.....in which I give thanks for some things.

I suspect many bloggers will take the opportunity that this week presents to list some things for which they are thankful.  Normally, I don't like to do what everyone else does, but to not take some time to think about the things that I'm thankful for would seem ungrateful, so here we go:  a list of things that I am thankful for on the week of Thanksgiving, 2015, with some brief comments on why I am thankful for them.  In, of course, no particular order.

• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That probably sounds pretty patriotic, even jingoistic, but when I look around at the world today -- to say nothing of human history -- it's a pretty substantial blessing to be living in a time and place where I don't have to worry over much about getting shot, being imprisoned, starving to death, dying of rampant disease, spending my life exploited in a sweatshop, etc., etc., etc.  Screwed up as we are, it is still a pretty good thing to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
• Other human beings.  I've been privileged in life to know a lot of people who are superlatively interesting, fun loving, kind, generous and/or some combination of all of them.  We need people around us.  It's part of life.  Didn't Aristotle say something about man being, at base, a political (which is to say social) animal?  Even that new Fox show about the Last Man on Earth couldn't survive long without throwing some other people into the mix.  We should learn from that.  It's probably the only thing we can learn from that show, beyond the folly of expecting Will Forte to carry his own program, but it's an important lesson.  We should truly appreciate the people around us. 
• Beer:  Those four letters pretty much say it all.  If they don't, I'm not sure anything else I could write by way of explanation would help.
• Golf:  See above on the four letters and their adequacy/inadequacy regarding explanation.
• I am thankful that when my infant son cries because he is hungry, we are generally able to do something about it.  I had this thought the other day.  It's embarrassing and tragic that in a world as technologically and economically advanced as we are that there are numbers of parents who still have to listen to their children cry out in hunger and not be able to do anything about it beyond hold them and cry with them.  Dammit but we need to do better about this. 
• Cars that run.  I'm at the moment driving a 2006 Volvo S40 that my wife bought new nearly 10 years ago.  112k miles with barely any mechanical work beyond routine maintenance.  That's not my general experience with cars.  I'll take it.
• That I was born and raised in Montana.  It's hard to say this without implying insult to people born anyplace else, but there's just something superlative in Montana character development.  Mind you, this isn't to trumpet my own character.  It's to imagine how much more flawed it would be if I weren't from Montana.
• Air travel.  I'm not the most well-travelled man in the world, but I've been some pretty cool places.  I've seen temples in Thailand and India, cathedrals in Europe, and mosques in the Arabian Desert.  Not bad for a farm boy from Montana, and I doubt any of it would have happened without the modern system of air travel.  Also it allows my parents to visit me frequently though I live miles away from home.  Or it would if my mom weren't paralyzed with fear of flying and my dad could stand to be away from a firearm for more than 30 minutes.  Maybe I should re-think that Montana bit.
• The crumbling American economy.  Stay with me on this one.  I'm told by those who should know that it is becoming harder and harder for Americans to achieve any real financial independence anymore.  Lower median income and mounting student debt are making such things as owning homes more unrealistic for an increasing number of people, and people are dependent on their parents for more than just health insurance much later in life.  One side effect of this is that it is taking Americans longer and longer to effectively grow up.  Effectively, that is to say, we're younger longer.  My experience meshes with this.  I'm just over 40, and I still feel like a relatively young man, particularly economically speaking.  20 years ago, I would have been identified as middle aged.  So, yeah, bring on the mortgage that I can hardly pay even though my salary is near the top of national averages for professors in my discipline at comparable colleges.  If it means I can keep credibly pretending I'm 29, I'm all for it.  Or at least I keep telling myself that.
• The increasingly long, expensive, and sensationalized American Presidential election cycle.  No, I'm not serious here.  I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.
• The Public School system.  As incredibly fraught with problems as it is (more on this below), it is a pretty nice thing to be able to drop my son off in the morning and know that he is safe, taken care of, and that someone is at least making some kind of attempt to educate him while I am at work. 
• I am thankful that I went through the process of public schooling when and where I did.  Education has gotten shockingly bad in our day and age, as this video of students at Texas Tech shows.  There's seemingly no guarantee anymore that being "educated" will result in one not being an ignoramus.  I suppose if we as a society have to choose between feeding everyone and making sure that our next generation knows anything beyond what's going on with the Kardashians, I'll take feeding the hungry, but come on, we can do better.  Speaking of college students.....
• I'm thankful for my students at Patrick Henry College.  Being a college prof is pretty much a plum job in any case (but for the cavernous debt and low salaries) but the intellectual acumen, maturity, and curiosity of PHC students make teaching class an experience that pretty much approaches conversation with colleagues.  Those of you reading this, thanks sincerely.  It's much appreciated.
• Dogs.  The most loving and non-judgmental part of God's creation.  Mankind couldn't ask for a better best friend.  Speaking of non-judgment......
• Grace.  I am profoundly thankful beyond measure that good Lord in heaven above has forgiven me my sins, both egregious and otherwise.  Beyond that, I'm quite thankful to the people who know and love me for putting up with the barrels of grief* that I am prone to dish out along with all of this wit and charm.  I'm looking especially at you, Nicole Grewell.  You're a saint, and it means the world to me.

