A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Southernbelle Reacts Reacts to Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The theory of human devolution, the notion that humans are deeply flawed, that humans have devolved rather than evolved or that devolution and evolution occur simultaneously in the human community has been around for a long time. One can, of course, trace aspects of it back to the Christian notion that Adam and Eve fell into original sin when Eve, in the second mythic tale of creation in the Tanakh, offered the willing Adam a bite from the proverbial apple which made both of them realise they were naked (note that this has, in actuality, no relation to sex though later puritanical Christians did tie original sin to sex at least before marriage). Apparently, god preferred to keep his human creations innocent and naive kind of like the gatekeepers of 1950s and 1960s American television who made the presence of toilets and talk of pregnancy, at least in English, verboten (apparently they did not understand Spanish as in "Lucy in Enceinte"). Christian Calvinism, of course, really picked up and ran with the notion of original sin. For hardcore Calvinism humans were and are, to put it nicely, fallible.

In the nineteenth century, sources tell us, an era when science was deeply wedded to a unilinear and progressive notion of evolution, science got into the devolution game as well. In 1857, for example, the French physician Benedict Morel argued that drug and alcohol use could lead to social degeneration or devolution in the offspring of those taking drugs and alcohol. In 1880 English zoologist Ray Lankester argued in his book Degeneration that degeneration or devolution was one of three paths Darwinian evolution might take. In 1909 the Baden born American ichthyologist Carl Eigenmann, who taught at my alma mater Indiana University and for whom a hall of accommodation for graduate students is named, argued that devolution occurred amongst those species who took to living in caves.

Devolution was also, according to sources, applied to human beings during these years by some. Thuringian physician, naturalist, physiologist, and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon opined that races of humanity could devolve from higher forms into primitive forms. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were White and that all other races of man,who came from them, other than the Caucasian race, of course, had devolved thanks to environmental factors such as too much or too little sun and poor and poorer diets. Leclerc like Blumenbach, believed in the devolution of species from higher forms due to environment, climate, and diet, while also arguing that such devolution could potentially be reversed. 

The notion of human devolution was also something that interested many writers and musicians from the late eighteenth century on. Jonathan Swift, for example, played with the notion of human devolution in his satirical book Gulliver’s Travels of 1726. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine of 1895 portrayed a future world in which the human race had devolved into two forms: the Morlocks and Eloi. H.P. Lovecraft’s 1924 short story “The Rats in the Wall” starred a group of devoluted humans. Cyril Kornbluth's 1951 satirical short story (satire, of course, is also generally deadly serious as well as being darkly humorous) “The Marching Morons” portrayed a future where dysgenic or anti-social and maladaptive evolutionary pressures led to the rise of massive numbers of morons who a small group of geniuses had to assure did no damage to both others or to themselves. The satirical and parodic Kent, Ohio rock band Devo, who formed in 1973 and who rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, made devolution a part of their very name, a name they took in shortened form from a Christian pamphlet on which a devil with the word D-EVOLUTION was portrayed (see their song "Jocko Home", in particular, a song title that comes from the same pamphlet). What was originally a joke, says a source, became much more serious after the murder of four students at Kent State University, which some members of Devo attendted) by the Ohio National Guard and the subsequent realisation by members of the band that responses to that murder—specifically that this murder was not murder—could be explained by a a devoluted human herd clone mentality that functioned automatically in cognitive terms thanks to the disciplining or socialised enforcement (political and ideological correctness).

I mention all of this if briefly and selectively because it seems to me that anyone who has taken even a cursory look at the wasteland that is social media like YouTube must conclude that not only is devolution a general human condition (social media seemingly has replaced American television as the vast wasteland, as the even vaster wasteland) but that with each new group of reactors to, for example, the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer human devolution seems to be increasing compared to earlier crops of reactors, reactors (each social media generation a degeneration?) like SoFie REacts, The Lexie Crowd, and Domi.e all of whom were all slightly above average with SoFie being the most above average. (The same thing, by the way, holds true for reactors to Firefly, Sherlock, and Doctor Who).

Perhaps the poster child for this further devolution of what is already devolved is Southernbelle Racts. I had seen and heard Southernbelle Reacts reactions before she began to react to Buffy recently. I had perused her reactions to a later Joss Whedon created television show Firefly. In Southernbelle Reacts reactions to Firefly I noticed what seems to be her modus operandi: she gabs and gabs over each episode of Firefly she reacts to missing important plot, informational, and character points (e.g., how one becomes a vampire) in the process. In her reactions to Buffy Southernbelle Reacts has compounded this attention deficit disorder (talking rapidly over television shows that require attention because they are unfolding texts (unattending, of course, is a common malady among YouTube reactors though often not to the degree it is with SoBelle) who even misses the rather obvious clues laid down about Angel from episode one to seven, season one...wow) with the questionable assumption that Buffy is a show for teens and tweens, an assumption grounded in nothing more than, presumably, the name of the show and/or the television channel it was on (initially the WB, later UPN). It is certainly not grounded in research either on what the author of the series said. (For Whedon, by the way, the title of the show was both parodic and satirical and explanatory. Nor was it based on data research, research shows that in the middle of the shows run the average age of the Buffy watcher was 27 or wandering why so many academics had written about Buffy (who are hardly tweens or teens. (Research, by the way is not a strong point for most of the reactors to Buffy though some do have more cultural capital to draw on than others). One would think that after watching Firefly Southernbelle Reacts would make the connection that Whedon shows are not only unfolding texts but are deadly serious amidst all the fun and tonal play and that they share several common themes (e.g., existentialism, chosen families). One wonders if she even realises that Whedon was deeply involved in both shows.

Southernbelle Reacts may be amongst the worst, in attention deficit terms and cultural capital terms, of the new crop of Buffy reactors. She even once said in one of her Buffy reactions in season two that these reactions are all about me, me, me (I can hear Cordelia saying the same thing as I type). If we delineate three mediocre ideal types—mediocre highbrow, mediocre middlebrow, and mediocre lowbrow or mediocre plus, mediocre in between, and mediocre negative (SoFie Reacts is above mediocre but below excellent for comparative purposes)—one can easily argue that Watch This! With Kevin and Joe are mediocre highbrow or plus though their reactions to Buffy aren't as incisive as their reactions to Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, a thriller that is in their wheelhouse since they appear to be fans of the James Bond films. North by Northwest, of course, is a Bond film before Bond films and Kevin and Joe view it exclusively in those terms and actually do a good job of talking about each scene of the movie. Chance's House of Horror, Shadowcat (a Canadian), and Nythical Reacts are decent in a mediocre middlebrow or mediocre in between sort of way. RolyPolyOllie Reactions, JayPerView, and JerBear Reacts are mediocre lowbrow or negative. Anna Alexander and 2 Girls 1 Episode, both of whom are below the gentleman's C average, and rival Southernbelle Reacts in attention deficit. Like her they also try desperately, too desperately, to be witty but are clearly unable to do so (perhaps proving in the process that the English are often right about Americans and wit) and lack the cultural capital in which to analyse the show in intellectual and scholarly terms. Tyler Alexander, who does have a degree if cultural capital thanks to his days studying creative writing at the University of Hull, is in a politically and ideologically correct world all his own. He makes even me, who makes use of critical theory regularly, cringe at his use of crystal ball textualist representational theories of writing and filmmaking.

I can hear the Beatles's song "You Never Give Me Your Money" as I type. How apropos when thinking about social media in this everybody wants to be a star postmodernist age.

The Books of My Life: Empire and Superempire

 

Imperialism. For many thinking people the word imperialism and the ideologies or meanings, actions, and behaviours associated with it has, historically speaking, been conceptualised in normative terms. It has been seen by some, in other words, as a good and by others as a bad. For many Romans, for example, Rome’s conquest of others brought with it the political, economic, and cultural benefits of Roman civilisation while for anti-imperialists  imperialism was grounded in ethnocentrism, exploitation, violence, and brutality. For the anti-imperialist Mark Twain American imperialism was a betrayal of fundamental American values.

Over the years there has been a host of attempts to define imperialism. Economic exploitations, particularly since the rise of Marxism and thanks to Lenin’s influential book on imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, have long been central to intellectual and academic definitions of imperialism. There is a problem with this economic and geographic conception of imperialism, however. The focus on imperialism as a geographic and economic phenomenon, the exploitation of the conquered by the conqueror for economic benefits, is too limited. It is only one of the forms imperialism has taken root in the human community since the rise of human civilisations in the Near East,  the Indus Valley, China, and in what is today Central and South America.

Imperialism is more than conquest and economic exploitation. It is also cultural, political, and demographic. Imperialism does have, of course, a geographic dimension. It has been and is the conquest of one territory by some entity, usually a city-state, a state, or a nation-state. I give you America’s conquest of and occupation of the American West, wherever that American West or the American frontier happened to be during the course of American history. Imperialism has also taken another form. There has been and is a form of imperialism in which the economy of one entity dominates the economy of another entity. I give you Trump’s use of the tariff as a heavy handed means for American economic domination in the world today and Trump's attempt to grab Venezuela's oil for American oil corporations. There has been and is political imperialism in which the political culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s attempt to spread American style “democracy” around the world particularly since World War II. There is cultural imperialism in which the culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s conception of itself as god or nature’s chosen land whose messianic and mission it is to spread the gospel of America across the globe. Needless to say, this American gospel has economic and political cultural dimensions, namely, the belief that Americanism, including the supposedly distinctive form of the American economy and the supposedly singular form of American democracy, is the best thing since that proverbial slice of sliced bread. And there is demographic imperialism in which the population of one entity is hegemonic over another. See the British in India or the Afrikaners in South Africa.

Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Bernard Porter’s Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), compares and contrasts British imperialism, particularly the liberal British imperialism of the Victorian era with the American imperialism of the post-World War II era. Porter gets that there are various forms of imperialism which sometimes if not often overlap making these various forms of imperialism Weberian ideal types. For Porter, both Victorian British imperialism and American post-WWII imperialism had geographic, if less so in the case of the United States, economic, if less so in the case of the British (once the Indies corporations became defunct), political, and cultural dimensions. It was in the cultural dimension area where the differences between the two were, so Porter claims, particularly evident.

For Porter both Victorian Britain and post-World War II America were imperial empires. Porter argues that there were a number of similarities and differences between these British and American empires. Both were cheerleaders of free trade though the British empire was less a cheerleader of free trade than the American. The English public school educated elite who staffed the colonies were not devotees of the gospel of free market capitalism, an ideology that proved to be a kind of a countervailing force to those who saw empire as a way to spread the gospel and the reality of “free” market capitalism, argues Porter. The British empire was also, claims Porter, more paternalistic than the American. 

Both empires, according to Porter, spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and of foreign investment. Both saw themselves as civilising and liberating forces bringing “enlightenment" and "democracy" to the areas they colonised. While the British elite, who did believe that the British way of life and its values were universal and absolute, tempered this civilising and liberalising force with a pinch of cultural relativism the US elite saw itself in a way Britain never did, namely, as chosen people of a chosen land who were messianic evangelists for a way of life that was universal and beyond space and time. 

Both empires, claims Porter, had pedigrees that stretched to the past. British imperialism was born in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars while the US empire originated in westward expansion or manifest destiny. Both empires had an interest in oil, some might argue, particularly in the case of the US, that they were addicted to oil. Hence both had an interest in the Middle East and Iraq. Both empires fought wars in Afghanistan, a place that has come to be known, as the graveyard of empires thanks to the British failure in Afghanistan. The US, of course, had its own failure in Afghanistan suggesting again that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Whether the American failure in Afghanistan, one which echoes its failure in Vietnam, will prove a factor in the fall of the American empire is an open question at the moment. Both empires felt the sting of guerrilla warfare. Both empires were overstretched militarily. Where the two empires differed in particular, according to Porter, was in their size. Britain was an empire. The US was and is, claims Porter, a superempire.

I found Porter’s Empire and Superempire an excellent read. I greatly enjoyed Porter’s rather coy and wry comments on the American empire many Americans refuse to recognise, about the US fighting wars against “enemies” it knows it can defeat easily only to find itself fighting guerrilla wars again and again, guerrilla wars it cannot win in the long run, about the US conviction that its invasions will be welcomed just as they were in Paris during World War II when they aren't, and about the US hoping to cut and run as fast as it can after it invades other countries leaving them, in the process, in economic and political ruin. 

That said I think that Porter overemphasises the differences between the British empire and the American superempire. These differences seem less important when one looks at the two in demographic and technological terms. America is bigger than Britain demographically which means that the US is bigger than the UK in its economic, political, cultural, and imperial dimensions. If Britain was as demographically big as the US would they be more similar? I think so. Technology is also a factor in the seeming differences between the two empires. New weapons like the atomic bomb have been developed since the US transplanted England as the dominant empire on the planet and the US has been willing to use these new technologies. So, the US is really simply a demographically (the key factor), geographically, economically, politically, and culturally and more technologically bigger empire than England. This, however, does not make them fundamentally different. 

By the way, the Commonwealth is a different kind of empire with its loyalty to the Crown and British political liberalism. It is also something that I think should be emphasised in this era of Trumpian economic and cultural imperialisms. The world is sadly in need of a countervailing imperial forces since the fall of the Soviet Empire if simply to keep American imperialism in check. The Commonwealth or the EU, with the addition of the UK and Canada, might be able to check and balance the American empire at least in certain parts of the world. That would mean that both the UK and Canada would have to get over their notion that there is a special relationship between the "Anglo-Saxon" three.

The Books of My Life: Comic Visions

I am not a huge fan of sitcoms, American, British, or wherever. Nor am I a big fan of stand up comedy television shows, political comedy television shows, or comedy variety shows on television. I find most of them far too obvious in their targets and far too lowest common intellectual denominator stupid in their form and content. That said, there are some sitcoms I do really love. I love, for example, Fawlty Towers, the first three or four series Absolutely Fabulous, The League of Gentlemen, the first two seasons of Chapelle's Show, the television work of Julia Davis, some comedy sketch shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and some stand up comedians in the raw such as George Carlin. 

Rather paradoxically, I suppose, I do like some books on the history of television comedy. I quite liked, for instance, a book I recently read on. American television comedy, David Marc’s Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 1997), a book I found to be an excellent introduction to the history and culture of American television comedy of the sitcom and stand up variety.

Marc’s introduction to and synthesis on American television comedy in its sitcom forms (domesticoms, ruralcoms, magicoms, ethnicoms and racecoms, litcoms and the coms that mix and match those various subgenres), comedy variety (the product, as Marc notes, of music hall and vaudeville), and stand up, is grounded in almost a lifetime of studying and writing on American television and it shows. Marc does an excellent job of placing American television comedy and American television in general in their economic contexts (its commercialism, for example), their political contexts (censorship), their demographic contexts (ratings, market segmentation in the post-network era), and their cultural contexts (its structure; forms; political, economic, ideological, and identity correctnesses). He nicely explores the dominance of the sitcom in American TV land, something he attributes, in part, to its political, economic, ideological, and ethnic correctness and its, unlike much stand-up comedy, tendency toward the vanilla. 

Marc does a nice job of exploring the terrain of the history of American television comedy. He takes us from the ethnicom (The Goldbergs, for example) in the early days of TV, to domesticoms (Father Knows Best, for example), to magicoms (a variation on the domesticom, see Bewtiched for example), to litcoms (the short and brief dominance of shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show All in the Family, and M*A*S*H, all of which are historically important but, in my opinion, aesthetically bland), to the return of the not so repressed domesticoms like Family Ties in the 1980s, to chosen family domesticoms that celebrate American diversity such as Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, and to the parodic and satiric contained by economic and ideological correctness domesticoms like Married...With Children and The Simpsons, both of which seem more daring than they really are as Marc notes. Marc nicely explores the decline of the American television comedy-variety show and its banishment to late night TV (The Tonight Show). He does an excellent job of exploring the impact of cable on American network television, one that led to audience declines for the big three of CBS, NBC, and ABC, and the advent of “real” stand up (the daring comedy of George Carlin on HBO, for example) on premium cable channels like HBO and the endless reruns of old sitcoms on basic cable channels and commercial channels. He nicely explores the standard structure and form of American sitcoms. They began, as he points out, with the familiar status quo, followed by a ritual error, the ritual lesson learned, and the return of the familiar status quo. Most viewers do like their rituals of repetition after all.

There are some missing pieces in Comic Visions. Marc does not explore how viewers read television comedies, something that is multiple and quite complex, and the multiple ways viewers use television in general, which is quite complex as well. He does not explore dramedy “sitcoms" such The Wonder Yeare. He does not explore a sitcom, a teencom which some, though not me, find innovative (example: Square Pegs). These absences will not please everyone but then we should remember that all history is selective and Marc’s history of American television comedy is no different. 

All that said, Marc’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of America, the history of American culture, the history of American television, and the history of American television comedy. It is made even better by the fact that not only is the book grounded in sound exegesis and sound exegetical context analysis, but it is also, unlike many contemporary crystal ball textualist works on American literature, film, and television with their fetishisation of psychoanalysis, and sound hermeneutics, grounded in sound contextual analysis, in other words. Finally Comic Visions is—and I love this in particular—wonderfully acerbic in its homiletics. Very recommended.

The Guardian and Journalistic Mediocrity: Musings on an Article About the Political Leanings of Academia in the Guardian

 

Recently the American page of the English newspaper The Guardian, one of the few quality newspapers left in a world of sub-mediocre newspapers and gossip rags (which The Guardian is in part as well), published an article entitled “US Universities are Moving to the Right: Will it Help Them Escape Trump’s Wrath?” What is remarkable about this article is how mediocre it is, something journalism at its best generally is these days. In fact, this article points up how little social science capital and savvy most journalists have.

This article notes a 2016 study by a professor of business, a developer of health economic solutions for the private sector, and a professor of economics  of the 40 “leading" universities in the US (mostly research universities that are members of the Association of American Universities). This study showed that a majority of faculty in the Humanities and the Social Sciences skew Democrat and, since the Democrats are popularly regarded as liberals in the US, liberal. Before I go on I should not that one might and should wonder about what the 2016 study left out namely,  the political and ideological leanings of faculty in agriculture schools, business schools, medical schools, dental schools, and veterinary schools are and why those who did the 2016 study did not study those academics as well.

