On Howard Zinn

My journal entry from April 17, 1997: “Bought Zinn’s Can’t Be Neutral.  Ate a heavy calzone and too much garlic bread.  At Wordsworth books in Harvard Square, someone asked the clerk where he could find books on marionettes.” 

In this rather unremarkable fashion, Howard Zinn’s memoir entered my life, equally sharing diary space that day with food and puppets.  I had already read and reveled in A People’s History of the United States, thanks to a colleague who had recommended it, but I knew little of Zinn the man.  You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times introduced me to Zinn the teacher, the activist, the historian.  I have reread sections of that book many times since then.  So last week, the first thing I thought of when I heard that Zinn had passed away was the experience of reading that book thirteen years ago.

I read Can’t Be Neutral as I was finishing up my third and final year of teaching high school English at a private boarding school in New Hampshire.  Those three years had constituted a kind of intellectual awakening for me that Zinn’s autobiography capped off perfectly.  I was reading widely and often during my tenure as a secondary teacher—books by Albert Murray, Cornel West, C.S. Lewis, Sven Birkets, bell hooks, Michel Foucault, Theodore Sizer, Jonathan Kozol, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Jane Smiley, J.M. Coetzee, Alice Walker, John Irving, Toni Morrison.  These theorists, critics, and novelists constantly filled my head with ideas and inspired me to fill my journals with amateur stabs at cultural analysis.  But it was Zinn that focused my wayward reading habits for me.  

Zinn prompted me to conceptualize how I could translate everything that I was reading and growing passionate about into a classroom teaching practice.  He helped me see how my writing and research interests could complement my teaching, rather than remain separate from it.  Moreover, he helped me understand that my own life experience, my own ideas about the world, my own beliefs did not necessarily have to be disconnected from what I did in the classroom.  This may seem like an obvious proposition to many in academia today, but for me, at the time, as a twenty-something high school teacher contemplating applying to Ph.D. programs, this was a revelation.  I found Zinn’s passion, his zest for teaching history, contagious.  That fall, I applied to graduate school.  I thought the field of American Studies seemed like just the place where I could put my new ideas about research and teaching into practice.  As it turns out, I was right.

I always find it interesting how certain books come into our lives at particular moments.  How we choose to buy that one book instead of any other in the store.  How we pull that one book off of our shelf—the one that has been collecting dust for years, one of many we have never read—and glance at the first few pages and suddenly leap in.  How we then integrate that book into our everyday life at that exact moment, using it to help us make sense of our world.  I’m grateful that I picked up Can’t Be Neutral when I did.

Mo’nique, Harry Reid and Haitian Orphans

This week the comedian/actress Mo’nique won a Golden Globe award for her portrayal of the abusive, horrifyingly ‘out-to-lunch’ mother in Lee Daniels’ Precious. I saw the film the weekend before I was scheduled to discuss the first chapter of Mo’nique’s 2004 memoir Skinny Women Are Evil in my undergraduate humor seminar. I wanted to give it another read before class. It was tough. Actually, it was impossible. I skimmed a paragraph here and there, then gave up and began flipping through the book, stopping at the photographs in order to remind myself that Mo-nique was not the woman she played in the film. Mo’nique‘s worst-mother-of-the-year performance as Mary Jones was torturous: referring to her Down Syndrome grandchild as an “animal,” kicking Precious continually in the head as she lay on the floor about to give birth, and, of course the creepy and truly haunting “Mommy-needs-you” masturbation scene. Mo’nique forced me to struggle with the distinction between character and actor to a greater degree than I have in quite a long time, just as she has challenged us to confront body image bias and dominant conventions of beauty in her comedic performance. (Having “neglected” to shave her legs for the Golden Globe Awards, she promises to provoke us even more in the future. Anywho, the Daily Mail  seems sure that she “won’t be winning any awards for her personal grooming.” FYI, Daily Mail reporter, many black women do not shave their legs and do not consider unshaven legs to be poor “grooming.”)

