2009
Contemporary Political Rhetoric and Teaching History
Earlier this month I did a post on my Hist 100 blog that might be of some interest to readers here [on Clio and Me], "Contemporary Politics and History." My audience was primarily freshmen in their first semester at university, most of them too young to have voted in the last election.
I have said this in class, but it needs repeating here: Our contemporary American political discourse about socialism and nazism has absolutely nothing to do with those terms and phenomena in actual history. While we are not in class to talk about American politics, I want to point out how language and history are being abused for political purposes. I am not doing this to undermine the stances of politicians who use hyperbole to make their points. There are perfectly good ideological and policy reasons that one can bring to either side of the health care debate, the energy policy debate, environmental policy debates, and so on. But none of these reasons has anything to do with Hitler, nazism, communism, or socialism—not if we are being honest, and as long as we are willing to see the slippery slope argument for what it is, a logical fallacy.
This abuse of history used to just offend me as a citizen who knew something about history, but addressing the abuse became part of my teaching job this summer when I had a student try to explain Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government." That is when I realized that not only was history being abused for political purposes, but our contemporary political discourse was getting in the way of students understanding the past. That's why I wrote a blog post on my own history blog sarcastically entitled, "What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom."
I could follow the logic of the student who described Hitler in terms of "socialism" and "big government," if I were willing to understand the past in terms of this country's contemporary self-image, but I am not. We need to take the past on its own terms and try to understand it in some detail before we attempt easy analogies. In other words, my concern relates to historical thinking, that is, that thing I began teaching you with the reading assignments from August 31st, including Gerald Schlabach's "A Sense of History."
Fall 2009 Semester
This is what I’m doing this fall: Hist 100 at Mason. I’m actually teaching in the first part of the day instead of splitting my workday between morning and evening. This circumstance makes me hopeful that I can get back to blogging history here.
What Having a Socialist Nazi in the White House Means for the Classroom
I am probably not alone when I say that I have a hard time taking GOP “socialism” rhetoric seriously. The same goes for right-wing attempts to equate Obama with Hitler. Apparently, however, I need to keep this rhetoric in mind when planning my classes for it has entered my classroom in an unexpected way. In a blue book essay about totalitarianism this summer, one student explained nazism in terms of “socialism” and “big government.” There was no political intent behind these statements. The student simply drew on the language of everyday life, as students are wont to do.
This is a sad commentary on what rhetorical excess on the right is doing to our everyday vocabulary, but it also presents an opportunity. Without engaging in politicking, I can use this apparent linguistic and cultural deficit not only as motivation to be more thorough about how I teach socialism, nazism, and other modern political ideologies and systems, but also as an example for historical thinking. My instinct here is to talk about the use and abuse of history, which is probably what I will do. On the other hand, however, some of those who throw around the “s” word really believe that socialism is on the march in the United States. If I were to take such fears seriously, I would also use them to teach my students about how the meaning of language shifts and even mutates over time, sometimes meaning different things to different groups of people. This too would be a worthwhile lesson, although it would bring me closer to something that some students might perceive as politicking. I should probably take that chance.
Tiring of the Permanent Campaign
The battle over health care reform has got me down. Like last year during the presidential campaign, one has to deal with two discursive opponents. On one hand, there are huge packs of lies being spread. On the other hand, there is the actual question of the government’s role in health care. If only we could concentrate on just this second thing and the actual proposals being discussed.
Instead of this being a relatively normal legislative process, all the so-called town hall meetings have turned this into an extension of last year’s campaign. It just doesn’t end. I suppose if I actually had a representative, I would get more involved in the process, but DC citizens have no representation in Congress. Instead I seek solace in The Daily Show with John Stewart, a little corner in our peculiar political universe that offers sanity, civility, and humor.
