The Books of My Life: Mikhail and Margarita

 

I have had a long love affair with Russian literature and particularly Russian satire and Russian magical realism, a style of fiction that seems invariably tied to authoritarian political contexts in which they were written such as Tsarist Russia, the USSR, and much of Latin America. Over the years I have devoured books by Gogol, by Zamyatin, and by Bulgakov.

I first read Bulgakov’s magical realist novel Master and Margarita sometime in the 1970s while I was still a teenager. I was immediately hooked. Eventually I read everything by Bulgakov that I could get my hands on. Later I was lucky enough to be able to re-read most of Bulgakov’s works during the time I lived in Moscow. It was wonderful to be able to go to many of the places Bulgakov described in Master and Margarita including the Arbat, the Master’s house, Bulgakov’s flat, the Sparrow Hills, and the Patriarch’s Ponds.

Given my love of Bulgakov it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Julie Lekstrom Himes’s love letter to Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail and Margarita (New York: Europa Editions, 2017). Mikhail and Margarita is a historical novel written by someone familiar with Russian and Soviet history and 1920s and 1930s Moscow. It is fictionalised tale that centres around an imaginary romance between Mikhail and the woman who had one been the lover of the Bulgakov’s friend, the famous Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, Margarita. The relationship between Mikhail and Margarita is complicated by the fact thatan official in the USSR’s secret police is also in love with Margarita and is determined that she will be his.

Mikhail and Margarita has been sitting on my bookshelf for several years. I suspect I held off reading it because in the back of my mind I thought I would be disappointed by it. I should not have worried. I really enjoyed Himes’s book. Mikhail and Margarita, which weaves aspects of Bulgakov’s life and works into it, nicely transports readers back to Stalin’s Moscow and nicely gives readers sense of what is was like to live in one of history’s many police states.

One thing I didn’t like was a review of the novel I read after I finished the book. An anonymous reviewer for Kirkus, a noted short review magazine, found the book humourless—it is meant to be serious—found it lacking in the satire department—it was not meant to be a satire—and finds the characters uninteresting—something I wholeheartedly disagree with. Isn’t it a pity that so many normatively driven reviews who often seem to be lacking in the descriptive ability department take it upon themselves whinge and whine about the book they might have written rather than the book they are supposedly reviewing. Culture and ideology, on the march.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: More Maps of Misreading

 

As I noted earlier, humans are, for cultural reasons, inherently ethnocentric. When a group creates an us, a group of insiders, whatever that insider group happens to be, they also have to create, via an equal and opposite reaction, a group of outsiders, a them.

This categorisation of some into us's and others into thems can take many forms, including a manichean, us good, them bad, form. This manichean form of identity classification and categorisation, of course, has dominated human culture for millennia and continues to dominate human culture today in alliance with a parochialism that mixes and matches human ignorance with human arrogance. 

In the brave new world of postmodernist digital media this manichean ethnocentrism is widely available for empirical viewing on a smart phone and a computer near you as I recently found out while doing participant observation research on and about social media. Needless to say social media sites like YouTube are a boon for the ethnographic observer and analyst who now doesn’t even have to leave the comfort of his or her armchair in order to travel to a not so exotic exotic culture any longer.

I recently stumbled on two possible if not probable culturally and ideologically driven maps of manichean misreading while doing ethnography on YouTube. The first was “reactor" Brooke Whipple’s “reaction" to one aspect of the the fifth season Buffy the Vampire episode “The Replacement”. In The Replacement" Xander, one of the original Scoobies or Slayerettes, is split into two halves, a suave Xander, who most “reactors” believe is not the real Xander, and a joking to hide his self-doubts Xander, the Xander who most “reactors” assume is the real Xander. At first the Gang is unaware that both Xander’s are the real Xander split into his confident and self-doubting halves by the demon Toth. Once  they realise, thanks to observation and research that both Xanders’ are real they devise a strategy to put broken Xander back together again. As they are preparing to do this Riley, Buffy’s ex-military boyfriend and graduate student in Psychology at the University of California-Sunnydale remarks, in what is clearly coded as comedy, satirical comedy, that the two Xanderses make him want to lock both of them up in a room and perform experiments on them, a reference, of course, to social scientific and particularly Behavioural Psychology twin studies. Not getting either the tone or the reference Whipple responds that of course Riley would want to do this since he is with the government.

Now, there is no doubt that states and nations have a distinctly checkered record when it comes to the treatment not only of their own citizens but of alien others as the deportations that occurred in the US in the World War II era, the lies associated with the US prosecution of the War in Vietnam including claims about North Vietnamese attacks on American ships and the massacre by American military of civilians at My Ly (one that recalls massacres of First Peoples by American troops and civilians in the 19th century), and US military experiments on pacifists with LSD make clear. However, private capitalist corporations and universities, public and private, also have a checkered past when it comes to truth telling and experimentation as well. See, for example, GM’s attempts to defame Ralph Nader for telling the truth about one of their cars and corporate experiments in Taylorism. So, the arises as to why Whipple chose to single out governmental nastiness while simultaneously ignoring corporate and academic malfeasance? Is it because Riley was in the US military? If so, why did Whipple not note what should be obvious to anyone with an empirical mind at this point, namely, the historic links between corporations, the government, and the military, public and private? Knee jerk manichean government evil, private bureaucracies good on the march? I suspect so.

The second example of potential knee jerk manicheanism in YouTube “reaction” videos I stumbled across were the many sensationalist Doctor Who is about to be cancelled “reaction” videos by “reactors” whose journalistic and scholarly credentials and expertise are questionable, to say the least.  No group of fans get more proprietary and red faced about their object of desire and devotion than Doctor Who fans, a fan clique that has been around since the mid-1960s. Doctor Who fans whinged and whined about the meta Doctor Who of the Douglas Adams years. They whinged and whined about the revival of the show in 2005 wandering if would do justice to their nostalagiased and romanticised memories of the show. They whinged and whined when David Tennant passed the torch to a new Doctor. They whinged and whined when Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor. They whinged and whined when Disney+ signed on to do Doctor Who with the BBC, something that required series fourteen of Doctor Who to become season one of Doctor Who again. They whinged and whined when Ncuti Gatwa became the first Black British Doctor, Doctor 15.

Recently, Doctor Who devotees (and one suspects those who have no devotion to Doctor Who but who are devoted to having their politically and ideologically correct way) have been boo hoo hoo and running around like chickens whose heads have just been chopped off prophesying that Disney+ is about to cancel Doctor Who because of its low ratings. In fact, ratings, for the nu new Who have been, as one Disney executive is quoted as saying that the ratings have been good though not stellar and Disney+ and the Beeb have just moved forward on a Doctor Who spinoff, hardly evidence that backs up “reactor” claims that the death of Who is imminent. They have also been conveniently forgetting that Doctor Who ratings have ebbed and flowed ever since the show came on the air in 1963. 

Given this empirical fact—the ebbing and flowing of the Who audience numbers—one invariably has to wonder if something else, something hidden, something below the surface something devouring from below is going on that accounts for all this whinging and whining about the most recent series of Doctor Who. Is it race, perhaps This type of whinging, of course, parallels all the whinging and whining that went on when Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the role of the Doctor.  If past is prologue one has to wonder whether some Doctor Who fans and some of those right wing populist ideologues who fancy themselves as warriors in a culture war for the soul of the universe (seemingly playing out their version of a pulp science fiction film in their comic book imaginations) can no more stand a Black man in the role of the Doctor than they could stand a White woman in the role of the Doctor. Manichean culture on the march? I suspect so.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Strange Case of Missing Canadian Content on YouTube

 

There have been a number of, in my opinion, excellent Canadian television shows over the years including the innovative and influential Degrassi trilogy of The Kids of Degrassi Street, (CBC, 1979-1986) Degrassi Junior High (CBC, 1987-1989) and Degrassi High (CBC, 1989-1991),  Degrassi before Californication, Anne of Green Gables (CBC, 1985, 1987), Due South (CTV, 1994-1999), Slings and Arrows (The Movie Network/Movie Central 2003-2006), a show turned down by the CBC for perhaps being too much of a satire of a Canadian cultural institution, Stratford, Being Erica (CBC, 2009-2011), the long running Murdoch Mysteries (City, 2008-2012, CBC, 2013-), and the long running Heartland (CBC, 2007-), to name a few. None of them, however, get either the attention they deserve or the props they deserve from the seemingly omnipresent but certainly not omniscient “reactors" on YouTube, whether Canadian or not, whether scholars, who are a vast minority on social media, or not.

