The Books of My Life: The History Wars (Mcintyre and Clark)

The culture wars and, in particular, the history culture wars, have been going on for some time. There was, of course, a cultural history war in the United States in the lead up to the American Civil War, a cultural history war in which the participants on both sides argued over slavery, including the morality of slavery, often in biblically infused terms. This history war, of course, resulted eventually in a hot war, the American Civil War.

Today there are culture wars in the British settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over a host of issues including abortion, smoking cigarettes in pubs, immigration, multiculturalism, and the academic curriculum, just to note a few examples. These cultural wars are fought out in similar ideological languages not only because of the similar political and ideological histories of these settler societies but because of globalisation and its attendant cultural globalisation thanks at least in part to the brave new digital technologies which link these societies and their ideological identity groups together.

Stuart Mcintyre and Anna Clark explore the history culture war primarily in one part of the world, Australia (though they also make limited excursions into the history culture wars in the United States, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent Canada) in their book The History Wars (Melbourne, Victoria: University of Melbourne Press, updated edition, 2004). After exploring how professional historians do history in chapter two, Mcintyre and Clark take a largely chronological approach to the Australian cultural history war. In chapter three Mcintyre explores how British imperial and later Australian historians wrote the history of Australia. In chapters four and five Mcintyre explores how two of Australia's most noted historians, Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey found themselves drawn into the Australian history wars on two different sides, the less mythhistory one in the case of Clark and the more mythhistory one in the case of Blainey. In chapter six Mcintyre looks at the culture history war battles over the Australian bicentenary in 1988, a battle that was reflective of the wider battles over Australian history. In chapter seven Mcintyre explores how the more mythhistorical Australian discourse on the history culture war changed thanks to their adoption and adaptation of the American language of political correctness. In chapter eight Mcintyre looks at how conservative and right wing historical warriors in Australia developed a discourse which accused the less mythhistorical historians of fabricating evidence of European violence against the Aboriginals thanks to a culture of guilt and the romanticisation of the "primitive". In chapter nine Anna Clark explores the strategies of conservative and right wing mythhistory warriors as they battled to gain control of the secondary school curriculum in Australia. In chapter nine Mcintyre explores the museum front in the culture war over history. In a conclusion Mcintyre's sums up his argument over the Australian historical culture war and in an afterward looks at the responses to his and Clark's book in the year between the initial publication of the book and the publication of an updated edition of the book.

In The History Wars Mcintyre argues that there have essentially been several paradigm shifts in the dominant perception and writing of Australian history since the early 20th century. Initially most historians saw Australian history as a species of British imperial history. As Australia became more independent from the "mother country" many historians, particularly those of the radical nationalist school of Australian history, developed a more independent from Britain version of Australian history. The effervescence of the 1960s saw the rise of new approaches to history in general and to Australian history in particular as social history, often quantitative in form, and cultural history, generally qualitative in form, in the Australian historical profession. Both of these, Mcintyre argues, replaced the radical nationalist school of historiography as dominant or hegemonic. 

At around the same time, Macintyre argues, there were reactions to these new histories, rending the consensus that characterised the writing of Australian history asunder, both within the academy and beyond it in intellectual and populist culture. The new social and cultural histories often focused on British imperialism and the impact of British imperialism on Australia and its indigenous population. They also focused on minorities like women and Asian immigration into Australia after the demise of the White Australia policy in the 1960s and 1970s (something that is paralleled in the US and Canada). These new social and cultural histories of imperialism, violence against Aborigines, women, and immigrants touched a boosterist nerve among some historians and in the conservative and right wing press. As a consequence the traditional reliance on evidence and reasoned debate in history and in Australian intellectual culture was sometimes replaced by a politically and ideologically correct culture (something the populist right shares with many liberals and many leftists) in far too often the language of ad hominems, Needless to say, this ad hominem approach was found not only in Australia but also in the post-Thatcher England, the post-Reagan United States, the post-Harper Canada, and in the New Zealand of the late 20th century and early 21st century. 

Critics of Mcintyre have accused him of being a history warrior himself and of, as a consequence, being emotionally attached to one side of the history culture war in Australia, the black or black armband approach to Australian history as right wing mythhistorians have come to call it. That said a lot of the current invariably politically debate over the impact of European and particularly British imperialism on indigenous Australians is, not surprisingly, inherently emotional and and one can't help but reflect on the moral aspects of British imperialism and its impact on Australia's indigenous population if one has a modicum of humanity left. Given this fact it is not a surprise that the debate has touched humanitarian and boosterist nerves. I suppose one can debate, and academics do continue to debate, whether what happened in Australia after 1788 was genocide. That debate aside there was certainly a policy, unofficial or official (including of the nudge, nudge, wink, wink variety), of extermination, extinction, and extirpation against Aboriginals. Smallpox certainly impacted the indigenous population in deadly ways but it is also true that generations of Aboriginals were stolen or taken supposedly for their own good so they could be more integrated, at least rhetorically, into the population. It is also true that land was taken from hunter-gatherer peoples with little understanding, on the part of the Europeans, of the differences in conception of land "ownership" between hunter-gatherer and modern societies and was not always done legally (though we should never forget that power often makes the illegal legal). All this happened in the United States and Canada as well, of course. Should contemporary generations feel guilty for this? Gee I would hope so. On the other hand, subsequent history suggests little was learned of lasting value from the Holocaust except about how genocide could be leveraged morally and politically.

