Funny how writing a post about a muppet christmas carol can lead to it getting demoted from best christmas carol adaptation

I kinda refuse to believe that older men are less misogynistic than men my age and I also refuse to believe a lot of this "growing misogyny problem in young men" research. I think the scale and visibility of it is all very new, but I don't think the attitudes are.

Like, you're not seriously telling me the generations that grew up with Girls Gone Wild and Tucker Max books and the OG Men's Rights Movement and "DR PEPPER MAX IT'S NOT FOR WOMEN" and "Smear the Queer" and Howard Stern videos and hypersexual Rock music videos and shitty Pop Punk songs that spoke of young women in such entitled and manipulative ways are any more accepting or well adjusted than your average Andrew Tate fan. Like it wasn't Zoomer and Millenial men that killed Kitty Genovese or Elizabeth Short. Ted Bundy was born in 1946. Misogyny has always been around and men and boys have traditionally always leaned more conservative than women and girls, because one of the basic standards of patriarchy is promising men and boys rewards and hyper-autonomy as long as they keep selling their souls to be good little cogs in the capitalist machine because that's what "real men" do (and if you're straight-- which a lot of these guys are-- you really want the capital and typical trappings of masculinity anyway, because those things are the quickest ways to get a girlfriend or a wife and "win" the game), while women aren't really promised anything but basic survival needs, and only if they're under the thumb of a man while doing so. It's also why war drafts were so enticing and successful in years past; if you're a good little meatshield, a good little worker bee, there'll lines of treasure and toys and games and women waiting for you hand and foot and you'll be revered as an honorable and respected warrior in Vallhalla / Heaven / Paradise / etc.

It's all a very meticulous system. Nothing has changed, everything is still moving exactly the way it's supposed to, this is just how it's always been. I'm sure if you went back to any high school during the Reagan or Bush years, most of the boys there would say they lean conservative or moderate as well. The only reason younger men acting more on these he-man misogyny-homophobia sprees now is because the trappings their fathers and grandfathers were promised are no longer viable realities and they're feeling betrayed about it. In the 70s you could go to school and college for cheap, then spend an entire week doing nothing but going to concerts and meeting cute girls because shows were 8 bucks a pop. The modern job market is garbage, college is getting more expensive, alienation is more common than ever with stagnant salaries forcing people to pick up longer shifts and take on anywhere from 2-4 jobs, leaving no time to socialize. The standards for masculinity remain the same as they were in the 50s, despite this. Boys are turning to guys like Andrew Tate and Kevin Samuels, because those guys are the embodiment of capitalist patriarchy and falling into that mindset reads, to them, as the quickest easiest and most "correct" way to achieve standards of manhood that are as highly regarded from the average person as they are outdated in this desolate economy we all find ourselves trapped under. It's very much the "We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars" monologue from Fight Club.

Spiraling into despair about it and turning it all into a big generation war or whatever just seems so....pointless to me? Like men are not becoming-- nor have they ever been-- uniquely evil and stupid. They're groomed by the trapping of western white supremacist capitalism. Seeing it as some unique new slight on reality with no solution just seems so blatantly wrong to me.

so i folded and binge-read lore olympus

im just gonna talk about it cause im bored and there’s stuff i wanna discuss about it. i’ve always been in love with the hades x persephone story (the first version i read was consensual so that’s the one that resonates with me the most) 

im gonna start with the good stuff

- i love the animation! the colours are so fun and cool and i like how captivating they are, and the pink of persephone and blue of hades works well together

- i like that the time frame of olympus and the underworld is expedited compared to the modern world, that’s really neat

- the comedic timing is spot on, both the dialogue and animation can be so great and make me laugh to tears

- hades and persphone’s moments can be so tender and sweet, one scene between them that just sticks with me is when they are cooking together, or the first time she asked the names of his dogs and he lit up. they are so soft for each other and it makes my heart so so warm ;-; and i like their banter too

- i like hermes, and artemis, and eros, and basically everybody who’s become a friend in this series, they’re great (ares is an honourable mention bc he’s funny with amazing character design imo)

- the fact that therapy is a thing here??? pls they all need it omg 

- the exploration of cycles in different extremes (the cycle of fertility goddesses being used for power, having shitty people around you in turn making you shitty to those you love, the fear of becoming one’s parents, etc)

- i like that none of the characters are “good” or “bad”. as it goes with deities, they are as morally grey as you can get especially in regard to mortals. (with the exception of apollo. i hate his character.)

- i appreciate the discussion of boundaries between hades and persephone, letting fluffy moments just be fluffy and sweet

- their relationship in general has very sweet moments and warms my heart a lot of times

- honourable mentions: baby hades being very worrisome for such a small boy, hades with his stars, hades with his crowns and earrings, hades with his little glasses, hades’ scars. hades. 💕 

all in all, it’s a very fun read with many intriguing and cool themes that I love and i’m excited to see how it is concluded

now for critiques 

- why did persephone have to be 19/20??? not 119, not 190, that young compared to everyone around her??? i mean even though on our (mortal) terms, she is legal and perfectly capable of making her own decisions. but the issue within most age gap relationships is not primarily the difference in years itself, but the difference in mindset and stages of life (a relationship between a 14 and 18 year old is vastly different from a relationship between a 30 and 34 year old). there doesnt seem to be a point to make her so young and then pair her with a being literally older than death itself, ya know? but that’s just me 

- not necesarrily the characters, but more so the reactions to them. why is it that hades, modeled to be a capitalist business owner that keeps the dead souls as slaves and does things that are so cruel (i.e tear out some kids eye for a photograph or threaten an employee for asking for ID) is seen as a precious baby that can do no wrong?? now please understand that I love his character, I adore him!!! but he is no baby, and there is nothing stranger than seeing a morally grey character or straight up villain (who doesnt love a good villain every now and again amirite) be coddled and have excuses made for them while their female counterparts are villainized for the same or lesser offenses, which brings me to my next point

- minthe. she is no saint, and i dont like her all that much. she was petty and catty, and an awful and cruel partner towards hades. however, she is complex in that we see her internal monologue and can see that most of these things come from a place of insecurity and deep rooted issues with herself. not to excuse her behaviour because it is all very immature and lame, but i hope to see an arc from her that allows growth and letting go of being forced to see herself as nothing more than a trashy nymph. and learning to apologize properly

- also why was it funny when hecate smacked him across the face like three times but a crime when minthe hit him upside the head. my point is both were bad, but one gets forgotten and forgiven. 

- man why is persephone drawn so mf tiny? i mean it’s cool to be short, but in some frames she’s legit at his waist which is a bit odd since you’re kind of already toeing the line of what is appropriate and what isn’t in their relationship (employer/employee relationship, extreme age difference, somewhat childish nature). i cant lie this feels nitpicky but it’s just so jarring everytime i see it combined with everything else, ya know??

- i dont know if the apollo incident was necessary. i feel the story would have been the same if had just been a pushy jerk trying to marry persephone because she is a fertility goddess for his own advantage. it was just an awful thing that provides very little substance to the plot and made me struggle to read it.

- im still a bit lost on where we are with what’s going on with persephone. when she goes into her “death bringer” state, why does it seem like she’s been possessed instead of it being embraced as who she is? i’d like to see her gain more control of these powers and maybe trained properly by someone so that the next time they are used, they are used with intent and purpose.

