The Unassuming Scholar's Weblog

Milestones

2026-07-04T19:54:21.271-07:00

I was ten during the Bicentennial celebrations. I was about to enter fifth grade. For at least a year or two before, America eagerly anticipated the event. (The actual preparations began a decade earlier.) I remember the TV documentaries, the American Freedom Train, and the Schoolhouse Rock! spots airing in between my favorite Saturday morning cartoons. My elementary school had its own celebration that summer, with the remains of red, white, and blue crepe bunting stuck on poles and roof eaves for at least the next year.

My family watched the varied televised coverage of the Independence Day events. I particularly remember the image of the tall ships sailing into New York harbor and, of course, the fireworks.

The climate of celebration was surprising considering recent events. Watergate had ended Richard Nixon’s presidency; Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon only deepened the public’s bitterness. South Vietnam had fallen the previous year. Inflation, high gas prices, and factory closures weighed on national morale. So, the genuinely joyous embrace of the Bicentennial afforded a weary nation a sense of continuity and revival.

Fast-forward fifty years. Social and political conditions in 2026 are arguably worse. The past decade has been particularly rough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the insanity of our national politics has spilled over into the America 250 observances.

The last few weeks have been a head spinning succession of batshit craziness and banal tackiness even for this presidency. A temporary MMA arena on the White House lawn that killed the grass. A wholly unnecessary “improvement” to the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool that rendered it algae choked mass contained by an incompetently applied polyurea sealant. Temporary cyclone fences and concrete barriers blocking access to popular attractions in the capital.

Then again, there’s occasion for schadenfreude. The much-ballyhooed Great American State Fair has experienced laughably low attendance since it opened. Several states declined to contribute official exhibits. After all the major headliners dropped out of the kickoff concert on June 24th, the president held a rally instead.

A key issue is the usurpation of the official America250 planning body by the White House aligned Freedom 250. Much funding for the latter comes from the interior department and donations from pay-to-play million- and billionaires. A holiday that should bring everyone together has become a cheap vanity project.

This year’s holiday just doesn’t resonate, even the more traditional 4^th of July events. The America 250 celebration lacks the anticipation and reverence and joy I remember from the Bicentennial. The paucity of gravitas has something to do with it. The unseriousness of the president’s minions and a chief executive who can’t leave well enough alone makes it hard to take the festivities at the desired value. Forgive me for being less than enthusiastic.

I Buy What I Like

2026-05-28T22:20:30.203-07:00

It’s been a minute since I’ve posted. The fast and furious storm of bullshit that is the news forced me into decision paralysis around topics. But I figure that I can write about current events without discussing the War with Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, Hezbollah, Hamas, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, chronic inflation, Medicaid and SNAP cuts, ICE, cosplaying cabinet members, UFC cage matches on the White House lawn, triumphal arches, painting the bottoms of reflecting pools, that goddam ballroom, and You Know Who.

So, here goes…

I’ll start with the whiskey. Bourbon. Woodford Reserve, to be exact. Even more specifically, the batch purchased by alleged FBI director Kash Patel. Not content with heading up the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, Mr. Patel wants to be the googly-eyed face of a lifestyle brand. He’s hawking bottles of Woodford Reserve engraved with his imprimatur. Kash—sorry, Ka$h—one must carefully safeguard one’s personal branding--has reportedly been giving away these personalized bottles as gifts. He probably won’t try to sell these due to trademark infringement, but there are other Ka$h tchotchkes to be had. Seriously. Just go to https://kashpatel.store.

Now, it isn’t any surprise if you believe imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Just look at the long line of products shilled by Patel’s master over the years. Most of it garbage, but each of these had their eager buyers. The grift never ends.

But the trend of taking advantage of true believers points up a larger, more prevalent phenomenon. I think most of us have consumer brands, famous or mundane, that we favor. For me, there are items ranging from durable goods to breakfast cereals where I will only buy a particular brand.

In my case, I make these purchases because each of them fulfills a specific need. What I’m not doing is making some kind of statement. None of them is tied to group affinity or loyalty to a cause. I buy what I like.

But for some of us, especially to people who are chronically online, consumer brands have become still another front of the culture wars. I first commented on this trend a few years ago in this space. When it came to light that Dan Cathy, the patriarch of the Chick-fil-A family, had spent considerable funds opposing legislation legalizing same-sex marriage, there was a short-lived tempest on both sides of the political spectrum. Protestors began demonstrating in front of Chick-fil-As across the land. SUVs carrying real Americans jammed the drive-thrus with those on foot jamming the indoor lobbies.

Chick-fil-A was one of the first times I connected the dots between consumer brands and culture war virtue signaling. While there are more than a few brands culturally coded as liberal or even left, it’s those attracting a conservative following so strong that any kind of deviation in terms of marketing or brand identity drives some people into conniptions. I can point to several recent examples.

About three years ago, trans actress and influencer Dylan Mulvaney released a video on Instagram featuring a personalized commemorative Bud Light can inscribed “Cheers to 365 days of being a woman.” True to form, the right wing trolls lost their shit. In no time flat, Fox and other conservative outlets were fuming that this single social media post was proof of the unstoppable force of insane liberals and large corporations bending the knee to woke ideology. Calls went out to boycott Anheuser-Busch.

The boycott did have an effect on sales. Sales of Bud Light dropped by a third over the ensuing weeks. By many reports, they haven’t fully recovered. But the news moved on eventually to focus on some other manufactured outrage. (For the record, I have been boycotting Bud Light my entire life. Life’s too short for crappy beer.)

Cracker Barrel has had a couple of public relations scrapes of late. If you’re not familiar with the chain, think of a cornpone Applebee’s. Attempting to accommodate patrons following healthier diets, the restaurant added a meatless sausage to the breakfast menu. It did not remove any of the existing meat items. No matter. The red blooded meat eaters were horrified that Cracker Barrel, their Cracker Barrel had caved to the soy boys. The pushback was apparently short-lived. As of this writing, Impossible Sausage remains on the menu at my local Cracker Barrel.

The other, more recent dustup concerned Cracker Barrel’s logo refresh. For years, the logo featured a man in overalls sitting next to a barrel. The old logo catered to both kinds of customer—those who could read, and those who couldn’t. A few months back, they unveiled a stylized logo featuring just the name in an updated logotype. Nothing controversial.

I was wrong. The social media on the right had a fucking meltdown. Many posters, having discovered Cracker Barrel’s CEO was a woman, accused her of being a woke DEI hire despite her having been in the position for about a decade. Another lamented that the logo update ruined what he called a family tradition. (The chain dates back to 1977. You know, the era of such traditions as disco, platform shoes, bad haircuts, and wide lapels.) Still another said his elderly parents swore never to eat there again.

Unlike the great Impossible Sausage controversy, corporate quickly reversed course. As a number of would-be internet wags put it, the faithful got back the cracker and the barrel. Right-wing outrage has the potential to shape some brands. It seems that these people internalize brand preferences as identity. It is much in the way that many of these same folks internalize their affinity with a certain politician as identity.

Imagine having so little, so few substantial things to hold on to that you have to grasp at the ephemeral to believe you stand for something. That is the world we live in.

Just Another Day...

2025-10-01T19:55:00.000-07:00

I began yesterday as I have so many other mornings with a single thought…What the fuck???

Tuesday’s WTF was prompted first by Secretary of ~~Defense~~ WAR! Pete Hegseth’s harangue of our military’s assembled flag officers and their senior enlisted advisors followed by remarks from President Trump. I imagine for many of them the assembly was two hours of their lives they will never get back.

Hegseth’s talk was the predictable kinetic, motormouthed display of performative masculinity. He decried DEI, wokeness, “climate change worship,” political correctness, men in dresses, men with beards, low esprit de corps, low physical fitness standards, out of shape personnel, “fat” generals and admirals at the Pentagon, nation building, a lack of warrior ethos, a supposed war on warriors (at which point Hegseth inserted a plug for his magnum opus of the same name), and even the term “defense” itself. Nothing new here.

This doesn’t mean there weren’t parts of the speech that are cause for real concern. One is Hegseth’s disdain for rules of engagement. Clearly, this is a dangerous attitude toward the law of war. Hegseth seems to imply that in the future servicemembers will be shielded from war crime prosecutions. That is a truly bad message to send to the rank and file, though the audience in front of him surely were unconvinced.

He also promised that leaders would be protected from frivolous complaints from within the ranks. This will almost certainly create a chilling effect on legitimate complaints to include allegations of abuse by colleagues and superiors.

On a related topic, Hegseth promised that initial entry training will be toughened up in the interest of making every servicemember a rifleman. (I’m not sure whether this skill is relevant if you’re, say, a submariner or part of a bomber crew, but I do not share Hegseth’s brilliant military mind.) Training should be scary and tough and should instill “healthy fear.” In the future, training cadre will be allowed to put hands on trainees to discipline them. At a time when it’s hard to attract qualified recruits, I’m sure this policy will improve the picture.