Work
I had planned to finish my grading yesterday, but that has to happen today. I was just too exhausted. Looking at the wreckage around me that is my apartment, I wondered why. I also wondered about the incredibly fast passage of time. Ten weeks of a daily intensive history course in the afternoon (in two consecutive parts) and two four-week evening courses, three hours per evening, three evenings per week, with a three-hour minimum round trip commute on top of that help to explain both my exhaustion and temporal dislocation. But that came on top of twenty weeks non-stop ESL teaching at another place, sixteen of those weeks including morning and evening work. And I have continued my Saturday ESL. In other words, I have just finished thirty six-day weeks of teaching, with the exception of two days off over Memorial Day weekend and three days for the Fourth.
If this actually amounted to a living income in the DC area, I could be happy. Instead, it just lets me almost get by, sort of, because it is all paid by the course (history) or hour (ESL). Of course, in these economic times, survival is a pretty good achievement too. And I do like what I do.
There is a ton of planning to do for Mason this fall, because I will have three sections of Western Civ with fifty-five students each. I am supposed to have a grader for ten hours per week, which will lighten the burden, but I have to plan in such a way that I can survive if the grader doesn’t come through. The early morning section will be a killer, because of the commute, but I am looking forward to a semester with all the teaching in the same part of the day, in this case from morning until early afternoon. Putting that aside, though, I have three whole weeks where I can work but not commute or manage a classroom. I really need that.
Turning up the heat in Iran?
Now things really seem to be getting crazy: “In Iran: A Call For Arrest Of Mousavi & Khatami," reports NPR blogger Mark Memmott. Once you make protest illegal, though, and put people on show trials for participating in it, such a move would be a logical next step. Will they really go there? It seems possible, after more incremental steps in weakening the opposition, assuming that weakening is what is actually happening, which might not be the case at all. Or it could be that such a statement is more a sign of frustration over divisions within Iran’s leadership. Hard to say.
Frightened Bushies
The Bush administration seems to have been more freaked out by 9/11 than I realized. Just how far down a paranoid path it had drifted is demonstrated by the newest revelation of a measure it was contemplating back in 2002: using the military to arrest terror suspects in the United States. Bush ultimately went against it, but that it was even contemplated creates an image of a very frightened White House. Of course, Dick Cheney and John Yoo had their hand in this, so legal traditions and our political culture were not major impediments.
Miracle Workers by Taylor Mali
I know my university history teaching and my work with adults learning to speak English is different than what Taylor Mali does with high school students, but I can still relate to his poetry about teaching. Maybe it’s because I often have teenagers in required courses. But maybe it’s because there’s something more fundamental to the craft, no matter who or what you are teaching. Here’s a piece he posted to his YouTube channel this year:
Update: I've removed my YouTube embeds because I don't want to set up consent notices for their trackers. Clicking the above screenshot will take you to the video on their site. (June 2, 2024)
Generous Farm Share Yesterday
Our weekly farm share feeds two people with room to spare, and often it works okay for three. There is less diversity than at the grocery store, because we eat what is in season, but a lot is in season in the summer. Yesterday’s share was particularly amazing: Asian greens, salad mix, spinach, kale, spring onions, cauliflower, beets with greens, zucchini, broccoli, kohlrabi, and turnips. These items from our farm were supplemented with couscous, black beans, maple yogurt, shell peas, and blueberries. Yummy!
Yesterday morning was my turn to help count out and set up the food for something like 200 CSA members. It was hot, so I don’t remember the exact number, but it was a lot. Still, five of us (including my wife) managed to get the bulk of the work done in something like three hours. Of course, this does not count all the organizational and logistical work to get the food there in the first place, or the work done on the farm.
The results are fantastic. High quality food that is good for the earth at affordable prices, and I get to work with good people too.
Noteworthy on Iran
In the New Yorker: Online Only, Laura Secor offers not only a trenchant comment on the “Burning Silence in Iran," but also a useful insight on what seems to be going on in that country. I found her piece via The Lede, a news blog at the New York Times that is offering a constant stream of interesting stories on Iran from a variety of online sources.
