The Books of My Life: America for Americans (Lee)

 

Identity, who we think we are, who we perceive we are, or who others think and perceive we are, perceptions that can feed back into who we think we are, is at the heart of human life. Economically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen by others as hunters, gatherers, pastoralists, farmers, auto workers, teachers, and managers. Demographically speaking, we have seen ourselves or been seen as male, female, kin, children, adolescents, and young adults. Culturally speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as the People, White, African, and a devotee of the Dallas Cowboys. Politically speaking we have seen ourselves or been seen as kin of a particular totem, a subject, a citizen, and a member of a particular political party. Geographically speaking, we have seen ourselves as or been seen as Europeans, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and South Africans. Generally speaking, all of these identities intersect and interact in a variety of ways. Hunters, gatherers, males, females, the masculine, and the feminine, can all be somewhat discreet identities in Hunter-Gatherer societies, for instance.

As historian Erika Lee reminds us in her superb historical synthesis, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic, 2019), identities, which are historically contingent and fluid, are sometimes if not generally xenophobic. She, unfortunately, does not seem to recognise that xenophobia along with racism, sexism, classism, and cliqueism are simply varieties of ethnocentrism, the notion that one identity or a group of identities are superior to others. Some may and some have, for example, believed that industrial societies are superior to the economic adaptations that preceded them. Some may think and some have thought that being male is better than being female. Some may believe and some have believed that being White is superior to being non-White and that Western culture is superior to Asian culture. Some may think and some have thought that being masculine is superior to being feminine or that listening to Metallica is better than listening to the Carpenters. Some may think and some have believed that their monarch is better than other monarchs or that being right wing is better than being liberal. Some may think and many have believed that being American is better than being Canadian.

In the United States, as Lee notes, being White, a fluid, historically speaking, category, was, because of migration patterns and the economic, political, cultural and demographic dominance of the, initially, Protestant migrants from England and Great Britain, seen as being the mark of a real or "native" American. As Lee notes, xenophobia sometimes accompanied this notion that Whiteness was the mark of being American. Initially, Germans, as Lee notes, were considered other (demographically, economically, politically, and culturally) and, as a result, inherently threatening and dangerous, to Colonial America and Colonials. With the decline in German xenophobia, others, in a seemingly ever repeating cycle, such as the Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics, Jews, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, and Muslims, became economically, demographically, culturally, and politically other and, as a consequence, perceived as threatening and dangerous to America and Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Over time, Irish and Italian Catholics, and I would add Greek and Russian Orthodox, for example, were grafted onto the White category. Only grudgingly, hesitantly, and incompletely, have some of these non-White groups, many of whom fall outside of or are perceived to fall outside of the Christian category, and Jews been accepted as American by "real" and "native" Americans, Americans of European extraction. America's indigenous and its Black slaves and segregates, were, of course, as Lee notes, considered inherently other.

Lee's America for Americans is a book everyone who wants to know about the real history as opposed to the mythic and manichean history of the United States should read. As Lee notes, the US has long been a contradictory nation. It has been a nation which welcomes the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, and the wretched refuse of the world, variously defined over the centuries, while at the same time that it puts roadblocks in the way of certain of the globe's and even America's tired, poor, huddled masses, and wretched refuse in the form of immigration restrictions and quotas and incarcerations and deportations. 

My only substantive issue with Lee's book revolves around what I see as her limited attention to some forms of economic, demographic, cultural, political, and geographical forms of ethnocentrism. Mormons, for instance, many of who were White New Englanders, were considered other by "native" Americans for such cultural practises as polygamy, something Lee mentions in her discussion of xenophobia about Muslims, theocracy--a criticism also made of Catholics who were, as Lee notes, considered loyal to a tyrannical pope by equally theocratic Protestants--block voting, communalism, and because of their notion that America's indigenous were the descendants of the twelve tribes of Israel. Despite this concern, I highly recommend Lee's America for Americans, an important history of xenophobia for those of us living in the Trump era, an era in which several ultimately socially and culturally constructed forms of ethnocentrism have become mainstream again.

