"Thanks, But No" Research Topics

Like most scholars, I keep a mental file of unwritten research. I have a list of topics that I've considered studying and writing about, only to reject them for other paths. Some topics just don't seem as fruitful in the light of the next day. Some require too big of an investment of time and energy. Others just get shoved down by the weight of other deadlines.

And others, a smaller group, just seem too icky to get into.

One of my ongoing interest areas involves activism beyond or opposed to the traditional left-progressive orientations. I write about conservative evangelicals, "ex-gay" ministries, and voluntary human extinction movements (like VHEMT), for instance. In such work I aim to get as accurate a take on the worldviews and rationales of these movements or groups as I can. The ideal is for me to be able to articulate their views so well that they, reading my summary of them, would say, "Yep, that's accurate."

Some views are easier to articulate than others. VHEMT, for instance, is surprisingly cheery about its view that humans should "live long and die out." (The same cannot be said for other antinatalist movements past and present.) I can get into evangelical mindsets with some work thanks in part to my early childhood in the Southern Baptist Church. Even sexual orientation change ministries take pains to explain themselves as clearly as possible. I mark how bereft of solid research their claims are as well as how harmful they've proven to so many LGBTQ+ folk, but I can hold those realities in tension with the good faith and professed self-experience of some of that movement's advocates.

Mind you, I have no interest in defending them or apologizing for groups that pathologize queerness. But rigor means accuracy. Accuracy requires that I understand them from their own point of view as well as from that of other perspectives.

All well and good. But there are some topics, some movements, some sites of performance for which the journey toward rigorous understanding seems simply too treacherous. These are the "Thanks, but no" topics.

I once knew someone tangentially, for example, whose job it was to infiltrate online message boards  frequented by pedophiles and pose as a minor in order to catch them in the act of soliciting underage sex. This was in the aughts, before the dark web had quite cohered into today's form. To Catch a Predator had recently premiered, a show (in case you're unaware) in which actors posed as underage people and invited liaisons with adults interested in...that. The men (almost always men) who showed up to the address would be greeted by the youthful-looking actor. The actor would then step outside the room, and in would walk NBC reporter Chris Wallace, who would then shame the men for national audiences. Think Candid Camera but for sex offenders.

My interest as a theatre scholar had to do with the acting involved. At no point was an actual minor involved in any step of the transaction--just actors pretending to be. I wondered just what kind of process the actors used to imagine and enact their characters as well as what kind of costs (a very taxing species of emotional labor, I imagine) such artifice extracted from them.

Nor was the interest purely academic. For all its popularity mobilizing righteous indignation, TCaP came under heavy fire from some children's rights groups. I read an article at the time (I'm disinclined to hunt it down) that demonstrated that the show's targets rarely suffered legal repercussions. It turned out that, in many jurisdictions, the fictional setup the show manufactured to catch their predators meant that no actual crimes had been committed. The theatricalized spectacle of schadenfreude undid the attempted workings of justice.

I was--and remain--interested in the kind of acting that might simply be called "lying" or "dissembling." I could imagine a book about the acting of scammers, entrappers, infiltrators, double agents, and snake-oil salespeople. To Catch a Predator might make a good chapter in such a book.

But.

I have trouble imagining the kind of research necessary for such a chapter. I'm sure the dark web is full of fascinating case studies of dissemblers as well as a small but dedicated cadre of people pretending to be dissemblers in order to catch them in the act. But the thought of wading into that mucky world in order to get the kind of near observation I view as rigorous--well, (as my character in Crucible says of cider) "It rebels my stomach." It's the kind of research that I fear would be contaminating. I'd see things I'd not be able to un-see, examine mindsets that I would be better off keeping out of my consciousness and definitely off my hard drives. It's a bit like a basilisk; simply viewing that stuff can be deadly.

I would prefer not to.

A similar "thanks, but no" feeling arose in me when I heard of right-wing activist Larry Klayman's plan to host a "citizens [sic] grand jury" to "try" the Bidens for their crimes (i.e., debunked conspiracy theories of wrongdoing in the Ukraine). On the one hand, a faux court session designed for a certain bandwidth of right-wing audience seems right up my alley as a researcher. But the thought of nosing around in the deep thickets of (racist, xenophobic, nationalist) conspiracy theorizing?

I would prefer not to. At least for now.

Thanks, but no.

JF

Outrage Snags

Amid all the impeachment buzz, there's a story that snagged my conscience a bit. A year ago, in Texas, A 26-year-old man named Botham Jean was in his apartment at night. The door (unlatched, apparently) opened, and someone burst in, pulled a gun, and shot him fatally. The shooter was Amber Guyger, an off-duty police officer who lived in the apartment directly below Botham. Apparently she had been distracted after her shift, talking on the phone, and went to the wrong floor, wrong apartment. Opening the door, she registered only seeing an intruder and firing.

That's Guyger's account, anyway. We can only imagine Botham's last, shocked moments.

I remember when this story came out. I was infuriated, as was just about everyone who heard about it. Guyger is white. Botham is black. The pattern here replicated all too queasily the violence by law enforcement against black and brown people.

Unlike all to many of those cases, though, Guyger did get off. Since she was off duty and unprotected by the shield of law enforcement (a shield which seems to many of us like the law doesn't apply to police officers excuse), the death was a criminal matter. Guyger was arrested and put on trial. This last week, news stories and videos of her cross-examination came out. "I hate that I have to live with this every single day of my life and I ask God for forgiveness," she sobs on the witness stand, "and I hate myself every single day. I never wanted to take an innocent person's life. And I'm so sorry."

The examining lawyer (for the prosecution) takes her apart. You were scared? Imagine how Jean felt as he lay dying from an armed intruder. You were scared? "“No one cares that you were scared.  You were trained to deal with stuff like this. You agreed to this job and you have to accept the consequences if you fail to do it.” She shot first. She had a full battery of first-aid materials she did not use.

National and social media have been harsh. Cry all you want. I hope you get what you deserve. I feel that, too. Righteous indignation. Outrage. A bit of schadenfreude.

There's a lot to that feeling. The affect here is overdetermined; that is, there's a lot of independent-but-crisscrossing lines of history and context that overcharge the indignation I feel toward Guyger. Let me try to parse out some of those lines:

• The fear I have of police officers and the overwhelming deference they're given to inflict violence with little to no consequence
• The anger I have about the systematic training officers receive that prioritizes deadly force conflict framings--the cop as warrior rather than guardian or ally. (She said she shot to kill as she had been trained to do)
• The pervasive, systemic racism that infuses white perceptions, making black and brown people sub-human and threatening
• The prior injustices of white officers who kill black and brown people and yet get off with no charges or a slap on the wrist
• The way that the defense mobilizes tropes that play into white supremacist and sexist narratives of the helpless weeping white woman, eliciting pity through tears
• The pleasure in seeing someone (the prosecuting attorney) finally calling out all that BS for what it is
• The inspiration/hope of seeing a white authority figure, a symbol of abusive privilege, being subject to justice.

There's more, but that's a start.

As overcharged, overdetermined affects do in the wilds of social media, the cluster of outrage/indignation online is also picking up some old-fashioned misogyny and hate (e.g., posts mocking Guyger's appearance, speculating about her intelligence, etc.). I try to peel away those affects from the sticky ball of feelings here.

But amid all those feelings is a nagging voice that makes me question the sanctity of my indignation. (And I must acknowledge my distance from this case and my skin privilege grant me the space to do this in ways not available to everyone.) I think of this story I read a decade ago, "Fatal Distraction." It's about people who leave their children in the back seats of cars, where the children overheat and die. It's harrowing, this article.

The author, Gene Weingarten, writes how that act--leaving kids in a hot car--usually occurs because of distraction. Parents or caregivers just forget. Whether this forgetting gets judged as a crime or as a tragic accident changes from place to place, an inconsistency that the author focuses on especially. Stories about child deaths spark an outrage not dissimilar to that I felt about Guyger. It seems so clear. Surely we can be outraged at parents who leave children in the back seats of cars.

What doesn't change by location, however, is the fact that distraction remains possible for everyone. The popular narrative of child car deaths is of the careless adult, self-absorbed, who should be punished. But research shows that everyone can be distracted--yes, distracted enough to forget a child in the back seat as you park and go off to work. Preventing deaths from distraction means not some vigilant will to remember but incorporating reminders into a car routine (for example, keeping a teddy bear in the car seat, which moves to the front seat--in the driver's line of sight--when a child is in the car seat).

Weingarten follows the after-stories of several parents who lose children. Some are charged and put on trial. Some aren't. Most voice something similar to what Guyger said: I wish I were dead. I wish I had died instead. I hate myself every day. The story talks about one such parent who dedicates herself to visiting other parents in this situation. She rushes up to them and embraces them, whispers in their ear, and weeps with them.

I have no idea whether it's right to put Guyger into that category of person who's committed such a devastating misstep. But the reality of moral luck means that it's not impossible for any of us to be in some kind of position similar to hers, where we've made a series of thoughtless decisions that have ended in someone's death. There's more than pure moral luck going on with Guyger (racist fear narratives and violent/confrontational police training). But, on some level, there but for the grace of God...

