Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 427

December 2, 2011: Homogenous

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a post on Ben Franklin's anti-German xenophobia, and included in a supporting role some discussion of "The Dark Side of Diversity," a truly abhorrent essay by Pat Buchanan that blamed the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre (and just about everything else Pat found wrong with late 20th and early 21st century America) on the Immigration Act of 1965. I didn't link to the Buchanan essay then, as I didn't want to give it or its host site, Townhall, any traffic; but since I'm going to discuss Buchanan's ideas at greater length here, and moreover compare another and much more well-respected writer and historian to Buchanan, I feel that it's important for me to provide that link. So, much as it pains me to subject you to this tripe, I'd suggest that you click on the "Dark Side" link above and get the full sense of Buchanan's (thankfully pretty short) piece. When you're done gnashing your teeth and rending your garments and cursing a blue streak (those were and are my responses, anyway), I'll be here. And I promise never to ask you to read any Buchanan again.Okay, welcome back, glad you survived. As you now know, there's hardly a single sentence in Buchanan's piece that doesn't cry out to be marked up with a red pen for its logical fallacies, its total lack of evidence and support, its blatant and ugly bigotry, its failure to meet the standards of either the most rudimentary writing course or the barest level of civil decency. But for my purposes here, I'm interested in what is unquestionably the most defining and mythic—and in some ways the most erroneous and destructive—narrative on which Buchanan's whole premise rests: the idea that "Before 1970, we were a people, a community, a country." A couple paragraphs later, Buchanan spells out more fully exactly how much he believes "we" shared prior to the changes wrought by the 60s (including the Immigration Act): "the old ties of history, heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture, music, myth, [and] morality." It's easy to feel as if Buchanan's central ideas in this piece are just more evidence of his (well-established) cultural, historical, and racist derangement (see his frequent defenses of Adolf Hitler, for example); certainly (I hope) most Americans wouldn't agree that the Immigration Act "threw the nation's doors open to the greatest invasion in history," or see a similar "correlation between mass migrations and mass murder." But the truth, to my mind, is that a very significant percentage of Americans do believe that there was once an America in which all those elements were shared, tying "us" all together into "a people, a community, a country"—it's back to this mythically unified nation, after all, that the Tea Party rallying cry of "I want my country back!" seems so clearly to harken.Moreover, this mythologized vision of a once-unified, clearly (if almost always slightly indirectly) white European Anglo-Saxon Christian (what else could Buchanan mean by "heritage, faith, language, tradition, culture"?) America, is to my mind the only possible way to specify Niall Ferguson's concept of America's declining and perhaps nearly lost form of "Western civilization" (a concept to which I responded in yesterday's post). So it's not just bigoted cranks like Buchanan or (predominantly) nostalgic older white Americans like the Tea Partiers who share the belief in this mythologized past—it's also one of our most prominent and public scholars and historians, one of the voices to whom our contemporary American culture turns to make reasoned, complex sense of our history and identity. Whatever their differences as scholars and people—and I fully accept that they are many and substantial—Ferguson's new book (as represented in that Newsweek piece at least) is entirely homogenous with Buchanan's essay in this key way: the premises of both depend entirely on this mythologized narrative of a once culturally/ethnically/religiously/racially unified America that has lost that unity; both see the loss as a bad thing in various ways against which we should push back, which is perhaps an unavoidable corollary to believing in the mythic unity in the first place, but even without that particular follow-up, the belief in the myth is strikingly similar, and, I would argue, renders Ferguson's core idea just as false, and just as destructive, as Buchanan's.So did the Immigration Act of 1965 not really change anything? Was America always just as diverse as it is in the 21st century? Have we not lost any unifying elements? My answers to those questions are, not surprisingly to any long-time readers of this blog, complicated, and the complexity itself is a big part of what's missing from Buchanan or Ferguson's accounts. I'll get to them in Monday's post! More then,BenPS. What do you think?

