Musings on Buying Used Books in an Era Where Ideology Seems to Create Reality

 

In the early 1990s when I was in my 40s I worked at a used bookshop, Walt West Books in Provo, Utah part-time and then full-time. It was one of the best jobs I ever had. The other was a library job at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. 

One of the things I learned from Walt West, the wonderful owner of Walt West Books, when I worked there was how to classify used books, something that helped me a lot when I bought books customers brought into the store to sell.  I, of course, had, given my browsing in used bookshop, a sense before I got a job in a used bookshop, that used books varied by quality. Some were good, some were not as good, and others were not very good at all. Walt taught me that one could and should classify used books as like new or fine, very good or near fine, good or mediocre, acceptable, and, of course, by whether a book was ex-library or not. Walt, if memory serves, never bought ex-library books that had been de-accessioned. or “borrowed”. 

For us at Walt West Books a like new or fine book looked like it could have been sitting on the shelves of a new bookshop. It had no underlining, little if any damage to the cover, and little if any damage to the pages of the book. A vey good or near fine used book was not underlined, did not have spine damage, and had minimal damage to the cover and the pages of a book. A good book had underling and noticeable damage to the spine and cover of the book. An acceptable book had extensive underling and extensive damage to the cover, spine, and pages of the book. The spine of the book, for example, was cracked, the cover exhibited several bumps and cracks, and the pages had extensive foxing,  An ex-lib book, which we did not buy because it had stamps, pockets or check out lists, and labels, could not, as a consequence, rise above the good category because of those stamps, pockets, and labels.

There are in the current used bookshop marketplace, whether brick and mortar, or online, a great variation in how bookshops categorise books. The categories remain the same as those Walt taught me thanks to mass sellers like Amazon, which has a marketplace which allows anyone, if they meet certain criteria, to sell items including books. Amazon classifies books into like new, very good, good, and acceptable categoris. It does not, and this is an unending problem when buying books on Amazon, have an ex-lib category though quality booksellers on Amazon note this in the description of the books they have for sale. Non-quality booksellers on Amazon don’t always note that a book is ex-lib and don’t often note anything about the book in the description field. Welcome to the wacky upside down world of used bookselling online.

Among the best used book sellers on line are long-existing brick and mortar stores. When you buy a used book from Midtown Scholar of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for example, you know that you are getting a like new book, a very good book, a good book, and an acceptable book whether you buy from them via Amazon or from their online store.

When you buy from other used booksellers online, a situation in which you as a buyer are dependent on accurate description, you don’t always know what you are getting. Take Thriftbooks which bills itself as the largest online bookstore, for example. I have bought used books from Thriftbook for years and I still have no clear idea of the condition of the book that I am buying from them until the book physically arrives. Sometimes a Thriftbook like new book is like new. At other times it isn’t even very good. Sometimes a good book is very good at other times it is acceptable. Sometimes an ex-lib book is listed as ex-lib sometimes it is not and sometimes an ex-lib listed or not listed is classified as like new or very good, something that boggles my mind. When you buy from Thriftbooks, in other words, it is like playing Russian roulette.

I hope it does not seem like I am overly picking on Thriftbooks. I am focusing on it because I buy regularly from them because their books are cheap. The are the online equivalent of Goodwill or Deseret Industries the difference between them and Thriftbook being that you cannot see and touch the book you are buying from Thriftbooks. I also know that Thriftbooks is not the worst offender online—I have had experiences with others that are unbelievably bad, and that they have gotten better over the years in terms of book classifications. They still have a way to go, however.

For example, just today I received a book from Thriftbooks that was described as very good. I don’t know what Thriftbooks means by very good if it is a book, like the book I received today, God’s Schools, it means a book that is highlighted throughout, has a soiled cover, has a 2 cm gash where the cover meets the spine, and has several bumps on the cover and on the pages of the book. This state of book affairs is not very good by any objective let alone by a quality subjective measure. What this classification of the book shows is a lack of quality workmanship by some Thriftbook employee. It shows a Thriftbook employee who isn’t paying attention or who doesn’t care perhaps because he or she isn’t paid a living wage like I was when I worked at a used bookshop. Ain’t that, one might argue, service sector America.

One thing you quickly learn from buying books online is that there are some booksellers who hue closely to the same used book classification taxonomy as Walt West did. Others are much less analytical and consistent in their classifications of used books. It almost seems that these less than quality booksellers are not cognisant of used book categories, are lazy when they classify books according to the dominant taxonomy, don’t care enough to categorise books accurately, are letting their own used book categories grounded in their own ideologies of what a used book category should be, or all or many of the above. Regardless, it makes one wary of buying used books from certain sellers in an age where reality often seems bent to the will of those doing the classifying and selling. I guess one could say that such booksellers are the snake oil salespeople of the brave new digital world.

Addendum: For those able to read between the lines of this essay it should be clear that I love books and that my life, including my life in academia, has been grounded on a love for books, a love for books that drew me to libraries, library work, bookshops, and bookshop work. A love of books, by the way, is not necessarily congruent with a life in academia, something I learned particularly in my graduate school years, just one of the things that cured my romantic outlook about academe.

Among the Mormons, 1991 to 1993

 

Sometime in the mid-1980s I became interested in Mormonism. I blame it on Jan Shipps whose book on the early history of Mormonism I read and loved.

At the time I had completed a bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and a master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology. For the latter degree I, of course, took four comprehensive examinations in Archaeology, Linguistics, Bioanthropology, and Cultural Anthropology and wrote a thesis on Quakers as a social movement rather than as a reform movement contra Charles Tilly. I decided, however, against completing a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology, a decision I occasionally regret.  I felt strongly, at the time, that Anthropology needed to have a strong historical dimension and component to it but didn’t even though that was beginning to change somewhat thanks to scholars like Eric Wolf. Despite this increasing historical consciousness and an increasing reflexivity among Cultural Anthropologists, a reflexivity that often was more text than context oriented, I still found Cultural Anthropology too ahistorical for my liking, too focused on moments rather than broader contexts.

At the time I still wanted to take a Ph.D. I was still caught up in academic romanticism at the time. So, I thought I would give Sociology a try instead of Cultural Anthropology. Because of my interest in Mormonism I decided to apply to Brigham Young University to do doctoral work in Sociology. BYU had a doctoral programme at the time and I thought where better to study Mormonism socially, culturally, and historically than at BYU.

I was, I have to admit, as I was applying taken aback by the fact that I, a non-Mormon, a never Mormon, a “Gentile" in Mormon terms, needed to go see a Mormon Bishop as part of my application package to BYU in order to pledge to him that I to abide by the rules of BYU’s honour code. I did this even though I could not believe that BYU as a large university with a good graduate school was serious about all of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I had no problem keeping most of the rules of the honour code. I did not drink caffeinated coffee except in emergencies when I, an asthmatic, needed a epinephrine like kick. I did not drink sodas given the health issues associated with them. I was not interested in a relationship. I did not like or wear shorts. I did not want a beard. As for the hair length that was a problem since during much of my adult life I had longish hair by BYU standards. Hair length issues aside, at least for the moment, I headed for Utah and BYU after I was admitted to study for a Ph.D in Sociology.

I was lucky in getting a flat only a few blocks from the Y, a nickname for BYU I quickly learned, and even fewer blocks from downtown Provo and a grocery store. What I did not fully grasp at the time was that the award I was given by the Sociology faculty only covered tuition for one term instead of two. Getting a teaching gig in Sociology and working at Walt West Books, both of which actually furthered my opportunities to study Mormons ethnographically, helped with that. As for BYU students they were the best students collectively that I ever taught and in some cases rivalled students at Oxbridge. What a rare and wonderful pleasure it was to teach such committed and more than prepared students.

