N and I have started watching Mad Men. We have seen two episodes so far and, to be honest, we haven’t been able to get the point of the show. Yes, the 1950s in the US sucked. They sucked majorly. But you can’t really stretch this very self-evident point for 5 seasons without boring people to death.

Yes, the wife is a textbook case of the ailment described by Betty Friedan in Feminine Mystique. Yes, traditional gender roles make a profound relationship between a man and a woman completely impossible. Yes, everybody suffers as a result. Yes, thank God and feminism for laws against sexual harassment in the workplace.

I have a feeling that the goal of all this bashing of the 1950s is to experience a self-congratulatory sense of how much better, more enlightened and happier we are today than those poor schmucks of our parents’ / grandparents’ generations. This is the same tendency towards escapism that I’m seeing in the obsession with zombies and vampires.

The show brings to mind all of those instances when Oprah would show horrible things that happen to women in the Congo or Darfur and say, “Aren’t we, American gals, incredibly lucky to have our equal rights?” The message behind this was that the status quo was perfect and anybody who criticized it was not appreciative of the suffering of rape victims in Darfur.

Of course, it’s good that the two most popular shows of the recent years (Breaking Bad and Mad Men) have such an intensely feminist message. I’d just rather it was delivered in a less schematic and more nuanced way.

The intricacies of the ad business could save Mad Men and make it interesting but the problem here is that the nature of advertisement makes an ad campaign very dated within a couple of years. Several decades later, what might have been a genius advertising move at the time it was made sounds nothing short of weird. The two ad slogans that the protagonist comes up with in the first two episodes (“It’s toasted!” for cigarettes and “Women would do anything to get closer!” for men’s deodorant) made zero sense to me today. In comparison, the ad campaigns created by the protagonist of Queer as Folk are absolute genius.

If we continue watching, it will be solely because of the dresses. The dresses are beautiful. They are 100% my style, and I would wear them every day if they weren’t out of fashion. Beautiful, beautiful dresses.

Rebecca Schuman has written an article that denounces UC-Riverside for waiting until 5 days before the MLA conference to tell the candidates if they will be interviewed there. This is obviously a disgusting thing to do because traveling to that conference is enormously expensive and it is crucial for people to know if they will get any interviews before they spend the last money they have in the world on airplane tickets and a hotel reservation.

I’ve interviewed at two MLA conferences and every time I had to max out the last remaining not-completely-maxed-out cards to go there. I will never forget the horrible feeling of being a worthless, useless outsider that I experienced when having to trudge over to Nob Hill in San Francisco where I was interviewed at several hotels in which I couldn’t afford to order even a cup of coffee.

I remember a liveried butler stopping me at the entrance to the breakfast room at one of these hotels.

“We are serving a buffet breakfast, Ma’am,” he said, staring at my old, scuffed boots that were leaking water like crazy. “It’s $48 and that doesn’t include beverages.”

At that point in life, $48 and $48,000 were pretty much the same to me since I had neither amount. The complete obliviousness of the people who decided to hold the (as in “the only one”) job hiring conference in Modern Languages at one of the most expensive places on the continent was mind-boggling.

So when Schuman criticized UC-Riverside, I thought that her post was bland and kind of boring (sorry, Rebecca!). “Duh, of course, what they are doing is disgusting,” I thought. “It isn’t like anybody will disagree.”

Boy, was I ever wrong, or what? Schuman was immediately attacked for her position by – and this is the best part – a blogger who calls herself “Tenured Radical.” Yes, it is totally radical to defend employers who treat prospective employees like shit. You need to muster every ounce of your revolutionary potential and radical way of thinking to condemn job-seekers for believing they deserve to be treated with a modicum of consideration and respect.

What I find completely hilarious is that people who consider themselves Marxists are doing this kind of thing. This is what Schuman has to say about such people:

I believe that academic hiring is a needlessly cruel exercise in gatekeeping by a bunch of self-professed Marxists whose own hiring practices favor the wealthy and well-connected; I believe that there can be no good reason on the planet for giving candidates five days’ notice whilst your own lavish, all-expenses-paid conference-attendance plans go completely unchallenged.

It’s one thing when you meet an honest-to-goodness Libertarian who says, “Markets rule, survival of the fittest, if you can’t pull yourself by the boot-straps, do us all a favor and hang yourself on them, etc.” One can hate this approach, but at least, such people are honest and they don’t pretend to be anything they are not.

