The Two Sides

One side argues that it has the right, say, to smoke cigarettes anywhere it wants. Or to pollute as much as it wants. Or to exploit others as much as it can get away with. And so forth. The other side argues that second-hand smoke limits the rights of the first side--one right is harming another right: here, the right to survive or the right to be healthy. And any moral system that has any meaning would have to say that the second side is the correct one. Yet who wants to inhabit a world in which every action is under surveillance, every gesture judged and weighed and found wanting? The current "debate" over health care reflects these two sides. One side wants to gamble--why should someone be forced to get health insurance? The other side says that, ultimately, others must then pay for the health care the first side refused to get. I say: gamble away. But if you need health care and you can't afford it, then you must pay the consequences. Ambulances and hospitals must refuse those who lack the moral imagination to see that their irresponsible actions still exploit others. You don't agree that the government funds Medicare? OK. But you can't have Medicare unless you do. And you have to acknowledge it beforehand--not in an emergency. Let's actually live according to the social Darwinist rules of the right.

Youth and Incivility

Sure, I, too, was incivil. An idiot. So here's my public apology for any rude, insensitive ways that I insulted others.

Corporate Dominance

We were talking to a just retired medical doctor yesterday, and he said that he was much happier after he retired from a job that he depised. He said that many doctors he worked with were filled with rage and bitterness. He mentioned that, around 1990, something changed in the medical profession, and doctors, who has once been at the center of medicine, suddenly became employees. Hospitals started buying up small clinics, and doctors, who had been working 80-hour weeks, started to want to work 40-hour weeks--and so the clinics lost money. The doctors also lost prominence: now MBAs from health care management started telling them what to do. The most important thing was patient happiness, and if a drug addict wanted Vicodin or Oxycontin and was turned away (and then complained), that was a problem. So the doctor was called on the carpet. Of course, I saw the parallel to higher education. Faculty governance began to evaporate at around the same time. All of these highly educated people suddenly found themselves locked out of decisions, their opinions and knowledge useless. What became important was student retention and student happiness (especially as certified on student evaluations). High grades and dumbed-down classes became our narcotics--what we could hand out cavalierly to encourage student happiness and retention. The corporate conquest of the academy was completed. Now, I, too, am just an employee. My degrees and experience mean little, if nothing, to the corporate surrogates who run our institutions. And then, bewildered, they wonder why we don't identify with our institution. Who would?

The year (more or less) of the change intrigues me. Was the cause, then, the collapse of the Soviet Union? Were the people there essentially held hostage so that corporations couldn't operate with impunity? And then, lacking even a corrupt and monstrous alternative, did the corporate managers feel empowered to remove the last vestiges of faculty governance?

The Liberal Wing of the Nazi Party

I finished Mazower's book, and I was interested in at least two things: the existence (not just a Pynchonian joke) of a liberal wing of the Nazi party and the seamless movement by any number of mid-level technocrats from the SS bureaucracy into the postwar West German state. The liberal wing espoused the idea that it would be better to work captive populations to death as opposed to immediately exterminating them. The mid-level technocrats offered knowledge of town planning and European identity to the anti-communist fervor of the late 1940s and beyond. The Nazis' main mistake? To treat some Europeans the same way that Europeans had been treating colonial subjects for 450 years. Otherwise, they weren't that much different than, say, other Europeans.

So the hopeless and pointless choice: Hitler or Stalin? And the third way--Anglo-American "liberal" plutocracy--doesn't seem so great either. A system that encourages financial geniuses to dream up ever more sophisticated financial instruments for fleecing fools and then suffer inevitable "crashes" doesn't strike me as a sane way to function. Yet the cycle has begun again. When will the next economic crash occur?

The Banality of Academic Evil

So, of course, I'm reading Mark Mazower's Hitler's Europe, and I'm reading about the academic discussions in Germany about how the Nazis should rule Europe (and associated topics like who should be considered a German, etc.). And, naturally, I understand how the academic world works--there's a larger "paradigm" that marks the boundaries of appropriate academic discourse. On rare occasions, someone writes something that's outside this paradigm and it gets published: but, in general, everything is within the bounds. You want discussions of how to mercilessly treat the untermenschen? We can do it. It doesn't really matter who is in charge: the academic animal can adapt to almost any kind of research needs. There's a group psychology in the academy. The very thing that I would like to believe--the academy as a site of intellectual freedom--is one of the bigger lies. So, yeah, I'm disappointed. In the ever diminishing humanities, this reality exists, although most of the academy is now centered in the social sciences and business. When I was at Wichita State, I applied for a non-tenured award for scholarly achievement. I had published a number of articles. But who won the award--some stooge from the business department who had published one article. I had an inkling then about the realities of the academic world. I'm more certain now.

