Life as Crisis Management: The Health Insurance Kiada Part 5

I recently learned, thanks to the failure of Medicare and my state health insurance, the Empire Plan, to pay my back and ear, nose, and throat doctors bills, that both Medicare and my state health insurance regarded themselves as secondary payers of my health insurance bills. I recently discovered, in other words, that no one was paying my doctor bills. So, once again, in order to try to bring life order out of bureaucratic chaos I had to get on the phone to figure out what was going on.

I started with Medicare and I am glad that I did. After helpfully helping me create a Medicare account (beware of dashes) I was informed that the problem was State Farm. State Farm, the private capitalist auto and home insurer, who I used to have auto insurance with, provided me health care after I was involved in an auto accident in 2013. After I went off of State Farm health insurance coverage that company did not update section 111 so technically this short-term State Farm health care coverage is my primary health insurance now that I am retired. Since State Farm isn't acting as my post-retirement health insurer and isn't, as a consequence paying my health care bills, well you can, I hope dear reader, see the problem. 

Now I have to, of course, spend my time and spend monies, without remuneration, for as capitalism teaches us my time is money, contacting State Farm to get them to update section 111 and purge me from that health care programme. I also, of course, have to spend time and monies contacting my doctors telling them to resubmit my bills to Medicare after 7 January of next year. What fun.

Can I get a big hurrah for capitalist bureaucratic "efficiency"?

Postscripts:

1. I contacted State Farm and, after two transfers, was told that they, the marvellous State Farm, can't cancel my coverage, though they aren't paying my health care bills, until they receive a notification from my doctor that I am no longer being treated for something I haven't used and been treated for since 2013. Marvel at the absurdity here. By the way, I am sure my doctor closed this treatment, but you can't argue with moronic once size fits all we need a paper trail and don't have it for whatever reason modern bureaucracy.

2. I contacted the doctor, Steven Elfant, the chiropractor who treated me after the accident and who State Farm said needed to close my case. He responded that State Farm was lying to me and that this case closed six months after it was opened. He refused to contact State Farm and refused to send me a letter saying the case was not open. I finally got Dr. Elfant to agree to sign a letter to State Farm and State Farm to agree to send me a letter explaining why closing this case must be done according to New York state law to give to Dr. Elfant so I can get the hell out of this absurd nightmare that is affecting my health insurance, my health, and my life.

Musings on American Hero Worship, aka, Having Other Gods...

Americans continue to carry with them secular versions of Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christian saintliness and sainthood. I gave up such notions in the 1970s and, as a result, I don't expect much from any economic, political, cultural, or religious figure. However, I realise that humans, particularly humans socialised and enculturated into religious or secular manicheanism and unable to escape that cultural and ideological box, will continue to expect, thanks to simplistic fictional Hollywood or comic book heroes, miracles from their saintly heroes. So while I don't view Biden as the messiah, and find it ludicrous that anyone would regard him as such, and find it absurd that anyone would regard the deeply flawed demagogic bullshitter and flim flam man (I know I am repeating myself here) Trump as a saviour, I know that humans, stuck in adolescent arrested development as they likely will always be, will continue to look for saints, religious or secular, to lead them to nirvana despite the fact that they never do. Cue Einstein's definition of insanity.

Life as Crisis Management: The Pharmacy Insurance Kiada, parts 3 and 4

As I explained in an earlier post I was recently switched to the CVS (bullshite pr heart) caremark SilverScript New York state retirees drug plan. The second time I used it I was given a generic version of Advair and was charged sixty bucks for it. First off, I didn't know there was a generic version of Advair, the skanky GlaxoSmithKline has successfully kept a generic version off the market since the 1990s thanks to its economic and political power. Second, I was confused and shocked at the cost since it was my first-time getting Advair or Advair equivalent on the new pharmacy drug plan. Third, I was shocked at the less expensive generic was not covered by the formulary of my drug plan but then I realised that drug companies and insurance companies make sweetheart deals with each other.

I appealed the lack of coverage of Advair generic and now, now that I don't need it, of course, the generic version of this asthma medication is covered by CVS (bullshit pr heart) SiverScript. I also requested a refund of $55 dollars since I would only have paid $5 if the generic had been covered by the formulary. I was denied the refund. What made the denial just absurdly perfect, however, was this little question on page three of the denial letter and I quote: "Did you know generic drugs an save you money?" 

Reflect for a moment on the absurdity of this. A drug company that refused to cover a generic drug for my asthma is suggesting that since the generic is cheaper, I should use it. This is emblematic of life in a postmodernist America run by skank vulture capitalists. I thank the winter solstice that I won't have to deal with such a humourless Monty Pythonesque world much longer as I am in the autumn of my life. To paraphrase Father Jack from Father Ted, feck off world.

Life as Crisis Management: The USPS Kiada Parts 23 and 24...

Something needs to be done about the USPS. Over the years since "free tracking" went into effect (a mistake since it reveals the inner workings of the USPS), including before the pandemic, I, who live in Albany, NY, have had packages I ordered from various companies sent by the USPS from NJ to Birmingham, Alabama, from California to Hawaii, from Springfield, Mass to Albany to Schnectady and back to Springfied, Mass. Since 19 November the Albany Distribution Centre lost one of my packages and, just when I thought USPS incompetence, lazziness, and/or mischief couldn't get any worse/better, sent two of my orders from different sources, from Albany to Newburgh to Harrisburg, Penn all in the space of a few hours. We now live in a serious Monty Python world people.

The Books of My Life: Not Hollywood

 

In her book Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2013), cultural anthropologist Sherry Ortner trades an ethnography of the Sherpas of Nepal, a culture she studied in the 1960s, tor an ethnography and analysis of one America filmmaking culture, which she studied in the 2000s. Like cultural anthropologists Hortense Powdermaker, a student of Bronisław Malinowski who took her doctorate at the London School of Economics, and Leo Rosten, who took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, before her, Ortner became not only an observer of an American film culture culture but also a historian and sociologist of one American filmmaking scene, the American independent fiction and non-fiction cinema of the 1980s and after, a cinema culture that, as Ortner notes, defined itself as not Hollywood, as not a purveyor of inoffensive and unrealistic fairy tale entertainments with happy endings.

Ortner ties the rise of post-1980s American independent cinema and its culture to neoliberalism and its impacts on Generation X, which she defines as the generations impacted by neoliberalism rather than as a cohort. Ortner explores the rise of the professional middle class with progressivist political leanings, a class that arose, Ortner argues, in the wake of 1970s and 1980s corporate neoliberalism and which would play major economic (as producers and investors) and artistic (as directors, actors, and crew) roles in the independent American cinema. She explores the economic, political, and cultural concerns at the heart of this Generation X professional middle class and Gen X independent filmmakers, including a fear of falling or downward economic mobility, a concern with the perilous economic position of migrants who came to the United States in the 1980s and after, and a concern with the perilous economic situations of impoverished single mothers and the children they tried to protect in the perilous neoliberal America in which they lived (a kind of filmic political activism argues Ortner). She explores debates over what independent cinema is, how independent American movies are made, and how independent movies are distributed, including the role Miramax and Hollywood studio specialty divisions, one of which would eventually be Miramax after it was acquired by Disney, played in the American independent cinema.

There is a lot to like in Ortner's historical, sociological, and ethnographic exploration of the American independent cinema. Unlike many deconstructionist and semiological text centred analyses of American cinema, Ortner's approach, and particularly its ethnographic approach, adds essential empirical flesh and bone to how American independent cinema is actually made and, as such, is an important adjunct and empirical corrective to so much English and Cultural Studies grounded film analysis these days. On the other hand, I don't think Ortner explores, as much as she could, earlier forms of American independent cinema including United Artists, which had a somewhat artistic bent, American International Pictures, which had a more pop emphasis and played an important role in the rise of targeted cinema, or Orion Pictures, a "mini-major studio that produced many small, heartfelt, and more realistic films in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor do I think Ortner does as much as she could with the role foreign art cinema, particularly French cinema in its nouvelle vague period, and the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, played in impacting notions of flimmaking in America, played in the rise of the new Hollywood cinema and its directors in the late 1960s and 1970s, and played in the distribution of non-studio films in the United States, particularly afther the breakup of the Hollywood control of production, distribution, and exhibition in 1948. Additionally, I don't think Ortner explores, as much as she could, how films of the new Hollywood, such as Where the Lilies Bloom, a 1974 adaptation by producer Robert Rabnitz, writer Earl Hamner Jr. of The Waltons fame, and director William A. Graham, of a novel by Bill and Vera Cleaver, about rural North Carolina children who fear falling further into poverty after their father dies and fear what will happen to them as a result of their father's death, a film distributed by United Artists, and a film which foreshadows at least some of dark themes--fear of downward economic mobility and the resultant dangers to children--Ortner finds in the American independent cinema of the 1980s and after. Finally, one invariably wonders if there would have been differences in the analysis of feminism and indie women in the book if the ethnography and analysis had been done in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Musings on the Endless Whinging and Whining of the Right-Wing and Murdoch Mysteries

Among the post-1960s ideological generations nobody whinges and whines like the right-wing. They whinge about the decline of the family. They whine about abortion. They whinge about liberals. They whine about socialists. They whinge about feminism. They whine about the make believe war against Christmas and Christians, the supposed decline in family values, cigarette restrictions, seat belt laws, gun control restrictions, and vegans, who are around 2% of the US population. They whinge about being victimised. They whine about films. They whinge about TV.  They whinge, whinge, whinge and whine, whine, whine, something right-wing radio does all the time because they know it attracts listeners, manipulates emotions, and sends listeners to the polls.

