"Peace Pig": Me, Neo-Nazis (1961), the U of I Anarchist (1970), and Street-Fighters Right and Left (2017)

         My first close encounter with neoNazis was when I was eighteen, in downtown Chicago over a break in the U of Illinois (Urbana) school year, second semester of 1961-62.

         I was downtown to attend a large dance held by a high school fraternity and sorority, the profits from which were to go to The Merton Davis Memorial Foundation for Crippling Diseases of Children. We were a teenager-run charity against crippling diseases and raised enough money for seed grants for research at Michael Reese Medical Center. I was the immediate-past president of the Foundation and was supposed to say a few words of gratitude, and, on the side I'd get in a bit of hustling for my college fraternity with some of the next year's crop of freshmen.

         There were crowds outside the hotel hosting the dance: unusually for Chicago not moving and giving off none of the stereotypical Midwest friendly vibes. The crowd was large, mostly stationary, and pissed off about something.

         The something was within a long oblong of large, grim-faced Chicago cops: an un-merry band of George Lincoln Rockwell's neo-Nazis in full uniform and regalia, marching in tight ellipsoids with large Nazi flags.

         I went into the hotel, went to the main ballroom, went to the stage, got introduced, stepped to the microphone and looked at a thousand or so Chicago teenagers, mostly Jewish. And I delivered my mentally-rehearsed few words of thanks and gratitude and giving credit and paused.

         All I had to do was say, "Rockwell's Nazis. Marching outside. Right now." And then several hundred or more teenagers would rush outside, and there would be a riot in which the cops would stand by for a few minutes while the Nazis got trashed and then would start cracking heads, making a couple arrests, and dispersing the mob.

         I got polite applause, said only "Thank you" — nothing about the Nazis — left the stage, and got on with my business.

         Whether or not to incite a riot was not a particularly grave ethical question for me. Growing up, I spent a lot of time across the street from the duplex I lived in at one of the three large, expensive, single-resident houses on the street — and more specifically with my friend Bill and his parents. I forget the context, but there was one, in which Bill's large, Republican father told us that back around 1940 he'd participated with other Jewish and Italian (and Sicilian) young men breaking up the Chicago German-American Bund, largely with baseball bats and tire irons. Insofar as I judged this action at all, I thought it on balance a good idea: there would be no unfortunate First Amendment precedents set by gangs of thugs attacking Bund members; it was obviously illegal.

         Concern for my own beginning college career aside — a conviction for incitement to riot would need explaining — my main concern at that microphone was practical. Those Nazis on the street wanted riots; SA-style street-fighting was part of their image of what they did and who they were.

         Later, when George Lincoln Rockwell himself came to the University of Illinois and still later when the Ku Klux Klan came to Oxford, OH, I stuck with my decision at eighteen and endorsed the strategy of (1) as much as possible denying the racists an audience, (2) when there must be an audience, packing it, and have that audience meet them with silence and one line of denunciation. We would not show the fear they fed on; we would not give them publicity; we would not allow them to dictate our schedules and control our concerns. At that stage of US politics, the most effective strategy was quiet, confident, disdain.

*

         My first encounter with a self-identified anarchist was at a mostly anti-(Vietnam)War protest march in Champaign-Urbana Illinois, probably in May of 1970. I was a graduate student with the English and then University-wide Graduate Student Association and through the GSA active in "The Movement." The Powers that Were told the protest organizers that the FBI was in town in strength, had kind of taken over police operations, and were hunkered-down and bunkered-up, so to speak, in the main police station — and were, the local authorities judged, very, very nervous. So we of the movement beefed up our parade-marshal contingent. To accompany me while marshaling, I recruited Bob, one of my fraternity alumni brothers: a law student who'd been in Marine ROTC (officially under the Navy) and then had decided that a more pressing patriotic duty was resisting a war he judged both immoral and a danger to the Republic.

         The march went well and ended up at the police station, where Bob and I oversaw the deposit of our signs and banners on the lawn and then dispersal: for a symbolic gesture from our side and, from the cops' point of view, to reduce the danger of people leaving the demonstration in big groups and with sticks heavy enough to break windows. It seemed fair enough to Bob and me, and, besides, that was the demonstrators' deal with the University, city officials, cops, and the armed and nervous FBI agents.

         The anarchist didn't want to lay down his sign and potential weapon or move on. In the windows of the cop shop I could see guys in suits looking excited, so with all the authority of our white armbands and somewhat greater age, we politely but firmly ordered our anarchist to put down the goddamn sign and move away already. I forget most of his argument with us before he obeyed, but I do recall him looking at me and calling me a "Peace Pig," in the sense of a member of the Peace Movement who acted like a pig, an epithet used at the time by some — not my people — for police

.

