Pop culture moment: Ellen Page comes out

At least one genuinely beautiful thing happened on Valentine's Day:



Being the analytical killjoy that I am, I started critiquing this speech almost as soon as I had seen it.  Big deal, a wealthy and privileged actress comes out in front of a sympathetic audience.  She is accustomed to performing, and clearly waited for applause after making the big statement.  But, even if there is some truth in these critiques, the more I thought about it, the more I felt like there was something more significant and valuable here, and I felt bad that I was so cynical at first blush.

Ellen Page is a professional actress who earns her living – and yeah, sure, it's a good living – partly through her desirability: the pleasure that people take in watching her craft as well as in admiring her physical charms.  She's also young and young-looking: she's only twenty-six, and has some good years of ingenue parts left in her.  Those are exactly the kind of parts that, historically, have paid her bills, and they are exactly the kind of parts that she is most likely to lose in the wake of coming out.  Think about it: with all the actors who have come out, how many of them have continued to find work as romantic leads in heterosexual roles?  Coming out isn't career-ending the way it once was, but it certainly seems like it still threatens or diminishes an actor's marketability in Hollywood.  Page is taking a real risk with real potential consequences, and she clearly knows that.  Not a risk quite on the level of, say, Michael Sam aspiring to be the first openly gay NFL player, but significant nonetheless.

I'm a little mystified that a bunch of people immediately reacted with "No big shocker" or "No surprises here."  Are you people out of your minds?  Page has always styled herself as something of a tomboy, but that's a pretty far cry from telegraphing I am a lesbian to all and sundry.  Don't act like you knew, because you didn't.  That's bullshit.

And don't act like it's inevitable that a gay actor would come out, either: for a lot of gay actors, everyone around them either knows or suspects it, and they never breathe a public word about it in their lives.  Being something and talking about it are drastically different things.  If you want to know what made me a little sniffly when I thought about it, Page was scared and anxious and, poised professional actress or not, had to fight for self-control when she gave that speech. 

Page also indicates frank awareness of how shitty day-to-day life is for a lot of ordinary non-famous LGBT kids, and makes no attempt to aggrandize her own experience as ultimate victimhood.  For heaven's sake, she's there at Time To Thrive to support the work of people trying to change those kids' circumstances!  She's no clueless self-absorbed celebrity airily offering solidarity.  She recognizes her luck and privilege freely while offering empathy, which I think is perfectly fair.

Page's empathy sounded genuine to me because she obviously knows about feeling forced to hide her identity, and, by the sound of it, to sneak around to keep her relationships out of public sight.  (Just imagine what that's like when you don't have to worry only about friends and family, but also a troupe of tabloid photographers who want to catalog your every living moment.)  It's a privileged version of the horrors that lots of kids fear, but it's no less real anguish for that.  It certainly sounds like Page knows whereof she speaks when she mentions the toll it took on her mental health as well as her relationships.  When she said, "I am tired of lying by omission," she fucking meant it.

I'm glad for her, and I hope that she goes on to break the cliché of an actor coming out and promptly seeing her roles dry up.  And I hope that the young LGBT people that no one will ever see onscreen take heart from her talk.

RIP DOMA

How the hell am I supposed to concentrate on my work when there are Supreme Court rulings like this to read?

Excerpts from Justice Kennedy's majority opinion:

The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.

DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency. Responsibilities, as well as rights, enhance the dignity and integrity of the person. And DOMA contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not other couples, of both rights and responsibilities.

What has been explained to this point should more than suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage. This requires the Court to hold, as it now does, that DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

 And the money quote:

DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.  By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

Pardon me while I sniffle happily a bit at this ruling.  I'll be skeptical and analytical tomorrow, but right now I just want to savor the moment.

Gun anger

Fuck you, NRA.

Too angry to say anything else right now.

Entitlement

I'm too busy gradinggradinggrading to say much right now.  But this post says it all for me. 

For tangentially related reasons, I'm feeling pretty angry about overly entitled and privileged bourgeois people whining that they are insufficiently entitled and privileged.  *Scowl*  I'll let that post speak for me, lest I start a rant.

We are sick f***s when it comes to guns

Gee, I wonder if the horribly common incidence of massacres has anything to do with the fact that our country has somehow convinced itself that there is a sane reason for a civilian to amass a stockpile of military-grade firearms.  Last I checked, the countries that ban such things have not yet turned into totalitarian dystopias.  Is it possible that perhaps Americans have fundamentally misinterpreted personal freedom and political self-governance to mean the right to possess the capability to destroy other human beings in large numbers?

Yeah.

I'm never going to run for office, so I'll say it: fuck you, NRA.  Fuck you for jacking off all over the second amendment and then acting like anyone who wants to regulate any weapon smaller than a nuclear warhead is some jack-booted would-be dictator.  Fuck you for encouraging the paranoid fantasies of disaffected, delusional people who believe that the U.S. government is simply waiting until we're all unarmed to conquer us.  And fuck you twice for fomenting a lack of regulation such that anybody can acquire enough firepower to do such harm to others.  We are not being harmed by not owning military assault weapons designed to blow away a bunker full of heavily armed, armored enemies.  We are being harmed by assholes, crazies, and inhuman monsters who own military assault weapons using them to blow away a crowd of unarmed, unarmored, innocent people.  And you are helping them to harm us.

