Samir Chopra's Blog, page 80

The World As Raw Material For Facebook Status And Tweet

Last morning, as I walked along a Brooklyn sidewalk to my gym, heading for my 10AM workout, I saw a young woman walking straight at me, her face turned away, attending to some other matter of interest (a smartphone, but it might have been kids or pets; the precise details of this encounter have slipped my mind). Unwilling to be run over by this rapidly approaching freight train, to be clothes-lined or head-butted, I nimbly stepped aside, infuriated that yet again, on a New York sidewalk, I had been subjected to the tyranny of the inattentive pedestrian. (And not even by a midtown tourist at that; those folks are just plain incorrigible. My fellow New Yorkers should know better.)

But my thoughts were not so inchoate, they weren’t just an incoherent mess of unresolved frustration; instead, they seemed to be arranging themselves into a sentence long expression of my aggravation: “My least favorite pedestrian is the kind that walks in one direction with his attention diverted elsewhere – whether its smartphones, kids, or pets”. Or perhaps, more mysteriously, and yet, immediately comprehensible to some: “That’s quite all right. You should, of course, barge ahead on this sidewalk, your head down, unseeing, uncaring. “

This wasn’t your garden-variety introspection; it was clearly intended for public consumption, for a pithy display of my thoughts about some matter of personal interest to those who might be interested. Perhaps I sensed that my audience would be sympathetic; some would chime in with an empathetic response; yet others would add embellishments in their responses. I did not think this sentiment of mine would be greeted with disapproval; I think I anticipated approval. (Indeed, that is why, perhaps, I indulged in that little bout of composition or drafting in my mind, framing the written expression of my thought to make it appropriately irate or sarcastic.) Maybe the ensuing conversation would feature some cantankerous rants about the smartphone generation, about over-indulgent parents and pet-owners, all too busy texting, fretting over children and dogs and cats; perhaps some of my interlocutors would add witty tales of how, one day, in a urban encounter for the ages, they had stopped one of these offenders, and told them off with an artful blend of the scornful and witty.

I had been drafting a Facebook status, a tweet.

It was a revealing moment of sorts. It wasn’t the first time I had, on encountering something entirely weekday or quotidian, and yet, not unworthy of a mental response, suffered a brief emotional tic, and then found myself quickly formulating such a 140-character (or more, if intended for Facebook) summation of feelings at that instant. The world and its events and relations were, so to speak, so much raw material to be submitted to the formulation and framing of Facebook statuses and tweets. On most occasions, those thoughts don’t make it to the status or the tweet box. But sometimes they do.

The folks at Facebook and Twitter do seem to have achieved something remarkable: they have made their users regard the world as staging ground for inputs to their products.

 

On Virtuous Acts: Paying Library Late Fees

A week or so ago, an old friend of my wife’s said to me, in the midst of a conversation about how much she enjoyed using her public library’s resources, that her busy schedule–work and taking care of two sub-five-year old toddlers–sometimes made her return her borrowings late, bringing a host of late fees in its wake. But, she went on, she didn’t mind: paying those monies to the public library almost felt virtuous. I nodded, and chimed in, “Yeah, I never mind paying late fees to a public library either.”

Talk about making a necessity into a virtue. I’m forgetful and disorganized and distracted (and perhaps absent-minded too.) I often return books late–to the libraries at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. (And before that, to the libraries at every academic institution I have attended.) Till recently, Brooklyn College would not levy late fees on faculty members so I got away scot-free there. Not so much at the CUNY Graduate Center, which shows no mercy to its professorial staff and has cleaned up a pretty packet from me over the years. (We’ve been ‘together’ some twenty years now; the smallest fine I’ve paid was no more than a quarter; the biggest, about five dollars.)

But I don’t mind paying late fees, that is true: every time a librarian looks up at from her terminal and announces the latest monetary sanction, I fork out the lucre without protest. And it is true too, that I feel oddly virtuous after this act; I suspect I regard these payments as a donation of sorts, a charitable contribution to a perennially cash-strapped institution. As my friend said, “the public library can use all the money it gets.”

Late fees, of course, are not supposed to be regarded so. They are penalties for the inconvenience we have subjected other patrons of the library to; we have made unavailable the books and materials they need and perhaps forced recall notices to be sent (which might consume precious temporal and financial resources). They might, indeed, as they probably are by librarians, be viewed as sanctions for the selfish. The most appropriate response to the levying of a late fee would appear to be one of suitable penitence: perhaps a muttered, shame-faced apology, perhaps a grim resolve never to bother librarians and fellow patrons again, perhaps a head-bowed incognito slinking away from the circulation desk.

