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.