Life as Crisis Management: Skankizon Does it Again.

Well, it happened again today. I ordered a book, The Authoritarian Personality, from Amazon and it arrived damaged just like other books I have ordered from them, and just like other CDs in jewel cases I ordered from them, and just like other DVDs and Blu-rays in keep cases I have ordered from them. This means that I received a book from Amazon that they claim is new but which is actually very good plus. It is vg+ because, empirically speaking, it has a bump in the top right cover. It is vg+ because it has massive bumps within bumps in the lower left corner that also affects the spine. It is vg+ because page 757 of the book is folded in half and then that half has been folded in half too. Again, this is a book—a $35 dollar book—that Skankizon claims is new. It is not given this damage.

I contacted Skankizon, of course, but since I don’t have a phone with internet access and I don’t have a printer Skankizon punished me for receiving a book they claim that is new that is not. They want me, a 70 year old with a history of asthma, arthritis, and stomach problems, in other words, to pay $8 dollars to return a book that they claimed that is new but is not. It is heavily damaged. I guess this is Skankazon’s notion of taking responsibility for its own actions.

I don’t know why I continue to buy books, CDs, and DVDs/Blu rays from Amazon. Well perhaps I do: Amazon seems to have deals. However, when you order books or CDs that are in jewel cases or DVDs/Blu ray that arrive damaged they are not really bargains anymore, are they? 

So up yours, Amazon, up yours Skankizon, up your automatons reading a slaggy and skanky moronic script in customer service and up your morally and ethically challenged powers that be. I will be much more circumspect about buying from you in the future and I will not purchasings books or CDs or DVDs/Blu rays from you in the future. If there is a hell, which I doubt—Skankizon, in Sartrean fashion is hell—you deserve to go there. 

Life as Crisis Management: The Renting a Flat Kiada

I never wanted to buy a house so I have rented places in a variety of cities and towns for all my life. If I could go back into a time would I change this? Perhaps. I might, for example, use a Tardis to go to the past and buy real estate in Toronto, Vancouver, or even Bloomington, Indiana. But I would not buy an house in which to live. I would buy one for the money that would result from real estate inflation. You see, I know, thanks to the vantage point of the present that in an absurd world governed by capitalist irrationality real estate values will rise (if also fall given the fact of that doppelgänger of capitalist booms, capitalist busts) and that I could make a proverbial killing from buying cheap in the past and selling high in the future.

Renting, of course, has its advantages and its disadvantages.The main advantage, I suppose, is that you don’t have to engage in that Sisyphean task of keeping the place up. The main disadvantage is, I suspect, having to deal with property of varying quality and landlords of varying quality if you rent. 

I have rarely made much money over the course of my life so most of the rented flats I have lived in have been in general OK. Only one of the apartments I resided in was beyond redemption. It never should have been allowed to host renters in the first place but then cities and towns are not always good at assuring that a place is liveable. The political powers that be tend to cozy up to the landlords the money men who sometimes grease their palms. A couple of the flats I let were very good. Most, however, have been mediocre at best and that includes the one I live in presently in Albany, New York.

Most of the landlords I have rented from have also been OK. Only one, the one who rented me the apartment from Hades, have been less than responsible and mediocrely ethical. A couple, one that worked for the corporation that owned the apartment complex I lived in, were excellent making sure that what needed to have fixed in the flat was fixed within a few days. Most of my landlords have been, including the one I have now, more slow in fixing problems.

The landlord I have now, for instance, is often as slow as molasses in fixing the things in the apartment that need to be fixed. For instance, the apartment I live in at present has a tile shower—a mould bearing tile shower to be precise—that has needed fixing for ten years or so. It still does. Why the dlanlord uses tiles in a shower which requires  early upkeep because of the humidity and the resulting mould is beyond me. Fetish for tiles perhaps? It is certainly not because of the aesthetic qualities of tiles which make up tile shower because my tile shower would drive even beauty is in my eye Christina from the HGTV TV channel batty.

There are other things in the flat that also need fixing and which, though I have told him, the dlanlord ignores. The kitchen cabinets of particle board, for instance, are literally deteriorating and the detritus of these needs to be swept up periodically. I had to remove the doors of several because their magnets no longer work and they have holes in them where the knobs used to be. Lovely.  The kitchen light is one of those long fluorescent tube light fixtures that looks like it belongs in some low rent down on its luck office buildings on the wrong side of town from 1950. I can no longer change the bulbs in this installation because it requires a step stool and flexibility I no longer have given that it hangs by wires from the old ceiling above where one of those panel and metal ceiling replacements was installed in the 1970s. This delightful desecration—the drop ceiling that is—is found in every room of the flat save the water closet. The kitchen linoleum looks little better than a dirt floor given its age and state of disrepair. It is shedding The living room light barely lights the living room. The gas stove and oven is kaput. The dlanlord said he would wheel in another used one in—the last one he wheeled in was not well cleaned and the rust he failed to clean off led to massive cracks in the stove and oven—and I said yes if he did a thorough cleaning job—not his usual crap one he does and calls it pretty—after he wheeled it or if he laid down moving rugs so very minimal cleaning could be done. He refused both options. There are no laundry facilities and so I have to drive a mile or so to do the laundry. The place is cold because the radiator heat is nineteenth century—the house first appears on an 1850 census—though the landlord does allow space heaters (he pays the electricity), which, alas, are of limited utility in raising the temperature in a place with virtually no insulation and walls so tender that a moderate touch cracks them. There is almost no ventilation in the flat since there are no fans (save the ones I now have blowing from the floor its windows) and its old windows do not open. There is no fan in the windowless kitchen and there there is not window that opens in the water closet (contrary to city laws). The place is dry because of the radiators and space heaters and requires a humidifier to try to correct the imbalance. It can’t. Water leaking from the ceiling—which thankfully has not occurred for a while—has, in the past, damaged my possessions including several limited edition and now out of print DVD’s and Blu-ray’s one of which now goes for over $300 dollars. I suspect the place I live in hardly does wonders for my health.

The house in general—which contains five flats, two of which are empty and in need of extensive repair—is three storeys high and four people live in the remaining three flats. It is next to impossible to take an uninterrupted shower (something I was reminded of yet again today) since it seems that all all times of the day someone is using the water which ain’t fun when you are in the middle of a shower and suddenly someone turns on the water and yours goes cold. Oh the joys of a single water heater! The electricity is in need of a little loving care. This fall the dlanlord did some work on it and we had to, well I had to since I am the only retired person in the place, endure four or five interruptions of electricity so he could try to fix it. I still don’t know whether he was able to. The furnace has gone off four times over the last several years, one of which was one of these new high tech jobs that the dlanlord finally junked since it was a piece of crap.

Something that may give you further glimpses into the mind of the dlanlord is the fact that when he needed to shut the electricity off yet again recently he asked us what would be a good time for him to do this, suggesting that 1:00 pm in the afternoon would be good for him. I suggested over night or 11 am on subsequent days. Instead of changing his schedule, however, he told everyone else in the complex that the electricity could not be fixed because I would not allow it to be fixed because I did not want him to do it at 1 pm. Of course, he conveniently elided the fact that I gave him several alternative options because I wanted him to do it at a time better for me, a time when I could, with ease, do chores while he mucked about with the electricity in the cellar. 

Another thing that might help understand the dlanlord is this. I am getting older with all that entails. I bought some sucker grab bars and put them up in the shower. They do not really work and after about a month the sucker stops sucking and well you know the drill. You have to take them off, alcohol them, alcohol the tiles, and stick them back up again followed by further rinses and repeats. Anyway, I asked the dlandord to put in the traditional grab bars, you know the ones that screw into the wall. He said he would but when he went out to get he—I am sure you are shocked—bought, yes, a sucker grab bar. I told him I already have two neither of which really function as they should anyway so. Well oh well.

Do I regret not buying a place? No. I don’t like to be tied down to a place though my possessions kind of make that moot at this point. Do I love renting? No. Those of us with limited incomes and who feel the limits of age, however, are ultimately beggars who can’t be choosers though so our options are inherently limited by social factors that impact us. And that means that sometimes we have to choose between not so great choices. As a consequence you sometimes can’t fear the reaper.
 

