facts

[NB: I offer no explanation for my lengthy absence from this space, or for my return.]

I tried, and mostly failed, to exercise my honors class this spring about the topic: what is a fact? (Every handful of years, a cohort passes through this class with little enthusiasm for the course. This was the year.)

There is, of course, a current semi-academic discourse about the issue. Many critics disparage “alternative facts” as cherry-picked, phony, or simply lies. More strategic critics counterattack campaigns that enlist alleged facts in the prosecution of ideological warfare. Still more sophisticated critics debate the meaning of facts in what some call a possibly “post-fact” political era.

On the whole, the discussion is premised on the notion that facts are patent, objective, knowable truths that exist in the world. According to this notion, facts are discovered, as though they were mineral deposits simply to be found. They are the antibody of fabrication—any artifice or production rules out a thing being a fact.

This positivism is found in fringes of the fact discussion, where it crosses the border into academic discourse, and the demise of facts is blamed on one or another development of social, literary, and philosophical thought—“postmodernism” or “deconstruction” or even “feminism” or “gender studies.” Generally, this charge is made by academics who have not read the main texts attributed to these developments, but have the vague idea that they all spell doom for scientific knowledge, truth, and disciplinary method—if not also for cardinal direction, physical laws, and matter. (I used to try to educate my colleagues about these “movements,” even going so far as to suggest that they try reading Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report commissioned by the government of Québec and published in 1977. It would seem odd that it took 40-50 years for deconstruction and postmodernism to destroy facts, but perhaps the US is just that much in the intellectual rear-guard.)

The fact is, facts are produced. They are assembled from observation, hypothesis, theory, and, often enough, “common sense.” They are debated, using methods of inquiry, by experts in every discipline. They are never final, even when they are firmly established. Everyone who understands any form of respectable method of inquiry should know this.

Instead, the discussion of facts usually takes the treacherous shortcut of assertion: there are facts, there are no “alternative facts,” there are multiple versions of facts, there are no facts, there is no difference between facts and opinions, etc. None of these assertions acknowledges the complexity of facts themselves. That’s too bad, especially for critics of the current President and the “alt-right,” since it is precisely the lack of any reasonable methodology for establishing their assertions of fact that is most vexing. (Hint: someone saying it on Fox News does not count as a reasonable methodology.) The political left has its (smaller) share of those who seek to establish facts through bald assertion, too, and these people are not helping.

I don’t have a lot of confidence that an honest discussion of the construction of facts would improve the political situation. Too many people have been trained to react to the dog whistles of demagogues and advertisers. But the movement of high school students demanding that elected representatives enact legislation that would make schools safer from gun violence might make us optimistic. They have realized that thoughts and prayers are not making them safer, and they seem to want change based on what to many seems like a clear pattern of facts. They are much smarter than the dominating elite in the country credit them to be. Perhaps there is a larger interest in rational discussion of debatable facts, and debatable hypotheses to explain those facts.

On the other hand, that didn't move my students this term.

x

normalization: remedial gym class, eye patches

I’m letting ideas swirl around a bit. Some of my motivation for investigating normality and normalization is autobiographical.

I wrote in a blog post once that I had been in “remedial gym” in elementary school. This is not what the school called it; in fact, I don’t know if they had a name for it. This happened in first grade, so my memory of it is not all that reliable. Some parts of it are crystalline.

Evidently, I was so awkward and inept physically that it was noticeable in gym class. I couldn’t catch a ball thrown or bounced to me, or throw or bounce a ball to someone a given distance away.

I don’t remember the precise circumstances, but I was sorted into a special gym class, of something like six kids. The one classmate I remember was an unfortunate soul who lived down the street from me, David Swisher. He was chubby, hyperactive, a fairly ineffective aspiring bully, and unsuccessful academically later on. He was called, of course, Swishy or Swish.

I had homework for remedial gym class.  So I could practice, my parents had to buy one of those hideous raspberry-Koolaid-vomit pink rubber inflatable balls with the scuffy texture—you know the thing, it was the “gym ball” because it wasn’t any particular kind of ball. I spent time in the hallway between our front door and the kitchen, bouncing this stupid ball back and forth to my mom. I think I wasn’t very good.

Now, this was strange, because I was physically very active, especially outdoors with my neighbors and best friends, Ryan and Trever Sink. It was hard to get us inside for the night. We spent every available daylight hour in good weather riding Big Wheels, bikes, or our old undersized trikes. We used the tricycles—solid steel and iron monsters—to play “Smash-Up Derby,” which involved riding them as fast as we could and running directly into each other as violently as possible. In the snow, we tromped around trying to see how far we could walk between yards, over fences that were nearly covered. I seemed reasonably coordinated for these activities.

It finally occurred to someone that I couldn’t catch, throw, or bounce a ball accurately because I couldn’t see it. On came the glasses. I still had trouble when the ball was to my left. It turned out I had a lazy eye. On came the eye patch, which was prescribed back then to try to train lazy eyes to work (I gather this has been abandoned since).

These were efforts to normalize my body and my movements. It didn’t matter that I was able, spontaneously, freely, and gracefully to crash tricycles together, to dig out of collapsed snow banks while suffering only minor frostbite, or to variously run, ride, leap, and so on. I did not perform to standard in the throw-catch-bounce test. Normalizing this performance began with identifying it as abnormal, separating my body from a mass where it could have remained relatively anonymous, placing me in a special location and prescribing special treatments. It reformulated my spontaneous, free, graceful embodiment as uncoordinated, incapable, and in need of correction.

Of course, a six year old with glasses and an eye patch (stuck onto the lens) is subjected to merciless hazing by other six year olds. This reinforced my body’s difference, the judgment that I am in fact uncoordinated and incapable, or in a word, defective. The failure of the eye patch to correct my lazy eye (lazy to this day) was my failure to achieve normalization, so along with my glasses becoming thicker every year, I remained defective, and it was my failure.

Now, imagine if my case had been really serious.

a brief interpretation of higher education, inspired by Georg Lukács

As long as higher education is construed through ideology, it will be impossible to develop the basis for overturning the social relations within. The ideology prevents us from confronting the contradictions of education in capitalist society.

