Musings on Russians as Evil Incarnate

 

There is some weird stuff on Facebook and then there is some really weird stuff on Facebook. One of the weirder things I have seen recently on Facebook are several posts, many of them "written" by devotees of the American civil religion, which seem to imply that Russians are a unique species or race who are singularly and inherently evil.

One of the many problems with this notion that Russians are the essence or incarnation of evil in the modern world, a problem that, in fact, characterises all manichean oriented groups including devotees of the American civil religion, is manicheanism. What is missed as a consequence of this manichean division of the world into us good, them evil, are the commonalities that exist among all humans in all core societies on the planet. All modern and postmodern core nations, including the US and Russia, are characterised, for instance, by modern and postmodern bureaucracies, human rights violations, wars, petty bureaucrats, petty politicians, massive chasms between rich and poor, the brutalisation of women, the brutalisation of children, racism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, corruption, poverty, gender inequalities, moronicity, stupidity, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, propaganda, spin doctoring, big cock on the block bullying, and athletes who have been caught using "performance enhancing drugs". 

 

Don't misunderstand me. I will concede that this litany of human commonalities varies in quantity and quality across the core nation world. Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland, for instance, seem to be characterised by lower levels of human rights violations, wars, sexual inequality, and corruption, to pick four of the above examples, than the US and Russia, which have higher levels of each of those measures. That said, it must be remembered these traits are not absent or non-existent in each of those kindler and gentler nations. 

 

I am constantly reminded that many in the core nation world are manichean in mentality everyday that I go on Facebook. Just last week, for instance, I saw a post on that social media site that portrayed Russians as apes, something that harkened back to the dehumanising and demonising British and American war posters of Germans in World War I, the dehumanising and demonising American war posters of Japanese in World War II, and the Nazi representation of Jews as vermin. That such images are forms of propaganda is beyond doubt. That not much has changed in propagandistic representations since World War I and World War II is undeniable. That these propagandistic representations suggest that humans, as Devo and Mark Twain have it, did not evolve from lower species but devolved from higher species is a contention that must now be seriously entertained. 

 

I have recently been listening to the magnificent new album by the Swedish rock band Ghost, Impera, an album whose subject is the rise and fall of empires and the mass deaths that inevitably accompany  empire. The previous album by Ghost, Prequelle, was prescient in its focus on the Black Plague and the deaths it brought. These two albums seem to me to be the perfect soundtracks for a world characterised by great power rivalries, a pandemic, hypocrisy, double standards, absurdity, anti-intellectualism, and death. Welcome to Year Zero.

Musings on British and American Imperialism

It is always interesting to reflect on the similarities and differences between British and American imperialism. Both British and American civil religion and imperialism, of course, were grounded in notions of national chosenness, national destiny, and Anglo-Saxon superiority. The British, unlike the Americans, however, revelled and gloried in their imperial chosenness, destiny, and superiority, consciously seeing themselves as on a mission to civilise the known world. They recognised that they were imperialists and justified and rationalised it by, in the case of England's posh aristocratic toffs, seeing their mission as one of "civilising" the "unfortunate" and "backward" hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists of the planet while imperialism gave the male English working classes a sense of power and manhood they didn't always have in everyday life (though English working class males could express their power in their relationship to women and minorities). It gave them a sense of being the biggest cock on the block in a world where their everyday lives were relatively miserable even after World War II.

The United States replaced Great Britain as the biggest and greatest imperial cock on the block in the wake of World War Two, something exemplified by Canada's move, one not always sought, from the British to the American imperial orbit after the Second World War. America's sense of chosenness was grounded in the American sense that they were the new Israel, the New Zion, and, after evangelicalism became the official unofficial religion of an empire that was born in imperialism, it after all pushed the First Peoples ever westward or simply cleansed the chosen land of them, in an evangelicalism that gave an evangelical cast to the sense of chosenness and evangelical mission that was at the heart of the American civil religion, public religion, or civic religion from the nineteenth century to today. 

This evangelical dominance of American culture helped manufacture an American civil religion with a sense of innocence akin to the American evangelical Christian primitivism that fantasised about a possible return to a utopian eden characterised by chosenness and perfectionist purity or perfection. As a consequence, Americans, who were generally absorbed into the culture of the American civil religion with its sense of evangelical chosenness and evangelical innocence via socialisation, made their chosen mission to Christianise the world an innocent and righteous (some might say self-righteous) one. Over time American style capitalism, American style oligarchic politics masquerading as "democracy", and American style culture, particularly its manichean melodrama, became central to America's holy and righteous mission to civilise the world, its manifest destiny, in other words, and its sense of self.

As an aside, Mormons had their own version of chosenness and mission. It undergirded Mormon culture and played itself out in the Mormon colonisation of parts of the American, Canadian, and Mexican West.

But back to the American culture of imperialism, ever since this ideology of American innocence, an ideology tied to the virgin land motif in American culture and the ideology that the US was new--it wasn't, of course, but empirical reality is generally irrelevant to how social groups see themselves--and to a manichean melodrama starring themselves as the good guy in this tale of good and evil (something Hollywood and particularly Hollywood westerns have imbibed) has tended to make Americans amnesiac when it comes to the American empire. The latest iteration of this amnesia, of course, is the tendency of most Americans to elide the fact that NATO is an imperial organisation that has, since the fall of "communism", spread ever eastward in Europe and looks to spread across the rest of the globe. Americans, in other words, have made NATO as innocent as they made themselves. Fiction made real.