If that is not enough, Global Voices has special coverage of the 2009 Iranian elections. While this outlet is always important for offering perspectives often overlooked by the mainstream media, its importance has grown during the current crisis, during which authorities have cut off traditional media from firsthand knowledge of the streets. Also interesting are the Iran Updates on the Iranian-American site, Tehran Bureau. They include reports from inside Iran.
Bloggers Unite for Iran on June 29th
There is a Bloggers Unite campaign for Iran on June 29th.
I doubt that a bunch of outsiders blogging for Iran will make any difference in the outcome of the immediate conflict, but I do believe that all the attention we in the West are paying to the Iranians is proving beneficial for the West in general and the United States in particular. No longer abstract Others that are easy to contemplate bombing because we are worried about their country’s nuclear program, the Iranian people have faces, hopes, and dreams with which we can identify and immense amounts of courage that we can admire.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
So Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is standing by the highly improbable fiction that the election was a fair one. It seems to me that he and his supporters are playing a dangerous game. Sure, Khamenei has the instruments of oppression at his disposal. He can use the state and vigilante citizens to crack down on the protesters, and he might even win the day. In the end, however, he has made all too clear that the democratic elements of the system are no more than window dressing. Instead of sacrificing his preferred candidate, he is now risking the entire system. How can it now escape the opposition that the president is not the problem, but the entire system itself?
The Fast Pace of Time in Iran
It seems to me that Iran’s clerical leadership is playing a dangerous game. The main opposition candidate is a conservative political insider who supports the current system, but who looks moderate in an Iranian context. His supporters are not demanding a change to the system either. They too just want the system to live up to its own official standards. But as time passes, expectations and goals might very easily expand to a vision that is even more at odds with what Iran’s clerical leadership wants for the country. Shouldn’t they concede before this happens?
One problem is that the opposition wants a new election, because the one they just had is tainted. But what would a new election mean? Among other things, more national discourse on the future of the country, and I suspect such a conversation would lead people to probe even deeper into the country’s problems, perhaps even to their systemic foundation, even if politicians are not allowed to question the country’s political system.
Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad’s supporters could become increasingly insistent about their desires, and that could easily undermine Iran’s social stability still further. Time is not on the side of those who support the status quo. Unfortunately, that does not mean it is on the side of the opposition.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The jury is still out on whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really won the election and, if so, to what extent. How this will play out is also anybody’s guess. One thing I already find worrying, however, is Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, which talks about freedom and bipartisanship, on one hand, and delegitimizes legitimate political opposition, on the other. The following combination of quotes from today’s Washington Post is chilling:
This election was so free that you could say it was complete freedom. . . . The election is gone and done. It is time for friendship, coalition and building the country. . . . [Reporters should talk to] true Iranians . . . Like the people you meet at my rallies. . . . [As for the opposition,] There is no other choice than to surrender. . . You think you are of the elite? That you are above the people? . . . The society must be purified of these people. . . . They will try to stop me, but I will expose them to the great nation of Iran.
The first statement rings hollow. What is “complete freedom,” especially in the Iranian system where unelected religious leaders determines who may run for office? The second statement sounds eminently reasonable, something like a well-wishing plea for bipartisanship in the United States. Then things get spooky. It is one thing to demonize the other side as not truly patriotic. We experienced that last fall with Sarah Palin’s rhetoric of “real America,” the “media elite,” and so on. While I find such rhetoric reprehensible, at least it did not come right out and say that the other side had no right to exist. It understood the concept of a loyal opposition, even if that opposition supposedly loves America less than Palin’s and McCain’s supporters do.
If Ahmadinejad’s legitimately won the election, which is far from clear, his rhetoric shows that he has no respect for democratic processes. Elections without the concept of a loyal opposition are meaningless. Here’s hoping that Iran’s Supreme Leader gets that.
Perhaps it will. After all, the oppositional candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was screened and approved by religious authorities. We are talking about opposition that is legitimate within the narrow confines of Iran’s political system, not our own. If even that is not acceptable, then what will be left of Iran’s revolution? Iranian independence, to be sure, as well as clerical rule and possibly the more extensive subjugation of women, but what about the semi-democratic elements of its constitution? The campaign, polling, and post-election protests suggest that they matter to Iranians. And well they should. The legitimacy of Iran’s post-1979 system depends on them.