More ominous still was when Hegseth put his misogyny on full display. I can’t speak to the thoughts of the female officers in attendance, but they cannot have been impressed. It is pretty evident at this point Hegseth envisions a significantly truncated role for women in the military. In the future, he crowed, women will have to meet the same physical fitness standards as men or they will be eliminated from combat roles. Just as bad is the implication that the elimination of diversity programs will make our armed forces predominately white.

The few camera shots of the audience showed row upon row of stonefaced people. Hegseth’s applause bait lines fell flat. As a veteran, as a former officer, he should have expected this up front. It was a policy speech from a superior, not a political rally. You stand at attention when he enters the room, and you stand at attention when he leaves. There was probably also the annoyance factor at work with some of them, particularly those who came from overseas or otherwise traveled long distances in service of a stupid publicity stunt.

The worst was yet to come though it didn’t seem that way at first. After Hegseth’s hyperactive onstage jackassery, the president’s speech came as almost a relief. Trump shuffled to the podium and launched into the self-pitying, self-aggrandizing word salad typical of the president’s public utterances. Then, he began to philosophize on the role of America’s military. Turns out, the fight is not against foreign adversaries. Unbeknownst to many of us outside the MAGAverse, we are being invaded as he spoke. The armed forces’ present mission is to fight the “enemies from within.”

Ah, yes, the ubiquitous yet invisible enemies within, the bugbear of authoritarian movements everywhere. What the president was effectively saying is that the American military’s enemy to be fought are certain Americans. Hence, the recent and wholly unnecessary National Guard interventions in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C, and Memphis, and coming soon to Chicago and Portland.

One of the stated reasons has been that the troops are there to safeguard ICE as they round up people for deportation. ICE’s sudden expansion has been characterized by some progressive critics as a nascent political police doing the administration’s extralegal bidding. What the military’s role in this will be is anybody’s guess, though Trump made it clear that America’s cities are to be its future “training ground.” Together with Hegseth’s new emphasis on “lethality,” it ought to worry the most levelheaded observer.

And all this because last fall we were frustrated at the cost of groceries...

Moral Panic

2025-09-13T19:21:00.000-07:00

Now we know.

After a couple of days of wildass speculation in the MAGAverse, a suspect in the murder of the Great Martyr Charlie Kirk has been taken into custody. He is…wait for it…wait for it…you will be shocked…a twentysomething white male.

After two “persons of interest” were arrested and released, theories surrounding the killer ran amok. Some concerned the latest MAGA moral panic, the transgender mass shooter. If you weren’t paying attention, a few weeks ago a transgender person in Minnesota who posted regrets over their transition on their socials shot and killed two children and wounded 18 attending mass on the first day of their parochial school term. In 2023, a transgender person killed seven and injured two at a Nashville Christian school.

And that’s about it. Since both perpetrators died in the attacks, we cannot know for certain their motives though their social media presence offers clues. In both cases, it appears they immersed themselves in websites castigating trans people and others promoting mass shooters. A simpler explanation is the Oswald motive: They did it to be famous.

No matter. Transphobic rhetoric colored the commentary from the right. My personal favorite quote came from Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who proclaimed to reporters that a “tranny” was responsible for Kirk’s demise. She went on to say that she and her staff were afraid to come to work because of the looming threat of radical left violence.

Apparently, this is a common fear in MAGA world. Because it’s all about them. Random clicking dredged up videos of bearded white men shouting into the camera about how patriots like them are being targeted for death by the violent radical left. Some of them—okay, most of them—bemoaned the rising death toll among men like them at the hands of these deranged leftists. They also promised that this fictitious carnage would be met at gunpoint. Disturbingly, one of these videos was posted by a police officer in uniform. I feel reassured that this guy is out there protecting the public.

The ludicrous overreaction continued at the top, at least for a hot second. The president announced he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Kirk, further cheapening one of our most prestigious honors. The vice president flew Kirk’s remains home aboard Air Force Two, at taxpayer’s expense of course. But when asked for comment about Kirk on the White House lawn, Trump devoted a few seconds to express his regret before launching into a monologue touting the new construction of the White House ballroom.

The president has perhaps moved on, but the MAGAsphere are like dogs with a bone. The most disturbing revelation of the past few days is the creation of a website which purportedly gathers the names of anyone who might have cheered Kirk’s death on social media. The idea is to get people to dime them out so their employers will terminate them. (Trump and MAGA are unpopular among my colleagues, so I think they are safe from the “mass firings” promised by the website’s creators.)

I don’t think this doxxing website poses much of a threat. It’s just more posturing. But the past eight months under Trump 2.0 have been exhausting. I was raised by a narcissist, and I recognize this feeling as a constant from when I was a kid. Add to that all the demented shit emanating from the right and the constant state of hypervigilance provoked by it, and one’s sense of wellbeing becomes hard to maintain.

The discourse from the left—the actual left, not the boogeyman living in MAGA’s imagination—is not encouraging. For all the grandiose talk about themselves as “the resistance,” their writ doesn’t extend much beyond Tik-Tok and YouTube. They are too few to pose a threat. Meanwhile, more moderate critics of the administration unself-consciously muse over whether Charlie Kirk is the Trump movement’s Horst Wessel or whether his killing is the administration’s Reichstag Fire.

It doesn’t matter. Trump and his allies control or have coopted all three branches of the federal government. We may not yet beyond the point of no return, but that point is edging closer by the day. Charlie Kirk’s murder, while unfortunate and unwarranted, will be bounced from the headlines in short order in service of flooding the zone. And the base will move on to fixate upon some other outrage.

Descent

2025-09-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I wrote about a bizarre incident in Colorado where a man stalked a TV news crew, following the news vehicle back to the station. When they arrived, the man confronted and assaulted the crew’s on-air reporter who was described as being of Pacific Islander ancestry. During the assault, the man yelled, “This is Donald Trump’s America!”

At the time, I mused that political violence under a second Trump administration would vary in intensity while the legal consequences would depend on local sentiments. In the case of the Colorado incident, the reporter’s assailant has pled not guilty and is to stand trial in January.

This afternoon, another violent act may put my speculation to the test. Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead while giving a speech at a Utah college. Details are unclear, but Kirk was apparently shot from a rooftop of a campus building about 150 yards away. A “person of interest” has been detained.

The reaction to Kirk’s death among prominent Democrats so far is in contrast to Republican reactions when Democrats are physically attacked. The June murders of a Minnesota legislator and her husband and the wounding of another legislator predictably generated vituperative victim blaming, for instance. On the other hand, Kirk’s murder elicited condolences and condemnations of gun violence from Democrats.

Personally, I despise everything Charlie Kirk stood for. But there shouldn’t be a death penalty for expressing despicable opinions.

Naturally, MAGA has overreacted in ways which border on the absurd. President Trump has ordered the flag flown at half-staff for the next several days, as ifi Kirk had been a great statesman rather than a self-serving, hate-mongering opportunist. The next few days will likely bring more hyperbole.

Considering the fate of the shooter, I cannot predict. Republican-majority Utah has been somewhat cool toward the MAGA phenomenon. I am sure any trial jury would approach the case independent of political considerations. But Utah’s governor has said this will be a death penalty case.

Would red state juries impose the death penalty on the murderer of a liberal activist or Democratic politician? Would they convict in the first place? Incitement is much more common on the right. It’s not much of a leap that if a liberal activist or Democratic politician were murdered in a red state, the social media response would find a way to dismiss the crime and find a way to subtly (or not so subtly) put the onus on the deceased.

Returning to the right’s knee-jerk reactions to any threat, real or imaginary (mostly imaginary), let’s look at the ongoing, unnecessary occupation of Washington, D.C. by National Guard troops. Although it had to have been in the works for weeks, the immediate precipitating event appears to have been an attempted carjacking involving DOGE twerp Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. (Okay, I don’t condone violence, but the revelation that Mr. Balls was beaten up by a 15 year old girl made me smile. Besides, his pride was hurt worse than his face)

Any crime committed against a white person in a city with a plurality or majority population of color is going to set off right-wing alarm bells. Since most of our cities, whether in red or blue states, have significant minority populations and tend to have Democratic administrations, they draw right-wing ire by their very being. The planned replication of performative military intervention is certain, all in the interest of preventing violent crime of course.

I wonder if the president will be sending troops to Orem, Utah anytime soon.

Not very likely.

Drag

2025-06-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

In the first season of Mad Men, protagonist Don Draper crashes at the apartment of a would-be girlfriend’s bunch of beatnik associates. Needless to say, they don’t hit it off. When asked how he sleeps at night, ad executive Draper replies, “on a bed of money.”

