My apologies. This is rambling and poorly proofed. I am stretched.

The ban on immigration from 7 predominantly Muslim countries imposed over the weekend brought out a fresh wave of protests. The entire thing was a shitshow, with our new ruler, Steve Bannon, seemingly over-riding the lawyers and deciding that the rule included those who hold green cards and those with dual citizenships.

I of course had to sit through listening to Team Trump natter on about how “they just don’t understand liberal hate towards Trump” and “why should people just stroll into the US and do whatever they want here?” In other words, more of the “Trump! Rah! Rah!” they have descended to because they can’t be bothered to think critically about anything he does. And nobody gets to say that “buh buh buh leeeebrals were just as uncritical of OBUMMER.” Whether it’s true or not, it’s stupid for people who live in a free country to sit in thrall of any leader and “because Johnny does it” stopped being a legit form of argumentation when you were eight.

So thereby the utter ignorance of people in the US about how the green card process works. We need “xtreme vetting.” Uh-huh. Of course, “government also does nothing” and “those bureaucrats just sit around all day doing nothing,” too.

Except that anybody who has ever gotten a green card, including people from countries we should probably just let in for efficiency’s sake, like Canada, can attest that it is a lengthy process that involves quite a bit of vetting, undertaken by bureaucrats in between the time they spend feasting and whoring and buying islands in Fiji with their salaries. If you go after refugees seeking asylum—or worse, green card holders and those who hold dual citizenship—you are going to catch people who have gone, for the most part, through official channels. They are simply low probability threats; you don’t just stroll into the US and get a green card. Smuggling networks, however, appear to be global, well-funded, technologically very adroit, and fully capable of moving the US’s enemies without a single document required. And thus Bannon and Co, because they have no clue how to actually stop terrorists from moving around, issued an order that led to the sorts of stories we had to read over the weekend–about two 80 year-old dears on the way back to Westwood*, about little boys locked up in detention all day (shame on you, Homeland) etc etc. Just ordinary people, who went through the long, irritating process we asked them to, hazed even more, in a symbolic gesture to show everybody that We Are Cracking Down(TM).

By including green card holders, Bannon’s ignorance made everything about this ban worse, uselessly.

Sure, other presidents during times of war have issued bans, but bans are not generally this far-reaching in terms of covering allies and green card holders. Supposedly conservative people are cheering this thing on, even though it denies entry to military interpreters and others who helped the US on the ground during Operation Iraqi Freedom and New Dawn. To me, that’s like leaving an American soldier behind. That is unconscionable. Doing so based on the small probability that a green card holder is going to go on a crime/terrorism spree? When did Americans become such a group of sissies? That is craven beyond my understanding and unAmerican by every value I have ever respected in the Republican Party before it became Team Trump.

Beyond that, there are people who are suffering terribly, including Christian and Jewish refugees from Iran, right along with those scary, scary children from Syria. We are going to turn our backs on them because we are scared? It’s like America no longer means anything other than “My consumer comforts.” Eyuch.

And spare me the line that this is about “helping the people already here.” These are the same people dismantling programs that serve victims of domestic violence. Boy howdy, helpful.

Yes, Bannon had to back down from the green card, but a great deal of suffering and time was wasted over the weekend simply because he has NEVER bothered to figure out how green cards work and simply prefers to believe what he wants to about them. There is ZERO chance that he wasn’t told including green cards was a bad idea. He just didn’t care to listen.
He knows the uncritical fans won’t care, the ones that follow Trump like they do their local high school football team with buying the hats and the t-shirts and coming out all dolled up with their “I’m deplorable” and “I’m a Trump-ette” gear and their pom-poms–like my allusion to football can get any more apt with that.

And no, it’s not some big, grand, clever strategy. Those little chiding posts that say “while you all were distracted with immigration ban, they did another thing!” are pissing me off, too. It’s just Bannon & Co, going through their policy wish list like they are using the “1-click buying” from Amazon. The more disarray and fresh clicks they get, the happier they are. We already know it’s a kleptocracy. I don’t need scoldings that my worry about green card holders and refugees is preventing me from being outraged by their latest act of kleptocracy. It’s going to be constant from here on out because they don’t have the decency to police themselves, and their adoring fans don’t care.

