"Anti-Jew" / "Anti-Semite" (There's a difference.)

In a matter before Queen Elizabeth I's Privy Council involving the playwright Christopher Marlowe, Richard Baines, a semi-pro if not professional informer offered "A note containing the opinion of on[e] Christopher Marly Concerning his damnable Judgment of Religion, and scorn of Gods word" (1593). One blasphemy Baines attributed to Marlowe was "That he [Christ] was the sonne of a Carpenter, and that if the Jewes among whome he was borne did Crucify him theie best knew him and whence he Came." 

Baines's quotation is not very good evidence for what Marlowe said since Marlowe was soon too dead to confirm or deny it; it is, however, excellent evidence for what a knowledgeable guy in a nervously Christian country would judge would really interest and upset the authorities. 

If nothing else, the argument "The Jews knew him best ..." was always potential to oppose Christianity, and if nothing else made the presence of Jews a potential problem for Christians. In any event, off and on from antiquity and more so after the First Crusade, England and other European countries had anti-Jewish currents prior to nation and race in the modern sense. That's anti-Jewish stuff.

Later in the 17th century, there was movement into more (Early) Modern theories of race (I'm thinking of Thomas Rymer on Othello, 1693), and by the 19th c. we got full-blown racism and nationalism. If Jews were out of place in Christendom, how about in a White Christian nation if Jews were neither White nor Christian? If the emphasis is on "Nation and Race," you get anti-Semitism: Jews as Semites, not Aryans.

Not all of the Tiki-Torch trolls of Charlottesville are conscious of such matters, but some are, and in an era of return to open racism and virulent nationalism, we need to spell out such distinctions. 

A Teaching Issue: "Blind" Grading

Here's one statement of a policy of mine when I was teaching. 

"'BLIND' GRADING: There are limits on the practice, but I grade written work 'blind,' not looking at the name of the author until after I've assigned a grade." 

When I refereed for journals I also tried to ignore authorship when a name slipped through — the essays were supposed to be "anonymized" — or when I could guess. And when I read scripts I usually tried not to look up names at all or not until late in the judgment part of the process.

I started teaching at the University of Illinois (Urbana) about 1966/67, during US warfare in Vietnam, when a male student's flunking out of school could make him immediately subject to military conscription and, possibly, "Sent to Vietnam to kill or be killed or wounded or maimed — and my blood is on your hands!", as we also-draftable Teaching Assistants used to bitterly joke about student grade appeals.

With that issue in the background, to grade blind was one of the first decisions I made about teaching when I started out, and I decided that working a bit against biases, likes, or dislikes in assigning a grade was more important than any advantages from getting to know students a bit better as human beings, tracking their development in the course — etc. 

I am not now nor I ever been an orthodox "New Critic" — looking at words on a page and considering nothing but the words on the page — but I consciously opted to deal, when grading, with a text as text, leaving out as much as possible the human author.

I did have some "I-Thou" moments with students and made some friends (and at least two open enemies plus one weirdo who gave me [?] a scathing evaluation on Rate My Professor for a course I never taught). 

This far, anyway, I opted out of the "Teach the whole child" movement — "College Is For Grownups" for one thing — and went over to an "I-It" relationship more than I needed to. 

Martin Buber says that impersonal I-It relationships are usual and normal and okay so long as there's the potential for "I-Thou": "I" dealing with "you" as a real Mensch on both sides, directly, human and humanely. If the Other in an encounter can be replaced by an ATM or a beverage-delivery device, it's probably not a situation for I-Thou. I sometimes thought that for a number of my students I could be replaced by a grading machine, and I sometimes felt — near the end of a pile of essays — that I *was* something of a grading machine and most of my students mechanisms churning out essays.

And I was definitely long enough in the Ed Biz and just long enough in the script-reading biz not to privilege scholars and scriptwriters all that much over their (usually) precursor-forms of college students. 

ANY COMMENTS OUT THERE ON INTENTIONAL DEPERSONALIZATION between teachers and students (and perhaps also superiors and inferiors in work-place and other hierarchies)? 

Nation/Republic: Brief Comments on Immigration Debate, Russian Meddling in US Elections — and Words

The US Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag pretty much conflates the USA as "one Nation" and "the Republic." They're different.