Recently, I ran across several right wingers whinging and whining in their typical declensionish way about the Canadian television show, Murdoch Mysteries at the questionably critically literate Amazon.com. In their "reviews"--a term I use advisedly here since they are less reviews than expressions of feelings--of season fourteen several posters deplored what they saw as the increasing political and ideological correctness of Murdoch Mysteries all, ironically, in an apparently unrecognised politically and ideologically correct way. Please take a moment to marvel at that. These "reviewers" don't, as they often don't, delineate exactly what they mean by agendas, pandering to bs, or preachiness. They simply assert it in empirically deficient declarative sentences raising the question of what all this right-wing gnashing of teeth is about. Are they upset that there are representations of alternative sexual lifestyles in Murdoch? Are they upset that there are Black Canadians in Murdoch Mysteries? Are they upset that there are too few serial killers in the show? They are certainly not upset, one assumes, over the respect for religion, the respect for tradition, the respect for scientific knowledge and its forensic abilities, and the respect for intellect Canadian Tory Michael Taube finds and praises in the show or the cameo of Taube's friend and then Canadian Tory prime minister Stephen Harper in the show.

Some of the reviewers of season fourteen of Murdoch Mysteries claimed that this political and ideological correctness of the show has increased recently. One claimed that it had increased after season five, when the Rogers Corporation owned Citytv axed Murdoch and the CBC, a knee jerk target of many right wing Canadians and their fellow travellers just as the BBC is the knee jerk target of the Daily Mail and Murdoch News Corp ethically and morally challenged right in the United Kingdom, picked up the show. These posters seem to forget about the sympathetic treatment of Blacks, at least by Murdoch and coroner and doctor Julia Ogden, and the critique of the cultures and ideologies of racism in the first season episode 'The Knockdown". They seem to forget about the sympathetic portrayal of gays and the critique of homophobia, including Catholic Murdoch's, in the first season episode "Till Death Do Us Part". They seem to forget about the sympathetic portrayal of women trapped in the iron cage of patriarchy in the third season episode "Victor, Victorian". They seem to forget that one of the themes of the show is how modernity impacts the faith of the Catholic Murdoch throughout the show and the real tensions and debates these often bring. Some of them even appear to have difficulty understanding the fact that there were political, ideological, intellectual, ethnic, sexual, and gender countercultures and subcultures during the Victorian and Edwardian eras and distinguishing a fictional television show from Victorian and Edwardian non-fiction. But then empirical analysis and accuracy have never been amongst the strong suits of right-wing political and ideologically correct types.

Right wing identity groups, of course, will never be nutted by this reality. They create their own reality in the political and ideological image of the demagogues that pied piper them and the elites these demagogues ultimately serve. That, unfortunately, is how so much of the world too often works these days. In contemporary right wing North American discourse they--fill in the evil other blank--are keeping the pie from our sky is the order of the emotional right wing day and they whinge about it all the time. This whining, sadly, ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

But do these politically and ideologically correct posters have a point even if it not quite the one they were trying to make in a rather unempirical way? Has Murdoch Mysteries gotten a bit long in the narrative tooth? One Amazon poster, who may or may not be right-wing, claims that the show needs new writers to presumably breathe new life in a show that has, as I write, been on for fifteen years, something that in and of itself may be a reason for any perceived decline in the show. I am not sure. I tend to binge watch Murdoch, which may not be the best way to watch the show, but I still enjoy it immensely after all these broadcast years. It remains, along with the Canadian show Heartland, also in its fifteenth season, and the Danish show Seaside Hotel, one of my favourites among the current crop of television shows I have seen. I still enjoy its stories, its character arcs, its character centred interactions, its humour, its satire, and its sometimes emotional and intellectual heft. I will likely keep on watching it when I can until it goes off the air, as it inevitably must.

Musings on Universities and their Communities

 

I have matriculated at and attended several universities during my academic life. I attended Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. I went to and took an A.B. from Indiana University in Bloomington.  I attended, among others, two religious universities, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and the Mormon University in Provo, Utah, Brigham Young University. Finally, I attended and took master's and doctoral degrees from SUNY Albany in Albany, New York.

Over the years, I have reflected a lot on the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical similarities and differences between the various universities I attended. Ball State University, for example, was relatively integrated into a northwest side neighbourhood in Muncie, Indiana, though it was not a college town since the school did not dominate the city of Muncie economically, politically, culturally, demographically, or geographically when I went there in the mid-1970s. There were shopping areas replete with pubs and even, eventually, a new and used bookstore near campus. Students, at least after, if memory serves, the first two years on campus or if old enough, could live off campus and there were a smattering of rooms and apartments for rent to students near campus. Some of the events at the Emmons Auditorium did draw some with the requisite cultural capital from Muncie and East Central Indiana but, for the most part, most of the events at the university were oriented toward and attended by a smattering of students. My sense is that Ball State has become more central to Muncie, just as Hartwick and SUNY Oneonta have become more central to Oneonta, in the wake of deindustrialisation and globalisation, but that Muncie is still not a college town. In fact, you wouldn't even know there was a sizable university in Muncie if you didn't know it already or live nearby. Rusting Muncie, by the way, remains a city in decline that keeps trying the same things over and over again to staunch the decay.

In 1978 I transferred to Indiana University. Indiana University dominated Bloomington then and dominated Bloomington even more after RCA packed up and left. It still dominates Bloomington economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically today. There were shops, restaurants, pubs (most notably Nick's Old English Pub), bookstores, and coffee houses aimed at students and the bohemians who came to Bloomington for school or culture and who never left between the western part of the east side of campus and the square some seven blocks west on Fourth and Sixth Streets and Kirkwood in between. 

Bloomington was a progressive Democrat town in a sea of conservative Democrats, right wing Democrats, and elitist Republicans in right wing and conservative Indiana. The Indiana School of Music, as it was then called, put on over 800 concerts a year when I was there, and one could see foreign films at least once a week if not more not to mention classic and more challenging Hollywood films at the film clubs and cinemas throughout the city. Indiana's 30,000 students came to a city of around 50,000 people and, when they were resident, consumed product at Bloomington's many businesses. The nearby mall, not surprisingly, was named the College Mall. The university consisted of almost 2,000 acres and constituted about one-third of Bloomington, Indiana.

Compared to Indiana University, the University of Notre Dame was a secular monastic community. Like the Muncie of Ball State, the South Bend, where Notre Dame is located and where I lived in 1984 when I attended UND, was a town that had seen better days thanks to the failure of the car maker Studebaker and White flight suburbanisation, and was about to see even less better days thanks to the deindustrialisation and the globalisation that were becoming noticaeble in the America of corporate friendly Ronald Reagan and corporate friendly Democrats. Like Muncie, South Bend was trying all types of urban renewal schemes to revitalise the central business district all to little avail. 

Notre Dame itself was isolated, save on football Saturday's, from South Bend and located in the northeast part of the city where it was officially known as Notre Dame, Indiana. It even had its own post office and zip code. And while students added to the economy of South Bend and nearby Mishawaka, most of what they added to was isolated on campus--Notre Dame had a student run pub near the football stadium-- it had an excellent bookstore that was probably more noted for its Notre Dame apparel and which it sold to students, alumni, and non-alumni fans (I made the mistake of going up, which itself was difficult given limited mass transit to campus, to browse the books one football Saturday and had to wait for 40 minutes to get in), and at the nearby University Park Mall in Mishawaka, which, if memory serves, was built by a corporation owned by a Notre Dame grad who has given extensively to his alma mater. 

