The Books of My Life: A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

 

When my father and mother moved me and my family to Texas in the mid-1960s I remember being more interested in the adventure of moving than in where we were moving and why. The myth of Texas had no meaning for me at the time. I think, in fact, I had only barely heard of Texas as I hadn't really watched many, if any, of the Hollywood westerns that celebrated the myth of Texas. I was much more interested in the Beatles, Doctor Who, who was mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and the American version of rounders, especially one of America's baseball players, Sandy Koufax, who, like the Doctor was truly mythic, heroic, and saintly to me, and who, unlike the Doctor, was actually real, though I am not sure I made that distinction at the time.

One thing I do recall from my teenage years is that the Beatles, Doctor Who, and Sandy Koufax were much more interesting to me than school, which, even though I was interested in history and politics, didn't do for me what the Beatles, Doctor Who, Sandy Koufax, and adventuring along Five Mile Creek in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas did. School simply did not engage me intellectually. The extracurricular, on the other hand, did. 

My memories today of my secondary school years are mostly extracurricular. I recall the seemingly endless rituals of football pep rallies at Browne. I recall the attempt of a small minority of us to stage an anti-Vietnam War walkout one afternoon after a pep rally, an effort that failed because the administrators and teachers got wind of it and chained us into the school with two teachers at every door. And I recall, if vaguely, that each of us at Browne had to take a mandatory Texas civics class in, if memory serves, seventh grade.

Like history in general, as I have come to realise, the civics class on Texas history and culture that was mandatory for me and my T W Browne school mates was, as I look back on it from the distance of today, mythic. It told a mythic tale of freedom seeking Texas, of Texas heroes, the Texans who fought for independence, and of non-Texas villains, the bad guys who tried to keep Texas unfree and Texans locked in the chains put there by a dictatorial tyrant named Santa Anna, who, in retrospect seems to be, in the Texas mythology of the 1960s, a Hitler before Hitler and a Stalin before Stalin. Historical presentism. While all of this mythhistory was clearly present at the time I was forced to take my Texas civics class, the only thing that I recall that I consciously remembered from that class at the time was the Texas's state song, "Texas Our Texas". Music, it seems, was central to my life at the time.

The lyrics of "Texas Our Texas", I later came to realise thanks to my increasing understanding of the empirical economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities of our world, was grounded in mythhistory and the closely related boosterist history. History as Advertising. It was, as I came to understand, the history that the powers that be, who were less part of a conspiracy to brainwash us than accepting, consciously and unconsciously, of a set of cultural ideological myths and self-images, believed we needed to be socialised into in order to be good Texans (and presumably good Americans). It was a history that, even if I didn't realise it at the time, affected me in such a way that I felt suitably awed when I visited the Alamo in San Antonio and San Jacinto near Houston with my family, the place, in the myths of Texas, where freedom loving and heroic Texans fought against incredible odds to make Texas free and the place where the freedom loving Texans finally defeated the villainous freedom hating Mexicans winning their freedom once and for all. I had, without even realising it, been socialised into a Texas version of the battle between good and evil, between good Duddly Do-Right (the Canadian mountie symbol become American heroic icon) and evil Snidely Whiplash, running through my head affecting how unconsciously or subconsciously I read "reality". At that age I was just too literal to recognise the parody and satire in that tale of good and evil that was Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash.

This manichean version of history I was socialised into turned out to be relatively short lived in my increasingly intellectual and scientific life. Soon, thanks to rock and roll and the Vietnam War, I was among the "bohemians" and "deviants" few who had come to realise the truth, namely that mythic and boosterist history, whether it was the mythic and boosterist history of Texas or the mythic and boosterist of Big D where every house was like a palace, was just that, mythic and boosterist. When I went to college I learned that the great social scientist Emile Durkheim argued that all cultures or societies needed such myths, and needed the "deviants" who contested it, to create a common community with a common identity. I learned that this, this need for a common community, was why communities needed and had the mythic, boosterist, and heroes versus villains stories and symbols that were grounded in a binary of sacred and profane.

The social sciences, and particularly, cultural anthropology, helped me to recognise the reality of how many of the tales and stories of American (and other) culture were socially constructed, universalised, transcendentalised, or fetishised. They were, as I came to recognise, the manichean myths that societies and cultures lived by and through, including in, if more complexly and contradictorily, in the core nation societies with its large populations and multilayered economic, political, cultural, and regional systems. It also helped me recognise that the histories that societies and cultures told about themselves were also mythic and, if less so, critical, drawing, as they did, on contradictions in the societies and cultures in which they were constructed.

I went to college during an era in which consensus history and myth history was under assault. It was an era in which social history, particularly social history influenced by quantitative approaches in the social sciences and particularly sociology, and cultural history, influenced by cultural anthropology and particularly by Clifford Geertz, were becoming prominent in the history profession and bureaucracy. Donald Denoon's, Philippa Mein-Smith's, and Maravic Wydham's A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), is one of the many products of this renewed interest in ethnographically sensitive cultural history in the post-imperial, post-modern, and post-industrial historical profession.

Denoon, Mein-Smith, and Wyndham place identity at the heart of their history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. Filtering identity, an identity that is both somewhat static and dynamic, through its interactions with other social and cultural constructions including imperialism, colonisation, modernisation, nationalism (New Zealand marking itself off from Australia in binary cultural fashion, for example), industrialisation (particularly in Australia), cultural myths (the myth exeptionalism and the myths of the bush, the beach, the yeoman battler, and British gentility, for example), deindustrialisation, decolonisation, the indigeneous rights movements, and great power politics (a great power politics in which the US replaced Britain as dominant power--economic, political, and cultural--in the region after World War II), Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history provide interested readers with an excellent cultural, economic, and political history of the region and particularly Australia and New Zealand. 

