Net promised us empowerment twenty years ago. Now it seeks only to monetize all we do, cajoling us as shoppers and consumers, to exploit our very selves.

It's no longer fat white men in cummerbunds, like Monopoly game millionaires, pulling such strings. Women and those marginalized rush to shatter glass ceilings, but do start-ups differ from Fortune 500 firms that significantly? As the show Silicon Valley skewers, "doing good" is their cynical manifesto. 

What's intriguing about Molly Crabapple's art in the "Shell Game" series is that she incorporates female symbols and caricatures, both as villains and heroines. (If I can still deliberately employ that contested noun.) Her account of the years between 9/11 and Occupy will appear at the end of this year, Drawing Blood. Funded on Kickstarter, her work in the year after OWS continues her pen-and-ink drawings, O'Regan reports, which revel in "frenzied visual chaos and declarative allegory." Like others, the artist takes inspiration from Athens' street art and protests; I found this on the day that the banks were shut EU imposed austerity measures on this defiant/cowed Greek nation.

Passing Craze

As many cheer on Caitlyn Jenner's transition and welcome any "coming out," is the furor over Rachel Dolezal's allegiance as a black woman justified? According to a statement issued by the organization's head office: "One’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership." If we acclaim gender transition and cheer "coming out," why not trans-racial self-identification? After all, the left tells us race is a social construct, created in our clannish minds.

After I wrote that paragraph, I read Frederik de Boer, an academic: "In the end, perhaps Dolezal simply believed the convictions of her academic culture a little too much. After all, we on the left have insisted for years that the various demographic categories we are placed into are merely social constructs, the creation of human assumption and human prejudice. That race is a social construct is a stance that brooks no disagreement in left-wing spaces." Hiring urges that the under-represented gain parity. Those marginalized are urged to gain equality. We institutionalize these incentives; we got her re-invention as a member of "her race".

Marcia Dawkins finds that technology accelerated such re-inventions, same as it does for Jenner. And she thinks the media dismissal of Dolezal as "crazy" blocks us from asking tougher questions. "Why is identity considered an editable 'profile' anyway? Do you have to be a person of color to care and advocate for people of color? Does passing make you a coward, a minstrel or a winner? Are there benefits to being perceived as black? Is anyone’s identity, racial or otherwise, 100 percent authentic 100 percent of the time? And the real doozy: Why do we try to get beyond race by clinging to the idea that race is real?" This contradiction sticks. Ideologues and bureaucrats act as if they are trying to advance people based on their diversity, but this does not dismiss race but affirms it as a label.

Unfortunately since I wrote this original entry, the sinister side of racial identity again surfaces. The deaths in Charleston at a Baptist church recall those of the Civil Rights struggle, which is not a period we have closed our books on after all. Such outbreaks occur more frequently, mass ones every 64 days as opposed to every 200 days a few decades ago. Ironically, blacks and whites are "represented equally" in such attacks. Hatred against the Other, technology enabling murder, increases mayhem.

Nell Irvin Painter adds how an "essential problem here is the inadequacy of white identity. Everyone loves to talk about blackness, a fascinating thing. But bring up whiteness and fewer people want to talk about it. Whiteness is on a toggle switch between 'bland nothingness' and 'racist hatred.'”

Meanwhile, voices of harmony and liberation seek to counter the domination of such pain in the headlines. Some deny race as a social construct but as with our sexual preferences, others stereotype each of us by it. We try to escape categories even as both the left and the right seek to keep us all marked or slotted. I wonder if this unease we face will harden or loosen "racial" categories in the U.S.

Alysson Hobbs notes: "As a historian who has spent the last 12 years studying 'passing,' I am disheartened that there is so little sympathy for Ms. Dolezal or understanding of her life circumstances. The harsh criticism of her sounds frighteningly similar to the way African-Americans were treated when it was discovered that they had passed as white. They were vilified, accused of deception and condemned for trying to gain membership to a group to which they did not and could never belong." I had thought of this immediately when I heard the story emerge, and I like Hobbs wondered why so much vitriol and ridicule was heaped Dolezal's way, mocking her for "blackface."

In the late 70s, the multiracial singer of X-Ray Spex, Poly Styrene, took the mike. She did not look like any other front person, even as a punk icon. One of their best songs has her wailing: "When you look in the mirror/Do you see yourself" and then asks: "When you see yourself/Does it make you scream"? The singer's image, her stage name, her own redefinition came to mind the past two weeks.