Americans have drunk the artificial kool-aid of forgetfulness and innocence, a beverage that immunises most of the faithful from reality. And that, of course, is a very human trait. Humans, after all, are ethnocentric.

On a normative level, I appreciate the British honesty about their imperialism. I don't appreciate the American dishonesty, obfuscation, and amnesia about their imperialism. The English may not have recognised that their imperialism was ultimately grounded in an ethnocentrism that was a cultural and ideological construct, believing that their imperial status was god given or nature given. But at least they had the self-awareness and ethical and moral honesty to recognise themselves for who they were, imperialists.  

Most Americans, on the other hand, because of the ideology of innocence at the heart of the post World War I American national faith, didn't and don't have the level of self-awareness necessary to see themselves for who they really are, imperialists. As a result they have to engage in all sorts of intellectually questionable mental gymnastics, including making normative politically correct ideology the standard for misinterpreting reality, an "approach" akin to interpreting all music on the basis of whether it is like Bach or not, in order to dissemble about what their country really is, namely, a great power that acts like any other great power that has existed over the course of history and is as imperialist as any other great power that has existed over the course of history. 

These amnesiac Americans make one yearn for the moral and ethical honesty of self proclaimed American imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and others in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century America who knew that they were imperialist, proclaimed that they were imperialist, justified their imperialism, and promoted it, arguing that Guam, for instance, was absolutely essential for the proper functioning of the modern American Pacific naval fleet if it was to rival Britain and Japan in the Pacific

America's nineteenth and early twentieth century imperialists may have been parochial and selective and situational but at least they were honest about it. And that is why they are more deserving of respect than the dissembling dishonesty and immorality of the morally and ethically challenged who see the US as the emodiment of a perfect and pure and innocent god or as the highest evolutionary achievement of nature.

Musings on Culture, Meaning, and Civil Religion

Humans are meaning giving animals. Humans over time and across space have given meaning to their lives, often metaphysical or non-empirical meanings to their lives, and given meaning to the world in which they live, often metaphysical meaning to the world in which they reside. Nationalism, the love of a place in space and the sense of having something in common with others, or at least some of the others , who reside in a common geographical space, is one of the meaning systems, religious groups are another, humans have created over the course of their prehistory and history. It is a meaning system that arose largely in the 19th century.

Most Americans have been socialised into, imbibe, and espouse consciously or unconsciously, the civil, civic, or public faith of the United States. This civil religion, this belief in a corporate and corporeal Caesar or Pharoah and the sacredness of Caesar's or Pharoah's realm, has historically centred upon the faith or belief that the US is a chosen nation (America, "god shed his grace on beautiful thee", America, the city on a hill), that the American people, or at least some of them, have been chosen by god or nature to spread the gospel of the American faith (the American way of "democracy" and capitalism), and that the US has a divine right to stretch from sea to shining sea (manifest or imperial destiny) and beyond (American civic faith evangelicalism and imperialism).

For most of America's history there have been at least two variants of this national faith. There was a Southern variant of the civic faith, which was grounded in sectionalism, pastoralism, and racism and a Northern version of the public religion grounded in industrialism, manifest destiny, the necessity of a stronger central government, and discomfort with slavery, both of which arose in the 19th century. The American Civil War of the 1860s did little to resolve this religious division and eventually the Southern faith became tied to the American Western civic faith of racism, expansion, conquest, exploitation, and states rights, all of which were also found in varying degrees in both the Northern and particularly, in the case of racism and states rights, in the Southern variants of the American civil religion.

Today there are two major variants of the American national faith. The popular media calls them Blue and Red. One of these variants of the civil religion, the Blue Civic Faith, currently dominates the Democratic Party and has dominated it increasingly since the tumult of the 1960s when the Democrat Party split apart and Dixiecrats increasingly migrated to the Republican Party. It centres around American chosenness (America the righteous Holy Virgin who welcomes all to its golden shores) and the beliefs associated with the American way as reinterpreted thanks to the rise of neoiberalism and globalism, the latter of which feeds into the Blue Faith's belief in cosmopolitanism.

This Blue Faith is the faith of specific demographics who reside, generally speaking, in particular geographies. It is the civic faith of many of those who live in the old Northeast and along the West Coast, and particularly those who live in its urban areas, places that experienced increasing number of migrants arriving from outside Europe after 1965 and who, over time, made peace with diversity and multiculturalism and has, as a consequence, become the party of faithful multiculturalists and pluralists. The Blue Faith has made multiculturalism, cosmopolitan, and pluralism central to its religious rhetoric though not necessarily its actual practise. The Democrat Party remains dominated by those who have long dominated the US and primarily serves the political and ideological interests of America's neoliberal but socially neoliberal economic oligarchs, like those in Silicon Valley, and on Wall Street, whose interests they served when they, for example, eliminated Glass-Steagall.

The Red Faith, the civil religion of the Republican Party, has also changed over time thanks, in particular, to the seemingly never ending purgings of RINO's that began after Richard Nixon and the increasing success of the Party's Southern Strategy with its tropes of a Big Bad LBJ and Democrats trampling their civil rights when he and they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and of a Big Bad LBJ and his Democrat allies undermining America when it passed immigration reform in 1965, something that made the US more diverse and multicultural. Current Republicans, in other words, reacted negatively to the increasing diversity and multiculturalism of post-LBJ America.