Life as Crisis Management: The Spectrum Kiada

 

I have said it before and I will undoubtedly say again, the internet and all it brings with it is a double edged sword. It makes some things easier while making almost everything harder. Today the harder is Spectrum.

I have had a Spectrum account for some years, since it was Time-Warner, in fact. You can depend on Spectrum for two things when you have an account with them. First,  prices will rise and second, the customer account online page will not work even if you have saved the user name and password to access the account in your computer.

Let’s take the first, first. My account costs with Spectrum rose from $49.99 in July to $52.99 in August and to $67.99 in January. I suppose Spectrum has to keep those executive salaries going up and up since the poor poor pitiful well off are always well off and want to be even more well off, all at our expense. By the way, I was not informed of the cost rise by either email or text message for that latest price rise. 

I suppose I have could have gone and seen the announcement of this price rise on my Spectrum customer account at Spectrum.net. I did try to look but guess what? I got an error message when I tried to log in

This is the second time I have got an error message when trying to log into my Spectrum personal account page. When I called Spectrum about this issue the first time I had this problem I was told that the reason I could not access my customer online account was because of a switch over on their part to a different system or some such like issue and needed to update my account. I did just that and like a good boy in this age of too much information to remember, I saved my updated user name and password into my computer so I could easily login in the future. 

I know I should never had assumed logging into my Spectrum account would work flawlessly after that. But a boy, even if he is cynical, can hope. When I tried to log in, however, I was, as is so often the case when dealing with online services these days, nutted by reality yet again. I tried to log in to my account at least a couple of times before today and I got the same seemingly inevitable error message I had seen before. I did not pursue the issue at the time because frankly I have better things to do.

Well today I tried to access my account again because I could find no email or text message from Spectrum. I clicked on my username and password to try to get into my account and instead I got yet another error message from good old Spectrum. Past is prologue, I guess.

So I contacted Spectrum chat and had to go through the whole annoying rigamarole of verifying who I was, verifying again who I was, and verifying my phone number so they could send me a code because I did not want to open Pages and get my security number while chatting. 

After much internet gnashing of teach I gave up the Sisyphean task of trying to get my online account to work again. I asked that my account be deleted since it never works anyway and I was assured that I would get account bills via email and text message. Fingers crossed.

Well we will see how this works out. I am sick and tired of dealing with Spectrum sick and tired that I am on the verge of cancelling my service and going elsewhere as I am sick and tired of the price rises within months of each other and I am sick and tired of expending energy and time trying to get the log in issue with my customer account page corrected (three strikes and out). But then I remembered something, the grass is probably not green anywhere else in this age of corporate greed and incompetence.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hannah Stoddard and Latter Day Mormon Apologetics and Polemics

 

YouTube is a wonderful mirror into the mentalities of modern and postmodern humans. It tells us, for example, something about the ways people read television shows. It tell us something about the ways people read classic rock and roll songs. It tells us something about how contemporary Mormon apologists and polemicists interpret the history of Mormonism, the history of the United States, and the history of the world.

Recently, I have been exploring the videos Mormon “traditionalist" Hanna Stoddard and her Jospeh Smith Foundation have produced and posted on YouTube and the YouTube videos in which Stoddard appears as a guest star. These videos, to pick a few examples, condemn the works of “progressive" Mormon historians like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman, condemn Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, celebrate those Mormon celebrities like Joseph Fielding Smith, Bruch McConkie, Boyd Packer, and Ezra Taft Benson who Stoddard and her fellow travellers regard as saints, and condemn modernity with its materialistic approach to history and its contextualism (history as the longue dureee product of economic, political, cultural, biological-demographic, and geographic factors).

Stoddard’s discourse has all the hallmarks of Mormon polemics and apologetics of the past, to Protestant Fundamentalist apologetics and polemics of the past, and to right wing Christian nationalist apologetics and polemics of the present. Like all apologetics since the beginning of apologetics time Stoddard’s apologetics are grounded in the assumption that “we", “us", however we and us are defined, and it is defined selectively by Stoddard, have the fullest essence of the truth. Stoddard assumes that Mormonism, her particular Mormonism, is true (she does admit that echoes of the truth can be found in other religious cultures). She believes that god exists, that the devil exists, that some people are inhabited by devils, and that there are evil witches out there in human land. She believes that the Mormon prophets are prophets of god. She believes the Mormon doctrine that America is a promised land and hence exceptional. She believes that the LDS Church is in danger of apostasy thanks to indoctrination by conspiratorial Mormon “progressives” (who are, in her mind, little better than devils and witches, Marxists and liberals) like Leonard Arrington and Richard Bushman (her apparent bete noirs along, echoing Benson, with Karl Marx, who, in an uncredited answer to what the teaching of class in the BYU Sociology Department on the Stoddards' Latter-day Answers (aka LDS Answers), refers approvingly to a book that accuses Marx of being a satanist, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, John Maynard Keynes (all amongst Benson’s “antichrists” in “A Plea to Strengthen Our Families”, a document often cited by right wing Mormons but not apparently emphasised by the contemporary Church) and the “Darwinists" and “socialists” at contemporary BYU, the, in common LDS parlance, “Lord’s University").

Not surprisingly, these assumptions, assumptions that are grounded in Stoddard’s religious “testimony” (a Mormon term for spiritual guidance) provide the bedrock and foundation for Stoddard’s polemics. She claims that only true believers or the faithful can write quality history (faith history) not only of Mormonism but of America, Europe, the ancient Near East, and the world. Joseph Smith, Stoddard clams, could not have been a treasure hunter, someone who engaged in the occult, because the Mormon prophets said he wasn’t and those who say he was are secularists like the new Mormon historians or anti-Mormons, who the new Mormon historians draw on extensively claims Stoddard, and who can’t, as a consequence of the fact that they are anti-Mormons, be trusted. She claims the earth has only been around for around 6000 years and that Noah’s flood actually occurred globally because the Bible tells me so and god’s prophets, god’s real prophets, tell me so.

Like all apologists and polemicists Stoddard is selective. She condemns new Mormon history materialist contextualism but she is a contextualist too. She assumes, for example, that the context of the Book of Mormon is ancient Near Eastern history and ancient American prehistory and history. She is selective in that she applies the canons of critical history to what she regards as the mythhistory of the new Mormon historians but she doesn’t apply them to her faith history, an actual mythhistory since it is grounded in ideological assumptions rather than empirical evidence, something that makes her kin to Sandra Tanner, someone who also doesn’t apply the analytical strategies she applies to Mormonism to her Christian faith. She sometimes seems to conflate the critical new Mormon history with anti-Mormonism. She is selective in the evidence she uses. She, for example, far too often bases her dismissal of evidence that does not line up with her ideological assumptions because of the supposed character defects of the person from whom the evidence originates (the ad hominem strategy). She, for example, dismisses evidence about Smith on the basis that the person making the claim is someone left the Church while, at the same time, claiming that any analysis of evidence must be grounded analysis rather than assumed "analysis". She selectively dismisses evidence on the basis of it being taken down after the fact except when that evidence comes from those she regards as prophets and true religious authorities. She downplays differences among the Twelve. She ignores the fact that the LDS Church and its revelations have changed over the years. See plural marriage or polygamy and Blacks and the priesthood.  She uses inductive analysis for deductive purposes. All one has to do, Stoddard’s logic demands, is simply “verify” what god and his prophets say and bingo, you’ve got it. All of this makes Stoddard an apologist and a polemicist and only kind of an historian, one that plays in the clays of mythhistory more than real history. And this is why Stoddard is a kind of intellectual demagogue, a kind of anti-academic intellectual, and a kind of anti-intellectual intellectual since, for her, once god speaks all the thinking that needs to be done is done. That is dogma and dogmatics not history or social science.

Life as Crisis Management: The CVS Health Silver Script Kiada Yet Again...

 

I am sick and tired of dealing again and again with American prescription insurance corporations. This time the problem, this time my latest life crisis, involves the muscle reliever Cyclobenzaprine and the prescription company I that covers my prescriptions, CVS Health Silver Script, the prescription corporation the New York State and Local Retirement System farms out their prescription contract for their retirees to. It sucks.

