Category: No Politics Friday

I am not exactly an old salt in the world of college teaching, but a scant half-decade has been more than enough to convince me that the textbook industry is in mortal combat with Three Card Monte dealers for the coveted title of the America's Biggest Scam. One often develops misconceptions about things when viewing them from afar but finds them quite different with first hand experience. Such is not the case here. It really is as much of a ripoff as you think it is.

My adviser co-authors a highly regarded textbook on political parties and she likes to tell me how when the project began a new edition was demanded every four years. By the late 1990s the updates became biannual. Now, as you might imagine, annual updates are on the agenda. What can one meaningfully update about a political parties textbook annually?
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Lots, as long as the term "meaningfully" can be disregarded. Otherwise not so much. Believe it or not, questions like "What is the role of political parties in our system?" and "Why is the American system dominated by two parties?" do not have new answers. So what does an annual or biannual update look like? Well, you change the anecdotes used as examples. Do a ctrl-f search to replace "Kerry" with "Obama." Add new pictures. Shoehorn in some dumbass sidebar about Jon Stewart (you know, really connect with the young'ns!) And of course, if nothing else, design a new cover.

You already knew this, of course, but the robustness of the second-hand textbook market (thanks, internet!) has increased pressure from publishers to obsolete each book as quickly as possible. But wait! There's more.

I have a valuable resource even though I am a nobody in this profession. We low men on the totem pole are the ones who teach the 350-student Intro to American Government courses, often required of all undergraduates. Intro textbooks are 80% of the textbook market in any field, and political science is no different. And at $95 a pop for new hardcovers the competition is intense. So are the textbook reps (salespeople, in essence).
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Publishers offer kickbacks – uh, "royalties" – to departments in exchange for adopting Intro texts, sometimes as much as $10 per copy. This never really affects the students, given that every one of the dozens of Intro books are exactly the same; how many ways can an interest group be explained? How many variations of the theme "Politics matters!" can they concoct? Fortunately my department(s) have not required me to adopt specific books. Which simply leaves the door open for the authors to lobby me.

Yes, the royalties on hardcover textbooks can be significant. $5/copy is not unheard of. That means that my 280 student Intro class is worth close to $1500 to an author. And in my graduate program, two of the five American politics professors wrote Intro textbooks. Thankfully their suggestions about adopting their books were gentle and non-binding. Nonetheless academia is full of people who are comfortable putting pressure on their graduate students and colleagues to adopt texts. More importantly, from my perspective it is nice to have one small piece of power, one decision I can make that constitutes a favor to people who are much higher up the ladder than me. "Hey, I adopted your book for my Intro class" is just about the only thing we who are the bottom of the barrel can say that translates to "This is a favor. Please return it at some point in the future.
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Don't even get me started on "online portals." The less I say about that the better.
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I understand that publishers need to make a buck and from my perspective I should be excited about potentially getting on this gravy train at some point in the future. I don't know why I can't shift my mindset from "Hey, this is a fucking crock" to "Woo hoo! Kickbacks!" If it ever happens I'll let you know.

We don't anoint celebrities as a society based on their brainpower. They are famous because of way they look, sing, act, throw baseballs, or whatever esoteric and impractical skill they happen to have.

This is why it tends to hurt so much to listen to them talk. Whether we're listening to Chuck Norris' brilliant musings on the nature of democracy, Charlie Sheen's incisive viewpoint on the demolition of the World Trade Center, Tom Cruise's copiously researched ideas about antidepressants, or Jenny McCarthy's groundbreaking work on vaccines that cause autism, there is a good reason that most of the public wants to punch them in the face when they break the fourth wall and enlighten us with their deepest thoughts. We may willingly shell out big bucks for tickets to their shows and movies, but we'd pay even more to avoid having to listen to them talk out of character.

So, yeah. The "Free Roman Polanski" petition.

I have nothing to add to this on the most basic level. To reiterate, this guy plied a 13 year old girl with prescription drugs and whiskey, fucked her, stopped to ask if she was on the pill (at 13), and then put it in her ass. Just so we're all clear on that.

We all have heard him say the following after admitting that he knew she was 13:

If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls.

Stay classy, Roman.

I have absolutely no use for cultural guardians – the kind who put warning stickers on CDs, rail endlessly about movie violence, and blame mass shootings on Marilyn Manson – and the tired right wing tactic of campaigning in the sticks by condemning Hollywood as the epicenter of our societal collapse is pure rube-baiting. It takes an awful lot to make me sympathetic to any such arguments. But for the individuals who decided that it would be a good idea to sign a petition to "free Polanski" – free him, like he's Nelson Mandela or some prisoner of conscience – could not possibly be more out of touch with whatever passes for the average American these days. I want to punch myself just for using the phrase "out of touch with…the average American" but I can't think of a more accurate way to state the sentiment. We lack experiential evidence that celebrities live on another planet (unless you happen to be a celebrity, of course.

Are you? Don't famous people have more important people to read than me?) but this fiasco provides the next best thing in circumstantial evidence. These people really don't see anything, well, disgusting about publicly supporting a guy who was just arrested for banging a kid. Note that we're not talking about a private phone call to support their old friend Roman; no, they're speaking out publicly against this heinous miscarriage of justice.

