Life as Crisis Management: The TracFone Kiada...

As all of you out there in reality land know, dealing with bureaucracies of any type, economic, governmental, educational, or cultural, can be a Kafkaesque experience and a Voinovichian challenge. I seem to get these Kafkaesque or Voinovichian challenges several times a year. Some backstory first: I get cell phone service from TracFone. Unfortunately, I have had problems with this company almost since I got their one-year plan several years ago. Recently, I had occasion to contact the TracFone corporation about several problems I was having with TracFone and to get to responses to several problems I was having with the company.

Here were my questions. Question: When will the log in to the TracFone website work consistently? I have tried to log in four times in the last two months and each time I been met with a website that malfunctions when I can actually get in it, which is only occasionally? Answer: We are working on it. Question: When I can actually get into my TracFone account online there are no minutes listed in my account. The only thing I find in my account is my phone number under “Devices Active” and my data minutes. As I don't have any data minutes, I don't need to know how many data minutes I don't have because I already know that I don't have any. Now that is absurdist, Kafkaesque, and Voinovichian ain't it? Answer: Silence. Question: Why do I not have my total minutes listed on my flip phone? I had to switch to a flip phone because of my arthritis and had to have the minutes moved over to the new phone from the old. On my old phone the minutes I had appeared on the time/date/signal etc. page. Answer: In a 25 March telephone conversation I was finally told that now I have a smart phone and smart phones don't list the minutes you have. TracFone could have simply told me this answer to this query via an email or via Facebook. Question: Do I pay for these calls for help to TracFone? Answer: A rousing vampire capitalist yes. Skank and slag capitalists like TracFone appear to want to have their cake and eat it to leaving the customer with not even any crumbs in the process.

I was given the gift of a telephone conversation with an actual TracFone representative once on 25 March. Here is what happened: The customer service operative told me to log in to my account on the TracFone website. After I logged in the rep asked me for my userID. I gave it to him. Then the information that was there, including my phone number and my data minutes, the data minutes that are none, suddenly vanished like a Soviet commissar living in the age of Stalin. Initially there was no change in the status of my website after this encounter. That changed, however, at 6 pm, 25 March when I was suddenly and almost magically able to log into my account. Once I got there, however, there was still no information about how many minutes of telephone talking time I have on my phone. By 9 pm on the same day, I couldn’t get in my account once again. I can hear you moan as I type dear Franz and Vladimir!

The TracFone representative did offer alternatives both of which I was already familiar with and both of which were not really viable options for me. First, he informed me that I could text for information about my minutes something physically impossible for me to do because of muscular skeletal arthritis. That is why I use the computer and try to use the online if awful TracFone website to get into my account. My computer keyboard, after all, is bigger than that of a smart flip phone. Second, he informed me that I could do the app thing. Again, as I told him earlier, I can’t do that given the small keyboard size of the flip phone. I use the flip phone exclusively to call people and it suits that purpose well, much better than the micro phone TracFone sent me after they upgraded everyone to 4G.

I can't end this post without briefly commenting on the TracFone telephone help line. One of the things you get when you call for help is the formulaic clear your browser history canned message. I have my browser, Firefox, set on automatic clearing or cleansing of all my online history when it is closes so this cliched response was irrelevant in my case. Better yet, once when I requested a call back from TracFone I got an automated “person” who told me I had to wait for the next available operator. During one of these callbacks I had to wait for several minutes and then I got a dial tone that rang fifteen times before it was picked up. Finally, a real human TracFone rep actually answered my callback but almost immediately hung up on me. TracFone's callback, needless to say, was not what I expected. I expected an actual human to call me back.

To end this long and tragicomic tale let me note that because of all the problems I have had with TracFone, that company, it seems to me, has broken its contract with me. As a result, I wrote the Attorney General of my state requesting refund for the 6???? or so minutes I still have in my minutes account. I simply have no interest in continuing with a corporation as incompetent as TracFone and prefer to seek a better alternative, which should not, given all the above, be all that difficult to find. Hell, If I wanted to experience Kafkaesque and Voinovichian incompetence and absurdity, I would rather experience it vicariously while reading Kafka’s masterful short stories and books and Voinovich's masterful satires rather than from a company that has taken incompetent Kafkaism and Voinovicheanism without the humour to new dumbed down "heights".

Musings on the Origins of the American Radical Right...