- lastly, why is persephone’s growth being stifled? we see her make mistakes, and fall short in certain areas, but i would also like to see her excercise agency and fix things for herself. we only got to see a glimpse of that, but i want more so that she can figure out for herself what and who exactly she is and what she wants without having to think about others and what they need from her. if she is to become the queen of the underworld we want her to be, she doesn’t need to be coddled all the time.

if there is anything more to be added to the conversation, pls feel free too!! i like conversation and this is an interesting topic!

decolonization in the atla comics

right well i know nobody cares but i think i figured out why i dislike the avatar comics so much. like i already thought that they justified colonialism a hell of a lot (in direct contrast to the themes of atla itself which makes me CRAZY grrrr) but i was finally able to pin down why, exactly, i think that. in this i’m gonna be focusing specifically on the promise and north and south because i hate both of those with a passion!

i think that the way both north and south and the promise handle the process of decolonization and reckoning with a colonial legacy is inherently flawed. in the promise, zuko withdraws his support of the harmony restoration movement because of the new earth/fire national culture that has been created in yu dao. he thinks it would be wrong to take these people away from livelihoods that they’ve created. he also says that economically, they are better off now than they were 100 years ago. 

so like, that’s already yikes. economic justifications of colonialism are the worst ones. always. also, it doesn’t help that as zuko says that, there’s a panel showing a fire nation man getting his shoes shined by an earth national as katara says “it doesn’t look like that wealth was shared equally” or something of that sentiment.

and i know zuko says one of his other reasons for withdrawing from the harmony restoration movement is because the people don’t want to be given back to earth kingdom rule...but uh...which people, exactly, don’t want to be given back to the earth kingdom? who benefited the most from colonial rule in the colonies themselves? (i’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the earth nationals.)

so although yu dao is now an incredibly wealthy and prosperous place as a direct result of its colonization, the wealth is not spread equally. also, economic prosperity doesn’t mean that yu dao should remain a colony? nor does it mean that the fire nation government should continue to meddle in its affairs by instituting a coalition government and then creating the united republic of nations? they should’ve just given them complete self autonomy and called it a day! but whatever.

in the promise, the process of decolonization (ie giving earth kingdom land back to the earth kingdom itself and repatriating the fire nation citizens) is kind of equated to a direct impediment of Progress™, particularly economic and social Progress™. this is seen again in north and south, when the northern water tribe tries to establish the oil refinery on southern water tribe land. in north and south, many southern water tribe members (and katara herself) take issue with this northern interference, citing that they are just turning the south into a cheap copy of the north in the name of...you guessed it...Progress™. katara and other members of the southern tribe are seen as extremists for wanting to preserve their heritage after one hundred years of war. the oil refinery and other northern interferences are portrayed as a solely good thing, even though they come at the expense of other important traditions. 

and so therein lies my biggest problem with these two atla comics: they assume that decolonization = anti progress, when it very much does not. this is something that’s seen in the real world, time and time again. like, i’m from hawai’i (not native hawaiian tho, which is an important distinction to make!) and the whole struggle to halt the construction of the thirty meter telescope on mauna kea is a good real life example. mauna kea is sacred land to native hawaiians, and construction of the telescope would completely desecrate the land, both culturally and environmentally. yet for some reason, native hawaiians are portrayed as “backwards” and “anti-science” for not wanting the TMT to be built, which isn’t true at all! but they shouldn’t have to sacrifice what they believe in the name of progress defined by someone else’s metric. 

in the atla comics (and legend of korra), Modern Westernization™ is the default. returning yu dao’s land to the earth kingdom and removing fire nation involvement is seen as anti-progress. refusing to build an oil refinery and trying to preserve important cultural practices and traditions is seen as anti-progress. anything that doesn’t lead to...cómo se dice...complete industrialization and what is essentially capitalism is seen as anti-progress. and this is such a western mindset that it hurts, because that’s not what decolonization is. decolonization is supposed to revive, humanize, and modernize important indigenous and traditional aspects of cultures. decolonization, unlike how it’s portrayed in the promise and in north and south, does not mean that we go backwards. instead, we actively reconstruct our perspectives and stop measuring previously aforementioned Progress™ by a western capitalist mindset! that’s why it’s important, and that’s why these comics fall short, because they had an opportunity to build a world that wasn’t modeled after the patterns of the west...and they just didn’t.

Do you think society as a whole understands and values history? I don’t think they do. And I don’t understand why.

HoooooWEEEEEE, anon. What follows is a good old Hilary History Rant ™, but let me hasten to assure you that none of it is directed at you. It just means that this is a topic on which I have many feelings, and a lot of frustration, and it gets at the heart of many things which are wrong with our society, and the way in which I try to deal with this as an academic and a teacher. So…. yeah.

In short: you’re absolutely right. Society as a whole could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing history, especially right now. Though let me rephrase that: they could give exactly dick about understanding and valuing any history that does not reinforce and pander to their preferred worldview, belief system, or conception of reality. The human race has always had an amazing ability to not give a shit about huge problems as long as they won’t kill us right now (see: climate change) and in one sense, that has allowed us to survive and evolve and become an advanced species. You have to compartmentalize and solve one problem at a time rather than get stuck in abstracts, so in that way, it is a positive trait. However, we are faced with a 21st century where the planet is actively burning alive, late-stage capitalism has become so functionally embedded in every facet of our society that our public values, civic religion, and moral compass (or lack thereof) is structured around consumerism and who it benefits (the 1% of billionaire CEOs), and any comfortable myths of historical progress have been blown apart by the worldwide backslide into right-wing authoritarianism, xenophobia, nationalism, racism, and other such things. In a way, this was a reaction to 9/11, which changed the complacent late-20th century mindset of the West in ways that we really cannot fathom or overstate. But it’s also a clarion call that something is very, very wrong here, and the structural and systemic explanations that historians provide for these kinds of events are never what anyone wants to hear.

Think about it this way. The world is currently, objectively speaking, producing more material resources, wealth, food, etc than at any point before, thanks to the effects of globalism, the industrial and information revolutions, mass mechanizing, and so on. There really isn’t a “shortage” of things. Except for the fact that the distribution of these resources is so insanely unequal, and wildly disproportionate amounts of wealth have been concentrated in a few private hands, which then use the law (and the law is a tool of the powerful to protect power) to make sure that it’s never redistributed. This is why Reaganism and “supply-side”, aka “trickle-down” economics, is such bullshit: it presupposes that billionaires will, if you enable them to make as many billions as possible without regulation, altruistically sow that largess among the working class. This never happens, because obviously. (Sidenote: remember those extravagant pledges of billions of euros to repair Notre Dame from like 3 or 4 French billionaires? Apparently they have paid… exactly not one cent toward renovations, and the money has come instead from the Friends of Notre Dame funded by private individuals. Yep, not even for the goddamn cause célèbre of the “we don’t give a shit about history” architectural casualties could they actually pay up. Eat! The! Rich!…. anyway.)

However, the fact is that you need to produce narratives to justify this kind of exploitation and inequality, and make them convincing enough that the people who are being fucked over will actively repeat and promote these narratives and be fiercely vested in their protection. Think of the way white American working-class voters will happily blame minorities, immigrants, Non-Murkan People, etc for their struggles, rather than the fact of said rampant economic cronyism and oligarchy. These working-class voters will love the politicians who give them someone to blame (see: Trump), especially when that someone is an Other around whom collective systems of discrimination and oppression have historically operated. Women, people of color, religious minorities/non-Western religions, LGBT people, immigrants, etc, etc…. all these have historically not had such a great time in the capitalist Christian West, which is the predominant paradigm organizing society today. You can’t understand why society doesn’t value history until you realize that the people who benefit from this system aren’t keen on having its flaws pointed out. They don’t want the masses to have a historical education if that historical education is going to actually be used. They would rather teach them the simplistic rah-rah quasi-fictional narrative of the past that makes everyone feel good, and call it a day. 