Yet, still: I like paying late fees to libraries/I cannot lie/you other patrons cannot deny. The libraries I use always appear cash and resource hungry: the stacks could always use more titles, the journal stores could do with more subscriptions. I doubt the tiny amounts I pay enable any satisfaction of these needs but perhaps the grand cumulative total paid by all of us delinquents will. Perhaps it could just help pay for a slightly swankier holiday party–some classy wine, food not ordered from the lowest bidder, a taxi fund for those who wish to get really, really sloshed?–for the librarians (especially the ones at the reference desk, who keep answering my amateurish questions.)

I assure you: I aspire to return books on time. But the late fee isn’t an adequate deterrent for bad behavior in this dimension.

 

Steven Salaita And The Anger Of the Subjugated

In response to my post yesterday, which I crossposted over at the NewAPPS blog, a couple of readers there wondered about the analogy I had drawn between Professor F and Steven Salaita‘s cases. Reader Meir Alon suggested my comparison was ‘very wrong’, Darius Jedburgh said my comparison of Salaita was, indeed, ‘slanderous’, and yet another worthy wondered what the point of it all was.

In constructing the analogy I noted Professor F, like Salaita, had a distinguished academic record, that she worked in a field which often featured polemically charged debates, many of which for her, because of her personal standing and situation–Professor F  has very likely experienced considerable sexism in her time–were likely to be charged emotionally, and that a few hyperbolic, intemperate responses, made in a medium not eminently suited to reasonable discourse, and featuring many crucial limitations in its affordance of sustained intellectual engagement, should not disqualify her from an academic appointment made on the basis of her well-established scholarship and pedagogy.

I could very easily have constructed another analogy, using an accomplished professor of African American studies, Professor B, who stepping into the Ferguson debate, after engaging, dispiritingly, time and again, in his personal and academic life, with not just the bare facts of racism in American life and the depressing facts pertaining to informal, day-to-day segregation but also with a daily dose of bad news pertaining to the fate of young black men in America, might finally experience the proverbial last straw on the camel’s back, and respond with a few tweets as follows:

Plantation rules still apply apparently; talk back and massa will let you know who’s boss. And keep those hands up, boy, while you talk to him.

The Black Panthers had it right; arm yourself and fight back. Dr. King might have gotten us some legislation, but cordite and gunpowder is needed now.

Malcolm X or King? Well, that debate now seems settled. By any means necessary for me.

Using these sorts of remarks–even if, or especially if, made on social media networks–as  ammunition against academics, is eminently bad policy. They can all too easily be read out of context–like the ones I have tried to provide above. (Salaita is Palestinian-American and likely knows many personally affected by the continuing tragedy of Palestine. Incidentally, as has been noted, he has tweeted widely and often on the Israel-Palestine debate, and while his pugnacious style is unmistakable in many of his productions, so is a far more temperate and conciliatory tone.)

There is a subtext to this whole business. The firestorm of reactions to Salaita, and which would be set off by Professor F and Professor B–Fox News would certainly have a field day with them, calling for their heads on a pike–is indicative of a continuing determination to police and regulate the nature of the resistance offered by those who speak up on behalf of the traditionally subjugated. Salaita, Professor F, and Professor B, are all expected to conform to certain norms of civil discourse, to channel their resistance–perhaps diffusing their passion and their energy–into channels defined and established by a system that has not worked for them.  (Yes, they are all faculty members with tenure, but that still does not make them ‘insiders.’) These transgressions on their part are just the moment those opposed to their resistance are waiting for; gone, in a flash, is their established record elsewhere; all that matters, now, is this indiscretion.

My point was not so much to construct an exact or precise analogy between the cases of Professor F and Salaita; rather, it was to provide some context, and to point to, perhaps only implicitly, a continuing pattern of willful ignorance when it came to understanding, accepting, and making room for those who, because of their backgrounds and histories, might often speak up and act in ways that those more comfortably ensconced do not have to.

Steven Salaita And The Feminist Professor Who Praised Valerie Solanas

Here is a story of a professor, whose tweets got her into trouble.

