The Books of My Life: History on Trial

 

History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997) by historians Gary Nash and Ross Dunn and curriculum studies scholar Charlotte Crabtree, takes readers on a journey through the sometimes wacky world of America's culture wars and American historical correctness. Culture wars, as Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, have been part of the intellectual and popular cultural and ideological landscape of the United States since even before there was a United States, while historical cultural wars have been around, in both cold and hot form, at least since the creation of the new nation of the United States.

Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn explore, in History on Trial, America's culture wars and specifically, America's battle over its own history. Early chapters of History on Trial look at the conflicts over America's history between what might be called the myth history school, for whom history is the tale of good guys and bad guys and for whom the function of history is to create politically and ideologically correct Americans, and those who view history more as an descriptive and less a normative discipline and for whom history's function is to capture historical reality as accurately as possible, warts and all. One chapter of History on Trial, "History Wars Abroad", Chapter Six, compares and contrasts battles over history beyond the US in other core nations particularly that of the UK where the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher, deregulated the economy while trying, if somewhat unsuccessfully, to regulate, centralise, and dogmatise the history curriculum of the United Kingdom. Chapters Seven through nine explore, from an ethnographic--all three authors were involved in the writing of these voluntary standards--historical, political, and cultural perspective, the battle over the attempt by several American States and the US government, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1990s, to write voluntary kindergarten through grade twelve national standards in science civics, and, particularly in history.

History on Trial is full of hypocrisies that seem an inherent part of the American and human cultural landscape, contradictions some will find both entertaining and absurd. As Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, one of the self appointed leading lights of mythistory, Lynn Cheney, was, while head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, supportive of the attempt to develop voluntary national standards until it became politically expedient, as the Republican Party dixiefied and birchified. to oppose them. Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn also note what has become a central part of the demagogic strategy of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, lie, take things out of context, demonise, and play to the emotions of the masses.  

History on Trial is an interesting book, one which offers an excellent short summary of the battles over America's history from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. It is a book that will probably not, however, interest those who think that mythistory is the only true or revealed history. After all, true believers with their our way or the highway approach, leave little if any room for empirical or rational debate.

The Books of My Life: The Image

 

In retrospect, Daniel Boorstin's The Image or What Ever Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962) is an odd book given its author, its subject, and the year in which it was published. That one of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, who was not really trained as a historian at all but was trained as a lawyer, and someone who wasn't a fan of Joseph McCarthy--pointing up the differences between American conservative liberals and the radical right--but who named names when called before HUAC, wrote a book in 1962 that prefigures much of the postmodernist theory of the late 1960s and after, seems at least a little bit odd to me.

Boorstin, like many of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, saw America as a new nation. American consensus historians saw the United States as something very different from old Europe with its conservative, conservative liberal, social liberal, and left wing ideologies, and the seemingly endless culture wars these ideologies gave rise to. In the consensus narrative America not only left behind the old ideological culture wars of old Europe but created, in the process, a land of economic opportunity for all. That there were some in this dream America who had no chance of living the American dream seemed to trouble America's consensus historians only a little. Those who really weren't offered the opportunity to do more than dream the American dream were often elided or only briefly mentioned in the dream world of consensus histories of the United States.

By the early 1960s Daniel Boorstin was beginning to wonder whether the world really was getting better thanks, in large part, to America exceptionalism and the American rise to great power status. Boorstin's The Image is, as its original subtitle suggests, all about the demise of the American dream. Before what Boorstin calls the Graphic Revolution, Americans, well mostly male Americans, like Europeans, mostly male Europeans, had images of heroes they could dream about and use as role models for their lives. They had adventures they could take partake in that provided new and very real experiences, an increase in learning, and that allowed one to prove one's mettle in what was kind of an epic journey almost worthy of New World Odysseus. They had art that was representational rather than an art that was imploding in and on itself and whose meaning, as a result, was as mysterious as the mystery cults of the ancient Hellenic and Roman world. After the Graphic Revolution, Boorstin argues, the world of the image with its simulated pseudo-events and pseudo-images that had no referent outside themselves and which many Americans had confused and conflated with real life, emerged. In this world of the pseudo-event photographs of exotic places, for instance, became evidence that one had been there. In comparison to the narcissistic pseudo-image the real thing could no longer compete with the unreal thing. Given all this I am sure Boorstin would not be surprised that Americans elected a capitalist flim flam man and celebrity charlatan as president in 2016.

Boorstin's The Image is a fascinating read from the vantage point of post postmodernism, from the vantage point of an intellectual terrain in which postmodernist theory has become commonplace in Western intellectual culture. Though it comes from a different time and a different theoretical place than late 20th century postmodern theory it is strikingly similar in its analysis and diagnosis of the postmodernist age of simulated fractured identities and images. For these reasons alone, and because I do think it diagnosis the simulated or tautological "spirit" of the postmodernist age pretty accurately, The Image is definitely worth reading.

Further Musings on the Difference Between Conservatism and the Right Wing...

Where to begin our musings on conservatism and right wingers?

Let's start with definitional accuracy.

Those right wingers who call themselves conservatives today are not conservatives. They are laissez-faire liberals. Classic conservatives, of course, reacted against Enlightenment liberalism and "democracy" along with Enlightenment radicalism.

Right wingers have an unfortunate tendency of being unable to distinguish empirical fact from ideologically correct fantasy, descriptive statements from normative demagoguery and delusions. Whether one likes reality or not is immaterial. Racism is real even though the notion of races is a fiction, whether in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Class inequalities and gender inequalities are real whether one likes it or not. Any approach worth its salt must begin there, with empirical facts. How one responds ethically and morally to these realities is a different matter. 

There have been and are a variety of social ethical approaches to economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic facts There have, of course, been conservative thinkers. Plato, Burke, Comte, and Tolkien come to mind. Conservatives, generally speaking, opposed--I am obviously speaking normatively here--industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Conservatives, at least those worth their salt, advocated for the rule of the best, whether they regarded those best as philosopher-kings, the English manorial elite, aristocrats, kings, scientists, or a frankly idealised priesthood of old. They did not advocate for the notion that morons like Trump and his nouveau riche ilk were either the best or the brightest. Conservatives treasured and treasure books; I doubt if a know nothing like Trump has ever read one. 

Because of their normative emphasis on looking backward and treasuring aspects of the past conservatives have offered little in the way of social theory on either modernity or postmodernity other than that capitalism, industrialisaton, and "democracy" were negative in their consequences for "tradition". There has been no Marx, Weber, or Durkheim among conservatives. Right wing no nothings probably have never heard of those intellectual giants who attempted to understand modernity other than to demonise them. All this said, conservative Niall Ferguson has explored the coming of modernity and postmodernity but his work is very derivative. Ferguson's interesting documentaries essentially update Marx, Weber, and postmodernist thinkers. Daniel Boorstin's book The Image--Boorstin was a consensus conservative/liberal a la Hofstadter and Bell who was very critical and dismissive of McCarthyist right wingism--did prefigure much postmodernist theory but conservatives have not really pursued it while right wingers either don't know much about it or simply demonise it as if social theory and one's response to it was or should be a low level theological or dogmatic enterprise.

One thing conservatives historically were not was utopian. This, once again, distinguishes them from contemporary right wing faux conservatives who curiously believe, they are laissez-faire liberals after all, that with capitalism the radiant future has arrived, despite or in spite of the empirical realities of poverty and inequality. True conservatives, of course, would and did defend inequality and rule of the best and brightest, however defined or delineated.