It's a snag on my outrage.

JF

Questions about the thing before me

Two shows back-to-back today. I'm dreading it. Most of the time, I tell people I know to come see a show after we've had a week of a run or so.  In this case, though, our second week thus far has been pretty rocky. Line blanks, skipped moments, rushed or strained delivery, flubs on words, missed entrances--we've seen these blossom in the last few nights.

Concerned-corrective notes via email from the director and the stage manager have not, it seems, done the trick. I mean, after one "off" performance, actors usually wake up, get their stuff together, and recommit to the work. I think there was waking and recommitting; there just hasn't been the results.

Perhaps the exhaustion of two shows (of a three-hour, especially taxing show) will push us into that magic zone of "don't think/just do"--the fully and naturally reactive body who simply listens and reacts to the reality before her. Or it may just short out our brains more.

I'm not immune. Lines I've had solidly since being off book went haywire, with me swapping in new words or bits of other lines, messing up the cues for other actors. Reaction lines I've flown through before trip and stall on their way out. My vocal register creeps into my upper chest and throat, giving my voice the whiny-strained quality I dislike so. Breathing correctly and deeply, connecting my character with my core and diaphragm, diverts vital concentration away from the who-am-I/where-am-I/what-am-I-doing of the moment.

It's just rough sledding. And then there's the blank moments on stage where the ball we try to keep in the air drops to the floor. There's the electric tension of Oh, no--so-and-so has lost his place and has no idea what's next. Someone, save him! And then two people lose their place.

And, who knows, it may be I'm one of those people today. Vapor lock happens to everyone.

Dreads like these make me question again whether this theatre thing is something I should be doing. "It must be a lot of work to do this night after night," said one audience member to me last night. I agreed it was. "But you enjoy it, right?" I said I did. But that may not have been entirely honest.

I'm still happy I'm doing it. I'm pleased I've done it. It's like running or other exercise. I'm not exactly fond of the thing itself. But I like the feeling that I've done it.

Or is it, perhaps, that I appreciate ducking the guilt of not having done participated? Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a huge motivator for me, almost as big as "get an A+ on this." I do little that doesn't involve at least one of those two goals. Theatre feeds on both those motivations. I want to get applause and compliments. I want to be part of The Thing Everyone Is Doing.

On a day like this, though, looking at a solid 10 hours at the theatre...well.

Well...

JF

Addendum: the shows today went fine. Indeed, the evening show was among the strongest we've done. Go figure.

Backfire Resistance

Whew. Just finished the first of four shows in 48 hours (or, as my sister pointed out, a show every 12 hours or so).

I'm almost too exhausted to be aghast-dismayed at the ongoing fallout of Ukraine-related news. Pompeo subpoenaed. The US special envoy to Kiev resigns. More House Dems (and even a House Republican) back impeachment inquiry. Geraldo says he'd like to "wap" the whistleblower.

I seem to recall--I can't locate it now--an addendum to research about the so-called "backfire effect." To refresh, the backfire effect names the tendency of those who deeply believe a false thing, folk who believe it in a my-identity-is-invested-in-this way, to resist evidence that contradicts their belief. Show an anti-vaxxer or dedicated flat earther why their arguments are just plain wrong, and often their initial response will be to double down, to become even more vehemently anti-vax or flat-earth.

As Yale researcher Dan Kahan as pointed out (again, I'm too tired to find the exact link, but much of his stuff is housed here), such resistance to belief change makes some rational sense. Identities are big, important, long-term investments of psychic energy that yield survival-relevant results in terms of the kind of social group we're linked to and embedded in. It's in my best interests to remain in line with the core beliefs/features of my social group. If my friends are flat-earthers, I want to remain friends with them, which in turn means I stick to flat-earth beliefs.

But--and this is the addendum I seem to remember--there are limits to the backfire effect. Our resistance to belief change isn't invulnerable. Enough counter-evidence from enough sources over enough time will eventually, usually, weaken our resolve.

I'm wondering if such a tipping point might eventually be reached in this affair. Given that what the White House has released on its own (the transcript, the complaint memo) has been so much worse than anyone expected, one wonders whether there's even worse we're not seeing. It's that, or one of two other possibilities: (1) the administration is defaulting to relatively high transparency, getting all the stuff out now, calculating that furor over it will burn out; or (2) they're just deluded about how damning the stuff is. Only time will tell.

If, though, more stuff keeps trickling out (a high-level defection/admission would be big), I'm curious to see how durable identity-based resistance would be on the right.

More tomorrow,

JF

Morality Apathy

It's still hard to tell while we're in the middle of it, but the impeachment question over Trump's Ukraine dealings appears to be a Real Thing rather than cry-wolf passing fancy.

Like everyone else, I'm just in reaction mode. News is coming out so fast that I barely have time to register the initial spin from right and left.

Even many conservatives are acknowledging that the whistleblower's complaint released today lays out a path to impeachment for Democrats to follow. It's trouble for the President. Whether it's "this will be a headache to deal with" trouble versus "this bespeaks real and longstanding problems that may lead to his losing office" depends right now on your partisan perspective.

As expected, of course, Trump's most stalwart defenders see only triumph and nobility in all that's come out from Trump and only nefarious bad faith from those who think otherwise. For them, the whistleblower represents a traitorous act by the intelligence apparatus in DC. Since it seems clear the whistleblower is acting on the information (and urging) of several officials, many conservatives are crying betrayal and treason. It's the Deep State at work, another soft coup attempt by the left. Speaking to a group of staff members, Trump alluded (in his vague, plausibly deniable, just "joking" way) to the way that we used to deal with traitors (i.e., execution).

Such a quasi-threat, however, only underlines the point made by conservative Rod Dreher: Trump is the Deep State. It amazes me how Trump's defenders lurch back and forth between praising Trump's endless many power to stand up to the libs, the state, the UN, and whomever else he targets on the one hand--and Trump's seemingly permanent victim status as helpless to prevent leak after leak, betrayal after betrayal, by current and former staff members who say enough is enough. He's alternately triumphant and martyred depending on the day.

I'm also confused about exactly where conservatives are landing on the question of the ethics of Trump's actions here. Many conservatives view the transcript and the report and come away with "nothing illegal! Nothingburger!" But others (conservative and otherwise) point out that illegality per se isn't the only point. Surely there's plenty that's worrisome in the US President directing a foreign intelligence to dig up dirt on a political opponent. Surely it's troubling to have the President's personal lawyer be connected so intimately with diplomatic relations. Surely it's all too convenient that the "favors" Trump requests of the Ukraine come at the same time that he's withholding aid from them (for rationales that have shifted day by day by day).

My big worry is that conservatives are going to settle, finally, on the idea that there's just nothing wrong with what Trump did. Politicians get to mafia-pressure weaker folk into doing their dirty work.

Theorists of the post-truth era have worried about "reality apathy." In the face of ever-more-difficult-to-detect facsimiles of truth, the worry is that people will simply give up trying to parse the false from the true. Who can tell? Critical thinking gives way to the shrug emoji.

I worry here about an apathy of political morality. Trump has so moved the needle on what is political normal or acceptable, and polarization has made debating that question so difficult, that it becomes almost easier to give up on the idea that presidents ought to be moral at all. There are no guardrails, no limits. Accountability is betrayal. Winning is everything.

It's depressing.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Persistence of Motivated Reasoning

So, the transcript--or, rather, an account of the transcript of a call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy--came out. I had been prepared to be underwhelmed thanks to multiple messages from Democratic leaders specifying that "no quid pro quo" need appear in the transcript for it to be impeachable. But I gotta say, the transcript itself seems full of quid pro quo.

David French (of The National Review, of the French-Ahmari debates) lays out the case pretty well. Zelenskyy brings up monetary support and military aid promised. Trump goes right into a "favor" he asks of him, starting first with some Russia-gate servers and progressing to Hunter Biden. There's no explicit statement along the lines of "If you want X, you'll give me Y." "But," writes French, "if I couldn’t walk a witness, judge, and jury through the transcript of Donald Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and demonstrate that a quid pro quo was more likely than not, then I should just hang up my [attorney's] suit and retire in disgrace."

Yet French is in the minority on the right, a "never Trumper." The overwhelming spin from that side ranges from "suggestive, but no smoking gun" to "another nothingburger from Trump-hating liberals." I've studied motivated reasoning and biased cognition research enough to expect, intellectually, that no possible transcript would appear as a smoking gun to Trump's base. As he himself boasted, he could shoot someone in broad daylight and still count on their votes.

Even then, research suggests that Trumpers gonna Trump.  I know this. Nevertheless, it's still disconcerting to witness people on the other side excusing a president asking a foreign ruler directly for help in discrediting a political opponent. It drains my life energy, makes me want to give on on the world.