Nevertheless, they agree on one thing. They eventually fall asleep after smoking a large quantity of pot. In the morning, they awaken to a police raid in progress at a neighbor’s apartment.

Draper, needing to report to work, straightens his tie and tugs on his suit coat to pull out the wrinkles. As he opens the front door, one of the beatniks anxiously objects, “You can’t go out there!”

Don pauses a beat and says, “No, you can’t,“ and walks out, nodding at the policemen in the hallway as he goes.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago as I boarded a plane for a brief vacation in Mexico. Walking down the jetway, I passed by a Customs and Border Protection agent. Suffice it to say, he was playing the part. Body armor, M-4 carbine slung across his chest, etc. Briefly looking over at him, he gave me a slight nod. Reflexively, I nodded back.

A fleeting exchange to be sure, but telling all the same. Like Don Draper, and unlike many other people, I can pass. I’m an average-looking middle-aged white male who presents conventionally. In a sense, I’m above suspicion. I’m just grateful no one can detain me for my thoughts. Yet.

At least the CBP agents were clearly identifiable. The news of late tells of law enforcement officials unidentifiable by agency or uniform rounding up migrants and student activists. Are they or aren’t they actual cops?

The second coming of Donald Trump has provoked a resurgence in militaristic cosplay. I first noticed the trend the first time around during the lockdown phases of the pandemic. We were shown the spectacle of white men donning tactical gear and brandishing weapons at urban civil rights protests and setting up unauthorized roadblocks in rural locales asserting authority they did not possess. The January 6^th insurrection appeared to be the climax of this nonsense which would simmer down with the absence of Trump and his minions from Washington.

Wishful thinking. Shortly after the election, I was at the airport waiting at the baggage carousel when I noticed a young man milling amongst us. He was white, with a beard of course. Otherwise dressed in civilian attire, he was sporting a tactical vest. He walked slowly, with a serious expression, thumbs hooked at the top of his vest. I had no idea who the hell he was or why he was there aside from being an arriving passenger, and I asked myself if anyone else was even noticing this. No one seemed to. It is common enough lately that such sights scarcely raise an eyebrow.

Much as they had during Trump 1.0, the real authorities have gotten in the act. News and phone footage showing what seemed to be ICE agents abducting individuals in public are disturbingly frequent. The agents are generally clad in black or in casual wear, their faces obscured with balaclavas or masks, and they are not displaying badges or other markings identifying which agency they represent. Homeland Security officials defend the practice as protecting law enforcement personnel from being doxed.

Maybe, but probably not. The intended effect is performative intimidation made more ominous by ambiguity. It also looks cool, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem is the poster girl for posturing as substitute for public safety. We see her in tactical gear joining Border Patrol agents on a raid. We watch her posing in front of a packed cell of deportees at El Salvador’s supermax CECOT, sporting a $50,000 Rolex no less. She parries a question from U.S. Senator Alex Padilla at a press conference on the wholly unnecessary federal intervention in the civil unrest in Los Angeles by siccing the Secret Service on him.

The optics are lost on her. Appearing before a congressional committee recently, Rep. Bennie Thompson greeted her by thanking her for her time amidst her busy schedule “of photo ops and costume changes.” Noem scarcely batted an eyelash.

As to be expected, bad actors are getting in on the act. You, too, can buy ICE merch online. Young white males have taken to stationing themselves in Home Depot parking lots wearing ICE jackets to scare off day laborers looking for jobs. Even more troubling are reports of midnight “raids” on immigrant households by people claiming to be government agents. In one instance, a family was told to hand over their phones and any cash in their possession. Contacting ICE and Homeland Security offices afterward, the agencies denied knowledge.

The Trump administration’s methods of ensuring law and order have encouraged vigilantism and enabled common criminals to prey upon vulnerable people. You could reason that this is an intended consequence. In the first category, we have a small group of MAGA diehards who believe Trump possesses extralegal authority and that anything they do on his behalf is justified. (I call this the deputization defense; several J6 rioters believed Trump had “deputized” them to stop certification of the 2020 election results.) In the second category are opportunistic crooks and garden variety assholes exploiting people who can’t go to the police.

Authoritarians are drawn to military and police regalia. Perhaps even more so when the individual never served in the military or law enforcement. (Consider Trump’s fixation on parades.) At a certain point, fantasy and reality blur. At a certain point, the biggest Walter Mitty losers can delude themselves into believing they’re the good guys simply by cultivating a look. Provoked by the violent rhetoric emanating from Trump and his allies or internalizing a belief that white men with guns are sheepdogs protecting home and hearth, and you have a recipe for tragedy.

Policing in a stable democracy must operate in the open. Law enforcement should be clearly identifiable to the public they serve. If you’re acting legally, there is no reason to hide who you are. Otherwise, you erode public trust. When legitimate law enforcement is indistinguishable from the LARPers you don’t believe your eyes anymore.

Perhaps this moment will stimulate reform. We can set guidelines for law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels relating to how they present themselves to the public they serve. Place limitations on the sale and possession of certain items such as body armor and certain kinds of lethal and non-lethal weapons (though this probably wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in some cases). Introduce stronger sanctions against impersonating law enforcement and military personnel. Any of these would be a good start.

What we may not be able to fix is a cultural toxicity that long predated Trump and MAGA. They are a symptom or the latest permutation of that ugliness. The only road to improvement is through individual hearts and minds. And that is a task fit for Sisyphus.

Vanity

2025-06-13T16:10:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow’s the big celebration.

President Trump is finally getting the parade he’s been after for years. On his birthday, no less.

There will be several thousand soldiers marching through the national capital. There will be Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, and self-propelled howitzers rolling down the streets, and a swarm of helicopters in the city’s skies.

But wait, there’s more. There will be fireworks, musical performances, and appearances by astronauts and NFL players. In other words, the parade looks as if it will be the sort of cheesy corporate spectacle[1] that has characterized any number of “patriotic” celebrations of the last twenty years or so.

I don’t plan to watch. I dislike these kinds of overblown displays as a general rule, and the fact that the administration has misappropriated the United States Army’s 250^th anniversary to serve the Narcissist-in-Chief’s unbounded vanity is a bitter pill.

But, you’re probably thinking, the president is making a heartfelt gesture celebrating soldiers past and present. How could anyone object to that?

Well, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be awfully pleasant for the soldiers marching past the reviewing stand. According to the Army’s public affairs office, the soldiers will sleep on folding cots in vacant federal buildings. Rather than providing them with at least two hot meals a day, something easily achieved with mobile kitchen trailers, the soldiers will enjoy two MREs and one catered hot meal daily during their stay. (Each will also receive partial per diem which will undoubtedly go far given the cost of takeout and fast-food meals these days.) Some news sources report that personal hygiene opportunities are being rationed, with field showers operating on rigid schedules.

Now that’s what I call military leadership, screwing the troops you profess to care about.

What’s most concerning are the optics. There’s the frequently voiced objection that such displays are worthy of Russia, China, and North Korea. That’s bad enough, because it’s true. The mindboggling cost of the parade, not to mention the street damage which will inevitably result from numerous tracked vehicles passing over them, provokes wonder at the administration’s priorities.

However, the widespread perception across the political spectrum that this event was planned solely as Trump’s “birthday parade” is what I find most galling. On the right, Saturday’s quick-time lollapalooza will be yet more justification for the MAGA revolution. For the left, the association with Trump serves as further proof of our military’s supposed evilness.

Neither camp appreciates the planning and logistics involved. It’s been known for a very long time that the Army’s sestercentennial was coming up, and you don’t just throw together a large-scale public display at the last minute. In other words, there would most likely have been a public commemoration even if Kamala Harris had won the election. With less bombast, perhaps, but a military parade nonetheless. The emerging details of the logistical clusterfuck housing and feeding 6,600 people suggest the original plans had been more modest before blowing up at the last minute.

Context dismissed, the Big Parade will be always remembered as Trump’s celebration of Trump. Before the media hype conflated the Army’s 250^th anniversary commemoration with the president’s autocratic fantasy of one-upping Putin, Xi, and Kim, I had privately looked upon the milestone with quiet satisfaction. It was a satisfaction borne from the longevity of an institution which had played a part in shaping me as a person. It was satisfaction that I had played a part in its story. A trivial, momentary part, but I had been there for it all the same.

I don’t feel that now. It’s as if something special of mine has been sullied. I am also concerned by the MAGA influence on the military. President Trump’s address to troops at Fort ~~Liberty~~ Bragg this week reflects this. The speech was the usual word salad complaining about political correctness and how Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, and Karen Bass ruined America. The soldiers’ laughter, cheering, and boos were disturbing. Subsequent reports said these soldiers were prescreened volunteers attending what was for all purposes a political rally. While it’s reassuring that the audience were self-selected MAGA-heads who are not (we hope) representative of all Fort Bragg’s soldiers, an important norm is eroding.