I had, as I noted, studied Mormonism and Mormon history before I arrived at the Y. Upon arrival I began to do ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Mormons. I talked to students, 93% of whom were LDS, and learned, for example, their ethno-categories for male and female Mormons (which included, for the Mormon women I talked to, "returning missionary" and "weird returning missionary") and what their Mormon faith meant to them. In the process I got a sense of what was symbolically central in Mormonism, namely, the Plan of Salvation. I talked to my neighbours who were all Mormons and BYU students. I talked to returned Mormon missionaries who were at the Y some of whom seemed to have been liberalised by the experience. I talked to some of the student activists in VOICE, a feminist organisation on campus and had five of them come to talk to my Sociology class. I went to ward meetings in Provo and Salt Lake with my neighbours and got, in the process, a sense of what Mormon rituals were like. I went to a Family Home Evening on the BYU campus thanks to two student friends. I talked to and observed ex-Mormons, one of who was a Quaker peace activist and co-founder of the peace encampment near the nuclear test site in Nevada. I talked to Jack Mormons or cultural Mormons. One, a female BYU student, told me that she still believed Jospeh Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, was the prophet even though she no longer believed in every tenant of contemporary Mormonism.  I talked to BYU faculty becoming particularly close to one, an archaeologist teaching while finishing up his Ph.D at the University of Michigan. It was he who dragged me to the Tanner’s in Salt Lake and to the FARMS brown bag talks held once a week in the Spencer W. Kimball Tower, the SWKT, where the Sociology and Anthropology faculties were at the time.

One of the things that struck me about these FARMS brown bags as I listened to scholars like Royal Skousen and Lyndon Cook was how what seemed to me like polemics, at least on one level, was grounded in scholarship like you would find in any intellectual and academic community on another level. I have to admit that I admired the scholarship of those like John Sorenson, who argued in a scholarly fashion that the Book of Mormon lands were actually in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Even though I could not accept Sorenson’s conclusions I admired the scholarly way he got there. 

It was this scholarship and the interest in scholarship that I most admired and continue to admire about BYU. It was a place, my ethnographic research revealed, where students were deeply engaged with their academic work and with the intellectual life, something that is rare as I would discover later during my part-time teaching sojourns—I hate bureaucracies of all types so a full-time position even if I got one, which was unlikely, was out of the question—at the University at Albany and SUNY Oneonta. RPI, where I also taught, was somewhat different in that the students at that institute were engaged but their engagement with academic work and intellectual culture was much narrower in focus than the students I met, talked to, and taught at the Y.

Another thing that struck me about students and faculty at the Y was how deeply engaged they were in what I would call social ethics. Many of those I met were deeply engaged with social issues. One of my neighbours, who knew English, German, and Dutch was so deeply committed to her feminism that she engaged the most conservative or traditionalist faculty and defenders of the Mormon faith in the Religious Education Department. I met a faculty member in Sociology who had become a pacifist—he was influenced by the Catholic Workers and Quakers—and who was involved with protests against nuclear weapons testing around Easter in Nevada. He took me and four Mormon students at the Y down to the Quaker eEster weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site near Las Vegas, where we stayed in a Catholic Church and were fed by members of the Catholic Workers. All five of us had what might be called a mystical experience or, if you prefer a more secular explanation, a betwixt and between symbolic and ritual experience, while there. We five would later form the core of the Mormon Peace Gathering, a group that planned and implemented a Mormon weekend protest at the Nevada Test Site the next year.

My involvement as the only “Gentile” in the Mormon Peace Gathering gave me further entree into Mormon intellectual culture. I met Eugene England, Steve Epperson, and a host of other intellectual and intellectually “liberal” Mormons thanks to the Mormon Peace Gathering. It was all a heady and exciting experience. I learned from this experience that, at least for me, one of the factors, if not the central factor, that seemed to separate “liberal” Mormons from “conservative” Mormons was “continuing revelation”. Faithful Mormons believe that the prophet in Salt Lake received revelations periodically from god. The “liberals”, it seemed to me, differed from the “conservatives” in that for them only revelations received by the prophet in Salt Lake and which were signed by the First Presidency were authoritative revelations. “Conservatives”, on the other hand, believed, it seemed to me, that any revelation the prophet received was authoritative. So, for them, if Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson counselled women to stay at home and take care of the house and the children, it was an authoritative revelation that had to be obeyed.

Most of the Mormons I hung out with were of the “liberal” persuasion. I did meet more “conservative” Mormons during my years in Utah. One of the students in my Social Inequality class, for example, believed that anything the prophet said was divine and he held “conservative’ views on a host of social issues including capital punishment, homosexuality, and abortion. Another friend of mine was somewhere in between on the “liberal” and “conservative’ continuum. He went to the Quaker protest with me and was initially involved with Mormon Peace Gathering planning but he dropped out early in the planning stages finding that what the MPG was doing conflicted with parts of his Mormon faith, what parts I no longer recall (I can’t look at my field notes because they have been destroyed).

What I have never forgotten about in the wake of my interactions with Mormon culture in Utah was the important fact that BYU was not representative of Mormons in general. It was representative, I think, of mainstream Mormon intellectual culture, a culture I was very impressed with. I really did not have much interaction with Mormons beyond BYU. Beyond campus I met academic to be scholars like Dennis now Kelli Potter while I worked at Walt West Books. I met non-Mormon academics interested in Mormons at the bookshop like Stephen Kent, a professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, and actor Edward Herrmann at the bookshop. I met Mormons who were not academics but who were intellectuals deeply interested in Mormon Studies and Mormon history who I met at Walt West Books when I worked there including a book buyer for Seagull Books who showed me a first edition of the Book of Mormon. I was so impressed that amateurs, most of them who seemed to work at the computer software firms in the Provo area and most of whom where “liberals", were interested in and in some cases writing impressively on Mormon history. I met some in the Mormon fundamentalist community, both practitioners and ideological fellow travellers, at and through the bookshop and during my visit to a fundamentalist community south of Salt Lake thanks to a fundamentalist fellow traveller. I helped put together and write for the short lived Deseret Free Press. 

There were things that, as I became more familiar with BYU, that troubled me and troubled me deeply. I was at the Y, for example, when David Knowlton and Cecilia Konchar Farr were fired for ideological reasons. I was there when the Brethren, the powerful leaders in Salt Lake, told members not to attend Sunstone conferences, Sunstone being a Mormon magazine for those of the “liberal” Mormon persuasion, “liberals” who, generally speaking, made use of historical and social scientific methodologies some “conservatives” saw as inherently “secular" and even possibly “anti-Mormon”. I was troubled by the Mormon policy on homosexuality. Given this I was and am proud that I, at the behest of the Y Sociology Club of which I was the faculty representative, was involved in bringing a group founded by the parents of gays which had a positive attitude toward homosexuals to campus. I was troubled by by the fact that I was turned in to the Honors Department by someone for bringing a book by the Tanner's on the changes in the Mormon temple ceremony to campus. After I wrote opinion pieces condemning the firings of Knowlton and Farr for the Utah Valley newspaper in Orem, arguing that the Y was more like Bob Jones and less like to Notre Dame (which I did attend briefly), after getting in trouble for some ethnographic experiments, and after Sociology proved as problematically ahistorical as Cultural Anthropology, I decided to leave the Y.

Given my conclusion that History was central to the human studies enterprise I decided to apply to doctoral programmes in History. I was accepted at several places including my dream school the University of Toronto. Though my dreams did not fully come true and it took me years to do so, thanks to financial problems and, when writing the dissertation, problems with my computer files, I finally finished my Ph.D and wrote my dissertation on Mormon Studies. Eventually that dissertation would be published after much blood, sweat, tears, and gnashing of teeth, by McFarland. Though it isn’t perfect—the writer’s cut which is in my possession is better and the authoritative version of the book—I am proud of the book and the research that went into it. 