Let me conclude by coming clean. I regard myself as a secular Calvinist. In my many years of observation and study I have become convinced that history is not teleological and that humans are, to put it nicely, fallible (one of Mcintyre's great realisations in the book is that the Cold War realist right traded in its pessimistic Calvinism for a best of all possible worlds optimism in the post-Cold War era, a best of all possible worldism in which free market capitalism became the utopian motor of end of history). At the same time, I think the scientific method with its emphasis on empirical evidence, allows for humans to make valid and reasonable generalisations about human society and culture, overcoming in the process, to some extent, the realities of human fallibility, since such an approach allows for verification or falsification. 

The application of such a method has shown me again and again that it is the right wing populists with their optimistic, some might say, given the evidence, overly optimistic version of history (something they paradoxically share with the best of all possible world liberals and leftists not to mention Hollywood) that is problematic. These right wing populists tend to prefer mythhistory (yeah rah ethnic, nationalist, civilisational history) to more empirical history and often replace rational and reasonable debate over the interpretation of evidence with ad hominem "zingers". They tend to engage in such obfuscation and such childishness because they seem to want to obtain power at any cost and will use any means to achieve it because they think that they and only they are right (something again they share with some liberals and some on the left not to mention a host of theocrats around the globe) and they know that playing up myths and using mythic and celebratory discourse plays well with a significant segment of the public. The fact, however, is that imperialism, for example, in all its forms is real and indigenous peoples suffered not only from the diseases but at the hands of these imperialists. Anyone with even a basic understanding of real history knows this and no amount of happy faced ain't we wonderful or at least some kind of wonderful rhetoric will change this reality.  All this is some of the reason why I find Mcintyre's and Clark's dispassionate analysis of the history war in Australia much more compelling than that of their critics.

 

And the Boogie Man Will Get You and Your Mind is Going to Gooohohohoh...

Humans are peculiar, very peculiar. They have always been peculiar since the beginning, well at least since they settled down into agricultural communities and city-states controlled by a mafia like family who tried—and who often succeeded—in  maintaining a monopoly on power and authority.

Since humans settled into settled communities where a common identity was created, an us, was created humans often, in order to maintain that sense of community, that sense of a common identity, have also often created a them, an other, an often evil them and other, a them that was everything us, we, were not. For example, many Americans during the Cold War believed that us. At the same time they believed they, the Soviets, were not. We had our god. They had no god. We wanted to enlighten the world about the joys of a capitalist economy and a “democratic” political system. They had a communist economy and a communist political system that was everything ours was not. We were freethinkers. They were brainwashed or terrorised. We were good. They were bad.

Today despite the end of the Cold War the same us and them is at still at play in the fields of the lords of the nations. Today from Finland (not the Finland Station) to Canada and from France to the United State, Russia is still the essence of evil (along with the Chinese and the Iranians). These Boris Badanov's took Crimea from the Ukraine. They interfere in elections. They attacked and continue to attack the Ukraine. They are barbarians. 

That us, we (and members of our clique) may not be that different from them rarely crosses we's mind because we are good, the best, the essence of saintliness in the world today. We may attack Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria. We may interfere in Ukrainian elections. But hey we are the good guys, we are the white hats, so it is OK for us to do that and proclaim our imperial sovereignty over Latin America and Canada in the name of economic and political freedom (a hollow rhetoric that still plays well in Peoria). If they, the evil Russkies, do the same thing in their near beyond (their version of the Monroe Doctrine) that is not kosher because we are the good guys, we are on god’s side, they are neither.

This creation of an evil boogeyman can make us see fictions. It can make us believe that Russia is a major great power (we, the US, are actually the major and to some extent only imperial great power, of course), a major great power that wants to conquer the West and which threatens the Western way of life, the West being those once industrial and now postindustrial countries including Germany, Finland, France, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Canada, and the big bloke on the block the US) despite the fact that they, the Badonov's can’t even defeat the Ukraine or take control of the ethnically Russian parts of that failed state (failed because of ethnic diversity and accompanying ethnic tensions that impact the political arena)? We can even make believe that the Ukraine is “democratic” (meaning, of course, dominated by right thinking elites who are generally the puppets of corporate capitalist imperialists) despite the fact that the ethnically Ukrainian president of the country has vetoed elections because it will break up a nation already riven through by ethnic tensions particularly between Ukrainians and Russians. These fictions can even make us believe that we are just lending poor Ukraine (shades of poor Edith) a helping hand eliding, in the process, that our intelligence services have been doing the same thing the evil Russians are doing in the Ukraine and the world at large. But then we are the good guys and if we don’t do something the boogeyman, Satan, Jason, Freddie, Michael Meyers, whoever, is going to get us and are chains are going to grow oh oh oh oh.

So eat your spinach. Pray to god or progress or historical inevitability, whatever. And always be on your guard or the boogie man will get you and, at best, make you his slave even if he is so weak and dispiritied that he can’t even defeat the Ukraine (and thank beezus he can't use the Bomb because of the madness of MAD) because that mean old bear is loose in the woods, not our woods but who cares. We are the policeman of the world and they are the perps we are after. Can I get an amen? 
 

