Life as Crisis Management: The Costco Kiada (aka, the Costco Muck-up)

 

I recently decided to join the Costco Club. I did it for several reasons. First, Costco is coming to where I live and I wanted to have a membership before it opens. Second, Costco had a bed I wanted, a bed brand the New York Times’s Wirecutter liked, and I needed a new twin instead of a full bed for myself. Third, if you joined and used a code you got a $45 dollar credit toward future purchases.

Anyway, I ordered the bed, got it, put it on my new Zinus bed frame and liked it (it is quite comfortable) and liked the experience I had with Costco. So I decided to use my $45 dollar credit and order two items amounting to over $800 dollars. 

I looked forward to receiving these items then I learned there was a problem. My order was cancelled. It took me 40 minutes with the chat associates to learn why. That, by the way, was an experience in and of itself. The first associate was going to transfer me to his supervisor but transferred me instead to a private home telephone number. The person who answered was not amused. The second associate eventually said that my shipping and billing addresses were different and that was why the order was cancelled. She said the latter had the address and the apartment number on the same line while the former had the exact same address with the apartment number on a second line instead. How horrible! No wonder the computer could not make sense of it. Computers we should always remember, thanks to their literalism, cannot see that two same addresses with a slight variation are the same.

So, I went to change my addresses. To go back a bit I do recall that when I ordered the two items that were cancelled that I noticed that the shipping address, according to the Costco website had a New England zip code. That was odd since I did not live in New England and Costco had sent my bed to the right address and billed the order to the correct credit card. So, I changed my shipping address before I ordered. When I went back to look at the addresses again after my forty minute chat and call with Costco customer service agents, I found that both the shipping and the billing were exactly the same. Still I changed them to the same address Costco, using USPS data no doubt, suggested. Will it work? Who knows.

Will I be ordering from Costco again? I don’t know. Possibly not. I can get the items I wanted locally and will likely do so within a few months. At least then I won’t have to screw around with stupid computers and stupid websites not to mention customer service agents.

Postscript: So, I chatted with a Costco representative to try to ascertain if my billing and shipping addresses were the same. This turned out, not surprisingly, to be Kafkaesque. Chat sent me to member services on the phone. Member services sent me to online. Online sent me to orders. All in all I spent an hour on the phone being passed from one customer service person to another who told me they could not help but someone else could. Could that someone else help me? Perhaps. Only time and ordering something will tell. Stay tuned.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

 

Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films before, the former just a few weeks ago also on the Movie channel (with blurring of nudity and cleansing of language, both of which one can easily figure out), the latter fifty years ago with my dear friend Duane Stigen at a cinema in Middletown itself, Muncie, Indiana. Both Duane and I were students at Ball State University at the time.

My initial reaction to Prime Cut, a film directed by Michael Ritchie, was that I liked it. I am a dark comedy or black comedy kind of guy after all and Prime Cut is definitely a dark comedy. Prime Cut is a film which reflects American films increasing adventurousness in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In fact, I am still amazed and stunned that a film this dark could have been made in the United States even outside of Hollywood, as this film was. 

Christ Petit, who did the entry for the Prime Cut in the Time Out Film Guide, describes the film, and rightly so, as a mash up of pulp gangster fiction and fairy tale with Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, playing the white knight to Gene Hackman’s Mary Ann, the dark knight. It is a noirish fairy tale which reveals the darkness at the heart of America including middle America. The film is set in Kansas City and rural Kansas where Mary Ann's meat packing plant is. Mary Ann is not only selling cattle and pig meat at his meat factory. He is also selling female flesh to the rich. (Hello Jeffrey Epstein). There is no difference between selling cattle and pigs and female flesh, female commodities raised from youth in nearby orphanages, Mary Ann tells Devlin when hit man Devlin raises moral questions about what Mary Ann is doing.