The classic liberal belief has always been that if you can just teach someone that their facts are wrong, or supply them with better facts, they’ll change their mind. This is not how it works and never has, and that is why in an age with, again, more knowledge of science than ever before and the collected wisdom of humanity available via your smartphone, we have substantial portions of people who believe that vaccines are evil, the Earth is flat, and climate change (and 87 million other things) are fake and/or government conspiracies. As a medievalist, I get really tetchy when the idiocy of modern people is blamed on the stereotypical “Dark Ages!” medieval era (I have written many posts ranting about that, so we’ll keep it to a minimum here), or when everything bad, backward, or wrong is considered to be “medieval” in nature. Trust me, on several things, they were doing a lot better than we are. Other things are not nearly as wildly caricatured as they have been made out to be. Because once again, history is complicated and people are flawed in any era, do good and bad things, but that isn’t as useful as a narrative that flattens out into simplistic black and white.

Basically, people don’t want their identities, comfortable notions, and other ideas about the past challenged, especially since that is directly relevant to how they perceive themselves (and everyone else) in the present. The thing about history, obviously, is that it’s past, it’s done, and until we invent a time machine, which pray God we never fucking do, within a few generations, the entire population of the earth has been replaced. That means it’s awfully fragile as a concept. Before the modern era and the invention of technology and the countless mediums (book, TV, radio, newspaper, internet, etc etc) that serve as sources, it’s only available in a relatively limited corpus of documents. History does not speak for itself. That’s where you get into historiography, or writing history. Even if you have a book or document that serves as a primary source material, you have to do a shit-ton of things with it to turn it into recognizable scholarship. You have to learn the language it’s in. You have to understand the context in which it was produced. You have to figure out what it ignores, forgets, omits, or simply does not know as well as what it does, and recognize it as a limited text produced from a certain perspective or for a social reason that may or may not be explicitly articulated. The training of a historian is to teach you how to do this accurately and more or less fairly, but that is up to the personal ethic of the historian to ensure. When you’re reading a history book, you’re not reading an unmediated, Pure, This Was Definitely How Things Happened The End information download. You are reading something by someone who has made their best guess and has been equipped with the interpretive tools to be reasonably confident in their analysis, but sometimes just doesn’t know, sometimes has an agenda in pushing one opinion over another, or anything else.

History, in other words, is a system of flawed and self-serving collective memory, and power wants only the memory that ensures its survival and replication. You’ve heard of the “history is written by the winners” quote, which basically encapsulates the fact that what we learn and what we take as fact is largely or entirely structured by the narrative of those who can control it. If you’ve heard of the 1970s French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work is basically foundational in understanding how power produces knowledge in each era (what he calls epistemes) and the way in which historical “fact” is subject to the needs of these eras. Foucault has a lot of critics and his work particularly in the history of sexuality has now become dated (plus he can be a slog to read), but I do suggest familiarizing yourself with some of his ideas. 

This is also present in the constant refrain heard by anybody who has ever studied the arts and humanities: “oh, don’t do liberal arts, you’ll never get a job, study something worthwhile,” etc. It’s funny how the “worthwhile” subjects always seem to be science and engineering/software/anything that can support the capitalist military industrial complex, while science is otherwise completely useless to them. It’s also always funny how the humanities are relentlessly de- or under- funded. By labeling these subjects as “worthless,” when they often focus on deep investigation of varied topics, independent critical thought, complex analysis, and otherwise teaching you to think for yourself, we therefore decrease the amount of people who feel compelled to go into them. Since (see again, late-stage capitalism is a nightmare) most people are going to prefer some kind of paycheck to stringing it along on a miniscule arts budget, they will leave those fields and their inherent social criticism behind. Of course, we do have some people – academics, social scientists, artists, creatives, activists, etc – who do this kind of work and dedicate themselves to it, but we (and I include myself in this group) have not reached critical mass and do not have the power to effect actual drastic change on this unfair system. I can guarantee that they will ensure we never will, and the deliberate and chronic underfunding of the humanities is just one of the mechanisms by which late-stage capitalism replicates and protects itself.

I realize that I sound like an old man yelling at a cloud/going off on my paranoid rant, but…. this is just the way we’ve all gotten used to living, and it’s both amazing and horrifying. As long as the underclasses are all beholden to their own Ideas of History, and as long as most people are content to exist within the current ludicrous ideas that we have received down the ages as inherited wisdom and enforced on ourselves and others, there’s not much we can do about it. You are never going to reach agreement on some sweeping Platonic ideal of universal history, since my point throughout this whole screed has always been that history is particular, localized, conditioned by specific factors, and produced to suit the purposes of a very particular set of goals. History doesn’t repeat itself, per se (though it can be Very Fucking Close), but as long as access to a specific set of resources, i.e. power, money, sex, food, land, technology, jobs, etc are at stake, the inherent nature of human beings means that they will always be choosing from within a similar matrix of actions, producing the same kind of justifications for those actions, and transmitting it to the next generation in a way that relatively few people learn how to challenge. We have not figured out how to break that cycle yet. We are an advanced species beyond any doubt, but we’re also still hairless apes on a spinning blue ball on the outer arm of a rural galaxy, and oftentimes we act like it.

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious why society doesn’t understand and value history, because historians are so often the ones pointing out the previous pattern of mistakes and how well that went last time. Power does not want to be dismantled or criticized, and has no interest in empowering the citizens to consider the mechanisms by which they collaborate in its perpetuation. White supremacists don’t want to be educated into an “actual” version of history, even if their view of things is, objectively speaking, wildly inaccurate. They want the version of history which upholds their beliefs and their way of life. Even non-insane people tend to prefer history that validates what they think they already know, and especially in the West, a certain mindset and system of belief is already so well ingrained that it has become almost omniscient. Acquiring the tools to work with this is, as noted, blocked by social disapproval and financial shortfall. Plus it’s a lot of goddamn work. I’m 30 years old and just finished my PhD, representing 12 years of higher education, thousands of dollars, countless hours of work, and so on. This is also why they’ve jacked the price of college through the roof and made it so inaccessible for people who just cannot make that kind of commitment. I’ve worked my ass off, for sure, but I also had support systems that not everyone does. I can’t say I got here All On My Own ™, that enduring myth of pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps. I know I didn’t. I had a lot of help, and again, a lot of people don’t. The academy is weird and cliquish and underpaid as a career. Why would you do that?

I wish I had more overall answers for you about how to fix this. I think about this a lot. I’ll just have to go back to doing what I can, as should we all, since that is really all that is ultimately in our control.

Bird Man

The movie “Bird Man” directed by Alejandro Inarritu was the epitome of post modernism. The movie was a confusing narrative that lead the viewer to question their own sense of reality, as well as hold newfound concern for the society the surrounds them. Set in New York City, the film brings into question the societal norms that America holds, using the character Bird Man to express universal truths and bring about a sense of lack for the main character. The two theoretical frameworks I will be analyzing from the film are the post modern lens and the gender performative.

