Samuel Cohen

I found this report at an estate sale a while ago. It was published seventy years ago by the University of Missouri (where I may or may not work, who’s to say). It’s a report from a three-year series of conferences on humanities teaching funded by the university and by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

In the back, there’s an appendix written by Professor Charles Hudson of the University of Missouri English Department. It’s about a new course in “general humanities” that he’d been developing with a colleague. They’d spent a year traveling the country, studying humanities programs at other universities. In the appendix, he lays out his rationale for the course.

The above is part of his rationale for teaching in the “humanistic disciplines.” It is a very mid-1950s statement, from the default male pronoun to the talk of values and a “philosophy of life.” As the passage itself says of this last phrase, though, its triteness should not blind us to its importance. Further, this importance, it insists, must be understood as being about, in his words, not a ready-made system of values but rather free and enlightened choice among values.

Today there were two developments in the long, ongoing war on the humanities, and they made me think of that war in the light of this report. The first development was Chris Rufo, Mark Bauerlein, and the rest of the trustees Ron DeSantis put in charge of New College voting to shutter their gender studies program. Rufo tweeted:

Incoherence aside (Rufo is not a strong writer or thinker, and that second sentence is especially good evidence), this tweet is an example of what Professor Hudson warned against seventy years ago: thinking that the humanities are about teaching a ready-made system of values. The board’s express aim of turning New College into another Hillsdale College, one that it has pursued ruthlessly, firing Pat Okker, the college president, and pushing scores of faculty to the exits, has nothing to do with a free and enlightened choice of values.

Today’s other development happened at West Virginia University, which looks like it’s being stripped for parts under serial school-colored bowtie adopter Gordon Gee, ostensibly to deal with a financial crisis. It was reported today that the Department of World Languages is being recommended for closing, with all programs being shut down and total reduction of faculty. This development is an example of another front in the war on the humanities. I cannot remember, among all the announcements of closures and reductions in recent years, there being any mention of STEM departments and programs. Foreign language departments are threatened routinely, usually under the logic that they can’t support themselves, a logic that only appears to make sense in a non-profit institution that as a matter of course subsidizes all kinds of activities and programs its stewards decide are worthy.

To decide that the study of foreign languages is not important enough to support is to decide that the humanities don’t matter. To decide that gender studies has no place in higher education is to decide that the values that the humanities disciplines consider shouldn’t be chosen freely but rather that the institution, in some cases the state, should choose them ahead of time. Whatever these people think universities are for–to provide culture war battlegrounds or neckwear color schemes–the result of their decisions is that it is harder for their schools to produce graduates who can think critically about values. It’s hard not to think that what those who make these decisions really want is to reduce the chances that their schools might produce broadly educated future employees, voters, parents, citizens, people who can choose their values for themselves. As the man who is somehow still the leader of Rufo’s party once said he loves the poorly educated, so do the people in charge of these schools seem to love the unfreely, uncuriously, narrowly educated. The philosophy of life that Professor Hudson thought study of the humanities could allow students to form for themselves has no place in this impoverished vision of higher education, a vision based on a system of values that is itself impoverished. Anger and frustration on behalf of colleagues close to these situations aside, it is the persistence of this impoverished vision of the world that keeps me up at night, writing blog posts into the wee hours, wishing things were different.

Look, it’s Florida House Bill 999, a festering, inflamed pustule on the body politic of The Great State of Snowbirds, Twelve-Lane Highways, Murderous Wildlife, and Exception. It was introduced yesterday with great fanfare in The Sunshine Apparently Isn’t Always a Great Disinfectant State, and with a catchy title:

Technically that entire thing is the title. If they’re taking suggestions for shorter, more memorable alternatives, maybe they could go with the Florida Understands the Correct Knowledge Inculcation Necessary for Government to Massacre Education in the Sunshine State Act. You make the acronym. (Leave off Act.)

It’s all there in the title, but we should look at a few highlights in the FUCKINGMESS Act. (Oops I made the acronym for you.) Shall we? No, you first.

This part is a masterpiece of bigotry and incoherence. “[…] a curriculum that teaches identity politics, such as Critical Race Theory, or defines American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on,” &c.? These people want to tell other people what they can teach when they can’t even be relied on to construct a sentence that doesn’t collapse in a gentle warm breeze such as you might find on the shell-strewn beaches of Sanibel? But the bigotry somehow shines through like blazing, myeloma-encouraging sunshine through a thin, sticky coat of Hawaiian Tropic.

Instead, the bill goes on to say, gen ed courses should eschew “theoretical” or “exploratory” content in favor of “traditional, historically accurate, and high quality” coursework. (Again, make it make sense, these sentences! Make the adjectives appropriate to the nouns!) Why? How else are we going to “preserve the constitutional republic”? I mean really, how else? (Also, fuck democracy, we’re not a democracy, someone else can brainwash the kids to preserve that.)

I think everybody knows that the only antidote to the crap being peddled by the Rootless Cosmopolitan Globalist Cultural Marxist instructors raking in almost nothing to teach the Children Who Are the Future of Florida (no acronym there) is a burning, puts-hair-on-your-chest Tito’s Vodka (or what’s Sammy Hagar’s tequila called–Cabo Wabo? Don’t make me look it up)-like shot of Entrepreneurial Vision, though good luck getting any of them to pronounce that first word correctly, not that I can half the time either. Trot out some Exceptional Individuals; they will Highlight the Possibilities. And for God’s sake don’t interact with experts from government, politics, policy, and journalism on a frequent basis or any-other-level-of-recurrence basis. No experts, please, people. What are universities for, manufacturing expertise? What are we, a goddamn democracy?

