Author: Sam Cohen

Today I taught my first class of the new school year. It was the first meeting of my course on book banning in America, and, as I learned when I asked them to go around the room and introduce themselves by saying where they were from and what their major was, what their favorite book is, students are taking the class for various reasons: because they liked the topic, because they needed to fulfill a distribution requirement, because they were in my class last semester and didn’t hate me I guess.

I had a great time.

Of course this is not the most important thing about a class meeting. It might be the least important thing, though I think many of us teach better when we’re enjoying ourselves. But it felt good to be in a room with thirty students on the first day of a semester, introducing what we’ll be working on for the next fifteen weeks. We came together, for fifty minutes, to earn distribution credits and for other reasons, starting to get to know each other a little and to think together about the history of attempts by Americans to keep other Americans from reading books they decided they shouldn’t get to read. It felt like possibility, as it has the first day of every semester I’ve taught for thirty years (!). And the way the summer’s gone, nationally, possibility feels especially good to me right now.

Tonight I’m sitting in front of the TV watching the Democratic National Convention. It’s easy to be cynical about conventions–there’s no more theatrical political theater–but so far this one is pretty inspiring. UAW President Shawn Fain followed Warriors coach Steve Kerr. A smart producer cut from Alexandria Ocasio Cortez delivering a fiery speech to a shot of Jesse Jackson listening and looking impressed. I’m feeling demographically targeted. I’m also feeling something like what I felt this morning. A convention is a coming together, etymologically. And it’s about possibility, about what the people coming together can make happen. And this particular convention comes at a time when that possibility feels pretty precious.

Wednesday, when class meets again, we’ll be talking about the long history of book banning in the world and the shorter but very busy history of book banning in the US. One event I’ll bring to the discussion is the banning of Thomas Morton’s 1637 New English Canaan. Morton came to Massachusetts in 1624 with the Puritans to Plymouth Colony, established an offshoot community that traded with Native Americans, and got exiled for it. New English Canaan is a celebration of the culture of the natives and a criticism of their treatment at the hands of the Puritans. So they banned it, making it likely the first book explicitly banned in what is now the United States. Importantly for our purposes in the course, the banning was motivated by fear—fear of loss of business from Plymouth to the natives, and fear of the natives themselves, with whom Governor William Bradford saw Morton’s people “dancing and frisking together,” something not even allowed among themselves. By the time we get to contemporary efforts to keep books away from children, we’ll draw the parallels to the motivating fear of difference–of Black people, queer people, people who don’t conform, who resist–behind those efforts.

As with the topic of my course, there’s a long history behind what’s happening this week in Chicago. It’s not always pretty, that history, not the part that began before the Puritans and not the part that began when Barack Obama made a joke that Donald Trump didn’t like. When things have improved over the course of that history, it’s been because people came together to work toward the possibility of treating others, however defined, better.

Jasmine Crockett, a former public defender and Democratic representative from Texas, is speaking now. Again, it’s easy to be cynical, but come on. Maybe we’re coming together. Maybe it’s working.

So I was playing pickleball this morning here in sunny Columbia, MO and thought a guy playing on the other court was Lucas Kunce. Lucas Kunce is running for US Senate against one of the top five worst men in the world, Josh Hawley, and seems like a decent guy. He’s from Jefferson City, a half hour south. I stood next to him once at a fundraiser while he talked to my wife about gun policy. His policy positions jibe with my preferences and values and with reality. Most important, he’s not Josh Hawley, but so is the ham sandwich I would vote for before Hawley.

At any rate, it wasn’t Lucas Kunce. I knew it couldn’t be him because what would he be doing playing pickleball on a Sunday morning in the heat of campaign season and he didn’t seem tall enough. Then when he and the man he was playing with needed people and I was sitting out over at my game, I went over and played with him and confirmed that he really wasn’t Lucas Kunce, and told him that from a distance he kind of looked like he was. His response was to say no and say he just moved here and to ask if that’s how people pronounce Kunce.

I hope it was.