I am no longer as interested in Mormonism as I was and as my book makes clear, I was more interested in broader questions of identity construction, identity, the origins of social movements as examples of how things are socially and culturally constructed and then fetishised or universalises than Mormonism per se in the first place. I had simply used Mormons to explore and get all of those broader issues. Social media, however, and specifically Mormon Stories and Mormon Discussions on YouTube, has peaked my interest in Mormonism and Mormonism as a social and cultural movement again. Perhaps one day I may even get to tell my Non-Mormon Mormon Story on one of them.

“Get Out Before It is Too Late”: An Open Letter to the Lawmakers of New York State

 

What happened in Minnesota over the weekend—the assassination of a Minnesota Democrat lawmaker, the attempted assassination of other Democrats, and the planned assassination of others who were politically and ideologically incorrect in the eyes of the assassin—should remind us of the history of political violence or terrorism in the United States since its inception. 

It should remind us of the attacks on and cleansing of Loyalists during the American War of Independence and the confiscation of their property without recompense. It should remind us of bleeding Kansas with its guerrilla wars between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, wars that were brutal and terroristic. It should remind us of the Quantrill’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederate raiders and their brutality which included the massacre of “civilians in places like Lawrence, Kansas. I should remind us of the racist Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror and terror killings after the Civil War. It should remind us of White supremacist attacks on those who are not them. It should remind us of anti-abortion attacks on abortion clinics and abortion doctors. It should remind us that Timothy McVay bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in response to what he saw as government terror in Waco, Texas. 

The immolation of members of an Adventist religious group by, at least in part, the US government should also remind us of government sponsored violence and terrorism, federal, state, and local, over the course of US history. It should remind us of the US government’s actions against rebellions in the early years of the Republic. It should remind us of the use of militias and the military against labour actions and socialists, communists, and anarchists. It should remind us of Waco. And it should remind us of the terrorists who attacked the US Capitol in 2021 under the delusion that their man, Donald Trump, actually won an election he lost. And it should remind us that in his first days in office President Donald Trump pardoned those convicted by juries of attacking the Capitol looking for lawmakers to, what, lynch?

Of course, none of these will remind most Americans and most American lawmakers of the history of violence, including state violence, that has erupted over the course of US history. Most Americans, after all, prefer to live in a Disneyish world of mythhistory rather than in the world of real history. Bright colours painted over dark ones do make the ideological world go round in the United States.

I remind you of this history because now that Donald Trump has returned to office we are seeing an uptake in non-state and state political violence and terrorism in Minnesota and in California. We are seeing an uptake in the power of executive branch of the government. We are seeing an uptake in executive branch deportations of immigrants and rumblings that the executive government may deport Americans who are not politically and ideologically correct in Trumpian terms. We are seeing the executive branch trying to avoid and undermine the rulings of the court, the third branch of the US government. We are seeing increasing “arrests” of Democrats by ICE, masters of Trumpian chaos and intimidation, which seems to be trying to prove that it is Trump’s own little Gestapo. 

Trump, of course, thinks of the American state as his corporation, He has no problem or compunction about using this corporation, a corporation which he controls and rules over,  for his personal financial benefit and gain. He is also using this corporation to further a political agenda that is arguably fascist.

As one of the three American academics who fled the United States and Yale for the University of Toronto in Canada told the Guardian yesterday there are important lessons one should learn from the Nazi takeover of the German government. Getting out earlier than later before it is too late is one of them.

In this spirit, I urge the lawmakers of New York to consider two proposals. First, to form a Union with California, Oregon, Washington state, and the New England states independent from a United States, a nation that should actually be called the Confederate States of America. Alternatively, I would urge New York lawmakers to consider petitioning Canada for admission as a province in that nation, Can we be the tenth. I would urge lawmakers to consider these two proposals before it is to late.

While Democrats seem to be treating Trump Mach Two as business as usual and as something that will end I don’t think one can treat what is happening as normal and I am not sure that Trump will willingly leave office. He may even want to pass his the US on to his son and heir. We are clearly, as many academics and intellectuals have pointed out, on the road to fascism, on the road to a White supremacist, literalist, misogynist, and terroristic fascist United States governed by the leader of a new religion, a theocratic cult, Donald Trump, a cult that brooks no political ideology, economic ideology, or culture other than its own. Do something before it is too late. Hoping that all things must pass is not doing something.

The Guardian and Journalistic Mediocrity: Musings on an Article About the Political Leanings of Academia in the Guardian

 

Recently the American page of the English newspaper The Guardian, one of the few quality newspapers left in a world of sub-mediocre newspapers and gossip rags (which The Guardian is in part as well), published an article entitled “US Universities are Moving to the Right: Will it Help Them Escape Trump’s Wrath?” What is remarkable about this article is how mediocre it is, something journalism at its best generally is these days. In fact, this article points up how little social science capital and savvy most journalists have.

This article notes a 2016 study by a professor of business, a developer of health economic solutions for the private sector, and a professor of economics  of the 40 “leading" universities in the US (mostly research universities that are members of the Association of American Universities). This study showed that a majority of faculty in the Humanities and the Social Sciences skew Democrat and, since the Democrats are popularly regarded as liberals in the US, liberal. Before I go on I should not that one might and should wonder about what the 2016 study left out namely,  the political and ideological leanings of faculty in agriculture schools, business schools, medical schools, dental schools, and veterinary schools are and why those who did the 2016 study did not study those academics as well.

But let’s assume for the moment that the 2016 study is correct, a conclusion that other studies could be used to raise questions about, and that the Humanities and Social Sciences (they also include journalism and law schools in these categories which is problematic) are filled to the brim with liberals. The question that needs to be asked about this is why is this the case? Why are those in the Humanities and Social Sciences liberals.

The answer to that question is rather obvious and is backed up by a host of social science qualitative studies. The higher the educational level achieved by someone the more they are to vote liberal in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Educational level, in other words, is the key variable here.

Why is this the case? The answer to that question is also obvious. Higher education faculty, particularly those in the Social Science, have generally been, to quote Nick Lowe, nutted by reality. They know, for example, that while some may assume that crime is higher in urban areas data has, in the past, shown that crime is higher percentage wise in rural areas.

Now this fact, the fact that higher education in the Social Sciences is a reality check, does not mean that there aren’t political and ideological conservatives in the ivy halls of academe and that there can’t be more political and ideological conservative intellectuals (real conservatives not the fake populists who claim the conservative mantle) in higher education. There are intellectual conservatives in American universities and there can be more. For a conservative who currently teaches in the ivy covered walls of the Ivy League I give you Niall Ferguson who holds a well paying job at Harvard and whose books, unlike his homiletics, skew empirical. 

Moreover, one might argue that if ideology is broken in surveys of politics and ideology in American education into a number of more nuanced criteria, such as religion to take one example, often a marker of a more conservative sensibility at least on one level, one might find interesting cultural and ideological contradictions or seeming inconsistencies. Studies of the religious sensibilities in American higher education, for example, show that even in the hard sciences there are a significant number of academics who believe in god even in these supposed secular anti-Christian days. Exploring cultural factors might, in other words, give us a more nuanced picture of the cultures and ideologies of academe.

But back to the nutted by reality argument, the fact is is that right wing populists, who are in no way intellectual conservatives, have been socialised into mythic or what David Graeber might call bullshit history and social science. Such a history and social science are often if not always fake history and such a history and social science should not be taught in academe save in literary studies or in classes on how cultural and ideology create reality in some human populations because they are fake history and fake social science. They are not science. Real science has to be vetted by empirical reality. They are instead ideology.