That norm is the traditionally apolitical military. Servicemembers are expected to keep their political opinions to themselves while on duty or any other occasion they are in uniform. That custom is fading into the past. The unprofessional conduct of the soldiers at the president’s speech, gratifying as it may have been to Trump, is a bad sign.

The public is noticing, and their conclusions do not augur well for the military’s reputation and its societal role. You cannot turn the military into a political instrument in a democracy and have it remain a democracy. This is what is at stake. The question now is whether there is any turning back.

[1] The Army reports that “more than 20” confirmed sponsors are (partially) funding the festivities.

Flooded Zone

2025-04-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

The tipping point for this post was a required online training for work. It was a refresher on Title IX and the Clery Act. Two things stood out from last time I took the training. The first was an advisory to clear my browsing history afterward. The second was the “safety exit” button present on every page.

I suspect these warnings were meant for my colleagues on their work computers. (I took the training on my personal laptop.) The company administering the class is a contractor which probably operates in states other than my own. What this tells me is that we are now at a point where workers have to be warned to cover their tracks after receiving DEI training.

The last ten weeks have been surreal. I originally meant to write about Signalgate, then the deportations to hellhole prisons in El Salvador, then the economic whipsaw of the tariffs. Now I’m left trying to take it all in.

Like millions of people, I have seen a good portion of my net worth vanish into the ether over the past two weeks. After a lifetime following the conventional financial wisdom of saving for retirement by investing in equities, it’s likely that none of us will fully recoup our losses. I’m rethinking my summer travels over concerns over being able to leave the country or return to it. More than before, I am self-censoring.

One thing I’ve noticed is the lessened prominence of rank-and-file MAGA in media coverage. Sure, you still see plenty of red trucker hats in the wild, but you see more reporting about Elon and RFK Jr.’s antics or the obsequiousness of public officials and media when appearing in public with the president. (On the other hand, a student told me about an incident she saw at one of last weekend’s “Hands Off” demonstrations. She related that a man driving a pickup truck with the obligatory Trump flag flying from the bed came to a sudden halt. He then got out and punched the first protestor he came to before getting back in and speeding off.)

I think I can say with certainty that the “flooding the zone” approach is working. Meanwhile, the apologists look at the pointless chaos and tell us to “trust the plan,” and that Trump is playing 4-D chess. (Honestly, I think tiddlywinks would be too complicated for him.) They don’t notice or acknowledge that real people are being hurt, some of whom voted for Trump last November.

I think back on the last ten years as unimaginable at their onset. I grapple with how to explain this moment when it’s my job to do just that. And I ponder what the world after will look like.

Calamities

2025-02-28T19:09:00.000-08:00

I’ve spent the past weeks wondering which outrageous act would prompt me to write about Trump 2.0. Keeping up with the firehose gush of ratfuckery emanating from Washington is exhausting and demoralizing.

Today’s televised White House meeting between Trump, J. D. Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was the tipping point. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match where Trump and Vance scolded Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful to Trump.

It should go without mention that Trump and Vance’s conduct was beneath the dignity of the American presidency. But so has so much of what has transpired since January 20^th. Elon Musk’s gang of teenaged incel tech-bros hiding behind an imaginary government agency randomly wrecking actual government agencies is probably the worst of them. The dismantling of USAID alone will diminish our standing in the global community. Our holding NATO at arm’s length will do the same. Cuts to Medicaid will imperil the health of millions of economically vulnerable Americans.

Just as troubling is Trump’s slavish sucking up to Vladimir Putin. Putin was undoubtedly the target audience for this morning’s public dressing down of President Zelensky. This, coming on the heels of Trump’s repeated assertions that Ukraine was the aggressor in its war of with Russia, was a perverse form of virtue signaling to ingratiate himself with Putin.

Then there are the more mundane policy proposals, particularly tariffs. In the fantasies of the MAGA-verse, these will be a “Take that!” to our imagined rivals. In reality, they will drive up the price of imported everyday commodities. Tariffs will also provoke retaliatory tariffs, dampening the market for U.S.-made goods. Then again, few in the base will believe that rising prices will be the fault not of tariffs but of—take your pick—Biden, congressional Democrats, irresponsible blue-state governors, DEI, ad nauseum.

The media are falling eerily in line this time around. Not that they have a choice. First, the Associated Press was banished from the White House press pool over the AP’s insistence in calling the Gulf of Mexico…the Gulf of Mexico. Then, the White House press office wrested selection of the reporters in the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association. The confrontational, occasionally belligerent demeanor of MAGA Barbie press secretary Karoline Leavitt does little to ease media relations.

The squeezing out of mainstream news services is accelerating. Fox News Channel has long been the most-watched of the cable news nets. Fox and the popularity of alt-right outlets appear to be incrementally taking control of the national narrative. Really, the dominant message taking hold is little more than a string of tropes. Here is the right’s narrative reduced to a few words: A mob of trans drag queens, along with the illegals, will descend upon Real Americans to take their Bibles and guns while grooming their kids in woke ideology.

Or maybe it is more than making the world scary for the base. While inflation is slowing, prices are sticky. The received wisdom since November 5^th is that voters were attracted to Trump because the Democrats had not done enough to make daily life affordable. Sounds true. Probably true.

In closing, I have just one question for those non-MAGA voters who went with Trump last November.

Still worried about the cost of eggs?

Day Zero

2025-01-19T18:57:00.000-08:00

It begins all over again tomorrow. It seems almost a sacrilege that this inauguration day happened to fall on Martin Luther King Day.

The silver lining is that due to the mourning period for President Carter, the flags will be at half-staff.

Reckonings

2024-12-31T16:37:00.000-08:00

I have been a poor correspondent lately. Cascading current events and work have distracted me. So, for what it’s worth I will write down some musings at the end of the year.

Summer and fall were unusually unsettled, even by the political standards of the last ten years. Joe Biden’s befuddled performance in the July presidential debate, his withdrawal, the sudden spot of hope of the Harris-Walz campaign, to the somehow predictable debacle on November 5^th, the second half of 2024 delivered on the worst pessimist’s expectations. Now, as in 2016, we look upon an uncertain and turbulent future.

Donald Trump’s promises of revenge and retribution have renewed the long-simmering animus among the base. As with any one of his past vows, this will not be what the Trumpers are expecting. But we are already seeing manifestations of hatred among the less stable Trump followers. Last week’s stalking and assault of a nonwhite TV reporter in Colorado by a taxi driver is likely the shape of things to come.

According to news reports, the assailant followed the reporter’s news van for 40 miles to attack him in the station’s parking lot. Claiming to have been a marine, the attacker demanded to know if the reporter was a citizen and proclaimed his self-alleged veteran status entitled him to police illegal immigrants. At one point during the incident, he yelled, “This is Trump’s America!”

Yes, it is. The confrontation is on-brand. It is reminiscent of any one of similar incidents in the lead-up to and during Trump’s first presidency. The assailant’s booking mugshot is familiar, reflecting a sad sack whose scant sense of self-worth is entirely rooted in his identification with Trump.

I’m speculating, of course, but I’m probably right just the same. What to make of this episode? Is it MAGA re-ascendant? Is it the return of the cosplayers claiming authority over others they do not possess? A case of stolen valor? Or, is it just a case of an emotionally disturbed person acting out?

Doesn’t matter. To the disappointment of people on the right and left, we most likely will not see widespread mass violence. The rule of law, though weakened, has not disappeared. What we can expect instead are a few dead, a number of injured, and millions in property damage at the hands of the worst MAGA nuts. Some of them will be held accountable by the legal system, some will not.

Each of these potential defendants will have their own story, but there will be certain themes in their self-justification. They will say that President Trump “deputized” them to do what they did. They will cite nonexistent or spurious legal doctrines. They will claim persecution by the deep state. If they identify as veterans, real or phony, they will say they were upholding their oath to defend the country.

(An aside is in order. Many of these oath claimants were discharged years ago, releasing them from said oaths. Any attempts to leverage their three years in the E-4 mafia to gain acquittal should not be acknowledged or allowed by the court.)

The extent to which any of these defenses will be taken seriously depends on political sentiment in the jurisdiction where the case is tried. On a certain level, these will be mere media diversions. The incoming administration’s real damage will be on the policy level.

The immediate threat will be to immigrants. The promised mass roundups and deportations are logistically infeasible in the short term, but four years is a long time. Trump’s promise to end birth citizenship won’t pass the constitutional smell test, but the administration could make life miserable for the U.S. citizen children of migrant parents. Other policy questions will stall for the time being. There won’t be any progress on gun safety. Reproductive rights, such that remain, are probably okay for now at the state level, and any proposed constitutional amendment banning abortion will not achieve the supermajority needed in both houses of Congress.

