The Books of My Life: History on Trial

 

History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997) by historians Gary Nash and Ross Dunn and curriculum studies scholar Charlotte Crabtree, takes readers on a journey through the sometimes wacky world of America's culture wars and American historical correctness. Culture wars, as Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, have been part of the intellectual and popular cultural and ideological landscape of the United States since even before there was a United States, while historical cultural wars have been around, in both cold and hot form, at least since the creation of the new nation of the United States.

Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn explore, in History on Trial, America's culture wars and specifically, America's battle over its own history. Early chapters of History on Trial look at the conflicts over America's history between what might be called the myth history school, for whom history is the tale of good guys and bad guys and for whom the function of history is to create politically and ideologically correct Americans, and those who view history more as an descriptive and less a normative discipline and for whom history's function is to capture historical reality as accurately as possible, warts and all. One chapter of History on Trial, "History Wars Abroad", Chapter Six, compares and contrasts battles over history beyond the US in other core nations particularly that of the UK where the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher, deregulated the economy while trying, if somewhat unsuccessfully, to regulate, centralise, and dogmatise the history curriculum of the United Kingdom. Chapters Seven through nine explore, from an ethnographic--all three authors were involved in the writing of these voluntary standards--historical, political, and cultural perspective, the battle over the attempt by several American States and the US government, during the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1990s, to write voluntary kindergarten through grade twelve national standards in science civics, and, particularly in history.

History on Trial is full of hypocrisies that seem an inherent part of the American and human cultural landscape, contradictions some will find both entertaining and absurd. As Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn note, one of the self appointed leading lights of mythistory, Lynn Cheney, was, while head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, supportive of the attempt to develop voluntary national standards until it became politically expedient, as the Republican Party dixiefied and birchified. to oppose them. Nash, Crabtree, and Dunn also note what has become a central part of the demagogic strategy of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, lie, take things out of context, demonise, and play to the emotions of the masses.  

History on Trial is an interesting book, one which offers an excellent short summary of the battles over America's history from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. It is a book that will probably not, however, interest those who think that mythistory is the only true or revealed history. After all, true believers with their our way or the highway approach, leave little if any room for empirical or rational debate.

The Books of My Life: The Image

 

In retrospect, Daniel Boorstin's The Image or What Ever Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962) is an odd book given its author, its subject, and the year in which it was published. That one of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, who was not really trained as a historian at all but was trained as a lawyer, and someone who wasn't a fan of Joseph McCarthy--pointing up the differences between American conservative liberals and the radical right--but who named names when called before HUAC, wrote a book in 1962 that prefigures much of the postmodernist theory of the late 1960s and after, seems at least a little bit odd to me.

Boorstin, like many of the consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, saw America as a new nation. American consensus historians saw the United States as something very different from old Europe with its conservative, conservative liberal, social liberal, and left wing ideologies, and the seemingly endless culture wars these ideologies gave rise to. In the consensus narrative America not only left behind the old ideological culture wars of old Europe but created, in the process, a land of economic opportunity for all. That there were some in this dream America who had no chance of living the American dream seemed to trouble America's consensus historians only a little. Those who really weren't offered the opportunity to do more than dream the American dream were often elided or only briefly mentioned in the dream world of consensus histories of the United States.

By the early 1960s Daniel Boorstin was beginning to wonder whether the world really was getting better thanks, in large part, to America exceptionalism and the American rise to great power status. Boorstin's The Image is, as its original subtitle suggests, all about the demise of the American dream. Before what Boorstin calls the Graphic Revolution, Americans, well mostly male Americans, like Europeans, mostly male Europeans, had images of heroes they could dream about and use as role models for their lives. They had adventures they could take partake in that provided new and very real experiences, an increase in learning, and that allowed one to prove one's mettle in what was kind of an epic journey almost worthy of New World Odysseus. They had art that was representational rather than an art that was imploding in and on itself and whose meaning, as a result, was as mysterious as the mystery cults of the ancient Hellenic and Roman world. After the Graphic Revolution, Boorstin argues, the world of the image with its simulated pseudo-events and pseudo-images that had no referent outside themselves and which many Americans had confused and conflated with real life, emerged. In this world of the pseudo-event photographs of exotic places, for instance, became evidence that one had been there. In comparison to the narcissistic pseudo-image the real thing could no longer compete with the unreal thing. Given all this I am sure Boorstin would not be surprised that Americans elected a capitalist flim flam man and celebrity charlatan as president in 2016.