There are, as anyone who has browsed YouTube for a period of time knows, a number of Canadians who do music, film, and television “reactions” on that social media site. They, like the English Canadian duo CineBinge, Popcorn in Bed (who is sometimes joined by her sister) and darcie’s watching stuff, both of whom hail from Alberta, the most Americanised of Americanised Canada, the Torontonian shadowcat, or the Canadian francophones Vic, and Verdy, however, largely react to American stuff though Popcorn does occasionally, very occasionally branch out into British stuff. A few, like the Hanier Family and Bars and Barbells do have Canadian content rules and periodically “react” to music by English Canadian bands like Rush, Triumph, and April Wine but not generally to lesser known English Canadian bands such as Great Big Sea, Figgy Duff, The Northern Pikes, Frozen Ghost, lesser known French Canadian bands like The Box and Men Without Hats, or very English Canadian Canadian bands such as The Tragically Hip or Sloan.

There is one Canadian “reactor”, however, an expatriate Canadian actor living in London in the United Kingdom named Megan Ruth who generally “reacts” to British television shows like the innovative and influential Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-1976), Fawlty Towers (BBC, 1975-1979), Blackadder (BBC, 1983-1999), Inbetweeners (E4, 2008-2010), and The League of Gentlemen (BBC, 1999-2002, 2017), all TV shows worthy or “reactions” and all British TV shows largely ignored by the majority of “reactors” on YouTube in favour of the much more mediocre American programmes that dominate “reaction" videos on YouTube. That makes Ms. Ruth somewhat of an anomaly amongst “reactors” on YouTube. 

In many ways Ms. Ruth, CineBinge, Popcorn in Bed, darcie’s watching stuff, Vic, and Verdy are allegories for Canada itself past and present. Ms. Ruth symbolises the English Canada of yore, an English Canada proud to be part of the British Empire, an empire that is more of a memory than a reality these days. CineBinge, Vic, and Verdy symbolise the Canada of today, a Canada that is a client state of Imperial America and in thrall to Californicated American culture. All of them ignore Canadian content generally. Ms. Ruth ignores Canadian television programmes that are similar to the British television shows she does “react” to such as the fascinating Twitch City (CBC, 1998, 2000), the brainchild of Canadian art director Don McKellar. CineBinge ignores the films of the brilliant Canadian artist, Guy Maddin while Vic and Verdy ignore the work of English and French Canadian artists. 

Of course, this state of affairs—the strange case of missing Canadian content on YouTube—is not surprising given that “reactors” have made themselves into commodities whose goal it is to make monies off of advertising revenue on YouTube. And the best way to make money off advertising revenue on YouTube is by “reacting" to American stuff given that American Californicated culture is one of the dominant imperial cultures on the planet and the dominant English language culture on the planet. Perhaps the strange case of missing Canadian “reaction” content on YouTube is not so strange after all. 

Canadians, by the way, are not the only “reactors” to ignore their own media history in favour of American television and movies. Most of the Brits on YouTube largely ignore great British television and movies like Inspector Morse (ITV, 1987-2000), Lewis (ITV, 2006-2015), Broadchurch (ITV, 2013, 2015, 2017), and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014, 2016, 2023), all of which are all far superior artistically speaking to almost anything and everything on US TV, in favour of American content just as Canadians largely ignore Canadian content and gravitate toward American media. But then like Canada once Imperial Britain is now a client state of the Imperial United States. By the way, the same state of affairs can also be found among Australian and Kiwi “reactors” to television and movies on YouTube, citizens of two other English and British settler societies that are now client states of the US who focus most of their "reactions" on American content.

One last word about Ms. Ruth, I have occasionally imagine that her show must be brought to us by CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada’s version of MI5, MI6, the CIA, and the FBI. Why? Because she apparently deleted a post of mine noting her exclusive focus on British media and her exclusion of Canadian content. Whether she did delete this comment or not I don’t know. I have no empirical data to verify that she did or didn’t do this. Still I like to imagine that she did. After all, it would make so much sense in the wider world of politically and culturally correct YouTube “reaction” videos.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: We Are Team Socialised for Media Reading Conformity

 

Most humans across time and across space have been and continue to be socialised for manichean conformity. They, thanks to cultural socialisation, come to embody a knee jerk manichean ideology that automatically makes them read “us”, whoever us is—ones family, ones kin, ones tribe, ones nation, ones state, or ones clique, to note a few examples of how ethnocentrism works in everyday life—as good and “them”, whoever them is—the them category is dynamic and changes as times change as when the Soviets replaced Nazis as the comic bookish evil in the American and Western Cold War universe—as bad. For many Americans past and present, for example, America the Good, America the Kind, America the Gentle, America the Compassionate, America the Leader of the “Free World”, America God’s Country, America the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, is the essence of good in the universe. For many Americans the Russkies are bad, the essence of evil in the universe because they, at least in part, are the very essence of not us, the antithesis of us. For many Americans Israelis are good even though they are, at the moment, engaged in actions and behaviours that are not that different from the Russkies in the Ukraine (or the US everywhere for that matter) because they are our friends and we like them so they must be good just like us.

This culture of manicheanism is present in all realms of human life whether the economic, the political, the geographic, or the demographic, something that points up the fact that it is ultimately culture rather than economics, politics, geography, or demography that makes the human world go round. Many Americans, who are socialised for manichean conformity, for instance, believe that the economic system of the US is the best because it is the economic system of the US (culture and ideology as tautological), that the political system of the US and its foreign policy is the best because it is the political system and the foreign policy of the US, believe that American geographic space is best because it has been blessed by god or by a teleological nature, and believe that Americans are god or nature’s chosen few because they are Americans and Americans are by “definition” good. Culture, meaning, faith, and belief are thus at the heart of Americans self-image of their nation and of themselves. Culture, in other words, undergirds and provides the scaffolding for the comic book like American religion of Americanism, a religion in which America and all that it stands for is the essence of goodness in the universe. America as a comic book.

This is not to say that there are not cultural contradictions in American society and other societies where the same cultural forces and ideologies operate as well. There are. However, those who can see through the socialisation for conformity curtain that hides the wizard of ideology behind it and see reality in the process are few and peer pressure and a host of other pressures (see the work of Emile Durkheim and Howard Becker on deviance and the social and cultural construction of conformity which is always in operation in everyday life) from a variety of cultural, economic, and political forces, including the media, the cultural institution and industry that melds them all together, are a major factor in why conformist humans always wear that happy we are the best face in their public and private lives.

One can readily see this culture of manicheanism at work in reaction videos on social media sites like YouTube. Looking at “reaction” videos on YouTube lifts the curtain to show the critical observer how the culture of human manicheanism works and how it generally leads to misreadings and misinterpretations of texts that operate and work outside of the manichean box to some degree. 

I have been, as I have noted before in these blogs, doing ethnography on YouTube. I have specifically been exploring “reactors” reacting to the television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Doctor Who in order to explore how this manichean culture of ideology permeates most readings of these television shows and how it works and functions to maintain manichean conformity.

The work of manichean culture in Buffy is apparent in how many, actually most, reactors read Buffy’s theodicy, interpret Buffy’s notion of evil. Buffy begins with a manichean notion of evil. Us humans good. Them demons bad. Very early on, however, Buffy complicates and makes messier its conception of evil. In the season one episode "The Pack”, for instance, Xander, one of the good guys goes bad thanks to demon possession, something that despite the fact that Xander is possessed by evil raises questions about the blanket good and evil binary ideology that Buffy begins at in its very first episode "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest” given that Xander is supposed to be one of the good guys, one of the Slayerettes. In the season one episode “Nightmares” Buffy’s Dad says some harsh and nasty things to our heroine, a heroine most viewers, one assumes, identity with because she is our heroine, because he is a manifestation of her nightmares, nightmares in which Buffy, who is coded as the good guy, believes she may the cause of why he and her mother split up. The episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” begins to turn the mean girl viewers love to hate, Cordelia, into the sometime Scooby viewers hate to love, something that continues in the next episode, the season finale, and in seasons two and three. 