The professor in question is a feminist, Professor F–sometimes termed ‘radical’ by her friends, colleagues, and academic foes for her uncompromisingly feminist scholarship and her vigorous, no-nonsense rhetorical style, which is well-versed in the demolition of putative rebuttals to feminist theory and keenly honed by vigorous participation in political polemical debate. She has a distinguished record in scholarship, excellent teaching evaluations–from male and female students alike (though some unkind ones did call her “a typical nut-cracking feminazi”), and found, by dint of these accomplishments, a cohort of scholars and students who admire her work.

One day, after reading in the news about yet another atrocity committed on women–perhaps a gang-rape by fraternity or football team members who then broadcast their deeds on social media networks, perhaps an obnoxious radio host leading a cheerleading squad of listeners terming women who use contraceptives ‘sluts’, perhaps a story like the Rotherham child abuse case. Today she is fuming; she is tired and dispirited–all that scholarship, all that debate, and the world continues on its merry misogynistic ways; this is the worst of all possible Groundhog Days–the same abuse, the same mealy-mouthed exculpations, the same offensive, tone-deaf defenses.

She goes to her office, grabs her cup of coffee, and checks into Twitter. Her timeline is abuzz–her friends are talking about the latest case, posting links from journalists and bloggers, all weighing in with their considered opinions. Some even post links from clueless male politicians, offering their usual insensitive, sexist responses to the latest fiasco.

The outraged, intemperate tweets follow:

Days like this, I feel like re-installing Valerie Solanas as my hero. She would have known what to do. The time for just polemics is over.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to re-read the S.C.U.M manifesto all over again and take it way more seriously this time. She might have been right all along.

In case you are wondering: S.C.U.M = Society for Cutting Up Men. And geez, I could send in the subscription fees for that right about now.

“Overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex”? Yes sir, more please.

A few more tweets follow along the same lines.

Unfortunately, more is brewing than just the next cup of coffee in our professor’s office. She has applied for, and–thanks to her outstanding academic record–been accepted for a tenured professorship in the Women’s Studies department at  a prominent mid-western university .  A mere rubber-stamping of the hiring decision by the university’s trustees awaits; moving expenses and administrative details of the new appointment are already being worked out. Unfortunately, the chancellor of the university, having read these tweets, or rather having been pointed to them, and having been contacted by donors who find them ‘anti-male’, ‘demeaning’ and ‘abusive’ and thus, possibly offensive to the male students who might be in her classes (and maybe even to her colleagues), decides to rescind the job offer.  Pleas to reconsider this decision, grounded in defenses of academic freedom, and of the inappropriateness of using pronouncements on social media as being indicative of broader personal and professional commitments, fall on deaf ears.

Professor F and Steven Salaita both need our help. Only one of them is real, the latter. Read this post by Corey Robin, which details the latest developments in his case; in it you will find the email addresses of the Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois to whom you should write, urging the university to rescind its ‘de-hiring.’

Back to Teaching – II

I returned to teaching today–after a hiatus of three semesters. The first semester’s release from teaching was due to a union-negotiated parental leave; I was exempt from teaching two classes that semester and because I was scheduled to be assigned that workload in any case, I was effectively exempt from teaching altogether. (I was not exempt from administrative duties such as departmental committee work, or student advising, or from my work at the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities.) The next two semester’s release was due to my academic sabbatical–originally due to be taken in 2009, but delayed for personal reasons.

A long absence from teaching is felt by some academics to be sheer bliss; I didn’t find it so. While I did not miss the grading, the exhausting bureaucratic interactions with administration and students–pertaining to delayed assignments, grade disputes, plagiarism, and sundry other misadventures, I did miss the constant mental ferment triggered by preparations for class and the ensuing classroom discussions; on more than occasion today, I felt an old familiar, and pleasurable, feeling recur: a moment of clarity that occurs in one’s own thinking as you strive to explain and explicate and edify.  As the day went on, and as I conducted classes at 11AM, 12:50 and 3:40 PM, I felt another familiar feeling, one not so pleasurable: exhaustion. Three seventy-five minute meetings–each, if done right, conducted as high-energy pieces of performance–can be wearing; fourteen more weeks of these, twice a week, will produce its own particular brand of lassitude by the end of the semester.