Most of what went on on campus was aimed at students and mostly student attended though the art museum did run classic films and hold art exhibits when I was there which I assume some from the community attended. Notre Dame had an entirely different feel from Indiana University, a much more segregated and isolated from the city that surrounded it feel. As such, South Bend, which was not a college town like the Bloomington I came to love, was not really my cuppa tea in any way, shape or form Nor was the university's student demographics, which were almost 90% Roman Catholic, my cuppa tea. Notre Dame seemed to me parochial, something that was particularly noticeable when New York governor Mario Cuomo sashayed into town to talk about why he, as a politician, a Catholic politician, had to follow secular law rather than canon law when it came to abortion. Needless to say, Cuomo's visit and speech was the talk of the campus town as nothing else had been before or after during my brief sojourn on campus.

Athens, Ohio, where I arrived in 1985, was a lot like Bloomington, Indiana. The central business district of the city and its Court Street, with its more than twenty pubs, began just across the street from the campus gates of the university. Ohio University was located in the southeast part of the town between the central business district and the (Hock) Hocking River. Athens, thanks to Ohio University, had a very vital cultural and intellectual life that centred around the pubs, though there was a vital film culture in Athens as well. It's key and central rituals were pubbing on every evening of the week--there weren't even Friday classes at OU at the time--and Halloween, when some of Ohio's 17,000 students, some of Athens's 19,000 residents, and those thirty thousand others who came to Athens for the rite of passage took over Court Street in the central business district. I enjoyed living in Athens, though I have always been more enamoured of Gothic college and university architecture like that of some of the colleges of the University of Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and much of the architecture of Indiana University in Bloomington, than the colonial architecture of much of Ohio University and parts of Athens.

After leaving Athens I ended up at SUNY Albany in Albany, New York in the late 1980s. I would return in the 2000s to take a doctorate. Albany was a lot like Muncie and South Bend. It had been hit hard by suburbanisation, it had been hit hard by deindustrialisation, and it had been hit hard by corporate globalisation. The University itself was impacted by two historical facts. First, it had been a normal college before it became a university, like Ball State, and second, the state of New York didn't create a university and college system until the 1960s. Unlike the University of California system, which had been around since the mid-nineteenth century, SUNY, which is larger than the California system, is a relatively new university system which was constructed late and which, because of the impact of deindustrialisation on the state of New York, has never been fully financially stable and rises and falls economically with the economy. By the way, the SUNY system may be larger than the California higher education system but it isn't close to being a rival academically and intellectually to the University of California system.

The old normal school campus of SUNY Albany was and is in midtown Albany between Washington and Western Avenues. It is home to political science and social service programmes. The new campus was built on an old golf course some three miles west between Madison Avenue and Washington Avenue and consisted of a dismal panopticonal modernist monolithic platform designed by Edward Durell Stone. It has not aged well and it is isolated from the life of the city. There wasn't, when I arrived at SUNY Albany much nearby campus, save the burbs and the Crossgates Mall. Many students, and particularly many graduate students, lived in the old and rundown parts of the city proper in cheap apartments cut out of some of the brownstones and row houses particularly in Center Square and Pine Hills. By the 2000s neoliberal SUNY Albany was building apartments on campus under the sleazy smelling leadership of Karen Hitchcock. Interestingly, around the same time the College of Saint Rose in the Pine Hills neighbourhood of Albany was buying and restoring old Victorian and Edwardian homes for campus and student occupancy. There was a bookstore in the nearby Stuyvesant Plaza, a plaza built for the burbs, and one several blocks from the old campus near the place where Central Avenue and Washington Avenue met at the Armoury. The last, Boulevard Bookstore, was gone by the time I returned in the 2000s thanks to the rise of corporate bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble in the suburbs, bookstores where books are akin to any other commodity including the non-book  objects they peddle. 

In both the 1980s and 1990s, but particularly in the 1990s, I found cultural and intellectual life at the monumental suburban campus of SUNY Albany as isolated and as isolating as the campus itself. There was a limited film culture. The bookstore was the first university bookstore I encountered that was corporate owned. The campus bookstore was and is run by Barnes and Noble and had only a smattering of supplementary reading material, an excellent measure of the quality of the college and university; generally speaking, the less the number of supplementary books in the bookstore the less the quality of the college or university. Like the suburbs, I found the physical campus alienating and chalked up its limited cultural and intellectual life, at least in part, to its alienating material culture. The isolation of campus was exacerbated by the fact that it wasn't easily to walk to from Albany and the fact that it was difficult as a non-student to park on campus particularly during the day. In that regard, SUNY Albany, which seems to me the educational equivalent of the suburban shopping mall, was a little bit different from that temple of consumerism. 

Some, by the way, argue that the isolation of SUNY Albany out in the burbs was intentional after the activism of the sixties, a period when Albany experienced student "riots". Whether this hypothesis is true or not, it does kind of help give one a sense of the culture, material and intellectual, of SUNY Albany.

Musings on Yet Another Great Power Crisis in Eastern Europe

Reality check:

The Ukraine is a complex mix of languages and "ethnicites". Generally speaking, and you can see this mapped, those on the eastern side of what is today the Ukraine, are Russian speakers. Lvov, on the western side, has historically been the cultural centre or hearth of Ukrainian nationalism

 

What is today the Ukraine has, historically speaking, been part of, for example, Galicia-Volhynia, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Mongol Empire, the Crimean Khanate, the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth (the western part), the Russian Empire (the eastern part), the Austria-Hungarian Empire, and the USSR. Like all "nations", in other words, the Ukraine is an ideological fabrication and it has not existed since the mythical dawn of Ukraine kind. 

 

It is, by the way, no surprise that some journalists and polemicists, like those at the New York Times, would fetishise the notion of nations, ethnicities, and the Ukraine. As with virtually all fetishisations they are fabricated. In reality, the Ukraine, like most European "nations", is the product of the nineteenth century age of nationalism in Europe, an age which equated speech community with blood and soil. Needless to say, such a notion--language equals blood equals soil--would lead directly to the Shoah or Holocaust. 

 

Also, needless to say, current tensions over the Ukraine are linked to the Cold War and the expansion of the imperial NATO into regions of Europe it promised not to go after the end of the Cold War. Putin has warned NATO of crossing the near frontier line or the near beyond on many occasions and, as an imperial power with a sense of its own rightness and universalism, it, NATO, refuses again and again to heed those warnings.

Postscript: 

On 13 December 2021 a now dissident former Putin supporter and former Duma member now living in Kyiv argued that Putin's focus during the so-called crisis over the Ukraine is not really on the Ukraine, though, he says, Putin is concerned and Russians are concerned with NATO expansion to the Russian border. The former Putin supporter and MD argues that Putin is really more concerned with Belarus and the Ukraine crisis is simply a kind of bait and switch. 

The Books of My Life: The Higher Learning in America

 

Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press, the Annotated Edition, 2015) is, as the annotator and editor of the this edition of the book, Richard Teichgraeber III notes in his introduction to the text, a social scientific classic. It may not have been the first book to explore the rise of the American university in the late 19th century. It may not have been the first book to explore the inherent contradictions between business interests with their obsessions with profit and status, and teachers with their obsession with learning for learning's sake. It may not have been the first book to explore the increasingly prominent role business interests played in the modern university. It is, however, one of the few books on the rise of American universities and their control by business interests to remain in print pretty much continuously since its delayed publication in 1918.

Veblen in his typically wry, witty, parodic, and satiric way, literary strategies that are almost certainly some of the reasons for Veblen's continuing intellectual and academic relevance and resonance for intellectuals today, argues that it was through college presidents, educators who were typically mediocre in the realm of learning but competent in the realm of business practises, and the president's administrative and academic supporters and enablers, that the business dominated boards of American universities controlled the universities they governed. College presidents, argues Veblen, were the ones who introduced business like time schedules and course schedules, particularly to undergraduate education but also, to a lesser degree, to graduate education, who introduced an obsession with status relative to "competitor" universities, and who introduced an obsession with administrative and extracurricular rituals, to America's college and universities. All of these, Veblen argues, were instrumental in the businessification of the American university and the marginalisation of learning for learnings sake. As Teichgraeber notes, there is some question as to whether Veblen, like Max Weber, who argued that bureaucracies were an iron cage in which modern humans were trapped unless a charismatic bureaucrat came along, saw the businessification and bureaucratisation of American universities, with their inherent hierarchies and celebration of inequality, as a kind of iron cage imprisoning the instinct for idle learning or the pursuit of learning. Some argue that he did see the university bureaucracy as an iron cage. Others point to Veblen's hope that a kind of cooperative global higher education might emerge and allow the university, with its inherent educational mission, to escape, at least to some extent, the iron cage of the business bureaucracy and business culture.