The Books of My Life: The Pleasures of Academe

When I graduated from high school in 1973 going to college was not the rite of passage for young adults it is today. Initially, my life plan was like that of a lot of others in my generation and cohort. I was going to get a well-paying job with good benefits at one of the local factories and spend the rest of my life labouring for the car of my choice and the stereo system of my dreams so I could listen to the music that was such a central part of my life at the time.

Life as it so often does, however, throws you curve balls. An injury forced me to reconsider working in factories for the rest of my labouring life, something in retrospect that was my good fortune since little known to me and most Americans at the time, the era of deindistrialisation and globalisation, both of which dried up the number of good paying and good benefit industrial blue collar jobs in the US and both driven by corporate elites and their political toadies, was just around the bend. So, in 1975 I enrolled in classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1978 full of dreams about becoming an academic, I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington where I finished my bachelor's degree in 1983.

My undergraduate experiences managed to wipe some of the romantic sheen off my perceptions of academia turning me into someone who took a pluses and minuses approach to the academy. Despite this, I still hoped to attend graduate school and I still, despite the diminution of my romanticism about academe, had plans to become an academic. I didn't, however, know what I wanted to specialise in. Nor, given my broad interests in the social sciences and humanities, did I know whether I wanted to specialise in any academic discipline at all. I thus applied to and was admitted into a post graduate interdisciplinary programme in American Studies at Notre Dame. 

Not finding Notre Dame's version of American Studies particularly conducive to my interests and not finding Notre Dame and South Bend conducive to me, I took an assistant acquisitions librarian job at the Science/Engineering Library at SMU in 1985, a job which, in retrospect, I wish I had never left. Unfortunately, I did quit the job to go to graduate school with my dreams of the academic life still somewhat intact. Though I was accepted at the University of Chicago (Social Thought) and the University of Kansas (Sociology), I matriculated at the school that offered me the most money, Ohio University in Athens, where I studied Sociology beginning in 1985. 

Though I loved the intellectual and cultural life of Athens my interdisciplinary self still tugged at my intellectual heartstrings. So, in 1987 I matriculated into an interdisciplinary doctoral programme at SUNY Albany. Fearing the difficulties of getting a job with a doctor of arts degree I transferred into the Anthropology Department at Albany and took a master's degree in 1988. I didn't opt for the Ph.D. because anthropology seemed too ahistorical and too anemic when it came to the study of the modern and postmodern core nation world. I wanted to do anthropological and sociological history and I wanted to do work on the history of North American Protestantism.

Because of these interests I eventually applied to and was admitted into a Ph.D. programme in Sociology in 1991 at Brigham Young University, a place where I could study in depth and historically, ethnographically, and sociologically, a group I had become fascinated with, the Latter-day Saints. I liked aspects of BYU. I learned, for example, a lot about the history and culture of Mormonism. I was alienated, however, by the cultural religiously grounded parochialism of the Y and of the Mormon Culture Region. So once again I found myself exploring the academic marketplace.

Among the choices I had for graduate school after BYU was my dream college and university the University of Toronto (History of North American Christianity), Queen's University (North American Religious History and Mormon Studies), LaTrobe University (History and Sociology under the guidance of Rhys Isaac), and SUNY Albany (History). Money again was the deciding factor and I went back to SUNY Albany where I finally earned a Ph.D in history and wrote a dissertation on Mormon Studies. By this time, however, getting a job in academe was about as easy as taking a trip to Mars with either Mr. Amazon or Mr. Virgin Records. Moreover, I had already earned a lot of pension and health care credits while teaching in the State University of New York system.