The Books of My Life: Historians in Trouble

 

In his Historians in Trouble: Plagiarsm, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivy Tower (New York: New Press, 2005), historian Jon Wiener takes us on an entertaining, enlightening, and depressing journey through the dark side of academia, specifically the history profession, and contemporary American intellectual culture, and the impact of the wider American culture war since the 1960s on both. Wiener, drawing on essays he wrote largely for the Nation over the years, gives us a picture of the problematic relationship between graduate students, faculty members, and star or celebrity professors (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's almost master and slave relationship with those under her). He tales the tale of the potential dangers associated with archival work, the problematic use of sources, and the problems of footnoting, by some intellectuals in the academic profession and outside of it (Allen Weinstein, Michael Bellesiles, David Abraham, Mike Davis, Edward Pearson, and James Lott). He explores the problem of plagiarism in academic and intellectual culture (Doris Kearns Goodwyn and Stephen Ambrose). He takes us into the world of lying and exaggeration in the academy and intellectual culture (Joseph Ellis and Stephen Thernstrom).

Along the way, Wiener asks why some academics have escaped punishment and shame (the academic and intellectual scarlet A) while others have been humiliated and been banished from the academy (the black O). He finds the answer in political culture, interest group politics, and the contemporary American culture war. Fox-Genovese, Weinstein,  Lott, and Thernstrom, Wiener argues, largely escaped any punishment for their sexual harassment, questionable acquisition of and use of data, archival and quantitative, and exaggerations of political correctness, and were rewarded for it, at least in the case of Fox-Genovese, Weinstein, and Lott, by political appointments from a right wing president and, in the case of Lott, a job at a right wing think tank. Others, because of their perceived left wing or liberal politics and theoretical approaches, however, as Wiener notes, were hounded out of academia by interest groups that disagreed with them, in the case of Bellesiles, by academics whose work they challenged, as in the case of Abraham, or run out of Los Angeles by boosterist interests, like Mike Davis, who got a job teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. Still others, like Joseph Ellis, who lied about being in Vietnam and involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement upon his return, was punished by the college at which he worked, Mount Holyoke, but was soon back teaching and writing reviews for the prestigious New York Times, because, Wiener argues, there was no powerful interest group that went after Ellis in the way that the right wing gun lobby went after Bellesiles.

Wiener's book is an interesting and easy read for anyone interested in the academy, ideology, politics, and culture wars. I recommend this documented TMZish excursion through the wonderful world of American academe and intellectual culture. Anyone who has been a graduate student, particularly a graduate student in history, will recognise the world Wiener describes.

The Books of My Life: I Do and I Don't

 

Jeanine Basinger, for my money, is one of the most insightful cultural historians and sociologists writing on Hollywood film these days. In her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2012), Basinger takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening romp through the history of the Hollywood marriage film mercifully free of the psychoanalytic jargon that so often makes academic books on films far more tedious than the films they are analysing, a remarkable achievement in and of itself.  

In I Do and I Don't Basinger explores the history and culture of the Hollywood marriage movie from the silent era of marriage movies, cautionary tales to be laughed at and be sad about, to the 21st century the post-marriage marriage movie. At the heart of the Hollywood marriage film genre, Basinger argues, is the couple, the men and women who are either getting married, the I dos as Basinger calls them, or getting divorced, the I don'ts, and the dramatic and comedic situations impacting the couple in the Hollywood marriage movie, namely, infidelity, in-laws, children, incompatibility, class, addiction, and murder. Basinger explores how the genre with its couples and its situations changed as a result of the impact of the coming of sound, the impact of World War II with its absent husbands overseas and its home front wives fighting to defeat the Nazis, and the impact of the sexual revolution in the 1950, 1960s and after. Along the way Basinger explores the spectacle and ritual of consumption in Hollywood films,  furniture, furs, and hats that populate classic era Hollywood marriage movies, and she explores the fairy tale have your cake--we will show you society's ideal norms and rules, norms and rules you should live your lives by--and the eat it too--please feel free to live your life momentarily through the characters on screen breaking society's norms and rules even though it won't last and everything will return to normal (pun intended) in the end--nature of the Hollywood marriage movie, both of which had appeal to the audiences who paid to watch the Hollywood marriage movie, a sociological approach to Hollywood film that is far more compelling, at least to me, than the oedipal fantasies of todays almost cultic psychoanalytic critics.

As was the case with Basinger's books on the World War Two genre and the women's film, I found I Do and I Don't one of the best books on Hollywood film I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in media history, film history, Hollywood history, approaches to popular culture, and particularly to those who find the hegemonic mode of film analysis these days not particularly enlightening.

The Books of My Life: The Dream Life

J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003) takes readers on an Alice in Wonderland like journey through the old and new myths of the American sixties from the late fities to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kraucauer, Marshall McLuhan, Benedict Anderson, and Jean Baudrillard, Hoberman explores how American myths or American dreams fed into American films including those of Hollywood, and how those films in turn created and recreated American myths.

Starring in Hoberman's sixties film dream life and filmic waking life cosmic manichean American melodrama are a number of celebrity star-pols. There is John F. Kennedy, America's own James Bond, secret agent man whose mission it is to help save the third world from evil tyranny in his own version of The Magnificent Seven (1960). There is Barry Goldwater the Cowboy from Arizona, a waking life version of the paternalistic John Wayne in McLintock (1963). There is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Cowboy from Texas who fancies himself in the John Wayne roles in The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). There is Richard Milhous Nixon, the waking life's own General Patton of Patton (1970). And there are those scores of left wing, liberals turned conservatives, and right wing righteous outlaws and vigilantes who imagine themselves as Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the two drug selling bikers in Easy Rider (1969), Joe in Joe (1970), and Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), and Harry in Dirty Harry (1971) and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter (1973).

Hoberman's historical, sociological, and cultural anthropological approach to the American dream life and its moving mythic dreams is a welcome remedy to an academic film criticism obsessed with the Freudian dream life. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American culture, the sixties, cinema, and nationalistic religion. Needless to say the dream life and the dreams that inhabit America's waking life are still with us today. President Donald Trump, for instance, seems to fancy himself a righteous cowboy wearing a white hat (pun intended), a righteous outlaw, and a righteous vigilante of the John Wayne persuasion, all at the same time. When you scratch beneath the ideological dream and find the reality, however, it is clear that Trump is actually Marion Morrison, the man who was lucky enough not to have to serve in any war other than a Hollywood war and the man who came to believe that he embodied the dream life myth Hollywood and America had him play in his waking life. We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.

More Musings on Free Speech...

The Legal Questions: US courts have, over the years, limited what they refer to as unlawful speech, the famous yelling fire in a crowded theatre argument, though Holmes's argument has been trimmed back a bit in the succeeding years, is often cited as an example of legal limits on free speech. The Courts have also limited so called obscene speech (they know it when they see it), as when they effectively banned XXX movies from the marketplace during the Nixon years and after.

I am not sure what college safe spaces mean in the context of court decisions regarding free speech. The courts have held, for example, that the Westboro Baptist Church can claim, at the funerals of American soldiers, that God is killing American soldiers because the US has rebelled against their God, if they do it from, if memory serves, 50 feet away. Is that what one means by safe spaces? How does all this work in the brave new digital age? Do we need an MPAA like rating system for college classes and social media? Students this Youtube video I am about to show you is rated R so feel free to leave if you need to? With respect to YouTube we already kind of have one for Youtube: confirm your age.

Academic Freedom: Generally speaking, the, often arguably more dream than reality idea at the heart of universities, is that they are arenas for the debate of ideas be these ideas Marxist, functionalist, sociobiological, semiological, feminist, etc. Since ideas are, in part at least, products of environments they are, as such, rent through with ideas about equality, inequality, and so on. Scholars, again perhaps more in theory than in practise, try to put ideas into context, economic context, political context, cultural context, geographical context, and demographic context. That seems to me to be one thing that should at the heart of serious systematic and analytical study and at the heart of academic teaching.

Those on the right wing who complain about the lack of freedom of speech on campus really aren't, by the way, defenders of free speech. In the 1960s right wingers shouted down speakers whose ideological views they disagreed with effectively cancelling their speeches and making them pioneers in what is today called cancel culture. That they whinge and whine about those allegedly doing to them what they have done to others is absurdly amusing. What hypocritical right wingers are concerned with is their freedom of speech. They could care less about the freedom of speech of those on the "other side" and they generally do nothing to defend a "leftist" whose freedom of speech is abridged in universities and beyond.