         I cracked up at the phrase, and then told him, still politely, "Okay, now put the sign down and go."

         And he went away, and after a couple moments Bob and I moved on as the demonstration peacefully ended.

* *

         In August of 2017, we have seen confrontations at a White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, VA, that include Peace-and-Justice-type people on one side and fascists or the fascistic on the other, but also among the anti-violence demonstrators against the neoNazis, Klan, and White supremacists there were "antifa[cist]" anarchists and young men at least willing to mix red flags of the traditional Communist movement amid the black flags and slogans of the anarchists (notably, "No gods, no masters," though possibly, and more immediately relevant "No gods, No master race").

         As of mid-August 2017, I've seen one news story but no statistical breakdown on which groups showed up for the demonstrations in Charlottesville in what numbers, although the statistics on casualties are clear: a terrorist murder of one peaceful counterdemonstrator and injuries of nineteen more (five initially critical). It's unlikely we will get cold-blooded numbers until weeks after the anger cools at not just the bloody, goddamn neoNazis and Klan fans but at President Donald J. Trump's refusal to speak seriously about the issue, starting with an unequivocal denunciation of fascism and those in his base who truly are deplorably fascistic.

         However, however — On the Left (and in the Center), we need to start now learning who is showing up for antifascist demonstrations, and the Peace and Justice component of protest movements needs to determine how much to accept and work with the ideological grandsons (and a granddaughter or two) of that anarchist at the U of I: young people enthusiastically willing to challenge opponents armed more heavily than the police and FBI in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois ca. 1970.

         On the one hand, decent America may find itself in the situation of Chicago in the run-up to World War II, and it may be necessary to have cadres of young folk willing to "take it to the streets." On the other hand — on the other hand, I'll put it this way. If I were a Republican black-ops operative preparing for the elections of 2018 and 2020, an operative of "a certain ... 'moral flexibility,'" I'd be putting money, incendiary tracts, and provocateurs into several of the more obscure and violent fascist groups and into the more ideologically ardent anarchists, Trotskyites, and any remaining Maoists or LaRoucheans. When the struggle gets taken to the street — especially in our time of open-carry on those streets — when there's street fighting and riots and maybe firefights, it's thriving time for politicians of the "Law'n'Order" variety, and nobody in America does law and order appeals better than Republicans backed by operatives with the "moral flexibility" to paint any and all opponents as soft on crime and violence.

         This round of extremism, the Left is way behind the Right. Still, violence in the streets from just about any source is likely to help Republicans win elections. If they play their cards right — or wrongly enough —  street violence may help the more respectable-looking Right to a victory like Nixon over McGovern in 1972 and the backlash victories from 1968 on.

         Older readers may here supply analogies, if we're really unlucky, with 1933.

Taking Trump (and Others) Seriously and Literally

I just heard again advice that Donald Trump's critics took and still are dense enough to take Mr. Trump "literally but not seriously," whereas his supporters took and continue to take him "seriously but not literally."

A number of times, I taught classes in college composition starting with sayings, clichés, figures of speech, and other overlapping categories of language, and one of the tactics I insisted on was starting with the literal meaning of a figure of speech. To take such language seriously, you start by looking at what it says, literally.

"A stitch in time saves nine": Nine what? Complete the sentence: nine stitches. Always and inevitably nine stitches? Of course not: sometimes one or two will do; sometimes it takes some serious sewing. The idea is — the "tenor" of this sewing "vehicle" — is that a little (relavively) minor maintenance now will avoid big(ger) problems later.

So far so innocuous, but what if a coach or boss says s/he wants "110% effort" on your part? Obviously, you can't give more than 100%, but how much dedication is being demanded of you? Well, you can't know: agree to giving "110%" and you've just written a figurative blank check on your time and effort. If you're into speaking truth to bullshit and don't really need the sport or the job — this is a time to demand clarification of the "tenor" of the "110%" vehicle. (Good guess: These authorities want everything they can get from you.)

Or what if a person of far greater power threatens you with "No options are off the table." You'd damn well better start thinking about that "No" very, very literally. That's an open-ended threat, and it can cover a whole lot of nastiness.

So when Donald J. Trump leads a cheer of "Lock her up! Lock her up!" one should remember that populist Folkish Leaders (and my snarky capitals do "mean" here) — you should remember that in the lifetimes of some remaining old farts populist Folkish Leaders have locked up political opponents and, when that worked out for the Leader went far beyond.

