Literati for Trump

By Finbarr Curtis

This week's election of Donald J. Trump did not surprise me as much as it did those who predicted an easy win for Hillary Clinton. The county in which I live voted 59.9 percent for Trump and so I had some idea of the intensity of his support. I watched the final debate next to a man who said he liked Trump because he "talked like a regular guy" and a few seats down from a woman who exclaimed that anyone who didn't vote for Trump was an "idiot" and yelled "You killed those people in Benghazi" as Clinton appeared on the screen.

The Saturday before the election, I was talking to someone who didn't meet the profile of the archetypal Trump supporter from the rallies. He was a financially successful college graduate who was well-traveled and happy to engage in conversation with African Americans, Latinos, and liberal college professors.  He agreed that Trump was a horrible person and had no interest in fabricated scandals about Benghazi or emails. Mainly, he liked Trump's tax cuts and promises to deregulate banks. I asked him if he was such a free trader, did he worry about Trump's call for a 40 percent tariff on China and trade wars against Mexico. He responded: "Trump cannot actually do any of that stuff. There is no way that he could get that through Congress. That's just what you tell the illiterates."

After hearing this characterization of the mass of Trump supporters as "illiterates," I realized I was talking to someone who echoed the views of the Southern bourbon aristocracy that maintained power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a divide-and-rule strategy.  In towns in the South, you still meet these members of old families whose names you recognize from the local streets named after their grandparents. Wealthy southerners discouraged economic populism across racial lines by helping to persuade working-class white voters that the greatest threat to them was posed by African Americans, and that big government was a tool of northerners who used minorities to exploit southern white men and women.

My interlocutor's conviction that Trump would not actually do most of the crazy stuff he promised appears to have been the conventional wisdom of Wall Street in the week after the election. In an election night post, I had attempted to imagine the economic effects of a Trump presidency if he enacted his policy proposals. But investors are gambling that this will not happen. If the markets believed that Trump would follow through on his protectionist platform, they would have plummeted. Instead, investors are convinced that Trump will be good for business. After all, Wall Street denizens are well aware of Trump's decades of outlandish promises. Trump financed every building project by making fantastic claims to rope people in and then daring his investors to sue when he did not deliver. Wall Street might be okay with this approach to the American voter

It's a French Thing

We readily imagine that we are a very tolerant civilization, that we have welcomed all forms of the past, all the cultural forms foreign to us, that we welcome also behavior, language, and sexual deviations.  I wonder if this is an illusion. - Michel Foucault

By Finbarr Curtis

The proliferation of essays following the Charlie Hebdo massacre confirmed Roland Barthes's observation that "Every national shock produces a sudden flowering of written commentary."  Most rallied behind the slogan "Je suis Charlie," but some offered other views.  In this vein, I wrote something that resisted conventional wisdom.  While I supported Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech and protection from murder, I was less convinced that I needed to applaud Charlie's heroism.  Many lamented how hypersensitive, humorless Anglophone academics like me ignored the French context. As Olivier Tonneau explained, if Brits and Americans knew more we would realize that these cartoonists were precious friends and allies:

Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.

In Adam Gopnik's description, the French have a "savage tradition" of satire that would shock most American sensibilities:

The staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, massacred in an act that shocked the world last week, were not the gentle daily satirists of American editorial cartooning. Nor were they anything like the ironic observers and comedians of manners most often to be found in our own beloved stable here at The New Yorker. (Though, to be sure, the covers of this magazine have startled a few readers and started a few fights.) They worked instead in a peculiarly French and savage tradition, forged in a long nineteenth-century guerrilla war between republicans and the Church and the monarchy.

These reported national disagreements recall the 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, which began as a discussion of human nature and developed into an argument about justice, inequality, and freedom. Except in this case, the parties have switched sides.  The French line up with Chomsky to defend enlightenment ideals while some Americans see freedom through the lens of discursive power.

Religious Studies! Huh! Good God Y'all. What is it Good For?

by Finbarr Curtis

Absolutely Nothing.  Or at least absolutely nothing is how Edwin Starr characterized the fruits of war back in 1969.  Because Starr’s sentiments are shared by many in today’s academy, scholars are likely to be troubled by a recent Guardian article about the Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative.  In some ways, Minerva’s objectives seem familiar.   The DoD provides grants to researchers who “define and develop foundational knowledge about sources of present and future conflict with an eye toward better understanding of the political trajectories of key regions of the world.”  To do this, Minerva hopes to encourage a “basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S.”  It’s that last part about strategic importance that is jarring to many scholarly ears.  Humanists and social scientists are uncomfortable with such bald-faced assertions that we seek to know the world in order to control it.

Among other things, Mineva hopes to understand social movements that might foster organized violence.  One possible source of such violence is labeled “belief.”  The hope to better understand belief shapes the first priority research topic entitled: “Belief propagation and movements for change.”  Under the category entitled “mobilization for change,” Minerva welcomes research that helps to develop a “better understanding what drives individuals and groups to mobilize to institute change. In particular, models that explain and explore factors that motivate or inhibit groups to adopt political violence as a tactic will help inform understanding of where organized violence is likely to erupt, what factors might explain its contagion, and how one might circumvent its spread.”

While many scholars of religion might distance themselves from the DoD’s desire to study belief in order to protect security, few eyebrows are raised when religious studies is tasked for civic projects such as “promoting peace” or “teaching tolerance” or “encouraging interreligious harmony.”  While “security” and “peace” conjure up different political associations, it is not clear that they are so analytically distinct.  The Minerva Initiative seeks to identify peaceful and tolerant beliefs that support religious freedom and minimize the threat posed by narrow and intolerant religions thought to produce violence.

Anthropos Metreon

by Cotton Mather

8/7/02

The black girders rose triumphantly, defiant in their lack of detail. The clean lines of an abstract industrial swagger. Jennie sat comfortably in the stainless steel chair. I sat across gazing, the lights bouncing off her long black hair at odd angles. We were having Mexican at the old Metreon foodcourt.

“How’s the guacamole?”

“A bit limey,” she said. “I think we should cut it with some cumin.”

Jennie had always been taste sensitive, at least she had been in high school.

“But Jennie,” I said, smiling, nervous, overthinking my words. “Cumin is hard to come by these days.”

She looked into my eyes and took a no-look dip with her chip.

“You ain’t kiddin’”