Nation v. Republic

For he might have been a Roosian,  A French, or Turk, or Proosian,  Or perhaps Itali-an!

All.

Or perhaps Itali-an!

Boatswain.

But in spite of all temptations  To belong to other nations,  He remains an Englishman!  He remains an Englishman!

 — Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

         My headnote from W. S. Gilbert's 1878 Pinafore lyrics includes a joke that some 20^th-century Americans missed, and some 21^st-century Americans might still miss.

         About 1599, in his Henry V, Shakespeare shows a British army in France with captains who are Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English and who talk of those designations as their nations. Things hadn't changed much that way by the Victorian era in the 19^th century, nor with the mother of a friend of mine who corrected people who thought she was English by telling them she was Welsh. Nor during the run-up to Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, when I saw a Union Jack only at a touristy place in the somewhat-United Kingdom and otherwise saw only the flags of the nations, especially, where I was, the English cross of St. George and the Scots cross of St. Andrew.

         The United Kingdom has one monarch, one flag of union, and four nations. And that's just one country we Americans refer to loosely as "England."

         "Nation" in the old sense was your tribe writ large: your ethnos, your people, and it wasn't something you chose, and it wasn't something you could change. You were born a Russian, Turk, French, or Prussian — and a Prussian damn well wasn't a Bavarian — and that was who you were.

         In that sense, Japan is a nation, and France is, sort of: France was pieced together from different independent medieval fiefs, and some Basques of France are getting restless, which gets one to the issue of Spain and the Basques and Catalans. And digging down a bit one would get to Québécois in Canada and, a bit further, such sensitive issues as Armenians in Turkey in the early 20^th century and the ethnic issues behind "ethnic cleansing" in the late 20^th century.

         In this sense of nation as "tribe writ large," the phrase "a nation of immigrants" makes sense only if you do a very fine-grain analysis of the old tribes and note that many of the big ones in historical times really weren't all that "blood and soil" pure-bred but more like confederations and semi-open communities.

         The First Peoples in the Western Hemisphere are also called "the Indian nations," and that's a plural. When the White folk arrived, they came from different cultures in Europe, and, indeed, even just what we call "the English" — "Albion's Seed" — came in different groups even more local than the current four UK nations and contributed to what Colin Woodard identifies as the "Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" (American Nations, 2011).

         How we count those (North) American "nations" or see our histories — plural — and rivalries isn't crucial; the crucial point is that the USA has not been, is not now, and for a long time won't be, if ever, "one Nation, under God" (or atheist or pagan).

         And unless we exclude a whole lot of people, we're not "a White, Christian" — as in "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — nation. (That Christian vs. Catholic line is a quotation from a student of mine: a nice guy I had a talk with on, let's say, religious nomenclature.)

         What we are, I think and hope, is what's identified in the old story of Benjamin Franklin's exiting the final session of the Constitutional Convention to be confronted by a woman who asked, in my paraphrase, «Well, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us […]?", answered with, «A republic, madam, if you can keep it.»

         We are, I think and hope, a republic, with a "mixt constitution" combining a rather monarchical President with an aristocratic Senate and a relatively democratic House of Representatives — as the Founders mostly intended, combined with a robust judiciary to check the other branches, and a professional bureaucracy to get the whole ungainly apparatus to work for what has become a large country.

         And we have citizens: people loyal to the Constitution (as much as they understand it) and to ideals in what has been called a civic religion, celebrated most especially on the Fourth of July, the anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence, one basis of American ideals.

         The Republic, of course, is kind of abstract and intellectual, but, then, you can't touch or smell or literarily feel a nation. Corporations are "fictive persons," but they exist, and money is just paper — or electrons in motion nowadays — backed up by convention and imagination and faith. The Nation also is a matter of symbols, rituals, origin myths, and stories, and in a better world than this one would be a safe and easy way to get emotional commitment to the State.

         In the world we actually have, the Nation gets emotional attachment much too easily, leading far too often to almost idolatrous attachment to symbols and a warm and fuzzy feeling of absorption into the tribe.

         Screw that. Or screw the extremes of "that": the xenophobic chauvinism summed up in Mel Brooks's joke about the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-six!" Screw unthinking infatuation with our little tribes, with us.