I have been taking Cyclobenzaprine for probably ten years or so now. My GP’s and my back doctors prescribed it and prescribe it for me. Today, however, I was unable to get my 30 pills of Cyclobenzaprine for this month because I turned 70 and the bureaucrats at CVS now need to approve it because I might apparently injure myself while taking it. Apparently 70 is, or the prescription insurance thinks it is, a magical boundary I have recently crossed that might now send me collapsing to the ground because of drowsiness and dizziness caused by Cyclobenzaprine.

Do the bureaucrats at CVS know anything about my case? No. Do they have all of my medical records that might indicate any history of dizziness throughout my life or any dizziness caused by Cyclobenzaprine? No. Have they contacted the prescribing doctor or doctors? I highly doubt it. Have they made my life and my health much more difficult? Absolutely. Ain’t that wonderful? NO. It isn’t a joy for an asthmatic, arthritic, elderly person to walk up to get medicines in 20 degree weather that he can’t get unbeknownst to himself.

Whether I should and can take Cyclobenzaprine should be between me and my doctor not me and the insurance company. My doctor knows me. She knows the specifics of my case. She knows whether I can safely take Cyclobenzaprine or not. The prescription health insurance company does not. 

Modern bureaucracies, of course, are a pain in the arse and perhaps no bureaucracy, one geared to making profits, is more a pain in the arse than health insurance companies as recent events show (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). These paternalistic bureaucracies should not be deciding what I can and cannot take. My doctor, who I see regularly should. But then the US health insurance system is the worst in the core nation world and I know because I have availed myself and experienced first hand and in reality what health care systems in Canada, England, France, and even Russia were like. They were all, in my humble opinion, far superior to the crazy, idiotic, and moronic one in the US.

Up CVS.

Life as Crisis Management: The Arkiv Music Kiada

 

It is another month and I have had to deal with yet another manmade bureaucratic crisis. The more things change, as they say.

Tis the season as they say and I have gotten into the holiday spirit by consuming, the Western capitalist way. One corporation I bought some stuff from, several CD’s of classical music to be more precise, recently is Arkiv Music.

This is not the first time I bought items from Arkiv. When Arkiv was owned by Steinway I bought a famous classic disc of chamber music by Dvorak performed by the Suk Trio. The transaction went well. I had a coupon which I used, a coupon which defrayed the transit charge.Generally speaking it was this postal charge and the fact that Amazon, which defrayed postal charges if you purchased more than $25 dollars in goods (now $35 dollars with corporate inflation), was competitive in prices and gave you free shipping under the right conditions, that kept me from making more purchases from Arkiv even though I despise Amazon (though I like some Amazon marketplace sellers).

I remained on Arkiv’s list, however. Recently I got a free shipping coupon from Arkiv via email. So I decided to dip my toes in the Arkiv pool again, create an account, and purchase several items, all Naxos discs, CD’s that were on sale at Arkiv. I unfortunately, assumed—never assume anything anymore dear reader—that all of these items were made in Germany, the place Naxos, who now owns Arkiv, makes many if not most of their discs and which, I assumed, now made all of their CD’s as I had not seen an American made Naxos release in months. I was wrong. The Gliere and Taneyev I ordered were, as I found out in short order, made in the USofA.

As a general rule I don’t buy American made discs if I can avoid it. I prefer to buy European made discs including from corporations that produce CD’s and DVD/Blu ray's for both European and North American markets like Naxos apparently does once again. I prefer to buy CD’s from places that respect the right of their workers and have laws in place that respect their workers unlike much of the US including stone age Tennessee, the home of Naxos USA.

So, I wrote Arkiv customer service a few hours after my purchase to cancel the Gliere and Taneyev. The Gliere was mercifully cancelled after my initial message to them. The Taneyev, however, remains on order despite my contacting Arkiv customer service now three times about this now unwanted disc telling them to cancel the bloody thing.

Needless to say, I am annoyed. I have told Arkiv customer service twice now that if this item is sent I will demand a prepaid postal label so I can return it. If they do not do this, something they should if this is sent to me despite my cancelling it thrice, given their incompetence. I also notified them that if the disc is sent I will ask that my account be closed and deleted and told them that if I receive a thrice cancelled disc I would not be purchasing anything from Arkiv in the future despite the wonderful Presto Classics like sales they have on labels like Bis and Brilliant on occasion.

I am sick and tired of corporate bureaucratic incompetence. Unfortunately, there is no escaping them—bureaucracies—or it—bureaucratic incompetence—as my many missives on private bureaucratic incompetence on this site well show. And so it goes. And so it will always go.

Postscript: After I contacted Arkiv customer service I finally managed to cancel not only the item Arkiv cancelled several days ago but the other once I asked them to cancel several days ago. Huzzah.

Then I made a mistake, I ordered a few more items that were on sale. Why do I say I made a mistake? Because Arkiv/Naxos says if you buy $150 dollars or more shipping is free. Well that may be true but it isn’t true if your discounts take you below the $150 dollar mark.

So I said up yours to Arkiv. I asked them to cancel both orders and to delete my account. I don’t like complications and Arkiv is too complicated for me. So good riddance Arkiv Music. 

Postscript Two: The Arkiv saga unfortunately continues. To show how incompetent they are let me note three examples of this incompetence. First, for several days they issued me a refund for an order they already refunded me for (42618NRS). Now that refund has disappeared from my credit card. Presumably, they figured out their mistake. Second, they issued me a refund for two discs from another order (42447NRS). Now they have pulled the refund of one of those discs from my credit card. Third, they still owe me a refund for four discs from this order. After five attempts to get this refund I contacted the New York Attorney General Consumer Fraud office and filed a complaint.

Postscript Three: After a number of emails that went unanswered I finally got a reply from Arkiv customer service or the for profit entity that does customer service for Arkiv. They say they refunded 42447NRS though they haven’t. As of today, 9 Dec, I have received a refund for 42618NRS for $159.49 and a refund of $12.99 for the Gliere in order 42447NRS. I have still not received a refund for the Monteverdi, the Taneyev, the Mignone, and the Castelnuovo from that order amounting to $73.96.

It should be obvious by now that I do not trust Arkiv customer service for a variety of reasons. See the complaint against the company on the Better Business Bureau complaint site, which isn't positive (and which—I am shocked, shocked—the BBB offered no aid in resolving). I also know that they are incompetent. At one point they refunded me a second $159.49 and another $12.99 (presumably for the Taneyev), both of which have now mysteriously disappeared from my AMEX feed. Apparently, they finally figured out their mistake after I told them several times. They have not yet, however, refunded me the additional amount that is due me. I have asked for confirmation of the refunds and the transaction numbers of the refunds. Stay tuned.

Postscript Four: After innumerable emails Arkiv Music finally realised their mistake and issued me a refund. I finally got this refund on 12 December.

The Books of My Life: Manifest Destiny (McNaught et.al.)

History may or may not be written by the victors. It is generally written by both and is almost always written, in these modes, in nationalist religious terms. Most histories, however, are mostly written by insiders and critical insiders. Mormon insider-insiders, true believers in the LDS faith, and insider-outsiders, true believers often nutted by some degree of reality, are usually the ones who write Mormon history. Jewish insider-insiders and insider-outsiders are usually the ones who write Jewish histories. American insider-insiders and insider-outsiders usually write United States history.

There are exceptions to this general rule, of course. A number of mostly Canadian scholars have written comparative analysis of Canadian and American history and aspects of Canadian and American history from settlement to today. Across the pond British scholars David Reynolds and Maldwyn Jones have written general histories of the United States. In the Great White North noted University of Toronto Canadian historian Kenneth McNaught, along with John Saywell and John Ricker, have written a general history of the United States, Manifest Destiny: A Short History of the United States (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin and Company, revised edition, 1980). 

It is always interesting to read books on American history and national histories in general by outsider-outsiders or outsider-insiders rather than insider-insiders and insider-outsiders for a variety of reasons including the potential ability of insider-outsiders and outsider-outsiders to escape, to some degree, the socialised for conformity sacred and profane civil religion boxes most citizens of every country are placed within and from which they cannot generally escape. In this context McNaught et.al's history of the US is a fascinating and interesting read.