Protected Speech: I do get that some forms of speech are probably not worth legal protections. Should the courts, for example, protect schoolyard ad hominem "speech", forms of speech that have become ever more prominent thanks, in part, to social media? Are claims, some of which seem to be made without grounding them in evidence, unlawful or obscene? Are they examples of bully boy ad hominems? As far as I know, bully by ad hominems have not been ruled unlawful or obscene by the courts.

The Neoliberalisation of Academia: One of the things I find fascinating about speech codes and safe spaces is their possible relationship to neoliberal capitalist notions that the customer is always right. Since the "Reagan Revolution" universities and colleges have been taken over by neoliberal managers whose training, often, is in management. They are managers not academics, in other words. Department of Education data indicates that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase. To paraphrase a political proverb: A bureaucrat for every tenured faculty member.

As academia has been neoliberalised the managerial elite in academia have become obsessed about several things including keeping the customer satisfied and growing the customer base. As a result, assuring that the various targeted demographics are happy with what they are consuming has become one of the missions of academic managers along with assuring that they make lots of money. Is that what is going on with speech codes and safe places?

Musings on Persona, 3 Women, Images, and Mulholland Drive

To understand Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women and Images, and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive we have to understand the broader contexts that surrounded and penetrated these films. In the 1950s sociologist and cultural anthropologist wrote a book entitled The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In that seminal book Goffman, drawing on Shakespeare's notion that all the world is a stage and we (us) are merely players, argued that those of us living in the rich core countries of the north, were actors on the stage of life.

Goffman argued that all of us played multiple roles on the stage of life. In late modernity and early postmodernity we played multiple roles such as student, teacher, salesperson, and friend, for example. At school I might play the role of student. At work i might play the role of cashier. I know how I am supposed to play these roles because I live in a postmodernist era dominated by the service industry and I have learned the cultural scripts for the roles I play via socialisation. I may realise that the roles I play are roles in the play of life. Or I might actually believe the roles I play, an everyday version of method acting.

The roles I play, as Goffman noted, are all socially and culturally constructed with scripts, front stages, back stages, and with the potential for role mistakes leading to possible stigmatisation. One has, I think, to be seen as part and parcel of the cultural understanding that our identities are not only multiple but also mutable. We can change who we think we are and who we want others to think we are. Who we are and who others think we are, are impacted, as Persona and 3 Women, two films that were impacted by the changing notions of identity and the roles we play that were in the cultural air in the 1960s and 1970s, by power relations and notions of prestige or celebrity. Mulholland Drive likewise plays with cultural notions of identity, multiple roles, and the fracturing and segmentation that is a central part of postmodernity. The US is a postmodernist society and many of Lynch's films, in addition to being updates of Bunuelian surrealism, are part and parcel of the fracturing of identity and the fracturing of roles we play that is so central to late modernity and postmodernity.

Meet Republican Dick and Democrat Jane...

Say hello to Dick and Jane. Dick is a Republican. He is a WASP, 58, and has a high school education. He attends the Church of Mammon every Sunday and worships at the altar of the gospel of wealth though he is not wealthy himself. His Granddaddy was a follower of Gerald K Smith and his Daddy was union man who once worked in the steel mills of Birmingham and adored Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Richard J. Daley. He loves the Donald with a religious like fervour believing Donnie to be the vessel of god.

Dick believes, as his church teaches, that the Democrats are the spawn of Satan. He is certain that Satan is a card carrying red, that god gave men guns on the second day of creation, that god made women the helpmeets of men, and that courts should be made up only of "true Americans" like himself. Dick listens to Fox News all day dittoing their message about how America is not what it used to be.

See Dick run up that hill. He knows that if his party doesn't do something they will have a difficult time winning elections given America's demographic realities. He approves of gerrymandering. He approves of the electoral college. He approves of making it difficult for "fake Americans" to vote . He believes that he and his Trumpublicans (aka Dixiecrats) are numbered among the saved and that Democrats are not.

Say hello to Jane. She is Democrat. She is 25 and is from New York City. She majored in history during her undergraduate years and knows that as the Democrats pursued civil rights and less WASPish immigration policies, that the Southern Democrats and their White evangelicals increasingly fled to the Republican Party transforming or dixiefying that party in the process.

Jane realises that Democrats are running up a very high hill mostly of their own making. She understands that her party really doesn't play well in more than 30 American states making it difficult for Democrats to gerrymander. She also knows that Republican control of almost two-thirds of America's states enables poor poor rich peoples movements to pass legislation favourable to their ideological agenda. She realises that electoral college math makes it more difficult for Democrats than Republicans to win elections on the federal level. Jane realises that as Republicans moved from conservatism to Birchism, Democrats too moved right becoming true believing neoliberals or cynics who believe you have to be neoliberal in order to win elections in the process.

See Jane running up that steep and high hill. She is beginning to wonder whether the Republicans will ever play ball with the Democrats again. She wonders whether Democrats will ever be able to stop the right wing lowest common denominator manipulative "magic" of Republicans. How can, she asks herself, they stop Republican attacks on unions, education, and minority voters, all important segments of the Democratic Party? She often hopes, like many in her party, that changing demographics will take care of all of the Democrats' problems allowing Democrats to make America great again.

Dick and Jane's cultural "marriage" is a bad "marriage" though they neither one seems to want to recognise that it is. Wouldn't it be nice if Dick and Jane recognised that their cultural "marriage" is a bad one and divorce as equitably as is possible before America experiences yet another battle in its continuing cold cultural civil war, a cultural civil war that has been around even before there was an America?

The Books of My Life: Hollywood v. Hardcore

If you are looking to read just one book that will help you understand and comprehend post-1948 and post-anti-trust Hollywood, Jon Lewis's Hollywood v. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002) is it. Lewis's book, which is broader than its title and subtitle suggests, provides an excellent economic, political, legal, and cultural history of how the new Hollywood cinema of auteurs and the new new Hollywood cinema of megabuck spectacular and anonymous blockbusters came to be.

In a series of related chapters, Lewis explores the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic history of how the old Hollywood became the new and new new Hollywood. In one narrative thread Lewis explores how Hollywood's collusion with the post WWII anti-communist witch hunt, a witch hunt which had a health dose of anti-Semitism in it, helped the studios solve their union and labour problems. In a second narrative thread Lewis shows how the demise of the collusive 1927 and 1930 Codes, which mandated what was not acceptable on the big screen and by extension what was acceptable, codes which, as Lewis argues, were linked to nativist real Americanism, eventually led to the collusive 1968 rating system with its copyrighted G, PG, R, which needed MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and CARA (Code and Rating Administration) approval, and its non-copyrighted X rating category, which didn't. This new ratings system, Lewis argues, immunised Hollywood from the tangle of local and state censorship regulations, after 1973 and particularly 1975, allowed Hollywood to emerge from its post-World War II economic decline, and essentially closed, with the aid of the Nixon conservative Supreme Court, the marketplace to anything with an X rating, especially an increasingly competitive hardcore porn industry that, in the mid-1970s, was professionalising and moving increasingly toward parodic and satiric narrative genre forms. It also, Lewis notes, made it difficult for independent American films and European art films to find exhibitors since exhibitors too--before the studios bought them back--for the most part, accepted the MPAA rating system and came to believe that X, a category that was for those who films that didn't want an MPAA rating and which eventually thanks, in part to Hollywood, came to be a perceived as a synonym for soft and hard core "pornography", weren't good for business.

Lewis's excellent book should be read by anyone interested in the economic, political, and cultural history of Hollywood and everyone who studies American film. I also recommend it to those who get stuck in the trees of censorship and don't, as a result, see how the forest of censorship serves economic interests. Unlike those who think that everything you ever wanted to know about film can be discovered by looking into a textual ball, Lewis's book contextualises Hollywood into its broader empirical economic, political, cultural, and demographic contexts. And while Lewis's may need a bit of updating, it remains the best book on the new Hollywood and new new Hollywood I have come across.