         What we need instead is a mature love for the homeland we were born into or have adopted, a firm patriotism for the American Republic as an ideal and a hope for human dignity. The Republic as a great experiment in self-rule, what Abraham Lincoln called "the last best hope of earth" if we can maintain our Union and expand freedom. We can strive for a nation embodied in a Republic worthy of our love and even that "last full measure of devotion" for the ideal celebrated by Lincoln: the poet of the Republic as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" — which God forbid should ever be replaced by the low appeal of just another arrogant, self-absorbed band of nationalists deluded by the myths of blood, soil, and ethnic purity.

On the Joy of Not Having to Care: Ethnic Casting, Jewish Subdivision

         In early June (2017), there has been some discussion on the web on how the Israeli actress Gal Gadot gives us a Diana in Wonder Woman who is princess of the Amazons, and Jewish. Aside from some weird issues here about race — issues that could be disposed of by just saying, "Yeah, at root we Jews are Semites, not Aryans" — what's at stake in this minor debate isn't that Ms. Gadot is Jewish but Israeli. So the film has gotten involved in the standard agit-prop over the existence of Israel/the Zionist entity and the 50^th anniversary of Israeli occupation of lands generally recognized as Palestinian. Well, Israel was the deep topic, plus informing people who don't know the history of comics the dark secret that the major comic book superheroes were created by Jews.

         The horror! But do keep the Yiddishkeit of the many of the creators of comics in mind if you ever study the attack on comic books in the 1950s and their role in the Seduction of the Innocent.

         But since "everybody is talking about" Wonder Woman — an excellent movie, by the way — I want to follow my usual custom and talk about something else, taking my "Jagged Orbit" off on a tangent.

         So: Consider the movie Norman (2016), subtitled "The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer," and definitely a New York Jewish fixer — who gets involved in Israeli politics and saving the synagog of a definitely New York Jewish congregation.

         Norman Oppenheimer in the film is mostly a small-time fixer, "mirrored" by Srul Katz, an even smaller-time fixer, played by Hank Azaria in a very small role.

         Hank Azaria is Sephardic Jewish, and the Israeli characters are played by actors at least generally Jewish, a safe inference with the major character, Micha Eshel, played by an actor named Lior Ashkenazi. Norman is played by Richard Gere, who is neither Jewish nor New Yorker (b. Philadelphia). The relevant rabbi, Rabbi Blumenthal, is played by Steve Buscemi, who was born in Brooklyn but raised Roman Catholic, and not Jewish. Ditto for not New York, not Jewish — there's a website where one can look up such things — for the English and Welsh actors who played the other major New York Jewish roles.

         Matters are similar for that fine movie on Jewish and other partisan resistance to the Nazis, Defiance (2008), where one of the three heroic Bielski brothers is the emphatically Jewish Liev Schreiber, but the other two are the English actors Daniel Craig, who is not Jewish, and Jamie Bell, who is probably also not Jewish.

         The point with Norman and Defiance is that if there are people out there who give a rat's ass about the ethnicities of the actors playing Norman or the Bielski brothers, they've been quiet about it, or, anyway, any complaints have failed to gain traction on the web and other media.

         No accusations of cultural appropriation; no complaints about the impossibility of these gentiles to embody the Jewish experience, the "inappropriateness" of their trying.

         And, the point of this little essay: that's a damn good thing.

         It might not continue given the Furies that can be released by a failed — or all-too-successful — Presidency of Donald J. Trump, but at least into 2016 of the Christian Era, Jews in the West were in a strong enough position that we could be happy that competent and popular actors were portraying us on film in positive or neutral or at least nuanced roles.

         The ideal for every minority group is a world free of ethnic hatreds and contempt. On the road to utopia, though, a decent mile-marker is where you can save your anger for blatant attacks and can take cultural borrowing as a compliment and not have to worry about such relative trivia as who gets cast to play whom in movies.

         It's good to see a nice Jewish girl kicking Aryan ass in Wonder Woman, but it's not a big deal. And Richard Gere made a most excellent Norman, and Steve Buscemi was well-cast as a nervous rabbi.

            And, for that matter, I prefer Irish-American Owen Wilson's Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris (2011) to pretty much any of Woody Allen's Woody Allen.

Immigrants: Excluded or Melted Down

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.

Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

— Leviticus 19.34 (New International Version)

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me […]" —
"And we'll send 'em right back, we'll send 'em right back,

we'll send 'em right back to you!"

— Quoting from memory, Mad Magazine, 1960s or so,

 and "The Critical Mom" website

            My father's father came to the US a couple steps ahead of the Czar's secret police. He, my grandfather had killed a Cossack. The family story is that my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom. That's our story, and I'm sticking with it, but if my grandfather had waited a couple days to kill the rapist, or had killed the Cossack as a servant of the Czar in an unfortunately premature burst of revolutionary zeal — that would be okay with me.

            The Cossacks are among the groups who suffered under Stalin, and that suffering should be respected, but at the beginning of the 20^th century many Cossacks served the Russian Empire, and for all of my dedication to nonviolence I won't speak badly of killing a Czarist rapist.

            From a US immigration point of view, however, my grandfather was a wanted criminal, and I assume he'd have been stopped at Ellis Island and returned to Russia if he'd given his right name and explained the reasons for his emigration.

            We can be sure my grandfather did not give his full story at Immigration and that far, which is pretty darn far, was an "illegal."

            Alternatively, in terms of interpretation, not facts, he was a refugee from an openly autocratic regime — "Autocrat" was part of the Czar's title — an openly if not always effectively autocratic regime that use pogroms and rape to keep down restive populations, e.g., the Jews.

* * *

            In its edition for 4 February 2017, The Ventura County Star ran an excellent column by Jerry Schwartz, titled and arguing that the "US has [a] long history of barring immigrants," and the 247 words above in black constitute my initial reaction. I ended up e-mailing a different response, since I kind of wanted the headnotes for this one, and because what I wanted to say took more than 250 words.

            There's more to US problems on this issue than Right-wing (usually) exclusion of us undesirables; there are also less deadly but still significant Lefty attitudes toward us "wretched refuse." Now refuse as a noun, the Oxford Learner's Dictionary tells advanced students means "waste material that has been thrown away," and is that sense is almost neutral: many were indeed cast off, "thrown away." However, the Oxford folk inform those advanced students of English that "refuse (noun)" has as synonyms in N. American English "garbage" and "trash" and among the Brits "rubbish."

            So the more progressive sorts sincerely and usually compassionately wanted to de-trashify our late-19^th and early 20^th-century ancestors — and later, too — by getting us to lose them there hyphens ("Irish-American," "Italian-American," "Jewish-American") and assimilate. Note the word: not "integrate" but assimilate, with the image of assimilation the great melting pot, which you should picture.

            It's a nicer image than trash collection — nowadays maybe recycling — but we foreign metals were to be thrown into a pot, subjected to heat sufficient that the metals liquefy, with individuals if not in the physics/chemistry sense definitely in the sociological sense atomized, and these radically individual individuals combined into a complex alloy: American. Except the alloy would be basically Anglo-Saxon WASP, at least in Yankee theory.

            And to a great extent this happened: if not in the first or maybe even second generation, most of the "Unmeltable Ethnics" melted at least a bit, assimilating into one or another of what Colin Woodard counts as "[…] The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. To some extent, the immigrant cultures and individuals changed the surrounding culture, but for the most part we were assimilated to them.

            And this assimilation isn't so bad a thing insofar as a good deal is necessary for a nonBalkanized country, and a fair number of immigrant cultures have aspects we can just as well do without — sexism, for example, some tribalism, disrespect for education — but, then, so do some of our regional cultures (sexism, racism, clannishness, xenophobia, macho violence, privilege, puritanical snobbery, elitism, anti-intellectualism (that stuff).

            Still, the ideal probably should be integration, not assimilation, and the image a well-made quilt, or, to get less artsy-craftsy, chop suey: that great American-Chinese hodge-podge of leftovers to simmer and sell to people who don't know high-class Chinese cuisine.

            Also, assimilation "to a great extent" has not meant total assimilation, and things can get complicated in an area such as "El Norte" in Woodard's dividing up the map: an area covering large parts of south-western US and the north of Mexico. And things can get complicated where different regional cultures, meet and overlap, places where there have been some important recent waves of migration: places where I have lived pretty much my entire life.

