What Happened? College Humor Gone Bad

Who doesn’t enjoy a good satire of higher education? Colleges are easy to send up – or at least they used to be. When I remember Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim or Jane Smiley’s Moo, I think laughter, smiles and knowing glances. Recently reading Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man, though, has me in a different state of mind. It might be just that book, which I found to be decidedly unfunny. Or it might be something different. I may have changed or perhaps something broader has shifted in our thinking about college satire.

Russo is a successful author whose fiction has been well-received for decades. He writes for the television and movies, too, and has even won a Pulitzer. Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool was made into an excellent movie with Paul Newman. It’s a favorite of mine. In 1997, Russo’s higher education comedy Straight Man was published. The reviews were consistently positive. Kirkus called it “gloriously funny” and the New York Times, New Yorker, and USA Today all liked it.

The book is first-person account from an English faculty member and acting department chair who is teaching at second or third tier college in Pennsylvania. Or more precisely, our narrator and faculty member is paid to teach but spends a ton of time on other issues while wrestling with a mid-life crisis. The protagonist, hero and anti-hero, William Henry Devereaux Jr., experiences a host of crises and dramas, flirtations and escapades, over a short period of time. Included in the escapades are campus politics (petty and serious), sex and flirting, sexual harassment, budget problems, student complaints, health complaints, family issues, drinking and drinking, and a whole lot more. Devereaux is a contrarian, a curmudgeon, a friend to some and also a really nasty colleague. He is difficult to everyone. We may be supposed to believe that he has a heart of gold, but chronicling his behavior makes it a difficulty claim to believe.

Entitled mediocrity best describes the environment in and around the fictional “West Central Pennsylvania University” of Straight Man. Mocking the characters’ pretensions would easier if they all were not so sad, so frustrated, and so deeply unhappy. The relatively disinterested university employer serves mostly as a foil. One could also argue that it is a facilitator and enabler to poor behavior across the board. Imagine over the top inappropriate actions, the kind that might show up on daytime reality television (Jerry Springer?), with faculty and staff as the stars.

Bracketing the strengths and weakness of this one particular book, I am starting to believe that the easy satirical pickings of higher education are now a thing of the past. We may have pretentious institutions and players, to be sure, but they are fewer and farther between. Decades of reduced funding, attacks from the left, right, above and below, and pressures to do more with less have rendered much of academia as toothless. Higher education may be generating a great deal of attention, but it is not setting the agenda or framing the conversation. As a consequence, it offers a fewer targets, and smaller ones at that, for lampooning.

Following a similar path, it is difficult today to make fun of the struggling student, burdened by debt, who hopes to do well and is not academically strong. Perhaps we can mock the entitled and pretentious. However, there are few of those students at smaller public universities. There is simply less humor to be squeezed out of these scenarios.

One could, I imagine, go super dark to make the situation funny. There have been funny novels that take place in all manner of awful situations, from wartime to future dystopias. They are different, though, than Straight Man. The book plays it straight. It’s tragic, not comedic. The book jacket extols Russo’s “high-wire walk between hilarity and heartbreak.” I think that he fell off on the side of unhappiness.

David Potash

January 24, 2019 Reviews

Evangelicals and American History

Frances Fitzgerald’s The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America is an outstanding work of history. A hefty 700 pages, the book is comprehensive without losing voice or focus. It’s a pleasure to read. It’s also the kind of work that should be read by many. Understanding the evangelical tradition in the United States is essential to deeper comprehension of American culture and politics.

Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist. Her aim here is to give a comprehensive review of the evangelical movement from the First Great Awakening in colonial America through the present. The book’s focus, though, is on more recent events, from the 1970s to the present. It is a work of synthesis and integration. Fitzgerald has read the scholarship extensively. The Evangelicals has a learned feel to it but it is not pedantic.

Evangelicals are Protestants who believe that the Bible is the ultimate religious authority. They come from many traditions. Evangelicalism is an expansive term and it has changed over the years. Common to all evangelicals is enthusiastic preaching of the gospels. The origin of the term comes from Greek for “good news.”

The books is not just about religion. It explains the thread of the evangelical movement, and its leadership, with great awareness of the political environment. Fitzgerald’s focus give us a much better comprehension of what is, and who is, the Christian right. Perhaps the book’s greatest argument and takeaway is that regardless of the waxing and waning of the Christian right in the past fifty years, the movement’s underlying values – the spirit that animates it – were forged in the nineteenth century. Historical knowledge is essential.