My beloved grandfather was a lifelong member of the NRA.  He served in the U.S. Army during World War II; he knew a thing or two about what totalitarianism actually looks like.  And if he were alive today, I would tell him all of this to his face.  But no one – including me, I suppose – has the guts to have a serious conversation about this in the national political sphere.  So after you NRA fucks stroke your bones again about not letting any government take away the weapons to which you never, ever should have had unfettered access in the first place, we will try to put all this out of our minds and move on...until the same shit happens all over again.

Fuck the NRA and every person who parrots their insane talking points for endangering our lives.

Sigh. 

Universities are not for-profit companies

I'm stumped for a clever title for this one, so I just stated the overarching thesis instead.  My second choice was: Fuck you, UVA.

RBOC: Storm and Stress edition

• I feel curiously ambivalent about today's haphazardly observed information blackout protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act.  Not about the protest itself, mind you – it's essentially a low-grade civil disobedience project, and I'm cool with much stronger forms of civil disobedience than that – but about the sensation that this fight is in some ways between two sides composed of large and powerful entities.  Congress is considerably more powerful than, say, a software company, but I can't help but get a feeling on the back of my neck that this current brouhaha is not necessarily about protecting my personal access to unfettered information.  My political voice is being courted by Google, Yahoo, eBay, and other corporate business endeavors that make an awful lot of money, and see themselves on this issue as in opposition to other large moneyed interests like the MPAA, the RIAA, and a host of companies that seek to defend their copyrighted stuff.  I can see the validity of both sides' arguments here, although I admit that I instinctively lean toward opposition to the bill as a matter of protecting free speech before protecting intellectual property rights.  At the same time, I'm a little put off by the implication of some of the rhetoric of taking down content before the gubmint can do it.  And I feel pushed around by both sides.  Hmm.
• You know those fights that happen between friends that seem to come out of nowhere, all because something came out of someone's mouth a little oddly and someone else took offense to it?  That happened on the internet a few days ago.  I resigned myself to not following it closely, because it seemed like everyone involved was getting progressively angrier and more accusatory, and I was afraid I would be sucked further into it as well.  I quite like Historiann's blog, as a rule, and feel bad for her that her digital front porch sometimes plays host to flame wars.  I was kind of blindsided to see how quickly tempers rose, since almost all of the early commenters, to my knowledge, are at least internet-level friends of Historiann, and the interactions are usually pretty cordial.  It upset me a bit, perhaps because it reminds me of analogous scenarios with my family.  :(
• I had my second therapy appointment yesterday.  After hearing me go off about everything messing with my head for a second time, the therapist seems to be getting a clearer picture of what's eating me, and how zi might help.  Hope zi's up to the task.  Zi had originally believed, from our first meeting, that my problem was stress.  Stress?  Really?  I survived eight years of grad school, two years of field research, a dissertation, and ongoing job hunt with no end in sight.  I'm actually pretty good at managing what some might call stress.  Zi eventually got the picture, though, when I spoke for almost an hour about all the horrible emotions that my family brings out in me.  Stress = no big deal.  Horrible emotions = big deal.
• Why must I keep encountering racists in Ghosttown bars?  I felt like I'd crossed into the Twilight Zone last evening when a guy next to me at the bar struck up a conversation, and went from perfectly pleasant chit-chat to advising – in that thinly coded language we pseudologists recognize so well – that black welfare queens were going to destroy this country, and I should get myself a second passport and move to some nice Third World country where there's at least less corruption than the US, and topped it off by outing himself as a birther. 
  *headbar*
  I suspect that I keep attracting this sort of vermin in bars because I look white, and I dress on the conservative end of professorial haberdashery, as pseudologists go.  In other words, I think tipsy people mistake me for things that I am not, but which they assume as normal around here: a) a Republican, b) a white supremacist, c) a wealthy person with unsentimental class interests to protect, or d) some combination of the first three.*  They're invariably older people, as well: not a one of these characters I've had to talk to at my favorite bar is under sixty.  Maybe I need to start politely ignoring tipsy old people?

  *With apologies to any of my readers who may be (a) but neither (b) nor (c).

Irresponsible blogging: on 'Amina Arraf'

I am unexpectedly quite angry today, after reading the news.  It's been a long time since I felt compelled to write such a long blog post.

So, in case you haven't heard already, the latest tragic media figure in the Arab Spring, Amina Abdallah Arraf, has been exposed as a hoax.  (Read about it here, here, and here.)  Amina, who blogged at "A Gay Girl in Damascus," and identified as a half-American, half-Syrian lesbian, turns out to be the fictional creation of Thomas MacMaster, an American living in Scotland, and possibly his wife as well, both of whom are apparently graduate students at the University of Edinburgh.  (And you thought you were a handful for your advisor!) 