Though America's radical right likes to think that it has its origins in conservatism that supposed genealogy is simply false. The contemporary American right is not conservative. Conservatism had its origins in the Enlightenment and to modernity. It was a reaction against the liberalism of the Enlightenment. Conservatives set themselves in opposition to bourgeois middle brow culture and society and proletariat low brow culture and society including bourgeois mass capitalism. Real, historically speaking, conservatives were thus opposed to mass capitalism, opposed to middle class or bourgeois political culture, and opposed to middle class mass middle brow or working class low brow culture and the mass individualism or mass narcissism (I, me, mine) of both. They favoured instead a kind of liturgical Christian or manor house like community run by the best and brightest, not surprisingly themselves, that was hierarchicalised on the basis of different degrees of culturedness and civilisedness.

The American modern and postmodern populist right, on the other hand, has its roots in three cultural streams, one before the European revolutionary eras and two others unleashed by the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and mass capitalism. The first stream that fed into the American right wing was the ethnocentric (nativism), conspiracy theory, paranoiac, and inquisitorial culture of theocratic and popular Christianity. One can also, of course, find this stream in the American South's Jim Crow Dixiecrats and the John Birch Society, two of the fathers and mothers of the contemporary American right. The second stream was the populist revolutionary movement that gave virtual free reign to revolutionaries chopping off the heads of aristocrats, putting them on pikes, and making them them eat hay. The third stream that fed into the American right was laissez-faire liberalism, one of the strands of liberalism that arose in the Enlightenment and afterwards. Paradoxically, this laissez-faire capitalist stream merged with right wing mass populism to produce a populist movement that advocated for oligarchic rights. All of these streams were inherently manichean, inherently intolerant (our way or, at best, the highway), inherently rageoholic, and inherently intellectually anti-intellectual. All of these cultural phenomena seem to have an elective affinity for each other and seem to be the glue that holds the intolerant, raging, and manichean American radical right together.

The terms "conservative" and "conservatism" have, of course, a history just like everything else. With the triumph of liberalism and modernity "conservative" was eventually coopted by laissez-faire liberals as a term for themselves, a term which also served to binarily mark them off from social or reformist liberals often in patented foucauldian fashion. The term and the social movement has now, in turn, been coopted by the looney radical right which consists of paranoids, the deluded, intolerant politically and ideologically correct theocrats, secular and religious, and adolescent rageoholics.

It is, of course, these characteristics--paranoia, delusion, political and ideological correctness, and the rageoholism of White men--which distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers. However, there are other characteristics that distinguish classic Conservatives from modern and postmodern right wingers as well. Right wingers typically can't engage in empirical discussion. Right wingers typically behave like male seventh graders during recess in conversation. Right wingers typically delude themselves that they are omniscient and that their cult totem is the messiah or a messiah. Right wingers typically have no sense of real history. Right wingers typically live in a simplistic manichean world with Dudley Doright and Boris and Natasha Badonov heroes and villians. Gee, they sound a lot like Dixiecrats and revved up WWE fans don't they? Anyway, right wingers typically tick all of these boxes, Classic conservatives do not tick any save perhaps one.

Further Reading:
Daniel Bell (ed.) The Radical Right
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Joseph Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism

Musings on the "Working" of the Right Wing "Mind"

I really find the exploration of how the contemporary American right wing mind "functions" fascinating. Of course, the place one has to start if one wants to understand how the right wing "mind" "works" is with its binarism.

American right wingers conceptualise the world, thanks to their Christian cultural heritage, in terms of boxes. They imagine that there is one box for them and another box for the other. As a consequence, right wingers seem incapable of understanding reality and the reality of human complexity. The seem incapable, in other words, of grasping that life is more a spectrum or continuum than two little binary boxes.

American right wingers are also manichean. They see themselves as saints and everyone else as profane sinners if not demons. They see themselves as sacred victims and everyone else as those evil nasty blue meanies who persecute them and victimise them.

As a consequence America's right wingers can only put those who disagree with them, even those who are citizens of the same nation-state they are, in the other box, in the bad guy box, in the demon box. They perceive the world as a theatre that is hosting a cosmic action-adventure or wild west drama in which they are the good guys in the white hats and every one else is one of those dastardly Boris and Natasha Badonov baddies in the black hats. Life, for them has become, as it was for the equally paranoid, conspiracy theory laden, and apocalyptic and eschatological early Christians, a battle between good and evil. For right wingers, life is an action adventure horror movie or TV show which bears, like film and TV, only a limited relation to reality.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "and so it goes".