The book, in fact, made me want to go back to the classroom to teach history. The evangelical tradition in American has been important for centuries. I have taught survey courses and reading The Evangelicals has highlighted to me just how important. The book offers and extremely helpful lens for understanding.

David Potash

January 23, 2019 Reviews

Completely Rethinking Policing

Alex S. Vitale is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His work is policy-based and in the public sphere. His latest book, The End of Policing, is a comprehensive rethink of policing and police as part of the larger criminal justice system and society itself. The aim here is not tweaks or adjustments. Vitale instead assembles just about every argument he can lay his hands to in order to present as dramatic a book, and theme, as possible. He identifies the growth and changes in the role of policing as the key justice issue facing our country. Vitale asserts that the police’s primary role today is not about fighting crime – it is about controlling poor people and those that might disrupt society. It’s a no-holds barred book that calls for a complete re-imagining of how we keep ourselves safe and secure. The result is fascinating and provocative – without necessarily being accurate or persuasive.

Opening the book, Vitale provides a brief historical overview of how police forces emerged in history. Those early efforts, which were often about maintaining political power through enforcing racism, classism and other forms of control, remain embedded in police forces today, he argues. Policing can actually worsen the problems it is supposedly is supposed to solve, he claims. The “wars” we have waged in recent years – on homelessness, on gangs, on drugs and on terror – have been distractions and means to increase funding and support for a neoliberal police state. In other words, we have started to label every social problem as an issue best addressed through more policing. Vitale buttresses his arguments with data and illustrations of the militarization and funding of modern policing.

Vitale claims that regardless of whatever reforms police might make, from use of data to community policing, the underlying hostility between the policed public and the police will remain. In addition to being ineffective, Vitale also argues that the expansive use of the police for social control is very expensive.

What we should be doing, Vitale states, is really thinking through what, exactly, we want the police to do. He also want society to engage in a major re-think about social problems, like poverty, hunger and homelessness, using different lenses of policy and expectations. If this takes place, he argues, then there will be a different way for society to think about crime, crime prevention and justice.

He calls for legalizing sex work, drugs, and keeping police out of the schools. Vitale believes that much more can be done with restorative justice and community involvement in public safety. Vitale seeks more funding for  mental health professionals and mental health systems, as well as for troubled adolescents and the jobless. He wants, in sum, an across the board redo of how government supports and promotes social welfare.

Vitale’s controversial argument makes one think. The book forces hard questions about what and how policing works. It raises many questions, most of which have me wondering about expectations, change and politics. I would be interested to hear how community and political leaders would respond to the book and its arguments. My hunch is that it would be greeted with skepticism by some and interest by others, especially those who leading the push for more accountable democratic socialism in government. But would a redo of policing be the first move, the foot in the door, the area of change that would generate the most support? I do not believe so. For many good reasons, we need and depend upon a professional and accountable police force. They are, in many ways, doing what no one else can or will do.

We also are often reminded, too, that the threats that social scientists tell us are more real are not necessarily the threats that move policy or politics. Take gun control, for example. Many in the policy sphere argue that a curtailment of availability of weapons would increase safety. Politically, there is less willingness to move in that direction. Terrorism is another example. Concern about foreign terrorists has been a catalyst for many policy changes. The data suggests, though, that there are probably more “likely” threats.

For the near future, I believe that Vitale’s book will find a more receptive audience in academia, especially sociology classrooms, than in the neighborhoods or city halls.

David Potash

January 17, 2019 Reviews

Urban Love Letter

How does one “know” a city? Can we even make sense of a metropolis? William James called a baby’s first experiences in the world to be a “blooming buzzing confusion” and I think that it’s an apt description of trying to take in the fullness of a city. It’s an overwhelming task. To find connection and meaning in an urban setting, we blinker our sensations, using moments, glances, and focus. A building represents a neighborhood, a person stands for a type, and an exchange can reflect something greater.

