A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Google the Pimp

 

There is no doubt about it any longer. The slaggy Google is the biggest pimp and the biggest hypocrite on the planet. It is even a bigger pimp and hypocrite than its close cousin, the skanky Facebook, which is stuck in a kind of eternal Zeno's paradox as it tries to catch up with Google in the hypocritical sweepstakes.

Like all social media Google and its flunky YouTube, have a set "community standards", one of which is not free speech. However, in true hypocritical and capitalist vampire fashion, Google and YouTube ban some for supposedly--they refer to it as "may"-- violate community standards. At the same time, however, this Pimpy Hypocrite simultaneously keeps videos up that "may", nay certainly, violate the selectively applied community standards they proclaim. What is behind this selectivity? It should be obvious. The videos Google and YouTube keep up despite their misogyny, their mythfications, their crude language, and their falsity because they make monies for this corporate cartel and worshipper of Mammon (Halleludollar). Now that is what I call situational ethics and situational bullshiting. And this, of course, makes Google, despite its self-serving rhetoric, a typical capitalist corporation, a flim flammer.

I have finally grown weary of this pimping hypocritical corporation filled to the gills with hubris and selective self-righteousness. As a consequence I have decided to dump Gmail into the rubbish bin of fascist history where this digital Elmer Gantry belongs. Pity that it won't stay where it belongs. 

Newton Minow once referred to American television as a vast wasteland. Compared to American television, however, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and social media in general are the real lower than low common denominator vast wasteland. Welcome to the brave new digital world of anti-intellectualism. I wonder if Minow is spinning in his grave?

Life as Crisis Management: The TracFone Kiada, the Sequel

Today is very likely the day that I will ever purchase TracFone service again. Half of the time that I have had TracFone service the service has been at best mediocre and often dismal. Back in 2021, for instance, my online account page was malfunctioning. The only way I could get it fixed was to file a complaint with the office of the Attorney General of New York and after about a month the malfunction was fixed by someone at TracFone after a series of emails between the two of us.

Well today, in 2023, the problems with the online account page are back for a return engagement again. According to my account page my unlimited plan with unlimited talk and unlimited text was set to expire in March of 2024. Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I tried to make a call and I got Straight Talk. When I called Straight Talk I was told the online accounts page was wrong and that one of my plans, the unlimited one, had expired and my limited plan would expire in 2024. Why they didn't roll these two into one another is a mystery. well perhaps not a mystery since it increases TracFone profits.

 
So I, stupidly, bought another Tracfone unlimited plan. And, of course, my online accounts page is a disaster again. The wrong email is attached to the account--I am eliminating all Google service--the corporation that is evil--and going with alternatives. And I can no longer get into my accounts page to do anything anymore save spend my time doing the circle game, namely, putting my account information into the accounts page at least three times before I can get to my service information, which now, I am told, expires in 2025 though I have my doubts about the veracity of this information given past experience.

So, as I said, I am likely going to explore alternative phone service when this TracFone plan expires. I will also be contacting the New York AG yet again about the incompetency of this corporation. The TracFone accounts online page has to be in the Crappy Accounts Pages Top Ten list, though that of Empire Blue gives TracFone a run for its money. Sadly, the fact that TracFone has been scarfed up by cartel Verizon hasn't helped it move off that list. Apparently as long as TracFone is around the AG of NYS will not be lonely.
 

The Books of My Life: The Culture of Western Europe

 

Over the course of my intellectual life I have had a number of mentors including Max Weber, Karl Mark, Karl Mannheim, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner, to name just a few. Most of these mentors mentored me not in the classroom but rather through the books and journal articles they wrote and which I read. The books and journal articles I read  made me think critically about evidence, methodology, and theory, all things essential to reflect upon if one hopes to understand the human comedy, the human farce, the human drama, and the human tragedy in all its forms, something I have been trying to do for at least forty years.

Another thing my mentors taught me since they taught in a variety of academic disciplines was the importance of interdisciplinarity, something far too often lost in the specialised study of trees that has been central to academic intellectual life since the twentieth-century. I came to realise that the boundaries marking off disciplinary borders in academe and particularly in the academic social sciences, disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, economics, and psychology, were and are artificial, arbitrary, and socially constructed fetishes or reifications. Over time I came to see that the artificial intellectual borders that marked off one academic discipline from another inhibited rather than helped one understand, in an integrated way, that all human beings are economic, political, cultural, geographic, and biological-demographic animals and that by looking at humans through these ideal types we could understand human life in all of its better angel and less better angel forms. The wholistic approach to the study of humanity was something that appealed greatly to me since I quickly came to identity myself primarily as a cultural anthropologist, as someone, in other words, who saw himself as part of a discipline which, at least in North America, was grounded in the assumption that to understand humanity one needed to study human biology, human language, human society, human culture, and human prehistory. Lastly, my mentors taught me that the study of humankind must be comparative if one was to truly and fully understand humankind.

Initially, I was only limitedly interested in history, a discipline that studied humans across time. I, was of course, forced to take history classes in high school. I was, however, only limitedly stimulated by them.  When I got to college I tended to focus my attention instead on the social sciences, disciplines which were not taught in the high school I attended. Now don't get me wrong, I was interested in history but history as a methodology rather than as an academic course of reading or study. So while I was not particularly interested in history as an academic discipline I did understand that the study of human beings must not only be reflexive, comparative, and social scientific but it must also be historical. Given this I, over time, became more and more interested in history as a discipline in addition to history as a method though I would still maintain that history is more of a methodology than an academic discipline. 

