Why Pope Francis' Words Matter

There's been much hullaballoo these last two days over the fact that Time magazine has named Pope Francis its Man of the Year.  Some, like Glenn Greenwald, have lambasted the magazine for wussing out and putting Edward Snowden in the runner-up spot.  Others, like Glenn Beck, have been blowing their tops about the pontiff's supposed Marxism and the lamestream media's love of said Leftist subversion.  (He has also been uttering the Beckian oxymoron "progressive Fascism."  When are the men in the white coats finally going to come and take him home?)  I'm quite surprised that so many people still care about Time magazine.

All that said, I think now's a good time to reflect on Pope Francis' importance.  While he is known now more for words than deeds, I think his words are incredibly meaningful.  For the past forty years or so, the world has been in the throws of a vast neoliberal globalization that has funneled money into the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the many.  It has caused unaccounted misery in its rapacious, never-ending quest for lucre, the human and environmental consequences be damned.  Those who criticize this monstrous state of affairs have often found themselves to be lone voices crying out in the wilderness.  With the Occupy movement and various other rumblings, from Arab Spring to Chilean student protests, it is evident that there is a growing pushback against the neoliberal tide.

Behind the various critiques lies the belief that unfettered capitalism is fundamentally immoral.  The various religious and moral leaders of the world, however, have been much more interested in enforcing their very narrow standards of personal morality than addressing the moral economy.  Conservatives have feasted on this omission, since it has given their greed and avarice a free pass.  Pope Francis, by using his position as the most powerful religious figure in the world to criticize capitalism, has given critics of neoliberalism a tremendous amount of legitimacy.  If an institution as traditional and conservative as the Catholic Church assails economic inequality and laissez-faire ideology it gives moderates the courage they need go against the lying cant of "job creators" and trickle down.

This, by the way, is why the likes of Limbaugh and Beck wail and gnash their teeth at this pope's pronouncements.  They know, deep down, that unfettered capitalism is an affront to any real sense of fairness and morality, and that once the broader public is willing and able to see that fact, their political power is ruined.  And that is why Pope Francis' words matter.

Track of the Week: Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis"

Christmas cards are a tradition I don't engage in, but they make sense to me.  At the end of the year I too usually take stock of my life and think about all that has happened since my last go 'round the sun.  It's good to get letters from friends and family about what they've been up to themselves.  I look forward especially to my sister's Christmas card and letter each year, since it gives me a great sense of what's been going on in her life over a thousand miles away.

Of course, my private thoughts about my life over the past year would need a great deal of editing before they could be doled out for public consumption.  Some people's Christmas cards might also make for harrowing reading.  That's the darkly humorous conceit behind Tom Waits' "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis." The narrator frankly discusses destitution, pregnancy, drug addiction, and hitting bottom.  This is not a letter full of brags about children on the honor roll or vacations in Spain, so much so that anyone who sends Christmas letter like that ought to receive a copy of this song in the mail in reply to remind them that others don't have it so easy.

"Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" comes off of Blue Valentine, which is the last of Waits' 1970s jazz piano-based records.  It's never been among my favorite albums of his, mostly because he seemed to know that his original persona and musical style were getting played out.  (He previously brought it close to perfection on Small Change, and would soon switch gears in a bluesier direction on Heartattack and Vine.)  However, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and this song beautifully combines the low-life stories, tender growl, and moody jazz accompaniment that defines Waits' best work in this period.

A Progress Report On Letting The Academic Dream Die: Facing Facts

Sometime this autumn, something in my head clicked.  I finally stopped feeling shame about having left academia, stopped feeling like a failure, and mostly stopped feeling intense bitterness towards my old profession.  Perhaps it just started to get ridiculous for me to keep feeling bad about myself.  I have a job I love in a city I adore, I am married to a fantastic woman, I have two great kids, we are about the move into a home in a great community, and I have been in good health.  All in all, I'm leading a good life, and with so many people out there facing worse problems than me, it's pretty silly to continue to brood Hamlet-like over the fact that I am no longer a professor.

Hearing this click has also allowed me to be much more sober and honest about myself and my old profession.  While I still know in my heart that I got a raw deal and my labor was exploited, I also know that I prepared myself poorly for the realities of the current academic job market.  I waited too long to publish, I studied an obscure topic that nobody cares about, I did not network at conferences (I am constitutionally incapable of the kind of social fakery involved in networking), and I squandered several job interviews through my own ineptitude.  In a difficult market I did not do myself any favors.