Musings on Buying and Using Trader Joe’s Body Butter

 I have been buying Trader Joe’s body butter for some time now. I have used the Passion Fruit Ultra. I have used the Brasil Nut. I will use the Coconut at some point. And I just started using the Cacay Oil.

I have liked all of the Trader Joe's body butter’s I have used up to now. I don’t like the Cacay, however. 

Why don’t I like the Cacay? Well there are two reasons. First, I don’t like the odour of the Cacay which is pretty noticeable. I have asthma and perfumes can cause problems for me. It would have been nice if a warning label that noted the potential dangers for those with respiratory issues. Second, and this is even more of a problem, the Cacay, unlike the other Trader Joe's body butters I have used, did not have the plastic film around the package protecting it from various and sundry human morons. I well remember when these were put on consumer products because of what happened in the seventies, eighties, and nineties when stuff was put in apples and Paracetamol or Tylenol and sundry other products because of the stupid and dangerous things humans do. Instead of the plastic wrap the Cacay had one of those paper and foil covers under the lid which are stamped on the product by a machine. 

So, what was the problem here. The problem was that I did not know the cover was under the lid. I assumed that it was just like the others and had the plastic around it that you had to peel off. This, opening the lid and peeling off the cover, was not easy to do after I got out of the tub and was still a bit wet. Nor was it easy to do when I was dryer. The product is large and the lid is not easy to screw off for anyone who does not have hands the size of Wilt Chaberlain. Add to this the fact that the paper and foil cover is not easy to get off and when you try to take it off it tears it into fragments, fragments that are made evem more difficult to get off because the body butter gets all over the fragments and that body butter is, just like butter, slippery. 

Anyway, I don’t think that I will be buying the Cacay Body Butter in the future for both of those reasons. I prefer the Passion Fruit Ultra with plastic protection but that disappeared shortly after it was on the shelves. And there you have it, the problem with Trader Joe’s and its amazing they appear and then disappear products and the stupid things that private companies do, namely, put a paper and foil cover on a product that can get messy. All hail the genius of private capitalist bureaucracies.

Musings on the LG BP175 blu ray and DVD Player

 

A few years back, probably sometime before the pandemic (time is wanky when you are retired), I bough tthe LG BP 175 all region blu ray and DVD player from 220 Electronics. I had a SONY all region blu ray and DVD player, which I also bought from 220 Electronics but I had recently purchased an inexpensive LG TV since I wanted to replace the one I had, which was an inexpensive all region Sharp TV, which I also bought from 220 Electronics. Why?  Because the Sharp required a digital tuner and I did not want to screw around with the digital tuner any longer. 

As of today the Sharp TV which needs a digital tuner, the SONY BDP blu ray and DVD player, and the LG TV still work. The LG BP 175 does not, however. On Thursday, two days after I had watched House of Cards, which was a region B blu ray, on the LG player the LG BP 175 suddenly stopped working. I could play DVDs but I could not play any region blu rays. Fortunately, I still had the SONY blu ray and DVD player so I switched out the blu ray and DVD players on my TVs which unfortunately required some heavy labour.

So why am I telling you this? I am telling you this because I want you to think twice before you buy an LG blu ray and DVD player. I would rank it below average and certainly well below the much superior SONY BDP blu ray and DVD player. But didn’t we know that already? 

Anyway, caveat emptor to those thinking of buying an LG blu ray and DVD player. For my money it is a piece of crap.

My So-Called Intellectual Life: Musings on a Life In and Out of Academe

I think I have said this before on this site but I will say it again. I think the best description of me as an intellectual I ever heard over the course of my 71 years came from my Canadian history tutor. He said to me after our term together had ended that he thought that the best description of intellectual me he could think of was that I was a culture critic. And, again from the vantage point of my 71 years, I think that is the best description of intellectual me I have heard. 

So how in the world did I become an intellectual? It was, as I have said before, my Mum who was key to the development of my so-called intellectual life. Once I had learned to read (at what age I first became able to read is lost in the mists of memory at this point) my Mum started buying me books. At first she bought me books on politics and on history.  Then she started, at my request, buying me books of fiction, purchases of which were further stimulated by school.

Very early on, as I recall, sometime in my early teen years, I read Moby Dick by Herman Melville. As a young person I was fascinated by the story and particularly by the story of Queequeg jumping into a whale to rescue a crewman who had fallen into the whale, a whale the crew had caught and were dismembering for profit, something, profit I mean, I learned more about later in life. At the time the metaphors that wove their way through Moby Dick and the allegory Melville was playing with went right over my head. I simply did not have the intellectual capacity, at the time, to grasp metaphor and allegory (sadly many well into their college years and beyond can't grasp them).

Moby Dick was not the only classic I recall reading at the time. I also read several books by Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain. Twain was probably my favourite writer at the time and remains one of my favourite writers and critics today. I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and loved the humour in it and the hijinks that Tom and his companions got up. But it was probably another book by Mark Twain that I read that really began to shape my intellectual life, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I knew Huck, of course, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I suspect that I expected more of the same kind of humour and hijinks from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that was in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And there was indeed some of the same humour and escapades in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that there was in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But there was also something else, something else that deeply affected, even touched, me and made me think. That was the critique of slavery and the critique of the ideological fictions that underlay slavery in the book. After Huckleberry Finn I began to want to read more social satires with a bite. I was a child of the 60s after all.