As John Dewey, Thorsten Veblen, James Cattell, and other early proponents of shoring up faculty governance at institutions of higher education argued, these institutions ought to be run like democracies. Cattell came right out and said it 110 years ago: “The university should be a democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is part” [sic, it’s a constitutional republic, you dumb bunny]. But as Ron DeSantis, sponsoring representative Alex Andrade, Head Architect of Motivelessly Malign Education Reform (ooh! Tom DeLay will be jealous if that catches on, unless he’s dead) Christopher Rufo, and all of the others skipping gaily down this path that Betsy DeVos so boldly blazed would respond, Make us. That is, faculty governance might be for democracies, but hiring is for the Captains of Industry (or junk bonds, whatever) populating boards these days (and in Veblen’s time, when he called them Captains of Erudition). The bill (as the two-page title hints) is full of exciting opportunities for hiring and don’t let’s forget firing to be taken out of the hands of the people who are qualified to judge scholarship and teaching in their disciplines and put into the meaty mitts of the Captains. After all, if we want to smother Woke in its sleep, keeping it from saying Gay or Actually it’s really hate, not heritage, we have to run these places like the tight ships that we know all entrepreneurial enterprises run by the exceptional individuals to be, and cut out the middlemen, unless they’re deans.

So anyway, it was nice while it lasted. American higher ed, American democracy, America, all that. I rewatched the original Rollerball the other night (which holds up as an impossible combination of awesome and awful, by the way), and in its future, America is gone, corporations have divvied up the world and are now running everything and everyone. There’s a part of the film where James Caan gets made fun of by a teammate for wanting to read a book for himself, rather than getting one of the librarians who aren’t really librarians to summarize it for him; he finds out they can’t let him have what he wants because it’s classified but also because the books have all been digitized and are in Geneva on a supercomputer the size of a house that would now fit on your wrist, except it turns out a bunch of them–and so, much of the world’s knowledge–have been lost. It seems it’s not in the interest of the corporations that run the world to have people know things or think about how things are organized and who’s in charge of them and whether any of it should change. No exploratory content for them, thank you very much.

A student found this on the floor in my classroom a couple of weeks ago and gave it to me. I reported it to campus police, but as I told the officer, I had no reason to suspect a crime had been committed, so there was nothing for anybody to do. I was told I could dispose of it, but I haven’t yet, and this morning I’m sitting at my desk in my office on campus, staring at it and wondering how it is we just keep going about our business.

Some of the business I’m going about is teaching, and some of that teaching is about the university itself, and that teaching has me thinking about what it means to find a shell casing on the floor of your classroom. We’re talking about Chris Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University tomorrow in my academic novel/Critical University Studies grad seminar. It is a detailed, thorough examination of how the promise of public higher education, made after World War II with the GI Bill and subsequent corrections of its inequities, has been broken over decades by the Right, which would rather not allow education to remake society to be more fair and more just, thank you very much. And they are still at it, pushing bills straight off of the Christopher Rufo Anti-Education Legislation Assembly Line through committees and onto state house floors, bills that would further break the promises of public higher education and public primary and secondary education. And they’re doing this not only through their hold on the purse strings and their waving of the bible but by failing to protect schools from violence.

This isn’t simply a list of things I’m mad about (for one thing, it would be much longer). The people in power in red states are unmaking the public university–unmaking public education at all levels–because they just don’t value education. The Right is actively working to destroy the public schools and has been defunding and attacking higher education since before Reagan ran for Governor on it. Between “school choice,” faith-based and anti-antiracist attacks on curriculum, and the demonizing of teachers and school boards, the Right is winning its war on K-12 public education. Between defunding, faith-based and anti-antiracist attacks on curriculum, and the demonizing of professors and activist students, it’s winning its war on public higher education. In its failure to confront gun violence–in what can only be seen as its active enabling of widespread access to firearms and hostility to any curbs on what no constitutional scholar worth a shit pretends is an inalienable right–the Right is winning its war on education at all levels. If it’s not safe to go to school anymore, the only equal access left is to guns.

This is what a college campus looks like tonight in America.

Tomorrow marks five years since the shooting in Parkland.

Tonight, the nation is watching as another shooting unfolds at Michigan State University.

We don’t have to live like this. pic.twitter.com/w0mnDC8hN2

— Giffords (@GiffordsCourage) February 14, 2023

At noon this past Friday, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, I presided over a “Just in Time” session (one of the sessions designed to address timely events or developments in the profession) on the topic of working in the profession at a time when that work is under attack. When I had put the roundtable together, I took an April speech by the architect of the Critical Race Theory panic, Christopher Rufo, as emblematic of those attacks. The speech, given at conservative Christian Hillsdale College, was titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” That morning, as I found out after the session, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had announced the appointment of six new trustees to New College of Florida, including a dean from Hillsdale College and Mr. Rufo. Members of the roundtable shared accounts of situations at their campuses and of how they have responded. I’m posting my introductory remarks below. I’m including the introductions of participants so you can follow their work; I didn’t include their titles because I wanted to emphasize that at times like these, maybe at all times, we are workers more than we are professionals. The session was grim and inspirational and, while I can’t share their remarks, I’m grateful for them and for the discussion that followed as well as for all the other people I heard last week theorizing academic labor and strategizing about how to protect academic workers in and outside of the academy.

Welcome to our Just in Time Roundtable, “Working under Siege; or, A Hill to Die On.” I’m Sam Cohen, and since the current chancellor of my campus and president of my university system has asked that we not identify ourselves as working for the university if we’re going to be saying critical things about it, I won’t. I’ll do brief introductions so there’s more time for discussion and then say a few words to introduce our topic:

Helane Androne works in the English Department at Miami University of Ohio; Emily Hind works in the University of Florida’s Department of Spanish and Portugese; Mercedes Chavez works in the Ohio State University’s Department of Comparative Studies; Christopher Hanlon works in the Department of English at Arizona State University; Alex Trimble Young works in the Honors College at ASU; Peter Caster works in the Department of English at University of South Carolina Spartanburg. Unfortunately, Jeffrey Insko is unable to be with us today, but he’s here in spirit.