The thing is is that Trump and his ilk may argue for an affirmative action programme for “conservatives” in higher education, itself a paradox and perhaps an irony given that they oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes (save for themselves it appears). What they really want is power, exclusive power, and they know that to achieve this they need to transform higher education into a politically and ideologically correct image and mirror of themselves. And they are, at the moment more than willing to engage in an inquisition of higher education in order to obtain this power.

I want to end this essay by suggesting to the authors of the study on political and ideological attitudes among academic social scientists and humanities scholars that they do a similar study of political and ideological attitudes among the police in the United States. What I think they will find, if Staten Island is prologue, is that there needs to be an affirmative action programme for liberals and Democrats in America’s police forces, an institution that is not only full of right wing populists who vote Republicam but a healthy dose of proto-fascists if not full fledged fascists.

Say Hello to Indiana University Vichy...

 

You gotta love the governor of Indiana and his politically and ideologically correct groupies. They whinge and whine about too few Indiana University alumnae and alumni voting in Board elections. Then they proceed, after eliminating the election of Board members all together and firing two Board members who have been critical of the leader of Indiana University, to “elect” two new members of the Board (don’t you just love those collaborators jumping at the chance to serve on such a Board?) by a single “vote” all. And they have done it all with the collaboration of bureaucrats at IU in Bloomington. Needless to say, this is positively Hitlerian, Stalinist, and, need I say it, Orwellian.

So also is Orwellian the fact that today on the IU Facebook page, a page that spews propaganda on a regular basis just like the Facebook pages of other universities and colleges, they wished Herman B. Wells former president and chancellor of the university, a happy birthday. It is Orwellian because Wells stood up to the paternalistic puritanical patriarchs in Indianapolis when they wanted to inquisit and exorcise the Institute of Sex Research at the university, irony intended. This is enough to make one recall what a lawyer said to Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings, namely, have you no shame? The answer, of course, is that just like Tailgunner Joe IU’s powers that be and their propagandists have no shame. For them it is political and ideological correctness by any means.

If I could do it all over again I would have transferred to the University of Texas when IU arranged for me to finish my degree in Austin for health reasons. UT remains a real university unlike the sinking academic ship that is IU, a ship that has been sinking since the 1990s in the ratings guides to research universities. All I have to say is I am so glad I sent my diploma back to an IU—telling them to do the Johnny Paycheck with it—that is fast becoming a right wing politically and ideologically correct theocratic institution dedicated to turning out yes men and yes women for the cult of Tangholio and its bread and circuses. 

The Books of My Life: Singin’ in the Rain

As I look back on my film viewing and film ranking habits one of the things that stands out to me from the vantage point of today is how much what I like, what I don’t like, and all points in between has changed across time and space. It is called, growing up with a reflexive mind, I guess

When I was a teenager I watched every film I could on television, at second run theatres, and at art cinemas. I particularly sought out films that were regarded as classics and as quality films by film critics like Leonard Maltin, whose film guide was my film bible in the early years of my film viewing life. Today I am much more choosy and much more persnickety about which films I would put in my film pantheon and which directors I would put in my director pantheon. I would, for example, number Doctor Strangelove and Casablanca as two of my pantheon films and number Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer as two of my pantheon directors.

Recently I have been rewatching a number of films that critical consensus among film critics would rank as classics. I have recently rewatched, for example, Gigi, Meet Me in Saint Louis, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain. Though I know that most critics would not agree with me, and the younger me would probably not agree with old me, I would not list, at the moment at least, any of these films among the best films ever made though I did quite like Gigi and Meet Me in Saint Louis the second or third time around. 

I blame a lot of this change in my film viewing aesthetics on Joss Whedon’s television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have long been fond of parody, satire, and dark or black comedy (yes, Virginia, black does not only refer to the colour of skin) but Buffy revealed to me how much I love genre blending, tonal blending, allegory, metaphor, and existentialism (that last actually makes Buffy kin to the works of Bergman and Kieslowski). A.B., after Buffy, I find it hard to watch films and television shows that don’t blend genre, tone, and social ethics. They seem mundane and banal to me now.

Now don’t get me wrong there were still things I found interesting and quite impressive in many of the films I rewatched. The visuals of the Vincente Minelli films and the John Ford films, for example, were and are impressive, really impressive. As a whole, however, the films by these directiors simply did not move me as they once did. 

Paradoxically I was quite moved—moved intellectually—by Peter Wollen’s monograph Singin’ in the Rain (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I have known Wollen’s work since I read Wollen' seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. If memory serves, I read the first edition of this monograph which is now in its fifth edition, sometime in the 1970s. At the time, Signs and Meaning was a mind blowing experience for me as it revealed to me a more semiological and contextual approach to the film auteurism I had become devoted to.

Wollen’s Singin’ in the Rain was just as impressive as Signs and Meaning in the Cinema had been to me some fifty or so years ago. Wollen does an excellent job of exploring the production aspects of the film including its production by MGM’s Freed Unit and the fact that the film was built around songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown that MGM already owned. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a few additional songs for the film at Gene Kelly’s insistence as Wollen notes. He does an outstanding job of exploring the roles co-directors Stanley Donen and Kelly played in the making of the film. He does an excellent job of exploring how Kelly, who was also one of the stars of the film, worked with others to choreograph the dance, camera movements, and transitions in the “Singin’ in the Rain" segment of the film. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, regards Kelly as the general, the conductor, the author who led his forces in the making of the film. He does a superb job of conceptualising Singin’ in the Rain in the history of modern dance and in exploring Kelly’s approach to modern dance. He does an outstanding job of placing Singin’ in the Rain within the subgenres of the film musical, sub-genres enunciated by Rick Altman in his book on the American film musical: the Show Musical, the Fairy Tale Musical, and the Folk Musical. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, argues that Singin’ in the Rain is all three. He makes an interesting argument that Singin’ in the Rain is, with its realism—its story arc, character arcs, and exploration of the transition from silents to sound in Hollywood—and its artifice—the ballet sequence in the film—a kind of filmic version of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. The film musical, as Wollen and others have noted since at least since the 1970s, foregrounds their construction making them similar to what Bertolt Brecht was trying to do in the theatre.

Recommended.

Musings on Mad Men

 

Let me admit something right off the bat: I don’t, generally speaking, like American television It is full of, at best, mediocrities situated between what is really important on American commercial television, product. The real point of American television, along with its socialising function, is to sell consumers consumer goods. The shows are simply there to bring consumers to the idiot box so the networks can sell product.

Now don’t get me wrong there are some American television shows I quite like. I like, for instance The Twilight Zone. I like the Dick van Dyke Show. I like The Wonder Years. And I really like the knowing and multitonal Buffy the Vampire Slayer, one of the few American television shows that can, in my opinion, be spoken of in the same breath with great British and European TV shows like The Jewel in the Crown, Brideshead Revisited, Lewis, Morse, House of Cards, Dekalog, Forbyrdelsen, Broen, and Badehotellet. But these are anomalies. The less said about drek like Gilligan’s Island, Full House, The Facts of Life, and The Brady Bunch the better. Hell even France, a country where television was often considered an aesthetic wasteland by its artistic elites, has better television shows than American television these days.

This brings me to Mad Men. Mad Men of course, is a basic television show. It was broadcast on AMC, which once upon a time showed mostly American movie classics. For many, including critics, with a kind of midcult cultural capital, it is cable television where the great American TV shows are shown these days. They like to point to Game of Thrones and The Sopranos as examples of what American TV and American television auteurs can achieve if it and they (though many leave this unsaid) adopt the British writer centred limited episode model of TV. Their mantra seems to be that is not cable TV it is, fill in the blank. 