I tell this fairly boring story because I was excited to meet Lucas Kunce, which means I was excited to meet someone running for national office from Missouri, which means I think that I must believe he has a chance to win. Polls says he does, and while I don’t trust polls much, I do believe that he’s an appealing candidate (even John Goodman says so) who’s got good comms people and some fight in him and that Trump’s increasing inability to not seem like an unbalanced malignant narcissist will prove to be a down-ballot drag and that Missouri has never been as red as it’s recently seemed, gerrymandering and all. Like Trump, Hawley has the ability to convince the current GOP base that he’s on their side, but the rest of Missouri might not be buying what he’s selling.

If you’re not from here, or from another red state, you might not understand how remarkable it feels to be excited to meet a candidate for national office from your state who might actually win. If you haven’t endured years of being represented by people who believe that all you need for a good political ad (other than bigotry and xenophobia) is blowing things up, or shooting them, or lighting them on fire, you might not sense the weight of this moment for us.

This morning’s non-encounter brought the moment home to me. Sure, I’m filled with dread like always, as the GOP isn’t even trying to hide their attempts at ratfuckery, but the sinking feeling of just a month ago, when Biden had not yet stepped down from the campaign, is gone, and now I have to admit that to myself, and not just in terms of the presidential election. If Missourians give money and knock doors and turn out, we could have people in office from our state who give a shit about it for a change. Democrats from Missouri for a long time had to be careful not to stray too far left, and recently that’s not been enough. But it’s possible that neither is the case any more; a certain kind of left populism seems to be having a moment and the momentum driven by defense of abortion rights may finally prove too much for the Gerrymandering Old Party, here and across the country, meaning Democrats can be Democrats here and win.

I hope so.

I’m nearing the end of Ed Park’s fantastic (as in very good but also as in not realist) novel Same Bed Different Dreams, flying too fast through its meticulously constructed pages, trying to remember who’s who and what’s real and to figure out how things are connected in its highly researched, deeply imagined account of Korean and American history. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

At one point, the novel tells the story of a fake thing that really happened in Buffalo, NY in 1952. Responding to a request by the military, the editor of the Buffalo Evening News publishes an edition of the paper reporting that the city’s downtown had been hit by a Soviet atomic bomb. The idea, the lieutenant general who makes the request tells the editor, is not to do another War of the Worlds but to make the public remember what their military shields them from, as it fights for them in Korea. In the editor’s words, “They will imagine the ruins of the city.” The paper even includes an explanation of how they were able to publish that details the destruction, down to the loss of their building: “Buffalo Evening News employes [sic] reported for work this morning as usual–a few hours later all were killed or wounded.”

Reading this part of the novel this morning, I had the ridiculous thought that my local paper would do this. Tomorrow. I would wake up, walk down my front walk, pick up the paper, take it out of the blue plastic bag, and see the headlines: TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ORCHESTRATES COUP, INSTITUTES MARTIAL LAW. PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT BEGINS MASS DEPORTATIONS, OPENS CAMPS FOR INTERNAL ENEMIES.

I imagined this ridiculous prank because I’ve been not-watching the Republican National Convention and because I’ve been living in the U.S. for the last eight years and forty-nine before that. I imagined it because I’ve been hearing on social media what they’ve been saying in Milwaukee and joked this morning that it might be time to teach Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here again.

I want somebody to remind my fellow citizens of what our democracy–as compromised and undemocratic and unequal as it’s been for many of us and as harmful as our behavior has often been abroad–exists to shield us from, to borrow the editor’s words, what the institutions and people of good faith who try to hold them up work to keep at bay: the authoritarians and kleptocrats, the true believers, the people who hold up Trump as their savior, protected from flying teleprompter glass by god, protecting them from taxation and regulation. Instead of describing how civilized the Republican convention has been or how riven by disagreement the Democrats are (or instead of reporting on the convention’s lies or the incumbent’s actual health and electoral chances, but who are we kidding), it might be good to have the newspapers scare the shit out of us by showing us an imagined future where what could happen does.