 

The Books of My Life: Religion in the Cinema

 

Ivan Butler's Religion in the Cinema (London: Zwemmer and New York: Barnes, 1969), which should have been titled Christianity and Anti-Christianity in the Cinema, is an early film studies attempt to explore the relationship between Christianity and, for the most part, though Butler takes brief excursions to Mexico and Brasil largely for aesthetic reasons, European and American cinema. In eleven chapters Butler explores the impact of Bible stories such as the Delilah and Samson tale and the Moses story; Christian figures such as nuns, monks, priests, saints, preachers, mystics, and sinners; Christian derived allegories and parables, Christian settings, Christian demonic figures; and comedy and satire on the cinema.

Butler's monograph provides a useful jumping off spot for anyone interested in the relationship between Christianity and the cinema thanks to its typological and historical approach. However, Its mix of journalistic film criticism and film history is a bit too much grounded in aesthetics for my taste, however, though one has to, I suppose select films on some basis and whether aesthetics is superior to popularity is an open question. Like so many scholarly books and monographs on the cinema it is overlong. It's selective encyclopedic form would come off better, I think, in article form rather than monograph form. While informative Butler's short book is now dated and anemic in its study of religous horror films like The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976), films of possession and the coming of the Beast that have become ever more prominent and popular in the post-new new Hollywood. After reading Butler's monograph I am still not sure whether religion in the cinema constitutes a genre, a tone, a set of images, specific settings, or all of the above.

Musings on Right Wing Delusions, Hallucinations, and Misuse of History

There are a lot of things about the contemporary American right, which has its origins in the wacko elite and popular Christian conspirary theories, many of them involving Jews, since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire rather than in anti-Enlightenment conservatism, that are intriguing. One of the things about the radical right I find most interesting is the concerted use by some of the Republican faithful of the Dixiecrats to tar and feather, in an act of deflection, the Democratic Party with the stain of racism.

Such a populist strategy, while certainly demagogically effective with respect to the faithful, is, of course, ahistorical not to mention bizarre. While it is true that the Dixiecrats, the Southern Democrats that dominated the American South, was one of the fractions of the Democratic Party between 1877 and the 1980s and it is true that most Dixiecrats, including its moderate faction, was tied to Jim Crow, it is not true that the contemporary Democratic Party has, as one of its fractions, the Dixiecrats. The Democrats who dominate Austin, Dallas, and El Paso, Texas are not contemporary Dixiecrats. Rather they are an embodiment of the Democratic Party that emerged in the wake of Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, Northern Democrats, and moderate and liberal Republicans passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those actions, as LBJ told Bill Moyers it would, crippled the Democratic Party in the South where Dixiecrats reacted angilly to the civil rights activism of the Democratic Party and transformed the Democratic Party as a result into a party of Blacks, educated Whites, Hispanics, and Asians.

The Dixiecrats, of course, did not disappear nor were they raptured. Where they went was to the Republican Party, a party that became the heir of the Dixiecrats and the John Birchers after the mid-1970s. The shift from Dixiecrat to Republican took several forms. The shift geographically from Dixiecrats to DixieBirchPublicans was political and was stimulated by Democrat President Harry Truman integration of the military and LBJ and his allies passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965 respectively. It was political and demographic. Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, for instance, who ran against Truman because of his desegregation of the military, became a Republican in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. It was cultural. Republicans came, thanks to their recognition of the effectiveness of Dixiecrat George Wallace's rhetoric in the Midwest and even the Northeast, to adopt the discourse of Dixie populist ragoholism. Republican President Richard Nixon and Republican strategist Kevin Phillips referred to the Republican adoption of Southern states rights discourse (the Dixiecrats meant by this, of course, keep your hands off our Jim Crow) and the rhetoric of White anger at busing and affirmative action, as their Southern strategy, their strategy to take Dixie for the Republicans. Between the 1970s and today the Republicans engaged in a kind of cult like ideological cleansing and purification that cleansed moderate and liberal Republicans, Republicans in name only, from the party and the Dixiecrat and Bircher factions became dominant within it. The shift was also geographical as evidenced by the shift between the late 1960s and the 1990s of Dixie and Dixie's Whites, including its evangelical Whites, into the Republican camp. Many in the West, particularly the Intermountain West with its legacy of anti-Chinese racism likewise found a comfortable home in the dixified and birchified Republican Party. Blacks, of course, well those Blacks who were allowed to vote, increasingly switched from the Republican Party (the party at one time of Lincoln, Reconstruction, Radical Republicans, and occupation of the South) to the Democratic Party after the 1920s.

I want to end this brief post with some musings on cults in politics. The ideologically driven cleansing of the Republican Party of "RINOs" (as the Dixiepublicans and Birchipublicans called them) post-Richard Nixon points up the similarities between the contemporary right wing populist Republican Party and all sorts of inherently reactionary purifying religious sects and cults and all manner of political cults including the Cult of Hitler, the Cult of Stalin, the Cult of Pol Pot. All of these political cults, including the Cult of the Orange One or Tangholio, of course, were and are ideologically driven purification cults that had and have at their heart populist anti-intellectualism.