1. Education provides access to socially produced goods—job security and income being the most commonly cited. The ideology tells us that this access is on the basis of merit earned by students’ academic and social-benefit work through the auspices of the institution. In fact, education is an institutional state apparatus that determines access to goods through sorting candidates, then subjecting those admitted to disciplines that produce a consciousness perfectly suited to the tasks of upholding and reproducing status quo predominant social relations. Power, wealth, and prestige are reproduced in a docile subject.

2. Education develops democratic citizenship. The ideology addresses democratic virtues of critical thinking, autonomy, and social responsibility. It develops these as the skills of individuals, in service to the prevailing social order. The possibilities of collective action are marginalized both by institutional policy and architecture, but also by the standards and protocols of evaluation. The democratic citizen produced by education is a individualist-bourgeois consciousness, prepared for fulfilling a role established by nationalist, capitalist aims. Meanwhile, this consciousness believes in individualist concepts of rights, merit, property, etc.—i.e., it does not believe in collectivism, cosmopolitanism, or the free ability to form social bonds through the collective will.

3. Education creates whole human beings through transformative experience. The ideology refers to the individual as a being whose transformation is needed and valuable. The self-regard of this form of consciousness further naturalizes individualism by producing a reality effect in which the individual is held up in opposition to the social whole. The cult of the fetishized individual makes it unintelligible that this effect is the result of being caught up in the social whole that is constructed through education (among other institutional state apparatuses). In fact, even the individualism worshipped in education is a false and mistaken one—individualism as the development of a “personality” composed of “lifestyle choices” which are nothing more than selections of consumer objects.

4. Education creates public good. The least tangible and plausible claim of the education ideology is that it benefits the social whole. Because education reproduces and recapitulates the class divisions in capitalist society, and naturalizes these along with the notions of merit, productivity, individual responsibility, etc., the product of education can only serve the class interests of capitalist society. The “public good” so named is an orderly (i.e. compliant) society where class divisions themselves can be occluded.

Yet these self-destructive, exploitative principles are marshaled in defense of education by “progressive” educators and their collaborators. Tax support of so-called public higher education is advocated on the grounds that education is the key to economic and social progress—for individuals, entry into the “middle class;” for society, creation of an army of professionals to provide ameliorations for various ills.

Here yet another contradiction is hidden: the ills for which the “middle class” needs amelioration are created by “middle class” consumption. Indeed, the ills of the society as a whole, and of the planet, are created by religious devotion to consumption. That consumption further drives worldwide exploitation of people and planet that enriches capitalists while it impoverishes everyone else. While those in the “middle class” perceive themselves to be beneficiaries of consumer society because they live among technological means, it is nearly impossible to discover, and really impossible to perceive the real effects and costs of consumption.

Education provides the ways and means of consumption: consumers and consumer objects. And of course, the amelioration of the ills of consumption is brought about by more consumption. For alienation from other people, consume “communications media” devices! For physiological and psychological malaise, consume medicine!

Meanwhile, real power and wealth not only remain in the hands of capitalists, but they accumulate still more. Their own false consciousness prevents understanding that their own power and wealth is dependent upon a fatal addiction to consumption and is destined to end. A despoiled, smoldering planet uninhabitable by humans is also uninhabitable by capitalists.

To the extent that any of this is true, education as it is currently formulated can not benefit anyone. The only form of education that could, would be a thoroughly critical education, aiming not to contribute to the prevailing social order but to bring about its destruction. This critical education could not promise any individual a better life, because the destruction needed will be costly and painful, and the conclusion of the revolutionary period is in an unknowably distant future. Critical education could not promise any kind of advance in the power or wealth of individuals—on the contrary, it would lead them to be ill-suited to the labor routines and compliance demanded by every workplace. Critical education could promise pain and suffering. It could promise exposure to forms of thinking that are unrecognizable in bourgeois culture. It could promise exposure to severe disciplinary tactics and state violence.

university education and opportunities to do stuff on campus

This is the text of something I posted for my students to read. It's related to class discussions in my Philosophy and Education class (aka Phil and Ed, nice guys, really), and starting Lani Guinier's Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and other stuff goin' on.

Last Thursday was the Academic Freedom Forum that I organized. One of the primary goals of the event was to contribute to the intellectual life of the university at large, and to invite all members of the university to take part. By my count, 8 of my 108 students attended. I expect there are basically three reasons more of my students didn’t attend: because they weren’t interested, because they had a schedule conflict, or because they didn’t feel comfortable going.

Those who were uninterested may not have understood what the event was about, or why it would be relevant to their lives. They might also have not cared about the issue. I expect that some didn’t care because they don’t consider education to be about doing anything except attending classes and fulfilling requirements for graduation. What is the purpose of university education? How does that purpose relate to fulfilling graduation requirements? Is that purpose related to doing anything outside of fulfilling graduation requirements?

Those who had schedule conflicts may have had a class at the time of the event, but many had work or family obligations. It’s obviously impossible to schedule anything such that no one has any conflicting events. But scheduling is made more difficult by the many obligations most of our students confront daily. Many of those obligations should take precedence over engaging in the intellectual life of the university. What is the relative value of engaging in that intellectual life of the university compared to these other obligations?

Those who were uncomfortable about attending may feel alienated from the life of the university. That could be because of language or culture gaps: even the notion of “intellectual life” may make someone feel unwanted or uninvited. Others may have a health or mental health related reason. I know I often skip events on campus, even events I am interested in, because of anxiety. I know it’s not avoiding anxious situations is not a very positive response to anxiety, but after a long work day, with my energy reserves low, it’s sometimes too much of a burden to summon the fortitude to tough it out. Whose university is it? Whose intellectual life is it?

This is a complex issue. I usually think about it in simple terms, based on my own experience as an undergraduate student. My life as an undergraduate student was not similar to most here at Stan State. I come from a relatively privileged background, and my parents paid my tuition to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (tuition would have been a bit higher there, in constant dollars, than tuition here at Stan State now). I had a job, 20 hours a week, in the library, to pay for books and other expenses. I lived on campus. In addition to classes and work, I spent hours and hours every week, on campus, talking to my professors in their offices, reading in the library, and just prowling around the academic buildings, seeing what was going on. I went to some kind of university academic-related event about every other week—a public lecture by a visiting scholar, a film screening, a play, an art display, a poetry reading, you name it, I would go, especially if there was free food. None of this was for class, or for graduation requirements, or for credit, but just because I saw there were opportunities to do these things, and I wanted to do them. It mattered to me because I had an actively curious intellect, and because I wanted to be an active member of the university. Not only that, but I felt like the university was mine to explore and even exploit in those ways. My feeling was that faculty in their offices were fair game for me to go talk to, about anything at all; that the library was an open invitation to read anything at all about anything at all; and that the art studios, theaters, and architecture department were there for my own entertainment and stimulation. Nobody told me I wasn’t allowed in.