Denoon's, Mein-Smith's, and Wyndham's history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, while a superb history of the region, is not a book for the novice or for an introductory course in the history of Australia, New Zealand, or the Pacific. It is, however, an excellent introductory text for the advanced undergraduate, history and social science graduate students, and the intelligent reader who already knows something about the history of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific. I, for instance, knew the broad outlines of Australian and Kiwi history and found those very helpful in expanding my knowledge of Australian and New Zealand history but was somewhat adrift in the parts of the book dealing with Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian history. Despite this I found reading the book highly rewarding and worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific will, of course, not please those who prefer their history to be the history of "great men", particularly great political men, and great events, particularly great political events such as scholars like J.L. Granatstein who, while not opposed to some of the new social and cultural history, has bemoaned the killing of history, by which he means political history which he thinks should be at the heart of the historical enterprise, in his jeremiad on the subject. The historical profession, however, is a marketplace and the historical markets that are prominent at the moment are cultural and social. Nor will it please those who prefer their  history mythic, legendary, and manichean, who prefer, in other words, their history European and celebratory and filled with European saints and sinners. For these latter, the only good history is politically and ideologically correct, as they define it, history. It will, on the other hand, please those, like me, who recognise that the tales we tell about ourselves are generally socially and culturally constructed and have a tenuous relationship to empirical reality. That empirically grounded history and social science, as the culture wars that rack the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, are persona non grata in a world that generally prefers its history comic bookish and Hollywoodish means that the histories of those who can see through the myths, the delusions, and the tales of white hats and black hats, are likely never be accepted in a world where reality is almost always "reality". So much for scientific enlightenment.

The Books of My Life: Petrified Campus

Though the University of Toronto clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson became something of an academic pop star who could sell out "arenas" in Canada, the US, and the UK in the second and third decades of the twenty first century, he was not the first critic of political correctness, a trendy new term for something almost as old as civilisation itself, orthodoxy and consequent censorship or, to use that other current trendy phrase for censorship, cancel culture. Nor was Peterson the first person to imply that his views and those of his devotees was politically, economically, culturally, geographically, and demographically correct. The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, all claimed to have a monopoly on truth, making them purveyors of what we would call political correctness, for millennia. Needless to say these chosen people were not afraid to target those who disagreed even torturing and killing them in the name of "compassion". 

In the modern era the virtually universal human condition of ethnocentrism has taken on a variety of political and ideological guises. The use of the phrase political correctness, historians on the subject of political correctness inform us, goes back to at least 1917 when the Bolsheviks used the phrase to describe those committed true believers of the Bolshevik cause. In the 1930s Nazis were accused by the American quality press of claiming that only to its chosen people, politically correct Aryans in this case, were correct in politics and ideology. In the 1940s socialists accused communists of the era of being characterised by the notion that they and only they were ideologically correct. Lenin and Stalin, it should be noted, did claim to be the high priests of the one and only true holy orthodox religion of communism, a notion that many Western anti-communists, somewhat ironically, bought into. In the 1970s the American New Left used the term as emblematic of a reflexive strategy to avoid any drift toward orthodoxy. In the 1980s University of Chicago English professor Alan Bloom accused the academy of being in thrall to a left wing orthodoxy. 

In the wake of Bloom a number of conservative and right wing intellectuals began claiming that political correctness had become dominant in universities and colleges all across postmodern American and the Western world, using the term as a synonym for things like the intellectual attempt to expand the historical curriculum, the intellectual attempt to expand literature reading lists, and the increasingly retail like strategies of college administrators, all of which, they claimed, were liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist in origin. For these selective right wing critics there was a liberal, left wing, socialist, and communist movement or conspiracy afoot to remake the Western world in its own ideologically correct image, an image that demonised the West for its imperialism, racism, sexism, and classism. 

Eventually, of course and not surprisingly--politics is a contact sport after all--conservative and right wing politicians and polemicists picked up their anti-politically correct crosses and used them, if selectively, in a politically correct way, to bash its social liberal cousins in a form. This conscious demagogic strategy, one learned from forebears like those purveyors of state propaganda and capitalist Madison Avenue propaganda, proved to be quite effective in many cases since it played, as did demagogues before them, on mass emotions like fear and anger. 

Jordan Peterson, who has become a saintly martyr to many of his politically correct devotees, was not, as I noted, the first person to claim that conspiratorial and tyrannical political correctness had taken over universities in the Western world. He was not even the first to make such a claim in English Canada for in 1984 three well known and and highly respected Canadian academics, University of Calgary historian David Bercuson, University of Toronto historian Robert Bothwell, and  York University historian J.L. Granatstein, argued, in their polemic The Great Brain Drain published by McClelland and Stewart, that political correctness had put, as the subtitle of the book claimed, Canadian universities on the road to ruin. 

Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein continued their polemic against political correctness in Canada, along with other aspects of post-World War II Canadian universities, in their 1997 book Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canadian Universities (Toronto: Random House Canada, 1997). Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell a tale that is well known in intellectual and demagogic circles by now After World War II, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein inform us, Canada, like the US, the UK, and Australia, flush with monies (thanks, in part, to German and Japanese economic decline due to war) and returning soldiers, and convinced that universities were central to the war against tyranny, expanded their university systems in order to fight such tyranny on the political and economic-technological levels. Some on the left, of course, argue that thanks to these social and cultural contexts universities, research universities, became central cogs in the military and industrial complex of the so-called "free world".

The 1960s, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein tell us, brought increasing numbers of baby boomers to universities. Many of these baby boomers pushed for a more "relevant" education and an expansion of the curriculum, particularly an expansion of courses on class, race, and ethnic groups, and an expansion of practical professional programmes on university campuses. Soon this utilitarianism led, particularly after the oil crisis of the 1970s and the declining support of federal and provincial support for universities, to increasing numbers of university consumers wanting and demanding an education for post graduation success, an ideology helped along by educators who preached the gospel, one that did have quantitative support, that more education equalled more financial and cultural rewards after graduation. This utilitarianism fed into even more curricular "reform" of a practical nature, a type of curricular reform that continues as I type.