One of my favorite genres of writing comes from the ambitious author who tries to capture a feel, a slice, a perspective on a city through literary non-fiction. The flaneurs of 19th century France are well-known examples, but they exist in other times and places, too: Pliny the Younger on Rome, Pepys on London, Balzac on Paris, and Dreiser on Chicago are part of this tradition. They produce journalism that is written with the care and creativity of fiction. They are our best explainers of urban life. And to their ranks, I recommend adding Suketu Mehta on Bombay.

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is Mehta’s 2004 love letter to Bombay. Now known at Mumbai, the city has had many names, Mehta tells us. It truly is an overwhelming metropolis. The scale and scope of the Bombay is staggering: 18.4 million people in 2011 and it is India’s largest, and densest, city. Mehta was born in Bombay and left for the US at the start of high school. He was educated in America, became a writer (fiction, nonfiction and screenplays), and returned to Bombay in his mid-30s with a family. He spent more than two years there, investigating the city and its seedier underbelly, interviewing gangsters, policemen, actors, producers, and a host of men and women about town. It’s something akin to Luc Sante’s Lowlife but for India. Maximum City is a fascinating read.

Mehta talks with the poor and the super wealthy, with poets and merchants, with cooks and gourmands. His curiosity and willingness to listen is extraordinary. It’s clear that tons of research went into Maximum City, including dangerous interactions with killers and other criminals. Mehta is unsparing in his accounts of the corruption, incompetence and indifference of the city. And yet – and it’s an important “yet” – he loves the city and its people. There’s great warmth and compassion in his writing.

Maximum City is not a travel book. I’m sure, too, that boosters and realtors hate it. But for those of us who have not been to Mumbai/Bombay and are curious, for those of us who find ourselves drawn to cities and city life, it is a book well worth our time.

David Potash

December 31, 2018 Reviews

Realistic Democracy From Political Scientists

My education as an historian carried with it appreciation for – as well as distrust of – political science. When historians congregate, political science often gets short shrift. The complaints are more than just sniffing at the math, too (“Formulas don’t explain history!). Political science often looks at political behavior through a lens that historians have difficulty understanding or appreciating. At the same time, many of us trained in history often cast a covetous glance at the political scientists. They are great at testing the counterfactual, at looking across time and location, and at advancing very useful arguments. Whether we admit it or not, we often borrow from them.

Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels is the kind of political science that historians admire. It is clearly written, informative, and a powerful corrective to those in the field that believe that political science has all the answers (not that many do . . . ). Also, Achen and Bartels do an outstanding job with their history. Their examples are well-researched and well written.

The book explains common theories about how democracies work and how voters are supposed to make decisions. Are they making rational choices? Or using heuristics? Or perhaps they engage in retrospective voting, rewarding or punishing candidates and parties for actions? Theorists have been outlining these and other theories for decades. Unfortunately, when Achen and Bartels look at American history and the data, none of these theories hold up. They don’t really explain anything particularly well. It is a problem for political science and for all of us, today, thinking about how our democratic institutions work.

It turns out the social identity and party identity, with all its irrationality, best explains voter behavior. The arguments set out in the book are solid and difficult to refute. Voters actually change their priorities in order to align their thinking with that of their party. When push comes to shove, democracies rest on less than rational, but organized, group behavior. More telling still, when parties are relatively balanced, election results can depend upon lies, distortions and plain bad information. Democracy might be the best worst system of government. Achen and Bartels are very effective in showing just how “worst” it can be.

It’s sobering. The authors are able to cover a great deal of ground, theoretical and historical, quickly and convincingly. The lack of rationality  is also something that most political historians realize when digging deep into American history. It may not be news – but it is  extremely important. And for those of us who are paying close attention to recent politics, Democracy for Realists is a very helpful addition to the bookcase. It explains quite a lot.

David Potash

December 28, 2018 American Culture Today, Reviews

In the Belly of a Beast of a Beast

Greater than day-to-day reporting, outstanding journalism can carry  with it the creativity of literature and the power of the truth. It does not come easily – demanding talent, skill, commitment and courage.

Oscar Martinez is an El Salvadorean journalist who writes for Elfaro.net, an online Latin American newspaper. It is an informative, vibrant site that offers insight and news into a region that is often under-reported and poorly understood. It’s a good place to learn and explore.