My way of approaching college life was unusual then, and would be even more unusual now. For one thing, my economic situation was very different from what a larger and larger majority of students face today. A lot has changed about the financing of so-called public higher education: fees are higher, and textbook costs are astronomically higher. A lot has changed about the economic conditions of everyday life, and about public funding for a great many human needs.

I imagine it is also the case that the culturally prevailing ideas about the value of higher education have changed. If it was unusual in my undergrad days for students to think of college as an intentional, transformative set of experiences, I think now it sounds almost goofy to suggest this. The cultural idea we have of higher education now emphasizes job preparation to such an extent, that it’s hard for many people to imagine it can do anything else.

The cultural role of higher education has changed also because the demographics of college student populations have changed. Back when I attended, UNCC had more than the usual number of “non-traditional” students—which means students who are not 18-22 years old, and who did not begin college immediately after high school and expect to complete college in four years. At Stan State today, most of our students are non-traditional students. On top of that, a huge majority are first-generation college students, many are immigrants, many more are the children of immigrants, and many do not primarily speak English (the de facto language of teaching on our campus).

When I take all that into consideration, I realize that my own experience of undergraduate education was incredibly privileged, but also that I took every last advantage of it that I could. That immeasurably enriched my education and my life. Because I know how full, rich, and happy the experience of participation in the intellectual life of the university was for me, I want that for everyone. This also indicates what I think university education is, what it is for, and what value it has.

But who is it for? Remember, I was privileged. I didn’t doubt where my next meal was coming from (not until grad school). I had the resources to take advantage of the university. I didn’t receive the message, not once, never ever ever, that university education was not for me.

What do you value about university education? What are you getting from it? What could you get from it? How?

If you did not attend the Academic Freedom Forum because you couldn’t afford to (i.e., your schedule made it impossible), because you weren’t interested, or because you were uncomfortable about coming, this is not your problem. It is a problem concerning the institution as a whole and all of our relations to it. It is a problem regarding our economic, cultural, and social statuses, and, yes, of classism, racism, sexism, prejudice against different ethnicities, against different linguistic groups. The university is not somehow outside of the society, and the social conflicts and problems in our society are reflected in everything that goes on in the university.

My question is what we can do to make university education as valuable to you as it can be, and as it should be?

the my-body problem

Most often, I believe, the conceptualization of one’s body as “my body” is objectifying and extrinsic. There are ethical, economic, political contexts in which “my body” and the mineness of a body make a great deal of difference, and these concepts inform how we interpret embodiment on an ongoing, everyday basis. We don’t often refer to “my body” outside of very particular, often evaluative contexts: “my body” is “athletic” or “sore” or “breaking down” or whatever. We don’t say “my body got up at 7:30 this morning,” although, no doubt, if I did, so did my body.

The notion of a body as “mine” is perplexing to me in part because of the way these typical ways of talking objectify and externalize body, as though my body were a possession. I don’t experience a possessive ownership relation to my body, under typical circumstances. Only rarely is it helpful to clarify which item in a pile of things is my body, in contradistinction to other things or other bodies. (In those kinds of circumstances, identifying which item is my body is sometimes not chiefly on my mind.)

If I consider the phenomenology of how my being embodied presents itself, I’m at a loss to identify something like “mine-ness.” Typically we move, we sit, we sip tea, we listen to Desprez motets, or whatever else we do, not by way of taking hold of something like a “my body” and moving “it.” Thus the holism of a lot of phenomenological accounts: I am my body, rather than have it. Even in this language, there’s that “my body” that I can’t account for from my own phenomenological assay.

What I find is what I shall call for the time being “tensile coalescing (the) all surrounding, to here.” This is unwieldy, I know.

I sat down at my keyboard, in the midst of puzzling about the “my body” problem, and did a little phenomenology of what turned up when I tried deliberately to set aside any notion that I knew what it might mean to say “my body”—or even “body.” (I think that’s a clue: it’s damned hard to set aside the ordinary posit of “my” without also setting aside “body” as well.) Some surprising stuff showed up.

What showed up was distant and nearby locales of encounter with surroundings. I was sitting in poor posture with the heel of one foot resting on the top of the other. Eventually that hurt, but the feeling of pain was located far away, though not so far as to be outside somewhere. The Desprez motets and the hum of the HVAC fan struck and surrounded. The floor vibrated throughout me. Suddenly the teeming of surrounding became vividly apparent, in a moment of allowing much more of the surrounding to go unfiltered. That teemingness prompts the word all.

There was a centrality to all this, but not a mere point: an ongoing bringing together of these surroundings (read that as a present participle as well as a gerund), hence “coalescing.” When I sat up I noticed better the way this coalescing presented itself as having a sort of tension built into it. This is not “tension” in the way we use it to name unpleasant stress, but tension in the sense of having potential energy to it (which I know I’m using improperly in the technical sense; it’s evocative). What showed up was both kinetic coalescing and potential for moving.

This had a focal point, but not in the sense of something fixed, pregiven, preordained. It was a point toward which the coalescing was happening: to here. Here just means that point—an asymptote, really (again in a nontechnical sense).

So: a tensile coalescing (the) all surrounding, to here.

(BTW, I think I'm gonna keep the name "the my-body problem" for this little venture, as a joke on the old saw, the mind-body problem.)

seduction

Unrelatedly to finishing Baudrillard's book Seduction, I happened to re-read some stuff I wrote about the account of seduction in Jean-Luc Marion's The Erotic Phenomenon. Between one thing and another, I ended up imagining a rather charged conversation I could have (read that as subjunctive, please). I suppose that's my way of confessing that I found Baudrillard's account of seduction a little bit seductive.

Seduction is a game, following its own rules, that removes us from the real, law-bound dramatic situation of sexuality and desire. The aim of seduction is the seduction itself, not sexual pleasure (or conquest, or...); the relation between seducer and seduced is a conflict, a kind of agonistic struggle determined by the rules.

