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.

The ACPHS 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.

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.