On the other side, the left seems to be getting its act together. It’s hard. Plenty of people did not get the intersectionality memo. We have lots of grumpy, angry people annoyed at the “nice white ladies” who showed up for the women’s march but not for Black Lives Matter, or people singing “This Land is Your Land” or saying “We are a nation of immigrants” because it is ignorant of indigenous people and the US’s appalling treatment towards native peoples. Yes, absolutely, it’s wrong that everybody isn’t more woke, etc. But while we are sniping at each other trying to perfect everybody, the GOP just dismantled in a week just about every decent social welfare program we have and their eyes are set on the others. You go into battle with the army you have rather than the army you want; you try to train as you go. Nope, it’s not the responsibility of oppressed people to educate their oppressor. Nope, white people shouldn’t be coddled. We are now in RealPolitik, however, and in that world, people are either useful to you in the moment or they are not. All the signs with the questions about whether the “nice white ladies would do next” got an answer this weekend: plenty of nice white people showed up, including some Jewish lawyers, and honestly right in the moment when you are in airport trying to keep a refugee from getting sent back to a country where they face torture and death, I don’t care about whether those lawyers, or the people blocking Homeland, have the right woke bona fides . I care about whether they are there, have skills, and what general side they are on. We can go back to perfecting each other when we are not hemorrhaging.

No, I was not out this weekend. My knees are so bad that a wheelchair is next for long periods. I will perhaps do that. But as with Black Lives Matter, I gave money. It’s what I felt I could handle.

I do understand the frustration and the revulsion at the toxicity, I do. I am getting advice handed down from on high from senior scholars in my field that I “should talk to your media” (like I haven’t been doing that for last the five years of my life, and blogging about it and publishing about it) and “oooooooh get out and talk to people. Wonderful me just talked Teh People.” This is virtue signalling, and it’s well-intended if narcissistic in today’s social media world. It’s a thing right now to critique virtue signaling–after all, signaling does not actually solve problems we say we wish to be virtuous about–but I think the critiques are overblown. It’s not like in the pre-social media world everybody always leapt up to address every problem in the world in the world all the time rather than talking about it. All social groups require norming, and how else does one norm if not both by acting and discussing? The problem “talking about virtue” rather than “enacting virtue” gets worse when communities exist digitally. You don’t really know what anybody is doing; just what they report on what they are doing. So if you went by my Fboo wall, you would assume that I am more preoccupied by wallpaper and paint samples than the injustices of the world. Fboo is better at communicating about wallpaper samples, however, than most other things, and the only research I’ve shared recently has been the stuff about little free libraries. It’s visual, and there are no real privacy issues in play there, unlike the rest of what I am up to (working on sex offender registry restrictions, open carry advocates, and the NII.) It’s just irritating to have scholars I respect still talking down to me, after all the damn years I have put into the academy, like I’m some kid who needs direction. Grrrr.

*If there is one group you don’t have to worry much about in terms of radical anti-US sentiment, it’s the Persians in West LA. Really. The kids who grew up here may be a different story.

I’ve been reading Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowl. Murdoch’s letter show the same fierce intelligence as her novels, there are so many moments of delightful weirdness and unapologetic bookishness that I am enjoying the book very much, particularly for the “I’m clearly crazy as a bedbug” asides in the letters, written in language simply bouncing with energy and intelligence, such as:

(I am going to the zoo this afternoon, chiefly to see the zebras–I have an intense occult passion for zebras)

Who doesn’t have an intense occult passion for zebras, I ask you?

In the same letter as the zebra discussion comes this little gem, which in my tendency to copy people I admire may lead me to become decidedly unpopular on the Expo Line:

I haven’t written anything since Schools–or even read very much, except a little Proust and some poetry (my latest pastime is reading Homer aloud in the underground. There is such a racket that non one can hear you–and the hexameter goes very well with the rhythm of the train.)