There is no real payoff, but for the game to be a game, there must be "stakes." I suppose that to mean that one can win or lose the game of seduction, but that nothing real is achieved. In a way, the point is to continue the game, because when something real happens, that is, sex or death, the game ends, and so too does its delight.

A main delectation of seduction is that the means of seducing, the chief tactic of the seducer, is to be seduced. Nothing is more seductive than one's own seductiveness, reflected in the counter-strategy of the seducer.

It's easy to imagine this game played to the Trois Gymnópedies and the Six Gnossiennes.

something is rotten

For [Adorno], the question of how to live a good life in a bad life, how to persist subjectively in a good life when the world is poorly organized, is but a different way of claiming that moral worth cannot be considered apart from its conditions and consequences. In his words, "anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. We might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today." -- Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, p. 133

Butler states the fairly obvious connection between Adorno and Foucault to what she calls "the critical tradition," meaning the tradition skeptical of Enlightenment conceptions of Reason as ultimate principle and savior of subjective agency, responsibility, universal morality, and political ends. I like very much the phrase "how to live a good life in a bad life," because of its simplistic expression of a basic urge of "the critical tradition," namely, that ethical reflection begins with the intuition that something is wrong.

I spend a lot of time and energy focused on what is wrong. From my standpoint, there appears to be a lot that is wrong: social inequity and discrimination, exploitation, hypocrisy, domination of individuals, the public, and the polity by extremely wealthy people, etc. This is not a pretty world.

One could chalk this tendency up to a reactive habit of anxiety instilled prior to any memory. This would be dismissive and reductive. I would not deny that a pre-reflective and pre-rational outlook on the world subtends every observation and interpretation we each make. There are, on the other hand, objectivities to observe. Ultimately, I think it's futile to try to separate and correct completely for the pre-thetic sensibilities through which we observe the world.

Besides, such a reductive view would miss a fundamental point. To the extent that my habitual self is pre-thetically oriented toward the world as "poorly organized," that orientation is the condition of my habitus (the condition that subjected me to the "bad life"), and thus of my having any moral outlook whatsoever. The world I find myself always to have inhabited is "poorly organized."

The ethical question is not about assigning blame for this "bad life;" neither is it about my responsibility for fixing it (which would seem to be both an impossible task and a performative contradiction, if you dig that). By "right form of politics," Adorno can't mean that those in this situation know precisely what is wrong and how to fix it, because that isn't politics at all, but the dissolution of politics. Politics would be, instead, the ethical discourse concerning how worlds can and ought to be organized, and how subjects in those worlds could act ethically and responsibly in them.

The critical approach thus asserts that the world and ourselves are out of joint, that ethics and ethical responsibility for an individual do not gear into the world as presently constructed. The task of ethics is not to make the world conform to my subjective conception of what is right, nor to make my subjective conception conform to the world as I find it. The task is to respond to that condition of being out-of-joint.

current events

I've been away awhile. How are you? You look well. Really? Sorry to hear that.

It's not all cycling here at Doc Nagel, Inc. No indeed: there's classes to teach, papers to grade, and proposition 30 to vote for and proposition 32 to vote against.

Times are tough for prop 30, which could mean times will become very much tougher at the CSU, at the UC, at the community colleges, and at K-12 schools. Honestly, the only way I can conceive of someone who doesn't make $250,000 a year choosing to vote against prop 30 is stupidity. To me it looks like this: either you can have a bowl of yummy ice cream, or a shiv to the neck, and about half of Californians say they want the shiv.

"Really?" I say to them in my fantasy, "'cuz, ya know, the shiv'll hurt, like, bad."

"I know. Want the shiv," says half of California.

"Look at this ice cream, though," says I. "It's way more delicious than being stabbed in the neck, don't you think?"

"I do," says half of California. "Want the shiv."

"It's a stab wound, you realize that, right?"

"Shiv."

Etc.

This is like a brief conversation I had the other day about prop 34, which would ban the death penalty in California. The pro-34 arguments are as follows: (1) the death penalty costs far more than life imprisonment would, (2) sometimes innocent people are convicted of murder, and so, when we execute those innocent people, our society effectively commits a murder of its own, (3) in states with the death penalty, it's likely that the murder rate is higher, so it does not serve as a deterrent. The student understood all these, but was still against 34. In fact, the student said that a person who has committed murder loses all rights to live -- a position I hear again and again, and which is entirely baseless in our political heritage of natural rights. I suggested that this assumes we only convict the actually and legally guilty, when things like the Innocence Project have determined that many death-row inmates are wrongfully convicted. The student repeated that a murderer has no rights -- completely ignoring my argument.

I offered that the only logical argument I could see in favor of the death penalty is if you assumed the only way to restore justice is with a reciprocal act (Kant argued this). This did not impress, apparently, because the student did not need or want a rational position. The student wanted vengeance. And a shiv.

on becoming a monster

I've spent some time this morning looking back over notes I wrote this summer on phenomenology and embodiment, in a typescript and in a bound notebook I keep as a kind of commonplace book.

In my book, I reserve the last two or three pages to list things I want to look into - there's a list of phrases, titles, or potential lines in a song or poem; there's a list of music, books, and other media stuff to look into. It's a long list, and I was surprised this morning to realize how much of it I had consumed this summer, and really, over the last couple of years.

And "consume" is the appropriate verb, I think - not in the Baudrillardian or "consumer society" sense, but in the sense of using and eating. I am consuming books and music at an especially alarming rate. I don't mean I'm in danger of using them up - one of the basic operating principles of consumer society is that the production of consummables must always be so excessive that consumption becomes an end in itself and continues without let or hindrance, so there's no worry we'll run out of stuff to consume.

I'm concerned about what it means about and for me. I am concerned that I am consuming far too much, and that my consumption of all these things - books, ideas, music - now threatens to make me monstrous. What if I become an eating machine that feeds on all this? That can't be good for me, or for the world, can it?

down with negativity!

For the last couple weeks I've suffered an unaccountable bout of depression.

All depression is unaccountable, as anyone who's had any kind of treatment for it can tell you. There are only "factors" in depression, no "causes," and no "cures."

One such "factor" is having previously been depressed, which is kind of like saying that there's a correlation between the sun rising Wednesday and the sun rising all over again on Thursday. (Which it has.) My first actually acknowledged and treated depression happened when I was 9. Then again at 14, 19, 22, 27, 29,... you get the general idea.