Image: Ebony magazine, April 1952. At Polygrafi. "The Delicacy of Racial Appearance."

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.

Fewer believers, more consumers?

The recent Pew survey on American religion shows a rapid decline, from around 78% to 70% in Christian identification since 2007. Catholics are dropping, as are evangelicals. While 10% of all Americans were ex-Catholic then, now it's 13%. Tim Rutten wonders how much evangelical and right-wing politics may be to blame for this decline. Unaffiliated respondents have increased by 6.7% the past period, to nearly 30% After all, independent-leaning, alienated, skeptical voters (like me) are often repulsed by pious rhetoric and cant. "Well over one-third of all Americans under 49 now are unaffiliated and a substantial number of them profess a complete disinterest in religion or its values."

This surge transcends the usual ethnic, class, regional, or traditional boundaries. If not for relentless immigration and concomitant population growth, the Catholic and probably some Pentecostal and fundamentalist churches would show deeper drops. The tilt of the Church in my region tips now about 70% Latino, for instance, with large Filipino and Vietnamese contingents. Sure, the South does still boast more believers, and cities more their cohort of "spiritual but not religious," a phenomenon now spreading beyond the privileged pockets on the East and West Coasts and I suppose college towns. The report sums up: "People who self-identify as atheists or agnostics (about 7% of all U.S. adults), as well as those who say their religion is 'nothing in particular,' now account for a combined 22.8% of U.S. adults – up from 16.1% in 2007. The growth of the 'nones' has been powered in part by religious switching. Nearly one-in-five U.S. adults (18%) were raised as Christians or members of some other religion, but now say they have no religious affiliation." This cheers me, if oddly for me.

For I study religion, I value its contributions, I suspect its assertions, and I analyze its functions. I teach a course in its comparative aspects, open to students online nationwide whom I will never likely meet. I ask them to discuss their own orientation. Most do so happily, revealing usually about one or two articulate but disenfranchised voices, maybe half who are more or less observant of some form, and the rest divided between those who have been raised Catholic, Baptist, or Methodist but who have a wavering or flexible attitude towards the tenets with which they were inculcated. Sometimes I get a pagan or two, a Jewish or Muslim student, too. A Buddhist, too, but so far all who blend a vague sort of aspiration with New Age, from a Christian background. So, they match Pew data above.

But some often bristle, being mainly mainline Christians still, when I challenge them about the growth of "nones," or when I confront them to move out of a comfort zone and critically respond to those who address the drawbacks of, well, every religious system we study over the eight weeks. I offer the positive and the negative aspects of the major faiths--even if the textbook and lectures on the online shell try to be very neutral, I cannot be so as a teacher who wants students to stretch their limits. Therefore, the new data I will have to offer my next class will continue to push their boundaries. As we turn a less religious nation, however, as Rutten concludes, we must all question another transformation: autonomic absorption of so many Americans into the consumer society, as we face a consumerist, capitalist force "that so often seems more powerful than any religion."

Rutten asks: "If you live in a world that begs you to choose from among 600 types of potato chips and 400 brands of hummus, why not faith? Whether a society that idolizes that kind of choice really is a better place than the one we’re struggling with now, will be something we’ll all discover." Amen.

David Graeber's "The Democracy Project": Book Review

Having found myself intrigued by this anthropologist-activist who was among the first, as he narrates here, to generate the "We are the 99%" slogan and Occupy Wall Street movement, I followed my reading of his dense but not dull academic study of Debt: The First 5000 Years (reviewed by me in April 2014) with his more casual 2013 narrative of OWS, its origins, impacts, and relevance within grassroots, participatory direct action as the genuine democratic exercise of rights. He insists that the lack of a platform or agenda spoke to the Occupy strengths, by its refusal to play into party politics, rather than as a left-wing balance to the Tea Party's anti-government (but less rarely anti-business, at least after the GOP co-opted it, an issue that merits attention more than the aside here, but it may not be that germane in Graeber's view given his anti-corporate as well as anarchist focus). I agree here, even if my friends and media disagree.  Graeber reminds readers that bipartisan "status-quo" presidents no matter their claims for "change" continue to prop up what's broken.