I'm sure there's more I could and should list, but I don't want this to turn into an Oscars acceptance speech.  I will say lastly that if you've read this far, I'm thankful to you for reading.  If you're still reading and glutton for more punishment, you might be interested in checking out a piece I recently published in Transpositions, a really nifty online journal out of St. Andrews University on Imagination and the Arts.  The piece is on reading "dark" literature.  Otherwise, I'll hope to see you all next Tuesday.  Happy Thanksgiving!

*I might have chosen a more appropriately descriptive word here, but I felt the internal rhyme with "wit" later on in the sentence was a bit much.

......in which I inadvertently defend Donald Trump from accusations of racism.

In the Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley offhand referred to Donald Trump as a "racist carnival barker."  I like "carnival barker."  It's good satire.  It's funny.  It picks on the Donald for less than laudable character traits and -- as is appropriate for a Democratic politician in that sort of format -- casts significant doubts in the minds of would-be voters as to whether or not Trump would be a good choice for the highest office in the land.  I am, however, bothered by O'Malley's assertion that Trump is a racist.  I'm even more bothered by the fact that this epithet, which has been leveled at the Donald repeatedly since his much ballyhooed announcement of his candidacy, seems to be more or less uncritically accepted by Trump's political opponents as a truism.  While it is undoubtedly true that the Donald said some not so nice and probably insensitive things about people who emigrate to the United States from Mexico (illegally, by the way, Trump has numerous times clarified that his comments do not pertain to legal immigrants), those comments are not racist in themselves and by no means provide any clear proof that Donald Trump is a racist.

I should clarify a couple of things here before I go on to make my case.  First, I am not claiming that Trump is not a racist.  He may or may not be.  I don't know the Donald beyond what I've seen on TV.  For all I know, he may be the very embodiment of the kind of man Homer Simpson claimed to be when he was trying to get out of jury duty:  i.e.  "prejudiced against all races."  All I'm arguing here is that his comments weren't, technically speaking -- and this is important -- racist as such.