Since the 1970s the Republican Party has become the Party of racist Dixiecrats, who switched en masse to the Republican Party, and of elite oil men and other similar economic oligarchs, many of whom had ties or were fellow travellers of the John Birch Society with its paranoia about enemies within whether those enemies are commies, union members, or "liberals", by which they mean any liberal who isn't a laissez-faire liberal like themselves.

The Red Faith, like the Blue Faith, plays to particular demographics who live in particular geographies. They are, generally speaking White, male, somewhat suburban, and rural (including rural folks who have migrated to cities looking for work). Like the Blue Faith the Red Faith sees the US as chosen, believes that Americans are the chosen people, particularly those, at home and abroad, if they think like they do, and believe that the American way, as they envision it, is the best way in history of the world. multiculturalism, and diversity.

This Blue Faith is the faith of specific demographics who reside, generally speaking, in particular geographies. It is the civic faith of many of those who live in the old Northeast and along the West Coast, and particularly those who live in its urban areas, places that experienced increasing number of migrants arriving from outside Europe after 1965 and who, over time, made peace with diversity and multiculturalism and has, as a consequence, become the party of faithful multiculturalists and pluralists. The Blue Faith has made multiculturalism, cosmopolitan, and pluralism central to its religious rhetoric though not necessarily its actual practise. The Democrat Party remains dominated by those who have long dominated the US and primarily serves the political and ideological interests of America's neoliberal but socially neoliberal economic oligarchs, like those in Silicon Valley, and on Wall Street, whose interests they served when they, for example, eliminated Glass-Steagall.

The Red Faith, the civil religion of the Republican Party, has also changed over time thanks, in particular, to the seemingly never ending purgings of RINO's that began after Richard Nixon and the increasing success of the Party's Southern Strategy with its tropes of a Big Bad LBJ and Democrats trampling their civil rights when he and they passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and of a Big Bad LBJ and his Democrat allies undermining America when it passed immigration reform in 1965, something that made the US more diverse and multicultural. Current Republicans, in other words, reacted negatively to the increasing diversity and multiculturalism of post-LBJ America. Since the 1970s the Republican Party has become the Party of racist Dixiecrats, who switched en masse to the Republican Party, and of elite oil men and other similar economic oligarchs, many of whom had ties or were fellow travellers of the John Birch Society with its paranoia about enemies within whether those enemies are commies, union members, or "liberals", by which they mean any liberal who isn't a laissez-faire liberal like themselves.

The Red Faith, like the Blue Faith, plays to particular demographics who live in particular geographies. They are, generally speaking White, male, somewhat suburban, and rural (including rural folks who have migrated to cities looking for work). Like the Blue Faith, the Red Faith sees the US as chosen, believes that Americans are the chosen people, at least those Americans who think like they do, and believe that the American way, as they envision it, is god's way.

If I were a Christian dogmatist or a Christian theologian I might find the prominence of the American civil religion among American Christians fascinating. Though the Judeo-Christian god demands that his chosen people not have any other gods before him, regarding any of his chosen who do have other gods before him as idolaters, the prominence of the American faith within American Christianity and the extent of the American civil religious faith among American Christians seems to foreground the fact that large numbers of American Christians believe in a hybrid Christian-American public religious faith and that much of American Christianity is a hybrid and hence idolatrous pseudo-Christian faith. Many American Christians, in other words, give to Caesar not only what is Caesar's, but give to Caesar what seems to be gods if one takes their scriptures seriously. Many American Christians worship the American nation as if it were a god and believe that the American nation embodies god, the will of god, and the mission of god as incarnated in their holy trinity of Nation, Mammon, and "Democracy".

Another thing that fascinates me about the American civil religion is the fact, that, like all forms of religion, it is grounded ultimately in metaphysical assumptions and emotions or passion rather than in the scientific method of dispassion or objectivity and empirical analysis. As a scientist and a social scientist one of the things I find interesting about many devotees of the American civil religion is the contradictions that they embody. Some of them, for instance, whinge and whine about academics not being objective enough, foregrounding the influence of science on their faith, while simultaneously condemning academics for not being nationalist and patriotic enough, foregrounding the ethnocentrism that is part of their faith. They condemn academics for not parroting what they think of as nationalist or patriotic. Academics, of course, can't win in such a situation because science requires that a scientist be dispassionate or objective, while the American civil faith, grounded as it ultimately is in the emotion of passion, makes it difficult if not impossible for one to be dispassionate or objective. Welcome to the American civil religion version of Catch-22.

There is,  of course, an inherent danger in passion. The cultural idelogy of romanticism, for instance, grounded as it is in a constructed culture of passion, has probably killed and maimed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. Jealousy, as history shows, has been hazardous to the health of many, particularly women, and particularly in societies where guns are readily available to those revved up on emotional passions. Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't argue that romanticism has killed and maimed more people than monotheistic and ethnocentric forms of religion. Yet. Monotheistic religion, after all, has been around a lot longer and, as such, has had more opportunity to put its inquisitions and holy wars into practise. I would argue, however, that romanticism is creeping up on religion in terms of its damages done particularly if one argues that the varying forms of civil religion on the planet are examples of the sacralising impulse in secularisation.