All of this is a long way of saying I know academe. I have, thanks to being a student and a part-time teacher in the academy, irregularly in the 1990s and regularly since 2006 to 2021 when I retired, gotten to know by experience academia quite well. Memories of my academic life were stirred as I read James Axtell's The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Like Axtell I found, over the course of my academic sojourn, pleasure in college towns (something I wish Axtell had been more systematic and analytical about since college towns are towns which the college or university dominates economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically), in college town bookstores (which are, I have always thought, measures of the quality of a college and university; it is no accident, for example, that the Coop Bookstore at the University of Chicago is one of the best bookstores in the US; it is also no accident that the Barnes and Nobles takeover of so many college bookstores, including that of my alma mater and the Harvard Coop, and the decline of supplementary books in such bookstores, probably reflects not only the increasing triumph of what Veblen called business strategies in academe but also the decline in the quality of student intellectual life and student reading life), in college town built environments, in college town intellectual life, in college town cultural life (lots of foreign film opportunities and musical performances in B-town), in college and university learning, in college and university research, in college town and college and university teaching, a not unalloyed joy, and even in college town semi-professional athletics (I was at IU when we won the NCAA basketball championship in 1981 and what I can remember of it was exciting, amazing, and wonderfully ritualistic).

What I don't remember is what the mostly demagogic polemicists who attack college faculty complain and whinge about: political and ideological correctness, elitism, too much faculty involvement in research and not enough in teaching, and too complacent and lazy a faculty thanks to tenure. It is hard to know what to do with such rhetoric. If anything, faculty, particularly part-time cheap from the bureaucrats point of view faculty, are overworked and underpaid in part because of the American tradition of anti-intellectualism that impacts college and university funding, particularly in the states, while administrators, who are increasingly authoritarian managers are overpaid, underworked, and committed to a retail model of education. As Axtell notes and the data he quotes quite clearly shows, such whinging is not grounded in reality. But them demagogues are not known for their commitment to empirical facts. The function and purpose of their anecdotally dripping rhetoric is to manipulate the masses by playing on emotions like fear rather than to have a civil, reasonable, and rational argument about what economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically is. In the end, I think we need to call such empirically anemic rhetoric what it is, bullshit.

Given this it is hard to know to whom Axtell's civilly toned book is aimed and to who it is addressed. If it is aimed at the polemicists even if they even bother to read it, which I think is unlikely, they are likely to perceive it and the statistical facts within it as yet another instance of liberal or left wing political and ideological correctness. If it is aimed at someone like me, it is preaching to the empirically grounded choir. If it is aimed at the inbetweeners, at anyone with an open mind and a commitment to fact-based analysis, hopefully they will find it helpful in understanding academia and academic faculty. I suspect, in the end, however, that Axtell's biography/memoir/history/ethnography/quantitative analysis is aimed more at people like me than anyone else. And that may be a reflection of a divided America that does not talk to itself anymore and does not have a common identity and sense of community if it ever did outside of the Great Depression to World War II era.

Musings on the Dim Dems

It should be clear to anyone with even an Eric the Bee brain that the Democrats cannot protect us from the sociopathic and psychopathic theocratic (our way or you will be cleansed) cultists that make up much of the Republican Party these days. The Republicans have more effective demagogues and pied pipers. Recent election results are simply the latest in a string of reminders of this. Hell, the Democrats can't even pass legislation that would help the masses without pre-emptively gutting it as Obamacare and the recent debacles over infrastructure spending should remind us. But then the Democratic Party is a party largely bought and paid for by America's economic elites and it has not been as cleansed of "impure thoughts" as the cultic Republican Party has been since Ronald Reagan though corporate Democratic political elites have occasionally tried to do just that.

What this means is that the Democratic Party as it is presently constituted is not the solution to the real problems an America that is not really a nation faces at the moment including the potential of violence from a Republican Party in which one in three of its devotees or cult members, according to a recent poll, think that violence may be needed in order to "save America". It is, in actuality, part of the problem.

One solution to this problem might be what has happened in the United States at least a couple of times over the course of its history: the demise of a political party, in this case the mostly bought and paid for Democratic Party, and the rise of a new or several new and truly alternative political parties. The Progressive Democrats might form and organise a kind of American version of the New Democratic Party of Canada or the Greens of Germany. The Corporate Democrats could form a political party that is, as Nancy Pelosi once remarked, cheerleaders for the religion of capitalism. 