Still, the color politics of Precious are troubling: all the folks whose lives are wracked with dysfunction are medium brown to dark-skinned and all the good-hearted, social worker types are fair-skinned. Even as I celebrate another victory for a black female actor, the reemergence of the film has reminded me of the “lost” news story of the past week, the latest blown-out-of-proportion racial ‘incident.’ Remember Sen. Harry Reid’s comments about how “electable” President Obama was based upon his “light skin” and ability to speak both standard and black English (although Reid clunkily referred to it as “Negro dialect”)? Oh yeah… that was just a little over a week ago. Reid’s poor word choice aside, I think he did us a favor by giving us (non-white folks) a glimpse into white Americans’ thinking about skin color. Not that we are surprised that white Americans are “colorstruck,” so to speak, or that such prejudice constitutes an important means by which racism thrives in this U.S. I’m just surprised that a white person put it out there into the public discourse. In fact, I think Senator Reid did us a favor by exposing something that I think most whites aren’t comfortable discussing for fear of being called a racist; that is, how the politics of “shade” structures their assumptions about morality, authority, leadership qualifications, etc. And we all know that many blacks haven’t “come to terms” (whatever that means) with their own color consciousness and, in the absence of a vibrant anti-racism movement, perhaps never will. For many of us, the scene in which Precious fantasizes about a fair-skinned boyfriend with “light eyes” and “good hair” is a moment of painful and inarticulable recognition.

The emergence of the tag phrase “Haitian orphans” in the news this week serves as an indicator of our newest, highly problematic reification of racial sentiment (sorry, jargon and cynicism). CNN has reportedly been bombarded with requests to adopt Haitian orphans this past week. According to the U.S. State Department, the numbers of Haitian adoptions have been on the rise over the past five years (i.e., even before last year’s hurricanes and recent earthquake ). Almost all of those children range from chocolate brown to midnight black. If colorism structures how we dole out political power, as Reid suggests, then what does it say about the politics of affect? If we are not capable of electing a dark-skinned president, then how can we sympathize with girls like Precious and how do we explain this clamor to adopt dark-skinned babies? In fact, how can we feel empathy for black babies if we cannot do the math that enables us to associate dark skin with all of those positive qualities that Americans supposedly value. While I’m not one of those people who believe that only black parents can raise black children (you have to be super committed to pursue a Haitian adoption), I am feeling very conflicted about this sentimentalization of black children by Americans (which, btw, is a historical phenomenon in the U.S.). I confess that I have felt the Madonna baby-knapping urge quite a lot in the past week. Watching children being shipped off to adoptive parents and other safe places has given me a huge sense of relief: all children need a loving family. But at the same time I feel a visceral, historically-engrained anxiety about children being taken out of an almost all-black environment and brought into predominantly white ones. I also worry about black children being raised in black homes where they are made to feel inferior or ugly because they are dark-skinned.

Perhaps we need to do a rewind and use Reid’s racial Turrets to help us reexamine this broad-based empathy for Haitian children within the historical context of a pervasive colorism against darker-skinned people in this country. This colorism crosses the racial spectrum, it cannot simply be dispelled by racial finger-pointing. And when I look at Gabourey Sidibe, I have to wonder if she’ll ever really work in Hollywood again.

Slasher Films Redux

Perusing the shelves at Blockbuster the other day, I noticed that quite a few remakes of horror films from the late 70s and 80s have appeared in the past few years.  Halloween, Friday the 13th, Prom Night, Black Christmas, Last House on the Left, and When a Stranger Calls, among many others, have been remade or reimagined in the mid-to-late 2000s.  And remakes of Fright Night and Nightmare on Elm Street are in the works.  My question that day in the video store: Why this particular cultural phenomenon, why now, and what does it all mean?  Why are these stories being reintroduced into popular culture at this moment in time?  How might we interpret this trend? 

One way to read the original versions of these films is as a commentary on generational failings.  80’s slasher flicks focus on teenagers who are typically killed soon after their ethical/moral transgressions.  For these celluloid kids, having premarital sex, doing drugs, or shirking job responsibilities will result in some kind of blood-and-guts punishment.  Many of these films similarly feature an elderly character who tries to warn the teens not to go into the house, or into the woods, or into wherever, but the kids always ignore that elderly person.  Read against the backdrop of the Reagan era, these films become an interesting commentary on the unsuitability of the rising generation to take on adult responsibilities.  The films essentially rearticulate a 1980s moral majority critique of the reckless, immoral sixties hippies who “ruined” America.  I realize it’s odd to think of horror movies as conservative, but arguably there is a consistent ideology embedded in these films that reflects the broader society’s culture wars and generational divides in the late 70s and 80s. 