December 1, 2011: What's At Stake

While I've moved on to a new book project and with it (and with other new articles and possibilities) many other scholarly questions in the fields of American literature and AmericanStudies, and for good and necessary reasons—most of all because I think all of the best scholars, and certainly all of my models in this profession, have continually turned their attention and interests to new and evolving topics—it's fair to say that hardly a day goes by that I'm not viscerally reminded of what's at stake in the questions of how we define American identity on which my second book focused. I identified a number of such issues in the "What Would Change" posts that are collected under the "Book Posts" category here, as well as in parallel Meta-Posts like "Why We're Here, Still." That particular post seems especially relevant these days, with Newt Gingrich suddenly the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination—Gingrich has always been particularly willing to talk (with that destructive combination of ignorance and certainty) about sweeping historical issues like what he called, in the speech I quoted there, "what it once meant to be an American"; and that phrase sums up quite precisely the question for which Gingrich's deeply mythologized and oversimplified narrative (one which would posit details like "European and Christian" as central parts of that founding American identity) continues to provide an answer for far too many Americans.Gingrich's goals, whatever his pretensions to scholarly or intellectual rigor, are of course drastically different from mine; he wants political power (and, yes, money), whereas I hope (among many other goals) to contribute something to our national conversations and narratives. That doesn't mean that I shouldn't engage with his ideas publicly—as I've argued many times in this space, one central reason why I created this blog was my growing feeling that public AmericanStudies "scholarship" had been ceded for far too long to the Gingriches and Becks and Bartons of the world—but it might make it seem like my ideas line up smoothly with what most of my fellow, more genuinely scholarly AmericanStudies peers might argue. I've felt that way at times myself, as when colleagues have highlighted for me prominent, inspiring, and publicly embraced examples of cross-cultural relationships and transformations; at moments like those it can seem as if at least we AmericanStudies scholars are in this together, doing our part to nudge our national narratives toward cross-cultural complexity and conversation. And then I start to read about the most recent work by one of our contemporary moment's most famous and successful historians, Niall Ferguson, and I'm reminded of what's at stake in every current arena, scholarly ones very much included.Ferguson is about as successful as an academic can get, however you want to define success—holds a couple different prominent faculty positions at Harvard, as well as one at Oxford; has published multiple best-selling works of history, particularly on histories of the financial world from the medieval era up to the present; and is a public scholar who writes a column for Newsweek, among other similar venues. I confess to not having read or even prior to this week known much about his most recent book, Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), which is apparently already slated for an accompanying 2012 PBS series; but at least as distilled into this article for Newsweek, the book's core arguments are pretty much exactly as mythologizing and oversimplifying as Gingrich's (and, through Ferguson's insistence on using tech terms like "app" and "operating system" to describe historical concepts, perhaps even more annoying). For a thorough dismantling of the article's arguments, I direct you to this exemplary blog post; I'll just note here, as that blogger and economist Noah Smith also does, that Ferguson's most significant and salient error is a direct conflation of "Western civilization" with "European white folks." That might work for the England in which Ferguson grew up (although I'm not saying that it does, only that I don't know enough about England to disagree), but the central goal of my book's redefinition of American identity is to make clear just how much of American identity and culture, past and present, such a cultural and racial conflation elides. To cite only one, particularly glaring example from Ferguson's own essay (one also cited by Smith): Ferguson uses as proof in his argument that America has lost our supremacy in "work ethic" the assertion that "you don't have to spend too long at any major US university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian Americans." I don't know that it gets much clearer than that. For Ferguson, Asian Americans are non-western, categorically different (presumably no matter how long they or their families have been in America, although that shouldn't matter in any case) from the culture he'd put at the heart of that description. It's not enough simply to say in response that Asian Americans are as centrally and constitutively American as, well, Anglo Americans like Ferguson; I believe that to be the case, but would go, as I go in the book, one step further. My boys—the sons of an Anglo and Russian-Jewish American and an Asian American, the products of the kinds of cross-cultural transformations that are at the heart of America's unique and crucial form of civilization—are the most centrally and constitutively American of all. Ferguson's ideas and success and public forum only further strengthen my sense of how much that redefinition of America is still needed. More tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