Devlin and his fully armed crew, have been sent by his bosses—gangster capitalists—from Chicago to collect the dues ($500 grand) Mary Ann owes the Company. One of his first acts (Devlin as White Knight) after arriving at Mary Ann’s meat plant—he arrives as the sale of female flesh is in progress—is to save Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who asks for his help, from the clutches of Mary Ann, his hired gun hands, and the rich sellers checking out the female flesh for sale in the pens (Mary Ann as Black Knight). By the way, all the female flesh for sale in the pens, it appears, are named after flowers (a reference to their soon to be deflowering after purchase?).

Chris Petit also notes in his entry in the Time Out Film Guide that a couple of set pieces in Prime Cut mirror the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his North by Northwest (1959), something that is certainly intentional. The first finds Devlin and his crew running for their lives through a busy all-American fair complete with the Lawrence, Kansas marching band and a mannequin cow filled with milk which can be put into cups by pressing on the simulated teat of the cow. The second finds Devlin and Poppy running for their lives as a terrifying and horrifying combine bears down on them. Both set pieces point up the fact that the White All-American types who are at the county fair are blissfully ignorant about not only what is happening at the fair but are largely blissfully ignorant about the darkness—the violence, the misogyny, the imperialism, the collateral damage, the forced prostitution, the heroin—at the heart of the US and, thanks to the US, around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

The second film, End of the Game (Der Richter und sein Henten), which was directed by Maximilian Schell and written by Frederich Durrenmatt and Schell, I did not like when I first saw it. In fact, I hated the film. I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time. Looking back on it, one has to take my “evaluation” of the film with a very large grain of salt. There were a lot of things in the film which went right by my head. I was, after all, only a sophomore in college and most of the movies I had seen up to that point were mainstream Hollywood films. I had yet to see films made in Europe or Japan, though that would soon would thanks to my move to Indiana University, and I had yet to take film classes which introduced me to the workings of narrative in film, mise-en-scene in film, the use of music in film, editing in film, and the various styles of acting in film. That too would soon change thanks to film course offerings at IU.

Between 1976, when I first saw End of the Game, and 2026, when I saw it for the second time, I had changed a lot. I was, thanks to the cultural capital that comes with age, education, and experience, better able to get the references, some satirical, in the film, a detective movie that explores the darkness at the heart of German Switzerland. I was also able grasp and to better appreciate the several styles of acting in the film, the way the film was cut, the films limited Brechtianism, and the films' dark humour in the film. For all these reasons and more I quite liked End of the Game on second viewing.

I guess the moral of the story is that we humans can, though we often don't, change. Some of this change comes from growing up and opening ourselves up to learning. Thank the lord Beezus for universities, teachers, and books. Amen.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Southernbelle Reacts Reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theory of human devolution, the notion that humans are deeply flawed, that humans have devolved rather than evolved or that devolution and evolution occur simultaneously in the human community has been around for a long time. One can, of course, trace aspects of it back to the Christian notion that Adam and Eve fell into original sin when Eve, in the second mythic tale of creation in the Tanakh, offered the willing Adam a bite from the proverbial apple which made both of them realise they were naked (note that this has, in actuality, no relation to sex though later puritanical Christians did tie original sin to sex at least before marriage). Apparently, god preferred to keep his human creations innocent and naive kind of like the gatekeepers of 1950s and 1960s American television who made the presence of toilets and talk of pregnancy, at least in English, verboten (apparently they did not understand Spanish as in "Lucy in Enceinte"). Christian Calvinism, of course, really picked up and ran with the notion of original sin. For hardcore Calvinism humans were and are, to put it nicely, fallible.

In the nineteenth century, sources tell us, an era when science was deeply wedded to a unilinear and progressive notion of evolution, science got into the devolution game as well. In 1857, for example, the French physician Benedict Morel argued that drug and alcohol use could lead to social degeneration or devolution in the offspring of those taking drugs and alcohol. In 1880 English zoologist Ray Lankester argued in his book Degeneration that degeneration or devolution was one of three paths Darwinian evolution might take. In 1909 the Baden born American ichthyologist Carl Eigenmann, who taught at my alma mater Indiana University and for whom a hall of accommodation for graduate students is named, argued that devolution occurred amongst those species who took to living in caves.

