A half dozen short takes...

A series of short takes… not topics I want to spend my usual 1000 or more words on, but worthy of comment. 

1. Students will know my politics. 

A Facebook friend I’ve known for roughly half a century recently posted a meme stating that “If your students know your political affiliation, you have failed as a teacher. Teachers are there to help students think for themselves, not think like you.” The second sentence is true… sort of. The first sentence is utter crap. 

Let’s start with the latter idea: if “think like you” means “agree with your conclusions,” then I wholeheartedly agree. I always want students who will argue, politely but emphatically, with each other or with me. We’ll get nowhere, either in the classroom or in society, if everyone agrees all the time: we would be reduced to choosing policies based on who speaks first rather than on what’s the best idea. 

If, however, “think like you” means that a teacher should model logical thinking, a pursuit of truth, a skepticism about likely partisan sources… well, in that case, I very much do want my students to “think like [I do].” 

But that first sentence is amazing in its over-simplified arrogance. In my current summer-school class, I have two (that I know of) non-binary students. If I respect them enough to use their chosen names instead of the “dead names” that show up on my role sheet, if I refer to them by their chosen pronouns instead of those applicable to someone else with their physical characteristics, those students—and the others—will know my politics. 

If, given the fact that in 1847 over ten shiploads of food a day were exported from Ireland to England, I refer to the mid-1840s in Ireland as “the Great Hunger,” as my Irish friends do, rather than “the Great Famine,” as many of the textbooks would have it, students will know my politics. 

If, in a different class, I make sure to point out that Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, if Marlowe and Euripides were communists, students will know my politics. 

If, in that same class, I suggest that Anatoly Lunacharsky may have had the coolest job title in history—Komisar of Education and Enlightenment—but one of the worst-ever jobs—serving as liaison between Josef Stalin and the Russian arts community—students will know my politics. 

If, in still a different class, I discuss the process of choosing a theatre season and emphasize the importance of having enough good roles for women and for people of color, students will know my politics. 

Most importantly, when I am honest enough to tell students my political opinions so they can factor that information into their decision as to whether or not to agree with my conclusions, rather than pretending to an objectivity that is ultimately impossible to achieve, students will know my politics. If that’s failing as a teacher, so be it. 

2. Taiwan is a country. 

Curmie is old enough to remember when then-President Gerald Ford proclaimed in a debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It’s probable that he misspoke, that he meant to argue that despite the USSR’s military and economic domination, the people of, say, Poland, proudly maintained their national identity. But that’s not what he said, and he was portrayed, not unreasonably, with failing to recognize the political reality of Eastern Europe. Many historians believe that single line cost him the 1976 election. 

A similar moment played out recently involving a considerably less important figure than the President of the United States. This time the offender was wrestler and B-movie actor John Cena. There’s a twist, though, and not merely in the status of the speaker. You see, in a promotional spot for an upcoming movie, Cena had the audacity to call Taiwan a country. Yes, it’s a country, but the fine folks in Beijing—you know, the ones whose lies about the coronavirus exacerbated the pandemic—were sore offended, because despite… you know... reality, Beijing still regards the island as their territory. Absurdly, organizations like the United Nations have allowed them to perpetuate this fraud. 

But whereas American diplomats might need to tread carefully around a vexed topic, there’s nothing to prevent an apolitical celebrity from speaking the truth. Well, there is something: money. Cena wants his movie to sell in mainland China, so his tough guy image melted faster than ice cream in a Texas summer when confronted with angry tweets from Beijing. Cena immediately apologized—in Mandarin, no less—to “China and the Chinese people,” deploring his “mistake,” and groveling rather embarrassingly. 

The good news is that his renunciation of the reality that he himself had described was met with derision from across the political spectrum. When, after all, was the last time Keith Olbermann (who called the apology “shameful”) and Tom Cotton (who declared it “pathetic”) agreed on anything, including that grass is green? The almighty dollar still reigns supreme, even in the communist world, but maybe we’re coming to understand that there might be some circumstances in which it shouldn’t? Baby steps. Baby steps. 

