What I Learned at a Communications Revolution That Was Not Really a Communications Revolution

 

Over the course of my university and college teaching career I have taught several different academic subjects. I taught, for example, Sociology, specifically Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and Social Problems. I taught Cultural Anthropology. I taught History, specifically World History, Western History, European History, American History, The History of the War in Afghanistan, and Environmental History (the first such course taught at SUNY Albany). And I taught the History of American Television and An Introduction to Communications course in two different Communications Departments.

When I was offered a class in Communications I have to admit that I knew very little about departments of communication. As someone who went to a major level one research university for my undergraduate education I assumed they were like film departments in that they broke down communications forms showing how they worked and how they were impacted by broader economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts. I assumed, in other words, that they were theoretically and analytically oriented.

My first foray in teaching Communications seemed to confirm that hypothesis. I taught a course on the history of television at a second or third level research university in New York. It went fine for several years and than, as so often happens with most jobs, there was burn out particularly as it related to dealing with students most of whom seemed more obsessed with grades as grades rather than as marks of academic achievement and with extracurricular activities. 

This difficulties associated with dealing with students was brought home to me during one term when I taught a class on the History of American Journalism, a class which I never should have taken on in the first place and which I had concerns about teaching even when I was asked to do it by a faculty member.In this class I had several students who were abusive toward me and claimed, fraudulently, that I had not indicated what I expected of them and that I had not explained to them how grades were calculated in the class. Students, you see, don't always read the syllabus and some of those who do don't quite grasp its content for a variety of reasons. In this class, by the way, I actually had students who did not know how to calculate twenty percent in a class where the maximum number of points was 100, something that was a shock even to me someone who had already taught in higher education for six years at that point. 

Nor did these same students understand how single payer and universal health care systems actually worked and work. Their knowledge of both, I found out when we explored journalistic data relating to the Canadian health care system in class, was very limited and was very ideologically driven. They did not know, for example, that a vast majority of Canadians were opposed to an American style health care system and they could not believe that anyone would not want to adopt American models of health care because, well they were American and America is the greatest country the world has ever seen. Amen. They could not believe, in other words, that anyone would not want to be like red, white, and blue them. 

The reason for this lack of knowledge among American college students about global health care systems is rather easy to grasp. Most of their knowledge of health care systems was and is mediated by the American media, a media in which there are negative stories about single payer and universal health care systems on a regular basis, an American media that usually simply accepts the testimony of demagogues who rant and rave and rage about health care systems other than America's own rather than exploring what the actual data itself reveals. And lest we forget, the American media is American after all. 

The students in my class had no first hand or unmediated knowledge let alone experiences with such health care systems and I made the mistake of telling them so. Teaching, I assumed, was, after all, about telling the truth, about correcting false opinions with the facts. I forgot, however, that what American higher education is really about in this consumer age is that customers, who are the backbone of college and universities, are always right because US colleges and universities need the monies student bodies bring into the college and university. Truth in most American colleges and universities, it seems, has as a consequence taken a back seat to ideologically correct driven fictions because in an age of belt tightening and fewer students keeping the customer satisfied is the mantra of the academic bureaucrat trained in business methods. Truth has thus been kicked out of the car entirely and is lying near death in the middle of the road somewhere in middle America.

My second foray in teaching communications took place at a small college that began life as a normal school which morphed into a liberal arts college in the 1960s. It was during this second foray in teaching communications that I learned that there was a division, a schism if you will, between three sects in communications departments: the sect that emphasises how to communicate, the sect that emphasises theory and critique if limitedly, and the sect that emphasises training students for jobs in the communications industries. Eventually the massive disconnect between these sects led the department I once taught in to split into two, led them to split into Communication Studies and Media Studies departments. I should note that though both departments continue to maintain the fiction that theory and practise go hand and hand in the Department in dialectical fashion in truth what passes for dialectics in the Department is actually dialectics without the dialectic.