After The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I read books like M*A*S*H*, Catch-22, Slaughter House 5, 1984, Animal Farm, We, The Heart of a Dog, and perhaps my favourite of the bunch, The Master and Margarita. I was also drawn to satirical films like Dr. Stangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (and Hitchcock films which my Dad introduced me to which often had a bit of the old satire in them), television shows like Doctor Who, which had a parodic and satirical edge during the era of the 4th Doctor and Douglas Adams, The Prisoner, probably the weirdest English language TV show to ever grace the TV screen and a television show that matched this weirdness to satire, and to satirical songs like “Eve of Destruction”and "I-Feel-Like-I'm Fixin'-to-Die-Rag".

Another factor in why I become a culture critic with a satirical and parodic state of mind was reality itself. I was a teenager in Dallas as the Vietnam War raged on thousands of miles away in Asia. It was, as I have said several times before, my friend John Cerillo who played a key role in opening my mind and eyes to the bullshit (the domino theory, the many and various threats to the United States, the most powerful military-industrial complex in the world, and all that jazz) that the American powers that be were feeding us about the Vietnam War via the media in its broadest sense at the time. Thanks to John and thanks to what I was reading and watching at the time this critical state of mind become embodied in me. As a result I began to look at government discourse about the war and by extension about everything else much more critically than I did when I was a child and spoke like a child. Tin soldiers and Nixon coming and Watergate simply built upon and expanded my increasingly critical and satirical turn of mind. “War children/it’s just a shot away/it’s just a shot away”. “Rape, murder/it’s just a shot away/ it’s just a shot away”.

The fact that I remember more about current events and popular culture from my conscious teenage years says something about my teenage school years at T.W. Browne Junior High School and Kimball High in Dallas. I remember little about those years now. What little I do remember involves learning how to sing "Texas Our Texas" in my civics class. "Texas Our Texas/All hail the mighty state"! I recall how boring and beyond me I found maths. I don't remember much about any of the social sciences classes I took, something weird since I should have been drawn to the social sciences and would be during my college years, beyond that civics class. They simply bored me since they were so irrelevant to what was really happening in the world around me. I also remember taking the I.Q. test they gave to me (and I assume to everyone else across the United States during their junior high school years), an "I.Q." test that I recall that I scored barely above dolt level on and that most of those who taught me in junior high and high school, as a consequence, think that I was tipped for a career in the rapidly growing industry of customer service (I was required to take a DECA in high school after I moved to rural Indiana). 

Probably the thing I remember most about high school in Indiana was Watergate. Watergate and the bullshit, dirty tricks, and and crime surrounding Watergate was another one of those things that made an impression on me and helped make me into the man that I am today. Watergate also made me appreciate journalism and journalists. for what seems like a brief moment in time from the vantage point of a 71 year old looking back on his life and even made me want to become a journalist at one point, but only again only briefly. At one time, I am ashamed to admit it, I even had a collection of newspapers from across North America that friends of my Mum brought back from their travels and gave to me. 

Like most of my generation I initially fell into the graduate from high school and get a well paying job with excellent benefits at a factory groove. My parents (networks are wonderful, eh?) found me a job at the local Overhead Door factory where I worked until I had an accident that made it impossible for me to work for the six months I recovered from at my grandparents house (My Gran was actually more of a mother to me than my own Mum). 

While I was laid up I took a trip back home to Dallas and, more importantly perhaps, I became interested in the history of Christianity. This seems quite weird and bizarre in retrospect because I wasn’t a Christian at all. Never have been. Never will be. It is not a weird and bizarre as it first seems, however, since I wanted to learn about the real history of Christianity not the mythhistorical one true believers or lukewarm believers used to try to frighten heathen like me with visions of the fiery furnace of hell. I wanted to be able to critique those Bible thumping Christianity that were so present in my cultural environment at the time and didn't realise yet that generally speaking Bible thumpers cannot be argued with on a rational and empirical basis. 

As a consequence of this urge to analyse and critique I soon began thinking about going to college. My father had gone to college before me and so had my best friend at the time, whose name was Steve. I increasingly wanted to follow in their footsteps. So when I was able to I rode my bike (it was a Raleigh) some ten miles into a nearby university, Ball State University. I rode my bike to Ball U because I wanted to go to the library (the old library that know serves another purpose) to read intellectual and scholarly books on the history of Christianity. I could not, of course, check them out of the library because I was not a student there so I had to read them in the stacks. It was also sometime during those pre-college years that I picked up Robin Wood’s book on Hitchcock. I was so impressed with Wood, a culture critic himself who would be in and out of academe for at least part of his life until he settled in at York in Greater Toronto, that he became for me my first intellectual mentor.

The next year I applied to and was accepted at Ball State. On the advice of my friend Steve I took every Religious Studies class I could with Dr. Carl Andrae, including a 400 level Comparative Religion class my very first semester at BSU. The classes I took with Dr. Andrae stimulated me intellectually in a way, excepting my high school English classes never did. Dr. Andrae would became my first academic mentor. 

