More Evidence Of The Great Divide In Academia

I have been trying really hard not to let my old bitter, burning rage at academia ignite once again.  It had been getting so easy, I wondered whether it would ever come back, but something today changed things.  To quote Michael Corleone, just when I thought I was out, they keep pulling me back in.

I read Rebecca Schuman's most recent post which concerned a Chronicle of Higher Education columnist's recent piece on academic internet trolls.  The old bile-filled burning rage boiled up once again from my guts when I read that the columnist claimed that contingent faculty members were most to blame for the lack of civility among academics on the internet.  Her comments also seemed dismissive or just flat out ignorant of the struggles that have pushed so many contingent folks over the edge.

Reading those words in the Chronicle piece reminded me of something I wrote awhile back about the divide between those who have experienced contingent labor, and those who have not. They also reminded me more palpably of how some tenured folk treated me like a nameless peon when I was a contingent faculty member.  Many others at the same institution were nice to me and understanding, but most of those folks had done time in the contingent trenches themselves.

I am not sure what can be done to remedy this divide, because the lifeboater types, like all good Calvinists, think that they are God's elect and those drowning around them have brought their fates upon themselves.  I am reminded of a scene in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, where the narrator, a prisoner in a Siberian labor camp, discusses how he tried to convince one of the foremen that it was far too cold to work that day.  The foreman refused to listen, to which the narrator responded "how can a man who is warm understand a man who is cold?"

In today's academia the only options are either to leave the rotten system, which is what I did, or start a revolution against it.  The privileged of the profession will never, ever see the light on their own.

Track of the Week: The Velvet Underground, "Rock and Roll"

I heard the news of Lou Reed's passing yesterday in the most appropriate fashion possible: on the radio.  My wife and I were driving home from a rare child-free outing, and I had WFMU and the Glen Jones Radio Program playing on the car stereo, as I do every Sunday afternoon.  He put on VU's "Black Angel's Death Song," which seemed like an odd choice, then broke the news.  Reed's passing has hit me harder than I would have thought, perhaps because death is looming over someone I love so much right now.

Part of the reason also might be that Reed and the Velvet Underground played a crucial role in my musical coming of age.  During my teenage years I kept reading about them in music magazines, and how great and influential their records were supposed to be.  Living as I did in the middle of nowhere in the pre-Internet age, I had no way accessing their music.  My first glimmer came with the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's biopic about The Doors.  I pretty much had all the songs on the album on other Doors records, but I bought it because in contained "Heroin" by The Velvet Underground.  I burned with the desire to know these legendary artists, and was not disappointed.

I had never heard anything like it before; it was like the gates of heaven opening up before me.  The drones, squalls of feedback, heartbeat drumming, and dirty subject matter were all revelations.  I knew from that moment I had to explore more.  My chance came the summer after my junior year of high school, while out on college visits.  I was with my parents in Omaha, visiting my eventual alma mater, where I made a detour to Homer's records and picked up a compilation album on cassette.  Buying it on tape might sound like an odd choice, but I had my Walkman with me, and I needed to listen to the music of the Velvet Underground immediately.

I first heard it through the headphones of my cheap Walkman as I rode in my family's car across the rolling hills of Iowa, the setting summer sun dappling the corn with orange light.  It was a scene a million miles removed from the gritty Manhattan of the songs, but a sublime accompaniment nonetheless.  The last song was "Rock and Roll," which would have been a big radio hit in a more just universe.

It's got a catchy hook and some of Reed's least monotone singing, but maintains a little of the glorious drone and repetition that VU was well known for.  The subject matter also can't be beat: someone being saved by hearing rock and roll on the radio.  Growing up as a bit of an outcast in an isolated town I can say that if it didn't save my life, it came pretty damn close.  Once I heard the Velvet Underground, though, my horizons suddenly broadened.  In just the time it took for that compilation tape to come an end with "Rock and Roll," my appreciation of music had changed.  I sought out the arty and challenging side of music, and never looked back. I've got to thank Lou Reed for that. 

A Scene From My Commute That Says A Lot About America's Moral Failure

My daily commute from the Ironbound in Newark to the Upper West Side of Manhattan has become so rote that I hardly notice anything along the way to work and back.  While on the train I am absorbed either in a newspaper or book, headphones firmly planted on my ears.  Once my morning train pulls into the polluted, congested rabbit-warren of Penn Station I am focused on rushing through its grimy tunnels to get to my subway train. In that state of single-minded focus, I get tunnel vision, and I don't notice a whole helluva lot.

However, on Friday, I saw something that I could not ignore.  As I bounded through the subway turnstiles and rounded the corner to the stairs to the uptown bound 3 train, I saw a homeless man (an all too common sight in Penn Station) sitting dejectedly between an incredibly gaudy poster for the reality show The Shahs of Sunset.  The whole poster was gold colored, with the titular reality tv personalities standing confidently around a pyramid of glasses brimming with champagne.  It is an image that so perfectly captures the amoral, materialistic excess that is the one value that our feckless economic elite holds scared.  That image made quite a contrast with the indigent man forced to bed down in a dirty tunnel.