But let’s assume for the moment that the 2016 study is correct, a conclusion that other studies could be used to raise questions about, and that the Humanities and Social Sciences (they also include journalism and law schools in these categories which is problematic) are filled to the brim with liberals. The question that needs to be asked about this is why is this the case? Why are those in the Humanities and Social Sciences liberals.

The answer to that question is rather obvious and is backed up by a host of social science qualitative studies. The higher the educational level achieved by someone the more they are to vote liberal in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Educational level, in other words, is the key variable here.

Why is this the case? The answer to that question is also obvious. Higher education faculty, particularly those in the Social Science, have generally been, to quote Nick Lowe, nutted by reality. They know, for example, that while some may assume that crime is higher in urban areas data has, in the past, shown that crime is higher percentage wise in rural areas.

Now this fact, the fact that higher education in the Social Sciences is a reality check, does not mean that there aren’t political and ideological conservatives in the ivy halls of academe and that there can’t be more political and ideological conservative intellectuals (real conservatives not the fake populists who claim the conservative mantle) in higher education. There are intellectual conservatives in American universities and there can be more. For a conservative who currently teaches in the ivy covered walls of the Ivy League I give you Niall Ferguson who holds a well paying job at Harvard and whose books, unlike his homiletics, skew empirical. 

Moreover, one might argue that if ideology is broken in surveys of politics and ideology in American education into a number of more nuanced criteria, such as religion to take one example, often a marker of a more conservative sensibility at least on one level, one might find interesting cultural and ideological contradictions or seeming inconsistencies. Studies of the religious sensibilities in American higher education, for example, show that even in the hard sciences there are a significant number of academics who believe in god even in these supposed secular anti-Christian days. Exploring cultural factors might, in other words, give us a more nuanced picture of the cultures and ideologies of academe.

But back to the nutted by reality argument, the fact is is that right wing populists, who are in no way intellectual conservatives, have been socialised into mythic or what David Graeber might call bullshit history and social science. Such a history and social science are often if not always fake history and such a history and social science should not be taught in academe save in literary studies or in classes on how cultural and ideology create reality in some human populations because they are fake history and fake social science. They are not science. Real science has to be vetted by empirical reality. They are instead ideology.

The thing is is that Trump and his ilk may argue for an affirmative action programme for “conservatives” in higher education, itself a paradox and perhaps an irony given that they oppose diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes (save for themselves it appears). What they really want is power, exclusive power, and they know that to achieve this they need to transform higher education into a politically and ideologically correct image and mirror of themselves. And they are, at the moment more than willing to engage in an inquisition of higher education in order to obtain this power.

I want to end this essay by suggesting to the authors of the study on political and ideological attitudes among academic social scientists and humanities scholars that they do a similar study of political and ideological attitudes among the police in the United States. What I think they will find, if Staten Island is prologue, is that there needs to be an affirmative action programme for liberals and Democrats in America’s police forces, an institution that is not only full of right wing populists who vote Republicam but a healthy dose of proto-fascists if not full fledged fascists.

The Books of My Life: The Psychology of Joss Whedon

 

As a general rule I have never found the pop culture meets academic discipline or sub-discipline genre particularly satisfying. They are often a curious hybrid or mixture in which a television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, or Firefly is pushed screaming and shouting into a science, physics, philosophical, or psychological box and made to fit, sometimes violently, into that box. Additionally, they are often written by fans of the show raising questions about how dispassionate or objective those writing essays in what are mostly collections of essays are.

Now don’t get me wrong sometimes these edited collections can be helpful to those attempting to understand a pop culture phenomenon (something which often means that they have a cult or sectarian following and hence people who will buy books on the subject given their often rabid interest in the show) when they are relevant to the television shows or films under discussion. And relevant to a number of academic boxes the work of Joss Whedon, specifically his television shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, is. 

Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, as anyone who has closely watched these television show knows, have great philosophical and, thanks to their focus on character and character arcs, great psychological depth, to them something many of the essays in James South’s edited collection Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2003) and the essays in Joy Davidson’s edited collection The Psychology of Joss Whedon (Dallas: BenBella, 2007) point up. The essays in the former explore the Platonic, Aristotelian,  Nietzschean, feminist, noir, theodicy, scientific, pragmatic, Kantian, educational, irrational and tragic, fascist, religious, political, moral, and metaphorical aspects of the show. Paradoxically, its existentialism, something its creator Joss Whedon has said is central to the show, doesn’t even merit an entry it the index of this book. The latter, part of BenBella’s Psychology of Popular Culture series along with edited collections on The Simpsons, the Harry Potter series, and Survivor (see that fanboy and fangirl cult connection?), explores the social psychological, clinical psychological, neuropsychological, psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytic aspects of the show in an often compelling and often convincing way.

There are, for example, essays on free will versus determinism issue in The Psychology of Joss Whedon. Is the work of Whedon deterministic, filled to the brim with free will, or a bit of both these essays ask There are essays on character personality traits and character development in Buffy, Angel, and Firefly. Who are Buffy, Angel, and Mal and why are they the way they are these essays ask? There are essays on the reason Buffy falls for the guys she does in Buffy. One of the essays is therapeutic. It is an essay on how the television work of Whedon helped one writer get through the trauma of leaving an authoritarian Christian fundamentalist social and cultural group. There are essays on the existentialist aspects of all three shows, apropos given the fact that Whedon is a self-professed existentialist and atheist. In terms of theory, some of the essays take a nature perspective, other a nurture perspective, still one of the binary fractures in a lot of the social sciences.

Unlike the essays in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, many of which I found interesting and compelling and many which made me roll my eyes in the way that only academics of the crystal ball persuasion can make you roll your eyes, I found most of the essays in The Psychology of Joss Whedon interesting for what they told me about the state of the psychological art circa 2007 and for what they told us about the show itself, quite an achievement for a book in the academia meets pop cult genre. After finishing it I thought that it would make an excellent book to use in an introductory psychology class given that its explorations of early 21st century psychological thought are easy to understand and  are written in a clear and straightforward language that even a university frosh can readily grasp in a world where American universities and colleges look and feel more like high schools that they did fifty years ago.

That does not mean that I did not have qualms about some of the essays in the book. Some, particularly those on the nature side of the spectrum, seemed far too reductive and needed a more social psychological perspective to balance them and make them more compelling for my taste. After all, humans are the product not only of nature but of nurture (their economic, political, cultural, and geographical environments they are embedded in) and there is, as several of the essays in the collection make clear, an, at least, grain of choice that humans can make by drawing on the complexity and contradictions available in our broader cultural contexts. Finally, we must never forget the dangers of psychological hubris and the fact that it has a close relationship to the powers that be (including the legal system and its core nation cultural systems thanks to the fact that it has historically proved easy to harmonise with modern and postmodern notions of individualism) and, as such, can institutionalise those they conceptualise as “deviant”, a category that has a strong whiff of the cultural, ideological, and polemical about it. That is even scarier than aspects of Buffy.

Musings on the Theatrics of Donny Drumpf...

As cultural anthropologists have known for decades symbols are at the heart of human life. Humans have always given meaning to their lives and to the worlds in which they live those lives in. They give cultural meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, religious beliefs. They give economic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, the theology and ideology of free enterprise. They give political meaning to their lives in the form of, for example, the belief that “democracy” is the greatest political system the world has ever seen, They give demographic meaning to their lives in the form, for instance, of rites of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, rites of passage which have, of course, varied across time and space. And they give meaning to the places in which they live those lives in the form of, for example, beliefs in the exceptionalism of their nation, state, clan, or tribe.

Cultural symbols (sacred, mundane, profane) are at the heart not only of so-called traditional societies but of so-called complex modern and postmodern societies like that of the United States as the recent symbolic theatrics of American president Donald Trump point up. Trump and his ilk, including many White Nationalist American worshipping so-called Christians, like their women domestic and domesticated and their men leaders of men and women. They like their dudes to be dudes (John Waynes, Rambo’s, feudal knights) and their dudettes to be dudettes (helpmeets, damsels in distress) and they justify and rationalise it all by claiming and maintaining that such social and cultural constructions are god given and hence universal. The fetishisation of culture. 

These socially and culturally constructed gender meanings along with political, economic, and geographic meanings and realities were evident in Trump’s and his mini-him J.D. Vance’s treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelinsky at an oval office meeting before cameras at the White House last week. Trump and Vance gave their target demographic what they wanted, namely a manly man warrior king, the messiah of a resurgent American nation, berating the president of a foreign nation at war as if he were a supplicant child of a less powerful feudal estate of less status, a vassal. But then that is exactly what Zelinsky is. He is a vassal of a weaker feudal estate relative to the “beneficent" United States and its "gift giving” king and messiah, Donnie Trump.

As such this event points up the fact that power, the thing that really makes the world go round is often if not always at the heart of cultural meanings and theatrics. Trump was not only showing his groupies or devotees that he is indeed their king and messiah by standing up, as they see it, for poor downtrodden America and for poor downtrodden Americans, something, one presumes, his target audience found the spectacle reassuring even if it was, from a more objective point of view, rather like a school yard bully confronting the weaker members of school society but then Trump and Vance do seem to like their Social Darwinism and eugenics. He was also showing Zelinsky American power, showing the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, that things had perhaps changed, showing America’s once close allies that things had likely changed, and preparing the American people for likely changes in US foreign policy. This last seems to indicate that even the Trumpies, those elites at the top of the Tangholio cult, are, at the moment, not fully ready to jettison support of the Ukraine before preparing the ground with a narrative in which the president of the Ukraine is a bad, bad man who has no respect for the United States or its king-messiah, Donald Trump. For as demagogues and conmen like Trump have learned over the years the more manichean, good versus bad, a story is the more likely it is to sell to the lowest common denominator masses.

