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Rants and counter-rants.

There used to be a town in Missouri called Ferguson

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I wasn’t going to write about this. Not now. Too much emotion, too much bitterness, too much frustration. Anything I write, I thought, is likely to bring down vilification from one side or another. Later, maybe.

Only, I had to. So much has happened, is happening, that cries out for a statement of conscience. I couldn’t leave it alone.

The undisputed fact is that an unarmed man was shot dead by a police officer. What is disputed, and hotly, is whether the killing was justified. Some eyewitnesses said he had his hands up, in a gesture of surrender; others apparently disputed that. On the face of it, it’s a case that begs for investigation in a public trial.

Normally, either the prosecutor would indict, or he would take the case to the Grand Jury, which would be given a summary of the evidence, hear a few witnesses, and make a decision that the case was worthy of further investigation: in short, an indictment based on the facts presented. Instead, in this case the Grand Jury heard an unprecedented amount of evidence, took months to reach a decision, and decided there was no probable cause for even a charge of involuntary manslaughter, a charge for which you can be convicted for causing a fatal accident by texting while driving.

What we got, instead of a public trial, was essentially a secret trial, the result of which was simply announced, a done deal, no recourse.

It seems the prosecutor, Robert McCullough, not a man known for his humility, wanted to dazzle everyone with his thoroughness; he has released a complete transcript of the proceedings. We can, he is saying, see for ourselves if we want to wade through endless pages of transcripts. None of this matters; Ferguson is burning tonight.

Why, you might ask, would people destroy the town they live in? True, there are the customary “outside agitators,” but they are thriving on the visceral anger of the residents; without it, they would fade away.

It’s about Michael Brown, the young man who was killed; and yet, it isn’t. People are killed, justly and unjustly, every day, and apart from people close to them, no one really cares. Although this killing is the direct cause of these events, it goes much, much deeper than that. It’s about a people who have been harassed and vilified for years upon years, and finally are taking no more.

Imagine a life, where you were stopped by police for the mildest of violations, where you were charged for crimes out of proportion to the general population. Imagine being stopped for simply walking down a street, and ordered to identify yourself and justify your presence. Imagine being carefully watched any time you enter a store in a mall. Imagine ordinary people avoiding eye contact regularly. Imagine being an automatic suspect any time something goes missing. Imagine that the police, who are sworn to protect you, were abusive and threatening, and that any encounter, no matter how trivial, could escalate into tragedy.

Imagine that your people are filling prisons in proportions far exceeding the general population. Imagine indictments far more frequent, almost automatic convictions, and sentences that are routinely longer than average. What would you call this?

In Ferguson, even traffic tickets are disproportionately issued to black residents. Do they just drive faster than white people? When I taught at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, I regularly drove through Ferguson on my way to work along Florissant Ave. The speed limit through town is 30 mph; I rarely saw anyone, myself included, go slower than 35, and usually it was closer to 40. Speeders were easy pickings. Under the circumstances, you’d think a normal distribution of traffic tickets would mirror the proportions in the population in general. Apparently, though, the biggest vehicular offense in Ferguson is DWB – Driving While Black.

Its polite name is profiling. Racism and oppression are other names that suggest themselves. Am I exaggerating? Ask any white person, and you’re likely to get a resounding yes. Ask any black person, any black person, and the answer will be quite different.

We live in a country where the attorney general of the United States was stopped while shopping at an upscale mall. Where the president of the country is regularly insulted in the most obscene ways. There is nothing, apparently, that a black person can do to completely escape being considered subhuman, and fair game for suspicion and innuendo.

This is what Ferguson is all about. This is why, no matter what anyone in authority says, there will be protest and violence. Because murdering a young black man for no reason is just what the police would do, in the minds of a people subjected to such humiliation for so long.

All the news

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At the gym this morning, the manager asked if I minded that he change the channel on the monitor in front of me to the news; the woman next to me had requested it.

“Of course not,” I said, and he changed it to Fox News.  “Hey,” I said, jokingly, “that’s not the news, that’s Fox.”

“I requested Fox,” said the woman.  Later she told me she watches Fox News, and reads Huffington Post, getting what she called both sides.

“But nothing in the middle?” I asked.

“The middle is where I make up my own mind,” she replied.

When, exactly, did we decide that, by getting misinformation from people with two opposing agendas, we could arrive at a good understanding of events?

Peanut butter manifesto

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The coffee shop I frequent was out of peanut butter cookies today, again.  This may seem a minor issue to you, but there’s a backstory.

When I was very young, I put my trust in all the usual stalwarts of society – the used car salesman, the insurance company, the heroin pusher, even (against all my instincts) the priest – only to see my hopes crushed one by one, until all that remained was a bitter shell of a man.  I became a cynic, and believed that not only was everyone just out for personal gain, and to hell with everyone else, but they actively sought and enjoyed the experience of disappointing others.  Worse, I thought they had tumbled to my instability, and banded together to make my personal life miserable.  I would hear of a terrific sale, only to find that the price had doubled once I made an irrevocable order.  Or I would attend a formal affair, and find that, not only was my fly open, but the zipper was irreparably broken (I still don’t know how they did that).  Worst of all, whenever I would start buying something regularly, it would disappear from the shelves.