Want to say it couldn’t happen? Want to Corey Robin this and tell us Trump’s not a fascist because he’s incompetent or because you want to look smart? Want to tell me that you know best about the coming election because departments of political science exist and use numbers to tell us things that sometimes numbers can’t tell us? Go for it, but don’t come crying to me when what can’t happen here happens here because you thought you knew better.

I don’t know how Same Bed Different Dreams ends. But I feel like I’m in good hands, like Ed Park understands the power of history and storytelling and the responsibility he’s taken on in constructing his own imaginative history. I don’t know how the story of this election ends either, but I don’t feel like I’m in good hands with American journalism anymore, largely. I don’t even feel that way anymore about many of my peers–friends, colleagues, professors across the country, fellow voters–and that’s an awful feeling (one many of them feel about me, I’m sure). It’s time to stop fucking around. It’s time to imagine the ruins of the city and use those imagined ruins not to be paralyzed by anxiety or depression or moved to rash decisions or infighting but to keep the ruins from becoming reality, or at least any realer than the foot soldiers in state legislatures, school boards, and high courts are already working to make them. In the words of Fountains of Wayne, it’s time to get our shit together.

Hey, it’s Independence Day tomorrow. Feeling less happy than usual to celebrate this year? Can’t imagine why.

Oh wait yes I can.

But to my friends who say What’s to celebrate, this country’s been racist and sexist and horrible to the people indigenous to this land we’re supposed to be celebrating the independence of for ever and ever amen, it’s all in the Constitution that the Supreme Court just tore into bits, I say Of course, all true, now what?

Let these guys do all the celebrating?

These guys?

Patch Madras?

Nationalism’s almost as bad as religion for making people kill each other, everybody knows this (read what our friend Mark Twain had to say about it). But a nation is what we live in, and as unhappy as it makes us day to day, with its obscene levels of gun death and incarceration and economic, gender, and racial inequality, this one was set up from its founding to allow (some) people to try to make it better, fairer, more equal. How’s it doing? Not great. But better than it was!

So you won’t catch me watching a parade or wearing red, white, and blue or blowing shit up, but I won’t criticize people who do those things if they do them in ways that say Yay, America, let’s keep working on this jawn, rather than We’re #1 except we’re a hellscape because of all of these migrants/gays/liberals, &c., so let’s get rid of them. Tomorrow I will grill hot dogs and drink something and see if I can renew our passports online or if I have to mail them in, no reason in particular, nothing to see here, move along. And I will read this Langston Hughes poem like I do every year (like I read Philip Levine on Labor Day, because I’m a simple soul), because it says this:

And because it says this:

So Happy 4th to all who celebrate in order not to fall into the deepest despair, which, given the last week or so, is easy to do, I’m told.

While the New York Times, the Pod Save America guys, and your friends on social media freak out about the debate, don’t forget to freak out about Friday morning’s SCOTUS decision, in which the bought members of the court took a Missouri GOP statewide office campaign spot-style flamethrower to the Deep State, or the entire institutional structure of how things actually get done to keep the country from food and waterborne illness, environmental destruction, and Other Things Rich People Don’t Want Getting in the Way of More Riches. I have some thoughts about the debate, the Democratic reaction to which has been understandable but completely out of hand and somewhere outside the confines of what a Bush Sr official once called the reality-based community, and they include a call to maybe focus a little bit on the man at the other podium lying to our faces.

They also include focusing on the damage that has just been done, damage the Leo/Koch/Bannon/Stone/Moloch right wants to continue to do to the boring, troublesome offices and officials that have until now worked to keep corporations from trampling the entire country underfoot. Half the country thinks The Other Guy and the armies of flunkies and toadies eager to be seen supporting him and eager to pursue the same cynical populism are in this for them, and a big chunk of them will feel the brunt of the effects an effectively deregulated economy will have outside of gated communities (and, eventually inside them, of course, but who can think that far ahead, am I right?). Maybe they’ll be surprised.

