Among the Mormons, 1991 to 1993

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s I became interested in Mormonism. I blame it on Jan Shipps whose book on the early history of Mormonism I read and loved.

At the time I had completed a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. For the latter degree I, of course, took four comprehensive examinations in Archaeology, Linguistics, Bioanthropology, and Cultural Anthropology and wrote a thesis on Quakers as a social movement rather than as a reform movement contra Charles Tilly. I decided, however, against completing a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology, a decision I occasionally regret.  I felt strongly, at the time, that Anthropology needed to have a strong historical dimension and component to it but didn’t even though that was beginning to change somewhat thanks to scholars like Eric Wolf. Despite this increasing historical consciousness and an increasing reflexivity among Cultural Anthropologists, a reflexivity that often was more text than context oriented, I still found Cultural Anthropology too ahistorical for my liking, too focused on moments rather than broader contexts.

At the time I still wanted to take a Ph.D. I was still caught up in academic romanticism at the time. So, I thought I would give Sociology a try instead of Cultural Anthropology. Because of my interest in Mormonism I decided to apply to Brigham Young University to do doctoral work in Sociology. BYU had a doctoral programme at the time and I thought where better to study Mormonism socially, culturally, and historically than at BYU.

I was, I have to admit, as I was applying taken aback by the fact that I, a non-Mormon, a never Mormon, a “Gentile" in Mormon terms, needed to go see a Mormon Bishop as part of my application package to BYU in order to pledge to him that I to abide by the rules of BYU’s honour code. I did this even though I could not believe that BYU as a large university with a good graduate school was serious about all of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no problem keeping most of the rules of the honour code. I did not drink caffeinated coffee except in emergencies when I, an asthmatic, needed a epinephrine like kick. I did not drink sodas given the health issues associated with them. I was not interested in a relationship. I did not like or wear shorts. I did not want a beard. As for the hair length that was a problem since during much of my adult life I had longish hair by BYU standards. Hair length issues aside, at least for the moment, I headed for Utah and BYU after I was admitted to study for a Ph.D in Sociology.

I was lucky in getting a flat only a few blocks from the Y, a nickname for BYU I quickly learned, and even fewer blocks from downtown Provo and a grocery store. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that the award I was given by the Sociology faculty only covered tuition for one term instead of two. Getting a teaching gig in Sociology and working at Walt West Books, both of which actually furthered my opportunities to study Mormons ethnographically, helped with that. As for BYU students they were the best students collectively that I ever taught and in some cases rivalled students at Oxbridge. What a rare and wonderful pleasure it was to teach such committed and more than prepared students.

I had, as I noted, studied Mormonism and Mormon history before I arrived at the Y. Upon arrival I began to do ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Mormons. I talked to students, 93% of whom were LDS, and learned, for example, their ethno-categories for male and female Mormons (which included, for the Mormon women I talked to, "returning missionary" and "weird returning missionary") and what their Mormon faith meant to them. In the process I got a sense of what was symbolically central in Mormonism, namely, the Plan of Salvation. I talked to my neighbours who were all Mormons and BYU students. I talked to returned Mormon missionaries who were at the Y some of whom seemed to have been liberalised by the experience. I talked to some of the student activists in VOICE, a feminist organisation on campus and had five of them come to talk to my Sociology class. I went to ward meetings in Provo and Salt Lake with my neighbours and got, in the process, a sense of what Mormon rituals were like. I went to a Family Home Evening on the BYU campus thanks to two student friends. I talked to and observed ex-Mormons, one of who was a Quaker peace activist and co-founder of the peace encampment near the nuclear test site in Nevada. I talked to Jack Mormons or cultural Mormons. One, a female BYU student, told me that she still believed Jospeh Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, was the prophet even though she no longer believed in every tenant of contemporary Mormonism.  I talked to BYU faculty becoming particularly close to one, an archaeologist teaching while finishing up his Ph.D at the University of Michigan. It was he who dragged me to the Tanner’s in Salt Lake and to the FARMS brown bag talks held once a week in the Spencer W. Kimball Tower, the SWKT, where the Sociology and Anthropology faculties were at the time.

