New Year's Eve Longings

New Year's Eve has always been a beloved holiday for me, mostly since it has nothing to do with family obligations, and a lot to do with friends, booze, and self-reflection, three of my favorite things. Growing up, my family always got together with two other families with whom we had been friends with ever since I could remember. One couple are godparents to one of my sisters, the other came all the way out to Jersey from Nebraska for my wedding, something that no one in my extended biological family bothered to do. The kids of my friends' parents were close in age to me and my sisters; in a lot of ways they were our second family. While the adults made merry upstairs (on one of the few nights when my parents would have more than a solitary drink), we would be in the basement, playing games, drinking endless cans of soda (Mountain Dew, not bourbon, was my tipple of choice back then), and running upstairs now and then to snag some snacks. The best part was when everyone got together at midnight to ring in the New Year (with the help of Dick Clark, of course.) Us kids had a box of old-school noise makers, and really raised a holler with them. Those nights are some of the most vivid and happiest of my life.

 I had such a good time that I would still show up to the annual party when I came home for college, although now I would be drinking beers and talking football upstairs with the adults. I did this despite being at a point in my life where my late-adolescent disdain for everything associated with myself before college and its concomitant personal reinvention knew no bounds. However, getting to participate in the New Year's party like an adult marked a true coming of age, more than either my high school or college graduation.

 As I get older, these memories highlight a problem with holidays I never used to have. Namely, I'm really starting to miss the people who aren't around anymore. I don't just mean friends and family who have passed on, but people that mean a lot to me who I never get to see. There's a lot I would give to reunite all of the three families together for a New Year's party. Sometimes we get to see each other around Christmas, but that's not enough. Some of us are on the east coast, some in California, others sprinkled around the Midwest. My childhood family friends are only the tip of the separation iceberg, however. 

Since leaving home at the age of 18, I have lived in seven different cities, four different states, and one other country. During my vagabond days I had the good fortune to meet so many fantastic people and make so many cherished friends. As happy as I am to be here in New Jersey with my wife and finally living together after years spent apart, I still really miss my old friends. New Year's Eve is not a holiday for family, it is a holiday for friends, and it is them that I long for more than ever this year. I want to relive the annual New Year's feast and drinking of Irish whiskey with my peeps in Lincoln, to get the grad school clan (the only other group that could qualify as a second family for me) back together for a bocce ball bbq and to see all their children who are growing up so fast, to enjoy a rye whiskey cocktail and obscure pop culture at R and E's pad in Illinois, to gab in broken German with my generous relatives in Nordenham, to get K and J from my Michigan days together with a bottle of Scotch and a trip to the bowling alley like we used to after our exhausting Thursdays, to spend a night in Milwaukee with my old Chicago roomie and pal D and his lovely wife M, and to reconvene and share survivor stories with the gang of true blue Menschen who helped me endure three years in East Texas purgatory.

Life is too short, and one of its great cruelties in our modern age is that it is constantly pulling us apart from each other to new jobs in new towns during the little time we have. With all due respect to Robert Burns, this New Year's Eve I fervently hope that all acquaintance shall not be forgot.

Will 2011 Be a "Turning Point that Failed to Turn"?

2011 has a been year of world revolution akin to those 1848, 1968, or 1989. In the space of one year Mubarak, Qaddafi and Berlusconi have all been tossed from power. Now even Vladimir Putin has had to face popular wrath. Arab Spring is remaking the Middle East, the Occupy protests have swept America and changed the political discourse, and the European Union has been pushed to the brink. In the words of Yeats' famous poem, "the center does not hold."

As a historian, I am well aware that revolutions are unpredictable and are just as likely to move backwards rather than forward. The old saw about the revolutionary year of 1848 in Europe was that it was "the turning point that failed to turn" because revolutionary regimes failed to maintain power and were toppled by authoritarian and reactionary forces. More recent historical work has shown that the revolutions still changed much in the long term, but the fact that they failed to reach their immediate goals still holds true. I often wonder whether the current situation will be a repeat.

As in 1848 and other moments of revolution, the current situation has arisen from the breakdown of basic political and economic structures. In the Middle East the old secular dictatorships are being toppled, in the United States there is increasing anger with the supply-side economic model that has reigned for the past three decades, and in Europe the whole post-Cold War order seems to be entering into a crisis stage.  At the same time, the forces of reaction have been readying their counterattacks.  For instance, the Egyptian military is clamping down on protest and in Europe the technocrats, hardly known for their democratic spirit, have more power now than ever.  2012 may very well be a repeat of 1849, a year of restorations.

However, I think it's well nigh impossible to get the revolutionary genie back in the bottle.  In this country wealth inequality has finally become a pressing political issue, and can no longer be warded off with shrieks of "class warfare."  Restorations of the old guard will happen, but they will also bring with them concessions.  Even if the next year sees a roll-back, 2011 will go down as a pivotal year.  