Devolution was also, according to sources, applied to human beings during these years by some. Thuringian physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon opined that races of humanity could devolve from higher forms into primitive forms. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were White and that all other races of man,who came from them, other than the Caucasian race, of course, had devolved thanks to environmental factors such as too much or too little sun and poor and poorer diets. Leclerc like Blumenbach, believed in the devolution of species from higher forms due to environment, climate, and diet, while also arguing that such devolution could potentially be reversed. 

The notion of human devolution was also something that interested many writers and musicians from the late eighteenth century on. Jonathan Swift, for example, played with the notion of human devolution in his satirical book Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine of 1895 portrayed a future world in which the human race had devolved into two forms: the Morlocks and Eloi. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story “The Rats in the Wall” starred a group of devoluted humans. Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 satirical short story (satire, of course, is also generally deadly serious as well as being darkly humorous) “The Marching Morons” portrayed a future where dysgenic or anti-social and maladaptive evolutionary pressures led to the rise of massive numbers of morons who a small group of geniuses had to assure did no damage to both others or to themselves. The satirical and parodic Kent, Ohio rock band Devo, who formed in 1973 and who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, made devolution a part of their very name, a name they took in shortened form from a Christian pamphlet on which a devil with the word D-EVOLUTION was portrayed (see their song "Jocko Home", in particular, a song title that comes from the same pamphlet). What was originally a joke, says a source, became much more serious after the murder of four students at Kent State University, which some members of Devo attendted) by the Ohio National Guard and the subsequent realisation by members of the band that responses to that murder—specifically that this murder was not murder—could be explained by a a devoluted human herd clone mentality that functioned automatically in cognitive terms thanks to the disciplining or socialised enforcement (political and ideological correctness).

I mention all of this if briefly and selectively because it seems to me that anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the wasteland that is social media like YouTube must conclude that not only is devolution a general human condition (social media seemingly has replaced American television as the vast wasteland, as the even vaster wasteland) but that with each new group of reactors to, for example, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer human devolution seems to be increasing compared to earlier crops of reactors, reactors (each social media generation a degeneration?) like SoFie REacts, The Lexie Crowd, and Domi.e all of whom were all slightly above average with SoFie being the most above average. (The same thing, by the way, holds true for reactors to Firefly, Sherlock, and Doctor Who).

Perhaps the poster child for this further devolution of what is already devolved is Southernbelle Racts. I had seen and heard Southernbelle Reacts reactions before she began to react to Buffy recently. I had perused her reactions to a later Joss Whedon created television show Firefly. In Southernbelle Reacts reactions to Firefly I noticed what seems to be her modus operandi: she gabs and gabs over each episode of Firefly she reacts to missing important plot and character points in the process. In her reactions to Buffy Southernbelle Reacts has compounded this attention deficit disorder (talking rapidly over television shows that require attention because they are unfolding texts (unattending, of course, is a common malady among YouTube reactors though often not to the degree it is with SoBelle) who even misses the rather obvious clues laid down about Angel from episode one to seven, season one...wow) with the questionable assumption that Buffy is a show for teens and tweens, an assumption grounded in nothing more than, presumably, the name of the show and/or the television channel it was on (initially the WB, later UPN). It is certainly not grounded in research either on what the author of the series said. (For Whedon, by the way, the title of the show was both parodic and satirical and explanatory. Nor was it based on data research, research shows that in the middle of the shows run the average age of the Buffy watcher was 27 or wandering why so many academics had written about Buffy (who are hardly tweens or teens. (Research, by the way is not a strong point for most of the reactors to Buffy though some do have more cultural capital to draw on than others). One would think that after watching Firefly Southernbelle Reacts would make the connection that Whedon shows are not only unfolding texts but are deadly serious amidst all the fun and tonal play and that they share several common themes (e.g., existentialism, chosen families). One wonders if she even realises that Whedon was deeply involved in both shows.