Given this it is important to recognise that Drumpf is not interested in real negotiations, in real compromises. He is interested in expressing, symbolically, his power and expressing America’s power. He wants thing his way. It is thus a waste of time trying to negotiate anything with a brick wall, which the self-righteous Trump is. He simply wants vassals to give obeisance to him and to the power of the United States, a superpower, a superempire. The stuff about fentanyl in relation to Canada is simply a hyperbolised smoke screen, a smoke screen to cover up what Trump and his minions are actually doing. Those who have to deal with this adolescent still in diapers and this now adolescent government in diapers must, therefore, look for other options. Canada, for instance, should probably consider reintegrating more strongly into the Commonwealth once again and increasing its political, economic, and cultural ties with Europe, including one of Canada’s mothers, Britain. After all, it is clear that you can no longer trust a nation like the United States that treats its friends, like Canada which has an economy that is legally and officially integrated with that of the US, like shit.

Another recent instance of the symbolics of Trumpian politics involves tariffs. Trump, of course, needs to show the faithful that he is actually trying to do what he told them he would do, make American great again. He is thus creating a narrative in which he is using tariffs to make American great again by bringing manufacturing back to the US and he has been able to achieve some successes in this thanks to supplicant sycophantic economic elites who have agreed to build new facilities in Texas though some might argue that such facilities are more needed in other places such as Ohio. He is trying to use tariffs in the same way the US did in the mid and late 19th century and in much of the twentieth century, to bring manufacturing to the US by making the prices of goods made elsewhere more expensive.

Whether this tariff plan will work in the long run is an open question. One has to ask whether tariffs on China and Mexico (those on Canada are another matter and are closely tied to power and the long standing American manifest destiny urge to annex that country) will work. Are these tariffs likely to make shipping goods from China or Mexico to the US so much more costly that cost conscious Americans looking for the cheapest prices and the best deal likely to switch to American goods even if they are American nationalists?

A fundamental problem here, of course, is that American wages are higher than those of China and Mexico something that will make American produced goods more expensive than goods produced in those countries prior to tariffs even with the additional shipping costs. One could, I suppose, cut American wages making them lower if not as low as China and Mexico hoping this will bring down the cost of goods (but will American economic elites want to cut their salaries and benefits too in order to accomplish this?). The problem will still remain, however. How will the American working class, poor, and middle class pay for the maintenance of their beloved and holy consumer lifestyles? Credit? I am sure American usurers are salivating over that scenario.

Of course, Trump could do other things such as raise taxes on corporations and wealthy American to subsidise the brave new American world he hopes to ressurect. He is, however, unlikely to do this given that that would be akin to foxes guarding the hen house. He has already said he wants to cut taxes and the reason he thinks he can (a rationalisation and justification of his class and status position) do this is because of downsizing at Trump, Inc., also known as the US government, and increased tariff revenues coming into Trump, Inc. Time, as always, will tell.

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Prophets and Profits in the Mormon Social Media Universe

 

Social media sites like YouTube are, in a way, microcosmic examples of what theoretical quantum physics in general tells us what the universe we all live in is like. To wit, there are a host of parallel universes on YouTube and within these parallel universes one can find a number of parallel worlds.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, of these parallel universes or cultures with parallel worlds or countercultures and subcultures within them on YouTube is that related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. But then I have been studying Mormonism for some thirty years now.

There are a number of parallel worlds within the parallel universe that is Mormonism on YouTube. There is the parallel world of Mormon news. There is the official LDS content world which includes an ask a missionary page and the Meet the Mormons film. There is the what Mormon polygamy was and is like world, a world that ranges from the polemical, the apologetic, and the academic. There is the why I am a Mormon world. There is the why I am no longer a Mormon world. There are insider explorations of Mormon doctrine. There are critical exposes of Mormon finances and the Church’s use of their monies. There is the what are Mormon temple rituals like world. And there is the intellectual polemical and apologetic worlds related to Mormonism in general, both of which have long histories in the history of religion, particularly monotheistic our way or the highway religions, and a long pedigree in the history of Christianity. 

The Mormon polemical and apologetic world is one of the largest LDS worlds on YouTube. One can, for instance, find worlds on YouTube where some categorise Mormonism as a “fake" religion and a “fake" brand of Christianity. The bases for such a claim is grounded in the poster's perception that Mormonism is different than the religion of the poster, which these posters regard, of course, as the one true religion (ethnocentric apologetics) despite the fact that all monotheistic religions are grounded in belief and not empirical fact. See, for instance, the self proclaimed I am not a “progressive" Bible Thinker Mike Winger who, following in a long tradition in Christian polemics, condemns not only Mormonism as a “fake” variety of Christianity but also condemns Roman Catholicism as “fake” brand of Christianity, a theme that has a long history in Protestant and particularly evangelical polemics. See Capturing Christianity’s Cameron Bertuzzi, a photographer and self proclaimed Christian apologist, who, following again in a long line of Christian insider or emic polemics, condemns Mormonism and Islam as “false” religions created by “false” prophets.

Another of the parallel worlds within discussions of Mormonism on YouTube is the world populated by ex-Mormons who have converted to another sect or brand of Christianity. See, for example, the posts of Sandra Tanner, who converted to “true” Christianity thanks to her husband Jerald, the barber James Wardle, and Pauline Hancock, the founder of the more “orthodox” or mainline Mormon sect the Church of Christ (Hancock). In the wake of her de-conversion and conversion experience Sandra, along with her now deceased husband, has been arguing against (polemics) Mormonism, if in a somewhat academic way since 1964 through their Utah Lighthouse Ministry and its bookstore. See the ex-Mormon convert Ed Decker who converted to “true” Christianity—Decker was an early member of Saints Alive in Jesus, a group of ex-Mormon converts to “orthodox” Christianity—who, unlike the Tanner’s, often engages in defamations against Mormonism. See Heidi Luv, a self proclaimed “born again” Christian, demonologist, and “conspiracy theorist" who hosts the Unfiltered Rise Podcast and who has appeared as guest star on several YouTube “programmes”. Luv says that she broke away from the “Mormon cult”(a loaded ethnocentric term that in less ethnocentric scientific parlance refers to a new religious movement or a sect in tense relationships with its broader religious geography)  because of its “occult" origins. For Tanner, Decker, and Luv problems related to aspects of Mormon history eventually foregrounded for them the falsity of Mormonism. One of the curious aspects of these now “true” believing “orthodox” Christians—well not, I suppose curious from an emic point of view—is that they never apply the same empirical and historical standards to their own faiths that they do to Mormonism, their other, a religion which they remain obsessed with even after departing from it.

There are other once Mormons who remain as obsessed with their now Mormon other as they were with their Mormon us (a trait one also finds in former I believe us's who become evangelical anti-them’s or “anti-cult” crusaders) . Karl Lyman and Clarity of the Clarity Podcast, for instance, left Mormonism for other cultural, ideological, and religious reasons than did the Tanner’s Decker, and Luv. In their discussion on the Clarity Podcast Karli and Clarity note that they left the LDS because the leaders of the Church gave into governmental “tyranny" during the covid pandemic—something they compare to another federal governmental “tyranny”, prohibition—when they counselled members of the Church to get the covid vaccine shot, to wear masks, and when they shut down wards (Mormon congregations) meetings during the pandemic. Interestingly Kari and Clarity do not discuss the giving in of Mormon authorities to another possible federal government “tyranny”, the feds forcing of the Mormon elite to end polygamy. Karli and Clarity maintain that when the Mormon bureaucratic elite urged members to use masks and get the vaccine poke during the recent pandemic they capitulated to a governmental conspiracy to limit human freedom and liberty. In response, they say, they left the Church. Problematically, they miss certain historical facts. They fail to grasp that prohibition and temperance were mass movements that effectively lobbied local, state, and federal governments to end alcohol sales in the United States—prohibition, in other words, was a mass movement of citizens—and they fail to grasp that, like the birth control pill, masks, particularly the N95 mask, are, 95% effective in blocking airborne particles when worn correctly and that the covid vaccines, in all their iterations have proved to be quite effective in at least softening the effects of covid should one get it.

And then there are the ex-Mormons like John Dehlin, the excommunicated Mormon psychologist who runs the Mormon Stories podcast where a variety of historical and cultural issues related to the LDS are discussed by Mormon and cultural Mormon intellectuals, the ex-Mormon HailHeidi, many of whose posts explore the standup comedy of George Carlin and the criticism of religion of atheists Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry, and the ex-MormonAlyssa Grenfell. The prolific Grenfell, like HailHeidi, seems to have jettisoned her Mormon beliefs largely because of historical problems related to Mormonism (a common theme in ex-Mormon posts), and exchanged it for another meaning system or cultural system, atheism. Grenfell ranges broadly over a variety of Mormon historical, cultural, and ideological topics from dancing in Mormonism, to Mormon garments, to what is was like to go to BYU, to what it was like to go on a mission, to Mormon purity ideologies, to Mormon polygamy, and to why I left the Church. Her posts, which condemn a prophetic religion and its prophets for empirical reasons, have garnered thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even a million views on some occasion, something that, no doubt, has brought Grenfell profits.