After crafting in great detail his creation's romantic history – including, as it seems, a long-running correspondence with a Canadian woman who honestly believed that she was conducting a long-distance relationship with Amina – and political opinions, MacMaster got too greedy for publicity, and wrote that she had been abducted by the Syrian secret police.  A lot of people who had been following the blog closely swung into action, and attempted to determine what had happened to Amina, and even to pressure the Syrian government to release her.  And in the media scrum over all this, close readers began to notice discrepancies that caught their attention.  Concurrent with their effort to connect the internet dots and figure out where the blog came from, a woman living in London saw herself splashed all over the front pages of major newspapers as 'Amina Arraf'.  (MacMaster had simply used a bunch of her photographs without her permission to create a visual avatar for his character.)  The woman, who is positively not Amina, pointed this out, and before you could say "harmful publicity stunt," the hoax was revealed.

Where do I start?

I cannot say what was in MacMaster's mind when he initiated his blog.  He seems to have sought to cover his ass by claiming that some of the things he wrote would be factual accounts, some others fictional, and he intended not to tell his readers which was which.  This has the effect of off-loading the work of sifting truth-claims from fiction onto the readers, which is a questionable maneuver, but hey, it's a blog, right?  Not like anyone signed an affidavit or anything.

But once the thing took off and people – real, flesh-and-blood people who sometimes came close to revealing their own identities at their own genuine peril – began commenting on the blog and veering off into discussions and arguments amongst each other based on the assumption that Amina was real and her blog updates factual reports, MacMaster let it ride.  There may have been a point at which he could have stepped in, even in character as his narrative voice, and reminded readers that some of this stuff was fake/fictional, and no one should get too worked up about it.  But honestly, I don't know when that would have been, since the blog seems almost purpose-built to lure people in very serious physical danger into revealing themselves and thereby exposing themselves to blackmail, imprisonment, torture, and murder by security forces in Syria, in Palestine, and other countries where homosexuality is either criminalized or so discriminated against that it may as well be a crime.  (I have seen commenters identify themselves on the blog as being Syrian or Palestinians, some of the latter in Israel and others in the West Bank.  I haven't taken comprehensive stock of the roll call, so I don't know who else participated.) 

Now, if MacMaster had started a blog called "Queer Life in the Arab World" and set it up as a clearinghouse for such issues, then no worries: people would know exactly what it was, or at least what it claimed to be, and could judge for themselves whether it was on the level, a front for some security branch, or whatever.  Queer people in the Arab world have to make those judgment calls all the time.  Or, if he had started a reformist Arab nationalist blog to use as a stick with which to beat the Asad regime, same deal: people could judge for themselves whether or not they wanted to participate in a discourse on that site.  There's no need for him to name himself if he wanted to keep a low profile and let some ideas get into circulation.

Except there is.  The cultural politics of the postcolonial Arab world do not readily allow for a white guy from the US to pretend to be an Arab girl in order to make people warm up to him.  It's not motherfucking sketch comedy, dude.

MacMaster is supposedly a "Middle East activist," which could mean practically anything at all.  From what I've gleaned, he has a history of working as an activist for the Palestinian national cause.  Well, all right; maybe he knows something about that.  Maybe he even knows a bit, somehow or other, about the practical logistics of being gay in a country that legally represses gayness.  But he seems frighteningly clueless about the implications of pretending to be someone that he is not in the Arab world, especially in the context of being an American activist.  American activists of all stripes in the Arab world have "possible CIA plant" written across their foreheads, even when they are totally on the level about their politics and their commitments.  For that matter, so do activists born and raised in the Arab world who pursue any kind of political project at odds with absolutely anything that their home country's regime does.  The very first thing that Arab dictators do when confronted with any kind of political opposition that they don't manage themselves is to accuse it of being a front for US or Israeli interests.  (Perhaps you have noticed such maneuvers this year.)  Since the same regimes have also been feeding their subjects this paranoia on a structural level in state-run schools and news media for many years, this line of attack finds a receptive audience.  All of which to say, oppositional activists must strive to prove their credibility with people who are inclined to view any kind of dissident politics, much less anything associated with the US, the major neocolonial power in the region, with suspicion and distrust.

In this article, MacMaster makes the fatuous claim that he pulled this massive stunt to let people focus on the issues instead of ad hominem attacks:

"I really felt a number of years ago, in discussions on Middle East issues in the US, often when I presented real facts and opinions, the immediate reaction to someone with my name was: 'Why are you anti-American? Why are you anti-Jewish?'
"So I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual issue."

Mr MacMaster said he had wanted people to listen to the facts without paying attention to "the man behind the curtain".

To which I respond: you fucking egotistical, self-aggrandizing, chicken-shit jackass!   You really couldn't handle being a "Middle East activist" in your own country?  Did no one mention to you at the sign-up table that you were going to be accused of being a traitor to your country, or an anti-Semite?  Did you really not have any reasonable counter-argument to these accusations?  And please: your name is MacMaster.  Not exactly a crypto-fascist signifier.  As a Jewish person who recognizes the difference between anti-Semitism and political debates about the Arab-Israeli conflict, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that your inability to handle such critiques stems not from your surname, but from the fact that you were incompetent at face-to-face political debate.  Shy little violets who need to resort to false personae online in order to make their political arguments are really not cut out for "Middle East activism."  Just ask anyone who actually has the guts to defend their positions in public, and knows how to field attacks from both sides accusing them of racism or imperialism or whatever else.  Some of them even have Scots-Irish surnames.