The second season episode “Lie to Me” furthers deconstructs Buffy’s there is good and there is evil and the twain doth not meet ideology in the character of Ford, who wants to become a vampire because he has an incurable fatal disease, and thanks to Giles, Buffy’s mentor. In the final scene of the episode Buffy asks Giles to lie to her about the nature of evil in the Buffyverse. He tells her that you can always tell the good guys from the bad guys by their varying characters and by their different appearances to which Buffy responds, and rightly so given Buffy’s world building up to this point, “liar”.

Season three of Buffy even further complicates the theodicy of Buffy. Season three is full of doubles of the shows main characters, all coded as white hats (a coding some “reactors” don’t grasp thanks, perhaps, to the decline of the Western, the genre that often recapitulated America’s good guy image of itself) or good guys revealing the similarities and differences between them and pointing up, in the process, how but for the grace of god goes I in all of them. Buffy, who earlier had the buy the book Kendra as a doppelgänger, now has the not by the book doppelgänger Faith. In the episode “Bad Girls/Consequences” the similarities between Buffy and Faith are foregrounded. Faith, who has long felt like an outsider due to a host of circumstances including being made to feel like an outsider by Buffy and her Scooby comrades in arms. Under the influence of her Faith side, however, Buffy's bad girl and Nietschean side begins to come to the fore only to be submerged again as a consequence of Faith’s killing of a human being and her lack of remorse about it. Xander and Willow have their dark and skanky VampXander or AltXander and VampWillow or AltWillow. Xander has his literal double who is sometimes played by his actual double in the fifth season episode The Replacement". Giles has his Richard Wilkins III (who is actually Richard Wilkins I and II too), the mayor of Sunnydale, someone who is “good enough to be concerned about potential gas leaks in the Sunnydale sewers but who is evil enough to want to become a demon who devours the youth of Sunnydale. When Faith becomes the mayor's enforcer he becomes a father figure to her just as Giles is a father figure to Buffy.

Despite this clear complexification of evil in the Buffyverse many viewers miss the increasing complexity of Buffy’s theodicy. Most “reactors” knee jerkingly interpret the relationship between Faith and the mayor as one of evil Svengali to innocent slayer. They can’t comprehend, at first at least, that the mayor actually cares about Faith—how can he, they knee jerkingly assume, since he is evil, and Faith is pure, or so many want to believe. Some even—cognitive dissonance at work?—try to turn Faith into a spy who is collecting information on what the mayor is up to so she can report it to the Scooby Gang. Others miss the fact that Buffy tells Faith that the demon Skyler, who wants to sell them the Books of Ascension which are essential to the mayor’s plans, does not fall in the dangerous category and so does not have to be killed, something Faith has a problem comprehending, pointing up, in the process, the fact that she has not had the experience with the complexity surrounding demons Buffy has

Season four of Buffy continues to deconstruct the good and evil binary that is so much a part of human socialised for conformity culture. Buffy and the gang ultimately refuse to kill the ostensibly evil vampire Spike who has been neutered thanks to a trip to the Initiative vet. The Initiative, the big bad of season four, whose manichean militaristic view of evil—evil is evil and always bad including Willow’s werewolf boyfriend Oz—is contrasted with and counterpointed to the Scooby Gang, something foregrounded in Buffy’s speech to Riley about the complexity of evil and the problems associated with a manichean world view in the episode “Goodbye Iowa”. Magic, which some have historically seen as evil, becomes central to the triumph of the Scoobies over Adam, the Initiative’s one man scientific killing machine.

Despite this complication of Buffy’s theodicy many continue to tow the manichean good is good and evil is evil line. It is only in the fifth season, a season in which Dracula reveals pertinent information to Buffy about who she, the slayer is, Vic and cass reacts, for instance, finally grasp the fact that Buffy’s theodicy is as complicated and messy as that of Buffy’s companion show Angel. In fact, the complexity of Buffy’s theodicy set the table for the complex nature of evil in Angel. Is this misreading due to culture and Ideology at work? It is the function of Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder? Empirical Deficit Disorder at work? Or is it the consequence of all of the above at work? Given that ADHD and EDD are social and cultural constructions just like manicheanism I am going to go with the last, with the caveat that I suspect ADHD and EDD along with Historical Deficit Disorder and Research Deficit Disorder, are largely social and cultural constructs as well.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Movie Night with Jacqui Reaction Show

 

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD and its closely related companion Empirical Deficit Disorder or EDD aren’t the only related disorders prevalent and noticeable on social media sites like YouTube. One can also readily observe two other closely related disorders, Research Deficit Disorder or RDD and History Deficit Disorder or HDD, on social media as well.

Like ADHD and EDD, RDD and HDD have likely been around for some time. They are not recently discoveries maladies by Psychologists newly appended to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the Bible of the psychological set. Rather they have likely been around for some time, well at least since humans organised themselves into small scale and large scale agricultural societies.

One can see contemporary examples of both RDD and HDD on many if not all "reaction videos" posted by the latest in postmodern media commodities or wanna be commodities on the social media site YouTube. Take Movie Night with Jacqui, for instance. On the Movie Night with Jacqui Show the commodity known as Jacqui, who like other “reactors” on social media seems more interested in making a buck than in enlightening the masses, claims to be or to have been a film student perhaps at USC, if the graduation certificate that appears in the background of at least one of her “reaction” videos is a guide. 

What is fascinating about film student Jacqui is that she appears, at least on the evidence of her reactions to the first two episodes of the Joss Whedon created television show Firefly, to be plagued by both RDD and HDD. Firefly, as those who have done some historical research know, is clearly a hybrid of John Ford’s Stagecoach (an adaptation of Guy De Maupassant’s famous short story "Boule de Suif"), Howard Hawk’s cinema of professionalism and stoicism, Shakespearean and Hitchcockian multi-tonality, and Hitchcockian suspense. Jacqui, however, is either unaware of all this or doesn’t think it is worth commenting on—too heady for the masses for our money conscious “reactor”?—something I find odd for a self-proclaimed student of cinema. Even if Jacqui is, as the evidence suggests—her remarks on shots and staging, for instance—in the filmmaking track rather than the Film Studies and Film History track, one would nevertheless expect, given that she studies or studies film and film making, as Wesleyan Film Studies student Joss Whedon knows well, is learned, at least in part, by watching, paying attention to, and learning from the masters of cinema in the same way that one can learn how to write, paint, and research by studying the great masters of the past, I would not expect commodity Jacqui to either miss or ignore such critical information about Firefly. But then this is the postmodernist world where research and history are passé, the Reithian remit is kaput, and emotionally grounded reactions are the name of the social media moneymaking game just as they have been the name of the manipulate humanity game at least since the Ancient Greeks.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Cass Reacts GobFest, 2024

 

Many commentators have made much of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which was first diagnosed in 1902,  since the rise of the modern media like the telegraph, the telephone, and the wireless and postmodern or new digital media like social media since the middle and late 19th century. Some have even attributed what they see as a rise in ADHD to these new media and particularly to these new digital media.

Several studies, in fact, have attributed a variety of problematic symptoms to one of these brave new digital media forms, smart phones. San Diego State Social Psychologist Jean Twenge, for instance, notes that there has been a decline among iGens, those born between 1995 and 2012, in face-to face interactions including hanging out with friends, driving around, dating, sex, and engaging with family, an increase in loneliness and the fear of missing out or FOMO, one of the reasons many now have their smart phones with them at all time, engage in dangerous walking by looking at their smart phones while walking, and an increase in suicide amongst those with greater smart phone screen staring and sharing times compared to those who use smart phones less. Other studies have found that those who use smart phones more have trouble sleeping. Thanks to all this many social scientists  have pondered whether smart phone use and its consequences is leading to the de-socialisation and feralisation of those addicted to smart phones.

I, for one, am not sure that there has been a rise in ADHD since the rise of modern and postmodern media. Most humans, I suspect, have long had limited attention spans for a variety of reasons including television viewings of things like commercials, Sesame Street, and Music Television or MTV, which some contemporaries believed, because of their fast jump cut structure, were contributing to ADHD and its closely related Empirical Deficit Disorder or EDD. I don’t doubt that each of these media and others of their ilk, media and non-media, have impacted human culture and human psychology, particularly in the rich and media drenched nations of the core nation world. I don’t think, however, that ADHD or EDD has increased—assuming that the former has been present across historical time and cultural space, the latter almost certainly has—nor would I argue that one can at this point put the digital genie back in the bottle thereby changing humans for the better and bringing about heaven on earth, something many social engineers of all political stripes have been trying to do for centuries. What I do suspect or hypothesise is that with the advent of the new digital media like computers, smart phones, and the internet, ADHD and EDD, which I would argue are primarily a cultural and social psychological phenomena rather than, at least initially, biological ones, have become more noticeable because of the omnipresence of smart phones, computers, and social media sites like YouTube. 

