The Books of My Life: Who Killed Canadian History?

Though a number of commentators have traced the history of the history wars back to the mid- to late 1960s and made the sixties either the hero or villain of the piece, depending on the ideological perspective of the polemicist or apologist writing the tale of the history war, battles over history--who tells it, how it is told, and the stories it tells--go back much further in human history than the 1960s. Polemics and apologetics, in fact, have been a central part of the writing of history for as long as there has been "history".

The historically oriented books of the Tanakh, for instance, and particularly the historically oriented books of the Torah, tell the inherently polemical and apologetic story of god's chosen people and their trials and travails as they tried to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh at Mount Sinai, the site of the covenant in the Yahwist and Priestly versions of the tale of the chosen people in the Torah, or Mount Horeb, the site of the covenant in Elohist and Deuteronomist retellings of the sacred story. Israel's prophets, the nevi'im offered polemical and apologetic commentary, a kind of midrash before midrash, on these sacred texts pointing out the failures of the chosen to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh or Elohim and the punishment the lord or god brought to bear on his chosen as a consequence of their failures to live up to the covenant. Ancient Egyptian texts polemicised about the greatness of their civilisation, a greatness that demanded that battles lost to the Hittites be rewritten as victories. The "histories" of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans are filled with examples of polemics and apologetics over hubris, barbarians, Socrates, Alkibiades, particular emperors, such as Nero or Justinian, or particular empresses, such as Theodora.

Polemics and apologetics didn't end with the advent of professionalised history and professional historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both can still be found on the surfaces and in the deep structures of contemporary historical writing despite claims by many professional historians that history has become, with them, empirical and objective or, at least, dispassionate. Professional historians of American Christianity, for instance, wrote empirically grounded histories of particular Christian denominations grounded in primary source material that were undergirded with polemical and apologetic assumptions and presumptions that Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, and even more particularly American Protestant Christianity, was god's one true religion and that the denomination they wrote their histories on and about was god's true Christianity. 

Professional historians have, over the years, fought a variety of polemical and apologetic battles. They have battled over whether history should be--note the normative phrasing here--narrative in form, whether it ought to be methodologically sensitive incorporating quantitative methods into what has largely been a qualitatively oriented discipline, and whether historians should be theoretically literate. Many professional historians, for instance, reacted negatively to Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States when it was published in 1913 finding it too theoretically oriented and too reductionist. One invariably wonders if some of this unease with Beard's book was due to the fact that Beard's book de-mythologised an American sacred text and, in the process, demythologised American sacred history. Some have reacted negatively to the theoretical and methodological approach of the French Annales school of history, a historical school that goes back at least to the late 1920s. Several of the Annales historians argue that history should be quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical, contending that history must be understood as made or caused by both long term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, such as the great power struggles that led up to the Great War, great power struggles that go back hundreds of years, and short term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events. such as the assassination of an Austrian-Hungarian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. Many historians find the Annales approach too theoretical, far too focused on economic events, far too quantitative in orientation, and too far removed from the traditional great events and great men approach, arguably a somewhat secularised version of the Christian lives of saints and the mode of history writing that has dominated history in both its "amateur" and "professional" forms for some time.

Others, a minority of historians like myself, a historian deeply impacted by cultural anthropology and sociology, have long found the Annales approach to history quite compelling. In fact I would argue that the Annales approach to human history best helps us understand and comprehend the culture wars and the battles over history that have often reared their heads throughout human history and have been particularly prominent since the 1960s. When we apply the Annales approach to the culture wars it is clear that the culture wars and the culture wars over history have been going on in the West, as I noted earlier, for centuries, the longue duree, and we can see that the culture wars are also stimulated simultaneously by specific events, such as the impact of renewed social and cultural history on the historical profession after the 1960s. Recently, there has been a lot of ink spilled over the history battles that erupted out of the countercultural 1960s. At the heart of these battles over history are the same questions that have troubled historians for years. Should history be mythic-empirical? Should it be objective-empirical? Should it be hermeneutic-empirical? Should it be narrative in form or quantitatively grounded? 

One of the most prominent polemicists and apologists fighting the post-1960s culture war over Canadian history has been the retired York University historian, former member of the Royal Military College Board of Governors, former Chair of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century, and former head of the Canadian War Museum J.L. Granatstein (sometimes aided and abetted in his culture war by fellow historian David Bercuson and others of a cult of militarism that seems aristocratic in nature). Granatstein, who has written extensively on the Canadian military and Canadian foreign policy has engaged in polemics and apologetics on at least two different levels. On one polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has advocated for the transformation of Canada from a peacekeeper nation to, what Ian McKay and Jamie Strong call, in a nice turn of phrase, a warrior nation in order to protect Canada's interests. That this Canadian warrior nation is likely to be little more than a player sitting on the American junior varsity imperial bench along with England and Australia seems to be acceptable to Granatstein. How a Canadian nation that is small in population and next door to the, by far, dominant superpower of the post-Cold War world, an imperial power that dominates Canada economically, politically, and culturally and hence doomed to be, in the foreseeable future, a junior partner on the American imperial team is going to protect its "national interests" (read elite interests) which are intimately tied to American interests (read elite interests) is beyond me, however. Perhaps they don't have a problem with Canada taking care of the gatorade and the dirty laundry for the Team America.

On another polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has waded into the polemics and apologetics surrounding the rise of a "new" Canadian history, a "new" Canadian history dominated, he claims, by social and cultural history and by quantitative and hermeneutic methodologies and approaches. In his provocatively titled monograph Who Killed Canadian History (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999 and Toronto: Harper Perennial, revised and expanded edition, 2007) Granatstein argues, much as did Australian historian Keith Windschuttle before him in his equally provocatively titled The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Sydney: Macleay, 1994), that the counterculture of the 1960s gave rise to a social and cultural history that is killing, murdering, and savaging traditional and national Canadian (or in Windschuttle's case Australian) traditional great man and great events political history. The social and cultural historians who came of age in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic ferment of the 1960s in Western Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, have, Granatstein argues, replaced the history of the state, politics, foreign policy, and wars with the history of common men, women, and ethnics, a history that is, Granatstein claims, far too focused on historical trivialities, something that has often been a problem in a discipline that has often avoided and demonised theory and methodology and hence, questions related to historical significance. 

Granatstein also argues that this "new" once countercultural and now dominant history has negatively impacted Canada beyond the academy. These "new" histories, Granatstein argues, have linked up with progressive educational reforms afoot throughout Canada in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, educational reforms that emphasised the need for education for individual and identity group self esteem. This has resulted, Granatstein argues, in a history that celebrates the achievements of identity groups like women and selective ethnic groups. Combined with the limited mandates for history courses in Canada's primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions, the "new" histories and the "new" historians, Granatstein contends, are undermining Canadian national identity, something that is essential if the Canadian nation is, claims Granatstein, to survive and thrive as a common culture.

Granatstein's argument that the lack of a common history resulting from acids associated with the "new" social and cultural histories along with post-World War II battles between the Canadian federal government and the provinces over power and authority (as I write Alberta is set to institute a policy which would allow the political elites of that province to effectively check what comes out of Ottawa and check any challenges to that power in the courts), is grounded, whether consciously or unconsciously, in theoretical perspectives that go back at least to the European Enlightenment and the Romantic era and to the Enlightenment philosophe and romantic social and cultural theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the founding father of sociology and ethnology, Emile Durkheim. Rousseau and Durkheim, more analytically, argued, as does Granatstein and others before and after him, that for a nation to effectively function as a nation and survive as a nation, it must have a common culture and a common set of values and norms. There is, of course, a lot of truth to this perspective though this approach raises a question Granatstein barely if at all addresses, namely whether Canada with its two and perhaps now three, four, five, or ten solitudes, has ever been a single nation and has ever had a common national culture, questions that can equally be posed about the United States with its at least two founding solitudes, that of the North and that of the South.