Since Veblen wrote The Higher Learning in America, the businessification of not only the American university but the American college (and universities and colleges throughout the Western world including Oxford and Cambridge), has continued apace. Today, thanks to the growth in the number of academic bureaucrats, the growth in the contingent sector of faculty, the use by academic business oriented bureaucrats of "metrics of accountability", the increasing commercialisation of sport, and the increasing importance of governmental and corporate monies to universities, corporate and business interests seem to have overcome, at least for the moment, whatever countervailing power faculty may still have in America's universities. At this particular time, then, it seems that Weber was right; the corporate bureaucratic university is a trap, a cage, in which learning for learning's sake seems to have been pushed to the margins if not entirely undermined and from which it is unable to free itself.

Life as Crisis Management: The Bullshite Kiada or the USPS Delivers

Dealing with bureaucracies, political or corporate, is worse than being Dustin Hoffman being tortured by that Nazi former dentist played by Lawrence Olivier in the film The Marathon Man. Unfortunately, I have to deal with a lot of bureaucratic muck-ups these days. No bureaucracy fucks up, in my experience, more than the United States Postal Service, which I have to deal with at least once a month.

This month the problem has involved the package below. According to this tracking information, this package, as you can see, has been in Albany, New York, the place where the item is going, since Friday, 19 December. That is over ten days ago.

Tracking information:
Friday, November 19
1:03 AM
Package arrived at a carrier facility.
Albany Ny Distribution Center, US

Thursday, November 18
10:58 PM
Package left the carrier facility.
Springfield Ma Network Distribution Center, US
9:52 PM
Package left the carrier facility.
2:47 PM
Package arrived at a carrier facility.
Springfield Ma Network Distribution Center, US
Tuesday, November 16
7:07 PM
Package arrived at a carrier facility.
Harrisburg, PA US

When I wrote and asked why this item has been sitting in Albany since 19 December, I got this rather typical Orwellian response from the USPS:

Dear Ronald Helfrich,

This is in response to your inquiry regarding your mail delivery service. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Package in Transit , haven't been received at Albany Carrier Annex yet

Thank you for allowing us the opportunity to respond. If you have any questions, please contact me at the telephone number below.

Sincerely,

Osama M

Note that this response tells me nothing I don’t already know. See the tracking information above. Note that the response doesn’t address why the item has been sitting in its destination city for over ten days. Note that this response doesn’t address the issue of why the item has not arrived at the Annex sometime within the ten days or so it has been sitting somewhere in Albany. Note that the response does not address the incompetence that allows the item to sit somewhere in the Raiders of the Lost Ark bureaucracy zone in beautiful Albanya. Note that the response doesn’t say that the USPS will try to do something about the incompetence that lets the package sit in some secret location without moving for over ten days. Note that this response is simply public relations bullshite; bs, of course, is at the heart of bureaucracies of all types these flim flam days. Note that there really isn't a damn thing I can do about this other than whinge and complain. Welcome to KafkaLand. But hey, at least I got an apology. Tiny mercies.

Postscript (late November early December 2021):

The item has clearly been swallowed by the USPS lost item black hole, the same black hole that elsewhere swallows socks. The seller issued me a refund. Now I no longer have to worry about the package that fell into the Albany USPS distribution centre Twilight Zone.

Yet another postscript referencing the futility of dealing with the USPS (mid-December 2021):

You have to dig the pony that is the USPS. They keep responding to the question I asked them "where is my package" with the same candy coloured canned bullshite. Your package, they write, for the third time, hasn't arrived at the Albany Post Office.

Of course, as I have noted several times before, I know that. I can read and I can read USPS tracking information. Tracking indicates that my package has been in the Albany Distribution Centre since 19 November and has settled in ever since.It apparently likes it there or, alternatively, has been lost in the black hole that is the USPS on far too many occasions. I am simply asking why the package has not moved since 19 November, a simple question the USPS seems intellectually and physically incapable of answering.

Musings on the Let it Be and Beatles Remixes

It is hard not to think of Steven Wilson when reflecting on the Beatles deluxe packages that have been released over the last several years including Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, Abbey Road, and Let it Be. Steven Wilson, as the reissues he does show, does it right. The Jethro Tull, Yes, and XTC remixes he has done on CD and blu ray, have a flat transfer of the original album on blu ray, a bevy of extras on CD and blu ray, and even the occasional audio/video. 

By  comparison, the Giles Martin remixes of the Beatles last few albums are anemic. The Let it Be five CD and blu ray deluxe package, for instance, does not contain, as it should, a flat transfer of the original album anywhere. It has a host of outtakes, though not all of them, but these are largely of interest only to  Beatles completist fanatic. It does not have, as it should, Let it Be...Naked. It has the singles and singles remixes on an ep; these, however, should be on the CD of the original release and on the blu ray. It does have the Glyn Johns mix which is kind of nice though not essential again except for fanatical Beatles completists. 

The two disc "new" Giles Martiin Let it Be remix and reissue is even worse. It should have the singles on the first CD along with the Spector mixed album, and Let it Be...Naked as well, but doesn't. It does have some of the outtakes, "the highlights" according to the package listing, on the second CD, but I would rather have Let it Be...Naked and a smattering of outtakes on a second well filled CD of around 80 minutes.

So, what can we conclude about the Beatles remixes? They are produced by a capitalist bureaucracy, in this case Universal, that appears, on the basis of empirical evidence, to worship at the feet of Mammon, its one and only god and ethic. The evidence also strongly suggests that Universal thinks that mediocrity is the height of quality. Since I usually don't buy mediocre I am not sure I be buying either of the packages of Universal's Let it Be remixes.

Bah humbug 

Postscript: I did break down and order the two disc set deluxe set reissue of Let it Be and all I can report about it is that it is crap. One of the discs, of the set I got, was glued into the very thin album like CD cover, was stuck, and was damaged as a result of me trying to get it out. Lowest common production denominator. cheap junk 

Other information: As is often the case with lazy Amazon, the picture of the two disc reissue item was different than the non-simulated one Amazon sent. Amazon, in all its skank slackerness pictured the Euro edition but they sold the American one to me. Oh well, part six zillion. Apparently Skankizon is not particularly fond of empirical accuracy and doesn't think that anyone else is either and I assume they assume that no one will care anyway.

Life as Crisis Management: The Half Price Kiada

I love books and so once upon a time when I lived in Dallas and Austin it was inevitable that I shop at Half Price Books. I used to haunt the Half Price bookstores on Northwest Highway and on Guadalupe and Lamar at least once a week and sometimes more. I became, in other words, a big fan of Half Price Books.

Recently, my devotion to and appreciation of Half Price Books has declined thanks to four strikes they whiffed at in short order over the last couple of weeks. Strike One was Half Price sending me an ex-library hardback book that was not noted as ex-lib in the description (which, I assume was the product of mechanical copy and paste). Strike Two was Half Price sending me a book with critical pages missing. Strike Three was Half Price sending me another ex-lib hardback book that was not described as ex-lib. Strike Four was Half Price sending me a paperback instead of the hardback I ordered. Incidentally, the paperback Half Price sent me in this instance had a ThriftBooks sticker on it. Apparently, Half Price Books has devolved into Thriftbooks these days and that seems, given these strikes, sadly fitting. 

Because of these four strikes I do not feel that I can purchase hardback books online from Half Price anymore. I  cannot trust the descriptions of the books they sell. I cannot trust that Half Price will send me the books I ordered. I can't even trust that Half Price will contact me about any problems regarding a book or simply cancel an order I made because they don't have the specific item I ordered. So, au revoir Half Price online, I doubt I will miss you.

Postscript, 16 July 2021:
I have had problems with two other orders (strikes five and six) I made with Half Price Books online service since the earlier post above. I purchased  a hardbook book on the American Revoloution which was listed as very good, something that would presumably rule out it being an ex-library book, emphasis on presumably. I did not receive an ex-library book (miracle of miracles) what I received, however, was a paperback with underlining, notations, including the names (presumably) of a university study group who had assigned different members to different chapters, underlining, and highlighting, all of which should have been noted if ABE guidelines were followed. At the same time I ordered a paperback copy of the plays of Soviet writer Mikhail Bulkakov which was likewise listed as very good. Like its cousin it arrived with names, notes, highlights, dogeared pages, and underling. Again, all of this internal damage within the book should have been if ABE guidelines had actually been followed. I can only conclude that the Half Price online store is staffed by a cabal of incompetents and morons who apparently can't one, accurately describe the quality of a book, and two, can't accurately describe what a book looks like on the outside or the inside. Why I should buy a hardback book or a work of fiction--notations in a literary work are, to me, an act of moronic desecration--is beyond me at this point. What isn't beyond me is filing yet another complaint about this putative bookseller with the Attorney General of New York State.