With the increase in the number of educational institutions, with student numbers increasing, with many students demanding an education relevant for post university life, and with the decline in federal and provincial funding for education, pressure was put on university administrators to find a way to keep their universities afloat in an age of economic and demographic austerity. Universities responded to this crisis in a variety of ways. Tuition fees (and student and alumni fees in general) rose with provincial consent. This meant that more students equaled more monies so university administrators developed advertising campaigns to promote their universities to prospective students and developed ways to retain students already on campus or off campus in distance learning programmes. The curriculum, as a consequence, was further oriented toward a utilitarian or practical education. The Liberal Arts, the heart of traditional education, suffered. Grades inflated. Sessional faculty increased. Tenure faculty streams decreased relative to the increasing number of Ph.D's produced by both the elite and less elite universities. The physical plant expanded (particularly administrative and residential buildings and sports facilities), much of it in order to attract students to campus. And since student numbers and student retention became central to universities, student concerns became a central component of university decisions about the curriculum and the extra-curriculum.

Political correctness fed into this university in the age of austerity in a number of ways, so we are told. The rise of identity politics and the mythistories that accompanied it led to lobbying for a celebration of identity groups and their "histories" in universities. Sensitivity and therapeutic culture led to calls for an education that didn't traumatise students. The hiring of faculty in the years the universities grew, particularly those from the sixties, provided students who wanted an education that celebrated their identites and avoided traumatising them, with an ally. In the process, a new dogma, one that celebrated aspects of the increasingly diverse student population and one which was careful not to traumatise sensitised students, emerged and was institutionalised in university politics. As a result, any behaviours or teaching that challenged such doctrines, became increasingly persona non grata on university campuses and a new orthodoxy emerged.

There are, of course, a number of problems with this picture. Yes, universities grew and prospered thanks particularly to governmental monies. Yes, universities came under financial pressure after the oil crisis of the 1970s and had to find other ways, thanks to a decline in governmental funding, to stay financially afloat. Yes, educational practise became increasingly tied to career and financial "success".  For far too many a medical degree, for instance, meany you could consume more than it meant helping others. Yes, the Liberal Arts declined in popularity and relevance while professional and career oriented education has increased in popularity. Yes, grades have inflated since the 1970s (and all college personnel know this) and if you are a faculty member, particularly a sessonial faculty member or an adjunct, who doesn't get with the brave new modern grade inflation programme, you can be made redundant. Yes, far too few students are even willing to read one book these days compared to the bad old its too hard days when I, for instance, had to read thirteen books in a semester length introductory level Greek history class and four books a week for a postgraduate seminar. Yes, far too many young people today are coddled thanks to the attempt of so many to turn the core nation world into a Disney movie. Yes, universities became more demographically diverse after the 1960s. Yes, student numbers increased leading to a situation where too many people are taking undergraduate and graduate degrees increasingly trivialising them in the process. Yes, far too many of the far too many going to college require, particularly on the undergraduate level, are in need of remediation. Yes, for far too many of those students in need of remediation there is not much media to re even should colleges and universities adequately fund remeadiation programmes. I had several students at a second division American research university who did not grasp the concept that 20 points is 20% and vice versa on a 100 grade scale. Yes, universites today rely too much on sessional lecturers. Yes, many American colleges and universities are little more than glorified high schools these days consisting of grade 13 and beyond. Yes there is far too much segmentation of labour in the academic cultural marketplace. That segmentation of labour, however, parallels that in the economy in general because both segmentation in the univerities and segmentation in the economy are, of course, the products of a modernity characterised by "rational" and "efficient" bureaucracies staffed, at the upper and middle levels of the pyramid, with managers engaged in specialised segmentied labour. Yes, far too many academic books are opaque. Academia does not have a monopoly on opacity and the targeting of specific narrow demographics, however. And yes, far too many universities are increasingly characterised by an environment of correctness and with practises that undermine university freedom of speech and academic freedom. However, it is not political and ideological correctness, in the way it is too often understood these days, that is undermining higher education in the age of neoliberal austerity. It is the need for student bodies, for customers.

The need for student bodies has led, along, admittedly, with federal and provincial mandates, to increases in administrative staff. One study found a significant increase in upper level and middle level bureaucrats at one American university, something that can clearly be generalised to other universities in the United States, Canada, and Australia (as can the increase in financial remuneration for academic bureaucrats). Part of the mandate of these university bureaucrats is to recruit and retain students, something that has led to the rise of a retail model of education, a model in which, oftentimes, the customer, the student, is right. It is this retail model of higher education (a model that seens to once again reared its head in the recent firing of an NYU organic chemistry adjunct) that is behind the sensitivity to the concerns of a number of students who have already socialised before they came to university. Yes, some faculty, particularly in the social sciences and humanities (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Grantstein are aware of), are favourably disposed to this retail model of academica to some extent. Like students, however, these more "radical" faculty--those in engineering, the hard sciences, most of the professional schools are not likely to man these barricades anytime anytime soon--reflect what is happening in fractured postmodern Canada in general.

So what to do? Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recommend greater interdisciplinarity, less emphasis on publish or perish, and the elimination of tenure. They recommend that universities be given greater administrative autonomy. They recommend more targeted governmental subsidies that recognise the differences in university and scholarly quality and writing and research quality. They recommend the recognition of the differences between universities that no eqalitarian rhetoric will paper over. They recommend the establishment of a national university so that Canada, for the first time in its history, can have an Australian National University of its own.