We can see the framework of post modernism carefully laid out throughout the duration of the film. There is no hiding that this film is meant to bring our societal standards into question, the movie creates a sense of lack for the characters and audience alike. This sense of lack can be related back to Lacanian psychoanalysis, where Lacan argues that all humans are in a constant state of lack, and continuously searching for something to make them whole again. We can see this exemplified throughout the film through the main character, Riggan, played by Michael Keaton. Riggan is an actor/director who began his career by playing a superhero named Bird Man. When the Bird Man series dies, Riggan cannot help feeling this sense of lack. Society sees him as this character, no one sees a struggling actor trying to make his way through writing a Broadway play, instead they continue to see him as what they want him to be: Bird Man. Riggan rejects this idea that he must be Bird Man to be loved in society, and his sense of lack urges him to write, direct, and star in this play, because he see’s it as a chance to be what he once was, a whole man who is adored for something he created. He no longer wishes to be this character that someone else conjured for him, but find a new sense of self through his play. He goes about this by making this play his own, and by wanting a new sense of self, he creates his own twisted reality that this play will be the new him, that he will be known for something greater than Bird Man. In this way he is rejecting a universal truth by becoming another one. It’s only when the play starts to go horribly wrong that he realizes he can never be more than Bird Man, or so he thinks. He tries so hard to find himself through this new play, that when things start to slip, he retreats back to this state of Bird Man, he plays the society card and becomes what everyone wants him to be, and by doing so, by conforming to societal standards, he becomes successful. From here we can see his conformity start to drive him insane, he is in a constant state of rejection, not wanting to conform, but he does what he believes he has to and becomes the Bird Man that he knows is heavily acclaimed. We can also see an array of universal truths being presented throughout the film. We can start with the character of Bird Man being a universal truth, because this is what society wants Riggans to conform to, which he eventually does. But Bird Man is more than this, he tells Riggans how to live, he is always the voice in the back of Riggan’s head, telling him right from wrong and what Riggan’s should do to stay relevant. During the beginning of the film Riggan’s is able to reject these truths because his focus is somewhere else, and he is trying to find a new truth through the play. But eventually he will fall into the diseased mindset of society, becoming Bird Man, only to lose himself again when he finds that conforming to these universal truths does not make him happier or a better man, but simply a person who does not seem to matter in the whole picture. His daughter points out to him early in the film that he is scared to admit that he is just like everyone else who means nothing, and eventually these words seem to get to him as Riggan’s realizes his nothingness and the ways he has conformed. His constant rejection and acclamation to the universal truths cause him to see himself as nothing, to become nothing in the eyes of society, because unless you are always conforming to the ways of society, there is no way to be successful. So by attempting to be something other than what society wants from him, he becomes irrelevant. Another universal truth that Riggan’s attempts to reject is that of the Broadway critic, who is seen telling him that she plans to write a horrible review of his play because she hates people like him, people who are entitled, spoiled, selfish children (though we all know she’s talking about the white man who runs capitalist corporations). He tries to reject her by spitting his own truth in her face, telling her how much this play means to him and eventually breaking down in front of her. Though she does not change her mind until the night of the play, when Riggan’s shoots himself on stage. She then writes a new universal truth, as if this is what she was looking for the entire time, she wanted something raw and different than what others before him had done, and forms a new truth for others to conform to. The universal truths of the film are shown in many different ways, but the most prominent are Riggan’s ways of becoming Bird Man and finding himself through his play, and that of the critic. 

Cinematically this movie is very post modern as well. Being filmed in seemingly one take was an interesting spin on most films. The breaking of the fourth wall which was done so often was an excellent example of the way post modernist differed from regual cinematography. Also, the use of the drum roll as the most prominent music in the film was quite interesting. When the characters were in motion the drum roll would commence, but when Bird Man was flying a new classical music would emerge, as if Riggan’s was leaving the world, or universal truths, behind him and constructing his own reality. Another post modern way they created this film was by not introducing the characters, the audience had to pay close attention to figure out exactly who was related to whom and how all the characters shared a collective that brought them together. Though what I found problematic is that the film rejects the universal truths of society, yet seems to accept the truths forming around women, which brings us to gender.

There were a lot of ways the gender performative was exemplified through this film, we can start with the actresses staring in the play. When the character Leslie finds a new actor for hire, she gets unwillingly kissed by the friend of the director, she says nothing but looks undoubtedly shocked, showing her weakness to stand up to the man. Then later she will be nearly raped by the actor she found in front of the entire audience, and instead of doing anything about it she continues performing and cries to one of her fellow actresses later. Of course when she is sharing her emotions they end up kissing, which if that isn’t an example of the male gaze and the gender performative I’m not sure what is. The fact that two girls end up making out because one of them is in distress is the most cliche and unrealistic thing to have ever hit television, and yet we exemplify it in a film about post modernism. Just because the film is post modern does not mean they don’t conform to the ideas of society as well, and this is one of the ways they do so. The film needs to make money because we live in a capitalist society, so why not have two girls make out if it means more revenue for the box office. Another problematic yet influential character is Riggan’s daughter Sam. A prior drug addict who just got out of rehab, happens to be a woman which partially shows her weakness. Even though she stands up to several male characters during this film, her lack comes from a sense of not having love or adrenaline, which she finds with the actor Mike after he attempts to rape Leslie, she also sits on top of a building to find her adrenaline and sleeps with Mike right above set while her father is practicing lines below. Sam considers herself to be broken and needs the help of a man to find herself again. Though when Sam and Mike first meet, things are not so lovey dovey, of course Sam is introduced by her father and cut off every time she tries to speak, also showing her weakness as a woman. Even though Sam is a strong and entitled character, she has her own problems as she exemplified everything a man wants in a woman. In fact, all of the female characters happen to be tall, slim, and beautiful, including the critic. And not surprisingly the main character, old as he may be, gets two, not one, two gorgeous women by his side throughout the film.

Overall, the film seemingly rejects universal truths though conforms to some. The gender roles are apparent as well as the post modern structure on which the film was based. The movie Bird Man is an excellent example of how our society pressures people into being something they are not. The idea that we are lacking something that can never be found is nothing new, though proven through the eyes of Bird Man. Even though Riggan’s never finds his whole truth, and ends up committing suicide because of it, we can clearly see how universal truth is pushed upon us by the media and others surrounding us. Riggan’s constant rejection yet conformity to universal truth drives him down a slippery slope from which he can never return. 

My Little June 6th Social Media Exchange

I’ve got a friend, a former teammate on a hockey team, who is fairly right leaning.  I made a post on June 6th, the anniversary of the storming the beaches of Normandy,  about my feelings on the Republican Party and their current state of true awfulness.  He didn’t respond directly, but definitely threw down on his own so that I could see it.  So I responded to him.  Harshly.  And this isn’t an exchange.  I called him out, didn’t do anything other than to acknowledge there was a response that I ignored, actually multiple because I’m sure that I was mentioned by more than one other mouth breather, and then I doubled down.  And now, because I am still mad, I’m making it public to my audiences.   

My response to his shameless defense of the Republican Party and conservatism in general. 

<My Dude>, on your side of the political divide there are unabashed racists. On your side, there are actual Klansmen. On your side there are actual, literal Nazis; we're talking "wir müssen die Juden ausrotten," Nazis. This isn't up for debate, either, this is absolute FACT. Now, and this is important, this isn't me being accusatory, but me pointing out the bare bones of the issue. These horrible people agree with you and your point of view. They are comfortable with you and your point of view. They *identify* with you and your point of view. They are comfortable with you and standing alongside you and supporting you and your perspective and your political point of view and everything you espouse. Actual f***ing Nazis are there with you, shoulder to shoulder. And this is an undeniable reality of irrefutable empirical evidence.

And all of this begs the question of pretty much anyone who might find themselves in a similar position, in a space where the most contemptible, most reviled, most deplorable, people can find comfort and sanctuary; "what does this reflection say about my values and what I believe?" If actual Nazis are on your side, and your first reaction is NOT to take a step back and ask yourself why they are comfortable on your side and not afraid to be beaten within inches of their life, you are in the WRONG. "Why are Nazis comfortable with me and being in my space?" The answer is, "I'm wrong about something, I need to figure out why and shut the hell up until I know exactly why." That's it.

Me? I'm pretty much okay punching them in the face, no questions asked, and leaving them on the ground bleeding. But that's me, and how I feel with the idea of actual Nazis being on my side...on June 6th...in the US of A. I am not a conservative or 2021 Republican so I don't have to make those decisions.