Musings on the Culture of the Nacirema

I have long been interested in and carried out ethnographic fieldwork and historical investigations amongst the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik and, if much more limitedly, on other tribes beyond these three tribes. Despite my interest in all of these social and cultural groups most of my ethnographic, historical, and ethnological work has been done amongst that most exotic of tribes, the Nacirema. 

 

The Nacirema, as others who have studied the body rituals of this exotic tribe with its holy sticks and its magical substances which are rubbed and dabbed on their physical bodies and which they believe gives them cultural, including gender culture, magical power, and those who have assayed the ethnocentrisms of the Nacirema, with their grounding in a messianic, self-satisfied, and self-righteous sense of self and tribe, to note just a few, are fascinating. 

 

These body rituals and this messianic sense of chosenness and mission of the Nacirema are, of course, not peculiar to the Nacirema if we look etically and comparatively at human cultures and societies. They are also characteristic of the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik and of human groups in general. What makes the sense of messianic chosenness among the Nacirema different from the similar messianisms of the Kunac, the Eissua, the Iwik, and most other human identity groups, however, is the linking, in Nacirema culture and society, of this messianism to large demographic size and to, as a consequence, immense economic, including technological, political, including military, and cultural power and imperial practise, whether of the economic, political, cultural, or geographic variety.

 

Recently I have been studying the cultures of the Nacirema's two dominant political totemic groups, the Tarcomed and the Nacilbuper. While the members of each of these totemic subtribes proclaim their difference from each other and assert emically that they are radically and irrevocably different from each other, they really aren't that different when one looks beyond a rhetoric whose function is group identity construction, group identity replication, and group boundedness. 

 

Both subtribes, for example, and despite somewhat changing demographics and ideology across time and space, share a common sense of messianic chosenness and mission, if with slight differences in meaning attached to the symbols, rituals, and language of both social and cultural groups. Both, for example, have long supported the imperial mission of the larger tribal group of which they are a part. Additionally, both share common and similar practises of social and cultural amnesia, in both their oral and literate forms, which paint not only their own subtribe as innocent, good or righteous, and on a holy mission from the divine, however they conceptualise the divine other, but also their tribe in general as innocent, good, and on a divine mission both on the home front and abroad. Finally, both, while claiming to be working for the common good, largely work for the good of the oligarchs who dominate the political, economic, and cultural life and social domains of Nacerimadom.

 

This rhetoric of emic cultural difference and the reality of etic cultural similarity, of course, is not peculiar to the Nacirema as I noted earlier. One also finds it, as I noted earlier, among the Kunac, the Eissua, and the Iwik. One, in fact, finds it among humans in general be they hunter-gatherers, small scale agriculturalists, large scale agriculturalists, industrialists, or postmodernists. It is, of course, this cultural similarity of humans groups despite the rhetoric of cultural difference that ethnologists explore and ferret out. And they do it despite the fact that most of the masses don't care about the scientific and comparative work they are engaged in because they, the socialised, demagogued, and propagandised masses, are inscribed in and magically enthralled by their culturally manufactured emic "realities". Sometimes, the seduced masses even demonise social scientists for doing their important scientific work because they perceive it as politically and ideologically incorrect profanation of the sacred myths they hold to be holy and true. And the human world turns.

 

 

 

Musings on Love of Land...

I don't buy Crest toothpaste because my mum told me I should. I don't buy Crest toothpaste because the television told me it would turn me into a chick magnet or guy magnet. I don't buy Crest because it was developed at the college I did my bachelor's degree at. I don't use Crest because my dentist has a deal with Proctor and Gamble and gives it away "free" to every patient she treats. In fact, I don't buy Crest toothpaste at all. I prefer to buy toothpaste I have scientifically researched and which meets my criteria for what a quality toothpaste should be and which will thus help me maintain my teeth for the remainder of my life.

Nor do I "love" a geographical place in space containing various individuals and groups of people with varying degrees of a sense of community, a nation, because my dad told me I should. I don't love a nation because the teachers and civic textbooks of my school, mediums of socialisation both, told me I should. I don't love a nation because television, a medium of secondary socialisation and a medium of propaganda, told me I should. In fact, I can't love a nation; I can only scientifically investigate real nations empirically. I can only analyse nations, in other words, economically, politically, culturally, and demographically.

Now don't get me wrong, I realise that I am inscribed within specific cultural aesthetic formations. I, for instance, like mountains. I prefer warmer climes. I prefer smaller communities to larger ones. I prefer places with less modern bureaucratisation, I prefer places where fewer people have been turned into morons by ideological delusions. I prefer places with lower leves of violence. I prefer places with less Californication and Disneyfornication. I prefer places that aren't rotting deindustrialised rustbelts and sprawling suburban megaloplises and which have excellent mass transport.  I prefer places in space that have parliamentary systems. I prefer places with rational, efficient, effective, and humane universal health care systems. I prefer places in space with strong intellectual traditions and excellent colleges and universities. In fact, I prefer college towns in which the economy, politics, and culture are dominated by academic institutions whose mission is to enable its citizens to live the only life worth living, the explored and engaged intellectual life. I prefer college and university towns because they best meet, if imperfectly--nothing is perfect--what I am looking for in a community.