The Books of My Life: Caligari's Children

 

I have never been and am not a fan of the horror or terror film. I have, of course, since I have been watching films since the 1960s, seem many of the "classics" of the horror or terror genre including Nosferatu, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Lodger, Frankenstein, Dracula, Cat People, Hound of the Baskervilles, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, and the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream cycles, both of which went all postmodern on the horror film. I have even liked some of them, the first Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance. I found its surrealism and snark about high school and everyday life enjoyable (the contradictions and disruptions some find in horror films). In the end, however, I have never been a devotee of the genre just as I am not a devotee of the cult of Star Wars.

So, why, you might ask, did I read a book on the horror or terror film genre, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror by S.S. Prawer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)? The answer, of course, is that it was there on my bookshelf. A better answer might be the other one I would give: namely, that I am interested in mass popular culture and horror films have been and are popular.

I found a lot of the things in Prawer's book intellectually interesting. I agree with Prawer that the terror film has historical precedents in gothic literature, fairy tales, and biblical myths and biblical apocalypticism. It is nice to see someone paying attention to the role Judaism and Christianity have played in the history of Western culture. I agree with Prawer that film socialises, resocialises, and is a form of social control and that it allows viewers to live vicariously before they return to their "normal" socially controlled lives. I agree with Prawer that audiences are not always if at all passive. I appreciated Prawer's delineation of several stages in the history of the terror film. I appreciated Prawer's attention to mise-en-scene, something relatively easy to see in horror films like Nosferatu, Caligari, The Lodger, and Cat People. I appreciated Prawer's attempt to bring a moral and quality dimension to the terror film by counterpointing the mood and tone of classic horror films and the in-your-face quality of more contemporary terror films. Of course, notions of quality are present in all forms of film criticism simply in the choice of what films to study and focus on and they are ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. I found Prawer's hybrid approach to the terror film, one which melds sociology, anthropology, history, theology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, genre studies, and narrative studies, interesting if very much a product of the post-auteurist bricolage age in which the book was published.

Has Prawer's book converted me to a devotion to the horror film genre? No. It did enlighten me about the genre and give me much to think about, however. And for those reasons alone I recommend it.

Musings on the Free Speech Shuffle That Really Isn't About Free Speech...

One of the bizzarest things that has occurred in my lifetime during the neoliberal post-Margaret Thatcher era is the rise of a right wing free speech movement that really isn't about free speech. Think of it, the very group whose pedigree goes back to the anti-anarchist, anti-socialist, and anti-communist crusades and to figures like Gerald L.K. Smith and groups like the John Birch Society, people and groups who supported making the Communist Party illegal in the US, have suddenly become champions of free speech. All I can say is don't believe the demagogic hype. Right wing free speechers are hardly proponents of no holds barred free speech.

First of all, right wing free speech groups really don't seem to have much of a conception of free speech beyond the tautological or circular: free speech is good because it is good to have free speech. Second, right wing free speechers, as the above examples show, have, like those who argue that free speech is limited and that you can't yell fire in a theatre when there is none, limited freedom of speech in practise. As I noted, right wingers have been leaders in what is today called cancel culture. They favoured cancellation of anarchist speech, socialist speech, anti-war speech, whatever speech they disagreed with and coded as profane. These right wing free speechers whinge about attacks on Christianity by the secularist crowd, but they would, I suspect, favour limiting the free speech of someone who went into a White evangelical Church on Sunday morning at 11 am spewing all kinds of expletive invectives at those sitting in the pews. They would claim, I assume, that anyone who would do such a thing must be a disrespecful "hater" of Christianity, a claim that is akin to yelling fire in a theatre that is not aflame and akin to limits on adolescent hate speech on, for example, college or university campuses. But then right wing free speech groups have long been inherently hypocritical.

Of course, in the end the issue for right wingers is not free speech. It is about their speech. For them the only speech that should be free is their speech and any speech that disagrees with theirs or which they categorise as evil godless commie nazi socialist fill in the blank should not, they believe, be freely available in the marketplace of ideas. They don't even trust that the free marketplace of speech, which doesn't really exist, of course, will lead to the triumph of their "ideas", which is why they favour limiting the speech of those they disagree with and favour limiting the voting rights of those they disagree with. In the end then it is all about power for these right wing faux free speechers. They want it and they want to cleanse "America" of any speech that does not agree with theirs. Welcome to the insane world of modern postmodern America.