As I've opined often among my pro-Democratic Party friends and family, Graeber raises a critique few leftists promote; they capitulate to the lesser of two evils or "they won't let Obama win" retorts. He castigates the handling of the 2008 crisis with a new president who exhibited "perversely heroic efforts to respond to an historic catastrophe by keeping everything more or less exactly as it was." (95) This can be confirmed by Timothy Geithner's subsequent defense while he promoted his own book in Spring 2014; and by Matt Taibbi's concurrent exposure Eric Holder's role as he kept kid gloves on as he handled "legal justice" for those victimized by Wall Street's banking powers in '08. George Packer finds in his narrative history another pattern of how the law was used to suppress the common folks, buried by robo-signings and instant judgements from judges, not those in charge.

This fits well with these two recent accounts I've studied which address the mess we're in these decades post-Reagan, and all who've succeeded him: George Packer's "The Unwinding" about a disintegration of American stability under the corporate-political oligarchy, and Matt Taibbi's "The Divide" about the refusal of Obama's administration to pursue justice against Wall Street bankers while doggedly beating down and hounding the poor and weak among us who cannot counter the power of the law and order forces, paid by the government which enables these same banks to launder drug money, profit off debtors, expand prisons, and sustain an increasingly unequal economy.

Graeber shows close-up at OWS a common complaint: the "U.S. media increasingly serves less to convince Americans to buy into the terms of the existing political system than to convince them that everyone does." (109) This is a bit too compressed, but his point is that--take Ralph Nader's campaign--that the media portrays such candidates and platforms as is only the 2.7% who voted for him favor them. The media refuse to offer such alternative advocates the opportunity to speak out, and consigns them to the realm of fringe or freakish figures who don't merit the gravitas afforded the Democrats and to a lesser or greater extent depending on the channel chosen, the GOP. Therefore, a false choice perpetuates, and dismissal of spontaneous uprisings that may present a challenge to the parties who persist in representing the 1% more than the rest of us continues. Those who take to the streets or camp out near City Hall or big banks get ridiculed as dangerous bums or deluded rich kids.

While I remain cautious about his claim that over half of all British female students engaged in sex work to pay off tuition and that nearly a third went to prostitution, and his factoid that 280,000 American women with college debt signed up for sugar daddies needs more than one HuffPo citation to sway me, I agree that student debt (I heard recently costs have gone up 1200% since 1978) and the wider indentured status this incurs among many of us cripples us. For degrees are now the ticket into many professions, and that entry fee rises as banks profit off the money they lend to students and their families, continuing to deepen the hold that loans and interest have over many Americans now. Coupled with his own studies and the pressing need for reform or a debt jubilee (as his previous book naturally called for), this does seem a logical stance to take as the issue most needing redress by us.

The trouble is, "corporate lobbying" as he relabels it by its reality as "bribery" stymies progress. Each Congress member needs to raise, he says, $10,000/week from the time he or she is in office to prepare for the next election. Contrary to our national myth that we can separate the system from its overthrow as if we are revolutionaries anew, Graeber contends the economic and political control is so linked now that it cannot be reformed by representatives, complicit in the status quo. He shows how the appeals of the indebted smack of peasants begging for their land and relief from burdens, such is what Americans have been reduced to. As to "white working-class populism," he correctly chides this for its anti-intellectualism, and Graeber to his credit takes a moment to consider the lasting appeal of it for so many. Within its determination to call for liberty, there's "an indignation at being cut off from the means of doing good," within a society bent in equating our life's range with only the satisfaction of our self-interest. (124) People want to achieve for themselves and conduct their own decisions, and not expect the State to cater to all of their needs. A sensitive issue; a commendable insight. This is explored idiosyncratically in James C. Scott's 2013 "Two Cheers for Anarchism."

Midway, Graeber tackles liberal mockery of OWS. He confides that the left as they dominate media tend to project their guilty conscience by their coverage.  "Liberals tend to be touchy and unpredictable because they share the ideas of radical movements--democracy, egalitarianism, freedom--but they've also managed to convince themselves that these ideals are ultimately unattainable. For that reason, they see anyone determined to bring about a world based on these principles as a kind of moral threat." (150) He reminds us that what John Adams feared as "the horrors of democracy" as if anarchy (often a negative term from Plato on) does not negate "core democratic principles," but takes them "to their logical conclusions." (154)  In a truly eye-opening chapter "The Mob Begin to Think and to Reason," he shows Gouverneur Morris, gentry of NYC, witnessing at planning for the Constitutional Congress "butchers and bakers" arguing the merits of the Gracchi or Polybius (a sign of how far we've fallen from a classical education for the masses?).