Why I am Saying Good-bye to College Sports

Growing up in rural Nebraska, I lived and died by the prospects of the Cornhuskers.  When they went through years of getting shellacked and embarrassed in bowl games, I felt real, despairing pain.  I attended their famous 1987 showdown with Oklahoma, and the 'Huskers' loss that day ripped out my twelve year old heart. When they won national championships after the 1994, 1995, and 1997 seasons, I felt true joy, akin to that of a pilgrim finally reaching a holy site.  Like any true believer, I tried to downplay the less savory aspects of my faith.  For example, in 1995 when star running back Lawrence Philips was merely suspended -not kicked off the team- for violently assaulting his ex-girlfriend, I felt a twinge of uneasiness and thought the decision was wrong, but managed to shrug it off and still celebrated when Philips returned for the Fiesta Bowl and helped the Huskers cream Florida.  Later on, when I was a graduate student at Big Ten University, I went to football games and watched as many of the team's basketball games as possible.  This despite knowing from friends who had some players as students, that some of them should have been academically ineligible to play, but either through manipulation or pressure, still got to take the court.  Those facts faded from my mind when I celebrated my team's amazing comeback victory to get them into the Final Four.

I'd known for a long time that big-time college sports were corrupt and riven with the rankest hypocrisy, but somehow managed to compartmentalize that knowledge.  Perhaps I saw it as a small price to pay for all the pageantry, drama, excitement, and fun college sports provide.  Is there any weekend in sports more captivating than the NCAA basketball tournament's opening?  Are there any rivalries in all of American sport to rival Auburn versus Alabama, Michigan versus Ohio State, and Texas versus Oklahoma?  These things are often wonderful things to behold, but they are built upon a foundation of lies and corruption, and have a parasitical relationship with America's struggling universities.  Finally, after years of trying not to think about the implications of big-time college athletics or let its reality mess with my ideals, my absolute disgust and moral conscience has triumphed.  I only wish it hadn't taken so long.

The NCAA is famously hypocritical and corrupt.  It talks about the ideal of the "student athlete" while generating millions of dollars for coaches, sportswear companies, leaders of "non-profit" bowl games and other assorted business types who benefit from the free labor on the field and on the court.  Recently it has allowed the creation of "superconferences" whose alignments have been determined by TV revenue, not geography.  These new conferences will necessitate longer travel times, and thus more missed classes by "student athletes."  These same "student athletes" often suffer from neglected education and low graduation rates.  The vast majority do not have professional careers waiting for them, and many are simply tossed on the trash heap once their playing careers are over.  (I should note that I have had many great student athletes in my classes over the years, so I am not saying that athletes are necessarily bad students.  However, I can say without hesitation that sports commitments make studies difficult for most of these students, and many of them were the absolute worst I ever had.)

Among those in the know, there's a consensus that every major basketball and football program cheats to a greater or lesser extent.  A recent study found that HALF of all big-time athletic programs had been punished by the NCAA in the last decade.  The tacit acceptance of this fact might be the reason why violators of the rules are allowed to get lucrative coaching jobs at other universities despite their past malfeasance.  In a recent example, Bruce Pearl, who just got fired from coaching Tennessee's basketball team for committing multiple major violations, fully expects to get hired somewhere else!  The pretense that college sports are being regulated in any meaningful way is a joke.

Athletic programs, in my experience, exist outside of the university community at large.  There certainly seems to be a mentality within these programs, and certainly among the coaches, that they are above the law and operate outside of university scrutiny.  The Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State is proof positive in case you needed it.  I also think of Mike Leach, the former Texas Tech football coach who locked a player with a concussion in a closet, has not only had the goal to sue Tech for wrongful firing, but has also been rewarded with a two million dollar a year contract with Washington State.

All of these things have nagged at me for years, but my true breaking point didn't come until I connected college athletics to the larger problems universities are facing.  Those of you who have been reading this job are aware of my alarm and anger at the continued degradation of our universities and their misplaced priorities. For a long time, like a lot of other academics, I viewed the athletic department as almost a separate appendage of the university, a wholly different world.  My main contact came in the form of queries from officials in that department over the grades of student athletes, which I resented for giving athletes special status.  Still, it didn't really bother me all that much until I noticed that during the major cuts at all of the universities where I studied or worked over the last ten years, humanities departments were more likely to be cut than anything related to athletics.  In my last job this was most clear.  When the president of East Texas University gave his annual address, he let the faculty know that we could not expect a merit pay increase in the coming year, and that no promises could be made in regards to job cuts.  In the same speech, he got very excited by a new purple beacon (school's color) that would be lit up to signal victories by the football and basketball teams and be seen all across the town, replacing the measly purple light that had been on top of a recently demolished dormitory.  Keep in mind, this is not taking place at a big-time sports university, but a regional state university struggling with its finances.  As if to confirm these misbegotten priorities, a new student recruiting film gave the school's football traditions more air time than its academic programs.

Murray Sperber memorably termed the college athletics "beer and circus," referring to them as a way to distract students from the degradation of their education.  A large number of students are much less interested in college as an educational opportunity than as an experience.  Athletics is one of the key components of the "college experience," as much as parties, luxury dorms, and the shiny new student centers and gyms that universities are building to compete for those students who seek it.  At big time sports schools, students are more willing to march to protect millionaire misbehaving coaches rather than to protest their increased tuition and the drastic cuts to their education.  Just witness the students who took to the streets to support child-molestation enabler Joe Paterno and the physically abusive Bobby Knight.  The support of "beer and circus" has seemingly eclipsed the educational mission of so many institutions of higher learning.