Despite my limited interest in the discipline of history in my early academic years there were a few historians who had an immense impact on my subsequent intellectual development. I can still recall some forty years later, for instance, reading Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic in Robert Janelli's class on folklore and religion at Indiana University. Its integration of theory, method, and anthropologically sensitive history had an immense impact on how I approached both theoretically and methodologically the study of humankind. Another historian who also had an immense impact on my intellectual development was George Mosse. I read Mosse's book Toward the Final Solution for a class on the Holocaust that I took with Todd Edelman who, at the time, taught at Indiana. I was gobsmacked by Mosse's exploration of the cultures that led to the Shoah in the 1930s and 1940s in Western Europe.  Both Thomas and Mosse made me see that for cultural anthropology, sociology, and social psychology to have any validity at all they all, in addition, had to be historical, must explore humankind in time as well as space, in some way, shape, or form. It was for that reason that I eventually matriculated in a history faculty in my postgraduate years, though I continued to find the discipline of history too theoretically and methodologically anemic and hence too parochial.

Though I am now retired I continue to read extensively in the social sciences and in history. Recently I read Mosse's (University of Wisconsin, Hebrew University) brilliant The Culture of Western Europe: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Chicago: Rand McNally, second edition,  1974). As in Toward the Final Solution Mosse superbly traces, if in greater detail, the cultures and ideologies that impacted Western Europe (and the Western settler societies beyond Europe including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States) that dominated those two centuries in the The Culture of Western Europe. In the book Mosse explores what he argues is central to the cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western Europe, namely, the separation of culture. the "real", from civilisation, the "artificial". 

Mosse's book takes readers on an excursion through the several -isms that dominated the epoch: romanticism, nationalism, racism, liberalism, conservatism, idealism, socialism, marxism, scientism or positivism, and fascism. These ideal type -isms, as they interacted with the historical dynamics of the era, argues Mosse, particularly modernity with its scientism, industrialisation, bureaucratisation, and mass society, have taken various hybridic forms, Despite taking various forms over these years, contends Mosse, all of these cultures or ideologies tended to emphasise, as Mosse makes clear, culture over civilisation. This distinction, argues Mosse, eventually led to the genocidal mania of the 1930s and 1940s, a genocide in which romanticism, with its notion of the organic real, culture, became affixed to mass racial nationalism (the culture collective blood and collective soil), mass culture, mass industrialisation, and mass modern technology. Together these led to genocide on a modern mass scale, the Holocaust.

The ideal type cultures or ideologies Mosse delineates, of course, as anyone who has been paying attention to increasing autocracy in Eastern Europe and the United States, are still with us today in the core nation West, a fact that adds an eerie been there done that quality to the historical tale Mosse tells. Though many after World War Ii, a war many thought of as a war against tyrannical fascism, argued that romantic, nationalist, and racist fascism had been tossed onto the rubbish bin of history once and for all, Mosse rightly notes in the conclusion to The Culture of Western Europe, that  the culture and ideology of fascism will never fade away. In the United States, for instance, romanticism has been integrated with nationalism and industrial capitalism to give us the most recent version of intolerant, nativist, and theocratic (my way of the highway) right wing Christian fascism. As Mosse notes, this combination of romanticism, nationalism, racism, and intolerance is a very effective meaning system, an effective meaning system that provides, particularly in times of economic, political, and cultural stress, simplistic answers to complex realities, all wrapped up in a simple minded manichean tale of us good and them evil, a manichean tale in which the "true Americans" must save America from devious liberal/Marxist/socialist/fascist enemies who are sapping America's very essence or soul.

Mosse's books, including The Culture of Western Europe, remain, in my opinion, among the most important and revelatory books published in the post-World War II era. It was a wonderful experience revisiting the work of someone I regard as one of the twentieth century's greatest historians some forty years or so after I read Toward the Final Solution in a class on the Holocaust. The Culture of Western Europe should, in my opinion, be read by anyone interested in history, particularly Western history, Western cultural history, and cultural studies. Very strongly recommended. 

There is, by the way, a third edition of The Culture of Western Europe which was published in 1988. I have not seen the third edition of the book though I am interested in taking a look at the recent University of Wisconsin Press reprint of the book, an edition which apparently restores the maps and illustrated material from the first edition of the book that had been taken out in the second. I am interested in taking a look at the new edition of the book because I have a sneaking suspicion that it may be yet another example of the dumbing down of university textbooks in the wake of the demographic revolution in American universities after the 1960s, the decline in student cultural capital, a decline so immense that one can no longer assume that all students have a basic understanding of history of Europe since the Enlightenment let alone of the Christian Bible, a book that has had an immense impact on the culture of Western society, and the ever increasing corporate businessification of universities throughout the West. If I recall correctly, I first noticed this dumbing down of university textbooks while I was preparing to teach a course on American religion. I intended to use Catherine Albanese's excellent America: Religions and Religion for the course, a book I had read in its 1998 edition. But when I compared the 1998 edition with the 2006 edition I was horrified to discover that over two hundred pages of Albanese's book had simply vanished from the book between the third and fourth editions. This cleansing of pages from the book, a cleansing I increasingly suspected was a response to the decline in student cultural capital and the retail model of education that dominates the culture of American administrators who run American research universities these days. After all American universities have become more and more like a glorified high school since the 1970s, an era that has not only seen the adoption of a retail model by the increasingly corporate capitalist administrators who dream of moving up the corporate status ladder by making their administrative mark on American colleges and universities, and an era which has been characterised by the difficulties in getting students to read even a short book of approximately 100 to 200 pages.