He cautions those who'd toss bombs or instigate violence, and he shows as in the chapter "How Change Happens" not only the way direct action and affinity groups and peaceful assemblies reach consensus, but he notes in passing the dangers of coercion. The Iraqi Sadrists attempted to form a mass working-class base for self-governance, but the zones they opened with the wedge of "free clinics for pregnant and nursing mothers" took on, as they required security, the social apparatus and then political platforms supporting charismatic leaders turned cultural voices in formal institutions.

This book as with "Debt" skips about although it stays animated with Graeber's confident presence. In a few places the style stumbled and careful editing might have smoothed out a couple of rough spots in the prose. I liked the glances at humor as in the Occu-pie pizza, "99 percent cheese, 1 percent pig" provided those at OWS early on. Books on anarchism sometimes need a lighter touch, after all.  And as with other studies, I needed to see how workplace strategies might evolve to prefigure change, in an increasingly unstable and detached electronic and dispersed environment where freer standards may contend against online surveillance, weak wages, globalization, and reductive profit.

He touches on this, however, in "Breaking the Spell" as he glances at the "productivist bargain" that assumes work is a moral good rather than an economic position. He shows if in passing how labor discipline can make one worse, not better, if it does not become virtuous to allow us to help others. Why not make mothers, teachers, caregivers the "primordial form of work" rather than models of production lines, wheat fields, or iron foundries? Mutual creation and a shift, as he admits Occupy might formulate a key demand, to "change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be" is a small step, if one meriting a book and movement of its own. (289)  He tells us how the weight of bureaucracy grew, under capitalism and communism, and how the latter term underlies what society, our circle of friends, our family runs on: amicability, cooperation, practical assistance.

I wish the book, after its vignettes as early on he and a handful of activists met at the Irish Hunger Memorial and then Zuccotti Park to jumpstart OWS, had covered more of the blow-by-blow on the street examples of how consensus might or might not have worked, and how across the world (not only in this perhaps understandably Manhattan-centered p-o-v from one who is based now in London academia after his departure from Yale) people met to for better or worse try to coordinate progress. I saw at the L.A. encampment examples of both, and Graeber appears to gloss over a lot of the mess. It's a mixture: a study of democracy historically and at OWS, and part personal testimony. But this makes it uneven in pacing and scope; it's valuable behind-the-scenes, yet you want to peer in deeper.

In closing, Graeber teaches a different civics lesson. "No government has ever given a new freedom to those it governs of its own accord." (239) Grassroots turn tough. Laws may need to be broken. (Amazon US 6-20-14)

Nikil Saval's "Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace": Book Review

How did Bartleby the Scrivener spawn Dilbert, and why does their "unnatural" office space compel over sixty percent of Americans to labor there, often in tasks divorced from farm or field so much that the work seems invisible, and its productions intangible? One wonders, if in a "cubicle farm", why employees in an electronic era must be corralled in this interior labyrinth. Despite networks and smartphones, many must commute. They may enter open-form layouts, replacing flimsy grey partitions, but raising walls of chat; we see headphones advertised now not for jet flight but during 9-to-5 when one must work next to ten others.

Nikil Saval asks many of the same questions I've had since my workplace--that term itself telling of the collective nature of the setting, separated from factory floor, unions, and solidarity to foster office politics, surveillance, and self-improvement-- "rightsized" a few years ago to half of its former layout. Once I shared an office with a colleague behind a wooden door; now we sit in cubicles. While our supervisors kept their doors, our employer mandates, all the same, an "open door policy". Given such scenarios repeat for hundreds of millions, it sparked my curiosity. The same day I mulled over that policy, I learned about Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, by this Philadelphia-based editor of n+1. The book began as a 2006 article in that publication on the origins of the office. Saval expands this topic by synthesizing sociology, literature, architecture, and cinema.

I remain unconvinced by that come-hither subtitle. This secret history lacks the salacious rumors of Procopius' Byzantine courtiers or the gothic menace of Donna Tartt's novel. Less gripping than efficiently told, as may be expected from its subject matter, Saval's history credits a more stolid literary forebear. For, clerks marked the arrival of a new type of mass-employed common man. Bartleby's odd situation, when offices themselves seemed a novelty in mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan, transformed tedious if cleaner manual labor for clerks, who, at first like Melville's protagonist and his colleagues remained largely male, and often derided for their foppish fashion and snobbery. They fought back against the system once in old Manhattan, so as to purportedly get off at 8 p.m., to attend debating societies or to frequent the lending library before it closed. Saval notes how their status, as salaried, meant that they spent long hours (if often with not much to do) earning their keep, and how this cut them off from the laboring masses, resigned to hourly wages or piecework.