A major "factor" this time around is that every day I am immersed in a tub full of the vomit and excrement of powerful people. In the media, this mainly takes the form of the resentiment of an ownership class so paranoid and jealous of its wealth and control that it foments fake populisms to pervert democratic processes. At the university, it's the mind-warping inversion of all meanings to preclude any real public accountability or responsibility. On the streets of this town, it's mainly in the trickle-down form of bumper stickers, like the one I see in a parking lot telling me that the driver will keep his guns and money, while I keep the change.

(Which - HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR! Keep the Change!! HAR HAR HAR! I have insane urges to grab people like this and shake them, shove them up against their own vehicles and sneer into their faces while I mutter in barely-withheld violence, "Oh, don't doubt it for a second, buddy. That crazy [derogatory word for African American] in Washington is going to come and take your guns away. And your money.... And your truck.... And your daughters....!" I don't do these things, you understand.)

So, I'm going to try to take a vacation from all that vomit and excrement, give myself a thorough wash. For me, that generally means a refreshing dip in a cool satire pool.

For the next little while, Paul Krassner is my co-pilot.

the problem with public education,or, why Johnny's much-bemoaned fate is probably a red herring

[Caveat: I've worked in public higher education for 13 years, going all the way back to the year I taught at Indiana University of Pennsylvania's satellite campus in Punxsutawney. I went to public school in Maumee, Ohio and Greensboro, NC, and to a public university for my bachelor's degree, UNC-Charlotte. So my perspective might be biased.]

I'm reading a fair bit lately about public education - about funding, success or failure, even purpose. Well, okay, a lot less about purpose. This morning's San Francisco Chronic web site had two stories about public education that, juxtaposed to one another, give a pretty clear picture of where public educational policy seems to be.

The first is a review of the David Guggenheim documentary Waiting for Superman. Guggenheim advocates for ... something (it's not clear what from the review), by following the families of four kids who are hoping to win a lottery to take a spot in a charter school, freeing them from the failed public school they were attending. The Chronic reviewer notes that, on average, charter schools are no better than public schools, and in fact may be marginally worse, and cites with irony the position Guggenheim has cast his protagonists in: "The families that won spots in the schools just won a future for their kids - why wouldn't they celebrate? Everyone else is just someone else's problem."

So, that's point one. Public education is meant to be a public trust and a public good. To me, the whole phenomenon of charter schools, home schooling and so forth are an admission of a tragic loss of faith - not in the schools themselves (they may be objectively crappy), but in public education as an institution and commitment. This is the deepest, most difficult, and most important problem to deal with, because unless there is public commitment to public education, there can be no political will or moral justification to help them.

Instead, many people blame them. And by "them," I mean the scapegoats they pick out, and by "scapegoats," I mean, for the most part, unionized teachers.

So, that's point two. Unions operating in the least socially conscientious way possible advocate the interests of labor groups. That is, they protect jobs and seek higher wages, expanded benefits, and more desirable working conditions. They do so through collective bargaining, in which (a) there is a powerful group called "management" on the other side pushing against the union, and (b) a need to reach a mutual agreement. Whenever you read a story blaming a teacher's union for schools' failures, you should ask what the relationship actually is between unionization and the alleged failures, and you should ask, if the contract they have seems far too cushy for the teachers, why the hell management agreed to it.

I know, I'm bucking the trend of 40 or 50 years of backlash against organized labor. I'm not a labor historian, but I can tell you about what I've seen the California Faculty Association do. Indeed CFA bargains faculty contracts, including the most recent agreement to give faculty their first considerable raises since I've been employed here. Those raises were eliminated by the CSU administration in the first round of budget trouble, because, they said, they had other spending priorities.

CFA has opposed every student fee increase. CFA has advocated for increased state funding for the CSU (while the administration has sat on their hands). CFA has commissioned a study of the economic and fiscal benefit of funding the CSU (an effort the CSU administration has recently duplicated). I don't think there's a better advocate for the CSU, for CSU students, and for the cause of public education in the state. Whatever one imagines the problems are in the CSU, unionized faculty don't seem to be causing them.

Point three is murkier. It's the question of what, exactly, is wrong with public education. Contrastingly, I think the issue of whether there should be well-funded public schools is obvious, and the issue of whether unions are good or bad for schools can have some actual factual basis - and I'm confident how such a debate would turn out (yes, even in the crappiest school districts).

But what's wrong with public education?

The hidden agenda of the "failing public schools" talk has always been: (1) break the unions, and (2) give the public's money to private companies. Various quantitative accounts of what the failures are alleged to be have been marshaled in order to drive the agenda, not in order to arrive at any objective conclusions about what schools do. We don't even know what schools do at that level of generality.

We judge schools subjectively, based on our own schooling experiences, and on our kids' experiences or our neighbors' experiences. I think we have to admit that. Education is not measurable in terms of general outcomes. And why should it be? Is everyone equally talented or industrious? Are the talents and work the school curricula demand even equal across disciplines? But if the true and proper results of education can't be quantitatively measured or even generalized, and if even qualitative accounts of the success or failure of education are going to be subjective, then we may have to face this rather inconvenient fact.

Trust me, I'm a doctor.

exciting new ideas for your (political) party!

Among the mysteries surrounding the so-called Tea Party movement is what exactly these self-styled zealots stand for. Usually, zealots are zealots because they believe in something with the core of their being - in the holiness of a, the abomination of b, the - uh - zestiness of c, etc. But as far as I can tell, GOP candidates who have associated themselves with this movement, especially successful ones, have no identifiable political beliefs, let alone a considered, coherent ideology. They're sort of wandering in a vast, vacant desert of politics, and apparently, they hate it.

So, as a service to anyone among them, or just anyone who shares their livid, if not altogether conscientious or self-reflective, anger at their existential bereftitude, I'm offering some new positions, expressed in convenient, poster-board-n-magic-marker-ready slogan format.

7¢ NICKEL NOW!

This marvel of economic and fiscal policy has its roots in Marxism, specifically in Animal Crackers (1930). Groucho expounds the prudence of the 7¢ nickel: you could buy a 2-cent newspaper, and get the same nickel back again as change. As Mr. Marx put it, a single nickel, carefully spent, could last a family for years. Obviously, prices have changed since the last Depression, so perhaps what we need here is a $7 $5 bill. But you get the idea. The slogan is symbolic.