I am actually sympathetic with many of these recommendations. However, as is almost always the case some of these recommendations are easier to say and more difficult to do. While, for instance, Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue that tenure is no longer necessary since all or most universities are dedicated to freedom of inquiry and is a hindrance to quality the reality is that a number of people and groups, many of them on the political and ideological right, have as their goal limiting freedom of inquiry on university campuses since they prefer their education to be mythic in orientation rather than empirical just like their nationalist forebears. Do they have influence? Just ask the universities in Wisconsin and Florida. 

There are several other problems I have with Petrified Campus. Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein claim that Canadian universities are not the equal of great American state universities. Both the University of Toronto and McGill (the Big Two?), however, are members of the elite Association of American Universities (and have been so since 1926) suggesting that Canada already has the equal of the great American state universities like Berkeley, Michigan, Indiana, North Carolina, or Texas, which are likewise members of the AAU. Administrative autonomy, which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein argue for more of, is likely to lead to more not less retail education. Eliminating some universities or downsizing selective universities, both of which Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein suggest, is problematic given that they are economically important to the communities they serve (something Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein recognise). But most of all, and Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein don't seem to grasp this fully, universities are reflections of the society and culture in which they exist. This suggests that if you want to change universities you first have to change the broader society and culture that they are situated in and impact them. This, however, is unlikely to happen since it means that one would have to change aspects of the relevant economic (Canada's economies of scale can never match that of the US), political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that have given rise to postmodernity in the core parts of the world, one of the dominant types of society and culture of Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Japan at the moment, and the societal form that "traditionalist" modernism sees as the enemy. Good luck with that.

As to why Peterson became a pop star while Bercuson, Bothwell, and Granatstein did not, good question. Perhaps it is because they are less sensational and stridently polemical and as a consequence less partisan and dogmatic. Perhaps it is because of the brave new digital revolution and the internet and the celebrities it creates. Perhaps it is because of the increasing prominence of political cults centred around charismatic bureaucrats in the brave new digital world. UofT tutorial time perhaps?

The Books of My Life: Joss Whedon (Pateman)

 

As I have hinted at again and again in this blog I have experienced hours and hours of joy and hours and hours of pain through watching the often profound genre blending and gender bending comedic, dramatic, and tragic television shows of auteur Joss Whedon. I developed a love of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the tragically short lived Firefly particularly after they came out on the relatively new medium of the DVD. I liked the noirish Angel. I found Dollhouse, a television show Whedon only partially created, interesting, intriguing, and the most Vertigoish of Whedon's work thanks to, in part, its exploration of male fantasies about women. 

I have a much more limited interest in Whedon's film work beyond his Shakespeare adaptation Much Ado About Nothing and his nudge, nudge, wink wink horror film Cabin in the Woods, which he co-wrote with former Buffy writer Drew Goddard. I simply have zero interest in the now dominant Hollywood superhero films which stretch credibility beyond the breaking point for me and which are too adolescent for someone who never had to move beyond comic books because he almost never read them. So, it is unlikely that I will watch his Avengers/Avengers Assemble and its sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron unless they appear on television and there is no better alternative on other channels at the time they are broadcast.

Thanks to my adventures in the television worlds of Whedon, my interest in culture, and my interest in social and cultural theory, it was inevitable that I would begin to read books and articles on what has come to be called the Whedonverse. As posts on this blog indicate I have read a number of books on the televisual worlds of Joss Whedon and his collaborators.  My latest literary excursion into the storytelling worlds of Joss Whedon and its contexts is a book by English Whedon scholar Matthew Pateman, Joss Whedon (Manchester, Eng: Manchester University Press, 2018), the author of a highly regarded in Whedon Studies circles previous book on Buffy entitled The Aesthetics of Culture in Buffy the Vampire Slayer published by McFarland in 2006.

Unlike David Lavery's creative biography of Whedon, Joss Whedon: A Creative Portrait published by Tauris in 2014, Pateman's book is, as Pateman emphasises, a critical and contextual analysis of the televisual work of Whedon. Pateman eschews biography and psychological detective work by focusing on Whedon's narrative art, his storytelling skills, and the intersection of these with Whedon's politics, which have often been seen as, as Pateman notes, liberal and feminist, instead. Divided into two parts, part one of Pateman's book explores the industrial and political aspects of Whedon's art while part two consists of several case studies of Whedon's storytelling art in Buffy, Angel (less so), Firefly, and Dollhouse, something that gives Pateman's Joss Whedon the quality of a collection of related essays. 

There is a lot to admire in Pateman's book. I found his attempt to move beyond the pitfalls and pratfalls of crystal ball textualism with its Chomskyish everything you need to know about a media text you can find in that media text, commendable. I greatly appreciated Pateman's attempts to move beyond the text in his exploration of Whedon's politics, particularly his gender politics, in his attentiveness to the production processes of a television show, and in his attention to the collaborative nature of mass art. I particularly appreciated Pateman's attempt, with the help of Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and beyond writer Jane Espenson, to explore the script writing processes practises that characterised the Whedonverse. Also worthy of praise is Pateman's emphasis not only on plot and character but on mise-en-scene. As such Pateman's book provides, I would argue, a better model for media analysis than much of what passes for media analysis in the text cenred media world these days.