Is this man actually so stupid that he thought 'inventing a name to talk under' adequately describes what he did?  For the record, I have invented a name to talk under: Dr. Koshary.  In the meat world, I answer to a different name, but I have never represented myself as other than I am; I've given enough details of my life and my work that I think my readers will recognize that.  Thomas MacMaster invented a fictional persona, a Syrian-American woman, through whom he felt comfortable airing his political opinions or, at the very least, experimenting with voice to see what sounded convincing or right to him.  Since he seems to have some pretensions to literature, it's hard to figure out when he thought he was writing fiction, and when he thought he was writing fact-based polemic.

[Sidebar: MacMaster's fictional blogging persona is the only entity that I have ever seen mount the claim that the Asad regime betrayed the Arab people by "giving away" the Golan Heights.  In fact, the Asad regime is the most stridently and dogmatically Arab nationalist government going these days.  And, for the record, Hafez al-Asad didn't even seize power until 1970, three years after Israel had occupied the Golan.  It's kind of like accusing Queen Victoria of giving away the American colonies.  I can't say for sure that no one in Arab nationalist circles says this, but I can say for certain that it's the first time I've heard the claim.  It feels to me as though MacMaster is either way off the deep end, or essaying a very satirical portrait of over-the-top Syrian-style Arab nationalists.  And in either case, how exactly is that supposed to advance his agenda?]

And then there's the whole lesbian business.  Sexuality, as we scholars of social science [should] know, is complicated stuff, and so I don't see any point in holding up MacMaster's heterosexual union as proof that he's out of his depth.  Who knows what path his sexuality has taken over the years, or what people he has known intimately?  For all I know, he has many close friends who have confided to him tremendous amounts of detail of how they conceive of their sexual identities.  After all, many great novels and plays have been written about characters who were pretty much nothing like their authors.  No one complains that The Tempest is bullshit because Shakespeare wasn't actually a savage wild man who grew up as the son of an evil goddess on an island far from England.  (Do they?)  I don't object to a straight guy writing in a lesbian narrative voice in fiction, as long as it's done well.

But MacMaster not only failed to make clear that he was messing around with pretensions of writing a novel or some other fiction piece, but he led on all sorts of people with whom he was in contact from behind his fictional avatar.  He was conducting a correspondence relationship with that woman in Canada under completely false pretenses.  He was representing himself to people across the Arab world and the LGBT activist world as someone that he was not, living in a place in which he did not live, and subject to certain kinds of direct experiential knowledge that he was not.  He was lying.

His admission that he didn't want people to think about "the man behind the curtain" is even more damning.  You need to own your politics to be taken seriously.  It's why we laugh at writers and politicians and other such public figures who get caught inventing online identities in order to praise themselves and their books on Amazon or Facebook or wherever else.  And the metaphor of the man behind the curtain is deeply unsettling here.  Just look at the blowback that both Syrian anti-regime activists and LGBT activists expect to endure: a sympathetic and beguiling figure in both worlds has been revealed as an American dude with murky motivations.  Bashar al-Asad could hardly have asked for a better media foil to demonstrate to his subjects that the political opposition is all a Trojan horse for US imperialist interests, and that LGBT people in Syria are somehow in league with those interests.  Living under dictatorship makes people prone to concoct conspiracy theories just to have some kind of coherent narrative that explains the reality they encounter.  The fear of 'the man behind the curtain' is very real for people in Syria, just as it is for people in Research Country, not only because of concerns about US domination but also because a repressive police state tends to develop the habit of entrapping people as 'enemies of the state' with innocent-seeming conversations that end up in the secret police offices.

Politics is an intensely personal business in many places, but especially in Syria, where people are understood to hold political loyalties based on a complex network of religious and familial ties.  The idea that MacMaster believes that he can get people to focus on the issues he raises without worrying about the source of the information is head-slappingly naïve at best.  It's not as if his avatar were a near-blank cipher that merely announced itself as a narrative voice and made no claims of particular identity, like some kind of accent-less voice emanating from a blank screen.  He represented himself as a Sunni Muslim, a Syrian-American, a lesbian.  He invented an entire deep-background for his avatar in the ways that Syrians reckon personal identity.  And they liked Amina because all of those details together added up to a brave and compelling person, who may have had her disagreements with some readers but seemed to have earned her self-knowledge the hard way.  She could criticize the Syrian government as an Arab nationalist, and criticize the Western-based LGBT rights movement as a proudly out lesbian.  Her critiques mattered partly because she was seen as invested in making those institutions better, not in knocking them down from the outside.

And now it comes out that she was an insider to none of those things, as her readers understood her to be.  Even if her creator really believes every word that he wrote in her voice, he is an outsider to all of those things, which makes a real difference.  It is not a fatal flaw to be an outsider with a critique to offer, but it is a subject position that one must acknowledge and accept.  Some people won't listen to an outsider no matter what, and that is sad and frustrating, but that is not sufficient justification to invent a fictional character and interact with the world through that creation.