3. Calling out hypocrites is a good thing. 

Curmie is no great fan of President Biden (“lesser of two evils” isn’t high praise), but I do appreciate skill at political gamesmanship, and it doesn’t get much better than pointing out the fact that a goodly number of GOP legislators have been claiming credit for various provisions of the American Rescue Plan, a.k.a. the second pandemic package: the very bill they had voted against. And he read out their names! In a just universe, none would be re-elected; this is, alas, somewhat less than a just universe, but embarrassing the hypocrites can’t be all bad. 

4. Lying with statistics. 

President Biden gets credit for what Curmie just described, but he also gets called out for crass political posturing. Whereas any attempt to reduce hate crimes, especially violence, is a good thing, exaggerating the extent of, in this case, anti-Asian activity is a good way to look silly. So the hype surrounding the need for new anti-hate legislation, much of it coming from the White House, is really so much balloon juice. Left-leaning news sites breathlessly report some 6603 “hate incidents” in the year between March 2020 and March 2021. That figure is drawn from the report of an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. And there are… let’s see… a little over 23,200,000 Asians and Asian-Americans in the US. So 1 in 3514 Asians experienced some kind of bias in that year. Oh, and over 83% of those incidents weren’t crimes: verbal harassment and shunning may be despicable, but they’re not criminal. So let’s amend that number to 1 in over 20,000 who endured violence, civil rights violations, vandalism, etc. 

We also see that “Anti-Asian hates crimes increased by nearly 150%, mostly in N.Y. and L.A.”. That sounds bad. But if we’re going to call out Tucker Carlson for using statistics to deceive, we need to do so here, too. Yes, New York and Los Angeles saw significant increases: from a total of 10 cases in those two cities in 2019 to 43 in 2020. Curmie is having trouble disentangling numbers for the city and county of Los Angeles, and isn’t sure which is being referenced in the increase of 7 to 15 cases there, so let’s just look at New York: 28 cases for a total Asian population of a little under 2,000,000 (apologies that the best source I can find is Wikipedia). The East Asian population is just under 750,000; that’s probably the more relevant figure, but if the case numbers say “Asian,” then perhaps the larger number is indeed more accurate. Even limiting the population figures to just four East Asian nationalities: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the average East Asian would go for roughly 27 years without experiencing a 1% chance of a race-inspired crime. This is not exactly cause for panic. 

5. You can’t make this stuff up. 

(Alleged) serial sexual predator Kevin Spacey will appear in his first acting role since the proverbial fecal matter interfaced the whirling rotors some four years ago. The role: “a detective investigating a false claim of paedophilia.” Bloody hell.

6. It’s actually OK to produce No Exit.

Students—it’s unclear exactly how many—at Western Washington University sought to cancel the production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, claiming it ignores matters of gender and sexuality (among other things).  Curmie is, shall we say, unconvinced.  

I first read about this incident on Ethics Alarms; I e-mailed that site’s proprietor, Jack Marshall, saying I would be responding, but I might be writing more than would qualify as simply a comment.  He suggested I send him my commentary and he would post it as a Guest Post.  I agreed.  So, here’s my post; I do suggest that you read Jack’s earlier post on the subject (and follow the links he includes) to be better able to understand what I’m talking about, since my remarks were intended to be read by people who were already familiar with the basics of the story.

Thoughts on the First Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd

 

Curmie makes no promises, but it may be that he’ll be returning to writing more blog pieces in the future.  He’s teaching a single course this summer, and it not only has no meetings on Fridays, but it ends in late June.  He’s officially retiring effective August 31, although he’ll be teaching a couple of courses as an “adjunct” in the fall, will keep the small cadre of advisees he now has (but add no more), and will supervise a student production of a play he acted in several years before the student director in question was born.  <Sigh.>  I hope to maintain at least my current level of scholarly activity—there’s a book chapter awaiting my revision, two conference presentations for later this summer, and at least two conference papers that I’d like to turn into articles.  And I’ll continue my presidency of a national honor society for another year or two, at least.

But it’s already clear that giving up the multitudinous service activities undertaken for the department, college, and university will free up literally dozens of hours of time; taken in conjunction with the required reduction in teaching load, I’ll definitely be able to devote myself to some other things.  A friend who retired from university teaching some years ago  remains a more active scholar than I’ll ever be; he describes his current life as “less of the same, and without the boring bits.”  I’m hoping for a similar experience.  One of the manifestations of such an eventuality would be at least a weekly blog post.  On y verra, as they say en France.