Affordable public higher education is a in life-or-death situation, perilously close to extinction.  That several universities have cut philosophy and language programs, yet retain football teams, is perhaps the greatest piece of evidence for our society's current insanity.  I just can't go on enjoying college football and basketball, pretending that these things aren't a big part of what's killing universities.  Like any other bad habit, I feel it's time to give it up.  

Reasons to Be Glad I'm Not Attending the American Historical Association's Annual Conference

This academic job hunting season is the first since 2004 that I have not been on the academic job market. It took me three cracks to get a tenure-track job, and then three increasingly futile stabs at finding an escape from that job. I spent about six months of each year in a six year period wracked with anxiety and self-doubt and an extra layer of stress on top of an already stressful existence. In 2009 I went to the conference in San Diego without an interview because I was flogging a book manuscript. Later on in the hunt some phone interviews and an on campus interview at least materialized. Last year I did not get a single interview for a university position, AHA or not, despite have better qualifications than ever (more on that below.) I had another article in print and a book contract, but apparently that didn't mean anything. Not being on the market feels liberating, but strange. Like some kind of sick junky, I watch the job ads and look closely at the ones I could apply to. Maybe it's because my life has been so transient for so long that I am just not used the idea that I can be certain about where I will be living and working in the next year. It's good to finally have that certainty, but it still hasn't sunk in yet. Below you'll find what I wrote about the annual AHA conference this time last year. My feelings are pretty much the same today.

 *****

 This coming January will be the first since 2005 that I will not be attending the American Historical Association's annual conference. Because none of the schools where I applied invited me to dance, and because my book manuscript is now under contract (eliminating the need to kiss the asses of publishers), the expense didn't seem justifiable. I am little bummed that I am passing up a chance to see Boston (a place I've never been), and certainly wish I could see many old friends who will be attendance. However, I have plenty of good reasons to happy about not going.

First and foremost, I will not miss the job annex, a place emanating a most powerful musk of fear and desperation. It represents much that has gone wrong with my profession: young scholars must humiliate themselves in an academic meat-market where they compete in a Darwinian struggle for a dwindling number of tenure track jobs. It's especially great if you have to deal with committee members who are out to lunch, senile, or just plain hostile.

Largely because of my rural, lower-middle class upbringing, I have a strong distaste for brown-nosing, status mongering, social climbing, pretentiousness, intellectual dick-waving, and institutionalized elitism. All of these are on display to rather disgusting extremes at the AHA. I loathe watching people check out the name tags of others, to see if they're worth talking to. My stomach turns when I overhear smug children of privilege brag about their number of job interviews. And I positively gag when I attend panels where someone who attended the same Ivy League institution where they now teach prattles on about some obscure tradition at that place like the rest of us should fucking care about it. The next person who tells me that academia is a meritocracy is going to get a neck-punching.

Last but not least, I can no longer simply stomach the sound of a violin playing in the midst of a great fire. Never has the metaphor of emperor Nero been more apt, despite recent efforts by the organization to address the jobs crisis. Last year the book display had an ominous number of empty spaces, and the job annex looked less like a bustling hive of anxiety and more like a lonely nave of dead dreams. As I have said many times before, the university-based historical profession is dying before our eyes, but the vast majority who have managed to get tenure-track jobs have preferred to relish their place in the lifeboat rather than to do anything for their peers who are drowning to death all around them. The lifeboarters will survive and get to live the great academic dream; my only solace is, to paraphrase Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, do nothing.

Why Education Reformers Remind Me of Robert Moses

I spent a lot of my time last summer immersing myself in the history of New York City. Part of this is because I am wanting to relate trends in history to episodes in New York to make the material more relevant to my students, but mostly because it's just so damned interesting. One subject that I find endlessly fascinating is the transformation (some would say disfigurement) of New York City at the hands of Robert Moses. As part of my further education, I recently read Joe Flood's recent, highly engaging The Fires, and am currently burning by way through Robert Caro's classic Moses biography The Power Broker.

Both show the horrible damage that can be done under the banner of reform, especially when unaccountable power is given to someone as ruthlessly autocratic as Moses. Essentially, from the 1920s to the 1960s, he tried to remake the city in the image of the automobile. This meant building freeways by bulldozing entire neighborhoods with almost zero input from their residents. Organic communities that had flourished, despite the challenges of poverty, were now having their hearts ripped out. These moves, of course, massively privileged the suburbs and helped drain the city of revenue.

In addition, Moses supported the postwar trends in "slum clearance" and concentrated public housing, which meant tearing people out of their neighborhoods and stacking them like blocks in alienating high rise complexes. A pattern emerges whereby poor people of color are labeled a "problem," and then have all kinds of misbegotten experiments performed upon them without their input.