Life as Crisis Management: The Portable CD Player Kiada

 

Within the last couple of years the CD players in my Bose Acoustic Wave and Wave systems stopped functioning. After over twenty years of service I guess I really can't complain too much despite the exorbitant cost of these systems. Because I wanted to play CDs on both systems--the sound quality coming out of the speakers isn't bad compared to other small systems--I decided to hook up portable CD players to both using a 3.5 mm RCA cable. It has turned out to be a pain in the arse, or, to put it more poshly, a Sisypean task. 

I have now purchased four portable CD players: the Desobry 5196-CD-B, the Monodeal MD 109, the Monodeal MD-601, and most recently the Gueray 8541720907. And all of them have the same problem,  hence the pain in the arse comment above. All four, far too often--sometimes on two out of three classical discs--stop playing suddenly on the last track, or, in the case of the Gueray, on the second to last track. One of the players, one of the Monodeal's also decided randomly to begin on the last track rather than the first contrary to programming.

I don't know what the problem is with these four portable CD players. Is it an inherent technical problem with the player? Is it because a passing car or a passing car with some communication device passes by causing the players to shut down during the last or second to last track? Is it because none of these players can play discs as long as your typical classical CD? Is it because modern postmodern technology is simply shite? So much for the brave new digital age. Whatever the reason, this is annoying as hell for several reasons and given this I won't be buing a Desobry, Monodeal, or a Gueray in the future for, in my mind, they are all pieces of malfunctioning shite. Caveat emptor.

The Books of My Life: The Sky is Falling

 

Peter Biskind's The Sky is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism (New York: New Press, 2018) is a sequel to his Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt, 1983). In Seeing is Believing Biskind argued that analysts can categorise and classify films culturally along ideological lines. There are, he claims, the films of the consensual centre (corporate liberal or pluralist and conservative), films of the extremist right, and films of the  extremist left. Corporate liberal or pluralist films, Biskind contends, emphasise science and technology and make heroes of its scientists. Conservative films tend to praise the forces of order and make heroes of its soldiers and cops. Left wing films tend to break down the us versus them binary and try to understand and even side with  the "alien", the other, someone or something that is often ultimately a metaphor or allegory for us, we humans. Right wing films tend to make heroes of those seeking revenge and valorise individualism.

In the years between 1950 and the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, America changed, argues Biskind, particularly after the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Those years saw the transformation of the United States from an America dominated by a New Deal political culture and practise to one dominated by neoliberal ideologies and practises. During those years the era of end of ideology ended and American political culture was transformed, thanks to the reaction of the "silent majority" to the counterculture and the civil rights movement, the advent of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, globalisation, hyperindividualism or narcissism, from an America with a supposed consensus on politics, economics, and culture, the New Deal-Great Society political culture, to an America fighting seemingly never ending cold wars over economics, politics, and culture. By the 1970s America, with its cities burning, its students being shot on college campuses, its rageholism resulting from busing for integration and equal education, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the increasing Repulicanisation of some White Northern ethnics and many of the South's Dixiecrats, among other things, seemed on the verge of the end of days. By the end of the century, fin-de-siecle American films and television screens were filled not with end of history fantasies about the triumph of American liberalism, but instead with science fiction and horror fantasies about vampire apocalypses, zombie apocalypses, superhero apocalypses (a category that would include the cop superhero we are good they are evil propaganda common on US television), and even those good old time if ever changing with the times right wing White Christian apocalypses.

This fraying of the United States's cultural and ideological consensus and the "rebirth" of culture or ideological wars wasn't only, according to Biskind, reflected in the ideologies of American political culture. They were also mirrored in American films and on American television where the liberal and conservative consensus in so many of the films of the 1950s began to break down. The films of the centre, the films of the old consensus of the 1950s, are still being made, notes Biskind, and they still preach the gospel of good old end of ideology civility, pluralism (though this has moved beyond the supposed 1950s Catholic/Protestant/Jewish pluralism of the era), the progressive nature of science, that American political and economic institutions still work, and that the forces of order can and will keep anarchy at bay. The HBO centrist television show Game of Thrones, for instance, privileges the pluralistic coalition of Jon Snow over the tribalism of Cersei Lannister while still placing that old Victorian warhorse, the family, and that other centrist Victorian warhorse, home, at the heart of the show.

Many of these centrist films are no longer what they used to be, however, notes Biskind. Some of them reflect Hollywoods hedging of its bets by incorporating--Hollywood does love to paint by demographic numbers for fun and profit--elements of the left and right into them making them, in the process, a cultural and ideological hybrid, a jingle and jangle, a yin and yang of cultural and ideological discourses. As a consequence these having your cake and eating it too films and television shows have built in something for anyone whether centre, left, or right. Star Wars, for instance, hid its anti-imperialist message behind a fog of Hollywood serial nostalgia and popular culture intertextuality and helped create passive consumers drugged up on the spectacle of bread and circuses special effects and romance, something that would soon expand the fan boy culture of comic books, creating, in the process, a fan culture in which fans identified with and simulated the characters in the film and television shows they worshipped at the many comic cons that arose and expanded in the era. This fan culture of identity simulation was quite different from the craze for films as films and the directors who made them that characterised the cinephile culture of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. This paint by the demographic numbers strategy has given us, for instance, the AMC television show The Walking Dead and the HBO show True Blood, television shows that provide viewers with right wing bleed the hearts--and we see a lot of hearts bleeding in these two shows--those on right can identity with and, at the same time, bleeding hearts those on the left can identity with.