One of the things that struck me about these FARMS brown bags as I listened to scholars like Royal Skousen and Lyndon Cook was how what seemed to me like polemics, at least on one level, was grounded in scholarship like you would find in any intellectual and academic community on another level. I have to admit that I admired the scholarship of those like John Sorenson, who argued in a scholarly fashion that the Book of Mormon lands were actually in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Even though I could not accept Sorenson’s conclusions I admired the scholarly way he got there. 

It was this scholarship and the interest in scholarship that I most admired and continue to admire about BYU. It was a place, my ethnographic research revealed, where students were deeply engaged with their academic work and with the intellectual life, something that is rare as I would discover later during my part-time teaching sojourns—I hate bureaucracies of all types so a full-time position even if I got one, which was unlikely, was out of the question—at the University at Albany and SUNY Oneonta. RPI, where I also taught, was somewhat different in that the students at that institute were engaged but their engagement with academic work and intellectual culture was much narrower in focus than the students I met, talked to, and taught at the Y.

Another thing that struck me about students and faculty at the Y was how deeply engaged they were in what I would call social ethics. Many of those I met were deeply engaged with social issues. One of my neighbours, who knew English, German, and Dutch was so deeply committed to her feminism that she engaged the most conservative or traditionalist faculty and defenders of the Mormon faith in the Religious Education Department. I met a faculty member in Sociology who had become a pacifist—he was influenced by the Catholic Workers and Quakers—and who was involved with protests against nuclear weapons testing around Easter in Nevada. He took me and four Mormon students at the Y down to the Quaker eEster weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas, where we stayed in a Catholic Church and were fed by members of the Catholic Workers. All five of us had what might be called a mystical experience or, if you prefer a more secular explanation, a betwixt and between symbolic and ritual experience, while there. We five would later form the core of the Mormon Peace Gathering, a group that planned and implemented a Mormon weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site the next year.

My involvement as the only “Gentile” in the Mormon Peace Gathering gave me further entree into Mormon intellectual culture. I met Eugene England, Steve Epperson, and a host of other intellectual and intellectually “liberal” Mormons thanks to the Mormon Peace Gathering. It was all a heady and exciting experience. I learned from this experience that, at least for me, one of the factors, if not the central factor, that seemed to separate “liberal” Mormons from “conservative” Mormons was “continuing revelation”. Faithful Mormons believe that the prophet in Salt Lake received revelations periodically from god. The “liberals”, it seemed to me, differed from the “conservatives” in that for them only revelations received by the prophet in Salt Lake and which were signed by the First Presidency were authoritative revelations. “Conservatives”, on the other hand, believed, it seemed to me, that any revelation the prophet received was authoritative. So, for them, if Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson counselled women to stay at home and take care of the house and the children, it was an authoritative revelation that had to be obeyed.

Most of the Mormons I hung out with were of the “liberal” persuasion. I did meet more “conservative” Mormons during my years in Utah. One of the students in my Social Inequality class, for example, believed that anything the prophet said was divine and he held “conservative’ views on a host of social issues including capital punishment, homosexuality, and abortion. Another friend of mine was somewhere in between on the “liberal” and “conservative’ continuum. He went to the Quaker protest with me and was initially involved with Mormon Peace Gathering planning but he dropped out early in the planning stages finding that what the MPG was doing conflicted with parts of his Mormon faith, what parts I no longer recall (I can’t look at my field notes because they have been destroyed).

What I have never forgotten about in the wake of my interactions with Mormon culture in Utah was the important fact that BYU was not representative of Mormons in general. It was representative, I think, of mainstream Mormon intellectual culture, a culture I was very impressed with. I really did not have much interaction with Mormons beyond BYU. Beyond campus I met academic to be scholars like Dennis now Kelli Potter while I worked at Walt West Books. I met non-Mormon academics interested in Mormons at the bookshop like Stephen Kent, a professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, and actor Edward Herrmann at the bookshop. I met Mormons who were not academics but who were intellectuals deeply interested in Mormon Studies and Mormon history who I met at Walt West Books when I worked there including a book buyer for Seagull Books who showed me a first edition of the Book of Mormon. I was so impressed that amateurs, most of them who seemed to work at the computer software firms in the Provo area and most of whom where “liberals", were interested in and in some cases writing impressively on Mormon history. I met some in the Mormon fundamentalist community, both practitioners and ideological fellow travellers, at and through the bookshop and during my visit to a fundamentalist community south of Salt Lake thanks to a fundamentalist fellow traveller. I helped put together and write for the short lived Deseret Free Press. 