<My Dude>, take a moment. Take your step back. Take a look at things from the outsider perspective on things, both as they are and through the lens of history you keep saying you have. And then please reevaluate yourself. From where I see things, you are in the bunkers on that beach aiming your weapons at those landing vehicles, repeating to your brothers in arms how right those Austrian and Italian f***s in charge of their nations were and that it was and is worth killing and worth dying for to grow their ideologies, and standing in staunch opposition to those storming that beach in defense of democracy. You ARE on the side of Nazis now, how can you possibly believe or defend the idea that your would not have been 70 years ago?

Personally, I believe you are better than that, given a more lucid frame of reference then where you actually stand, as it is. But for now, it is what it is. It can't be stated more plainly; it is 2021 and you ARE on the side with the Nazis and you would have been 70 years ago, too.

As I said, there was a response.  Maybe more than one.  I ignored them.  I posted this article (the transcript I used, and sources, are all below)

If you've read through this <article> and the source material, or at least given some of them a brief look, you'll know that the consensus definition of fascism in the sources says it hasn't *actually* existed after 1945, and I am inclined to agree.  At most it has morphed into lesser versions espousing *similar* ideological tendencies.  And that's my point in all of this.  We've taken minuscule baby steps away from blatant racism as a foundation, but the idea that there are some who belong, and some who don't, while defined less clearly than the past, still exists, and that mentality still serves as a primary motivator for specific beliefs and even prejudices.  

That said, <my Dude>, I read all of things you post that the algorithms of this site allow me to see regularly, and I can tell you, that through the scope of that version of neo-fascism outright predicated not on race but on the sense of some belonging, and some not, is reflected in all of your rhetoric CONSTANTLY.  All the time.  And maybe you believe it, or maybe you don't, that's not for me to say.  But the fact remains that, as I said before, you are a vocal supporter on the side that has Nazis.  You are on the side that this article basically breaks down as pro-fascist in its core beliefs.  

I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt by saying you're actually NOT of that mindset, but to look at just where you're sitting.  The Germans have a saying that goes something like, "if you see a Nazi sitting at a table, and ten other people sitting with him, you see a table of 11 Nazis."  

And my overall point remains unchanged; recognize the table you are sitting at, right now.  

PS- I didn't bother to read yours, or anyone else's responses.  You're sitting at a metaphoric table with those most ideologically aligned currently with 1930s and 40s fascism, along with modern Nazis, and I am calling it out, that's all.  Any response, it either agrees and like me, are asking you to reevaluate, or they are trying to defend sitting at that table without such a reexamination, which isn't worth my time

Be well. 

____

What Is Fascism?

Since before Donald Trump took office, historians have debated whether he is a fascist (1.).

As a teacher of World War II history (2.) who has written about fascism (3.), I’ve found that historians have a consensus (4.) definition of the term, broadly speaking.

Given the term’s current – and sometimes erroneous – use, I think it’s important to distinguish what fascism is and is not.

+Race-first thinking+ Fascism, now a century old, got its start with Benito Mussolini and his Italian allies. They named their movement after an ancient Roman emblem, the fasces (5.), an ax whose handle has been tightly reinforced with many rods, symbolizing the power of unity around one leader.

Fascism means more than dictatorship, however.

It’s distinct from simple authoritarianism – an anti-democratic government by a strongman or small elite – and “Stalinism” (6.) – authoritarianism with a dominant bureaucracy and economic control, named after the former Soviet leader. The same goes for “anarchism,” (7.) the belief in a society organized without an overarching state.

Above all, fascists view nearly everything through the lens of race (8.). They’re committed not just to race supremacy, but maintaining what they called “racial hygiene,” (9.) meaning the purity of their race and the separation of what they view as lower ones.

That means (10.) they must define who is a member of their nation’s legitimate race. They must invent a “true” race.

Many are familiar with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime’s so-called Aryan race (11.), which had no biological or historical reality. The Nazis had to forge a mythic past and legendary people. Including some in the “true race” means excluding others.

+Capitalism is good+ For fascists, capitalism is good. It appeals to their admiration of “the survival of the fittest,” a phrase coined by social Darwinist Herbert Spencer (11.), so long as companies serve the needs of the fascist leadership and the “Volk,” or people.

In exchange for protecting private property, fascists demand capitalists act as cronies (12.).

If, for example, a company is successfully producing weapons for foreign or domestic wars – good. But if a company is enriching nonloyal people, or making money for the imagined subrace, the fascists will step in and hand it to someone deemed loyal.

If the economy is poor, the fascist will divert attention from shortages to plans for patriotic glory or for vengeance against internal or external enemies.

+Might makes right+ Important to most fascists is the idea that the nation’s “patriots” (13.) have been let down, that “good people” are humiliated while “bad people” do better.

These grievances cannot be answered, fascists say, if things remain under the status quo. There needs to be revolutionary change allowing the “real people” to break free from the restraints of democracy or existing law and get even (14.).

For fascists, might makes right.

Since for them the law should be subservient to the needs of the people and the need to crush socialism or liberalism, fascists encourage party militias. These enforce the fascist will, break unions (15.), distort elections and intimidate or co-opt the police (16.).

The historical fascists of Germany and Mussolini’s Italy (17.) extended the might-makes-right principle to expansion abroad, though the British fascists of the 1930s, led by Oswald Mosley (18.) and his British Union of Fascists, preferred isolationism (19.) and preached a sort of internal war against an imagined Jewish enemy of the state. What fascists reject

First and foremost, fascists want to revolt against socialism (20.). That’s because it threatens the crony capitalism that fascists embrace.

Not only does socialism aim for equal prosperity no matter the race, but many socialists tend to envision the eventual extinction (21.) of separate nations, which offends the strong fascist belief in nation states.

Along with getting rid of aristocrats or other elites, fascists are prepared to displace the church or seek a mutually beneficial truce with it (22.).

Mussolini, Hitler and the Falangists in Spain (23.) learned that they had to live with (24.), not replace, the church in their countries – as long as their regimes weren’t broadly attacked from the pulpit.

Fascists also reject democracy, at least any democracy that could potentially result in socialism or too much liberalism (25.). In a democracy, voters can choose social welfare policies. They can level the playing field between classes and ethnicities, or seek gender equality.

Fascists oppose all of these efforts.

+Fascism grows from nationalism+ Fascism is the logical extreme of nationalism (26.), the roughly 250-year-old idea that nation states should be built around races or historical peoples.

The first fascists didn’t invent these ideas out of nothing – they just pushed nationalism further than anyone had before. For the fascist, it’s not just that a nation state makes “the people” sovereign. It’s that the will of righteous, real people – and its leader – comes before all other considerations, including facts.

Indeed, the will, the people, their leader and the facts are all one in fascism.

1. https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/164170 2. https://history.case.edu/faculty/john-broich/ 3. https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/blood-oil-and-the-axis_9781468314014/ 4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-history-of-twentiethcentury-political-thought/fascism-and-racism/CFB19146B5E63D20089DF0AAC5CD84D9 5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/fasces 6. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Stalinism 7. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anarchism/ 8. https://books.google.com/books?id=NLiFIEdI1V4C&q=%22racial+thought+for+political+purposes%22#v=snippet&q=%22racial%20thought%20for%20political%20purposes%22&f=false 9. https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1093/embo-reports/kve217 10. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/racethinking-before-racism/02AAE753AAD57BAFB03A2F003EF12538 11. https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-5/breeding-new-german-race 12. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/herbert-spencer-survival-of-the-fittest-180974756/ 13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/260578?seq=1 14. https://web.archive.org/web/20130930081524/http:/www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html 15. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14058/14058-h/14058-h.htm 16. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ss-and-police 17. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/mussolinis-racial-policies-in-east-africa-revealed-italian-fascists-ambitions-to-redesign-the-social-order.html 18. https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-49405924 19. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/1932729.pdf 20. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/128540/the-anatomy-of-fascism-by-robert-o-paxton/ 21. https://books.google.com/books?id=tH0jwbnj7BgC&q=%22withering+away+of+the+state%22#v=snippet&q=%22withering%20away%20of%20the%20state%22&f=false 22. https://www.npr.org/2014/01/27/265794658/pope-and-mussolini-tells-the-secret-history-of-fascism-and-the-church 23. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/02/spains-civil-war-produced-a-fascist-movement-that-was-disorganized-but-just-as-authoritarian-as-italys.html 24. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state 25. https://theconversation.com/what-or-who-is-antifa-140147 26. https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism/Extreme-nationalism

Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude

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In turning out woke and broke graduates, they have a lot to answer for. (Pixabay)

What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common?

