Eric The Red

27 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Breaking Bad, Colleagues, Eric, Graduate School, Indoctrination, Marxism, Mentoring, Pitt, Politics of Academia, Racism, Walter White, White Privilege

Bryan Cranston as Walter White (“bald” edition) in AMC’s Breaking Bad (screen shot, cropped), August 2011.

All these years with this blog and I’ve never written about the first of the people who came into my life and decided that I needed their tutelage about grad school and life in general. Because of people like him, despite their helpfulness, I always have found myself leery about people telling me that they will “mentor me” or about calling myself a mentor of any kind. It should be the type of process that happens organically, based on mutual respect and trust, and not just because one person is a generation or more older than the other person.

The first person to volunteer themselves as a mentor during my first year as a graduate school in the University of Pittsburgh’s History department was Eric, who was 42 or 43 to my 21 year-old self in September 1991. A year and a half earlier, Eric was the teaching assistant for my upper-level American Working-Class History course with Dick Oestreicher. We had exactly two interactions that semester. One was when Eric had scored my midterm exam short essays an 89. I asked him, “So, what’s the difference between an 89 and a 90 on this exam, anyway?” His mouth fell open, because he didn’t have an answer. He changed my grade to a 90 on the spot. Two was at a going-away party for my TA from my Western Civ II course my first year at Pitt, Paul Riggs. Paul was headed to Edinburgh, Scotland on fellowship to explore the height, weight, and diet differences among 18th and early 19th century European men in connection to a larger econometrics dissertation. (I still don’t quite know what Paul’s dissertation was about, beyond half-starve British and French soldiers hoping to grow to five-three before dying from bayonets or typhoid during the Napoleonic Wars.)

It just happened that when administrators assigned me a cubby hole for a desk my first year in grad-school-land, that it was in the same part of the department as Eric’s cubicle. His spot included a window that looked out from the third floor of Forbes Quadrangle (now Wesley Posvar Hall) to the open space below, as well as to Hillman Library, David Lawrence Hall, and if you tilted your head to the right, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the lower floor of the Cathedral of Learning. It was a prime spot, and Eric never hesitated to let me or anyone else know that he had earned it.

Eric had, in fact, earned it. He became a grad student in the department at the same time Pitt had awarded me an academic scholarship to attend as an undergrad, in 1987. He bragged about the fact that he had gone from having “only an Associate’s Degree to ABD in just three years.” Pitt had also rewarded Eric an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in 1990, making it seem he was on “cruise control” for finishing his doctorate in a couple of years.

What I’d learn about Eric over the next two years was that he was also a very active Marxist, a card-carrying member of the Community Party USA (or, maybe, if I’m remembering it wrong, the Socialist Party USA), and a trained actor who had made documentaries and written for news rags about union-busting, union-organizing, and class struggle since the mid-1970s. This would appeal to the powers that were in the department (including Oestreicher, his dissertation advisor), a place that privileged Marxist and neo-Marxist thought above all else.

The acting and other public-facing work made Eric a stand-out pontificator, but was also where his open declaration of his “mentoring” of me irritated me a helluva lot. Many times during our two years together in the same department, Eric would interrupt me in the middle of a conversation with a peer, or when reading a book before class, or when I was prepping to TA, or otherwise just working away on a research project. It was usually with articles on a topic different from my research on multiculturalism or with an issue he wanted to debate me on. Sometimes, these interruptions and distractions I welcomed, maybe even, needed. But so many times, not so much.

Eric accused me on several occasions of having “a chip on [my] shoulder.” Maybe I did have one, mostly about the erasure of anything on American race and racism by the Marxist set in the department. Eric, though, was the proverbial pot-meet-kettle type. His chip made mine look like a speck. Looking back, Eric reminds me a bit of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White from Breaking Bad. Both he and the fictionalized White could not see how their sense of white male privilege shaped their worldview and their interactions with people. In my case, Eric assumed that I sometimes asked him a question or sought his advice as a sign that I needed mentoring, when in my mind, I was just asking a question or seeking an opinion from whomever was around at 9 pm on a Thursday night.