Foreign policy is another area that could harm the country internationally and at home. Withholding funds from NATO is worrisome in light of the ongoing war in Ukraine. (It seems Mr. Trump has forgotten that NATO was here for us in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It’s good to have friends.) North Korea requires careful handling, something beyond the incoming top policymakers. The proposed tariffs will only hurt ordinary Americans dependent on affordable consumer goods.

Then there is the roster of amateurs proposed for the cabinet and other higher-level posts. Personal loyalty is a more important criterion than qualifications or competence. No one knows for certain what sort of influence, if any, that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 will have on the new administration’s policy choices but if even a small part of these get enacted it will have a deleterious impact on the public.

It is at times like these where a crystal ball would be most helpful. We can comfort ourselves that it’s only four years, but a lot of damage can be done in that brief span. Destruction is easier than construction and much more lasting.

Aftermath

2024-11-06T08:47:00.004-08:00

There is little to say. We are truly fucked. Welcome back to the Trumpocalypse.

One of Us

2024-07-16T19:09:00.003-07:00

This week’s Republican National Convention has so far yielded few surprises. Donald Trump secured his third successive presidential nomination. Trump’s naming of U.S. Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate did not raise eyebrows either since the freshman senator was already shortlisted.

Vance’s comparatively brief public career has reflected an interesting but also unsurprising evolution. His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, painted a bleak picture of the lives of Appalachian transplants in Ohio. Vance’s personal biography is presented as a paradox: A career in venture capital preceded by Yale Law School by way of Ohio State University and the Marine Corps. The book made him a media darling, an overnight pundit on the state of poor whites. A voice from the people who made good, one of us as it were. Vance was a Never-Trumper that election year, at one point tempting Godwin by speculating Trump might be a latter-day Hitler.

His election to the Senate in 2022 showed that Vance, like the Republican establishment, had “evolved” on the topic of Trump. Trump endorsed Vance, who defeated his opponent, Tim Ryan, by a healthy but unimpressive margin. Once in office, he fell into line. It paid off.

Vance’s positions have been variously described as national conservative to populist. He’s certainly a social conservative; the Heritage Foundation favored Vance as a candidate. His stated policy positions align quite well with its Project 2025 plan. While never liberal in his beliefs, he appeared a run of the mill conservative before he actually went into politics. To repeat, he fell into line.

Thus Vance’s views are alarming should he ever be in a position to act on them. It’s quite possible; the 39-year-old Vance is nearly half Trump’s age. Even if Trump completes his term, some of the editorial commentary has already anointed Vance as the heir to MAGA and he’s in scoring position for the 2028 nomination.

This week’s RNC solidifies a years-long trend. The Republican Party is wholly the Party of Trump. That’s the choice. With Biden’s obvious lapses and stubborn refusal to step aside as candidate, we have seen the future after November 5^th.

Something Like This

2024-07-14T15:42:00.001-07:00

Something like this was bound to happen. Yesterday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump is yet another manifesting of the roiling stream of violence churning beneath the surface of American life.

It could have been worse. But for the quick reaction to shots fired from outside the crowd by the Secret Service the incident would have joined a sordid history of political murder in this country. It is bad enough an innocent bystander at the Pennsylvania rally died and two others were injured. It is a sobering thought to know that even with extensive security precautions a would-be killer can come within millimeters of taking down a president.

Naturally the intended target immediately grasped the optics of his near-miss. Blood trickling from his injured ear, Trump greeted the crowd with an upraised fist as his bodyguards hustled him away. Predictably, he attributed his deliverance to God. Millions of others undoubtedly believe this. The attempt also serves to further the shared sense of grievance and need for a martyr among the base.

As time goes on the thread of our political narrative becomes snagged. Presidential elections used to be routine affairs; they came, they went. There were occasional complications, as in the case of the 2000 election, but for almost a half century most passed without incident. Perhaps we should have seen it coming with the Tea Party movement, but the surprise outcome of 2016 remains just that. More accurately, it was an all-around surprise at the time but has become a divinely ordained event to Trump’s more fervent supporters.

Given that last tenet, the public reaction to the incident is as expected. Commentators from the left expressed relief the attempt failed. From the right, the rhetoric from Trump’s opponents was to blame. As for the shooter, little is known at present other than his name, his age, and a few biographical tidbits. He is reported to have been a registered Republican who also made a small contribution to a liberal group, but neither fact really has any bearing on what he did. The demographics track; he was a twentysomething white male. But his motive is a mystery.

It's certain that Trump’s brush with death will pervade the discourse at next week’s Republican National Convention. It will likely become a theme in campaign media as we near the election. Perhaps it will have an effect on undecided voters. Trump’s sangfroid does enhance his image. Whether this will be the case several weeks from now remains to be seen. But the fact that something like this has happened is an ominous sign of our polarization.

Bedtime for Democracy

2024-07-02T17:46:00.001-07:00

(Apologies…I couldn’t come up with a better title, so I borrowed from The Dead Kennedys.)

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week, and it was predictably disheartening. Former (for now) president Trump got his executive immunity. Attempted election tampering and inciting insurrection are no barriers to the highest office. The Sackler family is immune from being sued for Perdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. The courts no longer have to defer to the expertise and judgment of administrative agencies. The Biden administration has been blocked from its efforts to curb air pollution.

And so forth. None of this is surprising, just more of the usual. Long standing protections and safeguards are falling one by one and there seems to be little will to push back. Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate seems to augur worse tidings to come.

Time has blunted the sense of shock surrounding J6. It’s hard to reconjure the feelings of dread pervading the pandemic year as emboldened armed nutters tested the boundaries of duly constituted authorities and the law itself. But it seems we are careening toward a repeat performance. Donald Trump is a master of self-reinvention, and it is becoming evident we are on the threshold of a second Trump presidency with all the implications that carries.

There’s always been an underlying current of violence beneath the placid surface of American life which periodically erupts as sudden, startling paroxysms of carnage. Nine short years ago some laughed and shrugged as long-shot candidate Trump bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and get away with it. But January 6^th demonstrated that his words could move bad actors to commit bad acts.

It’s tempting to reflexively paint Trump and his devotees as fascists, which isn’t always a subtle enterprise, but there are historical parallels. An apt comparison is the assassination of Italian politician Giacomo Matteotti a century ago. Matteotti had challenged the victory of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in the 1924 parliamentary elections, charging intimidation and election fraud. Days after making the accusation on the floor of parliament, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered. The antifascist opposition then miscalculated and abandoned its parliamentary forum and counted on a general strike to topple Mussolini’s government. The strike failed and the withdrawal of the opposition only solidified Mussolini’s hold on power, moving Italy toward the totalitarian state it became. Mussolini eventually took credit for Matteotti’s death, framing it as a necessity and condoning the actions of the assassination squad.

It is not a broad inferential leap to see something comparable in present-day America. The Democrats won’t withdraw from electoral politics to be sure, but the Republicans use razor-thin majorities in Congress much more effectively than the Democrats. If Trump wins and the Republicans regain the Senate in November, matters could deteriorate quickly. With SCOTUS loosening its oversight of the executive and with Trump’s stated intention to replace civil service merit hires with handpicked loyalists, it won’t take a large majority in Congress to advance the MAGA vision. The roadmap is already there in the Project 2025 policy document published by the Heritage Foundation. The conservative long game that began with the Powell Memorandum in the 1970s is about to pay off magnificently.

But then there is a faint glimmer of hope amidst the dark tidings. New York state just disbarred Rudy Giuliani. For election denial. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

2024-04-29T13:52:00.001-07:00

The news media of late presents an even more skewed view than usual of the state of our institutions of higher learning.

The current skirmish in the culture wars concerns the reaction of a handful of activist students and professors to the war in Gaza. If all your news diet consists of Fox News, pro-Palestinian activism and incidents such as the occupation at Columbia and a scattering of other, mostly private universities are rampant throughout American higher ed. If I am to believe the clickbait headlines in my newsfeed, all of the commie elitist professors on every single campus in the country are indoctrinating all of their students in a woke orthodoxy which, if unchecked by loyal Americans, will result in the destruction of Israel.

This reportage is a cynical ploy by right wing news outlets to further polarize the electorate ahead of November’s election by appealing to the prejudices of their audience. Tapping into festering resentments across a vocal segment of the public is profitable. Pigeonholing anyone with any schooling beyond twelfth grade as an out of touch elitist with a head filled with useless “knowledge” is a good media strategy.

