Weary

 It turns out the list of forbidden words amounted to three: diversity, equity, and inclusion. At least, that's the official case.

First--I find that hard to believe. Hundreds of pages had those words?

Second--even if that's the case, it's still unconscionable censorship. 

I'm weary. 

The Trump-Vance-Zelenskyy debacle today in the Oval Office encapsulates my frustration. The bits I've seen--even those touted by Trump defenders as proof of Zelenskyy's fault--all seem like ignorant bullies being ignorant bullies. All the core Trump tropes are on display: arrogance (chiding Ukraine as if it were a child), bad faith (marveling that Zelenskyy thinks Putin is untrustworthy--when the whole world knows that's so), pettiness (the bizarre "did you ever say thank you?"), and of course good old-fashioned DARVO ("I think it's disrespectful..."). 

But truly--no matter how obviously cruel or unprofessional Trump seems in any given public scenario, people leap to his defense, framing Zelenskyy somehow as the one suggesting inappropriate things. 

I concur with the frequent observation: if Trump et al. were actually, literally pro-Putin double agents, they would surely be doing exactly what we've seen them doing. I take that back: a professional double agent would be subtler. 

I just don't know. 

I read an account from NPR reporter Zach Mack about the year he spent trying to wean his father away from conspiracy theories. His dad even made a $10,000 bet with him that 10 conspiracy-theory predictions would come true by 2024--$1,000 a prediction. None did. By the time his dad had repaid Mack, he had driven away his wife of 40 years as well as Mack's lesbian sister. His father only doubled down on his beliefs. Mack reflects:

I don't know what comes next. Things fell apart so quickly, but also slowly; as the years passed, cracks started opening up, eventually turning into a chasm. In the end, we didn't make it.

I think about that quote a lot.  Things fell apart so quickly, but also slowly. I think we as a country may be falling apart. I think the next few months will tell the tale.

I don't know what comes next.

The Purge

 Today the roller coaster stayed at the low altitudes. If anything, it dove lower still.

My colleague informed me that my university had spent the evening purging hundreds of its webpages of any language now considered forbidden by Trump's new (soon to be dissolved?) Department of Education. A memo from an Ed Department official, sent on Valentine's Day, made various noises about how awful discrimination on the basis of is...

But cue the goose meme generator:

from Imgflip Meme Generator

 

Can you guess the answer? White people, of course. White people, who (along with Asian people) have apparently been the victims ALL ALONG: "These institutions’ embrace of pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination have emanated throughout every facet of academia."

 

The memo makes for a fascinating study in supported argumentation. On certain points, the memo dutifully footnotes various court cases it summons to support the judiciary's resistance to race-based admissions schemes. But these footnotes--any evidentiary citations at all--disappear as the memo moves into its tirade about accepted sociological history:

Educational institutions have toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon “systemic and structural racism” and advanced discriminatory policies and practices. Proponents of these discriminatory practices have attempted to further justify them—particularly during the last four years—under the banner of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (“DEI”), smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.

 

Moreover: 

Other programs discriminate in less direct, but equally insidious, ways. DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.

 

Again: no evidence, no argumentation, just pure assertion drawn from the right-wing media echo chamber. What these allegations have to do with race as a factor in admissions is unclear.

 

The memo concludes with scary-sounding demands that all educational institutions be ready to prove they're snapping into line against DEI: 

 

All educational institutions are advised to: (1) ensure that their policies and actions comply with existing civil rights law; (2) cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and (3) cease all reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race. Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding.

 

I am not a lawyer, but these demands seem (1) ridiculously broad--is this about admissions or any mention of race whatsoever?--and (2) practically unenforceable given the Trump administration's wild-machete-thrash-cutting of all federal workers and its stated intention to dissolve the Department of Education altogether. Who's going surveil institutions? How? Using what criteria? Will this be a patchwork of private-citizen bounty hunter laws a la Texas's anti-abortion regime? What?

 

Given the vagueness of this memo, I'm all the more dismayed to see my University not only stumble over itself to comply but to go so far beyond what the memo mentions. Apparently deans got a (not-yet-released) memo from the university's legal council with a list of no-no words that needed to be memory-holed from the university's website. 

 

Were faculty and staff consulted? Of course not! Do we know what those words are? Nope! I'm guessing they're similar to the lists given to National Science Foundation grantees. The Louisiana Illuminator notes that several of these words (diversity and equity, for example) appear in very different contexts in lots of departmental webpages, e.g., studying private health equity firms or cataloging a state's ecological diversity.

 

I found out about the purge only through my colleague's text link to the article. I found out that a bio of mine had been removed (along with those of other faculty) on a particular page only when my school's newspaper contacted me to ask if I knew about it. The reporter also asked what I thought about the anti-DEI purge. 

 

Here's what I said (after necessary qualifications that I was speaking for myself, not for the school, the department, etc.):

 

I'm dismayed by the moral panic against all things DEI. I'm disturbed by the reactionary, short-sighted, and undemocratic actions being taken to satiate that panic. In my view, both the fear and the reactions are being driven by a mix of honest ignorance held by some, persistent misinformation spread by others, and bad faith provocation stoked by outrage profiteers. 

It's a bad idea for LSU to feed into that reactivity. Censorship does not make our University stronger. It does not make education better or more affordable. It weakens our reputation, undercuts our research profile, and drives away talented faculty, staff, and students.

Most of all, it won't prevent future ultimatums by anti-DEI crusaders. Historically, moral panics aren't satisfied by just one purge. 

If we submit to this--or, worse, if we just do the censoring for them--what next sacrifices will Washington demand from us? Today it's a list of forbidden terms. What's tomorrow: forbidden topics? Forbidden books, plays, music, works or art? Forbidden disciplines? Forbidden groups of people? Where does this stop?

It has to stop with us--students, employees, staff, alumni, community members, and citizens. We can decline invitations to censor ourselves. We can refuse to alter our teaching, our research, or our services. We can say no to accommodating cynical fear mongering.

We teach our students about academic integrity--doing our work honestly, rigorously, and openly. I want LSU to model that integrity now.

 

I am trying to keep in mind that the folk behind the purge are probably operating in good faith, doing their best to protect our federal funding. But I'm surprised at the eleventh-hour, slipshod editing here. Did they think no one would notice? It's the weekend before Mardi Gras break, so perhaps they hoped they could get away with "quietly doing away with"? 

 

I'm not interested in keeping it quiet. This is a grave failure of courage on the part of the institution. I know it's not always easy to distinguish between preemptive camouflage and obeying in advance. But this act seems much more like the latter. Do better, please.

 

Roller-Coaster Days

 My mood roller-coasters. Today was a downward slope. I could tell by the number of irreverent and off-color jokes I kept making in my grad seminar. 

Why? Oh, I could do the [gestures at everything] move. But I guess a few immediate shots to my mood happened when I read one of my senators--deep, deep red--dismissing constituents' worries about federal workers as mere whining. So GOP representatives are getting booed and criticized in town hall meetings? The GOP solution: stop having town hall meetings. If you aren't a billionaire or a bully, they don't care to hear from you.

I had some hopes for some bipartisan action against the nightmarish budget proposal by the House Republicans, but those got dashed. Reclaim Congress's power of the purse from an overreaching executive branch? No thanks, says the GOP. Speaker Johnson seems to be curving his entire political will and power into one end: please Donald Trump.

And then there's RFK, our new top health official, cancelling the annual meeting to hash out next year's flu vaccine, dismissing the first measles death in the US in ten years, saying framing it not only as normal (it is not) but caused by the MMR vaccine itself (it is not). My other senator, supposedly the moderate-sane one, is a medical doctor. He approved Kennedy's appointment, promising that he'd watchdog Kennedy to make sure he didn't waver on promoting this tried-and-true lifesaving public health intervention. Where is he? 

And I saw the assembled presidential cabinet being hailed and addressed not by Trump but by Elon Musk, who still has no officially appointed role in DOGE but is still somehow the de facto president as Trump himself fades into senescence. I repeat my therapist's amazed observation: Trump defers to Musk in a way he rarely defers to anyone, save perhaps Putin. With Musk tweeting openly about wanting to go the way of El Salvador (getting rid of any judges that dare to challenge the executive branch, taking over the country by force), I wonder how much support he's winning from the armed forces.

I keep hearing from my lefty sources how even rank-and-file Trump voters seem increasingly restive about the mass firings and coming economic collapse. And the reaction from the administration only underlines how little the billionaire-bully krato-kakistocracy cares. But maybe I'm just stuck in my echo chamber? I do occasionally hear about non-AI-produced folk absolutely charmed by the wholesale destruction of our government. 

I wrote to my Representative--one of our state's few democrats--to complain about the GOP and thank him for his vote against the "big, beautiful budget." 

I suppose I'll call my senators' offices tomorrow, even though one at least has communicated as clearly as possible he does not care to hear from the likes of me.

It's . . . hard to keep going when the roller coaster is at the bottom of the hill.

Do You See the People [CENSORED]?

 I agreed this last week to a writing assignment: a short piece about some kind of right-wing performance practice. It's for a special issue of an international theatre journal focusing on how the lurch away from liberal, plural democracies and toward authoritarianism and ethnocentrism expresses itself through performances. 

I have to decide on what to write about in the next few days. As such, I've turned on my scholarly radar, opening myself to input from the universe about what kind of right-wing/authoritarian performances I can generate 2,500 words or so about.