In parallel to these developments in the films of the consensual centre, the era from Nixon to George W. Bush also saw the the increasing importance of "extremist" films of the right and the left, claims Biskind. Films and television shows that were once marginal B level Hollywood films and films made by independent filmmakers like American International, have, claims Biskind, become more prominent and even, in some cases, gone mainstream. Right wing films are of two types, argues Biskind. The films of the secular right and the films of the religious right. The secular right films and television programmes today are less John Wayne, one of the most beloved actors of the 1950s and 60s and the premier example of the independent loner cowboy fated to pass away along with American frontier in such movies as The Seekers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, than those of that prime example of the 1970s and post 1970s bleeder of hearts, Clint Eastwood of Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josie Wales fame. Jack Bauer, the Clint Eastwood stand in in the television show 24, for example, violates the law and engages in torture to keep America safe again and again from a host of Snidely Whiplash terrorists of mostly Islamic, Eastern European, and Chinese persuasion. Deceased former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was so taken with Dirty Jack and his act that he asked how any prosecutor in his right mind could bring charges against the man who saved America again again, something that tells us, Biskind argues, about the increasing prominence and influence of secular right wing films and television shows in American political and ideological culture since Nixon, and something that may tell us something about how important simulacra have become in a media saturated world and an America where film and television celebrities are often elected to political office.

The other strand of right wing films are those of the religious right according to Biskind. The films and television programmes (and literary forbearers) of the religious right, such as the seemingly endless Left Behind series of sixteen books and four films, trods trails that emerged in the Victorian era in mainstream and hegemonic Protestantism, ideologies in which the end times are coming thanks to secular humanism and urban decadence and decay. In these religious horror films good Christians are raptured, bad secularists are up fire creek without a paddle, and those secularists somewhere in between have a choice to make: either get born again and become a bride of Christ or suffer the pain and torments of a world become hellish and await the day of judgement. Speaking of hell, the secularists have their own mundane versions of hell such as the Wessex of ITV's Broadchurch and the Yorkshire of the BBC's Happy Valley where murderers, predators, rapists, and serial killers walk and stalk the streets of the small towns in which the story takes place.

Like the films and television shows of the once extremist right, secular and religious, the films and television shows of the extremist left, though they are more marginal and lesser in numbers than those of the centre and right in post-Nixonian America, also moved away from the consensual centre, writes Biskind. Avatar, for instance, condemns imperialism, including American imperialism, and celebrates the other, in Aviator's case the Na'vi, the natives of the planet that is being invaded by the military, industrial, and scientific forces of the centre. They also challenge, maintains Biskind, the essentialism of the consensual centre, In Avatar, for example, some of the scientists who have landed on the planet to help the military-industrial-governmental exploit the planets natural resource, go rogue from the establishment once they realise what the oligarchic complex is up to. Eventually, two of the rogues join with the Na'vi to fight the exploitative imperialism of the invaders and at least one of the rebels goes native by becoming Na'vi, making them us and us them, if limitedly, in the process, something that has been common in leftist films since the 1950s, claims Biskind.

In his conclusion to the The Sky is Falling, Biskind argues that the demise of the centre, to paraphrase Mark Twain, may have been somewhat exaggerated after the 1970s. Biskind suggests that the centre has revived thanks to the Jack Bauer meets Mort Downey Jr. meets WWE wrestling regime of Donald Trump, a man who has been married multiple times, publicly brags about his sexual conquests, and who publicly makes fun of the disabled. Keep your eyes on the trailer skies for coming film and television attractions of left, right, and centre, or perhaps on the writings of Peter Biskind so we can ascertain whether Biskind's hypothesis about the reviving centre has merit. Perhaps with the 2022 repudiation of elements of the delusional right wing notion that Democrats stole the election of 2020 Hollywood will tack increasingly back toward the centre, assuming, of course, that there is profit to be made by doing so.

Biskind's book should be read by anyone interested in the history of American film and television in the post-Nixon era of American history. Its textual approach, one that takes culture seriously, shows what can be done with the history of cinema and television when one puts films and television shows in the context of history, society, and culture rather than in the context of psychoanalysis with all its accompanying problems as does the crystal ball school of textualism that dominates so much film and television studies these days. While largely grounded in textual analysis with references to interviews with directors, actors, creators, and some polling data, The Sky is Falling is, because it is grounded in history and broadly focused on economic, cultural, and political forces, Biskind's approach to film and television, which finds culture war battles on the surface of filmic and televisual texts, seems, at least to me, far more valuable, valid, fruitful, and compelling than that of cult of crystal ball textualism, which finds ahistorical culture wars devouring texts from beneath them. Another thing The Sky is Falling nicely does is point up the problems associated with the polemical discourse of American conservatives and the American right, namely that Hollywood is a den and web of internationalist and traitorous leftists who are trying to brainwash the masses with their anti-American hogwash. It isn't, as The Sky is Falling nicely shows by isolating centre, right wing, and left wing variants of Hollywood cinema. Hollywood, contrary to the socially and culturally constructed fantasies of the paranoid and conspiratorial right, makes a lot of right wing films as Biskind shows. Very highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: Your Country, My Country

Robert Bothwell's Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) is yet another entry into the are United States and Canada similar or are they different sweepstakes. Like so many books written on this subject, one constituting perhaps what might now be called a sub-genre of English and British Settler Society Studies, Your Country, My Country is written by a Canadian (my country), a Canadian historian in this instance, a fact which, in itself, may say something about the stereotype of the Canadian obsession with the elephant living next door (your country) and the widespread American lack of interest in its neighbour lying to its north save as a place for vacationing or imagining.