November 30, 2011: November Recap

November 1: AmericanStudier, I Married Her: In honor of my wife's birthday, a tribute to five other American women whom I'd have been very lucky to marry.November 2: Storybook Weddings: Those five were actual historical figures, but as an English professor I've got plenty of fictional crushes too, including these five fictional women I'd gladly marry.November 3: Happily Ever After: Rounding out my wedding series with a post on four exemplary marriages in American texts.November 4-6: It's Here!: Celebrating the arrival of the New England American Studies Association's conference at Plimoth Plantation, on which I had worked for more than a year.November 7: Moments That Remain 1: The first of a four-part series following up the NEASA conference, this on one Friday evening's creative reading.November 8: Moments That Remain 2: The second in the series, on Saturday evening's Native Plymouth Tour.November 9: Moments That Remain 3: The third in the series, on the strong and vital undergraduate presence at the conference.November 10: Moments That Remain 4: The final entry in the series, on the many other moments that stood out and two that will continue into the year to come.November 11: Veteran Posts: My second annual Veteran's Day special, this one highlighting a few salient posts.November 12-13: There Are No Words: My thoughts on the Penn State child rape scandal.November 14: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 1: I start a week of posts focused on inspiring student voices and moments with a post on a recent paper on Sedgwick and the Cherokee Memorials.November 15: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 2: The week continues with a post on my very first class as a teacher, and their inspiring reaction after 9/11.November 16: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 3: The week continues with a post on the impressive multigenerational family history projects that defined my reimagined Ethnic American Literature course.November 17: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 4: The week rolls on with a post dedicated to the great graduate students in my first-ever grad course.November 18: Kids Say the Darnedest Things 5: I conclude the week by looking ahead to my five spring courses.November 19-20: Thanks-Fishing: A post requesting suggestions for my Thanksgiving week series, on American things for which we're thankful (suggestions still welcome!).November 21: Giving Thanks 1: Thanks for the innovative, challenging, and essential work of new historians.November 22: Giving Thanks 2: Thanks for some courageous and inspiring responses to the police brutality at UC Davis.November 23: Giving Thanks 3: In response to a colleague's suggestion, thanks for public universities.November 24: Giving Thanks 4: My Thanksgiving Day post highlights a great Thanksgiving-related essay and then gives thanks for the announcement of a new Bruce and the E Street Band album and tour in 2012.November 25: Giving Thanks 5: Another great Thanksgiving-related essay, this one authored by a longtime family friend and influence for whom I'm deeply thankful.November 26-27: Into the Mystic: On the historic site and recreations at Mystic Seaport.November 28: Bond, Racist Bond?: On Live and Let Die, race, and learning to be analytically critical of things we love.November 29: Hap-Hazzard: On The Dukes of Hazzard, Southern reactionaries, and how analytical critiques can sometimes change what we love.

More tomorrow,
Ben

PS. Any topics you'd like to see in this space next month?

November 29, 2011: Hap-Hazzard

There's a flip side to what I tried to describe in yesterday's post—something I mostly still love but can also analyze critically—and that's when our more critical analysis of a once-beloved work makes it impossible for us to feel much affection at all for it. One of my first pop culture loves was The Dukes of Hazzard (1979-1985)—one of my more vivid memories from pre-age 5 is of settling down in front of the small TV in the room next to my bedroom on a Friday night to watch a new episode—and when I have happened to watch the occasional rerun of the show in recent years, there's no question that its core ingredients (the car chases and jumps, Tom Wopat and John Schneider's easy camaraderie, Catherine Bach's charms, a Southern sheriff nearly as funny as JW Pepper, Waylon Jennings' great theme song and pitch-perfect cliffhanger narrations), all assembled into a comfortably consistent formula, still function almost exactly as my nostalgic memories of childhood had indicated.Yet on those occasions my present, adult self has found Dukes almost entirely unwatchable. Partly that's due to some elements that escaped my three year-old eye, including some of the worst overacting ever captured on film (the Ivy League-trained Sorrell Booke as Boss Hogg being the most egregious repeat offender, although I suppose anybody slumming that thoroughly deserves our sympathy more than our condemnation). But chief among those formerly overlooked elements, and the most overt and central source of my recent distaste for Dukes, is a constellation of Southern themes that I have noticed precisely because of my AmericanStudies, analytical perspective on the show. It's true that the Duke boys were in some ways a relatively radical rebellious force there in Hazzard County, fighting against the good ol' boy network of Boss Hogg (he of the full name Jefferson Davis Hogg and the plantation-esque white suit), in trouble with the law since the day they was born, and so on. But Jennings' theme song opens by calling the Dukes "just good old boys" as well—and on closer examination, the Dukes' rebellions echo those of the Agrarians, and of other similarly reactionary Southern traditionalists, far too closely for my taste.It's not just that the Dukes' car was named the General Lee, with a Confederate flag on the roof and the tune of "Dixie" for its horn—although those interconnected details were far from innocent in the post-Civil Rights American South. It's that the Dukes' central mission, their goal in virtually every episode, was to maintain the status quo in their county-that-time-forgot: the show's real villains weren't Boss Hogg and his police force (who managed to coexist happily with the Dukes within that County, each car chase and crash seemingly forgotten by the following week's episode), but rather the outsiders who would come to Hazzard, seeking to modernize it in one dastardly way or another. Each such plan was, on its specific face, well worth the Dukes' opposition; none of them had anything explicitly to do with racial integration or Civil Rights or the like. But in an era that would, a year after Dukes premiered, see Ronald Reagan launch his successful 1980 presidential campaign by traveling to Philadelphia, Mississippi and telling its residents "I believe in states' rights," the show's outright and absolute preference for the past over the future, for the way things have been in a place like Hazzard as opposed to how those meddling outsiders would like to reimagine the County, was in and of itself a powerful and, yes, deeply reactionary social statement.Sorry, Bo and Luke, Daisy and Uncle Jesse and Cooter, Rosco P. Coltrane and Flash, but I've got to call it like I see it. More tomorrow, the monthly recap,BenPS. Any former loves that haven't stood up to your analytical responses?

