All of Europe has now been reduced to Germany. Even books bought from a Spanish store arrive by German mail.

Is there anything left of Europe that exists for a reason other than enriching Germans?

Dating couples in their teens and twenties tend to end their restaurant meals with a half an hour of blissful, silent staring at their smartphones. I’m from a different generation, and 30 minutes of silence at the end of a date still seem weird to me.

At the lunch place in our neighborhood, we order a half portion and then split it between the two of us. And take the abundant leftovers home.

Of course, we only end up at that place because the other neighborhood lunch café, the one which serves small, expensive, very chic meals, is always overflowing with customers.

We have many doctors’ offices in this area, and doctors prefer expensive and healthy lunch options.

When I got my BA (with all kinds of prizes, awards and accolades), my parents presented me with a gift of my very first trip to Spain and Portugal. It was kind of weird to be planning a PhD in Peninsular literature without ever having visited the country, so the gift was very timely.

This was a bus trip where I was the only Canadian among a big group of Brits and a few Americans. We were led by our tour guide Francisco, a man who was gay in every sense of the word, and our driver Jesús. Jesús was in his fifties, didn’t speak a word of English, and was very happy to have at least a single Spanish-speaker on the bus whom he could regale with stories of his childhood under Franco and long quotes from his favorite book Lazarillo de Tormes.

After a few days of traveling, I noticed that Jesús kept getting stopped by traffic police. This was weird because he had told me that he’d been working as a tour bus driver for almost 25 years.

“So how come you keep breaking the rules?” I asked Jesús after we arrived in Seville. “I thought you were supposed to be hugely experienced at driving.”

“Oh, I do it on purpose,” he explained. “I want to get stopped every couple of hours. If I were driving a Spanish or a Latin American group, I wouldn’t need to. But with these crazy Anglos. . .”

And now the riddle: Why did Jesús make efforts to get stopped by traffic police when he drove this particular group?

Sunday is, as usual, the day for my driving lesson. And a driving lesson brings yet another string of sermons from N’s favorite Christian radio station. All of those sermons are a little bizarre, but today’s were special.

The first sermon was by a preacher who thanked God for the nuclear bomb because it was “a great equalizer in our fight with the Asian hordes.”

When I practice, N walks by the car, giving me directions (we were practicing driving into a garage today.)

“What station is this?” he asked when he heard the “praise the Lord for the bomb” bit. “Go back to that Christian station.”

“This is the Christian station,” I said. “It’s just a nice, loving message of obliterate-the-yellow-people-for-the-love-of-God.”

The next sermon was about taxes. The preacher told his audience that the concept of taxes was ungodly and we should resist the extortionate government that wants to rob us and give money to lazy people.

“And what, you are going to tell me this is still the Christian station?” N asked sarcastically.

“I haven’t even touched this radio!” I replied.

“But wasn’t Jesus in favor of paying taxes?” N asked.

“Yes, and he was also in favor of not killing people, but who cares about that boring fella?” I said.

Seriously, folks, what kind of Christians are these?

Another reason why the argument that today’s problems in the academic labor market are caused by the recession bothers me is that it simply isn’t true.

When I was a union organizer at Yale between 2003 and 2007, the main issue we were discussing and trying to fight was casualization of academic labor. Casualization means the destruction of tenure lines in favor of adjunct positions. And when I joined the union, that fight had already been going on for a while.

This is why it bothers me to see people buy into the egregious and dangerous lie that the current situation was caused by the recession. All the recession did was intensify a trend that had been developing for a while.

The excuse we keep being given for the destruction of tenure lines is that there is no money for them because of the crisis. That is a lie, people. There is money aplenty. None of it goes to people who teach and do research. This is the real problem, and it was not caused by the crisis.

It pains me to see intelligent, good people buy into this fiction of big, bad recession that is forcing college administrators to exploit adjuncts. Nobody forces the administrators to do that. If times are as tough as we are told, why don’t we get rid of half of our useless paper pushers with their “austerity exercises”, “diversity initiatives”, “5-minute networking sessions” and all the other crap they keep dishing out to conceal their extreme uselessness?

So let’s stop listening to these lies about the recession and start asking why the first and only answer to absolutely anything that happens in academia these days is to defraud students and educators.

As the protesters in Spain keep saying, “There is no crisis. The system is broken.”

One of the side effects of going to the gym is that people start feeling obligated to give me explanations as to why they don’t go.

Believe me, I’m not one of those obnoxious converts to a healthy lifestyle who badger everybody into joining their sect of health freaks. I don’t think anybody needs to go to the gym unless they feel like going. It’s everybody’s own business what level of physical activity they maintain.