If you’re Hillary Clinton, you should damn well take that chant both literally and seriously, and Donald J. Trump should do the same with Hillary’s knowing the political saying “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

And all involved should ratchet back their rhetoric.

Demand Strong Evidence for All-Too-Familiar Claims of Crisis: "The Opioid Epidemic"

Carl Sagan popularized the excellent rule, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," which I'll call (very informally) "Sagan's Law" and to which I'll add what I'll call "Mike Males's Caution": «Politically charged claims that sound really familiar should be viewed with strong skepticism.»
I get this principle from Males's work in the late 20th c. on "The Scapegoat Generation" and "Framing Youth," and his observation that claims of various failings and social pathologies among older US teenagers seemed very much like earlier accusations — sometimes backed with impressive-sounding science — against Blacks, women, Jews, immigrants, and other groups being economically and politically held back by being (mostly figuratively) held down.
Similarly, when we have another crisis epidemic of drug use, keep in mind the last several and ask for really strong evidence that we don't have just problems — and problems best handled as a public health issue, and a public health issue perhaps best seen as just another incarnation of America's drug habits and the US as a drug culture: where you can buy hard, addictive drugs in your local Krogers (check out the liquor sections and cigarettes), and where you are surrounded by ads that promise near-magic improvements in your life if you just take the right pills or drink the right booze (and, soon, smoke a sufficiently fashionable name-brand weed).
With any pain-killer, you're going to get some addiction and a fair amount of abuse; and drug use, like pretty much all things human, is subject to The Iron Law of Fashion about which the Powers That Be usually can't do a whole lot (but will take credit when fashions change: during the longer or, often, shorter period between one crisis and the next). So I'm sure there are problems and serious problems with opioids. 
I want to see serious statistics, though, and serious policies not only dealing with abuse of a pain-killer (more exactly: pain-ameliorator) but also for reducing people's pain. So before you come to get my Tramadol — I can't take NSAIDs any more if I want my kidneys to keep working — I want some stats on social pathologies for opioids per 100,000 population and with careful definition of those pathologies. 
To twist a partial quotation from Karl Marx, «Opiates and opioids are the opium of today's suffering people" and the pharmalogicals are probably less dangerous than fanatical enthusiasms in religion and/or politics. All things considered, opium might've been a fairly sensible choice among the wretched of the Earth in Marx's time — opium reduces pain and hunger — and so might an addiction leading to a fairly quick death. 
We need to hear solid, honest, disinterested statistics and analysis of the current US opioid problem, plus some suggestions for reducing sociological and economic pain, making it less pressing for people to use painkillers.
When US troops came home from Vietnam, Americans felt threatened by a HEROIN EPIDEMIC!!! from the return of hordes of heroin addicts. It didn't happen. Military users were dried out in 'Nam and sent home. Those who returned to a decent life, left their pain in Vietnam, the way most people recovering from surgery leave their pain and heavy narcotics in the hospital. Those who returned to pain and available and relatively cheap heroin, often returned to heroin. 
The situation will be similar with opioids, except I don't think American politics will allow us to even think about reduction of harm from reduction of social and economic pain. Minimally, though, let's apply Sagan's Law and Mike Males's Caution: don't panic, be skeptical, and demand rigorous analysis and compassionate policy.

WORDS MEAN (damn it): "Existential Threat"/"The United States"

A Congressional talking head on CNN or MSNBC this morning talked about a nuclear-armed North Korea as an existential threat to the United States. He needed to specify what he meant by "the United States." 

If he meant the American Republic, he definitely had a point: one enemy bomb going off in an American city — hell, one "friendly-fire" nuclear explosion — and many Americans and most of the US government would totally panic, and we'd be under some variety of martial law for the foreseeable future.

So, yeah, a North Korean nuclear capability and their willingness to use it against the US and what is in some ways admirable — an American horror of very large numbers of dead Americans: that combination is a threat to the existence of the American Republic.

North Korean military assets taken all together, including a fair number of nuclear warheads, is not, however, a threat to the United States in the sense of the American state or the American nation — not even if you define the American nation as only real Americans as in White, conservative, Christians (preferably Protestants in the Knox/Calvin/Puritan/Fundamentalist tradition). 

During World War II, the Germans under Hitler and Russians under Stalin did a fair job destroying states — Poland for a key example — but that was done as conscious policy and with a few lawyers and many serial killers on the ground, not by bombing cities. When the British and Americans air forces showed what aerial bombing can do and wiped cities off the Earth, that still in itself did not destroy the German state nor the Japanese. And for nations, World War II and its run-up was the time of large purges, massive manufactured starvation, and attempted genocide, but no nation — i.e., a cultural/ethnic people — was destroyed in spite of very ... let's say energetic attempts to do so: not the Jews, not the Roma, nor the Poles.