Thanks to Dr. Andrae I decided that I wanted to become an academic and a university or college teacher just like him (though I think even at the time I was more interested in research than in teaching). That seemed to me about the only role that a culture critic wannabe like me could strive for and, of course, live on in a country that fetishised and worshipped capitalism. 

It was for this reason, wanting to get a job in academia in order to teach, that I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington. IU was, after all, one of America’s leading research universities at the time (it is really fading fast in the leading research university category) and it was research universities like IU that trained university and college teachers for the academic job market, a job market that was still expanding at the time though that was about to end.

I loved my undergraduate years. I learned so much during them, more than I would ever learn in high school and more that I would ever learn, as I was soon to learn, in postgraduate school. During those years the historians Keith Thomas and George Mosse and the cultural critic John Berger (whose Ways of Seeing I read and watched during my IU years thanks to a Phenomenology of Religion class) became three more of my most important academic mentors and have remained so ever since. 

During my undergraduate years, as I was subsequently to learn, I was a babe in nobody's arms. I was simply not privy to nor did I really want to see since I romanticised academia, what actually went on in universities. After I entered gradudate school, however, I soon learned about all the Peyton Place (metaphor) that universities actually were and are. I learned that life in universities—the places that trained future academics—was actually not that different from what went on outside universities in bourgeois America. I learned that life in the academy was not simply about academic stuff. It was also a soap opera, a soap opera that mirrored, if perhaps in exaggerated form, life in bourgeois America. There was narcissism, petty politics, backstabbing, cliques, cults, sects, sex, sexism, arrogance, favouritism, petty ethnocentrisms, wealthfare, petty antipathies, careerism, money grubbing, and most of all, limited commitment to the intellectual life that I had long romanticised. I, you see, saw the examined intellectual life I saw as a calling (vocare) or a vocation, Most of the academics I met regarded, however, regarded the intellectual as part of a 9 to 5 job. All of this ended up giving me a severe case of cognitive dissonance at the time and ever since, a cognitive dissonance in which I both loved and hated academia and wanted to be part of and wanted not to be a part of, at the same time.

After I took my bachelor's degree I was at a loss with what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had a job working part-time with the developmentally disabled when I was a student and later worked full-time at though I really didn't like it thanks, in part, to burn out (something that was magnified by going full-time), and I certainly did not want to do that job for the rest of my life. As with so much else in life there was a tonne of bullshit surrounding the job. We, meaning me and my bosses, made plans we knew could never be kept. But we had to make these plans since they were required by state and federal bureaucracies. Thes  plans involved moving clients towards independence when they simply could never be trained to be independent. Chalk another one up in the absurdity of the world category. 

Unhappy with my job and still wanting, at least part of the time, to become an academic I applied to and was accepted for postgraduate work at the University of Notre Dame. Trying also to fit be the good little bourgeois mould I was told I was supposed to fit I, at around the same time as I quit my job working with the developmentally disabled I got married. I got married because my son's mother got pregnant when we dated and I felt like I had to do the honourable thing. 

So, while I was trying to go to grad school I became father to a son, and became part of a family, a family which struggled to survive economically while I was in postgraduate school. The graduate school I applied to was Notre Dame and the department I matriculated into was American Studies because I was an interdisciplinary sort of bloke. I ended up not really liking Notre Dame, which seemed like a secular monastery to me. Notre Dame at the time (I don't know whether it does now) had little in the way of the intellectual culture in part because the numbers of graduate students at Notre Dame were small and what few graduate students there were were largely isolated from each other. I needed a lively intellectual culture to thrive. So, I dropped out of UND and simultaneously dropped out of my marriage. I am not the marrying type anyway.

By this time my dream of becoming an academic was tempered and nutted somewhat by reality. I returned to Dallas and got a job at Southern Methodist University. This turned out to be, in retrospect, one of the few jobs outside academe that I really loved (the other was working in a used bookstore in Provo, Utah) and wish I had never left. I worked in the Science/Engineering Library where I was assistant acquisitions librarian. I also worked another job I also loved at the same time, this one on Saturday's at the Cokesbury Bookstore on Preston Boulevard

While at SMU I (stupidly in retrospect) applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and Ohio University. I got into all of them but could not afford either Chicago or Kansas since they offered me no monies beyond loans and I didn't want to further enslave my life to paying back college loans since I had already taken out several during my undergraduate years. So, (stupidly) I left SMU and headed to Athens, Ohio where I did get money. 

I had one hell of a good time in Athens. Athens was one of the great places to party, to, in other words, drink a lot of alcohol, smoke a lot of grass, and take in the beautiful natural and man-made sites in the US. Every night was like Mardi Gras on Court and Union in Athens with their twenty plus pubs. I hung with four other guys, all very bright. We spent our nights typically at two pubs on Union drinking a lot of cheap beer and debating everything from Marx to Weber to Nicaragua. My curricular activities weren't bad either. I took several classes and did a tutorial in theory with the wonderful Algis Mickunas in the Philosophy Department. 