Life as Crisis Management: The Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences Kiada

After I was forced out of my job at SUNY Oneonta due to the fact that I was only offered one course with typical adjunct level paltry remuneration and no health insurance, I decided to retire with my New York State pension and health care benefits. After retiring I applied for several jobs in the Albany area where I live. I was offered two and was turned down for two for reasons beyond me. The one I took was a job as a library assistant at the Library of the Albany College of Pharmacy.

I had high hopes for this job when I took it. I had worked as Assistant Acquisition Librarian at the Science/Engineering Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas in the 1980s. I loved that job and on many subsequent occasions I found myself wishing that I had never left it to go back to graduate school. I expected the library job at ACPHS to be similar to the one I had at SMU and that I would love it as much as I loved the one at SMU.

It turned out, however, that was I wrong. It quickly became evident that the administrative bureaucracy at ACPHS thought of its staff as basically akin to and kin of high school students. The first inkling I got of the real nature of the ACPHS administrative bureaucracy involved the six mandatory “training courses” staff were required to take. All of these courses were rather like the average American high school classes I took as a kid. Some of them took over an hour to do. One consisted of eleven modules (much more substantial in time demanded compared to any I had to do at SUNY Oneonta). I buckled down on these “courses” and finished them all, including the latest in the long line of harassment courses I have taken over my work life, within a month or so despite technical issues with the computer I was using and buffering on the last of the eight modules of the harassment “course”. I sent my many newly acquired e-certifications, which were good for a year, to the relevant bureaucrat to confirm that I had taken and completed the “courses” and was glad to be back to doing the library work I wanted to do when I took the job.

Freedom from required ACPHS courses didn't, however, last long. In November, only two months after I finished the mandatory harassment course, I was informed by the bureaucrats that I had to take it again even though I had passed it two months before with a 98.5. When I asked why I got the standard circular bureaucratic version of the parental reply to a child’s question, because we say you have to. By the way, SUNY Oneonta wisely, if I recall, waited until the middle of the spring semester to get everyone on the same bureaucratic time-table track.

As you can imagine I wasn’t very happy with this. Why not simply count my successful completion of the course and have me take it again within a month or two at the same time in a year after the certification expired, I wondered? And then I remembered that bureaucracy with its one size fits all mentality works on their schedule and wants everybody else to work on their schedule. I tried to do the “class” a couple of times but I had problems each time I attempted do it. I was able to watch one or two of the module videos and do one or two of the quizzes before I experienced that bane of the computer user, the eternal buffering circle. The first time I tried to do the course I got stuck on the second module of the “course”. The second time I got stuck on on the third. It appears that while I can watch Call the Midwife, Grantchester, and David Hurwitz on my computer with no problems, I apparently can’t watch the eight modules of the EAP Quiz Show version of New York State Harassment training produced by a private firm that feeds off of government and corporate monies and seems to not be ready for prime cyberspace time. As an aside, I actually preferred the EAP harassment “course” compared to the ones I took at SUNY Oneonta, which were made for business corporations; Veblen, I am sure, would have something a field day with that.

Anyway, long story short, I resigned. I probably would have slogged through this bureaucratic stuff if one of my colleagues hadn’t tested positive for Covid in the second week of November as I do live pretty close to the financial edge in retirement. I just could not continue to work in a workplace that put my physical health at risk. Nor could I continue to work in a workplace that treated me like a high school student to be kept in conformist line. I spent far too many years having to deal with bureaucratic mandates from on authoritarian high before I retired. Nor was working at ACPHS, with its bureaucratic annoyances some of them petty, conducive to my peace of mind. It seemed to me that the bureaucrats seemed more concerned that I take the harassment training “class” again, and harassing me to do so, than with the fact that I was put in harms way by a Covid incident in the library. In the end, I had to think of my well-being so resigning seemed the only rational and viable option for me.

Postscript: I learned after raising the resignation issue with my boss that the bureaucrats notified her that I had passed the harassment “course”. What happened, I think, was that because my September scores were locked into my EAP account and I could not override them, EAP assumed, and presumably passed on to the ACPHS bureaucrats, my September scores assuming that they were my November scores. Marvel at that. Marvel at my simulated passing of quizzes I had not taken. Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Life as Crisis Management: The Retirement Prescription Kiada

One thing that is absolutely and unequivocally true about life in the modern world is that it is absurd. As I noted in earlier posts, I retired in September. As a result, I now have the Empire Silver Script prescription plan instead of the New York State Empire prescription coverage that I had when I was still gainfully employed by and working for New York State. 

As you can imagine, I am still getting used to my new-fangled retirement prescription coverage and the bureaucratic wrinkles that go with it. Anyway, today I went to get refills of my medications for only the second time under the new prescription plan. I particularly needed to get a refill of my Advair which I paid $15 dollars for three months when I had Empire work prescription plan. I was told there would be no difference between getting the Advair on my new retirement plan than my old by the union and the retirement officer at work.

There turned out, however, to be a big difference between prescription plan before and prescription plan after. I didn't quite hear what I was being charged when I was at the pharmacy; masks and plexiglass make it even more difficult for me to hear than without them. When I got home, I was surprised and shocked to learn that I had paid $60 bucks for a one month's supply of the generic version of Advair, Fluticasone Propionate rather than the $10 dollars for three month's supply. I immediately called Empire Silver Script and asked why I was charged so much. Life as crisis management! I was told that my prescription plan didn't cover the generic version of Advair but that it did cover the non-generic Advair. By the way, and ironically so, both my past insurance and my present insurance cover the generic equivalent of Singulair. Apparently, consistency really is the hobgoblin of prescription insurance company minds. I need to learn that. Anyway, apparently now when I need to get prescriptions and when I need to get prescriptions refilled not only do I have to notify the doctors and pharmacists what prescriptions i need refilled, I also have to tell them that I need to get only medicines that are covered by my prescription insurance company. Isn't it wonderful how bureaucracies make living so much more complicated?

I don't, of course, know why the generic version of Advair isn't covered since one would logically assume that the generic version is likely to cost the insurance company much less money than the non-generic and very expensive Advair and approving the generic version would likely save the insurance company monies. But then, as I have learned, cost logic is not necessarily a characteristic of bureaucracies while cutting a deal with big pharmaceutical companies probably is and I strongly suspect that is why Advair is in the formulary and the generic version isn't.

At this point, of course, I cannot take the generic Advair back. So, I am out the extra money. And that is just not so wonderfully absurd on a retiree's "salary".

Postscript:
In trying to deal with this bureaucratic nightmare I have contacted the doctor, the pharmacy, the insurance company, and my New York State Assemblyperson. I asked the doctor to make sure I got a prescription for Advair because the generic the pharmacy gave me is not covered under my insurance formulary. I asked the pharmacy to take the generic back but they won't and apparently can't. The pharmacist told me they had to fill the prescription as a generic because of the way the doctor wrote it. The insurance company, on the other hand, told me the pharmacy could have given me Advair, which is covered by my insurance formulary and wondered why the pharmacy did not give me the Advair. They did not know why the cheaper generic version of Advair was not covered (As my NY State Assemblyman pointed out in a communication to me, the company that makes Advair undoubtedly cut a sweetheart deal with the insurance company and corporate pharmacies), noted that whether something is in the formulary or not was a decision the government, presumably Medicare or NY Civil Service, makes, and agreed to send me forms so that I could ask that I be charged the Advair price for the generic. At this point I can't imagine this will be the end of this Kafkaesque and Orwellian nightmare and the expenditure of my time, energy, and monies on something I would prefer not to expend it on.

Addendum:
So, I get a call from CVSCaremark (care, lol) today, you know the corporation that cut a sweetheart deal with NY state and the makers of Advair, asking if i wanted to request the insurance cover the generic version of Advair. Once again, the bureaucracy has royally fucked things up.

What did I actually request and what do I want? I want a refund of $55 dollars for the generic Advair since I would only have paid $5 bucks if i had got the Advair.

Now don't get me wrong, it would be nice and it would be rational (if keeping down the cost for the consumer is what we mean by rational) if the generic version was covered. I know, however, that that form rationality is not how corps work. They work to enrich themselves and fuck us, the folk who actually work for a living, over, again and again.

So, of course, and this is real corporate bureaucratic rationality, I end up being fucked again, cause I sure as hell don't want to spend my time dealing with corporate bureaucracies even if it means losing $55 bucks because I lose that in time and energy spent, peace of mind, and the phone bill in dealing with them for what seems like an eternity. My rational goal, you see, is never having to deal with these corporate elite skanks, slags, and fucks ever again in my life though that is, of course, an impossible and utopian ideal since almost everything is a bureaucracy these days and almost all of these bureaucrats worship at the trough of Mammon. And let's not forget where the real buck stops: these corporations and their political puppets have all the power and they have the ability to play the merry-go-round game while I have neither power nor the willingness to ride the absurd corporate bureaucratic merry-go-round. Fuck em and fuck CVS Caremark, the corporation that takes not only a pound of flesh from me but also from my local independent pharmacy. I will never, never set foot again in a CVS for the rest of the life that I have left.