November 28, 2011: Bond, Racist Bond?

One of the toughest but most valuable skills for any AmericanStudier to learn—or, let me be more exact, that this AmericanStudier has had to learn—is the ability to analyze critically things that we love. Make no mistake, I've never had any problem analyzing the things I love: my undergraduate senior thesis centered on extended readings of three of my long-time favorite historical novels (Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Gore Vidal's Burr, and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident), I started my second book with a Preface analyzing my favorite song (Bruce's "American Skin (41 Shots)"), and I've taught my three favorite American novels (Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony) in numerous courses. But those analyses have often tended, for obvious reasons, to focus on the things I love in those works, and while that's not necessarily a problem (and probably inevitable given my general half-full scholarly perspective), it has perhaps exacerbated my difficulties being more critical about works that I love.My boys have started to get into James Bond films recently—or at least into YouTube clips of the chases from the films; we haven't watched a full one yet, and I doubt that either spycraft or seduction will interest them as much as vehicular mayhem at this stage—and one of their early favorite sequences, quite rightly at it's one of the best action-comedy sequences of all time, is the boat chase from Live and Let Die (1973). Live has long been in my top few Bond films, and one reason—along with that boat chase and by far the best Bond theme song—is likely that it's definitely the most American Bond film: much of it is set in New York City, New Orleans, and the Louisiana bayou, with the rest set on a fictional Caribbean island that is deeply interconnected with those continental locales. (I don't think Edouard Glissant has written about Live, but maybe he should!) But one corollary effect of that American setting has also made Live the most controversial and critiqued Bond film (even among aficionados who have made their peace with the rampant sexism of the early films and the like): the villains are more or less all African American (or African Caribbean), and at times the film most definitely resorts to racial stereotypes or jokes in its portrayals of those characters.No matter how much I love (and will always love) Live, I can't deny those elements: the scene in which Bond shoots a Caribbean/voodoo statue and its eyes roll is only the most extreme of a number of similarly, uncomfortably racist asides. Nor can I entirely explain them away by noting that Bond villains, at least the lower-level ones, are always more or less buffoons, so the buffoonery of this film's low-level baddies is not connected to race (that's true, but doesn't get at the small racist asides like the aforementioned one). I would certainly note that the main villain, as played with serious gravitas by the always great Yaphet Kotto, is no laughing matter, and a more than worthy adversary for James. But ultimately, my argument would have to come back to that boat chase, and to its humorous foil, the one and only Sheriff J.W. Pepper—Pepper is the film's (and in many ways the series') definitive comic relief, a character who exists to poke fun at stereotypical Southern good ol' boys, but also someone who illustrates the more absurd and extreme and funny side to Bond himself and every aspect of his world (a side that Roger Moore was particularly adept at playing up). When Pepper mistakes one of the villain's African American henchmen for his park ranger brother-in-law, cackling "If one side of the family don't get him, the other side will!," we most definitely laugh—but is the laughter racist? Is it at the casually racist Pepper? Is it just at the absurdity of the moment, as it counterbalances the building tension of the chase's action? All of the above, I'd say. I've gotten better at analyzing critically the things I love, and again I can't and won't deny the racism within Live. But it's also a pitch-perfect Roger Moore Bond film (despite being Moore's first), and the over-the-top humor (directed in every direction), wedded to local color that is in this case distinctly American in flavor, is a central reason why. More tomorrow,BenPS. Links above, so I'll just ask: any works that you love yet can analyze critically at the same time?