The first possibility would be the U.S. Army Choir performing "Do You Hear the People Sing" for the White House Governors Ball. There's video of the event that went viral, with some people mocking Trump's team for choosing a song that critiques authoritarianism and endorses violent resistance against it. Others, however, point out that Trump is a fan of the big, bombastic, schmaltzy musical with the rousing chorus. His campaign even has a history of using the song; Les Misérables's creators asked him to stop back in 2016.  

Zach Brand-Wiita on Bluesky summarized the debate well:

 

I think the idea the Army Choir was trolling Trump is wishful thinking. I love Les Mis and it's a much more progressive story than people realize, but it's also big and bombastic and over-the-top romanticism schmaltz -- the kind of stuff Trump loves. Sorry, this was just them singing a popular song.

[image or embed]

— Zach Brand-Wiita (@zachbrand-wiita.bsky.social) February 23, 2025 at 8:55 PM

 

 

Call it Poe's Law of protest: can't tell if subversive or just clueless. Of course, Trump's supporters believe they are standing up (violently, if necessary) against oppressive forces who seek to kill them. 

Perhaps, then: call the performance of the song an empty signifier (in Ernesto Laclau's sense): compelling (spectacular in Amy Hughes's sense of makes you stop and pay attention) but also floating enough to be coded with whatever ideological content its producers (I don't know about its performers) would endorse.

I sense a disappointment with this openness in myself. It's similar to that expressed by the poster I mentioned yesterday who was livid that so-called universal human rights could be questioned or undermined. There's the same yearning for a more perfect system--or in this case a more perfect dramatic script--that would prevent usurpation by malign forces. But, again, that's just not how it works. Performance forms--song, dance, theatre, spoken word--can be wrenched from their original context and intention and repurposed for use opposed to that intention. Heck, "YMCA" is now a Trump standard, the Village People's only living member now insisting that the song has no homosexual subtext. 

Speaking of homosexual subtext, my only other radar blip about a performance to write about would be the AI-produced video of Trump going to town on ("worshiping" would be the term of art) Elon Musk's bare feet propped up on the Resolute Desk. It showed on all TV screens in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. "Long Live the King," notes the caption, referencing at once Trump's "Long Live the King" post about (supposedly) freeing New York City from congestion pricing, Musk's clear-to-everyone-else control of Trump ("Trump actually defers to Musk," marveled my therapist today), and Musk's email last Friday arbitrarily demanding that all federal workers produce a report of five things they accomplished last week--or be fired. 

I've not watched the video. I . . . would prefer not to watch it. Look: some people find feet gross. Some people find feet great. I lean toward the latter, and precisely for that reason I have no desire to have deepfake Elon's deepfaked feet--slobbered over by passionate Trump--uploaded into my brain. No thank you.

And yet. If I'm going to think of an activist-performance signifier that is absolutely full, one that Trump and Musk would be very hard-pressed to recruit to their ends--surely it's this one. What's the secret? Homophobia, obviously, drives the critique here (haw haw lookit how gay they are together!), spiked with a side of kink-shaming. And it's porn-y. Porn as threatening signifier--something beyond Trump's control--has haunted his campaign before. Witness the legendary "pee tape" supposedly floating around somewhere. There again we see the blemish of kink distorting the cishet sex god image Trump has long been keen to foster. Witness his first-term fixation on the size of his hands (with the clear implication about what that suggested about his genitals). Or consider the rumors about Vance's couch-humping. 

Dagnabbit. I may have a paper here, somehow about both a Les Mis song and deepfake foot porn. 

I guess I need to start working on clever puns to join those two. 

I doubt I'll do better than this exchange on John Scalzi's Bluesky thread:

 

Perfection

[image or embed]

— John Scalzi (@scalzi.com) February 25, 2025 at 5:06 AM

The Fragility of Victory

 "You have to keep living." I was on a zoom for LGBTQIA+ United Methodists and their allies earlier. The Bishop of our conference formed a ministry team to address the needs of queer folk in our state. We face the happy conundrum of deciding what to do and how to advocate after a systemic victory. The last General Conference (the quadrennial meeting of worldwide United Methodists) vaporized sections of the Book of Discipline (the polity and policy document for the UMC) that were gay-exclusionary and homophobic. Each conference can tailor regulations to fit its culture best. (This was primarily with a nod to UMC conferences in African and the Philippines.)

So we won! After decades of struggle, we had achieved some degree of equality. What now?

I've argued elsewhere that one primary mode of activism aims to put activists out of work. Suffragists succeed when there's no more need for suffragists. Abolitionists win when they no longer need to be abolitionists.

Social movements achieving such victories have two basic paths before them. They can go out of business, switching to the Next Great Cause. Or they can shift the quality of their work from oppositional change to something more like a church. They might deepen and widen their cause to embrace other struggles. They might adopt a maintenance and preservation mode, solidifying their victory as hegemonic.

I use hegemonic in the good sense here. When Antonio Gramsci (the first theorist of political hegemony) wrote about this term, he meant it not as the Big Bad System to fight but as a name for the mutually buttressing functions of consent and coercion that maintain a political status quo. Social movements (parties, in Gramsci's writing) want hegemony. They want their (initially minority) views of what Ought To Be not only to prevail in a single election. They want these views to become the political common sense of the whole society, so integrally part of the political sense of normalcy that the views cease to be political (in the sense of "contested") at all. 

Women's suffrage is a good case in point. The right of adult women citizens to vote in the US has for decades been hegemonic. It enjoys widespread consent (most people think it a good thing that women won the right to vote), and it's protected with the armor of coercion. If someone blocked a woman from voting, some kind of state force--lawyers, judges, police, or, beyond that, the armed forces--would enforce her right to vote. And, up until recently, to seriously call into question whether women should be allowed to vote is to mark yourself bizarrely out of step with political consensus.

And yet.

Political realities are inherently unstable, discursive. A political victory, however solidly won, is not eternal. Women have the right to vote--anyone has the right to vote, for that matter--only so long as there's a system of consent-coercion strong enough to recognize and enforce that right. 

This is a hard reality for some. I read a post on Bluesky that asserted that any right that could be taken away was not in fact a right at all, and that the aim of activism should be to create a system where rights become truly unquestionable.

But this just isn't how human societies work. How could they? There's inevitable disagreement and friction about exactly how to define, apply, and delimit rights. Systems that ignore or quash such disagreement tend to be totalitarian, stuck in a singular, frozen vision. They eventually lose some vital hegemonic element--consent, coercion, or both--and fall apart.

I write this because so many of the victories we thought won--specific rights for queer folk, but deeper and ostensibly more durable political systems as well--are proving perilously fragile. Trump seems to be hijacking many of the coercive systems of the state, forbidding them from defending certain rights formerly protected and directing them to enforce other rights--the rights of "bullies and billionaires" to use the phrasing of activist Anat Shenker-Osorio. 

Gramsci would hardly approve. Aside from being an ardent foe of fascism (Mussolini's OG Fascist party threw him in prison), Gramsci would note that the Trumpian wrecking ball of coercion seems to be losing popular consent. This lays a lethal groundwork for some pretty awful and bloody conflicts between segments of the armed forces and executive branches loyal to Trump and, well, everyone else. But history suggests that pure coercion alone rarely holds for long. 

I hope it doesn't come to that even. I hope folk can realize the bullies and billionaires only hold power as long as everyone else gives them power. I hope we take it from them soon.

Interesting Times

Yeesh, but this timeline keeps taking turns for the worse. And by "timeline" I mean "Trump administration." Trump just nominated right-wing podcaster Don Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. Federal employees face an uncertain Monday after Musk's government-wide email demanding that they list five things they accomplished last week or lost their jobs ("failure to reply is taken as resignation" or some such). Ukraine looks to Europe, which now charts a path ahead with America as adversary rather than ally. The wave of universities suspending PhD applications keeps growing.

 "I would just like to live in less interesting times for a while," one of my friends on Discord said. 

I concur. 

Someone on Bluesky posted that it's like Musk has fixated on the "What do you do here actually" scene from Office Space--and taken it ask a true guide to what most government employees do. That is, they're lazy and/or incompetent wastes of space. Viewing the world through that lens, why not take a machete to the employee rolls? 

We keep seeing and hearing about good, hardworking, and often irreplaceable people losing jobs to the detriment of basic government function. But I don't predict Musk recognizing an error and correcting course. 

I do foresee public outcry growing to the degree that Trump finally throws him under the bus. It would constitute the latest in that signature Trump maneuver: threaten to create a crisis, back down from the threat, and then loudly crow about having solved the crisis. Musk's doing all of this via DOGE serves Trump well. He's coated in plausible deniability for if/when DOGE goes belly-up. (Though how it has avoided getting stalled or stopped after dozens of stories ripping apart its so-called "wall of receipts" about how much it's saved, I don't know.)

I wonder what the tipping point will be? What volume or quality of public outcry would be sufficient to either move the GOP majority into reclaiming Congress's power or--miracle of miracles--cause Trump to flip on Musk? So far, I don't sense the level of "here's how he's causing pain to the people you hate" propaganda necessary to overwhelm the "I voted for Trump, but now my daughter's out of a job!" stories bubbling on social media. But then--I'm not the audience for such propaganda. I'm sure there are lots of useful idiots happy to sing praise hymns to Trump/Musk's genius.