McNaught’s outsider-outsider history of the United States is organised around a broad theme, manifest destiny, something that gives the book narrative coherence. McNaught et.al. trace American manifest destiny or imperialism in its multiple forms from 1763 to 1980, just before the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States. They explore American geographic or colonial imperialism, an impulse grounded in the belief that the US had by divine or nature’s right the land that stretched from sea to shining sea. They explore American cultural imperialism with its notions that American “democracy”—itself a fiction—and the American economic system-- usually Ebenezer Scrooge or Mister Potter style capitalism—was god’s gift or nature’s gift to mankind and that humankind should, whether they want it or not, be given that gift through “convincement” or by coercion. 

McNaught et.al's brief or short history of the United States has a lot going for it. It is a coherent text written largely by a single author organised around a common and consistent theme. It eschews the great men approach to history, though it doesn’t ignore important political and economic and to a lesser extent, cultural figures in US history, in favour of a history cognisant of the broader political, economic, cultural, and demographic forces impacting US history and placing boundaries around most of those embedded in it. It explores the connections between economic elites and political elites (one of the reasons the US is an oligarchy rather than a democracy) that have long dominated American politics and American political culture. It makes relevant comparisons between Canadian and US History.

Not everyone will be happy with McNaught et.al's approach to American history including those wedded to the great men approach to American history, an approach that is generally more mythical and religious like than empirical. Others will find McNaught et.al’s  analysis of, for example, Reconstruction outdated in light of post-1980s historical and sociological scholarship on Reconstruction Still others will decry the lack of attention to contemporary identity that one finds in so many of the everything but the kitchen sink behemoths that pass for college textbooks today. What none of the critics can deny, however, is how much substantive punch McNaught puts into 371 pages. 

Finally, the question must be asked as to whether McNaught et.al’s outsider account of American history is all that different from critical insider empirical accounts of US history? I don’t think it is. Like them its interpretations are grounded in empirical reality, something mythic insider accounts rarely are. I suppose this should give comfort to those, like myself, argue that we can have dispassionate social sciences, a position that is on the outside looking into a world where culture and ideology often construct the political, economic, and demographic “realities” of many if not most.

Recommended for those seeking a critical history of the US that nicely outlines the significant events that are at the heart of American history even though it is a bit dated here and there.

Musings on the White Evangelical Ubermensch and Making America Christian Again.

 

In cultural anthropology you are taught—and rightly so—that cultures vary across space. Contemporary cultural anthropology and history rightly teaches us that culture also varies across time. 

Despite the simple descriptive fact that culture varies across space and time there are many who have thought and who continue to think, despite the more than ample evidence to the contrary, that many people create their own “realities”, that a mixture of reality and rationality can cure anyone of this false reality syndrome and that, as a consequence, the human race can live happily ever after as they progress ever further toward paradise along the yellow brick road to utopia, a secular version of the Christian Eden.

The problem with this notion—that humans can progress thanks to science and rationality—is that it does not grasp the obvious fact that those who live in manufactured “realities” don’t simply go away or fade into the dark night of superstition anymore than does religion, ignorance, stupidity, or moronicity. There are, for example, many White Protestant Christian evangelicals, who believe that Donald Trump is god’s weak yet strong vessel who has been called by the White Protestant Christian evangelical god to make America great and godly again. As a consequence, they do not and cannot believe that Trump resoundingly lost the 2020 election, though he, of course, did, something that should be a red flag for those who believe that god makes the world go around for if he does and if she made Biden win in 2020, well you get the picture. God’s will, they believe, can only be subverted by devious and demonic subterfuge making the Trump lost the election of 2020 ideology akin to the idiotic and moronic claims that Jews were secretly poisoning wells and murdering Christian children in the Mediaeval era of European history and the various variations on this anti-Semitic theme in Europe and European settler societies seemingly ever after.

The fact that created “realities” and those who believe them and have faith in them don’t go away also explains why you cannot compromise with those who believe they have a monopoly on the truth and who, as a consequence, believe they are called by god to a holy crusade to make god’s will be done, the point at which Christianity paradoxically given Nietzche’s criticism of Christianity as the religion of the weak, meets up and merges with the will to power of the Christian Nietzschean macho superman on a crusade for Christ. These “Christian” ubermensch will take the inch of compromise, say a religious oriented charter school, but they want the mile, they want to make the charter school a house of intense socialisation, what some might call indoctrination or brainwashing. Even the mile, however, isn’t good enough for them. They want the proverbial whole nine yards. They want to make the United States into their own image, something that should not be surprising given that they are self-satisfied, holier than thou, we are always in the right because god is on our side saintly sinner theocrats. And they will not stop until they make America into their own image by “convincement” or coercion, the carrot or the stick. 

Welcome to TrumpWorld, a world that never goes away, and OrangeTrumpifornication. So, be afraid, be very afraid.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Prophets and Profits in the Mormon Social Media Universe

 

Social media sites like YouTube are, in a way, microcosmic examples of what theoretical quantum physics in general tells us what the universe we all live in is like. To wit, there are a host of parallel universes on YouTube and within these parallel universes one can find a number of parallel worlds.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, of these parallel universes or cultures with parallel worlds or countercultures and subcultures within them on YouTube is that related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. But then I have been studying Mormonism for some thirty years now.

There are a number of parallel worlds within the parallel universe that is Mormonism on YouTube. There is the parallel world of Mormon news. There is the official LDS content world which includes an ask a missionary page and the Meet the Mormons film. There is the what Mormon polygamy was and is like world, a world that ranges from the polemical, the apologetic, and the academic. There is the why I am a Mormon world. There is the why I am no longer a Mormon world. There are insider explorations of Mormon doctrine. There are critical exposes of Mormon finances and the Church’s use of their monies. There is the what are Mormon temple rituals like world. And there is the intellectual polemical and apologetic worlds related to Mormonism in general, both of which have long histories in the history of religion, particularly monotheistic our way or the highway religions, and a long pedigree in the history of Christianity. 

The Mormon polemical and apologetic world is one of the largest LDS worlds on YouTube. One can, for instance, find worlds on YouTube where some categorise Mormonism as a “fake" religion and a “fake" brand of Christianity. The bases for such a claim is grounded in the poster's perception that Mormonism is different than the religion of the poster, which these posters regard, of course, as the one true religion (ethnocentric apologetics) despite the fact that all monotheistic religions are grounded in belief and not empirical fact. See, for instance, the self proclaimed I am not a “progressive" Bible Thinker Mike Winger who, following in a long tradition in Christian polemics, condemns not only Mormonism as a “fake” variety of Christianity but also condemns Roman Catholicism as “fake” brand of Christianity, a theme that has a long history in Protestant and particularly evangelical polemics. See Capturing Christianity’s Cameron Bertuzzi, a photographer and self proclaimed Christian apologist, who, following again in a long line of Christian insider or emic polemics, condemns Mormonism and Islam as “false” religions created by “false” prophets.

Another of the parallel worlds within discussions of Mormonism on YouTube is the world populated by ex-Mormons who have converted to another sect or brand of Christianity. See, for example, the posts of Sandra Tanner, who converted to “true” Christianity thanks to her husband Jerald, the barber James Wardle, and Pauline Hancock, the founder of the more “orthodox” or mainline Mormon sect the Church of Christ (Hancock). In the wake of her de-conversion and conversion experience Sandra, along with her now deceased husband, has been arguing against (polemics) Mormonism, if in a somewhat academic way since 1964 through their Utah Lighthouse Ministry and its bookstore. See the ex-Mormon convert Ed Decker who converted to “true” Christianity—Decker was an early member of Saints Alive in Jesus, a group of ex-Mormon converts to “orthodox” Christianity—who, unlike the Tanner’s, often engages in defamations against Mormonism. See Heidi Luv, a self proclaimed “born again” Christian, demonologist, and “conspiracy theorist" who hosts the Unfiltered Rise Podcast and who has appeared as guest star on several YouTube “programmes”. Luv says that she broke away from the “Mormon cult”(a loaded ethnocentric term that in less ethnocentric scientific parlance refers to a new religious movement or a sect in tense relationships with its broader religious geography)  because of its “occult" origins. For Tanner, Decker, and Luv problems related to aspects of Mormon history eventually foregrounded for them the falsity of Mormonism. One of the curious aspects of these now “true” believing “orthodox” Christians—well not, I suppose curious from an emic point of view—is that they never apply the same empirical and historical standards to their own faiths that they do to Mormonism, their other, a religion which they remain obsessed with even after departing from it.