I am well aware that New York City presents examples of its extremes of wealth and poverty every day, signs and signals that have become so common to me that I barely notice them anymore.  This particular sight has stuck with me because it's indicative of the ways our entertainment industry aids and abets the increasingly ironclad class system in our country.  There are so many reality television shows about wealthy bores with endless reservoirs of crass narcissism.  I know people who claim to like them who say they see them as ways to mock the wealthy, or as simple escapism.  However, the more we see such self-centered materialism on television, the more that behavior is normalized and even implicitly justified.

Not to preach too much of a jeremiad, but I really and truly think that there is a moral cancer in our society that I fear may be inoperable.  Greed and selfishness have become virtues, and the plight of those who suffer from the greed perpetuated in this country are left on the dung pile to rot.  Even worse, many more people would rather follow the lives of materialistic moral cripples on television rather than contemplate the man sleeping in a dirty subway staircase, or bother to think they are much more likely to be in his shoes than topping off a champagne pyramid.  Until there are more people who feel moral outrage at elites living to excess while others starve than there are people who follow what TMZ has to say about the Real Housewives of New Jersey, nothing is going to change.

Tales of Baseball's Demise Have Been Wildly Exaggerated

Jonathan Mahler wrote a piece recently for the New York Times called "Is the Game Over?' that has received entirely way too much attention.  The article's thesis is that while baseball is profitable and its games are well-attended, it no longer occupies the primary place in American culture it once did.  Well, duh.  I've been reading statements like this for the past quarter century or so, and they are hard to deny.

It is indisputable that the NFL is now America's primary spectator sport; fifteen million people tuned in to see an abortion of a game on Monday between the Giants and Vikings.  People just don't watch the NFL draft, they will even spend some of the few precious hours they have on the earth watching the players do tests in the draft combine.  The Super Bowl is the highest rated event on television every year.

While I 've watched pro football for as long as I've been watching television, I must say I am a little flummoxed by the current level of the game's popularity.  The ball is in play for only eleven minutes of an average NFL game, and for less than the running time of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"in pigskin action fans must endure over an hour of commercials.  The games seem to last longer than ever, mostly due to the need to sell lite beer.  Great moments on the field are immediately followed by interminable instant replay challenges.  We are also more aware than ever of the human costs of pro football, and how the storied gladiators of the gridiron will often end up brain damaged, suicidal, or physically incapacitated.  The more fluid, beautiful, and exciting game of basketball is no challenge to football's supremacy, but if it hasn't eclipsed basketball in popularity yet, it likely soon will.

However, I am not here to diss pro football or praise basketball, but to point to the less obvious reasons why baseball will continue to be healthy and should not be considered a sport in decline.  In the first place, a lot of people go to the games.  No team in the majors drew fewer than 1.5 million fans this year, but thirty years ago nine teams (about a third of the majors) failed to reach that mark.  I keep hearing complaints, mainly justified, that tickets just keep getting pricier.  However, more and more folks are coming to games.  The reasons are pretty obvious.  Going to the ballpark is a great experience, one that is more enjoyable than going to a football or basketball game.  It's just a great, relaxing place to be on a summer's day, and cheaper than other pro sports.

In fact, the timing of baseball's season is one secret to its long-term health.  During the height of summer, from mid-June until early September, it's pretty much the only game in town.  It dominates the time of year when people have the most leisure time, and most desire to go out and have a good time.  Baseball and summer are practically inseparable, and as long as there are summer days in this country and a ballpark to go to, baseball will always be fine.

Fun in the summer sun will always draw in the casual fans, but as far as the more devoted fanatics go, those who care about baseball care about it more than the devotees of football and basketball.  Just look at the number of books about baseball compared to other sports, the arguments about it, the numerous analysts using their brilliant mathematical minds to compile statistics.  I do know of NFL fans who truly care about the game, its intricacies, and its history, but they are a decided minority.  Most people who watch the NFL are more interested in big hits than in x's and o's.  There are plenty of folks I know who can dissect a playbook, but there's a much bigger percentage of baseball fans who know sabremetrics.  Its language has even entered into the musty realms of the broadcast booth.

Part of why baseball matters more to the people it matters to is the sport's unmatchable historical legacy.  That legacy gives it an aura of meaning that other sports lack.  Even with the decline in baseball's importance, Barry Bonds' eclipse of Hank Aaron's home run record mattered more than any record that exists in either basketball or football.  Accusations of steroid use led to Congressional hearings, the concussion problem in football has not prompted something similar.  This is the case because baseball still has a special status, and its supposed purity is still a matter of public concern.  Nobody really cares about football records, nor do they bother to hold its behavior to a high standard.