 But still. I know that the competence of totalitarian regimes ("they made the trains run on time") is largely a myth. But I'm still struck by the sheer chaotic amateurism that seems to define Trump 2 so far--amateurism spiked with pettiness, cruelty, and (a Trump constant) whining. To be sure, Trump 2 has already delivered crushing blows to vital sectors of government, research, outreach, and diplomacy. I don't know how our international reputation recovers. We'll be decades repairing the destruction he's wrought in just a month. But it's not hard to imagine a smarter, more coordinated coup rather than the clumsy toddler-smashing-the-tower-of-blocks-and-crying-that-it-falls performance we've witnessed so far.

What really remains to be seen, I guess, is whether a clumsy coup is still coup enough to topple us as a democracy. The stopgaps that we rely on to prevent such collapse--well, they seem muted or absent (with some strong exceptions). 

Interesting times continue, alas.

Curtailing Instructor Speech

 So my friend and colleague texted me this morning at 8. I was asleep, having successfully fended off my cat from nudging me awake at my usual 6:30 time. 

Bad news.

My university's board of supervisors decided, last night, to restrict the rights of instructors in classrooms. They clarified that classrooms are not spaces where first amendment protections apply. Thus did they seek to prevent instructors from "imposing" their political views on students. The statement declined to define what "imposing" might constitute. 

More bad news: the University of Pittsburgh is pausing all PhD recruitment efforts in light of uncertainty about federal funding. Worse, the University of Pennsylvania appears to have done that and more, actually rescinding some assistantship offers. To call that shocking understates its seriousness. It's akin to hiring someone in a competitive field, having them accept the offer (and presumably turn down competing offers)--and then take it back. How horrible for the students affected. How embarrassing for the universities.

No one would accuse me of optimism, but I doubt that Trump's executive order on NIH funding will survive judicial review. I think one court has already put it on hold. Either Trump has doubled down on cutting funding despite court orders, or the universities have decided to take preemptive action. 

I worry this might spark a more widespread panic-wave of grad program admission freezes. I've already made four offers to prospective students. Thinking about the awkward "well, actually..." conversation I'd have to have with them should my university join that wave makes me queasy. 

Regarding the Board of Supervisors' decision . . . well, that doesn't upset my stomach in quite the same way yet. Oh, it angers me.  Similar to the post-the-Ten-Commandments-in-every-classroom thing, this decision seems transparently unconstitutional. I expect it to be restrained by a judge in the next week. From there, it will wind its way up layers of judicial review until it lands somewhere consequential and nudges the Overton Window a bit closer to tyranny--or not! So--infuriating? Definitely. I'll join whatever hell gets raised about it. 

But in terms of immediate threat, I worry more about PhD recruitment than I do about being fired for something I say in class--at least right now.

Perhaps naivete clouds my vision. Unconstitutional or not, this maneuver (instigated by our utterly anti-higher-ed governor) highlights the conservative movement's war on tenure, if not on university education itself. I recognize that we all have targets painted on our backs. Rumors suggest that most of our upper-administrative personnel have plotted (or been shown) escape routes from my institution in the next few weeks. Who knows how long we have before colleagues start following them?

And what do I tell students, prospective and current, without someone thinking that I have "imposed" my views on them?

Lecturing Guidelines

I watched a junior instructor today as part of our school's promotion and tenure (PT) process. Everyone in the tenure-stream gets observed once or twice a semester. The observer writes a report, and that report goes into the PT Committee's annual assessment of the tenure-stream faculty member's teaching, service, and creative/research output. 

It's nerve-wracking to be watched and evaluated. I didn't like being on the receiving end of that when I was untenured. As a watcher now, I try to make the experience as non-nerve-wracking as I can. My person today was nervous and felt off. They seemed mostly fine to me, just inexperienced. 

As I was watching, taking notes for a future conversation with the person about how they might up their teaching game (as we all can), I thought about composing a bit of a guide for creating theatre lessons in lecture-style classes. 

I know the L-word causes some pedagogy folk to recoil. Paulo Freire talked about the "banking model" of education: the teacher has a store of knowledge, which they deposit into the empty, passive minds of students. Students then return (vomit back out) that knowledge on a test. It's a thin view of what knowledge is, and it renders students relatively powerless to do anything to or about the knowledge they absorb and return. 

I get that, and my discipline is better than most about embodied learning. My history classes generally have some kind of performance project attached. I try to get students to synthesize and innovate instead of simply regurgitate knowledge. I want them to be creative, not just accurate. 

Still, though, such embodied learning requires a degree of common, basic knowledge. Lectures are one way of imparting that knowledge. I like to think I'm a better-than-average lecturer. Here's some basics to my philosophy of lecturing:

Communicate what you're covering and why. I start every semester with a "why are we here" conversation. "Why are you taking this class?" Inevitably, students answer with some variation of "It's required." "OK," I return, "but why is it required? Why do we make every theatre major take a history class?" That usually spurs some better answers. What I'm trying to get them to isn't just reasons but stakes. I want them to see how the class I'm teaching contributes something vital to their craft. 

Clarify how you teach. I also try to have some meta-pedagogical moments in my teaching. Here's how I've set up this class. Here's how I handle lectures. Here's what I expect you to pick up from lectures. Here's how I test these expectations in various assignments. Here's how those lectures and assignments connect to the stakes/goals we started with.

Clarify your philosophy of lecturing and listening. This may seem like an odd instruction. You lecture to give some information. Yeah, that's so. But I don't take it for granted that my students all know how to engage a lecture and get useful information. So I identify and explain (usually as I go) some of the features of how I lecture.

I have a "no screens" policy in class. I expect students to take notes, and (absent some accessibility issue) I expect them to take notes by hand. I point to the research that shows that, while tying notes on a computer can often result in an accurate transcription of what the professor has displayed on the screen or the board, transcription isn't the point. The point is to record the knowledge I'm conveying in a way that means something to the student. Typing doesn't do that as well as handwriting does.

I pare down the notes I show. I do words or phrases when possible instead of full sentences. I explain that I want students to write down not the exact words I'm saying but their own way of putting what I'm saying. I'll talk a lot more than the words I put on screen, in other words. I want them to take notes on what I'm saying, not (only) what I'm showing.

I slow down, presenting notes one bullet point at a time. Writing takes time. I try not to move on until everyone's finished writing. I do not present an entire screen of words, talk over it, and then flip to the next screen. 

I highlight terms or ideas I especially want them to see. Sometimes I'll even say "This part is just background; you don't need to worry about getting it down" and then transition to "and here's where I'd start to take notes more exactly if I were you." 

I don't just read the notes I have. I mean, most of the time, that'd be a list of truncated phrases. My lecture creates connective tissue between points. Where possible, I try to involve students in this flow. OK, so we have idea 1 here. What might you have to think about as a result of 1? That's right! Idea 2 (reveal next bullet point). As much as is possible, I try to have students help guide themselves through the lecture. Hiding and then revealing bullet points one by one lets me use some dramaturgical tricks (or rhetorical tricks, if you prefer): building, tension/release, surprise, twists, etc. 

I also pause to walk around and just talk. Especially after I present some surprising or significant point. I'll pause, ask for some student reflection, and walk around to try to get some feedback. If I have a fun anecdote or illustration, I can deliver it here. I try to break up the monotony of professor-behind-lecturn when I can. It also lets me reach some of the back-row Baptists who may otherwise be drifting. I can move to the back, sit down, have a chat with the class (as most other people turn in their seats to look at me). And ideally, my conversation leads me to the next point to talk about.

 Pictures and brief videos are also good interrupters of monotonous lecturing. I try to be careful (when I'm on my game) to set up videos--telling students what to watch out for and then asking them about it afterward, reinforcing those points I've covered already.

This is a personal one: I avoid powerpoint where possible. My preferred mode of note-giving is with an opaque projector. I manually cover up and reveal the next bullet point. And sometimes--if a student gives an especially creative answer--i can simply write or draw right onto the paper a new term or idea. I can skip around, not stuck to just the flow I've pre-programmed.  

More recently, I've adopted a check-out question format. I set my alarm for 3 minutes before the end of class. It goes off, I ask students to write down something about what we discussed. Sometimes it's as simple as "What's something from today that stuck out to you?" Sometimes it's a question directly related to the terms we've gone over "What's an example of a nonlinear plot from some movie, TV show, or play you're familiar with?" When I can, I take time at the top of the next class to revisit some of these. It takes more prep time, but I've found it generally a rewarding feedback loop for me and the students. I get to clarify a few issues, and students enjoy learning that what they write matters to me.

I'm still improving. I try to note when I get bored by something in my own class. That's usually a sign that I need to spice things up a bit. 

From Polarization to Shared Discontent

 Hopeful signs that majorities of people are noticing--and disapproving of--the Trumpian "find out" phase. Polls of Trump's first weeks in office register a broad sense that he's overstepped his power in several ways. Almost no one likes the mass firings. (Even Fox News's Jesse Waters pleaded with DOGE to spare a friend of his from firing.) And Trump's baffling new insistence that Ukraine and not Putin's Russia is to blame for, well, the Russian invasion of Ukraine--even some prominent Republicans balk at that.