Grenfell is one of those rare birds on YouTube. She actually does empirical historical research for her sometimes over an hour posts, good solid empirical research. Her research, however, has its limits. For example, in her discussion of Mormon purity culture she doesn’t dig deep enough and discuss how the cult of domesticity, which is not a monopoly of Mormonism (see patriarchal macho White evangelicalism, for example), has Victorian and perhaps even further back historical and prehistorical roots. In her discussion of Mormon ballroom dance culture and the prevalence of Mormon dancers on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars she fails to explore the important role dancing has played in broader aristocratic culture and in cultures in general before the advent of radio and television.

Beyond the critics of Mormonism (polemicists) there are, of course, a number of defenders of the one “true" faith of Mormonism (apologists) on YouTube. Answering LDS Critics tries to do just that. CES Letters is, like FARMS of old, an intellectual apologetics and polemical site. Thoughtful Faith discusses, sometimes with others, the Mormon Faith and often turns anyone who is critical of Mormonism for valid empirical reasons into an anti-Mormon enemy of the one true faith. The youthful and MTVish and TV commercial hip Saints Unscripted, for example, is on a mission to "present information about the gospel of Jesus Christ in genuine, compelling, and loving ways". The various hosts of Saints Unscripted do not duck and cover when it comes to addressing criticism of Mormonism. FAIR, one of today’s leading Mormon apologetic and polemical organisations, particularly after the demise of FARMS, provides self proclaimed faithful answers and informed responses, FAIR, to issues associated with Mormonism. Like Saints Unscripted FAIR does not sweep critical takes on Mormonism under the rug though they often, like Thoughtful Faith, confuse and conflate empirical criticism of the LDS with polemical criticism, a common phenomenon that one can also see in those groups and individuals who wrongly and sometimes cynically and manipulatively conflate academic analysis of Zionism and Israel with anti-Semitism and academic analysis of America with anti-Americanism. There are professional historians like Ben Spackman, who has appeared on several faithful Mormon programmes like Saints Unscripted, Keystone, and The Interpreter Foundation, who argues that Mormonism is not a form of Protestantism (which I think is accurate) and that it is more like Judaism rather than Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism and thus is not a sola scriptura, Bible as sole authority, brand of Christianity (which I think is accurate and which also makes it more like the liturgical brands of Christianity). Like many Christians, including evangelical Christians, before him Sparkman, in hermeneutic and homiletic mode, argues that the creation/evolution binary does not have to be an either or binary (which is accurate if not my cuppa tea in terms of intellectual engagement). One can argue, for example, for god directed evolution. Spackman also (rightly in my opinion) argues that in the 1950s, for a variety of social and cultural reasons, Mormonism was fundamentalised.

One of the major problems associated with those who interpret Mormonism, whether they are insider faith apologists and polemicists, insider critical apologists and polemicists (semi-historians and social scientists), or outsider anti-Mormon apologists and polemicists is that they all accept the false notion that Mormonism is exceptional in some way, shape, or form. The insider faith apologists and polemicists believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is exceptionally true, the, in fact, only true Christian Church on the face of the globe. The insider critical apologists and polemicists seem to, though this may be a reflection of their fixation, in the case of ex-Mormons, on Mormonism, that Mormonism is exceptionally ridden with falsehoods. The outsider anti-Mormon polemicists and apologists believe that Mormonism, like others of its cult ilk, is exceptionally demonic. You can find all of these exceptionalists, exceptionalists that have actually been around almost since the advent of Mormonism itself on YouTube. Once again the more things change...

The Books of My Life: Identity’s Architect

 

As someone who has long studied the history, sociology, and anthropology of religion in core nation societies throughout much of his academic life it quickly became apparent to me that Western Christianity since the Reformation, despite its claims to be the world’s only true and universal religion was, empirically speaking,  characterised by sectarianism, characterised by division. Most Christian sects, in other words, be they Lutherans in their various and sundry forms, Calvinists in their various and sundry forms, Baptists in their various and sundry forms, or Evangelicals in their various and sundry forms, claimed and still oftentimes claim to be the one and only true form of Christianity. 

Another thing I quickly realised early in my academic career was that religion was not the only cultural meaning system that was characterised by sectarianism, by the belief that one's sect or group was the sole possessor of the truth writ large. Political culture in the West, for example, is also characterised by sectarianism as the many sects of Bolshevism each claiming to be the one true form of Bolshevik Communism point up. Interestingly, the Church of Anti-Communism in its various and sundry sectarian forms, which too claimed to have the truth on its side, accepted and fetishised the claim of Bolshevik Church of Lenin and his pope like successors that it was the one and only true variety of communism on the planet thereby ignoring, for a number of economic, political, cultural, and geographical reasons, the sectarian nature of the so-called political left and the fact that, empirically speaking, no variety of Bolshevism had a monopoly on the truth anymore than any particular variety of Christianity did.

Political culture, of course, is not the only form of extra-religious—religion is only one institutionalised and bureaucratised meaning system--sectarianism in the West. As Lawrence Friedman, who has made a career of writing biographies of psychologists and psychoanalysts including on the Menninger family and their clinic (charismatic to traditional and bureaucratic leadership in action?), Erich Fromm, and Erik Erickson, shows, intellectual and academic psychology is also sectarian. Virtually every sect within the institutionalised meaning system that is psychology whether Behavioural, Freudian, Neo-Freudians, Jungian, or Gestalt, for example, claims to have a monopoly on the truth or at the very least a monopoly on some aspect of the truth. In his Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999) Friedman explores one of the many Neo-Freudians, those who followed in the footsteps of the charismatic father of the psychoanalysis cult or new meaning system, Sigmund Freud, but who also felt compelled to revise Freud because of his lack of attention, at least in his earlier years, to broader political, economic, cultural, and geographic contexts to the chagrin of “orthodox" Freudians, the Danish born Erik Erikson.

For Friedman, who practises what Erikson, Fromm, and the Culture and Personality school both belonged to, preached, namely, the need to pay attention to broader social and cultural contexts, broader contexts in which human lives are situated, must be explored if we are to understand humans in general and Erikson in particular. Friedman argues that Erikson, who never knew who his father was—something that troubled him throughout the course of his life apparently—and someone who was Danish, German, and American if in someone different ways, became someone who was adept at crossing borders—national, theoretical, professional, disciplinary, ideological—was drawn almost inevitably because of these broader contexts to the study of identity and how identity was impacted and influenced not only by biology—a central dogmatic tenant of early Freud and his followers--but by the dynamism of a historically situated human life cycle from birth to death where identity was situated within broader spatial formations and influenced and impacted by them. Biography as the micro of the meso and the macro. 

Friedman does a nice job of exploring Erikson’s many identities across time and space. He notes that Erikson was an artist and a qualitative if not always rigorous social scientist who moved across the disciplinary boundaries of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, and history during his long life in his many publications including what many regard as his most important book, Childhood and Society (1950), and his Young Man Luther (1958), and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). He does an excellent job of showing us Erikson the Dane, Erikson the German, Erikson the American, Erikson the romantic, Erikson the therapist, Erikson the clinician, Erikson the teacher, Erikson the academic, Erikson the sometime activist, Erikson the writer, Erikson the husband and father, Erikson the confidante, Erikson the confident, Erikson the self doubter, Erikson the mystic, and Erikson the prophet, all Erikson’s influenced by the broader social and cultural environments he moved through during the course of his life from Freud’s Vienna to FDR’s New Deal, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the backlash to colonialism, and Watergate, to mane a few. He does an excellent job of pointing out what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of Erikson including his attention to historical and ethnographic contexts, his development of a modern and perhaps even postmodern understanding of identity and, along with William Shakespeare and Soren Kierkegaard, both of whom Erikson read, of the modern human life cycle, his less than rigorous approach to the stuff of society and culture, the limitations of his understanding of Gandhi’s India, his perhaps too great an emphasis on the universality and linearity of the human life cycle, and his contradictions, something all humans, of course, are, to name a few.

The problem I had with Friedman’s biography of Erikson is the same problem I have with most biographies I have read, there is a lot of what I regard as insignificant components amidst the significant details of a life making the book longer and more gossipy than it, in my opinion, needs to be. This was, for me, less a problem in Friedman’s more intellectually oriented biography of Fromm, another refugee from Germany. Those interested in the history of the social sciences and the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, the practise of psychology and psychoanalysis will find much of interest in Friedman’s well researched and documented biography of a key figure in 20th century intellectual culture, Erik Erikson.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Culture, Ideology, and Social Blindness

 

There are a lot of problems on full display in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube to see if one wants to and is able to. By and large, many if not most “reactors”, including the most intelligent and educated amongst them, display, on observation, a limited knowledge of the history of popular music, the political contexts of popular music, the cultures of popular music, the geographies of popular music, and the economic contexts of popular music. 

