I noticed about a year ago that Facebook is losing its relevance to young people. With my students, it used to be all Facebook all of the time. Recently, however, more and more of them say they don’t use Facebook and make disgusted faces when the word is mentioned. I almost never catch them sneaking peeks at Facebook as I walk around the classroom. Now it’s all Tumbler, Twitter, Instagram, and the occasional Wall Street Journal.

I wondered what happened to sour the younger generation on Facebook, and then I read an article (sorry, I can’t link right now but I will try to do it later) that explained this phenomenon. Kids are escaping from Facebook because it has been discovered by their parents. There is no point in having a Facebook wall if it will be monitored by a parent who is tactless and intrusive enough to want to invade every tiny little corner of an adolescent’s existence.

Dating a married person must be very similar to using a book borrowed from the library for your research. The probability that at the worst possible moment the book might be claimed by its owner makes the relationship with it hurried, superficial, jealous, and somewhat neurotic.

One part of the grieving process is that you have to access the grief on regular occasions and let it out in the form of crying, yelling, weeping, etc. To tell you the truth, I’m sick and tired of accessing my grief. It is painful and it sucks to bring it out like nothing else in the world. But it has to be done or it will accumulate inside me and explode in an intolerable manner.

For some mysterious reason, this meme that I found here helped me access my grief, for which I’m very grateful to the person who posted it.

1. What did you do in 2013 that you’d never done before?

Gave birth. Buried my child. These are pretty major, I’d say.

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Yes, I wrote 2 articles and submitted a book for publication. This is exactly what I had planned. This year, I want to submit two more articles and finish the first draft of a new book.

3. How will you be spending New Year’s Eve?

I will prepare a Jewish dinner (recipes and photos to follow). Then, N and I will go someplace for the countdown. It is very important to have the countdown on New Year’s night.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

My son died.

5. What countries did you visit?

Canada and Spain.

6. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?

Health. And energy.

7. What date from 2013 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

September 5. Because that’s when Eric’s heart stopped beating.

8. What was your biggest achievement(s) of the year?

I survived. That’s good enough, under the circumstances, I think. Also, I didn’t turn my suffering into an instrument of torturing others. That’s always an important goal.

9. What was your biggest failure?

I try not to think of what happened in terms of failure but it’s hard.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I had diabetes, I had PUPPPS, I had major surgery. It was a year of endless trauma.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Furniture for my bedroom.

12. Where did most of your money go?

Traveling and my analyst.

13. What song will always remind you of 2013?

I’m not into music. It gets in the way of my thoughts.

14. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Reading. There can never be enough reading.

15. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Cried.

16. What was your favorite TV program?

I watched too many good TV shows to name just one.

17. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I’m kind of incapable of hating people. They never seem worthy of such an intense emotion.

18. What was the best book you read?

Así se hizo la Transición by Victoria Prego. It’s kind of old but it’s absolutely amazing.

19. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Silence is my favorite music.

20. What was your favorite film of this year?

I watched Celda 211 for the first time, and I loved it.

21. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 37 and got the ring of my dreams as a gift.

22. What kept you sane?

My husband, my analyst, my sister, my friend Regina, and my blog readers.

23. Who did you miss?

I miss my son.

24. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned.

See my post on the radicalizing structure of severe trauma.

25. What does 2014 hold for me?

I will get a driver’s license and buy a car. Also, I’m hoping that this year I will finally pay off my debts. I would have paid them off this year, but then I needed lots of expensive dental work as a result of pregnancy, and that added a fresh mountain of debt. Also, there will be a lot of research, reading, and swimming. And I hope that two of my best friends from grad school will come to visit me. Hopefully, for my next Birthday.

Have you heard about the post of this sad, lost loser who realized he was about to marry a woman he didn’t love but whose Daddy manipulated him into marrying her anyway? Now this victim of patriarchy has written a post about the experience:

With a knowing smile [the father] said, “Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.”

In short, a castrating Daddy at his emasculating best.

Of course, there are many such sad schmucks in the world, so 26 million people in miserable marriages linked, re-blogged, tweeted and posted this testament to masochism. And they didn’t do it to ridicule the idiot who wrote it.

Somewhere, a group of divorce lawyers is dying to get its hands on the names and addresses of these people because here are 26 million very nasty divorces about to happen.

The patriarch’s advice is not completely useless, though. If you want a really happy marriage, do the exact opposite of what this guy suggests. And then the divorce lawyers will never get any of your money.

Anthony Beevor says that Spanish fascism differed from Nazism “in its profoundly conservative nature” and in being “fundamentally reactionary.”

Unless by “conservative and reactionary” Beevor means only and exclusively “religious”, then I have no idea what he is saying. Hitler came up with the 4 Ks that were supposed to define a woman’s role in society: Kinder, Kuche (sorry, there needs to be an um-laut to preserve the meaning), Kirche and whatever is the German for dresses. How do you get any more conservative and reactionary than this?

Or do British historians still hold on to the geriatric canard about the modernist impulse at the core of the Soviet Communism and German Nazism?

People from countries that have experienced (or still experience) Communism prostitute themselves with an eagerness that is unmatched in countries with no direct knowledge of Communism. When I speak of prostitution, I mean, or course, both male and female sale of sexual services, so please don’t annoy me by referring to prostitution as something that only women do.

In my opinion, there is an enormous difference between what I call “sex work” and “prostitution.” A sex worker is an honest professional who provides specified services for money. Far be it from me to judge sex workers for the way they make a living.

Prostitution, however, is a term I apply to a very different kind of activities. What shocked me most in Cuba, for instance, was that you could start talking to people – other students, people just like you – about literature, religion, life, anything, but before long, they would succumb to the temptation to offer sex for compensation. This kind of prostitution is dishonest, sneaky, and it bastardizes human relationships by blurring the line between a financial transaction and friendship, affection, love, etc.