As I have noted in these blogs before, I have been studying and doing the ethnography of the social media site YouTube for two years now. One of the things I have noticed in YouTube reaction videos is both ADHD and EDD amongst “reactors" Nowhere are both of these more prominent and more obvious than in the reaction videos of cass reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one that I have observed on YouTube reaction videos gabs the gob more than cass reacts while watching videos, pointing up, in the process, the problems associated with multi-tasking that scholars have noted for some time. Studies, like that done at Stanford, for instance, have shown that multi-media multi-tasking reduces the quality of a student's writing. It also appears to reduce viewer comprehension of what he or she are viewing. In a recent “reaction” to the seventh episode of the fifth season of Buffy titled “Fool for Love, for instance, cass reacts as a consequence of her cocktail of hyperactive gabbing and empirical deficit disorder, missed the fact that Spike, a vampire character in Buffy who has killed two slayers, got lucky when he killed his first slayer, a Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion, in that episode. She apparently missed the fact that an explosion occurred while the slayer was about to slay spike and this explosion presumably of artillery origin, led her to drop her weapon, her wooden stake, one of the weapons that kills vampires in BtVS. And she missed the fact that Spike told us before the flashback that vampires have one advantage over slayers—they have their weapon on. them—while slayers have to reach for theirs, something the Chinese slayer was doing when Spike, thanks to the explosion, got the upper hand and killed, because the slayer had dropped her stake, his first slayer. Luck and skill.

Not all, by the way, is gob boom, gloom, and doom on cass reacts “reactions”. Cass reacts can be quite insightful about the relationships (not surprising given the prominence of emotion and emotional attachment in Western culture, a culture in which, generally speaking, emotions trump analysis) in Buffy after each episode she “reacts” to ends. See, for example, her reactions to the fifth season episode “Shadow” on YouTube. It is unfortunate that there is such a contrast to cass reacts' running “reactions” to each episode and her analysis after each episode is over because cass reacts has some interesting things to say once the gobfest ends and the analysis begins.

We Are Special: Musings on Human Self-Centredness

 

One of the things humans are is ethnocentric in some way, shape, or form. They have believed and they continue to believe that they are special, that their family is special, that their clan is special, that their clique is special, that their tribe is special, that their identity group is special, that their religion is special, and that their state or nation is special. They continue to replicate, in other words, in a self-centred culture in which they are the centre of and measure of everything, a culture of human narcissism.

Well humans are indeed special. They are especially special at brutalising, terrorising, and mass murdering their own species. They are especially special at producing and circulating bullshit, at creating all sorts of manufactured fictional “realities” that continue to produce lowest common denominator humans on a mass scale particularly in the modern and postmodern ages. They are especially special when it comes to gullibility, at buying snake oil from the demagogic salesmen and saleswomen who sell it and pied piper it, something again increasingly common in the mass modern and mass postmodern periods. They are especially special at destroying the planet they live on and which gave them and gives them life, something that has been particularly prevalent since the rise of modern and postmodern social formations. They are especially special at greed, a greed they use to justify human cruelty toward other humans. They are especially special at commodifying their own bodies for a host of economic, political, and cultural gazes. They are especially special when it comes to banality, mundanity, and triviality. They are especially special in conjoining blissful ignorance with blissful arrogance. They are especially special at emotionally driven jealousies, jealousies that far often lead to brutality and murder. They are especially special at emotionally driven abuse, abuse that far too often leads to brutality and murder. They are especially special, particularly in their modern and postmodern ages, at creating autocratic and authoritarian police states which herd the masses like sheep and cattle into little socialised for conformity pens. They are especially special at creating weapons of mass destruction which can now wipe most of them off the planet, something that many might see as a small mercy since the planet is plagued by a biblical like plague of human locusts. They are especially special at creating fictional “realities” which, in turn, produce neurotic,  psychopathic, and sociopathic versions of themselves, something which again has become more prominent in the modern and postmodern eras. They are especially special at lying to themselves and deluding themselves, They are especially special at hypocrisy, one of humanities oldest “professions". Humans, in other words, are especially special at mass moronicity, mass skankiness, and unconscious and semi-conscious mass suicide.

Let He Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone: Musings on Human Hyporcrisy

 

I first heard the story orally when I was in college. It is a story, however, or so I am told, that is as old as the stone age. It is a story that may be so old it was spoken before it was written down.

The story that I heard that day in class goes something like this. One day the Christian god-man Jesus was in Jerusalem drawing figures in the sand. All of a sudden a crowd appeared within Jesus’s eye and ear sight. They were physically pushing and pulling a woman along in front of them. Soon the crowd formed a circle around the frightened and disheveled woman each member of the mob picking up a stone to throw at the woman who, it turns out, was caught in adultery, adultery, well female adultery being a capital crime at the time. The adulterer, of course, was no where to be found. Before the members of the crowd cast the first stone, however, one of those who was part of the mob noticed Jesus and went over to him. “Rabbi", he said to Jesus, "we caught this woman in adultery. What should we do with this criminal". Jesus quickly responded to his inquisitor, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone". The mob heard the rabbi’s word and they stopped and contemplated what Jesus said. Suddenly, however, an elderly woman that was part of the mob let a stone fly at the adulteress hitting her squarely in the chest in the process. As mobs always do after someone does something they too began casting stones at the poor woman. Soon the adultress was dead. After most of the crowd left Jesus went over to the woman who had cast the first stone and said "mother, sometimes you make me so angry.”

This story, a story with a message that is ignored by most including those who consider themselves right thinking Christians, are like many stories and tales of this ilk. This tale, like those others, is a wonderful existentialist allegory of the human condition. The crowd represents most humans since no human is a saint and all humans are, in some way, shape, or form, sinners. Jesus represents that rarity in human life, the voice of sympathetic, empathetic, and compassionate reason. The adulteress symbolises not only human hypocrisies but human double standards. Mother symbolises holier than thou human beings who can’t see the mote in their own eyes and, for those in on the parody and satire of the story, the Christian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Mary who both have turned into a saintly virgin without sin and without children despite the fact that Mary was human and Jesus had siblings, or so the New Testament claims.

Those of us alive and living with a functioning critical brain are aware of the hypocrisies of the human species every hour of every day. Some of us revel in the absurdity of pots calling kettles black, of Republicans whinging and whining about liberal violence while ignoring the violence and violent discourse in their own midst, of sinners casting stones at Joss Whedon, or Alice Munro, or Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.. while ignoring the fact that other sinners would be, in this course of ideological affairs, fully justified at casting stones at them, of Donald Trump and Joe Biden whinging and whining about violence when they engage in selective violence, mental and physical, everyday, of whinging and whining out of both sides of their mouths US Supreme Court theocratic authoritarians claiming to be republicans, of political and ideological correcties whinging and whining about the political and ideological correctness of others. There are so many human hypocrisies out there in humanland that it would take more than two hundred lifetimes to list them. As I only have one lifetime I will simply point out that humans are and forever will be hypocrites. Isn’s that pathetic and ain’t that a shame?

The Adventures of the Starship Enterprise: Musings on Star Trek and its Contexts

 

Several scholars and critics have argued for years that the short lived US television series Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969), a series that has spawned a host of successors and fanboys and fangirls, was a reflection of an America in transition from the presidency of that aged, conservative and grandfatherly Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952-1960) and his administration, an administration that seemed to mirror him at least in the popular imagination, to the presidency of the young, vibrant, active, optimistic, liberal,  and Hollywood celebrity like John F. Kennedy (1960-1963) and his administration, which seemed to mirror him at least in the popular imagination. 