            I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana; grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago — where politics were largely ethnic politics — attended college in central Illinois, where the Midwest meets "Greater Appalachia"; spent a year at Cornell University in radically rural Ithaca, NY, living with guys from "The City" of New York; taught for 35 years in S.W. Ohio, in the non-Kentucky area J. D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, but at very much up-scale, largely Roman Catholic Miami University at Oxford, OH (with occasional trips to and gigs at our campuses in Hamilton and Middletown). And I now live in southernmost Ventura County, where Woodard's El Norte meets "The Left Coast," but in a town where more than half the people are not Hispanic but ¡Por Dios Mexicanos y Americanos!, and often here a long time before the gringos showed up.

So: The United States has a very mixed record meeting immigrants and in treating like immigrants or worse people here first — including Native Americans, whom I haven't discussed here, not to mention Africans who didn't immigrate but were kidnapped and enslaved. And this record didn't improve all that much in the 20^th century when our behavior — usually that's "our" in quotation marks, for our predecessors — when "our" behavior was frequently, well, despicable: when we let fear and bigotry over-rule our feelings of compassion and knowledge of basic ethics.

            We can do better. This time around, let us be of good courage, show some decency, and do better.

The Universe of Power is Lumpy, and Identity Is Complex (4 Feb. 2014)