Today we’ll be addressing escalating challenges to post-secondary instructors’ freedom to do their work. It’s a red state problem, but it’s also a national problem with astroturfed roots in Washington think tanks and in the fertile soil of American fear and hatred. And it’s a problem whose effects are felt on the ground where we study and teach and where students learn. The roundtable is framed as a response to a speech by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022 entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” In the speech, Rufo, architect of the campaign against public education using the largely imaginary presence in them of Critical Race Theory, broadens his attack on education to call for universal school choice in K-12 education and for legislative control over public higher education.

With regard to higher education, seven states have passed laws that qualify as what PEN America, AAUP, and other institutions keeping an eye on this kind of activity call “educational gag orders”; additionally, there are eleven live bills now working their way through state legislatures across the country. In my state of Missouri, home to many colleges that might be the one where I work, Rep. Ann Kelley has prefiled one of these, and it includes language of the kind we’re hearing around the country. Here’s a snippet from Missouri HB75:

No employee of an institution of higher education shall require or make part of a course the concept that:
(1) One race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex;
(2) An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;
(3) An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of the individual’s race or sex;
(4) Members of one race or sex cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex;
(5) An individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by the individual’s race or sex;
(6) An individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex;
(7) An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex; or
(8) Meritocracy or traits such as a strong work ethic are racist or sexist or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race

Of course, people have been and will continue to be punished and fired for such activity, regardless of the existence of these laws. Another part of the strategy is to work not just on the institutions but on public opinion, and that battle is ongoing, as scholarly and pedagogical work is cynically misrepresented and deployed by think tank hacks like Rufo and eager right-wing politicians like Rep. Kelley. So, again regardless of what happens in state houses—and in court houses, as Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act is under federal injunction—faculty and staff are under threat—as is itself clear from Governor DeSantis’s recent demand, in the words of a memo published Wednesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, that public colleges “provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activity related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory.”

So that’s the siege. It’s not a new phenomenon—we’ve had culture wars in this country for a long time, although they heated up after the end of the Cold War and people didn’t call them that until the early 1990s, thanks to James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book Culture Wars. The teaching of histories of racism and oppression was a topic of debate when I was in graduate school in the 1990s, with John Brenkman speaking at the 1991 English Institute about “the multiculturalism controversy” and Henry Louis Gates writing about arguments over Critical Race Theory in Luke Menand’s 1998 collection on academic freedom. We’re decades into these wars, with the old issues still live, now joined by global warming and the pandemic and fanned by a now-ended presidency entirely built on them and a party dedicated to running on them.

Siege warfare is an ancient and mostly outmoded strategy of attrition, carried out by surrounding an enemy inside its walls and by a combination of direct assault and blockade attempting to force surrender. The object of the siege tries to hold off the assaults and survive the attempt to starve it. That’s us. But this modern kind of institutional warfare, if you listen to Rufo’s speech and pay attention to what’s happening on your own campuses, also involves assaults from within. While state legislatures try to control the purse strings, private money works with upper administration to build academic centers that hire and program according to right-wing agendas and that weaken traditional department-based hiring and tenuring, the fundamental basis of academic freedom; perhaps most threatening, the tenure track dwindles to a fraction of its former self, depriving most faculty (73%, last I heard) of the fundamental protection tenure is supposed to provide. In the next few minutes, we’ll hear from faculty who have worked under sieges of various kinds and we’ll hear about strategies they’ve employed to defend against them. And then we’ll hear from you about ways to think about all of this. Maybe we’ll also have the opportunity to talk about ways to reconcile what we know about the historical and current damage done by the institutions in which we work with our desire to save and even improve them—to talk about why this hill, even though its buildings may be built on stolen labor and stand on stolen land and even though what happens here can be as likely to perpetuate as to challenge social hierarchies, is a hill worth dying on.

Today we buried my stepfather, Alan Romm. He died Tuesday morning, having lived ninety good years, the last thirty-three with my mother, and we gave him a good send-off and are sad. We talked about him a lot, at the funeral in the temple on the Upper East side, the burial in New Jersey, and back in the city, hanging out in their apartment over bagels and lox. One thing that came up again and again was his curiosity. He was a mensch and he was a curious man, curious about the world and about you. When you saw him, whether you hadn’t seen him in six months or had talked to him on the phone six days ago, he was full of questions about what you were up to, how school or work or life was, what you thought the future held for you. And the curiosity about the world, like the curiosity about you, wasn’t bullshit. At first, I thought it was, but I soon realized I was wrong. He really wanted to know.

Flying to New York Wednesday morning, I was thinking about this quality of his. I was also thinking, separately, about the state of higher education in the US, as I often do these days, in particular about recent efforts in states like Florida and Idaho to infringe on the freedom of instructors to teach as they see fit, and I was reminded of an infuriatingly wrongheaded essay that had been reprinted earlier in the week in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jonathan Haidt (originally appearing as a Heterodox Academy blog post) in which he announced his resignation from his scholarly society because of its attempts to address DEI concerns (by impertinently asking a question, one on a form containing many, about how his work might promote anti-racism). In a masterpiece of special pleading, Haidt claims that the university’s “fiduciary duty” to truth cannot coexist with these efforts to promote “social justice.” I realized that the conversation about the right’s attempts to outlaw teaching it doesn’t like reminded me of Haidt’s exercise in intellectual dishonesty posing as principled, voice-in-the-wilderness bravery because neither seems interested in accounting for something that is at the heart of higher education, the thing that was also at the heart of the man my family buried today: curiosity.

Ron Desantis, whoever it is who is telling employees of the state of Idaho that they can’t discuss abortion, and Christopher Rufo and all the other culture warriors who have made full-time jobs of attacking education do so for various reasons. Those reasons include a heartfelt belief that children need to be protected from extra-biblical ideas (ideas outside of their cramped interpretation, anyway); a base strategy to throw the red meat of racism, homophobia, and the fantasy of the persecuted Christian to the base; a desire to destroy public higher education in order to keep potential voters from asking too many questions. Curiosity–asking questions about the world–is anathema for all of these people just as it is anathema to the authoritarian personality and the authoritarians who take advantage of it.