There remained a problem, however. There was still a part of me that wanted to take a doctorate for purely career reasons and Ohio did not have doctoral programmes in the areas I was interested in. So, after seeing a promo for SUNY Albany on a clipboard in the Philosophy Department while I was waiting to see Dr. Mickunas for my tutorial I applied to and entered an interdisciplinary (I was an interdisciplinary type of guy with interdisciplinary social science and humanities interests) doctor of arts programme at SUNY Albany. The reason I went to SUNY was simple; they gave me a full ride.

I had never heard of SUNY Albany when I applied to the school. When I arrived in Albany I was, I have to admit, disappointed right off the bat not only with SUNY Albany but with the interdisciplinary doctoral programme in the art. What I thought was a photograph of one building on the SUNYA campus on the promotional material I saw at OU was actually the entire university and it was ugly. As for the Doctor of Arts programme, me and another student, David and who I roomed with, quickly christened it the DoA programme, the dead on arrival programme. It turned out that the DoA degree was less than a Ph.D. degree making it even more difficult to try to get a job in academia after graduation in an era of increasing decreasing opportunities for doctoral students in the arts, humanities, and social sciences than it already was. Not surprisingly the programme no longer exists. It seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs in the wake of the retirement of the guiding faculty light behind the establishment of the programme. 

As a student in the DoA programme I was assigned to the Anthropology Department to TA for an introductory Cultural Anthropology class. On faculty member I met in Anth when I took a class with here as a DoA student, Gail Landsman, who became yet another intellectual mentor for me, urged me to apply to the doctoral programme in Anthropology at SUNY Albany and that is exactly what I did. 

I was accepted into the doctoral programme in Anthropology though I really wasn't enamoured by the wholistic ideology of the programme nor what I saw as its ahistoricism at the time. As someone influenced by Weber and Geertz and Thomas and Mosse I felt that anthropology was far too ahistorical so I dropped out of the programme after taking a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and history. 

Upon graduation I floated around picking up retail jobs when I could get them. I ended up working at the DMV in the South Bend, Indiana area, the place my son lived, for a time. In the evenings I continued to engage in the intellectual life. At some point during this period I picked up Jan Shipps’s Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition. As a consequence I became interested in Mormonism not only as Mormonism but as a way to engage and expand my interest in social theory, particularly Weberian, Geertzian, and social and cultural construction social and cultural theory. Mormonism, one of the few new religions or cults that survived and bureaucratised in historical rather than prehistorical time became a way for me to link theory and practise or attempt to link theory and practise (something reflected in my subsequent dissertation and later book). 

As someone who did the same thing over and over again (yes I am, I admit, "insane") I once again returned to graduate school but this time to study sociology and, more specifically, to study the sociology and history of Mormonism. So, I applied to BYU. I thought, and I thought I thought rationally, that if you wanted to study Mormons go to the Mormon university in the heart of the Mormon Kingdom in the intermountain West. So I applied for and was accepted into the Sociology Ph.D. programme at BYU. 

The problem this time was once again ignorance. I was ignorant of what BYU was actually like. The Y turned out to be something out of the 1950 mashed up with an episode of The Twilight Zone. I could not believe it but there was no caffeinated coke on campus, no caffeinated coffee (which I don't drink anyway) on campus, and no caffeinated tea  (which I did and do drink) on campus. Men were prohibited from having facial hair and they had to keep their other hair cut in such a way that it would not be below the ears. Women could only wear skirts that were no shorter than an inch above the knee. Fundamentalism or literalism was rampant among some of the faculty and some of the student population. So was sexism. Homosexuality had to be repressed. Men could not live in the same flats as women off campus.

All this doesn't mean that that there weren't things I liked about the Y. At BYU I found a number of outstanding undergraduates. In the class I taught on social stratification I taught the best students I ever taught anywhere over the course of my academic career. I also found that if you wanted to talk religion and particularly the Mormon religion, one could find a very stimulating intellectual culture at BYU and in Mormon culture at large including at the used bookstore I mentioned previously that worked at during my two years in Provo. 

But there was a problem. Once again, ensconced in a university, my inner pendulum swung from the I want to be an academic pole to I don’t want to be an academic pole, the binary in my mind that has been at the heart of my mental life at least since I started postgraduate school and still is. This binary ("I love you/I hate you/I can't live without you") has, fortunately or unfortunately, been at the heart of who I am and what I have done with my so-called life such as it is. 

One of the other problems with respect to my so-called academic career has been something that I mentioned earlier. I was an interdisciplinary sort of bloke trapped in bureaucracies that were largely disciplinary in nature. I tried American Studies at Notre Dame but was eventually turned off by that programme and by Notre Dame itself as I noted. I tried sociology at Ohio but found the school wanting, though it by far is the most amazing party school I have ever seen. I took a degree in anthropology leaving that programme before I took a Ph.D because I found it too ahistorical and too restricting. Moreover, I wanted to study complex Western societies which really wasn't an option at the time and in that place though I did manage with Gail's help to get my thesis on Quakerism in revolutionary England approved the the gradate committee. I again tried sociology at BYU but found it too restricting and too anemic when it came to history and comparative history. During all these years I increasingly came to see history as a method that was essential to all social science disciplines, hell to all disciplines in general. Therefore I decided to return to SUNYA once again after being unable to afford to go to the University of Toronto, Queen's University, and LaTrobe University, all of which I was accepted at but unable to afford, to try to take a doctoral degree in history. 