I hope, by the way, that this reconfiguration of American political party culture happens before the shooting in the latest American culture war starts, a culture war that will be potentially deadly in a number of ways for those of us who are not inclined toward theocracy because it is likely that much of the army and much of America's internal armies, the FBI, the police forces of the nation, and the Border Patrol, will be on the side of the narrow minded anti-intellectual secular and religious theocrats.

The Books of My Life: Intertwined Lives

Once upon a time I was an anthropology student. As an undergraduate I took several courses in anthropology including Introduction to Anthropology, an Economic Anthropology class, and a graduate level anthropology course on "Names and Labels" for which I wrote an essay on Punk symbology and names. I also took, during my undergraduate years,  a graduate level course in the related discipline of folklore, specifically a course on Folklore and Religion. I, with my social science bent, liked them all, particularly the Folklore course which was one of the best classes I ever took during my long sojourn as a college student. I also came to like and admire the idea and practise of ethnology with its cross-cultural and inductive emphasis, things I came to see as essential if we are to fully understand humanity, that I applied for and was admitted into a doctoral programme in anthropology.

Like most anthropology students in the United States my postgraduate programme in anthropology mandated that all students, regardless of their emphasis in the discipline, take proseminar courses in all of the four subdisciplines of anthropology: cultural anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, and biological anthropology. Like many of my colleagues at the time, I wasn't completely taken with the four subdiscipline mandate though I appreciate it much more now in retrospect. Nor was I taken with what I saw as anthropology's limited emphasis on broad social theory. I found anthropological theory too anthropological and too little sociological. Additionally, I was concerned with what I saw as anthropology's far too limited emphasis on history. I thought at the time, and I still think this today, that all of the social sciences and humanities needed to make use of the method of historical analysis. In fact, I would argue today that history should be less of an academic discipline than a necessary social sciences and humanities methodology.

Two of the people we talked about in ethnographic theory in the 1980s were, of course, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, both students of who some would call the totemic father of American cultural anthropology, Franz Boas. Lois Banner's Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and their Circle (New York: Knopf, 2003) explores the intertwined lives of Benedict, Mead, and those around them, including Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Landes, to name a few. Banner, who made use of recently opened archival material on Benedict and Mead, takes us into Benedict's and Mead's friendship and friendships, loves, competitions, social and cultural influences including Victorianism, romanticism, and modernism, descriptive and normative cultural relativism that critiqued a variety of fetishisms, the anti-racism movement that critiqued the hierarchy of races ideologies that emerged in the wake of Darwin, and professional lives, including their fieldwork experiences, theoretical legacies, and activisms.

At the time and still today, as Banner notes, Boas and his students Benedict and Mead were important because they shifted the empirical and theoretical terrain of cultural anthropology from unilinear evolutionism and biological determinism to the role culture played in human evolution, human societies, and in human personalities. One of Benedict's most famous and influential works then and now, Patterns of Culture, argued that different cultural forms gave rise to different personalities and behaviours. Mead argued in her equally influential and impactful writings on South Pacific cultures that different cultures gave rise to different sexual cultures, different sexual personalities, and different sexual behaviours and that these different sexual cultures, sexual personalities, and sexual behaviours varied across space. And while Benedict's and Mead's emphasis on nurture has not ended the debate over the relative impact nature and nurture have on human personalities and behaviours--it will likely go on until the end of time--they did provide a template for the debate that remains prominent even today in anthropology, sociology, and pyschology.

I enjoyed Banner's book even though I would like to have seen a greater and tighter focus on Benedict's and Mead's theoretical and ethnographic legacies and a more critical exploration of Benedict's and Mead's work for the American government during and after WWII. Recommended for those interested in American Studies, the history of gender, the history of bisexuality, intellectual history, the history of the social sciences and anthropology, and the history of academe.