In a word, 21st-century higher education.

A pernicious cycle begins even before a student enrolls. A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. 

The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.

Once admitted, students take classes from faculty who, polls reveal, are roughly 90 percent liberal. According to one recent survey, Democrat professors on average outnumber Republican faculty by a 12-to-1 ratio on the nation’s supposedly diverse campuses. But such political asymmetries are magnified by a certain progressive messianic self-righteousness that turns the lectern into the pulpit, the captive class into a congregation. The rare conservative professor is more resigned to the tragedy of the universe and, in live-and-let-live fashion, vacates the campus arena to the left-wing gladiators who wish to slay any perceived heterodoxy.

Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics. In Camp Yale or Duke Social Warrior Base, they learn just enough about purported historical oppression to make them dangerous, as they topple statues, demand the renaming of streets and buildings, and swarm professors deemed politically incorrect.

No wonder that certain issues — abortion, global warming, illegal immigration — are mostly off-limits to campus disagreement. Safe spaces, racial theme houses, and censorship have replaced the 1960s ideals of unfettered free speech and racial and ethnic integration and assimilation. Today’s students often combine the worst traits of bullying and cowardice. 

They are quite ready as a mob to dish it out against unorthodox individuals, and yet they’re suddenly quite vulnerable and childlike when warned to lighten up about Halloween costumes or a passage in Huckleberry Finn. The 19-year-old student is suddenly sexually mature, a Bohemian, a cosmopolitês when appetites call — only to revert to Victorian prudery and furor upon discovering that callousness, hurt, and rejection are tragically integral to crude promiscuity and sexual congress without love.

The curricula in the social sciences and humanities are largely politicized. Culture, history, and literature are often taught through the binary lenses of victims and victimizers, as a deductive zero-sum melodrama. There is little allowance for tragedy, irony, and paradox or simply the complexities of the human experience. 

That preexisting slavery, imperialism, and atrocity were as common in the New World, Asia, and Africa as in Europe is rarely mentioned in the boilerplate campus indictment of the West. 

The reason that the Aztecs were in Mexico and Central America rather than Madrid was not that they were morally superior. Nor was it that they lacked imperial impulse. Rather, they lacked ocean-going technology, sophisticated maritime navigation, gunpowder, horses, steel, and a military tradition dating back to Rome. So they confined their genocidal sacrifices and imperial conquests to their neighbors on the Mexican peninsula.

Stranger still, the actual structure of the university is as reactionary as its governing ideology is radical.

In a society where almost no one has lifetime job security, professors take for granted archaic ideas of tenure as a modern career birthright. Yet they seem reluctant to extend such costly indulgences to other part-time instructors who are less fortunate.

The dirty little secret on campuses is that a legion of exploited, temporary lecturers, usually without multiyear contracts, are paid far less than tenured professors — often to teach the same classes. In short, an entire caste of low-paid faculty who lack the perks and benefits of their liberal permanent superiors subsidize thousands of colleges and their supposedly liberal agendas. 

The academic mentality is to feel angst about the distant plight of the would-be illegal immigrant waiting to cross the border; the angst is a sort of medieval penance for ignoring the exploited lecturer under one’s nose who indirectly supports the perks of the tenured.

Progressive college administrators, in the abstract, love unions and collective bargainers as long as they stay off campus and far away from their own exploited teachers. Tenure was originally designed to protect the sometimes unorthodox and even heretical views of the faculty. Today, however, professors who preach “diversity” in lockstep do not want to hear diverse ideas and values, among either students or faculty. 

Tenure has become not protection for against-the-grain expression but a merit badge for the party faithful coming up through the ranks. Try giving a public lecture on campus about the ill effects of abortion, the inconsistencies of global-warming advocacy, respect for the Second Amendment, or skepticism over identity politics. The result would be a student version of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.

The federal government guarantees student loans to pay skyrocketing tuition and room and board. That guarantee has empowered crony-capitalist universities to hike their annual costs far above the rate of inflation — without much worry over what happens to their customers when and if they graduate.

Elsewhere in the real world, buyers receive guarantees when they pay for services. Consumers are appraised of the risks of taking out high-risk loans. But most colleges and universities are exempt from such oversight. 

At first, students don’t seem to object — at least when they are in school and still mesmerized by luxury apartments, latte bars, Club Med fitness centers, and dreams of six-figure salaries upon graduation as payback for their progressive fides. Apparently, campuses have adopted the logic of car dealers who jack up the prices of their autos at buying time with all sorts of hip, extra accessories that hypnotize consumers into taking out multiyear loans to purchase luxury models beyond their means.

Eighteen-year-olds entering college are seldom warned by campus financial officers exactly how long their debt obligations will last — or which majors are likely to lead to better salaries after graduation. None are given itemized bills that are broken down to show where their money is going. Many who will remain in debt for years might have wished to know how much they paid for the vast swamp of non-teaching facilitators and high-paid administrators.

Colleges today can never assure students that after graduation they will at least test higher on the standardized tests than when they entered. 

If colleges could do that, they’d long ago have required exit examinations to boast of their success. Instead, the higher-education industry insists that almost any baccalaureate degree is a good deal, without worrying about how much it costs or whether their brand certifies any real knowledge. Again, the logic is that of consumer branding — as we see with Coca-Cola, Nike, and Google — in which status rather than cost-benefit efficacy is purchased. Does anyone believe that a graduating senior of tony Harvard, Yale, or Stanford knows more than a counterpart at Hillsdale or St. John’s?

The net result is a current generation that owes $1.6 trillion in college loans to the federal government. And that debt is now affecting the entire country, including those who never went to college, who as taxpayers eventually may be asked to forgive some if not all the debt. 

An entire generation of Americans has costly degrees; many cannot use them to find well-paying jobs, and they increasingly forgo or delay marriage, child-rearing, and buying a car or home until their mid-twenties or thirties. All that pretty much sums up the profile of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street adherents — or the environmental-studies major who is shocked that a skilled electrician makes three times more than he does.

Colleges are turning out woke and broke graduates. They are not up to ensuring the country that they will pass on to the next generation an America that’s as prosperous, secure, and ethical as what they inherited and have so often faulted.

Ignorance, arrogance, and ingratitude are now the brands of the undergraduate experience. No wonder a once duly honored institution, higher education, is now either the butt of jokes or cynically seen as a credentialing factory.

NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

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How To Thrive In Today’s Global Business Challenges

Our world is changing at a breakneck pace. The internet has opened up new and ever faster modes of communication; we are now more connected than ever before. This fact is just one of many that have fundamentally changed how the world does business.

Yet increased connectivity has also raised new issues. What used to be a regional or local problem can now turn into a global crisis almost overnight. How does a business navigate these tricky waters?

Let’s show you how business is done today and what you can do to revolutionize how you participate, by re-thinking everything from managing employees, innovation, accountability and more.

In our modern, technological world, leadership and power come with great responsibility.