Flood's book examines the famous epidemic of fires in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s. He finds that much of the problem had to do with the upheavals caused by Moses' reconfiguration, along with a failed attempt by the city to do fire fighting on the cheap. In a move that ought to sound familiar to those of us in education, the city decided to deal with its shrinking revenue by asking the fire department to "do more with less." They ended up doing a a lot less with less, despite the pleas from the firefighters' union for more men and more stations. In another familiar phrase, their proposal was met with the old saw "you can't just throw money at the problem."

Many of today's supposed education "reformers" exhibit a similar arrogance and willful ignorance of the people they are inflicting their ideas upon. They often come in from outside, with experience in the corporate world (think of Bill Gates), and little understanding of the educational system that they want to upend. They claim the current system is inefficient and costly, and boast that they can do more with less. Without consulting the teachers (who they always call "unions"), they propose destructive solutions like ending tenure, heavily relying on standardized testing for evaluating students and teachers and ending collective bargaining.

Coincidentally enough, the "failed schools" they rail against are always poor, and heavily attended by people of color. In the educational equivalent of bulldozing, they don't bat an eye at closing down schools or firing all the teachers, all the while refusing to address the underlying problems of poverty. Like the public housing officials who thought that park space and modern kitchens alone would somehow cause poor people to lead much improved lives, they believe the myth that the right teacher can somehow cancel out the effects of endemic social inequality. When the people being experimented on revolt against their treatment, as happened in Washington DC when Michelle Rhee (our modern day Robert Moses) was ousted by the public, parents are blamed for their short-sightedness, and simply not listened to.

I see a similar dynamic in higher education as well. Hollow-headed pols like Rick Perry make much fanfare about "breakthrough solutions" that amount to dousing the university system in gasoline and setting it ablaze. They propose doing away with the current system without having consulted the people who live and work inside of it. In fact, he has been actively pressuring universities to adopt his ideas against their will and better judgement. I would be the first person to say that higher ed faces major problems, but one of the primary issues is constantly being asked to "do more with less," since that's what's been done for thirty years and we're just about at the breaking point.

Many of the self-styled reformers of education exhibit the willful ignorance, authoritarian tendencies, and magical thinking I associate with technocratic reformers from the past like Robert Moses, and another Robert, by the name of McNamara. Like the US military in Vietnam, Rhee, Perry, and Bill Gates will do a lot of damage in the course of their failed experiment.

Progress Report on Letting the Dream Die

As most of you out there in cyberland who read this know, I recently left academia to teach at a private high school in New York City so that I could be with my wife and live in a place that I liked.  When I left my old job, despite its being wretched in so many respects, I still felt a great loss.  In effect, I was letting a dream die, a dream to which I had sacrificed over a decade of my youth, my financial well-being, my health (not having dental care through most of that time has taken a toll, and I drank and smoked way too much as a stress release), and tremendous mental and physical effort.  I told myself that I was in effect putting away childish things, and accepting the fact that I probably wasn't cut out to be a professor of European history.  I had the publications and the tenure-track position to sustain that fiction, but deep down in my heart of hearts, I was already feeling like I was having to try harder and harder to be pretend to be something that I was not, even if I had wanted to be that very thing more than anything else for so long.

A few months on, I can't say that I feel let down.  Right now I get to go to bed each night and wake up each morning with my wife, and our life together gives me unspeakable joy.  I eat much healthier, have lost weight, cut down drastically on booze, and have yet to fall into the kind of debilitating depressive episodes that I used to have every two months or so in the past.  I love my job, cherish interacting with my students, and am humbled by how much appreciation has already been shown me by my superiors.  After five years spent in two different positions where my hard work and accomplishments were either ignored or seen as a threat, I almost feel as if it is too good to be true.  The ill treatment I've endured at those jobs has made me a bit of a scaredy cat, always on my toes to be ready when they all turn on me.  This month I finally feel like I've been able to put my guard down and be more open and more like myself around my co-workers and superiors.

The hardest part has been letting myself have other dreams, after the dream of my lifetime ended with failure and bitterness.  I am working on a book-length project and a couple of smaller ones, but I constantly have to fight the voices in my head that say that publishing is dying, or that now that I have been banished from the groves of academe, no one will take my historical scholarship seriously, let alone publish it.  Today I went to the New York Public Library to do some serious research, and the nagging doubts died down amid the ecstasy of my immersion into the documents of the past.  Perhaps even if nothing comes of my research forays I can use them as a sort of meditation.

Here's the post I wrote on my old blog about letting the dream die, by the way.  Enjoy.
****** After much soul-searching and with the academic hiring season over, I've decided that it's time to leave the profession. I know in my heart it's the right thing to do, and many people I trust think so too, but it feels like part of my soul has died. Twelve years of insanely hard work -much of it spent in penury-, a book contract, three scholarly articles, and semester after semester of positive teaching evaluations don't seem to have added up to much of anything besides a lackluster job at a completely dysfunctional institution in a two-bit crudhole town over a thousand miles from the love of my life. It's insane to stick with it, and even if the dream was effectively killed before I made this decision, it still means I am in mourning.

I've been coping in the usual way: both wallowing and transcending. For the wallowing, there's been plenty of depressing British folk music. This song currently has a particular resonance with me.