Not all places in space meet or come closer to meeting these criteria. That is why I try, all things being equal which they rarely are, to scientifically research and investigate places I am considering living in before I live in them though, of course, we rarely have a free choice in where we live unless we are Madonna or Mr. "Tesla" Man. You can keep your I like it because I was born here, I like it because my mum or dad told me I should, I like it because my school told me I should, I like it because the television told me I should, I like it because politicians and the government told me I should, or I like it because some flim flam mediocrity like Mr. "Tesla" Man told me I should nationalism. I prefer to be enlightened by reality rather than manipulated by demagogues who play on emotions such as like, dislike, love, hate, fear, and jealousy. My loyalty, in other words, must be earned. You can keep your because we said so unexamined nationalism with its self-satisfied self-righteousness, its simplistic manicheanism, its ethnocentrism, and its blissed out navel gazing. You are welcome to it as long as it doesn't negatively impact my examined life.

 

The Books of My Life: Three Frontiers

 

One of the most important historical analysts and theorists of the American frontier, and, by extension, other frontiers such as those in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, is Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner famously argued that the United States was not the product of its European roots but that American democracy arose instead in the "wilderness" of its ever moving frontier. In a speech at a special meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893 at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, an exposition that celebrated Columbus's discovery of the America's four hundred years earlier, Turner also announced, in rather pessimistic tones, the closing of the American frontier raising questions, in the process, about the future of the United States and the future of American democracy.

Turner's frontier thesis has not gone unchallenged within the historical and social scientific professions. A number of social scientists have raised questions about both its theoretical and its substantive validity. In his book on the Burned Over District of upstate New York and northeastern Ohio historian Wesley Cross noted that the frontier Burned Over region had good soil productivity, largely equal sex ratios, and a relatively sizable population, all things one would not expect to find on Turner's frontier, raising questions about whether that part of the American frontier was really a frontier at all. Historian Richard Wade contended that urban areas on America's frontier, like Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, were the motors of American geographical expansion, raising questions about Turner's contention that the frontier was the motor of American history. Historians Patricia Limerick and Richard White jettisoned the notion that the frontier was central to American history entirely replacing it with the thesis that contact and conquest are central to an understanding of American history and central to our understanding of the history of the American West, America's most recognisable and mythically imagined frontier thanks to, monumental paintings, dime novels, and Hollywood films. Limerick and White argued that it was not the frontier that made America. It was, instead, they argued, contact and conquest, the contact of Americans and the American military with those who were already there, the American First Peoples, contact with other European imperialists, like the French, the Spanish, and Britons, the conquest of the First Peoples, and the establishment of boundaries with other European imperialists, that made America America.

Dean May, in his historical ethnography Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History series, 1994), trods a middle path between those of the frontier school and those of the contact and conquest school.  Drawing on censuses, tax rolls, court records, probate records, wills, diaries, reminiscences, and what he calls folk histories, histories by amateur community and family historians, May argues that settlers in three different agrarian frontier settlements in the Far West--Sublimity, Oregon; Alpine, Utah; and Middleton, Idaho (May's hometown)--brought with them their different cultures and imprinted these somewhat different cultures on the land in their settlement patterns, their material culture, and their interactions in a conquered and bounded American West.

Sublimity, which was settled in the late 1840s and early 1850s, was dominated by migrants from the  South who had spent some time in the American Midwest. These Southerners cum Midwesterners, who immigrated to Oregon in family and neighbour groups, brought with them, May argues, the more traditional culture of the yeoman farmer. As a result, they settled in kin/neighbour communities that dotted the rolling Willamette Valley landscape. Those in these kin/neighbour communities interacted largely with each other. Their homes mimicked those of the plantation South while their cemeteries were kin cemeteries. Sublimity's economy was dominated by subsistence agriculture. Land acquired through the Donation Land Claim Act was substantial and much of it went unfarmed as patriarchs intended to pass it on to their sons when they came of age. 

Alpine, although initially settled by "native" American Mormon converts, eventually became home to Mormon converts from the industrial areas around Manchester, England in the 1850s. While these English immigrants, prompted by the paternalistic LDS leadership to "gather to Zion" like other Mormons all across the globe, brought with them a culture impacted by industrialisation, they also brought with them, May argues, a relatively new and more traditional Mormon culture which they imprinted, just as did other Mormons gathering to Zion, into the land, in Alpine's case into the mountainous Wasatch Range in what is today Utah County. All Mormon villages, including Alpine, were quite similar. All of them were based on Joseph Smith's monumental grid based plat for Mormon Nauvoo. Mormon village grids were aligned to the cardinal directions. Each grid, in turn, was subdivided into quarter acre lots. The streets that defined the grid were six rods each. Irrigation ditches, which eventually bordered the streets of Mormon villages all across the West, brought much needed water into Mormon villages throughout the arid West. Every Mormon village, including Alpine was grounded in a cultural ideology of sectarian separatist independence, interdependence, religious grounded interaction, mutual aid, communalism, and subsistence farming. Each Mormon village had the central purpose of helping each Mormon become a worthy Saint and of helping each worthy Saint traverse the Mormon path from preexistence to fleshly existence to eternal existence.