There are a number of other empirical, methodological, and theoretical issues one could bring to bear on Granatstein's polemic against the "new" social history and cultural history and their postmodernist impact on modernist history. Granatstein, for instance, does not, in his rather too broad brushstrokes, distinguish between various types of academics inside Canada's ivory towers. As numerous surveys have shown over the years, those who teach in the professions, in the hard sciences, and in the applied sciences are not the same culturally as those who teach in the social sciences and humanities. Those who teach in the social sciences and humanities are closer to the caricatures and stereotypes Granatstein plays in in Who Killed Canadian History. Additionally, Granatstein ignores, to some extent, the impact the old analogue media and the new digital media have had on academic history textbooks. When I was an undergraduate, for instance, I had to read thirteen books for an introductory class on Greek history, texts that would not be considered textbooks today. Today a teacher is lucky if she or he can get her or his students to read the one brief textbook generally assigned for introductory courses today. Publishers, of course, have tried to sex up textbooks to get professors to assign them for classes and that, they hope, will move students to read them. They have added a host of colour photos, a host of topical elements, a host of anecdotal introductions that mimic film and television narratives, and a host of graphs, maps, and charts that they hope will stimulate and generate student engagement with the textbook. I have, however, have seen no evidence that this publishing strategy is working. What this strategy has done is to raise the cost of textbooks to astronomical levels, price levels that not all students can afford.

Some of the elements added to modern postmodern textbooks, of course, are related to gender, ethnicity, and class, all phenomena that have been prominent and significant factors in the making of history over the centuries and all things the "new" historians focus on and should--yes I am going normative here--focus on. Granatstein and his colleagues have qualms about this increasing focus on gender, ethnicity, and class, because, as I noted, they think they are pushing much needed political, diplomatic, legal, and military history out of history textbooks and out of history classes alienating students from history courses in the process. According to Granatstein students are still interested in these "traditional" subareas of the historical profession. He cites somewhat anecdotal data--student interest and attendance in courses in these areas--to make his case. But is this really the case? Is this anecdotal evidence sufficient to prove the point? Shouldn't historians (not to mention publishers) be engaging in ethnography to find out what really interests students? Beyond these, hasn't the old great men and great events history proven to be as if not more "boring" to many contemporary history students?

Speaking of university textbooks, I perused several introductory texts on Canadian history chosen somewhat randomly while reading through Who Killed Canadian History in order to test them against Granatstein's hypotheses. What I have found suggests that Granatstein overstates his case about the decline of traditional history and its replacement by trivial history and vanity history, both things that history has long been anyway and something that should not be surprising given that Granatstein is, after all, engaging in polemics and apologetics. In the 529 page Canada: Unity in Disunity by Paul Cornell, Jean Hamelin, Fernand Ouellet, and Marcel Trudel, a textbook that early on tried to deal with the realities of Canadian multiculturalism and pluralism, there are 19 references to John Macdonald, 10 pages on World War I, and 21 pages on World War II. In the 537 page second edition of the introductory textbook Destinies: Canadian History Since Confederation written by R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald Smith and  published in 1996, three years before the first edition of Who Killed Canadian History,  23 pages are devoted to the Great War while there are 50 references to John Macdonald. The 568 page 2003 edition of the single volume Canada: a National History by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, both of whom Granatstein brands as killers of Canadian history, devotes 19 pages to World War II, including brief sections on the air and sea war between 1939 and 1944, while Pierre Trudeau garners 5 references and the Charter 1. By way of comparison, the 567 page Nation: Canada Since Confederation, the 1990 textbook written by Granatstein himself along with Irving Abella, T.W. Acheson, David Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby, a textbook that is no longer in print, devotes 67 pages to the period from 1911 to 1919,  54 pages to the period from 1939 to 1957, references Macdonald 10 times, Trudeau 21 times, and the Charter once. While Nation has chapters on industrialisation, labour radicalism, and immigration, the bulk of the textbook is devoted to political history raising the question of how serious "traditional" historians like Granatstein are in advocating for an integrated political and social and cultural history in introductory classes and texts, particularly since the Francis, Jones, and Smith and Conrad and Finkel do integrate "traditional" and "new" histories.

I found Who Killed Canadian History in both of its editions--they do differ from each other as the revised and expanded edition adds a couple of chapters and some parts of the text have been deleted and other material added to the text in the second edition--an interesting if not fully compelling polemic on how Canadian history and history in general should be done. I agree with some aspects of Who Killed Canadian History, such as the need for politics to be a central part of introductory courses and introductory textbooks on Canadian history. But so should historical approaches that emphasise economics, culture (gender, ethnicity, class), demography, and geography, all significant and important forces that impact human beings and the worlds humans have created and all of which are essential frames through which we can understand the human species from prehistory to today. As for who might be interested in Grantstein's polemic, it is likely to be of interest to those interested in polemics and apologetics over how to do history and to those interested in cultural divisions within the humanities and the social sciences in contemporary Canadian universities, itself an iteration of the broader Western culture wars that have long impacted human history and human culture, particularly in the core nation world.

  

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Firefly and Political and Ideological Correctness

 

There is so much bullshite out there in the brave new digital cyber world that one really doesn't know where to begin in exploring it. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about a potential reboot of Joss Whedon's and Tim Minnear's short lived cult television show Firefly by Disney. Disney, who now owns the show itself and apparently wants it to run on their Disney+ platform, and which, perhaps even more importantly, at least for the corporations that dominate the modern and postmodern core nation world, owns the intellectual property rights associated with the show, things like books, model spaceships, comic books, McDonald's happy meal tie-ins, and bobblehead dolls, and has wet dreams about the monies they can make from both.

Firefly, as its legions of its fans, the self proclaimed Browncoats, know died almost before the show ever got off the ground thanks to interference from and a lack of patience amongst the executives at Fox, the network that broadcast Firefly between 2002 and 2003. Fox executives apparently thought they knew better about how the show should get made than did the successful show runners and writers who actually wrote it and produced it. Fox executives, for instance, demanded another pilot episode, finding the two part "Serenity", which was supposed to be the first episode, too lacking in action content despite the fact that there are more than enough action sequences in that episode. Apparently, Fox executives can no longer comprehend a narrative world that unfolds and is heavily character centred in their brave new world of adolescent comic book Hollywood movies with little plot and lots of special effects and make the pilgrimage to see them upon their release. Presumably these films with their multiple cliffhangers provide the next best thing to an orgasm for the fanboys and fangirls who go to seem them about every fifteen minutes. Additionally, Fox showed episodes out of order making a hash of at least some of the narrative arcs and character arcs built into the show.

Most commentators get this woeful tragi-comic tale right, something that isn't that difficult given extensive interviews with those who created, ran, and made Firefly. There are other aspects of Firefly, however, where the so-called critics who dominate the world of cyberverse television and film "criticism" seem to be writing about a show that isn't the real Firefly that was actually broadcast on Fox in 2002 and 2003. Take the "critic" who calls him or her self Faefyx Collington (a nom de plume?). Collington, like many others in the cyber world of television and film criticism, is yet another one of those critics who actually think they could make a better Firefly than those who actually made it. Collington, for instance, in her ScreenRant essay on the possible Disney reboot of 5 July 2001 ("How a Modern Reboot Could Work"), argues that one of the best things about a possible reboot would be the ability of those making the new Firefly to fix the politically and ideologically incorrect aspects of the old Firefly. According to Collington one of the main "mistakes", as she calls it, of the who made the show was to make it an apologia and polemic for Southern states rights and, by extension, Southern slavery. Another "mistake" or problem with Firefly was, according to Collington, its lack of Chinese characters in the show despite the implications of the show that China, or at least China in alliance with the 'West" is the Alliance. Representation, you see, is an obsession with some "critics", particularly in the academic world, who seem to think that equal (if not selective demographic) representaion is essential if the progressive world they imagine and code as good is to come about.

There are a number of problems with this approach beyond the one in which a critic, who, as far as I know, has never made television beyond YouTube and others of its ilk, thinks he or she can make better television show than those who actually make it. Another problem with the polemics of those like Collington is the fact that Firefly isn't a tale about the US Civil War despite the fact that it is a loose adaptation of a book of fiction that is about the Civil War, Michael Shaara's Killer Angels (1974), a book that Whedon read while on a trip to London and led him to wonder about what happened to the losers in war. War thus isn't the dominant theme in Firefly. Nor is state's rights. Rather the dominant focus of Firefly is what happens to the losers in war. Firefly, in other words, is about the losers--Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Jayne, Simon, River, and Book--who band together for various reasons out in the Black so to eke out a living on the edges of the populated universe in order to escape the smothering, stifling, and morally questionable Alliance and its corporate ally or master, Blue Sun, which is helping the government create a cadre of true believing assassins that will help them rule their shiny high tech empire and keep it safe from those who might challenge it. One of the main metaphors, if not the main metaphor the show explores, is the difference between the rich core planets of the Alliance, a metaphor for the rich core nations of the world, and those spaces and planets on the arse end of the galaxy, which are metaphors for the poor peripheral and exploited nations and countries of the modern and postmodern world. As for slavery, Firefly condemns it several times, most clearly in the episode "Shindig". And as for representational issues, a lack in Firefly, an unfolding text, is not necessarily absence (unless critics are omniscient and I don't know it) even out in a Black populated by the poor and outcasts, including political outcasts.