Given this particular interpretation, what does it mean that these films have been remade in the 21st century?  Is this generational critique being recycled?  Perhaps these films resonate with our current discourse about “Generation Me,” or the “entitled” generation that supposedly populates our high schools and colleges today.  According to some social scientists and cultural critics, this rising generation is narcissistic and discourteous; a whole slice of our population currently believes—as a result of permissive parenting and schooling—that they are all “special” and deserving of anything they want, whether they work for it or not.  Hence the popularity of slasher films redux, depicting the slaughter of the self-important youth of today, with a new slew of ignored warnings from old folks telling them not to go in the woods.  But I deserve to go into the woods, these kids seem to say.  Perhaps this explains, in part, the currency of slasher remakes right now.

Five Years After Six Feet Under

I recently pulled my copy of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking off of my living room bookshelf and reread sections that I had marked off when I first read it two years ago.  Didion’s book about the death of her husband is a beautiful meditation on loss, grief, faith, and enduring.  I started thinking about the year the book was published—2006—and realized that death was a prominent theme in American culture at mid-decade.  That same year saw the publication of Philip Roth’s novel Everyman, a stark reflection on aging and the human body’s inevitable deterioration that begins with the protagonist’s funeral on page one.  The HBO television show Six Feet Under, a drama about a family that owns a funeral home, ended in 2005 after five seasons.  Also in 2005 the indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie released its album Plans, which featured several musical ruminations on aging and death (most notably “What Sarah Said,” with its haunting closing refrain, “Love is watching someone die.  Who’s gonna watch you die?  Who’s gonna watch you die?”).  I can’t help but try to connect dots everywhere that I see them, and I started contemplating the meaning of this convergence of four serious cultural meditations about death, all appearing in the mid-2000s.     

My initial thoughts are that these serious treatments of aging, dying, and death emerged in the years after 9/11 and the start of the war in Iraq, and in the midst of Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and even the much publicized debate about Terri Schiavo.  For whatever reason, American culture seemed to take death seriously at mid-decade, with literature and popular culture encouraging audience reflection on life, mortality, and saying goodbye.

I can’t help but contrast these realistic, sober cultural offerings of five years ago to our current pop culture plate.  Much of our mass culture today is devoted not to the dead but to the undead—to zombies and vampires and people who never seem to die.  At decade’s end, we hungrily consume stories about lives (and loves) that transcend death, be it True Blood or Twilight or Zombieland.  Does this mean that 9/11 has receded too far from our memory?  That in the idealistic age of youthful Obama we are more concerned with possibility and new beginnings than with decline and the end (death panels notwithstanding)? 

Or maybe the rhythms of our culture simply reflect what we as human beings experience in our daily lives: there are moments when our contemplation of death is intense, other moments when we feel we will live forever, and many other moments when we simply don’t think about death at all.  I happen to be experiencing the first moment these past few months—thinking more about mortality as I enter mid-life—and perhaps that’s why I am even seeing these connections in the first place.

Why does “relevant” mean “make me money?”

To wit: This week’s “Education Life” Section of the NY Times, where the cover article is called: “Making College ‘Relevant‘” I appreciate the quotation marks in the title, but the article seems to focus primarily on how to translate a BA into a J-O-B. This is a question that those of us in the humanities and social sciences get with some frequency. And our response is often couched in terms of “critical thinking skills” or “cultural analysis” or “nuance,” “subtlety,” “tensions,” or “cultural politics.”

But the question isn’t really if what we do is relevant, but rather why the job hunt and the endless pursuit of wealth and “practical knowledge” seems to have controlled the conversation about “relevance.” Why are those of us so gifted at cultural analysis often so poor at explaining its “relevance” to our students? Or, maybe more importantly: why is it such a challenge to provide frameworks for our students to recognize the relevance of what we’re doing on their own? Surely, relevance isn’t only about capitalizing on skills you can market through your “personal brand.”

Frankly, if relevance were judged by making money, the NYTimes would be in worse trouble than our universities.

Science, Learning to be Human(ities)

The cover story of the most recent issue of Wired Magazine is dedicated to failure, and why failing can actually be a good thing. The prooftext (and cover model) is Alec Baldwin, whose career has been riddled with failures from which he learned and grew and so on.

But the accompanying story, “The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” is much more impressive, even than Baldwin’s rise to 30 Rock. And it is impressive for the ways it “scientifically” discovers what we humanists have understood about intellectual growth and… well… learning for a long long time.

The essay tells the story of Kevin Dunbar, who conducted an ethnography of bioscience labs at Stanford University, only to reach

an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.)

For most humanists and social scientists, this phenomenon is anything but frustrating. This is what most of us call “discovery” or “learning.” It happens when what we expect to happen doesn’t happen. It’s what happens when what we think we know turns out not to be so. It is what happens when we proceed, methodologically, with real questions we want to understand as opposed to hypotheses we set out to prove.