Middleton, which was settled by Southerners cum Midwesterners fleeing the devastation of the American Civil War of the 1860s, argues May, brought with them a more modern culture that had been transformed by industrialisation and the American Civil War. The culture of Middleton's migrants was acquisitive, materialistic, and individualistic. As a consequence, settlements along the Boise River in the Boise Valley of Idaho, made possible by the Homestead Act, were spaced out, the nuclear family dominated, interactions were largely commercial, financial, and consumerist, and farmers grew produce for the market, particularly the markets of nearby mining towns. 

While each of the three communities settled at various times were initially different in terms of their culture and hence in terms of the structuration of their economies, their politics, and their imprinted material cultures, by the 1900s, May argues, their cultures were converging. The acquisitiveness, materialism, and individualism that dominated Middleton was impacting and becoming dominant in Sublimity and Alpine as well, though to a lesser extent in Alpine thanks to its Mormon culture. Each of these three communities were, just like the US itself, May argues, becoming rational and efficient bureaucratic societies dominated by formal or written legal rules. They were becoming what Max Weber calls modern, in other words.

I highly recommend May's book to those interested in the history of capitalism and modern capitalism since May's book addresses the debate over whether the US was capitalist from the beginning or not, those interested in community or village studies since May addresses concerns related to community ethnographies, those interested in theory and culture theory since May's book addresses central concerns in social science theory and culture theory, those interested in frontiers since May addresses central issues relating to frontier theory, and those interested in the history of the American West. Fascinating book.

Musings on Post-Manichean Justifications of War

 

Once you ditch manicheanism with its us good them evil binary you certainly reflect reality with greater accuracy. We humans and the institutions and organisations we have made, as history shows, have the potential to do both good and evil. At the same time, however, you also make going to war, and the social ethics of war, a much muddier enterprise and mush more complicated than previously when comic book manicheanism with its clear differentiation between good and evil dominated and created a delusional mental world grounded in melodrama and emotion, including nationalist emotion. 

A number of issues come front and centre once the religion infused manicheanism that has dominated Western thought is jettisoned. For example, if virtually no one is fully good or fully evil how good do you have to be before you can justifiably go to war? How evil does some nation-state have to be before you can justifiably go to war against them? 

How does one determine degree of goodness and evilness in the first place? Can one develop a quantitive measure of degree of goodness and degree of evilness? Can one develop an objective measure which establishes benchmarks of goodness and evilness that allows one to justifiably go to war? Does one know good and evil when they see it, taste it, smell it, or touch it? Or is any such attempt at determining good and evil an ideological pipedream that is inherently subjective and intersubjective, impacted by culture and ideology which are relative? Do determinations of good and evil lie somewhere between the objective and subjective poles? 

If war, all war, particularly in the era of total war, violates human rights in some way, shape or form, how can you justify going to war if you claim to be fighting to protect human rights? And how can the violation of human rights be a form of human rights?

Musings on Propaganda...

Propaganda has long been used by states and nation-states to anesthetise and rev up the population. It has, not surprisingly, been used to do both in times of crises and war. I give you the bullshit about the Maine and Spain abusing Cuban women on the plains and the bullshit about evil Huns (Hitler before Hitler) bayoneting Belgian babies, claims that appeared in the mass media before the Spanish American War and during World War I. Both of these forms of propaganda, by the way, were used to manipulate the US into both of those wars.

 

Everyone, of course, uses propaganda from Innocent, the Blessed Virgin Mother America to the Ukraine. In fact, I recently read a report  about Ukraine's hiring of a PR firm, no doubt with American aid, to spin the war for that country in the mass commercial media so to rev up the West in its favour, something made easier by the almost total absence of spin for Russia on the Western corporate media and the almost total absence of those who rightly note the role the US and the Ukraine have played in the advent of the war on the dominant corporate mass media in the US.

 

Given this, one must be skeptical of claims of atrocities in war UNTIL they have been independently verified. One MUST also be cognisant of the fact that in the era of total war EVERYONE commits what are regarded as atrocities including Innocent, the Blessed Mother America. That is the nature of total war. so if past is prologue.
 

For those who prefer to have their emotional chains pulled by propagandistic bullshite, ignore this post. Bliss, after all, is one of the things that comes from a belief in a manichean faith, nationalist or otherwise, where you can spin or parrot notions that you are good and they are evil.

The Books of My Life: Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits

 

I have long been impressed by the work of historical, social, and cultural geographies. Some of the most impressive theoretical and substantive works--not to mention dense works--I have read on comparative and American history, for instance, have been by historical and cultural geographers like Donald Meinig and Wilbur Zelinsky. I can now add another name to the list of superb historical and cultural geographers and social scientists, the late University of Toronto historical geographer James Lemon.

Lemon's Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits: Great Cities of North America since 1600 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1996) is a geographic, economic, political, cultural, and demographic of the transition from traditional rural societies with their kin centred economic and political organisation and culture to a modern and a postmodern society of rich core nations characterised by laissez faire liberalism, at least in theory if not in practise thanks to state wealthfare, corporate capitalism, the movement from household production to work outside the home, the rise of bureaucratic manufacturing, retailing, and financial institutions, the increasing dominance of the retail sector, and increasing fragmentation and cultural complexity. Lemon tells this broader story of the transition from traditional society to modern and postmodern society by focusing on the geographic, economic, political, cultural, demographic aspects of six North American cities: Philadelphia around 1760, Manhattan around 1860, Chicago around 1910, Los Angeles around 1950, and Toronto around 1975. Lemon shows how the human striving for comfort, convenience, and safety led, in core nations, to the rise of an urban consumer society that by the Great Depression if not by the late nineteenth century had pushed up against the limits of economic growth imposed by nature resulting in economic stagnation in the core nations, an economic stagnation that has not been alleviated by the rise of a new communication culture and social formation associated with the new digital media, postmodernism.

