Musings on How Demagoguery Works...

Research has shown that demagogues are dependent on an ignorance is bliss red faced emotionalism in order for them to do their work. They play off of it in order to convince some of the masses, for instance, that someone who did not win the presidential election of 2020 won it and to make them angry about it. They play off of it in order to convince some of the masses that American liberals are actually socialists who are part of a cabal to take over and ruin the United States and to get angry about it. They are dependent on it to make some of the elderly and debilitated masses believe that a pill, a fountain of youth pill, will make them feel like they are seventeen again, something they desperately want to feel. They are dependent on it to make some of the masses think that if they simply use their product they will get the gay or gal of their salivating dreams. They are dependent on it to make people who probably have little idea where a country is on a map and who know next to nothing, at best, about it and its history, that another country, not the one, of course, that is as responsible if not more responsible for the situation, is the embodiment of Boris and Nastasha Badonov and is "raping" that country because they are the embodiment of evil and to get red faced about it. Demagoguery, in other words, is grounded in a healthy dose of comic book, i.e., mythic moralising and manichean bullshte. But then bullshit and the amnesia it cultivates really does make the world go round.

Speaking of bullshite that makes the world go round, research has shown that humans are conforming animals. The Milgrom I was just following orders experiement shows that significant numbers of human subjects will conform to what authority figure are demanding even when those authorities are demanding that they kill others. A recent experiment looking at an online music site shows that significant numbers will conform to the musical choices of their peers when they know what their peers are listening to. The Asch experiment shows that significant numbers of human subjects will ignore the empirical evidence of their eyes and conform to clear falsehoods or bullshite if their peers maintain that these falshoods are true, and here is where demagoguery comes in since demagoguery is generally nothing but bullshite driven by ideology or the seeking after power and money.

Realising that bullshite makes the world go round, by the way, does not mean there isn't, to qoute the X-Files, truth out there. Nor does it mean that Russia, the Ukraine, or fictional Belgian women whose babies are bayonetted by Boris Badanov Krauts are the embodiment of John Wayne goodness in the modern world. It simply means that we have to, if we can, recognise that things are more complex in the modern world than the Hollywood melodrama that far too often passes for the thinking life in the modern world. That this is difficult given human socialisation for conformity everywhere in every time and in every place, is a given. Few, sadly, are able to get outside the hermeneutic circle in which socialisation places us.

Musings on War in the Dark Continent...

My guess is that Putin's endgame now is to re-annex, offcially or unofficially, much if not all of the Russian speaking parts of the Ukraine. My understanding is that he offered the West and the Ukraine findlandisation but they rejected this, to me reasonable, offer but then the West was behind the over throwing of an elected govenment in the Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 sympathetic to Russia. Left without many options--one commentator noted Putin has, compared to Imperial America and her groupies, a relatively weaker poker hand though he has up until now played it well--Putin may well have, as a result of attacking Ukraine and thanks to the red faced vigilante response driven largely by propaganda around the globe directed at Russia as a result of the attack, overplayed his relatively poor hand.

By the way, it appears that Russia, in a act of hubris similar to that of that other much stonger and more hegemonic great power the US, may have thought it would only take the 200,000 troops--the number of troops according to sources Russia sent the Ukraine--to take the Ukraine...

The Books of My Life: John Ford (Spittles)

Brian Spittles's John Ford (Harlow, Eng: Longman, 2002) is a good brief monographic introduction to the film career of noted American film director John Ford. Over the course of his monograph, Spittles explores Ford as auteur, Ford as a collaborator with other craftspeople and other actors including the stock company that worked with him over the years, Ford as storyteller, Ford as an artist of the film frame, Ford as a genre director, the themes in Ford's films, and the relationship between Ford the filmkaker and his broader social and cultural environment over the course of his film career.

Along the way Spittles makes a number of interesting observations. Ford, he notes, could be a bully on set pointing up the fact that many directors have, over the years, had militarisitic and authoritarian streaks much like military leaders (think George Patton) and football and basketball coaches (think Bob Knight). Spittles notes the ambiguity in Ford's representation of First Peoples, Blacks, and women over the years, something that some film critics these days too often miss or paper over in their film criticism. Spittles uses interviews with those who knew and worked with Ford and with Ford himself, primary source research, something which adds much to Spittles analysis and points up the lack of primary research in so much contemporary film criticism. Spittles nicely uses particular films Ford made over the course of his career to generalise about his film career.

Speaking of ambiguity, my response to Ford's films has, over the years, grown increasingly ambiguous. When I was younger I was simply not intellectually able to take a more critical response to Ford's films despite growing up in the more critical 1960s. This change in my approach to films and how I read them was foregrounded for me recently as I rewatched Young Mr. Lincoln, Ford's famous and critically praised 1939 film. I can't remember or recall my first response to the film. I suspect that I wanted to see the film because it was a John Ford film and John Ford was, according to critics and other directors like Orson Welles and Kurosawa Akra, one of America's and one of the world's great directors. In those auteur centred and celebrated days I tried to see as many of the films of critically regarded directors on television or at the cinema when I could. As I rewatched Young Mr. Lincoln, however, I watched it less as a film fan and more as a social scientific critic. I noted, thanks to critical work on Ford I had read over the years and thanks to my more critical gaze, Ford's limited utilisation of close-ups, Ford's use of doors as frames, Ford's mythic celebration of America, in the Young Mr. Lincoln case the myth and legend of folksy Honest Abe Lincoln, Ford's emphasis on landscape and his use of landscape as a character, though it was not as noticeable in Young Mr. Lincoln as in the films Ford shot in the aptly named Monument Valley, a landscape Ford went back to again and again over the course of his career and particularly in his westerns, and the antinomy between frontier and spreading civilisation in much of Ford's film work, in the case of Young Mr. Lincoln, the law. 

As I have grew older, gained more education, and became more critically inclined I find myself "liking" Ford's darker and more critical films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) more than his earlier more celebratory fairy tale movies. These darker films, like the more critical sixties I grew up in and eventually imbibed and embodied, seem to me to deconstruct, to raise questions about, to undermine or at least partially critique, Ford's earlier nostalgia, his earlier celebration of American nationalism and American manifest destiny, his earlier myth making (Ford printing the legend), his earlier emphasis on and antinomy of individualism and community, something often represented in music and dance, his earlier representation of First Peoples, and his earlier less critical representation of the conquerors of the American frontier. Ford's later representation of the John Wayne character in The Searchers, who seems to be a sociopath on the rampage for much of that film, seems to me to be a more realistic representation of the White right wing "nativist" American who appears to be more common or just more obvious in the age of Trump. In all this these darker films appeal to the now more critical critic and realist that is very much a part of me these days.

...and the Bullshite Just Keeps on Coming...

So Dimocrat Old Joe "Don't Hand Me No Neil Kinnock Lines and Keep Your Hands to Yourself" Biden is going on about Russia violating international law. You have got to love this bullshite on one level. I mean what is not to love about the abusrdity of the president of the US whinging about Russian violations of international law when the country he represents regularly violates international law. And let's face it, if you are going to whinge about violations of international law then you and your nation better not be violating international law lest ye be hoist on your own petard and that petard be seen for what it clearly is, bullshite...

...You also have to love the absurdity of American gumby's not believing anything the US government says about health pandemics but believing everything the US government says about Russia. Bullshite, at least one one level, works, particularly when you are dealing with dittoheaded braindead gumby's. C'est la vie....

As for reality, once again, the "aggression" in Eastern Europe can be laid mostly at the feet of the US and its syncophantic minions. The USSR was promised no further NATO expansion after the USSR agreed to German reunification. The Russians are learning what the First Peoples of North America (and indigenous people everywhere impacted by European power) learned long ago, American promises and treaties aren't worth a shite...

The Books of My Life: How the South Won the Civil War

 

In rare cases some of us as we get older, realise that a lot of what passes for fact out there in the human universe is really just socially and culturally constructed bullshite. I don’t know what percentage of what is out there is bullshite, but it is, if experience and learning over sixty plus years is a guide, a lot.