Many of those who propound this hypothesis see JFK as the logos that enters into the young, vibrant, and optimistic Captain James T. Kirk, the leader of the Starship Enterprise which is on a five year mission to go where no man has gone before, into the new frontier that is now the ever moving universe instead of the moving American western frontier. One can argue, however, that the parallels between the Kennedy administration and the crew of the Starship Enterprise is even broader than the Kennedy-Kirk connection and parallels. You have vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson leading the medical operations of the Star Trek Enterprise in the form of the drawling and emotional Southerner Leonard “Bones” McCoy. You have Bobby Kennedy, one of JFK’s closest advisors, kind of inhabiting the body of the half-human half-alien Mr. Spock. You have the best and brightest Ivy Leaguers who served in the Kennedy administration represented in the engineers who keep the Starship Enterprise functioning particularly when it is under pressure from a variety of varying forces many of them from alien forces outside the ship. You have crew members who are representative of what passed for liberal diversity in the early and mid-1960s. There is the Black communications officer Lieutenant Uhuru whose name is supposedly Swahili for freedom and whose character is presumably a shout out to the civil rights movement then afoot in the United States. There is the Russian ensign Pavel Chekhov, whose last name is that of a famous Russian literary figure making it easy for viewer to make the connection. There is the Japanese Lieutenant Sulu who along with Chekhov often helms the Enterprise. Uhuru, Chekhov, and Sulu embody in the series Africa, the evil other of 1960s America, and Asia respectively. All three are played by American actors and all serve under the command of he who some would see as the ultimate American action hero and gunslinger of the era, Captain James T. Kirk. You have a host of glamorous young women in auxiliary female roles such as Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Janice Rand all whom, as is Uhuru, are garbed in not so futuristic mini-skirts presumably, at least in part, for the young nerd boy male gaze that those who made the show presumed would watch the show.

Characters are not the only reflections of Kennedy America in Star Trek. There are also the many contradictions in the show that reflect the contradictions of America in an era where the counterculture was becoming prominent. You have, for example, the ethnographic episodes where Kirk and Company learn about and learn something from the aliens they encounter on the new frontier such as in the 1967 episode “Errand of Mercy”, an episode in which Kirk and the Enterprise come up against the Klingons, Star Trek’s Russkies, both of whom are shown up by a planet full of powerful pacifists. You have the episodes that mirror the playing chicken games of the Cold War such as 1966’s “The Corbomite Maneuver”, an episode that ultimately asks why can’t we just get along and answers we can with a little understanding, understanding that will help the great powers avoid nuclear annihilation. And you have the too many to list imperial episodes in which Kirk and the Enterprise do what they are not supposed to do, violate the prime directive of the cultural anthropology episodes to leave native cultures alone so they can develop on their own, episodes that are slyly commented on and critiqued in “Errand of Mercy”, episodes all which show the primitives on the frontier how they can progress by simply “adapting” to the United Federation of Planets, the utopian liberal American way. 

The ethnographic, cold war, and imperial episodes are not the only generic episodes one finds in Star Trek. There are also the many episodes, too many to list, where Kirk not only gets his man but gets, well almost gets, his woman. It is as if those making Star Trek were coyly commenting on John's and Bobby’s many extra marital sexual affairs or the sexual power of those in power. But then again, affairs are close to the Hollywood heart and many of those who tune in to Hollywood television shows and watch Hollywood movies do so to see fairy tale romances amidst the western action adventure. Sex, as Hollywood has known for some time sells and selling is central to the Hollywood capitalist enterprise. There are the episodes where history in space parallels American history in time, the episodes where the Enterprise finds Romans, Chicago like mobsters, and Third Reich like Nazis in outer space, episodes undoubtedly impacted by the budgetary constraints of the show. There are the alternative history episodes of the show, most famously 1967’s “City on the Edge of Forever”. There are the episodes where the Star Trek crew go back to the era in which the show was made such as 1967’s “Tomorrow is Yesterday” There are the megalomaniac episodes of the show, episodes in which Kirk and the Enterprise come up against more powerful forces in the form, for example, of Greek gods and characters who have lived the lives of many illustrious humans but who, by episodes end, are outsmarted and out manoeuvred in classic Hollywood fashion by Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise such as 1969’s “Requiem for Methuselah". The show must go on after all and in Hollywood genres go on and on and on in repetitive fashion, something viewers of Hollywood television and film love and love and love.

Life as Crisis Management: The Consumer Cellular Kiada

 

Modern and postmodern bureaucracies, public or private, mostly private, have, been despite their claims of being efficient and effective, characterised by incompetencies of varying degrees since they were “created”. Sociologists, of course, have known this for a long time. I have experienced these incompetencies in my long life since I was a teenager but they have become, though I have only qualitative data to back up this hypothesis, even greater in the brave new digital world era.

I have experienced no greater incompetencies than in the telephone sector of the brave new digital media world. I initially went with Tracphone for my telephone service needs. I have email but corporations apparently don’t like to use email to communicate with you. They apparently think that telephones are more secure than email, a lie as the most recent data breach of a phone company, ATT in this case, shows. Tracphone was a disaster on so many levels. I finally managed, with the help of the Office of the Attorney General of New York State, to extricate my self from the intensely incompetent existentialist hell that is Tracphone and was even able to get a refund from that corporation in the process. With Tracphone finally in my rear view mirror I scurried on over to Consumer Cellular for my telephone needs.

Consumer Cellular, however, has proven to be almost as incompetent and mysterious in its bureaucratic operations as Tracphone. A bit of backstory first. The base charge for my Consumer Cellular service is $20. There are extra charges, which include taxes and all that other jazz, apparently of $8.11. Consumer Cellular also offers a reduction in the bill if you do autopay. The problem I have with all this is that my payments for service since I first signed up for Consumer Cellular have been all over the place and I can’t make sense of these significant fluctuations. My first payment to Consumer Cellular, according to my cheque book, was for $22.43. My second was for $18.12. My third and fourth were for $18.06. This months payment was for $28.12. 

I called Consumer Cellular customer service and asked for explanations why my bill went up this month. They said that I had a $10 dollar credit from Walmart that ended with this payment, something that I was not informed of but apparently I got because I bought the phone from Walmart, ended so my telephone charges rose. The problem with this explanation is that it does not really account for the fluctuations in my first four bills as far as I can tell. After I got my second bill I did not see what I assumed would be an autopay reduction in my first bill as I had autopay. I called customer service and asked why this reduction was not reflected in that bill. I As a consequence my bill was, or so I thought, reduced from $22.43 to $18.12. But no, I was later told that Consumer Cellular adds not subtracts the $5.00 autopay credit to accounts. Thus my $20 dollar base without the autopay reduction includes not only taxes and all that jazz but a $5.00 dollar charge which would bring my total bill up to $33 dollars plus. What I got from Consumer Cellular customer service, in other words, was a babel of inconsistencies, contradictions, and happy faced corporotese.

I have been trying to figure all this out but apparently you need a Ph.D in creative mathematics to make sense of it all. Did my Walmart credit not get fully credited to my first bill thus leading to declines in my charges for bills two, three, and four? Why was this decline in charges only around $5 dollars? That sounds more like a autopay credit to me? Speaking of autopay credit, don’t you just love the fact that Consumer Cellular’s autopay credit is not a subtraction of monies but an addition of monies?

The incompetence of Consumer Cellular, an incompetence foregrounded by the mysterious fluctuations my in my bills, fluctuations that are like those in the speculative stock market, didn’t end there. I called Consumer Cellular—I have now called them six times and contacted them via chat twice—and asked that electronic copies of my bills be sent to my email account. They sent them but what they sent does not indicate how much I paid each month. That information is blank. Additionally, I asked for transcripts of all conversations I have had with Consumer Cellular be sent to my email. That was impossible, they said and said I should contact Consumer Cellular if I wanted those. I want all this information because I intend to file complaints about Consumer Cellular with the Federal Communications Commission and the Office of the Attorney General of New York State. 

And so corporate capitalism goes and goes and goes…

Addendum: Consumer Cellular informed me that the reason for the discrepancy between the $18.12 and $18.06 charges had to do with tax rates.

Life as Crisis Management: The Presto Electric Skillet Kiada

I had wanted an electric skillet for some time. I remembered how well the fried potatoes my paternal grandmother made tasted coming out of her Sunbeam electric skillet something that I could not emulate on the gas stove and oven I have in my flat. I wanted those fried potatoes so much again that I could taste them.