There are other once Mormons who remain as obsessed with their now Mormon other as they were with their Mormon us (a trait one also finds in former I believe us's who become evangelical anti-them’s or “anti-cult” crusaders) . Karl Lyman and Clarity of the Clarity Podcast, for instance, left Mormonism for other cultural, ideological, and religious reasons than did the Tanner’s Decker, and Luv. In their discussion on the Clarity Podcast Karli and Clarity note that they left the LDS because the leaders of the Church gave into governmental “tyranny" during the covid pandemic—something they compare to another federal governmental “tyranny”, prohibition—when they counselled members of the Church to get the covid vaccine shot, to wear masks, and when they shut down wards (Mormon congregations) meetings during the pandemic. Interestingly Kari and Clarity do not discuss the giving in of Mormon authorities to another possible federal government “tyranny”, the feds forcing of the Mormon elite to end polygamy. Karli and Clarity maintain that when the Mormon bureaucratic elite urged members to use masks and get the vaccine poke during the recent pandemic they capitulated to a governmental conspiracy to limit human freedom and liberty. In response, they say, they left the Church. Problematically, they miss certain historical facts. They fail to grasp that prohibition and temperance were mass movements that effectively lobbied local, state, and federal governments to end alcohol sales in the United States—prohibition, in other words, was a mass movement of citizens—and they fail to grasp that, like the birth control pill, masks, particularly the N95 mask, are, 95% effective in blocking airborne particles when worn correctly and that the covid vaccines, in all their iterations have proved to be quite effective in at least softening the effects of covid should one get it.

And then there are the ex-Mormons like John Dehlin, the excommunicated Mormon psychologist who runs the Mormon Stories podcast where a variety of historical and cultural issues related to the LDS are discussed by Mormon and cultural Mormon intellectuals, the ex-Mormon HailHeidi, many of whose posts explore the standup comedy of George Carlin and the criticism of religion of atheists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, and the ex-MormonAlyssa Grenfell. The prolific Grenfell, like HailHeidi, seems to have jettisoned her Mormon beliefs largely because of historical problems related to Mormonism (a common theme in ex-Mormon posts), and exchanged it for another meaning system or cultural system, atheism. Grenfell ranges broadly over a variety of Mormon historical, cultural, and ideological topics from dancing in Mormonism, to Mormon garments, to what is was like to go to BYU, to what it was like to go on a mission, to Mormon purity ideologies, to Mormon polygamy, and to why I left the Church. Her posts, which condemn a prophetic religion and its prophets for empirical reasons, have garnered thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million views on some occasion, something that, no doubt, has brought Grenfell profits.

Grenfell is one of those rare birds on YouTube. She actually does empirical historical research for her sometimes over an hour posts, good solid empirical research. Her research, however, has its limits. For example, in her discussion of Mormon purity culture she doesn’t dig deep enough and discuss how the cult of domesticity, which is not a monopoly of Mormonism (see patriarchal macho White evangelicalism, for example), has Victorian and perhaps even further back historical and prehistorical roots. In her discussion of Mormon ballroom dance culture and the prevalence of Mormon dancers on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars she fails to explore the important role dancing has played in broader aristocratic culture and in cultures in general before the advent of radio and television.

Beyond the critics of Mormonism (polemicists) there are, of course, a number of defenders of the one “true" faith of Mormonism (apologists) on YouTube. Thoughtful Faith discusses, sometimes with others, the Mormon Faith and often turns anyone who is critical of Mormonism for valid empirical reasons into an anti-Mormon enemy of the one true faith. The youthful and MTVish and TV commercial hip Saints Unscripted, for example, is on a mission to "present information about the gospel of Jesus Christ in genuine, compelling, and loving ways". The various hosts of Saints Unscripted do not duck and cover when it comes to addressing criticism of Mormonism. FAIR, one of today’s leading Mormon apologetic and polemical organisations, particularly after the demise of FARMS, provides self proclaimed faithful answers and informed responses, FAIR, to issues associated with Mormonism. Like Saints Unscripted FAIR does not sweep critical takes on Mormonism under the rug though they often, like Thoughtful Faith, confuse and conflate empirical criticism of the LDS with polemical criticism, a common phenomenon that one can also see in those groups and individuals who wrongly and sometimes cynically and manipulatively conflate academic analysis of Zionism and Israel with anti-Semitism and academic analysis of America with anti-Americanism. There are professional historians like Ben Spackman, who has appeared on several faithful Mormon programmes like Saints Unscripted, Keystone, and The Interpreter Foundation, who argues that Mormonism is not a form of Protestantism (which I think is accurate) and that it is more like Judaism rather than Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism and thus is not a sola scriptura, Bible as sole authority, brand of Christianity (which I think is accurate and which also makes it more like the liturgical brands of Christianity). Like many Christians, including evangelical Christians, before him Sparkman, in hermeneutic and homiletic mode, argues that the creation/evolution binary does not have to be an either or binary (which is accurate if not my cuppa tea in terms of intellectual engagement). One can argue, for example, for god directed evolution. Spackman also (rightly in my opinion) argues that in the 1950s, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, Mormonism was fundamentalised.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Index of Banned Facebook Art

 

We live in an age of utter stupidity, utter idiocy, and utter moronicity. How else do you explain the election of a fascist with self-esteem issues, many related to the size of his dick, but who does not even have the mental reflexivity or capabilities to realise that he has self-esteem issues, as president of the United States? 

I was reminded of this fact once again recently when I received this rather banal message in bureaucratic American English from Facebook, another organisation headed by yet another fascist der Führer with possible self esteem and probable narcissist issues:

"It looks like you shared or sent something that shows nudity or sexual activity.

Ronald Helfrich

14 Nov 2024

https://www.prestomusic.com/.../8033275--gesualdo-the…

You shared this on your profile. This goes against our Community Standards on nudity or sexual activity”. 

What I shared or sent was a link to the Naxos Classics Gesualdo Madrigals box pictured above which I am presently listening to.

Now I realise that the age we live in is no more stupid, idiotic, or moronic than ages past. Humans have long lived in kingdoms of stupidity, idiocy, and moronicity. What is different, however, is that like term limits for politicians, limits that would simply spread the shit that is American politics around as George Carlin notes, social media sites like YouTube and Facebook spread the stupid, idiotic, and moronic shite around to a greater number of people. How else can you explain the confusion of a work of art on the Naxos Gesualdo box with pornography—painted breasts and painted arses—the morons at Facebook don’t even know because in all their wisdom they leave judgements about what is pornographic and what constitutes the violation of “community standards" to bots that are as stupid, idiotic, and moronic as they are? Nor should we forget that the scribes, Pharisees, parasites, and hypocrites at Facebook allow photographs of scantily clad women, and sometimes partially naked women, to appear hourly on their Reels feed, a feed aimed, no doubt, at the leering male “adolescent” demographic numbering in the thousands upon thousands on Facebook. But then, of course, one suspects that the high priests of Facebook adore such beefcake photos because they make monies by peddling such page three like photos on its site. And in Mammon Land money trumps everything including so-called community standards.

Like Dick van Dyke I am glad that I won’t be around to see much more of this stupid and moronic idiocy that Facebook encapsulates in its very digital bones. I may have long loved the fact that human life in absurd but even I recognise that absurdity has its limits. And Facebook's censorship of a work of art and its confusion and conflation of it as pornography is something that reaches those limits for me.

Life as Crisis Management: The Buying a Car Kiada

 

Around 2009 I bought myself a car at Rensselaer Honda in Troy, New York. It was a used Honda Fit with 11.000 miles on it. It was a car I had done extensive research on. I paid cash for it as I had done with the previous four cars I had owned. I loved it. 

Unfortunately, one day in 2013 while driving from work in Oneonta to home in Albany I came up over a hill and ran into a snowstorm and an unploughed freeway, one of the far too occasional “joys" of living in upstate New York at the time. I tried to slow down. However, the car hit an ice patch hidden under the snow, skidded, hit the railing, and died. RIP.

