Town without Pity

 If you can't stand any more election stuff, skip this one.

 

This song (music by one of my favorite Old Hollywood bombastic composers, Dimitri Tiomkin) has been running in my mind for the last, oh, 6 days since November 5. In case you don't want to listen to a pop song/movie title music from 1961: "No, it really isn't pretty / What a town without pity can do." The lyrics are talking about young lovers, but I'm listening to the part that's something about "this crazy planet falls apart." 

 

She ran a great campaign, and we supported her with as many dollars as we could muster. Those who held back from voting, or voted again for the worst president in American history, have put us here, and here we are. 

So we're about to see an administration without pity, only with more juice from billionaires, a corrupt right-wing Supreme Court, and, as Mad Magazine used to say, "the usual gang of idiots." 

I'm sure you've all seen this great  meme, from https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1870771-leopards-eating-peoples-faces-party: 

The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party is in power now, and, to complete the pity theme, I am having a very tough time dredging up any pity whatsoever for people who voted for that man and are now in for a world of hurt--like the rest of us, of course, but at least we tried.

Hope you are all doing well.

Addendum: I'm also tired of "if you can't effect major social change, do nothing," or a Twitter attack on Little Free Libraries

An LFL heinously upholding neoliberalism.

Okay, the next post will be about writing or something, I promise.

But I came home after a full day and a long drive to see this on the news and on Twitter--on the traditionally slow "news dump" time of Friday afternoon:

• Against precedent of having the Justice Department vet pardons, Trump throws yet MORE red meat to his base and pardons the convicted Joe Arpaio.
• Hurricane Harvey is bearing down on Texas and Louisiana, drenching it in torrents of rain and wind so strong it's swaying concrete buildings.
• Trump disgracefully issues an order banning transgender service members, after the Joint Chiefs had individually indicated it's a terrible idea on so many levels--not just rights but fighting strength.
• He also might deputize school safety officers to enforce immigration arrests in the schools, where children are supposed to be safe. 
• This is on top of threatening to hold U. S. hostage, via the debt ceiling, to pay for the ridiculous, racist, and unnecessary wall that he swore to the Trumpettes that Mexico would pay for. With no sense of irony, one of his cabinet said "It'll be like the Maginot Line." Uh, yeah. Ask France how that one worked out.  Maybe they ought to go for Hadrian's Wall instead.

 And this is just an hour's worth of news.

But what's most important? What's A#1 on the radical librarians' agenda this evening? (Google them if you want to. I don't want to give them the link.)

Little Free Libraries.

That's right, the little free-standing book houses where you can take a book and leave a book. Where little kids can get books for free (and so can adults).  Where someone in your community cared enough to put the time and effort in to reach out to neighbors.

They don't solve the problem of inadequate library funding, say the rad librarians. True enough.

They make people feel good without a radical tearing down of the oppressive structures that enable systemic privilege blah blah blah and you can fill in the rest of this speech yourself.  True enough.

But shouldn't a small good get the benefit of the doubt?

Apparently not.

I'm tired of the false equivalence thing not only because in the media it gave us Trump (Hillary's emails! Hillary's emails!--remember that?) but because in giving equal weight to horrible things like white supremacy and the trans ban and things that just aren't quite correct enough, like the Little Free Library, we're squandering an opportunity.  And with things the way they are, we don't have the luxury of wasting opportunities to set things right.

How can we write in the current environment?

I saw a tweet the other day that said something like "I hope I can put the 6 hours a day I spend watching the news about the U.S. destroying itself on my annual review."

Amen to that.  I know that this is a first world/academic world problem, and it's insignificant in the face of what Charlottesville has suffered and what continues to happen throughout the country,  but it's a problem nonetheless.

How do we keep calm and carry on, as the Brits say, when there's a fresh !@#$show every time we open our laptops? How can we develop consecutive thoughts about research when the country is being run on the reality show principle that every day is an escalation of the worst of the day before? When Nazis are back and racism is horrifyingly endemic? I might be ripped apart for saying this, but we were making progress on racism. Obama did give us a sense of hope. Now the president endorses white supremacy, and the Congress does nothing? Is this the United States?

And what if we are horrified by what's happening but express ourselves incorrectly? For example, Tina Fey did a sketch recently about eating sheet cake to drown out stress or to satirize people's desires to turn away rather than to protest. I didn't think it was hilarious but thought it was okay--until social media tore her a new one, pointing out the parallels to Marie Antoinette, branding her with the most heinous of insults--"liberal" and "neoliberal" and "racist"--and generally taking her down.

It feels disloyal or traitorous, somehow, to write about something other than the events that are happening around us. About the only non-news things on Twitter, for example, are those that are put out by twitterbots, which would churn out tweets if the sky was falling, which it kind of is.

If we need to write about our actual research, we seem unfeeling or uncaring (we're not). Ditto for teaching, with each fresh tragedy appropriately bringing with it a "syllabus" to teach resistance to the Nazis. Yet we have obligations that demand other kind of content, and we have to consider that, too, don't we?

I have research-related posts and writing that I want to do, but I keep thinking I'll wait for the !@#$show to end or at least die down. Like the never-ending heat this summer, though, it never does.

The winter of our discontent

As the long winter of our discontent drags on, I struggle to find something to say here that isn't simply repeating the several million messages of escalating daily outrage in Twitter or that doesn't sound entirely frivolous--like posts about writing.