Yet What About Boredom?

After the tumultuous events of the mid-20th century--mass murder and such--is it so surprising that some people opted for boredom, the flat banality of the suburbs? Yes, Skokie was dreadful: it sucked the life out of people. But what alternative? Perhaps avoiding attention, especially in a world in which attention means harm and trauma and pain, is the only strategy worth anything at all. What's so bad about being Portugal--off the radar screen, so to speak?

Democracy and Stupidity and Election Day

I'd like to think that democracy is a good thing, yet so many people are clueless about the the world--they live in a delusion, an infantile fantasy world. Recall that the Germans elected Hitler. Here, because we have been so far away from the rest of the world, we've been able to survive idiots as leaders--and mete out vicious harm on the hopeless minority groups: indigenous people and their descendants, blacks, immigrants, anyone perceived as different or vulnerable. I recall once going to a Catholic wedding and seeing the eucharist and thinking, no wonder they despise(d) the Jews, those who refused this communion. It would have taken an astonishing, mostly impossible courage and moral imagination to resist the demands of the church hierarchy and accept others not in the religious community as human. And this from people who, in Protestant America, themselves were often despised and destroyed. I'm reading David Mura's Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. He went to my high school, maybe in the class a year or two ahead of me, and writes about the secret, hidden world of suburban Japanese Americans. In Skokie, I had grown up thinking that no one on the planet could have lived in a more boring, less potentially "novelistic" environment. I should have known better: I should have known about the rage and frustration that existed behind closed doors. Joyce should have clued me into that--the lives of quiet, often inarticulate desperation. Of course, there were many (are many) who live in a kind of oblivion, idiotically unaware of what their society inflicts on others or even delighted by it, yet any society will inevitably produce some, a few, someone, who are (is) aware of the brutality, who live(s) with the knowledge of terrible crimes (the Holocaust, Japanese internment, slavery, systemic discrimination, thwarted hopes and dreams, just the generalized stupidity of massive bureaucratic organizations, the clumsy, callous pain meted out on defenseless, unknowing people) that have been committed, continue to be committed. Can we have democracy and obliviousness? If someone doesn't know--can't know or won't know--should he or she be allowed to vote? Hitler wanted to kill Jewish women and children because he didn't want their descendants trying to gain revenge. (I'm not even talking about the crime of killing anyone--men, women or children.) And sure enough, he was able to locate enough others who, for whatever reason--racism, fear, routine, indifference, sadism, nihilism--decided to kill defenseless others. The idea that the Jews offered a threat! A people without weapons, accustomed to take whatever punishments those in power decided to inflict, a hopeless minority (some peasants in small villages, others sophisticated urbanites--it didn't matter)--these are the people he sees as the direst threat against Germany! He might as well have accused falling leaves of betraying the nation: they presented the same level of danger. And then, of course, whoever survived turned into fanatics themselves--in different ways, of course. The Jewish Century looks at three examples: the socialists in Russia who themselves became the victims of a lunatic, the capitalists in America who through education and perserverance climbed into the middle class, and the nationalists in Israel who must see virtually anyone as an enemy. Revenge, indeed.

Stalingrad

I read Antony Beevor's book on Stalingrad. The callousness towards life on both sides astonishes me. There was one moment when, to combat cowardice, a Russian commander shot every tenth soldier. Behind every unit was another unit making sure that the first unit didn't run away. At one point the German soldiers saw that they had just shot at a boat of women trying to get away--and they felt bad about it! Hours before they had been shooting and killing women and children. The soldiers also looked around the steppes and thought--this might be a good place to have a farm. After they were surrounded, they thought--the Fuhrer (I can walk!) will rescue us. There's hope and then there's delusion. But perhaps the kind of delusional beliefs found among the Nazi soldiers parallel the everyday delusional beliefs among people today.