There were things that, as I became more familiar with BYU, that troubled me and troubled me deeply. I was at the Y, for example, when David Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr were fired for ideological reasons. I was there when the Brethren, the powerful leaders in Salt Lake, told members not to attend Sunstone conferences, Sunstone being a Mormon magazine for those of the “liberal” Mormon persuasion, “liberals” who, generally speaking, made use of historical and social scientific methodologies some “conservatives” saw as inherently “secular" and even possibly “anti-Mormon”. I was troubled by the Mormon policy on homosexuality. Given this I was and am proud that I, at the behest of the Y Sociology Club of which I was the faculty representative, was involved in bringing a group founded by the parents of gays which had a positive attitude toward homosexuals to campus. I was troubled by by the fact that I was turned in to the Honors Department by someone for bringing a book by the Tanner's on the changes in the Mormon temple ceremony to campus. After I wrote opinion pieces condemning the firings of Knowlton and Farr for the Utah Valley newspaper in Orem, arguing that the Y was more like Bob Jones and less like to Notre Dame (which I did attend briefly), after getting in trouble for some ethnographic experiments, and after Sociology proved as problematically ahistorical as Cultural Anthropology, I decided to leave the Y.

Given my conclusion that History was central to the human studies enterprise I decided to apply to doctoral programmes in History. I was accepted at several places including my dream school the University of Toronto. Though my dreams did not fully come true and it took me years to do so, thanks to financial problems and, when writing the dissertation, problems with my computer files, I finally finished my Ph.D and wrote my dissertation on Mormon Studies. Eventually that dissertation would be published after much blood, sweat, tears, and gnashing of teeth, by McFarland. Though it isn’t perfect—the writer’s cut which is in my possession is better and the authoritative version of the book—I am proud of the book and the research that went into it. 

I am no longer as interested in Mormonism as I was and as my book makes clear, I was more interested in broader questions of identity construction, identity, the origins of social movements as examples of how things are socially and culturally constructed and then fetishised or universalises than Mormonism per se in the first place. I had simply used Mormons to explore and get all of those broader issues. Social media, however, and specifically Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions on YouTube, has peaked my interest in Mormonism and Mormonism as a social and cultural movement again. Perhaps one day I may even get to tell my Non-Mormon Mormon Story on one of them.

“Get Out Before It is Too Late”: An Open Letter to the Lawmakers of New York State

 

What happened in Minnesota over the weekend—the assassination of a Minnesota Democrat lawmaker, the attempted assassination of other Democrats, and the planned assassination of others who were politically and ideologically incorrect in the eyes of the assassin—should remind us of the history of political violence or terrorism in the United States since its inception. 

It should remind us of the attacks on and cleansing of Loyalists during the American War of Independence and the confiscation of their property without recompense. It should remind us of bleeding Kansas with its guerrilla wars between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, wars that were brutal and terroristic. It should remind us of the Quantrill’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederate raiders and their brutality which included the massacre of “civilians in places like Lawrence, Kansas. I should remind us of the racist Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror and terror killings after the Civil War. It should remind us of White supremacist attacks on those who are not them. It should remind us of anti-abortion attacks on abortion clinics and abortion doctors. It should remind us that Timothy McVay bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in response to what he saw as government terror in Waco, Texas. 

The immolation of members of an Adventist religious group by, at least in part, the US government should also remind us of government sponsored violence and terrorism, federal, state, and local, over the course of US history. It should remind us of the US government’s actions against rebellions in the early years of the Republic. It should remind us of the use of militias and the military against labour actions and socialists, communists, and anarchists. It should remind us of Waco. And it should remind us of the terrorists who attacked the US Capitol in 2021 under the delusion that their man, Donald Trump, actually won an election he lost. And it should remind us that in his first days in office President Donald Trump pardoned those convicted by juries of attacking the Capitol looking for lawmakers to, what, lynch?