Musings on Right Wing "Analysis" of the Trials and Travails of Antioch College

While I was exploring the continuing problems of Antioch College recently I ran across this little gem or right wing “analysis” of Antioch’s current economic problems by one Reed Alexander in the comments section of Megan Bachman’s update on the continuing economic problems of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the Yellow Springs News on 29 March 2021:



"After all these years of “reinventing” itself – Antioch administrators still don’t “get it.” Antioch offers an antiquated approach to education – its sole mission is to indoctrinate young people with leftist propaganda. Other schools focus on providing students with cutting-edge skills to compete for jobs of the future, while Antioch judges success on the number of minds it can infiltrate with socialist ideology. A losing proposition.
A nephew of mine in roughly eight years ago attended Antioch because he thought it would expand his horizons to think more broadly about the world. Instead, because he was wasn’t liberal enough, he was ostracised (spelling corrected by me) by both faculty and administrators. Diversity of thought is not a goal at Antioch. Sad."

 While it is probably sad to some that Antioch College continues to have problems, problems which go back to the 1970s, what is also sad, if not surprising, is the abstract and decontextualised political and ideological correctness that undergirds Alexander’s response to Bachman’s article on the economic and demographic struggles at Antioch College. Where to begin?

First, Antioch is not the only college that is experiencing economic and demographic problems these days. So is, for example, the College of Saint Rose, a small Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York that no longer, to cite one example of curricular cleansing, has a Sociology Department. So did the University at Albany in the same city. SUNY Albany once had to cut its language and theatre programmes among others because of financial problems in the wake of an economic downturn and decreasing state monies.

Second, not all colleges and universities that I suspect Alexander would put in the “liberal” camp are having financial and demographic problems. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, one of the other colleges, along with Antioch and Swarthmore, Burton Clark analysed in his classic The Distinctive College, has a $569 million dollar endowment. Swarthmore has an endowment of over $2 billion dollars. Both have healthy student enrollments, healthy and productive faculty, and healthy academic departments. Another "liberal" university, Brandeis University, has a $1.2 billion dollar endowment post-Madoff.

Third, all cultures, subcultures, countercultures, societies, nations, the military, prisons, corporations, and educational institutions socialise. One might argue, for example, that The King's College (home of demagogue Dinesh D’Souza once upon a time) and Bob Jones socialises its students into variants of right wing Christian ideology. Unfortunately, and unscientifically, those demagogues with a political and ideological correctness axe to grind prefer to refer to certain forms of socialisation, forms of socialisation they don’t like (ah there once again is that pesky emotionalism that dominates right wing “thinking”), in other words, as “indoctrination” or “brainwashing”. A more value neutral and scientific term for the common phenomenon of cultural reproduction of the young or initiation of new members into cultures, organisations, and institutions, is the tried and true one of socialisation. That term, however, isn’t politically and ideologically demonic and frightening enough for right wing demagogues like Alexander.

Finally, the reasons some colleges and universities are having problems these days are multiple. First there are the demographic factors. I give you student decline and greater competition for the potential student pool. Second, there are the economic reasons. Some colleges and universities are poorer than others, some have less endowment monies and other monies to work with, and some are seeing decreases in state support in absolute and relative terms. Third, there are the cultural factors. Colleges and universities have different degrees of social and cultural capital in the minds of applicants and their parents. It is more appealing to those who have been impacted by branding, ideologies of ancientness, and other cultural phenomena to apply to and go to Reed or Swarthmore as opposed to Antioch or Ball State University.

I realise this brief discussion of colleges and universities and their trials and travails will have little and, more likely, any impact on the abstract politically correct demagogues of the world and those who pied pipper and ditto their ideologically grounded rhetoric. Still, people like Alexander, people who seem to prefer their analysis to be ahistorical, contextless, empirically deficient, and ideologically correct, make for, I hope, an interesting blog in the age of Kornbluth’s marching orange tinted bsing morons.

The Further Adventures of Ron in Skanky and Slaggy Amazon Land

Every so often one is reminded of just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. One of the things that I used to like about Amazon was that it was, to some extent, global and that it offered services around the world. One could, for example, compare and contrast the cost of product at Amazon, Amazon.CA, Amazon.UK, and Amazon.De and buy product from one and all.