Heather Cox Richardson guides us through the history of one strain of American bullshite in her How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Fight for the Soul of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), right wing American bullshite. Richardson begins her brief history of this right wing strain of American bullshite by arguing that historically the United States has been characterised by a cultural paradox at its heart, the paradox that a nation that preached that “all men are created equal” in its "Declaration of Independence” enshrined inequality in its "Constitution" by not granting Blacks, free and slave, and women, full citizenship and voting rights. This paradox, Richardson argues, has resulted in a culture war between two broad strains of American culture, one which emphasised and emphasises democracy and another which emphasised and emphasises the oligarchy of “the best and brightest” (themselves, of course).

Richardson traces right wing oligarchic culture to a host of empirical factors. American oligarchic discourse was initially embedded, she argues, in economies of extraction associated with, for example, tobacco, cotton, and mining, particularly in the American South and American West. These extractive economies of scale which required high levels of investment, were, as a consequence, oligarchic since they were dominated by economic and political elites. Ironically, as Richardson rightly notes, many of the White men who became economic elites have the government to thank for their elite status because many received governmental welfare handouts in the form of land, like the oligarchs who built America’s railroads in the West, subsidies, or because “consumers” worked for the federal government and used at least part of their federal pay cheques to buy goods in department stores like the one owned by Barry Goldwater's family in Arizona allowing that family, in the process, to have many of the comforts of a modified English manor house. By the way, it is also worth noting, as Richardson briefly does, that the federal government has long subsidised the lifestyles of the West and South through its building, for example, of dams, its water projects, and its rural electrification programmes or “investments", things, by the way, as Richardson notes, that tied Southerners and Westerners together. She notes that simply because these oligarchs had big money they also had, as a consequence, immense political power and economic, political, and cultural authority, an observation so obvious and so well documented in time and space that it shouldn’t even be controversial anymore.

It is, as Richardson points up, on the cultural level where things really get interesting. Richardson argues that big money and big power in combination did not always enable elites to tamp down or suppress the democratic strain in American culture. The oligarchs found that something else was needed in order to manipulate or drug the masses. They found it in culture, specially ideological and demagogic cultures associated with classism, racism, and sexism. America’s elites were able to leverage, Richardson argues, ideologies of class superiority, racial superiority, and gender superiority to maintain their positions of privilege, power, and control despite democratic impulses associated with the Civl War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This ideology, Richardson notes, eventually had as its premise the notion that the liberty of White men declined or dissolved whenever the government tried to improve the lot of, for example, the disenfranchised and often terrorised, including Blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, First Peoples, women, or dissidents, economic, political, and cultural outsiders all in an America dominated by White oligarchic authoritarianism. Along the way, as Richardson notes, the oligarchs and their minions were able to turn the Republican Party from a party of free labour and anti-slavery into one that mirrored their ideology, an ideology characterised by elitism, racism, and misogyny, things that were all hidden hidden away thanks to their use of the cultural mythologies of gentility, White victimisation, and the lost cause of the South, and the individualist Cowboy culture of the West.

Richardson’s synthesis, which draws from a host of other studies including her own on Reconstruction, the Republican Party, and the Indian wars, is an excellent brief introduction aimed at the general intelligent reader on something that is at the heart of American economic, political, and cultural life today, the battle for the “soul” of America between the forces of oligarchy and the forces of democratisation. Needless to say, the former, who now, as they did in the past, suppress the vote of those who tend to be more culturally and ideologically democratic, rig the electoral map for their own benefit through their control of state legislatures and the drawing federal and state electoral districts, their lobbying, their packing of the courts, and their writing of legislation through bureaucracies like ALEC, are winning at the moment just as they have ultimately won in the past. They have won despite losing what increasingly looks in retrospect like one battle in the seemingly never ending civil war between the forces of authoritarian oligarchy and greater democracy, the Civil War. It is, of course, this fact, the fact that the forces of oligarchy never give up, keep coming back, much like the terminator of Hollywood film lore, despite setbacks such as the Civil War, the New Deal and the LBJ era reforms, is why the South, at least for the moment, and thanks to its alliance with the West, has won the Civil War. From my vantage point, it looks like they will continue to win the battles of this long civil war for the soul of America for the foreseeable future given their control of large swathes of the White American South and American West, the realities of the electoral college map, and the authoritarian right's cynical almost any means to the end of achieving power macchiavelianism. 

Hold on to your hats. It is going to be a bumpy ride.

Response to Another Right Wing Wacko Jacko...

Ah, another delusional right wing wack guided by moronic bs fed to him by the media and other sources of right wing jackoff we love power and will keep it at any cost socialisation. 

First, the media is corporate. They are owned, in other words, by oligarchs. And oligarchs, notes Jack, aren't and never have been, generally speaking, "left wing". Jill likes the mindless mantra you ditto, however. Since those who are empirical generally provide examples, unlike the right which is delusional and guided by a reality that is manufactured along politically and ideologically correct lines, here are two: Sinclair, which owns Channel 6 in Albany, and Fox News are both right wing. So, so much for the right wing the media is "left wing" bs.

Second, as Jill notes, the media want to reach as broad an audience as possible. In the old days of the three network monopoly, that meant everyone. Since the rise of media targeting specific demographics, however, that means particular demographics. Since the corporate media sells product, as Jack notes, i.e. commericials, they don't want to offend those they are targeting because if they do, as Jill notes, they may lose the sheep they target their product at. That means, for example, that Fox News broadcasts emotionally driven fear mongering bs because that is what their delusional and sociopathic "consumers" want. Wants, of course, as research has shown, are constructed so propaganda like commericials work.

Third, as any historian and social scientist, neither Jack or Jill are either, knows the right wing has little sense of history and what they do have is mythic, i.e., bs. So, what does history show? It shows that Conservatives reacted to capitalism and democracy. They were not fond of either. Liberals, of the "right" and "middle", embraced the Enlightenment and thinkers like John Locke (the dude in the Declaration of Indpendence) and Adam Smith (the utopian who focused on deus ex machinas and economics). We now know the former as laissez faire "liberals". In time what we might call social liberalism arose and laissez liberal would  morph, rather oddly given some of their Enlightenment ideological predilections, into "conservative". Both were apologists and polemicists for oligarchic capitalism. The Left, by the way, is characterised by anti-capitalism mentlities and are thus not "liberal".

The right is a reaction to the Enlightenment though it has Enlightenment elements within it. It is grounded, historiclly speaking, in Christian anti-intellectualism. It is an anti-intellectual ideology grounded in authoritarianism, intolerance, self-righteousness, terror, inquisition, and delusion. The conemporary looney right is, of course, cut from the same cultual cloth as Dixiecrats and the John Birch Society. One of the ironies of history is that the party of free labour and anti-slavery, the Republican Party, is now, thanks to George Wallace, Richard Nixon, the National Review crowd, and others of their ilk, the heir of the Dixiecrats and they still, like the Dixiecrats, are characterised by emotionally red faced bs.

I know, of courst, that facts are irrelevant to people drugged up on bs, so, bsing goob dude, just keep calm, ignore reality, and keep on bsing. That seems to suit right wing wacko jackos.

The Sirius/XM Kiada or, Dealing with the Skanks at Sirius/XM

 

I bought a new car in November of 2019. Like many if not most new cars these days it had a satellite capable radio in it and as a consequence I had, for six months time, "free" Sirius/XM in the car.

At first I liked the service. When I drove down from Albany to work in Oneonta it was rather nice to have crystal clear satellite commercial free radio for the length of the hour or so drive. When I retired from SUNY Oneonta, however, and once I had to pay for Sirius/XM, the cost and the limited amount of driving I did outweighed the positive aspects of the network. I thus cancelled Sirius/XM.

As companies like Sirius tend to do, they gave me a deal and I resubscribed for a year. When renewal came up once again this January, however, I cancelled my service when Sirius would not give me a radio that I didn't have to pay a $15 charge simply for them to ping and activate it. 

Sirius, however, did not go away and it still has not disappeared from my car radio as I hoped. While I do not get Sirius audio I still get three Sirius channels, let's call them ghost or shadow channels, on my car radio. Whenever I change my car radio channels these three channels come up and on each occasion force me to click on a pop up menu that asks me to call an 800 number and resubscribe to Sirius. Not only is this dangerous as no one should be clicking on a pop up menu while driving just to change the radio, but I can't believe it is legal. It certainly is capitalist skanky and slaggy and I am sure Sirius is more than aware of what they are doing. It is an economic strategy.