I am also beginning to realize that I lacked a lot of things necessary for a career in academia.  My specialization didn't really stick, for one.  While I find nineteenth century Germany to be fascinating, I also know that my level of interest in the subject is not enough to sustain itself as the focus of my life's work.  It's been months since I've read a book on the topic, and I am finding myself a great deal more interested in American history.  Being a teacher allows me to still be a student of history, without the pressure of being an expert on an obscure vein of knowledge that few actually care about.  That suits me just fine.

My academic career also just wasn't consistent with what I wanted out of life.  When I finally landed a tenure-track job it was in an isolated East Texas town where, had I stayed, I would have been an outsider for the rest of my life.  While it had a few charms, I felt painfully isolated there (apart from some great friends) from day one.  In any case, my beloved spouse had no interest in moving there, and she was right.  My love of being a professor just wasn't deep enough to sustain me living in a place I did not want to live, and to live apart from the person I loved the most on top of it.  I know the ivory tower alone is enough for others, but not for me.

In fact, it's only since I have left academia that I have realized how uncomfortable I felt there from the beginning.  I forced myself to learn its bourgeois modes of sociability alien to my rural upbringing, I learned to bullshit on things I knew little about, and I learned to bite my tongue around the large number of arrogant jerks one commonly encounters in that walk of life, especially at conferences.  Even worse, when I landed my tenure-track job I found myself in an institution that did not follow the normal rules of the profession, yet replaced bourgeois affect with macho bullying.

That said, I met many fantastic friends along the way, and I feel like my studies made me a much more intelligent and interesting person.  Unlike a lot of others, I look back on grad school as some of the best years of my life.  I was poor but young enough to endure it, and living in a town cheap enough to support it.  I had many tremendous comrades, and I enjoyed spending my days immersed in knowledge.  I also know that I did not direct my energies in the right directions in those years, and that what came after grad school was a horrid descent in depression and disappointment, only mitigated by meeting some more good people.

When I face all these facts today I no longer have bitterness, jealously, and shame swirling inside me, as I once did.  My inner peace comes from the fact that after a long and difficult journey, I finally feel like I am finally where I am supposed to be.  The dream of being a tweed-clad professor writing books respected by my scholarly peers is now long dead, but I won't be shedding any tears.

The Continued Political Relevance of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

My first brush with Dickens did not impress me.  We read A Tale of Two Cities in my tenth grade English class, and I came away turned off by his anti-revolutionary politics, sugary sentimentality, and ridiculous plot devices.  (How many Dickens novels are there that don't feature crazy coincidences or orphans with mysterious parents?)  Around that same time I started reading serious literature on my own, not just Stephen King novels and the Dragonlance series, but didn't pick up a Dickens novel again for about a quarter century.  Having grown many years older and more open minded about my reading choices, a close friend during my Michigan days convinced me to pick up Bleak House, saying it would change my opinion of Dickens, and he was right.

Three Christmases ago, when I was still deep in my Dickens phase (I read Little Dorrit, for cryin' out loud), I decided to finally read A Christmas Carol.  I was well familiar with it, of course, through countless reinterpretations and retellings, from the Disney version to the movie Scrooged, which was a particular holiday favorite in my family.   Reading it I fell in love, and also soon realized that Dickens' highly political message had been drained from the various adaptations.  A Christmas Carol is not just about Scrooge's redemption, but is also a critique of greed and laissez-faire capitalism.  That critique is just as relevant now as it was then, in the midst of Britain's rough transformation into an industrial society.

Near the beginning, when he is asked to give money to assist the poor, Scrooge famously roars "are there no prisons?" and notes that workhouses, the treadmill, and the Poor Law are all in full effect.  When those asking for a donation note that many would rather die than subject themselves to such cruel institutions Scrooge replies: "If they would rather die...they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."  As a historian of the 19th century I knew when I read those words that Dickens was calling out the cruel economic philosophy behind what Pope Francis has recently deemed "unfettered capitalism."  Through Scrooge Dickens was trying to expose a hard-hearted way of thinking that was only increasing the sufferings of the poor.

These days our conservative politicians are not so brazen as to openly call for the poor to be killed off for the good of society, but as my friend Chauncey DeVega has theorized, that thought may very well lay behind the recent attacks on Food Stamps and other aspects of the welfare state.  These same modern Scrooges are more than happy to spend money profusely on prisons while they slash school funding, and those of Newt Gingrich's ilk have even openly called for disadvantaged children to clean toilets.  More than one Republican has likened welfare recipients to animals.  Just as in Dickens' time, these apologists for the status quo think that all poverty is deserved, and that those who profit handsomely from the system do not owe anyone else anything.  Scrooge's rants about the surplus population have come down to us in Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum. "there is no such thing as society."