Secondly, this is not a defense of nor an endorsement for Donald Trump as either a person or a presidential candidate.  I'm only obliquely concerned with Donald Trump at all.  What I'm really concerned about in the ongoing rhetoric about Trump's racism is the sloppy and incorrect usage of the term "racist."  My stance here towards those who accuse Donald Trump of racism is that of Inigo Montoya to Viccini in The Princess Bride when he questions him about his usage of the term "inconceivable":  i.e.  "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means."  The issue is one of language.  See, the problem is that language follows usage, so if we keep using the word incorrectly, then it loses the meaning it has had and therefore uses its utility in the production of cultural meaning.  I'm a professor of language and literature.  I read, write, and try to teach others to do the same.  Words are the tools that I work with.  It concerns me when they get distorted and bent out of shape because then I can't use them anymore, at least not in the way that they were designed to be useful to me.   My dad is, among other things, a mechanic.  He used to get justifiably a little upset at my brothers and me when we were kids for misusing his tools because if we lost or broke them, then he didn't have them when he needed them.  That's how I feel about words.  It's important to keep them where they belong so that they're there when we need them.  My post is thus linguistic more than it is political.  Put another way, though I am in fact a registered Republican, it is not as a Republican that the misuse of the term "racist" offends me, it is as a linguist.  I feel a little bit like Jerry Seinfeld in the "Anti-Dentite" episode, where his dentist, Nick Watley converts to Judaism for the jokes; he notes that the conversion offends him not as a Jew, but as a comedian.  Anyway, on to the case that Trump's remarks were not racist.

Before looking at the remarks themselves, I should, of course, attempt to settle what the term "racist" means.  I'm going to make the assumption that we can rely on the folks working over at Merriam-Webster to do this for us.  Their dictionary provides two working definitions of racism.  The first reads, "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race" and the second is "racial prejudice or discrimination."  The second seems to be the one most people are attributing to the Donald in his comments on Mexican immigrants.

The thing is, though, that Mexicanity (thanks to the venerable Michael Scott for this handy term) is not, properly speaking, a race.  It's a nationality.  And in this day and age, one imagines that there are people of numerous races who are, in fact, Mexican.  Thus, even if we grant that the Donald is prejudiced against people from Mexico -- and I don't know that we can safely say that he is; he did after all, even in his most strident comments against the (illegal) immigrants, be careful to note that "some [Mexican (illegal) immigrants], I assume, are good people" -- that does not necessarily make him a racist, because Mexicanity is not a race. 

I suppose that many of the Donald's detractors are trying to make the case that his comments betray a general prejudice against people of Hispanic descent.  A case that, by the way, is a completely unfair stretching of his actual comments. Seriously, look at them again and leave your own prejudices against Donald Trump in particular and conservatives in general at the door.  They don't say anything about Cubans, South Americans, El Salvadorians, Americans of Hispanic descent, etc.  They are limited to Mexican (illegal) immigrants.  Yet, even if we grant that the Donald is denigrating Hispanics, according to FBI race codes, even that wouldn't make the comments racist, technically speaking, because "Hispanic" refers not to a race, but an ethnicity.  Ethnicity is a marker that includes race, among other things, in its distinguishing capacity, but it is a much larger concept.  You might argue that this makes Trump's comments more offensive, not less.  Perhaps.  But they are not "racist."

One might ask why it is important to be so precise.  Well, aside from the general idea of the utility of language that I've referred to above, it is important to limit the term "racism" to its actual meaning because the thing it refers to is important.  Discrimination against a people on account of their race is an odious thing.  This becomes obvious when we look at historically racist institutions, e.g. Nazi Germany, the ante-bellum American South, etc.  We are repeatedly told that racism is still a lingering problem in our country, and it probably to some extent is, but if we are to work towards eradicating it, it seems to me important that we don't sloppily conflate the issue with arguments about the relative merits and demerits of broader cultural and ethnic groups.  We run into a similar confusion in our conversations about Islam, which is, of course neither a race nor an ethnicity but a religion.  Any conversation about Islam that employs the terms "race" or "racism" is problematic from the start because it miscategorizes the issue by misusing the terms of discussion.

I think it's important to protect a term like "racism" from suffering the same linguistic fate that the term "barter" has suffered in the English language.  Of course, the folks down at Merriam-Webster are holding the line on "barter," reminding us that it means, "to trade by exchanging one commodity for another," but we are probably all are familiar with friends who have innocently yet ignorantly used the term in place of "haggle," which means to negotiate over price.  The barter/haggle confusion is a textbook instance of needless degeneration of language.  We don't need to confuse the definition of barter; we have a word for what we want to say.  The sloppy usage of "racism" puts the word in danger of suffering the same confusion as "barter," and the cultural stakes of unsettling "racism" as a moniker are much higher than a few dollars saved on a purchase.