On the other hand, there were a number of things that I found vexing about Pateman's book on the work of Joss Whedon. I found his formulaic critique of classical auteurist theory problematic. Yes, the auteurism of Cahiers critics and later filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard were polemical and ultimately individualist in orientation. However, many of those who adopted the policy of auteurism, like Andrew Sarris and many of the critics associated with Movie, did not simply adopt what might be called the Cahiers "romantic" approach to auteurism, they also adapted it. Many post-Cahiers auterists, for instance, foregrounded the fact that filmmaking was collaborative, that only a few Hollywood directors were auteurs, wrote about actors and writers and hinted that they too might be seen through the lens of auteurism, and emphasised that auteurism was a useful approach for organising and understanding the films produced Hollywood studio system before the break up of the Hollywood production, distribution, and exhibition system in 1948, at least in part. Like so many of the post-1960s film studies generations, Pateman seems not to have read much of classic auteurist theory--an approach that goes back at least to the 1920s--and seems to be more intent to create a straw man or woman he can play off of. It really is well past time for the younger generations of film and movie critics to move beyond these straw men and women arguments and go back to the diverse texts of post-World War II auteurism in order to tease out the various approaches to mass media authorship that were there from their post-World War II beginings, approaches that included Marxist approaches that were very, if selectively, contextual and critical of the romantic approach to artistic creativity.

Additionally, as is also the case with Lavery's creative biography, I found Pateman's reliance on a single source problematic. As ethnographers engaged in observation and historians working in archives know there are problems in relying on single informants or even a handful of informants. The information one gleans from them may very well be accurate but it must be checked against other sources, ethnographic and archival.

Finally, there is the related issue that Pateman has, like so many of his colleagues in film and television studies, written a book on an artistic figure who is still alive and well and who will, one presumes, continue to work in Hollywood despite the 2018 and 2022 revelations about his behaviour, revelations that led to Whedon's fall from grace in the eyes and hearts of some of his devotees, This means that Pateman's analysis and conclusions must remain somewhat tentative. Since Whedon is still alive and because Hollywood limits access to contemporary primary source material for a variety of reasons, scholars and analyists simply are unable at the moment to fully appraise Whedon's work. For this reason, Pateman's book, while interesting, useful, and praiseworthy in many respects, is inherently incomplete and as such tentative. As a consequence the authoritative and definitive work on the storytelling art of Joss Whedon and the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts that surrounded and impacted it, awaits some future biographer and critical analyst who has access to all relevant materials that are essential to understanding both Joss Whedon and his art.

Recommended.

Musings on Democrats, Republicans, and the Demonisation of the Media

 

It is fascinating to listen to and read and then analyse the apologetic and polemical rhetoric of many self-proclaimed Republican partisans and many self-proclaimed Democrat partisans. What becomes clear when you dispassionately analyse the discourse or rhetoric of both partisan sects is that both sectarian groups began with similar if somewhat different perceptions of the oligarchic class that rules the United States and that both sects have different if somewhat similar perceptions of the media. What becomes clear, in other words, about this partisan discourse is that on one level, the structural level, the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats are similar, while on the level of form they are somewhat different.

The Republican and Democrat conceptions of the American ruling oligarchy assume that the ruling class is economically, politically, and culturally the same. They both assume, in other words, that there is only one ruling class when, in fact, there really isn't. As a number of scholars have noted at least since Antonio Gramsci, there are fractions within the ruling elite, fractions that sometimes produce tensions within the ruling elite. The Republicans, for instance, particularly since they adopted so much of the rhetoric of Southern Dixiecrats, have ties to right wing oil elites and their fellow travellers. This is one of the reasons the Republican Party, as it has dixiefied since the 1950s, has developed even stronger ties with right wing economic elites and have helped these right wing economic elites move from the margins to the mainstream of American political and economic discourse since the 1950s. The Democrats, on the other hand, since the 1960s, thanks to the disenchantment with and defection of its Dixiecrats, deindustrialisation and the decline of unions, increasing DixiePublican success among White working class ethnics, and the rise of the new digital media, have aligned themselves with the economically conservative and socially somewhat liberal oligarchs, such as those in Silicon Valley. 

While there is limited economic tensions between these fractions of the ruling oligarchic class. They all are, as Nancy Pelosi noted, capitalist (a fact that makes the wacky right wing's characterisation of them as socialists or communists or anarchists looney). They are just somewhat different kinds of capitalists. While both fractions are neoliberal in their economic ideology--they believe in the free market theology--the new digital oligarchic elite are more open to social liberal or social insurance liberalism than are the Republican leaning oligarchs.

While both Republican and Democrat apologists and polemicists believe the media is biased against them it is clear that they have a funamental misunderstanding of the media. Like the two Jesus's in Dire Straits song "Industrial Disease" one of these groups, one assumes, must be wrong since it would logically seem that "the media, as Republicans and Democrat partisans call it, cannot be out to get both of them at the same time in the same place.

As I have written elsewhere there are several types of media. The first type is corporate and commercial. They are owned and run by for profit corporations. Their reason to be is to sell "copy", and by se;ling you copy they also, because they are commerical, sell you tootpaste and lifestyles the things that allow them to sell copy hence their sensationalism: did you know Marion Morrison wore a toupee and had sex with n, and may have even smoked some Mary Jane?

The US's CBS, NBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Canada's CTV and the Globe and Mail, and Britain's ITV and The Times (owned by oligarch Rupert Murdoch), are examples of corporate media. There are variations in them given the political contexts in which they operate. I think ITV, British commercial TV, still fills 50 minutes of a 60 minute time slot (instead of the 42 minutes on US commercial stations, something that points up the power of corporations and the nature of the commercial media in the US) because of government regulation. With the rise of right wing populist Toryism in the UK, however, regulation has been relaxed and ITV, which initially had something like fourteen somewhat autonomous regional bodies within itself (example: London Weekend TV), is now controlled by two.

The second type of media is public and corporate. They are also supported by advertising revenue in the form of ads at the beginning and ends of programmes. They do, however, tend to be much less sensationalist in their selective journalism and hence often subscribe to parochial ideologies of journalistic practise. They are, in other words, embedded and inscribed within, thanks to sociallsation, certain ideological grounded "realities".