November 26-27, 2011: Into the Mystic

Our Thanksgiving trip to Connecticut ended with a quick sunset exploration of Mystic Seaport with our two little AmericanStudiers. They were suitably taken with it, although it's fair to say that their AmericanStudier Dad was slightly torn—their central goal was to climb on as many things as possible, including to be sure any and all historic recreations of ships; I would be lying if I didn't admit to enjoying seeing their curiosity and energy, but on the other hand, y'know, historic recreations. I made my peace with it by hanging right with them and  by asking them to be careful a lot, and I think we only once explicitly went under a "Closed" sign and onto a boat; that, and the total absence of any historic destructions, makes for a pretty successful balance of fun and responsible if you ask me. And my older son said "The Seaport is fun!" as we were leaving, which certainly warms the cockles of this AmericanStudier's heart.Besides the family fun, and besides the rather un-scholarly but very definite great memories (our wedding reception was at the now-apparently-closed Seamen's Inne, a restaurant and reception hall directly adjacent to the Seaport; we even got to take some photos on one of the historic ships, although not the one onto which the boys and I illegally snuck!), I took away one other impression from this visit: Mystic is working very hard to preserve its historic recreations, and has likewise made those preservation efforts very central to the story it tells to its visitors. I'm sure that the first part has been the case since the historic site opened, but I don't remember the preservation efforts being foregrounded nearly as much in past years: there are for example two giant buildings dedicated entirely to the current preservation and renovation work being done on a single ship, the Charles Morgan (that link both details much of that work and illustrates how much the Seaport is working to highlight and talk about it), and the whole preservation section of the site felt open to the public in a way that I didn't remember (and that my construction-loving boys certainly appreciated).Seeing this (to my mind) new emphasis on the preservation and recreation work reminded me of a similar, and similarly recent (compared to much of the historic site), space at Plimoth Plantation: the Craft Center. Again, the work done in that space by artisans and craftspeople to recreate historically accurate materials with which to populate the Plimoth Plantation site has been part of the site's recreation efforts since their origins; but the work of the Crafts Center to make public and accessible those recreation efforts, to turn them into another, meta-site where Plimoth visitors can talk with many of those who have contributed to the nearby historic site from which they have likely just walked (or to which they are about to walk), is a striking addition to the Plimoth Plantation experience. It might seem as if the most significant recent changes to historic sites have been those in the name of greater historical complexity and balance, and there's no question that both Mystic and Plimoth are working hard to achieve those goals; but they're also both changing the way they represent their own historic efforts, and some of the most ongoing and critical (and worthy of our support) work on which they depend.Just another reason to get out to our historic sites, whether you've been before (got married there, even) or not. And bring the kids! More next week,BenPS. Links above, but any interesting or inspiring historic sites you'd highlight?

November 25, 2011: Giving Thanks 5

[This week I've been highlighting American things for which I'm thankful. This is the fifth and final entry in the series.]

This is really a Guest Post of Sorts, but one authored by somebody from whom I definitely also give thanks: Mike Branch. Mike was a graduate student of my Dad's for many years, writing his dissertation on American environmental writing, and has since gone on to become one of the leading scholars and teachers in that evolving field; he's certainly a scholarly role model for me in many ways, not least his commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and his admirable ability (as this essay illustrates) to connect his scholarly work to real, vital American and human questions and conversations. But Mike was also a close family friend during my transitional teenage years, and likewise served as a profound influence on me as an individual, as a Bruce fan, as a lover of nature (I still remember our overnight camping trip in Shenandoah National Park), and as a man.

So I'm very thankful for Mike on multiple levels, and am doubly thankful to have stumbled on this great Thanksgiving essay of his:

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6471/

Enjoy, and thanks, Mike, for everything! Happy Thanksgiving one more time, and more this weekend,

Ben

PS. Any American things for which you're thankful? One more chance to add them in the Comments!