The problem with this argument, and it certainly relevant to what I have seen of Mad Men, is that most of the shows on American cable television aren't very good relatively speaking or absolutely speaking. Game of Thrones was a self important misogynist mediocrity aimed at a fanatic fandom, some of whom wanted to see tits, ass, and pussy, and they got a lot of all three during the run of the show. The Sopranos was a self important mediocrity with lots of sex and tits, something that apparently makes HBO better than American commercial television, and something that certainly draws certain viewers to it, and violence (bang, bang, shoot em up), a mafia Western for the anti-Western generation.

This brings me to Mad Men. From what I have seen of the show so far it is a self important mediocrity that wears its Hollywood social problems theme on its sleeves, something akin to being repeatedly hit by a hammer on the head. Mad Men is something I imagine Stanley Kramer, the producer and director of the 1950s and 1960s social problem Hollywood film, would have loved or even made in the 1950s and 1960s. The problem with these social problem films, however, beyond their social problem obviousness—something known to appeal to Oscar and Emmy voters and to critics at elite magazines and newspapers—is that it doesn’t feel organic. I prefer social problems to emerge organically out of a narrative.

There are other problems I had and have with Mad Men. The acting is generally mannered, presumably to hit viewers over the head with stereotypes, in this case misogynist frat boy (something actually mentioned in the first episode) stereotypes. Such an acting style doesn’t feel organic as it does in the theatre, however. Additionally,  the show wears its attempt at high art on its sleeves. It tries to tell viewers (check out that mise-en-scene) that it is clever, something some viewers undoubtedly accept because of its seriousness and the fact that it is on cable. To me it really isn’t clever. To me Mad Men is Saturday Night Live to Britain’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It is, in other words, sophomorically clever while Python is often truly clever. 

For these reasons Mad Men is not my cup of tea at least at present. I will keep watching to see if I will change my mind.

The CVS Kiada Goes On and On and On and On and On

 

I am truly shocked, shocked that I was able to go almost half a month without a bureaucratic feck up I had to deal with. Now, however, I have to deal with yet another bureaucratic feck up. The more things change, I guess.

I have told this story before but I have to tell it again. With bureaucracies you have to retell the story again and again and again after all. I was overcharged for my Pregabalin by CVS in Delmar. I did not catch this overcharge, the result of, you guessed it, another bureaucratic feck up, until I got the second prescription filled. I was thus only able to get a refund for the second filling not the first.

The bureaucrat-workers at CVS Delmar told me to contact my prescription insurance to get a refund. And that is what I did. Do I called CVS Silver Script Empire, explained the situation to them, and filled out, what I could, of the form they sent me. Much of it was irrelevant and confusing. Ah, bureaucracy.

Well today I got a missive from CVS Caremark. It was not the refund I expected but a denial of my request for a refund. Here we enter Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. I got a refund for the second Pregabalin filling but not the first. Take that in. I was refunded for the second filling of Pregabalin but not the first. Can I get an absurd?

So I called CVS Silver Script... again. After getting the runaround I was told I needed to fill out a form, perhaps even the one I had already filled out. I did the eye roll thing and declined and said I would file the appeal form I had received from good old CVS Silver Script NY by post. It is simply easier to do that than to spend half hours and hours on the phone trying to explain the situation. And this strategy allowed me to get back to the movie I was watching.

Will the appeal work? Who the hell knows. I suspect it eventually will when the bureaucrats at CVS Caremark realise I am owed the same refund for the first filling of my Pregabalin I got for my second. Until that time I live somewhat in Orwell and Kafka and Voinovich territory. Ain’t that fun.

The Books of My Life: Gun Crazy

 

With the advent of digital television and its many channels and sub-channels it feels a lot like 1971 again today. 1971 was an age where you had the big boy network channels of ABC, CBS, and NBC on your local television box and also, at least in major metropolitan areas like the Dallas I grew up in, independent channels that showed old American movies and television shows. I loved watching old films and television shows like The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone so I tended to watch the independent channels more than the network channels back in the day.

Given this, I actually kind of like this back to the past aspect of contemporary digital television despite the fact that many of these future past retro channels like WYBN here in upstate New York, are often poorly run by hacks who regard commercials as the real star attraction of their we want their money stations. The problem for those of us who actually want to watch the television shows or films rather than the commercials on these stations is that these stations are run by money grubbers who care more about commerce and profits than the shows or films they run and so they run their commercials, many of which make you wonder about their professionalism (amateur is actually too kind of a word to describe their incompetence), literally over the shows and films they broadcast. This makes watching any shows or films broadcast on these stations and their sub-channels next to impossible because these commercials often run over the end of the television show or at critical points during a film making it literally impossible to make sense of them. Such, I guess, is media life in neo-liberal America where the surreal is no longer surreal. It is the neo-American way.

Amidst the uber-amateurish retro TV stations out there in digital TV land there are some good stations, stations which are actually run by professionals who know what they are doing and who actually know how to make bot technologies properly. They don’t, in other words, incorrectly use one size all automation programmes to run their stations so they can milk them for the largest profits possible disrupting the flow of television shows and films in the process. One of my favourite of these quality retro TV networks is the Movies network.

The Movies network is a retro joy to watch for those of us who became cinephiles in the 1960s and 1970s thanks, in large part, to TV stations, particularly independent television stations, independent stations which showed classic Hollywood movie after movie on their channels in the 1960s and 1970s. And watch movie after movie on these channels my sister and I did. It was only after I went up to college that I discovered another way you could watch classic Hollywood flics, namely, in second run film theatres and in film society showings, both of which  ran classic Hollywood films but who also added into the mix classic and current foreign films for ones viewing pleasure.

It was on the Movies channel that I finally saw the celebrated film Gun Crazy, a 1950 noir made by the poverty row studio Monogram, produced by Monogram’s King Brothers, directed by Joseph Lewis, written by MacKinlay Kantor and blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and starring Peggy Cummings and John Dahl as the two leads, Laurie and Bart. The film, originally titled Deadly is the Female, which is often cited by critics and historians as a precursor to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde given that both films, as is Fritz Lang’s 1937 film You Only Live Once, centre around a couple who, in Gun Crazy’s case, meet cute at a gun shooting exhibition at a low rent carnival, and who proceed to rob their way across the American Midwest.

I liked Gun Crazy quite a lot but then I am a sucker for the cynicism and darkness of film noirs. They suits my perspective on the world quite well. So, after watching the film I picked up Jim Kitses’s book on the film, Gun Crazy (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1996), to read more about the film. Kitses does a nice job of putting the film in its production contexts giving readers details about its writing, the impact of censorship on the film, its making, and those who made the film. Kitses, in a swipe at auteur theory, argues that the film was a collaboration between the King’s who produced the film with a proletarian chip on their shoulders. They were aided and abetted by the aforementioned Kantor and Trumbo, the latter of whom wrote under an assumed name, who wrote it, and the craftspeople, including the actors, who helped make it and helped give it meaning, even though it is, I would argue, the director, the general or the conductor, who ultimately leads the troops or players who make it into film battle or film performance.

Kitses also does an excellent job of exploring the noir context of the film. Additionally, he makes interesting connections between the noir aspect of the film with its narrative, character, and mise-en-scene codings, and other genres and tones the film, according to Kitses, draws on, including, surprisingly, the Western and Screwball Comedy. Kitses asserts that Gun Crazy is playing off of American myths about the freedom American frontier and the ideological spaces our two protagonists are confined in and which they try to break out of, to no avail, of course, in the deterministic world of film noir. It is on this cultural level that Kitses links the cultural to the political, to an America increasingly standardised and packaged and which is not particularly, as a consequence, palatable to our protagonists.