America's PBS and NPR, Britain's the BBC, Canada's the CBC, Australia's ABC, and Denmark's DR, are examples of public corporate media. Some corporate media, like PBS, gets private funding via ads at the beginning and ends of TV programmes. The CBC, in addition to government funding, has advertising. It has a mandate to emphasise Canadian content hence Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries and Schiitts Creek. The BBC is funded a licence fee, that the Tories want to do away with, and has no commercials. All that said, the Beeb has to cowtow to the oligarchic powers that be thanks to their control of the extent or even the existence of the licence fee. Needless to say, the Beeb has been one of the most significant media for years producing things like Doctor Who, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Fawlty Towers.

A third form of media is the sensationalist and targeted type of media. They are interested in selling product (political and ideological product rather than toothpaste) to an ideologically and sometimes ethnically segmented audience. They tend to influence true believers and their viewing numbers are exaggerated. Like the sensationalist corporate media the politically and ideologically correct media mirrors the lowest common denominator. Additionally, they don't create divisions, they mirror them. Fox and MSNBC are examples of corporate segmented politically and ideologically correct media. UK Murdoch owned The Sun, a host of Murdoch media in Australia, and, though not as much as it used to be Canada's National Post, are examples of politically and ideologically correct newspapers.

A last form of media is independent media which is not corporate. It is widely present on the internet but not widely read. Thanks to their limited sensationalism, their dissident nature (making them more factually accurate), and the fact that Mericans don't read much, independent media are at a significant disadvantage in the early twenty-first century "media market".

As is the case with the ruling class there are, not surprisingly, fractions within the corporate commercial media and the independent media. Some corporate commercial media, like the New York Times, are embedded in the ideology of what used to be called sixpenny journalism, "quality" journalism, "high" journalism. Other corporate media, such as the tabloids, are the heirs of penny journalism. While both depend on sensationalism to sell copy, the type of sensationalism they play on to sell copy are somewhat different. The tabloids tend to emphasise what is now called gotcha journalism, though one can also increasingly find this we gotcha you politicians and celebrities in "quality" journalistic publications like the Guardian as well. Additionally, the tabloids tend to dissolve to some extent the difference between the opinion and news discourses in commercial corporate journalism. Independent media is diverse in content ranging from the so-called far left of the political spectrum, to the far right of the political spectrum. One can find self-proclaimed socialist media in internetland at the same time that one can find self-proclaimed White supremacism media in worldwidewebland.

There are, of course, other differences between the two major strands of corporate commercial media. Sixpenny news organisations are more devoted to the who, when, where, how, and why practise of journalism than the penny news fraternity, which is dominated by rageoholic political and ideological correctness and whinging and whining type of journalism, the type of sensationalism that sells to the lowest common denominator masses these days. The sixpenny press tends to see itself as the fourth estate, as a check and balance on the powerful, though their muckracking or investigative journalism has declined for a number of reasons during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sixpenny press tends to be tied to the neoliberal social liberal elites. Jeff Bezos, for example, owns the Washington Post. Tabloids, be these tabloids Australian, Canadian, or American, tend to be tied to right wing apologists and polemicists like Rupert Murdoch and the political "journalism" they engage in is mostly of the apologetic and polemical sort. What should not be missed here is that both American political parties, as that last sentence indicates, have ties, ideological ties, economic ties, political ties, and cultural ties, to different fractions of the American economic elite. 

What should also not be missed is that both partisan sects, particularly in their true believe form, are equally manichean, seeing themselves as being numbered among the chosen people. They are equally messianic believing that they are on mission from god, whatever or whoever their god happens to be, to to instantiate their version of America throughout the chosen land. They are equally paranoid and conspiratorially oriented thinking the media is out to get them. they are equally utopian preaching that their way is the best way. Both fails to realise that the sixpenny press regards itself (often without reason) as the fourth estate, as a check and a balance on power and thus it sees its mission, at least in part, as expressing truth to power, whoever that power happens to be. Both praise the sixpenny media's speaking truth to power or investigative journalism only if it is speaking truth to its other. Both sectarian groups are, in other words and formally speaking, mirror images of each other.

Speaking of conspiracies, the media, by and large, are conspiratorial. They want to sell you product.

The Books of My Life: A History of the Canadian Peoples

Writing a history of anything, including a history of a modern nation state that arose after the eighteenth century like Canada, is always a tricky task. In order to write such a history the professional historian has to decide what is significant or important in order to keep his or her history from becoming a simple and simplistic litany of necessarily selected historical events, selected historical events that are unfortunately not always recognised as selected, which may or may not be important. Significance, in turn, means, or should mean, that the historian and social science seek out important causes and effects that are thought to impact human life, particularly those economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that impact human life and the things that humans have constructed over the course of human existence.

History as a professional practise, a professional practise formalised and bureaucratised in the core Western world, has, since its beginnings and particularly since the Enlightenment,  been interested in determining causes and effects, in determining what caused some phenomenon and what caused some humans to act in the way that they did. The earliest modern historians tended to focus on great men and the great events, particularly political events that they were thought to be causal factors in the drama and melodrama of life. Many nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth century historians (and their contemporary mythistorical heirs) tended to see these great men, great men who were generally turned by historians into unalloyed saints and sinners, as makers of history and tended, since modern history was deeply embedded within and impacted by the nationalism that arose particularly in the nineteenth century, to see the nation-state as the obvious and proper focus of their studies. Many nineteenth and twentieth century historians (and their contemporary heirs) tended to see the nation-states they studied and focused on in fetishistic, universalistic, or transcendental terms and tended to see the nation-states of which they were citizens in chosen, holy, and messianic terms, as the essence of all that was good and superior in the modern world, in other words.