Martinez parlayed his reporting into an outstanding book, The Beast. It is a fearless study of the migration of people’s from Latin America to El Norte, the U.S., through a focus on “La Bestia” – the freight train that runs through Latin America. Much of the content was in a series of articles penned by Martinez. The book is more, though, and taken as a whole it portrays a harrowing region and movement of peoples. There is a great heroism, compassion and care here. Also, there is horrific violence, cruelty, greed and indifference. Beautifully written and close to its subjects and their accounts, The Beast is difficult to read. The stories are that tough.

The book came out in Spain in 2010, in Mexico in 2012, and in the US – and English – a few years later. It won awards and praise. Martinez interviewed migrants, families, travelers, the police and gang members. He helps the reader understand the difference between fleeing and migrating – and also the hard choices people must make. Kidnapping, theft, rape and exploitation are rampant. The normal structures of civil society have been bought off or threatened into inactivity. The crimes, desperation and migratory patterns have developed over so many years that they collectively have become something of a “system” – and with their establishment, ever greater resistance to reform or improvement. The system itself is an indifferent beast.

Martinez writes from a perspective that every life has value, that every life matters. The Beast explores a world based on an antithetical view: life is nasty, brutish and short – and no one individual matters all that much. It is an ugly, frightening picture. It’s all the more damning because economic and political actions by the US are active contributors. Governments have been destabilized and the growth of the drug cartels has been fueled in part by American markets. Reading this book gives insight into why so many are fleeing Central American.

The book is driven by outrage, but this is no polemic. The Beast gives voice to the powerless and mostly stereotyped immigrants. Martinez cares about them and their plight – and makes the reader care, too.

David Potash

December 19, 2018 American Culture Today, Reviews

A Different World

Cesar Aira is a prolific and gifted Argentinian writer. His stories and novels are dynamic, driven by innovation, and difficult to categorize. Light on structure, improvisational, they are also very engaging. Aira reportedly has a rigid and unique process for writing: one page a day with no revisions. However he does it, he does it well. Aira is an accomplished teller of tales.

Shantytown, a short novel or novella, is a good introduction to Aira. It features a shifting focus, a tangle of characters, and a parable like simplicity that tidies up questions. It takes the reader from beginning to end quickly, but through unexpected routes. What might be “normal” in a normal novel is not normal here.

The eponymous “Shantytown” is an off-grid slum in Buenos Aires with a separate culture, its own power supply, and it’s own rules. Characters from the city proper engage with, and in, Shantytown with mixed results. The feel is film noire with a parable-like mission throughout. The collective outcome, happily, is a short and intriguing book that transports the reader to a different world.

David Potash

December 14, 2018 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Figuring Out Fidelity

There’s a certain category of book that I think of as “airport nonfiction.” These paperbacks – and they are almost always paperbacks because they’re on their umpteenth printing – are accessibly written, drawn on some research or professional activity, and go light on the argumentation and the footnotes. They most resemble long magazine articles, pieces that you might read in The New Yorker or The Atlantic. You find airport nonfiction in a doctor’s office periodical and want to spirit it home to read at your leisure. They’re engaging and interesting. We read them because they appeal to our curiosity and so many other folks read read them. And when we finish airport nonfiction, we are not necessarily any wiser for it. They are a bit like a tasty appetizer: enjoyable and a good conversation starter but not terribly filling.

An excellent addition to this category is Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Perel is a therapist who focuses on couples and sexuality. Already a successful author, she gave a very popular TED talk on infidelity before publishing the book. She’s smart, extremely media savvy, and knows how to share a good anecdote.

Who isn’t interested in relationships? No one has them figured out and no one ever really understands anyone else’s marriage or “coupledom.” Perel writes about affairs – the loss of trust and fidelity – from a privileged perspective. As a therapist who specializes in relationships and sexuality, she hears from couples and from individuals about their loves, their fears, their hopes and their pains. They tell her all to her. Perl seems to be an outstanding listener. She’s a very good writer.

Perel’s perspective is global and analytical. She wants her clients to be healthy and happy, and and that leads her to wondering why Americans hate infidelity so much. Every culture frowns upon infidelity but It turns out that relative to other countries, Americans are much more likely to condemn cheaters. Perhaps it is our lingering puritanism. Regardless of cause, Perel is compassionate. She wants to give voice to her patients and for things to work out well for them. Casting blame is of little help. Perel is also willing to challenge convention.