The students I taught at this small college were, by and large, characterised by the same division the department was. My sense is that those interested in the more academic side of communications were a small minority compared to those who wanted a vocational education. Most of them, in other words, wanted a how to course in how to make television, how to make films, and how to make commercials. They had little interest in the more critical side of Communications, in the side of Communications that explores how communication forms actually work. They were, by and large, inscribed or sutured into the economic, political, and cultural status quo because what they came to college for was to get a job. They didn't want a critique and they certainly didn't want a history since it too was not really helpful or even relevant in their minds when it came to them getting a job working as a cog in the communication industries machine. Don't question Media Authorities seemed to be their unconscious mantra. I want a job was definitely their conscious mantra. Needless to say, both of those are nails in the coffin of a liberal education.

Teaching in Communications turned out to be a rather surreal experience. I was given Introduction to Communications to teach, something that I had never taught at that point and had no idea what it entailed. My conception of communications was, as I noted earlier, one in which one explored, historically, culturally, and socially, the communications media. So, I asked the chair of the department to send me a previous syllabus and the course text. She did. I organised my syllabus just like the one I was sent. The surreal part comes in when another faculty member who had previously taught the class asked me why in god's name I organised the class as I did. I told him the truth, namely that that was how the syllabus the chair sent me was organised. I later reorganised it in a way more closely aligned with the textbook, which made more sense to me.

In the end I count myself fortunate that I got out of teaching communications. I was offered a class in the Sociology Department, a department that was still, at the time, a department grounded in the academic liberal arts side of the higher education ledger. I taught Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Religion for the Department for several years. I was also fortunate in that when I explained to the chair my lack of health insurance woes at the time I agreed to teach the class he gave me another class to teach when he learned I had to have a hip operation and that I needed to keep my health insurance so I could have this operation so I needed the second class in order to keep my health insurance (you only got health insurance if you taught two courses at the same college or university), something that fell on deaf ears in the Communications Department.

Eventually, I retired with a pension from the college thankfully before Sociology too was recreated more in the image of vocational education, a vocational education in how to be police officer and a vocational education in how to be a human services bureaucrat. Sadly, this seems the only option open to academic disciplines that want to survive in small colleges in an era of education for a job education, in an era which has seen the death of so many once upon a time liberal arts colleges.

As for Communications if I had my way I would take all of the academic courses out of that Department and transfer them to Sociology since Sociology of the Media is where they should and could be taught and taught more critically, analytically, and rigourously. As for the how to communicate part of Communication courses I would transfer those to English faculties where they belong. As for the vocational courses in communications where should they go? Get thee to a vocational college (the best way to learn to make films, after all, is to watch great films like those of Alfred Hitchcock and to talk about them and study them in Film Studies classes). Communications Department, I doubt that anyone would really miss you.

The Books of My Life: Luis Bunuel (Krohn)

I did not discover the movie director Luis Bunuel until the late 1970s. My introduction to Bunuel his through hi surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930) in film classes at Indiana University in Bloomington. Later, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I saw his El angel exterminador (1962), a film that  is almost certainly is paid homage to in the season six Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Older and Far Away", and his last film, Cet obscur objet du desir, at one of the Ryder film series showings probably at Bear’s Back Room off campus in Bloomington. When I lived in Utah in the early 1990s I saw his film La Voie lactee (1969) with my favourite Mormon Yoderian at an art house cinema in the south eastern part of Salt Lake. Thanks to all this viewing I was intrigued with the surrealism, the Marxism, the critique of theocratic religion, and the humour in each of these Bunuel films.

Bill Krohn’s Luis Bunuel (Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2005) follows Bunuel’s movie career chronologically from his 1929 movie Un chien andalou ,which he made in Spain with his fellow surrealist Salvador Dali, to the last film he directed, Cet obscur objet du desir from 1977. As with all of the books in the Taschen books on directors edited by Paul Duncan Krohn’s Luis Bunuel is more like a  profusely illustrated encyclopaedia like entry on whichever movie director the book is about than an in depth study of a film director.

According to Krohn the Spanish born but cosmopolitan film director Luis Bunuel—over the course of his career Bunuel worked in Spain, Mexico, the US (including briefly in Hollywood), and France—Bunuel was simultaneously an avant garde surrealist and a Freudian, and Marxist movie director whose films centred around sex, often “deviant” or “perverted” forms of sexuality including a variety of fetishisms, religion, specifically largely somewhat respectful critiques of the right wing theocratic Roman Catholicism he grew up with, and politics, specifically a Marxist influenced politics that Bunuel was influenced by beginning in his youth. This political aspect of Bunuel’s films marks him off from a latter day filmmaker who is often compared to Bunuel these days, David Lynch, a director whose movies are often compared to Bunuel's but seem to me to lack the political aspects of Bunuel's films and to be be surrealism for surrealisms sake and little more (see Robin Wood on Lynch whose assessment of the director I agree with).