Nor is Trump's (master? buddy? co-President? hanger-on?) pal Musk helping things. Musk commands perhaps the most powerful propaganda network (the Trump-X-Fox News Pipeline) yet realized. But the guy seems bound and determined to become as unpopular as possible with as many people as possible as quickly as possible. The massive savings DOGE initially crowed about shrink considerably--by about $14 billion--on closer inspection. I'm hoping such slip-ups (as well as his childish tirades with [checking notes for today] astronauts) start chipping away at his intellectual and entrepreneurial bona fides. Right now this vague reputation appears to be all that justifies the unprecedented power he's being granted. I don't know how he survives when that reputation goes belly up.

All of this turmoil makes it tough to know how to proceed in terms of depolarization groups like Braver Angels. Our local meeting on Sunday was very well-attended, but the attendees were manifestly left-leaning (or at least Trump-critical). We gathered ostensibly to discuss/debate whether we need a new labor movement. But the video of Braver Angels talking heads debating this issue tended toward broad consensus: labor good, even as it could be better. Our own live guest speaker, head of the state's AFL/CIO, found little to dispute in any of the video speakers' words. He had harsh words for Democrats, but his main sympathies were for working class people trying to organize.

Most of the breakout conversations I was part of dealt with marches and protests spinning up to speak out against Trump's mass firings, DOGE's depredations, and general chaos of Trump II. 

One of our exec members wrote a brief but honest letter to our chair afterward, saying that if he had been a red visiting this meeting, he'd not have felt welcome. We've drifted, he points out, from the core functions of Braver Angels--to get two sides to talk to each other and learn from each other (even if they end up disagreeing).

I concur that a deep-crimson MAGA Trump supporter would have hated this gathering. But then, I'm hard pressed to imagine a Braver Angels meeting that such a person would enjoy. I'll indulge in a little both-sides-ism: I don't think a revolutionary anarchist would enjoy the average BA meeting either. 

But we're at a point where the reds in power--the GOP platform--has sorted itself almost entirely into the likeness of Trump. And what that shade of red shares with the radical anarchist of the left is a basic disagreement with many of the premises of liberal constitutional democracy. Here we're beyond polarization.

Indeed, as recent polls attest, there's actually very little strong polarization about folks' opinions on the mass firings: we're against it! Ditto issues like sensible gun laws or moderation in abortion regulation. There's broad agreement. These issues seem polarized only if you give the vocal minority that's taken over the GOP pride of place as 50% of an argument.

Up until recently, though, even this vocal minority stayed basically within the bounds of democratic norms. Trump and MAGA-ites simply do not care to have a pluralized democracy. Or at least, their version of democracy looks radically different than anything we've seen for hundreds of years. They don't want checks and balances between branches of government (even those they control). They don't want liberal concerns (I mean classically liberal--respect for human rights, etc.) getting in the way of profit for a few billionaires or autocrats. The very

I'm not sure BA has many full-on-pro-Trump fans in its midst any more. Instead it has an explosion of "purples" and other independents. They don't like Trump, but they can't stand the left. But the awfulness of Trump II has the potential to make some foxhole coalitions.

And that's a problem for Braver Angels. BA proceeds from the premise that polarization (affective polarization) is the biggest problem facing US politics today. And I think most of the time, that argument has teeth. But not right now. Polarization isn't the biggest issue. The biggest issue is Trump II. Whether you call it a coup or chaos, whether you disagree with his ideas or dispute his implementation--the guy is going to be pretty unpopular pretty soon. Yet he's in power and causing great harm--directly and indirectly. 

Are there still die-hard Trump supporters? Definitely. But for how much longer? 

I'll be curious to see what BA does in response to all this.

 

Grade Gradey Grade Grade

 Long day of long grading first drafts. Most of these fell into one of three boxes:

• Completed effort
• Mostly completed effort with a few gaps
• Not a countable effort

There were more of the final variety than I'm comfortable with. I'll need to clarify to folk that if their major revision plan is "finish the analysis," then they don't really have a first draft and cannot therefore participate in peer review.

Someone seems also to have used AI to crash-write something at the last minute. I had to make the "this is the worst option to choose" lecture happen. 

I'm impressed that I buzzed through all the papers so quickly. I'm curious whether I can do a similarly quick buzz-through for the final drafts. At the very least, my old version of intensive commenting will simply have to fall away. I don't have it in me to do that 40+ times.

Another problem I flagged: I suspect many students just aren't reading the play for the day, waiting to read it until they decide to write about it. They can get through a multiple-choice quiz fine with faking. But when it comes time for peer review, lots just freely admit they never read play X. 

This relates to a larger problem of unequal commitment from students. Group work--directing scenes particularly--becomes next to impossible since one or two students in a group simply do not do anything. 

 I think I'll pitch this problem directly to the classes, get their thoughts. 

Truthfully, I'm kinda low and tired right now. I think I need some sleep before I can delve into or vent about all the things.

Peer Review Insights and Lightning First-Draft Rubric

 So--I've looked at folks' peer review sheets, and I'm mostly heartened.

 A surprising number said it was harder to review someone else's work than to have their own reviewed. I had expected the opposite. I loved reading how many students took the task very seriously: "no skimming allowed in peer review!"

I also like how many noted that reading other people's work helped them to see how to make their own work better. 

I still have reservations about the free-riders--the folk who didn't read all the plays, don't care to review someone else's work in detail, etc. But this experience convinces me the peer review is a good idea.

NOW--I gotta burn through 40+ rough drafts in the next day or so. I let everyone know not to expect detailed responses (that's what the peer reviews were for). My thinking right now involves a rubric-style clump grade:

• 50 points (A): This is a fully done, good-faith effort to produce as polished an analysis as the writer can deliver. All questions are answered fully, all word counts are met, all writing reasonably proof-read.
• 40 points (B): This is more or less done. A few minor parts are missing (ex: there's a few missing parts of a single question) or deficient (ex: one or two sections do not meet minimum word counts). The writing may not have been as carefully copy-edited as it could have been. There may be a significant misunderstanding about some aspect of the prompt.
• 30 points (C): The is the bare minimum that could possibly count as "a completed first draft."  Possible problems include one or more of the following: three or more sections do not meet minimum word counts; more than one question is either missing or incomplete; the writing has substantial grammar/spelling problems; the prompt is only loosely followed.
• No points: The analysis does not qualify as a completed first draft but is more like "a placeholder for a first draft to come," "a desperate dumping of random information unrelated to the prompt," or "an apology for not writing/completing a draft." Problems could include more than two sections missing; word counts ludicrously low (ex: a sentence or two as placeholder for a section); little evidence that the writer even read the play and/or the prompt carefully. 

I hope to be able to get through these first drafts quickly--tomorrow. We'll see.

 

Teaching Notes: Trying Peer Review

 So--I attempted my first peer reviews in my script analysis class today. I've taught the course for years, but this is the first time I've carved out time (by cutting out lots of assignments) for peer responses.

I'd love to claim I was acting in Best Pedagogical Interests, but really I instituted this as a response to losing TA support for the classes this semester. It's all me, facing a digital pile of 50 analyses that historically have taken 20 minutes per paper to do. I don't have that time or energy now, so I wanted to farm out some of the low-level responding to students.

Of course, I do want the process also to make students think more carefully about their writing and the plays themselves. 

How'd it go? Well, I haven't graded their response sheets yet, but I saw some good and some meh. 

The meh: lots of people didn't show up. There's always a deficit between enrollment in the class and those who turn in an analysis assignment. But today I saw also a deficit between those who turned in an assignment and those who showed up for the peer review.

The good: I successfully impressed on them the requirement to have brought in a printed-out copy of the assignment. I even got them to agree last Friday that anyone not having a printout copy could not participate in the peer review. Sure enough, everyone showed up with a printed out copy.

The meh: There was a good bit of blowing off. Lots of people finished so quickly that I gather they didn't do much actual reading and responding. This is apparently a common reaction in peer reviews: "great work!" and nothing else. One student asked if she could get some additional peer review, as her peer had not (by their own admission) read the play she had written about. 

The fix: I think I'm going to borrow a bit of ungrading tactics here and let people choose which grade level they want to do for the peer review. Perhaps I'll do something like the following:

0/25--You choose to skip the review process altogether

C (15/25)--You do a self-review based on a Q&A checklist I provide.

A (25/25)--You commit to reading all plays people have written about, and you commit to being in class to do a more in-depth response to their paper.

The fix, part II: I need to scaffold peer responding a bit more. I think a lot of the finish-quickly-say-it's-good factor has to do with the fact that people don't know how to respond. 

The fix, part III: perhaps I'll anonymize peer responding? It could be that some folk are just very nervous about responding to another person in person. It might be easier for them to respond to someone anonymously. I'm not exactly sure how to make that happen?

We'll see on Friday (with the revised analysis drafts) how yay or meh the process is at nipping in the bud some common pitfalls.

The "I Told You So" Impulse

 A friend sent me a video yesterday that, I admit, captures a recurrent theme in my thoughts about the awfulness:

 

 It's from the Lincoln Project's co-founder Rick Wilson. The title says it all: "If You Voted for Trump, You're Not Allowed to Act SURPRISED!" As the thumbnail says: "Welcome to the FIND OUT phase."

It's an angry cri du coeur directed at Trump voters. Like me, Wilson has already started to detect elements of backfire in Trump's wrecking-ball attack on federal institutions and norms. People are dying due to USAID monies being frozen. People are shocked and scared at their jobs being ripped away from them for no reason other than a group of early twentysomethings (and Elon Musk) decided (how? using what criteria?) that their job was not important. (Take, for example, the hastily retracted firings of nuclear weapons experts.) And people are livid upon finding out that Trump's long-stated brilliant plan of "tariffs on everything" is leading to--as everyone else predicted--higher prices.  