In a course I finally named just "Massacres," my students reported the disturbing fact that in spite of the casualties of World War II — Matthew White counts some 66 million dead — the human population rose during the period, including in every theater of war except Germany's Eastern Front, what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. The human population of the United States is over 325 million, and even with the most bigoted, racist, exclusionary definition of "the American nation," we have enough people to survive a million casualties in a limited atomic attack and its deadly aftermath (disease, hunger, survivor violence).

General "Buck" Turgidson in DOCTOR STRANGELOVE (1964) is a sociopath in suggesting a massive, first-strike attack on the USSR, but he has a point on American casualties : "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks." 

What is an existential threat to the United States as Republic, State, or nation; what is an existential threat to human civilization and perhaps the human species is full-scale thermonuclear war. And with full-scale (thermo)nuclear war we're not talking directly about North Korea but first and definitely foremost about the arsenals of Russia and the USA, plus France, China, and the United Kingdom.

To remove the existential threat to the United States et al. we need reductions down to the minimum for deterrence by the major nuclear powers.

Having said that, however, I'll add that I live next door to a deep-water port on the US Pacific coast, and I get to walk past very large container ships and don't have to wait for the North Koreans to develop full ICBM capacity to be concerned about delivery into my neighborhood of a nuclear warhead. That's not an existential threat or an immediate one or a likely one, but it bloody well is a threat, and it needs to be dealt with, as do the nuclear arsenals of Pakistan and India, and Israel. 

It's long past time for negotiations of a peace treaty ending the Korean War, one that prohibits nuclear weapons on or near the Korean Peninsula. It is also time for ensuring a nonnuclear Arabian Peninsula with cutbacks on Israeli bombs, and scaling back of nukes on the Indian subcontinent — and a renewed dedication to nuclear nonproliferation planet-wide so that the increased safety of scale-backs isn't negated. 

Here's a couple Old Rules! for you. (1) From writing courses: Cut modifiers as much as possible; let nouns and verbs do the work. (2) Mass murder doesn't have to be genocide to be a horrible act; threats don't have to be existential to be serious. So let's say, North Korean development of nuclear warheads and missiles to deliver them is a threat to their neighbors and to the United State; the American government should lead the way dealing with that threat, and use it as an occasion to work on even more horrific threats.

Climate and the World Turned Upside Down (A.D. 7th Century, 1st Century and a Bit A.H.)

         One of my favorite quotations is usually attributed to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, and it'd be appropriate for either of them, though it's probable neither said it. I'll pass it along, though: "War is God's way of teaching American geography" — and suggest a variation: «Planning for war is a pressing invitation to learn some history.»

         Unlike many in their civilian leadership — Donald J. Trump for one — U.S. war planners and others represented in the figure of speech "the Pentagon" are looking very seriously at climate change as "a national security threat," and some quick history lessons can help drive home the point that they have good reason to do so.

         The major history lesson is in a book like The Great Warming (2008), which has as its subtitle Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. But Brian Fagan's book was researched and written recently, and he relates "The Great Warming" — the Medieval Climate Anomaly of ca. 800-1300 C.E. — very specifically to global warming nowadays, and stresses its threat of extended droughts. What might be more persuasive is some historical work done a good while before our time and therefore innocent of our current political debates — and on a topic very directly relevant for one national security issue.

         So here is an excerpt from James W. Thomson and Edgar N. Johnson's An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300-1500 (New York: Norton, 1937) — again 1937 — from Chapter 7, "The Empire of the Arabs" (I have marked but left unchanged locutions neutral in 1937 but probably discourteous today). The topic is the Muslim conquests of what Christians call the 7^th century and a bit thereafter, usually explained by both Muslims and historians from Christendom in religious terms. Thompson and Johnson have a different take.