Finding what you don’t expect to find is a success, not a failure. And perhaps some of the apparent “hard times” of the humanities are not “failures” at all, but the result of stilted and stunted ways of looking at the very processes of research, and not only focusing on the findings.

Our Obsession With Teens and Technology

The New York Times recently published an article on teenagers who have decided to reduce or eliminate the time they spend on Facebook in order to bolster their grades, their offline social lives, and their self-esteem (“To Deal With Obsession, Some Defriend Facebook,” December 21, 2009, A16).  I found the article especially interesting for the way it depicted teenagers and their relationship to technology.  The story reinforces one of our dominant, culturally constructed beliefs about adolescence: namely, the notion that technology poses a particular threat to teens because they lack the maturity and willpower to use it in a responsible, temperate manner.

First consider how technology is represented.  Throughout the article, Facebook is described as an addiction.  Words like “habit,” “obsession,” and “temptation” appear, as do phrases such as “like an eating disorder,” the “lure of the login,” and “time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling.”  One teenager mentioned by the piece even went on a “Facebook fast” for Lent.  Here, technology is depicted as a drug that can be especially dangerous and abused in the hands of teens.

Next consider the representation of adolescents.  The teenagers who have weaned themselves off of Facebook come across as having accomplished a remarkable victory.  They had to undergo a fierce struggle, one that required them to fight against their inherent adolescent traits and tendencies.  These exceptional teens exhibited “self-control,” “willpower,” and the ability to “delay gratification.”  The presumption here is that teens fundamentally lack these qualities… and they do not acquire them until they become adults.

Indeed, an unstated assumption of this New York Times story is that adults can use technology like Facebook more responsibly because adults have self-control.  However, many of my adult friends, myself included, are regular if not obsessive users of Facebook.  I even tried to “quit” Facebook back in April, posting a status update that read, “Leaving Facebook in 10 days.  I am both addicted and over it.”  In ten days I stopped looking at my account, but did not deactivate it.  Then two weeks later I was back on, and have basically logged in daily since then.  The teens profiled in this article are made of stronger stuff than I. 

One of the consequences of recirculating these assumptions about teens and technology in our mass news media is that it makes it easier for adults to claim the need to restrict or monitor teens’ use of technology.  The passing of laws targeting teens and technology comes to be seen as normal and even necessary for their safety.  For example, California recently passed a law prohibiting drivers under the age of 18 from using their cell phones; drivers over the age of 18, however, may use hands-free devices to talk on their phones.  Video games are assigned ratings (not by law, but by voluntary industry self-regulation) and people under the age of 18 cannot purchase certain games. 

I am interested in the larger questions raised by this story, questions about the role of technology in all of our lives, questions about the meaning of “maturity” and “immaturity” in our society, and questions about our cultural attitudes—and selective stigmas—regarding various “addictions” and “obsessions.”

The Sustainable Pen

The UCD Sustainable Pen

There’s something troubling about this artifact.  What appears at first to be another of the hundreds of variations on “spirit pens,” this UC Davis implement is something else entirely.  It is actually a plastic pen–perhaps of the bic variety?–wrapped with a thin layer of cardboard onto which the UCD logo is affixed (and a note indicating that it is “recycled material” is added).  Topping off this creation is a popsicle-stick like clip that is attached directly to the plastic pen top and can, one assumes, enable the user to affix the pen to the interior of a pocket–a scenario in which only the popsicle stick would protrude.

I don’t believe the UC Davis gurus of promotional products mean this to be funny.  Jokes that pass plastics off as good for the environment products don’t tend to get a laugh these days.  It’s possible that this is a sign that our sales and marketing team is losing their edge–certainly this is not a great product on several levels.  Green washing has to go right alongside peeling cardboard, cracking popsicle sticks, and depleted ink on the list of “poor design qualities.”

Yet let’s imagine just for a moment that we might need to take this pen seriously as what it claims to be: a symbol of our university.  That’s when things get scary.

In the day of business plans and bottom lines, is it too much of a stretch to imagine that this pen symbolizes the precarious nature of knowledge itself in the modern research university?  With class sizes growing and the pressure to “make something” and “bring in funding” (even in the humanities) we may find ourselves teaching students who never get deeper than superficial concepts and producing work that looks neat but has little there there, ultimately.  Maybe we are becoming the professorial equivalent of cardboard plastic pens stating our “recycled material.”

and that is definitely not funny.

I Don’t Watch TV. Or Do I?