One Problem with Unemployment Statistics
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our current unemployment rate is 8.9%. As bad as this number is, it is still comforting to think about how it is “only” in the single digits. Yet this number does not account for the huge number of self-employed professionals and tradespeople in this country who are unable to file an unemployment claim, even though they are effectively unemployed. And what about those of us who cobble together a series of temporary and part-time jobs that fill up our hours with work, but which do not amount to a job that is eligible for unemployment benefits when some of those gigs fall through? What about the underemployed? My gut and my own experience tells me that that 8.9% number is way too low.
Small Crime
I only had time for one film during this year’s Filmfest DC. Fortunately, it was one of those films that was a delight for both the senses and spirit: “Small Crime” [Mikro eglima], directed by Christos Georgiou (Greece 2009). We also got to hear Georgiou answer questions about the film afterwards.
Downgrading 'Torture' to 'Harsh Questioning'
On the front page of today’s Washington Post, one can read the following headline:
Effectiveness Of Harsh Questioning Is Unclear
Detainee May Have Faced Few Traditional Tactics
This language bothers me. We are talking about torture here, so why not use the term? Why downgrade it to “harsh questioning” and even make it sound innovative, which comes to mind as the opposite of “traditional”? A story broadcast by On the Media this week shows that the Washington Post is not alone in this. Apparently the media is following the Obama administration’s lead.
I understand the administration’s position, because it is hoping this dark cloud will go away and not overshadow its policy agenda. Nonetheless, I do not understand how the administration could possibly believe that it will go away. The administration needs to get ahead of the story, even if it feels it can’t prejudice any possible criminal cases by calling it torture.
Meanwhile, there is no reason why newspapers have to toe the line on what language to use. The mere existence of definitions of what could and could not be done does not mean that the interrogation techniques used by the CIA were any less torture.
Terrorism
On December 28th, I began the first draft of a blog piece thus:
We need to stop thinking of terrorism as the disease and look at it instead as a symptom. In illnesses we have to treat unacceptably dangerous symptoms too, such as a high fever, but in the end we have to go to the root causes of the disease.
I never got any further with these ideas, and now, with President Obama, perhaps I don’t need to. What a difference the past few months have made!
Unlike the Bush administration, the Obama administration does not use the term “Global War on Terror.” I believe that this is not only a cosmetic change to differentiate the current administration from the previous one. Instead it constitutes recognition of the fact that terror is one part of a host of other problems, which differ according to region. The matrix of the Taliban, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for instance, raises a rather different set of challenges than does Iraq or Iran or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even if they overlap in significant ways. Of course, the fight against terrorists will continue, but the new administration is no longer attempting to squeeze the broad set of foreign policy and security challenges it faces into the “Global War on Terror” rubric, which seemed to give the previous administration a bad case of tunnel vision.
Mob Rule
While I understand the anger about the AIG bonuses, the House bill to tax them into nonexistence feels a little bit too much like mob rule to me. Such measures are hardly designed to inspire confidence in our legal system. The rule of law can only endure when all sides accept its results, even when these results stink. Here’s hoping cooler heads prevail in the Senate and White House.
Honor and Violence
America’s heartless terrorism
Killing people like insects
But honor doesn’t fear power.
These sobering lines making the rounds in some parts of Pakistan raise troubling questions about our use of drones to bomb extremists in that country’s tribal regions. (See Mark Mazzetti’s “The Downside of Letting Robots Do the Bombing” in today’s New York Times.) While I am not sure how to interpret them, I am reminded of how effective the rhetoric of honor was for the insurgency in Iraq, until the U.S. developed a more hands-on approach under General Petraeus. I’m not trying to make a policy suggestion, mind you. Iraq and Afghanistan are two very different places. I am simply struck by the powerful role that an injured sense of honor can play among populations that might feel like David in the face of Goliath.