          From these small beginnings at Medina the Arab church-state [sic] spread with prodigious rapidity. Within fifty years after Mohammed's death [in 632 C.E., 11 A.H.] it had conquered Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. Within one hundred years it had spread to the frontiers of India to the east, and to the west had swept across North Africa through Spain and beyond the Pyrenees. [Usual explanation for such success (an act of God for the faithful; for secular historians) political cohesion combined with, and mutually reinforcing, religious fanaticism. …]

          The facts are quite otherwise. In the first place, it is impossible at this early date to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance. […]

          In the second place, it is impossible to speak of Mohammed's creating any such thing as Arab unity, nor can it be supposed that in any substantial way the nomadic Arab tribes suddenly consolidated into a unified state after his death. […] [163-64]

         The expansion of the Arabs is best understood in the light of previous movements out of the desert into the neighboring Fertile Crescent. These were constant phenomena, to be explained by the vicissitudes of climactic conditions, which always drove nomadic peoples onwards. It is now known that for a long time previous to Mohammed there had been a gradual movement of Arabs into the adjoining Byzantine and Persian empires. […] The [Arabian] peninsula itself was experiencing a periodic desiccation, which made life within it ever more unbearable and drove its inhabitants to seek relief elsewhere. It seems, accordingly, highly probably that what occurred would have happened [given the weakness of Persia and Byzantium after prolonged war (and plague)] even without Mohammed and Islam. (166).

         A couple things here. First, when you hear people talk about "Islam vs. the West," tell them that to say nothing of geography — Islam has been or remains the dominant religion in regions clearly in the western part of the Old World — there is the commonplace in European history that Islam joins the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Germanic streams in the making of Medieval Europe. Second,  whether you accept the theory in Thompson and Johnson or not, note that in 1937 historians could find plausible that at least local long-term weather — "a periodic desiccation" — was a key factor in one of the most important political/military events in world history: the Islamic conquests and expansion leading to "The Empire of the Arabs" and, arguably, the final push taking western Europe from Late Antiquity into the early Medieval.

         Two common figures of speech for the countries on and around the Arabian Peninsula are "the Middle East" — how you'd see things if you're looking out from the British Isles toward your "Far East" — and "tinderbox": from a literal "box containing tinder, flint, a steel, and other items for kindling fires," and having as its tenor, "a potentially explosive place or situation."

         "Tinder" refers to dry slips of wood that you use for starting fires; "desiccation" means a drying out; in the Middle East and large areas in Africa, desiccation could get to desertification: taking dry areas to outright desert.

         And people will yet again move out, and there are few places to go nearby that (1) can support them and (2) do not have a lot of people already. Now add to that a large number of small-arms in the world and a fair number of people willing and able to sell not-so-small arms or teach how to make IEDs, and add to that the fairly recent and still vigorous development of Fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam, and fanatical varieties of the big three monotheisms and even in such fanaticism-resistant traditions as Hinduism and Buddhism.

         Take a tinderbox, add heat, wait for a spark. Or, change the figure of speech and let ISIS evolve into something more sophisticated, add a charismatic leader (a modern Saladin), oppose it to a Christendom relearning fanaticism, tell them all "God wills it!" (Deus vult!), and be prepared to learn geography.

         If very unlucky, you'll become and expert in geography and in the history of downright fascinating times parallel to the transition from Late Antiquity to early Medieval, known some places in Europe as "the Dark Ages."

Grade Inflation: GPAs and SATs

          USA Today reports "A's on the rise in U.S. report cards, but SAT scores founder" (17 July 2017) — and I think, "Here we go again."

            Fairly frequently over 35 years I handled grade complaints in a good-size university department of English. I usually mentioned in my annual reports that there were fewer complaints than we should have in a department as large as ours, so it was likely that colleagues were grading too leniently.

            I believed in the existence of grade inflation and that grade inflation could hurt returning students whose, averages had been good back in the day but looked less good against the inflated grades of younger competitors. Still, grade inflation was balanced by requirement inflation so there was some fairness: "Back in the day," one could graduate college with 120 semester credit-hours; by the time I left teaching, the more usual requirement was 128 hours: a half-semester more.

            Measuring high school GPA's against SAT scores must be done carefully, however, and reported carefully. For one thing, you need the numbers for who's taking the tests.

            In the 1970's, Richard Ohmann examined the "literacy crisis" and reported on it in an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 25, 1976). "Johnny can't read / Johnny can't write," and the cause had to be radical changes in American high schools in the 1960s.

            Not really,

            What had changed most was more young women going to college, so the issue was good news with Jane, not degeneration for Johnny: college teachers were seeing a more typical sample of (female) high school graduates.

            There has been grade inflation, but SAT averages are affected strongly by who's taking the tests, and we should expect a decline in scores because of the mostly good news that more high school grads are going to college meaning more people are taking SATs meaning a more typical sample of US high school students — and lower scores.

------------------------------------------------ 

Reference:

            Ohmann, Richard. "The Literacy Crisis Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax." The Chronicle of Higher Education 25 October 1976.

Also:

            Erlich, Richard D. "[…] The Parable of the Masturbating Madmen." Views from a Jagged Orbit. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2017: pp. 141-43.