So when holes and cracks started appearing in the stone age oven my landlord had put in my flat to replace another stove and oven that had too started to crack I decided to get an electric skillet. Not only did I want the taste of grandma's fried potatoes in my mouth again but I did not want my landlord to put a new gas stove and oven in my flat since he would not put down floor covering to protect my apartment and keep in clean when he moved in the “new” stove and oven in. At 69 I am simply no longer able to clean up the inevitable messes landlords leave in their wake and I don’t think gas ovens and stoves are particularly kind to a person’s physical health, particularly the physical health of an elderly person with asthma like myself, in the first place. So when the landlord refused to do the gentlemanly and easy thing and put down runners to wheel the “new” stove and oven in on and when he refused to buy me an electric oven and stove as a replacement I decided to opt for the electric skillet instead for stove top.cooking.

I wanted a Sunbeam electric skillet just like my gran used to have but Sunbeam like so many American corporations thanks to deindustrialisation and globalisation, no longer make home appliances save for irons and have moved into the ever growing health care appliance market. Whether or not Sunbeam like other once well known and well regarded American corporations have sold their once good name to a fly by night bargain basement company making cheap knock offs I do not know. So on 3 May I bought the Presto 06620 electric skillet from Target Online. I had done a lot of homework before I made the purchase and I found many ratings sites singing the praises of the Presto 06620 as the best bang for your limited American buck.  

The skillet worked quite well initially and I have almost been able to replicate my gran’s fried potatoes. Hopefully more practise will make perfect. There was a problem, however. I soon began to notice that thermal cracks were appearing in the corners of the “innovative” plastic cover after less than two months of use. I saw that one could buy a replacement top from Presto and contacted them to see if the 06626 tempered glass top would work on the one I had purchased. Presto informed me that it would and that the replacement lid would only cost $19.99, half of what the skillet cost in the first place. And that was not even counting the wonderful additional shipping and handling costs which added another $9.00 dollars to the bill.

Needless to say I was not happy paying for a replacement cover of a cover that was clearly inadequately designed for the purpose it was made for. Target, thankfully, refunded me for the lemon and I bought a Walmart electric skillet with a tempered glass cover complete with a steam vent to release pressure which the Presto 06620 does not have, which is perhaps why thermal cracking may be appearing on the Presto lid in the fist place. 

Presto I bid you adieu forever. I hardly knew ye.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: An Open Letter to the FCC

 

Every morning, weather permitting, I take my daily constitutional through the park I live across the street from in Albany, New York. One day, the day after the fourth of July fireworks in Albany, a day when the dead remains of those who go to the park across the street to watch the fireworks and who apparently can’t be bothered or don’t have the physical or mental capacity to put their trash in the numerous rubbish bins in the park, I heard two city workers who were in the process of cleaning up the mess talking about how the United States sometimes resembled a third world country. It was a sentiment I long shared not only when it came to people and the garbage they left behind but also about the new digital media that the US government and its puppet masters, American’s media elites and their corporate allies, have foisted upon us in the name of “progress". 

I recently felt the need to write a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, the US bureaucracy that is charged with regulating America’s pubic airwaves, about this brave new digital over the air television. I reprint this letter below…

Dear Federal Communications Commission of the United States,

I am writing to complain about the operation of WYBN TV 14 in the Catskills of upstate New York.

I am, of course, aware of the problems associated in general with digital television. I live in the heart of Albany, New York a city with several local over the air television channels. In Albany over the air signals are weak. It is a city in which, when cars go by in front of my flat, the signal disappears. Signal transmission too often freezes up. Audio and visuals are sometimes off. Interference with signals, including background noise such as background noise from other stations and perhaps even radio signals, happens far too often. Frankly, I prefer the old analog signals to the brave new world of digital television even though the visual and aural quality of digital signals are admittedly better. Why? For the simple reason that I prefer to watch television stations consistently which you could do when we had analog signals and which you can’t do now.

What has [also] surprised me about the brave new digital world is the incompetence of many of those who run small stations in the US today like WYBN. WYBN, for instance, runs commercials over TV shows. They sometimes run commercials that are clearly incompetently made seemingly by dudes who have dropped too much acid. They run weather information that bears no relation to the actual weather outside. Their signals freeze way too often. Their signals disappear way too often. Their audio and videos are not synched up way too often. 

So, get off your arses and stop doing the business of America’s economic elites and fix the problems with the signals and the quality of over the air TV. I won’t, to say the least, be holding my breath. By the way, I was fascinated] a couple of apparently irrelevant fill in the blanks below in your file a complaint with the FCC online tool. I am not surprised because the US government is barely more competent when it comes to media than the rank and skank amateurs at WYBN.

Me out.

Addendum: It is difficult to find information on WVBG. They appear not to even have their own internet page. According to Wikipedia WVBG, which at one time ran the same subchannels as WYBN, is owned by Bridge Media which, in turn, is owned by the Indian businessman who developed and markets the 5-hour Energy Drink. Recently WVBG changed its programming. The Christian station that was once on 25.1, the Watchman Broadcasting WBPI-Religious from Augusta, Georgia, a station characterised by factual deficit disorder, was moved to 25.4 and now seems to have left the building entirely—praise the lord—and been replaced by Retro. [25 has returned on my TV dial and unfortunately WBPI is still there, a fact some might see as yet further proof for the non-existence of the gods], Newsnet is now on 25.1, Sportsnet, which is owned by Newsnet, is on 25.2, and ShopHQ is on 25.3. Of course, now that I wouldn’t mind watching this channel I can’t because I can’t get it just as I can’t get channel 4 either. The joys of television watching in the new digital age. 

The Books of My Life: These Truths

 

These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2018) by prolific Harvard historian Jill Lepore takes readers on a journey through the tortured and not so exceptional landscape of United States history from its imperial settlement to the early twenty-first century. Focusing on the not so peculiar mix of universalism and parochialism that has undergirded American history, Lepore explores the contradictions that have been at the heart of American history and American culture since even before there was a United States of America. 

There are, Lepore claims, several contradictions at the heart of America. There is, she claims, the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of liberty and freedom and the reality of slavery and slavery by another name in the United States, Jim Crow, a slavery that really did not end until the 1970s. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of the equality of all Americans, well at least White American males for much if not all of American history, and the reality of inequalities of income, inequaliities of wealth, inequalities of power (to wit the recent US Supreme Court decision to grant immunity to Donald Trump and current and former presidents for “official” but not “unofficial" acts—a latter day version of the King’s two bodies ideology—turning them into monarchs who are now “officially" above the law), inequalities of gender, and inequalities of authority in America. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of an America originating out of a revolt against imperial tyranny and the reality that the US was born out of imperial conquest. a conquest, a manifest destiny, in fact, which has continued ever since. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of an America devoted to freedom of speech and the reality that the US has limited free speech and imprisoned those who engaged in it almost any time there was a war and beyond as recent successful attempts to limit freedom of speech by the populist right in Dixie, in the American Midwest, and in the American Intermountain West show. Finally, there is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric that Enlightenment reason should and would guide the politics of the United States and the reality that the US has largely been ruled by demagogues, political, economic, and culture, who are adept at manipulating emotions, irrationalities, and unreasons.

Wonderfully written, Lepore's necessarily focused and selective book goes where other more bland and fragmented books generally fear to tread. Lepore's book, of course, hits most of the "high" points of American political, economic, and demographic including immigration history. Where Lepore excels, however,  is in her discussions of the rise of political consulting or professional demagogues with their essential public opinion polls and their impact on American political culture, in her exploration of the rise of hippie libertarian digitatopianism and its idiocies and dangers, and in her exploration of the rise and impact on the new digital and their impact on America and Americans. Lepore argues, rightly for the most part, in my opinion, that political consulting, opinion polls, and the new digital media have increasingly polarised the United States turning it into the dysfunctional nation-state that it is today. How long this rather tenuously bound together nation-state can survive is a question Lepore essentially and rightfully leaves unanswered even if one leaves the book with a heavy sense of foreboding given the recent history of the United States which Lepore details. Lepore nicely explores the rise of selective speech codes on college campuses—something foregrounded by the recent fascist like behaviour of university boards and their administrators toward pro-Palestinian protestors at places like Columbia University and NYU—speech codes demanded by those who apparently have chronic traumatisation disorder and who appear to have a limited grasp of satire, parody, universities as, at least in theory, bastions of free speech and freedom of inquiry, and the fact that all humans, given the realities of growing up, have been traumatised at some point in their lives but still manage somehow to get on with them and who often, despite this, are able to maintain a sense of humour and a sense of the absurd about it all. Needless to say the speech codes lionised by the post baby boom crowd are a world away, as Lepore notes, from the movement on college campuses in the 1960s reacting against limitations on free speech on college campuses.