But the folks who spout Althusser all day long and quote Paulo Freire at every turn while simultaneously cheering on the oppression of their colleagues get to me every time.

So now we are being told that under-enrolled courses will have to be taught on the off-load basis (meaning, for free and on top of the 3 courses per semester that we teach according to our contracts). This means that the administration is not doing its job and is not managing to recruit enough students (even though enrollments are growing each year) and the professors will be punished by working without pay. Got it? Professors will work for free because inept and hugely overpaid administrators can’t administer worth a crap.

You’d think that upon hearing about such an egregious violation of their work contract people would protest. Or at least, they would ask questions. Or just maybe they would say something along the lines of, “Huh? What?”

Remember that we are a state university and any attempt to change our contract officially would have to go through the state legislature. The administrators don’t want to follow the official procedure of changing the contracts (because that will involve having to do work, and they don’t like work), so they are sneaking a de facto increase of the workload by the professors with out complete compliance.

And nobody is making as much as a peep. This is why I am now convinced that we need a union.

Normally, the institution of tenure and the concept of self-governance are supposed to protect us from such abuses. The idea is that tenured professors are not afraid of losing their jobs and are free to speak out against obvious injustices and attempts to destroy the university. The problem with this seemingly good system is that tenured professors never do or say anything to oppose such things. I don’t know what it is they fear so much but the reality is that they sit there in silence while one egregious change after another is imposed on them.

Time and again, I (and 2 other untenured people) speak out and all we ever get in response is complete, deathly silence. There is nothing I can think of that would make people start using their tenure and Full Professorships for the benefit of the university and themselves.

So if we can’t speak for ourselves and defend our own rights, we need an organization to do that for us. We have a union that protects the rights of part-time instructors and university staff. Now we need the union to organize and protect people with PhDs, tenure, and Full Professorships.

Otherwise, we will all find ourselves staring at our contracts that specify a 3:3 teaching load while teaching 5 courses per semester. And that’s just the beginning. If you can sneak this kind of thing past people, you can safely assume they will swallow a lot more shit eagerly and contentedly.

President Obama would rather read any stupid hack in the world than anything written by a woman.

Rewriting the Bible to make it more palatable to people of a certain political persuasion. I’ll leave it to you to guess which persuasion that is.

Canada’s Supreme Court makes brothels legal.

A brilliant reading of Disney’s Frozen by an autistic.

Most people diagnosed with depression don’t even meet the diagnostic criteria. The doctors are in such a rush to foist a scrip on them that they don’t stop to consider the symptoms.

It is shocking that this completely idiotic piece on LinkedIn has been declared one of the best pieces of business journalism in 2013. These days, the way to get hits, likes, pageviews and awards is by declaring that everything sucks, any effort or activity is useless, and the best thing one can do is to avoid even trying to do anything. Except read defeatist, wallowing articles, of course.

How the cuts in SNAP benefits have impacted one teacher’s students. This is a very good post, do read it.

“When it comes to weight, America and Neptune aren’t too far apart. Just being there adds a few pounds to your mass. For some, it’s more than just a few pounds. I was shocked when I was in an elderly home where someone seemed to need all the constant care just because he ate himself to the point where he was immobile and completely dependent. The whole country at its worst seems an over sized theme park with funny grocery store rides, comfortable double chairs, cool scooters in airports, and accommodated facilities for whoever has a boo-boo.”

“The demands for change must be en masse, just as the civil rights movement was. So how tired are we of gun violence?  Fed up enough to force our leaders to get off their duffs and make the changes the public demands? This may be a long, long struggle.” This is absolutely true. We need a very strong and massive public determination to change the situation.

Why do some academics run out of breath? The post is about STEM fields but I find it relevant to the Humanities, as well.

Google+ is creating confusion and tries to mess up people’s blogs. I hate Google+ and hope never to have to join it.

“I always get asked, “Where do you get your confidence?” I think people are well meaning, but it’s pretty insulting. Because what it means to me is, “You, Mindy Kaling, have all the trappings of a very marginalized person. You’re not skinny, you’re not white, you’re a woman. Why on earth would you feel like you’re worth anything?”” The real mystery is how anybody can confuse this sad creature with a confident person.