I would like to think that I would be better. Before news of the transcript came out today, I asked myself: is there anything the transcript could say or fail to say that would weaken my hunch that Trump was engaging in nefarious behavior? If it turned out that the conversation had avoided Biden altogether, for instance, I'd like to think I'd be back-peddling or cooling off my own impeachment fervor. Of course, my side already had a prepped response for such a possibility: the transcript is redacted by the White House. I fully expect that many of my compatriots on the left would have resorted right to this rationale. I might have joined them, alas. We are never as immune to motivated reasoning as we think we are.

But I also wanted to ask of the other side whether there was anything that the transcript could have said that would actually have been a so-called "smoking gun." I'm not sure that high-stakes political quid-pro-quo gets much more explicit than what's in the transcript now. Perhaps if Trump had uttered the words, "You'd better get me dirt on Biden, or no money for you!"

As it is, a mishmash of different, sometimes contradictory rationales fuel that stance. The transcript is OK because Obama did worse. The transcript is OK because it shows Trump doing routine political strategizing. The transcript is OK because Trump has the right to ask favors of anyone he wants. The transcript is OK because it shows he's just interested in getting rid of Ukrainian corruption. The transcript is valuable because it spotlights how corrupt Biden is. And so on.

The most depressing, I think, is the idea that of course Trump is right to pressure Ukraine like this. He holds the winning hand. He has the power. To the victor go the spoils. Might makes right. Mind you, even arch-conservative Erick Erickson allowed that "if Obama had done this, Republicans would be demanding impeachment." (Erickson argues in that piece that impeachment is inappropriate, but still.) That "if the other side did it, would we cry foul?" question used to have some power. I saw it deployed a few times in right-wing comment threads about the electoral college after the 2016 election, for instance. But even there it fell flat. Winning means more than moral standards.

Again, I doubt--though I'd love to be wrong--that my side would do much better were the situation somehow reversed.

Change is possible. The whistleblower's report, according to Erickson's sources, contains some damaging, credible material for impeachment proceedings. But I'm not optimistic.

More tomorrow,

JF

Nervous Times

The afternoon's been abuzz with the big news: it looks like Trump may be impeached. Nancy Pelosi, long an impeachment skeptic, announced today that she's officially opening an impeachment inquiry.

Of course, as with most such processes, the announcement portends no immediate change but, at best, a months-long process of governmental deadlock.

"Trump is being impeached." I've expected to write or read that sentence since 2016. A well-known grifter with a scandal-ridden past, Trump can hardly be surprised to face as much inquiry as he does. I get the sense, in fact, that Trump knows of no life absent people criticizing him for his behavior. It's almost like he believes that, if no one is seriously questioning his ethics, he's not really doing anything.

I have no idea if or how impeachment will actually unfold in the weeks ahead. Today's sizzling story is tomorrow's Y2K. And Trump has so often dodged accountability that any cry of victory by his opponents (or even by folk interested in holding him to some professional-presidential standards) seems like yet another cry of wolf. Remember the umpteenth time Trump was going to be impeached? For that whistleblower thing? Yeah, that fizzled, too.

Pelosi's reticence to impeach, of course, stems from the fact that impeachment backfires on the impeachers. It promises to drive up support for Trump--Trump the underdog, Trump the martyr, tormented by the Deep State Swamp he (somehow, in the minds of his base) stands apart from. Democrats appear petty. You lost the Muller probe thing. Now you're just sniping. The unlikelihood of his being found guilty, let alone punished, by a divided Congress gives the whole affair a whiff of political theatre.

One of Trump's main strategies--one that's worked for him well up to now--has been to surround himself with so much scandalous chaff, administrative chaos, and communicative noise that no accountability mechanism can get a clear lock on him. His unprecedented behavior in office normalizes to background noise. Pointing out how out of step it is makes you seem like the problem.

I've come to appreciate how, among some of his supporters, the chaos itself seems empowering, inspiring. He's rocking the boat! He's draining the swamp! He's cleaning house! How can you tell? Well, look how angry he's making the libs! When's the last time they impeached anyone?

My fear is that, even if it comes out that Trump did in fact direct the Ukraine to undermine a political opponent of his, his supporters won't even blink. What's the big deal? All politicians do that. He's just being held to a different standard. You didn't complain when Obama [did something apples-and-oranges different]. Already the specifics of this particular story seem too complicated to communicate in an attention economy/sound-byte world.

Exciting times. Nervous times. We'll see.

JF

J.R. RIP

Whatever I was going to write tonight has been blasted away by news. A dear friend from grad school ("J") just lost her son (I'll call him JR). JR had been a big part of my grad school memories. J came the year after my cohort, entering a PhD fresh from a divorce and with a three-year-old in tow. Over my years there, I watched JR go from squalling little one to talking little one. I watched J, a brilliant scholar and one of the most powerful performers I've ever seen, juggle the impossible tasks of single motherhood and PhD work.

Through it all, J's love for JR was constant, a source of strength for her and--vicariously--for all of us around them. I have no words, only memories crowding in.

I remember load-in for some show we were working on, J driving and JR in a car seat in back. "I'm gonna fwoh up," he wailed.

"Oh, JR," she crooned to him, "just hold on. We're nearly there." "He gets carsick," she explained to the rest of us passengers, "but he never really--"

JR coughed and then vomited.

"Whoops," she said. "Oh, JR, I'm sorry. I thought you were just feeling sick like normal. I didn't think you'd actually throw up."

"But I did, mommy," he observed, "I did."

JR had a knack for memorable lines. J would regale us with his latest. "Today," she laughed once, "JR looked at me, shook his head, and said, 'You have old legs, mommy. Old legs.'" We all cackled at that.

As I left grad school and saw J at conferences over the years, she would update me with JR's progress: pictures, reports, and sometimes JR himself in tow. On one of those latter occasions, time she boasted that JR had gotten his first email address. JR, a preteen now shy in front of this stranger who knew him ages ago, blushed. When JR stepped away for a moment, J leaned in. "Would you do me a favor? Could you send JR a message by email? He doesn't know many people with email yet except for his old mother. I know he'd be thrilled." I sent him the email. I know I have it somewhere in the endless archives.

JR grew tall and handsome, entered college. J fretted about girlfriends.

I just can't believe he's gone. It's not like we were incredibly close. But he's been a consistent beat in the occasional music of my life for over twenty years. Knowing that beat is gone makes the music sadder.

And J. Oh, J. She adored him. Her first conference away from him, I was on the flight back home with her. We got off the plane, and she walked as quickly as she could toward the exit. Once through the doors, we hear, "Mommy!" JR awaited her. J. drops her bags and runs--runs--to him, sweeping him up in her arms, beaming at being reunited with him.

That image imprinted itself in my memory as a picture of parental love second only to my own parents.

Lord of lost children and grieving parents, have mercy. Bring presence and comfort. Gather JR into your arms. Enfold J in care and support. Let the memory of J and JR's delight and love inspire more.

JF

Matinee Audiences

Matinee for The Crucible today. Well attended, though we got some odd reactions to certain scenes. When Abigail begins performing (or manifesting) spiritual possession in the middle of the trial, a clutch of audience members began giggling. They had been laughing off and on throughout the performance--and not just at the funny parts.

In the green room, the more experienced actors told the younger actors the same things we ourselves had been told countless times past: You just can't predict how audiences will react. Some people respond to tension onstage with laughter. Better that reaction than no reaction at all.

All that's true, but it wears on actors putting themselves wholly out there onstage for audiences to guffaw at high drama and vulnerability. The seasoning process that performers go through over dozens, hundreds of times on stage involves a fair share of disaffected or outright rude audiences.

High school drama matinees provide the typical such lesson. Generally cheery that they're getting out of class but generally bored with the sustained attentional demands of the live theatre, high schoolers test the mettle of production teams. Exquisitely reactive, they reward broad comedy, punish obvious missteps, and reject inaction or lack of intensity. They are easy to read, alternately great too have when engaged or wretched when bored. And high schoolers bore easily.

Worse, though, in my experience, are the college students at university shows. Practically every gen ed theatre course requires attendance at our shows, from student-directed pieces to mainstage offerings to our professional company. You might expect such audiences to exhibit more maturity, being college students and given that they most often have to write some kind of reflection on the show they're seeing.

Instead, you get an unhappy combination of factors. First, college students aren't getting out of class to see the play; the play is homework, time and money taken over and above class time. Second, college students are much more independent than high schoolers, much more used to being masters of their own actions. A good teacher-chaperone can, through charm or threats, usually restrict high school students' behavior. Some university students, on the other hand, have few compunctions about checking phones, texting, or even chatting with neighbors during the show. (There's a whole other conversation to be had about the ethics of season selection and assignment. Are the shows we produce really the best to show college students with little to no theatrical experience? Should that be the main consideration as we decide on shows and syllabi?)

It's the movie theatre phenomenon we've all complained about at some point: people not knowing or caring how a public audience experience differs from their private living room TV-watching habits. It's worse in live theatre, ruder, because the performers on stage are aware of inattention or distraction in the audience. That's one of the main lessons I try to teach early on in Intro to Theatre classes: your behavior as an audience member matters in the theatre.