I know what you’re thinking.  That’s just crazy paranoia, and I should get over it, trust the used car salesmen again, get on with life.

Well, that’s exactly what I did. It was a tough, grueling road, fraught with traps and pitfalls, but with perseverance and, yes, positive thinking, I began to see these coincidences for what they were.

Then I started going to a small local coffee shop, just a hole in the wall, really, but with a friendly, quirky vibe.  They had a display case with a variety of munchies, including which were, regularly, peanut butter cookies.

Now, a peanut butter cookie is the perfect snack.  Fist of all is the delicious flavor, along with that unique and inexpressible texture, which together make for un unsurpassed snacking experience.  As if that weren’t enough, the thing is made of peanuts, a small amount of sugar, and eggs.  Nutritionally speaking, you couldn’t find a combination that could provide a better fuel for a human.  So I started buying one regularly with my breve.

It started slowly.  I would go in one day, and they would be out of peanut butter cookies.  No big deal; it happens, and the next day all would be well.  But it started happening once a week, then twice a week, until, now, I rarely find the cookies available, ever.  When I ask, I’m told the last one was sold just moments ago; once recently, they even went to the lengths of pretending their oven was broken, and they sold only funky looking things that looked like gravel encased in polyurethane.

Yeah, right.  If the oven was broken, how did they make the gravel cakes, hmm?

But this time, I’m not giving in.  I’ll never go back to the life of paranoia that I so narrowly escaped.  I know exactly what to do.

As God is my witness, I will never eat another peanut butter cookie as long as I live.!

That should get them back on the shelves in no time.

You don’t need a weatherman…

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I have been following the exploits of Vladimir Vladimirovich in Crimea with great interest of late. As a Latvian I can see which way the wind is blowing, so I’m changing my Gravatar image:

picture020

 

I’m hoping this new image helps me fit in with the new look.

Alma Mater, Bursa Pater

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The purpose of the University is simple.  It is to further the careers of academicians.

For administrators, this means graduating as many people in lucrative fields as possible, so they can donate generously to the endowment as alumni.  This is mutually beneficial, since a large endowment enhances the reputation of the university, and, by reflection, that of its graduates, all the while assuring princely salaries for top administrators.

To achieve a similar impact in less lucrative fields, for example, in the humanities, requires significantly larger numbers of graduates, since each one will be able to contribute significantly less to the endowment.  This, in turn, is reflected in the salaries of the faculty.  By far, the largest salaries are generally paid to faculty in the professional schools: Medicine, law, and even that johnny-come-lately, business.  Funds for educational programs in the various schools are distributed in similar proportions.  Literature, history, and other such poorly remunerated fields suffer accordingly; a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since these graduates are more likely to find work in the university system which trained them, where they will get paid relatively little.  This is especially true in these times, when such faculty are increasingly part time, at truly pathetic salaries with no benefits.

For faculty, career advancement requires an entirely different set of principles.  The motive here is to ensure a slow, but steady supply of young colleagues who will not upend years of pronouncements by established faculty.  This is accomplished in two ways.

The first is to act as gate keepers.  Faculty hiring committees sift through applications for open positions, discarding obviously unqualified candidates, then sparring over how to rank the rest.  This usually breaks down along adherence to schools of thought within the discipline; factions, in other words.  Structuralists will want other structuralists, post-modernists will want more of their kind, and so on.  Almost no one will favor applicants whose work calls into question any of the prevailing factions in the department.  There is some honor among academics, after all.  In this way, serene advancement through a career is ensured without problematic disagreement, except along acceptable factional lines.  The process is disturbingly similar to the way acolytes move up through religious ranks.

The second way is similar; it works through the peer review system for publication of papers.  For professors, advancement occurs through just one avenue: publication in peer reviewed journals.  I don’t think I need to go into detail on the difficulties of publishing a serious objection to accepted dogma, when that publication depends on favorable reviews by the very people who have built their reputations on that dogma.

It’s worth noting the increasing trend to circumvent this entire process by hiring only “adjunct” faculty, a process wryly called “adjunctivitis.”  Adjuncts are hired as part time employees, or as contractors, thereby absolving the institution of any requirements for minimum compensation, especially with regard to health insurance, retirement , and so on.  They are usually hired en masse to teach the large lower-level courses established faculty find so tiring.  This is obviously beneficial for administrators, as it frees up much more money for their own bloated salaries, but many short-sighted faculty also fall into line as well.  Adjunct faculty are no threat to the established faculty, because, in spite of technically being part-time, they are forced to teach so many courses to make ends meet, that they have no time left for the kind of research that leads to publication and career enhancement.  I say short-sighted, because this will inevitably lead to further erosion of prestige for university faculty in general, affecting the upper echelons as well as the lowest.  Of course, some, at the end of their relatively lucrative careers and ready for retirement, hardly care.

The wily reader will have noticed that at no point was the welfare of students, or the contribution to knowledge brought up.  Let me just remind you that we have spent the last few decades selling higher education exclusively as the gateway to lucrative jobs.  The inescapable conclusion is that it is the paper, not the process, which has any true value.

Surprise!  Welcome to our brave new world.