Like Fox’s audience, my only experience with the protests is what I watch and read. The campuses where I work have been quiet. The topics of Israel, Gaza, and Hamas are largely unmentioned by my students and I have only touched upon them in passing as they are largely tangential to the subjects I teach. This goes to show that the people most agitated about what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis are on the fringes while the people most affected get lost in the ideological dogma of others.

Let’s begin with the campus protestors. Let’s stipulate that the events of October 7^th and beyond have been horrific for those affected on both sides. Having said this, the rhetoric wielded by the pro-Palestinian activists is disturbingly pro-Hamas. It seems they are blind to the implications of “From the river to the sea.” Quick to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, they are explicitly advocating the genocide of Israeli Jews. Their behavior towards their critics or even towards anyone outside the group is also couched in rhetorical excess, branding them as “Zionists” without regard to the person or the arguments posed.

Now on to the cultural warriors of the right. Unwilling to brook any criticism of Israeli policies or actions, they brand any critics as “anti-semites” who seek an end to Israel. They willfully ignore Netanyahu’s heavy-handed policies in the West Bank and his ill-fated abandonment of Gaza to Hamas rule. There doesn’t seem to be any questioning of the intelligence failures which led to the October 7^th attacks. (Considering that the attacks coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—another intelligence failure—one would think Netanyahu, his advisors, and the Israeli intelligence establishment would have been more alert.) The delusional worldview of evangelicals for whom Israel’s existence brings us one step closer to the End Times has taken on a cult-like status across the political right, further polarizing the discourse.

The overflow effect on domestic policy has been to put American higher education in the crosshairs even more so than usual. The focus has been upon “elite” institutions but the larger targets are colleges and universities across the board. Conservatives want to replace so-called political correctness, which is not nearly as prevalent as charged, with their own orthodoxy. Calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, coming on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president after her congressional testimony on campus activism, is calculated to create a chilling effect. Calls for cutbacks of humanities and social science courses and their replacement with more vocational curricula are another front in the right-wing war on academia. The limited scope activism that has the right in a lather is merely a convenient opportunity for them to advance their anti-intellectual agenda. For them, Israel is beside the point. The war in Gaza is a convenient opportunity, nothing more.

The World at Our Doorstep

2024-04-07T12:42:00.001-07:00

Last week, I spent over an hour in a disheartening conversation with a student. She said she had spent her Spring Break watching TikTok videos of the humanitarian crises in Gaza and Ukraine. Despite her family’s efforts to cheer her up, she told me she felt helpless to do anything. She had donated money to relief efforts but felt it wasn’t nearly enough.

The best I can do in these discussions is to offer anodynes. As with the student’s contributions they aren’t nearly enough. What strikes me is that these kind of conversations with students have become more common. It’s true that subjective life experience for young people has become seemingly grim of late. Casual exchanges with students suggest the pandemic may have been a tipping point. Parents are more sheltering than those of my youth. The pandemic was probably the first indication to today’s kids that the outside world can be a scary place.

Throw in the shenanigans of the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and it’s understandable that young people are more anxious than in the past. The uncertainty surrounding what may happen in November and beyond isn’t helping. The first week of classes, I had three students ask me if I thought there would be a civil war. Notwithstanding the polarization of the last eight years, I’d never gotten a question like that.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The media have posed that question with growing frequency for months. I have private doubts about the stability of our social and political systems but don’t express them in class or in personal conversations. It’s hard to be reassuring, though. A couple of months ago, I was a panelist in a discussion concerning past polarization in America. My part was to cover the runup to the Civil War (the first one). While the theme was to point out that we have been polarized at various times, a recap of the 1850s and its mounting evils—Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown’s raid—personally reinforced my sense that we are once more on the precipice.

If I’m unsettled by what’s going on, I can only imagine what my young students are feeling. Now that I’m mostly back in the live classroom it’s hard to distance myself or feel detachment from what the students are experiencing. During the lockdowns my online students were a mix of traditional and “mature” students, with the inevitable subpopulation of MAGA trolls. The trolls are mostly in the past, since the internet affords anonymity and a classroom does not.

But of course we are all online, the old and the young. Ridiculous conjectures like Pizzagate and QAnon are fading into the past, along with the eructs of Alex Jones. But rest assured something just as bad, if not worse, will take their place. And while the youngsters have migrated to Instagram and TikTok, Facebook and Truth Social are still the refuge of the delusional and unhinged. What’s been simmering the last four years threatens to boil over as we get closer to Election Day. And I suspect that underlies the anxiety some of my students are experiencing.

For better or worse, I guess we are in this together.

The Most Dangerous Season

2023-09-30T19:14:00.000-07:00

I remember the fall of 1983 well. I was in twelfth grade. The dreary ordeal of high school would finally end in the spring. I didn’t pay much attention to the world beyond my small town, didn’t know much about the world beyond.

Aside from the routine of schoolwork, I was engrossed in the pop culture of the moment—music, movies, the occasional book. The Second British Invasion was underway, and the airwaves buzzed with synthpop. But there was one artist who dominated the radio and a nascent cable network called Music Television that year. We had heard the first singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller the previous fall, and subsequent tracks would keep hitting through the end of the year. We had watched MJ’s electrifying performance of “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 television special a few months before. We eagerly anticipated the first airing of the video of the title track, which would finally arrive in December. That year’s yearbook would even feature a small section devoted to the Thriller phenomenon.

But there was a larger world beyond mine and that of my classmates. Although we were aware of the ongoing Cold War, it did not register as important to us. Our teachers never discussed it save for a passing reference toward the end of our required U.S. history class. We were required to view the TV movie The Day After, which would air that November. I admit it scared the hell out of me, but it quickly faded from memory as smaller concerns again filled my mind (such as the “Thriller” video). Looking back, I should have taken a good look around.

That fall brought a number of incidents which should have driven home the precarious nature of the U.S.-Soviet standoff other than a network TV special with cheesy special effects. These went beyond the boilerplate rhetoric emanating from Washington and Moscow. That fall saw events that exacerbated tensions to the point where the world came closer to a thermonuclear war than it had at any time after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

There was the stuff that was reported in the news. In September a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air 747 that was off course due to a navigational error; Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia was among the dead. The following month, U.S. forces invaded Grenada, whose pro-Cuban, pro-Soviet revolutionary regime had descended into a factional coup. (This came on the heels of the unrelated truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.) In protest of the Grenada intervention, a fringe group called the May 19^th Communist Organization planted a bomb in the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol. It detonated after the Senate had adjourned for the day; no one was hurt.

Then, there was what wasn’t reported until much later. The truly scary stuff. At the end of September, the duty officer at the Serpukov-15 nuclear control center near Moscow was alerted to incoming NATO ballistic missiles. Tensions had been building for the past two years as the U.S. expanded its nuclear arsenal in West Germany; the first Pershing II missiles would be fielded by year’s end. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, noticed the suspected attack indicated only a handful of incoming missiles rather than the expected full onslaught. Petrov correctly deduced a malfunction of the Oko early warning satellites and did not order a retaliatory response. This decision earned Petrov a reprimand and effectively ended his military career. It would be many years before he would receive the recognition he deserved.

That wasn’t the only close call. November saw that year’s NATO Able Archer exercise. Able Archer 83 was a command post exercise that simulated the precipitating events which would in turn lead to DEFCON 1 and the opening moves of a nuclear war. The Soviet leadership watched what they misconstrued as an actual ramp-up to an actual nuclear attack. Operation RYAN had been stood up in 1981 at the behest of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov to monitor NATO war preparations. Signals intelligence through RYAN led Andropov, by then the General Secretary, and the rest of the Soviet leadership to believe Able Archer was the precursor of a surprise attack.

Later revelations would help explain their apprehensions. It seems that nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were airlifted into Europe ahead of Able Archer, an airlift which required 170 aircraft flying under radio silence. NATO headquarters moved into its wartime bunkers. Intelligence also indicated that NATO was modifying its nuclear release procedures.

Several factors may explain why Able Archer 83 didn’t touch off World War III. There was some skepticism within the KGB, according to double agent Oleg Gordievsky and other KGB officers who published memoirs well after the fact. Andropov was in poor health—he would die three months later—and may have been hesitant to mount a preemptive attack despite his longtime suspicions of Western intentions. Or it might have been that the U.S. Air Force commander in the theater advising NATO leaders not to respond to the reactive Warsaw Pact military buildup. Some of the decision process on both sides may remain unknown to both historians and the public.

Much of this did not come to light for years, though subsequent releases of classified documents have expanded our understanding. I can only express relief that nothing escalated to the point of war. And that I was blissfully ignorant of it all at the time.

Eyes Open

2023-08-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

I underwent my first faculty evaluation for an online class last year. We’re evaluated by our department chair every four years; my last eval was pre-pandemic when I was mainly teaching in a live classroom. These evaluations, on ground or online, include an anonymous student survey on their take on my performance.