I’ve been to Mexico and the Dominican Republic and, of course, there is prostitution there but it exists nowhere near on the level of Cuba. Or Eastern European countries.

The reason why Communism leads to massive prostitution is the following: work that doesn’t benefit and enrich an individual feels absolutely unnatural to human beings. You can dupe people into working for the benefit of the state, the society, the collective, the group, etc with a bunchy of attractive slogans, but that will only work for a very short time. The longest this will work is one generation and that is only if you slaughter people by the million to keep their enthusiasm alive.

Soon enough, people will begin to detest the very concept of work if work is divorced from personal, individual, competitive self-interest. They will conceive such a hatred of the very concept of work that even after their society abandons its Communist dreams, they will do absolutely anything whatsoever to avoid working.

Then, of course, prostitution becomes their answer to everything.

Severe trauma makes one want to crawl under a blanket and lie there, trembling and terrified. If, however, you manage to overcome this understandable impulse, you might find that the trauma has radicalized you, given you a powerful impulse, transformed you into an arrow shot into the skies.

It is fashionable to try to deaden the pain of trauma with psychotropic drugs. This approach denies that tragedy is part of human experience. It castrates survivors, turning them into zombies who reject a big part of their humanity for fear of feeling, living, and being.

There is no life without pain, and hiding from pain in artificial contentment equals a refusal to live.

Tragedy can be transformative, if we allow ourselves to face it.

I want to kiss (in an entirely friendly, non-creepy way) the blogger who wrote the following:

People like Francine Hirsch have argued that we should seek to understand what the Soviet government “thought” it was doing within its own officially stated ideological conceptions and terms and not what the objective results of its actions were as measured against later scholarly and legal understandings of the concept of racial discrimination (Hirsch, pp. 40-41). Of course nobody makes such excuses for Nazi Germany or South Africa under apartheid. It is only the USSR that is still blessed with such stalwart defenders in the western academy against the charges of racism.

And also this:

Even today a lot of people don’t think Stalin’s murder of 15 million people was nearly as bad as Hitler’s killing of 5 million Jews. Minimizers of Stalin’s crimes still hold quite a bit of influence in US academia. Nobody would wear a shirt with a Swastika on it around London. But, I see lots of sickle and hammer shirts. This ability to maintain a positive PR spin decades after his death is an accomplishment of evil by Stalin that Hitler could never have dreamed of accomplishing.

This is the greatest tragedy of the Soviet people: they suffered and died for nothing. An over-fed Canadian academic recently published a long article telling the world that Stalinism was not that bad and we have all been duped into thinking it was by Solzhenitsyn’s lies. (I’m not linking to this loser because I don’t want to give him traffic.) And he is only one of many.

 

I find the TV show Mad Men to be eerily appropriate to the analysis of what is happening today in my profession. Don Draper is the perfect image of an academic.

Don’s central organizing quality is that of being terrified. He can’t muster the strength to tell his boss, “You disrespected me in my own house, and that sucks.” He can’t say to his mistress, “I’m jealous and humiliated.” He can’t even dare to tell the wife who is completely dependent on him that he doesn’t want her to work. Instead, he design pathetic, childish revenges that give him an illusion of some completely imaginary power.

This is a guy who makes a very comfortable living, who has tons of free time, who can come and go at work as he pleases, who is very good with words, has charisma, and whose job is to influence people with words. If that doesn’t scream “academic”, I don’t know what does.

Draper’s irrational, all-abiding fear has no explanation. The impostor syndrome, which is also an excuse trotted out eagerly by every terrified academic under the Sun, is a very unconvincing explanation for his abject terror.

So he grew up during the Great Depression, big whoops. I grew up during the bandit wars of the FSU’s 1990s and I’m not trembling in fear all day long. So he feels like an outsider in his professional and social milieu. My accent precludes me from even trying to pretend that I’m not an outsider but I’m not fearful.

It isn’t surprising that the show is so popular. It tells us what we all know: the most creative, intelligent, resourceful people in our society are besieged by nameless terrors. This is why it’s a mistake to expect them to stand up for anything or anybody. Nothing they can do will ever amount to anything but a silly, childish prank.

I will consider it a great personal failure if I ever get to the point of thinking, “To hell with everybody else, to hell with collective action and watching out for the good of the discipline, I’ll just concentrate on my career and watch out for nobody but myself.” I don’t want to be that person but I can’t banish the suspicion that there is no alternative.

If people have no objection to part-time instructors losing their jobs because full-timers will teach their courses for free, if there isn’t enough solidarity to oppose this blatant attempt to destroy the union representing part-timers, if everybody agrees to let the administration effectively cancel out our contracts, then I don’t see what can be done about it.

I feel like all I’m achieving is annoying people who are perfectly content with teaching 7 courses per semester instead of 3 with no salary increase and who are profoundly at peace with relinquishing self-governance and academic freedom. I don’t mind making myself obnoxious and fostering the image of myself as a grumpy malcontent and a habitual refusenik. But there’s got to be a point in this.

I see only two possible reasons for everybody’s perpetual silence: people are either terrified or perfectly happy. Since there is no reason to be terrified, I have to conclude that everybody is content with how things are developing.

Imagine you have a contract stating that you are obligated to teach 3 courses per semester. And then you are informed that, from now on, you will teach an unspecified number of extra courses for free. Would you have something to say about this? Questions to ask? What if you couldn’t be fired and have already earned a good, comfortable pension? Would you say something then?

Maybe I’m insane, and silence is the only appropriate reaction.