If you believe the US is primarily "a (White) Christian nation" — with "White," when said or thought, possibly limited to "Aryan" and "Christian" traditionally referring to a set of Protestants — then a major potential or actual threat to the US is substantial immigration, since large-scale immigration would undermine and "impurify" our "one Nation."

If the US is primarily the Republic, foreign meddling in an election is an attack on a crucial democratic part of our republicanism and a crisis-level threat.

WORDS MEAN, and a crucial part of politics is our conscious, semiconscious, and unconscious disputes over what we mean by key terms.

My oath was to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and the Republic in which it is embodied. And I wouldn't be a member of a Christian America and perhaps not a White one. Others have strong loyalty to America as a culture and identity, a loyalty I understand and in some ways share. Still others have a loyalty to Americanism rooted in soil and confirmed in at least two senses by blood: they can be enemies of the Republic.

"Everybody," "Nobody," and Other Absolutes in The Age of Ads and Trump (repeat post)

CAUTION: Repeat rant from recovering English Teacher trying to get people to cut back the BS of everyday semi-communication.

What's on my mind is the click-invitation Link title (different from the article title) in the e-mail to me from THE NATION for current stories: "All Eyes Are Now on Robert Mueller [...]" / [by] GEORGE ZORNICK

Uh, no; "All Eyes" are not. Not even all human eyes among American adults. This is part of the "EVERYBODY/NOBODY" problem where we habitually forget to mention the population of which EVERYBODY is or is not doing something (etc.) and how the hell we might be able to know.

This is not a good thing, and how not-good has become especially clear the last couple of years.

* Politically-involved people tend to think *everybody* is politically involved. That's patently untrue: check out the large number of Americans who don't even bother to vote.

* Politically-involved people of Leftish persuasion can come to think that *everybody* is ready to impeach Donald Trump or struggle to retain the Affordable Care Act, or whatever. Unfortunately, "whatever" can include such delusions as some activists in the late 1960s thinking the USA in a pre-revolutionary state. We were not, as the 1972 Presidential election convincingly demonstrated.

*Everybody* they knew was ready to "take it to the streets": (1) probably not, even among those they knew; (2) they didn't know enough people, or a statistically useful sample.

* Donald J. Trump is on an extreme of the continuum, but there is a continuum of everyday, hyperbolic bullshit that American speakers of English (and probably others) clearly tolerate way too much. Your kids tell you "But *everybody* in my class is getting tattooed," and you know to tell them, "Name two." Try similar challenges when adults (with less excuse than kids) hit you with AdSpeak, CoachSpeak, CampaignSpeak, AcademicSpeak — all those "disruptive interventions" by just a journal article — CorpSpeak, and similar fonts of hyperbole and other usually misused figures of speech. The road to Trump was paved with sloppy use of language (superlatives anyone?) and bullshit clichés like, "Since the beginning of time" — Really? Is that since the Big Bang or the rise of human consciousness (for highly local, subjective time), or even the last odd 6K years for a popular Mythic Time? "We want 110%?" — Uh, huh: You're saying you want a blank check on my time, right? "The worst/best _______ ever." (1) Again, probably not. (2) Something doesn't have to be THE WORST EVER!!! to be very, very bad. The pizza you're selling doesn't have to be the best in this arm of the galaxy to be a good buy: In a big city, as MAD Magazine pointed out long ago, best on the block is probably good enough.

People who (figuratively) bend over backwards not to offend their auditors on identity grounds should take at least a bit of care not to offend their auditors' intelligence.