Charming on multiple fronts: reading Homer, aloud, train.

Ok, before anybody yells at me: think about it this way: Trump made a lot of big promises about “bringing jobs back” to rural America. Well, in addition to hiring people to clap for him at press conferences, the wall is another way to make jobs. But a wall just between Mexico and the US is really short compared to mine, and members of noble, wonderful, real America in the heartland would have to travel really really far to get a job building the wall. Steelworkers upset that they are not getting jobs…well, my wall is MUCH longer, would require more steel, and is much closer to the folks who need jobs in middle America.

I’m just saying.

I have the best special issues. The best. Really. We are also bigly ethical. (No, the me part of we is not, but my other writers probably are.)

I have been out of commission blogging for a bit because every spare minute was spent trying to get these papers lined up and put to press.

Ok, sometimes your mentors say things like “Do you really want to take on that project because it is way more work than it seems like” and you (if you are me) bull-headedly go forward, and then, too late, you figure out, again, that mentors tell you things because they are trying to warn you away from trouble, not because they have nothing to do and want to mess with you.

So that’s all by way of saying that THIS WAS WAY MORE WORK THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE HOLY CRAP.

Nonetheless, I think we wound up with some very useful papers. We have:

• a paper from Bonnie Johnson, Mary Kay Peck, and Stephen Preston on the differing ethos between city management and urban planning;

• a paper from Carolyn Loh and Arroyo on the special ethical considerations of planners in private practice;
• a paper from Mickey Lauria and Mellone Long that is an update and extension of a practitioner survey first conducted by Kauffman and Howe in 1979 (I love both these papers, and I super-love updates to date papers;
• a paper from me and Nader Asfalan on why AICIP needs an open data ethic; and
• a planning note from Orly Linovsky on the ethics of pro bono work and urban design and planning.

Global media theories are not my specialty, obviously, but they are a interesting set of ideas. What happens when with social media and global corporate media in pluralistic world? Do you start to get erosion of specific cultures, and a subsequent hybrid? Heidegger viewed global communications with suspicion for that reason, though in his case it probably reflects a knee-jerk anti-modernism. In Athens, arguably, the cosmopolitan nature of trading city got people thinking about νόμος and φύσις–or man’s law, custom versus the laws of nature/universe. After all, if you are surrounded by different people from different places who do things differently, then which set of laws/customs is the right one? I think it’s fair to stay the west has struggled with that a bit. In a world of global media, it’s likely that similar questions might arise.

Or not.

Alternatively, when media are customized and delivered according to taste like other consumer goods, globally, you might see global pluralism reinforced rather than any unity or standardization.

And I think that’s what I see. When I see Trump supporters shrugging their shoulders at the possibility of Russian influence, I get to thinking that allegiances are shifting in important ways. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not into getting too het up about Russian hacking unless we can show they did something to influence counts. I’m assuming that just about all our political enemies have tried to influence elections, and this was not the first time, just as we rather routinely do it to other places. And as a scholar interested in media (urban media, but still), my read of the influence literatures suggests to me that it’s harder than intuition suggests to influence political behavior, like voting. Just because people see a message or a story doesn’t mean they believe it, and even if they do believe parts of it, it’s hard to predict how they will interpret it and apply it to their voting preferences.

I am getting a little annoyed with people I normally respect like Corey Robin overstating the Left’s response to the Russian actions. No, “half of America believes the Russians fixed the elections” is not a fair read, just like half of Americans believe Barack Obama was a Muslim born in Kenya. I really have no idea what half of Americans believe and neither does Robin. Yes, people are upset, and yes there are people who are concerned–as they should be. But mostly, it’s another straw on the camel’s back of Donald Trump’s presidency. He won the election by a procedural vagary; I have hardcore Orange County Republicans telling me that they think it’s BS that a president can lose the popular vote and still become president. If those folks–Trump voters all–have their problems with procedure here, we got problems with procedure, no matter how long and loud Trump’s mob (distinct from Trump voters, some of whom undoubtedly did so with fear and trembling) yell “them’s the rules, so nyah nyah boo boo!”