The issue of Canadian and American similarities or differences in the Canadian and American post-World War II scholarly and academic worlds, was stimulated by and dominated by (and perhaps still is) by a book which began life as a Columbia University dissertation and which was published by the University of California Press in 1950  Agrarian Socialism: The Cooperative Commonwealth Federation in Saskatchewan, a Study in Political Sociology. In Agrarian Socialism up and coming sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset focused his gaze on the democratic socialist political party that largely governed Saskatchewan from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, in order to ask a larger question, namely why democratic socialism was successful in Canada but not in the most advanced industrial nation on the planet to its south, the United States, the place where it (along with Germany, the other industrialising giant of the nineteenth and early twentieth century) should have been successful if much socialist theory was correct and a question, not surprisingly, that has exercised the minds of many Western socialist intellectuals ever since. 

In Agrarian Socialism and in subsequent books including The First New Nation, published in its first edition in 1963, Continental Divide, published in 1989, and American Exceptionalism, published in 1996, Lipset traced the differences between the Canada and the United States to several historical factors that, he argued, made the United States "exceptional" or unique. According to Lipset, the lack of feudalism in the United States (something Louis Hartz would emphasise in his Liberal Tradition in America of 1955 and in the collection of essays he edited and contributed to on the subject of Latin and English/British settler societies, The Founding of New Societies of 1964), the consequent prevalence of equality in the United States, an equality that opened up opportunities for many of European background in the United States (something that De Tocqueville made much of in his Democracy in America of 1935), and the migration, often forced, of British loyalists out of the new United States after the civil war that rent North America in the late eighteenth century, the war Americans refer to as the American Revolution, and into the nineteenth. These differences, Lipset argued, initially made Canada, born in Tory loyalty to Great Britain and the Crown and reaction to the more radically Whig United States, more conservative than the new United States. Paradoxically, according to Lipset, conservative Canada would prove more conducive to Western European style democratic socialism in part because of this British and consequent European heritage.

Others have followed in Lipset's footsteps. Social scientist and pollster Michael Adams, for instance, argued in his Fire and Ice (2004) that the notion that Canadians and Americans were converging on a variety of social indices was more myth than reality. The Canadian historical geographer James Lemon, in contradistinction to those who argued that Canadian and American cities were similar and were converging even more in the post World War Ii era, argued that there were significant political, economic, central city, suburban, and planning differences that characterised Canadian cities like Toronto and American cities like Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in his Liberal Dreams and Nature's Limits (1997).

Not everyone, of course, agreed with Lipset's conclusions despite the fact that Canadian exceptionalism had become and remains a central symbol of Canadian nationalism just as American exceptionalism was and is a central symbol of American nationalism. Some, including many politicians particularly south of the 49th parallel, have emphasised the similarities between Canada and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) including their common federalisms, their common liberal heritage with its emphasis on liberty, freedom, equality, and private property, their common language (if you exclude French Canada), their common Protestant religious culture (again if one excludes French Quebec), their common Anglo-Saxon demographies and Anglo-Saxon political and economic dominance, their common capitalist economic culture, their common foreign policy interests, their similar immigration patterns, and their common popular culture, and pondered why the two nations have not yet merged (the high apologetical and polemical priests of what we would today call the Anglosphere which currently includes Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand), something the United States tried to bring about, of course, through force on several occasions via its several invasions of Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a reflection of the ideology of American manifest destiny, a closely related symbol to the central symbol of the American nationalist faith, American exceptionalism.

Others, like Robert Bothwell, have emphasised both the similarities and differences between Canada and the United States. Bothwell's "unified" selective history of the two countries is, despite the claims of one truly deluded Amazon poster who claims that My Country, Your Country is an example of demonic social history, actually pretty standard traditional (meaning late nineteenth and most of twentieth century history) historical fare given its focus on great events, including wars, great treaties, and great men even though it does have a bit of quantitative social history and cultural history thrown into the mix for good measure. 

 

Bothwell emphasises the role that both history and geography have played in making Canada and the United States both similar and different. Given the important role Great Britain has historically played in British North America, Canada, and the United States, Bothwell rightly notes that both Canada and the United States are English and British settler societies and that have both been impacted economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and even geographically (Great Britain, particularly its navy, served as protector of both in the nineteenth century) and hence united by the fact that they are both English and British settler societies. That doesn't mean, however, as Bothwell notes that there haven't been or aren't differences between the two. As Bothwell notes, the similarities and differences between Canada and the United Stares have ebbed and flowed across historical time and geographical space. In times of tension between the two nations, such as during the American Revolution and the civil war between Britain that followed in the early nineteenth century, periods of tensions over trade, periods of tension over civil rights for Blacks and over America's imperial adventures in Vietnam, they have ebbed. In periods of common political and economic purpose such as World War I, World War II, the early Cold War, and willingness to create an Canadian and American "free" trade zone, they have flowed.

There is, to borrow a phrase from Seinfeld, nothing wrong with My Country, Your Country generally or with Bothwell's understandably, given the length of the book and its subject matter, traditionalist approach to the history of Canadian and American interactions and similarities and differences. Nor is there anything wrong with Bothwell's ruminations on a theme one also finds in a book by two Canadian sociologists, Edward Grabb and James Curtis, Regions Apart (2010) and the American Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America (1982), namely that there are more similarities than differences between certain Canadian and American regions than to other parts of their respective nations. Clearly oil rich Alberta, (the dominance of oil in the Albertan economy makes that province vulnerable to the ebb and flows of the speculative stock market as recent history shows) and other parts of the Canadian Prairies, for instance, share more with parts of the American West, South, Midwest, Oklahoma and most of all Texas than with Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, and even British Columbia while the American Northeast shares a lot with Ontario. All this, if it is true, of course, means that Canada and the US are not really nations but nations within nations, a fact that increases tensions within both states.