But nothing piqued Eric’s interest in me more than his attempts to make me into a Marxist. “Racism is a byproduct of dialectic materialism” or “capitalism,” Eric would sometimes say (or at least, as much as I can remember him saying). This line of whitemansplaining I had heard in less sophisticated circles years ago. I never told Eric about all my arguments over the years with my Humanities classmate JD, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I had. Eric was deep into his cups of Marxist wisdom, deep enough to ignore my counterarguments. “You cannot understand inequality in America without also accounting for racism,” I often said. I did enjoy these debates, at least at first. By my second semester, and especially by my second year, I was weary.

I didn’t see Eric much the second half of the 1992-93 school year (this as I prepared to transfer from Pitt to Carnegie Mellon to battle with privileged-white-privileged, ass-kissing center-right fake Marxists). I guess that was when he finally sat down to write his dissertation, though it would be a number of years before Eric would complete it to his doctoral thesis committee’s satisfaction.

I wouldn’t have learned about the good qualities of Rolling Rock or explored hard apple cider without his encouragement. But, as intriguing as these arguments with Eric could sometimes be, I longed for being understood, for people who took the centrality of racism to everything that is the US and the West seriously. It would be a long time before I’d find people like me in this life.

From Heat Checks to Hail Marys

13 Monday Sep 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work

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Failure, Fear of a "Black" America, Hail Mary, Heat Check, Narcissism American Style, Next Steps, Publishing, self-publishing, Sports Analogy, Writing

Heat Check, Hail Mary, between Steph Curry and Aaron Rodgers (cropped and spliced), September 13, 2021.

This is my final (maybe?) essay in my series More Confessions From an Educated Fool. I do need help, to keep me from self-publishing a third book, to make the leap into writing beyond the freelancing. I ask, but I don’t think I ask correctly. Or, maybe people just don’t like me. Anyway, the essay is less than 1,000 words. Please read.

Make no mistake. This post is a plea for help to reach the next stage as a writer, to get a book out into the world with some measure of success. I’d prefer not to go the route of the self-published manuscript this time, where the book has no chance to reach more than a few hundred people or maybe a couple thousand people. For those who are better positioned as writers, I’m not asking for your first-born child. However, if you have enjoyed my stories, my blog, or my published work over the years, maybe, put in a word with an agent if you have one? Or, maybe, if I ask you to read a chapter of my latest ms, that you read it and give me feedback? Or, maybe even, just the least bit of encouragement to hang in there?

My latest manuscript is titled Narcissism, American Style: Essays on Racism, Narcissism, and How to Get to a Post-Western World. (I do have an alternative title, Sage’s Gold.) It was originally supposed to be a series of essays on America’s narcissism, its origins, permutations, and the damage it has done and will do to the world if left unchecked. After I had published a piece in The Atlantic on the hidden psychological costs of college education for first-gen students five years ago, I did a heat check, put together an initial proposal and a cover letter, and sent out my idea to agents. Two immediately responded, but said no (or didn’t respond) after I sent them my initial drafts. Oh well!

Then, I started writing out the essays, all to figure out what direction this book should take. I had two epiphanies along the way. One, I needed to make my mostly US-focused book one that challenged the West, and that meant testing out parts of essays as articles. Two, I needed to figure out where this world is headed as long as the US and the West remain steadfast in leading and exploiting resources and lives.

That’s where all my articles with Al Jazeera come in. After years of mostly writing articles on education and Black and US identity, I mostly dropped looking at K-16 education reform and debates in 2017. Al Jazeera gradually gave me the platform to write about my topic for an international audience. And despite Al Jazeera’s flaws, it was an opportunity I needed.

But after a while, having figured out how to turn longer essays into digestible article- and op-ed-length chunks, the obvious question to me was, Who’s gonna offer me a contract for a collection of essays that were mostly published as articles internationally — especially in these elite New York streets? That was in the fall of 2018. It occurred to me that I could take another approach, to embed these essays as conversations about a post-Western and post-US world. That made me think of Derrick Bell and his best-selling allegories, published as the nonfiction books And We Are Not Saved and Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Bell demonstrated the necessity of critical race theory to describe the permanence of racism within the American matrix in both books. I needed to do something similar, an ms where systems of racist and class-based oppression had been destroyed as part of the climate-change apocalypse, but the narcissism of our current age lingered on in this new world order.