Krohn not only explores Bunuel’s auteurist themes in the essay and photographs in the book he also nicely illustrates the motifs one finds in Bunuel’s movies, motifs that show up again and again in Bunuel’s films. In a series of photographs from several of Bunuel’s films from the late 1920s to the late 1970s Krohn finds a number of recurring motifs in Bunuel’s films including legs, feet/shoes, back/vulva, breasts, young women and older men, bells and towers, religion, mad guns, guns, physical deficiencies and deformities, poultry, insects, animals, boxes, and dreams. The book ends with an excellent and very helpful filmography.

Krohn’s book is largely descriptive. It contains, if briefly, information on the contexts, the production aspects, and the plot of each film, which, as is almost always the case with books and monographs on films and film directors, is not always easy to visualise if one has not seen the films. Though primarily descriptive Krohn does not hesitate to offer his judgement on the quality of the films. Some will miss the analysis one finds in books like those of film critic, historian, and scholar Robin Wood but one must remember Krohn’s brief. His remit, as is true of all of the books in this Taschen series, was to write a brief encyclopaedic like entry and coordinate it with extensive and helpful illustrations. Krohns book does this well. That said the interpretive anaemia of the book is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is the lack of the crystal ball textualism that so dominates academic film studies these day.

  
 

The Books of My Life: The Godless Constitution

 

Sometimes when I am deep in my almost daily book reading I find myself getting into a kind of thematic groove. I have been in one of those thematic groves recently which is why, after reading Jill Lepore’s empirical take down of the twentieth century American Tea Party and its selective historical literacy (The White’s of Their Eyes) I decided to read another book in the same vein, Isaac Kramnick's and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (New York: Norton, edition with a new chapter, 2005). 

Like Lepore’s The White’s of Their Eyes Kramnick’s and Moore’s book is a mixture of empirical history and rational empirically grounded polemic. In The Godless Constitution Cornell professors Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings of the US Constitution just as Lepore attempted to correct the historical misreadings of the right wing American Tea Party, if in a more conventional narrative way. Where Lepore attempted to correct misreadings of the US Revolution by the American right, Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings by many on the intellectual and populist right, the latter generally mimicking what the former mouth with a little bit of help from their right wing friends in the demagogic and sensationalist red faced and fear mongering media, of the US Constitution.

Right wing mythhistory, like that which Lepore, Kramnick, and Moore attempt to correct, of course, has a long history as the parodic and satirical National Lampoon 1964 high school yearbook published in 1973 with its parodic and satirical excerpts of a high school history text points up, a long history that stretches back to the beginnings of the nation itself, actually even before there was a nation called the United States of America. So, it should be no surprise to people in the historical know, save for those wedded to an Enlightenment perception that education has or will put such mythic rabble into the rubbish bin of history once and for all, that mythhistory is still alive and well and living in intellectual secular right and intellectual religious right American minds today.

Kramnick and Moore do an excellent job of exploring the real as opposed to the mythhistorical origins of the US Constitution. They note right off the bat that the US Constitution does not mention god once and mentions religion only once in order to mandate that no religious test for office be mandated in the new United States in its original form. In its expanded form, of course, thanks to the addition of the Bill of Rights, something that was added to the Constitution to assure its passage, religion is mentioned only, as Kramnick and Moore note, in order to mandate that there be no theocracy in the United States, something that on one side of the coin separates religion and the American state and on the other separates the American state from religion. The founding fathers, after all, knew the dangers of theocracy not only because of its long European history—Christianity as a state religion in what became Europe goes back to the Roman Empire—and reality but because many of the American colonies were theocracies as well, theocracies where, for example, Quakers, were murdered because they were not “orthodox” Puritans.