It didn't work out this time any more than it did the first time, second time, or third time. One of the problems was by this time I had also started reading several of the great academic satires of the era including Lucky Jim, Changing Places, and Eating People is Wrong. All of these fed me into the I don't want to be an academic pole lodged in my mind at the same time that I was trying to take an academic degree. Ron swings like a pendulum do. Additionally, I once again found a bourgeois soap opera at SUNYA and it once again really turned me off to academe. 

So, I again dropped out of school and shuffled between dead end jobs in retail. Eventually, thanks to my friend Bonnie, I got a job at the Encyclopedia of New York State. I parlayed that job into a job in acquisitions at the State University of New York Press. I liked working at the Press. I would still be there if I had not got caught in the jaws of one of those inevitable economic downturns that is constant in the US and the Western world thanks to its inevitable booms and busts. It might have been different if I had taken the job at the University of Illinois Press I was offered (where I would have eventually gotten the Mormon Studies list) and which I stupidly (20/20 retrospective vision again) turned down to stay at SUNY Press until I was made redundant a month or so later thanks to the economic downturn after 9/11. Now that is timing Ron!

Fired by the SUNY Press I returned once again to retail this time in Austin. Not liking the dead end job in Texas I was stuck in and the fact that Austin was full of overqualified people looking for the same jobs I was, I returned to Albany when I was offered a part-time history teaching job at SUNY Albany which now called itself the University at Albany. Teaching part-time in a university was one of the things I could actually make a decent living at, well kind of a decent living at. 

Since I taught in the SUNY system I got a financial break when taking classes in the SUNY system. So I returned to the History Department at SUNY Albany (a department without much in the way of an intellectual culture) and completed my Ph.D. (I had taken my exams before I left for Moscow). By the time I finished my degree I had som much clocked time pension and health benefits time that I decided to keep working if I could in the SUNY system (along with Albany, Oneonta, and Cobleskill I also taught at RPI). It wasn't easy. Anyway nobody wanted me for a full time academic job in history. I had only one job interview and that I loused up thanks to my honesty. But truth be told, I have never really been academic material anymore than I have been CIA material. So I stayed in part-time teaching in the SUNY system until 2021.

Working as an adjunct wasn’t bad at first. I minded, of course, being overworked and underpaid, of being one of the many lumpen academetariats, but hey I got benefits and a promise of a NY pension including NY state health care after retirement. What made being an adjunct or a seasonal worker in the coal mines of academia was the increasing attempt by the bureaucrats who ran the universities and colleges to force even us part-timers into doing the interminable bureaucratic crap they made and make full-timers do such as those idiotic end of term evaluations of us by students and the increasing retail nature of the higher educational business where the customer, the student, is usually right. The notion that lower level students who don't know much if anything at all about either teaching or real academic subjects (see YouTube "reaction" videos) are competent enough to evaluate professional teachers is beyond looney but it has to be done, I guess, in an era where bureaucratic outcomes and evaluations are a growth industry (which enrich some) in the service or retail sector of the contemporary American economy like the contemporary American university and college industry. This bureaucratic stuff, in addition to the inherent soap opera moroncity, the self-evaluations we had to do at the end of each term, the tests we had to take during the school year, and the inherent inequities of universities and colleges (I had been fucked over by Project Renaissance and SUNY Oneonta as I noted in other blogs), which I had learned to kind of tolerate if uneasily, made working in academe never fully satisfying for me.

I worked largely at SUNY Oneonta until they, as I mentioned earlier and talk about in more detail in other blogs on this site, fucked me over and offered me only one class instead of the usual two after the Covid pandemic and an influx of money from the state. This meant that I would no health benefits and that I would have to drive an hour to teach one class. Instead I retired with a small pension and state health care along with Medicare (I am actually one of the lucky ones in the glorious neo-liberal United States). I enjoyed and enjoy retirement. I can read when I want to, listen to classical music when I want to, watch movies and TV shows on TV, DVDs, and blu rays when I want to, and mess around on the internet at my leisure when I want to. I even managed to finish my aforementioned book on Mormonism which I had started in the 1990s during my retirement. 

I have since applied for and gotten other jobs (and not gotten other jobs) since retirement but I had problems with the bureaucracies at two of those jobs (both of which, including one at Schenectady County Junior College. I wrote about in other blogs) and that turned me off to both of them. I don't have to work for meagre wages simply to survive anymore. One job which I did like was working in one of the branches of the Albany Public Library. I had to quite it because I could not do it physically "thanks" to health issues. The poor health of my pre-retirement years is even worse now.

Somewhere along in this journey, it had to have been during graduate or postgraduate school—learning is sometimes a dangerous thing if your mind is open—something else happened to me, something else very important happened to me. Somewhere along the way I was disabused of the utopianism allied with my wanting to be a university of college teacher and academia in general and became a secular Calvinist ridding myself of Enlightenment ideologies in the process. At the same time I became less and less enamoured not only of academia and the notion that education, in general and for all, was liberatory. Somewhere along the way I learned that while these are all nice little stories they are mythic stories. I also learned that the masses prefer their stories mythic and that they generally create realities to match their political and ideological prejudices. But at least I have a pension that keeps me, at least at the moment (though DonnieDT may still be able to change that for the worse), barely above the poverty level. Despite all this I remain as convinced as ever that there is a difference between the ever examining intellectual life and academic work and that I prefer the former over the latter.