Scrooge's attitude toward the poor is echoed in his treatment of his employee, Bob Cratchit.  Cratchit is given hardly enough coal to warm himself in a cold office, is paid the absolute minimum, and has to beg to get Christmas off.  Scrooge gives him the holiday, but only after grumbling that providing a Christmas holiday is "a poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December."  Reading these words I cannot help but think of the retail workers who are now being forced to give up their Thanksgiving holidays, or the companies that are chiseling their minimum wage employees further through fee-laden debit card payments.

As the story goes on, Scrooge learns the error of his ways.  As the ghost of Christmas future reminds him, the wages of sin is death.  Make no mistake, Dickens judges Scrooge to be a sinner, and his mistreatment of his employee and his cruel attitude towards the poor to be great sins deserving of damnation.  That is essentially the same moral framework that Pope Francis has been advocating recently.  When he wrote that a two point drop in the stock market was news, but a homeless person dying of cold on the street wasn't, I heard in those words the spirit of A Christmas Story.

As in Dickens' time, we live in a society where wealth is being generated on a massive scale but is going into the hands of fewer and fewer people who have abdicated any sense of social responsibility.  Their arrogant disregard for the sufferings of those below them -the surplus population- is trumpeted throughout our public discourse under the guise of conventional wisdom.  It is time we follow the lead of A Christmas Carol, and shame those who so easily deny the needs of those less fortunate than them.

Why 12 Years A Slave Matters

This week I finally got to see 12 Years a Slave, which is no mean feat considering that taking care of toddlers makes going to the movies difficult.  I'd been wanting to see it since I first heard about it, in large part because my students read part of Northup's narrative in my American history course.  I was also wondering whether America would finally have a film from a slave's perspective about the true realities of slavery.  Hollywood has produced several fine films about the Holocaust, and many other moving accounts of horrible atrocities in other countries, such as the Khemer Rouge's genocide in Cambodia (The Killing Fields), the Hutu slaughter of the Tutsi (Hotel Rwanda), and paramilitary slaughters in Central America (Salvador, Romero).

When it comes to America's greatest historical atrocities, slavery and the genocide of its first nations, much less shows up on the screen, and if so, very rarely, if ever, is the story told from the perspective of slaves or Native Americans.  Historically Hollywood has produced potent images downplaying the violence of slavery and implicitly justifying white supremacy.  The infamously pro-Klan The Birth of a Nation was America's first epic blockbuster, and a brilliantly executed piece of racist propaganda.  Later, during Hollywood's "golden age," the Antebellum South was a commonly romanticized place, drenched in gauzy moonlight and lacy Spanish moss.  Slaves were loyal servants, treated like family and devoted to their masters.  One only has to think of Gone With the Wind or Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel.

In recent decades such glorification of the Antebellum South and Confederacy has faded from the screen, but it has not been replaced by realistic portrayals of such an important aspect of American history.  Django Unchained, for example, was essentially a cartoon that had more to say about Quentin Tarantino's obsession with 70s exploitation cinema and spaghetti westerns than with the American past.  Amistad tried to speak to this absence, but that film is about the Middle Passage, and not the institution of slavery in America as it was experienced on a daily basis by those unfortunate enough to be trapped in it.

12 Years A Slave is always locked into the perspective of Solomon Northup, so much so that when the camera goes inside of the big house, the audience feels alien there, as if they don't belong.  In older films, it was the slave quarters that were off limits.  The symbols that once showed the quaintness and beauty of the old South are twisted in 12 Years A Slave and made malevolent.  For example, director Steve McQueen shoots the paddle wheel of the riverboat close up and ominously, its churning scary in that it is bringing Solomon from Washington to the hell of the New Orleans slave market.  Nobody is singing "Old Man River."  The Spanish moss in the plantation trees looks absolutely sinister and foreboding, and the film shows explicitly how the blood and sweat of slaves went into building the quaint plantation gazebos.  McQueen captures the real beauty of the South's nature, both in the use of light as well as in the soundtrack's bird and insect noises.  However, the beauty on display is presented as an ironic contrast to the horrible acts committed in its midst.  The reversal of these symbols is nothing short of brilliant.