You want Freedom? How about the freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat clean food? Sorry but this decision, brought to you by the few very rich white men who bought the deciders, makes that a lot less likely. The government hasn’t actually gotten smaller, as these people have always said they wanted, but it certainly won’t be able to help much. As Reagan put it a long time ago, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help. “

Not anymore.

I’ve been thinking this morning of something that happened nearly twenty years ago, and I’m trying to figure out why. It has something to do with the presidential debate that took place last night, which I had the good sense to almost entirely miss but caught enough of, and read enough about, to be disturbed. What that connection is is what I’m trying to figure out.

In 2006 I gave a talk at a conference on 9/11 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Before the conference, I’d seen the names of a well-known pair of 9/11 Truthers on the online program and emailed the organizers to ask that my name be removed from it so that I wouldn’t be associated with their brand of “found the one engineer in the entire world who will argue that Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to bring down a skyscraper, plus nobody saw the plane hit the Pentagon, so 9/11 was an inside job” conspiracy theorizing. I had no plans to call them out at the conference until one of them (I’m not naming them because, honestly, fuck them) approached the microphone at a lunchtime open forum/general meeting to share the good word of 9/11 Trutherism, which was met by Canadian politeness, American apathy, and maybe some agreement, I don’t know.

I stepped up to the microphone and addressed myself to the graduate students in the room while ignoring the man who’d just spoken. I said some things about how there was plenty of reason for suspicion of the American government, including the failure of the Bush administration to heed intelligence warnings about such an attack, but that giving time and attention to people like the man who just spoke is a bad idea, as trying to approach the truth with intellectual integrity is a big part of the business we were in. I sat down vibrating with an anger that came not just from an abstract defense of intellectual values but also from my experience of living in downtown Manhattan in September 2001, trekking home from work in the Bronx when the trains started to shut down, emerging to see military vehicles in the middle of 42nd Street, running from hospital to hospital looking for my brother-in-law, who worked in the towers and was not to be found, seeing and smelling the Towers’ smoke from my apartment window for weeks. After I sat down, I was thanked by a few people and ignored by the subjects of my remarks, as I expected.

Reliving this memory at my desk eighteen years later, my body is telling me that the feeling of wanting to confront people who say untrue things is the connection between this remembered moment and last night. While a lot of the chatter this morning is from rightfully anxious people on the left responding to Biden’s performance by saying he needs to let someone else run, what I’m sitting with right now is the feeling of having someone lie to your face. Whether the liar in this kind of situation knows that they’re lies or has convinced himself that they’re true may be of interest, but it’s less important in the end than the fact that he’s saying them as if they’re true and that nobody is saying anything. This isn’t an intellectual realization for me, and I suspect for many–it’s a feeling in your chest. It’s like that feeling you had when you were a kid and somebody cheated in a game, or stole your toy, or said something you knew wasn’t true and nobody challenged them. It’s the feeling that something obviously wrong is happening and that people are letting it happen. It makes you wonder if people care or if the world is a place where wrong things just happen.

Fifty-seven-year-old me knows that the world is a place where wrong things just happen, but he also believes that it is also a place where something can sometimes be done about them if people pay attention to them, if people point them out, call out their wrongness, ask others to notice and address the wrong things. Many of us believe this. What we think is wrong, and right, is what divides us, and arguments over what’s right and what’s wrong are what politics is. But it’s also people who don’t seem to care about right and wrong and just want to be in charge. We’ve all known those people since we were kids. Standing up to them, to the kids who did wrong things and didn’t care because they wanted to be in charge–we called them bullies then and should do so now–can make you unpopular. It doesn’t make you feel better. But you do it out of self-defense and you do it because someone has to or the world is only a place where wrong things happen.

I understand that people are anxious, and they absolutely have a right to be, about the health of the president and about the danger of his opponent winning in November. But what I’m feeling this morning is the wrongness of Trump’s lies, as baldfaced as they’ve ever been, things that everybody knows are lies. And I’m wishing people would talk about that, would stand up to the bully who lied to us last night and to all the second-tier bullies in his gang, standing next to him on the playground, defending his lies. Otherwise what kind of world is this?

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.