I hope my return to teaching, rather than torpedoing the various writing projects I have yet to complete, will actually facilitate their journey past the finish line. (I am optimistic too, that it will kickstart my blogging here, which has become ever more tedious over the last year and a half.) All too often during my sabbatical I had missed the conversations with my students and my colleagues at Brooklyn College that somehow, in some mysterious way, had set my mind astir, triggering connections and pathways to thoughts yet unthought, leading on to gratefully accepted moments of inspiration during both reading and writing.

My first class meetings today went off rather smoothly–as indeed, most first days of teaching often do. The students–for the most part–look suitably enthusiastic (I am glad to report there are many students in my classes who seem like they will engage the readings and participate in the subsequent class discussions); discussing the syllabus often deludes the professor into thinking he or she can run the semester smoothly (yes, ‘it’s on the syllabus’ but that will not preclude moments of conflict later in the semester as students seek exemptions from its provisions and regulations).  There is a sense of intellectual excitement in the air; unread books and essays promise to take us into regions of the mind as yet unexplored. Soon enough, there will be disillusionment as fidelity to reading assignments break down, classroom discussions stall, and papers are handed in for painful grading sessions. But for now, there is hope.

Back To Teaching – I

On Wednesday, I return to teaching after a one-year hiatus (on sabbatical). Here are the–admittedly skimpy and sketchy–course descriptions of the three classes I will be teaching this coming fall semester. I am looking forward to them. I’m sure my enthusiasm will soon be tempered by encountering my university’s mind-numbing bureaucracy (and the dubious pleasures of grading) but for now, it’s good to be able to anticipate my forthcoming encounters with students and classroom discussions.

Philosophy of Religion

The philosophy of religion queries the foundations of religion and religious thought. Its central questions are among the most enduring in philosophy; they may be engaged by both theists and atheists, and involve the major branches of philosophical inquiry such as epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and ethics.

Among the most important of the questions raised in the philosophy of religion are: What is the nature of religious belief?  What is the relationship between faith and reason? Does God exist? If so, what is (its/his/her) nature? Does morality require religious belief? What is evil? What problems does it create for arguments for the existence of God? What is the nature of religious experience? Is there a difference between religious belief and religious feeling? What are religious language’s distinguishing characteristics? What is the relationship between religion and science?

We will examine these in the context of several philosophical and religious traditions, finding sources in philosophical and literary texts.

Social Philosophy

In this class we examine social theory and social thought—beginning with the Enlightenment and continuing on to twentieth-century postmodernism. The issues we tackle include equality, social justice, gender relations, political structures, family life, ethnic relations, and political economy. We will read philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, economists, novelists; all contribute to grappling with the complex questions facing societies and those who interact within them.

Philosophical Issues in Literature: The Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Literature offers us a lens through which to view the human condition; it enables a literary grappling with metaphysical, epistemological, logical, ethical, aesthetic, and political issues of philosophical interest and significance. In this class, we will read several works of post-apocalyptic fiction to facilitate an exploration and discussion of some of these issues.  What is the ethical and political and aesthetic vision these works embody? By imagining a radically altered state of existence, they allow us to speculate about the changes in the world and the humans who live within it; they permit a safe exploration of alternative modes of living, ethical and political systems. Of especial relevance to us is the following question: Why are the concept of the apocalypse and human responses to it of such enduring interest to novelists and philosophers?

The following is the reading list:

Nevil Shute, On the Beach , 1957
Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle For Leibowitz , 1960
Jose Saramago, Blindness, 1999
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower , 2000
Cormac McCarthy, The Road ,  2007
James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand , 2009
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars, 2013

As the semester progresses, I hope to blog here about the material I teach, drawing upon reflections triggered by my preparations for the class meetings, as well as the actual discussions in the classroom.

Tomorrow: a report on my first day back in class.

On The Possible Advantages Of Robot Graders

Some very interesting news from the trenches about robot graders, which notes the ‘strong case against using robo-graders for assigning grades and test scores’ and then goes on to note:

But there’s another use for robo-graders — a role for them to play in which…they may not only be as good as humans, but better. In this role, the computer functions not as a grader but as a proofreader and basic writing tutor, providing feedback on drafts, which students then use to revise their papers before handing them in to a human.

Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater…and they’ve observed a striking change in student behavior…Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they’ve written. But [Klobucar's] students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result…students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is “corrective, even punitive” do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer….