Kramnick and Moore are also very good at exploring the ideologies of American’s founding fathers in relation to religion. They note rightly that founding fathers like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, who many on the right have turned into secular "orthodox” Christian saints, were not the nationalist Christians who are so prominent in America and American politics today. Many of the founding fathers, in fact, were Deists, those who denied the Trinity, the Christian notion that god has three faces, god, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. They note that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers and writer of the early drafts of the American Declaration of Independence, made his own version of the New Testament, the Christian Bible which was added to the Jewish Tanakh, in which the miracles and other supernatural elements were removed, in order to produce a Jesus who Jefferson thought was more real, a Jesus who was a kind of an Enlightenment figure before the Enlightenment (akin to how Joseph Smith made Jesus a Mormon before Mormonism in the Book of Mormon). They note that James Madison, the author of the US Constitution, played a significant role in helping pass Jefferson’s Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom, a statute written in 1777 and passed in 1786, which mandated religious freedom in once theocratic Virginia (Anglicanism was the colonial state religion in Virginia) thanks to his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, which, in turn, argues for religious liberty and against theocracy, documents that made religion in the US a private not a public or state matter. 

Where Kramnick and Moore are wanting is their failure to explore how this secular constitution written by Enlightenment philosophes who, while using a language about god that was very similar to those who regarded themselves as “orthodox” Christians, gave different meanings, more deistic meanings or twists, to that language, something those wedded to a literalist and fundamentalist reading of language often fail to get or refuse to get (thanks to political and ideological correctness). They fail to explore the fact that one variant of American Protestant Christianity became the unofficial state religion of the United States beginning with the second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial theocracy that lasted well into the twentieth century, and an unofficial theocracy that many on the right point to as evidence that the US was and always has been a Christian nation.  

Another thing wanting in Kramnick and Moore is a reflection on who this book is meant for. If it is meant for those already convinced of the fact that the US is a secular nation then it is simply made to order for an already present echo chamber. If it is aimed, at least in part, to those on the right who misread the empirical facts about the secular American Constitution it is doubtful that many on the right, particularly the Christian nationalist right, will read it in the first place and it is likely that if they do they will do what often times happens when cognitive dissonance occurs, should cognitive dissonance even occur in the first place, they will simply become even more convinced that the US was a Christian nation. After all, for far too many on the mythhistorical right ideology creates reality rather than the other way around, something proven yet again by the malreview of the book by one Dan Crawford on Amazon, a Pontius Pilate like corporation that refuses to weed out politically and ideologically correct reviews from fact based reviews. Crawford accuses, Kramnick and Moore of being "atheists", offering no evidence whatsoever for this claim, and maintains, despite empirical evidence to the contrary (see page 96 chosen at random, for example), that the authors do not quote the words of the founding fathers. It should also be noted that Crawford blissfully ignores the bibliography at the end of the book while making the claim that Kramnick and Moore offer no sources for their arguments. And so political and ideological correctness goes.

The Books of My Life: The Whites of Their Eyes

 

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, The Public Square series, 2010). Actually, if I am honest, I kind of know what to make of it. I feel a little of this and a little of that about it. I feel a little comme ci and a little comme ca about it.

Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes is interesting structurally. Like the Tardis (it is perhaps most like the Doctor Who episode "City of Death") the book bounces back and forth between the present, the present being 2009 in Lepore's book, and the past, the past being the revolutionary era of the so-called founding fathers of the American Revolution, the era from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century. 

The 2009 present in The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a kind of ethnography, but not a very deep or detailed ethnography, of people associated with the latter day Tea Party in Boston and the current events related to this latter day Tea Party in Massachusetts. Their various political rallies at various historical sights in Boston and the Boston area is grist for Lepore's mill. Another 2009 present is grounded in Lepore’s critique of this latter day Tea Party and how it approaches and interprets the history of the American revolutionary era.