Some, like me, will find Lemon's explorations of the differences between two core nation settler societies, the United States and Canada, both of which I have lived in over the course of my life, among the most interesting aspects of Lemon's superb book. As Lemon notes, Canada, unlike the United States, has been characterised by a less anti-governmental culture and ideology and hence less resistant to social democracy even among its Tories ("Red Tories"), social welfare, rational planning, and regulations on the economic sector, and transitioned earlier to postmodernism than did the US. As Lemon notes, these differences matter and are the reason Canada and Toronto are are less divided by economic divides of income and wealth, have lower levels of economic, cultural, and geographic segregation, have public housing in the suburbs, have stronger central cities and inner cities, are more rationally ordered, have more metropolitan political forms, and are less characterised by the geographic and economic urban transition the Chicago sociologists noticed in Chicago, than is the US.

Mandatory reading for anyone interested in comparative history, the comparative history of the US and Canada, the history of settler societies, and urban history.

The Films of My Life: Cassidy Red

 

Ignore the naysayers who find this film "boring". Boring after all says more about the person making that claim that it does about what they find "boring". Ignore the naysayers who think this film is too slow. After all, they have an attention span even shorter than Andy Warhol's fame mongerers. Ignore the people who seem to think that only a big budget film can be great. After all, they have a parochial sense of cinema and little sense of film history, a history that suggests that the bigger the budget the worse the film. Ignore the people who say this film is politically and ideologically correct in its anti-violence rhetoric. After all, these scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites can't see the huge politically and ideologically correct mote in both of their eyes. Ignore those who say that they don't make them like that anymore because occasionally they do. This is an excellent all around independent revenge flick with a heart and a brain and a couple of really interesting twists. A solid 4.5 stars.

Grown Up With Degrassi

I was already in my thirties when Degrassi Junior High hit the CBC and PBS (thanks to WGBH) airwaves in 1987 and Degrassi High hit the CBC and PBS airwaves two years later. I was, by that time, already a devotee of classic Hollywood cinema, a devotee of the art cinema of Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut, and someone who found what would be the first entry in the seemingly never ending Star Wars franchise too adolescent and too uncampy campy for his taste. Degrassi Classic, as Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High have come to be called thanks to Degrassi: The Next Generation (CTV, 2001-2009, Much Music, 2010-2013, MTV Canada, 2013-2015), a reboot and reimaging of the original two series, ended with the more adult oriented CBC telefilm School's Out in 1992.

I don't recall exactly how or when I happened upon Degrassi Junior High. I do, however, recall what I found interesting about the show and what I liked about it, it felt real rather like some of the films of John Cassavetes and François Truffaut's 400 Blows. Later I learned that Degrassi Junior High was the heir of the Kids of Degrassi Street (CBC, 1979-1986). I learned that the franchise came out of Playing With Time Incorporated, a production company established by Linda Schuyler, a former teacher, and Kit Hood, a former editor, in Toronto. I learned where the realism of Degrassi with its age appropriate casting, its emphasis on school time, and its documentary like mise-en scene, a mise-en-scene that was so real that it was filmed on the upper floors of a real school, came from. I learned that it came not only out of the intentions of Schuyler, Hood, and main writer Yan Moore, but also from the Playing With Time Repertory Company, which was also established by Schuyler and Hood, and which was made up of the cast of, at its zenith, around 65 young people, who applied to become members of the company and had to do auditions before they could become members of Repco, as insiders called the Playing With Time Repertory Company. I learned that the cast of Degrassi got together during the reading of scripts and during those readings cast members made suggestions to Schuyler, Hood, Moore, and the other writers, as to how the characters in the show would act and how they would speak. I learned that the adults behind the show, who were already committed to realism, took the input of the Repco seriously, something that made the show seem real despite exaggerations for dramatic and comedic effect, to this thirtysomething who had experienced many of the things portrayed in a show during his junior and senior high school years. I learned that Degrassi's mission was, as was that of the early BBC, to entertain and critically, to educate. I thought Degrassi did both.

Now that I am even older it seems to me that Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High were among the first television shows, to realistically explore the lives of junior and senior high schoolers. In retrospect, Degrassi seems like the first in a line of more realist television shows that would lead to the American television show The Wonder Years (ABC, 1998-1993), whose focus was as much if not more on the outside of school life of three friends, Kevin, Winnie, and Paul, and on Kevin's family life, Aaron Spelling's Beverly Hills, 90210 (Fox, 1990-2000), initially, apparently, an American attempt to do Degrassi High, the American television show My So Called Life (ABC, 1994-1995), the American television show Freaks and Geeks (NBC, 1999-2000), the brilliant American television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997-2001, UPN, 2001-2003), where the metaphors of the horrors and terrors of high school--not only those of the id--were grafted onto monsters, the British show Outnumbered (BBC, 2007-2014), which was filmed in a real house in Wandsworth and which allowed its three kids to improv within the boundaries set by the script, and the British television show Skins (E4, 2007-2013), the Georgie arc in the Canadian show Heartland (CBC, 2007-), aspects of the Canadian show Dark Oracle (YTV, 2004-2006), and even the American television show thirtysomething (ABC, 1987-1991), a realist look at the lives of several American thirtysomethings in Philadelphia. For this reason alone Degrassi is historically significant and deserves the attention of cultural historians, social scientists, and media scholars.