I tried contacting Sirius by chat twice but they were utterly unhelpful and incompetent or perhaps guided by that mantra of skank and slag capitalism of do everything you can and everything you are ordered to do to keep a customer on the hook. I thus contacted the New York state attorney general and hope to hear if they can do something about the slaggy and skanky Sirus/XM.

One thing is for sure, thanks to this skanky and slaggy behaviour of Sirius/XM I will never subscribe to Sirius/XM again. By the diseased fruit of their skanky and slaggy behaviour, they have lost me as a customer forever. They can offer me the home radio for free if they want but at this point they would have to pay me for two years for me to resubscribe to Sirius/XM in the future. A pox on them.

Let this be a warning...

The Books of My Life: American Zion

 

The social and cultural anthropologist, sociologist, and moralist Émile Durkheim argued, both descriptively and normatively, that societies, mechanical or organic, simple and complex, did have and had to have a common culture or a common set of what he called collective representations. In 1967 in his seminal essay “Civil Religion in America” in the journal Daedalus, Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah, drawing on Durkheim, argued that the United States and other complex societies had what he called a civil or civic religion. All these societies had, in other words, a common set of myths, symbols, and rituals that were not tied to any particular church, denomination, sect, or cult, and which arose to provide a common set of mythic, symbolic, and ritualistic meanings for the citizens of a complex societies including relatively new modern societies like the US. All of them had, in other words, a common culture or meaning system, at least on some level.

This American civil religion with its emphasis on, according to Bellah, America as the “chosen nation”, Americans as a “chosen people”, and America as the “promised land”, drew historically, Bellah argues, on Judeo-Christian themes that had been prominent in Judaism and Christianity in general and Protestant Christianity in particular, for thousands of years. According to Bellah, America’s civil religion was, just as Durkheim claimed societies were in general, a celebration or worship of society itself. Like any collective representation in complex modern societies, claims Bellah, American civil religion turns historical accidents of American history into transcendental or universal achievements of global significance, legitimating, in the process, in this specific instance, the American state, the American nation, the American political system, the American economic system, and American technological achievements turning them in the process of universalisation into venerated objects of national worship.

American civil religion, notes Bellah, functions much like what we commonly think of when we think of religion in many ways. It has its holy or sacred days—Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. It has its great and almost saintly men—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. It has its holy writ—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It has its pilgrimage sites—the Congress, the White House, Independence Hall, and Gettysburg, to pick a few examples. It has its symbols—the flag the defamation of which is for many an act of profane heretical sacrilege. It has its myths—Daniel Boone on the frontier, Davy Crockett at the Alamo, the log cabin origins of its presidents, the notion that in America anyone can become president, the notion that America is the most equal of nations, the notion that the US has the highest equality of opportunity of any nation on the earth, the notion that America has the highest standard of living on earth, the notion that the US is the most generous nation on earth, the notion that America and its people have a divine destiny, and so on. It has its calls for national repentance, its generalised jeremiads, such as Lincoln’s Civil War era speeches emphasising the evils of slavery and the need to repent of the sin of slavery.

Since the seminal work of Bellah other social scientists have noted other sacred aspects of the American civil religion. Some note that music, and particularly “America the Beautiful”, “God Bless America”, and “God Bless the USA”, with their generalised notions of American goodness and American choseness, have become part of the American civil religion over the years and, something that shows how important they are to the American civil religion, are often played at ritual events like sporting contests in the United States these days, sporting contests that increasingly, in the wake of the “war on terror”, celebrate the American military and American militarism. Others suggest that Super Bowl Sunday, with its celebration and worship of consumption as reflected in its advertisements, which have become for many as important as the Super Bowl itself, has become part of the American civil religion. Both of these point up the fact that American civil religion is dynamic and that it has and will continue to change to meet the changing needs of the changing times.

One of the latest social scientists to engage the issue of civil religion, civic religion, public religion, or political theology is University of Haifa historian Eran Shalev. In his important monograph American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text From the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) Shalev compellingly argues that the United States was characterised not only by a ideology of Roman republicanism, an ideology that situated the origins of America’s new republican government after the Revolution in the Roman Republic, but an Old Testament, Biblical, or Hebrew republicanism which situated the origins of America’s republic, the “new Canaan”, typologically, metaphorically, and sometimes literarily, in the era of Ancient Israel’s “republican” judges.

In this Old Testament republicanism America was seen, as is evident from its material and oral culture including newspaper articles, sermons, orations, and pseudo-biblical writings, notes Shalev, as a chosen nation of chosen people with a millennial purpose led by new Moses’s and new Joshua’s like George Washington. This restorationist culture of choseness and mission played, according to Shalev, an important role in the creation of an American identity for the new American nation.

According to Shalev, this Old Testament republicanism declined, from its zenith in the 1820s and 1830s as the less intellectual and more emotionally grounded evangelical Great Awakening swept the United States leading to a decline in Calvinist denominations like New England’s Congregationalists, the embodiment of New England covenantal and later American Biblical republicanism, and the Presbyterians, and the rise of the evangelically oriented Baptists and Methodists, after the 1830s. Modernity with its market economy and democratisation in the Jackson years of the early American republic also, notes Shalev, played central roles in the decline of American Biblical republicanism as both were more compatible with the Christ centred evangelicalism that came to dominate American equally sacralised political theology in the wake of the decline of Roman republicanism and Hebraic republicanism.

Shalev’s American Zion should be a must read for anyone interested in culture, American history, American culture, ideology, the history of American civil religion, the history of the early American republic, and even the history of Mormonism since it situates the Book of Mormon in the context of Tanakh style pseudo-biblicism and it contextualises the very Hebraic Mormonism in the culture of American Old Testament republicanism. Highly recommended.

One note: Shalev claims on page 222, note 14 that Berkeley historian Charles Sellers first used the term "market revolution" in his book The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). However, the first use of the term "market revolution" and the first use of that term by Charles Sellers that I know of (I may be ignorant of earlier uses of the phrase) was in the textbook he co-wrote with fellow Berkeley historian Henry May entitled A Synopsis of American History published by Rand McNally in Chicago in 1961. I have not seen the first edition of this text but the second, published in 1969, does contain the phrase "market revolution" on, for example, page 107.

 

 

When They Let Monkeys Sell Books

 

If you have ever wondered what would would happen if they ever let monkeys sell books well then you have to look no further than Monkey Music and Books. The aptly named Monkey Music and Books is one of the many marketplace sellers that has reared its ugly head in the new digital age to sell items, including books, on, for example, Skankizon, the corporation that has given skank and slag new meaning in the postmodern world and which has almost singlehandedly undermined the used book market and rent asunder historical book selling practise.

I unfortunately recently made what turns out to be a mistake when I purchased a book from Monkey Music and Books. Monkey Shams, of course,  have long been prominent in western capitalism and particularly in American capitalism, something that has not changed in the postmodern era. Postmodernity, in fact, seems only to have heightened the practise of skank and slag macho capitalism and its associated low level schemings, incompetencies, and irrationalities and made it more difficult to deal with as a consumer. While I made a mistake by buying from the Monkey Sham it was a sin of omission rather than a sin of commission. That second sin was committed by the Monkey Sham thanks to his/her inability to accurately describe the items he has for sale, something sadly quite common in the brave new digital world.

The Monkey Sham described the book I bought from him/her in this manner and I quote: "Condition: Used - Very Good - No cover slip". So, was the book "used"?. Yes. It clearly was. Was it "very good"?. It clearly wasn't. Was one of the reasons it wasn't "very good" because it was something that was not noted as it should have been in the description of the book? Yes, it was an "ex-library" book, a commodity that is too often a silent common currency in the shyster book world these days. Are "ex-library books "very good"? No. The plethora of stamps and pockets on an "ex-library" book makes the that book inherently not "very good"? Is this description deficit disorder (ddd) that characterises a significant subspecies of primates selling items in cyberspace, this inability to accurately describe an "ex-lib" book as an "ex-lib" book, noting something, in other words that has been de rigueur in the bookselling business for years, a problem? Absolutely. It is essential information that every reasonable and rational seller should note so every consumer can make a reasonable and rational decision whether to buy something or not. Finally, I should also add that the Monkey Sham did not pack this quite substantial 600 page plus book very well and it arrived at my doorstep severely damaged.