The past of The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a historical synthesis of what was happening primarily in Boston during the revolutionary era. So, we get a discussion of the American colonial reaction to the various taxes imposed by the British government on the American colonies, taxes meant to reduce the British debt which was incurred partly because of its defence of the Colonies (see the French and Indian War). The Whites of Their Eyes also explores colonial response to those taxes, which led to the Boston Massacre, when British troops stationed in the American colonies fired on and killed several protestors, and the Boston Tea Party, when some colonials dressed as American First Peoples boarded ships in Boston harbour filled with tea and dumped it in the drink. Along the way Lepore introduces a gallery of characters including founding father George Washington, founding father John Adams, Adam's wife Abigail Adams, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom, printer and newspaper publisher Benjamin Edes, founding father Samuel Adams, founding father Thomas Jefferson, the man who road himself into American history books Paul Revere, the Black man Crispus Attucks who was shot and killed during the Boston Massacre, and poet Mercy Otis Warren. Lepore uses this past, which also includes discussions of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, a discussion of the tensions over slavery during the era in Boston, a discussion of the founding fathers response to religion in the era, and a discussion of the difficult life of Jane Mecom financially and the mental health problems within her family, to try to paint a broader and less mythhistorical picture of this era in American history than that of the latter day mythhistorical modern Tea Party.

Lepore also uses this synthesised past to distinguish professional history from mythhistory, the historical sensibility that dominates the contemporary Tea Party. For Lepore the “history” of the contemporary Tea Party is grounded in a romanticism that decontextualises the past jerking it, in the process, out of its cultural, economic, and political contexts or frames, sanctifies it, making the events associated with it sacred and the founding fathers saints with hagiographies to be written about them, and recontextualises it in a present, doing injustice to the real history of these events and these people in the process. For Lepore, and I agree with her entirely here, the mythhistory of the 2009 Tea Party is a fundamentalist history, a cherry picked history that tends to leave out the social and cultural lives of those who aren’t the great men of history, of women, and of Blacks. The fundamentalist Tea Party history, in other words, is a history grounded in the present and the culture and ideology of the present and which reads a romanticised and selective contemporary history, culture, and ideology back into the past turning it into a mythic history of that past. As a consequence, as Lepore notes, the mythhistory of the Tea Party really isn’t history, a history grounded in empirical evidence and valid interpretation. It is a disneyfied or disneyfornicated, pollyannish, and manichean history, nor history, in other words.

This mythic history of the present does injustice to the historical record as Lepore notes. It does injustice to the contradictory and situational attitudes the founding fathers of the past had to religion and the role religion should play in the new American state. Mythhistory, for example, leaves out the fact that the founding fathers said different things and meant different things about religion at the time and the fact that several of the founding fathers were not “orthodox” Christians at the time by the standards of what passes for “orthodox” Christianity today. As Lepore notes the founding fathers were diplomatic about religion (Washington), continually tinkered with it. Jefferson cut and pasted to take out the miracles of the Bible (the famous Jefferson Bible), and Madison defended it (in its natural religion not fundamentalist religion form). All of them did agree on one thing, as Lepore points out, however, that there should be no establishment of religion (theocracy) in the new United States. Additionally, as Lepore notes, the authors of the US Constitution specifically stipulated that there should be no theocracy in the new American state, that there should be no religious test for office holders, those running for office in the US did not have to be Christian, in other words, and that the civil rights of Americans was not to be grounded in religious ideology. She also notes that the treaty between the new United States and the Muslim “pirates” of the Barbary Coast stipulated that the US should not be a Christian nation though this reality has not stopped theocratic and generally nationalist Protestants from trying to make it in to one over the years (something that should tell you something about theocratic Christianity).

Mythhistory also, Lepore argues, does injustice to the fact that both Jefferson and Madison did not argue for an originalist position with respect to the US Constitution. Originalism or original intent theory is an ideology which tries to ascertain what the writers of the Constitution meant at the time. For founding fathers Jefferson and Madison, however, the Constitution was alive and had to adapt to changing times because times changed and animated minds had to change with the changing times if their minds were to remain alert and alive. For them history was progressive, moving in a direction that would invariably lead to improvements. It should also be noted that the originalist position that dominates so many legal minds these days, including at the US Supreme Court, really isn’t originalist since an originalist interpretation of the right to bear arms would have to rule that the arms Americans had the right to bear were only those present in late 17th century colonial America since that is what the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about the right to bear arms. Originalists thus aren’t really originalists. They are actually proponents of the Constitution is a living document that can and should be amended given that times change position though they don't recognise it unable to see the motes in their own politically and ideologically correct eyes. They see the Constitution as a living document since they magically turn muskets into AK-47s, something the founding fathers simply did not have in their minds when they inserted the right to bear arms into the Bill of Rights.

