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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Say Hello to Indiana University Vichy...

 

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

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

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

The Books of My Life: Singin’ in the Rain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

Musings on Mad Men

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life as Crisis Management: The CVS Kiada Goes On and On and On and On and On

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Books of My Life: Gun Crazy

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

Life as Crisis Management: The Powell’s Books Kiada

 

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

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

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

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

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

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