The problems with such an approach to history should be obvious but they aren't and they won't be to far too many, particularly to far too many amateurs who think that simply by being conscious they know how to do history and how to interpret historical events in the same way that preachers with no background in history, archaeology, and languages think they know and know how to interpret the Bible. First, there is the problem of causality, a problem that became particularly apparent after the rise of mid- and late nineteenth century social theory. Is history made by men or is it made by the forces, the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, within which humans are embedded and within which they act? The second problem has to do with class, gender, and "ethnicity". Is it only great men, great elite men, great Western elite men, who make history? The third problem is geographical and spatial since constructed national boundaries are incapable of acting as spatial barriers. Isn't history really regional and global? 

As post nineteenth century scholars have increasingly recognised, economic, political, cultural, and demographic factors, of course, are regional and often global and are ultimately tied to the economic form that dominates specific societies, specifically hunter-gatherer, small scale agriculture, large scale agriculture, modern, or postmodern. Birth rates, life expectancy rates, and the numbers of women and infants who die during childbirth, for instance, are impacted by economic, political, and cultural factors such as poverty, political policies related to poverty, and cultural notions surrounding poverty.

The late St. John's College and University of Manitoba American born historian J.M. Bumsted's A History of the Canadian Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2007) navigates the labyrinthian maze between nineteenth and twentieth century great man and mythhistory history and mid- and late twentieth century social and cultural history. Bumsted's history is full of factual tales of Canada's great men and women from William Mackenzie King to Wilfred Laurier to Maurice Dupplesis to Pierre Trudeau and to Margaret Atwood. Bumsted doesn't stop with "traditional" great man history, however. A History of the Canadian People also explores the economic history of Canada from the fur and cod trading era to the industrial and postindustrial or postmodern era. It explores the political history of Canada from French and British colony to a federal Dominion where power is arrayed between the federal government in Ottawa and the various confederated provinces and territories of the nation and where Canadian political and economic power has been impacted by French, British, and American imperialism. It explores the history of Canadian literature, music, and art. It gives us a portrait of how Canada's demographics have changed across time and within space.

Bumsted's book offers a very good if far too brief excursion through Canadian history. Like most late twentieth and early twenty-first century textbooks its tale of Canadian history is rather like a jump cut in a Jean-Luc Goddard film jumping, as it repeatedly does, from politics to economics to culture and to demography in far too brief compass. That, however, is necessitated by the nature of mass education in Canadian society, the nature of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and the fact that reality is more complicated than a simple fiction like narrative can convey. It is filled to the brim with excerpts from contemporary documents, sidebars about important historical figures and historical events, brief historiographies, brief recommendations for further reading, a lot of black and white and colour reproductions, which raise the cost of college textbooks to astronomic levels (a reflection of twenty-first century economic realities), and questions for students to ponder, should they choose to do so (I doubt if many do), after each chapter. If you are looking for a good, if far too brief introduction to Canadian history, a book written for a Canadian audience yet revealingly printed in the US (occasionally, apparently, imperialism reveals itself in print), you could do far worse than Bumsted's brief A History of the Canadian Peoples. For those looking for lengthier introductions to Canadian history I recommend  Bumsted's two volume The Peoples of Canada and R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald's Smith's Origins and Destinies.

The Books of My Life: An Historical Geography of Modern Australia

 

I don't recall exactly when this happened, but at some point in my intellectual life I developed an interest in comparing and contrasting human beings, human societies, and human cultures. I suspect that my  increasing interest in comparative studies during my undergraduate years initially derived from my work in Biblical Studies, a discipline that required an attentiveness to broader Near Eastern culture and to broader Mediterranean culture in general. 

My interest in comparative studies didn't end with Biblical Studies, however. It seemed to me that an interest in the study of humanity required that one explore human prehistory and history from a variety of disciplinary standpoints including Anthropology, Sociology, History, Culture Studies, Social Psychology, Biology, Environmental Studies, and beyond. As a consequence of this broadening out of my interests, my intellectual life suddenly changed direction and focus sometime in the 1980s as I was entering graduate school. 

My interest in comparative human studies was certainly one of reasons I was drawn to take a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, a discipline that attempts to look at humans through the lens of biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological holism or wholeism. My interest in comparative studies was also behind my growing interest in Comparative Historical Sociology and Comparative History. I became particularly interested in the comparative study of English and British settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If one wants to understand these societies and cultures, past or present, it seemed obvious to me, one had to compare them with what they were and are most like. If one wanted to understand the history of the United States, for instance, it seemed obvious to me that one needed to compare it to what it was most like, namely the other English and British settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Because of these broad interests I had a problem finding a disciplinary box that I could fit into and which fit me. Anthropology limited the comparative study of human society and culture to "exotic" traditional societies and cultures and anthropologists, at the time, looked askance at anyone who wanted to study modern core nation societies and cultures. Atheoretical History made doing comparative studies difficult because it parcelled out humans into little fetishised boxes of states and nation-states that novice historians were supposed to specialise in. Sociology, as taught in the US, tended to focus on, in typical naval gazing fashion, on the US. I did not realise for some time that there was a discipline out there in academialand, a discipline that paralls wholistic Anthropology, that would have allowed me to act on my holistic interests had I been aware of it, Geography. If I had been aware of Geography and specifically of its subdisciplines of Historical Geography and Cultural Geography, subdisciplines that were somewhat comparative and attentive to the five factors that affect human groups--economics, culture, demography, and politics-- I woud have taken my postgraduate degree in it.

As someone attracted to the comparative study of English and British settler societies I finally  got around to reading something I should have read years ago, J.M. Powell's seminal An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Resitive Fringe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Powell's book, which is more of a series of related essays on the history of Australian environment, the human adaptation to and transformation of that environment, Australian politics, Australian economic history, and Australian cultural history, than your typical textbook history of Australia, allows anyone with a basic understanding of US and Canadian histories, to compare and contrast these three English and British settler societies across time and across space. 