Southernbelle Reacts may be amongst the worst, in attention deficit terms and cultural capital terms, of the new crop of Buffy reactors. If we delineate three mediocre ideal types—mediocre highbrow, mediocre middlebrow, and mediocre lowbrow or mediocre plus, mediocre in between, and mediocre negative (SoFie Reacts is above mediocre but below excellent for comparative purposes)—one can easily argue that Watch This! With Kevin and Joe are mediocre highbrow or plus though their reactions to Buffy aren't as incisive as their reactions to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a thriller that is in their wheelhouse since they appear to be fans of the James Bond films. North by Northwest, of course, is a Bond film before Bond films and Kevin and Joe view it exclusively in those terms and actually do a good job of talking about each scene of the movie. Chance's House of Horror, Shadowcat (a Canadian), and Nythical Reacts are decent in a mediocre middlebrow or mediocre in between sort of way. RolyPolyOllie Reactions, JayPerView, and JerBear Reacts are mediocre lowbrow or negative. Anna Alexander and 2 Girls 1 Episode, both of whom are below the gentleman's C average, and rival Southernbelle Reacts in attention deficit. Like her they also try desperately, too desperately, to be witty but are clearly unable to do so (perhaps proving in the process that the English are often right about Americans and wit) and lack the cultural capital in which to analyse the show in intellectual and scholarly terms. Tyler Alexander, who does have a degree if cultural capital thanks to his days studying creative writing at the University of Hull, is in a politically and ideologically correct world all his own. He makes even me, who makes use of critical theory regularly, cringe at his use of crystal ball textualist representational theories of writing and filmmaking.

I can hear the Beatles's song "You Never Give Me Your Money" as I type. How apropos when thinking about social media in this everybody wants to be a star postmodernist age.

Musings on Capitalist Free Enterprise...Again...

 

The profitic prophets of free enterprise capitalism, cheerleaders and demagogues that they inherently are, like to claim that nobody does it better than free enterprise capitalism. Every month, however, free enterprise capitalism reminds me that bullshit, including capitalist free enterprise bullshit, to often makes the world go round.

This month I was reminded that much of the rhetoric of capitalist demagoguery is bullshit in a couple of instances. First let’s talk garbage. Our garbage and recycling is picked up by the private company County Waste and Recycling on Monday morning's thanks to a deal our landlord cut with this company. They don’t, however, always pick up our garbage and recycling on time. This week they picked up the garbage. The recycling, however, remains sitting on Caroline waiting for them to pick,. As I type it is Thursday, four days after it is supposed to be collected, and there is no sign of County Waste and Recyclling.

Now let’s talk satellite digital television. As I have said on these “pages” previously I have all sorts of problems with digital television. I live on a busy street and when a car goes by at speed (30 mph is the speed limit) my over the air signal disappears for a few seconds and, on rarer occasions, for longer. That is not the only problem with my over the air digital signal, however. The last couple of weeks the signal has disappeared twice on the Minnesota based Hubbard Broadcasting owned Albany broadcaster WNYT's sub-channels 51.2, 51.3, and 51.4 right in the middle of the movie on the Movies channel which, to say the least, rather annoying. Is it the satellite going out? Or is it something else? Presumably WNYT knows.

The Books of My Life: Racism, Sexism, and the University

 

In June of 1992 twelve graduate students in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver sent an anonymous letter to the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC accusing several White male professors in the Department of being racist and sexist. A few months later in November of 1993 six more students joined the chorus of voices claiming that UBC’s Political Science department was sexist and racist. 