I want to end this review by giving a shout out to Lewis's contention that when porn became a subject of interest in academia, it was no longer a significant economic player in the film theatre exhibition marketplace (the wide availability of porn on the internet has changed this and problematised the profitability of porn in other ways). I would add that as films, selective films since contemporary film academics focus, ahistorically, on a few select films, have become central to academia and contemporary academic film analysis, they have become increasingly detached from what should be of central importance in film analysis, their broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts, and the more culturally arcane Film Studies has become. But then like any knowledge bureaucracy, Film Studies has to become more and more arcane in order to protect its organisational and cultural boundaries.

The Books of My Life: thirtysomething

I was a thirtysomething baby boomer when the television show thirtysomething hit the airwaves in 1987 and I was still a thirtysomething boomer when thirtysomething went off the air four seasons later in 1991. As a devoted watcher of "quality" films and, if much less so, of "quality" TV, I watched thirtysomething when it debuted and I watched it, if not religiously,  I was taking a graduate degree after all, until it went off the air.  My sense at the time, was that thirtysomething was a slice of middle class life, a television show about the intimate lives of a group of people, as co-creator of thirtysomething along with Eward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz put it in 2018. To me, someone brought up on European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, thirtysomething had a lot of the Ingmar Bergman of the 1970s, particularly the Bergman of Scenes from a Marriage (1973), in it and a bit of The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-1993) in it. And I suppose for those reasons alone I liked it and probably for those reasons I didn't and still don't give much credence to all the whingers whining about the shows whinging boomers. The whining seemed rather "realistic" to me.

Albert Auster and Leonard Quart explore several aspects of thirtysomething, aspects foregrounded in the subtitle of their monograph, in their thirtysomethng: Television, Women, Men, and Work (Lanham, MD.: Lexington Books, Critical Studies in Television series, 2008). Instead of being dedicated followers of Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Television Studies fashion, Auster and Quart take, as they call it, a "traditional" approach to thirtysomething. They, if perhaps far too briefly, and drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, explore the broader empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the show and explore the economic, by focusing on thirtysomethings representation of work, political, by pointing up that politics was only limitedly in the background of the show, cultural, by exploring the representation of masculinity and femininity in the show, demographic, by noting the shows focus on slice of middle class boomer life, and geographic, by pointing up the shows setting in Philadelphia, aspects of the show. For Auster and Quart thirtysomething was fundamentally a show about a group of friends, a kind of extended family of blood and choice, that mirrored yuppie boomerdom in late 1980s and early 1990s America.

Auster and Quart point up some of the problems with fashionable textualist readings of thirtysomething and Literary, Film, and Television Studies in general. Where textualist critics whinged about the stereotyped and caricatured portrayal of the female and male characters in the film, Auster and Quart argue that thirtysomething's characters were complex and contradictory and changed across the series, something that has become common in arc driven shows like the groundbreaking Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in what might be called television's third golden or its platinum age.

Auster and Quart are not afraid to criticise the show. They argue that politics was too much in the background of the show and they criticise the show for paying, in its early years, too little attention to work beyond how it impacted the inner and domestic lives of its characters. They do praise the show for exploring the Machiavellian labyrinths and moral dilemmas associated with it of the corporate ad agency Michael and Elliot go to work for after the failure of their own mom and pop advertising firm.

Though I am not enamoured of the this is how a work of literature, a film, or a television show should be written and this is how I would write it or film it if I were doing it school of criticism any more than I find the crystal ball approach to literature, film, and television text centred analysis school of criticism, compelling, Auster's and Quart's somewhat schematic monograph was, for me, an interesting trip down memory lane. thirtysomething truly was a groundbreaking show that brought Bergmanian slice of life intensity to an American television landscape that was changing thanks to the rise of satellite driven cable television. My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995), by the way, created by thirtysomething and The Wonder Years alum Winnie Holtzman, and whose writers included several thirtysomething alums, would do something similar for teensomethings several years later.

As for thirtysomething's slice of life realism mixed with fantasy, flashbacks, and parody, I have to admit that I did see a bit of me in all the characters in thirtysomething and particularly in Gary since I wanted to be, once upon a time, an academic and I wasn't fully comfortable with what was expected of me when I graduated from the bohemian life and exchanged it, at least in theory, for the supposedly grown up bourgeois life. So after a few attempts at being a good bourgeois and trying to do all the things a good bourgeois was supposed to do, I gave up the ghost. Needless to say, I have been a bohemian, for the most part, ever since and I do not regret not "growing up" one whit.

The Books of My Life: Queer as Folk

In his BFI monograph Queer as Folk (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007) Glyn Davis explores what he calls the "groundbreaking" TV serial, Queer as Folk. Commissioned by Channel 4, written by Russell T. Davies, and produced by Nicola Shindler's Red production company, this show in which virtually the central characters were gay or lesbian, was broadcast in two series of eight and two episodes respectively, went out over the air in 1999 and 2000.

In his monograph Davis, drawing on secondary research and published interviews, explores the cultural pedigree of Queer as Folk; the economic and cultural contexts of why Channel 4 commissioned the show; the backgrounds of Davies and Shindler; the production of the show, if perhaps too briefly; the collaborative nature of the making of Queer as Folk; the look of the show and how mise-en-scene related to character and broader economic context; the central theme of the show; the narrative structure of the show; and the impact the show had and the political controversies it left in its wake. Along the way, Davis notes that Queer as Folk broke the stereotypes and caricatures of gays and lesbian characters that had been the stock and trade of TV shows in the UK and US over the years; points up the inclusivity at the heart of the show; notes the sexualised gaze of the show which, he assumes, drew viewers to identity with its gay and lesbian characters; points up the centrality of created families to the show; notes the theme of unrequited love at the heart of the first series of Queer as Folk; and explores the common no more than 1 to 2 minute segments the show was divided into, a practise most modern television shows follow.

As with a lot of academic books, and particularly books written on film and television, Davis' archivally anemic book would probably have been better as an article rather than a 100 page plus monograph. Davis' excellent and interesting "Introduction" to Queer as Folk lays out, in microcosm, what he is going to say about the show in the pages that follow. That said, anyone with an interest in British television and queer television and studies in general will find much of interest in this monograph.

Beevis and Butthead Do College Studies....

I really get a kick out of these politically and ideologically correct notions that "evil lefties" have been taking over higher education since the 1960s. One has to admire the crackpot notion that college and university administrators trained in management techniques developed under managerial capitalism are inherently leftist. Such notions may be looney but the notion that they are leftist is truly daft and such notions also, of course, miss another thing that is obvious, social scientists and practitioners of the humanities do not, by and large, run universities and colleges these days, not even Oxbridge.

During my lifetime universities and colleges have indeed been taken over by a kabalistic cabal, neoliberals. Neoliberals have brought into universities those good old corporate capitalist mantras of, first, the customer is always right, and second, try not to offend the customer. Additionally, since neoliberal universities are run by devotees of another one of those capitalist mantras, namely, that growth is good, and since so much of financial growth in higher education comes from increasing the number of students or holding on to them, many universities have been recruiting and admitting students from other countries including China. And given the catechismal statement that you should not bite the hand that feeds, well you do the math.

The Books of My Life: Seven Up

In 1964 ITV broadcast a documentary called Seven Up!. As Stella Bruzzi notes in her monograph Seven Up (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), Seven Up! was the brainchild of an Australian and a Canadian working in Britain who wanted to explore the impact of class on the present and futures of English girls and boys. To get at the impact of class on English youth the makers of Seven Up! chose ten males and four women, some from the upper class, some from the middle class, the class the Up Series celebrates, claims Bruzzi, and some from the working class, and one minority. "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man", Seven Up!, quoting Ignatius of Loyola, declared. The fourteen were asked questions, some where shown at play, some at school, and all were brought together at the end of the 40 minute long "episode" at the zoo so that the camera and the voice of god narrator could "observe" how the fourteen interacted with each other.