The Degrassi franchise, as I noted earlier, did not end with School's Out in 1992. In 2001 Degrassi was resurrected as Degrassi: The Next Generation, just as Star Trek had been raised from the dead with Star Trek: The Next Generation (syndicated, 1987-1994). This new iteration of Degrassi, after the two parter "Mother and Child Reunion", which introduced us to Emma, the daughter "Spike" gave birth to in Degrassi Junior High, even reused, at least in the first season, many of the same elements (for example, the school election, the school dance, alcohol abuse) from the early episodes of Degrassi Junior High.

There are other similarities between Degrassi Classic and Degrassi: TNG as well including an ensemble cast, the use of age appropriate actors, character arcs, the focus on school time, the focus on the seemingly apocalyptic trials, tribulations, and travails of the junior high school and senior high school student, a musical score that still does variations on the theme song, and a cast that reflected the multiculturalism and diversity of Canada in the wake of changes in Canadian immigration policy and the sources of immigration to Canada in 1947, 1952, 1962, 1967, and 1976. Similarities aside, there are also differences between Degrassi Classic and Degrassi: The Next Generation. Instead of filming in a real school, as did Degrassi Classic, Degrassi: The Next Generation was filmed at the studios of Epitome Pictures in Toronto, which was founded by Schuyler and Steven Sohn in 1992, which was renamed DHX Pictures Toronto in 2014 (a division of DHX Media) and which is now part of WildBrain, a Canadian entertainment conglomerate specialising in children's television programming. There was no longer a repertory company that the cast was part of. The actors in TNG were professional actors unlike the amateurs of the Playing With Time Repertory Company. The stars of TNG got their names and faces above the title while the ensemble that was Degrassi Classic got their names in the end credits. Though the actors in TNG are age appropriate, some of them looked to me more like the professional models cum actors of American teen shows with their twentysomethings playing teen somethings. TNG was on the commercial Canadian network CTV while Classic was on the Canadian public television network, CBC.

Though co-creator Linda Schuyler downplayed the differences between Degrassi Classic and Degrassi The Next Generation at a TNG panel at the 2021 ATX festival, the differences between the two are, at least to me and to others who have written critically about the differences between Degrassi Classic and TNG, significant. While viewers still, if fan comments on social media are a guide, identified with members of the TNG cast, there is a qualitative difference between identifying with cast members who are amateurs and more like the viewers than with a cast of professional actors, even if being a professional actor and celebrity in Canada is different than being a professional actor and celebrity in the United States, who are a class apart. Speaking of stars, we shouldn't forget that TNG produced a megacelebrity, rapper Aubrey Graham who now goes by the name of Drake, and middling television celebrities like Shenea Grimes, who went on to star in the reboot of the American teen show 90210 (CW, 2008-2013), Nina Dobrev, who starred in the American teen horror show Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009-2017), and Stacey Farber, who went on to star in the Canadian show 18 to Life (CBC, 2010-2011, CW, 2010), none of whom appeared on the ATX TNG 20th anniversary reunion panel. Classic, on the other hand, did not produce megastars or even middling celebrities because, to some extent, the original kids of Degrassi--"Snake", "Wheels", "Spike", Stephanie, Lucy, Michelle, Caitlin, Joey, Heather, Erica, Arthur, Yick, Liz, Voula, LD--were too real and were, as a result, too typecast as actors. Subsequent acting gigs offered many of those who remained actors after Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High were for characters which were much like those they played in Degrassi Classic.

For an interesting collection of essays on Degrassi see Michele Byers (ed.), Growing Up Degrassi: Television, Identity, and Youth Cultures, Toronto: Sumach Press, 2005)

 

Musings on Historical Explanation

The contention, thought out or parroted, that great power struggles, the US's attempt to demonise, delegitimise, and isolate Russia, the Ukrainian civil war, US covert and overt actions in the Ukraine since the 1990s, and US backtracking on promises had nothing to do with the current crisis in the Ukraine seems to me to be problematic. It seems to me to be an attempt by some, mostly apologists and polemicists for the American civil religion and the devotees of that American national faith, to negate what should be obvious to anyone with an empirical and contextual mind, namely that long term and short term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors structure human history. 

Such an assertion seems to me akin to arguing that great power struggles between the French and the British in the "new world", the French and Indian War, and the British attempt to make the Colonials pay for at least some of the cost the expensive French and Indian War, to get the Colonials to pay for their own protection, in other words, were not factors in the coming of the American Revolution. That assertion seems to me as equally causally problematic as the similar argument about the Ukrainian war and a prime example of "intellectual" boot scoot boogieing. 

It is, of course, another matter to note the fact that the Colonials seemed to, by opposing taxes to pay for the French and Indian War, want something for nothing, a rather common human and American cultural trait at least since the coming of the modern world.