 In academic jargon from the late 20^th century, I can put the Basic point here fairly succinctly: Outside of the simplest societies, and in ways highly sensitive to context, human beings are multiply and complexly situated, with different status- and power-positions in a number of hierarchies of class, caste, age, profession, etc. — in modern times (say 1500 CE-present) often including race.
            Coming down out of high abstraction, this means that if you're Oprah Winfried, you could be refused a close look at a $38,000 purse at the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich, Switzerland, because you are Black; and it may've taken you longer to become a billionaire than if you were a man — but you can find yourself at a boutique for the upper .01% in Zurich, and you can conceive of a handbag running $38,000. It means that if you're Carlos Estavez visiting Oxnard, California, from the Santa Barbara Film Festival, you're less likely to be shot or beaten by our local cops than if you weren't also Charlie Sheen.
            Putting the matter in terms of my personal experience, this —
            One winter holiday season a couple decades back, I was happily surprised to find a card in my mailbox from my editor at Miami University student newspaper, The Miami Student. "Happy Holidays!" the card company wished me, and my editor added a few lines of her own. "Hope all goes well, blah blah. So happy to have had your column for The Student. I'm dropping your column." And then she ended with a sentence or two that I shouldn't worry about the newspaper because she'd found another member of the faculty to replace me, and he was, as I well knew, just a great guy, an incredibly popular teacher in my department, and, she was sure, a most excellent writer.
            Over the next couple of days, I showed the card around, and one of my colleagues joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I just might write one for her since she showed the tact and sensitivity I'd come to associate with editors. (Like many authors, I saved and occasionally savored the more notable of the rejection letters I'd received. The most memorable is still the one I got at the very start of my scholarly career: the editor of PMLA was kind enough to include some comments from the first, and only, reader of a long essay I submitted, a comment that began, "Very interesting opening paragraph, before the whole thing falls flat.")
            As you've probably anticipated, I soon received another letter from the editor of The Miami Student — a note, anyway — requesting a letter of recommendation.
            I was at my office typewriter, I think (it may've been a computer keyboard), composing my response to her, when she stopped at my door, put her head in, and asked me in person for the letter; and I told her to come all the way in and repeated to her what had been the joke that I just might write the letter.
            She was somewhat taken aback, and we get to the point of this story for my point here. "Oh," she replied. "It didn't occur to me I could hurt the feelings of a" (White male?) "professor."
            So I explained to her, in nonfigurative terms, how rejection hurts coming from just about anyone, but that "The universe of power is lumpy" and in this context she was the editor, I was — had been — a staff writer, and she the person with power.
            The upshot, if you're interested, is that I think I did write a brief "RecLet" and (I'm almost positive) she got whatever the RecLet recommended her for. The colleague whose column replaced mine was indeed a hotshot, and sufficiently one that he soon stopped submitting columns to The Student and then moved on to a better job.
            In a similar line, as English Department Student Mediator — i.e., the guy who handled complaints from students — I had to deal with a couple of young women teaching assistants brought up feminist in the era stressing the all-pervasive power of patriarchy. And they couldn't believe that they could hurt, or mess over, a male student. Whether or not they had done so is something I wouldn't reveal if I remembered, and I certainly don't remember. And it's irrelevant. "The universe of power is lumpy," and in their classrooms, most immediately embedded in the student/teacher relationship — most especially as in grades — they held the upper hand.
            Furthermore, at that place and time if their students had threatened them outside the classroom, relying upon the students' status as Whites and males and large and (in one case) a jock, the full police powers of the University and State would have enforced the power of the TA's. However much the cops and coaches might have held them in contempt as women and "civilians," academics and intellectuals, their status in the classroom would have trumped other concerns: the Establishment protects the Establishment, and as Miami U teachers they were part of the local Establishment.
            Centrally, though, were the grades, which were assigned by "The Instructor of Record," which — short of some very fancy and difficult-to-execute bureaucratic footwork — even a lowly Teaching Assistant was. And, once assigned, the grade was the grade, and only the instructor of record or a court order could change it.
            While explaining that they were the power-holders here, I could identify with these young women. I hadn't believed it my first couple semesters as a TA: it took me a while to realize The Power of the Grade.
            As a new teacher in my twenties, my previous experience dealing with freshman had been in my fraternity, where we kept the pledges somewhat uninformed on just who could do what to them — and most of them suspected that I, as a chapter officer, could have them "racked out": with a "rack-out" an extended periods of late-night strenuous Physical Training of the sort Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket would immortally formalize as, "I will PT you all until you fucking die! I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!" Additionally, some suspected — as I learned from a really drunken pledge who pleaded with me not to — some thought we might paddle them. Actually, we didn't paddle pledges, and I personally lacked authority to order a rackout, although I probably could have arranged one if I worked at it, and I certainly could have had a pledge put on one of our nastier work assignments. ("There is more than one way to skin a cat; none of which are pleasant for the cat" — and the grease trap in a large kitchen often needs cleaning.)
            My previous experience dealing with frosh was with guys who thought I could punish them, possibly significantly, and that is what counts: they showed me respect, or at least took care to be deferential outside of ritualized "Saturnalian" pledge entertainments, where they were invited to insult actives. What I had never encountered from pledges in the fraternity was servility, and when I encountered servility in the classroom, it disturbed me.
            I finally said to a class, "Look, I'm maybe five, six years older than most of you; I look younger than half of you; I'm 5'2" tall and 135 pounds, and most of you can beat me up — why the servility?!?" And they reminded me about my giving them grades.
            And I told them that I was an ethical person and really wanted them to argue with me and did actually grade "blind," not looking at the names of the students who'd written the essays and I respected integrity … and, yeah, I gave the grades.
            "The universe of power is lumpy" and a little Jew who got asked to show multiple ID's in bars that sold my students beer without question — I had to work to keep a fair number of students from high-power, hydraulic sucking up.
            Later on in my career, when linguistic "morÄ“s" loosened, I had my students consider the implications of expressions like "to brown-nose" and "suck up to" and consider the fact that if they prostituted their ideas for a grade that made me (figuratively) a professorial "john." But that was later, about the time of my "mediation" service at Miami U and having to explain to a new generation of teachers, especially young women, the variation on the theme by Stan Lee that even with a little bit of power comes responsibility, starting with the responsibility of admitting that in some contexts even members of otherwise oppressed groups can have power.
            Larger issues are involved, though, with that lumpy universe of power, some of them depressing.
            At my fraternity, some wise-ass (who might've been me) illustrated the principle of seniority and hierarchy with a posted drawing of a multi-storey outhouse, imaging the bureaucratic and more generally sociological meaning of the adage "Shit flows down hill."
            That principle can move into the horrific in contexts like the Jewish Police and community councils in too many cases during the Hitlerian Holocaust, or the problems slave women would have found looking for sisterly solidarity from the wives of their masters or even their widowed mistresses. Or with gang leaders in ghettos and barrios having tremendous local power, even if they might have trouble hailing a cab (if their armored Humvee is in the shop) and probably won't apply for membership in "The City Club" — although their children or grandchildren might well be asked to join.
            And here I will stop on that line of thought since it leads back to European ghettos and those Jewish police, death camp Kapos, and tales of survival and complicity I can only think about briefly. So I'm going to tone down the emotional stress and put things a bit more positively —

