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Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent Through American Popular Culture, ed. Timothy M. Dale & Joseph J. Foy: I got this because it has an intro by Kate Mulgrew, who wrote about being asked to speak in front of actual female scientists and how she apologized to them for not being a real scientist, but then found that many of them thought of her as an inspiring figure. Unfortunately, most of the book’s essays about different popular (and some not-so-popular) media just offer the author’s own interpretations of their potentially disruptive meanings, without much acknowledgement that the genius of popular culture is its openness to multiple and often conflicting interpretations. Archie Bunker was a hero to some and a figure of fun to others, all of them convinced that the producers shared their interpretations. Moreover, the introduction excuses itself from analyzing conservative/reactionary offerings (or interpretations) by claiming that its key texts came from 2000-2006, when conservative politics prevailed, and that protest and dissent are progressive by their nature. I don’t think conservatives would agree they were winning the culture war at that time, and I definitely don’t agree with the latter claim—look at GamerGate. An individual’s own reading of a text can be really interesting and insightful, but it can also lead to narrowing assumptions; when one author claims that “[c]learly, the act of buying a shirt is not always simply buying a shirt,” it’s just an assertion that progressive reforms can be accomplished through consumerist means, and I don’t know why I should believe that over Naomi Klein’s critique of same. Likewise, the essay about the Simpsons finds satire in episodes that, the author admits, others saw as reaffirming Christianity, and then attributes his own reading to the producers, insisting on the singularity of meaning.
Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone): This is a book at war with itself. It wants to believe that charter schools are committed to improving education (and not to dumping students who don’t do well with their formats, as public schools can’t do, and to producing investor returns), but its own story is about how the basic thrust of the big charter proponents has been wrong. By focusing on controlling student behavior and measuring “outcomes,” American school reform has managed to alienate teachers without changing teacher behavior in the ways that the practices of other countries and the evidence from empirical research show actually helps teachers teach and children learn. We’ve yelled at teachers, dumped new methods on them without coherence or sufficient training, and devalued professional development, when mentoring and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge are what’s needed. We’ve pretended that teaching is a natural gift that you either can or can’t do, and not something that requires more than loving children to succeed at. As one of Green’s interviewees points out, you wouldn’t train doctors by dumping a bunch of them into a hospital and firing the bottom-performing 10% at the end of the year. Despite the account of methods that do work to help teachers succeed, this ends up being a really depressing book; it’s hard to believe that America will commit to the necessary support, when it’s so much easier to test students and declare their teachers successes or failures.
Jake Halpern, Bad Paper: The story of debt collectors in Buffalo, mostly struggling to get by on the backs of other people struggling to get by. Halpern talks to a few debtors—whose debt information, such as it was, was stolen and they were fooled into paying people with absolutely no title to the debt—whose bad luck or bad relationships have taken them from struggling to defaulting. But mostly he focuses on the collectors, including a wealthy guy who creates a hedge fund to invest in debt because it’s so profitable: buy defaulted accounts for fractions of pennies on the dollar; call up the debtors and inveigle them into paying; try to keep your employees’ violations of fair debt collection laws to a minimum (which is to say, try to keep them from lying about whether a court case is imminent; a reputable agency only has to fire people for this once in a while); lather, rinse, repeat.
At the end, Halpern goes even further to the bottom of the barrel—lawyers who buy the debt after the debt collectors have been at it, and really do sue, often obtaining judgments that allow them to seize bank accounts and garnish wages. Only trouble: the amounts they claim don’t necessarily have any relation to the amount owed at the time of default, with “fees and costs” added to double or triple the debt. And the debt collectors don’t actually have any underlying data about the accounts, just names and numbers on spreadsheets. It’s not worth it for banks to provide actual records, which might or might not still exist; every time debt is sold the seller makes the buyer contractually acknowledge that the seller isn’t making any promises about validity. (And then the buyers go to court with an affidavit swearing to the facts under penalty of perjury! These lawyers should be disbarred.) The court system only works because most people don’t appear and ask for the plaintiff to prove its case; they drop cases if the debtor shows up. This is how we roll in America today.
Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze: A tour through various issues surrounding yeast evolution, fermentation, the effects of alcohol (generally increases propensity for violence, but highly culturally mediated/affected by expectations as can be shown by using placebo), and the nature of the hangover (still largely unknown). Quick read, with some interesting factoids, like the mold that, quite unusually, can live on alcohol and thus coats the area around a distillery. Also that the amount of alcohol that evaporates, concentrating the rest, is known as the angel’s share.