The attitude of conservative politicians toward the modern research university is fluid. They love the university when it’s producing future workers and hate it pretty much all the rest of the time, except maybe at tailgates. They tolerate it when it’s throwing up STEM-devoted buildings they can put their names on and when it sticks to producing employees for the businessmen who keep them in power. They hate it when the faculty it employs and the students it charges tuition to question their policies and the ways of seeing the world that inform those policies.

Unfortunately for them, questioning is what universities are for. I don’t think Jonathan Haidt’s “truth” is quite right: truth might be one way of framing the telos of the university, as he puts it, its end goal, but it’s a mistake to think it’s anything but a distant goal. Outside of the hard mathematical and scientific facts on which we build our machines and fix our bodies (facts which themselves do get revised as science advances), there is “truth,” and nobody should think they’ve reached the truth, that they possess it; that’s for religious fundamentalists and people who think the Laffer Curve is a real thing. Truth is the thing we work towards, endlessly, by asking questions about the world and what we think we know about it. We test what we think we know, confirm it until somebody else finds a new way to test it that disproves it. We construct ways of seeing things that work for us until somebody shows things to us from a different angle, in a different light. And then we work from there. The work of scholarship–the work of the university–is the work of finding new questions to ask and teaching students how to ask them too.

The curiosity at the heart of this work, like my stepfather’s curiosity, is a whole orientation toward the world. Alan let you know he loved you by the way he asked endless questions of you; the questions he asked about the world were how you knew he loved the world. Working to keep people from asking questions is also a whole orientation to the world, and it’s not just wrong in itself, it’s opposed to the love the people who ask the questions have. It’s about mastery, about domesticating, about pinning the world down and sitting on its chest; it’s not about loving the world, about expressing the joy of exploring it, getting to know it, not thinking you’ve got it all figured out and can safely ignore it.

It’s a tradition at Jewish burials for each mourner to drop three shovels of dirt onto the casket after it’s lowered. It’s a hard thing to do, but as the rabbi today put it, it’s a reciprocal act, returning the care shown to you. As I took my turn, I noticed two thick roots cut off at the end of the hole; they seemed to come from an evergreen growing just behind the plot. Another tradition of Jewish burials is to be buried in a plain pine box, one that doesn’t interrupt the returning of the body to the earth. I’m not a believer, but I believe in this practice because of what it does for the earth and what it says about our relation to it. When I think of today, I will think of his orientation to the world, of the cycle of curiosity and care, and of those roots. And I will remember that the root of curious is care.

I spent part of the morning just now trying to put together a roundtable for the upcoming Modern Language Association convention on the subject of nationwide attempts to control what instructors in higher ed (though of course not just in higher ed) are allowed to teach. Then I got an email from my textbook publisher granting me access to a digital sample of the new edition of the composition textbook I author. So of course I immediately shared a blurry shot of the new cover on social media (with a link to the publisher website because once a salesman, &c.). Then as I was scrolling through the sample, I ran across a new section we’d added to the introduction and, reading it, saw some connections.

The new section was added at the request of my editor, who felt that it was an important subject to broach, and I think she was right. I’m going to share it here.

The roundtable, should it make it into the program, will be framed as a response to a speech by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022 entitled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” In the speech, Rufo, the architect of the campaign against public education using the attack on the largely imaginary presence of Critical Race Theory in our schools, broadens his attack on education to explicitly call for universal school choice in K-12 education and for state legislator control over public higher ed institutions. That control, in Rufo’s vision, can be exerted in a number of ways, from the more direct tightening of purse strings, to the more indirect surveys of faculty’s beliefs, establishing of conservative centers within state university flagships, and removing requirements for K-12 teachers to hold advanced degrees in education.

Forgot to tag @MacmillanLearn & @Bedford_English! Also @RonDeSantisFL & @GregAbbott_TX (& @realchrisrufo), all of whom will love this new edition. https://t.co/C4dK1Jxpvd

— Sam Cohen (@cohenss) September 15, 2022

The goal of Rufo–and DeSantis and Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and the many other Republicans he’s influenced–is to dismantle public education in order to defuse the dangerous powder keg that is an informed citizenry. That isn’t quite the way they’d put it, of course. A state senator from Missouri, speaking on the floor of the state house yesterday, said just as important to him as saving the unborn is fighting back against the dangerous radical left-wing ideology that’s infecting our schools (and he did use most of those words, and also he’s a doctor).

As I say in the introduction to the new edition of my textbook: counter to what the anti-“CRT” operatives and politicians believe, as long as do it with respect, empathy, and honesty, we should be able to talk about any subject in the classroom. As Bill Germano and Kit Nicholls say in Syllabus, empathetic engagement is at the center of what we do: we learn together. It’s what knowledge is. Storming school board meetings and state houses, passing laws that impose penalties on instructors and institutions for teaching what those in power don’t want taught: that’s not learning. It doesn’t produce knowledge. And it certainly isn’t about community. It’s about control.

Sid Jacobson, writer of comic books such as Casper the Friendly Ghost and Richie Rich, died on July 23rd; his obituary ran in The New York Times today, under Olivia Newton-John’s. He was also the writer of The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, a book I gave a talk about fifteen years ago that I am graphically adapting for my blog today because I returned to it this morning after seeing the obituary and thought that, in spite of its many flaws, it might have a couple of useful things to say to us today. (Offered with apologies to Sid Jacobson and the late illustrator Ernie Colón, who were just doing their jobs, and to whomever is offended by egregious violations of copyright law).

