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 Ethnography 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.