I am not as weary of going where Lepore decides not to go: thinking about the future of a divided and dysfunctional United States. For me the answer to the question of whether a polarised at least a two nation-state America can survive. I, like Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, doubt that it can. This issue, one that Lepore decided not to answer, leads me on to a few other issues I had with These Truths. While Lepore is certainly correct that the rise of the American propaganda apparatus—advertising, political consulting, duelling mythhistories—has broadened the partisan divide in post Depression, post New Deal, and post Great Society America, in the America, in other words, after that brief consensus period which, at least on the surface, lasted from the Depression to the Great Society, I don't think Lepore reminds us as strongly as she should and could that these cultural and ideological divisions have been around since the advent of the United States. The US, in fact, has really never has been a unified nation with a common set of cultural and ideological meanings, a fact that made the US not only divided and dysfunctional before the Civil War but, for the most part, after it as well. It is these pre-existing conditions or divisions in the US that have been manipulated by the demagogues and pied pipered of the brave new digital world. Additionally, I have a problem with Lepore's contention that the US was and is a kind of a democracy. The US was, as Lepore notes, an oligarchy at its birth and given the presence of economic and political bureaucracies in the US at least since the Gilded Age, it has been an oligarchy ever since for, as Max Weber and Robert Michels noted long ago, modern bureaucracies of all types institutionalise hierarchical inequalities of power and authority in their very form and structure. Apparently, many are unable to rid ourselves of the myth of American and Western "democracy" (not to mention imperialism) for, like other myths, it provides some with a sense of cultural and ideological comfort just as the notion that god takes young people unto him after death comforts many emotionally traumatised human beings.

Very very highly recommended for anyone interested in American History. These Truths is, in my opinion, a wonderful purgative for all those awful bland, narratively anemic, and fragmented textbooks on US history (and beyond) that sadly dominate a college textbook market that seems to be more about image than content these days.

The Books of My Life: The Penguin History of Canada (Bothwell)

 

Robert Bothwell's The Penguin History of Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 2006), is an excellent introduction to Canadian history from French and English colonisation, with a few details on the indigenous history of Canada thrown in, to the election of the American style Tory government with Stephen Harper as prime minister of Canada in 2006. Bothwell's history of Canada is, one presumes, a replacement or perhaps better a supplement to Bothwell's teacher Kenneth McNaught's much revised classic The Penguin History of Canada (London: Penguin, 1988), first published in 1969.

Bothwell's book is largely traditional in form thanks to its emphasis on great men and great events. While Bothwell emphasises the usual suspects in the political and economic history of Canada he does occasionally throw in some useful social history in the form of demographic history and a bit of cultural history, mostly on ebb and flow and complexity of Canadian identity history, into the mix.

Some may like the fact that Bothwell's book, given that it is authored, by a single historian, is a coherent well-written narrative of Canadian history that virtually anyone with an interest in Canadian, English and British settler societies, and comparative history can read unlike the fragmented multi-authored textbooks that dominate introductory university classes these days. Some may be slightly annoyed with Bothwell's periodic editorial comments about Canadian political history and economic history and his editorial comments of the "great men" of Canadian history. Others may appreciate Bothwell's editorial comments given that it allows readers a peek behind the wizard's curtain and into Bothwell's ideological convictions. For those interested in an excellent and relatively recent history of Canada, I highly recommend Bothwell's The Penguin History of Canada which gives us a history of Canada warts and all.

The Books of My Life: America, Empire of Liberty

 

As a general rule I don't like introductory college textbooks. They are, and they long have been, way too big and way too heavy for my taste, making them, as a consequence, almost impossible to hold in one's hands let alone carry them around. 

There are a number of reasons I don't like your standard contemporary university text. In order to read them you have to have some sort of desk or desk-like surface, something that makes them less portable and more difficult to deal with compared to mass market or standard sized trade books. They are too sexy, or perhaps better put, they attempt to be sexy filled with colour photos, graphs galore, and numerous subject or thematic boxes that are stuffed in the book in an attempt, generally unsuccessful, to appeal to students brought up on a steady diet of adolescent film, television, and digital streaming. They are generally of the kitchen sink variety filled to the brim, as they are, with information that attempts to appeal to a number of identity groups (including the White identity group that generally and delusionally so does not see itself as an identity group) in the broader population in Western core states. As a consequence, they are the academic version of a kind of polemical dictionary or, at best, a partly polemical encyclopedia, something that, in turn, makes them perfect, I suppose, for generations with limited attention spans and limited interests in anything academic in the first place. And they are way too expensive particularly for middle class and poorer students attending university or college on a tight budget these days.

Not all introductory history textbooks require a crane to operate, however. Canadian historians Kenneth McNaught's, John Saywell's, and John Ricker's excellent Manifest Destiny: A Short History of the United States (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, revised edition, 1980), Welsh historian  Maldwyn Jones's excellent The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1995), American historians Peter Carroll's and David W. Noble's excellent The Free and the Unfree: A Progressive History of the United States (New York: Penguin, third revised edition, 2001), and prolific American historian Jill Lepore’s excellent These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2018) all look like the books one might find on the shelves of that once endangered species, the local independent bookstore that sometimes stocks academic books or used bookstores particularly in college towns.  

America Empire of Liberty: A New History of the United States (New York: Basic, revised and updated, 2021 [first edition 2009]) by Cantab (Christ's) historian David Reynolds is another textbook that looks like a book one would find on the shelves of a local book shop. Like all of the books noted above, including the single authored one's by Jones and Lepore, Reynolds's book is characterised by greater narrative coherence than your standard introductory textbook on American, Canadian, Australian, or New Zealand history these days. As Reynolds explains in an introductory chapter and again in his conclusion, he focuses his "new" history of the United States around the ideology of liberty--as did Eric Foner in his Give Me Liberty textbook (New York: Norton, 2004) and more successfully, in my opinion, in his The Story of American Freedom (London: Macmillan, 1998)--the ideology and practise of empire (continental and global American manifest economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic destiny), and the ideology and culture of faith, something, Reynolds argues, that is the glue that holds liberty and empire together for many true believing Americans. Like Foner (and others) Reynolds is also aware of and explores the fact that there are dominant or hegemonic, countercultural, and subcultural meanings attached to liberty or freedom, empire, and faith in the United States, something that Daniel Rodgers does well in his Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (1987). a book presumably modelled, to some extent, on Raymond Williams's seminal Keywords (first edition, 1976).

Reynolds's book, though it is more standard book-like than most if not all introductory textbooks these days, is actually not on a substantive level all that different from other contemporary textbooks in American history once one gets beyond the issue of narrative coherence. Foner's book, as I noted earlier, does something similar and like Reynolds' book, weaves into it, though not always successfully in my opinion, traditional narrative history, the "new" social history, the "new" cultural history, the "new" class history, the "new"gender history, and the "new" and ethnic and racial history, the standard subgenres of the contemporary historical enterprise these days. It does so by grafting these "new" histories onto a standard "old" history template of great men and great events that are presumed to be the long term and short term bedrock of historical dynamics by most historians even today, at least when they are publishing general histories. 

So, like other contemporary introductory textbooks America, Empire of Liberty ends up being, to a large extent, another kitchen-sink style introduction to American history. Reynolds hits the usual high spots of American history with his historical darts: colonisation, revolution from imperial Britain, the making of a new nation that was, to some extent, grounded in an English conception of liberty,  the compromises that were necessary to create what Seymour Martin Lipset calls the first new nation, the culture war over slavery and its groundedness in European ethnocentrism and racism, the Civil War fought over whether the US would be dominated by slave labour or free labour, or whether it would be"tyrannical" or "free" (concepts that were perceived somewhat differently between the American North and the Amrican South), reconstruction and the freeing, if limitedly, of the slaves and the reinstitution of slavery by another name in the Jim Crow South, industrialisation and the transportation revolution, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the decline of modernist America and the rise of postmodernist America and the culture wars that undergird both. Along the way, Reynolds introduces us to some celebrrated names in the American mythological civil firmament or the American mythological gehenna, depending on one's point of view, including George Washington, the pragmatic or hypocritical Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisnhower, Lyndon Baines Johnson, George Bush one and two, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and that delusional demagogue in chief, Donald Trump.