 

The Applying for a Job Kiada: The University System of New Hampshire Idiocy

 

The new digital technologies of the brave new digital world are a double edged sword. I have known this fact for a long time but I recently discovered it yet again when I applied for an online teaching job with the University System of New Hampshire.

As some of you may know I retired from part-time college and university teaching in 2021. To say I have enjoyed retirement other than my ever increasing health problems would be an understatement. I have enjoyed the freedom to be able to listen to classical music when I wanted, read when I wanted, and watch TV shows or movies when I wanted.

Recently, I have begun to think about applying for jobs again. The reason for this is simple. I know that the politically and ideologically correct wild bunch at the White House are thinking about getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

So, I applied for a job at Siena College recently which I did not get partly, I suspect, because of my longer than shoulder length hair. I saw the person who interviewed me via Zoom, actually do a double take when she saw it. I also recently applied for an online teaching job—I did online classes at SUNY Albany and SUNY Oneonta—at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and I tried to apply for one at the University System of New Hampshire.

Both Worcester Poly and the USNH actually used the same third party application system (public and private corporations enriching other private corporations). I had no problem using this system when I applied to Worcester. The application system was able to autofill my application at using my vita. I was not so lucky when it came to the University System of New Hampshire application, however.

When I learned about the job from Indeed I went to the USNH company page (academic institutions as corporations) and created an account. I told the application to fill in the blanks with my vita. Unfortunately, it proved unable to do that simple task.  Why it was able to do this with my application to Worcester Poly and not able it at the USNH is beyond me and I want it to remain beyond me. Trying to understand computers is like trying to understand the human mind.

Everything went well with my USNH application until I was asked for my educational background. The system was able to fill in my name, my address, my telephone number, my email, and most of my employment background material. It was not, however, able to fill in my educational history. When I tried to put in the information manually the programme would not let me. Presumably this was because the system was too stupid to realise that since it did not put in the information and I thus had to it could not cope with the fact that I needed to do it manually when it wanted to do it automatically, or rather not done it, automatically. Life as surreal farce. 

At this point I gave up. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time then to waste it (time is money) trying to do what apparently could not be done.

I went back to the USNH again today to see if I could do the impossible. I wasn’t going to try to do this manually since whether I should be considered for the job, a professional job I should add, should be done solely on the basis of my vita since I am not applying for a job at McDonalds. I forgot my password so I tried to get a new one. When I requested a line to create a new password the link the USNH sent me arrived without a link I could actually click on.

The moral of this story? Computer associated systems used for applications can be utterly stupid on occasion. Perhaps this is because of the literalism associated with this stuff, perhaps it is the fact that humans create such systems, or perhaps it is because we live in a kafkaesque world. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. I will leave this theological questions up to hardshell Calvinists to try to discern.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Musings on YouTube Reactors Reacting to Queen’s “Fat Bottom Girls"

One of the great joys associated with the watching of YouTube reactors on music, films, and TV, is watching reactors do injustice to music, films, and TV shows on YouTube.

Most reactors have this fascinating rationalisation for not doing any research about the artists, films, or TV shows they are listening to or watching before they listen to them or watch them. It is the we don’t want to spoil our experience of the song, movie, or TV show we are listening to or watching rationalisation. As a result they don’t do what many of us did back in the day when we heard or watched something we liked; we tried to find out anything we could about the artist, the movie, or the TV show and the meaning of the song, movie, or TV show we were watching. 

We also read the TV Guide summaries religiously of what was coming up next week on the TV show we were watching and we watched the what was going to be on next week's episode promos of the television show we were watching. 

Our YouTube reactors, however, don’t do any of this because they think it will ruin the experience of hearing an artist and watching a TV show or film. They prefer the tabula rasa approach, something that is impossible in the first place given the realities of socialisation.

Beyond not doing research some YouTube reactors have difficulty grasping parody and satire though many do get the joke which the song is in large part. Perhaps it is because they make parody and satire meaningless by rolling both into the omnipresent but empty concept "cheese". I was reminded of this once again when I watched several reactors react to Queen’s 1978 song “Fat Bottom Girls”. 

Several reactors thought the song, written by Queen guitarist Brian May, was serious. They even pondered a historical, sociological, and ethnographic question. Didn’t they like skinny girls back then, they asked? Two other reactors reacting together wondered why Queen’s vocalist Freddie Mercury, who they knew was gay (so much for tabula rasa), was singing a song, which they wrongly assumed was written by Mercury, about women. They also assumed that the song was autobiographical, which it may have been at least in part, but to grasp how it was or whether it was autobiographical they needed to do research on how it was autobiographical which they did no.

American YouTube reactors also revealed a lack of knowledge about British colloquialisms and euphemisms. None of them, for instance, knew that Fanny, the narrator’s naughty nanny (how is that for alliteration), was also a euphemism or that May was likely parodying and satirising, the English upper class, in the song.