For three years now I have not had a television.  I enjoy telling people this, as friends and family (as well as strangers I’ve met at parties) will readily testify.  Whenever they talk about some commercial or new show, I always say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I don’t watch TV.”  The pleasure I get from this disclosure comes in equal measure from witnessing their disbelief and from tingling with my own self-righteousness.  (As someone who teaches the history of popular culture, the fact that I don’t watch TV is ironic if not problematic, but that’s probably the subject of another post).  Recently, however, several of my close friends have begun to call me out on my smug pronouncement.

Them: “So you don’t have a television in your apartment?”
Me: “Well, I have a monitor that includes a built-in DVD player that I watch movies on.”
Them: “But it is technically a television set.”
Me: “Yes, technically, but I don’t have cable.”
Them: “Do you watch television shows on DVD?”
Me: “Well, sure.  I rent seasons of Arrested Development, Californication, Six Feet Under, and so on.”
Them: “Do you watch television shows on your computer?”
Me: “Well, once in a while I’ll watch clips of Jon Stewart online, or I’ll watch episodes of old TV shows on YouTube.”
Them: “So you watch TV shows online and on DVD?”
Me: “Yes.”
Them: “Then I hate to break it to you, but you still watch TV.”

Hence these friends of mine, these masters of logic and forensics, believe they have put me in my place.  And perhaps they have.  Two cultural questions emerge here.  First, what does it mean to “watch TV” today?  And second, what does it mean to say, “I don’t watch TV”?  American Studies practitioners (as well as psychologists) would probably be less interested in debating whether or not I technically “watch” television (technically I suppose I do), and more interested in analyzing why I feel the need to tell people, “I don’t watch TV.”  What does it mean that I say this?  What does it reveal about my sense of identity?  What does it say about how I perceive my relationship to modern technology, to mass culture, to social conventions?  Why is not watching TV an essential component to my vision of who I am—to my vision of self—living in the United States in the year 2009?

As an American Studies practitioner, I’ll try to answer my own questions.  Here are four possible ways to interpret my TV boast, though this list is by no means inclusive.  1) It is my way of asserting control over technology.  When I say, “I don’t have TV,” maybe what I really mean is, “TV does not have me.”  I mean that I can watch TV shows however and whenever I want, on my own terms—on DVD, or online, or not at all.  I am not yoked to the technology, not beholden to the medium.  I am master of it.  2) It is my way of signaling that I can control the flow of information into my domestic space (I also don’t have internet access at home).  I can limit the intrusion of the outside world into my private sphere.  3) It’s my way of pushing back against information overload in this new digital millennium.  I am making a return to simple living in a complex age.  4) It is a way to express my individuality, to present myself as a nonconformist, and—let’s be honest—to use culture and taste to make me feel superior to others.

I can already hear my friends saying, “So why don’t you just get cable and a DVR and watch specific shows whenever you want and shut up already?”  Fair enough.  But if I had cable, I’d probably watch TV all day long.  And then TV would definitely have me.

Twitter is (kinda) the new Ham Radio

I frequently find myself caught somewhere between the criticism of twitter as full of mindless blather and the praise of it as a new venue for communication and information sharing (see: protests in Iran as examples of the latter and just about anywhere else as examples of the former). But as someone trained as an historian, I’m less interested in historical ruptures and things being created ex-nihilo than I am in the strange ebb and flow of historical tides, especially where technology is concerned.

So, I found myself thinking about Ham Radio because the thing about Ham Radio was that people mostly tinkered in their basements and sent out signals trying to get in touch with as many people as they could. When you tuned in another Ham operator, you usually acknowledged receipt of the signal by sending them a postcard in the mail, noting the time and day of the signal you tuned in. The postcards themselves are sometimes really beautiful, but that’s a different story.

See where this is going? On Ham Radio, people were communicating over long distances, with one another, but the impetus and conventions here had less to do with saying something in particular; the impulse here was to say anything at all. The goal was not the proverbial “deep and meaningful” conversation, but just the act of communication.

So, and I went ahead and bought a bunch of ham radio postcards on ebay (mostly because I could, but also because, it turns out, they’re fascinating). I bought a lot of 264 cards from the early 1950s, collected by a man named Dale Wolters of Zeeland, Michigan. Call Letters: W8GEH. All of these cards were sent to him from people who heard his signal — and they are from all over the world: South Africa, Spain, Germany, the Caribbean, Mexico. Ham Radio was global long before all this talk of “globalization.”

People were connecting just to connect long before twitter breathed its first tweet.