As Bruzzi notes, Seven Up! was initially a one off. ITV, however, decided to revisit the participants in a second installment in the series in 1970, Seven Plus 7. Since then ITV and Michael Apted, one of the researchers in Seven Up! and now the chief interviewer and director starting with the third installment in the series, have revisited as many of the participants who wanted to be participate every seven years in 21 Up (1977), 28 Up (1984), 35 Up (1991), 42 Up (1998), 49 Up (2005), 56 Up (2012), and 62 Up (2019). the most recent installment of the series. As a result, as Bruzzi notes, the Up Series has become one of  the most celebrated and iconic documentaries and perhaps the most celebrated and iconic documentary series ever, has been mimicked by a host of other Up like documentaries, and has influenced a host of documentaries that came after it.

Bruzzi's monograph on the Up Series is a good workmanlike exploration of the series. In her monograph Bruzzi briefly explores the influences on the series, the contextual background to the series, the production of the series, the "participants" in the series, the influence of the series, and the "narrative" structure of the series. Bruzzi's monograph is enhanced by interviews with two of the "children", Michael Apted, and executive producer Claire Lewis.

Bruzzi's monograph puts Up into the context of the realist tradition of documentary cinema with its emphasis on exploring everyday life and the direct documentary tradition. Bruzzi also explores the changes in the series over its 66 year history. Bruzzi argues that the Up Series changed with 28 Up, transforming itself from a series focused collectively on class with most of the interviews conducted along the class based lines of the "children", to one in which interviews were conducted individually with the 'participants. Bruzzi argues that the tragic trajectory of one of the lives of one of the "children", Neil, was one of the main factors for this change to a more individualistic format, as were changes in the television documentary form itself as television documentaries became more focused on the lives of individuals in the 1970s and 1980s.

The Up Series has stuck with this format ever since. As a result of this change from a more collectively focused documentary to a more individualistically focused one, a change marked by a change from the juxtaposition of posh participants to working class "participants to individual interviews, Bruzzi argues, the narrative of the Up Series changed somewhat and, like other documentaries that focused on individual lives, used the individual lives of the "children" to make points about the broader social and cultural contexts of the lives of the "children" As Bruzzi notes, over the years the "children" and particularly Neil, have become kind of "reality" stars and the Up Series became a forerunner and role model of the "reality" shows of the late 20th century and early 21st. Many of the "participants" also became, very early on in the series, critics of how the series portrayed giving the series a reflexive quality. This was one of the reasons, as Bruzzi notes, that some of the "children" refused to participate in later installments in the series.

If you haven't seen the Up Series it is definitely worth your time. If you are looking for a good guide to this documentary bildungsroman, Bruzzi's introduction and exploration of it, is also worth your time. Bruzzi's textual analysis of the series alone is probably worth the price of admission  even if some might like to see more production analysis of the series grounded in a greater degree of archival research.

The Books of My Life: Essential Concepts in Sociology

Anthony Giddens's and Philip Sutton's Essential Concepts in Sociology (Cambridge, England: Polity, second edition 2017) is a kind of Keywords--Raymond Williams's famous book on the history of keywords in the humanities and social sciences--for sociology. At the heart of Essentials are 67 "essential concepts" in the academic discipline of Sociology selected by the authors. For each of these 67 key or essential concepts in sociology, the book defines the concept, explores the origins of the concept, delineates the meaning and interpretation of the concept, notes critical points related to the concept, and offers a discussion of the continuing relevance of the concept to academic Sociology (and by extension Political Science, History, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, and Social Psychology). 

Each of the 67 concepts Giddens and Sutton explore, concepts like society, culture, sick role, division of labour, sexuality, and stigma, for instance, are, in turn, organised into ten themes, as Giddens and Sutton call them-Thinking Sociologically; Doing Sociology; Environment and Urbanism; Structures of Society; Unequal Life Chances; Relationships and the Life Course; Interaction and Communication; Health Illness and the Body; Crime and Social Control; and Political Sociology. Organising the concepts into themes allows the authors of the book to touch on and succinctly introduce readers to most of the central sub-disciplines of the discipline of Sociology in the twenty-first century.

Though one might quibble with the concepts Giddens and Sutton include or exclude--I found it unfortunate that the book did not include a discussion of civil religion, public religion, or civic religion given its centrality to national identity--Essential Concepts in Sociology does an excellent job of exploring, in a little over 200 pages, most of the central theoretical concepts of the discipline today. In addition to being brief--each essay is three to four pages--and to the point, each essay is written for a general audience making it an excellent guide to the state of the current Sociological art, and a book that can be usefully assigned in general education introductory classes in Sociology. At its heart, after all, Essentials tells us things all of us need to know and understand about the human condition, something everyone, including every college student, needs, in my opinion, to think about at least once in their life.

Musings on the Murdoch Mysteries

Canadian television doesn't get a lot of respect from the academic and critical film and television community. The BFI and Wayne State University Press, despite their ample list of monographs in their BFI TV Classics and TV Milestones series on American and British television shows, have not published a single volume on a Canadian television show. I find this not only interesting but also unfortunate because, of the limited number of new television series I watch these days, the two shows I enjoy the most are two Canadian TV shows, Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries.

Both Heartland (CBC, 2007), the contemporary family saga of the Bartletts and their Alberta ranch, a show that has elements of the rural and pastoralist myth in it, and Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV, 2008-2011, CBC, 2-11-), a Canadian mystery series set in Victorian and Edwardian Toronto, have been very successful by any measure. Both Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries have been, for example, on air for thirteen seasons and been commissioned by the CBC for a fourteenth. Both are currently the longest running drama series on Canadian television with 214 and 211 episodes respectively. You would think this would garner at least a modicum of attention from the academic and critical community but it hasn't as of yet.

In the rest of this essay I want to focus my gaze on Murdoch Mysteries and the various levels on which Murdoch functions or "works".

The Production Level:
ITV's involvement brings with it quite a pedigree in adapted detective fiction including Inspector Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, DCI Banks, Vera... Another thing that struck me about the show is how like classic Doctor Who Murdoch is. It simultaneously entertains and educates.

The Narrative Level:
Murdoch Mysteries is centred around the various cases of Precinct Four of the Toronto Constabulary its detective, Inspector William Murdoch, its constables, particularly Constable George Crabtree, its coroners, Dr. Julia Ogden, Dr, Emily Grace, and, once again, Dr. Ogden, its Inspector, Thomas Brackenreid, and the criminals, politicians, members of the Toronto Constabulary who intersect with the main characters of the series.

The narrative level of Murdoch contains the character traits and character arcs not only of the central characters of the show but also recurring characters who reappear on the show, some criminal, some not, like Eva Pearce, Terrance Myers, James Pendrick, and a brilliant young man who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. When these recurring characters reappear it is like seeing old friends even if these old friends have murder and mayhem on their minds.

One of the interesting things about Murdoch, given that it is a show grounded in history, is that among the characters who we viewers see as we watch the series are historical figures and incidents from the Canadian, British, European, and American pasts such as Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agnes Macphail, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, Clara Brett Martin, Florence Nightingale Graham, Mark Twain, Harry Houdini, the Wright Brothers, Wilfred Laurier, Emma Goldman, Prince Alfred, W.C. Fields, the Canadian and British women's suffrage movement, and the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904, among others.

As is typically the case with ensemble arc driven television shows, Murdoch takes viewers on a journey that intersects with the journeys of its characters. Those who become involved with the show have a lot to chose from as they intersect with the characters of the show. Will Julia and William finally get married, they might wonder. Will George find someone, they might ask themselves. Will George's Book become a success? Will Julia and the suffragettes succeed?