If this ability to inaccurately describe books sold is not enough absurdity for you, the Monkey Sham and Skankizon expect the customer to eat the cost of a return postage label if you don't want to print the label from Amazon, something that costs monies and labour, or if you don't have a printer. These skanks and slags, in other words, want you to pay for someone else's incompetence, a phenomenon that has, of course, long been the American way of business and seems to have become even more the practise of American business in the brave new digital world. 

I will leave you with one last nugget of wisdom before I go: avoid the Monkey Sham like the plague or better yet the pandemic. Of course, in the end it is impossible to avoid skanky and slaggy flim flam capitalist shysters like the Monkey Sham in the brave new digital age of misinformation, disinformation, and bullshite. Like bullshit itself, these shysters are everywhere and they can, thanks to the fact that they can readily change identities in the double edged pox that is cyberspace, simply change their names in order to appear innocent and screw you all over again, all with the help of a morally challenged corporation like Skankizon which itself pleads the ignorance of bliss and proclaims its third party bystander status when such issues arise. Caveat Emptor. Let the buyer beware.

 

 

Hate Thy Neighbour: Musings on Sociopathic Christianity...

Nobody needs what passes for "the gospel" here in the States. American Christianity, by and large with a few small exceptions, is fake Christianity, a decontextualised Christianity that worships other gods like Mammon, greed, narcissism, imperialism, misogny, wars, and macchiavelian means-ends theocratic politics before any other. It is a sociopathic Christianity, even a psychopathic Christianity. It is a dangerous Christianity. It is a Christianity hazardous to human health.

Musings on Postmodernist Bullshite...

 

One of the key characteristics of the postmodern world is bullshit. It is omnipresent in the world we live in particularly in the core societies historically impacted by flim flam snake oil bullshite capitalism, one of the children of perhaps the original bullshitter, religion. We have bullshit jobs in bureaucracies of all type, governmental and non-governmental, public and private, economic, political, and cultural, and even in academe which some hoped would prove, thanks to the empirical method, to be a bullshite free zone but it, of course, has been coopted by the forces of neoliberal bullshite, who are amongst the world's foremost bullshitters. Bullshit infuses the rhetoric and interactions associated with branding, public relations, politics, sport, everyday life, and the new digital media, and the latter has probably been more instrumental in spreading this social and cultural disease wider and more broadly than any other communications form before it. And bullshite is at the heart of a thriving anti-intellectual culture particularly among the delusional right who, like several other prize winning bullshiters before it, such as right wing Christianity, Dixiemania, and Bircherism, which are all today linked in the increasingly cultish Republican Party, have come roaring out of the closet along with the neoliberal revival during the Seventeenth Great Awakening, and have become increasingly visible and vocal in the second decade of the twenty first century.

 

 

The Books of My Life: Children in Amish Society

 

My first memory of the Amish is an early one. Some of my relatives had a cottage on Big Turkey Lake in LaGrange County in north central Indiana and I have a vivid memory of accompanying one of them to the court house in the county seat of LaGrange town to pay his taxes when I was a young teenager. There I recall seeing the hitching posts around the court house where the Amish parked their buggies. It is an image that has stuck with me ever since. In the 1970s I had further encounters with the Amish after I moved up to Indiana from Texas. I lived only a few miles from Berne in Adams County where there was a substantial Amish community and a substantial Mennonite community which I visited occasionally. In the 1980a and 1990s I encountered even more Amish when I visited a friend who I went to college with at Indiana University and who was doing postgraduate work at the Mennonite seminary in Elkhart and while I was doing postgraduate work at the University of Notre Dame in nearby South Bend. Occasionally I travelled to neighbouring Goshen, which was home, at the time, to the largest Amish and Mennonite communities in Indiana, to visit a Mennonite bookstore in that city. I recall occasionally driving around rural Elkhart County between Goshen and Elkhart city as I returned to the Bend on observational excursions where I saw numerous Amish church houses, schools, and farmsteads.

Though I had taken a degree in Religious Studies at Indiana University I had, at best, a very limited interest in the Anabaptists, the broader social movement that the Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites arose out of. By the 1970s, however, as I moved away from Biblical Studies into the history of American Protestantism, I developed an interest, thanks to someone I was dating at the time who was a Friend, and thanks to the extensive course work I had done in cultural anthropology with its emphasis on culture and the ideologies of culture and the symbols, rituals, and behaviours that derived from this culture and its ideologies, in Quaker culture and ideology. I was intrigued by Quaker activism and the role Quakers and particularly Quaker women played in movements like the anti-slavery movement, the Indian rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the various and sundry peace movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It was very easy for someone as anthropologically and hence culturally inclined as myself to see the central role Quaker culture and ideology played in such activism.

It was Quakers who eventually stirred within me an interest in the Anabaptists. I was interested in pacifism and both Quakers and Anabaptists were pacifist if sometimes differently pacifist. Some of the more “traditional” Anabaptists were more non-resistant pacifists than peace activist pacifists like many of the Goshen College Mennonite crowd. Additionally, the inability of the activism of the 1960s to change the world in economically and politically meaningful ways gave me an intellectual appreciation for Anabaptist separatism and the political and cultural theology of John Howard Yoder as reflected in and enunciated in his book The Politics of Jesus. This interest in Anabaptism and Yoder, an appreciative if critical one, was always more of that of an observer than a participant since, when it comes to religion, I have never been a joiner and have never been interested in being a joiner, and, when it comes to politics, I am also more of an observer than a joiner. In the end I have always been more of a secularist, an empiricist, and a realist who understands that trying to change the world for what one thinks is the better is invariably and ultimately a Sisyphean enterprise and that generally speaking when change does occur the new boss is not that much different from the old boss. Additionally, I have long found a secular Calvinism with its notion that humans as deeply fallable, a secular Calvinism I derived from the Niebuhr’s, more compelling than the utopian idealism of Quakerism, the separatist utopian idealism of Yoder, the capitalist authoritarian oligarchy masquerading as democracy idealism of right wing White Protestantism and Catholicism and their economic elite masters, and the we know the purpose of life or the direction of history and we will get you to our utopia whether you like it or not of a host of theocratic monotheistic religious groups and a host of secular political and economic movements like Marxism and neoliberalism.

Recently, I encountered the Amish again when I picked up and read a copy of Children in Amish Society: Socialisation and Community Education (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Case Studies in Education and Culture series, 1971) by the late Temple University sociologist John Hostetler and the now retired University of Michigan ethnographer Gertrude Huntington, a book which focuses on an important sub discipline of sociology, socialisation, and an important sub discipline of cultural anthropology, enculturation. Hostetler’s and Huntington’s monograph, written while the tensions between various American states and the Amish over school consolidation were still high, tells the tale of the response of the Old Order Amish, the Amish sect the monograph focuses on, to and resistance toward the mania for school consolidation afoot, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, in rural America. The Amish were uncomfortable, as Hostetler and Huntington note, with school consolidation because it, from the Old Order Amish point of view, had a negative impact on “traditional” rural Amish face-to face culture and the Amish way of life. There were also tensions between the Amish and several American states over school leaving. From the Old Order Amish point of view schooling, as opposed to the more practical education for Amish rural agricultural and agricultural related life, should end at the eighth grade. Tensions arose between the Amish and “the English” because many states had laws which inhibited school leaving before age 16 and in some cases later.

In their monograph Hostetler and Huntington explore the rise of Amish schools as early as the 1920s in response to rural school consolidation. They explore how these schools, elementary and vocational, schools Amish youth attended until they were able to legally leave school, and both the product of compromises with American state officials over school consolidation, reflected Amish culture and its key or central ideologies in the 1970s and were embedded in the Amish life cycle. They explore the role Amish teachers, who, as Hostetler and Huntington put it, were qualified to teach in Amish schools because they were, from the Amish point of view, embedded in Amish culture and the Amish way of life, though they were not certified to teach from state school officials points of view—something that also caused tensions between the Amish and several American states—played in Amish schools. They explore the material culture of Amish schools and how that school material culture reflected the broader culture and ideology of Amish society.