Every LGBT activist in Syria with whom MacMaster was in contact must be in a heightened state of paranoia right now, wondering who exactly was that person behind Amina's emails, and what consequences they might face for having corresponded with that email address.  As if those people didn't have enough to worry about nowadays!  MacMaster's stunt is an act of reckless endangerment: people in Syria who read that blog actually called up governmental offices asking about Amina Arraf's whereabouts.  They have outed themselves as readers of the blog, which in the secret police's perspective is pretty much outing themselves as LGBT, and more likely than not, opposed to the Asad regime.  And, now that this has been exposed as a hoax, those well-meaning people have also outed themselves as potential dupes of yet another American indulging in some skullduggery, as the secret police will explain to some of them in interrogation cells.

I am appalled to consider all of this, and even more so to see that MacMaster seems unapologetic about those real-world consequences while continuing to push his claim that people should focus on "the issues."  He does not understand that he has become the issue, and it will take a long time for his erstwhile readers and fans to sort through all this and try to see the good intentions behind the erroneous actions.  I mean, if they aren't tortured and killed first.  I half-expect to see a succession of news stories in the next few days in which MacMaster either walks back some of his claims of factuality of material or admits that he made up huge amounts of reported information wholesale because it sounded consonant with other things he had heard.  I also expect to hear about some terrible things happening to people who don't deserve such misery, all because they bought into the fruits of MacMaster's atrocious judgment.  I wonder: what will he have to say about that?

Sympathy

The big tornado that cut through the Deep South not only killed hundreds of people and did who knows how much damage to property, but effectively ended the school year early for the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa.  For some reason, it's the latter fact that shakes me a little more — maybe I'm getting a little jaded about tallying death and destruction, given some of my recent research here in Research City. 

Dear Old University is also a big state school whose campus is central to life in DOU-Town.  It's tough to imagine a disaster big enough to make DOU conclude that it couldn't complete the school year, and send home students while rescue workers tried to find out what on earth had happened to a whopping eighty employees that no one could locate since the disaster struck.  But UA is really going through that right now.  My heart goes out to them.

Late to the party: On William Cronon

I know, I know: the bullying, counterproductive, and essentially indefensible political intimidation of one William Cronon began last week.  My blogging colleagues, especially some far better-known than I, have even been commenting on the developing skirmish for days now.  Cronon himself – no slouch at either close reading or carefully measured prose, from my brief skim of his shiny new blog – looks more than ready for this fight.  No one, on the wider disciplinary or interdisciplinary level, knows who the hell I am, and I know that no one who cares about this sort of thing hasn't already read about it elsewhere.  I'm pretty much the ranting late-night cable-television crazy of the academic blogosphere.

But my ego somehow remains oversized, even after the drubbing it took courtesy of the job market this past week.  I have a voice, I have an informed point of view (I hope so, anyway), and I feel like I have an obligation to echo what my eloquent colleagues have already stated.  I'm not eloquent, though, so I'll just spit it out: the Wisconsin GOP is trying to carry out a political hit on Cronon.  It's disgusting and indefensible politics, of which Republicans ought to be ashamed if they really believe in individual freedom, small government, or any of the thinking that undergirds the Bill of Rights.  I have little doubt that Cronon will be forced to comply with the FOIA request, which is, after all, legal.  But I also have little doubt that Cronon, who already knows this better than anyone, will treat this as the sucker-punch that starts a brawl.  He's going to make the GOP character assassins look

• foolish at best;
• pretty damn stupid, more likely than not;
• and materially corrupt at worst.  (Long odds on this one, I admit.)

In fact, I'm counting on him to do so.  We academics committed to free intellectual inquiry, to say nothing of public intellectual engagement, need him to do so.  The implications of this political bullying, if left unchallenged and unchecked, are pretty dire for us.  Politicians – the GOP in this case, but let's not kid ourselves that a single political party holds a monopoly on dirty, unethical, or counterproductive tactics – cannot be allowed to believe that they can scare the shit out of people who legally and legitimately critique, question, and challenge the wisdom of those politicians' actions. 

And yeah, it's a little trite, but I don't mind trotting out my constant counter-example of Research Country.  RC is most emphatically not the United States: it has never experienced a time when responsive representative democracy or full freedom of political speech were respected, or even attempted.  This makes RC an imperfect comparison, which I acknowledge freely.  That said, I can tell you a shit-ton about the pernicious effects of political witch hunts on higher education, not only for the unfortunate targets but also for the larger institutions, and for the students who find their educations compromised by political forces that would prefer not to have intelligent analysts even allowed to present canned facts to lecture classes.  Political oppression is only one of the ills that plagues RC's universities, sad to say, but it's one of the most insidious and widespread, even in the fanciest institution here that likes to pretend that it can rise above the politically crippled mediocrity that most of RC's higher education has come to be.

I am comforted to think that the Wisconsin GOP seems to have awakened a sleeping giant.  Or, at least, unwisely sucker-punched a skillful bar brawler.