The computer program appeared to transform the students’ approach to the process of receiving and acting on feedback…Comments and criticism from a human instructor actually had a negative effect on students’ attitudes about revision and on their willingness to write, the researchers note….interactions with the computer produced overwhelmingly positive feelings, as well as an actual change in behavior — from “virtually never” revising, to revising and resubmitting at a rate of 100 percent. As a result of engaging in this process, the students’ writing improved; they repeated words less often, used shorter, simpler sentences, and corrected their grammar and spelling. These changes weren’t simply mechanical. Follow-up interviews with the study’s participants suggested that the computer feedback actually stimulated reflectiveness in the students — which, notably, feedback from instructors had not done.

Why would this be? First, the feedback from a computer program like Criterion is immediate and highly individualized….Second, the researchers observed that for many students in the study, the process of improving their writing appeared to take on a game-like quality, boosting their motivation to get better. Third, and most interesting, the students’ reactions to feedback seemed to be influenced by the impersonal, automated nature of the software.

Not all interactions with fellow humans are positive; many features of conversations and face-to-face spaces act to inhibit the full participation of those present. Some of these shortcomings can be compensated for, and directly addressed, by the nature of computerized, automated interlocutors (as, for instance, in the settings described above). The history of online communication showed how new avenues for verbal and written expression opened for those inhibited in previously valorized physical spaces; robot graders similarly promise to reveal interesting new personal dimensions of automation’s spaces for interaction.

Calling Bullshit On ‘Outside Agitators’ in Ferguson

A few days ago, a friend on Facebook posted the following as his status:

Would any of you be down to help me organize a march on Ferguson, MO? Dead serious. It’s something I hope would send a powerful message to the powers that be, but I’d need help getting it all together. I mean, like a grassroots thing via Facebook to organize a march on Ferguson and get people from here in NYC and possibly the entire country to descend and march on Ferguson. A march to show solidarity. A march to show that we will not sit idly by and ignore human/civil rights violations at the hands of police against anyone, but most specifically to say that we will absolutely not ignore the deliberate genocide of black boys and black men in the United States.

If my friend does manage–beginning with this powerful and passionate call to action–to organize this march,  and is able to bring to Ferguson other concerned citizens to participate in protests and rallies, and perhaps even get in the face of overzealous police to remind them loudly and verbally that they might be overstepping the bounds of reasonable policing, that the murder of Michael Brown will not be allowed to just pass idly into history, he will be regarded as a provocateur of sorts, an outside agitator, one meddling in affairs best left to locals, to the local community and their police, who can, and should, work out by themselves, a response to a highly particular, specific, local, problem, using highly particular, local, specific tactics to devise a highly particular…you where this is going.

It’s a road to unmitigated bullshit, toward the worst kind of self-serving political delusion.

For as long as the cry of ‘outside agitator’ has been made–most notably, in the sad history of racist Southern resistance to the nationalization of civil rights–it has always been code for ‘butt out, and let us continue to address a political problem in familiar dead-end ways.’ In the South, the cry of ‘outside agitator’ was simply a euphemism for ‘we know how to deal with our blacks and we’ve been doing damn good job at it when no attention was paid us.’ The light often sends many scurrying for cover.

What is happening in Ferguson is not a local affair. It never was and never will be. The shooting of Michael Brown was a national phenomenon, temporarily resident in a new setting. That circus will soon move elsewhere, to some other urban killing ground, where soon enough, some other young man of color will fall to a policeman’s bullets. The police in Ferguson are not a local problem; the response to the demonstrations in Ferguson–indicative of a dangerous militarization of the police–is not a local problem. These are American problems, of interest to all Americans.

There are no ‘outside agitators’ in Ferguson. There is no arbitrary boundary that can be drawn around the problems of racism and police brutality; the stench of those wafts easily across one county line to the next.

Cutting Some Umbilical Cords (The Virtual Kind)

The day after the World Cup ended, I called my cable company and cancelled my cable and land-line subscriptions. (My phone call with my internet service provider’s customer service representative was long-winded, perhaps inevitably so given the number of inducements sent my way suggesting I only change the offerings in my subscription packages, but it was nowhere near as unpleasant as that nightmare Comcast call that went viral a few weeks ago.) And then, two weeks ago, I uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone.