Reading An Historical Geography of Modern Australia from the vantage point of the history of English and British Settler Societies Studies, one quickly fastens on several fascinating similarities between Australia, Canada, and the United States. There is, for example, the fact that all three are the products of European and more specifically English and European geographical imperialism. There is the common federalism that often plays out in tensions between the federal government and the state and provincial governments and sometimes leads to threats of secession. There is the common notions of manifest destiny with its emphasis on settlement from sea to shining sea even when such settlement was and is geographically problematic. There is the common notion of chosenness,  messianism, and exceptionalism (variations on human ethnocentrism) that all three settler societies shared and share, notions that were and are tied to ideologies of progress and to imperialism and racism. There is the common notion of White supremacy amongst all three societies, an ethnocentric ideology that led to limits on who could immigrate to Australia, Canada, and the US until the post-World War II period. There is the shared manichean and binary ideology of bush or frontier good, cities bad. There is the shared emphasis on Lockean individualism and the yeoman farmer. There is the common notion in all three nations that economic growth is a good, something that aided and abetted the massive transformation of the environment that characterised and still characterises all three nations. There were the common gold rushes. There is the common environmental limits on settlement patterns particularly with respect to Australia and Canada, though when Americans reached the Plains and the deserts it too faced geographical barriers to settlement.  Needless to say, some, many, and perhaps most of these similarities can be traced back to the hearth of the mother country.

There are also, of course, differences between the English and British settler societies of Australia, the US, and Canada. Australia, for instance, as Powell notes, has long been, given down under environmental realities, quite urban. Interestingly, despite being an urban nation almost since its beginnings, Australians celebrated and continue, to some extent, to celebrate the macho rural Aussie of the bush as the epitome of Australianess.

For anyone interested in the history and historical geography of Commonwealth Australia and comparative English and British settler society studies, Powell's book, despite its age, is essential reading. Highly recommended.

Musings on Me, Me, Me and Greatest Good for the Greatest Number Liberalisms

 

When looked at dispassionately, something most people are unable to do, of course, there have clearly been two forms of liberalism that have dominated the core nation world of wealthy Northern and Western European states and European settler nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand since the Enlightenment: narcissistic or me, me, me liberalism and greatest good for the greatest number liberalism. One of the reasons this obvious fact has been missed and continues to be missed by so many, of course, is because of the dominance of demagoguery faux mass democratic societies.  For the vast majority of masses, fed as they are on the often delusional, conspiratorial, and manichean binary ideologies of the elites, ideology creates "reality" and one of the realities ideology has created is the ahistorical notion that narcissistic liberalism, particularly in its right wing populist form, is actually conservative when it isn't.

Laissez-faire or narcissistic liberalism, whether in its elite, middlebrow, or populist form, has been the dominant or hegemonic of the two, dominating many Western nation-states until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Utilitarian liberalism briefly dominated Western political culture from the Great Depression to the oil crises, deindustrialisation, and globalisation of the 1970s through the 1990s, all of which, in turn, allowed economic oligarchs to regain whatever political and economic control they had briefly and not always cheerfully ceded with a vengeance. While utilitarian liberalism has not disappeared and is stronger in some Western nations like the Scandinavian countries of Europe and in some intellectual circles even today, narcissistic liberalism came to dominate in nation-states, particularly in those nation-states that really mattered like Imperial America, the dominant economic, political, cultural, and geographic power of the post-World War Two era.

There have been and are a host of myths associated with both forms of liberalism. Laissez faire liberals like to talk the free trade talk but have had and continue to have no problem accepting government wealthfare and of engaging in the monopolistic and cartellistic managerial practises associated with corporations pointing up the hyperbole or hypocrisy of their keep the state out of the economy rhetoric. After all, if Adam Smith is right and the economy works best all on its own, managers are unnecessary. Narcissistic liberals have also developed ideologies--one assumes it helps some of them sleep at night--by which they convince themselves, or at least convince others, the demagogued masses, that greed will raise all floating boats despite the reality that only a very few boats actually float, a fetish that points up the theological and dogmatic underpinnings of narcissistic liberalism. 

Utilitarian liberalism, despite its reformist rhetoric, has often been limitedly reformist in practise. Its elite political practitioners, after all, have had and continue to have close ties with economic elites and its political practitioners are hardly, as is true of virtually all politicians and of all humans for whatever reason, immune to the personal "pleasures" of plunder and power and the perquisites that have typically accompanied both. Utilitarian liberalism, in other words, reminds analysts that they need to explore the always present differences between rhetoric and reality. As with the narcissistic liberals utilitarian liberals have developed their own comforting myths that presumably help them sleep at night including the one that they really want to help the poor and American minorities though they have never been really able to clairfy how they can do this by cosying up to the economic elite and doing much of their bidding just like their narcissistic liberal kissing cousins.

One of the fundamental problems for the once seemingly invincible greatest good for the greatest number liberalism  (seemingly invincible from the vantage point of the early 1960s) today is that core nation-states have become too big, too unwieldy, too complex, too one size fits all bureaucratic, too impersonal (at the same time that it is dominated by oligarchic personal networks), too distant, and too consumerist (I buy therefore I am) oriented, to be able to manage the corporation that we call a core nation-state today. This inability of elites to be able to manage large territorial and governmental entities is almost certainly one of the reasons, money and power and the global nature of megacorporations are others, for the revival of political, economic, cultural, and geographic regionalism we have seen in federalist states like the US, Canada, and Australia since the oil crisis, deindustrialisation, and globalisation. 

The solution to this state of affairs would seem to be obvious: core nation-state downsizing, a downsizing that would play out in the development and emergence of smaller nation-states like Quebec or alliances between regions such as that along the west coast of Canada and the US. Of course, there are countervailing forces which make the obvious solution to deal with the multiplicity of problematic "issues" difficult including nationalism with its associated delusions and its inherently manichean and hence binary hallucinations amongst them my cock is bigger and harder than yours militarism and holier than thou populist Big State paternalism.