The Genre Level:
Murdoch is a drama, a tragedy, a satire, a parody, a comedy, a romance, a detective and mystery show, science fiction, steampunk, costume, adaptation, horror. The show has a wonderfully wry sense of humour.

The Historical Level:
As I noted Murdoch is set in Victorian and post-Victorian Toronto. This gives Murdoch a different flavour when compared with the other numerous detective shows on Canadian, British, and American television. While the Toronto of Murdoch is dominated by Anglo-Saxons and WASP culture, the city, thanks to immigration, is becoming ever larger, ever noisier, and ever more culturally, demographically, and socially diverse. There are references to the various neighbourhoods of the city, the various ethic groups of the city, the various classes of the city, and the various historical and cultural geographic landmarks of the city.

As I noted earlier, we meet, in the course of the series, various well known historical events and historical figures and various not so well known historical events and figures. For those with a historical and social scientific bent like myself, Murdoch is a kind of historical and social scientific pursuit.

The Nationalist Level:
Like the classic CTV series Due South (1994-1999), Murdoch plays with the notion and idea of Canadianess. I might add here that Inspector Murdoch is kind of a RCMP Constable Benton Fraser, one of the main characters of Due South, for the 21st century. In fact, Murdoch's half brother seems to me to be an intentional chop off the old Fraser block. One of the themes that runs throughout Murdoch, just as it, according to some, was and is a central theme of Canadian history and culture, is the difference between Canada and the behemoth to its south, the United States.

As was the case with the Canadian references in Due South, most prominently to Diefenbaker, one suspects that the references to Canadian history, Canadian culture, and Canadian historical figures, is something American viewers are unlikely to get save perhaps those that are well known south of the border. Winnifed "Freddy" Pink, in her younger form, for example, seems to be a reference to Anne of Green Gables fame, a historical reference some Americans might get.

Some might find it interesting that Murdoch, like Due South, has a firm grasp of American history, something that living next to the US and being inundated with American media, given the geographical realities of Canadian settlement, certainly promotes. Canadians, claim many, including film maker Michael Moore, seem to have a firmer grasp of American history and culture than Americans have of Canadian history and culture.

Murdoch is somewhat similar to Forgotten Silver (1995), the Peter Jackson and Costa Botes faux documentary, that played into and played with New Zealand nationalism and ethnocentrism offending some when they learned the documentary was actually fictional, in the process. As was the case with Forgotten Silver, where a Kiwi was first in flight, the developer of the moving camera shot, and the creator of colour cinema, the character of James Pendrick, a Canadian, is first in flight, the creator of the electric car, and the developer of a new and dangerous weapon. Like Forgotten Silver, Murdoch plays into and plays with notions of Canadian nationalism in what some might call a reflexive, parodic, satiric and postmodernist way.

The Parodic and Satirical Level:
One of the fascinating things about Murdoch is that though it is set among the British Canadian Protestant elite, middle class, and working class cultures, and Murdoch is a Victorian gentleman, he is also, as Brackenreid periodically notes, a "Papist", a Roman Catholic, an outsider, an other.

Murdoch pokes fun at Canadianess and Canadian nationalism in a number of ways. When Prime Minister Laurier walks into Precinct Four one of the constables does not recognise him. Is this a poke at contemporary Canadian knowledge of Canadian history?

Murdoch undercuts Canadian nationalism, for example, by referencing the breaking of a treaty between the government of Ontario and Ontario's First Peoples in 1903 when silver is discovered in First People's territory in an episode where Murdoch and Crabtree investigate a murder that takes them into First People's lands. So much for Canadian exceptionalism.

Murdoch also undercuts notions of Canadian exceptionalism by pointing up the similarities between the Canadian spy Terrance Meyers and his American cousins, Very LeCarreesque.

The Intellectual Level:
Murdoch has, at times, a moral heft to it as when Murdoch and Inspector Chief Constable Giles debate law, justice, and loyalty in a deeply tragic episode.

The Postmodern Level:
Murdoch plays with us 20th and 21st century viewers and our popular culture capital in addition to our historical capital. The female comedian in the vaudeville episode, for example, recalls Joan Rivers. Murdoch references Hitchcock, the film D.O.A, and the Steven Spielberg film Raiders of the Lost Ark, among others, and actually simulates them. Additionally, the show makes us, I suspect, connect and perhaps even laugh at Crabtree's discovery of pizza (by the bite), hamburgers, and hot dogs, and one of the characters' dismissal of beef on bread.

Murdoch, which is fairly historically accurate, also plays with history in a kind of present meets past way. Murdoch, for example, invents the lie detector and the taser, amongst a host of crime fighting technologies and categorises what we today call serial killers as sequential killers.

A lifesize replica of Hagia Sophia and the Holy Grail in Markham Ontario? A killer corset in Toronto? Valerie Solanas before Valerie Solanas? H.P. Lovecraft and Toronto's Edwardian goths?

A note on the Halloween episode Sir.Sir?Sir!!! (12:6, 2018):
What a fun and humourous episode. If the comments on IMDb about this episode are a guide, those who watched it and commented on it at the IMDb website seemed to have missed the episode's indebtedness to the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Apparently, if this is prologue past and present, many are not as aware of postmodernist intertextuality as some would like us to think. I suppose we can, given this, why many of the "reviewers" didn't seem to have grasped the fun, humour, and parodic aspects of the episode. Nor, of course, do many of the younger viewers have any sense of media history. Welcome to the brave new digital world where those who have the world literally at their fingertips show little in the way of inquisitiveness.

Envoi
Murdoch Mysteries, what a wonderfully fun television show that is also quite moving at times thanks to its Buffylike emotional depth...

The Books of My Life: The Singing Detective

Film and Television Studies academic Glen Creeber seems to have carved out an academic career, in part, by writing about Dennis Potter, the author of the highly regarded BBC television shows Pennies From Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986). The bibliography of Creeber's book The Singing Detective (London: BFI, BFI TV Classics series, 2007), in fact, lists four other books and articles Creeber has published on the Gloucestershire born Potter.

In his monograph on Potter's The Singing Detective, Creeber reprises the much made criticism of auteur theory, the notion that there are some film and TV authors, that such an approach doesn't take into account the fact that film and TV are collaborative media. The fact of the matter, however, is that Movie critic and University of Warwick academic Victor Perkins argued as long ago as 1972, in his book Film as Film, that film was indeed a collaborative medium but that in some instances the director acted as conductor of a film bringing all of its plot, narrative, and mise-en-scene aspects of a film together just as a conductor brings together the score and all the instruments of an orchestra in a performance of, for example, Mahler's First Symphony. Somewhat ironically, Creeber goes on to argue, after giving us his auteurist straw man, that while a number of people--costumers, editors, directors of photography, set designers, and so on--contributed to the making of The Singing Detective, Potter and the director Jon Amiel were the primary auteurs of the serial, a perspective not dissimilar to that of Perkins.

In The Singing Detective Creeber argues that Potter's serial is a complex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanaytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Fascinatingly, Creeber's book likewise is a compex array of discourses: Christian, romantic, psychoanalytic, generic (a hybrid of the musical, the musical comedy, the detective story, film noir), semiotic, modernist, and post-modernist. Creeber's book is such a dialogical hybrid, in fact, that it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Creeber is arguing that Freudian psychoanalysis is transcendental, is a Bergerian social and cultural construct that has taken on a cultural life in the post-late 19th century West, or both. And while Creeber has interesting things to say about the Freudian aspects of The Singing Detective I was more convinced that at its heart Potter's work was more a pilgrim's progress and a paradise lost and refound, and more a critique of Calvinist theodicy, than a Freudian tale of therapeutic salvation.

In the end what Creeber's monograph on The Singing Detective, a serial I very much enjoyed when I first saw it in the 1980s, pointed up to me again is that most books on film and television shows simply aren't as entertaining, moving, and thought provoking as that which they are trying to interpret. I found Creeber's monograph to be, despite an attentiveness to the religious dimensions of Potter's work, pretty much standard, one might even say generic, film and TV criticism by a film and television academic embedded in a fin-de-siecle socially and culturally constructed academic film culture.