In for a penny, in for a pound

Now that I'm back in Research City, I have no intention of leaving again until my postdoc finishes.  This is what I tell myself whenever I feel a twinge of fear from watching the news, reading the news, or, as occasionally happens lately, witnessing the news occurring.  One can only evacuate so many times in a season, right?  The fact that my fellowship is still going on at all, and that I'm able to live in my apartment and move around my neighborhood at will is enough all by itself to make being here worthwhile.  Even if other parts of town were intermittently too dangerous to venture into from time to time – and that really isn't true for me as yet – I could always hole up right here, concentrate on writing, and still do something valuable for my professional development.  It'll take more than, um, a number of violent deaths and hints of more serious violence to come to make me up and go.  Especially when I just re-stocked my liquor cabinet at duty-free!

Without getting too much into the issues here, there's some genuine nastiness afoot in RC nowadays, and not all of it can be blamed on the bad old regime stirring up trouble.  I'm sure they are, but as any pseudologist worth hir salt can tell you, people do not do what they do solely because malevolent, shadowy forces manipulate them into doing it.  And a lot of people around here, despite their generally sound analytical instincts, are forgetting that fact in their intense desire to pin the blame on the bad guys.  Grimly ironic, considering the divide-and-rule tactics the former government here pursued for decades. 

What I think I'm seeing in RC nowadays is one of the less savory effects of a political revolution: a bunch of not-so-great opinions and prejudices that were repressed from public airing in a number of ways are now being blared aloud, along with the more constructive opinions and ideas.  The line from I, Claudius comes to me: "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out."  They're hatching, all right.

At present, I think the little voice in my head fretting about a second evacuation is just paranoia.  I already feel cowardly and substandard enough as it is, having evacuated once.  Even so, I'm trying to keep my ear to the ground for hints of a larger wave of violence and anarchy, since those are really the only things that can scare me away.  (Besides total open-ended lack of internet; I'll admit it.)  It's tougher than it used to be: several important news channels that broadcast in RC-ish are currently blocked, or at least aren't getting through to my satellite dish.  That makes me even more dependent on the internet — and I think you can all figure out why that is not necessarily comforting.  But I'm hopeful that this paranoia remains just that, and I can spend the next few months occasionally reminding myself to stay calm while continuing my research unmolested.

And don't even get me started on coffee.  I brew my coffee at home in a French press, and since I returned to RC, there's no goddamn whole coffee to be had here, and there's no ground coffee coarse enough to use in a press.  (For those not in the know, espresso-ground coffee is too fine for the press filter, and ends up clogging it.)  The place near me that sells coffee beans that it can grind to order told me today that they won't have any for sale until the end of the month.  Holy caffeine withdrawal!  I may have to take a taxi out to the other roaster I know of, several miles away, after I call to confirm that they have beans in stock.  Meanwhile, I swallowed my pride and bought a small container of Nescafe to see me through.  Hard times, people. 

On a thematically related note, I notice that the US and its allies are still dithering about how to respond to the mounting violence and flat-out insanity on display over in, uh, Gonzo Country.  While it's hard to watch people struggling to liberate themselves from an oppressive dictator with long odds of success, I at least understand intellectually why not much is happening: in for a penny, in for a pound.  It's not easy to commit to a no-fly zone over GC without implicitly committing to later ground warfare.  Could we do that?  Sure.  But is it a good idea, in the wake of the clusterfucks we made for ourselves in Iraq and Afghanistan?  Maaaaaaaybe not so much.  Unintended consequences have loomed large in those arenas, and now the US is once bitten and twice shy.  (Er, twice bitten and thrice shy?)  The PR effects are hard to gauge, but surely the US government now recognizes – I mean, Christ, they must have picked up on this by now, right? – that they are not playing in the big leagues when it comes to public image work in a big swath of this region, and they tend to let others define the politics for them, and then they play catch-up belatedly and, more often than not, unsuccessfully.  Sending in troops to depose a dictator in a country full of Muslims whose sole major industry is petroleum and whose system of government would have to be re-built from the ground up...well hey, what could possibly go wrong? 

All of this knowledge, of course, doesn't make me feel much better that my country is basically telling a bunch of very brave and very endangered people in GC, "We salute you, we respect you, and you sorry bastards are on your own here.  Lotsa luck!"  The emotional pull of seeing people risk their lives to free themselves from tyranny is, no doubt, part of why an entire wing of the discipline of Pseudology is devoted to intellectually aiding activist movements.  I've never been in that wing, for various reasons, but I certainly understand the impulse at moments like this.  At best, the US is stuck in a no-win PR situation, but those people rising up against their ruler may be trapped in a far worse no-win situation, barring a miracle.

Can't stop won't stop

Know where I'm going next week?  Research City.  Know why I'm going?  Because I'm a motherfucking pseudologist, that's why.  And, to be fair, because I caught a lucky break with the workability of my postdoc's administrative office.  That the admins are on the scene again and have our back for getting back to our research helps a lot.

Now that I've bought my ticket and can count down the days, I can stop feeling so much like a displaced person here in Evacuation City, and enjoy this final week as more of a proper vacation.  I'm going on a sightseeing trip tomorrow, because why the hell not?  Why not go see a few things that I don't ordinarily get to see?