By counterpointing the realities of the past with the political and ideological correctness of the Tea Party of the 2009 present Lepore shows that the history of the contemporary Tea Party is not the real history of the American revolutionary past. This is, of course, important and critical but it raises a fundamental question: will the Tea Partyers of the present (or their populist Trumpian children) actually read Lepore’s book? Personally, I doubt it. As my old religion professor said to me once, arguing with fundamentalists, in this case with the political and ideological fundamentalists, is akin to arguing with a brick wall since true believers, by and large, simply create their own political, economic, cultural, geographical, and demographic realities. And even if these politically and ideologically manufactured realities are challenged cognitive dissonance generally leads to few defections and paradoxically often ends up strengthening the attachment of true believers to the socially and culturally constructed "realities" that are a central part of their identity formations.

Like so many history books, particularly those aimed, as Lepore’s book is, at a popular reading audience, The Whites of Their Eyes is full of anecdotes including anecdotes about the disappearance of, for example, Thomas Paine’s bones, the Thomas Paine who was an agnostic and who Glenn Beck, one of the televangelists of the Tea Party who was briefly on Fox news, magically transformed into an exemplary “orthodox” Christian founding father. She provides information on when the Boston Tea Party was first referred to as the Boston Tea Party, 1834. Anecdotes like this, I am sure, play well with the general audience Lepore aims the book at. But? 

At the same time The Whites of Their Eyes provides excellent summaries of the significant Revolutionary history of the American colonies, summaries on the American Revolution, particularly in Boston, which was an important centre of revolutionary activities in the colonies at the time, explorations, if we can generalise from the stories Lepore tells about Mecom and Warren, on the history of women in the Revolutionary era, and summaries relating to the tensions over slavery in Colonial America and, again, particularly in Boston 

Lepore does make some important general theoretical points. She rightly points out that the mythhistory of the contemporary Tea Party is similar in form to the lost cause mythhistory of the post-Civil War US White South. Myths, she shows, and she is not alone in showing this, can be similar in form but different in content in that they can sacralise different tales whether of the American revolutionary past, the Southern post-Civil War past (the myth of the lost cause), the Canadian myth that it was the destiny of the nation to settle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the Australian myths associated with the great men who settled the bush. She rightly points out that the Tea Party mythhistory is, because of silences about what their mythhistory elides, such as the stories of women and Blacks during the Revolutionary era, anti-pluralist. Its mythhistory is tales of "great" men, “great" White men. She rightly notes that mythhistorians fail to differentiate between opinion, the belief that the US was a Christian nation, for example, and the fact that it wasn’t as the treaty between the US and the Barbary “pirates” makes clear. She rightly notes that mythhistorians generally prefer politically and ideologically correct opinion to empirical fact. Cultural sociologists and, particularly cultural and social anthropologists, of course, have long been familiar with the fact that mythic symbols work this way still it is nice to know that some historians are cottoning on too. 

If you know someone who has deeply imbibed American mythhistory but still has an open mind (open to quantitative and qualitative empirical and scientific research grounded in evidence) you might give them The Whites of Their Eyes to read. Whether they will have a road to Damascus experience or a gradual change of mind is an open question since, as social scientists have noted for some time, it is not easy to open the closed minds of most true believers. At the same time we know it is possible to open closed minds. Several members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example, have left, the Church something that shows that seeing the light is possible. That many Mormons who have left the LDS faith and become mirror images of themselves when they were Mormons, given that now instead of evangelising for Mormonism they are now evangelising for some variety of Mormonism was a fiction I was brainwashed into, shows that even those who leave retain some aspect of who they were (see, for instance, the YouTube videos of John Dehlin and Alyssa Grenfell). Moreover, it must be remembered that at the same time as some have exited the faith many still remain faithful members of the Westboro Baptist Church despite widespread polemical and apologetic and empirical criticism of them. And if the Westboro Baptist Church tells us anything it tells us that groups with a strong identity grounded in symbols associated with their own mythhistories often see criticism through the prism of persecution and see themselves as suffering servants of the Truth, making undermining their mythhistory with the facts difficult at best.

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.