I’m torn between wondering if the people who think the Russian thing is “no big deal” do so because a) reasoning not unlike mine; b) they just wanted him to win because they are so vested in what he represents to them (which, since nothing he says makes any sense, is likely a projection of what they *want* him to be) that even if the Russians put him in power they are ok with that; or c) there is a new global cosmopolitanism in play (which is not incompatible with either a or b) such that a certain brand of American conservative thinks that Russian conservatives are better, more worthy of power and political authority the despised American liberal. After all, Putin has repressed religious difference and promulgated anti-LGBTQIA laws. Speaking of the “real” America strikes me as a way of making people amenable to this type of cosmopolitanism; after all, if being an American citizen and serving in the army (John Kerry) is not sufficient to qualify as authentically American, and authentic Americanism is a set of values and cultural markers…then anybody who shares those gets in the club. If that’s the case, the world is becoming more integrated in some ways even as isolationism has reared its head again.

Or this is all bullcrap, and I don’t know what I am talking about. But that’s what I have been thinking about.

I’ve written here before about how class in the United States is horrendously distorted in our dialogue, which makes it more about what you consume than wealth and power. This idiotic hit piece about Meryl Streep over at Jacobin is a prime example. OMG, Streep used to be from Jersey, but then she started playing WASPs, what a traitor to her class! Her speech was the worst thing that happened since Trump’s election! (When, btw, did simply being from New Jersey become a marker for working class? There are wealthy people in New Jersey, too, people. Come on.)

Um, no, I’d say dead Syrians are worse maybe than Meryl’s speech, wouldn’t you? I know that’s a cheap shot; you can always find more suffering, but if there is one thing I have had fully enough of, it’s celebrity politics of all kinds, and that includes celebrity take-downs like this one, which have nothing–nothing–constructive or substantive to say other than to denounce a successful woman in an industry where many, many people do not get desert. Point out those things? Nope. Jacobin just wants the clicks. How market-oriented of them.

Streep, had she said nothing, would have been vilified. She said something, she got variously celebrated and vilified. None–absolutely none of the blah-blah about “out of touch Hollywood liberals” or the “Yay, way to go, Meryl” discussion changes anything. There are no new things to learn here. It’s still a conversation centered on one of the elect that got a reward in a vicious, star-based system. Why we’d expect anything from anybody else in such a system is, frankly, astounding to me.

And, even more perversely, critiques of the winners in that star system fall too readily into sounding like sour grapes, and that Jacobin piece reeks of it.

Streep is, via her success, part of the 1 percent in an industry dominated by people struggling to make a living. The academy (my world) and the entertainment industry are both star system economies, where the winners make economic rents and everybody else…barely keeps body and soul together. I’m sick of celebrities and branded people of all types, and if nothing else, I’m sick fo the rest of us playing by those rules.

I’m sick of people saying things like scientists are “elite.” Um, no. They may be educated, and there are elite scientists. Neil deGrasse Tyson is an elite scientist, and I think he does try to do some good with his influence. But he is also financially doing jes’ fine. Plenty of other astronomers are teaching endlessly and doing grunt work in labs with little hope of getting out. We’ve stupidly assigned the characteristics of celebrity to the entire class of people “Hollywood”, and it’s terrible reasoning, and I very much doubt that’s the way to a more humane way of relating to each other either politically or economically. I’m not worried about Streep per se or any of the people who manage to make themselves darlings in these systems; I’m more worried about about collective inability to see what pulls the strings behind the large, loud image speaking and the way media just feeds and feeds that inability because it makes journalism and content cheap and easy to find.

Making the rounds on social media is this piece from the Chron about how state legislators are far more likely to be a threat to free speech than professors. I’m sure that’s right. Here’s my question:

Are you pipo high?

Not just the legislators, who are super vested in making symbolic, culture war gains that don’t really amount to a hill of beans. But everybody who is imagining classrooms full of eager young people just BURSTING with ideas that they wish to debate. All y’all.