Donald J. Trump and Military Science 101

In Military Science 101 at the U of Illinois in 1961, we were "discussing" — getting Socratically quizzed on — military preparedness. Our instructor, the Professor of Military Science and Tactics and head of the Army ROTC unit, asked what sort of preparedness the US should pursue.
First guy he called on (and we were all guys) said the US should be able to defend ourselves "against any conceivable attack." The PMS&T asked/challenged — "Invasion from Mars?" And the student answered back, "I said 'conceivable' ... Sir." "H. G. Wells conceived of it, and it's been a popular literary theme ever since. Should we prepare for invasion from Mars?"
The instructor kept pressing the point, which I enjoyed (although I came to understand better why the Athenians poisoned Socrates) until he finally got a class consensus that we should fund the military to where we could defend the US against attack from any country or any group of countries including every other country. 
The PMS&T then paused and said something like, "Well, aside from any ethical qualms you might have fighting for a country that couldn't find a single ally on the planet — thank you, gentlemen: in your little frenzy of patriotic zeal you've just bankrupted the Republic. (beat) It was a trick question; you had to have read the assignment, or thought. It's a political question and a diplomatic one: What more precisely does the President and the Department of Defense want to *do* with the military, and what allies can we get — and what will they go along with."
Colonel Ramrod (my very private name for him) thought 18-year-olds should be able to figure out on our own that the US needs allies, or read, already, our goddamn assignments in the US Army history of the US Army and see that that was the assumption by US military folk pretty much since the US got in the Great Powers business.
I think Cadet Trump missed that class.

Defending US Gun Policies

"The claim that gun massacres are mysterious or 

difficult or bewildering or resistant to legislation is a lie." 

— Adam Gropnik, "Four Truths About the Florida School Shooting," 

The New Yorker 15 Feb. 2018

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely 

the defense of the indefensible. 

Things like the continuance of British rule in India, 

the Russian purges and deportations, 

the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, 

can indeed be defended, but only by arguments 

which are too brutal for most people to face, 

and which do not square with 

the professed aims of the political parties."

— George Orwell, 

"Politics and the English Language" (1946).

Allowing gun massacres can be defended — e.g., if one argues as allowed by the New Yorker essay that the economic and cultural advantages of widespread ownership of a variety of guns justifies the loss of life. Alternatively, people have argued that the 2nd Amendment in the Bill of Rights undergirds all our other rights by helping guarantee The Right of Revolution, the final bastion against tyranny and oppression by the Federal government (and State and local governments as well). Thomas Jefferson said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure" (1787), to which, in this argument, we would add the blood of a few thousand innocent Americans a year.

So of course the NRA should be defending sale of Kevlar-piercing bullets: the police and military personnel defending the State might well be wearing Kevlar armor. And of course US citizens should have semi-automatic weapons — and some access to kits to make them full(y) automatic — with large magazines: to counter those of the SWAT teams and military. Etc. Q.E.D.

Like, if you want a coherent and rational argument, go to the greed-heads of the weapons biz (or the crazies arming for the coming race war or apocalypse) or those who fear the black helicopters coming in from the Deep State. They'll be bringing AR-15s to a drone fight: the State always outguns the People. The turning point of revolutions is when the troops turn their guns away from the People and toward an oppressive government.

On the other hand, "Post-Truth is pre-Fascist," and in a Post-Truth USA, there is much to be said for recalling the Right of (Mostly NonViolent) Revolution.

Voter Turn-Out / Voting Age (and Fighting Arrested Development)

In the US we need a consistent and meaningful "age of majority," reinforced with ritual. 

We've got the 26th Amendment so let's stick with 18 for that "age of majority": legal adulthood. The privacy issues will be difficult, but at 18 every American should be issued The Card: passport, voter registration, registration for any conscription we still have (e.g., jury duty), I.D. for buying legal recreational drugs such as ethyl alcohol, and with one chip to be activated with licensing to drive and another to purchase fire arms — under whatever regulations are in place. And for each monthly cohort we can have a little ceremony with the oath or affirmation "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" and a proclamation of this group as now adult citizens of the United States with all the rights, privileges, and obligations pertaining thereto — and then a party.

Some people are fully mature at 15; some people never grow up. And all sorts of stuff is happening in terms of neurological development that energetic lawyers and PR-savvy scientists have been talking about the last decade or so and will continue to talk about. Screw that. "Old enough to decide whether or not to obey an order to kill people, then old enough to perform any other adult function" (as a matter of policy; as mentioned "Individuals will vary, including individually, in different situations"). Wise societies depend on self-fulfilling prophecies, the psychological efficacy of ritual, and the social pressures of expectations. 

Also we need classes for teens in civics and sex Ed (including sex-related ethics) and in using and not abusing drugs.