It is also on the cultural level where Kitses’ interpretive analysis, one grounded in exegesis, an analysis of the how the text was produced, gave me pause. Kitses utilises the standard operating practises of contemporary scholarly film criticism to explore, for example, the psychological and psychoanalytic aspects of Gun Crazy, but largely does so without documenting these presumed aspects of the film in the archival record. And while these suppositions may have validity one would, or at least I would, would like to see them linked to the historical record rather than to problematic and interesting conclusions based largely on a reading of the text. Sometimes it really does seem that the criticism aimed at so much film criticism is true: it far too often over analyses and over interprets a film on the basis of less than fully documented information in such a way that it appears that the socialised eyes of the beholder/critic is guiding the interpretation rather than the empirical evidence. 

Recommended.

The Powell’s Books Kiada

 

In the brave new modern digital world you simply can’t let things stay as they are. You have to continue to do something if, for no other reason than to justify jobs anthropologist David Graeber might call bullshit jobs if he were still alive. I learned this lesson again recently thanks to Powell’s Books of Portland, Oregon.

I have been shopping at Powell’s for years. And while the Powell’s web page may not have been aesthetically pleasing to me it did what it was supposed to do. You could search for the used book you wanted. Find that book if Powell’s had it in stock. Put it in your save for later queue if you wanted. Put it in your buy queue if you wanted. And you could buy it if you wanted, something that was relatively easy to do.

There were, of course, as there always are with everything, hiccoughs and annoyances. Putting items in the save for later queue required the extra step of creating that queue in the first place and clicking on add to the queue when you put something new in it. This was hardly a labour of Herakles, however.

Recently, Powell’s decided to change their webpage. They did not warn us customers that they were doing this by email, however, so we were unawares of the changes and it meant that we could not take action in order to preserve the items we had placed in the to be bought queue and the to be saved for later queue should something go wrong. 

And, of course, something did go wrong. Powell’s assured us when we logged into the new site, something that required a password change to do (ah, the joyous extra step), that all would be well with our saved items world. It wasn’t. I lost everything in my to be purchased queue and my saved for later queue. And while the webpage may look better, though this is in the eye of the beholder, of course, personally I am not blown away by it, I am not happy that all the items I had in my queue are lost in the hyperether of the webverse. Moreover, I find it much more difficult to find used items in this supposedly new and improved webpage.

Will I purchase items from Powell’s in the future? I don’t know. This experience has left a very sour taste in my mouth both hyper and real.

The Wonder Book Kiada

 

Bureaucracies, bureaucracies thy presence, power, and reach is legendary. You are everywhere and in all organisations and institutions. You are our logos, our god, or saviour. All hail the power of bureaucracies name.

As I mentioned yesterday I ordered several items from the Washington DC area bookstore Wonder Book. Unfortunately, they use FedEx to ship some of their items. 

I say unfortunately because as I noted yesterday the FedEx van was within five blocks of my house during the time they said they would be but they did not deliver my Wonder Book package for a reason or reasons unfathomable to me. If I had more knowledge—something FedEx is unlikely to give me—I might be able to figure it out should I want to and I kind of want to because I am interested in how “rational” and “efficient” bureaucracies work and how irrational and incompetent they too often truly are.

In response to this utter failure by FedEx to deliver the package to my nearby address I told FedEx to return the items to the sender if they could not deliver them by 4 pm, almost two hours after the time they said they would and could have. Or I suggested another option: pay me $75 dollars for my time and effort (something I still expect). They have not, unsurprisingly, accepted that offer yet either.

Scene shift to today. Though I told FedEx to return the items to Wonder Book should they not be able to deliver the items by 4 pm or compensate me for my time and effort—time is money—the package is once again out for delivery against my express orders. Oh joy. So much for attempts at communication with FedEx.

I did, of course, contact Wonder Book, explained the situation to them and told them too to try and issue a return to sender order. They wrote back today and said sorry, we can’t since the item is on the truck (which it should not have been given my orders to FedEx to cancel the delivery and return the package to sender). They also told me that I will not be refunded for these items until they receive them.

I responded to their email saying sorry but once I refuse delivery my responsibility for the order and the items in that order is over. They, I told them, needed to contact FedEx, their deliverer of this order of choice, should the package come to be missing in action or delayed. I also told them if I am not refunded I will take a variety of actions, including, possibly, small claims court.

Perhaps we would should just stop struggling with bureaucracies and submit to them as our holy saviour. Why keep fighting that which cannot really be fought? I don’t know.

Postscript: I have now been banned from Wonder Books. I will wear this ostracisation with honour. After all, there is no shame in complaining about the practises of Wonder Books, practises that include occasionally inaccurately describing the condition of a book, selling an edition of the book different from that pictured, or providing false information about the publisher of a book, something that should be shameful even in the age of Trump. Nor is there any shame in complaining about a company like FedEx being five blocks from one's door within the time frame they said they would deliver a book, a time frame one took time out of one’s life to be sure to be there when the over $100 dollar package arrived. What there is shame in is, beyond the false information about about items for sale, is Wonder Book's (and Fed Ex’s) silence about why FedEx did not deliver the package when they were five blocks and five minutes from my house when asked about it. That is a shame, one assumes, Wonder Books (and FedEx) will not even recognise but then they are one of your typical corporations in this brave new world, a world in which an interest in the customer’s problem is largely feigned and wrapped up in tiny bows of ritual and cliched apologies. 

The CVS Kiada Rolls Ever Onward and Downward

 

The problems associated with health care bureaucracies in the United States never end as I well know. I experienced them again today. I am sure I will experience more of them in the near and distant future until I die.

As I noted earlier in this blog, I was prohibited from getting Cyclobenzaprine by my prescription insurance company, Silver Script, a sub-bureaucracy of CVS Health, a sub-bureaucratic unit of CVS, which covers retirees of New York State, of which I am one. They ordered a cease and desist on my use of Cyclo not for medical reasons and not because my doctor advised it but because I had turned seventy. 

In the meantime, I tried to other drugs neither of which worked. So, when I went for the first time to my Pain Management doctor, who diagnosed me with Fibromyalgia (the second time I had been diagnosed with it), for which he prescribed Lyrica, I asked him to restart my Cyclobenzaprine as well, which he did. It is the only thing I have found that helps my muscles relax and helps me sleep.

I went to my CVS pharmacy, a sub-bureaucracy of the same company that covers me for prescriptions, something which I assumed would make all this easier—It hasn’t it is even more difficult. They filled my Cyclobenzaprine prescription—so much for the ban. It cost me thirty cents for ten pills. I assumed my prescription insurance, CVS Silver Script, covered it. But no. When I went to get a refill for Cyclo today I was charged $17 dollars plus for ten pills. Boom! Sis! Bah! Bam! Now I know that the difference in price was because CVS Delmar used a discount card which covered the nearly $17 dollar difference. 

So, I called my doctor on the advice of CVS Delmar. I asked the doctor to do what CVS Delmar advised, namely put in for a price override on the drug as I did not and really cannot pay the significant price difference. My doctor’s nurse, when she returned my call, said that CVS Silver Script was not allowing her to do this. 

So—the carousel goes round and round—I called Silver Script. I also needed to call good old Silver Script because the form it promised me so I could fill it out a form for a refund for monies I should not have been charged for for Lyrica had not come yet though I requested it ten or eleven days ago had not yet arrived. Two birds. One stone. Fingers crossed.

Well my fingers are still crossed and will be crossed, I am sure, for some time. I was promised another refund form and I was told the proper bureaucratic paper work would be sent to my doctor and then a decision would be made regarding my Cyclo. 