Great War Course Planning
I’ve made a little more progress in my Great War course thanks to the early deadlines for book orders. We can’t cover as many books as I might have liked because of the compressed time period: three three-hour meetings per week for one month. I can’t fill all that time with lectures either, for then the main question would be who succumbs to fatigue first, me from speaking or the students from listening. More depth and less breadth is my goal, though the reading schedule will remain rigorous.
We’re going to do four major units with six books. First, there will be the origins question with July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War by Samuel R. Williamson, Jr. and Russel Van Wyk (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2003). We’ll supplement this documentary history with the first chapter of The First World War by Hew Strachan (Penguin 2005) Second, we will use several classes to cover the course of the global conflict using Strachan’s survey together with the personal narratives in Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis (HarperCollins 2005). Third, we will use Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Anchor 1990) to consider the cultural impact of the war. Finally, we will look more closely at the war in two countries with Imperial Germany and the Great War by Roger Chickering (Cambridge 1998) and France and the Great War by Leonard V. Smith, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, and Annette Becker (Cambridge 2003).
I might add some articles or online sources when I write the syllabus, and students will get a broader feel for the literature through brief oral book presentations at the end of the semester.
Because students will need a little time to begin reading in the first place, I will begin the class by looking at a selection of classic films. There could also be a lecture at the beginning on broader trends in war and society, although I’m tempted to forego that in favor of students raising related questions during discussions.
Incentives for students to read will be not only the subject matter and two short papers, but also a midterm and final exam. While I am no big fan of exams in history courses, many undergraduate students seem to need this carrot and stick. They might even appreciate it, though I would expect none to admit as much.
What happens during classroom time will depend largely on class size. The theoretical upper limit is 45, but I’m told 25 is more usual in the summer. Even that would be too large for meaningful discussions, so I’m thinking about what kind of discussions among small groups of students could occur within the larger classroom, with the groups then reporting results to the class as a whole. I have little experience with this setup in history; however, I regularly use the technique when teaching English to non-native speakers. I believe that this student-centered approach could be applied to history, in which learning historical thinking and a new topic is also about doing. Students need to read, think about, and discuss history in order to make it their own. Discussions in small groups could significantly increase the amount of practice that each student gets in a larger class.
Integrating these student-centered discussions into classroom time should also help with the pacing of each three-hour evening session. There will be more variety for everyone, and time usually passes more quickly for students when they are actively engaged in the class.
Walking
One small milestone: I told myself I should start walking to my current job in Arlington, and I actually did it today. I walked about a half hour downhill to Key Bridge in Georgetown. Then there was the trip up a hill in Arlington on the other side of the river. The walk in this direction was only 47 minutes, but coming back was closer to an hour, because I took a detour across Georgetown University’s campus, mistakenly believing it was a shortcut. Getting to Arlington with public transport involves two to three busses, depending on my route, so the walk didn’t cost me much extra time. Sure, I couldn’t read the newspaper, but thinking and exercising are more important anyway. Besides, it’s spring.
A Different Approach to History 100?
George Mason’s Hist 100 courses are supposed to cover Western Civilization in one semester. To manage this Sisyphean task, I switched from a chronological to a thematic approach. While this makes sense from an analytic point of view, covering themes seems to alienate some students, because the themes appear in the foreground, not the events and personalities. Moreover, the themes tend to bridge larger periods of time. With “Religion and Society,” for instance, I cover the Investiture Conflict, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Wars of Religion, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. And “War and Society” goes from the French Revolution through the Second World War into the Cold War.
The material in my thematic courses has been organized in a more meaningful way than was possible under a broad chronological approach, but it has not held students' attention. That is why I am thinking about covering a selection of specific episodes the next time around. I could put these up front and use the people, ideas, and issues involved as a vehicle to understand the broader themes that I want them to learn. A possible subtitle for such a course might be “Select Events and Ideas,” which might also make the history feel more manageable to the students.