So yes, baseball has been eclipsed by the NFL, and maybe the NBA, too.  That well-established fact should not fool us into thinking that baseball is somehow irrelevent, or entering decline.  The World Series will never get the Super Bowl's ratings, but no moment in any Super Bowl, past, present or future, will ever mean as much as Boston breaking the Curse of the Bambino, Bill Mazerowski's seventh game homer, or Bobby Thompson's "shot heard 'round the world."  That's hardly a sign of irrelevance.

Ready to Go Home

I am listening to "I'm Ready to Go Home" by the Louvin Brothers tonight after talking to my grandmother, who's living and soon to be dying a half a continent away back in Nebraska.  She hadn't been doing well, but things have taken a turn for the worse.  She told my mother today that she's ready to go to heaven.  So tonight, I sit in my city apartment "back East" above a busy street, police sirens and car stereos blasting and think of the deathly quiet, Bible-black skies of my Great Plains homeland looking over my grandmother, and wish there was some way I could be there with her.

Track of the Week: The Carpenters, "We've Only Just Begun"

Back when I still thought certain things I liked were "guilty pleasures," The Carpenters were one of my guiltiest.  My abiding love came from my childhood, mostly because they were my Mom's favorite and their music was the soundtrack to my happy years pre-Kindergarten, before school and my peers made my life miserable.  On so many mornings I can remember sitting on the yellow and green linoleum floor in the kitchen with a cassette of the Carpenters' greatest hits playing while my mother went about her chores.  Once I got older and developed my own musical tastes and began to eschew anything on the Top 40, I got a little ashamed of my love of the Carpenters, even though many of my indie rock heroes had contributed to the If I Were a Carpenter tribute album.

After growing up some more, I realized that I like what I like because I like it, and there's no reason to feel guilty about it.  In any case, The Carpenters produced some gorgeous pop tunes, with "We've Only Just Begun" near the top.  Yes, this song was written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols, but Karen Carpenter gives it a stunning vocal performance that is uniquely sublime.  I still get gooseflesh at the way she croons "And when the evening comes..."  Even at a young age, I thought it was a song that spoke of the joyful possibilities of life like few others.  My little four-year old soul was always lifted when I heard it.

It's an appropriate song today, when marriage equality is finally a reality in my state of New Jersey. "We've Only Just Begun" is ostensibly about a couple starting their new lives together, and I'm sure it will played at many weddings today.  As a society, we've only just begun to learn to let all people live with dignity; on this day of hope I pray that we can keep moving towards a more humane and equitable society.

How Conservatives May Have Actually Won the Shutdown

Great relief resounded throughout the land this week when the GOP hardliners finally stood down.  I myself took great heart in the fact that the Republicans had demanded a stop to Obamacare, and ended up getting nothing.  I gloated with and high-fived my progressive friends, happy to see the Tea Party get its due.

After some reflection, however, I've come to realize that these feelings may have been premature.  While the Tea Party types did not get what they wanted, I doubt they will face any real consequences.  Gerrymandering makes it difficult to flip most districts, and the election won't be until next year anyway.  Our amnesiac voting public and its ever-shortening attention span will ensure that this latest episode in right-wing perfidy will slide right on into oblivion.  The US almost went to war with Syria a month ago, but nobody is even talking that conflict on these shores anymore.

Not only will Republicans not be punished, they might well be in a better place now because of the shutdown.  This does not mesh with conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is never to be trusted.  The answer is simple: conservatives have, yet again, determined the parameters of our national political discourse.  After Sandy Hook they managed to swat away a much-desired look at gun control.  Despite the fervent hopes for immigration reform across the country, Congress hasn't even come close to passing legislation.  Now, in the aftermath of the shutdown, all talk centers around budget and taxation.

These are the bread and butter issues of modern conservatism, and the ground where conservatives would prefer to fight.  During the 2012 presidential election,  Mitt Romney took great pains to make his campaign a referendum on the budget.  He nominated Paul Ryan, the posterboy of modern-day Reaganomics, to be his running mate and lend credibility on the issue.  While most Americans don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with Republicans on this issue, the GOP gets into serious trouble with the electorate when it comes to issues like women's rights, gun control, and immigration.  If the national political conversation begins to take up these topics, the Republicans know that their goose is cooked.  Hence, they must do everything they can to prevent them from even being discussed.

The shutdown basically accomplished that.  Now in Congress there will be nothing but budget and taxation-related action, and if there is another Sandy Hook or Syria, no worries, since the deadline for another continuing resolution to fund the government is always around the corner.  The rest of us will be forced to make concessions to head off another hostage crisis, and all other issues will fall by the wayside.  It is an unfair and dangerous strategy, but will continue to happen for the simple reason that it works.