            If not all, then at least most effective politics is coalition politics, and in an era of "identity" politics effective coalition building is helped by reminding people that their identities are complex and that identity itself is malleable and contextual.
            My personal personal story here is a quick one, from a time I had been about a week in Tokyo and caught myself looking for Black people. Why was I looking for Black people? Well, as an American in Tokyo, I was definitely gaijin, a foreigner, and I found myself feeling like a foreigner and looking for other gaijin, and for sure a Black person would (1) stand out in a crowd, (2) be gaijin, and (3) likely be American. I wasn't the only one feeling that way. A South Korean businessman sort of picked me up and bought me dinner. He was interesting to talk to, but I wondered what the agenda here might be. It was simple; he'd been in Japan for several months was not just gaijin but Korean gaijin, and he just wanted to talk to a fellow foreigner and someone who wouldn't view him with just a touch of something hard to pin down. The people he'd dealt with hadn't been racists, exactly, nor xenophobes nor jingoistic; it was just that for them there were Japanese and gaijin, and Koreans were definitely gaijin, and that was that. Random Blacks on the street, this South Korean businessman, and I were in the same group.
            Another story is less personal, but still low-key and small-scale.
            There was a radio interview I can't cite but recall well in which a young feminist scholar studied a Black church where young women were trying to change things and were running into resistance from their elders, women as well as men. Why would the older women side with the men and oppose an attempt to democratize the church in ways that would give women an equal voice in running the church? Why would the old women reject a voice in hiring ministers and establishing the liturgy and, well, moving the church into the future?
            Why wouldn't these old women join with the young ones to gain power to innovate, or just to do things?
            If you've ever dealt with a group of organized old women, you have guessed by now that they knew exactly what they were doing.
            The reforms that would've given church-women in general more power would have given the old ladies of the "amen corner" less, more exactly, less where it mattered to them. They liked the church the way it was, thank you, and didn't want changes. They lacked the power to innovate, but they had the power to block: a near-absolute power to veto. They couldn't hire the minister — or get a female one — but they sure as hell could get a minister fired, and the one after him and the one after him until they got a leadership that knew not to cross them.
            Increased democratic power for women in that church generally would've meant less of the power for the old women particularly.
            On the other hand, moving from a memory of a sociological story to a memory of a fictional one — there's a minor but important theme in Suzy McKee Charnas's searing feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World (1974). The book shows a world ruled by men in which women are enslaved. That's literally enslaved and brutally enslaved. Still, Walk reminds us that patriarchy isn't rule by men, as such, but rule by some men, the patriarchs: older men with power. It's inferable in the world of Walk that the majority of men would find it in their interest to ally with the enslaved women to depose the patriarchs and democratize their world.
            That ain't gonna happen in Walk to the End of the World. Even as poor Whites and poor Blacks in the real-world USA rarely allied to resist the plantation owners and other power elites, the oppressed young men and the women we see in Walk aren't going to ally. "The universe of power is lumpy" implies that those with power who stay in power keep themselves united and keep opponents or just serious competitors from getting together: divide et impera as they used to say in Latin, "Divide and rule"; if you're already ruling, break up every threatening concentration of power as it forms, preventing competing "lumps."
            More exactly, if you are ruling and wish to continue doing so, you prevent concentration of power that might compete with you. The ideal is to maintain your big lump of power while those below you form groups that you get competing with each other: slashing up and grinding down each other.
            And powerful groups will continue to divide, conquer, and rule so long as so many people, even highly educated and politicized teaching assistants, are unconscious of most of the game.
            So, MORAL to all this: power clumps in weird ways and anyone sufficiently privileged to be literate and reading an essay belongs to some groups who have power and other groups that don't. Ethical political behavior is largely using one's positions of power to help get power and the goodies it brings distributed more equitably. The beginning of such ethical behavior is understanding that the universe of power is lumpy and figuring out where in it one is privileged to be in an empowered lump.

            Next comes a "Basic" not worth an essay, but the one thing I ever said liked by an ethicist colleague of mine: "A lot of morality is learning to direct your aggression up the hierarchy, not down it" — with, I'll add, occasional angled and lateral shots going for appropriate "lumps."