US OUT OF CANADA

Foreign policy is often so complex as to defy forecasting, let alone policy-making. Ending conflict with Canada is an easy policy goal to understand, and a campaign promise any aspiring candidate could defend.

OBAMA IS A SECRET AMISH

The depths of rumor-mongering about President Obama have yet to be plumbed. The great thing about insinuating or directly claiming Obama is secretly Amish is that, if you restrict yourself to screaming about it in the media, the Amish will never come forward with proof. Plus, you could demand that Obama prove he was never at a barn-raising, point out that the Amish don't have cameras, and that therefore he can't possibly prove it. QED.

DON'T ASK WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK TO SUPERSIZE YOUR ORDER

Since most Americans already seem to agree that the primary legitimating purpose of government is to assure their access to an endless supply of fries, this is sure to win popular support.

FREE MARYLAND

Poor Maryland!

TIPPECANOE AND TYLER TOO!

Campaign proven! Especially useful if your name is Harrison, for some reason.

KILLING PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD IS MURDER!

Let folks know where you stand. Someone's got to be bold enough to tell the truth about this issue. All these career politicians try to bend words and line their pockets! But the truth needs to be told! (This is also a terrific slogan to include in any candidates' debate, or city council meeting, or any other occasion when more than one person occupies a defined space: the train, an elevator, waiting for the crosswalk light, intimate moments...)

LEGALIZE PAT

In this day and age, it's just unfounded prejudice that keeps us from making Pat legal. If the government would legalize, regulate, and tax Pat, a large portion of our deficit could be fixed. Everybody knows this.

on gender, orientation, subjectivity and description

I'm begging someone to tell me how badly I've misinterpreted Irigaray. I'm also begging someone to tell me I've got her mostly right, or right enough, or that my reply is good, or lousy.

You are living in conceptuality, somewhere between the imperceptible presence of nothingness and the inertia of a corpse. What is the rigour of your thought? The superb confidence of someone moving inside a fleshy fabric borrowed from the other. The limitless appeal of someone entrusting his survival to the destiny of mortal women. The implacable, systematic quality of an organization which has already taken from living organisms the elements it needs to be sustained and developed unreservedly. A sovereign power, miming and undermining the whole of the resources from which it draws.

The fact that you no longer assert yourself as an absolute subject changes nothing. The inspiration which breathes life into you, the law or duty which guide you – are these not the very essence of your subjectivity? You feel you could abandon your ‘I’? But your ‘I’ holds you fast, having flooded and covered the whole of everything it ever created. And it never stops breathing its own emanations into you. With each new inspiration do you not become more than ever ‘I’? Reduplicated within yourself. (Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 82f.)

There is an obvious gender-essentialist position in this book. I don’t accept that position, based on my own experience as much as my philosophical thoughts about gender. I don’t recognize myself, my sexuality, my experience, in Irigaray’s accusations. But I am uncertain of myself: To some degree, we always misrecognize ourselves.

I think I understand the challenge of Irigaray’s account of passion and the gendered differences in “feminine” and “masculine” sexuality in 20th Century northern-white cultures (let’s be honest with ourselves, Luce: that’s who you’re talking about and who you’re talking to). Most people, looking at me, would see someone “male” and to a large degree “masculine” – the beard is a bit of a giveaway for most. I was brought up into a culture that has a gigantic disciplinary and discursive apparatus to reproduce a heterosexual norm, and to gender our bodies and our experiences. One might assume, then, based on my superficially appearing “masculine,” that the norms of “masculine” and “heterosexual” apply to me in some untroubled way. One way I feel challenged by Irigaray (and other essentialist feminists, e.g., Geraldine Finn) is that, since I, by being “masculine,” have a position of privilege in our society, it’s all very well and easy for me to claim to be “liberated” from “masculine” or “hetero” norms. It’s easy because, first of all, coming from that position of privilege, there’s less obstruction to my making my gender and sexuality an issue for myself – that is, I am not forced to make it an issue, I have a kind of privilege to take it up as an issue. I think that’s probably true. I also can’t do anything about it. Does that mean, really, that I can’t “repudiate” my “absolute” subjectivity?

On another level, the way I’ve been describing erotic experience, and the erotics of sensation, is undoubtedly gendered, because I am addressing this from my perspective and understanding, with my language. Therefore, my privilege, and my gender, and my presumed heterosexuality, decidedly matter in these descriptions. One might, in fact, read them as nothing other than the outpourings of an erotic “entrusting” of my “survival to the destiny of mortal women.” But given Irigaray’s descriptions of passion, and of sex, which are decidedly gendered and hetero, I think dismissing my accounts on this basis prejudges them on the basis of a presupposition that when I describe erotic clutching, I mean by that to name and evoke heterosexual intercourse. And, to be brutally frank and overly candid, that is simply dead wrong.

For, however “masculine” and “hetero” our culture’s vast disciplinary apparatus has constructed me to be, my actual practices of embodiment and sexuality don’t fit the profile very well, and only have for brief periods of my life. Reading my evocations of the erotic from a standpoint that doesn’t presume that, for me, the erotic is limited to the sexual, and the sexual isn’t limited to the heteronormative, I hope I have been able to say something that can’t be boxed up that way. I bring this up to get at two things in response to Irigaray.

(1) If one ties subjectivity, and the mastery-sovereignty-dominance she imputes to (masculine/masquerading-as-neutral) subjectivity, on the basis of, and through the auspices of an erotic and sexual act-relation-orientation, then what one imagines to be true about sexual practices would have to factor into how that, or any, subjectivity is constructed. In short: it should matter, for the construction of my gender/sexuality/subjectivity, just how I tend to get it on. Making presumptions about it on the basis of my superficially apparent gender would substantially miss the point.

On the other hand, to account for gender/sexuality/subjectivity, I would myself have to link this back to sexual practices, disciplinary practices attendant thereto, and the entire history of my body and its orientation and gender. This could, I believe, begin with an account of those practices, histories, etc. (This is something I’ve been doing all summer, and which I haven’t posted, for probably obvious reasons.)

(2) The “absolute” subject who appropriates women and flesh as “resources” is, on my alternative account, subjected even in that appropriation, and never “absolute” sovereign. Certainly I do mean to appropriate the flesh of this peach, but I have to let the peach into me, to become (in part) part of me, for that appropriation, that enjoyment, that jouissance to happen. (I know, I know: jouissance is an ambiguous French word that means, in one sense, orgasm; I know, I’m saying eating a peach is orgasmic – but we do say things like that. I once tried to convince a grad school pal to translate jouissance as juiciness in a paper he was writing. Almost won him over, too.)