There are actually several“reactors” with a degree of reflexivity who actually realise the fact that they have a limited knowledge of the realities of popular music. This is why many make the argument that they want to come to whatever they are reacting to tabula rasa, with a blank slate, so there is no need for them to do research on a popular music song. There is, admittedly, a certain logic, if one of the multiple cultural logics that are out there, to this apologetic. It is a logic that leads to a practise that is not that dissimilar from the iron cage of popular music listening those of us who grew up with popular music and particularly rock and roll—which was more broadly conceptualised than it is today thanks to market segmentation and listener prejudices—were locked into at the time. We came to the songs we heard from an artist for the first time with limited knowledge of that artist. We, after all, lived in the world before the brave new digital media when new bands and new music really were new to us. We really did hear the music of these new bands somewhat tabula rasa. 

That said, we quickly developed prejudices about artists and bands and music we came to like or dislike, normatively grounded prejudices that impacted whether we continued to listen to or purchase the product of particular new artists then or in the future. I, for instance, fell in love with the Beatles when I was a kid and first heard one of their songs by on top 40 AM radio—the dominant form of the radio species that we listened to at the time--in 1963. I would go on to purchase every Beatles album and many of the extended plays and singles the Beatles released over the years. 

I also, as we humans tend to do in our more naive years—naive years that sadly never end for many—developed a manichean tinged binary related to the Beatles along with my childhood friends who also liked, or perhaps better put, loved the Beatles. This manichean binary led us, defensively, to dislike certain other bands or artists because we loved the Beatles. For us, the Beatles, were sacred and bands that competed with the Beatles artistically and economically, like the Rolling Stones, were profane. 

This manichean binary didn’t last, at least for me, very long as I quickly came to love songs by the Stones, the Kinks, Manfred Mann, and a host of others. I quickly came to the normative conclusion that good music was good music regardless of whether it was by the Beatles or not. That said, I did continue to have a preference for certain genres and styles of rock and roll and I did have other musical prejudices that lasted for some time over the course of my life such as my unwillingness to listen to country music, something the Beatles changed my mind about when they covered a song by Buck Owens, a country star at the time, which I liked a lot.

The obvious problem, of course, with the tabula rasa argument proffered by “reactor” apologists, and the tabula rasa practise of us young music lovers, a problem you recognise when you start thinking empirically, is that we never come to anything, including music, tabula rasa. We are, for example, influenced in the music we have aleady listened to, either positively or negatively, by our parents, by our peers—something a recent experiment pointed up again recently--music gatekeepers, the radio, and by the television, for example. This means that what may sound reasonable initially—I don’t want to prejudice my listening experience of a song for the first time—isn’t really all that reasonable let alone rational from an empirical perspective. Instead it looks like a justification and rationalisation for blissful ignorance about, for instance, music cultures, music economics, and the politics of music.

I want to focus briefly on “reactor” ignorance, an ignorance revealed in their YouTube reactions, about how the economics of the music industry has and still does impact the music that is produced by the mainstream music industry. There are several “reactors” on YouTube whose YouTube “reactions”—they certainly do not constitute criticism, historical analysis, or the fruits of research and thus probably violate fair use or fair dealing exceptions with respect to copyright laws—betray an ignorance of the economics of the music industry. Those who whinge and whine about fade outs in popular music, for instance, miss the fact that one of the reasons for fade outs had to do with the fact that well into the 1970s singles dominated the popular music industry marketplace. A the time, it was a statement of faith among the suits who ran the music industry that singles, which were considered their profit making bread and butter, should be two to three minutes in length and no longer which is why Focus’s "Hocus Pocus”, Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4”, and Yes’s “Roundabout”,  to chose three examples among many possible ones, were released in shortened single versions to the mass radio audience in the United States, a mass radio audience which still listened to AM Top 40 radio and over which DJ’s, many of whom seemed less like music lovers than empty shils for the suits who ran the radio stations for profit, and whose reason for being seemed to little more than to spread the gospel of business advertising and the next single you should buy, itself a form of promotion. Speaking of talking over records, in the thank god for small mercies category, “reactors”, who are the equivalent of the AM DJs of today, at least, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, stop a song at some point or points so they can talk “over” it. Ain’t the brave new digital world wonderful?

In the early days of FM radio you could, at least for awhile, hear the longer versions of “Hocus Pocus”, “25 or 6 to 4”, “Roundabout”, and other longer songs, on free form countercultural FM radio in the late 60s and even into the early 1970s. where the DJ’s tended to be music lovers like ourselves. In the Dallas of my youth, for instance, I could and did hear bands like King Crimson, the Moody Blues, the Mothers of Invention, and others, on  a free form FM radio station in Arlington. Then the commercialisation of FM radio set in. This commercialisation and eventually centralisation turned free form countercultural FM stations into clones of AM radio and created an alternative format for listeners of an increasingly segmented and increasingly limitedly defined rock music landscape, album oriented rock, a form of rock that was harder than musics that were increasingly defined as pop. On AOR FM stations one could, for example,  listen to certain new album cut, album cuts that became the equivalent of singles on Top 40 radio. Additionally, pressure was put on the progressive rock bands one heard on countercultural FM radio who were told by the suits in no uncertain terms that they needed to write singles that the suits could sell in mass quantities to a mass audience increasingly defined in increasingly segmented terms. Those who were able do that, like Kansas and Genesis and eventually even Yes, did.

This ignorance of the industry emphasis on singles and the history of the realities of rock radio is just the tip of the ignorance appears to be bliss iceberg that one finds in “reaction” videos on social media sites like YouTube. “Reactors” seem not to know much about the history of payola in popular music (something that still goes on if in a roundabout way as Rick Beato and company note), the hierarchical structure of the music industry with its multiple ways to take percentages from artists for their “services”, the impact or lack of impact of the FCC on media, the political power of economic elites including music industry elites, the history of rock genres, the different cultures of rock including the culture that grew up around the ideology of authenticity in the mid and late 1960s and early 70s, the role popular music elites played and play in how artists sound in the studio and in what they wore or wear, and the different lyrical strategies of popular artists (satire, parody, metaphor, allegory, and so on), to note only a few of the political, economic, and cultural aspects of the world of popular music that influence how popular music is made and what it “says".

In the end, of course, none of these empirical facts really matter to most “reactors” on YouTube. Most “reactors” live in a mental world where they have been socialised not to look beyond more individualist factors and a world in which they have been socialised for conformity only to consider whether one likes or doesn’t like an artist and his, her, or their musics. And while liking or disliking something, including popular media on social media reaction videos in the brave new digital world, has been impacted by economics, specifically, the fact that “reactors” make advertising monies along with social media outlets like YouTube, most “reactors” seem to have been able to convince themselves (false consciousness?, the social and cultural construction of reality? rationalisations?) that they aren’t pandering to their demographic for the purposes of making a “buck” even though many, including some of the more genial and knowledgeable “reactors” who have turned themselves into marketable commodities, clearly are. Whether they actually love the music they are listening to, thus, is an open question.

And so it goes…

“Informants": I “observed" a host of reactors including but not limited to Rob Squad Reactions, Andy and Alex, BrittReacts, DatOne Reacts, Mike and Ginger, Hanier Family, VerdyChannel, HarriBest Reactions, Trash Talkers, MyIndie Productions, Dana’s Faith, DashyXDandDadReacts, Kerry Tries It, The Wolf HunterZ (a and b), AileenSenpai, Bars and Barbells, Millie Mochi Tunes, JustLP, Reactor2Drummer, Sing with Emma, the Charismatic Voice, Vinand Sori, the Thamesmen Too, Virgin Rock, Lost in Vegas, Maggie Renee, the Vocalyst, Brad and Lex, L33Reacts, Archive Jem Reacts, Life with Recklezz, Asia and B.J., Sight After Dark, John Slop, NicknLex, Brit Pops React, Rayactions, Trash Talkers, Jamel_AKA_Jamal, Alex Hefner, Dean Bros, Virgin Rock.

It needs to be noted that many of the “reactors" on YouTube also “react” on Patreon, a monetisation site, which, according to Patreon’s capitalists, allow those using their service to create “community”.  On Patreon commodities, in the form of human reactors, are commodified and extract moneies from "patrons". Though I have not visited Patreon it is clear that many commodified “reactors” have their “patrons" vote for what they will listen to or watch and react to next and offer them “rewards” for “patronising” them via monthly financial support. The owners of Patreon, of course, take a cut (8% to 12% “commission”) from these “reactor” labourers” patron pledges. Some “reactors” sell “merchandise” to supplement their income.

Miserable Political Experience: Musings on Politics, Academics, and Political Science

 

When I was an intellectually younger man so one of the major works in American political science was Yale Political Scientist Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of how American government actually worked in one American community, Yale’s home city of New Haven, Connecticut, a book published by Yale University Press in 1961.  Dahl’s book took a consensus and conflict theory approach, the two major theoretical approaches to politics (and by extension American economics and culture presumably) in the social sciences at the time, arguing that New Haven, and by extension the US, was pluralist and stratified and hierarchical in its interest group centred politics.

Who Governs, which made Dahl an intellectual and academic celebrity and superstar, would prove to be a critical jumping off point for empirical and normative theoretical analyses and critiques of American politics in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the era when I took my undergraduate degree at a university that will henceforth remain nameless because of its increasing theo-fascism. The late 1960s, of course, saw a revival of Marxist theory and practise in the US in American intellectual life and American academia and many Marxist critics of Dahl’s work and his later theory of polyarchy. grounded in his early work, saw Dahl as too much of a consensus theorist. Dahl, however, was hardly, like Max Weber, a purely consensus or functionalist theorist since he argued that there were power inequalities in American political culture. Some interest groups, Dahl argued, had more power, authority, and hence influence than others. But then attacks in the social sciences during the long sixties on consensus and functionalist theorists was as much in the heady and overgeneralising academic air just as it was in the countercultural air of core nations more broadly at the time and this almost revivalistic oxygen did not really breed more nuanced critiques. 