So, where to begin after such spotty blogging activity for several years?  There are a lot of potential topics vying for attention right now, but what comes first to Curmie’s mind is the anniversary earlier this week of the death of George Floyd.  I approach this topic, curiously enough, in the spirit of moderation. 

Here, it might be valuable to tease out the differences in meaning between two often conflated concepts: vagueness and ambiguity.  The former suggests that there is no clearly identifiable meaning; the latter implies that different, perhaps even opposed, implications might exist simultaneously.  The George Floyd case is vague only in terms of details we don’t yet know and probably never will.  It is ambiguous or even multivalent in virtually everything else.  Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to disentangle the strands.  In Curmie’s world, a B student might have gotten there with 3 B’s, or with 2 A’s and a D, etc.  In the Floyd case, as with that hypothetical B student, what is difficult to find is anything approaching a complete picture.

What we see in most of the “mainstream” press coverage of both the death of Mr. Floyd and its aftermath—the BLM protests, the trial, etc.—is a sort of gasping idolatry of a petty criminal, for that’s what Floyd was.  (Curmie gets it: he wasn’t only that.)  We barely hear about the medical examiner’s report that drug use and an underlying heart condition were contributing causes of Floyd’s death, albeit his ultimate conclusion was that the restraint by police, specifically by Derek Chauvin, was the primary cause.  And the presumed racial motivation of Chauvin’s actions has been taken as given from the outset, without any evidence, let alone proof.

Nor is it possible to deny that some of the literally billions of dollars of damage from riots was caused by those who used BLM as a justification—or perhaps as a cover—for their actions.  (Note: Curmie was seeing the catch-phrase “Black Lives Matter” long before the death of Mr. Floyd, but it didn’t achieve the spotlight until last year.)

So let’s get this straight.  Were Chauvin’s actions appropriate?  No.  Criminal?  Yes.  Murder 1?  Doubtful at best.  Felony murder or Murder 2?  Maybe.  Manslaughter?  In all likelihood.  Was Chauvin a bad cop?  Yes.  Should he have been removed from the police force long before this incident?  Apparently so.  Was the system that kept Chauvin on the job racist?  Somewhere between “perhaps” and “probably.”  Did Floyd’s race have anything to do with Chauvin’s actions?  Maybe, but there has been literally no actual evidence adduced to support that conclusion.  Let me repeat that: none. 

The fact that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black might, of course, be relevant, but it strikes me that this is ultimately a problem one encounters early in a course in formal logic: the fact that A implies B does not mean that B implies A.  That is, all racists are inherently bad cops, but not all bad cops are racists.  (Spare me the “all white people are racist” dogma.  It gets us nowhere.)  And, as Curmie noted in the aftermath, cops across the country, presumably aware of increased scrutiny, responded not by toning down the violence against black people, but evening the score by abusing a few white folks.  The problem is bad cops, and a system that covers up for them; many, but nowhere near all, manifestations of these people’s unfitness involve racism.

So, were the protests legitimate?  Yes, in the sense that the widely viewed video seemed to tell us everything we needed to know (although it now appears that perhaps it didn’t).  Yes, in the sense that racism certainly exists in this country and police forces are particularly rife with it.  Yes, in the sense that protests are nearly always legitimate, using that term to mean legally, morally, and ethically responsible.  No, in the sense that this was not the event that should be the watershed moment.  (Had it been the killing of Breonna Taylor or the death of Sandra Bland, Curmie would be more on board.)  No, in the sense that not all of the protests were non-violent.  Which leads us to…

Was a good deal of the violence and property damage resulting from protests that turned into riots perpetrated by BLM activists, or at least by those claiming that affiliation with no denials by BLM leaders?  Yes.  Was a good deal of that violence and property damage perpetrated by white racists seeking to undermine the credibility of the BLM movement, or simply by violence-prone assholes using BLM as an excuse?  Yes.  Was a good deal of the violence in particular initiated by the toxic masculinity, arrogance, and irresponsibility of police forces… and in at least isolated cases, by federally-funded mercenaries?  Yes.