Boorstin's The Image is a fascinating read from the vantage point of post postmodernism, from the vantage point of an intellectual terrain in which postmodernist theory has become commonplace in Western intellectual culture. Though it comes from a different time and a different theoretical place than late 20th century postmodern theory it is strikingly similar in its analysis and diagnosis of the postmodernist age of simulated fractured identities and images. For these reasons alone, and because I do think it diagnosis the simulated or tautological "spirit" of the postmodernist age pretty accurately, The Image is definitely worth reading.

Further Musings on the Difference Between Conservatism and the Right Wing...

Where to begin our musings on conservatism and right wingers?

Let's start with definitional accuracy.

Those right wingers who call themselves conservatives today are not conservatives. They are laissez-faire liberals. Classic conservatives, of course, reacted against Enlightenment liberalism and "democracy" along with Enlightenment radicalism.

Right wingers have an unfortunate tendency of being unable to distinguish empirical fact from ideologically correct fantasy, descriptive statements from normative demagoguery and delusions. Whether one likes reality or not is immaterial. Racism is real even though the notion of races is a fiction, whether in the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Class inequalities and gender inequalities are real whether one likes it or not. Any approach worth its salt must begin there, with empirical facts. How one responds ethically and morally to these realities is a different matter. 

There have been and are a variety of social ethical approaches to economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic facts There have, of course, been conservative thinkers. Plato, Burke, Comte, and Tolkien come to mind. Conservatives, generally speaking, opposed--I am obviously speaking normatively here--industrialism, capitalism, and democracy. Conservatives, at least those worth their salt, advocated for the rule of the best, whether they regarded those best as philosopher-kings, the English manorial elite, aristocrats, kings, scientists, or a frankly idealised priesthood of old. They did not advocate for the notion that morons like Trump and his nouveau riche ilk were either the best or the brightest. Conservatives treasured and treasure books; I doubt if a know nothing like Trump has ever read one. 

Because of their normative emphasis on looking backward and treasuring aspects of the past conservatives have offered little in the way of social theory on either modernity or postmodernity other than that capitalism, industrialisaton, and "democracy" were negative in their consequences for "tradition". There has been no Marx, Weber, or Durkheim among conservatives. Right wing no nothings probably have never heard of those intellectual giants who attempted to understand modernity other than to demonise them. All this said, conservative Niall Ferguson has explored the coming of modernity and postmodernity but his work is very derivative. Ferguson's interesting documentaries essentially update Marx, Weber, and postmodernist thinkers. Daniel Boorstin's book The Image--Boorstin was a consensus conservative/liberal a la Hofstadter and Bell who was very critical and dismissive of McCarthyist right wingism--did prefigure much postmodernist theory but conservatives have not really pursued it while right wingers either don't know much about it or simply demonise it as if social theory and one's response to it was or should be a low level theological or dogmatic enterprise.

One thing conservatives historically were not was utopian. This, once again, distinguishes them from contemporary right wing faux conservatives who curiously believe, they are laissez-faire liberals after all, that with capitalism the radiant future has arrived, despite or in spite of the empirical realities of poverty and inequality. True conservatives, of course, would and did defend inequality and rule of the best and brightest, however defined or delineated.

The Books of My Life: Historians in Trouble

 

In his Historians in Trouble: Plagiarsm, Fraud, and Politics in the Ivy Tower (New York: New Press, 2005), historian Jon Wiener takes us on an entertaining, enlightening, and depressing journey through the dark side of academia, specifically the history profession, and contemporary American intellectual culture, and the impact of the wider American culture war since the 1960s on both. Wiener, drawing on essays he wrote largely for the Nation over the years, gives us a picture of the problematic relationship between graduate students, faculty members, and star or celebrity professors (Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's almost master and slave relationship with those under her). He tales the tale of the potential dangers associated with archival work, the problematic use of sources, and the problems of footnoting, by some intellectuals in the academic profession and outside of it (Allen Weinstein, Michael Bellesiles, David Abraham, Mike Davis, Edward Pearson, and James Lott). He explores the problem of plagiarism in academic and intellectual culture (Doris Kearns Goodwyn and Stephen Ambrose). He takes us into the world of lying and exaggeration in the academy and intellectual culture (Joseph Ellis and Stephen Thernstrom).