Of course, none of these will remind most Americans and most American lawmakers of the history of violence, including state violence, that has erupted over the course of US history. Most Americans, after all, prefer to live in a Disneyish world of mythhistory rather than in the world of real history. Bright colours painted over dark ones do make the ideological world go round in the United States.

I remind you of this history because now that Donald Trump has returned to office we are seeing an uptake in non-state and state political violence and terrorism in Minnesota and in California. We are seeing an uptake in the power of executive branch of the government. We are seeing an uptake in executive branch deportations of immigrants and rumblings that the executive government may deport Americans who are not politically and ideologically correct in Trumpian terms. We are seeing the executive branch trying to avoid and undermine the rulings of the court, the third branch of the US government. We are seeing increasing “arrests” of Democrats by ICE, masters of Trumpian chaos and intimidation, which seems to be trying to prove that it is Trump’s own little Gestapo. 

Trump, of course, thinks of the American state as his corporation, He has no problem or compunction about using this corporation, a corporation which he controls and rules over,  for his personal financial benefit and gain. He is also using this corporation to further a political agenda that is arguably fascist.

As one of the three American academics who fled the United States and Yale for the University of Toronto in Canada told the Guardian yesterday there are important lessons one should learn from the Nazi takeover of the German government. Getting out earlier than later before it is too late is one of them.

In this spirit, I urge the lawmakers of New York to consider two proposals. First, to form a Union with California, Oregon, Washington state, and the New England states independent from a United States, a nation that should actually be called the Confederate States of America. Alternatively, I would urge New York lawmakers to consider petitioning Canada for admission as a province in that nation, Can we be the tenth. I would urge lawmakers to consider these two proposals before it is to late.

While Democrats seem to be treating Trump Mach Two as business as usual and as something that will end I don’t think one can treat what is happening as normal and I am not sure that Trump will willingly leave office. He may even want to pass his the US on to his son and heir. We are clearly, as many academics and intellectuals have pointed out, on the road to fascism, on the road to a White supremacist, literalist, misogynist, and terroristic fascist United States governed by the leader of a new religion, a theocratic cult, Donald Trump, a cult that brooks no political ideology, economic ideology, or culture other than its own. Do something before it is too late. Hoping that all things must pass is not doing something.

The Guardian and Journalistic Mediocrity: Musings on an Article About the Political Leanings of Academia in the Guardian

 

Recently the American page of the English newspaper The Guardian, one of the few quality newspapers left in a world of sub-mediocre newspapers and gossip rags (which The Guardian is in part as well), published an article entitled “US Universities are Moving to the Right: Will it Help Them Escape Trump’s Wrath?” What is remarkable about this article is how mediocre it is, something journalism at its best generally is these days. In fact, this article points up how little social science capital and savvy most journalists have.

This article notes a 2016 study by a professor of business, a developer of health economic solutions for the private sector, and a professor of economics  of the 40 “leading" universities in the US (mostly research universities that are members of the Association of American Universities). This study showed that a majority of faculty in the Humanities and the Social Sciences skew Democrat and, since the Democrats are popularly regarded as liberals in the US, liberal. Before I go on I should not that one might and should wonder about what the 2016 study left out namely,  the political and ideological leanings of faculty in agriculture schools, business schools, medical schools, dental schools, and veterinary schools are and why those who did the 2016 study did not study those academics as well.

But let’s assume for the moment that the 2016 study is correct, a conclusion that other studies could be used to raise questions about, and that the Humanities and Social Sciences (they also include journalism and law schools in these categories which is problematic) are filled to the brim with liberals. The question that needs to be asked about this is why is this the case? Why are those in the Humanities and Social Sciences liberals.

The answer to that question is rather obvious and is backed up by a host of social science qualitative studies. The higher the educational level achieved by someone the more they are to vote liberal in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Educational level, in other words, is the key variable here.

Why is this the case? The answer to that question is also obvious. Higher education faculty, particularly those in the Social Science, have generally been, to quote Nick Lowe, nutted by reality. They know, for example, that while some may assume that crime is higher in urban areas data has, in the past, shown that crime is higher percentage wise in rural areas.