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No Alternative: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation and the False Promise of Genre (MLA 2007, Chicago)

“A comic book about what?” In 1986, when the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus brought alternative comics and longer graphic narrative to the attention of a broader public, this was the question asked first and loudest. A comic book about the Holocaust? Others followed: Jews as mice? Nazis as cats? Will anyone be wearing a cape? The same kind of response met Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s 2006 The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation (which I’ll refer to as the Adaptation) when it was published last August. A comic book about 9/11? But for many, especially in the academy, in particular those in English departments, Maus had taken care of that response. The intervening decades had seen not only the critical and pedagogical canonization of Maus but also the appearance of works by many graphic narrative writer/artists who took on history, the political, and other topics once not thought of as comics material (including, in 2004, one about 9/11, Spiegelman’s own In the Shadow of No Towers, about which Dana will have much more to say). I mention this because with the adjustment in generic expectations came another assumption: that longer graphic narratives were subversive, that they were outside the mainstream in their ideological orientation, that they were alternative or oppositional. In their introduction to the 2006 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies dedicated to graphic narrative, Marianne DeKoven and Hilary Chute see the alternative in the very essence of the form. They argue that graphic narrative “always refuses a problematic transparency, through an explicit awareness of its own surfaces,” that it can take on “complex political and historical issues with an explicit, formal degree of self-awareness.” In this same issue Gillian Whitlock, citing Spiegelman’s Towers as a prime example, writes that comics “can free us to ‘imagine differently’ in a time of violence and censorship.” Kristiaan Versluys, writing elsewhere about the same text, calls it a “counter-narrative.”

Graphic narrative is often seen as alternative, I think, partly because it is true of many of its best examples and partly because these are the kinds of things many of us (and I include myself) like to find in the works we study. I mention this now not because it is true of the Adaptation, which could only be more official if Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, had not just written the foreword but had also written and drawn the entire book themselves. However, the moment of generic confusion that happens to graphic-narrative familiar readers when they first encounter the Adaptation—knowing it’s an adaptation of a government report yet somehow still expecting subversiveness—can be a productive moment. While the Adaptation offers no alternative, reading it with an eye opened to questions of genre can help us think about the ways in which this work, also a representative of the genre of historical narrative, is, like its source, a narrative whose shape is heavily influenced by another genre, the unofficial but dominant narrative of national history. In the next few minutes I will argue that by laying it out in condensed and graphic form, the Adaptation lets us more easily see how the story of 9/11 as it appears in The 9/11 Commission Report (which I will refer to simply as the Report) and in many other texts and other media has been made to fit into the story the nation likes to tell itself about itself.

As Hayden White and others have argued, history is always just a narrative. The historian takes her material—“facts”—and then has to, in White’s words, “choose, sever and carve them up” in order to create a story. The choices made in American historical narratives are often shaped by a larger national narrative about victoriousness and righteousness, what’s been called the triumphalist narrative, which, when faced with experiences and deeds that don’t fit that storyline, elides them in the interest of maintaining itself. (To see what is indicated by the triumphalist narrative, think of what James Berger in After the End argues is opposed to it, the traumatic, which does not leave out those moments of defeat and violence and thus is truer, if less comforting.) Individual historical narratives that have a wide audience can have a wide impact on the health of the larger triumphalist narrative, and the 9/11 stories have been widely disseminated: in addition to the free version downloadable from the Internet, the Norton version of the Report (there were also at least two others, from Dunne mass market and Public Affairs) sold, according to Publishers’ Weekly, 1.43 million copies in 2004, the year of its publication. According to someone at Farrar Straus & Giroux, the Adaptation has had over 100,000 combined hard and soft cover sales; in addition, the online magazine Slate put the entire book up on its site.

In their foreword to the Adaptation, Kean and Hamilton say their purpose in the Report was “not only to inform our fellow citizens about history but also to energize and engage them on behalf of reform and change, to make our country safer and more secure.” It is not the case, despite their good intentions, that they succeeded in doing this. The Adaptation, five times shorter than the Report, condenses and simplifies, but does not stray from its parent text. The chapters, narrative line, and most of the words come directly from the Report. The end result of what is by all indications a sincere attempt to put the commission’s conclusions before a wider audience through the use of graphic narrative is, unfortunately, an intensification of its failure to inform about the past; however, I believe, again, that this intensification helps us to see the triumphalist narrative at work in it and in histories like it. 

As Benjamin DeMott wrote in Harper’s shortly after the Report appeared, it “had to be the real thing,” weighing in as it did at 567 pp, with 100+ pages of footnotes and the U.S. Seal on the cover, the product of massive research, including over 2.5 million pages of documents, public testimony from 160 witnesses, interviews of 1200 people in ten countries, all gathered and written up over a period of 20 months with a staff of nearly 80. Despite this access and this effort, though, the Report is hamstrung by a fear of the appearance of bias. In DeMott’s words: “In the course of blaming everybody a little, the Commission blames nobody—blurs the reasons for the actions and hesitations of successive administrations, masks choices that, fearlessly defined, might actually have vitalized our public political discourse.” Instead, he continues, “Issues of commitment and responsibility are time and again reconfigured as matters of opinion, or as puzzles of memory, or as pointlessly distracting ‘partisan’ squabbles.”

This refusal to blame and desire to spread responsibility around for things not done marks the entire Report. One of the more important examples of the refusal to blame is that concerning the now-famous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing, or PDB. When interviewed in April 2004, Bush said he didn’t know terrorists were in the U.S.. This was a lie, as numerous officials’ testimony indicated. When Bush asserted in his testimony that the August 6 PDB, with the famous section unambiguously titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.,” was “historical” in nature, he was also lying, and the Report glosses over this moment, missing the opportunity to plainly state what the briefing actually said and to point out the discrepancy.