There are a lot of things to like about Bothwell's book. I appreciated his integration of the mother country, well one of the mother countries, Great Britain, into the book. I appreciated Bothwell's emphasis on history and change as being important in the study of Canadian and American similarities and differences. I appreciated Bothwell's attentiveness,  if more in theory than in practise, to the reality of subcultural and countercultural variants of the dominant or hegemonic culture of difference and similarity in both nations.

 

That said, I did find things to criticise, as critics always do, in Bothwell's book. Some readers would, I am sure, myself included, have liked to have seen a healthier dose of cultural analysis in My Country, Your Country, something that Bothwell could have done, for instance, by exploring the playful depictions of Canadian and American similarities and differences in a Canadian and American television show that made Canadian similarities and differences and their myths and realities central to its tale, Due South. An exploration of Due South (CTV, CBS) would also have allowed Bothwell to explore the vast differences in American and Canadian power given that the show was on life support twice thanks to CBS pulling its money out of the show. It remained on the air, though in shorter form and somewhat changed, thanks, in part, to the BBC, a fact that would have allowed Bothwell to explore the continuing ties between Canada and Great Britain (a relationship that also ebbed and flowed), something that he makes so much of in My Country, Your Country. Others would probably liked to have seen greater exploration of the sketchy comparisons Bothwell makes between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, British settler societies all, that are simultaneously similar and different (and whose similarities and differences have also ebbed and flowed) from one another thanks to their somewhat different post-colonial histories. Some, like myself, likely will have preferred a more systematic and analytical exploration of Canadian and American identity and identities as opposed to the implied one Bothwell offers. Some, like myself, may object to Bothwell's manichean division between Western democracies and authoritarian regimes and find this binary problematic given that Canada and the US have long been oligarchies and, with the coming of managerial capitalism in the Victorian era, became even more oligarchic thanks to their corporate economic and political bureaucracies, something that resulted in the increasing political power of economic elites. Needless to say, the USSR was also a modern oligarchic bureaucracy. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's speculation that one may be able to usefully compare post-1960s "reliably" liberal (but not reliably Liberal) francophones with post-1960s reliably liberal Hispanics in the US interesting while at the same time recognising that it was a prophecy that would prove rather premature given the success of Republicans in places like Texas with some Hispanic voter. Some, like myself, may find Bothwell's book a bit too gossipy at times.

 

So whither Canada and the United States? Both Canada and the United States have changed, as Bothwell notes, just as they have before, during that era dominated by the theocratic Church of Neoliberalism in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States (and Australia and New Zealand) with its powerful mandarin priesthood. All three countries have experienced a radical increase in the chasm between the rich class and status group and other class and status groups and a consequent increase in the power of economic oligarchs to determine "public" policy. They have also experienced, perhaps even more worryingly, a decline in fact if not in mythhistocially inscribed fiction, in social mobility, so much so, in fact, that the old Canadian and American dream of opportunity, mobility, and making it, seems to be more alive and well in the more democratic socialist nations with higher tax rates and larger social security or social insurance nets of the Nordicsphere than in the increasingly lower taxes, shrinking social security net states of increasingly neoliberal Canada and the United States. And perhaps, as Bothwell suggests, that is why there is increasing regional political, cultural, and ideological tensions within both Canada and the US these days, something both the demagogic Trump and his increasingly looney Republican Party and the demagogues in the increasingly looney and once again renamed Conservative Party of Canada manipulate for fun and/or electoral profit.

 

In the end, Bothwell and others are right. regardless of how alike and how different Canada and the United States are in the end both Canada and the US serve as a reflecting and deflecting mirrors for the mythhistories, whatever those mythhistories might be and however these mythhistories are interpreted by dominant, subcultural, or countercultural elements in each country, of each other. And that makes the comparative study of the similarities and differences--economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic--between Canada and the United States, fascinating. I highly recommend Bothwell's book to anyone interested in comparative history, comparative settler society history, Canadian history, American history, and relations between the two.

The Books of My Life: The Culture of the Cold War

The history of American culture and the history of American religion can be profitably understood, at least in part, as the product of a series of cultural, ideological, and religious revivals that have occurred in the North American colonies and provinces and the United States over the years. They can be seen, in other words, as the product of a series of religious, cultural, and ideological awakenings characterised by an increase in religious belief or fervour and an increase in religiosity, an increase in those claiming to be religious and in the number of believers attending the services of their religious organisations.

America's revivals weren't simply religious revivals in the narrow sense, however. America's revivalists, including Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, generally saw their revivals not only in religious terms but also in nationalist or Americanist terms. Such a linkage should not be surprising given that nationalism itself is, at the very least like (and actually is) a religion in that it is a meaning system (ideologies) that takes cultural and institutional form (symbols, rituals, icons, stories, bureaucracies) and has its own chosen people, its own chosen land, its own chosen myths, its own chosen mythic heroes, its own chosen economic system, capitalism, and its own chosen political system, "democracy". As a consequence many of America's revivalists saw the revivals not only as divine occurrences that spread the good news of Christ, as they interpreted him, but also as a divine occurrence that strengthened what was for them an inherently Christian nation or, more accurately, an inherently Protestant Christian nation, the United States of America. For many of America's Protestants, Christianity, as they understood it, was thus American Christianity and the United States of America, as they understood it, was a if not the, Christian nation, and both, as they understood them, were inextricably linked to one another since America was god's chosen land and god's chosen religion was their religion, "mainstream" or dominant American Protestantism.