Now this fact, the fact that higher education in the Social Sciences is a reality check, does not mean that there aren’t political and ideological conservatives in the ivy halls of academe and that there can’t be more political and ideological conservative intellectuals (real conservatives not the fake populists who claim the conservative mantle) in higher education. There are intellectual conservatives in American universities and there can be more. For a conservative who currently teaches in the ivy covered walls of the Ivy League I give you Niall Ferguson who holds a well paying job at Harvard and whose books, unlike his homiletics, skew empirical. 

Moreover, one might argue that if ideology is broken in surveys of politics and ideology in American education into a number of more nuanced criteria, such as religion to take one example, often a marker of a more conservative sensibility at least on one level, one might find interesting cultural and ideological contradictions or seeming inconsistencies. Studies of the religious sensibilities in American higher education, for example, show that even in the hard sciences there are a significant number of academics who believe in god even in these supposed secular anti-Christian days. Exploring cultural factors might, in other words, give us a more nuanced picture of the cultures and ideologies of academe.

But back to the nutted by reality argument, the fact is is that right wing populists, who are in no way intellectual conservatives, have been socialised into mythic or what David Graeber might call bullshit history and social science. Such a history and social science are often if not always fake history and such a history and social science should not be taught in academe save in literary studies or in classes on how cultural and ideology create reality in some human populations because they are fake history and fake social science. They are not science. Real science has to be vetted by empirical reality. They are instead ideology.

The thing is is that Trump and his ilk may argue for an affirmative action programme for “conservatives” in higher education, itself a paradox and perhaps an irony given that they oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes (save for themselves it appears). What they really want is power, exclusive power, and they know that to achieve this they need to transform higher education into a politically and ideologically correct image and mirror of themselves. And they are, at the moment more than willing to engage in an inquisition of higher education in order to obtain this power.

I want to end this essay by suggesting to the authors of the study on political and ideological attitudes among academic social scientists and humanities scholars that they do a similar study of political and ideological attitudes among the police in the United States. What I think they will find, if Staten Island is prologue, is that there needs to be an affirmative action programme for liberals and Democrats in America’s police forces, an institution that is not only full of right wing populists who vote Republicam but a healthy dose of proto-fascists if not full fledged fascists.

Say Hello to Indiana University Vichy...

 

You gotta love the governor of Indiana and his politically and ideologically correct groupies. They whinge and whine about too few Indiana University alumnae and alumni voting in Board elections. Then they proceed, after eliminating the election of Board members all together and firing two Board members who have been critical of the leader of Indiana University, to “elect” two new members of the Board (don’t you just love those collaborators jumping at the chance to serve on such a Board?) by a single “vote” all. And they have done it all with the collaboration of bureaucrats at IU in Bloomington. Needless to say, this is positively Hitlerian, Stalinist, and, need I say it, Orwellian.

So also is Orwellian the fact that today on the IU Facebook page, a page that spews propaganda on a regular basis just like the Facebook pages of other universities and colleges, they wished Herman B. Wells former president and chancellor of the university, a happy birthday. It is Orwellian because Wells stood up to the paternalistic puritanical patriarchs in Indianapolis when they wanted to inquisit and exorcise the Institute of Sex Research at the university, irony intended. This is enough to make one recall what a lawyer said to Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings, namely, have you no shame? The answer, of course, is that just like Tailgunner Joe IU’s powers that be and their propagandists have no shame. For them it is political and ideological correctness by any means.

If I could do it all over again I would have transferred to the University of Texas when IU arranged for me to finish my degree in Austin for health reasons. UT remains a real university unlike the sinking academic ship that is IU, a ship that has been sinking since the 1990s in the ratings guides to research universities. All I have to say is I am so glad I sent my diploma back to an IU—telling them to do the Johnny Paycheck with it—that is fast becoming a right wing politically and ideologically correct theocratic institution dedicated to turning out yes men and yes women for the cult of Tangholio and its bread and circuses. 