And there are all kinds of pleasures (and pains) that take place even for privileged white “masculine” types like me, that only happen by way of the commingling of flesh and my subjection to sensation. There is no “absolute” subject – I assume Irigaray understood this and was writing hyperbolically, but that skews the account.

face-to-face politics

To the driver who honked his horn, shot me the bird, and proceeded to yell at me about Barack Obama at the corner of Crowell and Monte Vista this evening at 8:58 PM:

Your approach to political discussion is interesting. Obviously, you noticed the Obama/Biden magnet on my trunk, and decided I was an appropriate person to talk to. As an invitation to dialogue, a blaring car horn and a fuck-you gesture significantly inform, as did your initial shouted question, "You actually like what this guy is doing to the country?" I rolled up my window and didn't engage with you because I don't believe the complexity of the issue of health care reform could probably be meaningfully discussed in those circumstances.

Now I'm remembering how I responded to all those "W '04" bumper stickers I saw absolutely everywhere here as the economy tanked and the Iraq fiasco dragged on in 2007 and 2008. I kept driving.

Of course, I did sometimes express to other passengers in my own car that I thought the economic, social, and global policies of the Bush administration were terrible, sometimes illegal, sometimes unethical. I never flipped anybody off and yelled at them because of a "W '04" sticker, and I frankly believe taxing people in the top 3% or so of income in order to extend health care to people who are susceptible of going bankrupt over an illness is a much better idea than invading a country on the basis of a series of false pretexts.

I'm sure you're really genuinely angry that health care reform has passed, and that you genuinely believe expanding health care coverage for more people is somehow illegal, unethical, and terrible. (It follows that you'll refuse to accept any benefits that may accrue to you as a result of passing the bill.)

But we can't talk, not on your terms.

tax burden

I just filed our taxes for 2009. We're getting our usual sizable refund.

As I was filing, I was thinking about the way people complain bitterly about the burden of taxation that US citizens are prone to feeling they're under. People complain that 1/3 or some absurd amount is taken away from them by the greedy government. Like most people, I do object to some of what the government spends money on, though my list is different from most tax revolutionaries' lists. (I like roads and schools, not so much prisons and wars.) But the notion that the government is paupering us to spend like drunken sailors doesn't really fit the fact pattern in my life.

This year, a typical year for me, my effective rate of taxation, after all the deductions and so forth, was a grand total of 11.34%. Now, if you look just at the very much reduced federal "taxable" income (which is about 1/3 less than my adjusted gross income), I pay about 12.97% of that to the feds. But if you take the tax amount from the adjusted gross, my total federal tax is a quite reasonable and doable 8.95%. My rent per month is more than double what I pay in federal income tax.

The state tax is even more interesting. Californians of a certain political stripe love to harp on the incredibly high tax burden of Californians. This is a lie, there's no other word for it. The actual rate of property tax here is below every other state I'm familiar with. And the income tax is even lower. My income tax rate this year, versus my taxable income, was 2.7%. In relation to my adjusted gross income, it was 2.4%.

You know what? I pay about the same amount per month for satellite TV as for state income taxes. (And again, I'd prefer more schools than prisons...)

There are governments that impose serious taxes on people, and do things like fund universal health care, strong educational systems, programs to eliminate the urge to commit crimes, and to rehabilitate people who do. Given how much of our tax dollars go to the military-industrial complex, and how little goes to helping ordinary people's lives, the social services portion of our tax dollars are stretched incredibly thinly. And most of us should shut the hell up about burdensome taxes.

death eating a cracker, signifying nothing

I'm not sure how to set this up. I blame the dreams, and Neil Gaiman. We took a brief junket to SoCal during the interim between Winter and Spring over the weekend, and my dreams were bizarre. On the drive back, Lauren read to me from the Neil Gaiman novel we're reading right now, American Gods.

I ended up with this thought.

I am missing a certain register of belief. I can't account for this, at the moment, but I know it's true. I simply can't make myself take seriously those metaphysical concepts the human species seems so prone to apply to experiences of the cycle of life (birth, death, rebirth, etc.), the significance of life (sanctity, the general goodness of life), or any of the various ways people seem to like to assure themselves that they'll continue life everlasting.

What I realized today is that my basic metaphysical belief related to life is a simple, ridiculous, counterfactual sense that, whatever Life might mean, my life, as I understand and live it, is everlasting.

Don't get me wrong. I believe that I know that, realistically speaking, I will die sometime. Everything alive dies. But my sense of life, of my life, is that it does not end. I suppose this could be because I can't imagine what the end of my life would mean, aside from the consequences for the living. If I were to die, that would mean the end of my existence, but that's an empty idea to me. The end of my existence is inconceivable, because with the end of my existence, the universe ends.

Death, therefore, means nothing to me. Life means everything.

marriage ban

Proposition 8 is on trial. The judge in the case is asking its supporters for evidence that it will, as it was claimed, protect the institution of marriage from damage that same-sex marriage would cause. So far, defenders of Prop 8 have testified that same-sex marriage would be good for couples and children, and that there is no actual evidence that same-sex marriage will disrupt heterosexual couples. They just kinda know it will, they say.

Prop 8 supporters have also claimed that marriage is invalidated by couples who do not have biological children, since the sole purpose of marriage, according to them, is for sexual reproduction and child-rearing. These are obviously specious and intellectually dishonest claims, but hey, it's politics. It's not about telling the truth about your policy goals or motivations, it's about manipulating people to vote for them. However, the tide turned.

Today the San Francisco Chronic reported on the testimony of a long-time same-sex marriage opponent who claimed in court that same-sex marriage would increase divorce rates, again, without presenting any actual evidence. One might think you'd need evidence to support a claim like that.

One might be wrong! Face the facts: 100% of divorces are the result of marriages! Expanding marriage rights is going to increase the number of couples who divorce, because, as my statistics prove, marriage causes divorce.

The trial is making it increasingly clear that the only way to save the institution of marriage is to destroy it. Marriage is the leading cause of divorce. Therefore, marriage should be banned. T-shirts and bumper-stickers to follow.

presidential imperial authority

I just heard a story from BBC news about the failure of the Obama administration to launch a criminal investigation into torture techniques employed under the authority of the Bush administration. Their various political and academic experts/talking heads came to the consensus position that there is every legal reason to go forward with an investigation, but every political reason not to.