Instead of investigating these accusations internally through UBC’s administrative officers tasked with investigating harassment and multiculturalism or by the recently appointed vice-president of Equity, an outsider was tasked with investigating the accusations, the Vancouver lawyer Joan McEwen. The McEwen report, which was finally issued in 1995, found the accusations of the graduate students credible. Even the president of UBC, David W. Strangway, believed the accusations though most of the administrators at UBC did what university administrators usually do, they sat with one leg on one side of the fence and the other on the other side. What the administrative bureaucrats at UBC did do was mandate that no further graduate students would be admitted to the Department of Political Science for a time. 

UBC sociologist Patricia Marchak in her analytical and ethnographic study of this battle in the culture wars being fought all across the English settler society world, finds the conclusions of the McEwen Report less than credible in her book Racism, Sexism, and the University: The Political Science Affair at the University of British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). To Marchak, who was the Dean of Arts in the Faculty of the Arts when the affair began, the evidence, in the McEwen Report was not only anaemic. It was grounded in ideological correctness. In fact, according to Marchak, it was McEwen, who introduced racism and sexism into the report by repeatedly using terms like “white”, “female”, and “Jewish" in her final report, a report that sounds from its description more like a prosecutorial brief than an investigation of the facts of the case.

While racism and sexism seemed to be, on the surface, what the UBC Political Science affair was about Marchak argues that this battle in a long standing culture war was really about power. It was about, Marchak argues, who had the power to determine the Political Science curriculum at UBC, who had the power within the hierarchical Political Science Department at UBC, whether the Political Science Department at UBC would be one in which truth grounded in empirical evidence was pursued or good causes were promoted, and whether academic freedom and Enlightenment rationality (empirical facts and empirical context as evidence) or postmodern relativism (perceptions as facts) would prevail in the UBC Department of Political Science. As Marchak notes, this battle for the soul of the university was hardly singular to UBC or Canada. There were battles like this in other universities across the English settler society world in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US, where Trump and his comrades are trying to remake universities and colleges in their own political and ideological correct image.

In 1995 the dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies ended the ban on the admission of graduate students to the Department of Political Science. In 1998 then UBC president Martha Piper apologised for how UBC’s administrative bureaucrats had treated Department of Political Science during the affair (these apologies seem to always come after time has passed and the damage is already done, don't they?). As is so often the case with these after the fact apologies, however, it could not erase memories of the damage caused by vigilante like attacks on the Department between 1992 and 1995. 

I enjoyed Racism, Sexism, and the University quite a lot. Marchak was spot on about the impact of consumer capitalism with its mantra that the customer is always right on North American universities (one of the original sins of the modern North American university). I personally experienced this culture of consumer feelings when I received a visit from the college lawyer and the college equity officer at the college in which I worked when one student in a class of 34 complained about a joke i told which apparently offended her or him. She is right about the impact of managerial corporate capitalism with its mantra that professionals, well non-academic professionals, know best how to run the institutions of higher education (another of the original sins of the modern North American university). She is spot on in her contention that the anti-hierarchal attitudes of postmoderns undermines the notion of professionalism and professional training and its accumulated cultural capital and that the cultural war between moderns and postmoderns is a battle for power in the North American university. She is spot on that illiberal intolerance can be found among many postmodernist sects. The radical right hardly has a monopoly on illiberalism. She is right that many varieties of postmodernism have a radical democratic aspect to them. This makes some postmoderns close cousins to religious fundamentalism with its ideology of every man a Bible interpreter regardless of educational level and cultural capital accrued. She is spot on about the need for a middle way, a middle way that respects the seeking after truth, natural justice or due process, and merit (even if this is unequally distributed for class, race, and gender reasons), and respect and equity for all.

Finally, I do agree with Max Weber that value, what someone values, does impact what academics and fan boys and girls study but that does not mean that we have to throw out the scientific method with its dispassion with the everything is about power ideologically correct water. One can and should be trained in the fine art of dispassionate analysis grounded in an understanding that every human thing is grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities, even if many of those realities are nothing more than social and cultural constructs.