To do the former is to pile more doom and gloom, and you already have enough of that on Twitter to sink your own feelings ever deeper. People are recommending books that are ever more dystopian both ecologically and politically, as if they figure you can't get enough of "I told you so" misery.

To do the latter is to suggest that you're gleefully dancing on the grave of American democracy, as in people hissing, "Don't you even care?"

Both positions can leave you feeling powerless, despite the actions you've taken (calling legislators, etc.)

What to do?

Well, "fight on," obvs.

But maybe also give a little time and space to some things that help mentally.

One, for me, is contemplating pictures from the past of my region --not to go back there politically (because nostalgia = racism, sexism, and all that, I do get it, I really do) but just . . .  to look and imagine being there, in that time and space, to see if it can be recaptured for --

Two, some writing that's not academic but might be fiction or creative nonfiction, never to be published (since it's neither sci-fi nor dystopian nor memoir) but just to turn the brain over to a different place for a while.

And then I'll write more about writing if everyone promises not to hiss at me in the comments.

Welcome to 2017!

I haven't posted here or over at my Real Name blog in forever--well, a month, anyway, and haven't even been reading many blogs because the news has been so, um, compelling.

I keep saying things like, "But how can that be legal?" and "Doesn't everyone see X?" and "That's insane" and, to my elected representatives, very respectfully, "Hello, I'm a registered voter in your district, and here's my address, and here's what I think about defunding the NEH."

The NEH may not love me, like it doesn't love the 94% of people like me that apply and don't get funded in its elite 6%, but I still love it, because it does good things. Also, Humanities and Democracy.

My thinking is that right now, those who rule politically are basically shaking up a snow globe of ideas so heinous that you wouldn't think they are real. They come fluttering down via the media & Twitter thick and fast,  and we're the little figures inside trying to pin them down to one so we can protest it. But what they really want to do is to use the whole snow globe to smash this country.

Anyway. I'll write a real post soon.

So how was your winter break?

Cassandra without portfolio

Well, the chipper feeling of that last post didn't last long.

I didn't see this coming, did you? In academia, we knew it couldn't happen because the candidate was racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, crude, a liar, etc. etc. etc. plus not being able put any plans or logic together, and everyone must hate this and see what we did. Right? Right?

But I feared it. Looking back there were some little nagging things, like something you catch out of the corner of your eye, weren't there?  Like the guy who predicted all the elections correctly?

Back in the mid-NAFTA-1990s, I went around asking, "But if all the jobs and factories go abroad, who's going to have living wage jobs to buy all the junk we will now be able to buy so cheaply?" (something I also asked on the blog) and was told "Shut up! Knowledge economy! Jobs for everyone! Don't worry about it!" which sort of worked a little bit for some people in the tech boom and then not so much because of a lot of corporate reasons involving outsourcing jobs and moving their corporate headquarters abroad. Same with the 2008 housing collapse: the lending principles didn't add up, but I figured that it was my stupidity and not their mendacity.

One day I came into the room and told Spouse, "I'm worried, because you-know-who is talking about job loss and H1B visas and the Democrats aren't doing that as much." But then with every revelation about his prejudices and actions, the pundits would say x group certainly won't vote for him now (evangelicals, women, etc.) because it would offend their moral sensibilities and I would think, they absolutely do not care, regardless of what they say they value. Yes, I saw the charts, and yes, I know that higher-income voters voted for him and that too many white women did, too.  It was horrible but true what he said about being able to shoot someone down in cold blood and still people would vote for him.

And then Hillbilly Elegy, along with all those economic hopelessness articles in WaPo, became part of an economic conversation about rural areas that we were not having, or not having enough of, in the academic vortex of Twitter. Michael Moore called it (as 
xykademiqz told us today)  and so did David Wong, who basically says that our president-elect is a brick thrown through our windows of privilege.  [Edited to add: Matt Taibbi has an analysis at Rolling Stone and Elizabeth Drew at The New York Review of Books.]

Now we who were with Her are left in the aftermath of the election trying to take meaningful action in this country* and maybe to think about what Ethan Coen said in his satirical "thank you notes" in the NY Times: 

6. All our media friends. Thank you for preserving reportorial balance. You balanced Donald Trump’s proposal that the military execute the innocent families of terrorists, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced pot-stirring racist lies about President Obama’s birth, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced a religious test at our borders, torture by our military, jokes about assassination, unfounded claims of a rigged election, boasts about groping and paradoxical threats to sue anyone who confirmed the boasts, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced endorsement of nuclear proliferation, against Hillary’s emails. You balanced tirelessly, indefatigably; you balanced, you balanced, and then you balanced some more. And for that — we thank you. And thank you all for following Les Moonves’s principled lead when he said Donald Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.”

And the Republicans? They got their whole wish list--President, House, Senate--but I can only imagine that they are now like the couple at the end of The Graduate, wondering what they've gotten themselves into.




* Here's a pro tip for those who have dramatically exclaimed that they'll move to Canada: It is very, very hard to immigrate to Canada as a U. S. citizen, unless you already have dual Canadian or British citizenship: you'll need a job offer in a field that they don't have enough of (spoiler alert: humanities grads--they've got 'em!), then a path to landed immigrant status (hard to get, and you have to be there 5 years before even being considered for citizenship), then money for lawyers, and so on. If you have bad vision, health problems, age problems (as in being over 45), they want to know about that, too, and not in a "we'd like to take care of you!" way, either. Yes, they want to see a recent set of chest x-rays, too, or used to.