Why do some critics prefer their simulated Firefly to the real Firefly? A lot of this, I think, has to do with the fact that humans, by and large, socially and culturally construct their realities. The realities they construct, not surprisingly, reflect their utopian visions (more prominent among those on the left) or dystopian visions (more prominent among conservatives, critics of the Enlightenment, and the multitude of populist know nothings). As is well known from social scientific experiments, political and ideological correctness (a cultural phenomenon that characterises most political, economic, and cultural parties and movements particularly of a religious nature including nationalism) has been known to override and overdetermine what is actually there on the "page" or in the "text". And it is such creative readings of "texts" that makes the homiletical criticism of critics like Collington problematic.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Social and Cultural Construction of Reality

For those interested in exploring how humans construct their realities both socially and culturally, YouTube reaction videos are a gold mine. These reaction videos allow empirical researchers a means by which they can peer into the minds of those who construct alternative "realities" for themselves and, by doing so, can help scholars understand how the social and cultural construction of reality works in real life. 

I recently watched a YouTube reactor react to the tragic, sometimes shit happens, death of Tara in the season six episode of Buffy entitled "Seeing Red". The reactor to this episode and to season six of Buffy whinged over the course of his fifteen minute video about how the death of Tara was yet another example of the dead lesbian cliche in Western films and television, a cliche that admittedly has been prominent allegorically, metaphorically, and, more recently, literally in American television and beyond, and about how season six of Buffy undermined everything Buffy had done up to that point. The evidence he offered for this assertion? The magic which Tara and her girlfriend Willow is coded as a metaphor for sex and once Tara and Willow reconcile after their breakup from earlier in season six, they have sex and almost immediately afterwards Tara is shot and killed by Warren. Dead lesbian. Dead lesbian cliche. Case, or so our reactor concludes, closed.

There are, of course, problems with this argument as anyone who has ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer closely knows. Magic was coded in a number of ways in Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the course of its television run. The magic of Amy's mother in the season one episode "Cheerleader", for instance, is coded as negative and as a metaphor of parents sucking the life out of their children who they are convinced are not living up to the potential they have for them. The magic performed by Amy at the behest of Xander in season two's "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered", a magic that is ostensibly supposed to make Cordelia reconcile with the Xandman after she dumped him so he can break up with her, is coded as humorous and potentially dangerous for, to paraphrase Buffy's Watcher Giles, love, or more accurately obsession, can lead to jealousy and jealousy can lead to verbal and physical violence. Romanticism, history seems to tell us, has, in fact, probably killed and maimed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. Other instances of magic as both humorous  and potentially dangerous include Willow's use of magic to try to forget Oz, Willow's boyfriend who has left her and Sunnydale after a complication in their relationship in the fourth season episode "Something Blue". The magic performed by Willow to restore Angel's lost soul in season two's finale "Becoming" is coded as positive, as a ritual act that honours the memory of Angelus's victim Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher Buffy's watcher Giles fell in love with, who was killed after using the computer to reconstruct the the spell that would restore Angel's soul, and as a good thing because it restores Angel's soul, if, tragically, a bit to late. Tara's undermining of a spell she and Willow cast in the season four episode "Goodbye Iowa" in order to find the new big bad Adam, is coded as mysterious and we don't learn the reason for Tara's action until the early fifth season episode "Family".

It is true that Buffy did also code magic, in much of season four and season five as a marker of lesbian attraction, specifically for the mutual attraction of Tara and Willow, and for lesbian sex, specifically the lesbian sex between Tara and Willow. Given the fear that the studios that made American television shows like Buffy had, after the demise of the sitcom Ellen in the wake of the main character's coming out on that show, a demise some network executives appear to have attributed to Ellen's coming out, the portrayal of lesbian attraction and lesbian sex had to be lightly danced around on commercial American television for much of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Buffy certainly danced around lesbian attraction and sex via its use of magic as a metaphor or an analogy for sexual attraction and lesbian sex between Tara and Willow beginning with the fourth season episode "Hush". This was hardly the only metaphorical or analogical use of magic in those seasons, however. Magic was also used as a metaphor and analogy for addiction and particularly Willow's addiction to magic during those years, an addiction that becomes clear clear--though it may have precedents in retrospect--in season four's "Something Blue", the episode that directly precedes "Hush", the episode in which Tara and Willow meet for the first time and an episode in which the sexual frisson between the two of them explodes off the small screen.

Given this evidence, in order to make the argument that magic is a metaphor for sex and that Tara is killed because she had sex with Willow just prior to her murder at the hands of Warren, one has to ignore not only the fact that the sex Tara and Willow have before Tara's death is literal, but one has to ignore the various ways that magic has been coded over the course of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from 1997 to 2003. In the world of scholarship such an approach in order to be compelling must, if the hypothesis is to be at all compelling, tell us how and why the other ways magic has been coded in Buffy are irrelevant to the accidental death of Tara in "Seeing Red". Unfortunately, this is not the approach our YouTube reactor and others like him, including many fan scholars and scholar fans, take. But then, given the empirical evidence it is an approach they do not and probably can not take. What they, including our YouTube reactor, can and often do instead is to simply ignore any evidence that conflicts with their "opinion" dismissing and coding that which does not concur with their "opinion" as simply an "opinion". The problem, a problem that should jump out at anyone which prefers their analysis empirical rather than politically and ideologically correct, is that magic has, factually speaking, been coded in several ways in the Buffyverse and this fact has bearing on Tara's murder in "Seeing Red". The fact that many simply dismiss such empirical evidence as "opinion" gives us a peek into how contemporary socialisation works and how the social and cultural construction of reality works to construct alternative cultural and ideological universes that appear to be impervious to empirical reality. And so it goes.
 

PT Barnum Was Wrong, A Sucker Isn't Born Every Minute, a Sucker is Born Every Second: On the Conspracy Theory Flim Flam Trail

I was watching France 24 News yesterday and I was intrigued by a report on that network by a journalist whose job it is to monitor social media sites for disinformation and fake news for France 24, an admirable if an often if not generally ineffectual enterprise given the realities of the social and cultural construction of reality and the workings of cognitive dissonance in human beings. Of course, the manipulation of information by "public" and "private" entities is as old as large scale agricultural civilisation themselves, the very civilisations in which writing, a new conmunication form, arose and developed, often taking the form of "sacred" texts. In such societies and cultures monarchs claimed, for instance, to be related to the gods in some way, shape, or form and claimed that their relationship to the gods gave them the divine right to rule and, of course, expropriate the peasants in the process. The courtiers of the monarch often conveyed this religion of divine right to the peasant masses via oral and eventually written forms of communication, and many of the peasants to who such propaganda was conveyed, one assumes--assumes because peasants have only rarely left their thoughts on the subject to posterity in the form of written documents--believed the hype.

Conspiracy theories have taken many forms since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in China, India, and the Near East. The Judaic, Christian, and Muslim religions of the Meditteranean are, for instance, chock full of conspiracy theories about, for example, the end times and conspiracies related to the final apocalypse. The Christian Bible's book of Revelation or the Apocalypse, for example, claims that the Roman Emperor Nero, who it refers to as the Beast, 666, or 616, is a major player in an anti-Christian conspiracy that will ultimately bring about the second coming of the Christian messiah and the restoration of a Christian theocratic utopia. Given, the geographical and cultural impact of Christianity and Islam these conspiracy theories have left their mark on the cultures, high, middle, and low, that arose out of them in the various geographies they dominated culturally and politically. They are still with us today, for instance, in European settler societies like the United States, Canada, and Australia, all the children, in some way, shape, or form, of a Christian culture in which conspiracy theories are central.

Recently, a number of climate and weather conspiracy theories have become prominent in particular countercultures and subcultures in the West and particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In the report I watched on France 24 that I referred to earlier, the journalist debunked the accuracy of a YouTube video--YouTube is one of the central communication platforms in the brave new digital world--which purported to show governmental weather making machines which were devised to create weather havoc across the world and particularly in the United States and Australia. She showed quite clearly that those demagoging for this conspiracy theory used a YouTube video that was totally unrelated to the claim that governments were manipulating the weather for fun, power, and profit. But then factual accuracy has never been at the top of the to do list of demagogues, apologists, and polemicists.