Time management, by the 1920s, had long put paid to the leisurely pace of Bartleby. Adding machines, typewriters, bells, and bosses accelerated the working day. Railroad dispersion necessitated the division of corporations into stratified departments. The "company ladder" loomed. Specialization required that tasks were aided by telecommunication and divided into vast spaces filled with desks, similar to the factory floors, for both demanded "labor-saving" machinery, which led only to more products and then more memos, more invoices, more letters, and more calls for harried salaried staff.

"Taylorism" dominated as rational, "scientific management". Bureaucracy enabled  women, who by 1920 comprised half of the ranks under the hierarchy Taylorism required, to take on the perceived or practical advantages of clerical work. This led to many disadvantages of disparity, as when male bosses took advantage by their own office politics, and the scheming secretary on the rise led to a  provocative archetype promoted in Depression-era stories and films. Predictably, "white-collar" wages stagnated once "unskilled" jobs were associated with "white-blouse" stereotypes. Meanwhile, regimentation for all meant that desks lined up, bosses carried stopwatches, and the sole "restroom" might be a few flights up, near executives who sat in their suites behind doors, glass or wooden. On the open floor, as supervisors scanned the ranked as they filed, "time would not be given, but stolen".

Air conditioning, skyscrapers, file cabinets, Dictaphones, stenography, skylights, adjustable chairs: the innovations applied to this workplace may endure or fade, but as Saval narrates, "what passed for workers' welfare could with a little imagination be seen as social control". The words "system", "order", and "efficiency" proved to managers that the monotony of office work preserved its appeal. The less that salaried staff had to worry about on the job, went the rationale, the less fuss they made.

The "office zombies" of King Vidor's film The Crowd (1928) in its splendid opening scene characterize the postwar predicament for many in New York City or Chicago by then. The camera directs one's gaze up the side of the Art Deco exterior, with column after column of windows. It enters one, hovers above "a waste and empty sea of desks", and then lowers itself among countless clerks all filling in ledgers. Down below, more leave the farms, to join the commuting, urban herd.

Social backlash then, as Saval notes, would return against the "hard-hat" workers in the 1970s. It urged many to deride the white-collar man as a not only a conformist but a racist drone. But in the 1920s as later, unions could not gain traction within most office ranks. Pink or white collar, the salaried employees refused to see their plight as akin to that of their waged, blue-collar neighbors. Distancing by class, if not always economic differences in salaried income, ensured that solidarity did not supplant supposed self-improvement. Saval applies German sociological theory, drawn upon for C. Wright Mills' 1951 study White Collar, to critique what turned out for many leftists a persistent but in Saval's opinion too facile a link between lower-middle-class clerical workers and reactionary politics. The switchboard operators, message boys, and the typing pools became scapegoats for lack of ambition, and their cadre represented to the elite a shorthand for stagnation and subordination.

Could paper pushers or the steno staff revolt? It seemed doubtful, but fearing unions and Marxists, a "pop Freudianism" soothed managers. Their staffs feared not losing their jobs, as blue-collar workers did, but not getting credit for a job well done. "The way to counter the threat, the managers decided, was to design better offices." These "human relations" specialists favored environments conducive to cooperation rather than competition, to advance harmony. This led to more glass, alongside the steel. We see its results in Ayn Rand's Fountainhead and in Mad Men's Sterling Cooper advertising agency.

These postwar paeans to Cold War affluence, however, lord over cities. These towers and the cold, empty (or packed) streets below, for many postwar aspirants discouraged rather than encouraged affection. Suburban office parks answered the need for more space, and more of a lateral rather than vertical presence as corporations led or followed the flight from the skyscraper. AT&T's Bell Labs in New Jersey pioneered the long corridor: this is where, subsequent management gurus suggested, ideas might be generated as colleagues passed each other many times daily. Yet, the totality of the corporate presence, epitomized even in the better-designed structures that sprawled, discouraged others in the 1950s. Lonely Crowds, Power Elites, Hidden Persuaders, and Organization Men in Gray Flannel Suits (to combine a few popular works of that era's social criticism), connoted a "soft totalitarianism" as advertisers and bosses colluded to lock up Americans in conforming cages.