But adults gonna adult. And that means that performing in theatre sometimes involves performing over and past people whose faces are lit up by phone screens, people murmuring or chattering to their neighbors, or people adopting a quasi-heckling attitude to what's going on.

Them's the breaks. And usually, such people are a minority. Even college students for the most part get that they're there to share an experience structured by conventions of politeness and listening. And the people who continue to come to theatre past the requirements of classes, the amateur audiences, the ones who come to see theatre for love of the art, usually more than compensate for the few who opt out.

At least, that's what we tell ourselves.

The next performance of Crucible comes Wednesday. It's a high-school matinee. We'll see what happens.

More tomorrow,

JF

Duprass and the Most Dangerous App

Between a steroid shot, decongestants, cough suppressants, and expectorants--all on top of a week of heavy theatrical lifting--my brain is a sludgy vat of inertia right now.

The trick to freewriting, I tell my students, is that there's no way to get it wrong except by stopping. You stop writing, you stop doing the thing. Even if you write, "I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write. I can't think of anything to write," for a page, you simply have to believe in the trick of writing for its own sake. Something good will come from it.

A similar idea fuels The Most Dangerous Writing App, which I read about on BoingBoing. You start writing (well, typing) with a time limit, say 5 minutes. Stop writing for too long before that timer is up and all of your writing starts to fade. That's impressive as a way of getting students to write constantly. I'm not sure I need that now...

...I type, as I stall and stare out the window. Two smart-looking motorcycles of different styles just pulled up and parked outside the coffee shop I'm typing in. An older couple--thin, grey-haired, both with beautifully long braids--dismount and stroll into the store, hand in hand. She wears faded denim jacket and jeans, he a leather jacket.

They're a duprass, I think. In Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, he structures the narration around a catechism in the made-up religion of Bokononism. It's made-up both in the literal sense and in the diegetic sense, as in it's a fabrication of one of the characters that nevertheless gets taught and practiced as a real faith.

A karass, in Bokonon's religion, is a group of people who are cosmically linked in some way, even though it may seem that they are unrelated. Karasses contrast with granfalloons, false groupings that pretend to great significance.

A duprass is a karass of two: two people linked by fate to mutual existence. They are soul-mates.

I'm romanticizing. I know nothing about this elderhippie couple save that they perform linkedness.

I like seeing that. There are several married couples in the show I'm in. I watch the couples come close together, look into each other's eyes, smile, and kiss or embrace. Most of them, I know, have been together many yearss.

The script of love in the USA leads us to yearn for duprass pairings, the soul mates that hold hands after motorcycling to a coffee shop on a Saturday night.

The scripts rarely live up to their promises in life. Or maybe we fail to live out the scripts.

Most pairings in my experience are work. They feel fragile, ephemeral, not cosmically fated. They fade if you stop moving, stop developing.

Maybe that's why they ride motorcycles, to keep from fading out, to keep living the most dangerous app of all.

More tomorrow,

JF

The Horizon of Depressing Blogging

Opening night and illness make this a brief entry.

Mind you, there's no shortage of topics to blog about, even if I restrict things to "performance/theatre studies" lenses. I can imagine posts, presentations, papers, and even articles growing out of any number of events in today's news:

• The worldwide young people's climate strike.
• The Area 51 raid that largely fizzled.
• A book by journalist Mike Pearl about speculative apocalyptic scenarios.

These "fun" topics get pressed to the margins, however, by the bigger, less related-to-my-research topics of import:

• The whistle-blower report--apparently substantiated--that the President pressured Ukraine to act against Joe Biden in exchange for international relations. Related: the fact that the Administration's response consists, typically, of two steps: vociferous denial ("It's fake news!") and then unapologetic admission ("Of course I did it!"). Somehow I've not yet exhausted my capacity for surprise at how right-leaning media outlets pretzel themselves in defending actions they'd shriek about (and rightly so) if the parties were reversed.
• The fact that we seem, bizarrely, to be gearing up for yet another Middle Eastern war.
• How North America has apparently lost over a quarter of its bird population in the last fifty years.
• Heck--might as well note that the climate strike doesn't seem likely to move the needle much on what continues to be a grim and grimmer picture.

It may be the sick-and-tired talking, but I perceive a great deal of depressing blogging on the horizon.

More tomorrow,

JF

Climate Confessions, Climate Christs

My punishment for theatrical anhedonia: I'm sick today, the day before we open. Ah, well.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones points to an intriguing feature on NBC News: "Climate Confessions." Tying in with the Democratic candidates' primary race, with its focus on climate issues, the site invites people to write their climate sins. You can view others' confessions as well. A sampling:

• I recycle but only to keep the trash volume to a manageable level.
• I drive 80 miles to and from work everyday.
• I like the temperature low in my home so I blast the AC in the summer. Using so little heat in the winter justifies it somehow.

The feature appears to be only lightly moderated. Several comments express resistance:

• I run my AC 24/7. I'm not going to sweat to appease this climate religion 
• I do not believe in man-made climate change and do absolutely nothing to 'prevent' it in any way, shape or form. 

Drum is unimpressed by NBC's tactic: 

Congratulations, NBC. This is probably the most efficient possible way to ensure that nothing gets done about climate change. In one stroke it:

• Perpetuates the myth that voluntary individual action makes much of a difference.
• Makes people feel guilty about ordinary, everyday activities.
• And then turns the whole thing into a game where we absolve ourselves with a public confession.

Climate change isn’t a game, and trying to make people feel bad about living their lives isn’t going to increase support for the kinds of things that really make a difference. It just gives people a reason to put climate change out of their minds in order to avoid having to feel guilty about it.

I concur with Drum. To go further, the doctrine of guilt and responsibility behind the site conveys a very Western Christian understanding of sin. The site, of course, doesn't use the word sin, asking instead for people to share where they "fall short in preventing climate change." But "falling short" is of course the meaning of hamartia (ἁμαρτία) the Greek word often used in the Christian Testament to name sin. "Confessing" these shortfalls adds to the religious sense, suggesting that some kind of expiation--guilt, penitence, punishment--is possible and required. It's neatly transactional: you sin, you confess and repent, and boom! Climate change thwarted!
I'll say I see a similar sin-guilt-confession-repentance model operating in some threads of social justice discourse, where racism and sexims--or, worse, white privilege or male privilege--get  framed as purely individual failings. This has been one of the criticisms of privilege discourse from the left: that focusing exclusively on one's privilege leads to an unhelpful cycle of guilt-confession-repentance that focuses on the privileged individual rather than on the larger systems and structures that perpetuate that privilege.

The real gospel of global warming, unfortunately, is much less rosy and self-serving. As Drum has noted, to really, truly stop global warming to the extent we can, everyone--especially those in industrialized countries--must endure radical transformations to their way of life. Most people, even those concerned with global warming, just aren't willing to endure such transformations--or at least aren't able or willing to inflict those transformations on everyone else.

I wonder, then, if the secret wish behind this little exercise is really for Grace--a Climate Christ who, in an act of triumph or atonement (depending on your theology of crucifixion), eradicates the sin, the guilt, and the punishment altogether.

More tomorrow,

JF

Preview Night and Theatrical Anhedonia

Just back from our first performance with an audience (pay what you can/preview). The show went pretty well, I think.

The audience filled about half the theatre, not bad for a straight play (non-musical). Clusters of students (high school and otherwise) mainly there for class or extra credit murmured and scrolled through sites on their phone. Others enjoyed the play well enough to tell us.

I recognize this experience as the kind of thing I don't especially like to do from the audience end. I like supporting my friends, of course, seeing them succeed and strive on stage. But, as I've noted before, I'm not sure going to see a play is a thing I'd do in my spare time were it not for the fact that it's sort of my profession.

I call it various things depending on whom I'm talking to. Sometimes I name it theatre agnosticism (I don' t know if I like this whole watching theatre thing); sometimes I describe it as theatrical anhedonia (I don't get joy or feeling out of watching theatre). Other times I just say that it's like the guy working in a doughnut factory: after a while, even doughnuts can start to seem, well, meh.

It worries me sometimes that I seem to enjoy teaching and talking about (or even writing about) theatre a lot more than actually doing it. To be sure, most of the time, I like acting on stage better than watching it. But even acting has come to be filled with anxiety for me. I'm struggling to remember the me that was acting in shows all the time, deep in my addiction to performing. I liked it. I loved it.

And now? Well, I love working with the group of wonderful, dedicated folk, many of whom are dear friends and colleagues. There's something special, something intrinsically good, about participating in community theatre. I know that intellectually. I feel it--the you're doing a wholesome thing--deeply.

But this experience has also been a source of daily dread that I don't remember feeling before. And the time suck--well, that's a feature, not a bug, of the theatrical life. I'm out of practice with it. I'm very glad to have participated. I'll breathe a sigh of relief when it's done.

When I meet people, as I did after this show, who gush about how much they enjoyed watching a play, I'm always a little surprised and curious, as if I've just heard from someone who professes a deep love of clipping their fingernails. What, honestly, do you like about this? I mean, I believe you, but you're having an experience I don't share.