For the transcending, I have started working on a non-academic book that may very well be my magnum opus. I also think about this clip to cheer me up, too. It's the equivalent of laughing at a funeral, which I am wont to do.



As the man says, "let the dream die!"

More Evidence That The Ideological Tail Wags the GOP Dog

Not so long ago, I had this to say about the current presidential campaign: "The continuous circus sideshow otherwise known as the Republican presidential debates has exposed the GOP's scary twin obsessions with ideological purity and demonizing their opponents."  I wrote those words partially in response to Rick Perry's claim that he would purge the government civil service of those who did not agree with his political philosophy.  Now it appears that the Newtron bomb has upped the ante saying that president Gingrich would send out US Marshals to arrest judges who made decisions that he did not agree with.  Perhaps the death of Kim Jong Il has pushed these words off of the front pages, but they are as chilling as they are outrageous.  We essentially have the leading candidate for one of the two major parties for president openly bragging that he would destroy the independence of the judiciary through authoritarian means.  (It can't happen here, you say?  Anyone remember the purge of the Justice Department in the last administration?)  I've said it before, and I will say it again: the modern Republican party has ceased to be a political party in the traditional American sense, and has become a vehicle for an extremist political theology.  If the increasingly dire pronouncements by its presidential candidates don't convince you, the most recent hostage-taking attempt by the House GOP over the payroll tax should.  With any luck these tinpot crackpots will have worn out their welcome with the sane sectors of the public long before November of 2012.

What Newt Gingrich's Catholicism Means

There's a very well-done piece in today's Times about Newt Gingrich's conversion to and relationship with Roman Catholicism, a topic that's been on my mind this election season. Why? Because we are witnessing a historically unprecedented moment in our nation's history: politicized evangelical Protestants throwing their support behind a member of a religion they have traditionally seen as the handmaid of the Antichrist.  As in all things related to the past, Americans have a short historical memory when it comes to the longstanding and deep historical currents of anti-Catholicism in this country, and so fail to notice how odd the current situation truly is.  In early America, Catholics were banned from voting and holding public office in several colonies (and later states).  Irish immigrants met a great deal of xenophobia in the mid-nineteenth century, much of it related to their faith.  During the 1920s, the KKK emphasized anti-Catholicism along with racism, and Al Smith's presidency of 1928 inspired all kinds of paranoia about having a "papist" in the White House.  (The rhetoric employed against him, depicting Smith as a kind of anti-American alien, is eerily similar to the paranoid rantings about the current president.)

These days such anti-Catholicism is rather rare outside of isolated pockets of backwoods America and among a certain brand of overly zealous atheist.  Muslims have become the acceptable religious group to hate, evidenced by attacks on mosques, local efforts to ban shariah law (reminiscent of the paranoid rantings against papal domination of the 1920s), and the recent pulling of advertisements from All American Muslim, a show that dares to depict adherents of Islam as human beings.  Gingrich's politically successful conversion to the church of Rome indicates that the old combination of religious bigotry and anti-immigrant "Americanism" has found a new target, even if the substance and rhetoric of the base hatred involved has changed very little.  The formula is pretty much the same: a foreign people with foreign, apostate ways supposedly want to impose their alien way of life and will eventually keep America from staying American.

Basically, the evangelical types supporting the Catholic Gingrich are more concerned about beating back Islam and "secularism" than with the pope.  I should add that this change of emphasis has as much to do with changes in the Catholic Church itself as it does with changes among evangelicals and American society at large.  American Catholicism has always been as much -or even more- about ethnic identity as it is about religious belief.  Being Catholic is part of being Irish, Italian, Mexican, Cuban, Polish etc.  As the descendants of many of these ethnic groups are further and further removed from their immigrant origins and progressively "whitened," ethnic identities fade, and with them adherence to the church.  ("Former Catholic" is the second biggest Christian denomination in America today.)  The church has abetted this process by becoming increasingly ideologically narrow and militant in the last forty years since the great and brief window opened by Vatican II.  To be a Catholic means not being a member of a community, but to be a zealot in an army to roll back the modern world.  It's hardly a surprise that many born into the Church would abandon it, or that many outsiders who share an inability to reconcile with the modern world would become converts.  In their unhinged obsession with abortion and their persecution complex regarding "secularism," many of today's devout Catholics have plenty in common with evangelicals, hence their current, and strange, political alliance in the form of Newt.

Gingrich is a perfect fit for the nouveau Catholicism, as the Times articles points out, because he was attracted from the outside by its reactionaryism and its recent political stances.  As one of the numerous ex-Catholics in this country, I would also say he must be attracted by the Church's manifest hypocrisy and arrogance, two of  Gingrich's defining traits.  In regards to hypocrisy, Gingrich has famously attacked liberals for bringing about moral decay and Bill Clinton for his infidelity, all the while engaging in extramarital affairs in the midst of his fulminating.  The Church's hypocrisy, evident through much of its history, has been made glaringly obvious in the wake of the innumerable abuse scandals, horrific revelations enabled by that institution's tendency to judge others but to retain its moral authority by covering up the heinous crimes of its clerics.  In regards to arrogance, Gingrich never misses an opportunity to puff up his supposed credentials, calling his paid lobbying for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac historical consulting, and expecting others to view him as a "definer of civilization."  The Church's arrogance has been even more flagrant, as it screams about "secularism" and tries to browbeat lapsed Catholics back into the pews while doing absolutely nothing to make the Church more welcoming to and reflective of the needs and desires of Catholics, lapsed or not.  The recent changes in the English language liturgy, which supposedly make it more literally faithful to the Latin but clunky and, in places, non-sensical in English despite the objections of Catholics to the changes is just the most recent example of the Vatican's arrogance.