For many of those who did recognise that Dahl was both a consensus and a conflict theorist it was Dahl’s conception of power that many of them had a problem with. Many of Dahl’s critics found it to limited and limiting. Subsequently, of course, the conception of power and its adjunct authority has broadened in the social sciences since Dahl and this is all for the good in my opinion. Power is not only about getting A to do B, as Dahl had it. It is also discursive. Humans are, as contemporary studies of power have shown, embedded in socially and culturally constructed webs thanks to socialisation, for instance, that rule out certain ideological options by marginalising them and silencing them, something that should be remembered in these looney politically and ideologically correct days on increasingly fascist university campuses. As such power, in both its social and cultural constructionist discursive and rhetorical form and in its ability to make A do B form, is central to traditional, modern, and postmodern societies with their class, ethnic-racial, gender, and age inequalities.

As I have grown older I have become increasingly convinced that conscious ideology plays a very limited role in how American (and core nation) politics actually works and functions, something that some if not many academics and intellectuals embedded as they are in their own little fetishised world  of Enlightenment rationality with education as the means to right thinking enlightenment and subsequently liberation (intellectual and academic nirvana) aren’t likely to agree with me on. There are, of course, a few true believers for who conscious ideological purity is important. Sometimes such ideological purity movements can give rise to a cult centred around a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense. I give you the contemporary Republican party which has become an institutionalised cult centred around their holy figure of Donald Trump, their Tangholio. For most potential voters, however, I am increasingly convinced, fatigue, tiredness, and weariness of the party in power plays an important role in who they vote against and who they consequently vote for.

Such weariness of those in power, of course, works hand in hand and hand in glove with the demagogic polemical attack strategies of those prominent political forces not in power. In a media world with a steady diet where those prominent and elites out of power attack those in power for all sorts of political, economic, and cultural woes, with their sky is falling sensationalistic if it bleeds if leads apocalyptic rhetoric coming from polemicists and demagogues and which has become central to the communication sphere, works quite well, as it always had, with the masses. As such, the social and cultural construction of weariness and tiredness is quite easy to manufacture and, in turn, manipulate. We can readily see this process working in contemporary Britian where those who once voted Tory, even in areas traditional Labour geographies which switched to Conservative in the last election, look ready to switch to Labour to throw the bastards out in the upcoming election. We can see it in Canada where the Liberals of Trudeau, who won two successive elections, are running behind the Conservatives once again. Shades of Harper Tories. We can see it in attack dog politics in the United States today.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to assert that political culture is nothing but fatigue politics. Luck and being in the right place at the right time are factors in elections. The recent Labour victory in the United Kingdom, for instance was aided and abetted not only by fatigue with the Tories after fourteen years of Conservative rule in the UK but also by scandals in the Conservative Party, the incompetence of the Conservative Party, specifically the incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and scandals in the Scottish National Party, all of which aided the Labour Party. 

Additionally, there are, as I noted earlier, true believers who operate on the elite faithful and elite demagogic political levels and on the mass political level in the core nations. There are a cadre of true believers among the masses. Political culture in core nations is also, as the celebrations of D-Day today show, symbolic, grounded in cultural meanings even if those cultural meanings, as they have been on this “sacred" D-Day, rather and necessarily so vague since one can interpret things like “freedom” and “liberty’ in multiple ways while others can see such meanings for what they are, the ways and means great powers like Imperial America, Imperial Russia, Imperial China and wanna be Imperial Europe manipulate the masses via vague declarations that play on national and regional faiths and broad notions of what has been socialised into some as profane.

The Books of My Life: The Limits of Power

The United States, born out of a revolt against monarchical and parliamentary "tyranny"-- taxation without representation--has long had a collective sense of its own uniqueness, its own chosenness, and its own destiny. For many Americans the United States, the first new nation according to Seymour Martin Lipset, was a light unto a world dominated by tyrannies of various kinds including monarchical, imperial, and theocratic. For most Americans the United States was a shining example unto a world in chains, a city on a hill that showed that it was possible to throw off the chains of political, economic, and religious oppression that bound them and start anew in a wilderness that, of course, wasn't really a wilderness.

Paradoxically, the new United States of America, a self proclaimed empire of liberty, a state born out of the need for freedom from tyranny, was also an empire and hence, at least potentially, tyrannical. It was an empire born out of geographical imperialism. It was an empire that spread from its east coast hearths into indigenous lands beyond the Appalachians, into the equally imperial French lands beyond the Appalachians, Spanish lands to its south and to its west, and Mexican lands to its east and southwest throughout the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century. It was an empire that spread in a variety of  ways including by treaty, by robbery, by flim flammery, by purchase, much of it coerced, and by military might. It was a new empire that warned other older empires in its Monroe Doctrine (an imperial doctrine that parallels the near beyond of imperial Russia) that it and it alone guaranteed the "freedom" of the Americas from the tyranny of imperialism, a doctrine which, at the time that it was proclaimed was an act of hubris, self-righteousness, and self-satisfaction, a treaty that only became a reality when President Theodore Roosevelt added a corollary to it, a corollary added after the United States had become the dominant political, economic, and cultural imperial hegemon in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine also made the US the cop on the American block a role the US has played ever since in Latin America and the Caribbean  where it has "intervened" on a number of occasions to "lend a helping hand" to those "poor backward nations" that just don't look like or act like chosen America.

As an empire born out of the British empire and fed by the same ideologies of uniqueness, chosenness, and mission of the mother country and impacted, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by modernity including bureaucratisation, industrialisation, rationalisation and the bureaucratisation and the industrialisation of the military, the United States would eventually come to mirror the very European imperial great powers they hoped to liberate themselves from. In the late nineteenth century the United States, after its war with Spain, spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, the latter in response, in part, to another rising empire, the empire of Japan. As the empire of liberty spread into the Caribbean and the Pacific, an empire that had political, economic, cultural, and military dimensions, American elites made sure that those who lived in the Spanish lands into which the empire of liberty spread didn't have the same liberties and freedoms that those citizens of god's chosen had. The empire of liberty was, after all, an empire of Anglo-Saxon liberty, a major reason why the United States wanted, at times, usually in periods in which there were tensions between the British and the Americans, to annex British North America and Canada to it but not the Spanish and Portuguese regions of the Americas beyond a few islands of "strategic" naval importance in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

The Great War and World War II drew the United States increasingly into the global affairs of other European empires. The empire of liberty helped liberate Europe from supposed Prussian militarist tyranny in World War I and it helped liberate Europe and the Pacific from Nazi and Japanese tyranny in World War II. After the war it helped Western Europe and Japan recover and rebuild, helping turn Western Europe and Japan into political, economic, and cultural mirrors of itself in the process. This American helping hand would have long term consequences for America's economy. After World War II the empire of liberty, which was always an empire just like any other empires of the past despite the exceptionalism rhetoric, was an empire, along with other empire "less agreeable" empire, the USSR, helped decide not only the fate of nations and states--shades of the Congress of Vienna--but, as one of the cops on the world block and eventually the dominant cop on the global block, world cops that helped ensure that the world the empires created behaved itself in the way that the great powers thought it should. If the countries of the world didn't obey their “beneficent" parents they were, of course, taken to the wood shed by Big Daddy Smith America and Little Uncle Jones, the USSR

The post-World War II era saw the empire of liberty confront another "tyrannical" empire that trampled on the political, economic, and religious freedoms of its people and which threatened, according to true believing ideologues and manipulative demagogues the freedoms of Americans. As is always the case with great power interactions the Cold War, as the sometimes cold and sometimes hot conflict between the US and the USSR was called, was a tit for tat war. It was a war in which each side in that struggle mirrored, to some extent, the other. Both the US and USSR, for instance, were modern bureaucratic states that were, as a consequence, oligarchic, they were both states that had expanded into frontiers, they were both states with notions of their own uniqueness, chosenness, and mission to the world, and they were both states with military-industrial complexes that fed the Cold War each was fighting. When the American imperial Smith's, for instance, united its Atlantic allies or clients into a military alliance the imperial Jones's of the USSR had to follow suit creating in the process an alliance of its own in Eastern and Middle Europe. This is not to say that there weren't important differences between the two great powers who now fancied themselves superpowers (a notion of empire, I suppose, suitable for the comic book age), for there were important differences between the two. The USSR, for instance, was a more unipolar centralised bureaucratic state while the US, though dominated by its economic bureaucracy, had a political bureaucracy that once upon a time, at least on occasion, had a degree of autonomy,  and, on occasion, usually periods of domestic crisis, asserted this autonomy.

To deal with perceived Soviet geographical, political, economic, and cultural ambitions the United States adopted a strategy of containment and deterrence, strategies indebted, to some extent, to the writings of American social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr if in a more manichean and simplistically vulgar way than Niebuhr often intended. The US used a variety of strategies, including the threat of nuclear attack, economic aid or bribery, and covert operations, strategies also used by the Soviets, of course, to contain the Soviet empire and deter it from further expansion. As the Cold War thawed with the death of Stalin, the United States and the USSR added detente, a live and let live policy, to their arsenal of interactions with the USSR but always with an eye on gaining some advantage over the enemy other, something Nixon and Kissinger were able to initiate particularly thanks to their opening to Communist China.