In early 2017, I had written a post where I envisioned a descendant of mine in Olivia, and what her post-Western and post-US world might look like. I sensed this could be useful in furthering my book idea. I began writing up allegories based on my vision of Olivia in 2018, and worked them out for most of 2019. I wasn’t sure I could completely mesh these allegories with the fuller version of my published pieces, or with those essays I hadn’t published. This was why I asked friends, colleagues, frenemies even, to take a look at earlier drafts. My PhD-ed colleagues mostly didn’t get it. My writer buddies told me they liked it, with two telling me “less is more.” Or, they were like, “Can you even sell this in today’s market?”

Then I fully committed. After separating the nonfiction essays from the allegories about Olivia’s world to rework them as standalones, I sensed in my bones that they needed each other. I spent much of 2020 writing and rewriting to bring the two halves together, but cutting and rewriting anything that didn’t fit. Once I got sections to the point of “this works,” I began contacting publishers, agents, and colleagues again. Some obviously liked what they read, but because Narcissism, American Style was now both nonfiction essays and speculative allegorical fiction, they didn’t “know how to sell this book.” It didn’t matter that I identified Bell, Patricia J. Williams, Kiese Laymon, Octavia Butler, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar (among others) who had successfully done what I am doing now in varying degrees with their books.

This is where I stand right now, about to make another run at finding a publisher this fall. I need any and all help I can get. I have previously reached out to folks who have agreed to read and critique, and then, nothing. Sometimes, I find myself trusting no one. The pandemic has made this mistrust worse. If people can’t consistently keep a mask on, how can I put faith in anyone to read my manuscript with care and honesty, assuming they actually read it at all? It would be one thing if I didn’t think my work was good enough. But even the most self-disparaging of writers knows when they’ve written something publishable, if not for themselves, then for the world. This is my Hail Mary. I pray someone will see or sense it, and respond.

The Three Stooges of My Paths

03 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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Academia, Capitalism, Cogs in the Machine, Corruption, Moe Larry and Curly, Nonprofit World, Politics, Publishing Industry, Racism, The Three Stooges

This is the fourth post in my series arc of More Confessions From an Educated Fool. This one deals with the “cares of this world,” and how I got caught in a web of them, over and over again, like I was prey for a spider to bite and suck the life out of me.

So, a university president, a corporate senior vice president, and nonprofit senior program officer are all sitting at a bar off East 59th Street, after a long decision-day Thursday. Gus, their bartender, asks in his Hollywood-exaggerated New Yorker accent, “Hey jerks, what is it that youse do for a living, anyway?

Damon, the university president says, “I kneel and grovel for money.”

Steve, the senior program officer says, “I do cartwheels, somersaults, and floor exercises for money.”

After a brief pause, Alan, the senior VP says, “I use ads spots to hold up people for money,” while gesturing with his right hand in his blazer pocket. “Now give me your wallets!,” he says. The other two stooges laugh without restraint.

Gus pulls out his Saturday night special, and points it at the senior VP. “You mean like this?”

The senior VP says, without batting an eyelash or turning away, “I work for a trillion-dollar company. We get a billion people to sign their lives away every day. Hell yeah, it’s like this!”

The other stooges and Gus laugh. Damon pounds the table with his fist so hard he knocks over his drink.

After putting away his gun, Gus says, “What’ll it be? This one’s on me!”

Without taking a beat, all three gents say, “A vodka tonic.”

I have walked three paths in my career. Academia, the nonprofit world, and writing and publishing (and self-publishing) articles and books. Academia will claim that it isn’t a capitalist endeavor. The nonprofit world will say it claims 501(c)(3) tax status because they are changing the world by doing good works. The corporate world deflects while fully engaged in public displays of affection with capitalism, lips and tongues and spit included. “That’s just the way it is,” they sigh before another round of groping.