Fuck Around and Find Out currently wins out for "phrase of the year." Or, in its G-rated version: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. We're all finding out, winning stupid prizes.

And some I frickin' TOLD YOU SO is understandable. I certainly feel it. I've created many a mental monologue just like Wilson's here. 

Lefty-libs like me enjoy such righteous reversals. It's the stuff of The West Wing--people being put in their place with a well-crafted, well-delivered speech. Such speeches fueled that show, gave us a romanticized view of how disagreements resolve: someone is forcefully and irrefutably corrected. And oh my stars do I ever want some folk in this country to be forcefully and irrefutably corrected (for the record: corrected with words/results, not with, you know, actual force or violence).

But West Wing style putdowns. . . aren't how things work in real life. That TV show is a fiction. As I tell my students, even the most slice-of-life, naturalistic play is edited reality, life distilled into entertaining chunks. 

In real life, interpersonal arguments seldom resolve cleanly before a commercial break. They rarely conclude with one person getting a pristine last word and the other person simply surrendering. Usually there's hot words and high volumes, and both parties stalk away feeling like they're in the right.

Few people who voted for Trump are going to respond well to a rant like Wilson's. I mean, would you? It takes a special kind of person to be able to absorb an acid-soaked jeremiad like this with equanimity, let alone contrition. I am not that special kind of person, especially when the acid is coming from my political opponents. I don't trust their view of reality most of the time. Why would I trust their evaluation of who's to blame when the economy crashes, our global reputation tanks, and more people start suffering and dying?

I'm hardly the first to say it: we on the left would rather denounce a heretic than win a convert. Our recruitment sucks. We make it worse when we assume that "reality itself" or "the obviously bad results of Trump's policies" will do our recruiting for us. We also make it worse when we expect contrition, silence, or loud repentance from apostates of from the Church of Trump. People are attracted to Trump--just like people are attracted to the left--because he gives them a story that makes them feel seen, important, and cared about. I think Trump's story is a con, a promise offered in bad faith. But just because people might come to recognize Trump's story as repellent doesn't mean they'll find the left's story appealing. 

Dare I say, we need to be better evangelists--winsome witnesses to a better way. And part of that evangelism must involve suppressing or moderating our frustration with the bad results of the majority's choices. 

Make no mistake: I'm often furious at those who voted for Trump. I'm incensed at those who chose not to vote at all or who decided that both sides were equally bad. There's part of me that cheers along with Wilson. But not everything we feel is a good guide to how we should act. 

 Right now, we need more people who feel like we do about Trump's policies. We need them to make common cause with those of us who have been fed up for a long time. For that to happen, we long-term-anti-Trumpers have to swallow the urge to chide or lecture newcomers about why it's taken them as long as it has to come to our conclusions.

Satisfying as Wilson's rant is, then, I'm hopeful that we can generate some better evangelists--and soon. Because when the "find out" phase really hits, Trump et al. are going to spin some wicked lies about who's to blame (spoilers: it'll be the usual suspects: immigrants, people of color, queer/trans folk, university folk, women, etc.). We need a better--not just truer but more appealing--counter-narrative. 

Grim Hopefulness

 My blogging roller coaster continues. Yesterday found me down in the dumps. So many people support Trump and (I feared/fear) will continue to support him no matter what. Why? Because he's promising to hurt groups of people whose persecution makes other groups feel good-vindicated-superior. He won the election. Voters wanted this, wanted affirmatively to purchase comfort for themselves by harming others. 

That downer-doomer post reflected where I was yesterday.

Tonight I'm in a different place, for better or worse. A skeet from Hamilton Nolan: 

We are in a dangerous time but here are two important facts: 1. Trump's base of support is a minority. 2. That base is going to shrink as his agenda is enacted. The opposition is the majority. No moping allowed. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/they-are-a...

[image or embed]

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 10:09 AM

His linked Substack post unpacks things.

 When you brush away the chaotic bombardment of daily outrages and look at the actual base of support for these policies, you will see that that base is a significant minority of the public, and that it is going to shrink as the impact of the policies begins to be felt in the real world. In other words: We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart.

It's nothing brand new. I could have (and have) told myself many of the same things he says. But it's helpful to read someone else saying them. Nor is he sanguine about the length or cost of the fight ahead:

 Let me hasten to add here that the fact that we are the majority does not mean that we are automatically going to prevail. No. That is going to take a lot of work. It is going to take a lot of organizing, and it is going to take a lot of mass communications, and it is going to take the creation of political coalitions between groups that do not care for one another, and it is going to take level of bravery and resoluteness from the Democratic Party that they have not yet displayed. But it is important to recognize all of these tasks as things that exist within the realm of possibility, and not as some sort of far-fetched dream. How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.

I've posted before on here about feeling guilty for burning so many words on here about "the awfulness." I gotta get myself off of a doomer-gloomer-outrage cycle. But my therapist this week countered that it was actually good and healthy for me to get such frustrations out via writing. Where else are they gonna go? 

I similarly took some heart from another skeet/Substack, The Alt Media by Adam Parkhomenko and Sam Youngman. A confetti storm of conflicting bits of advice floods left-progressive spaces right now. Don't be distracted. Don't believe Trump. Don't fall for the con. Don't spend all your fuel on outrage. Parkhomenko and Youngman counter much of this. Yes, they concede, the Trump victory and Trump administration are wearying. BUT:

We’re not going to just throw up our hands and say oh well, it sucks that we’re so ignorant and misinformed that we elected someone who hates us and wants to hurt us. If anything, it makes us madder and makes us want to fight harder. Because the alternative is to decide which parts of Trumpism we’re ok with. And the answer is none. Not one goddamn bit of it. It is all evil. It is all corrupt. It is all anti-American. 

and

 Democrats can’t keep sending out fundraising text messages while believing that nothing matters and resistance is futile. It’s demoralizing. It’s self-defeating. It’s a total victory for Trump, and it will lead to the total collapse of our party.

and

It also means fighting every fight. We don’t have time to sit around with our thumbs up our asses trying to decide which battles will help us win elections. The answer is none of them. While so many people have struggled to learn the lessons of the 2024 election, the one that we learned is that right now the American people don’t give a damn about policies that help them. They want theater, drama, heroes and villains. They want pro wrestling, and we keep sending debate club champions to get body-slammed. It’s embarrassing.

It is past time for our party to change to a fighting posture. We can swing at every pitch. We can fight every battle. We can overreact to everything Trump and Musk are doing. We have nothing left to lose. Let’s act like it.

 "Fighting every fight"--now, on its face that seems to flout the wisdom of long-term battles, self-preservation, putting your mask on before helping others, etc. Maybe. But for me--right now--this quote acts a bit like my therapist's advice: it's OK--even good--to be angry at lots of things and to say as much. I'm not someone who enjoys expressing anger. I harbor a deep well of doubt about the righteousness of my own anger--about most anything--and an even deeper skepticism that my expressing anger ever accomplishes anything good. I tend to be very selective in what and how I complain (at least in official capacities). I don't think I have to abandon necessary lessons in taking breaks and self-care to embrace a bit more of a right to express impatience and outrage. 

The long-term veterans/heroines/martyrs of the last few centuries' grandest moral revolutions all seem to have developed a discipline of grim hopefulness at once rich, grounded, and empty. I mean "empty" in a kind of Buddhist sense of letting go of the need for immediate emotional gratification. It's similar to Vaclav Havel's notion of hope as opposed to optimism. I paraphrase: optimism believing that what you're doing will win the day; hope is doing what you're doing not because you think it will win but because it is the right thing to do. Those who realize (or helped to realize) advances in justice and equality played a long game, where patience was as necessary as passion. A commenter to Hamilton's Substack quoted at length from the leftist journalist I.F. Stone:

The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.

I've not yet been able to confirm the provenance of that quote. It may be one of those "attributed to" sayings. But it captures that sense of dogged, meaningful moral action against tyranny. And yes--I know and will delve into how many on the other side think the same thing about their causes. Yes, yes. But for right now, I needed to hear this bit of unromaticized hope.

 

 

It's What the People Want

Ah, so hopeful for a second yesterday. And then today. A step outside of my usual Bluesky-colored glass house to folks at RedState, Fox, National Review, Federalist--and their comment threads (where available)--and I see the world through their lenses. DOGE is doing great. Trump and Musk are real men who only get tougher the more hysterical Dems shriek. Trump's approval rating is higher than his disapproval rating (true). An Axios focus group with Arizona swing voters suggests most people want more and more of what Musk/Trump are doing. 

Meanwhile, the CDC has lost its "disease detective" taskforce, the folk who in those realistic pandemic movies swoop in to do first-level assessments. RFK has been affirmed as HHS Secretary and has--as expected--set his sights on the last 150 years of germ theory. Bird flu is spreading still. Tuberculosis cases have spread from Kansas to Ohio even as USAID funding to tuberculosis treatments worldwide have been cut off. 

And most people love it.

A problem with me, and with lots of left-leaning folk, is that it's hard for me to get past what seems like plain evidence of Trump's corruption, incompetence, deceptiveness, ignorance, and authoritarianism. Again, the most bare-bones rendering of even one day's worth of his administration's actions reads like a pilot episode of It Can't Happen Here. I've been so convinced of the plain illegality of his executive orders and the manifest amorality of his cronyism (witness prosecutor resignations in response to dropping charges on NYC mayor Eric Adams) that it's still hard for me to think that anyone can spin these as positives. 