But Hostetler’s and Huntington’s tale is not only an analytical and descriptive one. It is also an apologetic and polemical one. Hostetler and Huntington, writing during a period where culture and personality studies were still in vogue particularly in cultural anthropology, gave Amish students a series of tests, including a culturally reconfigured version of the standardised tests given in public schools, which showed that Amish students had scores similar to and in some cases better than those of pubic school students on several school subjects. They also note that Amish students who were in public schools, particularly public high schools, were more likely to leave the Amish fold compared to those who attended Amish elementary and vocational schools, foregrounding, in the process, how Old Order Amish concerns that creeping modernity with its one size fits all norms and values was having a negative impact on Amish life and Amish culture were indeed valid. As a result, they argue for a more mosaic approach to education, one that respects cultural diversity, including conservative religious cultural diversity, does not hinder the educational attainments of outsider and separatist groups like the Amish, and functions to successfully integrate Amish students into the practical aspects of Amish rural life, aspects like self-discipline, self-respect, and vocational training, allowing them, in the process, to be quite successful in the context of Amish culture. They generalise this argument asserting that similar culturally sensitive approaches to the education of American First Peoples, Blacks, and Hispanics, for example, could improve the schooling outcomes of these groups.

Hostetler’s and Huntington’s book, one impacted by the increasing popularity and influence of the culture of pluralism, one of whose hearths was Boasian cultural anthropology, in the US and beyond, raises a host of fascinating questions. Hostetler and Huntington note that Amish education is non-critical, at least of Amish culture and the Amish way of life, and that it is not conducive to the artistic life or the acquisitive life raising the question of whether schooling without a critical sensibility is really an education at all and whether it is possible to survive in a world where acquisitiveness is increasingly central without schooling for acquisitiveness. They note that Amish society and culture is authoritarian raising the question of whether even a more agape oriented patriarchal authoritarian schooling like that of the Old Order Amish is consistent with what education should be in a putative democratic society. They note that Amish education is resistant to some forms of science and technology raising the question of whether schooling without science and technological education is useful and acceptable in a nation and in a world where basic science and technological education is essential because both are central aspects of the world we live in and labour in and a world that changes because of the centrality of each to the world we live and work in, something foregrounded by the anti-intellectual reactions of many in response to scientific suggestions on how to protect oneself during a pandemic. They praise the idea and ideal of e pluribus unum but one inevitably wonders, a la Emile Durkheim, whether it really is possible to have the one amidst the cultural and ideological diversity of the many particularly when the divide is as seemingly wide as that between the Amish and “the English” and the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, authoritarian, and intolerant Christian Right and secular, more tolerant, and more democratic America. They note that Amish culture is a “traditional” pre-industrial culture which is more kin centred, face-to face and oral in communication form, but the question invariably arises whether such a culture can continue to survive and thrive in a core nation world where the population is ever growing, agricultural land is becoming ever scarcer, industrial farms are ever increasing, and rational-efficient bureaucratic rules, to deal with increasing population and increasing bureaucratic complexity, are ever more the norm.

All that said, there were some policy proposals Hostetler and Huntington suggested that I found interesting and even compelling. I found their defence of Amish vocational education interesting. I think that since the 1980s too much emphasis has been placed on high school graduates attending liberal arts colleges and multiversities. I think there should be greater emphasis on post high school vocational education and apprenticeships for those who understandably are not particularly interested in the schooling liberal arts colleges and multiversities offer. Beyond policy, I found it interesting that the Amish, when faced with school consolidation, didn’t whinge, didn’t whine about taxes for public schools, didn’t play the victim, like so many contemporary right wing Christians do these days. They simply built their own alternative schools, literally, to serve their cultural needs when necessary. Now that is what I call cowboying and cowgirling up. Anyway, one has to admire a group like the Old Order Amish, a religious group that doesn't try to shove its parochial values down your throat whether you want them or not or like them or not.

The Albany, New York Kiada, or How to Make Things that Aren't Bad, Bad...

To Kathy Sheehan, Mayor of Albany, NY.

I am retired and 67 and asthmatic. I live on Morton Ave. We have to park on the even side of the street for cleaning on Sunday. And that is where I was parked. But guess what? Your jerk off ploughboys plouged me in making a not bad situation far worse than it needed to be. They turned two or three inches of snow (at worse) into six or seven. They also, braniacs that they are, simultaneously, thanks to their gumby ploughing approach, eliminated many parking spots on the even side of the road because they ploughed snow into the area where people who live here can actually park. Way to go goobs. You have made a non-snow emergency a snow emergency situation on Morton Ave. Screw you and yours and up the establishment. JERKs.

So, I had to go out and move my car when I should not have had to because of the incompetence or dumbstick power motives of your ploughboys who surrounded my car with six or seven inches of snow when only two or three fell. But they have to do something, right? Anyway, my asthma is acting up as a result of this. My fingers are numb. I will be sending the City any doctor bills or health care costs that result from this. Who should I send them to Jerks?

Anyway, you know life is absurd when you have an asthma attack brought on by ploughboys ploughing where they don't need to plough. You know life is absurd when ploughboys confuse ploughing a road to make it passable with ploughing parking spaces that don't need ploughed and no one has had a problem getting into and out of until ploghboys come by and miraculously turn two or three inches of snow and ice into six or seven. You know that life is absurd because ploughboy ploughing in Albany during a non-emergency situation is inherently absurd and that it will continue to be inherently absurd until you get the hell out of the rusthole land of the absurd you are for the moment trapped in.

Tucker Carlson, Twit of the Year

Tucker Carlson, with his claim to have a monopoly on Western values--he doesn't--his apocalyptic chicken little rhetoric that the sky is falling--it isn't--and his utopian rhetoric that eden is just over that rise--it isn't--is an all too typical and all rather common example of a right wing demagogue in the late modern and early postmodern eras, an era which has seen an increase in demographic diversity, cultural fragmentation and narcissism (both Cryer Tuck and Dissembling Donald are cut from this cloth), and a global corporate economy in the core nation West.  In fact, his claim to be the guardian of a parochial conception of Western values--one that is inherently intolerant and brooks no contradiction--his claim that the end is nigh--an end that for two thousand years has never been nigh--and his edenic utopian opiate of the masses discourse come right out of the playbook of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean theocracy.

So too, of course, does Carlson's anti-Semtitism. Carlson's posh toff meets populism anti-Semitism is likewise the product of Mediterranean theocracy as it was institutionalised in an imperial and intolerant Roman Empire in "decay" or in change. Like all instances of such scapegoating, including claims that Jews were drinking the blood of Christian children and poisoning wells, such claims are bullshite. They ultimately all function as the emotional appeals of true believing demagogues or consciously gobshitting cynical or machiavellian bullshitters to rev up the emotions of the anti-intellectual mob so to attain power (Gimme, Gimme, Gimme), prestige (I wanna be adored), and/or financial gain (let's make lots of money).



Carlson's posh toff meets populism demagoguery is also--and this perhaps has an even longer pedigree than Mediterranean theocracy--hypocritical. Carlson and those of his ends justify the means ilk praise their values while damning to hell the same or similar values in others. They praise their priestly money changers while consigning to hell the financial backers of causes with which they disagree and which are as much a product of Western values, non-theocratic Western values in this instance, as their intolerant Western values. 

In the end, old Cryer Tuck is nothing but a good old time pot and kettle if with a silver spoon stuck up his arse. And like the gilded silver crap Swanson dinners are served on, that silver spoon is ultimately fool's gold.

The CVS Caremark Kiada or CVS Caremark Sucks...

The CVS Caremark Silver Script saga continues…

Back in early December CVS Caremark (which New York state has given the contract for the New York retiree health care sytem to) changed my Advair 250/50, which along with Advair 500/50 I have been using since the mid-1990s and which were heretofore covered by my health insurance, to the generic Fluticasone Propionate 250/50. I took it and immediately I had an allergic reaction to it. Eventually, I was able to get Advair but since the reaction lasted for over a month I am not sure the medicine I should have been given in the first place did me much good. I have had chest tightness and breathing problems ever since.

Then in January CVS Caremark changed my Advair 500/50, which I was prescribed because of the health problems that resulted from the generic Fluticasone, to Wixela. Why? It was all about, as it always is for these corporate types, Mammon. What happened? I had another allergic reaction which sent me back to what had been happening for over a month, intense chest tightness and breathing problems.

So, what was the result of all these CVS Caremark actions? I have been going to doctors, urgent clinics, Accident and Emergencies, doctors, doctors, and more doctors ever since.