It’s easier for me in a live classroom where I can gauge the students’ reactions to me in real time. I can pretty much predict how they will describe my performance. Online, I’m blind. So, it was with a frisson of trepidation that I read over the survey comments.

The written comments are optional, which means they are usually left by students who either love you or hate you. The latter category of comments included a disparaging description of me as “woke.”

Woke is a funny choice of a snarl word, since it never really caught on among liberals and progressives. The only occasion I remember using it in the classroom was a few years ago. I had slept poorly the night before, and that day’s talk was not one of my best. After a couple of stumbles, I paused and apologized and told them why. I facetiously remarked that I should be more woke.

No, woke the way it’s used by conservatives is just part of their funhouse mirror vision of how they think people to their left are. In the case of the critical student, he (it was probably a he) meant that I had failed to cater to his prejudices. Concerning the course, there is really very little ideological content. If my material has a flaw, it is that it is maybe a little more rah-rah about the status quo than I actually feel about it. If it is woke in this student’s estimation, it’s likely it’s because I acknowledge the existence of non-whites, that we took our land from its indigenous occupants, that slavery and Jim Crow actually happened, that police violence is visited most often on Blacks and other people of color, that LGBTQ people have rights, and so forth.

It is disconcerting for me the way each of us lives within our own media-driven ideological bubbles. I grew up in an era where there were only three television networks (four if you counted PBS), most moderately large cities had at least two daily newspapers, AM talk radio was fringe, and the internet was in the future. There was already a deepening rift between left and right, but there weren’t cable news and social media to channel extremist ideas unrooted in fact. I am sure that the present climate of mutual mistrust explains the distaste for my classroom statements among some of my distance learning students, and that the quasi-anonymous online environment where teacher and student will never meet personally emboldens them to proclaim their beliefs with little concern for their potential offensiveness. Pity.

Cultural Desert

2023-06-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

My dwindling “Saved” queue is finally at zero. My music streaming service updated its site and now offers fewer of my favorite musicians and tracks. My preferred podcast platform is going dark at the end of August.

It seems that some of the best cultural experiences the internet offers are drying up. The hardest hit for me is Netflix’s discontinuing its DVD service. The funny thing about that development was its streaming service offered better content 10-12 years ago. Particularly during the time when Netflix partnered with Starz, I could access all kinds of obscure titles in streaming format such as films produced by the East German studio DEFA. As Netflix transitioned into content creation, its streamed titles interested me less and the reason I continued to subscribe was mainly for the DVDs.

I’m not sure what I will do now. I read recently that TCM had cut its staff. Programming quality there seems to be slipping, and I watch that channel less frequently than I did before and during the pandemic.

A casual reading of recent news coverage surrounding our culture industries points to COVID as a culprit. Movies and music helped me through the lockdown, and I know I wasn’t alone. When it came to music, I listened to familiar favorites, discovered new artists, and fell in love all over again those I hadn’t listened to in ages.

The spike in demand for streamed music increased the value of copyrights owned by songwriters and recording artists while yielding comparatively little return in the form of royalties, which in turn led to what I will call The Great Catalog Sell Off of 2021. (Bruce Springsteen was reportedly the biggest winner, receiving more than a half-billion dollars for his body of work. The buyer was Sony; I think they can afford it.)

The passing of copyrights from what must have been scores of songwriters and recording artists into the hands of a narrow range of new owners is ominous. It’s true that owning the rights to numerous catalogs afford economies of scale which make streaming profitable in a way it would not be for individual artists. But it also means that un- or less-profitable artists or their works are more likely to be withdrawn. I hope this prediction is wrong, but my tapered listening diet of late is anecdotal evidence in that direction.

Time was, there was money to be made from “long tails” marketing to a clientele who wanted niche goods and services. Online commerce would lower the transaction cost incurred selling to small groups of customers. I used to believe that. But like a lot of conventional wisdom, this may not have been true in the long run if ever. With the growing trend toward concentrated ownership in media, less mainstream consumers will be shut out.

Concentration of ownership in any industry is not a good outcome. It compels media platforms and outlets to dumb down and reduce the diversity of content available to the viewer or listener. In the business world, you have to positively spin changes even when they don’t benefit or work against the consumer. I’m not convinced and you shouldn't be either. New is not necessarily improved.

Spectator Sport

2023-03-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

It’s funny how certain memories survive the passage of time. I’m not sure which night it was—March 19^th or 20^th—but I distinctly remember my eyes being riveted to the screen of one of the TVs in the student union watering hole.

I was a graduate student in the spring of 2003. I enrolled a year and a half earlier after being released from the armed forces. The 9/11 attacks occurred during the third week of my first semester and had cast a pall over my studies from then on. The ensuing war in Afghanistan seemed remote, however, and I did not dwell much on the relatively small number of servicemembers serving there.

The preparations for the invasion of Iraq in the summer and fall of 2002 filled me with renewed anxiety. I knew people I served with would inevitably become mixed up in it. The Bush administration’s absurd claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, as well as the mistaken belief among many Americans at the time that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, made the impending conflict all the more worrisome. The consensus among my fellow students and professors was that the war would end in disaster.

And so I found myself standing with a clutch of students watching the promised shock and awe unfold. One of my professors, a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy, stood with us slowly shaking his head before wandering off. Those of us who stayed drowned the rest of the evening in pitchers of beer until we were chased out at closing time.

The war hung over the remaining year or so of my master’s program. I led classroom discussions on the subject and was a panelist on a graduate student panel on its possible consequences the week President Bush declared the active phase of the war over whilst standing in front of the notorious “Mission Accomplished” banner.

Part of me wanted to believe that last part. But my initial pessimism was rewarded as insurgency gripped Iraq. I wrapped up the program upon completing my master’s thesis, a gloomy tome critiquing the flaws in neoconservative foreign policy preferences. Seems quaint looking back.

I’ve commented on it elsewhere in this space, but I believe the public is too deferential to the military as an institution. The path was set during the Reagan years and the media spectacle of the Gulf War confirmed it. Thanks to our all-volunteer armed forces, war had become a spectator sport. The lopsided victory over Iraq, together with the high-profile media presence of uniformed leaders such as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf undoubtably contributed to the widespread support. Several polls during the 1990s counted the military among the country's most trusted institutions.

The early mass protests notwithstanding, there was surprisingly little pushback against the intervention as it went awry over the ensuing years. We can attribute some of this to the so-called rally effect and a reluctance to be seen as somehow disloyal. It didn’t hurt that the relative success of the 2007 surge permitted a somewhat graceful exit later on.

But the damage was done, even if it receives negligible attention. Roughly 6,000 U.S. servicemembers died in our Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Their absence is surely felt by their loved ones. Around half a million receive VA compensation for disabilities incurred in the two conflicts.

There is a tendency to just look at our own losses without accounting for the innocent bystanders. The number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths were connected to the war varies by source but most put it well into six figures (not including casualties from the later Islamic State insurgency). The toll the conflict took on Iraq’s infrastructure (outside the Kurdish northern region) may not be remedied for years, if ever. Iraq ranks low on many human development indices. (The United Nations Development Programme ranks the country slightly above the less developed countries of the Global South.)

The topic of the post-9/11 conflicts seldom arises among my students. There are fewer veterans of these wars in my classes. Most of the seats are filled with Gen Zers and younger Millennials who either hadn’t been born yet or have little or no memory of the time. Most of the decisionmakers who cooked up (or at least went along with) these schemes are either dead (Powell, Rumsfeld) or are no longer in government service (Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al.). Perhaps any lessons learned are beside the point for younger generations due to their removal from the present, opening the door for future misjudgments.

Projection

2022-10-29T19:18:00.001-07:00

Justice Alito is afraid.

The author of last summer’s holding in Dobbs said this week that the leaking of the decision draft in May exposed his fellow justices (the right-wing ones, anyway) to risk of assassination.

One can partly attribute this rhetorical drama to conservatives’ self-importance. Conservatism is rooted in the belief one is intrinsically better than other people. Putting oneself above others leads to self-aggrandizing ideation. Having said that, we have to look at who is victimizing whom in the long-Trump pandemic. Aside from the incident of an antifa protestor killing a Patriot Prayer militant in Portland in 2020, there are few credible examples of lethal left-on-right violence in recent years.

Before Dobbs I saw Samuel Alito as I regarded other run of the mill conservatives in high places, something resembling a pebble in my shoe. His low public profile in the past led me into a grudging acceptance of his presence. Since the May leak, Alito’s outspoken assholery has become nearly intolerable. We have learned much of his character in past months. Alito strikes me as an angry, embittered man with antediluvian views who poses a threat to the personal liberties of tens of millions of Americans.