As far as attempts to roll back the tide of digital distraction go, these gestures give me a Canute-like air; they are minor in conception, execution, and probability of success.  Still, I suppose, they are not entirely insignificant either; they are gestures of a resistance of sorts, and that, even if quixotic, or perhaps because, can be suitably energizing. (The annual monetary savings on the canceled subscriptions promise a couple of airfares to domestic destinations.)

The desperation that provoked them has been alluded to by me here, in these pages, on many a previous occasion. Writing and reading, in these days of being ‘predisposed to interruption’ is harder than it always is; its still a privileged, leisurely activity, most assuredly, but it requires just a little more commitment when easy beguilement is only a tab or so away. This summer, like the others before it, seemed long and endless before it began, week after week stretching away, unoccupied, promising long hours of scholarship and rewarding dilettantism. And then, mysteriously, heat induced lassitude, the World Cup showed up in town, schedules decayed, and as the end of the summer beckoned, as did teaching with its new syllabi and bulging class rosters, so did postponements of publishers’ deadlines. In the panicky mood induced by this sense of a summer slipped out sight, the phone call to the cable company and uninstalled phone apps were no-brainers. I had little time left now for live sport; and I was growing a little nauseated by my mindless scrolling through News Feeds and Timelines while waiting for trains and buses.

Next week, I will travel–to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state–and plan to stay off the grid as often as possible; the relief promised by such abstinence is fast becoming a much-praised reward for the virtuous withdrawal. I look forward then, to not just the auto-back-pat but also the social approval sure to be sent my way. (I have often wondered, ever since I bought my smartphone two years ago, whether I would be able to resist the temptation to post photos to my blog while I was traveling; the answer, as I found after two days of struggling with blogging apps and poor cellphone service in Oklaholma and New Mexico, was that it was very easy to not want to be bothered once I was on the road.)

These little corners that I keep cutting, in an effort to clear some space in which to do work, to quell the monkey-brain, require little effort to identify; the hardest work is acting, and then, staying on the straight and narrow.

Ferguson And The Tale Of Two Wars

A nation at war–an indefinite, borderless one, conducted against a faceless enemy, with little legal or moral restraint, with an endless wallet to be dipped into–will find, sooner or later, that the same inchoateness, the same vagueness, the same productive lack of definition of that conflict, which permitted its waging to be conducted secretly without trammel, will also facilitate the seeping back of that war to within its own borders. Wars, if conducted long enough, come home. To stay. To search too long for enemies elsewhere is to make possible and easier their location closer to home.

There are two wars currently underway, conducted by the US. There is the war on terror, kicked off in 2001, with a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, a budget in the trillions, and a progress report card that would qualify for an F–thanks to the political, legal, and moral disasters it has left in its wake. Local states made unstable; hostile regimes made stronger; religious and sectarian strife reinvigorated; torture and killings without due process; and of course, curtailment of civil rights at home. And then, there is the war on drugs. Its kickoff date is a little uncertain but there is no mistaking its cost and failures: rampant, social-service destroying budgets, a racialized conflict written into legal stone, a grossly bloated drug enforcement apparatus, interference in the domestic policies of sovereign states, the incarceration and criminalization of thousands of young men, the list goes on.

The blowback from these never-ending wars is clearly visible in Ferguson, where a perfect storm rages in exquisite miniature: a hostile, militarized, aggressive police stalks the streets of a town with a significant African-American population, their fingers resting lightly on the trigger, convinced they are in hostile territory; a  confrontation with the locals–now not understood as members of a ‘community’ but as potential deadly criminals–quickly turns violent and murderous. Police all over the nation know the feeling; they are used to patrolling behind the lines on search and destroy missions. They’ve seen plenty of footage of kick-down-the-doors raids, of young men lying on the ground, waiting to be searched; they know what to do when someone talks back. A punch to the throat, a kick in the groin, and sometimes, when they don’t stop coming at you, a bullet to the head. Nothing is as important as making sure dimebags stay off the streets.

Then, when protests occur, they are met with disproportionate amounts of force and regulation and policing, with all the tools whose use has been perfected in the years of control that have followed the declarations of these wars. The language is that of peace at any costs, no matter the damage done to the values supposedly being protected. The peace of the graveyard–an orderly place–will do just fine.

All too often, it is imagined, because of the relentless hagiography of the Second World War, that war is an ennobling thing. But it isn’t. Those who conduct it lose themselves in the process; the fighting doesn’t remain directed outward.

If you stare long too into the abyss of war, it stares back at you.