I went back to to the doctor a couple of times since for these same problems. A nurse practitioner I saw called good old CVS Caremark to confirm coverage for medications they were contemplating prescribing for me to deal with the problems CVS Caremark created in the first place. Bizarrely, CVS Caremark doesn’t, for some reason, cover the Advair 500/50 discus though they cover the 250/50. So much for consistency. They told my doctor that they did cover the Adviar puffer.

That claim turned out to be inaccurate unless they mean a $60.00 per pop for something I usually pay $5 a month for means covered. As a consequence, I did not get it. I will continue to use the discus 250/50 Advair. It wasn't until March after going off Advair for a week that I finally started to feel better. I still have occasional tightness in my chest but it isn't like it was. My experience suggests this crap is standard operating practise at CVS Caremark. I have, as a response, given CVS Caremark its third strike. 

So, what does this third strike for CVS mean? It means I want CVS Caremark to forward a one time only payment of $20,000 dollars to me for pain, suffering, and a host of health care costs. It means that in the long term I would like CVS Caremark's contract with New York state to provide elderly care for its retirees ended.

The Books of My Life: Religious Pluralism in America

By the 1780s and 1790s the new nation of the United States was, as the late Yale trained and Harvard Divinity School historian of American Christianity William Hutchison notes in his excellent Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 203), Protestant, Calvinist, and English-speaking. As Hutchison points out, in 1780 95% of Americans were Protestant, 90% of Americans were Calvinist, and 85% of Americans were English speakers and Calvinists. This new American nation was dominated economically, politically, and culturally by Protestant Congregationalists, Protestant Presbyterians, and Anglicans become Protestant Episcopalians. Only one member of the First Continental Congress of 1774 was not Congregationalist, Presbyterian, or Anglican. He was a disowned Quaker from Rhode Island. Only 600 of early 1780s America’s 3200 religious congregations were not English speaking; 80, for example, were dissenting Quaker, 65 were sectarian Methodist, 56 were “outsider” Catholic, 31 were non-English speaking Moravian, 24 were non-English speaking and “outsider” Dunker, 16 were non-English speaking and “outsider” Mennonite, and 12, in 1790, were sectarian “outsider” Shaker. 


This demographic, cultural, economic, and political domination of the US by Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Calvinist, and English speakers, as Hutchison notes, created not only, in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial “mainstream” religious establishment in a United States where disestablishment was legally established; it also created American others. It created, in other words, an American cultural, counterculture, and subculture fringe. Hutchison, drawing on the work of the late University of Chicago American religious historian Martin Marty, argues that the American “cultural fringe”, American “dissidents”, American “outsiders”, and American “infidels”, faced, depending on how outside of the “mainstream” they were, three different reactions from American intellectual and popular or mass “mainstream” cultures. Deists and/or atheists like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen, Adventists like William Miller and Joshua Himes, and Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were parodied, teased, ridiculed, and, in some cases, attacked intellectually, and in the case of Adventists often seen as “mad”. However, they did not, because they were in the end considered “insiders” and, in the case of Jefferson, Paine, and Allen, were also heroes of the American Revolution, experience physical attacks. Revivalists were parodied, ridiculed, and virulently attacked for their, from the point of view of the intellectual “mainstream”, course, gross, narcissistic, sinister, intolerant, fanatical, and sectarian behaviour in addition to their ideology. They too, however, were ultimately considered “insiders”.

On the other hand, as Hutchison points out, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons were parodied, ridiculed, attacked intellectually, and sometimes, particularly in the case of the Shakers and the Mormons, physically attacked by mobs of American nativists. For Hutchison, the fundamental differences in the treatment of Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons by American intellectuals and the American masses compared to Deists and/or Atheists, Adventists, Transcendentalists, and Revivalists, revolved around culture, specifically religious culture, political culture, and economic culture, and, crucially and ultimately, behaviour. In the case of Catholics, according to Hutchison, it was Catholic perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to a “tyrannical” pope and their perceived monastic sexual immoralities that made them “outsiders”. In the case of the Shakers, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to celibacy and communalism that made them “outsiders”. In the case of the Oneida Community, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to communalism and communal marriage that made them “outsiders”. In the case of Mormons, it was their perceived ideological and behavioural devotion to their practises of plural marriage, economic communalism, and theocratic and geographical zionism that made them “outsiders”.

Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons were not alone in their ideological and behavioural cultural and behavioural “outsider” status as Hutchison notes. According to Hutchison, half of America’s 120 “experimental communities”, including Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormons, experienced nativist attacks in the nineteenth-century. Once, as Hutchison points out, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, Mormons, and the other American “experimental communities” gave up their ideological and behavioural “peculiarities”, however, they were able to largely assimilate into “mainstream” American culture, but then they were all, in the end, considered what we would today call “White”. 

Between 1790 and 1860 America was, as Hutchison notes, changing. It was becoming more diverse both demographically and culturally. Between those years the population of the United States increased by 35% per decade. While English, Scots, and Protestant Scots-Irish immigrants continued to come to the US there was also an increase in non-English speaking immigrants coming to America. In the 1840s and 1850s, for instance, 50,000 Chinese came to America, many drawn by the gold rush, and many of whom settled in the Pacific Northwest and in Idaho and Montana where they constituted 30% and 10% of the population respectively. By 1850 increasing numbers of German Protestants and Irish Catholics migrated to the US. In 1790 only 9% of Americans were of German background and even fewer were of Irish Catholic background. However, by 1850 70% of the foreign-born cohort of the US was German and Irish. The arrival of German Lutherans and, to a lesser extent Scandinavian Lutherans, in significant numbers—in 1820 there were 800 Lutheran congregations while by 1860 there were 2000—chipped away at Calvinist dominance in American culture, American intellectual culture, and in American religion, and increased the number of non-English speaking churches and communities in the US. By 1860 there were over 1000 non-English speaking churches and communities along with non-English speaking colleges and seminaries, which rose from zero in 1790 to 12 in 1860. The United States victory in the Mexican War from 1846 to 1848 increased the numbers of Roman Catholics in the geographically expanding United States. All of these, increased tensions in the US and gave rise to various forms of nativism, some of them virulent and violent, such as those directed at the Chinese in the American West, forms of nativism that included murder, ethnic cleansing, and lynchings, and some of them even directed against Anglo-Saxon outsiders, such as the Mormons.

It was during the Gilded Age between 1877 and 1902, as Hutchison points out, that nativisms of all shapes and forms were given a veneer of scientific respectability, in the context of increasing immigration to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe, all across the Western world including in the United States. Social Darwinism, a unilinear racist adaptation of Darwinism, was used by racists and “nativists” to provide scientific justification for their prejudices and the discriminations that resulted from them. Proponents of Social Darwinism, many of them WASP’s, thought of White Protestants as the most fit of all “races”. In 1914 University of Wisconsin sociologist and Progressive Edward Alsworth Ross, for instance, compared those who immigrated to the US from Southern and Eastern Europe to the “primitive” peoples of the primitive past. Chairman of the New York Zoological Society and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Madison Grant (1865-1937), propounded a “racial history” of the world in his book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). For Grant, the Nordic “race” was the White “race” par excellence. In order to preserve the purity of the White Nordic “race”, Grant advocated the extermination of “undesirable” traits and “worthless race types” from the human gene pool (eugenics, good genes) and urged Americans to limit immigration into the US from Southern and Eastern Europe, lest the US commit “race” suicide and America, as he knew it, come to an end. American intellectual H.H. Goddard, who promoted and advocated giving immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Ireland, intelligence tests, regarded those coming to America from both regions and from Ireland, as “morons”” who should be prohibited from entering the United States lest they pollute American genetic stock. These intelligence tests, as is clear from the Army Intelligence Tests initiated in the late 1910s and early 1920s, indicate that those who were given them, alpha for the “literate” and beta for the “illiterate”, had to answer questions that were grounded in assumptions associated with American Northeastern WASP culture and cultural knowledges. There were questions on the alpha test about Cornell University, for instance, and questions about telephones and tennis courts, something the “illiterates” did not have, on the beta test. Needless to say, those who created these military tests saw them as empirical confirmation of Southern and Eastern European, Jewish, and Black “inferiority”. Even festivals and expositions of the era reflected the intellectual and popular nativism and racism of the age. The 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, for instance, offered “ethnological” or “anthropological” displays of non-Whites set up by showmen but endorsed by prominent anthropologists which lent scientific credibility to elite WASP “racial” attitudes, particularly the notion that White men (it was a patriarchal society) and White society were the pinnacle of biological, social, and cultural evolution. All of this helped expand and extend the reach of American nativism and eventually helped build up support for American manifest destiny, the notion that the US should stretch from sea to shining sea, and for subsequent American expansionist foreign policy.
 
