Florida is Done
The pathetic spectacle of a state hammered by two severe hurricanes in just a few weeks must be viewed in the context of home insurers canceling policies, resale values dropping, the immense costs of rebuilding after each storm, algae blooms which kill dogs, bleaching coral, starving manatees, rising sea level flooding neighborhoods in Miami and the Keys, lakes with no fish and the beat goes on. Who does Florida elect in its moment of need? A governor who won't acknowledge any of this as human-caused, and, besides proposing hotels and golf courses in state parks, is spending all his time fucking with Disney, censoring and even throwing out books, telling LBGT people not to visit Florida any more, destroying New College, harassing pro-abortion organizations, and, in consummate Rudy style, harassing and doxing anyone who stands up to him. I am boycotting Florida, an easy choice because the things I treasured there-- the coral and the manatees, for example-- are being destroyed.
The Israeli Pager Escapade
The routine reaction in the media to the Israeli booby-trapping of thousands of pagers distributed to Hezbollah members was "How clever those Israelis are!" What got elided was that it was a consummate act of terrorism that bin Laden would have admired. The assertion that "It is all right to terrorize the terrorists", which has been Israel's creed for its entire existence, results in all the world becoming terrorists if we adopted it as a Kantian imperative. The chattering classs (or most of them) also avoided any understanding of the depravity of setting off bombs in devices that might be near a child or even being played with by one, in the pocket of a guest at a wedding or a worshipper praying in a mosque with his civilian neighbors. The people who come up to shout at me at the Sunday demonstration I attend, that there are no civilians in Gaza, that the children are all baby terrorists, , sociopathic and hateful as they are, are at least honest aboiut their views, while the rest, who simply pass over all this in silence, are hypocrites.
University Ad Ministration
I did my first student disciplinary matter fifteen years ago, for a friend, then got a bunch of referrals during the pandemic of students threatened with sanctions for Black Lives Matter demos. One thing I observed over and over, back then, was that every university I had been raised to revere-- Ivys, performing arts schools, feisty public colleges which had produced an earlier generation of socially mobile intellectuals-- had one thing in common. Administration at each place were surprisingly infantile, egotistical, and disassociated from any concept of the values of academic freedom or even those inherent in other aspects of operating a liberal arts school. Now, since October 7, 2023, I have developed a full time pro bono retirement practice defending students and faculty, and--news flash-- it is all not only true, its getting worse.
In recent years, there has been some coverage (maybe not here) of the transformation of universities into Fortune 1000 companies: the old president, a professor of classics, retires or dies, and her replacement is a former CEO or VP of a Fortune company. Staff is cut, as are non-tenured professors. Departments are closed, majors discontinued. Faculty leave, hating the changed environment. Enrollment drops. Death spiral!
Today, most trustees are business people, and many are Trump supporters. They may be alumni but have no comprehension of the university as historical organism, as entity. For decades, they deferred to norms, like the people you never knew were racists until Trump said it was OK. Now they are gleefully targeting the "woke", the people of color, Palestinians, Arab Americans, anyone who says the word Palestine in class. Doubtless, some are not as malevolent as they are cowardly, unable to withstand the excruciating pressure applied by billionaire donors, the right wing media, and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
De Santis' gutting and zombification of New College of Florida provides the model. He is a pioneer, not an outlier.
Instance of a return to feudalism
Young people who grew up here, blue collar workers and service providers, and the middle of the middle class such as teachers, all cannot afford to live in my town, East Hampton, which has approved and built a handful of affordable apartments in the last thirty years. A secondary effect is the horrendous traffic on route 27, our two-lane highway, as the locally employed drive eighty miles from and to their homes in western Suffolk. Along comes a local real estate developer and announces the conversion of a building he purchased to apartments to be sold to local businesses only, large and small, for their employees. The semiotics are rather fascinating: this is not a nonprofit effort but is being wrapped in all sorts of piety. The odds seem quite good that no bakers or schoolteachers will actually ever live there; the apartments will be a perk for high performing real estate brokers and the like. But if working class people and the aspirational middle class lived in those apartments, just imagine your boss also being your landlord, all up in business at hoime as well as at work. A loss of employment will automatically cause eviction, rather than just tending to do so, as it does everywhere else. Its an instance of our headlong rush back to feudalism, but no one sees it.
Just open a store in those projects with overpriced essentials, which takes only scrip issued by the employer, and we will be partying like its 1910.