Musings on Biden and Afghanistan

Since the debacle of American president Joe Biden's inglorious and sensationalised by the media exit from Afghanistan, Biden's approval numbers have been in freefall. For those of us like me old enough to remember President Ford's similarly inglorious and sensationalised by the media exit from Vietnam, the video and pictures of the fall of Afghanistan on media old and are all too familiar. Both, it turns out, even had their emblematic and symbolic inglorious end points, something the media with their sensationalise for today and don't remember much of yesterday mentality, goes orgasmic over. In the case of Vietnam there was that emblematic moment when a helicopter was pushed off the side of an American aircraft carrier. In the case of Afghanistan there was that symbolic moment of Afghans hoping to escape the coming fury of the bully boy theocratic Taliban regime trying desperately to get on aircraft flying those fleeing Afghanistan out of the country.

Something else I remember about Vietnam and something that applies equally to Afghanistan is that I was in favour of withdrawal from both of these wars that should never have been fought in the first place. I also remember that lesson the French learned, or should have learned from Vietnam and that Americans apparently didn't: you can't win a guerrilla war against those who have the time to wait you out since you are fighting the guerrilla war on their turf and whose hearts and minds are dedicated to getting you, the "invader", out of their country. 

There are, of course, other lessons the United States should have learned in Vietnam. First, you, an "invader", can't create a common identity, a common sense of community or a common government among disparate ethnic or ideological groups save by the brute force of a strong man. Second, you can't build a "democratic" (translation oligarchic capitalist) regime in places where "democracy" is novel and perhaps even unwanted by large segments of the population. Third, you ignore Machiavellian power games among various local elites at your own risk, Machiavellian competitions for power that complicate and intersect with ethnic and ideological realities often of a historical character. Fourth, getting out of situations made worse by your "invasion" of a "nation" that is questionably a "nation", is fraught with difficulty as Ford, who inherited a debacle that began under Eisenhower and which was misinterpreted thanks to its Cold War manichean homiletic contexts, and Biden, who inherited a debacle that went back to Bush the Second, learned.

As I said, I supported leaving Afghanistan and "ending" a war was never going to end well for the US whether that war ended under Donald Trump, who sat the timetable for withdrawal, or Biden, whose administration simply followed through on what the Trump set in motion. The exit strategy from a war that could never have been won despite the self serving delusions and fantasies of those convinced that they were the "best and the brightest" that they could go where no one else had gone before and easily win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was always going to look bad on screens big and small regardless of who "ended" it or when it "ended". And that is another history lesson, a lesson drenched in the omnipresent absurdities of everyday life, Americans should learn or, better, relearn once again.

The Books of My Life: America for Americans (Lee)

 

Identity, who we think we are, who we perceive we are, or who others think and perceive we are, perceptions that can feed back into who we think we are, is at the heart of human life. Economically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen by others as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists, farmers, auto workers, teachers, and managers. Demographically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen as male, female, kin, children, adolescents, and young adults. Culturally speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as the People, White, African, and a devotee of the Dallas Cowboys. Politically speaking we have seen ourselves or been seen as kin of a particular totem, a subject, a citizen, and a member of a particular political party. Geographically speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans. Generally speaking, all of these identities intersect and interact in a variety of ways. Hunters, gatherers, males, females, the masculine, and the feminine, can all be somewhat discreet identities in Hunter-Gatherer societies, for instance.

As historian Erika Lee reminds us in her superb historical synthesis, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic, 2019), identities, which are historically contingent and fluid, are sometimes if not generally xenophobic. She, unfortunately, does not seem to recognise that xenophobia along with racism, sexism, classism, and cliqueism are simply varieties of ethnocentrism, the notion that one identity or a group of identities are superior to others. Some may and some have, for example, believed that industrial societies are superior to the economic adaptations that preceded them. Some may think and some have thought that being male is better than being female. Some may believe and some have believed that being White is superior to being non-White and that Western culture is superior to Asian culture. Some may think and some have thought that being masculine is superior to being feminine or that listening to Metallica is better than listening to the Carpenters. Some may think and some have believed that their monarch is better than other monarchs or that being right wing is better than being liberal. Some may think and many have believed that being American is better than being Canadian.

In the United States, as Lee notes, being White, a fluid, historically speaking, category, was, because of migration patterns and the economic, political, cultural and demographic dominance of the, initially, Protestant migrants from England and Great Britain, seen as being the mark of a real or "native" American. As Lee notes, xenophobia sometimes accompanied this notion that Whiteness was the mark of being American. Initially, Germans, as Lee notes, were considered other (demographically, economically, politically, and culturally) and, as a result, inherently threatening and dangerous, to Colonial America and Colonials. With the decline in German xenophobia, others, in a seemingly ever repeating cycle, such as the Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, and Muslims, became economically, demographically, culturally, and politically other and, as a consequence, perceived as threatening and dangerous to America and Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over time, Irish and Italian Catholics, and I would add Greek and Russian Orthodox, for example, were grafted onto the White category. Only grudgingly, hesitantly, and incompletely, have some of these non-White groups, many of whom fall outside of or are perceived to fall outside of the Christian category, and Jews been accepted as American by "real" and "native" Americans, Americans of European extraction. America's indigenous and its Black slaves and segregates, were, of course, as Lee notes, considered inherently other.

Lee's America for Americans is a book everyone who wants to know about the real history as opposed to the mythic and manichean history of the United States should read. As Lee notes, the US has long been a contradictory nation. It has been a nation which welcomes the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and the wretched refuse of the world, variously defined over the centuries, while at the same time that it puts roadblocks in the way of certain of the globe's and even America's tired, poor, huddled masses, and wretched refuse in the form of immigration restrictions and quotas and incarcerations and deportations. 

My only substantive issue with Lee's book revolves around what I see as her limited attention to some forms of economic, demographic, cultural, political, and geographical forms of ethnocentrism. Mormons, for instance, many of who were White New Englanders, were considered other by "native" Americans for such cultural practises as polygamy, something Lee mentions in her discussion of xenophobia about Muslims, theocracy--a criticism also made of Catholics who were, as Lee notes, considered loyal to a tyrannical pope by equally theocratic Protestants--block voting, communalism, and because of their notion that America's indigenous were the descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel. Despite this concern, I highly recommend Lee's America for Americans, an important history of xenophobia for those of us living in the Trump era, an era in which several ultimately socially and culturally constructed forms of ethnocentrism have become mainstream again.

The Books of My Life: The Pleasures of Academe

When I graduated from high school in 1973 going to college was not the rite of passage for young adults it is today. Initially, my life plan was like that of a lot of others in my generation and cohort. I was going to get a well-paying job with good benefits at one of the local factories and spend the rest of my life labouring for the car of my choice and the stereo system of my dreams so I could listen to the music that was such a central part of my life at the time.

Life as it so often does, however, throws you curve balls. An injury forced me to reconsider working in factories for the rest of my labouring life, something in retrospect that was my good fortune since little known to me and most Americans at the time, the era of deindistrialisation and globalisation, both of which dried up the number of good paying and good benefit industrial blue collar jobs in the US and both driven by corporate elites and their political toadies, was just around the bend. So, in 1975 I enrolled in classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1978 full of dreams about becoming an academic, I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington where I finished my bachelor's degree in 1983.

My undergraduate experiences managed to wipe some of the romantic sheen off my perceptions of academia turning me into someone who took a pluses and minuses approach to the academy. Despite this, I still hoped to attend graduate school and I still, despite the diminution of my romanticism about academe, had plans to become an academic. I didn't, however, know what I wanted to specialise in. Nor, given my broad interests in the social sciences and humanities, did I know whether I wanted to specialise in any academic discipline at all. I thus applied to and was admitted into a post graduate interdisciplinary programme in American Studies at Notre Dame. 

Not finding Notre Dame's version of American Studies particularly conducive to my interests and not finding Notre Dame and South Bend conducive to me, I took an assistant acquisitions librarian job at the Science/Engineering Library at SMU in 1985, a job which, in retrospect, I wish I had never left. Unfortunately, I did quit the job to go to graduate school with my dreams of the academic life still somewhat intact. Though I was accepted at the University of Chicago (Social Thought) and the University of Kansas (Sociology), I matriculated at the school that offered me the most money, Ohio University in Athens, where I studied Sociology beginning in 1985. 

