The Evil of American Fascism

America has normalized, accepted, and embraced fascism at the highest levels of our national government. It is our moral obligation, no matter who we are, to oppose such evil.

"Fascism" and "evil" are strong words. They are not to be thrown around lightly. Since the rise of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2015, our media and civil society have chattered, far too quietly, whether our now President-elect qualifies as a "fascist." A historian of fascism, Robert Paxton, claimed in a Slate interview that it's "enormously tempting" to use the term to criticize one's opponents. Doing so without historical awareness and sophistication risks diminishing the evil that Italian fascism, German Nazism, Japanese militarism, and other regimes committed against their peoples. In this reluctance, Paxton is wise. Fascism is more complicated than simple right-wing authoritarianism. And using the term in a debate tends to end conversation rather than promote it.

On Dread

It's been almost two days since the Presidential Election of 2016 and I still feel a bit numb.

The word that stuck in my mind today was "dread." I honestly don't remember when I felt anything as serious as "dread" before. I've endured a lot of moments of pain in my adult life: when I learned in March that my liver was ailing on account of my allergy medication; when my father collapsed last fall from a weakened heart; when I sat motionless before my parents and came out as bisexual a couple months after Obama's election; when I feared whether I would pass my general exams in grad school earlier that year; when George W. Bush won reelection in 2004; when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on live CNN.

But in retrospect none of these moments carried with them anything close to "dread." Some even seem silly as I write them out. After all, a lot of folks suffer great fear way more than I ever have, for reasons that no one can explain.

Global Journal 1: Global Citizenship as Process

Among other things, I teach a class at Kansas State University called "Global Citizenship." It's a year-long program for first-year students in which we critically discuss our own identity formation and how, with greater self-awareness, we can act more ethically and autonomously. My co-leaders (Leigh and Kayla) and I will then take students abroad over Spring Break to a location that varies year by year: Hong Kong last year, Paris this one, and probably Tokyo in 2018. After the study tour we reflect openly on our experiences and how to put them in service for, by, and with others.

It's pretty cool, I have to say. I'm lucky to have the support network at Kansas State to allow me such a passion project and students earnest and intelligent enough to contest themselves so powerfully.

Serialized essays comprise my course's primary assignments. I call these "Global Journal Entries," a means to encourage students to reflect, with my comments as a prodding nudge, on their self-development at such a key juncture in their lives. Last year I failed to keep up with my hand-written journal. (I even found one at a bookstore chain branded with the Tolkien-inspired name for our program: "Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost.") My learning assistant this year, Kayla, inspired me with her own journaling to try to follow through this year.

So begins the first of my Global Journal Entries here on this blog. I'm really looking forward to rereading these over time, so here's hoping I keep up.

Global Journal Entry 1 from LEAD 195: Global Citizenship I

What does it mean to be a global citizen? Are you a global citizen now? Why or why not?

Thoughts on Marriage

I woke up this morning next to my partner, Leigh, to whom I've been married since December 10, 2011. I didn't feel like a second-class citizen. My family, friends, and community have been very supportive of our union, with some minor (if now obsolete) exceptions. The businesses, banks, insurance companies, and institutions of Manhattan, Kansas, have rarely pointed out with discrimination the fact that my adoptive state had any other opinion on our marriage than full support. I can state with full awareness that I have been privileged enough to not suffer in ways that many LGBT Americans have and do.

And yet, on this evening, as I sit next to my husband--only now according to the State of Kansas by way of the Supreme Court of the United States--I feel a quite bearable, a very welcome lightness of being. It's only now, in the wake of the Court's non-decision decision, that I get what it means to not feel the threat of institutionalized discrimination, as opposed to such discrimination itself. These are two very different things--things that I have long known intellectually, but now only understand holistically.

An Unambiguous Utopia

A Review of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974)

"True journey is return..." - Shevek

Even though I never seem to remember its author's name, William G. Perry's scheme for cognitive development comes to mind nearly every day. It shares common traits with Milton Bennett's developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, as well as Carol Gilligan's stages of the ethic of care and Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development, both of which Jean Piaget's constructivist work deeply influenced. (Geek snort.) As a humanist, I find much social science inherently problematic, reliant upon assumptions that elide contextual differences. These criticisms equally apply to Perry, Gilligan, Kohlberg, and Piaget, of course, as the extensive literatures on educational psychology illustrate. But these theories, and particularly Perry's, continue to undergird my philosophical metanarrative of life in powerful ways.

Written at roughly the same time as Perry's model, science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed reads like a fictionalization of one individual's pursuit of full cognitive development. The book's (mass market paperback) cover strikingly describes it as "an astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia." It's misleading in a very clever way. This book is not about "utopia" as the elusive, perfect place, that "no place" of Thomas More. Le Guin's vision of utopia is a state of mind, of cognitive enlightenment, of the realization that the perfect place--the state of true freedom--is nowhere but in ourselves, an epistemological nirvana. 

Is There In Trek No Truth?

A Review of Star Trek (The Original Series) (1966-1969)

Dr. Miranda Jones: "The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity."
Mr. Spock: "And the ways our differences combine, to create meaning and beauty."
From "Is There In Truth No Beauty?"

I first experienced Star Trek through the original films: Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Voyage Home, and Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. My brother Mike was a huge fan. As a child, I quietly observed him sharpen his considerable drawing skills on a Crayola marker portrait of Klingon phaser fire and photon torpedoes blasting through the U.S.S. Enterprise A. But at that time Star Trek was an unknown quantity to me, something violent and loud, and even slightly scary, to my seven-year-old mind.

Wibby-Wig

A Review of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004)

"Belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & in the mind's mirror, the world." - Adam Ewing, Cloud Atlas, 508.

Sociologists like my partner like to deploy the Thomas theorem as shorthand for the idea that "what you believe is what you get." In other words, what we interpret to be reality is, in fact, reality, insofar as we act on our beliefs and therefore shape reality in the process. The phrase "self-fulfilling prophecy" comes close to the point, if missing some of the meaning. I guess you could adapt the WYSIWYG acronym appropriately, to result in WYBIWYG. Or how about the cuter "wibby-wig"?

Cloud Atlas is such a massive tome of ideas that it needs a shorthand adjective, and "wibby-wig" is it for me. To avoid such extreme reductionism, a simple legend of themes (a tapestry metaphor came to mind, but let me stick with maps) is helpful in the effort to decode David Mitchell's complex atlas: themes like belief, but also the human condition, narrative, truth versus Truth, the unity of time and space, the number six, comets, clouds (of course), and--as Mitchell divulged in an interview, "predacity." What I take away most from Cloud Atlas, though, was a wibby-wig view of life that, not to my surprise, reflects my own perspective. What we believe shapes who we are and what we do. This is the case to a large, if certainly not total, extent, because what we believe is not always a choice we make ourselves. Rather, society and its many elements--our parents, peers, children, friends, co-workers, politicians, media overlords, et cetera--often make them for and with us.