Along the way, Wiener asks why some academics have escaped punishment and shame (the academic and intellectual scarlet A) while others have been humiliated and been banished from the academy (the black O). He finds the answer in political culture, interest group politics, and the contemporary American culture war. Fox-Genovese, Weinstein,  Lott, and Thernstrom, Wiener argues, largely escaped any punishment for their sexual harassment, questionable acquisition of and use of data, archival and quantitative, and exaggerations of political correctness, and were rewarded for it, at least in the case of Fox-Genovese, Weinstein, and Lott, by political appointments from a right wing president and, in the case of Lott, a job at a right wing think tank. Others, because of their perceived left wing or liberal politics and theoretical approaches, however, as Wiener notes, were hounded out of academia by interest groups that disagreed with them, in the case of Bellesiles, by academics whose work they challenged, as in the case of Abraham, or run out of Los Angeles by boosterist interests, like Mike Davis, who got a job teaching at SUNY Stony Brook. Still others, like Joseph Ellis, who lied about being in Vietnam and involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement upon his return, was punished by the college at which he worked, Mount Holyoke, but was soon back teaching and writing reviews for the prestigious New York Times, because, Wiener argues, there was no powerful interest group that went after Ellis in the way that the right wing gun lobby went after Bellesiles.

Wiener's book is an interesting and easy read for anyone interested in the academy, ideology, politics, and culture wars. I recommend this documented TMZish excursion through the wonderful world of American academe and intellectual culture. Anyone who has been a graduate student, particularly a graduate student in history, will recognise the world Wiener describes.

The Books of My Life: I Do and I Don't

 

Jeanine Basinger, for my money, is one of the most insightful cultural historians and sociologists writing on Hollywood film these days. In her book I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies (New York: Knopf, 2012), Basinger takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening romp through the history of the Hollywood marriage film mercifully free of the psychoanalytic jargon that so often makes academic books on films far more tedious than the films they are analysing, a remarkable achievement in and of itself.  

In I Do and I Don't Basinger explores the history and culture of the Hollywood marriage movie from the silent era of marriage movies, cautionary tales to be laughed at and be sad about, to the 21st century the post-marriage marriage movie. At the heart of the Hollywood marriage film genre, Basinger argues, is the couple, the men and women who are either getting married, the I dos as Basinger calls them, or getting divorced, the I don'ts, and the dramatic and comedic situations impacting the couple in the Hollywood marriage movie, namely, infidelity, in-laws, children, incompatibility, class, addiction, and murder. Basinger explores how the genre with its couples and its situations changed as a result of the impact of the coming of sound, the impact of World War II with its absent husbands overseas and its home front wives fighting to defeat the Nazis, and the impact of the sexual revolution in the 1950, 1960s and after. Along the way Basinger explores the spectacle and ritual of consumption in Hollywood films,  furniture, furs, and hats that populate classic era Hollywood marriage movies, and she explores the fairy tale have your cake--we will show you society's ideal norms and rules, norms and rules you should live your lives by--and the eat it too--please feel free to live your life momentarily through the characters on screen breaking society's norms and rules even though it won't last and everything will return to normal (pun intended) in the end--nature of the Hollywood marriage movie, both of which had appeal to the audiences who paid to watch the Hollywood marriage movie, a sociological approach to Hollywood film that is far more compelling, at least to me, than the oedipal fantasies of todays almost cultic psychoanalytic critics.

As was the case with Basinger's books on the World War Two genre and the women's film, I found I Do and I Don't one of the best books on Hollywood film I have read. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in media history, film history, Hollywood history, approaches to popular culture, and particularly to those who find the hegemonic mode of film analysis these days not particularly enlightening.

The Books of My Life: The Dream Life

J. Hoberman's The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties (New York: New Press, 2003) takes readers on an Alice in Wonderland like journey through the old and new myths of the American sixties from the late fities to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kraucauer, Marshall McLuhan, Benedict Anderson, and Jean Baudrillard, Hoberman explores how American myths or American dreams fed into American films including those of Hollywood, and how those films in turn created and recreated American myths.

Starring in Hoberman's sixties film dream life and filmic waking life cosmic manichean American melodrama are a number of celebrity star-pols. There is John F. Kennedy, America's own James Bond, secret agent man whose mission it is to help save the third world from evil tyranny in his own version of The Magnificent Seven (1960). There is Barry Goldwater the Cowboy from Arizona, a waking life version of the paternalistic John Wayne in McLintock (1963). There is Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Cowboy from Texas who fancies himself in the John Wayne roles in The Alamo (1960) and The Green Berets (1968). There is Richard Milhous Nixon, the waking life's own General Patton of Patton (1970). And there are those scores of left wing, liberals turned conservatives, and right wing righteous outlaws and vigilantes who imagine themselves as Bonnie and Clyde in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and the two drug selling bikers in Easy Rider (1969), Joe in Joe (1970), and Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), and Harry in Dirty Harry (1971) and the Stranger in High Plains Drifter (1973).