Recent decades have witnessed great change, but such change has also raised the stakes. In our rapidly moving, globalized world, leaders have far more power and responsibility than ever before. And a lot more to answer for if something goes wrong.

Global leaders must be conscious of the impact their decisions have. One bad decision could lead to a compromised food product, for example. Yet where once such a slip-up might have just affected a small town, today the health of hundreds of thousands of people could be at risk.

Many leaders are already grappling with how an interconnected, international economic system can amplify the fallout from a decision. Sometimes it’s necessary to pay up to contain a mistake before it spirals out of control.

In 2011, for example, French and German banks moved to bail out the financial systems of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain spending almost $900 billion in an attempt to maintain the euro’s stability and prevent an even larger currency crisis.

Think about today’s global leaders. Do you trust them to keep small mistakes from turning into global catastrophes?

The internet and other new technologies have become effective tools to drive a global sense of consciousness and, importantly, keep world leaders in check. Injustices are harder to sweep under the rug; news stories travel around the world in the blink of an eye. As a result, the pressure to create change and increase social responsibility is far greater.

In 2008, Coca-Cola came under fire for using unsustainable methods to extract water from a drought-stricken region in India. As the news spread, Coke sales dipped all over the world. The then company CEO announced the company would become “water neutral” by 2020.  

Without ethics, we have nothing. It’s time to treat people not as consumers but as human beings.

Did you make a mistake today? Forget to do something you said you would, or fail to notice something you should have?

Humans make mistakes; and so do policy makers, bankers and even those in government, as all of us are human. We also, as humans, try to justify our actions in an attempt to appear ethical, regardless of how much power, money or responsibility we may have.

The 2008 economic crisis wasn’t just about money – it dealt too with moral and ethical issues. Dishonesty, arrogance, greed and denial were rife among global bankers. Those in the industry or working with the industry wound themselves up in a web of morally questionable practices.

Mortgage lenders approved loans for people who had no jobs, income or assets. Bankers on Wall Street bundled these faulty loans into securities that were sold as solid investments. Investors convinced their clients such products would guarantee above-average returns. And ratings agencies craved new business so badly that their objectivity was compromised.

So how did so many people get it so wrong? Capitalism is an ideology that brings extraordinary privileges. But if the capitalistic system isn’t based on or led by moral principles, everyone loses. We need a way of doing business that doesn’t exhaust our natural resources, and understands people not just as consumers but as human beings.

If a company wants to survive, it must be able to adapt. Kill your bureaucratic structures!

Large-scale, successful companies these days are struggling to keep up. Bureaucracy and its principles of discipline and stability are no longer enough to keep a business afloat in a rapidly changing, hypercompetitive market. There is also increasing calls for social accountability and this presents a challenge like nothing companies have faced before.

So how can a successful company adapt? First, it’s time to do away with your company’s top-down, bureaucratic structure. Sure, many CEOs and managers will tell you that they support personal growth, diversity, mentoring and empowering employees. The reality, however, is you cannot achieve any of this if bureaucratic methods remain the rule.

We see this in the way that initially creative and innovative companies change after becoming successful. These companies protect their success, and instead of challenging the status quo, they start defending it! This is a perfect formula for market decline.

Here’s just one example. Despite Samsung’s multimillion-dollar research budget and army of talented employees, the technology company is still not the leading LCD television brand in the United States.

Vizio, however, is – and is a company with less than 200 employees and a focus on purchasing flat-screen suppliers based in Asia. What’s more, Vizio claims some $2.5 billion in sales. No matter how big your brand name, a great brand can’t always top a truly ingenious business model!

Your best bet for success is to encourage innovation in your workplace. How do you do this? The secret is to always encourage wild ideas and keep people talking. And the more ideas, the better. This way you don’t waste time thinking about “what to build.” Instead, you’ll “build to think!”

You don’t have to innovate big to change the game – just please your clients.

Innovation is today’s buzzword. But what exactly does it mean to be innovative? It’s not about throwing all your resources at a single project expected to be the big game-changer. In fact, effective innovation comes down to discovering those small details that make and keep your clients happy.

As open markets encourage fierce competition, the window of opportunity to come up with something totally different from your competitors is actually quite small.

But what if you managed to convert a low-cost product in a crowded market into a highly valued experience? Virgin America did this. Even though domestic air travel is a very competitive market, since Virgin’s launch in 2007, the airline has been voted consistently as America’s best.

How did the company do it? Simple: by remaining aware of the little things that make customers happy. Virgin offers comfortable seats, touch screens so you can order healthy food directly from your seat, pleasant music in the washrooms and Wi-Fi on every flight, plus a fun, energetic flight crew.

Virgin demonstrates that innovation isn’t always about coming up with something ground-breaking or even genius, but instead being consistently in tune with a client’s unspoken needs and wants.

But how can you tackle unspoken needs if you don’t know what they are? This is where innovation comes in. Brainstorm with your staff to find creative solutions that turn little details into parts of an overall memorable experience.  

Consider this innovation: a triangular shelf some 20 inches off the floor in the corner of a hotel shower. What for? So a woman has a place to rest her foot while she shaves her legs. Such an innovation costs virtually nothing, yet is highly effective in creating a positive and long-lasting impression for your clients.

Learning from the bottom-up keeps your company agile and revolutionary.

If you think a CEO alone should be the company commander and controller, then it’s time to change your thinking! It’s time to realize that values are created by employees and customers.

Take Apple and Google, two companies that are the best in their respective fields. How did the companies get to where they are? By merging core business values with new thinking.

Both companies have built natural, flexible hierarchies, where status is determined not by the position you have but by the contributions you make. This motivates people, both professionally and personally, to innovate.

Google in particular has succeeded at learning early, inexpensively and quickly. Through simulations, role-playing and cost-effective mock-ups, customers can interact with early-stage ideas to give Google real-time feedback. This automatically gives the company a competitive edge.

True, some of today’s most-successful companies are young and have been revolutionary from the start. But what matters is that these companies have stayed on top of the game.

So how can you make sure you are and stay competitive? First, you have to constantly challenge the status quo. This mind-set will give you access to a whole range of new consumers. Just a decade ago, for example, playing video games meant hanging out on the couch – until Nintendo Wii changed the game completely!

Second, you should create diverse work teams with people of different ages, genders, cultures, skills and industry experience. If you do, you’ll have access to different types of customers, giving you far greater insight into new market segments.

Finally, remember to keep your ego in check. Don’t hesitate to ask staff or consider different opinions if you’ve got a crucial decision pending. You might be surprised at the blind spots you didn’t even know you had!

Embrace the expectations of the Facebook generation: passion, recognition and creativity.

Nothing in our history could have prepared us for the overwhelming pace of change that characterizes today’s business world.

The Industrial Revolution in the mid 1800s established our current business models in which obedience and discipline are expected. It’s taken us a long time to shift away from this mindset.

We no longer need elites to set the tone or course of discussion. Instead, people all over the world can organize independently online. The workplace too should therefore be revolutionized!

So what can the internet teach the world of work? On the internet, authority originates from the bottom. People become influential based on the acceptance and respect they receive from others.  

If you post a self-made video on YouTube, in seconds it can be viewed around the world, and yet no one would think to ask whether you went to film school. What’s more, bloggers and Facebook users are now empowered by the access they have to individuals, companies and governments, access that used to be prohibited or just not possible a decade ago.

The way we think about transparency and reward systems are changing. People are no longer just driven by money, but recognition and accomplishment are seen as currencies now too.

So what got us here? The fact is that people are intrinsically passionate. This is what you’ll see if you just give a person an open space where she can develop her talents and allow her creativity to flourish.