A generation after The Crowd, The Apartment (1960) depicts the power of "gigantism". Consolidation eliminated small business and the individual's ambitions, unless to score a coveted bathroom key. IBM's dress code matched its punch-card mentality, and its uniformity that it trumpeted as the future. Such firms countered with a PR campaign assuring "more opportunities for better work". As always, many welcomed the security of the corporation, the amenities of the office, and the steady salary. Justifying itself to the public, free enterprise generated a bland, safe jargon.

Safety might spawn seduction, if not secure secrets. Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl (1962) and Sex and the Office (1964) beckoned working-class secretaries to snatch small joys during or after work, "through strategies of small subversion". Marriage need not be the goal, and staying single did not condemn a gal from climbing up the ladder at work in her own way, on her own time.

But closed doors and executive suites remained the domain of few in the office space. Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967) portrays in a futuristic but ramshackle Paris the cubes in which many of us now work. In 1958, furniture maker Herman Miller furthered through ergonomics Robert Propst's Action Office, defined as "a mind-oriented living space" functioning as "a place for transacting abstractions".  Theory-Y, advanced by Douglas McKenzie in 1960, pushed the ideal of Abraham Maslow's self-actualization into the realm of desks and chairs: by propelling bodies eager for direction, individual and corporate needs were better met. Peter Drucker appealed as a management guru, reaching out to anxious if compliant "knowledge workers". "For businessmen who read no philosophy, Drucker was their philosopher." Such theorists, for a restless generation of managers seeking to boost productivity while streamlining movement, spurred the open-plan. Workstations fostered innovation, but installation led to cubicles, perpetuating what were invented as temporary partitions. Saval confirms the trade-off: the sounds of typing and phones could never be silenced by carpeting or sound screens. Introspection and concentration capitulated to interactive communication.

Two decades after Propst's proposals, his humanistic vision of a flexible set-up at work had led to its opposite, as Tati had envisioned. By the end of the 1970s, "that beige, dishonest decade", conversion to cubicles and open-space confined as many workers as feasible in as small a blueprint as possible. While not mentioned by Saval, "positive" psychologist Martin Seligman has diagnosed "learned helplessness" as a symptom of this human filing system. Voice mail spews and depression deepens as  "technical support" on hold wears customers down, as corporate environments brutalize. Those staffing such situations suffer too. Diversifying workers did not lead to diversifying workplaces. Office work was rationalized, requiring fewer specialized skills. But higher levels of education were required. Those frustrated as their ambitions met with drudgery blamed themselves (and the system) for their stagnation. They may have escaped the factories and farms, but similar tedium awaited them.

The trend exalting whimsical post-modern rather than glass-and-steel modernism for the skyscrapers of the 1980s mattered little to those who rode the elevators. Corporations increasingly did not need so many cubicles. Worried executives and pressured middle managers made bestsellers out of business books. But Japanese Theory-Z failed. Manufacturing was automated or offshored. White-collar "post-industrial" work, promised as security by Drucker, faltered. Meaner, leaner downsizing followed.

Even the cubicles shrank, between a fourth and half, between the mid-1980s and the 1990s. Some were built by prisoners, who at night might return to their own fabricated stalls. Apple's workers refused them, and they were removed. IBM kept reducing them; employees reasoned this was meant to increase their miserable conditions such that nobody would want to show up anymore, and thus the savings on office space would reward their employer. Saval observes how cubicles make workers close enough to "create serious social annoyances, but dividing them so they didn't actually feel that they were working together". No wonder satire rebounded with Dilbert then and Office Space soon.

Did the PC advance the liberation that the Action Office predicted? Keystrokes monitored, errors subtracted, talking tallied: this depersonalized routine deadened many who sought to save their clerical jobs as automation created fewer positions but more apathy along the digitized assembly-line. Administrative assistants, renamed, arguably enjoyed less status than secretaries, who by their relationships with their bosses might gain some autonomy and respect. By contrast, the predictable data entry into electronic devices allowed supervisors to monitor this labor by a detached process.