The mass popularity of nativist mentalities and policies is probably best seen, as a number of scholars including Hutchison have noted, in its impact on American immigration policy in the late nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century. In 1882 the US Congress excluded Chinese immigration into the United States trying to end the threat of what they called the “yellow peril”. In 1883 Congress banned convicts, paupers, and criminals from immigrating into the United States. In 1885 anarchists and “undesirables” were banned from entering the US. In 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order excluding the Japanese from the US. In 1908 Congress mandated literacy requirements for immigrants. Between 1921 and 1927 limits were placed on Latin European and Slavic European immigration to the US. In 1921 emergency legislation imposed a quota system on immigration into the US, limiting the number of immigrants from Europe to 3 percent of the number of foreign-born members of the same nationality as determined by the 1910 census. It limited the number of immigrants to a total of 357,000 per year. In 1924 Congress passed the National Origins Act limiting immigration to the US even further by reducing the allowable number of immigrant entries to 2 percent. It used the 1890 census, since fewer Southern and Eastern European immigrants were in the US in 1890, as the base for calculating the number of immigrant’s permissible, and limited immigrant numbers to 165,000 per year. The act also barred immigration from the Far East entirely and prohibited non-citizens from buying and owning land in the US.

It would be the Cold War between the US and USSR after World War II, as Hutchison notes, that would ultimately undermine, at least, in retrospect, for the moment, American nativist immigration policy in the United States. It would also broaden the notion of who was "White". After World War II and during the Cold War it was difficult, of course, to maintain the illusion, given this American nativism and the consequent differential treatment of different peoples from different parts of the globe enshrined in American immigration law, that in the US everyone was equal when everyone was clearly not equal before American immigration law, something the USSR condemned along with the Jim Crow segregation of Whites and Blacks in the American South, in its global public relations battle with the United States. So, in 1965 the US Congress passed, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed a bill eliminating quotas favouring Northern Europeans in American immigration policy. As a result, fewer people immigrated to the US from Europe after 1965, fewer than 10% in fact, and more and more came from non-European countries. Between 1989 and 1993 more than half of the migrants to the United States came from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and El Salvador. The last two groups, of course, were pushed out of Vietnam and El Salvador by civil wars in which the US played an important role. Between 2002 and 2006 an average of 1,021,884 migrants came to the US annually. By 2003 Hispanics overtook Blacks as the largest minority group in the US. By 2012, Asian American migrants to the US overtook Hispanic migrants coming to America making Asians the largest ethnic group in per capita terms migrating to the US. Between 2000 and 2015 the number of Asian Americans grew from 11.9 million to 20.4 million. This new immigration had an immense impact on America demographically, economically, culturally, and politically. By 2014 only 1 in 3 Americans were not White. In 2014 the number of White deaths exceeded the number of White births. By the early twenty first century, in other words, America, had become less European and more demographically diverse.

Given the White Anglo-Saxon and Nordic domination of the United States demographically, economically, politically, and culturally throughout much of American history, it should not be a surprise that, as Hutchison notes, American identity and Protestant identity were intertwined and interwoven together until well into the twentieth century. America was a Protestant nation and mainstream Protestants believed it should always be a Protestant nation.

Nor should mainstream Protestant reactions to the increasing diversity of the US, particularly during the Gilded Age and after, be surprising. Drawing on a wealth of popular culture “texts” from Protestant hymns to literary and religious tests by, for example, Horatio Alger and Charles Sheldon, from satiric and parodic cartoons to architecture, Hutchison delineates the three broad responses of the Protestant Establishment to increasing American diversity and the anxieties and fears it raised in the Club. Some of the Protestant reactions to this increasing diversity, as Hutchison notes, were reactive and nativist (the America for real “Americans” myth that resulted in immigration restrictions from the late nineteenth century until 1965) particularly during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Other Protestants reacted, particularly during the Progressive Era, in more assimilationist and inclusive ways (the America as a land of immigrants myth and the America as Protestant-Catholic-Jewish nation myth of the 1950s). Still other Americans, particularly after the 1960s, reacted in more pluralistic and multicultural ways (the America as mosaic myth where everyone should have a seat at the table and a voice at the table). All of them, as Hutchison makes clear, are still with us today and continue to play central and important roles in America’s continuing and seemingly never ending culture war.

Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America should be read by anyone interested in American history, American culture, American culture wars, American religious history, and the history of power in the United States. It should be read by anyone interested in how the United States got to now in its continuing culture wars, particularly the culture war relating to issues surrounding American identity. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Note: Portions of the material in this blog are drawn from the revised and expanded version of my book Mormon Studies: A Critical History published by McFarland in 2022.
 

Musings on Life in Delusional America

I moved to Indiana in the 1970s from Texas. I returned to Indiana briefly in the 1980s and the 1990s, when I left for good. I hope I never have to live in the state again. The only reason I would return to HoosierLand is because my son lives in the -iana part of Michiana. I would be more likely to live in the Mich- part, though the appeal of Michigan over Indiana is rather like chosing to vote for Democrats over Republicans. Voting Dem is the least worst choice since that political party is far less delusional and nowhere near as sociopathic and psychopathic as the Repub Party. Thankfully, I don't have to make the least worse choice at present because the state I live in presently is like many other US states. It is, particularly when it comes to federal politics, probably more of a one party state than the USSR ever was in its heyday. 

Indiana today, like many other so-called red states, is dominated by delusional thinking. Delusional thinking blames the morass that characterises large swathes of the US on, for example, high taxes on the rich and limits on the operation of the free market, something that links up with the delusional Horatio Alger myth and its magical thinking. The actual reason, of course, for economic distress in large parts of the US, including in Indiana, is deindustrialisation and globalisation. Both, of course, were polemicised for by members of both dominant political parties in the US since both dominant American political parties are cheerleaders for neoliberalism and were bought by and sold to economic elites many years ago. 

Deindustrialisation deindustriaised large swaths of the state including places like Hartford City. Globalisation brought corporate globalisation which benefited corporations and bankers. It certainly didn't benefit workers who are not free to move around the globe and seek out the best paying jobs, something that is, at least in theory, central to the capitalist myth of rational consumers. Globalisation also led to the dominance of the service or retail sector of America's economy, a sector of the economy that historically has low wages and limited, if any, benefits. 

That so many don't recognise this reality and prefer the simplistic rhetoric of scapegoating demagogues says it all. Of course, the manipulation or propagandisation of the masses for political and economic benefit is not new. Nor are the levels of delusional thinking. What has changed is the means and modes of communicating this sort of delusional thinking and the sociopathy at its heart.

The Books of My Life: Four Classic Mormon Village Studies

 

In the mid-1940s and 1950s, as Howard Bahr notes in the introduction to his edited collection Four Classic Mormon Village Studies (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2014), two ethnographic projects that involved fieldwork in Mormon villages in full or in part, were conducted amidst what almost amounted to an academic mania for ethnography in the wake of published fieldwork studies by ethnographic pioneers like Franz Boas and his students, Bronislaw Malinowski, the sociologists of the Chicago School, and Robert and Helen Lynd. The first, the Harvard Five Cultures Project, focused on five cultures in and around the Mormon village of Ramah New Mexico—Zuni, Navajo, Spanish, Texan, and Mormon. The second, the University of Chicago sponsored fieldwork for its graduate students and dissertation writers, focused on ethnography in Mormon villages in Arizona and southern Utah.