I was and am familiar with the chemtrails conspiracy theory, a theory which claims that aeroplane chemical trails are attempts by governments to manipulate the weather, a theory which would require at least some governments, like that of the US, for example, to be in league with major corporations since chemtrails are left by private airlines as well as American military aerocraft, I was not familiar with the variant of the chemtrails conspiracy theory that was the focus of the report on France 24, a conspiracy theory that suggested that giant electrical towers were and are weather making machines that are causing all sorts of climate havoc across the world, well at least the core nation world, including hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina, the hurricane that devastated the American Louisiana and Mississippi coasts in 2005, and massive rainfalls, like those that led recently to massive flooding in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria in Australia.

As several scholars have noted, the best propaganda, the best socialisation for conformity, the most effective bullshite, contains at least some truth amidst the fiction or bullshite in it. That is certainly the case here. The "public" sector and the "private" sector have, as social scientists have long known, been trying, with some success, to manipulate the weather for some time as water witching and cloud seeding, which dates back to the 19th century, shows. It is quite a hop, skip, and a jump from technological efforts like that of the Chinese to lower pollution levels in Beijing to the US government making hurricanes to devastate parts of the US to expand their control of the population and enrich the petroleum industry, something the US already does in the form of subsidies to an oil industry that recently made billions in profits making one wonder why further subsidies are needed, to a full blown conspiracy in which governments and their corporate fellow travellers are creating hurricanes, tornados, droughts, droughts in areas that are already arid and which wouldn't have the populations and human made landscapes they do have without government subsidies for things like dams and reservoirs, something one assumes even these negative nabobs of nutty conspiracy theories would see as a positive even if they don't know the role of governments in making the settlement of arid areas in the core nation world possible. 

We shouldn't, of course, be surprised about such hop, skip, and jump flights of delusional fantasy. Self-proclaimed Christians have been hop, skipping, and jumping to their conspiracy laden predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ since at least the first century CE. Nor should we be surprised that the people who believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories and create realities that reflect these conspiracy theories think they are living a movie and that life is like a movie. They think they are good James Bond's--ironically a govenment agent from the deep state--fighting evil incarnate in the form of SMERSH or SPECTRE who now run the govenment. They think, in other words, that life is like a manichean piece of fiction and they are the good guys fighting the totally evil bad guys in a cosmic drama that will determine the fate of the universe. In the end, P.T. Barnum is both right and wrong. Suckers are born constantly, but they are born constantly every second rather than every minute.
 

A Critical Ethnocgraphy of Social Media: Social Media in an Age of Narcissism and Anti-Intellectualism

In Alfred Hitchcock's superb film Rear Window a broken legged Jimmy Stewart who is stuck in a cast because of an accident he suffered while photographing a car race, sits in his wheelchair and stares at the windows (metaphorical cinema screens) across his quardrangle. As he, Scotty, gazes again and again at the windows across his courtyard he begins to do what we humans often do. He begins to construct stories--whether they are real or unreal we are unsure at first and even to some extent at the end of the movie--about the people and the situations they have gotten themselves into behind each of those rear windows. Today, the voyeuristic and narrative ("reality") constructing society Hitchcock explored in Rear Window dominates digital media sites like YouTube. On digital platforms like YouTube voyeurs voyeur and those being voyeured act out--whether in deep acting mode or surface acting mode is sometimes unclear--various scenes from their own movie about their own "real life" hoping, in the process, that by allowing voyeurs to voyeur them they can earn the crumbs (and to find perhaps simultaneously an online community of the like minded) offered by our new digital bosses (much the same as the old bosses) thanks to the "reactions" they put up for all the voyeuring "public" to see. 

Much of what these voyeur mes put up on their social media pages is almost as old as humankind itself. Sensationalists like Inside of You Clips and Sarah Z sensationalise for fun and (California dreaming) profits. Demagogues like Milo Yiannopoulos demagogue about the political, ideological, and cultural things that have proven to be successful in manipulating the gullible masses. Some of them are presumably even congnisant of the fact that they are playing a game. Those demagogued follow along after their cultural masters repeating the apologetic and polemical mantras their pied pipers have loudly whispered into their ears. Whingers and whiners, like Books and BlueStockings, spew emotional hatred and ad hominems at, for example, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Joss Whedon, with little of anything empirical, systematic, analytical, or substantive in their rants. In fact, posters like Books and BlueStockings foreground the empirical fact that many if not most of these voyeur mes have not grasped the empirical fact that beauty and value are in the socialised eyes of the beholder. Even many of the posts that are actually grounded, if limitedly, in empirical facts end up being, as is the case, for example, with posts by Ronnie Bradley on Buffy, limitedly empirical, selectively empirical, and ultimately overdetermined by ideology and political correctness, making such posts more polemical than empirical and analytical. Decently done if limitedly exegetical reaction posts by those of SofieReacts, the LexiCrowd Thor, and Andy and Alex, though grounded in textual rather than political and ideological correct analysis, evince little understanding of the broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, geographic, and historical contexts of that to which they are reacting, approaches that make many YouTube reactions variants of fundamentalist textual literalism. In the end, so much of what is on social media sites like YouTube suggests very strongly that social media sites are the real vast wastelands of the core nation world, wastelands with only thin and microscopic intellectual oases (I am thinking here of the wonderful Fil from Wings of Pegasus, the amazing Clever Dick and his superb Doctor Who histories, Overthink Podcast, and others like them who do research and preparation for their videos) lying in the interstices of its vast intellectual deserts.

The Books of My Life: A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

 

When my father and mother moved me and my family to Texas in the mid-1960s I remember being more interested in the adventure of moving than in where we were moving and why. The myth of Texas had no meaning for me at the time. I think, in fact, I had only barely heard of Texas as I hadn't really watched many, if any, of the Hollywood westerns that celebrated the myth of Texas. I was much more interested in the Beatles, Doctor Who, who was mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and the American version of rounders, especially one of America's baseball players, Sandy Koufax, who, like the Doctor was truly mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and who, unlike the Doctor, was actually real, though I am not sure I made that distinction at the time.

One thing I do recall from my teenage years is that the Beatles, Doctor Who, and Sandy Koufax were much more interesting to me than school, which, even though I was interested in history and politics, didn't do for me what the Beatles, Doctor Who, Sandy Koufax, and adventuring along Five Mile Creek in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas did. School simply did not engage me intellectually. The extracurricular, on the other hand, did. 

My memories today of my secondary school years are mostly extracurricular. I recall the seemingly endless rituals of football pep rallies at Browne. I recall the attempt of a small minority of us to stage an anti-Vietnam War walkout one afternoon after a pep rally, an effort that failed because the administrators and teachers got wind of it and chained us into the school with two teachers at every door. And I recall, if vaguely, that each of us at Browne had to take a mandatory Texas civics class in, if memory serves, seventh grade.

Like history in general, as I have come to realise, the civics class on Texas history and culture that was mandatory for me and my T W Browne school mates was, as I look back on it from the distance of today, mythic. It told a mythic tale of freedom seeking Texas, of Texas heroes, the Texans who fought for independence, and of non-Texas villains, the bad guys who tried to keep Texas unfree and Texans locked in the chains put there by a dictatorial tyrant named Santa Anna, who, in retrospect seems to be, in the Texas mythology of the 1960s, a Hitler before Hitler and a Stalin before Stalin. Historical presentism. While all of this mythhistory was clearly present at the time I was forced to take my Texas civics class, the only thing that I recall that I consciously remembered from that class at the time was the Texas's state song, "Texas Our Texas". Music, it seems, was central to my life at the time.

The lyrics of "Texas Our Texas", I later came to realise thanks to my increasing understanding of the empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities of our world, was grounded in mythhistory and the closely related boosterist history. History as Advertising. It was, as I came to understand, the history that the powers that be, who were less part of a conspiracy to brainwash us than accepting, consciously and unconsciously, of a set of cultural ideological myths and self-images, believed we needed to be socialised into in order to be good Texans (and presumably good Americans). It was a history that, even if I didn't realise it at the time, affected me in such a way that I felt suitably awed when I visited the Alamo in San Antonio and San Jacinto near Houston with my family, the place, in the myths of Texas, where freedom loving and heroic Texans fought against incredible odds to make Texas free and the place where the freedom loving Texans finally defeated the villainous freedom hating Mexicans winning their freedom once and for all. I had, without even realising it, been socialised into a Texas version of the battle between good and evil, between good Duddly Do-Right (the Canadian mountie symbol become American heroic icon) and evil Snidely Whiplash, running through my head affecting how unconsciously or subconsciously I read "reality". At that age I was just too literal to recognise the parody and satire in that tale of good and evil that was Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash.