Yet people--a plurality, at least--do. 

Back in the Bluesky bubble, the folk I follow are (1) bitterly blaming Dems for not doing anything effective to stop Trump legislatively or win support electorally and/or (2) declaring this round fully lost and thinking that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to win enough to start the decades-long task of repairing what Trump has already shattered. From that perspective, the asteroid has already hit, and we're in the obliteration wave, waiting to see who survives. The only useful conversation now concerns post-apocalyptic rebuilding strategies. The lively debate resulting from that focuses on whether such winning or repair is even possible at this point. 

Right at this moment? I'm not hopeful. 

I can't help but expect that the massive and indiscriminate (and utterly corrupt/Musk-serving) cuts and modifications to federal agencies will result in several preventable disasters--a recession, a pandemic, the collapse of trustworthy air travel, etc. Yesterday I had some hope that these multiple failures would turn popular opinion against Trump, blemishing the image of him (and maybe Musk) as top-notch organizers and leaders. 

Now I think it'll just make the angry-reactionary part of the electorate (the ones who brought Trump into power) even angrier and more reactionary. Trump, like most successful authoritarian leaders, has proven adept at redirecting such anger at his ever-growing list of enemies. I expect a lot of violence against, well, anyone who isn't white cis-het Christian male.

And even if there isn't violence, even if the system somehow limps along, I no longer expect Trump to lose support. I no longer expect Trumpism to die with the man himself. It's just too popular, its appeal too enduring. 

I'll get to some better place on this. But for right now...bleah. 

A Thousand Stooges Syndrome

 There's an episode of The Simpsons (season 11, episode 12) where the evil, decrepit Mr. Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic. After a montage of examinations (including Mr. Burns getting stuck in the gears of an MRI machine), the doctor gives Burns the bad news: he's got everything. Every disease. 

"You mean I have pneumonia?" asks Burns.

"Yes," the doctor answers.

"Juvenile diabetes?"

"Yes."

"Hysterical pregnancy?"

"A-a little bit, yes."

But this isn't as bad as it sounds, the doctor reassures him. To explain, he takes out a tiny model doorway and a pile of little fuzzy toys of different colors. The fuzzies, he says, represent different diseases. The door represents Mr. Burns's body. They all try to cram in at once--the doctor grabs a handful and stuffs them into the doorway--but they get stuck. 

 

"We call it 'Three Stooges Syndrome,'" the doctor says, punctuating the explanation with sound effects and catchphrases from Larry, Curly, and Moe. 

Mr. Burns is enraptured. "So what you're saying," he concludes, "is I'm indestructible?"

 "Oh, no, no," the doctor counters. "Why, even a slight breeze--" 

"Indestructible," Burns interrupts, savoring the word.

This image crops up whenever I read the daily news about the latest mix of cruel, craven, and confused moves by the Trump (Trump/Musk) administration. They're doing so much, all at once, that's so objectionable on so many levels simultaneously. 

I get that's the aim--flood the zone and all that. But I'm wondering--hoping, at this point--that we might start to see some backfire here. Most of Trump's big-news executive orders (e.g., rescinding birthright citizenship, cutting funding for national agencies, firing independent councils, granting DOGE free rein and zero independent oversight) have been balked by court orders. Even some GOP senators (not nearly enough!) are now murmuring that Trump needs to back down and respect the rule of law. But instead he just keeps producing more and more toxic/unlawful/unenforceable executive orders.

Trump I was deft at deflecting blame. Since he faced a divided Congress, he was often able to foist responsibility for his administration's blunders onto the opposing party.

But right now Trump's wackadoodle plans (and/or their confusing and disastrous) are crowding the doorway of media attention. It's a thousand stooges syndrome--110% Trump craziness, all the time. And there just isn't a lot there that's positive. Even as so many of his moves appeal to the most fanatical parts of his base, their sweeping nature (and clumsy execution) impacts even his own supporters. I saw a clip of some farmers, for instance--Trump voters all--griping about how his tariffs-on-everything policy was making their lives worse. (I could wonder how these gentlemen could have been surprised by Trump's move; he was crystal clear that he was going to step boldly onto that rake.)

And right now, there's no other moves on offer that Trump could lift up as blameworthy. Now, it may be that he and the Fox/rightwing mediasphere can frame his crusade against the judiciary--the "activist judges" who dare to check his executive overreach--as a righteous battle by an embattled David (Trump, in his mind) against a corrupt Goliath. But I'm not seeing that catch on. 

Trump has a lot of trouble sharing a spotlight. He wants to be seen stuffing all those executive orders into the public consciousness, moving fast and breaking things, making strong (stupid, alienating, utterly unwise) gestures. I think--I hope--it might be harder for him to avoid the "find out" part of such F-ing around. 

He thinks he's indestructible. I'm hopeful such hubris will prove vulnerable to a slight breeze soon.

Grad Program Worries

Every year of teaching, I re-learn the lesson: less. Do less. Shorter. Talking about Blasted today alone took over thirty minutes. It was a great discussion! But I wish I hadn't also assigned three other readings. "But they were short," I told myself. Didn't matter. 

It's the same thing with sermons. I'm so wordy. "I can make it 10 pages! That's 20 minutes, right?" Inevitably, it's more like 25. Besides, 20 minutes overstays its welcome. 15 minutes makes for a better sermon.

Shorter, less. The law of diminishing returns reigns supreme. 

We're talking to accreditors from our discipline's big accrediting body. We had the whole faculty talking to them this morning. They toured facilities and sampled classes (not mine) over the day. They watched the show tonight. Our PhD/theory-crit-history faculty (including me) talks to them tomorrow morning. 

I've told my therapist already I'll have to be judicious about how honest to be. The truth? I harbor grave and growing ethical qualms about having a PhD program. Increasingly, the PhD does not--cannot--deliver what it's classically guaranteed: a career in academia. Only 37% of graduates find full-time positions in five years of graduation. Too many PhDs are graduating, but the bigger systemic issue has to do with the shift from tenure-stream and full-time teaching positions to adjunct and other contingent labor. 

The discipline's response so far has largely consisted of blaming PhD programs, charging them either with being disingenuous to recruits about their chances or refusing to equip them with the skills they could use to find employment beyond the academy (or at least beyond the discipline).

About the former, we're if anything too honest with prospective students--honest to the point of demoralizing. We've long told actors not to go into the profession unless they can't imagine doing anything else. I find myself giving similar lectures to applicants in our interview rounds. "Imagine yourself spending 7 years of hard work studying and teaching, only to find yourself unable to get a tenure-stream position after. Would you still do it?" For some, the answer is yes--at least, they can't imagine themselves doing anything else. 

As for the other factor--training PhDs in skills beyond the discipline--that seems like slow-motion nihilism to me. I mean, sure--by all means, encourage students to minor in disciplines that might help them get jobs. Hold some workshops in diversifying skills and communicating what you can do beyond teaching/research. But when it comes to giving over curricular hours to, say, skills that would make them attractive to alt-ac careers (counseling, assessment, para-curricular program management)--I don't like it. Other grad programs already exist in higher ed administration. 

Also, at some point, don't we risk turning the PhD into a pure vocational training? Is that what it's for? Is that its only worth? I don't accept that argument on the undergrad level. Do I accept it on the grad level? It is different. PhD work is much more expensive--monetarily and professionally--than undergrad degrees. 

I'm just not comfortable asking students to make that sacrifice. I need to find a reason for the degree in the absence of jobs the degree preps graduates for.

 

Pretty and Disgusting

 

Inevitably in script analysis classes, I have to dissuade students from explaining away some odd or confusing choice by a playwright in a script by blaming it on expediency (Maybe she knew it'd be too difficult to do X on stage) or propriety (She avoids doing X because it would have been too much for the audience). Neither recourse works. Or, rather, both undercut the playwright's artistic agency--and underestimate theatre's potential.

As Elinor Fuchs says, in the world of the play "there are no accidents." We approach a script, in other words, assuming that the playwright knew what she was doing. What's in there is what she wants in there. What's not in there is what she chooses not to put in there. The actual truth, of course, might lie somewhere else. But we adopt the attitude that the script is as the script is meant to be.

Beyond that, though, I try to disabuse students of the misconception that it's the playwright's job to keep audiences feeling safe and comfortable. Some plays do that, and good for them. But no law exists requiring playwrights to protect audiences from feelings. 

You say Marsha Norman keeps Jesse's suicide off-stage (behind the closed door) because showing it would have been "too much for the audience"? I'll see your presumption of theatrical decorum and raise you Sarah Kane's Blasted. 

Nakedness, violence, sex, rape, cannibalism, sucking out eyes and swallowing them--this play has it all, really. (I don't think it has a single gunshot, though--just one big explosion in the middle.) "This Disgusting Feast of Filth," trumpeted one of the first reviews.

That headline is not not accurate, exactly. If you can imagine a place to go, Blasted goes there. It's pretty disgusting. See these two production photos:

The character with his head sticking out of the floor, Ian, has been a rapey creep in the first part of the play only to find his realistic Leeds hotel room invaded by a Soldier who proceeds to menace, rape, and mutilate him before blowing off his own head. The nice hotel room gets blown apart by some explosion. The girl Ian had been with (unwilling on her part), Cate, escapes for a bit before returning--first with an infant she had been handed. The infant dies, Cate buries it and leaves, and Ian later digs it up to eat it.