Bahr’s edited collection brings together four ethnographies, one from the Harvard project and three from the Chicago project, for the first time and, in one case for the first time in English. The first, chronologically speaking, is that of consent Saint and cultural anthropologist Wilfrid Bailey, a student at the University of Chicago at the time, who undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Pomerene, Arizona in 1946-1947. The second is that of Thomas O’Dea, a Catholic doctoral student in sociology at Harvard who was initially part of the Harvard Five Cultures Project, who did his ethnographic work in Ramah, New Mexico in 1950 and 1951. The third is that of University of Chicago trained political scientist, Edward Banfield, who taught at the University of Chicago at the time, who led an ethnographic expedition to Gunlock, Utah in 1951. The last is that of the French sociologist Henri Mendras, who studied at the Sorbonne and at the University of Chicago with Banfield, and who worked under the direction of Banfield in Virgin, Utah in 1951.


While all four ethnographies that came out of the Harvard and University of Chicago projects do vary somewhat, they are all grounded, as was American cultural anthropology in general at the time, in an ideology of cultural holism with its emphasis on recording the details of everyday life via in-depth ethnographic fieldwork or “thick description”, and in the notion of the community as a microcosm of broader culture and society. Each of these three ethnographies are characterised by an interest in ecology or geography (for example, the lay of the land, the proximity of peripheral villages to semi-peripheral villages or towns and to city centres and the ease of travel between them, the importance of water in arid environments), economics (for example, farming part-time and full-time, ranching, sewing, canning, the tourist trade, average acreage per farmer and rancher, working for wages, inheritance patterns), politics (the LDS ward as the quasi-official village government, government agricultural agents, status), culture (for example, religion, particularly the LDS religion, taboos, material culture, the cult of domesticity, official versus popular religion and religiosity, local boosterism, remaking nature, cowboy individualism), demography (for example, population, kinship, marriage patterns, age), society (for example, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, social psychology, social interaction, cliques such as “active” Saints versus inactive “Jack Mormons”, haves and have nots, the links between certain families and power), and change (for example, the impact of the automobile, secularisation, increased individualism), particularly when the ethnological gaze was fixed on modernisation. Finally, each ethnography points up the differences between the Mormon villages, in terms of their religious and hence social and cultural values and practises, and those of the broader society and culture making them all examples of cultural and Mormon exceptionalism.

Where the ethnographies do differ somewhat is in terms of the background of the observer, in the observer’s theoretical emphasis, and in the tone of the observer’s ethnography itself. Bailey’s study, one that is extended from the 1940s and Bailey’s dissertation, when Bailey did his initial fieldwork, into the 1990s in Bahr’s collection, is that of an insider social scientist. Bailey emphasises several economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors in his study of Pomerene. He emphasises the centrality of Mormon culture and ideology including the strived for but never fully achieved ideal of separatist or sectarian individualist “spiritual communism” among Pomerene’s Mormons. He points up the Mormon cultural, economic, political, and demographic dominance of relatively isolated Pomerene. He emphasises the hamlet’s domination by two Mormon kinship groups, one, the founding settlers who came from the nearby Mormon community of St. David and who were least active in the Church and tended to become less “orthodox” Mormons over time (the “Williams” family), and the other, refugees from the Mormon polygamous colonies in Chihuahua and Sonora who fled civil wars in Mexico, who were the most active in the Church, who tended to be more “orthodox” as a result, and who came to dominate the village politically over time (the “Marsh” family), something that sometimes led to tensions between the two kin groups. He emphasises the cooperative irrigation farming that dominates in Pomerene, the ranching agricultural economy of the village, and the hamlet’s sometimes irrational, as he puts it, use of the water that is essential to the survival of the mostly subsistence economy of the village. He notes that only slightly more than half of Pomerene’s farmers are full-time farmers and that many have part- or full-time jobs wage paying jobs in nearby Benson. Finally, he points up the differences between Pomerene and, in particular, the nearby Gentile dominated town of Benson and how Mormons in the village, in some cases adapted to and accommodated the increasingly changing and more diverse social and cultural environment they faced (the beehive response of the less “orthodox” Mormon and the “Jack Mormon”), while, in other cases, they resisted accommodation to the ever more influential broader non-Mormon social and cultural environment (the angel response of the more “orthodox” Mormon). Bailey ends his study of Pomerene by noting how dramatic the change was in the village after 1945 when the hamlet grew, its subsistence farming economy declined, the power and authority networks in the village changed as cleavages between Marsh’s and Williams’s were replaced by cleavages between Mormons and non-Mormons, technological changes increased, and Pomerene’s Mormons were increasingly integrated into broader American society and, if more limitedly, American culture. By 1990 Pomerene was, demographically speaking, no longer a Mormon hamlet. It had become a non-Mormon village with less Mormons than Benson, the city that was once notorious in Pomerene Mormon eyes for its “immoral” ways. This pattern was, as Bailey points up, a microcosm of what was going on in broader Mormon society and, if again more limitedly, in Mormon culture, and more broadly across the United States.

Mendras’s study of Virgin, which Bahr edited from Mendras’s comparative study of Aveyron in France and Virgin, is that of a French critical outsider who, amidst his inventory of arid geographical realities, the subsistence and modernising economic life of the hamlet, the LDS dominated political life of the village, a social life where Church and village are much integrated and Mormonism dominated the cultural life of Virgin, and the similarities and differences, differences rooted in variations in adaptation to modernity and culture, between Mormon village life and French peasant life in Aveyron, notes the economic irrationalities—Mendras was writing during the New Deal which was characterised by government attempts to rationalise the American rural economy and make it more efficient— and repetitiousness of rural Mormon village life with its seemingly endless daily rounds, rituals, and routines.

Banfield’s study of Gunlock is an outsider “clinical sociology” written during the New Deal era by a political scientist who wants to know why, something that gives Banfield’s ethnography just as it does Mendras’s, a bit of a normative flavour, farming productivity is lower in the more peripheral, more isolated, and rural Gunlock than in nearby less isolated and more modern if still somewhat peripheral St. George, and why cooperation is so limited in tiny Gunlock. Banfield finds the answer in Gunlock’s culture, values, or morals. Gunlock’s values, Banfield argues, are those associated with a farming and livestock subsistence economy while those of St. George are more associated with a modern economy of bigger and more productive farms thanks to the fact that St. George farmers are more inclined, thanks to their more modern value of acquisitiveness and their networks of technical-efficient communication networks, toward modern technologies and hence less resistant to change. For Banfield, then, Gunlock lies somewhere between a modernising cowboy subsistence economy and a modernising “rational” economy, leaning more in the direction of the former in some ways and more in the direction of the latter in others. As a result, argues Banfield, Gunlock’s values are individualist in such a way that they inhibit cooperative community planning, functional in that LDS Church ties bind Gunlock into a kind of extended family, and dysfunctional since Gunlock’s semi-subsistence economy results in low economic productivity (at least from the vantage point of the more modern and the modern), dysfunctional since Gunlock’s residents resist a cooperation that would better serve the village economically, politically, and culturally, and dysfunctional since Gunlock’s residents are resistant to change.

O’Dea’s ethnography, which Bahr edited largely from O’Dea’s Harvard doctoral dissertation, touches on the ecology, economics, and details of everyday rural life in Ramah, which the Harvard project gave the fictitious name Rimrock to, as was ethnographic practise, but his focus, particularly in its final pages, is on modernity or secularism, which was a hot topic within the discipline of sociology and within the subdiscipline of the sociology of religion at the time. O’Dea argues in his conclusion (and, more generally, in his later 1957 book The Mormons) that social strains or contradictions set in motion by secularism, were causing strains or tensions within Mormon Ramah and bringing changes to Mormon Ramah in the 1950s.

Howard Bahr’s edited collection of Mormon village studies does students of Mormonism, students of anthropological ethnography, students of rural sociology, and students of the history of community studies in the US, a great service. It reacquaints contemporary students of Mormonism, students of anthropological ethnography and rural sociology, and of American community studies, with four important, historically significant, and in retrospect quite impressive Mormon village studies from the 1940s and 1950s. Not everyone will agree with the holistic approach of each but it is hard not to appreciate the fact that all of them emphasise both stasis and change, do not ignore the broader social and cultural environment of each village, and take a non-reductive economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic approach to Mormon villages and village life. Bahr’s edited collection is a must for anyone interested in Mormon Studies, the ethnography of villages or communities in the United States, and the history of ethnography in the United States.

Note: Portions of this review appear in the revised and expanded edition of my book Mormon Studies: A Critical History, the original version of which was published by McFarland in 2022.