Still, a day doesn’t pass without somebody offering me a string of excuses for why they don’t work out. I can’t say I enjoy provoking an intense sense of guilt in everybody who sees me.

You know why I hate departmental meetings?

Because nothing ever gets done.

And you know why nothing ever gets done?

Because people – great, well-intentioned, brilliant, hard-working people – keep raising endless, nit-picking objections to every single proposal. As a result, every practical suggestion is drowned in a mass of clarifications, footnotes, parentheses that dilute the suggestion to the point where nothing of value can ever come out of it.

And this annoys me and raises my blood pressure to the point where you can boil a kettle on the nape of my neck.

I was asked to comment on a post that responds to the study of job market trends I linked earlier today. That post illustrates exactly what I find so obnoxious about so many of my colleagues. Its author berates the study’s creator for not mentioning that a global economic crisis started in 2008. Of course, people who have not suffered extensive brain damage in the past five years are not likely to remain unaware of the crisis but who cares about a minor detail like that when you have the perfect opportunity to nitpick?

The rest of the post offers a perfect example of academic self-loathing and temerity. “We need to sit very quietly,” its author seems to suggest. “Because actual human beings find us unacceptable”:

Because here’s the thing: people don’t like academics. They don’t. We can have a long conversation about the reasons why and the consequences, but that’s the fact.

I haven’t met any people who dislike academics, so I’m venturing a guess that they can be found among fans of Fox News and Duck Dynasty. In any case, they are very unlikely to frequent Rebecca Schuman’s blog where the study in question was published. So the idea that we will get “them” to like “us” by making it very clear we have noticed the recession seems a little too hopeful.

Nit-picking and self-loathing are small potatoes, however, compared to the quality that academics possess in excessive degree and that routinely drives me to distraction. I’m talking, of course, of drama-queenishness. I will always feel an alien in this culture of overwrought melodramatic self-pity:

They become, instead, merely more suckers in an economy full of suckers, losers in a society where the loser-winner split is something like 99 to 1. . . They want to represent their very real, very degrading labor market problems and poor working conditions as special, and the academy as a specially exploitative employer. But there is nothing special about us. The academy is a factory, like any other, and we’re all assembly line workers*, and until we accept that fact and work in tandem with the rest of the losers in a comprehensively broken economy, no positive progress will be made.

I read this and I imagine an aging provincial actor who has always played very minor parts and now has suddenly been given an opportunity to play Hamlet. So he wheezes, rages, and thrashes about, knowing that this is his first and last chance to shine.

This happens all the time with academics who slip into cheap melodrama without any provocation. And while we all declaim, preach and rant about the abject horror of our overfed existences, nothing ever gets done.

Of course, the author of the quoted post is still very young, so let’s hope that this is all just a pose and not his actual way of being. There is still time to ditch melodrama and self-pity. The army of academic drama queens does not need yet another recruit.

* Yes, this is from the same article that berates somebody else for antagonizing “them simple, uneducated folks.” Priceless. I’d ask my husband who has both worked as an assembly-line factory worker and done a PhD at Purdue (not at the same time, obviously) if these experiences were alike but I don’t want him to think I’m a spoiled brainless brat. 

A careful analysis of actual data demonstrates that:

1) There is no over-production of people with PhDs in Humanities.

2) There is no shortage of undergrads in Humanities.

3) The only problem is the substitution of tenure lines with contingent adjunct positions.

Here is a very detailed study that uses data from the field of Germanic Studies. Here is its conclusion:

What changed in 2008 was not the number of doctorates, however, but the number of TT jobs. Ph.D. production has been essentially unchanged since the late 70s (an average of 78 per year in the 80s, and an average of 75 per year in the 2000s). Nor is it the case that Ph.D. production is outstripping the growth of undergraduate enrollments; undergrad enrollments rose over 40% between 1999 and 2010.

Once again, I advance my suggestion that we heap scorn and ridicule on any program that cuts a tenure line. This is the only solution because that’s what the entire problem is.

A colleague sent me this great poem about the cold to illustrate how he feels about it:

> A poem by Abigail Elizabeth McIntyre

>

> SHIT

>

> IT’S COLD

>

> The End.

There seems to be a strong possibility that there will be another spell of brutally cold temperatures that might reach all the way down to Florida. If you live in Eastern and Central part of North America anywhere above the Mississippi, make sure you buy candles, matches, blankets, and enough pantry supplies to carry you through a possible blackout.