All that being said, I know a lot of good people who are also deeply Catholic (or evangelical), and we shouldn't confuse all rank and file parishoners and priests with the more reactionary members of the current hierarchy.  I only hope that those wonderful people have the courage to resist the Catholic church's alliance with people who have traditionally treated Catholics with contempt and intolerance, and who are currently heaping infamy on Christianity through their inflexibility, bitterness, and bigotry.

War is Over: Is Anyone Paying Attention?

The American occupation of Iraq is coming to an end, despite the carping of has-beens like Dick Cheney and John McCain. Strangely enough, that carping has pretty much been the only public discussion about such a momentous occasion. This is reflective of an American public who checked out on this war years ago, despite the continued export of dead Americans in flag-draped coffins from Mesopotamia. Despite the aforementioned moaning from high ranking Republicans, the end of the occupation is massively popular in this country.

But why is this majority silent? Most likely because this war has been unofficially acknowledged as a terrible mistake, the worst American foreign policy decision since Vietnam. It was the most defining aspect of the Bush administration, and the single biggest reason why Shrub has been the least public ex-president in living memory. Lest we forget, his administration fabricated evidence and lied to the American public while exploiting post-9/11 grief to start a war of choice that distracted the military from its mission to get bin Laden and destroy al-Qaeda. At the time, war hysteria reigned, and opponents, like myself, were a distinct minority. In the run-up to war any dissent or questioning of its motives was met with accusations of treason. I still remember having profanity screamed at me while I quietly held my sign (which read "I love America, not imperialism") at peaceful anti-war protests. I have a feeling that most of the people who yelled those epithets back then secretly believe today that the war never should have been waged. Most people are loathe to admit they are wrong, and so the silent majority today is unwilling to admit their change of heart.

There are plenty of unpleasant worms lurking under the rock of the Iraq war's memory, things most people in this country do not have the stomach to revisit. Let me just name a few, in case you've forgotten: massive torture at Abu-Ghraib, American soldiers sent into battle with inadequate protection (and then condescended to by Donald Rumsfeld for daring to raise the issue), the vice president's henchman outed a CIA operative in order to cover up administrative lies over uranium sales to Iraq, and president Bush proclaiming "mission accomplished" when seven years of grueling war followed.

That rock needs to be turned over, no matter how painful the memories. Now that old Bush administration hands have been rising out of the muck and returning to the public spotlight and advising Republican candidates for president, it is time to remind the public of their past malfeasance. More importantly, we ought to remember the sacrifices made by American soldiers (who deserve a true welcome home), and the sufferings of the Iraqi people, whom we still bear an obligation.

An Ode to Robert Altman

As I sat down to watch McCabe and Mrs. Miller tonight, I remembered this piece from my old blog about Robert Altman. He may be the greatest cinematic genius this country ever produced, and even though I've seen many of his films several times, they always reveal new riches.

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I was going to write a long piece that's been gestating in my mind for a couple of years about having grown up during a time of cultural reaction and how I can't fathom the current wave of 80s nostalgia considering the utter shittiness of that particular decade. My plans got changed, however, after I sat down this evening to watch California Split, a 1974 Robert Altman film that I'd never seen before. Altman has become one of my favorite directors, mostly on the basis of his more canonical films, such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Gosford Park, Short Cuts, M*A*S*H*, and the incomparable Nashville.

I like him enough that I've decided to delve into his lesser known stuff (including The Long Good-Bye, a fantastic piece of film making), and California Split certainly qualifies. To be honest, it doesn't reach the heights of the classics I've already mentioned, but it contains all the elements that make Altman's films so good. Unlike 98% of all the movies that get made, the characters live in the kind of cheap, cluttered interiors that most Americans occupy. I'm amazed at the houses depicted in typical Hollywood films, they are light years cleaner and bigger than the average domicile. This may seem like a small thing, but when I see an Altman picture I BELIEVE it because it looks real. His characters also drink in bars with bad lighting, fake leather chairs, and overly talkative, annoying barflies.

Which brings me to one of his great innovations: his way of recording dialogue. Conversations in the movies are usually much too clean; one person talks, and then another one does. In California Split, as in other Altman flicks, people talk over each other, they don't listen, and snatches of conversation in the background distract the listener. In Split he probably takes this a little too far, it was impossible for me at times to understand the gist of some of the conversation. Still, even at its most extreme his methodology betrays an artistry and attention to detail that most directors can't even dream of approaching.