All of them are liars, I have found with 30 years (mostly) in and (sometimes) out of academia, 11 years working and consulting with nonprofits, and 20 years of off-and-on work in publishing articles and beating my brains into mush in book publishing. But if they are all liars, the lies are for people who are looking to do good in the world, for disdainful people, but people not so cynical that they have given up their core principles and universal moral values. They are for people like me.

That’s what capitalists do. They take advantage of people and rob them of their wealth, of their minds and bodies and souls. They like to do this at gunpoint, but they love to do it with slogans and pitches. “Connecting People, Creating Change” was the mantra of one Academy for Educational Development (AED), a nonprofit I worked with for nearly eight years. I used to joke that their real slogan was “Corrupting People, Creating Chaos.” The sad part was how correct I was in my assessment. This was even before I took on budgetary duties for a multimillion-dollar grant on a K-16 education project, where I learned AED had us mid- and senior-level program officer types to keep three separate budgets: one for the government, one for funders and potential funders (to hide our overhead), and the real one for AED’s nabobs. That last one included a one-percent vig on all grants that any of us brought in, a “rainy day fund” meant only for AED’s most senior staff.

It turned AED into a $600-million-a-year Ponzi scheme, and included millions in bribes to corrupt Afghans as part of the cost of “Connecting People, Creating Change” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The truth was, the 501(c)(3) status was only to get away with making a profit off government and private foundation funding without having to pay a cent in corporate income taxes. I knew this was the reality of this world in 1999, when I made the switch to full-time nonprofit work with Presidential Classroom, when my former APUSH teacher Harold Meltzer laughed at the idea of nonprofits in the US’ capitalist regime. I had ideals about doing good outside of higher education, but I was never naive about their larger money-making agenda.

Publishers, agents, and editors would have me believe that the only criteria for publishing my stuff is if my fastball, curveball, and slider/sinker combination is good enough for dissemination. But first always comes the disclaimer: “if you have a work that doesn’t easily fit into a formulaic category, or if you are Black and over 40, or if you don’t account for the feelings of fragile white readers, we can’t make money, so we can’t publish you.” However, “we will publish schlock, how-to guides, and very famous people with ghostwriters, because that’s easy work for quick bucks.” They are the most honest liars, mostly because they don’t give a shit about the greater good. I can work with this.

But what I can no longer stomach is academia’s hypocrisy. This time 30 years ago was my first week as an MA student in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Eric, a fourth-year grad student and PhD candidate in the program, a man who once saw himself as my mentor (I never saw him that way), explained the nature of academia this way. “The academy is a medieval institution, whose ways are founded on the idea of the guild.” In my head, I’m thinking, This is utter bullshit. The European university began its missions during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries to be sure. But they needed funds to run then, and they damn sure do now. This analysis from an avowed 40-something Marxist let me know just how much he didn’t get about the academic world.

The only thing medieval about academia in my three decades of learning, teaching, and experiencing it is its ideals. In reality, academia is a money-making machine for its boards, for its athletics programs, and for the “hot stuff,” scientific and technological research. It serves at the will of deep pocketed robber barons, professional athletic corporations, and at the behest of corrupt governments and the military-industrial complex. That anyone comes out of a college or graduate or professional school with their sense of morality and social justice intact is no small miracle. That anyone these days earns their degrees with low debt or no debt at all is either part of the super-rich class or has performed a feat John the Baptist would be proud of. And in that latter-day case, they probably are completely fine with the system the way it is, supporting the bloated salaries of upper university managers everywhere.

The story about the three stooges of my career should end with them all stumbling drunk out of the bar, only to be robbed by some random guy wearing a ski mask. After all, that is what they deserve. What I deserve, well, that’s a bit more complicated. Loving money has a way of making the mediocre hireable, popular, and powerful, while marginalizing everything and everyone else. I spent so many years chasing promotions for funds to help pay down student loan debt and to provide for our son the life I never had growing up with poverty (and then welfare poverty in my teens). The strategy didn’t work.

I had to accept that I am not built to be a capitalist cog or hamster. I had to accept that I as a person ask questions, and make good trouble doing so. I am at my best as a writer and thinker. I am at my best when I question the worlds I have inhabited, not when I am just going along to get along in them.