But it isn’t Alito’s hyperbole that prompted me to write this. The attempted murder of Paul Pelosi in his San Francisco home yesterday is the worst example of right-wing violence since the January 6^th insurrection. The accused is, unsurprisingly, a Trump-troll whose activism was previously limited to shitposting on social media. News reports indicate the assailant planned to hold Pelosi hostage until his wife returned from Washington. Pelosi was able to dial 911 during the home invasion and the police promptly responded, but not until after the attacker fractured his skull with a hammer.

The attack on Speaker Pelosi’s spouse is the latest incident in the trend of escalating far-right aggression since 2016. As I write, a group of self-proclaimed militiamen (i.e., armed cosplayers in camouflage) are on trial in Michigan for plotting to kidnap and murder governor Gretchen Whitmer. The ambiguity of Donald Trump’s statements on such incidents from the “good people on both sides” assertion after Charlottesville to his instruction to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” before the 2020 election constitute a tacit endorsement of illicit force directed at other Americans. Statements by other Republican leaders, such as Lindsey Graham’s prediction of “riots in the streets” if Georgia prosecutors dared to indict Trump for his attempted election fraud simply add fuel to the fire. Last summer’s YouGov / Economist poll reporting more than 40% of those polled believe a civil war is likely in the next decade is probably a reflection of the ratcheting bombast emanating from Republican politicians.

And yet, to hear them tell it, these same pols are the victims. Alito’s drama queen fears of assassination have manifested in little more than Brett Kavanaugh being forced to cut short a night out when a few protestors showed up outside the restaurant. To the last individual, Republicans at all levels whine about imaginary stolen elections while shamelessly advocating and instituting policies designed to exclude minority voters in future contests. Delusional imaginings of violence meted by antifa and other lefties ignore the very real threat from the right.

There’s a word for this: Projection. Push your faults and your misdeeds on your opponents. That’s what is happening here. Call it for what it is. Call out the offenders. May the truth win the day.

Free Ride

2022-09-25T19:24:00.001-07:00

I must say that the latest stunt out of MAGA-dom is inspired, though not in a good way. Busing and flying immigrants from Florida and Texas to blue states has the optics of a raised middle finger liberals. Fox and other right-wing news outlets are portraying it that way. Less unhinged sources highlighted the outpouring of kindness toward the new arrivals in communities like Martha’s Vineyard.

No story is that simple, notwithstanding one’s ideological lens. We know that the migrants were promised jobs, housing, and gifts at their destination. Some were misled about these destinations; the Cape Cod contingent thought they were going to Boston. Others seemed to have known their itinerary in advance and saw an opportunity to travel someplace they wanted to be; one man got off his bus in Chicago and was met by family.

I’m sure each family or individual concerned had their motives for going along. It does appear that many were deceived. Outside the MAGA-verse, there have been comparisons to the “reverse Freedom Rides” of the early 1960s. I thought I knew my Civil Rights Movement history, but I was unaware of them until now. This bit of near-forgotten right-wing ratfuckery was orchestrated by the New Orleans White Citizens Council as retaliation for the SNCC- and CORE-organized Freedom Rides against racial segregation in the South. Black families were bused to northern states with the promise of housing and jobs only to discover upon arrival that they had been had. The campaign subsequently spread to other southern states.

The idea was to overload social welfare systems up north, point out the imputed hypocrisy of civil rights advocates, and demonstrate to the displaced Black people that they were better off in the segregated South. Similarly, the ongoing drive to offload Latino migrants onto blue states and sanctuary cities is intended to punish those who have the temerity to view these people as human beings possessing human dignity. (The immigrants seem to have been indiscriminately targeted; El Paso bused 223 migrants to New York City many of whom were Venezuelan refugees. Venezuelan-Americans, like Cuban-Americans, tend to favor Republican candidates. Looks like the GOP successfully alienated a bunch of future voters.)

One key difference between then and now is that the Louisiana legislature refused to fund the 1960 campaign while the Florida legislature appropriated $12 million in support of the current effort. (Governor Ron DeSantis has pledged to spend every last dollar.) I am unsure of the cost to Texas taxpayers of Greg Abbott’s mischief, though indications point to private donations.

One wrinkle is that this caper could actually benefit the receiving communities. Many of the immigrants may be eligible for Temporary Protected Status. If granted, those with TPS will be legally able to work. While I’m not familiar with the labor economics of the various destinations, let’s assume that they are having the same hiring troubles as the rest of the country. The arrival of the migrants may help alleviate labor shortages in at least some places.

Like all the other wingnut shenanigans of the last six-plus years, the bus-off will be superseded by even barmier escapades. I’m not sure what they are meant to accomplish. They’re not “triggering” or “owning” the libs. All they’re doing is jerking each other off as they become less relevant over time, a development that cannot happen soon enough.

Monarchy at the Crossroads: A Brief Assessment

2022-09-13T19:33:00.000-07:00

Queen Elizabeth II has finally passed away. Ninety-six years is a good run for any individual. And as with so many of us, she was the sole British monarch of my lifetime up to this point.

Our fascination with the British monarchy has had a life of its own; a perennial feature of American pop culture for decades. In my memory, it didn’t become a thing until the marriage of Charles and Diana. It wasn’t so much him—then and now his bland persona made him easy to ignore. It was the sudden glamour bestowed upon this mild-mannered nursery school teacher thrust suddenly into the limelight which caught the popular imagination. Her divorce from her Prince, her sudden and tragic death, and the lives of her sons have kept the royals in the forefront of our collective consciousness.

But it is not my intention to dissect the royal family as cultural phenomenon. The monarchy, for all its recently acquired media friendliness, possesses a fraught legacy. While hardly at the fore of the media coverage, there has been a steady commentary in online media particularly concerning the larger implications of British imperialism.

Much has been written of the rapid decline of the British Empire since the Second World War. Ensuring the survival of the metropole took precedence over preserving the overseas colonies, and rapid decolonization was a collateral effect once the guns fell silent in Europe. Not that this was entirely a smooth process; one need only reference the Malayan Emergency, Mau Mau, and the Aden Emergency to recognize that Britain sought to maintain its possessions across the globe even as the anticolonial tide washed upon them.

The vestiges of the Empire survive in the form of the Commonwealth, which is an institution in flux. For much of its history, the Commonwealth served as a means for Britain to exert soft power over its former subjects. However, one can also make the argument that principled actions such as the opposition to UDI in Rhodesia and apartheid in South Africa were as much the product of its recently independent members exerting influence over British policy in the court of public opinion.

The nature of the Commonwealth is changing, with countries without a history of British colonialism such as Mozambique and Rwanda coming into the fold. Similarly, the stance of members toward the monarchy is changing. Barbados was the latest to break with the Crown and became a republic last year.

A discussion of the Empire’s decline and fall too often sidestep its origins. England, and later Britain was arguably the originator of the Western settler state. Medieval and early modern Ireland was the prototype. Even though Ireland was the first Commonwealth country to withdraw, the Anglicization of its culture is permanent. (Gaelic is an official language, but just about everyone speaks English exclusively. Although there are identifiable cultural differences, the country, at least in the cities, is rather like Britain albeit with a different accent.)

Consider the rest of the Anglosphere. Indigenous peoples were displaced and subjected to genocide in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. English-speaking Europeans form a substantial demographic in South Africa almost thirty years after majority rule. In other places, they are a minority as they had been during the colonial era. The only former colony to have achieved a near-purge of European settlers has been Zimbabwe, where one-fifth of one percent of the population is white.

So, the Queen’s passing does mark the end of an era. It will probably also feed the fascination surrounding the royal-watching pastime. Whether the new king and the surviving royals can maintain the future relevance of the monarchy is a separate question. Britain’s future relevance post-Brexit is one as well.

This Looks Familiar

2022-08-21T19:09:00.001-07:00

Fall semester begins tomorrow. Not that I, my online students, nor my colleagues can do anything about it.

You see, the college website is down. Has been since yesterday. After a day and a half of silence, IT finally took to Twitter to explain the matter.

For the second time in eighteen months, the college has fallen victim to a ransomware attack. The last one delayed the end of Spring semester by more than a week. This one will probably delay the Fall term for who knows how long. A temporary page assures students they can access their classes and contact their instructors via the LMS. This instructor accessed the linked backdoor LMS login page. The LMS rejected my password as invalid. Funny, it worked before. I tried to rest my password. The password reset page is down.

You would think the administration (and our IT folks) would’ve learned from last time. Just like last time, the response was slow and the messaging unclear. Just like last time, the college has retained the services of a “third party consulting form.” Maybe it would be cheaper to just pay off the hijackers and be done with it.

Maybe they should just hire the hijackers.