There have been exceptions, plays that slip past my guard (my apathy? my cynicism? my dead, dead soul?) and provide me with a grand experience. But even there the experience tends toward an appreciation of craft and work--this was a great success--and less the kind of spiritual fuel that I know watching theatre to be for others.

My own feelings feed into my ambivalence about acting. Why should I ask or expect others to come see me do a thing that I in their place would likely experience as, at best, a labor of love for a friend? I know that's not how many people actually feel about shows I've done. But that sense I have remains.

Still: I'm proud of the folk involved. I'm happy to be involved myself. It's a leap of theatrical faith I make, doing this thing, hoping that it may/will enrich someone else's life.

More tomorrow,

JF

"Polite Persecution"

In a podcast about the recent French-Ahmari debate I was listening to yesterday, the hosts referenced the "polite persecution" they say (conservative) Christians face. I was curious about the phrase. Google pointed me to a 2016 meditation by Pope Francis.

In that meditation on on the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts, Francis suggests that there are two kinds of persecution Christians face. Some Christians face, like Stephen, explicit martyrdom--imprisonment, torture, and even death because of their desire to spread the faith. Others, he says, face what he ironically terms "polite persecution," which he defines as "when someone is persecuted not for confessing Christ’s name, but for wanting to demonstrate the values of the Son of God." This kind of persecution, he explains, is "disguised as culture, disguised as modernity, disguised as progress." Polite persecution leads not to jail or the Colosseum but to lighter punishments, censures, and "being set aside."

Francis claims this type of persecution is infrequently discussed next to the mortal martyrdoms of Christians in hostile countries.

On the contrary, I see conservative Christians crying polite persecution constantly. The go-to examples include the bakers, florists, and photographers castigated and fined for refusing to provide services for same-gender weddings. Depending on who's writing, the appellation may extend to conservative Christian organizations like Hobby Lobby who balk at providing employee health care options that cover contraceptive or abortion services. Or it may cover adoption agencies who refuse to place children with LGBTQ+ parents. Or it may cover county clerks who decline to file marriage documents for same-sex couples.

It's an awfully elastic term, "polite persecution." Forced to endure LGBTQ+ characters and storylines in media? Polite persecution. Required to learn or teach evolution rather than young-earth creationism? Polite persecution. Asked not to begin a public, government-sponsored event with a Baptist pastor praying in Jesus's name? Polite persecution. Hearing someone say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas"? The very politest of persecutions, but persecution nonetheless.

And, just today: refuse to vote for Sean Spicer on Dancing with the Stars? Polite persecution becaues of his Christian beliefs!

Mind you, I rarely see conservative Christian pundits standing up for other faiths when they face resistance or blowback. Build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero? Unthinkable! Wear a turban or headscarf in public? Go back to where you came from! Acknowledge or celebrate some non-Christian holiday? Special favors!

I'd love to see conservatives Christians getting half as exercised about the persecutions--rarely so polite--of black and brown people, of immigrants, of LGBTQ+ people, of impoverished or unhoused people, or of prisoners and former prisoners. And, to be fair, some conservative Christians do position themselves in ministry with these groups.

But right-leaning discourse online and in mass media about polite persecution tends to displace these other concerns. Yes, that's bad and all, but consider the real victims of today's culture: US.

Such chest-beating stands in sharp contrast to actual martyrs and persecuted believers in scripture. I rarely see Jesus complaining about all the people persecuting him. He says, "Forgive them." He says, "Turn the other cheek." He says, "Love your enemy. Do good to those who persecute you." And more, he says that he is already, always with those who are the most objectively persecuted: the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, the left-behind, the good-as-dead.

I have difficulty reconciling Lord Jesus's picture of those who are persecuted with a multi-billion-dollar corporation who feels queasy about providing employees with birth control as part of a health insurance package. I have trouble comparing those Christians who are in fact facing death and torture for their beliefs with media stars facing blowback on Twitter for, say, oh-so-bravely castigating trans or gender nonconforming folk.

I'm not saying there aren't legitimately some tensions unique to the present day that first-world Christians face. But it's hard to see these amid the dust-storm of "polite persecution" whinging. 

More tomorrow,

JF

Conservative Christians and Polite Persecution

Yeesh. I thought I was late last night!

It's tough to blog and work and get through opening week of a show. I forgot to pres "publish" last night, so technically the first of today's posts was yesterday's post.

I heard a podcast take on the Ahmari-French debate (the first one). I also started a podcast interview with Ahmari, who is impressively well-versed in Nietzsche. That one I'm only a few minutes into.

One of the takeaways for me from this intra-conservative (intra-Christian conservative) debate between the two men is their areas of agreement. Both agree that current culture is deeply inimical to Christians, that Christians are at least suffering from "polite persecution" (more the French side) if not facing looming state/physical persecution (Ahmari). The polite persecution bit came from the podcast conversation I heard, also between two conservative-leaning Christians (though neither seems enamored of Trump).

It's simply taken as a given nowadays in most conservative Christian circles that Christians (and most who espouse this view mean "true" Christians--conservatives like themselves) face hardships as great if not greater than those faced by ethnic and sexual minorities. There's a litany of anecdotal examples, some big (the bakers in Oregon) and some small (numerous tales of put-upon conservatives in college).

It's an odd turn from thirty years prior. I grew up during the rise and heyday of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right.

What would those leaders think if they viewed conservative Christian victim mentality today?

More tomorrow,

JF

Quick Notes on Sacrifice

Oy, what a long day. Dress rehearsal for Crucible. I'm under the midnight gun for a post again, so--quickly:

One of my friends has her entire family in the show but her ten-year-old son. The son watched the end of the play from the wings tonight, saw John Proctor, falsely convicted of witchcraft in Salem, decide finally not to lie. He accepts death rather than sign his name to a false confession that would allow him to live, rejoining his wife and three sons.

My friend's son was bawling after the show. His father, stripping off his costume in the dressing room, talked him through the trauma.

"It's not fair," said the boy.

"Nope," agreed the father.

"People shouldn't kill each other," sobbed the boy.

The father nodded, noting that the show was about how Proctor decides that some ideals are worth dying for.

Tricky idea, that. My character in the play, John Hale, argues exactly the opposite. "Life," he cries, "is God's most precious gift. No principle, however glorious, is worth the taking of it." Proctor's decision--clearly the morally correct one from playwright Arthur Miller's point of view--repudiates Hale's argument.

And I agree with Miller. Some ideals, some principles, of course are worth dying for.

But mortal sacrifices in the name of ideals are double-edged swords. Ideas worth dying for one day are often principles worth killing for on another. The witch-hunting judges in the play and in life sincerely believe for most of the play that they are doing important, lifesaving, necessary work. History judges them harshly; I cannot help but endorse that judgment.

But what, if anything, in the moment, lets us see our actions, our sacrifices, in light of future history?
Or should we strive to be true to our ideals as best we understand them, without worrying about the judgment of the future?

What plays will be written about us, our time? Which characters will we be? What will children, seeing our story, cry about?

More tomorrow,

JF

French Rudness?

Initially, the wave of commentary about the David French-Sohrab Ahmari debate seemed to declare French the winner. He had better arguments, pressed his case more consistently, and posed questions Ahmari couldn't answer. 

Much of the subsequent comment wave, however, takes a different view. At Crisis, Austin Ruse, for example, found French's manner in the debate off-putting, decidedly uncivil. French, in Ruse's recollection, was frustrated, testy, and interrupting. Ahmari, by contrast, marked his performance by "consistently treating French not as an enemy or an opponent, but rather as a friend." French took the whole thing personally, treating his opponent with "dripping contempt." Ahmari, by contrast, argued peaceably. Ruse notes this ran counter his expectations. Since French generally argues for civility and Ahmari against it, Ruse writes, he expected the opposite of what he saw.

Writing for The Resurgent, Shaun Kenny flatly declares that Ahmari won the debate. On a large level, Kenny argues, French enjoys the support of the elite conservative intelligentsia who sponsored and attended the debate. Ahmari was always odd man out in that crowd, so if he won even one convert, he won the debate. Kenny also points to what he calls a "you could hear a pin drop" moment, where French brings up the fact that Christ urges his followers to "love their enemy." Ahmari responds by saying that this formulation requires that you recognize enemies as such. In Kenny's recollection, French had no response to that.

Based on the two-thirds of the debate I've seen so far, I disagree with both assessments. French did not in my view seem unnecessarily rude or testy. He was precise, lawyerly. He refused to let bad arguments or evasive answers stand. True, he did not hesitate to call ideas stupid or crap when he saw them as such. Then again, he was engaging with a guy who precipitated the debate by coining "Frenchism" as a slur (French would say a straw man) for a conservative philosophy he sees as moral (and mortal) cowardice. I've not yet encountered an unfortunate bit where apparently Ahmari calls French's courage into question, French brings up his wartime service. Ahmari responds by observing that French was a JAG officer, not an infantry soldier. French has a "how dare you" response. Not a great moment for either of them.