Other examples include the refusal to challenge the president’s explanation for his remaining in the classroom he was visiting for seven minutes after having learned of the first plane—he is reported to have said he “felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening”—or to challenge the White House obfuscations about the Vice President’s decision to issue the shoot-down order he was not empowered to make (which Scooter Libby described Cheney making “in about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing”—and he meant this as a compliment). The desire to spread responsibility around, regardless of facts and historical context, also results in the attempt to apportion blame equally between the Clinton and Bush administrations, which, as countless analysts point out, is inaccurate, as it ignores the difference between the historical contexts, in particular the opportunities which presented themselves to the Bush administration and did not present themselves to Clinton’s.

The Adaptation shares these faults of the Report, and its visuals reinforce them. some examples:

Refusals to come to conclusions about responsibility (which sometimes appear under the heading “conclusions”) appear next to tricky but outright evasion and more subtle forms of attention-deflection. Practically buried in the narrative, in two small boxes, is a semi-conclusion about a large matter, the Atta trip to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer, which concludes that it didn’t happen while avoiding mention of who “alleged” that it occurred in the first place or any discussion of why it would have been alleged.

Even more subtle is the lack of visual interest in the two panels devoted to Bush’s self-serving and dishonest testimony about the August 6 briefing. The August 6 Report wasn’t historical in nature; that he said he did not recall discussing it doesn’t mean he didn’t; he had been advised that there was a cell and he hadn’t done anything. It’s worth noting that the murkiness of the language is the result of the White House insisting there be no direct transcription if Bush and Cheney were to testify.

These aspects of the Report and Adaptation can be explained, in part, as due to White House attempts to undercut the commission’s work by asserting that some of its members—Democrats—were partisan. There was also a campaign to discredit Richard Clarke, as well as other critics. Beyond these attempts and the commission’s being in a difficult position from the start, having to fight with the administration over who would appear, and how, over funding, over time, was the commission’s desire for unanimity. Elizabeth Drew reported on this desire, writing: “The main partisan division within the commission, I was told, was over how hard to press the White House for information that it was holding back. In its effort to achieve a unanimous, bipartisan report, the commission decided not to assign ‘individual blame’ and avoided overt criticism of the President himself.” The upshot of all this was, in DeMott’s words, that the commission’s report “can’t call a liar a liar.”

But these failures can also be understood as the result of the influence of the triumphalist narrative on this history’s construction. This influence can be traced throughout the Adaptation, even from its cover’s inclusion, next to the title, of the image of the fireman with his hand over his face, an echo of the popular desire to find heroes, evident in the way people called the office workers who died in the Towers “heroes.”

It can be seen even in the most visually striking and in some ways least problematic sections of the Adaptation, the twenty-page timeline following the four flights on the morning of September 11 and the closely following six-page timeline showing when various agencies on the ground knew what was happening. Set against a black background, tracking the relentless forward movement of time toward four conclusions we already know about—and doing it twice—the timelines offer a textbook example of graphic narrative’s ability to spatialize time.

Already evident, however, is the triumphalist influence, in elements which emphasize the superhero story roots of graphic narrative, including cartoonish rendering of sinister, swarthy bad guys and use of sound renderings.

But more important than the demonized enemy element of the superhero genre influence (an influence which is more relevant to what we actually get in the Adaptation than the alternative comic or subversive graphic narrative) is this emphasis on the heroic. In addition to the cowboys and Indian language of some of the reproduced testimony, we get Bush as head cowboy. It’s everywhere, but you can see it here, in the heroic clenched fists (especially in contrast to Clarke) and bomber jacket; note also the progression down the page from Congress to Bush to soldiers, presenting the military action as the will of the people.

The heroic self-image central to what Tom Engelhardt calls “victory culture” is evident in these moments from the Adaptation. What this comic-book version of the Report makes plain (with apologies to more sophisticated graphic narratives and those who love them) is the comic-book quality of the triumphalist narrative. The infantilizing two-dimensionality of the worldview insisted upon by American triumphalism is too flat for dissent or complexity. Its influence on historical narratives of  9/11 cannot be overstated. This influence can be seen in the cover’s fireman even more than in the rancor toward those who tried to understand the enemy, such as Susan Sontag or Bill Maher, a rancor driven by what Joan Didion (in her short book Fixed Ideas: America Since 9/11) calls a “belligerent idealization of historical ignorance.” Triumphalism must have “evildoers,” but it needs heroes more, and complicated accounts blaming our own are not welcome.  The reason it needs heroes more is evident in an image in the section on commission recommendations towards the end of the Adaptation.

This nightmare, the smoking gun that could turn out to be a mushroom cloud, as the president’s men and women argued in the run-up to war, is an old nightmare and, as Paul Boyer and others have demonstrated, a powerful cultural force. The sense of vulnerability awakened since our use of the atomic bomb is at the heart of post-45 triumphalism. And it is also key to our reaction to 9/11, as Engelhardt argues in a recent essay, because the image of the towers’ destruction resembled our imaginations of nuclear apocalypse. Pointing to the immediate references to Pearl Harbor and nuclear winter, the naming of the World Trade Center site “ground zero,” and the discrepancy in reactions to events at that site and to those at the less apocalyptic-seeming Pentagon, Engelhardt argues that the histories constructed of that day and of what led to it would have been very different (as would events since) if unconscious fears of the nation’s vulnerability had not been so played upon by the visual impact of the Towers’ collapse.

Reading histories right—that is, reading accounts of the past critically—requires attention to the larger narratives informing those accounts, sensitivity to the fantasy stories and nightmare visions that shape them. If you’ll pardon the pun—and I’m not sure I would—the Adaptation is a good illustration of this necessity.

Sometimes it is just a fight. Sometimes, regrettably, it is just us and them, good and bad. It’s never good and evil–I can’t think of a less helpful term for characterizing the people you disagree with than evil–but sometimes it’s not possible to characterize the struggle over the future of the place we live and of the lives of the people with whom we live in it as anything other than a battle.