I should have purchased another Honda Fit and would have if I had known that several years later Honda would cease selling the fit in North America. The issue at the time, however, was that I wanted a heavier car than the Fit because the drive over hill and dale and through ice, rain, sleet and snow from Albany to Oneonta sometimes proved to be too much of an adventure. I initially thought about getting another Honda but I, not very deep of me I know, really didn’t like the look of either the Civic or the Accord. Idiotic me. 

My neighbour had a Ford Focus which I liked the look of and the compact met my criteria of a bigger car than the subcompact Fit. So, I started looking at Focus’s. I was able to get what my neighbour said was a good deal on Focus from Crossroads Ford in Ravenna. So I bought it and paid more than half down on the car and took out a car loan for the rest with SEFCU, my credit union, for the rest. It was my first car loan ever.

The Focus wasn’t a Fit. Not even close. Two years after I bought it the brakes had to be replaced. A year after that the motor in the door for the driver window had to be fixed because the chain had gone all wibbly wimey. A year after that the air conditional died. This was partly my fault since I didn’t run the a/c periodically even during the winter. And while I should not have assumed that you treat a car a/c the same way you treat one in your window, I would prefer not to have an air conditioner in the car if the technology requires that it be run periodically including in the dead of winter.

In the winter of 2019 I got a have we got a deal for you mailer from DePaula Ford in Albany. It offered me, or so they claimed in the missive, a great deal on my long in the tooth Focus, which was sitting on 90,000 miles plus at the time, and a deal on a new car of my choice. Given my age and health I had been thinking that I needed a car that was easier for arthritic me to get into and out of and a car with four wheel or all wheel drive given historic upstate New York weather even before the “invitation” arrived. So I got the Escape. Part of the deal was an interest free payment plan so I arranged to pay the Escape off over a five year period.

Just like the Focus the Escape needed new brakes within two years later. A year of two after that it required extensive transmission work. Later in the same year an axle and a bearing had to be replaced. This summer—it always happens in summer doesn’t it?—the air conditioner went bust. 

I almost sold the car to DePaula when the axle and bearing were replaced in November of 2023. I thought I could get a decent amount for it since it had only 8500 hundred miles on it. I tried to find a Fit with less that 50,000 miles on it, one of the neo-labours of Herakles at the establishment I bought my old Fit from. Though Ren Honda said they would contact me if a Fit came in they didn’t when a Fit came in so I sent them packing. I also looked at a Kia Soul. In the end, however, I decided to wait until the car was paid off in full, which just happened this month, before exchanging the Escape for a Soul.

At this point I must say that I have really had it with Ford motor cars and not only for the reason that they periodically break down and have to be fixed even when they have few miles on the odometre. Late last month, to note yet another example of why I am fed up with Ford, I got a letter from Ford Credit. informing me that my title was about to revert to me. A week or so later I received another letter from Ford Credit telling me that my title had been lost or destroyed. 

Now I have, as I said, only bought two cars on credit my entire life and I was naive about how titles and liens worked. When I did not receive my title in 2019 I assumed Ford Credit had it. When I went to DePaula for my annual inspection TODAY, however, I learned that this was not true. DePaula assured me that they did the title and registration work when I bought the car. And admittedly I did receive my registration renewal by email and mail after that so they clearly did get the address on the registration right or they just simply merged it into my already existing Focus registration at the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. As for the title, DePaula blamed the DMV for me not getting the title to the Escape I now own. The DMV, of course—don’t you just love the bureaucratic blame game merry-go-round?—blamed DePaula.

Now it is certainly possible that the DMV is to blame. Did the DMV mess up the address on my title? Did it post the title at all? Did they post it to the wrong address?  I do know that I had problems with my New York State EZ Pass after I had DePaula upgrade my licence plates to the new Excelsior ones on the Escape. I could not link my EZ Pass to my new licence plate number when I tried to do this. On the other hand, it is possible that DePaula somehow messed up the address on my title since I never received it at the flat that I have been living at since 2007. Whatever the reason I had to pay the DMV $20.00 dollars for a car title I never received. Can you say Ron you have been screwed over again?

To make a long sad story short I think I will be looking to trade in my Escape, which now has around 9500 miles on it, for a Soul once I get my errant title. My experience with Ford has not been a good one. I no longer trust Ford vehicles and I am not sure I trust DePaula any more though they have admittedly done a good job inspecting—this took an hour and a half today— and repairing the Escape over the years. 

Such is the absurdity of life.

The Books of My Life: Jacques Tourneur (Fujiwara)

As someone who has devotedly watched films since the mid-1960s—many of them in the company of my sister and my friends—I early on gained a familiarity with the French and Hollywood director Jacques Tourneur, the son of another famous French and Hollywood director Maurice Tourneur. Sometime in the 1960s and 1970s I saw several of his films on television including the famous Cat People (1942), the famous I Walked With a Zombie (1943), the famous The Leopard Man (1943), all of which he made with the noted B movie producer Val Lewton at RKO, the famous Out of the Past (1947), and the famous Night of the Demon (1957). 

When I went to university I broadened not only my cinema going, the number of films I saw, including what were called at the time “foreign films”, and took a few Film Studies classes while an undergraduate. The auteur approach to film studies was still popular at the time, particularly with film critics who wrote critical reviews for the major newspapers. major magazines, many major film journals, and with me though it was being challenged, particularly in the ivy halls of universities, by structural, semiological, semiotic, Marxist, sociological, historical, psychoanalytic, feminist, and approaches to film that mixed and matched all of the above. They to, particularly the structural, semiological, Marxist, sociological, and historical approaches, also impacted my approach to auteurism at the time. 

The auteurist approach, along with critiques of auteurist approaches to directors and others, has impacted scholarly work on Jacques Tourneur over the years. The major question relating to Tourneur in auteurist or authorship approaches to film has long been whether Tourneur or Val Lewton, were the author of the films they made together and which made the name of both with the film going public and with auteurists. For some auteurist critics Tourneur was ultimately the author of the Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, the three films the pair made together. For others Lewton was the author of these and others of his films, a hypothesis given flesh by those who point out the fact that there are many Lewton biographical elements in, for example, Curse of the Cat People and the fact that Tourneur disagreed with some of the decisions made concerning The Leopard Man. For a few, myself included, both were the authors of these films. For Chris Fujiwara, the author of Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998) Tourneur is the primary author of the films he directed between 1931 and 1966.

In his exhaustive study of the work of Tournier, one that includes not only the short and long films he directed, the television shows he directed, the films he was a bit player in, the films he was a script clerk for, and the films he was an assistant director on, several of these foci a rarity in film studies, Fujiwara argues that one can find consistencies across Tourneur’s films and some of the television shows he directed. These consistencies, according to Fujiwara include consistent themes, consistent character traits, and a consistent mise-en-scene such as his consistent use of decor, his consistent use of sound, his consistent camera movements, his consistent acting strategies, his consistent melding of the real and the supernatural, and his consistent editing strategies, this despite the fact that Tourneur once said that he never turned down a film opportunity offered to him and the fact that Tourneur made films produced by others and written by others.

Fujiwara argues that in Tourner’s work, particularly in the best of it and in the films with which Tourneur was deeply involved intellectually and emotionally whether mystery films, horror films, western films, or noir films, one finds a tight relationship between his themes, his characters, his mise-en-sene, his camera movements, his use of sound, and his use of actors. Tourneur’s cinematic universe, Fujiwara argues, is one in which characters act naturally, in which the mise-en-scene is expressionistic, atmospheric, full of light and shadow, filled with the prominent use of natural light sources, in which camera angles are sometimes odd, in which the editing gives viewers a sense of dislocation, and in which things often happen offscreen. In this they parallel, Fujiwara argues, Tourneur's narrative emphases with their fluctuations, fluctuations between the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, and oppositions between human and animal, the living and the dead, the healthy and sane and sickness and insanity, town and country, law and crime, male and female, and the powers of darkness and the power of the mind. Tourneur’s cinema is generally, Fujiwara argues, a cinema of mystery, a cinema of the supernatural, and a cinema dominated by outsiders.