Perel avoids or goes light on academic arguments in the book. Her aim here is to explore, to understand, and to ask interesting questions. She regularly contrasts individual wants with societal expectations. It makes for very interesting reading – and just ever so uncomfortable reading, too, as we understand that our mores and expectations for marriage can be unexpectedly contingent. After all, why does one marry today? The economic demands of earlier times carry less weight. We have more choices and options – and there are many ways to maintain healthy relationships. Infidelity, Perel stresses, does not necessarily end a marriage. Some couples successfully navigate this tricky terrain. The journeys they take underscore the variability that we all have with love, relationships and marriage.

State of Affairs is a very interesting read, carried along by Perel’s deep curiosity and the stories she tells.

David Potash

December 11, 2018 Reviews

Lyrical Wisdom and Loneliness

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing is a brilliant and wise book that defies simple categorization. Part memoir, part reflection, part observation, with quite a bit of biography, The Lonely City is an extended conversation with an extremely smart writer. Laing is incisive, and insightful, and both in the book and around it. She’s a novelist, critic, and very well-read writer. The book is an unexpected and thought-provoking journey into what it means to be alone in the big city.

Laing tells us about herself, a Brit who moved to New York City for a marriage that never took place. She remained in New York, considering herself and her environs. Laing had lived alone before but in Gotham, she experienced a deep sense of loneliness and isolation. She saw herself as the woman in the Hopper painting Automat – on display and quite alone. An elegiac tone pervades the narrative, but it is not depressing.

From these beginnings, Laing walks us through her thoughts, ruminations, and interactions in the city. She explores her situation and makes sense of it through art and biographical investigations of four artists: Edward Hopper, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, and Edward Hopper. Each addressed questions of human interaction and connection differently. Each used their talents differently. And each, through their art, creates much-needed intimacy.

Laing’s work captures a mood, a feeling, a sense of aloneness that lurks within everyone who resides in a big city. It does so with great wisdom. It was surprisingly cheering, if only for her smarts and understanding. And perhaps because it connected this reader with the author in unexpected ways. I can’t say in any way that I know Olivia Laing, but I do feel more connected – and just a small bit smarter and more hopeful – for having read her book.

David Potash

December 3, 2018 American Culture Today, Reviews

Latino Migrant Politics, History and Theory

Making sense of US immigration policy and practice – especially what has happened in the past few decades with America and its neighbors to the south – is an extraordinarily complicated task. There are many moving pieces: local histories, transnational histories, international histories, changing laws, policies, practices and economics, and a complex overlay of perspectives and agendas. No simple narrative that can capture what has happened and why.

Alfonso Gonzales, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside, provides a provocative and helpful take on the topic in Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State. Gonzales’s research rests on a solid review of better-known historical events (public marches, legislation, speeches, etc.), interviews with more than 60 activists and many immigrants personally affected by the issue, and a powerful neo-Gramscian political theoretical lens. Antonio Gramsci was an Italian political theorist, communist, and anti-fascist who spent many years imprisoned by the Mussolini government. Gramsci’s work often revolved around questions of power and hegemony. He looked at ways that groups in power are able to remain in power, even in periods of transition and uprising. His insights – which cross many disciplinary boundaries – give tools to help map out complex issues of power, adjustment, and continuity.

Gonzales harnesses a reading of Gramsci to explore how, during a period of national shifts in political parties and massive street protests advocating for immigrant rights, conditions for so many Latino/a immigrants worsened. The US experienced a period where many thought that ground up change would lead to an opening of opportunities and supports for immigrants. It did not transpire. Governmental controls increased. The political culture worked against comprehensive immigration reform and the extension of immigrant rights. To explain this, Gonzales identifies an anti-immigrant hegemony that cuts across parties, social groups, and other categories. This “structure” has grown in power, too, under the Trump administration. Absolutely central to that effort, Gonzales effectively argues, is the criminalization of the immigrant.

Adding to the power of the narrative is Gonzales’s willingness to occasionally insert his voice as an immigrant. He is judicious but when he does insert himself, it resonates. Gonzales is an activist who cares. His work, as a theorist and as a chronicler of change, is valuable.

Reform Without Justice offers a persuasive lens to help to understand current American political culture and politics when it comes to immigration and Latinos.

David Potash

August 28, 2018 American Culture Today, Reviews