I’m thinking this now because I watched the January 6 hearings yesterday and because I’ve just read a couple of excellent pieces about Yascha Mounk and other anti-woke warriors from the right and the center. There are those who attack people in politics and in higher education who value and work for diversity and the rights of the marginalized from a position that is explicitly against those things, and there are those who do the same from a position they describe as less extreme, claiming to support those ideals but against what they call the extremes on the left.

Of the former group, John Warner writes:

These are people who are actively hostile to education and to the larger democratic ideal of a diverse society. (The telos to which Warner refers is the pursuit of truth in higher ed, but it’s not hard to see that it’s about more than that, that it’s about everything.) Then there are the Mounks, who flatter themselves by thinking of their discomfort with the angry left as a sensible bid to save democracy rather than a both-sidesing staking out of a middle ground that doesn’t exist, between two positions whose extremism can only falsely be called equivalent. As Ian Beacock writes of Mounk’s new book:

Sometimes you just are on the side of the good cause. Addressing the history of how people in power in this country have treated groups with less power–addressing it in education and in politics–is the good cause. Fighting against these things in a way that allows you to convince yourself that you are on the side of what’s right, even when you are simply helping right wing extremists who may not be as far to the right of you as you think (and not because you don’t understand them)–this is being on the wrong side.

The other reason I’m thinking about this this morning is because I’m starting to see friends and internet acquaintances (and strangers) stating their aversion to voting for members of this administration who might be running for president in the next election. You might think seeing this would lead me to make an argument for compromise, for finding a sensible position between two extremes–for just the thing I’m arguing sometimes doesn’t exist–but that’s not what I’m thinking. Instead it leads me to want to argue for voting with an understanding of how voting works and of what the good causes are up against. There’s nothing wrong with finding some Democratic politicians distasteful for their failure to stand up for the good causes as resolutely as you’d like. What you do in this situation is fight to elevate other candidates who stand up straighter and stronger. But you do this understanding that there’s a difference between thinking about things and getting things done, and you vote for whichever candidate emerges as the nominee.

There are, again, some ideas and causes between which there’s no sensible middle ground. But elections and legislation happen on the battleground in the middle, between the good and the bad. If you want someone to fight for the good, you might have to vote for someone who is not your ideal candidate. Not doing so shows nothing but your failure to understand that between good and bad, allowing the bad to win is an infinitely, painfully, disastrously worse outcome than allowing someone less than ideal to win. They might not fight as hard as you’d like for these causes; they may be better positioned to scratch out some wins for those causes. It’s hard to know. What’s not hard to know is that the guy on the other side will be actively fighting against those causes.

So all I want to say this morning is that sometimes it really does come down to a fight between good and bad. If you think of yourself as on the side of the good but less extreme and hysterical than some of its champions, criticize the way some people conceive of the good and the way they fight for it, and the bad will win. If you think of yourself as on the side of the good and won’t support people who conceive of it and fight for it in ways different from yours, don’t support them and the bad will win. I’m putting this in simple terms because it’s simple. Like yesterday’s hearing was simple. You don’t have to think in terms of evil or of moral character: you just have to see the plain truth that there are people who for whatever reason don’t currently value democracy, diversity, equality, the rights that in this place we live have always been an ideal fallen well short of. You just have to know who’s trying to achieve this ideal and who’s not. And figure out which side you want to be on.

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon’s sprawling 2006 novel set in the late nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth, paints a picture of the turn of the century and just beyond as a time of technological innovation, rampaging capitalism, and bewilderment at the pace of change and the loss of shared meaning and purpose amid labor unrest and violence, world war, and catastrophe possibly natural, possibly not. Also included prominently are the never-aging and impossibly optimistic boys of the Chums of Chance, who among many, many other exploits encounter time travelers. Learning of a dystopian future and doubting that they could continue to remain untouched by mortality, they are “ready to deal with hell itself, to betray anything and anyone if only they could be sent back to when they were young, be allowed to regain the early boys’-book innocence.”

And they do, hopping back in the balloon in which they fly from adventure to adventure, floating above the modernizing earth, escaping from its labor troubles and coming catastrophes. They fly away and continue to pursue improbable missions in their hopeful journey to their official ostensible destination, Shambala, the mythical Tibetan Buddhist kingdom, which they and other characters seek as a place of transcendence or as a source of power, depending, among other things, on whether they are well-intentioned pilgrims trying to transcend a world of power struggles or among the “capitalist Christer Republicans” turning the American West and the globe from free to exploited.

The Fourth of July is, among other things, both an act of time travel and a search for a mythical place. This is the case in any year but especially this year, when the Constitution is being torn up by elected and unelected employees sworn to defend it and its total destruction just got put on the docket. Especially in these faux originalist times, when specious references to the specifics of the founders’ intentions are used to justify the destruction of what the documents the founders wrote make clear are the larger values they intended the nation to pursue. Following the long tradition of patriotic amnesia, ramped up in an orgy of nationalism after 9/11, we pretend to travel back in time to the nation’s founding (increasingly, in the popular imagination) as a white, Christian nation. The Fourth of July is for this vision a proud celebration of a time when American men commenced kicking ass, a recuperation of a victory culture built even early in Indian massacres that’s been taking serious hits ever since, certainly in our loss in the war in Vietnam but arguably even earlier with our dropping of the bomb, an act that makes it hard to claim we’re the ones in the white hats. Our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are the result of these hits, part of the larger cultural imperative to be innocent and victorious, to, like the Chums of Chance, betray anything to regain innocence.

The culture war battle to keep this past out of schoolchildren’s ears is driven by this same imperative. We are the nation that doesn’t lose. The Big Lie of the 2020 presidential election is driven by this imperative too, this promotion of a Myth America where everything wrong is the fault of those who don’t love it and ought to have left it or, since we’re wishing here, never ought to have come (forgetting for a moment that that’s pretty much all of us). It’s all a wishful time-travel return to a time and place of innocence that never existed.