Because this is what my undergrad classroom looks like day in and day out:

My students never want to say anything ever. It may be that they are terribly, terribly frightened of mean, mean, bad old me, or they just don’t like speaking extemporaneously, haven’t gotten around to the reading, or any other rationales, but students don’t volunteer to talk much. Some super-keeners do, but that’s just because they feel pity for me.

Undoubtedly all you poco/pomo education folks are just chomping at the bit to tell me that I’m doing it wrong, that if I just make learning INTO PLAY with games! Activities! Embodied learning! Yeah, I do all those things. Some students like that. I would have hated that shit as a student. There was NO faster way to make me shrink to the bottom of my seat than than some hippy dippy prof announcing “Form groups! Today we are going to simulate therapy!!” Retch, puke vomit.

And I know that isn’t a fair characterization of pomo/poco thought. But neither is condemning things as “drill and kill” or “sage on the stage” fair, either. Some of my happiest learning memories were with brilliant lecturers and devising clever systems to memorize things…rather than shifting the burden onto the professor to devise a clever system for me.

Because my bet is that dematerialization has already had a big effect on jobs. Brilliant friend Kevin Holliday and I were at lunch the other day, and we got to talking about all the thing-things that people don’t really need to buy anymore because everything is consolidated into one device.

• Radios. (we buy speakers, maybe)
• Television sets. (we buy screens)
• Watches (ok, I supposed wearable technology watches are thing, but my students think I’m just adorable with my little Timex)
• Notebooks
• Books
• Film
• Cameras (yes, those of us who publish photos do have to buy digital cameras, but how many people just have their phone camera now?)
• GPS devices
• Magnifying glasses (yes, there is an app for that)
• Keylights (yep, phones)
• cds and discs
• DVDs
• VCRs
• pens, pencils (I know, still used, but you would not believe how many people though it was just *adorbs* that I needed a new pencil sharpener)
• newspapers
• puzzles and games (they seem to have become a niche market. When my students see a picture of me with puzzle, they say “have you ever done a digital jigsaw?) Why??? Why would you do that?
• carbon paper
• calculators
• kitchen timers
• alarms clocks
• clocks in general
• Levels
• Recipe cards
• Rulers
• atlases, maps, globes
• phone books
• planners, address books, desk blotters
• ledger books
• checkbooks
• passbooks
• analog phones

etc. I’m sure there are things that I am missing. Certainly, old-timers like me, with my broadsheet newspapers and clocks in every room, still exist. But there going to be niche markets for various things just because people like the objects. Will that be enough to employ people? Will there be enough jobs making artisanal cheese to make work for folks displaced?

I’ve been reading the Universal Basic Income material for my social policy class next fall, and I have to say I am not convinced by any of the arguments on the pro or the against side. On the pro side, we have the technophiles breathlessly telling us about how great it will be for people to be free from poverty (it would be nice). On the “no” side, you have free marketeers absolutely convinced that people will begin a life of indolence and sloth, thereby killing off all innovation and productivity. There are things I very much like about the universal basic income, including the universality: by making it available to everybody, I would have to hear less whinging about “teh Blacks on welfare” and we would not have to deal with all the means-testing and deservingness nonsense. I do not buy the argument that productivity and innovation will halt; it could even go up. Freed from the necessity of working two jobs, somebody might pursue their interest in small-scale robotics in a home workshop, for example, and come up with something nobody has thought of before. And it’s not like people who inherit wealth never do anything productive. Plenty of people from moneyed families get out and find a profession or a set of causes to work for even though they do not have to do so, financially. We could have more poetry and art, and I see little wrong with that. What if there are diminishing marginal returns in innovation anyway, and we’ve gotten as far as we are going to in all but entirely new directions that right now we can only dream and tell stories about?

Anyway, I’m arguing myself in circles on it, and I’m sure there are other macro factors I’ve not thought about. And I do understand that we can’t just experiment with it, as taking away would be a disaster once people got used to it.