November 24, 2011: Giving Thanks 4

[This week I'll be highlighting American things for which I'm thankful. Feel free to suggest your own topics in the comments, or send your own guest posts to me by email [brailton@fitchburgstate.edu]. This is the fourth in the series.]In my inaugural Thanksgiving Day post last year, I wrote about, and tried to push back against and complicate and revise, Rush Limbaugh's oversimplified version of the holiday and the Pilgrims. Whatever the influence of Rush's particular version, though, the fact remains that Thanksgiving, like virtually all other American holidays and prominent occasions, exists in our collective consciousness as at best a mythologized narrative dimly connected to any specific historical or cultural details; since the holiday mostly means some combination of good food, family gatherings, and football, those mythologizing tendencies might not seem like such a big deal, but they're certainly not an ideal way for us to engage with the national stories and communities to which the occasion might connect us. Fortunately, we've got historians like one of my Monday subjects, Karl Jacoby, who are willing to write complex and rich but also clear and engaging pieces like this op-ed for the Los Angeles Times on the history of Thanksgiving—just another reason I'm thankful for Jacoby!So with my fellow AmericanStudier having done that heavy lifting, I'm free to focus this second Thanksgiving Day post on a piece of news from earlier in the week that makes me very thankful on at least three distinct but equally meaningful levels. First, the news: in a brief statement on www.brucespringsteen.net, Bruce and the E Street Band revealed that they'll be releasing a new album sometime next year and going on a US and world tour shortly thereafter. Now, the three levels of thankfulness:1)      For the Music: In the aftermath of Clarence Clemons' unexpected and far too premature passing, about which I blogged here and here, I genuinely wondered whether the Band would release any more albums; I didn't think Bruce could stop writing and making music in other ways, but the thought of no more Band music was still pretty depressing. I've grown up with the E Street Band in every conceivable way, and sure am excited to know I'll be able to keep growing with them into 2012.2)      For the Inspiration: The E Street Band goes way beyond just my own lifetime, of course, both literally and figuratively. The core group has been making music together since 1973, with the only breaks coming when Bruce has worked on other projects, and thus without the "breakup and reunite for a reunion tour" vibe that has affected virtually every other longstanding rock band. But their longevity is about a lot more than just time or consistency—when keyboardist Danny Federici passed away a few years ago, the band responded in the best ways possible: by honoring him at the start of concerts, by recording a song in his honor on their subsequent album Workin' on a Dream (2009; the song, "The Last Carnival," includes an accordion played by Federici's son!), by continuing to carry the torch and do what he and they did and do so well together. Pretty inspiring stuff.3)      For the Boys:  As my kids have gotten into Bruce and the Band over the last few months, they've both asked me on multiple occasions whether we can see them in concert sometime; one of their early favorite songs is "American Skin (41 Shots)," and a lot of what they love about it connects directly to the live performance details. (The way they say "Clarence!" when he sings the song's first line and then later during his beautiful concluding solo is about as cute as it gets, and makes me even sadder that they won't get to see the Big Man in action.) I'm not sure if, at 6 and 5 years old, they'll really be ready for a rock concert if and when the Band comes to Boston on this tour—but I'm also not willing to pass up the opportunity to find out!Thanks, Bruce and the Band, for so many great moments and memories and some more on the horizon! And Happy Thanksgiving to all of you and yours! More tomorrow, the last of the series,BenPS. Links above, so I'll repeat a final time this week's request: any American things you're thankful for? Ideas, and even guest posts, still very welcome!