After a montage of Ian struggling to survive for days after Cate leaves (including the baby-eating scene), a despondent, blinded, starving Ian buries himself in the infant's grave-hole in the ruined hotel floor. His head sticks out. "He dies with relief," the stage directions read. It begins to rain, and water drops down from the ceiling--right onto Ian. He wakes up, curses.

Cate returns, scarred and bloody from whatever war-torn hellscape Leeds has become (Kane keeps the nature of the conflict vague). She's procured gin, bread, and sausage. She eats it, then crawls over to Ian--and feeds him. "Thank you," Ian says. The play ends.

Having thoroughly debunked any notion that she writes to protect audiences from discomfort, Kane ends this "feast of filth" with one of the most elemental human acts--sharing food.

"In performance," playwright and director Ken Urban observes (PAJ, no. 69, 2001), "it is a gesture of unimaginable generosity" (46). Writing soon after Kane's death by suicide, Urban notes how European critics recognized in Blasted a greatness that initial British reviews missed. Urban in fact sees Kane as searching for ethics in a space of catastrophe.

Since its premiere, the play and Kane's other works have established themselves as hallmarks. Her other plays don't quite match Blasted's level of graphic brutality. (Cleansed has lots of violence, but it's refracted through more theatricality.) But most have that mix of inhumanity and transcendence. Pretty disgusting and pretty and disgusting. 

That doesn't mean I'm assigning it to my script analysis classes anytime soon. But as catastrophe of some sort looms (just constitutional? Civil war?), I appreciate both the frank portrayal of utter breakdown and the hope of human kindness even in blasted ruination.

Panicky Rants about The Awfulness

Yikes. I missed yesterday's post.

It was a day in which I had already done quite a bit of writing work, partly for class and partly for a statement of purpose to a seminary. Sometimes I have days where it feels like I've written myself out already.

It was a busy day today as well, and I feel a similar sort of written-out-ness.

Alternately, I'm trying to avoid writing more about The Awfulness, which somehow continues to get more Awful. I'm losing the thread of whether the BlueSkySphere of panic/outrage has completely skewed my perspective--or whether things really are just getting dire.

I'm afraid it's the latter, but then that's what I'd think in the BlueSkySphere, no? 

And yet--even planning for recruitment to our grad program has become fraught. With NIH budgeting slashed/curtailed/stuck, our graduate teaching assistantship lines are  . . . in limbo? My chair suggested we just try to get everyone we can this year, as soon as possible, before we have all lines revoked. 

But then, would that even work? Lots of people at (or in projects dependent upon) USAID are right now out of jobs. A whole raft of already-funded projects across multiple agencies find themselves under re-review to make sure their proposals and reports do not contain the dreaded DEI verboten words.  I'm worried about us accepting students--particularly foreign nationals--only to find halfway through the summer that we can't fund them as promised. That would be a nightmare. 

Last I checked, it seems the Trump administration has chosen simply to ignore court orders to restore funding or refrain from cutting/curtailing funds. We do in fact seem to be heading into a Constitutional crisis. What Trump is trying is flatly illegal. What judges have ruled is plainly legitimate. But we're about to find out what happens if Trump and his cronies simply tell the courts to go pound sand. "Obey the terms of my restraining order? I'd prefer not to!" 

Who's going to stop him? Republicans in Congress so far seem to have sold their ethics in the name of avoiding Trumpian wrath. I have yet to see a Trump idea so utterly beyond the pale that Mike Johnson or other GOP lawmakers won't crawl over each other to get in front of a camera and declare how commonsensical and good this plan to, I don't know, turn Gaza into a resort development scheme (for Trump--not for Gazans, who will be forever forbidden from returning to their home).

Who's going to stop him? The Supreme Court has at least two members seemingly dedicated to entertaining and promoting maximalist views of executive power. The Overton Window is so far to the right currently that I'm not sure the plain text of the Constitution fits into it any more.

Who's going to stop him? The White House "adults in the room" have been purged, the guardrail structures in government tranquilized or euthanized. Elon Musk and his cadre of twentysomething hacker-programmers are doing heaven-knows-what to every database and digital system they can get their hands on. (As the viral quip goes: if he was looking for fraud, why bring in programmers instead of accountants?)

And there we are: another panicky rant about The Awfulness. 

I gotta do something else tomorrow.

For Kamile

 Today I learned that a colleague of mine entered hospice. Her husband made a post on Facebook, which a friend of mine shared with me (I don't have Facebook). She had been battling liver cancer for the last half year or so. She taught classes Wednesday, ending by telling her students, "I love you all."

Thursday, she had terrible pain and went to the hospital, and thence into hospice. Her husband says she does not have much more time.

I knew her only a bit, but she always greeted me as a friend. I saw her present some of her work--music therapy, how mothers' songs comfort their babies. She sang the song she created for her own son when he was small. I heard how much she loved him. I saw how much she loved her work. I saw her stretch herself, try out for and be cast in a play at the local community theatre. I saw how delighted she was to discover this new way of expressing herself through art. 

News of her illness was a blow to us. This latest news is hard and sad.

I need to tell my students I love them more often.

Lord, bless Kamile and her family. 

Grant her peace and comfort as she passes out of this life. 

Grant her family--her husband, her kids--as much peace as they can have. 

Spirit of peace, work through the hospice care folk and the medical professionals to unburden her and her family of any worry about her pain or distress. 

May she and her family know without any question their love for each other. 

May they share the assurance, undimmed by regret or unsaid words, of how grateful they are for each other.

May their love for each other and your love for them drive out fear. 

May love bless their sorrow, making it rich and deep and pure and healing. 

May love imprint memory of this time with the best of Kamile: her joy and care and passion and adventurous spirit.

May love let them carry forward the blessing that is Kamile into the rest of their lives.

May love carry Kamile into the good plan you have for all of us, in to the place where there is no fear or pain, only joyful wonder and happy reunion. 

May her love move those of us she leaves behind to love better:

to love out loud

to love more often

to love in art and song and stage and classroom.

Thank you for Kamile, Lord. Thank you for putting her life and ours into contact. 

God, grant her peace. Grant her family peace. Surround them with your love and comfort.

Amen

Squealing and Wackadoodle Fixations

 I've got to write about something other than The Awfulness, but it's tough. Trump's superpower consists of the gravitational pull on attention, like a train derailment that's gained somehow gained sentience. You just can't look away. 

Villainous schemes to revile and hurt our most vulnerable populations I expected. But Trump accompanies these aims with such weirdness. Take over Canada! Rename the Gulf of Mexico! And now Become chairman of the Kennedy Center! He declared himself so earlier today, terminating all board members.

Does he . . . does he want to do this because the Center has honored comedians who've made fun of him in the past? I've heard--and cannot discount--the notion that Trump began aiming for the presidency in earnest way back at an Obama Press Dinner where the then-President made a joke at Trump's expense. 

But who knows? 

It seems Elon Musk also sets his own evil-scheme victims on the basis of his mercurial mood: USAID! NPR/PBS! The Department of Education! None of these, mind, make up nearly as significant a portion of overall federal spending as, say, defense, social security, or medicare. But each has in some random way landed on Musk's personal radar of pique. 

Like Trump, it seems Musk has certain idiosyncratic but reliable direct lines into his brain from certain sources--a bro podcaster, an alt-right pseudo-intellectual, his own brittle sense of cishet masculinity. 

And it seems that Musk and Trump are, at least for now, direct lines into each other's brains, circulating crackpot focus zones into collective idées fixes. That's my nearest explanation for Trump's newfound focus on the "plight" of white Afrikaners in South Africa, horribly oppressed by, well, the non-white people who spent decades living under apartheid oppression. 

Both also seem to share that juvenile squeal that happens when entitled preteen boys get stymied. Wired has over the past weeks exposed some of the otherwise anonymous (and unvetted, unauthorized, complete unknown) twenty-somethings serving as his advance DOGE guard. One of these the magazine exposed as having made rancidly racist posts, which quickly got him let go. Musk--and now Trump and J.D. Vance--are now calling (squealing) for him to be let back. Can't we have a little grace? tweeted Vance. 

Jon Favreau replied, wondering whether he had missed when the 26-year-old had apologized for or recanted the tweets he made when he was 25. 

As more and more of the Musk/Trump executive actions get delayed and blunted by courts and unions, we can expect more squealing, I bet. Squealing--spiced with some more wackadoodle fixations.

Waiting Til Breakdowns

 So many people are just plain stressed out right now. There's trans folk who have lost access to health care or even basic human regard. There's immigrants--legal and otherwise--who find themselves left out in the cold (at best) or hunted down by ICE (at worst). There are federal workers whose jobs have now become precarious based on the whims of unaccountable billionaires and their teen/twentysomething cronies. There are USAID employees out of work as well as USAID beneficiaries cut off from HIV meds and other vital care. Researchers dependent upon NSF funding suddenly face an uncertain future. Federal workers across dozens of agencies now have to scour their materials to delete references to any of a hundred newly forbidden words.

And then there's a whole lot of other people who just shrug and wonder why so many people let themselves get worked up over politics. 

I was wondering to my sister what might have to happen to get them to wake up and realize the magnitude of haphazard, blitzkrieg changes sweeping federal government. What trickle-down effects would possibly move them from either pox-on-both-houses apathy or full-throated MAGA support?