The Books of My Life: Changing the World

As Alan Dawley notes in his Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), the nature of American progressivism, which originated in the era between the 1890s to the 1920s, the period that is supposed to encompass, according to many American historians, the American Progressive Era, has been extensively debated by many of those same historians. Dawley's book is one of the latest tomes to take on the challenge of defining what American progressivism was and is.

Progressivism, as Dawley notes, has been defined in several ways by historians. Some historians, for example, see American progressives as those American political reformers trying to reign in the destructive aspects of the laissez-faire liberal capitalism wrought by the corporations that dominated the American Gilded Age from 1877 to the early 20th century. Others argue that progressives were nostalgic middle class Jeffersonian elites trying to take the United States back to the pastoralism that they believed dominated the nation before the Gilded Age. For still others progressives were older middle class elites who were attempting to regain the power and authority they had lost to the new corporate elites of the Gilded Age. Still others see progressives as the urban professional class trying to restore moral order in the face of challenges to it by urban political machines. To still others Progressivism was an effort by the urban political machine and their working class allies to expand their power and influence. Still others see the progressives as the promotors of ideas, ideas like pragmatism, that they hoped would change the world for the better. To still others progressivism was a movement of corporate elites and their bureaucratic allies who wanted to bring scientific and managerial order to the chaotic world of turn of the century American politics. To still others, progressivism was some or all of these.

For Dawley American progressivism, which lasted well after the Progressive Era ended with the Woodrow Wilson presidency, progressivism was initially a complex and not very cohesive movement that counted in its ranks Yankee Protestants, social gospelers, Jews, Catholics, secular Americans, the labour movement, ethnics practising mutual aid, economic managers, and female reformers. Progressivism was, according to Dawley, a social movement which centred around the key symbols of American efficiency, American millennialism, the utopian belief that American progressives could change America for the better, and American messianism, the utopian belief that Americans could unilaterally or in concert with other nations, particularly other Western nations, make the world a better place. As Dawley notes, these key cultural scripts or symbols intersected with a universe of other symbols circling them including ethnocentric, racist, and sexist symbols such as the White man's burden, civilisational uplift, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP superiority, and calls, from some progressive quarters, for a more activist if still limited government, a limited redistribution of wealth, municipal ownership, the greater regulation of liberal free market capitalism, and the rethinking of America's role in the world to bring about a more orderly America and a more orderly world.

There are a number of things I liked about Dawley's approach to American progressivism. Dawley's book is sensitive to the dynamics of progressivism and how progressivism and its culture or meaning system was changed by what was happening in the US and what was happening in the world. Dawley argues, for instance, that American progressivism was not only a response to the seemingly chaotic and unequal world brought about in the land of equality for all by corporate laissez-faire liberal capitalism, but also a response to revolutions in Mexico and Russia and World War I and World War II.  Dawley's sensitivity to change at home and abroad allows him to explore the changes that progressivism underwent in the 20th and 21st centuries as a result of broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces. As Dawley notes, progressivism, which was a liberal social movement that shrank the gulf between liberalism and the radical left in its earlier form, became more internationalist, realist, and leftist after World War I, the horrors of which diminished utopian American millennialism and utopian American messianism among Progressives. Dawley is aware of and nicely utilises cultural approaches to social movements to flesh out the role meaning and meanings play in social movements and in the progressive social movement in particular. Dawley is particularly good at showing what historians still tend to minimise and at their peril, the impact of WASP religiously grounded culture on broader American culture. American millennialism and American messianism, both of which provided the cultural scaffolding for the myth of American exceptionalism and impacted the domestic and foreign policies of American economic and political elites. American millennialism and messianism didn't, after all, come out of nowhere.

Dawley's book is somewhat like progressivism itself, descriptive and normative, empirical and advocacy oriented. It attempts to describe the forces that gave rise to progressivism and it attempts to explore the culture and cultural contradictions of American progressivism from within a progressive tradition that, normatively, advocates for a more multicultural and internationalist progressivism. Dawley's book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of American social movements, for anyone interested in a more cultural sociological and cultural anthropological approach to the history of social movements, and for progressives wondering where progressivism came from, where it went, and where it might be going.

Musings on American Right Wing Populist Moronicity...

For most critics of right wing populism, I suspect, the thing that they probably find most interesting about that social movement is its general inability to distinguish fact from fiction and truth from fantastical and fanatical myth. And while the inability of right wing populists to discern fact from fiction is intriguing and important, for me, the most interesting thing about right wing populists is their lack of knowledge about their own identity group history.

While some right wing populists seem to fancy themselves knowledgeable intellectuals, they are, because of their ahistoricism, fundamentally anti-intellectual. For instance, they don't seem to grasp the historical fact that post-World War II "conservatism" is actually a political and cultural hybrid. William F. Buckley style conservatism, for instance, is actually a mashup of Enlightenment laissez-faire liberalism and a pre-Enlightenment conservatism that celebrated the superiority of elite manor house culture and Christian theocratism, hence its Anglo-Catholic and Catholic impulses. Buckley style "conservatism" was an ideology, in other words, that romanticised capitalism--traditional conservatives decried capitalism for undermining the conservative old order leading, eventually, to the rise of the vulgar middle class, economic and political power--along with traditional rural elitism and theocratic Christianity.

Populism, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast born out of similar if differently constituted cultural scripts. It is an intellectual anti-intellectual and anti-academic social movement whose historical forebears include the nativist know nothings of the American 19th century and the nativist John Birchers of the 20th. It is a liberal social movement in its general devotion to the dogma of free market or laissez-faire capitalism and its empathy and sympathy for the capitalist rich peoples movements of the American 20th and 21st century. It is modern and postmodern in its devotion to the theologies of extreme narcissism. It is traditionally and religiously manichean in its division of the world into the good and pure, them, and the evil and impure, anyone who doesn't agree with them. It is traditionally religious in its opposition to intellectual diversity and its seeking out of heretical latter day "witches".

Welcome to the Kingdom of Glupov...

The Dixiefornication of the Republican Party has given us not only an incompetent narcissistic moron as president, a theocratic idiot grandpa as vice-president, and Republican lawmakers who have turned stupidity into a not so fine art. It has also given us [pun intended] ever increasing levels of anti-intellectual moronicity in a nation that has become a textbook example of an Idiocracy and a casebook example of a country in which moronicity is running ever more amok.

These red, white, and blue faced idiots screaming and yelling about big government taking away their right to be a moron, don't even have the brains to realise that they are not anywhere close to being the hard volcanic island of right wing myth. Given this empirical reality these empirically challenged morons are not free to inflict their moronicity--their failure to wear a mask and distance during a pandemic that is killing thousands, for instance--on me or anyone else.

These meatheaded members of the cult of moronicity do not seem to realise the obvious, that we live in a world and in a country of networks and that we live in a world and a country in which what one person does or doesn't do, can and does impact others. As most writers on liberty from an Enlightenment perspective realised long ago, but apparently not these goobers, when you have a multitude of individuals you have a multitude of potential liberties which are sometimes in conflict. Hence someone or something, the imperfect government, for example, is necessary in order to adjudicate between liberties. Nor do they appear to comprehend that liberties are, like speech, limited. One does not have the liberty to commit murder, at least officially, nor does one have the liberty to falsely yell fire in a theatre. One can only assume that this nuanced exploration of liberty is irrelevant to these morons since for them the only liberty is, in a kind of bully boy meets dictatorial "approach", their liberty. For them, in other words, it is their liberty their way or you can hit the highway.

I wouldn't give a fuck about all this if these morons were snuffing themselves in a kind of death cult in love with dying and doing it in Texas fashion. When they threaten me and others, however, I do give a fuck. These morons have no right to threaten my health or my life or the lives and health of others.