Fujiwara’s analysis of Tourneur’s work will not please everyone. Those sceptical of the auteurist approach to American cinema will not likely find it compelling even though Fujiwara is attentive to historical and sociological contexts and makes use of semiological and psychological theory in his author centred analysis of Tourneur’s films. Those who find an approach grounded in a unitary ideal reader (akin to Chomsky’s ideal speaker) will find much that concerns them in the book given Fujiwara’s unitary interpretations. Those who find the mix of the descriptive with the normative problematic will find much to critique in the book given that Fujiwara not only describes the narratives, mise-en-scene, use of sound in the film, and the editing of the films but also whether he likes them or not. Some may wonder why the book wasn’t an article instead in a book given that it could have been if his extensive analysis of each film had been dropped in favour of a more linked and threaded auteurist approach as in the introduction to the book. Despite all this Fujiwara’s book on Tourneur is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton.

 

The Problems of Book Addiction: Planning to Move With Books When Elderly and Infirm

 

I have a confession to make. I am an addict. I am a book addict.

I have been a book addict for years. I blame it on my mother who, out of love, first introduced me to the many joys of books and of learning from books before I even started school. 

My addiction to books was compounded by the fact that I was a sickly child. I got severe asthma when I was twelve, an illness that often immobilised me, often sent me to the hospital gasping for breath, and an illness which led me even further down the path of a devotion to learning and to book love and book collecting. 

As I have gotten older and even more infirm than I already was my substantial collection of books, a collection that has flowed when sedentary and ebbed when not, and there has been a lot of the not over my life, has become more and more of a problem beyond the simple mechanics of moving heavy them. One way in which they are causing me a headache these days is that the shear number of them are inhibiting me from extricating myself from the shitehole in which I live and the incompetent landlord I rent from, someone who is often economical with the truth and who can’t be fully counted on to actually take care of the problems associated with the place in which I live in a timely manner or sometimes any manner at all.

I currently live in Albany, New York less by choice than due to the fact that I got a job there and kind of got stuck in that old rust belt city as a consequence. It is, truth be told, not a horrible place to live though it has all the problems of a city negatively impacted since the 1970s, for example, by the usual suspects including deindustrialisation, White flight to the suburbs, increasing property taxes, and inflation, including inflation of real estate “values”. Needless to say all this points up several facts about post 1970s America and the core nation world including the fact that money has no inherent objective value, the arbitrariness of market mechanisms, the speculation that undergirds them, and the attempt by hollowed out cities to utilise rising real estate markets to increase their income, an income negatively impacted by White flight to the suburbs, via increasing property taxes, something that, in turn, drives up rents and restarts anew the seemingly never ending cycle of inflation (though, of course, the ideology of growth at all costs that undergirds dominant variants of capitalism does this as well). 

The neighbourhood I live in was once described as a poor area of the city with a mix of poor ethnics and bohemians and there is truth to that description of the neighbourhood I reside in. I live in the neighbourhood and the apartment that I do because by Albany standards it is cheap in all senses of the term. Neither the flat that I rent nor my landlord are that bad comparatively speaking, something that should tell you something about the reality of renting apartments on a limited income in Albany, New York. I live in an old house on Morton Avenue, a house that goes back at least to the 1850s and which has, to say the least, seen its better days. The house was apparently remodelled in the 1970s, an era which saw urban decline and attempts, largely failed attempts, to deal with tis urban decline by a host of mostly inappropriate urban renewal schemes all over the rust belt of the United States, schemes that, as they were intended to do, enriched some often if not always at the expense of others. The flat has little in the way of insulation, a problem in a Northeastern city that gets quite cold. Its windows are, to put it nicely, breezy and let in the dirt and dust from the busy road in front of the house. As a consequence I had to use rope caulk to try to inhibit cold and hot air from readily entering the apartment and had to purchase two air purifiers to clean the unwanted dirty air entering the flat. I wish I could say that these are the unintended consequences of a half-arsed job but they are not. They are standard I want to get rich with the least effort capitalism operating practise. It has rotting kitchen cabinets made of wood product not wood. The shower consists of tiles, mould bearing tiles, a none too wise design in a humid environment during the summer months. The carpet of ugly blue never seems to get clean despite repeated attempts to clean it and which bears the memories of hot irons and other heating devices laid on it at sometime in the past. All the showers in the house use the same system and the same water heater which means that taking a shower at almost any time of the day is an adventure in hot and cold inconsistent running water. The walls are paper thin and crack if you barely lean against them. The heat comes from radiators which barely heat the house in fall, winter, and spring and requires the addition of space heaters to keep the place warm. Needless to say this does wonders—I am being facetious here—for one’s ability to breathe through one’s nose and to maintain a moist mouth in the fall, winter, and spring months. It gets so dry in the flat thanks to the radiator and space heaters that a humidifier is essential to try, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to open one’s nasal passages when lying in bed. It has gotten to the point that the flat I live in is, I suspect, making me sicker than I already am. 

All this, along with the increasing rents on a rundown apartment in a rundown part of town and a landlord who has been unable to fully fix a shower in ten years and who has recently had to turn the electricity off in the entire house four times and who still hasn’t been able to fix the problem as I type, necessitates that I move and that I move soon. I am hoping to move into senior subsidised housing in the Albany area (though frankly I would rather be in Ashland, Oregon or even stone age Athens, Ohio), of which there are, thankfully, several options in Albany even if trying to get on and stay on the waiting lists of these is often a way too complex and way too Sisyphean task. 

One of the problems with moving, of course, are the thousands of books I own, These books are not only unwieldy and heavy to move, they also add to the cost of moving. One quote I got for moving with half of my books already packed in boxes last hear, was the sum of $2000 dollars, a large sum for someone with a limited fixed income. All of this mean that I really do have to downsize my collection of books.

As someone who loves books and treasures what one can learn from books it is hard for me to part with them, however. I have, despite this, slowly been parting with some of them over the last year and a half. I have been sending books to my son and to friends bit by bit. Despite this I have barely made a dent in my book collection and, of course, I still buy books thanks to my addiction. A few weeks back I tried to sell some books, including a large collection of beautifully produced Soviet Foreign Languages Publishing House, Progress, and Raduga books to the Strand bookstore in Manhattan and to Powell’s in Portland but to no avail. The former wants me to drive several thousand books to Manhattan, something that I simply cannot do physically, while the latter uses a computer programme to buy books with ISBN numbers, something that makes Powell’s less of a real bookseller and more of an automated corporation that doesn’t really care about books to me. I did put in a few ISBN’s into Powell's Hal 2024 but they, or better the programme they purchased from some other corporation who, in what is now commonplace in global capitalism, makes money off of other people’s money, wanted so few of the books and offered so little for them (something that points up how low these profiteers and privateers will go) that it wasn’t even worth the effort to put the ISBN’s into the automated system in the first place. Welcome to the you do all the work and get little for it economy that has become so prominent since the revival of that religion known as neoliberalism in the United States.

So what to do? At this point it looks like I will be tossing the books into the rubbish bin. There really is little else that I can do. It makes me sad to think of doing it but this is the book economy that we have to live with in contemporary America. And for me nothing reveals what life is like in disposable consumer oriented America and in anti-intellectual capitalist America where scholarly and classic literature books are so unloved and unwanted, better than that. The microcosm as the macrocosm. Perhaps I should have bought comic books over the years instead; they might actually be sought after and worth something. Such is life in the upside down world of modern America.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out

 

You always know what you are going to find on social media. You know that you are going to find a lot of lowest common denominator nonsense about the usual suspects, for example, films, television, women (some scantily clad for the “adolescent” male gaze), politics, sports (including fabrications related to Caitlin Clark), banal and mundane sensationalist and melodramatic clickbait for fun and profit, and music. You never know, however, how low the rubbish you find on social media will go. I was reminded of this fact yet again while I was looking at books by Warren I. Cohen on Amazon, one of the lowest of lowest common denominator social media sites on the world wide web given its poor search engine, its limited and I suspect mostly bot curation of its comments page, a curation that looks for certain hot button words and phrases, and the limitations it places on actual scholarly reviews. Amazon seems to prefer “reactions” that are reflective of the widespread reality of attention deficit disorder in postmodern America and large parts of the core nation world.