“What I find so amazing is that Canada Post can get away with bold face lying to the media and that the media actually prints their lies without investigating them at all. Back in the day the media could be sued for printing something that is untrue. Not now. Now corporations control the media with advertizing dollars.” Very true.

And another important post on why the impending demise of Canada Post is a very very bad sign.

“Teens [from the suburbs] were much more anxious and depressed than teens from inner-city neighborhoods who were faced with all manner of environmental and social ills. The privileged suburban teens smoked more, drank more, and used more hard drugs than inner-city teens…”

On corporate Communism: “This is Harper’s Communism. Paying lip service to small business but abandoning small business in favor of large corporations. Getting rid of the Wheat Bord was to help muscle out the small private farmer and aid the large corporate monopolies. Gwyn Morgan and Stephen Harper like to do a lot of name calling, trash talking and pointing the finger but the truth is, they are the Leninists not the people who pay taxes, care about the environment, support individual rights and freedoms and oppose trade agreements that erode national sovereignty. Throwing away the Bill of Rights is the final step.” I know there are many posts on Canada in this lineup but Canada is turning in a very bad direction these days. We need to be paying attention and not allow the traditional winter somnolence get the best of our Northern neighbors.

The best line to have come out of the whole “Let’s racially profile Santa and Jesus” campaign was this: “Of course, worrying about what color Jesus was is sort of, like, missing the whole point of Jesus. Just sayin’.”

Do check out this absolutely hilarious curriculum used by homeschoolers. It’s extremely funny right to the point when you realize that this is what some poor kids get in lieu of an education. 

“Muslim staff working for Marks & Spencer have been given permission to refuse to serve customers buying alcohol or pork products.” And tomorrow religious fanatics will be allowed not to sell birth control or offer medical assistance to people of whose religion or behavior they disapprove. Welcome back to the Dark Ages, UK!

It is very important that we all join in shaming universities that engage in horrible and abusive hiring practices. Please read this post on egregious behavior of UC Riverside.

Rebecca Schuman is surprised that the Tenured Radical is bullying her. I’m not surprised, though, because the memory of TR getting on my case over absolutely nothing important is still fresh in my mind.

And the post of the week: “The Kansas Board of Regents. . . recently voted, unanimously, to deny every single employee of a Kansas university the right to blog, Facebook or Tweet under their real name.” If you are not appalled, then I don’t know what’s ailing you. ANY faculty member can be fired for posting, blogging or tweeting something that a brainless bureaucrat happens to disagree with. Got it? Bye-bye, academic freedom, bye-bye, intelligent blogging, bye-bye, freedom of speech. 

This weekend, a group of people in Russia brought flowers to the monument to Stalin:

So in the absence of anything better, we went to see Catching Fire last night. It wasn’t bad at all and a lot better than the first movie in the trilogy. Definitely more expensive. I don’t know what they will do with part 3 since the last book in the trilogy was so weak that all I remember from it is the phrase “Let’s go to District13!”

What was quite disturbing, though, was seeing the previews. Of course, the previews for people who came to see a movie in the fantasy genre will be selected based on what these viewers might find appealing. Still, the sheer volume of escapism was unsettling. Vampires, Frankenstein (yet another one!), fantasy, Noah’s Ark with cute special effects, space monsters, more fantasy, and a movie starring Ben Stiller who fantasizes of being a superhero.

And look at the movie lineup. Is there anything about the reality we live in at your neighborhood theater?

Hasn’t the time come to stop escaping into fantasy and start becoming aware?

Yesterday as I got out of the swimming pool, an elderly gentleman spotted me and noticed that I was grunting, wheezing and moving my eye-brows in weird ways.

“Swimming is hard, isn’t it?” he said.

The reason why I was making weird noises and strange faces, however, wasn’t that the swim had been strenuous. What happened was that I was trying to create a conclusion to the article I’m writing. Intellectual efforts always elicit grunts and wheezing from me and make me look scary.

Jennifer Armstrong left a link to a brilliant article that contains the following great quote:

Administrators breed unless checked.

We all need to be reminded of this as often as possible.

 

The only words that are not offensive about this ad are “January 30, 2104.” Everything else is simply egregious.

Excuse me, I need to go vomit right now.