As with barter/haggle, we don't have to misuse the term "racist" when discussing Donald Trump's comments on Mexican (illegal) immigrants.  There are words available to describe the insensitive tone of the Donald's remarks.  In fact, I've just used one:  "insensitive."  Personally, I prefer the term "boorish."  I especially like boorish because, not only is it more accurate, but when the adjective, which can be used to describe the Donald's comments, is put into the noun form, boor, it still seems to accurately describe the Donald's person.  And it does so in a way that still gives me pause when considering him as a candidate for the presidency. 

Of course, "boor" is not as damning as "racist."  Being a boor probably does not disqualify one for public office in the same way that being a racist does.  Boorish remarks can still be funny, as when the Donald noted that Hillary Clinton is running for president in order to stay out of prison.  (In the words of Mater the tow-truck, "That's funny right there.")  I suspect this is the reason Trump's opponents prefer the less-accurate epithet of "racist," but that's a discussion for another time, and I don't want to speculate on political motives here anyway.  What I do want to do is urge us as a culture to be more careful and precise in how we use language.          

   

....in which I tackle a pressing issue of immediate cultural relevance: The Plain Red Starbucks Cup

I'm already too late to the party, I suppose, to weigh in with anything like a fresh perspective about this year's first installment of the annual War on Christmas conversation, that being the furor and counter-furor over the plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  The positions, for the most part, have been taken, solidified, and countered thousands of times on social media in the scant few days since Joshua Feuerstein posted his Facebook rant lamenting the absence of Christmas semiotics on his plain red Starbucks Christmas cup.  (By the way, did anyone else catch the irony that Feuerstein is wearing a red ballcap turned around backwards, so that we are missing the symbols that would explicitly identify with his team?)  This morning, my own social media feed was laced with well-meaning but ill-thought-through posts by Christians jumping on the Feuerstein bandwagon, with well-meaning and significantly-more-thought-through posts by Christians pointedly NOT identifying with Feuerstein's rant, and with a few puzzled posts by my liberal friends wondering what the Christians are so worked up about this time.  So the positions are established already.  Well and good.  I don't want to take a position so much anyway as I want to lament the fact that he entire conversation exists.  I'm irritated that, to use the vernacular of my undergraduate students, this is a thing.

For starters, the indignation over the cup is rather ridiculous.  It has been well documented by virtually everybody that none of the images on the old Starbucks Christmas cups was terribly Christian as such.  Many of them are not even terribly Christmas-y, exhibiting, as they do, merely images of winter:  ice skates, snow men, snowflakes, etc.  Several of my friends have pointed out that the red color is really the most Christian thing about the old cups, so that Starbucks has actually retained the essential semiotic of Christmas in the red cup.  This line of reasoning is bolstered by the fact that this year's edition of Starbucks' Christmas Blend -- you'll notice that these leftist Grinches have sloppily left "Christ" in their Christmas Blend -- is the same plain red packaging as the coffee cups. 

As I said above though, the self-righteousness silliness of Christmas zealots and the less-so-but-still-kind-of-self-righteous anxiety of more open-minded Christians to distance themselves from those zealots are both screwing up the opening to my Christmas.  And it's not even Veteran's Day.

See, twenty-some-odd years ago, when I was a kid still, but old enough to drink coffee, Starbucks would have introduced their Christmas cups as plain red cups, and the only thing I or anyone I knew would have thought was, "Huh.  The Christmas cups are plain red this year."  Actually, I doubt we would have even given voice to a thought as vapid as that.  It simply would have been the Christmas cup.  Someone might have noticed that, aesthetically speaking, they preferred the white snowflakes, as my wife did this morning.  (It's an interesting point of fact that the particular cup I think she had in mind hasn't been around since 2007.)  But I don't think anyone would have made anything of the appearance of the cup as an assault on Christmas.  That's because, to a large extent, the culture war over Christmas, with all of its outrage and counter-outrage, didn't exist, at least not to nearly the extent that it does today, and we were all happier for it.