Now I wait and wait knowing that more bureaucratic bs will come again to a Ron near you soon. Probably next week in fact. And so it goes.

The Fed Ex Kiada

 

One of the things you can count on along with death is corporate incompetence. I got to experience yet another example of this today.

Recently I ordered some books from Wonder Book in the Washington DC area. They were having a 25% off sale and I love book sales.

Wonder Book filled the order. They shipped the order via FedEx. That was a mistake. 

The order was supposed to arrive today. When I woke up and switched on my computer I found three time of delivery messages waiting for me each with a different delivery time. The last one said that I should expect delivery of the package between 12:40 pm and 2:40 pm this afternoon.

So, I waited. I followed the progress of the delivery van on the FedEx follow your delivery webpage, which is no where near as good as that of Amazon. At around 2:35 pm or so the delivery van was at a nearby school that was around a five minute walk from my front door. I expected the delivery any moment so I waited, and waited, and waited. 

At around 3:00 pm I accessed the FedEx delivery page again. The van was now on I 787 and soon it was about ten or fifteen miles away to the east in Rensselaer across the Hudson River from Albany. Needless to say I was annoyed and then I got angry. Why I wondered was the package not delivered when it was so close? Hell, I could have walked down and picked it up from the delivery van.

So, I called FedEx. After three attempts I actually got a human being to speak to. I asked him why the package was not delivered when it was so close? The customer service clerk did not know or at least said he did not know why it had not been delivered. 

My response was to tell FedEx to pay me $75 dollars for my time (two hours waiting plus one hour trying to deal with the fiasco; time is money after all). I told them if they could not do this then I needed to have the package in my hands in one half hour. If they could not do that, and they could not, I asked them to return the item to the sender.

As of this moment, approximately 5:50 pm, the item is still not here. Interestingly, I could no longer access the delivery progress map at 6:07 pm. It disappeared like a “disgraced" Stalinist commissar at just the right moment for FedEx that is. Anyway, I am hoping it is returned as I no longer want it, I no longer want to deal with the incompetence that is FedEx, and I certainly don’t want to clean up FedEx’s mess. I informed Wonder Book that I requested a return.

The moral of this sad but not unusual tale? Don’t count on FedEx and don't use FedEx. Have a nice corporate happy faced day.

A Critical Ethnology of Social Media: Musings on the Mormon Stories Podcast

 

I, a “Gentile”. a “never Mormon”, a never will be Mormon or member of any other organised religion (though I like silent Quakerism and primitive Buddhism), like to dip my toes into the waters of the Mormon Stories podcast (and other LDS social media casts) on YouTube now and again. After all, I have been a student of Mormonism for some thirty years now and even wrote a book on the history of Mormon Studies, a book published a few years back, a book that is uses Mormonism to explore social and cultural theory. I am typically interested in episodes of the podcast because the show generally deals with interesting topics ranging from Mormon history to Mormon controversies to ethnographies of how I lost my Mormon (or other religious) testimony even if I am not interested in all of these issues equally.

The show, which began in 2005, is hosted by John Dehlin who has a doctorate from Utah State University in clinical and counselling psychology and who has worked in the software development field as well as in the counselling or therapeutic psychology field. Dehlin, who was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 2015 because of his very public explorations of Mormon faith crises and his criticisms of Church policies including its position on the LBGTQ community, is, to some extent, the Dick Cavett of the Mormon podcast world if Cavett was a therapeutic psychologist. That, the therapeutic approach, is the both the plus of the show—Dehlin knows how to ask questions sometimes probing questions in a friendly and nom-threatening sort of way—and the negative of the show—Dehlin seems to have limited knowledge of the approach other social science disciplines including history take to religious groups, organisations, and bureaucracies.

Dehlin's limited knowledge of other social scientific approaches to religious organisations becomes particularly apparent to the educated viewer with a high degree of social science cultural capital when he talks about “cults” on his show. The most developed typology of religious organisations is that which has evolved in the academic discipline of sociology. Contemporary sociology, thanks to scholars like Max Weber and others like Rodney Stark (someone who has extensively studied Mormonism) and William Bainbridge, has a four fold typology of religious organisations: church, denomination, sect, and cult, a typology that is broader and more comparative than the use of Christian oriented religious terminology would at first seem. In this typology a church is a religious group, institution, organisation, or bureaucracy that dominates its religious environment (think Mormonism in Utah, Orthodox Christianity in Tsarist Russia, or Hinduism in India); a denomination is a religious group, institution, organisation, or bureaucracy that coexists with others in a religious environment without an official theocratic religious organisation or bureaucracy (think religious groups in the United States); a sect is a break-off from a church or a denomination (think Baptists in Britain); and a cult is a new religious group emanating generally from a charismatic figure (think Mormonism, Islam, the Bahai Faith, or Buddhism) or an old religious organisation in a new hostile cultural environment (think Buddhism in the US in the 19th century).

For Dehlin (and many of his fellow travellers), on the other hand, a cult is a high demand religion and for Dehlin high demand religions are sometimes if not often if not generally abusive whether this high demand religion is the Mormon faith, Scientology, Christian fundamentalism, or the Two by Twos, the subject of a recent podcast on Mormon Stories. The problem with this definition, one closer to a sensationalistic journalistic one rather than the sociological one, is that it can be if not inherently is normative. It is grounded in a notion that some religious organisations are normal and thus can be or are healthy while others, the deviant ones, are unhealthy and hazardous to human physical and mental health. Additionally, such a definition is grounded in organic structural functionalism. It assumes that what is normal or should be normal in individuals is normal or should be normal in organisations. As such, it is ahistorical and aethnographic if not anti-ethnographic in that it assumes that normal is the same in every time and in every place. It, in other words, ignores the empirical fact of cultural relativism, that normal and deviant have changed over time and across space. It turns some forms of religions into normal forms and other into abnormal, psychopathic, sociopathic abnormal forms ignoring the fact that all forms of organised religion share a culture that is ultimately grounded in fictions. Whether these fictions are “good" is an open question. I give you clearly empirically challenged virulent White nationalist Christianity in the US and theocratic inquisitions. It creates a normal religion that becomes, for the therapeutically or normatively oriented, a model of a good faith, a good theocratic faith. Whether theocratic faiths are ever fully “good” is an open question. Finally, it makes religion something other than a reflection of human beings who created them and who are themselves deeply fallible making organisations, which can take on a life of their own in time, fetishised, in the sociological sense, forms.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not arguing that religion or any other social or cultural phenomenon is not potentially hazardous and hazardous to human health. Clearly human theocratic and human authoritarian religion and human wars, for instance, have been hazardous to human health, mental and physical, across time and space, the emphasis on human here. I am simply arguing that one cannot argue that one religious organisation is normal and others are not without grounding that perception in empirical reality first. I am arguing that before one can engage in normative analysis, theologising or social ethical analysis if you will, about religion that analysis must first be grounded in description, in this case it must be grounded in the sociological and historical typology of religious organisations. That is something Dehlin repeatedly does not do. 

Another blind spot Dehlin has concerns power. Max Weber, of course, delineated three forms of power: charismatic power, the power grounded in a charismatic individual like Joseph Smith, an individual who was or is often regarded as having a special relationship with the divine, however the divine is defined; patrimonial/patriarchal power, power grounded in kinship and kingship, in tradition, in other words; and rational bureaucratic power, power grounded, in other words, in one's position in a modern and postmodern bureaucracy. As should be clear, the first form of power has often been and often is central to new religious movements which are often if not generally highly demanding when they begin. Over time such religions, if they survive, which is not likely, develop into organisations, organisations grounded in and on patrimonial/patriarchal forms of power and bureaucratic forms of power.