This manichean version of history I was socialised into turned out to be relatively short lived in my increasingly intellectual and scientific life. Soon, thanks to rock and roll and the Vietnam War, I was among the "bohemians" and "deviants" few who had come to realise the truth, namely that mythic and boosterist history, whether it was the mythic and boosterist history of Texas or the mythic and boosterist of Big D where every house was like a palace, was just that, mythic and boosterist. When I went to college I learned that the great social scientist Emile Durkheim argued that all cultures or societies needed such myths, and needed the "deviants" who contested it, to create a common community with a common identity. I learned that this, this need for a common community, was why communities needed and had the mythic, boosterist, and heroes versus villains stories and symbols that were grounded in a binary of sacred and profane.

The social sciences, and particularly, cultural anthropology, helped me to recognise the reality of how many of the tales and stories of American (and other) culture were socially constructed, universalised, transcendentalised, or fetishised. They were, as I came to recognise, the manichean myths that societies and cultures lived by and through, including in, if more complexly and contradictorily, in the core nation societies with its large populations and multilayered economic, political, cultural, and regional systems. It also helped me recognise that the histories that societies and cultures told about themselves were also mythic and, if less so, critical, drawing, as they did, on contradictions in the societies and cultures in which they were constructed.

I went to college during an era in which consensus history and myth history was under assault. It was an era in which social history, particularly social history influenced by quantitative approaches in the social sciences and particularly sociology, and cultural history, influenced by cultural anthropology and particularly by Clifford Geertz, were becoming prominent in the history profession and bureaucracy. Donald Denoon's, Philippa Mein-Smith's, and Maravic Wydham's A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), is one of the many products of this renewed interest in ethnographically sensitive cultural history in the post-imperial, post-modern, and post-industrial historical profession.

Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham place identity at the heart of their history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Filtering identity, an identity that is both somewhat static and dynamic, through its interactions with other social and cultural constructions including imperialism, colonisation, modernisation, nationalism (New Zealand marking itself off from Australia in binary cultural fashion, for example), industrialisation (particularly in Australia), cultural myths (the myth exeptionalism and the myths of the bush, the beach, the yeoman battler, and British gentility, for example), deindustrialisation, decolonisation, the indigeneous rights movements, and great power politics (a great power politics in which the US replaced Britain as dominant power--economic, political, and cultural--in the region after World War II), Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history provide interested readers with an excellent cultural, economic, and political history of the region and particularly Australia and New Zealand. 

Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, while a superb history of the region, is not a book for the novice or for an introductory course in the history of Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific. It is, however, an excellent introductory text for the advanced undergraduate, history and social science graduate students, and the intelligent reader who already knows something about the history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. I, for instance, knew the broad outlines of Australian and Kiwi history and found those very helpful in expanding my knowledge of Australian and New Zealand history but was somewhat adrift in the parts of the book dealing with Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian history. Despite this I found reading the book highly rewarding and worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific will, of course, not please those who prefer their history to be the history of "great men", particularly great political men, and great events, particularly great political events such as scholars like J.L. Granatstein who, while not opposed to some of the new social and cultural history, has bemoaned the killing of history, by which he means political history which he thinks should be at the heart of the historical enterprise, in his jeremiad on the subject. The historical profession, however, is a marketplace and the historical markets that are prominent at the moment are cultural and social. Nor will it please those who prefer their  history mythic, legendary, and manichean, who prefer, in other words, their history European and celebratory and filled with European saints and sinners. For these latter, the only good history is politically and ideologically correct, as they define it, history. It will, on the other hand, please those, like me, who recognise that the tales we tell about ourselves are generally socially and culturally constructed and have a tenuous relationship to empirical reality. That empirically grounded history and social science, as the culture wars that rack the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, are persona non grata in a world that generally prefers its history comic bookish and Hollywoodish means that the histories of those who can see through the myths, the delusions, and the tales of white hats and black hats, are likely never be accepted in a world where reality is almost always "reality". So much for scientific enlightenment.

The Books of My Life: Petrified Campus

Though the University of Toronto clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson became something of an academic pop star who could sell out "arenas" in Canada, the US, and the UK in the second and third decades of the twenty first century, he was not the first critic of political correctness, a trendy new term for something almost as old as civilisation itself, orthodoxy and consequent censorship or, to use that other current trendy phrase for censorship, cancel culture. Nor was Peterson the first person to imply that his views and those of his devotees was politically, economically, culturally, geographically, and demographically correct. The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, all claimed to have a monopoly on truth, making them purveyors of what we would call political correctness, for millennia. Needless to say these chosen people were not afraid to target those who disagreed even torturing and killing them in the name of "compassion". 

In the modern era the virtually universal human condition of ethnocentrism has taken on a variety of political and ideological guises. The use of the phrase political correctness, historians on the subject of political correctness inform us, goes back to at least 1917 when the Bolsheviks used the phrase to describe those committed true believers of the Bolshevik cause. In the 1930s Nazis were accused by the American quality press of claiming that only to its chosen people, politically correct Aryans in this case, were correct in politics and ideology. In the 1940s socialists accused communists of the era of being characterised by the notion that they and only they were ideologically correct. Lenin and Stalin, it should be noted, did claim to be the high priests of the one and only true holy orthodox religion of communism, a notion that many Western anti-communists, somewhat ironically, bought into. In the 1970s the American New Left used the term as emblematic of a reflexive strategy to avoid any drift toward orthodoxy. In the 1980s University of Chicago English professor Alan Bloom accused the academy of being in thrall to a left wing orthodoxy. 

In the wake of Bloom a number of conservative and right wing intellectuals began claiming that political correctness had become dominant in universities and colleges all across postmodern American and the Western world, using the term as a synonym for things like the intellectual attempt to expand the historical curriculum, the intellectual attempt to expand literature reading lists, and the increasingly retail like strategies of college administrators, all of which, they claimed, were liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist in origin. For these selective right wing critics there was a liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist movement or conspiracy afoot to remake the Western world in its own ideologically correct image, an image that demonised the West for its imperialism, racism, sexism, and classism. 

Eventually, of course and not surprisingly--politics is a contact sport after all--conservative and right wing politicians and polemicists picked up their anti-politically correct crosses and used them, if selectively, in a politically correct way, to bash its social liberal cousins in a form. This conscious demagogic strategy, one learned from forebears like those purveyors of state propaganda and capitalist Madison Avenue propaganda, proved to be quite effective in many cases since it played, as did demagogues before them, on mass emotions like fear and anger. 

Jordan Peterson, who has become a saintly martyr to many of his politically correct devotees, was not, as I noted, the first person to claim that conspiratorial and tyrannical political correctness had taken over universities in the Western world. He was not even the first to make such a claim in English Canada for in 1984 three well known and and highly respected Canadian academics, University of Calgary historian David Bercuson, University of Toronto historian Robert Bothwell, and  York University historian J.L. Granatstein, argued, in their polemic The Great Brain Drain published by McClelland and Stewart, that political correctness had put, as the subtitle of the book claimed, Canadian universities on the road to ruin. 

Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein continued their polemic against political correctness in Canada, along with other aspects of post-World War II Canadian universities, in their 1997 book Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canadian Universities (Toronto: Random House Canada, 1997). Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell a tale that is well known in intellectual and demagogic circles by now After World War II, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein inform us, Canada, like the US, the UK, and Australia, flush with monies (thanks, in part, to German and Japanese economic decline due to war) and returning soldiers, and convinced that universities were central to the war against tyranny, expanded their university systems in order to fight such tyranny on the political and economic-technological levels. Some on the left, of course, argue that thanks to these social and cultural contexts universities, research universities, became central cogs in the military and industrial complex of the so-called "free world".

The 1960s, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell us, brought increasing numbers of baby boomers to universities. Many of these baby boomers pushed for a more "relevant" education and an expansion of the curriculum, particularly an expansion of courses on class, race, and ethnic groups, and an expansion of practical professional programmes on university campuses. Soon this utilitarianism led, particularly after the oil crisis of the 1970s and the declining support of federal and provincial support for universities, to increasing numbers of university consumers wanting and demanding an education for post graduation success, an ideology helped along by educators who preached the gospel, one that did have quantitative support, that more education equalled more financial and cultural rewards after graduation. This utilitarianism fed into even more curricular "reform" of a practical nature, a type of curricular reform that continues as I type.