As a largely traditional textbook that, at the same time, takes seriously the revolution in historiography that blossomed particularly in the 1960s and after (social history, cultural history, ethnic history, class history) Reynolds' book is not, in my opinion, as good as another traditional yet postmodernist textbook on American history, Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005) by American historians David Harrell, Edwin Gaustad, John Boles, Sally Griffith, Randall Miller, and Randall Woods. Unto a Good Land, while perhaps not as narratively focused around the key American civil religious symbols of liberty and empire, explores these in detail and does a better job, in my opinion, of exploring American faith. That said, Reyonold's deserves credit and praise for emphasising the role religion in American life and culture whether of the Christian variety or the American nationalist variety (which is also often dominated by Christian nationalism) and explores the role these faiths have played in American history and American culture and ideology. Anyone who doesn't recognise the role faith has played in American history from the revivals of the nineteenth century to the role religion played in the abolitionist and Southern slavery faiths to the social gospel, to the rise of fundamentalism, a modern reaction to other aspects of modernism, to the election of Ronald Reagan, and to the election of Donald Trump, is blind or have made themselves blind. Finally, Reynolds nicely, if too sketchily and limitedly, addresses the question of American exceptionalism, a central belief in the American public or civil religious meaning system, arguing, rightly in my opinion, that the US must be viewed as lying on a continuum along with other messianic English and British settler societies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. 

A good entry in the American history textbook market that gratefully emphasises content over image making it somewhat of an anomaly in a postmodernist textbook world where image seems to often be more important than content.

The Books of My Life: The Atheist

The sad fact about many if not most biographies about “important”, economically, politically, culturally, personally “significant" “subjects”, is that  they tend to be hagiographic and hence mythical and consequently decontextualised. Though most biographers for whatever reason—some are intentionally censored—want their “subjects” to be saints, most of the subjects of biographies are neither saints nor sinners. They are rather, as are most if not all humans, if in varying quantities and qualities and in varying circumstances, both.

Richard Le Beau’s biography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair (New York: NYU Press, 2003), is a biography of a “subject” some saw as a sinner, “the most hated woman in America” some called her, but who others saw as a saint, the tower of strength who helped return America to the nation that it was in the beginning, a nation that was not only a place where religion could be freely practised—some scholars refer to this as the democratisation of Christianity, others as free market Christianity—but a nation where there could be, as the US Constitution guaranteed, no establishment of religion, no federal American theocracy, an America where one was free not to be religious. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, like all those who feed off of the fame, fortune, and misfortune celebrity breeds and brings, learned to treasure and use her status as saint and sinner. She seemed to love being the sinner and saint lighting rod and playing to the crowd, for and against, just like all celebrity salespeople including that noted flim flam man of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, Donald Trump.

In Le Beau’s biography O’Hair is a real flesh and bones human being. Le Beau’s O’Hair is a Shakespearean figure who fights the good fight against bigotry, religious and “secular”—a fight which was perhaps ultimately tragic in that O'Hair recognised, in more private and reflective moments, that was likely ultimately to be a failure—and the essence of evil for other Americans because she was perceived by them as one of those who gave us an America that was decadent, an America that was devoluted, an America that was a nation that was no longer on god’s side. 

O'Hair was also a paradox as Le Beau makes clear. She was, as Le Beau points out, the kissing cousin of her Christian evangelist and televangelist counterparts. She was an authoritarian organiser and salesperson, in her case, a salesperson trying to sell organised atheism to groups of people with varying “interests” who could probably never be fully organised in the first place—something O’Hair also realised in reflective moments—and who had often been cowed into fear by social, political and cultural contexts that surrounded them. As O’Hair realised from observing Jerry Falwell’s nationalist Christian advertising campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at particular demographics, fear was useful in selling a product, something Christian proselytisers and religious elites, Washington political elite, American economic elite, and modern advertisers recognised earlier on. As a consequence, O'Hair was not averse to using the same strategies as her Christian nationalist kin to raise monies from whom all blessings flowed for herself, her family, and her social movement. 

O'Hair was, as Le Beau notes, a symbol whose star and celebrity rose and fell and rose again and fell again as America changed and changed again between the 1960s and 19990s. O’Hair’s celebrity declined, as Le Beau notes, in the 1960s only to revive somewhat in an era in which America saw a neo-liberal and right wing populist religious like cultural revival in the late twentieth century. O’Hair’s second coming, however, as Le Beau notes, did not rise to the level of celebrity she had from 1960s and into the early 1970s. 

As Le Beau’s attentiveness to the ebbing and flowing of O’Hair’s star power points up, Le Beau’s biography does an excellent job of putting O’Hair’s life in context. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, became a celebrity, a symbol of good for some and of evil for others, at the height of the Cold War. He does a fine job of contextualising O’Hair’s life and thought in the surface rigidity of Cold War America—there were always countercultures and subculture which ebbed and flowed in the post-World War II period it should be remembered—with its conformities and demonisations of “the other”.  O’Hair, of course, was one of the most infamous and famous of these demonised “others”, of those demonised as“commie atheists” in Cold War America before the shock of the not so new sixties. It is also very good at contextualising O’Hair’s life in the broader history of scepticism and atheism. Le Beau provides an intellectual history that traces O’Hair’s influences to figures like Robert Ingersoll, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. He provides an excellent summary of O’Hair’s synthesis of a variety of different intellectual sources relating to science, atheism, the origins of religion, theocratism, American civil, civic, or public religion, Christian nationalism, Christian persecution, the importance of a “real" education, and socialisation for conformity, among other things. 

Where I had problems with Le Beau’s biography was in those cases where his very useful emic or going native approach got in the way of an etic or distanced and hence more scientific analysis. This lack of etic analysis is particularly apparent when Le Beau is discussing the very public break between O’Hair and her out of wedlock son, William in whose name the Supreme Court case arguing that public involuntary school prayer violated the US Constitution, and who later converted to right wing fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. Unlike Le Beau, Murray’s polemic reduces his mother's polemicising and empirical analysis, decontextualising it in the process, to family and personal issues, a trait common to most humans who typically can’t see the proverbial forest though the proverbial trees. The problem I had with Le Beau’s “analysis" here was that he did not critique William's decontextualisation and personalisation of his mother’s ideology. If Madalyn was rebelling against family, against an absent god, and against the suffering that is life, trying to find a meaning or meanings for it—theodicy—so was he. If atheism was a crutch for O’Hair, right wing American Christianity was a crutch for Murray whose troubled life, a troubled alcoholic life, eventually led him to Alcoholics Anonymous and to its close cousin right wing Christianity, something that gave him and his life meaning along in his war with his mother just as atheism gave meaning to hers. If O’Hair loved the limelight so did he. While William's road to Damascus conversion turned him into a celebrity within a particular identity community. It is kind of odd that Le Beau, in emic mode, plays along with this decontextualisation and offers none of the contextual critique of Murray that he does of O’Hair.

Le Beau’s book was particularly interesting to read in the context of an early twenty-first century that has seen the increasing flexing of political and ideological muscles by politically and ideologically “correct” right wing theocratic our way or the highway and hence fascist American nationalist Christians. As Le Beau notes, the US courts, including the US Supreme Court, hedged its bets in its cases relating to religion and the state though recent history would suggest that the theocrats on the US Supreme Court and in many US states are hell bent on turning the US into a theocratic monarchy. They never pushed the fact that the US Constitution and the fourteenth amendment to that Constitution, which made theocracy in the states of the US unconstitutional, which prohibits the establishment of religion—though the US did and does have a civil, civic or public religion that proved somewhat flexible as the sixties show—to its logical conclusion. They allowed, for example, religious prayers to continue in federal, state, and local contexts on the basis of tradition, a tradition where meaning supposedly became so empty that it became meaningless in the process. In an era where right wing populists, religious or not, have jigged electoral maps, jigged voting itself cleansing Americans from the voting rolls in the process, a clear statement that they don’t trust their ideas to the marketplace, packed the courts with their politically and ideologically correct polemicists, and jigged the tax system in their favour, amongst other things—something that points up the fact that certain meanings can be imposed by force in a nation-state—Le Beau’s book serves as a warning if likely a warning of someone crying in the proverbial politically, economically, and ideologically incorrect wilderness.