Again don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy the Mormon Stories podcasts hosted by John Dehlin and I like that podcasts like Mormon Stories bring a critical edge to the conversation about religion, one that helps many escape what they feel are dangerous religious cages. I simply wish the show was grounded in a more descriptive conception of religious organisations and power than a normative and less interrogated one. Here’s hoping that one day...

The ThriftBooks Kiada That Never Ends

As a book lover who is getting older and more infirm thanks to the years but who continues to buy books though I shouldn’t I have bought books from ThriftBooks among other booksellers on occasion. My problem with ThriftBooks, a problem of longstanding though they have gotten better with this, is the fact that too often ThriftBooks sends you an ex-library book that isn’t listed as ex-library. During one week, for example, I received three books that were not listed as ex-lib but were. ThriftBooks does refund you for their mistake, which is great, but that doesn’t make receiving an ex-lib book that isn’t listed as ex-lib any less annoying.  

Because of this annoyance I decided to pause my ThriftBooks account and think about whether I wanted to buy books from them in the future. After several months wrote ThriftBooks asking them to restore my account and wrote them at the email they suggested in order to do this. No answer. I wrote again. No response. I wrote yet again. Nothing. 

So, given that restoring my account didn’t seem to be in the cards I wrote ThriftBooks asking them to delete my account entirely so I could either avoid ThriftBooks in the future or create a new account in order to buy books from them. I was unable to use my email since ThriftBooks still had my email in the system and as you know you cannot create new accounts with the same email if it is still in the system.

ThriftBooks finally responded to my email sending me a link to request that my account be deleted. The email I received suggested that if ThriftBooks did not want to delete my account they did not have to. This irked me even more. All I should have to do is tell them to delete my account and voila it is deleted by ThriftBooks tech nerds. I don’t know whether they finally deleted my information but what I do know is that I cannot use my email, the email in the ThriftBooks system, to even buy books as a guest from this corporation. I suspect that petty and adolescent ThriftBooks has banned my email entirely. Oh well, it is kind of nice to have one’s email cleansed.

 

The CVS Kiada…Again

 

Bureaucratic bullshit, as anyone alive and well or unwell in the twenty-first century knows, never ends. Again and again I have had to deal with bureaucratic bs. I thought with retirement such bullshit would be reduced but no, it has actually increased.

This month the bureaucratic bullshit I have had to deal with involves CVS, again, and a prescription for Pregabalin which I take for Fibromyalgia. It is always wonderful to deal with bureaucratic bs and incompetence when one doesn’t feel well but as I said bureaucratic bullshit never ends and it seems to increase with increasing age and infirmity.

I recently picked up my second prescription for Pregabalin and got a hand out saying I could contact Medicare to see if they would cover this. So, I contacted Medicare. They told me to contract my prescription insurance plan. So, I contacted Silver Script, a division of CVS, which covers my prescriptions under the Empire Plan. I am a retired New York state employee you see. They told me Pregabalin was covered and informed me CVS Delmar, where I now get my medicines, entered the incorrect DEA number.

So, I contacted CVS Delmar. When a female, a female technician I later learned, returned my call I told her what Silver Script told me. She told me no mistake was made and hung up on me. Now that's customer service! So, I called my doctor and talked to his nurse. She told me she could not fix the mistake but would call CVS Delmar to see what she could do.

In the meantime I called CVS Delmar again. The first call back ended in failure when I answered my phone no one was on the other end. So, I called CVS again and was immediately sent to a pharmacist. He found the mistake—a mistake complicated by the fact that my doctor did not submit the prescription but someone presumably under him whose DEA number was not acceptable—and corrected it. He could only, however, correct the mistake for the second time that I picked up the prescription. I now have a refund coming for my second prescription pickup from CVS but not the first. 

So, I called Silver Script again and got information on how I can get a refund for the first prescription pickup. I have to, of course, fill out a form and attach a sales receipt which I can apparently get from CVS Delmar. Here’s hoping.

All this bureaucratic bullshit would not have occurred if the Tech at CVS Delmar had simply investigated other options or contacted my doctor. But hey, what would life be if one didn’t have to do something one should never should have had to do in the first place? 

Postscript: Well they finally—the doctor, CVS, CVS Silver Script—got it figured out. I got a refund for my second Pregabalin fill. Instead of paying $21 dollars I am paying $2. The only way I can get a refund for the first fill of the drug, however, is more complicated. Isn’t this always the case with corporate bureaucracies? I had to contact Silver Script, a CVS department in CVS Caremark, and ask for a refund form and I had to go to CVS Delmar to get a copy of my payment slip because I need to send that in with the refund form. Now all I have to do is wait for the other branch of CVS to send me the form, fill it in, send it back (ain’t it wonderful I have to pay for petrol and postage to get a refund for something I should have never been charged that much for in the first place?) and return it and, of course, wait again for the refund to come. Isn’t corporate capitalism wonderful?

The Books of My Life: What Would Buffy Do?

 

Jana Riess’s What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) has one significant advantage over many other books and articles written about Joss Whedon’s television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer; it focuses on the existentialism and consequent social ethics that is at the heart of this television series. Unlike many academic books on the show, which far too often take a sociological approach, but a sociological approach sans empirical evidence beyond the text to back up their arguments (take a moment to take that in), What Would Buffy Do?, as its title suggests, is, like Buffy itself, is a hybrid. 

On one level What Would Buffy Do? is part analysis. It explores, for instance, the themes at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer particularly its existentialist and mythological dimensions. On another level the book is part self-help manual. It is a guide to how Buffy can help us humans living in twenty first century core nations get through the existential and meaning difficulties associated with everyday life and our everyday life courses. Speaking of growing up and to digress for a moment, Buffy is a bildungsroman so growing up is the key symbol around which all other existential and ethical symbols revolve including mercy, forgiveness, and redemption.

Among the things Buffy explores are, Riess implies, things that every one, at least in complex core nation societies should think about (though many don’t deal with then consciously and intellectually, at some or any points in their life courses) are questions of identity (who am I?) and questions of purpose (why am I here?), all issues religion and spirituality have dealt with for centuries if not always or at all (primitive Buddhism with its emphasis on psychology and social psychology may be the exception here) from the existentialist perspective Buffy does. In the course of her book Riess focuses on what Buffy can teach us about how our emotions, our humour, our friendships, those who mentor us, our ability to cooperate, the choices we make, and the power of forgiveness we have all of which can help us, as we move through our life courses. All of these can help us, Riess argues, deal with the reality of evil both internally and externally, the ambiguities of life, including the fact that good and evil are not always cut and dry, the reality of death (what do we want our legacies to be), and our constant struggle for redemption (redemption is, as Buffy teaches, not linear but cyclical).

Riess’s book does an excellent job of exploring the existentialism and consequent social ethics at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel though I do have a few quibbles with Riess’s terminology and approach. It is understandable that Riess, a progressive Mormon, prefers to use the term “spiritual” to explore the meaning dimensions of Buffy. I, however, not being religious in the conventional sense, prefer to use the term mythology since I, a social and cultural constructionist, don’t fetishise either religion or spirituality. Buffy, which has a mythological dimension as Douglas Kellner notes, does, like all mythologies, including those of ancient Greece and the ancient Near East, provide us answers to the questions of who am I and why am I here. As an existentialist myself—a term Riess interestingly avoids using in her book though the creator of Buffy Joss Whedon has emphasised it—I find the answers Buffy provides (though not everyone gets the same social ethical answers from Buffy as reaction videos on YouTube show thanks to economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts) much more compelling than that of virtually all organised forms of religion today (though I do admire aspects of Buddhism, Quakerism, Anglicanism, and progressive Judaism).

The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or sub-discipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.