The elephant in the room: presidents are effectively above the law. Now, progressive Bush critics have been saying for several years that Bush had placed himself above the law, on this and a host of other issues (for instance, the unprecedented level of his use of signing statements), but it struck a different tone for me after hearing this story.

For purposes of this little flight of imagination, suppose that torture is both morally wrong and illegal under federal and international law. Suppose further that some president - call him President Lush for purposes of illustration - had ordered that torture be used in an attempt to extract information about planned terrorist operations in the US (in this case, let's suppose further that we are referring to foreign terrorists, trained and motivated by a ruthless religion-exploiting leader who was in turn trained by the CIA - you know, just for the sake of illustration - and not domestic terrorists trained and motivated by a completely different ruthless religion-exploiting leader).

If you're following so far, the scenario is: (a) President Lush ordered torture to be done, and (b) that torture is illegal. What the BBC story made clear is that, under these conditions, no future President in his or her right mind would attempt to prosecute these crimes, because that future President's political viability would be instantly destroyed by the party of President Lush and their media blowhards.

This leaves no domestic avenue for criminal justice to apply to President Lush. Meanwhile, President Lush might be prosecuted by an international criminal court - say, a war crimes court. This might well work, except that the military power of the US makes President Lush above international law as well. It's unimaginable that any sitting president would turn over President Lush to the international court, and it's unimaginable that any international body would, or could, come grab him.

So there you have it: we no longer have a Presidency. We have an elected Emperor, whose domestic power is limited by Congress, but whose international, military and paramilitary power is unchecked, unlimited, and beyond any meaningful legal authority or oversight of any kind. Let me remind that the military budget of the US is 48% of all the world's military spending - and it's not clear that this represents the entirety of the military and paramilitary budget. That's trillions of dollars of unchecked power.

public intellectuals

Today's Inside Higher Ed newsletter published a story about Boyce Watkins, a finance prof at Syracuse who has had a feud with Bill O'Reilly, over some fairly stupid comments by O'Reilly. Apparently, Watkins is a bit of a firebrand. He's also a self-styled "public intellectual."

I believe randomly, this phrase has crossed my path a few times recently, which is a few more times than it usually does. During the last three weeks of sessions, the Cow State Santa Claus academic senate heard a resolution in support of Tom Ammiano's bill legalizing marijuana in California. During the debate over the resolution a couple faculty argued that the senate had no business considering the issue, but they were countered by an unchallenged claim that such matters are the business of the senate, because faculty are public intellectuals with the privilege and duty to speak on matters of public concern.

I don't seriously doubt faculty have the right, as individuals, to speak publicly, in any forum they like, about any issue they like, expressing any view they like. I also agree with the implicit premise that faculty have expertise and ability to think rationally and clarify and articulate issues in ways that could be a boon to the level of public discourse. I do wonder about this public intellectual business, though.

For one thing, there isn't much of a tradition in the US of public intellectualism. The fact that one of Watkins' credentials as a public intellectual is that he has appeared on O'Reilly's show suggests something about how much weight we give to public intellectuals. Their cultural currency doesn't have a high exchange rate.

Watkins' tenure battle might also indicate that those who stake a claim to being public intellectuals aren't terribly well regarded by their colleagues or their institutions. This is dicier, because it isn't so much his being a public figure that's at stake here, as the tone of the nonsense with O'Reilly, and, apparently, his use of the phrase "magic Negro." In the article, Watkins says, "The rules of academia change when you are part of a powerless group." True, and no one knows this better than the 70%+ of college faculty in the US who are not on the tenure track. It's hard to imagine a large number of my part-time and job-security-less colleagues experiencing the privilege and duty to speak publicly about anything. They probably wouldn't be recognized as intellectuals in the first place.

I'm not saying this is the fault of tenured faculty whose privilege it is to determine who has this privilege, what it means, and what legitimately can be done with it. It is largely their fault, but that's not my point. My point is that this ideological self-conception grossly overestimates faculty's political authority, where it doesn't misconstrue public intellectualism as speaking as an expert in a particular, narrow field of specialization. Other than the alleged effect on his candidacy for tenure at Syracuse (and other than the firing of Ward Churchill, to cite another example), it profoundly doesn't matter what the public intellectual says.

(The academic senate passed the resolution in support of the marijuana bill. No word yet on whether, as one faculty senator put it, the local community now regards us as a bunch of pot-heads.)

an open letter to a concerned California teacher

Dear Jeanne Caldwell,

I see you and your attorney husband are appealing to the US Supreme Court to hear your lawsuit against UC Berkeley for violating the separation of church and state. Berkeley has a web site presenting information on evolution, and from that site one can link to a page which presents an argument that evolution is not incompatible with religious positions about divine creation. That, according to you and your husband, is a violation of church and state.

I realize that your argument is that the violation is that it contradicts a your religious position that evolution and (your) religion are contradictory - that is, that it says something about the relationship of science to religion that your religion disagrees with. But I think you've hit on something much deeper.

You see, you're absolutely right that religion and the state should be divided by a wall of separation. In fact, the UC Berkeley web site should not have mentioned the issue at all, since there is no scientific controversy about evolution: evolution is the only scientific theory of the development of life. Religious views have no place whatsoever in the discussion, as your law suit helpfully points out. You no doubt support the independence of all public schools from any incursion of religion, too. For instance: no instruction on creationism in biology classes. I'm right, aren't I?

The only way the state can protect your religious freedom is to keep the state free from any religious affiliation at all. Equal protection, right? Which of course means removing "under god" from the Pledge of Allegiance - another move I'm sure you're ready to support, since obviously the mention of god in the Pledge affiliates the state with religion.

While you're at it, maybe you should sue the federal government for granting tax money to faith-based social services groups that discriminate in employment, which would be a violation of federal equal opportunity statutes for a public agency to do. That's an obvious case of a violation of the separation of church and state, innit?

Wow, there's a lot for you great activists for liberty and the constitution to do! I can only wish you the best of luck, because there are lots of people who seem to think the separation of church and state is a principle they can bend and twist in all sorts of shapes to basically any particular outcome they want.

Yours in the Jeffersonian spirit,
Doc Nagel