The ties between American "mainstream" or politically and demographically dominant Protestantism and the American political culture have not gone unnoticed by those who have studied and continue to study America. As historians have noted over the years the First Great Awakening, a revival often tied to the efforts of George Whitfield, played a major role in laying the foundations of a common identity among America's colonists, an identity grounded in the distinction between the colonial "us" from them, the colonising "other", Great Britain. The Second Great Awakening, a revitalisation tied to Charles Finney, many historians tell us, helped provide Americans and America itself with a hegemonic or dominant meaning system grounded in "mainstream" Protestantism. Even more Americans came to believe, as a consequence of the second great revival, that the United States was god's nation, at least potentially and that they should help make it so, that the United States was, at least potentially, a chosen land populated, at least potentially, by god's chosen people, and that they should help make them so, and that the American nation was, at its best, a light unto a world in varying degrees of darkness. Many of America's missionaries who conflated American Protestantism and Nationalist Protestant Americanism thus helped spread not only the gospel of Christianity at home and abroad but also, given the links between American Protestantism and American nationalism, the good news of America itself, that promised land of capitalist get rich quick milk and "democratic" honey, across the nation and around the world.

A number of social scientists and historians, including, perhaps most notably William McLoughlin, have taken note of the link between Christian revival and American nationalist revitalisation. Many of America's revivals, after all, occurred around the same time as heightened great power tensions and great power wars.  Revivals in Colonial New England occurred at a time of heightened tensions between France and Great Britain. Some, have argued that the Salem Witch Trials with its denunciations and its torture and execution of "witches", for instance, was a product of these great power tensions. The First Great Awakening occurred in an atmosphere of tensions between Great Britain and the colonials. Some have argued that the new sects of this revival, Baptists and Methodists, helped give birth to a "democratic" current in colonial America. The Second Great Awakening occurred in the context of tensions over who was and who was not an American. This era saw attacks on Masons, Mormons, and Catholics for being "un-American" in their behaviours and for being members of social groups or social groups that were perceived as autocratic or authoritarian. The revival of the Great War era was characterised by the modernist anti-modernist crusade of Billy Sunday, an awakening where evolution and modern biblical criticism were linked to the evil Hun who many believed was the essence of evil in the modern world, who many believed was Hitler before Hitler. This revival era saw the deportation of aliens (particularly political and ideological "aliens") from America's shores, limits on freedom of speech, and the deportation of labouring men and women from Arizona who were crammed into cattle cars and dumped in the deserts of New Mexico simply for having the audacity to organise for wage increases and better working conditions. This early twentieth century revival eventually split American Protestant evangelicalism into "traditionalist" and "modernist' or liberal camps, split American denominations, most notably, the Presbyterian Church, into "traditional" and "liberal variants, split schools of theology into "traditional" and "modernist" variants, most famously Princeton Theological Seminary, and led, at least in part, to the rise of American fundamentalism, a social movement centred on the defence of the literal interpretation of the Bible and of Victorian norms and values. The Cold War anti-modernist revival most associated with Billy Graham painted the evil godless communism of the USSR as a threat not only to American Christianity but to America itself. In response the federal government once again went after "alien" "heretics" within, including members of the Communist Party, Socialists, homosexuals, and New Deal Liberals. During this era the Cold War faithful were able to change the American "Pledge of Allegiance". The Pledge, which had been written by a Christian socialist, was revised during the Cold War (it had been revised before) to include " under God", while "In God We Trust", was added to American paper money. This change in the American Pledge and the addition of the "in God we Trust" mantra on American paper money nicely shows the links between American Christian Protestantism, the American nation, and between American Christianity and American capitalism, the "American faith".

 

The American civil religion, civic faith, or public religion saw perhaps its largest split in the 1960s as an American prophetic civil religion emerged from the margins and challenged, at least in the minds of America's political, economic, and cultural elite, the official priestly civil religion that had dominated the United States almost since it was born. The, what might be called silent majority revival, which had strong ties to political and economic elites, categorised "dissidents", civil rights dissidents and anti-Vietnam War dissidents, as un-American thereby justifying and rationalising attacks, physical and verbal on them by a variety of bullies and thugs, since they were seen as threats to the American way of life and American law and order. The counterculture of the 1960s has been vilified ever since by many on the right, including Gertrude Himmelfarb in her polemic One Nation, Two Cultures, as responsible for a host of America's ills including a rise in the divorce rate, a rise in out of wedlock births, a rise in cohabitation rates, an increase in sexual immorality, an increase in drug use, and a host of other decadences that are putting, many believed, the chosen nation and the chosen people at risk of god's wrath and, as a consequence, decline or devolution. 

 

The latest major nationalist revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was the revitalisation movement that occurred after the 9/11 terror attacks. The War on Terror revival led to attacks on  "heretics" like the Muslims and the Sikhs, the latter a religious group that was attacked because those who attacked them had no comprehension of the historic and cultural differences between the Sikh faith and Islam, something that shows the lowest common denominator nature of many if not most of these nationalist revivals. This latest of American national revitalisation movements would eventually give us the cult of Donald Trump, a cult cobbled together, in the midst of a War on Terror, from right wing Christianity, right wing ultra nationalism, White supremacism, and conspiracy theory fabrications and delusions. This cult was led by and centred on a flim flam salesman turned right wing politician, demagogue, and messiah-prophet. That this bully demagogue learned his demagogic lessons of innuendo and demonisation for economic and political gain from Roy Cohn, the chief counsel of that once celebrated and still celebrated in some quarters, demagogic grand inquisitor of the Cold War himself, former Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, should not be surprising to any historian of the American national faith. 

Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 1999) is a superb exploration of the culture, official and popular, of one of the United States's many nationalist revival and revitalisation movements, the Cold War nationalist revival movement. Whitfield explores the self-righteous, self-satisfied adolescent bully boys reliving their glory days in the school yard as arrested development adults and cynical demagogues who led the crusade against heretics during the Cold War. He explores the impact of a narrowed American nationalism on politics, books, films, television programmes. It was a culture, as Whitfield notes, in which political denunciations that negatively impacted peoples lives, particularly the lives of those "heretics" who were members of the Communist Party, USA, former members of the Communist Party, "fellow travellers of the party from the late 1940s to the 1960s, New Deal liberals, and homosexuals, anyone, in other words, who didn't conform to a selected national myth. That all this became commonplace in the self proclaimed land of free speech and "democracy"but not to those that know the history of ideological inquisitions in the United States. 

 

Whitfield trods a middle path in his interpretation of the Cold War. Whitfield argues that while the Soviet Union and its spies were a threat to the American way of life, so were--perhaps even more--the anti-communist intellectuals, demagogues, and the masses they demagogued, something that makes them akin to the true believers in the cult of Stalin in the USSR with its orthodox cum communist meaning system and its own periodic nationalist revivals such as that aimed at the Old Bolsheviks and symbolically expressed in the show trials of the 1930s and in which denunciation was a central ritual,  and, the Soviet revival in 1950s that led to conspiracy theory in which cosmopolitan intellectuals and professionals (translation Jews) were trying to kill the great cultic leader, Stalin. The national faith of the US was also similar to that of the USSR, for instance, in its emphasis on conformity. That a nation like the US, which claimed that individualism and freedom lay at its doctrinal core, also emphasised conformity to a very narrow catechism of that national faith is one of the fascinating absurdities of human history and American history.

There are a few areas in The Culture of the Cold War which I think Whitfield could have developed more. While recognising, particularly in the 1999 second edition of the book, that America's has a history of follies--I would call them delusions, fantasies, and forms of social and cultural madness--the book is weak on the history of these follies. Whitfield does a good job of putting the culture of the Cold War in its immediate context but is less better at putting the culture of the Cold War in its broader American revival and revitalisation context. 

A related weakness of The Culture of the Cold War is Whitfield's failure to put Cold War great power politics, that between the US and USSR, within broader great power politics. Great power politics, of course, have been around since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in the Near East, the Mediterranean, and China. Both the US and the USSR were the dominant great powers in the Cold War era and as such, they behaved somewhat similar to the great powers of the past and they behaved somewhat similar to each other in the present. I have already mentioned their heretic hunting similarities between the two powers chosen by god or history to remake the world in its image. Both the US and USSR were also, like the imperial powers of the past, ethnocentric (us versus them). They were messianic. They were manichean. They were utopian. They were bureaucratic (meaning that they were not democratic but rather oligarchic). And they were, in the end, Smith's and Jones's caught in an ever spiralling and never ending cycle of trying to keep up with each other, something that is characteristic of great power struggles, cold or hot.

Finally, Whitfield's use of the term "totalitarian", a term laden with negative and normative ideological meaning, is problematic. That term, given its cultural history, arose in a particular context and implies, that humans were simply puppets of the Fu Manchuy leader, and that the masses, all the masses, the totality of the masses, can be easily manipulated by their puppet masters. While this may be generally true--advertisers and demagogues in the US, for instance, have been able to manipulate the masses into supporting wars such as the Spanish American War on the basis of fabrications and Trump has made a career out of spewing delusions (facts that raise questions about the selective use of the term totalitarian)--there was dissent, countercultures. There was and is, for example, dissent in the authoritarian Mormon Church, in the autocratic Soviet Union, and in the oligarchic United States. Any of those terms--authoritarian, autocratic, and oligarchic--are, I would argue, better descriptors than the inherently normative totalitarian when talking about modern bureaucratic oligarchies. We should also remember that modern societies, which are dominated by bureaucracies with intherent hierarchical variations in power and authority, are quite similar cross culturally like those in the US and USSR, pointing up the fairy tale that is the manichean us "democratic", them "totalitarian" binary.

Despite these slight concerns, which may or may not be entirely fair given the focus and short compass of The Culture of the Cold War, Whitfield's book is an excellent brief guide through the noirish main streets and back alleys of one variant of American nationalist culture, the Cold War nationalist revival of the 1950s. Everyone or everyone who can and is able, should read this brief book for it is a reflective mirror for what is happening today in an even more fragmented and equally as rageoholic and deluded America, an America that is experiencing yet another in the cycle of American theocratic and near fascist revivals it has since at least the late 19th century. 

 

I want to end this essay by returning to a quote from John Updike that Whitfield's references in The Culture of the Cold War: Is there a reason for being an American if there isn't a war, cold or hot? In the end this question really isn't relevant for a couple of reasons. Identities are socially and culturally constructed around the us versus them binary. Sometimes these binary distinctions are hard, sometimes they are soft, sometimes they are somewhere in between and oftentimes they vary, in complex societies, within countercultures and subcultures. During wars and rumours of war, the us versus them binaries that are at the heart of identity construction and civil religions, tend to harden into a sacred versus profane manichean dualism. And since there will always be wars and rumours of wars coming to a theatre, television screen, or internet page near you, there will always be a reason for those living in powerful nation-states like the US, Russia, or Chima to identity with great megapower America, great power Russian, great power Chinese, or even a non-great power nation-state like Finland where a Finnish citizen is the citizen of a state with economic, political, and cultural ties to the US, a nation-state that is ultimately a junior partner of Imperial America and a nation that has a traumatic past with Imperial Russia. And so it goes...