I'm just a tiny bit anxious about the political situation in Research Country, which isn't anywhere near as bad as it was when I left, but could certainly be better/quieter/stabler/more democratic/etc.  But of course, this is partly why I'm going back: a lot of pseudologists would give their right arms for the chance to spend some months chronicling a period of revolutionary change up close.  I'm actually really lucky, to put it cynically, that I can get paid to do this and acquire a huge amount of data that could only be gathered at this historical moment.  This excitement balances out the fear.  I'm not a front-line guy; I don't have the temperament of a war correspondent, as I seem to recall someone else saying recently.  But between the intense desire (to say nothing of financial necessity) to complete my fellowship, my sense of obligation to my RCian friends who have been busting their asses to enact real change, and perhaps even a dash of egotistical pleasure that I will be doing for months what other pseudologists are paying through the nose to do for a week, I feel like it's time for me to step up and do it.  (Assuming, of course, that all hell doesn't break loose, a la a certain unfortunate country close to RC.) 

This also brings up a hitherto unknown issue for me in my research: my political commitments and my sympathies with one group of RCians over another.  (Anyone who has read the last month's worth of blog posts here already has a fair idea of where those sympathies lie.)  Until this year, none of that mattered at all; everyone could – and did – paint themselves as oppressed by the state in one way or another, and everyone saw me as a welcome opportunity to air complaints that they couldn't just blurt out loud in public.  Now push has come to shove, and some people have belied their early complaints by, um, taking the wrong side of history. 

Never mind what this implies about my personal relationships with some of these people; that can always get worked out somehow or other.  What comes to mind is that, depending on how certain events proceed, I may – in a very hypothetical and not-very-likely, don't-think-I'm-beating-my-breast-about-this way – find myself annoying some of the powers that be, owing to things that I have publicly said in easily traceable formats.  It would absolutely suck to blow this opportunity by being kicked out of RC by some irate functionary.  But, since I feel like the time has passed for staying officially neutral about all this, I don't see any way around the public statements.  All I can say is that I have no official voice as a foreign national, so it's not strictly my business, but I have personal loyalties to my friends who have taken great risks for their country in a way to which I, as an American, respond deeply. 

In any case, I rather doubt that I would be ejected for what amounts to posting a bunch of links and comments on Facebook.  But, since we all know now that Facebook played a more than casual role in these proceedings, it is technically possible that someone is monitoring such things, and may call me to account.  But seriously, even discussing this feels self-aggrandizing to me: I regret that I have but one Facebook account to give for Research Country!  I'm not some hipster douchebag trying to pick up chicks in a coffeehouse by broadcasting my personal sacrifices for a political cause; I'm a very junior academic researcher trying to build a career.  The point is that I am aware that my political statements now carry more weight than they used to; it's not just a theoretical exercise to run while killing time at a café.  I have a lot less to lose, and perhaps even something more to gain, from speaking my mind than have my colleagues who work full-time in RC, which is itself a curious state of affairs.  For pseudologists, who often* get very comfortable posing (unconvincingly, as a rule) as radical activists while maintaining the most conventional and conformist of professional and personal lives, it's actually kind of freaky to confront the possibility that their academic privileges and more could be rescinded for the most modest levels of political engagement.  And, maybe, a needed splash of cold water.

*Discounting, of course, the pseudologists who knowingly put themselves in serious harm's way out of their professional commitments.  People get killed doing this job sometimes.

Awesomeness

For those who have not yet finished their vocabulary exercises in RCish (late papers not accepted!), those words around the border are tyranny, bribery, strife, influence-peddling, corruption, and despotism.

It is, of course, not necessarily the end of these things.  But, if the good people of Research Country keep up the magnificent job they have been doing lately, it will be the beginning of the end.  They have been engaged in a near-textbook-perfect non-violent civil disobedience project, on a scale and scope that the country has never seen before.  (And, it's worth noting, Research Country has a looooooooooooong history.)  They have endured everything that their government could throw at them, and they not only survived but held their line.  And we, their friends, colleagues, and students, are all inspired.

What the hell, here's one more item vocab item for you: Taḥyā maṣr!  (Don't look at me like that: look it up in your texts!)

DADT repeal: also kind of a big f*cking deal

Let us now toll the death knell for Don't Ask, Don't Tell.  I am not a scholar of the US gay rights movement, and am not positioned to say how significant of a milestone this is in that history.  It seems to me, though, like a big fucking deal, to borrow Joe Biden's health care quip.  I am no militarist, and have a laundry list of objections to how the United States government thinks it should deploy its military power in various parts of the world.  But I'm also realistic enough to see that the fact that great military strength and powerful economic and political motivations to throw weight around cannot be made to heel simply by saying "We don't like war and want to stay as far away from its instruments as possible."  And, for a number of reasons both so obvious and so personal that I see no reason to detail them here, I find it absurd and dangerous to say, no matter the rationale, that some perfectly capable, willing, and eligible US citizens should be forbidden to join the armed forces voluntarily.

A comment that Tenured Radical once made – I'm too lazy to search her archives for the precise link at the moment, sorry* – rang very true for me: the desire to forward political aims by staying away from military service is in some ways a class privilege that not everyone shares.  For a lot of young people without many economic (or, for that matter, social) opportunities, military service has long been a way out of otherwise dreary prospects.  Yes, that brings up good questions about race, class, and the composition of the armed forces, but that is the case nonetheless.  Sheer probability dictates that a proportional number of those recruits are queer — I was about to write GLBT, but I suppose the T there is a bit more unlikely in this particular context.  Some kids have more than one really good reason to want to get the hell out of their dead-end town, is it not so? 