9-to-5 (1980), produced by Jane Fonda, took much of its farcical plot from real testimony, although Saval avers it may not have helped advance the battle against sex discrimination. Eight years later, anticipating a move away from the typing pool, Working Girl shows a young woman scheming to replace her female banker-manager, using the "knowledge worker" skills that reward her "gumption".
Neither film revolts against the system. One suggests ending sexism might lead to a happy workplace; the other replaces one ambitious, conniving woman with another in a coveted position.

Before the start-up crash, fantasies continued. The paperless office and the non-territorial workspace emerged as paradigms sought by disgruntled designers. Telecommuting met with skepticism as managers feared losing control over their workers. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, since the 1980s issues "utopian prognostications" about the workplace of the libertarian, decentralized future. Their cubicles, started in the 1960s, stood for a rebellion against hierarchy and an installation of equality. But soon, as IBM epitomized, this structure embedded conformity. Apple and Microsoft turned to more closed offices, as workers opted to stay home to work as the noise interfered in their cubicles.

The mid-1990s embodied the dot.com as counterculture, one praising the company as the place to be, not only to work. The New Economy, as Chiat Day's giddy Frank Gehry-designed but confusingly paperless (for an advertising agency, after all) building boasted, generated for Type-A types a "simultaneously lackadaisical and profoundly intense pace, which kept people essentially confined to one place for hours on end". Mobility or freedom, on the other hand, diminish, despite Aeron chairs. The appeal of an airy domain where one can flee, free of the hubbub, no matter the job or site layout, persists. Lately, I pass on my way home from work a freeway billboard depicting a woman who celebrates her promotion by shopping for a new dress: "I got an office with a door," she exclaims.

Timed for the stock market's fall, 1999's Office Space sends up the dead-end jobs at "a grey tech company". The series The Office and novels by Ed Park (Personal Days) and Joshua Ferris (And Then We Came to the End) sustain this dark vision since that cult film appeared. Saval explains that these targeted "the unholy expectation of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return". Beyond the cubicle, ubiquitous big-box retailers and chain diners betray the same homogenized failure. For a few, Saval shows, disenchantment with corporate life led to another go around. TBWA/Chiat Day redesigned a bold campus for its staff after 1997. Their virtual office failed. They replaced it, but to Saval that still feels like Disneyland. The "cheerful haphazardness" of Google's headquarters perplexes him, but at least you can take your dog to work.

As the 2012 decision at Yahoo ordering workers to come to the office rather than work at home has demonstrated, the changing technologies that energize Silicon Valleys and Alleys alter the workplace. The "cloud" may puff up the temp economy even more; the Dutch insurance firm Interpolis models a second option, which gives employees more power over whether they want to come to an office to work at a variety of spaces (they only have a locker), or stay at home for part of their workweek. Mobile phones connect employees, no matter where they choose to work. Still, as Saval listens to a Marx-quoting manager, he realizes what one may call "trust" based on "activity-based working" may for workers translate as tacit "consent" to what a boss intends to implement to get all of the jobs done: the way the supervisor wants them to happen, regardless of the preferences of those assigned to tasks.

Saval's skepticism serves his investigation well. He keeps a wary eye on boosters from the business bestseller shelf, and he looks around where he is guided to check out the claims by managers and designers as tested against his own experience. He visits with Professor Richard Greenwald in Brooklyn, who champions the freedom while admitting the worry in contract work by freelancers. Fewer companies take on more workers, but a "frayed safety net" extends where no stability endures.

Open-source firm GitHub claims to be a non-managed, bossless office; like Interpolis, it breaks up its space into many configurations. Yet over seven out of every ten of its employees work at home. Many may come to the place once or twice a month, so the "serendipitous encounters" the designers hope to encourage by its innovative architecture may not happen much at all.  Co-working shared spaces suggest another alternative, not beholden or built for one company, and this may lead, Saval reasons, to more rewarding "creative collisions" with other workers outside one's firm or field.

Autonomy persists as the worker's ideal. Promised by many managers and parroted by many gurus, its actual presence appears to diminish from a typical, however high-tech, work site. Freelancers and contingent laborers, after all, may possess a degree of freedom not given to the salaried permanent staffer, but the uncertainty of living from one elusive paycheck to the next creates its own confines One may long to leave the cubicle as once one escaped the typing pool, but a corner office may not reward today's toiler who wants to make his or her workplace more than a location to log in or sit at.
(In shorter form to Amazon US 3-4-14; 4/8/14 without hyperlinks, to an excerpt and an interview with the author, in slightly edited form at PopMatters)