Just think of how much time people worldwide have invested in editing Wikipedia articles, building free apps or penning advice blogs, all just to feel recognized and appreciated. And it’s this kind of passion we should foster in the workplace!

Amid a rapidly changing society fraught with increasing responsibility, companies often struggle to stay ahead. But by recognizing that passion, innovation, creativity and flexibility are what matter most, you can be certain of success even in an uncertain world.

Universities Breed Anger, Ignorance, and Ingratitude

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In turning out woke and broke graduates, they have a lot to answer for. (Pixabay)

What do widely diverse crises such as declining demography, increasing indebtedness, Generation Z’s indifference to religion and patriotism, static rates of home ownership, and a national epidemic of ignorance about American history and traditions all have in common?

In a word, 21st-century higher education.

A pernicious cycle begins even before a student enrolls. A typical college-admission application is loaded with questions to the high-school applicant about gender, equality, and bias rather than about math, language, or science achievements. How have you suffered rather than what you know and wish to learn seems more important for admission. 

The therapeutic mindset preps the student to consider himself a victim of cosmic forces, past and present, despite belonging to the richest, most leisured, and most technologically advanced generation in history. Without a shred of gratitude, the young student learns to blame his ancestors for what he is told is wrong in his life, without noticing how the dead made sure that almost everything around him would be an improvement over 2,500 years of Western history.

Once admitted, students take classes from faculty who, polls reveal, are roughly 90 percent liberal. According to one recent survey, Democrat professors on average outnumber Republican faculty by a 12-to-1 ratio on the nation’s supposedly diverse campuses. But such political asymmetries are magnified by a certain progressive messianic self-righteousness that turns the lectern into the pulpit, the captive class into a congregation. The rare conservative professor is more resigned to the tragedy of the universe and, in live-and-let-live fashion, vacates the campus arena to the left-wing gladiators who wish to slay any perceived heterodoxy.

Campus activism has replaced the old university creed of disinterested inquiry. Students are starting to resemble military recruits in boot camp, prepping to become hardened social-justice warriors on the frontlines of America’s new wars over climate change, gun control, abortion, and identity politics. In Camp Yale or Duke Social Warrior Base, they learn just enough about purported historical oppression to make them dangerous, as they topple statues, demand the renaming of streets and buildings, and swarm professors deemed politically incorrect.

No wonder that certain issues — abortion, global warming, illegal immigration — are mostly off-limits to campus disagreement. Safe spaces, racial theme houses, and censorship have replaced the 1960s ideals of unfettered free speech and racial and ethnic integration and assimilation. Today’s students often combine the worst traits of bullying and cowardice. 

They are quite ready as a mob to dish it out against unorthodox individuals, and yet they’re suddenly quite vulnerable and childlike when warned to lighten up about Halloween costumes or a passage in Huckleberry Finn. The 19-year-old student is suddenly sexually mature, a Bohemian, a cosmopolitês when appetites call — only to revert to Victorian prudery and furor upon discovering that callousness, hurt, and rejection are tragically integral to crude promiscuity and sexual congress without love.

The curricula in the social sciences and humanities are largely politicized. Culture, history, and literature are often taught through the binary lenses of victims and victimizers, as a deductive zero-sum melodrama. There is little allowance for tragedy, irony, and paradox or simply the complexities of the human experience. 

That preexisting slavery, imperialism, and atrocity were as common in the New World, Asia, and Africa as in Europe is rarely mentioned in the boilerplate campus indictment of the West. 

The reason that the Aztecs were in Mexico and Central America rather than Madrid was not that they were morally superior. Nor was it that they lacked imperial impulse. Rather, they lacked ocean-going technology, sophisticated maritime navigation, gunpowder, horses, steel, and a military tradition dating back to Rome. So they confined their genocidal sacrifices and imperial conquests to their neighbors on the Mexican peninsula.

Stranger still, the actual structure of the university is as reactionary as its governing ideology is radical.

In a society where almost no one has lifetime job security, professors take for granted archaic ideas of tenure as a modern career birthright. Yet they seem reluctant to extend such costly indulgences to other part-time instructors who are less fortunate.

The dirty little secret on campuses is that a legion of exploited, temporary lecturers, usually without multiyear contracts, are paid far less than tenured professors — often to teach the same classes. In short, an entire caste of low-paid faculty who lack the perks and benefits of their liberal permanent superiors subsidize thousands of colleges and their supposedly liberal agendas. 

The academic mentality is to feel angst about the distant plight of the would-be illegal immigrant waiting to cross the border; the angst is a sort of medieval penance for ignoring the exploited lecturer under one’s nose who indirectly supports the perks of the tenured.

Progressive college administrators, in the abstract, love unions and collective bargainers as long as they stay off campus and far away from their own exploited teachers. Tenure was originally designed to protect the sometimes unorthodox and even heretical views of the faculty. Today, however, professors who preach “diversity” in lockstep do not want to hear diverse ideas and values, among either students or faculty. 

Tenure has become not protection for against-the-grain expression but a merit badge for the party faithful coming up through the ranks. Try giving a public lecture on campus about the ill effects of abortion, the inconsistencies of global-warming advocacy, respect for the Second Amendment, or skepticism over identity politics. The result would be a student version of the Jacobin Reign of Terror.

The federal government guarantees student loans to pay skyrocketing tuition and room and board. That guarantee has empowered crony-capitalist universities to hike their annual costs far above the rate of inflation — without much worry over what happens to their customers when and if they graduate.

Elsewhere in the real world, buyers receive guarantees when they pay for services. Consumers are appraised of the risks of taking out high-risk loans. But most colleges and universities are exempt from such oversight. 

At first, students don’t seem to object — at least when they are in school and still mesmerized by luxury apartments, latte bars, Club Med fitness centers, and dreams of six-figure salaries upon graduation as payback for their progressive fides. Apparently, campuses have adopted the logic of car dealers who jack up the prices of their autos at buying time with all sorts of hip, extra accessories that hypnotize consumers into taking out multiyear loans to purchase luxury models beyond their means.

Eighteen-year-olds entering college are seldom warned by campus financial officers exactly how long their debt obligations will last — or which majors are likely to lead to better salaries after graduation. None are given itemized bills that are broken down to show where their money is going. Many who will remain in debt for years might have wished to know how much they paid for the vast swamp of non-teaching facilitators and high-paid administrators.

Colleges today can never assure students that after graduation they will at least test higher on the standardized tests than when they entered. 

If colleges could do that, they’d long ago have required exit examinations to boast of their success. Instead, the higher-education industry insists that almost any baccalaureate degree is a good deal, without worrying about how much it costs or whether their brand certifies any real knowledge. Again, the logic is that of consumer branding — as we see with Coca-Cola, Nike, and Google — in which status rather than cost-benefit efficacy is purchased. Does anyone believe that a graduating senior of tony Harvard, Yale, or Stanford knows more than a counterpart at Hillsdale or St. John’s?

The net result is a current generation that owes $1.6 trillion in college loans to the federal government. And that debt is now affecting the entire country, including those who never went to college, who as taxpayers eventually may be asked to forgive some if not all the debt. 

An entire generation of Americans has costly degrees; many cannot use them to find well-paying jobs, and they increasingly forgo or delay marriage, child-rearing, and buying a car or home until their mid-twenties or thirties. All that pretty much sums up the profile of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street adherents — or the environmental-studies major who is shocked that a skilled electrician makes three times more than he does.

Colleges are turning out woke and broke graduates. They are not up to ensuring the country that they will pass on to the next generation an America that’s as prosperous, secure, and ethical as what they inherited and have so often faulted.

Ignorance, arrogance, and ingratitude are now the brands of the undergraduate experience. No wonder a once duly honored institution, higher education, is now either the butt of jokes or cynically seen as a credentialing factory.

NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

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