I acknowledge that this seems less of a step forward if you are intent on seeing military service as a cannon fodder factory, and a grimly cynical way of disposing of Americans of comparatively low social status.  In the context of the misbegotten current US engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can understand this concern.  But this ignores the fact that the bulk of the US population, to say nothing of the military itself, regards service personnel as intrinsically valuable (or, if you prefer, high-status) people who personify a host of positive qualities, not least of which is a spirit of self-sacrifice in the service of the country's welfare.  Given that a lot of gay and lesbian teens who have been literally and metaphorically kicked around lack a sense that others around them value them, that others around them consider them worth having around, it seems plain to me that those who are equipped to do so might consider joining up, even at the cost of having to talk about pretend SOs or switching the gender pronouns for real SOs.  They probably had to do a lot worse than that just to get through their day in their youth.

The benefits of joining the military are no doubt that much greater if you have the chance to become an officer: more money (not a lot, but still), more status, more opportunity to rise even further.  Don't underestimate the attraction of that possibility to anyone who believes, rightly or not, that other status-advancing career paths are not open to them.  That's why we often associate the armed forces with blue-collar backgrounds: nowadays, there are simply more people from such backgrounds than those from elite military-caste families (like, um, John McCain) who are on hand to staff the military, and have some compelling reason to do so.  The US Army is a lot bigger than its West Point alumni; the Navy bigger than its Annapolis grads, and so on. 

And jeez, it's not as though there aren't queer military personnel training in elite officer colleges, either.  If you want to lecture officer-students about the implications of their career choices in terms of US foreign policy and so on, go ahead.  But don't tell the gay and lesbian ones among them that they should either hide their sexualities, or that they should simply avoid the military.  Such avoidance only reinforces the discrimination and lends weight to bigots' assertions that non-hetero people just shouldn't be around, no matter how they dress up that assertion with claims of military readiness and unit discipline.  That's a much larger claim than just 'in the military' — as has been observed elsewhere, queer youth hear the larger message of "We don't want you around in the first place" within the seemingly milder claim of "We don't want you in this particular position." 

I do not doubt that, at least at first, there will be an upsurge in hazing and gay-bashing in the ranks.  Ending DADT means that queer military personnel need not misrepresent their sexual orientation in social situations.  (Presumably, they need not represent their sexual orientation at all from now on, in official contexts.)  And openness about that will, I fear, lead to some backlash among the more bigoted and hateful in the ranks.  But the same thing happened, I would think – by all means, fact-check me if you have the history at your fingertips – when the military ended racial segregation, and yet the military did not collapse in an orgy of racial violence.  Plus, a big component of gay-bashing and bullying in such institutions relies on the implicit understanding that the object of the bullying cannot lodge a full complaint with superiors, because they are not 'supposed' to be gay in the first place and thus could only indict themselves.  Removing that official stigma won't wipe out prejudice and bullying altogether, but it will, I suspect, sap a lot of what fuels the bullying.

Finally, I want to declare my distaste for the desire to keep the armed forces segregated, whether spoken out of radical leftist politics or right-wing quasi-religious politics.  The United States is going to have a large professional military, whether you like that idea or not.  It has become an unavoidable reality for our country.  Critiquing where the military goes and at whom it shoots is an equally valid and necessary part of our body politic, but expressing the desire that people would simply no longer join up – as if we were discussing a boycott of a brand of shampoo – is a stupid and dangerous fantasy.  It's not stupid or dangerous because the military could be left too short-handed to defend our borders.  (That would be the fantasy part, there.)  It's stupid and dangerous because it leaves the military personnel with the belief that some people either are above military service or beneath it.  That builds both class-based resentment among serving personnel against those who can choose a less physically dangerous career and gender-based hatred of those who are deemed innately incapable of doing a job that has nothing to do with sexual orientation, and thereby creates a bullying atmosphere that feeds on itself and its own obsessions with validating the worth of military personnel at the expense of someone else.  I can tell you with great personal and professional authority that I do not want to live in a country where only 'those people' are in the military, no matter what the term might include or exclude.

I take no joy in seeing my government accepting convicted violent felons into the army for lack of better recruits who meet the stupid 'not openly gay' criterion.  The fact that the US Army thought it made more sense to recruit a man with a history of using firearms in pursuit of criminal activity than a man with sterling credentials, the capability to lead soldiers well and judiciously, and happened to have a boyfriend is head-slappingly frightening to me, and indicates how far down the wrong path the military was already going.  Rest assured that decisions like that would not have made it any easier for critics of US military engagements and foreign policy to persuade the military to exercise restraint or forbearance in its conduct at home or abroad.

RIP DADT.  I'm glad to see it go and I'm not ashamed to say it.

*ETA: I can't find TR's comment on this to save my life: I think it may have been a response comment, rather than a post of its own.  In any case, she has since written her own post on the DADT repeal.