Though I loved the intellectual and cultural life of Athens my interdisciplinary self still tugged at my intellectual heartstrings. So, in 1987 I matriculated into an interdisciplinary doctoral programme at SUNY Albany. Fearing the difficulties of getting a job with a doctor of arts degree I transferred into the Anthropology Department at Albany and took a master's degree in 1988. I didn't opt for the Ph.D. because anthropology seemed too ahistorical and too anemic when it came to the study of the modern and postmodern core nation world. I wanted to do anthropological and sociological history and I wanted to do work on the history of North American Protestantism.

Because of these interests I eventually applied to and was admitted into a Ph.D. programme in Sociology in 1991 at Brigham Young University, a place where I could study in depth and historically, ethnographically, and sociologically, a group I had become fascinated with, the Latter-day Saints. I liked aspects of BYU. I learned, for example, a lot about the history and culture of Mormonism. I was alienated, however, by the cultural religiously grounded parochialism of the Y and of the Mormon Culture Region. So once again I found myself exploring the academic marketplace.

Among the choices I had for graduate school after BYU was my dream college and university the University of Toronto (History of North American Christianity), Queen's University (North American Religious History and Mormon Studies), LaTrobe University (History and Sociology under the guidance of Rhys Isaac), and SUNY Albany (History). Money again was the deciding factor and I went back to SUNY Albany where I finally earned a Ph.D in history and wrote a dissertation on Mormon Studies. By this time, however, getting a job in academe was about as easy as taking a trip to Mars with either Mr. Amazon or Mr. Virgin Records. Moreover, I had already earned a lot of pension and health care credits while teaching in the State University of New York system.

All of this is a long way of saying I know academe. I have, thanks to being a student and a part-time teacher in the academy, irregularly in the 1990s and regularly since 2006 to 2021 when I retired, gotten to know by experience academia quite well. Memories of my academic life were stirred as I read James Axtell's The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Like Axtell I found, over the course of my academic sojourn, pleasure in college towns (something I wish Axtell had been more systematic and analytical about since college towns are towns which the college or university dominates economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically), in college town bookstores (which are, I have always thought, measures of the quality of a college and university; it is no accident, for example, that the Coop Bookstore at the University of Chicago is one of the best bookstores in the US; it is also no accident that the Barnes and Nobles takeover of so many college bookstores, including that of my alma mater and the Harvard Coop, and the decline of supplementary books in such bookstores, probably reflects not only the increasing triumph of what Veblen called business strategies in academe but also the decline in the quality of student intellectual life and student reading life), in college town built environments, in college town intellectual life, in college town cultural life (lots of foreign film opportunities and musical performances in B-town), in college and university learning, in college and university research, in college town and college and university teaching, a not unalloyed joy, and even in college town semi-professional athletics (I was at IU when we won the NCAA basketball championship in 1981 and what I can remember of it was exciting, amazing, and wonderfully ritualistic).

What I don't remember is what the mostly demagogic polemicists who attack college faculty complain and whinge about: political and ideological correctness, elitism, too much faculty involvement in research and not enough in teaching, and too complacent and lazy a faculty thanks to tenure. It is hard to know what to do with such rhetoric. If anything, faculty, particularly part-time cheap from the bureaucrats point of view faculty, are overworked and underpaid in part because of the American tradition of anti-intellectualism that impacts college and university funding, particularly in the states, while administrators, who are increasingly authoritarian managers are overpaid, underworked, and committed to a retail model of education. As Axtell notes and the data he quotes quite clearly shows, such whinging is not grounded in reality. But them demagogues are not known for their commitment to empirical facts. The function and purpose of their anecdotally dripping rhetoric is to manipulate the masses by playing on emotions like fear rather than to have a civil, reasonable, and rational argument about what economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically is. In the end, I think we need to call such empirically anemic rhetoric what it is, bullshit.

Given this it is hard to know to whom Axtell's civilly toned book is aimed and to who it is addressed. If it is aimed at the polemicists even if they even bother to read it, which I think is unlikely, they are likely to perceive it and the statistical facts within it as yet another instance of liberal or left wing political and ideological correctness. If it is aimed at someone like me, it is preaching to the empirically grounded choir. If it is aimed at the inbetweeners, at anyone with an open mind and a commitment to fact-based analysis, hopefully they will find it helpful in understanding academia and academic faculty. I suspect, in the end, however, that Axtell's biography/memoir/history/ethnography/quantitative analysis is aimed more at people like me than anyone else. And that may be a reflection of a divided America that does not talk to itself anymore and does not have a common identity and sense of community if it ever did outside of the Great Depression to World War II era.

Musings on the Dim Dems

It should be clear to anyone with even an Eric the Bee brain that the Democrats cannot protect us from the sociopathic and psychopathic theocratic (our way or you will be cleansed) cultists that make up much of the Republican Party these days. The Republicans have more effective demagogues and pied pipers. Recent election results are simply the latest in a string of reminders of this. Hell, the Democrats can't even pass legislation that would help the masses without pre-emptively gutting it as Obamacare and the recent debacles over infrastructure spending should remind us. But then the Democratic Party is a party largely bought and paid for by America's economic elites and it has not been as cleansed of "impure thoughts" as the cultic Republican Party has been since Ronald Reagan though corporate Democratic political elites have occasionally tried to do just that.

What this means is that the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted is not the solution to the real problems an America that is not really a nation faces at the moment including the potential of violence from a Republican Party in which one in three of its devotees or cult members, according to a recent poll, think that violence may be needed in order to "save America". It is, in actuality, part of the problem.

One solution to this problem might be what has happened in the United States at least a couple of times over the course of its history: the demise of a political party, in this case the mostly bought and paid for Democratic Party, and the rise of a new or several new and truly alternative political parties. The Progressive Democrats might form and organise a kind of American version of the New Democratic Party of Canada or the Greens of Germany. The Corporate Democrats could form a political party that is, as Nancy Pelosi once remarked, cheerleaders for the religion of capitalism. 

I hope, by the way, that this reconfiguration of American political party culture happens before the shooting in the latest American culture war starts, a culture war that will be potentially deadly in a number of ways for those of us who are not inclined toward theocracy because it is likely that much of the army and much of America's internal armies, the FBI, the police forces of the nation, and the Border Patrol, will be on the side of the narrow minded anti-intellectual secular and religious theocrats.

The Books of My Life: Intertwined Lives

Once upon a time I was an anthropology student. As an undergraduate I took several courses in anthropology including Introduction to Anthropology, an Economic Anthropology class, and a graduate level anthropology course on "Names and Labels" for which I wrote an essay on Punk symbology and names. I also took, during my undergraduate years,  a graduate level course in the related discipline of folklore, specifically a course on Folklore and Religion. I, with my social science bent, liked them all, particularly the Folklore course which was one of the best classes I ever took during my long sojourn as a college student. I also came to like and admire the idea and practise of ethnology with its cross-cultural and inductive emphasis, things I came to see as essential if we are to fully understand humanity, that I applied for and was admitted into a doctoral programme in anthropology.

Like most anthropology students in the United States my postgraduate programme in anthropology mandated that all students, regardless of their emphasis in the discipline, take proseminar courses in all of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. Like many of my colleagues at the time, I wasn't completely taken with the four subdiscipline mandate though I appreciate it much more now in retrospect. Nor was I taken with what I saw as anthropology's limited emphasis on broad social theory. I found anthropological theory too anthropological and too little sociological. Additionally, I was concerned with what I saw as anthropology's far too limited emphasis on history. I thought at the time, and I still think this today, that all of the social sciences and humanities needed to make use of the method of historical analysis. In fact, I would argue today that history should be less of an academic discipline than a necessary social sciences and humanities methodology.

Two of the people we talked about in ethnographic theory in the 1980s were, of course, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, both students of who some would call the totemic father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. Lois Banner's Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2003) explores the intertwined lives of Benedict, Mead, and those around them, including Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Landes, to name a few. Banner, who made use of recently opened archival material on Benedict and Mead, takes us into Benedict's and Mead's friendship and friendships, loves, competitions, social and cultural influences including Victorianism, romanticism, and modernism, descriptive and normative cultural relativism that critiqued a variety of fetishisms, the anti-racism movement that critiqued the hierarchy of races ideologies that emerged in the wake of Darwin, and professional lives, including their fieldwork experiences, theoretical legacies, and activisms.