Neither did I see the "pin drop" moment. There wasn't much of a pause after Ahmari's "we have to see enemies as such" response. French returned to a core question--what follows from seeing them as enemies? That remains a question Ahmari (and other militancy advocates on the right and the left) often leave unanswered. OK, we now recognize the other side is an enemy. What's changed?

There are forces on the right and the left that have definite, lethal answers to that question. I join David French in sensing that Ahmari and his followers aren't up for living those answers out. What Ruse castigates as French's crudeness, I see as a well-earned, funny moment. "What did you do during the great culture war?" David French asked, joke-hypothetically. "I was an asshole on Twitter!" he answered in a cartoon-redneck voice.

I think I have one more post in me about this debate, and then on to other things (apparently there was a whole other debate on Friday?).

JF

More Ahmari-French Thoughts

Regarding the French-Ahmari debate I've been writing about: I got through the next third last night on the elliptical. I do wish a transcript existed. Ahmari's mic in particular faded in and out, making his contributions difficult to hear (I wondered several times why moderator Ross Douthat, sitting right next to him, did not simply offer him his own, working microphone).

I stopped right before Douthat turned the floor over to questions for the debaters. The debate itself mostly solidified my initial impressions that French had the better arguments overall. Once again I was struck by a generational difference between the two that mirrors a similar difference on the left.

Ahmari presents a passionate frustration at the status quo, sounding an emergency alarm that things are very, very bad and that something must be done right now. He proposes a better (for him) future in which Christian (read: conservative Roman Catholic) thought rather than secular liberalism forms the basis for governance. But he offers little in the way of concrete proposals for getting the USA from the status quo to that that vision. More significantly, he seems ill-equipped or disinclined to grapple with the dilemmas that his suggestions would breed. Whose Christianity would triumph? As was pointed out to him, a Christo-centric public sphere has not in the past worked out that well for minority Christian faiths (especially Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). How would the governmental mechanisms that realize his vision not be easily turned back against Christians themselves?

French by contrast found himself cast as the moderate, a position that seemed surprising to him given his long history of battling in courtrooms for conservative Christian stances. French generally pushed back against Ahmari's sense of crisis. The Colosseum, he said, isn't imminent, even in a Sanders presidency. Indeed, he argued, no single presidential election lasts long enough to provide the ultimate, decisive victory for either side. He related a long history of abortion restrictions that grew under the presidencies of both Republicans and Democrats.

I especially appreciated French's tweaking of the "Flight 93 Election" rhetoric--that is, the sense that 2016's election (or any election) constituted a "win or die" crisis point for conservatives. Storm the cockpit and support Trump, this analogy goes, or be eradicated by a Clinton presidency. French suggested that, in reality, the plane experienced turbulence. The passengers battered their way into the flight cabin, choked out the pilots, and settled themselves at the controls--only to realize they had no idea how to fly the plane.

French stands instead on the principles of liberal democracy enshrined in the Constitution, principles he admits at one point existed in tension with the lived realities of slavery during he nations first few generations. In that French almost sounded like an advocate for radical democracy a la Chantal Mouffe. The system's ideals are good: liberty, justice, and equality for all. But the status quo has some catching up to do with the ideal. Mouffe and French would disagree strongly, of course, about exactly where and how the status quo should shift to conform to the ideal. French sees pornography, for instance, as clearly beyond the bounds of first amendment protections, and he takes it as unquestionably true that abortion is a grave violation of a constitutional right to life. He operates from an originalist viewpoint (Would the founders agree with X interpretation of the First Amendment?) that Mouffe would especially reject.

Yet ultimately French and Mouffe maneuver on something like the same playing field, endorsing the same basic set of rules. Ahmari, like many more radically leftist critics of Mouffe, does not.

That isn't to say I'm comfortable with David French's America, though. Even in their disagreement, it was clear that both men operated in a worldview inimical to my own.

More tomorrow,

JF

Admirable Liberalism

So I'm a third of the way into the 90-minute David French-Sohrab Ahmari debate. It's my workout podcast for a bit. The sound is, as some observers noted, a bit wonky.

It's too early to say who is getting the better of whom for certain. Thus far, however, I side with those who see French as having the stronger point of view. He poses a question for Ahmari early on: What exactly would you do to stop Drag Queen Story Hour? Or, rather, French asks what Ahmari would do to stop DQSH that would pass Constitutional muster.

Ahmari has to be pressed several minutes on this. At first he gestures toward local community initiatives to stop the event. Not so fast, French responds. Local initiatives, too, must past Constitutional scrutiny. What exactly do you have in mind? Finally, Ahmari paints a vague scenario of a Senate hearing with representatives of the "modern library association" before a panel of conservative Senators (like Ted Cruz). French is skeptical. So your answer is, basically, a Congressional hearing? How is that not regular old liberal-ideal conservatism? (I paraphrase.)


French's point, which he makes eloquently several times in the first half-hour, is that the USA hosts a diverse mixture of viewpoints. Only a relatively viewpoint-neutral approach, the approach French sees as Constitutional, ensures that these neutral viewpoints play fair with each other. Any measure you adopt to disallow drag queens reading to children, he warns, could and would instantly be turned around and deployed against Christians. It is a solidly liberal (that is, in line with the liberal tradition of human rights and liberties) and quite refreshing to hear from a conservative. I found myself wishing his words would replay to Republicans in North Carolina, who used some technically legal but deeply dirty pool tricks to force through a veto override yesterday.

I assume Ahmari mounts a more plausible response later in the debate. We'll see.

I'll say that, aside from French's admirable liberalism--well, let me pause here. Admirable. What makes it so? Because it articulates a view I agree with? I can't deny that may be part of my admiration. But, on a deeper level, French's stance strikes me as admirably principled in that his loyalty to it forces him into positions that his gut morality (Ew, gross. Men in drag.) would have him reject. He's not in favor of Drag Queen Story Hour. But he recognizes the wisdom of a political structure that allows some events he doesn't like in order to make room for those he does. Such wisdom is pragmatic. The "us" in the us-versus-them struggle that is democratic governance isn't always in power. The wisest, happiest course for a stable society is to favor standards that protect "us" even when "they" are in power.

I appreciate greatly when those in the judicial system are asked questions along the lines of "what's a stance that you personally abhor that you recognize and would defend as legal?" That kind of counter-gut questioning is all too rare. I disagree hotly with French on a variety of issues (including on his gut-level reaction to drag queens). But he at least seems sincere and consistent in his commitment to a value neutral framework of law.

Of course, sincere and consistent commitment to principle is not in and of itself a guarantor of goodness. Supervillains like Thanos are sincere, consistent, committed--and nightmarish. Lawful evil isn't necessarily less terrifying than chaotic evil (I'm not framing French or Ahmari as such). But principles, especially those openly and transparently espoused, can be the basis for compromise and coexistence, especially when their intention is to found a viewpoint-diverse society. I feel like I could have a conversation with French about the meaning and application of shared principles in a way that I'm not sure I could with Ahmari.

The question remains, then, whether Ahmari and his followers can sustain such a conversation with French and his.

More tomorrow,

JF

Geese and Ganders and Drag Queen Story Hours

Fallout from the David French-Sohrab Ahmari debate continues online. I've still not watched it. Most accounts have French trouncing Ahmari. Given French's courtroom experience, such an outcome comes as no surprise. He's a debater in a way Ahmari is not.

Much of the debate, apparently (I'll judge for myself later), revolves around Ahmari's horror at Drag Queen Story Hour, events at public libraries where drag queens read to children whose parents take them to that event. The event also figures large in Ahmari's original jeremiad against "Frenchism."

DQSH figures as something like a one-dimensional Rorschach test for conservatives like Ahmari. To them, the very idea is so viscerally, obviously, and immediately repellent that it's hard for for them to conceive of how anyone with a modicum of moral sense could think otherwise. For most other people the event barely breaks the surface of awareness; they place it somewhere on the spectrum between harmless and laudable. To this group, reactions from folk like Ahmari appear bizarre.

I'm fascinated by such worldview gaps, the stunned, how can you possibly think that? dumbfoundedness with which people on either side of the gap view each other.

I'm in the group of people who think it grand for anyone, drag queens included, to spread pro-literacy messages on a volunteer basis. But of course, I also think it morally neutral for folk identified as men to dress in female drag. Indeed, I applaud drag queens' commitment to aesthetically beautiful self-expression and their bending of strict gender norms.

In such convictions, too, I stand on one side of a worldview gap. Staring back at my from the other side are conservatives who see flouting gender norms as a pernicious attack upon the foundations of moral culture. Instability in gender, they would say, leads to instability in society generally. Children exposed to such gender-bending grow up without a clear image of who they can or should be as men and women. (That is, as cis-men and -women in twenty-first century USAmerican, Christian, middle-class culture, etc.)

Nor are such events bad generally, Ahmari suggests. Insofar as DQSH gets leveraged as a woke, pro-diversity move, he argues, resistance against it from conservative Christians gets cast not as a difference of taste but as bigotry. DQSH thus effectively forces those who disagree with drag (or who take issue with the acceptance and normalization of LGBTQ+ identities) into a catch-22: applaud these events that you see as evil or be branded as evil by popular culture. Once so branded, Ahmari says, conservative Christians will be themselves discriminated against.