Given how greedy mammon worshipping Amazon is, however, they eventually realised that customers were engaging in comparison shopping, and they recently made it either impossible or prohibitively expensive by increasing postage, to order items from Amazon beyond ones constructed Amazon "shores". They made it impossible for me to buy,  because they won't ship it to the US, for example, the thirteenth season of Heartland from Amazon.CA at a cheaper price than for what it or its marketplace flunkies and sycophants sell it at Amazon or for me to buy less expensive Doctor Whos from England (I have an all region DVD and blu ray player) because of the cost of postage. Additionally, and this says volume about this gilded corporation, Amazon established its Amazon Global service to sell items one used to be able to buy at a more reasonable cost from Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK. 

Interestingly, since I can no longer buy product sold by Amazon.CA or from Amazon.UK I decided to cancel my Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK accounts. Not surprisingly, however, I can't. Amazon may not allow one to buy globally but they have a global (and increasingly mediocre) digital information system so if I want to cancel Amazon.CA and Amazon.UK I must also cancel my Amazon account. That I can't cancel my Amazon.CA or Amazon.UK accounts, neither of which I use anymore because of the reasons cited above, shows just how skanky and slaggy Amazon is. Skankyness and slaginess, in other words, are in Amazon's cultural DNA. I think it is time once again to contact the office of the Attorney General of New York State.

Further Musings on Political Correctness and Cancel Culture

It is remarkable, though not surprising, how easy it is for demagogues to manipulate the masses and even the chattering class of right-wing intellectuals these days. The reasons for this are not hard to discern. Both are largely historically illiterate, and both prefer what "history" they do know to be largely of the mythic and political, and I would add ideological, correct variety and ahistorical. 

In reality, of course, and contrary to those who have contracted ideologically based historical amnesia, both political and ideological correctness and cancel culture have long histories stretching back centuries.  For example, Alkibiades and his circle's supposed desecration of the statues of Hermes in Athens in the fifth century BCE was an act of what we would today call political incorrectness though others might call it a lack of patriotism, an act of vandalism, or an act of heresy, whether he and they actually "desecrated" the statues or not. The Spanish Inquisition and other inquisitions like it before and after aimed at Christian "heretics" and Jews was an act of political and ideological correctness and cancel culture, sometimes very deadly cancel culture. The deportation of anarchist Emma Goldman by the United States government in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The banning of the Communist Party in the United States during the Cold War was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. The blacklisting of hundreds in the United States during the Cold War, such as scholars like Moses Finley, was an act of "true" red, white, and blue political and ideological correctness and "all American" cancel culture. 

What is, of course, remarkable, is that the historically illiterate and those whose minds have been colonised by right wing historical myths, manichean fantasies, and negations think and argue, despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, that political and ideological correctness, is novel and that it is the product of a liberal or left-wing conspiracy to take over American educational institutions, America itself, and the world. I recently, for example, saw a comment from someone who attributed the fact that Timothy Hutton wasn't in the recent iteration of the TV show Leverage, Leverage: Redemption on IMDb TV, to liberal and left wing cancel culture. Needless to say, such an "argument", if I can call it that, has to ignore the fact that the accusations against Hutton, as I discovered very quickly during a search online, have been corroborated by someone who knew the person who was allegedly raped, and was told by that person that she had been raped at the time. It also ignores the reality that in the world of consumer capitalism corporations, like those that produce media product, these corporations are constantly conscious of their brand and, in a world where public relations is a fact of corporate (including educational corporations) and increasingly everyday life, of their reputation and that having someone with accusations of rape hanging over him star in a television show might not be good for their brand or for viewership numbers and hence the possible financial gains that come from commercials that run during each episode of the show and on which the show depends for its continuation. What, in sum, the nattering nabobs of the right don't see, in other words, is the mote in their own eye, their political correctness, which they fetishise or transcendentalise, their own involvement in cancel culture both past and present, and empirical reality. All of those, of course, are impressive examples of how ideology creates a rather perverted "reality".