I honestly can't figure out which is stronger evidence of their lack of judgment: that they personally support a child rapist or that they thought it would be a good idea to go on camera and talk about it. There's regular stupid, which we assume all celebrities to be, and there's ridiculous, cartoonish over-the-top obliviousness to the world around them. Doesn't their money buy them agents, publicists, lawyers, and other self-interested parties who are compensated well to stand guard between those two points?

I don't feel particularly old. I may have hit 30 recently, but I act a good decade younger. I feel old only twice annually: when I receive my class rosters and see the birthdates of my students. The late 1980s dates were bad enough, but now they are mostly 1990. These people are adults. They can vote. They can join the Army. They can buy porn. One of the challenges inherent in teaching about politics or history is that one must convey to students meaningful context for events that happened before they were born. In my line of work the biggest problem – and one that will only get worse with time, of course – is realizing that these kids have absolutely no concept of the Cold War or the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall fell two or three years before they were born. It is troubling enough that they do not understand Communism, but this generation has lost touch with the concept of the Commie.

I'm talking about the good old fashioned Hollywood Commie and the Red Herring Commie referenced in political campaigns. They were featured so prominently in our culture for so long and now they are, for all intents and purposes, gone. When was the last time the kids these days (If you ever want to feel old, use the phrase "the kids these days") saw a good movie about fighting Commies? When was the last time we had a (serious, non-Teabagging) conversation about how the hardened Soviets live? It is all foreign to today's college student. They know Yakov Smirnoff isn't funny, but they don't really understand why he's not funny.

Today's movies and television are missing something. They are missing the vodka- and borscht-swilling, square jawed, tough-as-nails caricature Commie with hilariously overdone accent, a comical lack of familiarity with Western culture, and a single-minded obsession with destroying imperialist capitalist aggressors. Our discomfort with all things race related makes terrorists a poor substitute. And besides, what's funny about terrorism? Nothing. But even when our political and social elites were telling us that the Commies were hellbent on killing every last one of us there was something funny about them. They were like Charlie Brown lining up to kick the football; we felt a little sympathy because we knew he was only there to miss it. And rhetoric aside, you just knew that Ivan was too backward (or drunk) to succeed in his Commie goals of world domination. He was the villain, the comic relief, and the sympathetic character rolled into one.

That is why the Commie is disappearing. In the final verdict the Soviet Union turned out to be hapless, verging on pathetic. They lacked the bone-chilling kind of evil that would have made them suitable Villains in Perpetuity, a la the Nazis. I think we are worse for it as a society. Batman needed the Joker like we needed the Commies. Sure, Batman fought many other villains…but it just wasn't the same.

At some point in the last six months virtually every person who knows me even half-decently has mentioned that I'd be interested to know that Ken Burns' new documentary series is about the National Park Service. Indeed I am quite excited to see The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Having visited over 150 units of the National Park system (and with ready access to all things southern, I plan to work on that in the near future) I can guarantee that I'll watch every minute of the series. I am not alone in my enthusiasm – the critical anticipation and initial reviews border on fawning. Let's briefly overlook the fact that for every hit like The Civil War or Mark Twain Burns has pinched off at least as many turds (Baseball, Jazz, Lewis & Clark). This is no time to get cynical. I choose to think good thoughts about it.

That said, I'm worried. The normal person buried inside of me thinks, "Wow, this speaks directly to my interests!" The rest of me thinks, "Great, how many more assholes in SUVs is this going to bring?"

It's not a secret among people who enjoy the outdoors that several of the most well-known natural attractions in this country are very difficult to visit. Yellowstone is essentially unvisitable during warm weather. Visitors to Great Smoky Mountains or Shenandoah in any season except winter end up sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for a couple hours. Yosemite is grossly overdeveloped, with Bay Area day-trippers apparently requiring a full-sized supermarket in the valley to meet their needs. Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon are excellent places to meet every Japanese tourist or rented RV full of unhappily vacationing Midwestern families on the planet. Glacier, despite its size and remote location, is always packed. These places attract large numbers of visitors because they are spectacular, but the throngs of suburbanites who want to experience Nature through the window of their Ford Excursion are overwhelming to people who actually want to escape.

The secret, of course, is that there are secrets. Few people know of or visit Guadalupe Mountains, Pinnacles, Chiricahua, Walnut Canyon, Bent's Old Fort, Theodore Roosevelt (North Unit, thank you very much), or Craters of the Moon. Yet these are just a handful of places that are as amazing as the big names – and better, because there's no one there most of the time. We devoted fans trade tips about lesser-known places and take pains to ensure that we do it quietly. The last thing we want, of course, is for something like a popular TV series to blab all of the system's secrets. A few Ken Burns segments about Chaco Culture or Capulin Volcano will be enough to blow their cover.

I will continue looking forward to this series, but I hope it sticks to the attractions that are already badly overcrowded and most recognizable to a typical TV viewer. Like one might bake a separate birthday cake for the kids to ruin in order to protect the real one, I get the impression that the NPS has written off the Yellowstones, Yosemites, and Smokies of the system and is looking to save the rest. The big name parks are revenue makers and attention getters. They're for the casual fan, the dilettante. They are to the outdoors what Fela Kuti is to world music. While it's not my place to judge how other people prefer to enjoy a public good, I'd be more than happy to keep the RV and diesel generator crowd focused on Yellowstone and ignorant of our hidden gems.