Life as Crisis Management: The Consumer Cellular Kiada

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so corporate capitalism goes and goes and goes…

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

Life as Crisis Management: The Presto Electric Skillet Kiada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Dear Federal Communications Commission of the United States,

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

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

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

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

Me out.

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

The Books of My Life: These Truths

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The Books of My Life: America, Empire of Liberty

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Books of My Life: The Atheist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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