At the time and still today, as Banner notes, Boas and his students Benedict and Mead were important because they shifted the empirical and theoretical terrain of cultural anthropology from unilinear evolutionism and biological determinism to the role culture played in human evolution, human societies, and in human personalities. One of Benedict's most famous and influential works then and now, Patterns of Culture, argued that different cultural forms gave rise to different personalities and behaviours. Mead argued in her equally influential and impactful writings on South Pacific cultures that different cultures gave rise to different sexual cultures, different sexual personalities, and different sexual behaviours and that these different sexual cultures, sexual personalities, and sexual behaviours varied across space. And while Benedict's and Mead's emphasis on nurture has not ended the debate over the relative impact nature and nurture have on human personalities and behaviours--it will likely go on until the end of time--they did provide a template for the debate that remains prominent even today in anthropology, sociology, and pyschology.

I enjoyed Banner's book even though I would like to have seen a greater and tighter focus on Benedict's and Mead's theoretical and ethnographic legacies and a more critical exploration of Benedict's and Mead's work for the American government during and after WWII. Recommended for those interested in American Studies, the history of gender, the history of bisexuality, intellectual history, the history of the social sciences and anthropology, and the history of academe.

Musings on Right Wing "Analysis" of the Trials and Travails of Antioch College

While I was exploring the continuing problems of Antioch College recently I ran across this little gem or right wing “analysis” of Antioch’s current economic problems by one Reed Alexander in the comments section of Megan Bachman’s update on the continuing economic problems of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the Yellow Springs News on 29 March 2021:



"After all these years of “reinventing” itself – Antioch administrators still don’t “get it.” Antioch offers an antiquated approach to education – its sole mission is to indoctrinate young people with leftist propaganda. Other schools focus on providing students with cutting-edge skills to compete for jobs of the future, while Antioch judges success on the number of minds it can infiltrate with socialist ideology. A losing proposition.
A nephew of mine in roughly eight years ago attended Antioch because he thought it would expand his horizons to think more broadly about the world. Instead, because he was wasn’t liberal enough, he was ostracised (spelling corrected by me) by both faculty and administrators. Diversity of thought is not a goal at Antioch. Sad."

 While it is probably sad to some that Antioch College continues to have problems, problems which go back to the 1970s, what is also sad, if not surprising, is the abstract and decontextualised political and ideological correctness that undergirds Alexander’s response to Bachman’s article on the economic and demographic struggles at Antioch College. Where to begin?

First, Antioch is not the only college that is experiencing economic and demographic problems these days. So is, for example, the College of Saint Rose, a small Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York that no longer, to cite one example of curricular cleansing, has a Sociology Department. So did the University at Albany in the same city. SUNY Albany once had to cut its language and theatre programmes among others because of financial problems in the wake of an economic downturn and decreasing state monies.

Second, not all colleges and universities that I suspect Alexander would put in the “liberal” camp are having financial and demographic problems. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, one of the other colleges, along with Antioch and Swarthmore, Burton Clark analysed in his classic The Distinctive College, has a $569 million dollar endowment. Swarthmore has an endowment of over $2 billion dollars. Both have healthy student enrollments, healthy and productive faculty, and healthy academic departments. Another "liberal" university, Brandeis University, has a $1.2 billion dollar endowment post-Madoff.

Third, all cultures, subcultures, countercultures, societies, nations, the military, prisons, corporations, and educational institutions socialise. One might argue, for example, that The King's College (home of demagogue Dinesh D’Souza once upon a time) and Bob Jones socialises its students into variants of right wing Christian ideology. Unfortunately, and unscientifically, those demagogues with a political and ideological correctness axe to grind prefer to refer to certain forms of socialisation, forms of socialisation they don’t like (ah there once again is that pesky emotionalism that dominates right wing “thinking”), in other words, as “indoctrination” or “brainwashing”. A more value neutral and scientific term for the common phenomenon of cultural reproduction of the young or initiation of new members into cultures, organisations, and institutions, is the tried and true one of socialisation. That term, however, isn’t politically and ideologically demonic and frightening enough for right wing demagogues like Alexander.

Finally, the reasons some colleges and universities are having problems these days are multiple. First there are the demographic factors. I give you student decline and greater competition for the potential student pool. Second, there are the economic reasons. Some colleges and universities are poorer than others, some have less endowment monies and other monies to work with, and some are seeing decreases in state support in absolute and relative terms. Third, there are the cultural factors. Colleges and universities have different degrees of social and cultural capital in the minds of applicants and their parents. It is more appealing to those who have been impacted by branding, ideologies of ancientness, and other cultural phenomena to apply to and go to Reed or Swarthmore as opposed to Antioch or Ball State University.

I realise this brief discussion of colleges and universities and their trials and travails will have little and, more likely, any impact on the abstract politically correct demagogues of the world and those who pied pipper and ditto their ideologically grounded rhetoric. Still, people like Alexander, people who seem to prefer their analysis to be ahistorical, contextless, empirically deficient, and ideologically correct, make for, I hope, an interesting blog in the age of Kornbluth’s marching orange tinted bsing morons.

The Further Adventures of Ron in Skanky and Slaggy Amazon Land

Every so often one is reminded of just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. One of the things that I used to like about Amazon was that it was, to some extent, global and that it offered services around the world. One could, for example, compare and contrast the cost of product at Amazon, Amazon.CA, Amazon.UK, and Amazon.De and buy product from one and all.

Given how greedy mammon worshipping Amazon is, however, they eventually realised that customers were engaging in comparison shopping, and they recently made it either impossible or prohibitively expensive by increasing postage, to order items from Amazon beyond ones constructed Amazon "shores". They made it impossible for me to buy,  because they won't ship it to the US, for example, the thirteenth season of Heartland from Amazon.CA at a cheaper price than for what it or its marketplace flunkies and sycophants sell it at Amazon or for me to buy less expensive Doctor Whos from England (I have an all region DVD and blu ray player) because of the cost of postage. Additionally, and this says volume about this gilded corporation, Amazon established its Amazon Global service to sell items one used to be able to buy at a more reasonable cost from Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK. 

Interestingly, since I can no longer buy product sold by Amazon.CA or from Amazon.UK I decided to cancel my Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK accounts. Not surprisingly, however, I can't. Amazon may not allow one to buy globally but they have a global (and increasingly mediocre) digital information system so if I want to cancel Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK I must also cancel my Amazon account. That I can't cancel my Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK accounts, neither of which I use anymore because of the reasons cited above, shows just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. Skankyness and slaginess, in other words, are in Amazon's cultural DNA. I think it is time once again to contact the office of the Attorney General of New York State.

Further Musings on Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

It is remarkable, though not surprising, how easy it is for demagogues to manipulate the masses and even the chattering class of right-wing intellectuals these days. The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Both are largely historically illiterate, and both prefer what "history" they do know to be largely of the mythic and political, and I would add ideological, correct variety and ahistorical. 

In reality, of course, and contrary to those who have contracted ideologically based historical amnesia, both political and ideological correctness and cancel culture have long histories stretching back centuries.  For example, Alkibiades and his circle's supposed desecration of the statues of Hermes in Athens in the fifth century BCE was an act of what we would today call political incorrectness though others might call it a lack of patriotism, an act of vandalism, or an act of heresy, whether he and they actually "desecrated" the statues or not. The Spanish Inquisition and other inquisitions like it before and after aimed at Christian "heretics" and Jews was an act of political and ideological correctness and cancel culture, sometimes very deadly cancel culture. The deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman by the United States government in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The banning of the Communist Party in the United States during the Cold War was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The blacklisting of hundreds in the United States during the Cold War, such as scholars like Moses Finley, was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. 

What is, of course, remarkable, is that the historically illiterate and those whose minds have been colonised by right wing historical myths, manichean fantasies, and negations think and argue, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, that political and ideological correctness, is novel and that it is the product of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy to take over American educational institutions, America itself, and the world. I recently, for example, saw a comment from someone who attributed the fact that Timothy Hutton wasn't in the recent iteration of the TV show Leverage, Leverage: Redemption on IMDb TV, to liberal and left wing cancel culture. Needless to say, such an "argument", if I can call it that, has to ignore the fact that the accusations against Hutton, as I discovered very quickly during a search online, have been corroborated by someone who knew the person who was allegedly raped, and was told by that person that she had been raped at the time. It also ignores the reality that in the world of consumer capitalism corporations, like those that produce media product, these corporations are constantly conscious of their brand and, in a world where public relations is a fact of corporate (including educational corporations) and increasingly everyday life, of their reputation and that having someone with accusations of rape hanging over him star in a television show might not be good for their brand or for viewership numbers and hence the possible financial gains that come from commercials that run during each episode of the show and on which the show depends for its continuation. What, in sum, the nattering nabobs of the right don't see, in other words, is the mote in their own eye, their political correctness, which they fetishise or transcendentalise, their own involvement in cancel culture both past and present, and empirical reality. All of those, of course, are impressive examples of how ideology creates a rather perverted "reality".