12 Years A Slave matters because it could, and should, bring about a permanent change in how the American past is treated on film.  Perhaps instead of delving into the crimes of other nations, we might seriously and forthrightly do the same for our own nation's atrocities.  Not only does the film skillfully reverse the meaning of old symbols, it is well-directed, finely written, and wonderfully acted.  (I'd say it's the best film I've seen in a theater in quite some time.)  I can only hope that more films of its ilk will be created in the years to come.

Why Regional State Universities Are Higher Ed's Real Battleground

Over the years I've noticed a major blind spot in the public discourse on higher education, namely that it rarely touches on the situation in regional state universities.  Conversation often turns to elite private universities or the big state flagships, and may shift to community colleges from time to time, but rarely touches on the regional four-year public universities that educate many more students that the Ivy League or the flagships do.  These humble institutions, however, have become the most altered by the current forces tearing away at academia, and are in most in danger of completely losing their integrity as institutions of higher learning.

Of all the universities in the country, San Jose State has been the biggest battleground in the wars over MOOCs.  Minnesota State University-Moorhead seems poised to eliminate 18 of its academic departments.  Schools like SUNY-Albany have made news by destroying their language and fine arts programs.  The University of Louisiana at Lafayette no longer has a philosophy major, but it does have a football team.  The likes of Michigan, Illinois, and Cal have the resources to weather these storms with their integrity intact, but the Western Illinoises and North Dakota States of the world do not.

Based on my own personal experience, I think that regional state unis are am absolutely crucial element of our higher education system because they, more than any other kinds of four year school, are the bridge for so many people into the middle class.  I taught at two different regional state universities, one in Michigan, and one in Texas.  Half of the graduates at both of these institutions were the first people in their families with college degrees.  Many of them were "non-traditional" students with families and full-time jobs whose education was a path to a better life.  Others were just kids from working class families who wanted to save money on their education, since both of these schools charged low tuition, and many of these same students lived nearby with their parents.

There is an insidious assumption that the only reason that students go to institutions like this, which are not selective, is that they are incapable of getting in anywhere else.  This assumption helps justify the gutting of humanities and fine arts departments at these schools, since the students are supposedly only really fit for a kind of glorified vocational education, and not in need of the more refined things in life.  This assumption is complete and utter bullshit.  While I did have a high percentage of students who were ill-prepared for college, there were also a significant number of absolutely stellar students, including a few that I would put up against students from any university in the country, Harvard and Yale included.  These people weren't attending second tier state universities because they couldn't get in somewhere with a higher reputation, but because they did not have the financial means or unencumbered family situation to go elsewhere.  When I hear about regional universities being gutted and MOOC-ified, I think about the wonderfully smart and driven students I used to teach, and how they are being cheated.  I also think about those less prepared students who were trying like hell to improve and get ahead, and how their needs will not be met because it costs less money to turn their education into a series of computer-administered multiple choice tests.

There is a further personal reason why I care about the erosion of our nation's second tier state schools.  Back in the late 1960s and 1970s, my parents attended one of these colleges, and were both the first people in their families to get a four-year degree.  At the time my father was working multiple jobs, and my mother had elected to stay close to home.  That education brought my father out of poverty, got my mother off the farm, and cleared a path for me to have all kinds of opportunities that they didn't.  If regional state universities morph into vo-tech to train the proles to pull the digital levers of the new economy, opportunities to build a better life will not be around any longer for a lot of people in this country.

Track of the Week: Ernest Tubb, "Blue Christmas"

This month my tracks of the week will have a seasonal orientation.  In recent years I have embraced the holiday season anew in ways that I haven't since childhood.  Having a family of my own makes it more fun, and it alsoprovides a welcome festive break from the awfulness of winter's long cold nights.  That being said, I can't stand most Christmas music.  It's sappy, lowest common denominator crap and by the time December is over I will have heard the same damn twenty songs about a million times.

For that reason, I'll be highlighting songs that speak to the darker side of the holiday season.  One pitfall of the holidays has to do with their heightened meaning and emotions.  The first holiday season after a breakup is usually tough, since reminders of one's singlehood abound.  That's the theme of "Blue Christmas," Elvis' most famous holiday tune, although I prefer the Ernest Tubb version.  Country music is much more suited to such a lament, especially with a weeping steel guitar for accompaniment.

Of course, I have no breakup to lament this holiday season, but it will be a blue one nonetheless because of death's cold hand.  Since last Christmas I've lost my grandmother and one of the best friends I've ever had.  I will inevitably think back to the times we had together, and how the memories are all that remain.