The Books of My Life: Singin’ in the Rain

As I look back on my film viewing and film ranking habits one of the things that stands out to me from the vantage point of today is how much what I like, what I don’t like, and all points in between has changed across time and space. It is called, growing up with a reflexive mind, I guess

When I was a teenager I watched every film I could on television, at second run theatres, and at art cinemas. I particularly sought out films that were regarded as classics and as quality films by film critics like Leonard Maltin, whose film guide was my film bible in the early years of my film viewing life. Today I am much more choosy and much more persnickety about which films I would put in my film pantheon and which directors I would put in my director pantheon. I would, for example, number Doctor Strangelove and Casablanca as two of my pantheon films and number Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer as two of my pantheon directors.

Recently I have been rewatching a number of films that critical consensus among film critics would rank as classics. I have recently rewatched, for example, Gigi, Meet Me in Saint Louis, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain. Though I know that most critics would not agree with me, and the younger me would probably not agree with old me, I would not list, at the moment at least, any of these films among the best films ever made though I did quite like Gigi and Meet Me in Saint Louis the second or third time around. 

I blame a lot of this change in my film viewing aesthetics on Joss Whedon’s television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have long been fond of parody, satire, and dark or black comedy (yes, Virginia, black does not only refer to the colour of skin) but Buffy revealed to me how much I love genre blending, tonal blending, allegory, metaphor, and existentialism (that last actually makes Buffy kin to the works of Bergman and Kieslowski). A.B., after Buffy, I find it hard to watch films and television shows that don’t blend genre, tone, and social ethics. They seem mundane and banal to me now.

Now don’t get me wrong there were still things I found interesting and quite impressive in many of the films I rewatched. The visuals of the Vincente Minelli films and the John Ford films, for example, were and are impressive, really impressive. As a whole, however, the films by these directiors simply did not move me as they once did. 

Paradoxically I was quite moved—moved intellectually—by Peter Wollen’s monograph Singin’ in the Rain (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I have known Wollen’s work since I read Wollen' seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. If memory serves, I read the first edition of this monograph which is now in its fifth edition, sometime in the 1970s. At the time, Signs and Meaning was a mind blowing experience for me as it revealed to me a more semiological and contextual approach to the film auteurism I had become devoted to.

Wollen’s Singin’ in the Rain was just as impressive as Signs and Meaning in the Cinema had been to me some fifty or so years ago. Wollen does an excellent job of exploring the production aspects of the film including its production by MGM’s Freed Unit and the fact that the film was built around songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown that MGM already owned. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a few additional songs for the film at Gene Kelly’s insistence as Wollen notes. He does an outstanding job of exploring the roles co-directors Stanley Donen and Kelly played in the making of the film. He does an excellent job of exploring how Kelly, who was also one of the stars of the film, worked with others to choreograph the dance, camera movements, and transitions in the “Singin’ in the Rain" segment of the film. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, regards Kelly as the general, the conductor, the author who led his forces in the making of the film. He does a superb job of conceptualising Singin’ in the Rain in the history of modern dance and in exploring Kelly’s approach to modern dance. He does an outstanding job of placing Singin’ in the Rain within the subgenres of the film musical, sub-genres enunciated by Rick Altman in his book on the American film musical: the Show Musical, the Fairy Tale Musical, and the Folk Musical. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, argues that Singin’ in the Rain is all three. He makes an interesting argument that Singin’ in the Rain is, with its realism—its story arc, character arcs, and exploration of the transition from silents to sound in Hollywood—and its artifice—the ballet sequence in the film—a kind of filmic version of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. The film musical, as Wollen and others have noted since at least since the 1970s, foregrounds their construction making them similar to what Bertolt Brecht was trying to do in the theatre.

Recommended.

Musings on Mad Men

 

Let me admit something right off the bat: I don’t, generally speaking, like American television It is full of, at best, mediocrities situated between what is really important on American commercial television, product. The real point of American television, along with its socialising function, is to sell consumers consumer goods. The shows are simply there to bring consumers to the idiot box so the networks can sell product.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some American television shows I quite like. I like, for instance The Twilight Zone. I like the Dick van Dyke Show. I like The Wonder Years. And I really like the knowing and multitonal Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the few American television shows that can, in my opinion, be spoken of in the same breath with great British and European TV shows like The Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Lewis, Morse, House of Cards, Dekalog, Forbyrdelsen, Broen, and Badehotellet. But these are anomalies. The less said about drek like Gilligan’s Island, Full House, The Facts of Life, and The Brady Bunch the better. Hell even France, a country where television was often considered an aesthetic wasteland by its artistic elites, has better television shows than American television these days.