With the increase in the number of educational institutions, with student numbers increasing, with many students demanding an education relevant for post university life, and with the decline in federal and provincial funding for education, pressure was put on university administrators to find a way to keep their universities afloat in an age of economic and demographic austerity. Universities responded to this crisis in a variety of ways. Tuition fees (and student and alumni fees in general) rose with provincial consent. This meant that more students equaled more monies so university administrators developed advertising campaigns to promote their universities to prospective students and developed ways to retain students already on campus or off campus in distance learning programmes. The curriculum, as a consequence, was further oriented toward a utilitarian or practical education. The Liberal Arts, the heart of traditional education, suffered. Grades inflated. Sessional faculty increased. Tenure faculty streams decreased relative to the increasing number of Ph.D's produced by both the elite and less elite universities. The physical plant expanded (particularly administrative and residential buildings and sports facilities), much of it in order to attract students to campus. And since student numbers and student retention became central to universities, student concerns became a central component of university decisions about the curriculum and the extra-curriculum.

Political correctness fed into this university in the age of austerity in a number of ways, so we are told. The rise of identity politics and the mythistories that accompanied it led to lobbying for a celebration of identity groups and their "histories" in universities. Sensitivity and therapeutic culture led to calls for an education that didn't traumatise students. The hiring of faculty in the years the universities grew, particularly those from the sixties, provided students who wanted an education that celebrated their identites and avoided traumatising them, with an ally. In the process, a new dogma, one that celebrated aspects of the increasingly diverse student population and one which was careful not to traumatise sensitised students, emerged and was institutionalised in university politics. As a result, any behaviours or teaching that challenged such doctrines, became increasingly persona non grata on university campuses and a new orthodoxy emerged.

There are, of course, a number of problems with this picture. Yes, universities grew and prospered thanks particularly to governmental monies. Yes, universities came under financial pressure after the oil crisis of the 1970s and had to find other ways, thanks to a decline in governmental funding, to stay financially afloat. Yes, educational practise became increasingly tied to career and financial "success".  For far too many a medical degree, for instance, meany you could consume more than it meant helping others. Yes, the Liberal Arts declined in popularity and relevance while professional and career oriented education has increased in popularity. Yes, grades have inflated since the 1970s (and all college personnel know this) and if you are a faculty member, particularly a sessonial faculty member or an adjunct, who doesn't get with the brave new modern grade inflation programme, you can be made redundant. Yes, far too few students are even willing to read one book these days compared to the bad old its too hard days when I, for instance, had to read thirteen books in a semester length introductory level Greek history class and four books a week for a postgraduate seminar. Yes, far too many young people today are coddled thanks to the attempt of so many to turn the core nation world into a Disney movie. Yes, universities became more demographically diverse after the 1960s. Yes, student numbers increased leading to a situation where too many people are taking undergraduate and graduate degrees increasingly trivialising them in the process. Yes, far too many of the far too many going to college require, particularly on the undergraduate level, are in need of remediation. Yes, for far too many of those students in need of remediation there is not much media to re even should colleges and universities adequately fund remeadiation programmes. I had several students at a second division American research university who did not grasp the concept that 20 points is 20% and vice versa on a 100 grade scale. Yes, universites today rely too much on sessional lecturers. Yes, many American colleges and universities are little more than glorified high schools these days consisting of grade 13 and beyond. Yes there is far too much segmentation of labour in the academic cultural marketplace. That segmentation of labour, however, parallels that in the economy in general because both segmentation in the univerities and segmentation in the economy are, of course, the products of a modernity characterised by "rational" and "efficient" bureaucracies staffed, at the upper and middle levels of the pyramid, with managers engaged in specialised segmentied labour. Yes, far too many academic books are opaque. Academia does not have a monopoly on opacity and the targeting of specific narrow demographics, however. And yes, far too many universities are increasingly characterised by an environment of correctness and with practises that undermine university freedom of speech and academic freedom. However, it is not political and ideological correctness, in the way it is too often understood these days, that is undermining higher education in the age of neoliberal austerity. It is the need for student bodies, for customers.

The need for student bodies has led, along, admittedly, with federal and provincial mandates, to increases in administrative staff. One study found a significant increase in upper level and middle level bureaucrats at one American university, something that can clearly be generalised to other universities in the United States, Canada, and Australia (as can the increase in financial remuneration for academic bureaucrats). Part of the mandate of these university bureaucrats is to recruit and retain students, something that has led to the rise of a retail model of education, a model in which, oftentimes, the customer, the student, is right. It is this retail model of higher education (a model that seens to once again reared its head in the recent firing of an NYU organic chemistry adjunct) that is behind the sensitivity to the concerns of a number of students who have already socialised before they came to university. Yes, some faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Grantstein are aware of), are favourably disposed to this retail model of academica to some extent. Like students, however, these more "radical" faculty--those in engineering, the hard sciences, most of the professional schools are not likely to man these barricades anytime anytime soon--reflect what is happening in fractured postmodern Canada in general.

So what to do? Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recommend greater interdisciplinarity, less emphasis on publish or perish, and the elimination of tenure. They recommend that universities be given greater administrative autonomy. They recommend more targeted governmental subsidies that recognise the differences in university and scholarly quality and writing and research quality. They recommend the recognition of the differences between universities that no eqalitarian rhetoric will paper over. They recommend the establishment of a national university so that Canada, for the first time in its history, can have an Australian National University of its own.

I am actually sympathetic with many of these recommendations. However, as is almost always the case some of these recommendations are easier to say and more difficult to do. While, for instance, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue that tenure is no longer necessary since all or most universities are dedicated to freedom of inquiry and is a hindrance to quality the reality is that a number of people and groups, many of them on the political and ideological right, have as their goal limiting freedom of inquiry on university campuses since they prefer their education to be mythic in orientation rather than empirical just like their nationalist forebears. Do they have influence? Just ask the universities in Wisconsin and Florida. 

There are several other problems I have with Petrified Campus. Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein claim that Canadian universities are not the equal of great American state universities. Both the University of Toronto and McGill (the Big Two?), however, are members of the elite Association of American Universities (and have been so since 1926) suggesting that Canada already has the equal of the great American state universities like Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, or Texas, which are likewise members of the AAU. Administrative autonomy, which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue for more of, is likely to lead to more not less retail education. Eliminating some universities or downsizing selective universities, both of which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein suggest, is problematic given that they are economically important to the communities they serve (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recognise). But most of all, and Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein don't seem to grasp this fully, universities are reflections of the society and culture in which they exist. This suggests that if you want to change universities you first have to change the broader society and culture that they are situated in and impact them. This, however, is unlikely to happen since it means that one would have to change aspects of the relevant economic (Canada's economies of scale can never match that of the US), political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that have given rise to postmodernity in the core parts of the world, one of the dominant types of society and culture of Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Japan at the moment, and the societal form that "traditionalist" modernism sees as the enemy. Good luck with that.

As to why Peterson became a pop star while Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein did not, good question. Perhaps it is because they are less sensational and stridently polemical and as a consequence less partisan and dogmatic. Perhaps it is because of the brave new digital revolution and the internet and the celebrities it creates. Perhaps it is because of the increasing prominence of political cults centred around charismatic bureaucrats in the brave new digital world. UofT tutorial time perhaps?

The Books of My Life: Joss Whedon (Pateman)

 

As I have hinted at again and again in this blog I have experienced hours and hours of joy and hours and hours of pain through watching the often profound genre blending and gender bending comedic, dramatic, and tragic television shows of auteur Joss Whedon. I developed a love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the tragically short lived Firefly particularly after they came out on the relatively new medium of the DVD. I liked the noirish Angel. I found Dollhouse, a television show Whedon only partially created, interesting, intriguing, and the most Vertigoish of Whedon's work thanks to, in part, its exploration of male fantasies about women. 

I have a much more limited interest in Whedon's film work beyond his Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing and his nudge, nudge, wink wink horror film Cabin in the Woods, which he co-wrote with former Buffy writer Drew Goddard. I simply have zero interest in the now dominant Hollywood superhero films which stretch credibility beyond the breaking point for me and which are too adolescent for someone who never had to move beyond comic books because he almost never read them. So, it is unlikely that I will watch his Avengers/Avengers Assemble and its sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron unless they appear on television and there is no better alternative on other channels at the time they are broadcast.