Aaron O’Connell, Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps: Cultural history of the Marines during and since WWII. O’Connell emphasizes the Marines’ grasp of PR, used in service of their overwhelming and constant sense of being under threat, more often from other services than from actual hostile combatants. However, there was also plenty of actual trauma and PTSD, given that Marines faced more combat exposure than other services and also adopted tactics that emphasized speed of victory over safety of fighters. So the homefront involved political maneuvering to position the Marines as the true guarantor of manhood versus both civilians and other services—the others liked planes and nuclear bombs and other tech, while the Marines focused on the fighting man as a man and a soldier. This also required the Marines to carefully manage their perceived relationship with violence to keep from becoming offputting to civilians, especially women—O’Connell calls their claim that brutal training was a fatherly way of making boys into men “tender violence.” It didn’t work all that well in practice, as O’Connell’s discussion of high domestic violence and alcoholism rates indicates, but it definitely achieved its PR objectives. I was surprised to learn how dirty the Marines played in politics, leaking top secret military reports to their congressional supporters, and it was also a reminder how longstanding the conservative self-positioning as victims really is.
Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone): This is a book at war with itself. It wants to believe that charter schools are committed to improving education (and not to dumping students who don’t do well with their formats, as public schools can’t do, and to producing investor returns), but its own story is about how the basic thrust of the big charter proponents has been wrong. By focusing on controlling student behavior and measuring “outcomes,” American school reform has managed to alienate teachers without changing teacher behavior in the ways that the practices of other countries and the evidence from empirical research show actually helps teachers teach and children learn. We’ve yelled at teachers, dumped new methods on them without coherence or sufficient training, and devalued professional development, when mentoring and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge are what’s needed. We’ve pretended that teaching is a natural gift that you either can or can’t do, and not something that requires more than loving children to succeed at. As one of Green’s interviewees points out, you wouldn’t train doctors by dumping a bunch of them into a hospital and firing the bottom-performing 10% at the end of the year. Despite the account of methods that do work to help teachers succeed, this ends up being a really depressing book; it’s hard to believe that America will commit to the necessary support, when it’s so much easier to test students and declare their teachers successes or failures.
Jake Halpern, Bad Paper: The story of debt collectors in Buffalo, mostly struggling to get by on the backs of other people struggling to get by. Halpern talks to a few debtors—whose debt information, such as it was, was stolen and they were fooled into paying people with absolutely no title to the debt—whose bad luck or bad relationships have taken them from struggling to defaulting. But mostly he focuses on the collectors, including a wealthy guy who creates a hedge fund to invest in debt because it’s so profitable: buy defaulted accounts for fractions of pennies on the dollar; call up the debtors and inveigle them into paying; try to keep your employees’ violations of fair debt collection laws to a minimum (which is to say, try to keep them from lying about whether a court case is imminent; a reputable agency only has to fire people for this once in a while); lather, rinse, repeat.
At the end, Halpern goes even further to the bottom of the barrel—lawyers who buy the debt after the debt collectors have been at it, and really do sue, often obtaining judgments that allow them to seize bank accounts and garnish wages. Only trouble: the amounts they claim don’t necessarily have any relation to the amount owed at the time of default, with “fees and costs” added to double or triple the debt. And the debt collectors don’t actually have any underlying data about the accounts, just names and numbers on spreadsheets. It’s not worth it for banks to provide actual records, which might or might not still exist; every time debt is sold the seller makes the buyer contractually acknowledge that the seller isn’t making any promises about validity. (And then the buyers go to court with an affidavit swearing to the facts under penalty of perjury! These lawyers should be disbarred.) The court system only works because most people don’t appear and ask for the plaintiff to prove its case; they drop cases if the debtor shows up. This is how we roll in America today.
Adam Rogers, Proof: The Science of Booze: A tour through various issues surrounding yeast evolution, fermentation, the effects of alcohol (generally increases propensity for violence, but highly culturally mediated/affected by expectations as can be shown by using placebo), and the nature of the hangover (still largely unknown). Quick read, with some interesting factoids, like the mold that, quite unusually, can live on alcohol and thus coats the area around a distillery. Also that the amount of alcohol that evaporates, concentrating the rest, is known as the angel’s share.
Aaron O’Connell, Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps: Cultural history of the Marines during and since WWII. O’Connell emphasizes the Marines’ grasp of PR, used in service of their overwhelming and constant sense of being under threat, more often from other services than from actual hostile combatants. However, there was also plenty of actual trauma and PTSD, given that Marines faced more combat exposure than other services and also adopted tactics that emphasized speed of victory over safety of fighters. So the homefront involved political maneuvering to position the Marines as the true guarantor of manhood versus both civilians and other services—the others liked planes and nuclear bombs and other tech, while the Marines focused on the fighting man as a man and a soldier. This also required the Marines to carefully manage their perceived relationship with violence to keep from becoming offputting to civilians, especially women—O’Connell calls their claim that brutal training was a fatherly way of making boys into men “tender violence.” It didn’t work all that well in practice, as O’Connell’s discussion of high domestic violence and alcoholism rates indicates, but it definitely achieved its PR objectives. I was surprised to learn how dirty the Marines played in politics, leaking top secret military reports to their congressional supporters, and it was also a reminder how longstanding the conservative self-positioning as victims really is.
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