The US, though its demagogues generally refused to admit this over the years, was always the dominant of the post WWII superpowers and hence had major advantages in the Cold War. It was economically, technologically, and militarily superior to the more technologically backward USSR. By the post-Stalin 1950s, in fact, technology was playing an increasingly important role in the war of words of the Cold War even if for many the struggle was more of a morality play than anything else. By the 1950s the superpower contest was increasingly being fought out on consumption terrain, something symbolised by the kitchen debate between American vice-president Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, a debate in which Nixon touted the  technological and hence economic superiority of America thanks to its technologically “sophisticated" consumer society. By doing this Nixon helped create a variant of the Cold War, a variant in which the notion of the freedom to consume consumer goods increasingly became freedom itself. The Cold War, at least on one level, had become a war in which the plentiful consumer society of the United States was counterpointed to its opposite, the austere and rationing USSR, geerally eliding, of course, the fact that the USSR had been devastated materially and physically by World War II. Demagoguery on the March.

Historian Andrew Basievich, in his The Limits to Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2008), makes much of the conflation of freedom and the freedom to consume in post-World War II America. For Basievich this linkage in the wake of crises associated with guns and butter Vietnam era America, the oil crises of the 1970s--both of which brought inflation--America's transformation from a creditor nation to a debtor nation and its policy of increasing military spending while cutting taxes, maintaining the welfare state, and building up the military--a delirium Bacevich traces to the faux conservative Reagan era--gave birth  to a profligate America living beyond its means thanks to its lines of credit. At the same time as a profligate America came into being, argues Bacevich, Americans too began living beyond their means thanks to their individual lines of credit and their credit cards, credit cards that became increasingly easy to obtain in the wake of the Reagan era deregulation of financial institutions of various stripes.

This ideological linking of freedom with consumption, in turn, argues Basievich, gave rise to a second crises in post-1960s and post-oil crises America, namely, the necessity for politicians of all stripes, if they wanted to get elected, re-elected, and attain or maintain power, to play the we will give you what you want card again and again in order to get elected or re-elected and hence acquire or maintain power. This makes it increasingly difficult, according to Basievich, for politicians to deal rationally and realistically with the ever increasing debts and deficits of a US living off the credit of others And this, in turn, has, says Basievich, led to an increasingly delusional, dissembling, and corrupt American political culture.

Closely linked to an America living beyond its means crisis are two other crises, claims Bacievich, a political crisis and, by extension, a military crisis. In the wake of World War II, claims Bacevich, the United States morphed into a military-industrial-national security state dominated by an imperial presidency that linked economic and political oligarchs in a number of ways. Many corporations, for instance, though Basevich doesn't really explore this, increasingly relied on research subsidies and government contract subsidies for military weapons creating a socialist welfare state in which wealth was redistributed from taxpayers to wealthy American corporations in the name of national security. It was a national security state that increasingly claimed that any enemy of the US was an enemy of freedom including the freedom to consume.

In an American dominated by consumption practises and ideologies, argues Bacevich, the imperial presidency increasingly, and even more increasingly after 9/11, used its military might to assure, by "convincement" or coercion, that the American way of life and the American way of consumption continued despite threats to the empire of consumption out there in the wider world. As a consequence the Cold War doctrine of containment and deterrence withered away to be replaced in the War on Terror and its dogma of the preemptive first strike. Take them out before they can take you out became the mantra of the warhawks of the war on terror ensconced in the pleasant confines of the imperial presidency and who, of course, rarely, if ever, took part in the battles of the war for "freedom". This led to an attack on Iraq that was justified by a tissue of lies because the warhawks wanted Saddam Husssein gone. Accompanying this policy change were related declines in the American willingness to engage in diplomacy, a decline in American consultation with its allies, and an increase in the arrogance and hubris of America's unelected policy"experts" that advised the American imperial president, an arrogance grounded ultimately in the American civil religion.

Bacievich has written an interesting, enlightening, and well argued introduction to post-WWII and post-9/11 American imperial policy. I appreciated Bacevich's neo-Nieburhianism. The Limits of Power is not only an empirical analysis of the American consumer and national secutiry state but a neo-Nieburhian jeremiad against the use of the military as a big stick to to help maintain the American consumer oriented way of life. Bacevich urges America to return to a more Niebuhrian containment and deterrence strategy, one that opts for diplomacy over military force but, at the same time, is conscious that military force might have to be used when necessary but in a way consistent with the doctrine of just war. I appreciated his exploration of the nationalist religious faith that undergirds the American sense of being special, of being unique, of being exceptional, and of being called by god, nature, or history to spread the gospel of Americanism to the rest of the world. I appreciated the fact that he was not afraid to point out the obvious hypocrisies of the US including forcing austerity on others but not on itself and its specious justification for dropping nuclear bombs of Japanese civilians during World War II, the it will end the war quicker rationalisation. I appreciated Bacevich noting that the US, after 9/11, discovered that Central Asia was, or so it claimed, essential to American security. I only wish that he had also noted that by redefining Central Asian nations, many of them formerly part of the USSR, as essential to American security and the continuation of the American way of life, the US simultaneously used this as a means to try to box its old enemy, Russia. This get Russia policy, by the way, whether by overt and covert means, has also been at play in the Ukraine, Russia's near beyond, since the disintegration of the USSR and fed into a number of other tensions between the US and Russia. I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of the process by which the freedom to consume was incorporated into American notions of liberty and freedom. I appreciated him asking readers to think about whether the freedom of nations and individuals to be profligate is a freedom too far. Finally, I appreciated Bacevich's discussion of how the US morphed from a creditor nation to debtor nation and the consequences of this affluenza without, apparently, a vaccine to help to fight it or at least contain it. Whether the US can continue to subsidise the profligate American way of life while running in the red is a question that needs to be asked and addressed. On the other hand, I suppose the US can keep on borrowing in order to subsidise the American way of life as long as someone is willing to lend it monies at interest. 

There are a few issues I had with Bacevich's book. Bacievich could, for instance, have put American profligacy and its cultural and ideological scaffolding, individualist narcissism, in the broader context of the rise of modernity and postmodernity. He could have explored American exceptionalism more broadly and comparatively. The American civil religion, after all, is a lot like other forms of exceptionalism around the globe, including that of Canada and New Zealand, with their ethnocentric notions of superiority. When allied with imperialism, these forms of ethnocentrism can be hazardous to human health as the history of empires since Ancient Sumeria show. While Bacievich rightly notes that the American civil or civic faith is a religion with its own universalised articles of faith and its own transcendent catechism to which "real" and "true" Americans are expected to conform, he doesn't really deal with the fact that a fetishised modern capitalism has been central to the American public faith for some time. I wish Bacevich had explored in greater detail how the narcissistic American consumer society links up not only with the imperial presidency but with the American corporate welfare state, a welfare state that invariably promotes weapons production and wars. I wish Bacevich had explored how the impact of deindustrialisation and globalisation with its cheap products made by cheap labour in semi-peripheral countries helped transform America from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. In many ways the cheaper consumer goods that flowed into the US from semi-peripheral states allowed the American middle class and working class to continue consuming despite stagnation in wages and a decline in wages and benefits in a postmodern America now dominated by the poor paying and even poorer available benefits service or retail sector. Needless to say, the increasing importation of consumer goods from sermi-peripheral countries into the US and the decline of manufacturing in the United States hasn't done much for America's trade imbalance. I should note before I go that these criticism may be a bit unfair since The Limits to Power ia a short book of just over two hundred pages which is aimed at a more common denominator than academia but they need to be said.

Whither America? Bacevich hopes for a transformation that allows America and Americans to reflect on the disease of affluenza that afflicts it and them and to reflect on the arrogance that afflicts America and Americans as it did other empires before it. Such reflections, he hopes, will push America and Americans to adopt more responsible and rational monetary policies and to tamp down on the arrogance and parochialism associated with the American civil religion and hence American foreign policy. Cultural transformations, however, often require an economic, political, cultural, demographic,or geographic crisis in order to stimulate change and even then culture is often resistant to change as cultural anthropologists have known for nearly a century. Perhaps a coming debt and deficit crises will make America and Americans more reflexive, more humble, less arrogant, less bullying, more good citizens of the world, and more financially responsible. On the other hand, if the recession of 2008, also driven by hubris, the hubris of many in the investment bank industry that had convinced themselves that they had conquered risk through the innovation of hybrid derivatives (the social and cultural construction of reality), is a guide, the hope that America and Americans will adopt more rational domestic and foreign policies is, to paraphrase Rupert Giles, probably doomed. After all, the 2008 bust, bad as it was, did not come close to effecting a cure for American affluenza because the federal government doled out American taxpayer monies to bail out the too big to fail investment banks who had made bad investments, something that should in itself make us question the faith many have in the rationality of human beings. After a period of woe is us and woe is me America and Americans returned to their happy faced merry consuming ways, just as George Walker Bush had urged them to do after 9/11, and put the re-regulation of the hubris filled profligate investment banks on hold. No more Glass-Steagall for us, I guess. Sorry Oliver, only gruel for you.