Thanks to my adventures in the television worlds of Whedon, my interest in culture, and my interest in social and cultural theory, it was inevitable that I would begin to read books and articles on what has come to be called the Whedonverse. As posts on this blog indicate I have read a number of books on the televisual worlds of Joss Whedon and his collaborators.  My latest literary excursion into the storytelling worlds of Joss Whedon and its contexts is a book by English Whedon scholar Matthew Pateman, Joss Whedon (Manchester, Eng: Manchester University Press, 2018), the author of a highly regarded in Whedon Studies circles previous book on Buffy entitled The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer published by McFarland in 2006.

Unlike David Lavery's creative biography of Whedon, Joss Whedon: A Creative Portrait published by Tauris in 2014, Pateman's book is, as Pateman emphasises, a critical and contextual analysis of the televisual work of Whedon. Pateman eschews biography and psychological detective work by focusing on Whedon's narrative art, his storytelling skills, and the intersection of these with Whedon's politics, which have often been seen as, as Pateman notes, liberal and feminist, instead. Divided into two parts, part one of Pateman's book explores the industrial and political aspects of Whedon's art while part two consists of several case studies of Whedon's storytelling art in Buffy, Angel (less so), Firefly, and Dollhouse, something that gives Pateman's Joss Whedon the quality of a collection of related essays. 

There is a lot to admire in Pateman's book. I found his attempt to move beyond the pitfalls and pratfalls of crystal ball textualism with its Chomskyish everything you need to know about a media text you can find in that media text, commendable. I greatly appreciated Pateman's attempts to move beyond the text in his exploration of Whedon's politics, particularly his gender politics, in his attentiveness to the production processes of a television show, and in his attention to the collaborative nature of mass art. I particularly appreciated Pateman's attempt, with the help of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and beyond writer Jane Espenson, to explore the script writing processes practises that characterised the Whedonverse. Also worthy of praise is Pateman's emphasis not only on plot and character but on mise-en-scene. As such Pateman's book provides, I would argue, a better model for media analysis than much of what passes for media analysis in the text cenred media world these days.

On the other hand, there were a number of things that I found vexing about Pateman's book on the work of Joss Whedon. I found his formulaic critique of classical auteurist theory problematic. Yes, the auteurism of Cahiers critics and later filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard were polemical and ultimately individualist in orientation. However, many of those who adopted the policy of auteurism, like Andrew Sarris and many of the critics associated with Movie, did not simply adopt what might be called the Cahiers "romantic" approach to auteurism, they also adapted it. Many post-Cahiers auterists, for instance, foregrounded the fact that filmmaking was collaborative, that only a few Hollywood directors were auteurs, wrote about actors and writers and hinted that they too might be seen through the lens of auteurism, and emphasised that auteurism was a useful approach for organising and understanding the films produced Hollywood studio system before the break up of the Hollywood production, distribution, and exhibition system in 1948, at least in part. Like so many of the post-1960s film studies generations, Pateman seems not to have read much of classic auteurist theory--an approach that goes back at least to the 1920s--and seems to be more intent to create a straw man or woman he can play off of. It really is well past time for the younger generations of film and movie critics to move beyond these straw men and women arguments and go back to the diverse texts of post-World War II auteurism in order to tease out the various approaches to mass media authorship that were there from their post-World War II beginings, approaches that included Marxist approaches that were very, if selectively, contextual and critical of the romantic approach to artistic creativity.

Additionally, as is also the case with Lavery's creative biography, I found Pateman's reliance on a single source problematic. As ethnographers engaged in observation and historians working in archives know there are problems in relying on single informants or even a handful of informants. The information one gleans from them may very well be accurate but it must be checked against other sources, ethnographic and archival.

Finally, there is the related issue that Pateman has, like so many of his colleagues in film and television studies, written a book on an artistic figure who is still alive and well and who will, one presumes, continue to work in Hollywood despite the 2018 and 2022 revelations about his behaviour, revelations that led to Whedon's fall from grace in the eyes and hearts of some of his devotees, This means that Pateman's analysis and conclusions must remain somewhat tentative. Since Whedon is still alive and because Hollywood limits access to contemporary primary source material for a variety of reasons, scholars and analyists simply are unable at the moment to fully appraise Whedon's work. For this reason, Pateman's book, while interesting, useful, and praiseworthy in many respects, is inherently incomplete and as such tentative. As a consequence the authoritative and definitive work on the storytelling art of Joss Whedon and the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts that surrounded and impacted it, awaits some future biographer and critical analyst who has access to all relevant materials that are essential to understanding both Joss Whedon and his art.

Recommended.

Musings on Democrats, Republicans, and the Demonisation of the Media

 

It is fascinating to listen to and read and then analyse the apologetic and polemical rhetoric of many self-proclaimed Republican partisans and many self-proclaimed Democrat partisans. What becomes clear when you dispassionately analyse the discourse or rhetoric of both partisan sects is that both sectarian groups began with similar if somewhat different perceptions of the oligarchic class that rules the United States and that both sects have different if somewhat similar perceptions of the media. What becomes clear, in other words, about this partisan discourse is that on one level, the structural level, the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats are similar, while on the level of form they are somewhat different.

The Republican and Democrat conceptions of the American ruling oligarchy assume that the ruling class is economically, politically, and culturally the same. They both assume, in other words, that there is only one ruling class when, in fact, there really isn't. As a number of scholars have noted at least since Antonio Gramsci, there are fractions within the ruling elite, fractions that sometimes produce tensions within the ruling elite. The Republicans, for instance, particularly since they adopted so much of the rhetoric of Southern Dixiecrats, have ties to right wing oil elites and their fellow travellers. This is one of the reasons the Republican Party, as it has dixiefied since the 1950s, has developed even stronger ties with right wing economic elites and have helped these right wing economic elites move from the margins to the mainstream of American political and economic discourse since the 1950s. The Democrats, on the other hand, since the 1960s, thanks to the disenchantment with and defection of its Dixiecrats, deindustrialisation and the decline of unions, increasing DixiePublican success among White working class ethnics, and the rise of the new digital media, have aligned themselves with the economically conservative and socially somewhat liberal oligarchs, such as those in Silicon Valley. 

While there is limited economic tensions between these fractions of the ruling oligarchic class. They all are, as Nancy Pelosi noted, capitalist (a fact that makes the wacky right wing's characterisation of them as socialists or communists or anarchists looney). They are just somewhat different kinds of capitalists. While both fractions are neoliberal in their economic ideology--they believe in the free market theology--the new digital oligarchic elite are more open to social liberal or social insurance liberalism than are the Republican leaning oligarchs.

While both Republican and Democrat apologists and polemicists believe the media is biased against them it is clear that they have a funamental misunderstanding of the media. Like the two Jesus's in Dire Straits song "Industrial Disease" one of these groups, one assumes, must be wrong since it would logically seem that "the media, as Republicans and Democrat partisans call it, cannot be out to get both of them at the same time in the same place.

As I have written elsewhere there are several types of media. The first type is corporate and commercial. They are owned and run by for profit corporations. Their reason to be is to sell "copy", and by se;ling you copy they also, because they are commerical, sell you tootpaste and lifestyles the things that allow them to sell copy hence their sensationalism: did you know Marion Morrison wore a toupee and had sex with n, and may have even smoked some Mary Jane?

The US's CBS, NBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Canada's CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Britain's ITV and The Times (owned by oligarch Rupert Murdoch), are examples of corporate media. There are variations in them given the political contexts in which they operate. I think ITV, British commercial TV, still fills 50 minutes of a 60 minute time slot (instead of the 42 minutes on US commercial stations, something that points up the power of corporations and the nature of the commercial media in the US) because of government regulation. With the rise of right wing populist Toryism in the UK, however, regulation has been relaxed and ITV, which initially had something like fourteen somewhat autonomous regional bodies within itself (example: London Weekend TV), is now controlled by two.

The second type of media is public and corporate. They are also supported by advertising revenue in the form of ads at the beginning and ends of programmes. They do, however, tend to be much less sensationalist in their selective journalism and hence often subscribe to parochial ideologies of journalistic practise. They are, in other words, embedded and inscribed within, thanks to sociallsation, certain ideological grounded "realities".

America's PBS and NPR, Britain's the BBC, Canada's the CBC, Australia's ABC, and Denmark's DR, are examples of public corporate media. Some corporate media, like PBS, gets private funding via ads at the beginning and ends of TV programmes. The CBC, in addition to government funding, has advertising. It has a mandate to emphasise Canadian content hence Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries and Schiitts Creek. The BBC is funded a licence fee, that the Tories want to do away with, and has no commercials. All that said, the Beeb has to cowtow to the oligarchic powers that be thanks to their control of the extent or even the existence of the licence fee. Needless to say, the Beeb has been one of the most significant media for years producing things like Doctor Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers.