So, is the introspection precipitated by the reaction to the Chauvin/Floyd case a good thing?  Yes, in that honest self-evaluation is an inherent positive.  Yes, to the extent that it brought about in unprecedented ways an examination of the power structures in American society and the extent to which that hegemony is exclusionary along racial lines.  No, in that what started as a positive desire to recognize and celebrate diversity has morphed into witch hunts, quotas, and frankly Stalinistic thought control. 

Lest you think Curmie is exaggerating the last point, allow me to direct your attention you to “socialist realism,” a policy which required Russian artists not merely to avoid saying or doing anything critical of the USSR or the Communist Party, but to actively advocate for those entities.  How is that different from universities which now base hiring and promotion/tenure decisions to a large degree not on proven abilities as a teacher or researcher, but on demonstrated, active, commitment to the Great Gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  At the very least, faculty are expected to participate in “workshops” on these issues.  Curmie has endured dozens of variations on this theme on many topics over the years.  There are two constants: there is never any useful information, only opinion masquerading as fact; and Curmie always leaves far more angry than enlightened... and actively resistant to the propaganda he's just withstood.  (Side note: many of the voluntary programs have, in fact, proved valuable.  I did a weekend-long workshop in Rape Crisis Intervention 30-ish years ago, for example.  I've only used it twice in the ensuing time... but I’ve used it twice in the ensuing time.)

Thirty years ago, Curmie got into trouble for saying that whereas there is much to be gained by applying a feminist lens to texts, not all feminist arguments are good arguments.  The cause du jour has changed, but the expectation of ideological compliance has not.  Alas.

Concentrating for a moment on the professional world Curmie inhabits: this enforced singularity of vision runs through universities and professional organizations alike.  Case in point: there’s an organization Curmie has belonged to for decades.  The committee structure has always worked like this: committee chairs are elected by the membership, subcommittee chairs are appointed by the chairs, and committee members… wait for it… simply volunteer to serve; no one is turned away.  Anyone willing to work is given a task.  But it turns out that a couple of committees have an “under-representation of people of color”… so white people, some of whom have specific expertise, are now being denied access to those committees on which POC folks have expressed no interest, and the organization is denied access to their skills, in the name of “diversity.”  We have to make those percentages work out, after all.

Of course, other power structures—state legislatures, boards of trustees, and the like—are reacting in precisely the opposite way: forbidding discussion of race-sensitive issues and attempting to enforce their own monomaniacal vision, in which American exceptionalism is to be taken as a given, but curricula must otherwise be “apolitical.”  One group wants Critical Race Theory to be mandatory; another wants it completely expunged.  The idea that it might be available, possibly required in certain specific disciplines in the sense of knowing its tenets, but with no expectation of having to agree with its conclusions: this doesn’t seem to be acceptable to the ideologues on either extreme… and it appears at first glance that virtually everyone indeed positions themselves at those opposing poles.  Curmie doubts this is actually true, but those positioned at both extremes demand absolute fidelity.

All of this messiness, this swirl of competing ideologies, this series of simultaneously “yes” and “no” responses, never seems to all come into focus at the same time in the same commenter.  On the one hand, we have the majority of the center-left news agencies and Democratic pols applauding George Floyd as some sort of messianic hero, the noble if accidental progenitor of Racial Justice, the Second Coming of MLK.  On the other side, we have the rightwing press and the GOP condemning all things BLM-related, labeling anyone remotely affiliated with the movement as thuggish, communist (!), anti-American, and probably responsible for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.  OK, maybe not that last one, but give them time.

At the moment, universities are more interested in pandering to leftwing claptrap than to rightwing claptrap.  That will probably change, especially in state institutions in blue states, before long.  But the glorious concept of the university as the testing ground for opposing ideas, as the site where disputants recognize in each other the desire to seek the truth, as the vigilant guardian of intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression: this vision, the one Curmie believed in when he started out in the profession 40-odd years ago… this noble cause lies in the ICU, gasping for what may soon be its last breath.  

Do black lives matter?  Indubitably.  What about Black Lives Matter?  Sort of.  Any full-throated endorsement or condemnation will forever leave Curmie saying, “yeah, but…”