I read that Trump's bizarre obsession with emptying Gaza of Palestinians and claiming it for US-own development--ethnic cleansing on a massive scale--got some bewildered pushback on Twitter at least. Perhaps if he starts a war? 

No one seems to have noticed his inability to end the Ukraine war in a single day, with a single phone call. Courts seem to be stopping many of his most objectionable executive orders from happening. Musk may find himself the target of multiple class-action lawsuits soon.

But still, so much damage is being done. I confess to some morbid curiosity about how exactly Trump will spin the massive blowback of his massive (and so often clumsy, thoughtless, and unworkable) edicts. But more than that I'm just worried about all the lives he's ruining so casually. 

Our church's social justice team met. We dithered. What can we do? We're trying to define a lane, areas of local help and impact. But things are moving so quickly it's hard to tell even whom in our church is being affected. 

Surely this momentum can't continue like this for much longer. There's so much energy being burned by the administration right now. Elon's attention, I suspect, is finite. Trump's willingness to share the spotlight with him certainly is. Already I hear reports of Musk's young men screaming at White House officials.

How long before even some on the GOP Congress start throwing up their hands? Trump I's administration turned into a revolving door as even the most loyal loyalists either flamed out or got fed up or failed to meet Trump's idiosyncratic preferences.

Surely surely surely. We'll see.

Inside: Late Capitalist Weltschmerz

The day after I discover Weltschmerz (world-weariness, depressed resignation about the state of things), here comes Jason Pargin writing about the most recent species of it on the left. Specifically, Pargin published a substack post about Bo Burnham's 2021 Netflix special Inside. 

The special (which I have not watched, save for the "Welcome to the Internet" song) features an increasingly unkempt, shaggy-haired Burnham seemingly creating a one-man musical performance piece about (and over the course of) the pandemic. Burnham has proven himself a talented artist. I find the internet song clever, funny, catchy, and thoughtful. I imagine the special's other pieces are equally so.

Pargin starts with a long peon-disclaimer attesting Burnham being "a treasure" and "better than I am at absolutely everything." He then unpacks the fiction of Burnham's special persona--I'm so isolated and depressed making this special about how isolated and depressed I am that I'm becoming dangerously isolated and depressed--noting that (1) it's a curated falsehood (Burnham was living with his girlfriend in a multi-million-dollar house and doing interviews about his latest Hollywood projects during the making of the special), and (2) nothing about this fiction is wrong or dishonest. Burnham is a performer. He plays parts. That he stages his show is no more a strike against than noting that Bonnie Raitt still sings "I Can't Make You Love Me if You Don't" with first-time pathos even after all these years. That's craft, not dishonesty. (Pargin does suggest that many of Burnham's fans mistook the special as a documentary--He's really that isolated and depressed. Depressed he may be, but the portrait of that suffering, unkempt artist was, Pargin maintains, a performance.)

Pargin focuses his annoyance on the tone and target of Burnham's show: "misery" as Pargin puts it. Weltschmerz. Despite all his talent, wealth, fame, and good fortune, Burnham is still (at least the "Burnham" in Inside is still) suicidally depressed. And this, Pargin argues, is a flex, a kind of extended, virtue-signalling boast whose cachet is unique to a particular phase of Web 3.0 (2012-). It's a flex that communicates, I'm a good person because I am miserable. 

Pargin:

Somewhere, right now, a teenage girl just recorded herself crying for a TikTok video but, when she went to edit it, realized her mic wasn’t plugged in and so now she’s making herself cry a second time to get another take. Next door is some dude with a great job, healthy body, a loving partner and lots of friends who, after a long day of fairly easy work and an evening watching Netflix, will tweet, “Another wretched day enduring the horrors, my thoughts are with all of you who know that just surviving this absolute hellscape is an accomplishment all its own.”

They all exist within an online subculture in which earnest attempts at positive sincerity and wellness are to be mocked as vapid (as they are in Burnham’s “White Woman’s Instagram”). The practice of not just broadcasting your lowest moments, but intentionally playing up the angst for maximum engagement has to be the world’s worst possible coping mechanism, a form of self-harm with an added layer of performance anxiety (I’m not sure science even has a word for the gut-punch sensation of recording your sobs of despair, only to see the post get zero likes and a single comment from a spambot).

But they do it because that subculture says this is what a good person does, they demonstrate how they constantly feel the terrible weight of the world on their shoulders. That means the despair portrayed in Inside is also a flex, Burnham proving that his misery is bigger, deeper and more watchable than yours.

Though he doesn't say so explicitly, Pargin tracks the impetus for this subcultural misery-mania to online left-progressive woke politics. I don't mean he's a right-winger. He seems to endorse the broad--and, as he mentions, actually very popular--range of social/political positions that make up the US left (pro-reproductive rights, pro-affordable healthcare, pro-environment). But, he contends, this collection of beliefs got conventionally repackaged with a coating of performative hatred of everything enjoyable: 

They insisted that everything was better in the past but has steadily gotten worse due to capitalism, and thus our misery won’t end until that system is violently overthrown. They always portrayed themselves as in poor mental health but said it was simply a rational response to modern life (again, due to capitalism). In general, everything about the subculture was designed to repel the normies on both side of the aisle, asserting that everything loved by Middle America (religion, cops, the military, nice cars, big houses, hamburgers) is, if you think about it, a form of literal genocide. 

Add to this drumbeat of guilt a reflexive ridicule and dismissal of any expression of joy or happiness, Pargin continues, and you get--well, a whole younger demographic of men (not women, tho? and probably he means white men?) rejecting what the left has to offer:

Politics is always just a backlash to a backlash and when young men surged to the right in 2024, you only needed about five minutes on social media to realize the online left’s pitch to those men had become absolute dogshit. Regardless of what any actual candidate was saying, what young men heard/perceived was:

“Come join the Left and be miserable! Listen to us talk endlessly about how awful your demographic is and how you should keep your mouth shut unless it’s to apologize! Abandon any hope for the future, as you either need to become poorer to protect the environment, or endure the horrors of climate disaster! Relentlessly police your own language according to rules that change hourly and be prepared to be totally ejected from your personal and professional network the second anyone even accuses you of stepping out of line! If you criticize any aspect of the above, that means you’re a literal Nazi! And don’t worry about the crushing malaise, that’s just a sign that you’re a Good Person Who Cares!”

Now, there's lots of this criticism that strikes me as partial to completely off base. 

First, briefly: clinical depression is real, and it isn't always or necessarily simply a reaction made of Weltschmerz. Moreover, there were plenty of no-fooling, actually traumatic triggers for depression in the late 2010s and early 2020s. (COVID, anyone?)

On another level, I'm weary of 2024 election postmortems that participate in the left-blaming chorus of Well, what could independents and right-leaning people do? The left was so horrible that they had no choice but to support someone like Trump. That's Murc's Law in action: "Only Democrats have agency or causal influence in US politics." Conservatives and independents are hopelessly reactive, like animals, goes this line of thinking. Holding them to the same standard of self-reflection and critical thinking as we do the left is foolish. We should know better, but we can't expect them to. I do not excuse Trump voters (or even "I just don't like either side" folk) of responsibility for supporting the leopard currently ripping off all our collective faces. (I'm deeply--alarmingly--furious at them, but that's a post for another time.)

Finally: hyperbole aside, our capitalist system really is lethal for vast swathes of people, especially folk outside of the protections of US citizenship. There are literal genocides--or near enough--going on right now, directly supported by US arms and monies. Future generations will curse us mightily for our collective capitulation to global warming. Even in the US, we countenance--even praise!--a great deal of suffering for groups we deem ignorable (unhoused people, the elderly, disabled folk, those who live in vulnerable places) and/or hate-worthy (the poor, the incarcerated, non-citizens). I don't think the existence of those less well off justifies constant self-flagellation. But neither am I good with passive acceptance of mass immiseration in the here and now.

That said. . .

Pargin scores some palpable hits when he notes how performative misery at one's lot in life (late capitalist Weltschmerz) seems like the only viable position for anyone who lands on the "privileged" side of the room after a "privilege walk" exercise. (And there's no one living in the US who isn't privileged in at least one dimension.) Even as books like White Women's Tears castigate the white women having tears for their misery and solipsistic guilt, there's just no other or better affective position for activists on offer in the social justice space. 

This is a problem some scholars spotted early on in with privilege discourse: what exactly are privileged folk supposed to do with the knowledge of their privilege? Systemic inequities are systemic. Most of the time individuals aren't able to snap their fingers and magically become unprivileged. Nor is that always the desired outcome. The point is to spread the goods of liberal democracy to everyone. The point is to make privileges like access to healthcare or livable wages rights that everyone enjoys, not get rid of them altogether. The danger is that privilege discourse--especially the corporate-workshop-for-sale style that became so popular around 2020--does nothing but encourage repeated, empty gestures of "confessing" one's privilege. Gestures of confession--and miserable guilt.

Sure, aside from guilt/misery/Weltschmerz there's righteous anger now and then (for those who are not privileged). But (A) righteous anger is a fuel that burns hot and quick but doesn't last long, and (B) righteous anger gets in the way of signalling solidarity with those groups who aren't more privileged than yours.

I agree with Pargin, in other words, that, if the left is to regain power, it needs something more appealing than misery and guilt and Weltschmerz.