The best thing, though, is that his real subject is life, its compromises, failures, and hopes. When I was a 21 year old I didn't know shit about life, and so I gravitated towards the theoretical flights of fancy in Kubrick and the violent frescoes of Scorcese and Tarantino. Granted, I still enjoy their work, but for the most part they are overgrown adolescents who have little to say about the small sorrows, setbacks and defeats that adults must endure. California Split itself is about two gamblers, and unlike the new entry in the Ocean's Eleven franchise, casinos are not glamorous places. No, the casinos are like the casinos that I've experienced: sordid dens choked with cigarrette smoke and the smell of desperation and wild hope. The gamblers aren't romantic heroes, they're chain smoking, polyester-clad addicts burning with an itch for the next hot streak like a junkie craving for a fix. Even when they win, they know that they're losing a wholly different battle.

Now that Robert Altman is dead, I don't know if anyone else can make flims that speak to these dilemmas. At least he made a lot of them, and I know they'll be my companions until my own passage from this earth.

Explaining the Diminishment of Rick Perry

I haven't weighed in much on the presidential election or the political scene recently, partially because it wears me out, and partially because there are other people out there who can write about the Herman Cain phenomenon better than I can. And let's face it, the fact that Herman Cain became a leading candidate before imploding in a flash of scandal just weeks later is just about the strangest turn of events one could think of. I also never would have thought that the disgraced, disliked and fatuously self-important Newt Gingrich, a man who seems to have put more time into personal book signings than building a ground game in Iowa, would rise from the dead to take the front runner's spot. There's another twist, however, that I saw coming a million miles away: Rick Perry crashing and burning.

Having lived in Texas for three years, I had the opportunity to get to know Governor Goodhair up close and personal. His personae was perfect for the Lone Star State: ultra-conservative, doctrinaire, and leavened with masculine braggadocio. Lotsa my Texan friends thought that he would go down like gangbusters in the Republican primaries, but I was skeptical. Like New Yorkers, Texans have a tendency to see their homeland as a place unto itself, and forget or just don't know that the rest of the nation is very different than they are. Perry was so used to preaching to the wingnut Texas choir that he never had to deal with the broader and more diverse national electorate. I never understood how a man proposing secession could then turn around and ask to be the leader of the very country he would have torn apart.

Perry's inability to see that paradox speaks to one his most obvious attributes: the man is a goddamned moron. If his "D" grades in college weren't enough to prove that point, he has done his best to prove the proposition in the Republican presidential debates and via several public speaking gaffes. Despite the downfalls of Cain and Bachmann, Perry has failed to pick up any momentum. Even a party as brazenly anti-intellectual as the GOP (full global warming denial, creationism and the bashing of academia) seems to be aware that they cannot let the public face of their party be a palpable idiot along the lines of Palin, Bachmann, or Perry. They know deep down that the erudite, articulate, and intelligent president would flat-out embarass any one of those three dolts. Gingrich, on the other hand, preaches the old time conservative religion, with lots of pseudo-intellectual clap-trap to make it look like a set of ideas rather than blind faith in supply-side theology. In the soon to be immortal words of Paul Krugman, Gingrich is "a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."

Perry is nobody's idea of what a smart person sounds like. The nation already endured eight years of an intellectually unserious swaggering Texas governor as president, there's little call for another one. That's easy to see. Here's something less obvious, but no less true, in my opinion: the Occupy movement's effect on public discourse has ultimately sunk Perry. Even among rank and file Republicans, there's a sense that America's current economic model is a failure. Perry's main claim to fame was as a "job creator," but his state has mostly produced insecure, low-wage jobs, the kind that exemplify the diminishment of opportunity. (Romney may have a record of putting Americans out of work, but he at least looks like he knows what he's talking about.)

Last but not least, Perry is fighting the wrong culture war. He has recently tried to gain strength among evangelicals by attacking gays, but that strategy is so 2004. (In any case, Rick Santorum has the rabid homophobe/self-hating closeted gay vote sewed up.) Republicans have turned their hatred on new targets: immigrants and Muslims. Perry's record in Texas undercuts his anti-immigrant credentials, and he doesn't seem to have engaged in much anti-Muslim or anti-Arab rhetoric (unlike Herman Cain or Newt "Palestinians are an invented people" Gingrich.) Newt gets special a bonus for blowing the "welfare queen" dog whistle; his proposal to teach poor children the value of labor by putting them to work scrubbing toliets in their schools has a subtext that essentially says "let's teach those shiftless Negroes a lesson."

And so Rick Perry, supposedly the shoe-in candidate, finds himself in fourth place. I would feel a little sorry for Rick Perry's continuing public humiliation if he wasn't such a hate-filled authoritarian bully. The overly large contigent of blockheaded right wing flat earthers in Texas might buy into his hokum, but it pleases me to know that the rest of the nation, even in conservative circles, has rejected it.

Musical Interlude: Christmas Music That Doesn't Suck

Ever since the dawn of recorded music it seems that performers have been trying to cash in on the Christmas season with the worst kind of over-larded sentimental drivel. Ordinarily enjoyable acts like the Beach Boys have dumped atrocities like "Little Saint Nick" on an unsuspecting populace that still must endure Mike Love's adenoidal yelpings of the world's most asinine lyrics for yet another December. Amidst this never-ending sea of dreck there are a few wonderful pearls to be found, some of which I'd like to highlight.