A third form of media is the sensationalist and targeted type of media. They are interested in selling product (political and ideological product rather than toothpaste) to an ideologically and sometimes ethnically segmented audience. They tend to influence true believers and their viewing numbers are exaggerated. Like the sensationalist corporate media the politically and ideologically correct media mirrors the lowest common denominator. Additionally, they don't create divisions, they mirror them. Fox and MSNBC are examples of corporate segmented politically and ideologically correct media. UK Murdoch owned The Sun, a host of Murdoch media in Australia, and, though not as much as it used to be Canada's National Post, are examples of politically and ideologically correct newspapers.

A last form of media is independent media which is not corporate. It is widely present on the internet but not widely read. Thanks to their limited sensationalism, their dissident nature (making them more factually accurate), and the fact that Mericans don't read much, independent media are at a significant disadvantage in the early twenty-first century "media market".

As is the case with the ruling class there are, not surprisingly, fractions within the corporate commercial media and the independent media. Some corporate commercial media, like the New York Times, are embedded in the ideology of what used to be called sixpenny journalism, "quality" journalism, "high" journalism. Other corporate media, such as the tabloids, are the heirs of penny journalism. While both depend on sensationalism to sell copy, the type of sensationalism they play on to sell copy are somewhat different. The tabloids tend to emphasise what is now called gotcha journalism, though one can also increasingly find this we gotcha you politicians and celebrities in "quality" journalistic publications like the Guardian as well. Additionally, the tabloids tend to dissolve to some extent the difference between the opinion and news discourses in commercial corporate journalism. Independent media is diverse in content ranging from the so-called far left of the political spectrum, to the far right of the political spectrum. One can find self-proclaimed socialist media in internetland at the same time that one can find self-proclaimed White supremacism media in worldwidewebland.

There are, of course, other differences between the two major strands of corporate commercial media. Sixpenny news organisations are more devoted to the who, when, where, how, and why practise of journalism than the penny news fraternity, which is dominated by rageoholic political and ideological correctness and whinging and whining type of journalism, the type of sensationalism that sells to the lowest common denominator masses these days. The sixpenny press tends to see itself as the fourth estate, as a check and balance on the powerful, though their muckracking or investigative journalism has declined for a number of reasons during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sixpenny press tends to be tied to the neoliberal social liberal elites. Jeff Bezos, for example, owns the Washington Post. Tabloids, be these tabloids Australian, Canadian, or American, tend to be tied to right wing apologists and polemicists like Rupert Murdoch and the political "journalism" they engage in is mostly of the apologetic and polemical sort. What should not be missed here is that both American political parties, as that last sentence indicates, have ties, ideological ties, economic ties, political ties, and cultural ties, to different fractions of the American economic elite. 

What should also not be missed is that both partisan sects, particularly in their true believe form, are equally manichean, seeing themselves as being numbered among the chosen people. They are equally messianic believing that they are on mission from god, whatever or whoever their god happens to be, to to instantiate their version of America throughout the chosen land. They are equally paranoid and conspiratorially oriented thinking the media is out to get them. they are equally utopian preaching that their way is the best way. Both fails to realise that the sixpenny press regards itself (often without reason) as the fourth estate, as a check and a balance on power and thus it sees its mission, at least in part, as expressing truth to power, whoever that power happens to be. Both praise the sixpenny media's speaking truth to power or investigative journalism only if it is speaking truth to its other. Both sectarian groups are, in other words and formally speaking, mirror images of each other.

Speaking of conspiracies, the media, by and large, are conspiratorial. They want to sell you product.

The Books of My Life: A History of the Canadian Peoples

Writing a history of anything, including a history of a modern nation state that arose after the eighteenth century like Canada, is always a tricky task. In order to write such a history the professional historian has to decide what is significant or important in order to keep his or her history from becoming a simple and simplistic litany of necessarily selected historical events, selected historical events that are unfortunately not always recognised as selected, which may or may not be important. Significance, in turn, means, or should mean, that the historian and social science seek out important causes and effects that are thought to impact human life, particularly those economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that impact human life and the things that humans have constructed over the course of human existence.

History as a professional practise, a professional practise formalised and bureaucratised in the core Western world, has, since its beginnings and particularly since the Enlightenment,  been interested in determining causes and effects, in determining what caused some phenomenon and what caused some humans to act in the way that they did. The earliest modern historians tended to focus on great men and the great events, particularly political events that they were thought to be causal factors in the drama and melodrama of life. Many nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth century historians (and their contemporary mythistorical heirs) tended to see these great men, great men who were generally turned by historians into unalloyed saints and sinners, as makers of history and tended, since modern history was deeply embedded within and impacted by the nationalism that arose particularly in the nineteenth century, to see the nation-state as the obvious and proper focus of their studies. Many nineteenth and twentieth century historians (and their contemporary heirs) tended to see the nation-states they studied and focused on in fetishistic, universalistic, or transcendental terms and tended to see the nation-states of which they were citizens in chosen, holy, and messianic terms, as the essence of all that was good and superior in the modern world, in other words.

The problems with such an approach to history should be obvious but they aren't and they won't be to far too many, particularly to far too many amateurs who think that simply by being conscious they know how to do history and how to interpret historical events in the same way that preachers with no background in history, archaeology, and languages think they know and know how to interpret the Bible. First, there is the problem of causality, a problem that became particularly apparent after the rise of mid- and late nineteenth century social theory. Is history made by men or is it made by the forces, the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, within which humans are embedded and within which they act? The second problem has to do with class, gender, and "ethnicity". Is it only great men, great elite men, great Western elite men, who make history? The third problem is geographical and spatial since constructed national boundaries are incapable of acting as spatial barriers. Isn't history really regional and global? 

As post nineteenth century scholars have increasingly recognised, economic, political, cultural, and demographic factors, of course, are regional and often global and are ultimately tied to the economic form that dominates specific societies, specifically hunter-gatherer, small scale agriculture, large scale agriculture, modern, or postmodern. Birth rates, life expectancy rates, and the numbers of women and infants who die during childbirth, for instance, are impacted by economic, political, and cultural factors such as poverty, political policies related to poverty, and cultural notions surrounding poverty.

The late St. John's College and University of Manitoba American born historian J.M. Bumsted's A History of the Canadian Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2007) navigates the labyrinthian maze between nineteenth and twentieth century great man and mythhistory history and mid- and late twentieth century social and cultural history. Bumsted's history is full of factual tales of Canada's great men and women from William Mackenzie King to Wilfred Laurier to Maurice Dupplesis to Pierre Trudeau and to Margaret Atwood. Bumsted doesn't stop with "traditional" great man history, however. A History of the Canadian People also explores the economic history of Canada from the fur and cod trading era to the industrial and postindustrial or postmodern era. It explores the political history of Canada from French and British colony to a federal Dominion where power is arrayed between the federal government in Ottawa and the various confederated provinces and territories of the nation and where Canadian political and economic power has been impacted by French, British, and American imperialism. It explores the history of Canadian literature, music, and art. It gives us a portrait of how Canada's demographics have changed across time and within space.

Bumsted's book offers a very good if far too brief excursion through Canadian history. Like most late twentieth and early twenty-first century textbooks its tale of Canadian history is rather like a jump cut in a Jean-Luc Goddard film jumping, as it repeatedly does, from politics to economics to culture and to demography in far too brief compass. That, however, is necessitated by the nature of mass education in Canadian society, the nature of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and the fact that reality is more complicated than a simple fiction like narrative can convey. It is filled to the brim with excerpts from contemporary documents, sidebars about important historical figures and historical events, brief historiographies, brief recommendations for further reading, a lot of black and white and colour reproductions, which raise the cost of college textbooks to astronomic levels (a reflection of twenty-first century economic realities), and questions for students to ponder, should they choose to do so (I doubt if many do), after each chapter. If you are looking for a good, if far too brief introduction to Canadian history, a book written for a Canadian audience yet revealingly printed in the US (occasionally, apparently, imperialism reveals itself in print), you could do far worse than Bumsted's brief A History of the Canadian Peoples. For those looking for lengthier introductions to Canadian history I recommend  Bumsted's two volume The Peoples of Canada and R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald's Smith's Origins and Destinies.