Those of us who want this history taught right, who insist on the harmfulness of ignoring the realities of the past and who recognize that the prosperity gospel of the GOP is nothing more than a continuation of the grand resentment-based fleecing of poor whites that gave us racial capitalism–we’re having a different kind of Fourth today. There have been some powerful reflections on what our national exercise in time travel and mythical meaning-making means to them this time around. Some of the people angry about abortion and prayer in schools and gun safety and climate warning–even people who have in the past celebrated–have announced that they will wear black, they will take a knee, they’ll skip the fireworks. Others insist that expressions of patriotism are more important than ever this year, that we can’t let the flag be taken away from us.

I’m not a flag-waver; I’m an anthem-sitter. And I think I sort of understand what it feels like to know that flag’s not waving for you. But I do think there’s something to this argument. As much as we know (because they keep showing us) the dangers of nationalism and as much as patriotism manifests routinely in violations of the flag code and of basic human morality, patriotism doesn’t have to be nationalism, and pride in a country doesn’t have to be invidious or false or inspire violence. One of the things people who read Pynchon read Pynchon for (aside from the puns, the high/low mashups that in Against the Day include appearances by Karl and Groucho Mark and a dog who reads Henry James, and the beauty) is his way of exploding history so that the moments in the past that seem determinative and set in stone can be revealed for what they were and always are–moments of possibility that could have gone a million other ways.

Mason & Dixon is my favorite of his novels for the way it does this, showing that what happened could have not happened that way, that what’s happening now won’t be understood until the unknowable future happens, that the feeling of inevitability we have about history is just a feeling and not in fact the case. Mason & Dixon brought together three such moments–the 1760s, 1860s, and 1960s–moments when lines were drawn and possibilities realized or unrealized, explosions of change that came and went, pointing to future moments of possibility when lines can be redrawn or erased. The line the title characters drew turned “subjunctive to declarative,” in Pynchon’s words, but the future is always subjunctive, and moments will come around again where different possibilities can be realized.

One thing I’ve grown tired of hearing (and I’m not alone) is invocations of King’s line about “the arc of the moral universe.” He meant something particular by it, and it’s brought up to express hope, but when quoted it often carries a kind of passivity with it: don’t worry, it ends up saying, eventually we’ll have justice. We won’t–not eventually, inevitably, somewhere down the road. The long-building but sudden-seeming violence done to the legal foundation of the nation over the last two weeks should be our wake-up call. There are no laws of history or essential innocence or goodness or nugget of Declaration-declared, Constitution-constituting truth that will determine our outcome, and we can’t fly off in balloons of wishfulness or denial, refusing to look down and get our hands dirty or waiting for the revolution and pointing out the dirty hands. Maybe a dirty patriotism is what we need. A determination to do the hard, unglamorous work of democracy and compromise and resistance and to save the country for what it could be, from what its descending into becoming. Maybe it’s the only way we have to bend the arc in the right direction.

Like everyone I know who has been paying attention, I’m fucking terrified of what’s becoming of my country. In the past few days, the Supreme Court has issued decisions that leave no doubt of its illegitimacy or its lack of interest in the integrity of our system or in the right to freedom from religion, bodily autonomy, safety, a livable planet. Yesterday, we learned more jaw-dropping things about our violent, venal former president and the coup he and a small army of bottom feeders attempted. And there’s little reason to think the court wouldn’t help him or one of the many Republicans patterning themselves after him into the highest office next time.

A major hospital system in Missouri will no longer provide emergency contraceptives to victims of sexual assault for fear of criminal prosecution of it’s providers.

THIS IS TERRIFYING. pic.twitter.com/7vhcwCbFeZ

— Betsy Fogle (@Fogle4MO) June 29, 2022

Likewise, like everyone I know in Missouri who has been paying attention, I am terrified by what my state has already become. Because Missouri was one of nine states with trigger laws–the ludicrously named “Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act”–as soon as Roe was overturned, the law went into effect, and abortion was banned here.

Yesterday, a major Missouri hospital system announced that it would no longer provide Plan B because it wasn’t yet clear that it was still legal to prescribe emergency contraceptives and it didn’t want its doctors to get arrested. According to a statement made today by the governor’s, it is, though there are some who say an ambitious prosecutor could still test that determination. Regardless, the state house is filled with the kind of people who would name a law the “Right to Life of the Unborn Child Act,” and there is no reason to think they will be stopping at abortion or that those who think that women should have control over their own bodies and that religious belief should have no place in public policy will be able to stop them.

And just as democracy in my country has been under attack by coup plotters and election riggers, so it is under attack now in my state. The party simply ignored a popular referendum on Medicaid, refusing to accept federal money that would have helped alleviate an underfunded healthcare system. Gerrymandering has long been common practice in Missouri, and the state GOP is forever on the lookout for more ways to create long skinny, misshapen districts designed to rob Democratic voters of the chance to have the representation they should.

Today the governor signed an awful bill into law that contains a number of provisions designed to further chip away at the ability of the opposition to oppose them, from voter ID laws to procedures that make it much harder to register voters. As it is for the national GOP, democracy–elections, lawmaking, constitutions–is an obstacle, something that gets in the way of their hold on power, power that is to be used in profoundly antidemocratic ways.

It all feels hopeless for us here, just as it does for many across the country. We march, we call our elected representatives, we work to get out the vote for candidates who might better represent our interests and the interests of the state as a whole rather than a small, vocal minority. And they sometimes are able to fight back against bad legislation. But more often they aren’t. And we have our own criminal who might make it back into office, just like the country does, with his own people eager to get him there. And it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot we can do about it–if Greitens emerges from the primary, all we can do is hope he flames out. And unless the Department of Justice makes it so Trump can’t run again, unless Biden and others in DC who could make court reform happen do, unless in doing so they make it impossible for SCOTUS to continue to ignore our legal tradition and the separation of powers and to steal the White House for the GOP, we’re going to need a plan B to save us from a future we don’t want and shouldn’t have to have.