Again, most people--David French included--don't see anything like the kind of existential threat Ahmari sees here. And, pressed to say exactly what he'd want done in response to DQSH, Ahmari and his supporters have (from my perspective) tended to be vague. Does he want the government to intervene? Arrest the drag queens for daring to read to children? Arrest the parents for sending their kids to such an event? Forbid libraries from hosting events featuring drag queens?

In his written responses to Ahmari, French rightly points out that such steps would set awful precedents. Deny drag queens in one library, and a dozen other libraries might deny Bible study meetings. French's liberalism carries a strong "good for the goose, good for the gander" feel. Ahmari seems to want to maintain that the goose and the gander are qualitatively different, but from what I can tell he offers no distinguishing criteria beyond his own self-evident-to-himself beliefs (i,e., "What the Roman Catholic Church says is right").

I'm not sure how Ahmari could respond to French's points without doing away with the idea of liberal equality of application (the goose-gander factor) altogether.

I suspect, actually, that that's what Ahmari has on offer.

More tomorrow,

JF

Frenchism vs. Ahmarism

Among the catch-up activities I'll need to do once I'm on the other side of the tech-week marathon for the show I'm in is the debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French that happened last week. Both conservative Christian writers, the men had been sparring since last May, when Ahmari published a stinging manifesto-invective called "Against David French-ism."

There the formerly Muslim, formerly progressive, formerly evangelical, and now conservative Roman Catholic Ahmari announced that the time had come to shed the liberal public sphere conservatism of David French. The tipping point for Ahmari came with the advent of "drag queen story hour"--events in a few dozen cities where drag queens read stories to children in public libraries. Such events, Ahmari posits, demonstrate that a stronger, more militant hand is needed to halt America's cultural and spiritual decline. He argues for Christians " to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good." There are friends and enemies, Ahmari says. We must distinguish the one from the other and treat the groups accordingly.

French responded, somewhat bewildered to have been promoted to poster-boy for milquetoast conservatism. A veteran, lawyer, and National Review writer, French had made a name for himself as one of the many conservatives who, in 2016, distanced themselves from then-candidate Donald Trump. Subsequent events--primarily Republicans' rock-solid support for President Trump--have put him on the wrong side of history, red-state-wise. Yet he remains well respected in terms of his conservative credentials.

French grounds his rebuttal to Ahmari in a the very civil liberalism Ahmari critiques. Although he is no fan of drag queens reading to children, French avers, he cannot help but see such events as solidly in line with First Amendment protections. From the start, he challenges Ahmari's vision (very Carl Schmittian, really) of politics as a battlefield of friends and enemies:

Here is the absolute, blunt truth: America will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against some of those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.

For French, the USAmerican Constitution provides more than enough space for such worldviews to express themselves and even battle for legislative power without instituting a scored-earth campaign to vanquish one or the other side. Moreover, as Christians, we are called to love enemies and do good to those who persecute us. Imperial Ecclesiastical militancy, he suggests, is difficult to realize alongside agape. 

The squabble produced tons of response and counter-response pieces from various sides. Now, on one level, this was an insular debate among a certain strata of a certain subset of conservatives online. Its immediate relevance to the larger political sphere are questionable. But on another level, the tension replicates debates among progressives about militancy, civility, and What Is To Be Done. 

Is the situation so dire, the fight so existentially critical, that "normal" routes of politics no longer serve? At what point do we stop pretending to "just disagree" and start fighting a different kind of battle? And who gets to decide when the normal form of politics should revert to its baser form of warfare?

It was fascinating, then, to see the two men actually engage in a live debate. Or--it will be fascinating to watch once I'm able to devote 90 minutes to it.

More tomorrow,

JF

Under the Deadline

Once again, I'm writing just under the wire after a long day of classes, rehearsal, workout, and shower. I mean, better something than nothing when it comes to the discipline, but sheesh.

I used to think I wrote better--that I wrote best--under a deadline. In retrospect, the likelier explanation is that I wrote when facing a deadline, whereas I often merely thought about writing with no deadline in front of me.

But that's not always the case. When I have a large writing project before me, I'll often start writing stuff weeks ahead of the deadline. I'll churn out pages and pages, mostly me chasing wild geese down rabbit holes and mixing my metaphors.

I've called this the crap writing stage in the past. In part the function is excretory. I'm expunging the bit of writerly poison that builds up over time, working the kinks out of my authorial voice, shedding my bad habits, passing authorial kidney stones (ugh.).  It's like a warmup before a performance, singing scales before the aria.

That crap writing phase, though, exists also as a journey that many of my writing projects have to take, especially those that represent relatively new areas of research.

There are arguments that I can whip up into a brief conference presentation with relative ease because they draw on a reservoir of prior research, writing, thought, and discussion. I apply a prior hard-won line of argument to a novel object.

But for those times when I lack a prior, hard-won line argument, I have to spend time doing the hard work of winning it. Lots of what I might casually call crap writing isn't bad per se. It's just raw, me thinking things through in writing. I tell my students (as I was told as a student) that writing changes how you think. Ruminating on a subject to yourself or even having conversations with other people get you only so far. Writing forces you to slow down, use your words, lay out your arguments. Someone (I'm not sure who) described philosophy as "thinking in slow motion." Writing is that.

But the slow-motion thinking isn't the same as the polished end product. This too was an old misconception of mine: that I didn't need revisions. In my high school and (shamefully) early undergrad days, I tended to see revising as a kind of failure step, a remediation needed by those who lacked the brilliance to get it right the first time.

Ah, younger me.

Truth be told, the urge to earn the automatic A still runs strong (You got it completely right the first time! What a genius!). But I've come to distrust any writing of mine that hasn't gone through some thorough, frustrating, time-consuming revision.

I can meet a deadline, a minimum word count, with crap writing. But getting a piece under a maximum word count demands revision and time. I have to build in time for crap, for rawness, and for time to refine those elements into something new and better. It's rare that I can do that nowadays in a last-minute fashion (this post included).

I need to start writing these entries earlier in the day, lol.

More tomorrow, hopefully earlier,

JF

The West Wing and the Fantasy of Putting Someone in Their Place

Back in the day, I loved The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin's Bush-era drama about a Democratic administration. I enjoyed the actors (Allison Janney, Martin Sheen, Richard Schiff, and Bradley Whitford were favorites of mine). I drew energy from the show's imperfect-but-still-preferable-to-Bush progressivism. And, although I recognize Sorkin's dialogue can occasionally fall into noticeable patterns, the scripts often sizzled with whipsmart, quotable beats.

But what I really liked, what I finally decided the show was about for me, were the scenes of people being put into their place.

It became a motif. Person X (usually a guest character or antagonist, but occasionally a main cast member/protagonist) acts out in some asinine way. We have scenes of X being a know-it-all, bullying other characters, and/or espousing some overconfident ideology. Then, person Y responds in a way that punctures X's stance utterly. Sometimes it's a shouting match that Y wins. Sometimes it's a quiet, honest statement that shatters everyone. Most often it's a disappointed, half-impatient, weary lecture that knocks out the supports that X had been relying on all through the episode.

X gets put in their place.

Most of the time, the script's dramaturgy has routed our sympathies in such a way that we're happy to see X so chastened. Y says what we've all been thinking--but of course she does so with Sorkinesque rhetorical skill and direction.

I came to realize that such scenes appealed to me especially because they enacted what I wish I could do myself in life. I don't mean "express myself with TV-worthy dialogue" (though that'd be swell). I mean that the scenes featured people setting a strong boundary against someone who was over the line--and having that boundary instantly respected. The put-them-in-their-place speeches are great. But the payoff is in the chastened, deflated, and ultimately submissive reaction from the person so corrected.

The fantasy of speaking truth to power is that power listens. The dream of standing up to bullies is that bullies stop. The romance of setting boundaries with difficult people is that the people respect those boundaries.

It took me a while to realize that the fact that such fantasies didn't manifest for me personally had less to do with me (If only I had said this!) and more to do with the fact that The West Wing is a fiction. X gets put in their place--and stays there--because it's a TV show where the writers have created the character to do just that.

Most of the time, in my life at least, setting a boundary with a difficult person results in the person doubling down, reacting badly, and/or violating the boundary again. (To be honest, it's how I've reacted--childishly--when a boundary gets set against me.) Boundary-setting is not a one-time conversation but an extended effort of persistence and stubbornness. And the person in question is unlikely ever to simply back off (or, as sometimes happened in West Wing, thank you for your correction) after a single killer conversation. Perfect, effective "back off" speeches rarely happen.

Now, it is often the case that the long, unromantic work of boundary setting actually is worthwhile. Boundaries work; if nothing else, they clarify to me (the boundary-setter) what I will and will not stand for. That's a vital realization, one that illuminates my next steps. I'm happy about many of the boundaries I've worked to establish in my personal and professional life.

But I can't think of any times where a single act of responding with force or resistance in person, face to face, has felt as good as it looks on The West Wing.