Today, because of the culture of offense and outrage, rather than being happy about the red cup signaling the advent of the Christmas season, I have to think about whether or not the lack of winter symbols on the cup signal some sort of renunciation of the Christmas Holiday.  It's another log on the same fire already stacked with the horribly annoying conversations over whether one ought say, "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays."  When I was a kid, you could say either, and everyone knew you were simply being festive about the Christmas season.  I said "Happy Holidays" sometimes because I heard Bing Crosby sing it on my mom's records, not because I was trying to be especially sensitive to the Jewish kids in town.  (I don't think that there were actually any Jewish kids in the small town I grew up in, but that's beside the point.  It wouldn't have changed anything). 

The "Merry Christmas"/"Happy Holidays" dilemma, while I'm on the subject, is another annoyingly manufactured and completely false occasion for moral outrage.  I'm not offended by either festive greeting.  I am, however, tremendously irritated at anyone being offended by either greeting, because, again, instead of being able to enjoy Christmas in a spirit of joyous festivity, I'm forced to think about our painfully annoying cultural moment.  I think it was actually the politically correct crowd on the left that was responsible for kicking off this one.  There was some idiotic idea that wishing a merry Christmas to someone who wasn't a practicing Christian was somehow forcing your religion on them.  The solution was to generically refer to Christmas as "the Holiday" or "the Season" as if somehow not naming it made it more innocuous.  Actually, I find that the combination of abstraction and adding the definite article actually seems to result in a veritable apotheosis of Christmas as THE HOLIDAY, the holiday above all other holidays.  Thusly, Christmas is, albeit unwittingly, more exalted than ever.  Sure, Hanukkah is right around the corner and Kwanzaa (in all it's manufactured glory) almost overlaps, but Christmas is "the Holiday."  Never thought of it that way, eh? 

Of course, there are those who will maintain that "Happy Holidays" is nice because it is inclusive all of the holidays that surround Christmas, including Thanksgiving, and I'm sure they mean it when they say so, but really, we all know that the etymology of the phrase in common usage refers to Christmas, or at most Christmas and New Year, the veritable season of the 12 Days.  

In any case, the outrage is needless.  Only in America could we be so dumb as to somehow turn a timeless greeting of good will ("Merry Christmas") into something offensive, and then react by the equally stupid decision to take offense at a less-specific-but-equally-festive-and-well-meant greeting ("Happy Holidays") as an assault on Christmas.  When I was teaching in Dubai, my students routinely wished me a Happy Eid before we took the holiday break from university.  I don't recall ever thinking that their greeting was offensive or an attempt to force their Islam on me.  I took it as a genuine wish that I would enjoy the holiday, which was, in fact, Eid, whether I celebrated it with religious observation or not.  Incidentally, the same students wished me a Merry Christmas before we broke at Christmas time.  Muslims wished me Merry Christmas.  I assume that was because they knew I celebrated Christmas and, again, hoped it was happy.  I wished them both Merry Christmas and Happy Eid in turn, for similar reasons.  I wished my Indian students Happy Diwali.  See, in Dubai, they really have a good take on being mulit-cultural, especially as regards holidays.  If there's a holiday, celebrated by a member of the cultural constituency, let's all celebrate it.  That's the idea there.  Nobody is offended.  If it's religious for you, it's religious.  If it's not, it's not.  But nobody has to pretend like a holiday doesn't exist, nor does anyone get worked up by anybody else's observance or lack thereof.  We could learn from that. 
   
So, I guess what I'm saying is that this Christmas, it would be lovely if nobody got offended about anything.  Personally, I like to wait until at least Thanksgiving weekend to celebrate in earnest, but, once that gets here, let's pass around those plain red cups full of Eggnog Latte and wish each other good cheer.  After all, the spirit of Christmas, authorized by the angels themselves, was not socio-political zealotry, but was rather, "peace on earth, good will towards men."