November 23, 2011: Giving Thanks 3

[This week I'll be highlighting American things for which I'm thankful. Feel free to suggest your own topics in the comments, or send your own guest posts to me by email [brailton@fitchburgstate.edu]. This, inspired by the first such comment, is the third in the series.]I wrote a Tribute Post back in August on some of the many inspiring teachers with whom I was fortunate enough to work during my time in the Charlottesville public schools; it was a sequel of sorts to an earlier Tribute to six exemplary individual teachers, with four of whom I likewise worked in public schools (in Charlottesville, as a grad student at Temple University, and as an adjunct faculty member at UMass Boston). I've also written multiple posts, including a couple of Tributes, on the great work being done at their respective public schools by my Mom (a teacher, counselor, and social worker in a Head Start-like preschool and elementary school program) and my Dad (an English professor at the University of Virginia). All of which is to say, long-time readers of this blog know full well how much I owe to, and love, public education in its many vital and inspiring forms.In a comment on this weekend's Thanks-Fishing post, though, my colleague (and guest-blogger) Irene Martyniuk made the case for a somewhat more specific example of public education—state colleges and universities, like the one (Fitchburg State University, née College) at which we both teach. She was, as usual, plenty articulate and convincing in her own right, and if she hadn't already done her duty as a guest-blogger I'd just enlist her to write this third Thanks-Giving post instead. And even though I'll resist doing that, I will note that the first reason for which I would likewise give thanks for public universities is precisely, as Irene also noted there, the incredible quality of their faculties; I paid Tribute at the start of the semester to some of the many impressive new FSU colleagues with whom I've had the chance to work over these six and a half years, and I would argue to my last breath that that group, amazing as it is, is simply representative of many equally amazing public university faculties across the country (including certainly those at Virginia, Temple, and UMass Boston with which I'm familiar). The recent and ongoing political attacks on public university faculty members, as exemplified by those directed this past spring at Professor William Cronin, have thus struck me as particularly ironic and, to use a technical AmericanStudies term, ass-backwards.But having taught for virtually all of my professional life at public universities (outside of my year as an adjunct at Boston University, which was great for other reasons about which more in a future post), I am even more thankful for the students I've worked with there, and for one particular quality that they consistently possess: an awareness of the value of the education they're getting. As Irene noted in her comment, public universities are of course significantly less expensive than privates (especially for in-state students), yet the irony is that, at least in my experience, public university students are far more likely to be paying a portion (if not the whole) of their tuition, and so to be profoundly aware both of what their education costs and of why it's worth it. When I think back to my time as a Harvard undergraduate, especially when compared to my Fitchburg State students, I'm ashamed of how little I knew of or thought about what it cost; I did work 10-12 hours a week as a work-study student, which was more than the average Harvard undergrad to be sure, but again, compared to the 30-40 hour weeks that the majority of Fitchburg undergrads work, I had it very, very easy indeed. While that work schedule and many other factors can make it difficult for FSU students to find the time and space to (for example) do all of the reading for a course, I try always to remember that they're bringing something a lot more important to every class than an ideal textual starting point—they're bringing themselves, very genuinely and impressively. Thanks for the Thanks-Giving idea, Irene! More tomorrow, which is set; but you've still got time to propose a topic or write a guest post for Friday,BenPS. Links above, so I'll repeat yet again this week's request: any American things you're thankful for? Ideas, and even guest posts, very very welcome!

November 22, 2011: Giving Thanks 2

[This week I'll be highlighting American things for which I'm thankful. Feel free to suggest your own topics in the comments, or send your own guest posts to me by email [brailton@fitchburgstate.edu]. This is the second in the series.]It might seem hard to find much for which to give thanks in the police brutality that unfolded late last week on the campus of UC Davis, when protesters with the Occupy UC Davis movement were (as the multiple photos and videos of the incident all too clearly demonstrate) dispassionately and unnecessarily pepper-sprayed by riot-gear-clad police, apparently for not moving when asked. But in both the immediate and the longer-term aftermath of the incident, I can in fact find three distinct American things for which I would give thanks:1)      The restraint and nobility of civil disobedience: With its roots in Henry David Thoreau's essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) and its central presence in the Civil Rights era (as emblematized by the iconic images of marchers being attacked with fire hoses and dogs and refusing either to retreat or to respond with violence), civil disobedience, sometimes erroneously called "passive resistance" (I can imagine few things more active), is as American as it gets. All you have to do is watch the Occupy protesters in this video (especially around the 4-5 minute mark), or even more clearly the silent protest against the UC Chancellor captured here, to see how much the protesters in these instances lived up to this legacy.2)      The courage of his convictions: In the aftermath of that Chancellor's questionable actions (she was the one who had ordered the police to evict the protesters) and thoroughly despicable response to the brutality (including classic passive verb usage and blaming of the victims), an open letter calling for her resignation went viral and became a petition. The letter is very well-written and compelling, which is no surprise as it was written by Dr. Nathan Brown, an English professor at UC Davis. An untenured assistant professor, to be exact—and thus a colleague who is very willing to risk his own career in order to express his clear and important perspective on what had happened on his campus. 3)      Great American journalism is alive and well: And, often, available for free on blogs (no, not self-promoting, I promise). As is so often the case when it comes to issues of civil liberties and rights, no journalistic voice has responded more passionately and powerfully to this incident than Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. As is equally often the case when it comes to framing individual events in larger communal and social contexts, The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates is doing great work. And as is just as often the case when it comes to considering the broader historical and ethical sweep of an event and of our current moment, Coates's colleague James Fallows is a must-read. In a moment as (frequently) ugly as this one, I give thanks for all those inspirational Americans. More tomorrow,BenPS. Links above, so I'll repeat again this week's request: any American things you're thankful for? Ideas, and even guest posts, very very welcome!