This brings me to Mad Men. Mad Men of course, is a basic television show. It was broadcast on AMC, which once upon a time showed mostly American movie classics. For many, including critics, with a kind of midcult cultural capital, it is cable television where the great American TV shows are shown these days. They like to point to Game of Thrones and The Sopranos as examples of what American TV and American television auteurs can achieve if it and they (though many leave this unsaid) adopt the British writer centred limited episode model of TV. Their mantra seems to be that is not cable TV it is, fill in the blank. 

The problem with this argument, and it certainly relevant to what I have seen of Mad Men, is that most of the shows on American cable television aren't very good relatively speaking or absolutely speaking. Game of Thrones was a self important misogynist mediocrity aimed at a fanatic fandom, some of whom wanted to see tits, ass, and pussy, and they got a lot of all three during the run of the show. The Sopranos was a self important mediocrity with lots of sex and tits, something that apparently makes HBO better than American commercial television, and something that certainly draws certain viewers to it, and violence (bang, bang, shoot em up), a mafia Western for the anti-Western generation.

This brings me to Mad Men. From what I have seen of the show so far it is a self important mediocrity that wears its Hollywood social problems theme on its sleeves, something akin to being repeatedly hit by a hammer on the head. Mad Men is something I imagine Stanley Kramer, the producer and director of the 1950s and 1960s social problem Hollywood film, would have loved or even made in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem with these social problem films, however, beyond their social problem obviousness—something known to appeal to Oscar and Emmy voters and to critics at elite magazines and newspapers—is that it doesn’t feel organic. I prefer social problems to emerge organically out of a narrative.

There are other problems I had and have with Mad Men. The acting is generally mannered, presumably to hit viewers over the head with stereotypes, in this case misogynist frat boy (something actually mentioned in the first episode) stereotypes. Such an acting style doesn’t feel organic as it does in the theatre, however. Additionally,  the show wears its attempt at high art on its sleeves. It tries to tell viewers (check out that mise-en-scene) that it is clever, something some viewers undoubtedly accept because of its seriousness and the fact that it is on cable. To me it really isn’t clever. To me Mad Men is Saturday Night Live to Britain’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is, in other words, sophomorically clever while Python is often truly clever. 

For these reasons Mad Men is not my cup of tea at least at present. I will keep watching to see if I will change my mind.

The CVS Kiada Goes On and On and On and On and On

 

I am truly shocked, shocked that I was able to go almost half a month without a bureaucratic feck up I had to deal with. Now, however, I have to deal with yet another bureaucratic feck up. The more things change, I guess.

I have told this story before but I have to tell it again. With bureaucracies you have to retell the story again and again and again after all. I was overcharged for my Pregabalin by CVS in Delmar. I did not catch this overcharge, the result of, you guessed it, another bureaucratic feck up, until I got the second prescription filled. I was thus only able to get a refund for the second filling not the first.

The bureaucrat-workers at CVS Delmar told me to contact my prescription insurance to get a refund. And that is what I did. Do I called CVS Silver Script Empire, explained the situation to them, and filled out, what I could, of the form they sent me. Much of it was irrelevant and confusing. Ah, bureaucracy.

Well today I got a missive from CVS Caremark. It was not the refund I expected but a denial of my request for a refund. Here we enter Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. I got a refund for the second Pregabalin filling but not the first. Take that in. I was refunded for the second filling of Pregabalin but not the first. Can I get an absurd?

So I called CVS Silver Script... again. After getting the runaround I was told I needed to fill out a form, perhaps even the one I had already filled out. I did the eye roll thing and declined and said I would file the appeal form I had received from good old CVS Silver Script NY by post. It is simply easier to do that than to spend half hours and hours on the phone trying to explain the situation. And this strategy allowed me to get back to the movie I was watching.

Will the appeal work? Who the hell knows. I suspect it eventually will when the bureaucrats at CVS Caremark realise I am owed the same refund for the first filling of my Pregabalin I got for my second. Until that time I live somewhat in Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. Ain’t that fun.