The Books of My Life: The Man With the Movie Camera

By the time I first saw Dziga Vertov's, Yelizaveta Svilova's, and Mikhail Kaufman's The Man with the [a] Movie Camera at Indiana University for the first time, probably in one of James Naremore's film classes, the film and its author-supervisor, editor, and cameraman, were already feted and celebrated particularly by those who wanted to make films that not only described the world, if not in a Hollywood kind of way, but that also changed the world they described.

Graham Robert's The Man with the Movie Camera: The Film Companion (London: Tauris, Kinofiles series, 2000) nicely explores Vertov's film on a variety of different levels. Roberts nicely puts Vertov's "experiment" in its historical, political, economic, cultural, and biographical contexts. Robert's provides an intriguing and enlightening structural and textual analysis of Man's shots, scenes, montage, and mise-en-scene, untangling the argument of the film in the process. Finally, Roberts's book explores the afterlife of the film in both the USSR and the West.

For Roberts The Man with the Movie Camera has to be set against the backdrop of constructivist, futurist, and what Roberts calls productivist, cultural and artistic contexts. Man, Roberts notes, was an experiment doomed to failure in the USSR of the late 1920s and 1930s, just as the dogma of socialist realism with its heroes, villains, and uplifting plots and its emphasis on the need for a literature, film, and theatre, that could be readily understood by the masses. Man, with its montage is the message structure and its message of Soviet power bringing about the triumph of socialism in one country, the USSR, and inevitably globally, was, or so Soviet leaders thought, simply not amenable to easy interpretation by the masses. As a result, Vertov's career languished.

As Roberts notes, the powers that be in the USSR and the Soviet masses may not have been ready for Vertov's, Svilova's, and Kaufman's Man with the Movie Camera, but avant garde artists and filmmakers in the West in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s were and many film makers and film students impacted by the countercultural 1960s in the West, such as Jean-Luc Godard, and even in the Iron Curtain East, such as Dusan Makavejev and his wonderful and wonderfully Vertovian collage film WR: Mystersies of the Organism, were. It was the counterculture sixties with its celebration of the experiment film and of the need to change the world that provided the context in which I first say Man With the Movie Camera.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the avant-garde, Soviet film, Soviet experimental film, ahd the artistic straitjacket that was state mandated socialist realism.

The Books of My Life: Dziga Vertov (Hicks)

Dziga Vertov, the spinning gypsy, born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bielystock in the Russian Empire in 1896, was the son of Jewish librarians. During his lifetime Vertov was not, as many have noted, as celebrated as other Soviet filmmakers of his era such as Sergey Yestenstein or Vsevolod Pudovkin. Today, however, things have changed as they sometimes do and Vertov is as celebrated today as both Yesenstein and Pudovkin.

Vertov, as Jeremy Hicks makes clear in his excellent monograph Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: Tauris, 2007), was not only a maker of what came to be called unplayed, unacted, caught unawares, fly on the wall, actuality, documentary, or non-fiction films--Vertov was averse to calling them documentaries or non-fiction films--he was also, as Hick's subtitle makes clear, a film theorist. Finally, as Hicks notes, Vertov was the founder of an influential school of film makers, the Cine-Eyes, who wanted to film life unaware and who Vertov imagined would one day "publish" a daily cinematic newspaper, a kind of kino-pravda, for the masses. Between 1918 and 1947 Vertov, after 1919 editor, assistant director, and director, and also Vertov's wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, and, after 1922, Vertov's cameraman brother Mikhail Kaufman--Vertov called the three the Council of Three--made newsreel films, cine-eye films, cine-truth films, song films, and feature length caught unawares films including Forward, Soviet (1926). A Sixth Part of the World (1926), The Eleventh Hour (1928), Man With a (or the) Movie Camera (1929), the last film with Mikhail, Enthusiasm (1931), Three Songs About Lenin (1934), and Lullaby (1937).

Drawing on archival material, including an extensive analysis of Vertov's writings, the work of post-Thaw Soviet historians of journalism, and film, particularly documentary films, and Western analysts of Vertov, Hicks argues that the Council of Three's films must be understood against the backdrop of late Tsarist and early Soviet journalism. The Council of Three's caught unawares films, Hicks argues, melded the precise description and heroic themes of ocherk and the sharp juxtapositions, ironies, and critical aspects of the feuilleton. The Council of Three's films were thus, according to Hicks, attempts to simultaneously capture via the mechanical eye of the camera, life unaware, and, capture the lives of the heroic Soviet builders of communism, who were, with a little help from the surveiling gaze and paternalistic guidance of Soviet leaders, building the industrial and secular future of not only the Soviet Union but of humankind.

Vertov, as Hicks notes, was an apologist and a polemicist for a particular kind of what we now call documentary film. Instead of finding actuality in the filmic documentation of events, historical reconstructions or stagings of events--though sometimes Vertov did engage in staging and even used animation--in the use of professional actors and scripted scenes, or or the voice of god voice overs so common to documentaries then and now--Vertov even disliked intertitles and tried to keep them to a minimum--Vertov strove for truth in images, sounds, music like structures, and montage, in, in other words, argument arising out of the juxtaposition of images. This, as Hicks notes, eventually put Vertov at odds with the doctrine of socialist realism, which became dogma in the late 1920s in the USSR, given that the films Vertov made were rarely easily understood by the millions the high priests of socialist realism thought all art should be. This, in turn, made it difficult for Vertov, Svilova, and to a lesser extent, Kaufman, to make the films they wanted to make in the Stalin era USSR.

Some have seen a decline in the quality of the Vertov group's films after 1929 and The Man With a Movie Camera.  For many Vertov and Svilova sold their souls to the devil of socialist realism after 1929 and their films increasingly became a film by the numbers garden variety socialist realism.  Hicks, however, notes that elements from what some call the Council's avant garde (futurist and constructivist) era are present in Vertov's and Svilova's later documentaries and that theoretically, at the very least, Vertov pursued his dream of a pure documentary cinema that fit well with internationalist and nationalist Soviet Communist orthodoxy, making the marginalisation of Vertov and Svilova somewhat ironic, I suppose.

Though by the time of his death in 1954 Vertov was largely forgotten in the USSR and around the world, it would be, as Hicks notes, the experimental nature of the Vertov group's films, particularly Man With a Movie Camera, that would resurrect both the reputation and the works of Dziga Vertov particularly in the countercultural West. After the 1960s Vertov joined the ranks of Yesenstein--whose work and approach Vertov disdained--Pudovkin, Alexandr Dovzehnko, Abram Room, and others, as one of the great auteurs of Soviet cinema, a rank Vertov thought he deserved all along. Vertov now became celebrated by film makers such as the French auteur Jean Rouch, father of a reborn cinema vérité or direct cinema in the 1960s, an approach Rouch and others traced back to Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard, who, with Jean-Pierre Gorin, formed Groupe Dziga Vertov in that failed revolutionary year of 1968. Vertov's reputation was also resurrected in the USSR during the periodic Thaws of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. In 1966, for instance, Soviet historian Sergey Drobashenko published an edited for the new Soviet orthodoxy collection of Vertov's diaries, articles, and projects that was published in Moscow. In this new somewhat thawed USSR Three Songs About Lenin came to be regarded as Vertov's and Svilova's masterpiece.

As Hick's book and other articles and books published in the West and in post-Soviet Russia point up, Vertov, Svilova, and Kaufman, are alive and well and living in the limited compass of intellectual, scholarly, and academic cultures, these days. Given the impact of Man With a Movie Camera on film theorists, and film students and cineastes of both the theoretical and practical film making variety, I very much expect the legacies of all three to live as long as media live. As Hicks notes, after all, Vertov can be seen as the father of database media theory and practise and surveillance media theory and practise, two major aspects and characteristics of the brave new digital media world, though the increasingly mainstream paternalistic practitioners of both throughout the core nation world, may not realise it.