Fifties jazz singer Pearl Bailey shows how it's done with "Five Pound Box of Money," the type of Christmas gift that I could really go for. The song's a fun play on the materialism of the holiday, taking it to its logical extreme.



So many performers screw up their Christmas songs by making them radical departures from their normal style, or by trying to sing hoary old holiday standards. It's much more fun when a country singer like Ernest Tubb takes his signature tune, "I'll be Walking the Floor Over You" and turns it into "I'll be Walking the Floor this Christmas."



Speaking of deviating from one's strengths, Elvis' "Blue Christmas" has always left me a little cold. However, his rendition on the '68 comeback special, with Elvis tearing into his guitar and the song while clad in black leather, gives it the kind of rough edge it needed on record.



Not all Christmas songs that get major airplay this time of year necessarily stink. The top 40 station in my hometown played this McKenzie brothers tune every year and I still love it. After all these years SCTV holds up really damn well too, much more so than Saturday Night Live. Don't believe me? Check out this hilarious Christmas moment from the show.

December Sunsets and the Velvet Underground

Here's something I wrote six years ago that came to my mind on a day when the sun came down before I even got to Penn Station. It makes me a bit sentimental, since I wrote it back in my Illinois days, a time that just keeps looking better in hindsight.

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I love December sunsets so. So today, after feeding my friends Rachel and Ed's wondrously lustrous feline Delores, I took a walk around in the late afternoon, listening to the Velvet Underground's first album on my discman. It's one I love, especially in December, it just sounds wintry to me for some reason, even though I first started listening to the album in the spring of 1994. Nico's voice (or Nordic foghorn, more accurately) is like a chilly north wind, and the sparks of feedback courtesy of Lou Reed's guitar shoot into my skull like the cold air knifes through my coat. When I listen to "Heroin" or "All Tomorrow's Parties" on that album, though, they seem to physically warm me somehow.

John Cale's background drone on "Heroin" replicates the hazy feeling of a December dawn. The setting sun today created that orange-grey dusk that somehow sets my heart affire in ways that I cannot comprehend. It is ethereal, as if I am on another planet further from the sun, where the sun is more of a star that provides light but no warmth, and a dim light at that. Perhaps it is in the shortest days of the year that we come closest to seeing universal death, and it just might be that brush with mortality that gets me every time.

Or maybe just memory. Growing up, my family would go to Mass on Christmas Eve at 5PM, the church's "children's Mass." Because my parents have a pathological fear of being late, we always arrived more than half an hour early, able to take any seat in the church, and right as the sun was setting. The church lay in a spot where the sun would strike the stained glass quite directly, flooding the church with a golden bath of color and warmth. It would set before the special Mass so full of ritual, and in a child's eyes, magic. (When a child is very young, that's what religion is to them.) The setting sun of Christmas Eve was probably the closest I came to religious ectasy in my life, and I guess there's a piece of that exhilerating feeling in the sunset I saw today.

Why It's A Wonderful Life is More Relevant Now Than Ever

Last weekend my wife and I got a wild hair to sit down and watch It's a Wonderful Life, a way to combine our live of 1940s Hollywood with the desire to get into the Christmas spirit. It had been a long time since I'd seen it, and watching it with new eyes I realized that it is one of those films whose deeper meanings have been forgotten. We think of it today as a heart-warming Christmas parable, but in doing so we forget that the main character is driven by his miserable circumstances to lash out at his family and come close to committing suicide. George Bailey, like a lot of people beaten down by life, wonders if he'd been better off never having lived in the first place. This is some pretty dark stuff.

This time around, I paid special attention to the character of Old Man Potter, a greedy banker and slumlord who refers to the immigrant and ethnic residents of his properties as "garlic eaters" and mocks George for trying to give the less fortunate a leg up rather than squeezing them for as much money as possible. Despite the ornate and old fashioned trappings of his office, Potter is a rather contemporary figure. Like the ownership class today, his business decisions are motivated entirely by lucre, with absolutely zero concern for humanity. The local politicians do his bidding, and Potter almost successfully ruins George through an act of naked theft. Because of this apparent critique of the heartlessness of unfettered capitalism, the FBI in 1947 considered It's A Wonderful Life rife with communist propaganda.

When George famously visits his hometown as it would be had he never existed, it has become a mean-spirited, unseemly place where immorality rules and no one cares about the common good. Unlike the Gingrich types today who like to bloviate and bluster about traditional morality while supporting laissez-faire capitalism -that solvent most potent to traditional social bonds- Frank Capra understood that the two cannot coexist. You cannot reduce other human beings to lines on a ledger and expect to create a society that values anything other than the cash nexus. Capra was hardly a radical, but back in 1946, when he made this film, Americans took for granted that a concern for humanity and greed were not compatible.

In our own lives, where many of us are often beset by the kind of self-doubt and economic hardship that drives George Bailey to the brink, it's important to remember what really matters. For years It's a Wonderful Life has been seen as a reminder that family, friends, and community really matter in our own lives. Perhaps we should also see it as a reminder that treating people with dignity and respect is better for our society, too.