Hoberman's historical, sociological, and cultural anthropological approach to the American dream life and its moving mythic dreams is a welcome remedy to an academic film criticism obsessed with the Freudian dream life. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in American culture, the sixties, cinema, and nationalistic religion. Needless to say the dream life and the dreams that inhabit America's waking life are still with us today. President Donald Trump, for instance, seems to fancy himself a righteous cowboy wearing a white hat (pun intended), a righteous outlaw, and a righteous vigilante of the John Wayne persuasion, all at the same time. When you scratch beneath the ideological dream and find the reality, however, it is clear that Trump is actually Marion Morrison, the man who was lucky enough not to have to serve in any war other than a Hollywood war and the man who came to believe that he embodied the dream life myth Hollywood and America had him play in his waking life. We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.

More Musings on Free Speech...

The Legal Questions: US courts have, over the years, limited what they refer to as unlawful speech, the famous yelling fire in a crowded theatre argument, though Holmes's argument has been trimmed back a bit in the succeeding years, is often cited as an example of legal limits on free speech. The Courts have also limited so called obscene speech (they know it when they see it), as when they effectively banned XXX movies from the marketplace during the Nixon years and after.

I am not sure what college safe spaces mean in the context of court decisions regarding free speech. The courts have held, for example, that the Westboro Baptist Church can claim, at the funerals of American soldiers, that God is killing American soldiers because the US has rebelled against their God, if they do it from, if memory serves, 50 feet away. Is that what one means by safe spaces? How does all this work in the brave new digital age? Do we need an MPAA like rating system for college classes and social media? Students this Youtube video I am about to show you is rated R so feel free to leave if you need to? With respect to YouTube we already kind of have one for Youtube: confirm your age.

Academic Freedom: Generally speaking, the, often arguably more dream than reality idea at the heart of universities, is that they are arenas for the debate of ideas be these ideas Marxist, functionalist, sociobiological, semiological, feminist, etc. Since ideas are, in part at least, products of environments they are, as such, rent through with ideas about equality, inequality, and so on. Scholars, again perhaps more in theory than in practise, try to put ideas into context, economic context, political context, cultural context, geographical context, and demographic context. That seems to me to be one thing that should at the heart of serious systematic and analytical study and at the heart of academic teaching.

Those on the right wing who complain about the lack of freedom of speech on campus really aren't, by the way, defenders of free speech. In the 1960s right wingers shouted down speakers whose ideological views they disagreed with effectively cancelling their speeches and making them pioneers in what is today called cancel culture. That they whinge and whine about those allegedly doing to them what they have done to others is absurdly amusing. What hypocritical right wingers are concerned with is their freedom of speech. They could care less about the freedom of speech of those on the "other side" and they generally do nothing to defend a "leftist" whose freedom of speech is abridged in universities and beyond.

Protected Speech: I do get that some forms of speech are probably not worth legal protections. Should the courts, for example, protect schoolyard ad hominem "speech", forms of speech that have become ever more prominent thanks, in part, to social media? Are claims, some of which seem to be made without grounding them in evidence, unlawful or obscene? Are they examples of bully boy ad hominems? As far as I know, bully by ad hominems have not been ruled unlawful or obscene by the courts.

The Neoliberalisation of Academia: One of the things I find fascinating about speech codes and safe spaces is their possible relationship to neoliberal capitalist notions that the customer is always right. Since the "Reagan Revolution" universities and colleges have been taken over by neoliberal managers whose training, often, is in management. They are managers not academics, in other words. Department of Education data indicates that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009. This increase in the numbers of administrative personnel was, according to an analysis by Bloomberg, 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. An analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the California State University system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183, a 221 percent increase. To paraphrase a political proverb: A bureaucrat for every tenured faculty member.

As academia has been neoliberalised the managerial elite in academia have become obsessed about several things including keeping the customer satisfied and growing the customer base. As a result, assuring that the various targeted demographics are happy with what they are consuming has become one of the missions of academic managers along with assuring that they make lots of money. Is that what is going on with speech codes and safe places?