More tomorrow,

JF

Mishandled Fuel, or Near Enemies of Righteous Indignation

I continue to turn over in my mind Amy Olberding's meditations on civility and incivility. Warning of the dangers of righteous incivility, Olberding cites 5th century philosopher Buddaghosa, who writes about the "near enemies" of virtues:

Virtues, Buddhaghosa argues, do not simply have corresponding vices, they also have near enemies – seductive, plausible counterfeits that closely resemble the virtues but are nonetheless distortions of it. This is why, he explains, we can mistake indifference for equanimity, or attachment for love. These can look alike, and the risk is that we aim for one but hit the other. Worse still, because of their resemblance, we can call a bullseye when we miss. I can think I have achieved the unperturbed poise of equanimity when in fact I simply fail to care enough – I enjoy the dubious peace that indifference to the world and all its woes can bring. The near enemy is a far more subtle form of error than plain vice, for it is moral failure taken as success.

When we act uncivilly in the name of righteous indignation, in other words, we often mistake as righteous a pique that is merely petty or even selfish. Just about all the recent works celebrating the power of anger and rage--especially the rage of women and people of color--acknowledge that rage may be misdirected. Rebecca Traister, for example, suggests that anger is like an explosive fuel: useful, even essential, to move big things but destructive when mishandled. Traister et al. come down on the pro-anger side, however, as a corrective to cultural (patriarchal, white supremacist) disciplines that shame, belittle, or suppress anger.

Olberding works from the other direction. She nods to the occasional necessity of incivility, and she rejects configurations of civility that would prohibit anger. But the argument she makes--the one I find compelling--is that angry actions and reactions are less likely to result in productive uses of incivility. To extend Traister's analogy a bit, rocket fuel is useful rather than destructive in a relatively narrow range of uses. It's much easier to make fuel explode, all things being equal, than to make it explode in precisely the controlled manner necessary for internal combustion engines. To call anger "in many ways exactly like fuel" as Traister does (Good and Mad xxiii) surely suggests that anger requires an immense amount of discipline, machine-precise contexts to calibrate and direct its force.

Yet righteous indignation, Olberding notes, elicits pleasure in part because it refuses such discipline. It's a release. It blows the machine apart.

And I think it's largely a fantasy--or at least an exception--that such combustion brings about a better situation all by itself.

Let me clarify: sometimes an outburst destroys a machine that was causing misery. Setting a boundary in a relationship or social system where harm or oppression has been normalized can feel explosive. A statement like I want you to stop belittling me in front of my co-workers or Hands off of me can seem out of control. It's a show-stopper statement, an angry expression that violates the norms of politeness and comity. Yet many abusive relational systems depend upon the appearance of civility to thrive. Boundary-setting acts that disrupt that system often get taken as rude behavior by the boundary-setter. Why are you being so sensitive? You really hurt my feelings and made everyone uncomfortable when you said that! In fact, it's the system, the situation before the boundary was set, that was insensitive, hurtful, and uncomfortable. The boundary-setter simply surfaces those feelings, returns the awkwardness to the sender, and refuses to participate any more.

Surely that's righteous indignation-fueled incivility working, right?

Yes, but. In those times in my life where I've set a boundary or had a boundary set against me effectively, the situation feels anything but thrilling. Most of the time, I've rehearsed carefully just what I'm going to say, how I'll say it, and what I'll do to handle the various expected responses to my boundary. Effective boundary-setting, in other words, consists of anger channeled through discipline. And even then it often blows up in my face (though sometimes even that is better than the status quo ante).

More often, though, my outrage fails to draw a good or clear boundary. I instead fight fire with fire, abuse with abuse. Or I just lash out indiscriminately at everyone. I'm frustrated at X, but I scream at everyone. It's the opposite of the controlled kind of angry response that gets me results that improve the situation that angered me in the first place.

Or, rather, indiscriminate rage shotgun-blasted out is a near enemy of effective righteous indignation and boundary-setting.

More tomorrow,

JF

Olberding on Civility

Here's a fun Friday activity: drop everything and read Amy Olberding on civility. Please?

A Philosophy prof from the U of Oklahoma, Olberding has been on my radar for a few months thanks to some posts she's made on her blog and elsewhere regarding incivility in online spaces. I've quoted her in this blog before. Her book, The Wrong of Rudeness, is just now out from Oxford UP. As part of the push for the book, she's produced some gems of wisdom about civility and incivility.

Of course, by "gems of wisdom," I should cop to the fact that I mean that her thoughts on the matter run in concert with some of the concerns I've been having of late regarding conversations about civility. To boil it down, Olberding is generally in favor of civility, but with a number of caveats. Inversely, she's decidedly wary of incivility as a necessarily good or righteous mode.

I fear that, put that way, my description threatens to turn Olberding into a wishy-washy, have-cake-and-eat-it-too liberal squish.  Yet a nuanced take on civility, especially from someone apt to be aligned with left-progressive causes, really does seem bold at this point in history.

Anger is in. Both the right and the left in the US and elsewhere appear to have decided that the time for bridge-building overtures has passed. The other side, whomever they may be, has just gone too far. For many on the left, Trump's election--and, even more, his seemingly unshakeable bedrock of support by 30-40% of the voting public--signals the end of any meaningful future for pro- and anti-Trumpers to coexist. Many on the right point to other litmus-test events (the Kavanaugh hearings, for instance) that to them demonstrate conclusively how hopelessly radical those on the left have become.

One can track similar conversations in right- and left-leaning spaces, especially during pile-on conversations where the community focuses its contempt on the latest outrage from the other side. In such conversations, nuance or moderation get interpreted as betrayal, a kind of sick apology for the worst kinds of injustice. Celebrations of outrage and anger abound, defensively arrayed against the perceived forces of civility (forces construed as simultaneously flimsy--weak-willed, fainthearted, snowflakey--and authoritarian--capable of violent repression and damaging reprisal).

I'm not neutral in this debate. Although I'm averse to tension and conflict myself, I recognize that civility as a social ideal regularly plays out on a uneven terrain. Some segments of society--usually the weaker or more marginalized segments--feel the constraints of civility more than others. Civility has too often centered the comforts of the privileged classes rather than the well-being of all. As a mostly privileged person, then, it's not surprising that I find my sentiments pro-civility.

True enough, Olberding allows. But the fact that civility can be used as a cudgel of the oppressed by the oppressors, she argues, does not mean that civility is only a cudgel. Nor, she writes, is incivility necessarily any better. For one thing, she notes, it's not like oppressors refrain from incivility. Indeed, various uncivil modes are some of the primary tools of oppression and injustice. Olberding also punctures the all-too-frequent equation of incivility with bravery. From her Thesis 15:

Popular rhetoric likes to identify civility with spineless acquiescence and incivility with courageous truth-telling. These associations are farcical. Context matters.  Sometimes, civility is the far harder, and braver, approach to interaction in disagreement.  There simply is no way to draw a decontextualized straight association between incivility and bravery, between civility and cowardice.  (Also:  implicitly associating incivility with bravery explains why seemingly everyone being rude nowadays hurls utterly tedious charges of snowflakery at any who don’t like it.)

This is one of those "well, duh" statements that, for numerous reasons, has acquired provocative status. I expect she'll get some fierce pushback soon.

I especially like her critique of righteous indignation-fueled incivility. But I'll get to that tomorrow.

JF

Strange Things

Boy howdy. I gotta start doing these in the morning, first thing. After rehearsing, working out, showering, and eating, my gas tank is nearly empty and the clock is about to strike twelve and I'm awash in cliches and run-on sentences.

I had just downloaded some fascinating-looking articles from Theory and Event (a grand little journal, really) when my friend called to see if I were free to finish up season 3 of Stranger Things. I was, and we did. So in lieu of theoretical ruminations, I'll spend a few words on that.

Overall verdict? Enjoyable and generally well-adapted to the exigencies of a third season. The writer-director-creator team of the Duffer Brothers seemed to know that the bloom was off the rose the elements that garnered brought the show such praise when it first appeared are no longer as fresh as they were. The 1980s/Goonies pastiche style, cleverly incorporating some stars of the 80s (Winona Rider, Sean Astin), is expected rather than innovative. The appealing preteen task are now gangly teenagers (and the teens are now post-high-schoolers). And the Lovecraftian threat of the Upsidedown lacks some of the WTF mystery it once held.

Season 3 Stranger Things realizes this, making change one of its recurrent themes. Relationships evolve, youngsters mature, and body-horror transformations get inflicted on innocent townspeople and rats. Most of this worked for me. I appreciated adding a bit more diversity to the cast.

The Starcourt Mall setpiece works well (oh, how I miss you, Waldenbooks!), as does the "Scoops Ahoy" ice cream shop. The style is accurate enough (according to my memory) to reinforce how garish mid- to late-80s fashion was. The Russian/Red Dawn antagonists brought back Cold War feels. And the scary elements--human and otherwise--were quite effective.

And, without spoiling too much, I loved the treat of the "Neverending Story" duet.

I have little in the way of deep thought about this. Gas still on E.

But more tomorrow,

JF