I am familiar with Cohen, a specialist on American foreign policy retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County  and author of introductory books on American foreign policy, including his excellent and aptly titled A Nation Like All Others: A Brief History of American Foreign Relations published by Columbia, his introductory work on US and USSR relations published by Cambridge University Press in its four volume history of American foreign relations series, America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991, and studies of Asian-American foreign relations, which is why I went to Amazon to see what other books he had written.

What I also found and found as interesting as the other books Cohen had written, were the comments on his book America in the Age of Soviet Power, 1945-1991. Two of the four comments—the fact that there were only four tells you a lot about the contemporary core nation world—on the book were favourable. The other two comments, however, were negative.  Of course, you are going to invariably find negative comments on almost any critical history and analysis of American foreign policy because you are inevitably going to step on the toes and draw the ire of the many faithful churchgoers of the Church of America who believe in the dogma of American exceptionalism.

One of these negative comments, that by Josh, was more “substantive” than the other, that by Sol D. Josh’s “reaction" to the book—I hesitate to call it a review since it really isn’t a review as is the case with most posts on scholarly books on Amazon—whinged about what he believed was Cohen’s New Dealism and his supposed belief that the New Deal was the best of all possible American worlds. He complains that Cohen interprets American post-WWII militarisation and the rise of its national security state as something other than a response to Soviet imperialism. He whines about Cohen's book being too much of an introductory text, something the book, in fact, is.

Sol D’s “substance” is also a statement of faith. Sol D’s faith is more clearly than that of Josh that hybrid mix of Christianity and America that has long been prominent in American culture and American life. He spends his reaction whining about Cambridge histories being the product of apologists and polemicists for “butt kissing atheist-Marxist tyrannical dictatorship”, a dictatorship, he claims, killed 200 million of its own citizens (today, of course, any self respecting empiricist would have to number many of the corporate and entrepreneurial elite, particularly in places like the Silicon Valley and Austin, amongst the tyrannical dictatorship of the mediocretariat). He ends his diatribe by stressing his devotion to his lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

Both of these comments reveal, as I noted, a faith in America, a faith some theologians would argue is a form of heresy and blasphemy. The faith of both is ultimately grounded in metaphysical and metaphysical manichean presuppositions that some humans are good guys, generally the group, clique, community, state, or nation, in this case the United States of America, that one belongs to, and that other humans are bad guys, that other whoever the goods mark themselves off against, the USSR in most of the mid-to late twentieth century, and, after the fall of the USSR, those liberals and “New Dealers” who are seen as “commies” and, paradoxically, fascists, by many and are categorised as “commies” and fascists by demagogues looking for leverage to gain political, economic, and cultural power. They are grounded, in other words, in the notion that some humans are good and some humans, them, are evil. They are grounded in the dehuhamisation of these others.

And this last—dehumanising the other—is one of the fundamental problems with these manichean politically and ideologically correct ways of seeing. Contrary to such manichean faiths humans, to varying degrees, are characterised by their better angels and their less better angels Humans, real humans, be they Hitler, Stalin, those who ordered bombs dropped on civilian targets in the name of victory, or true believers in monotheistic religious inquisitions, are, as history shows, complex and contradictory. They are neither inhuman incarnations of pure evil or cliched and stereotyped incarnations of pure goodness. Those who see the world in such manichean hues, of course, can’t admit the fact that humans, particularly those humans in positions of power (the power corrupts prover ), are the same every where and at every time for if they did they would have to admit that Cohen and other empirically grounded analysts like him are right and that both American and Soviet powers that be are neither evil incarnate of good incarnate and that humans can and do make mistakes and, of course, they can be socialised for moronic ethnocentric conformity. Cognitive dissonance, as it often does, however, in these cases, often ends up making the faith of true believers  even stronger than it was despite empirical facts to the contrary because in so many cases fiction, created reality, trumps, as it does with Trump and his ilk, real reality.

The Books of My Life: The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas

I am not, as I have written before on this blog several times, a big fan of biographies. Most of them—the worst of the bunch, in my opinion—are little better than hagiographies and provide us less with a full understanding of the subject of the biography than a glimpse into the mythic and censorial mentalities of those who write hagiographical biographies and those who buy them and read them. The better biographies, on the other hand, may present a flesh and bones subject rather than a somewhat fictionalised saint but they, for my money, far too often get mired in the quicksands of gossip and insignificance, the latter something sadly common in the writings of far too many historians who focus far too often on the trees rather than the forest. 

Historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s biography of M. Carey Thomas, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas (New York: Knopf, 1994), gives us a flesh and bones portrait of a significant figure in American and Western intellectual and particularly American higher education history. Thomas, who was amongst the first Americans who undertook their graduate education in Germany and German Switzerland, was, to use a probably overused metaphor, the mother of Bryn Mawr College, the ostensibly Quaker women’s college located in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. The scion of a Gurneyite Quaker family, Thomas was Bryn Mawr's second president. 

Thomas was not only the president of what became one of the elite women’s colleges in the US—one of the now mythical seven sisters—but was also, as Horowitz reminds us, an important figure in the history of American education, in American higher education, in American higher education for women, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century suffrage and feminist movements, in philanthropic movements, and in the intellectual life of the era in general. 

Horowitz’s biography does what all good biographies should do: It puts Thomas’s life in broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts. Horowitz does a nice job of exploring Thomas’s 19th century Anglo-Saxonism with its ethnocentrism and Social Darwinism. She does a fine job of exploring Thomas’s seeking after power side. And she does an excellent job of exploring Thomas’s romantic—she was devoted to romantic artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne—and her romantic cultural criticism side, Thomas's passionate side, Thomas's Anne Shirley side, if you will. Horowitz also gives us a lot of information—I would call it gossip—about Thomas’s “smashes", the trials and tribulations of those “smashes", Thomas’s upstairs manor house mentality, Thomas's devotion to wealth and what it could bring, Thomas’s more Machiavellian and scheming side. This last side of Thomas, by the way, seems essential for someone embedded in higher levels of corporate bureaucracies like America's colleges and universities who has ambitions beyond being a cipher of the real powers that be, many of them businessmen (or conservative Quaker businessmen and “local leaders” in Bryn Mawr’s case for most of Thomas’s reign), in America’s educational bureaucracies who serve on the boards of directors of America's colleges and universities.

While I liked Horowitz’s contextualisations I found her polemical argument that by formulating a more egalitarian feminism that called for equal opportunities for women Thomas stood outside of her time to some extent and thus that we can condemn her, from a late 20th century vantage point, for her late 19th and early 20th century ethnocentrisms (moral presentism?), problematic. Thomas's egalitarian feminism, after all, as Horowitz notes several times in the book, was ultimately, grounded in Anglo Saxon Social Darwinism, something she took initially from Herbert Spencer, making it and her very much the product of its and her time. Nor did I find Horowitz’s attempt to argue that Thomas’s anti-Semitism was a projection of her own conscious or unconscious attitudes about herself particularly compelling. Ethnocentrisms of all varieties, in my experience, are generally tied to conceptions of usness and themness or otherness, with the other often demonised, a phenomenon that is less psychological projection and more a social and cultural construction of identity and communituy that is embodied, thanks to primary and secondary socialisation throughout one's life cycle.

As someone interested in the history of higher education and British settler society religion I enjoyed Horowitz’s biography of Thomas. She and her siblings and cousins, many of whom moved in the lofty circles of the North American and European intellectual culture of the era, represent, at least to me, someone who has had a long interest in the history of Anglo-American Quakerism and the increasing secularisation of Gurneyite Quakerism particularly on the east coast of the United States. More broadly, Horowitz’s  The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas restores Thomas to the important position in American intellectual history and the history of American higher education she held and holds, something that should not be but far too often was forgotten.

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In the Kingdom of Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest?...

 

I should know by now that every time humans seem to take one step forward in the development of “new" communications technologies and technologies in general that there is, for the most part, no corresponding step forward in the use of those technologies by the masses. In fact, it often seems instead that most humans take several steps backwards when technological change occurs. I was reminded of this indisputable fact yet again today.

This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada. 

It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon. 

I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.

The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad. 

"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.

Ron once agaiin shakes his head in disbelief...