The Power of Stories

I have been thinking on this topic for a long time now, and for the most part, I felt like I was having some valuable insights and maybe that I’ve stumbled upon something really important. I felt like I was doing good work, really blazing some philosophical trails.

                

That was a very grand story I was telling myself. At the recommendation of a friend, I picked up a copy of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human for inspiration on this post, and quickly realized this is a subject that has been fascinating mankind for hundreds of years.[1] There is no small shortage of scholars, scientists, poets, novelists, and film-makers. On NPR even as I write this, there is a story talking about a storybook and what messages it conveys to children. There has been no small amount of thought put into the question of why stories hold so much value for us humans, and I stand humbly beside the mountain of their work, with but a pittance to add and probably unoriginal observations at that.

               

Still… I want to get some of this stuff out.

So obviously, my trade as a historian means that above all, I am a purveyor of stories. It’s right there in the word. It’s the part about being a historian that I relish. All the hours I spend at the library reading, all the time in the stacks researching, all the time translating… all of it ultimately boils down to prep work for telling the best story that I possibly can.

                

While my chosen field doesn’t exactly offer the most economically secure career path in the modern world, I am comforted by the fact that many of the people that I talk to, after asking me what I do, will tell me “oh I loved history in school!” Even though there are individual histories that can be extremely dull (for my favorite chocolate-loving Master’s adviser I once had to read a 300 page history of coin hordes archeologists dug up in pre-Kievan Russia and what they largely could only guess that it told us about their society—blech), most of the time there is just something fascinating about the lives of our predecessors that is enough to peak our interests. Stories of heroic sacrifice, injustice and betrayal, good and evil... they are occurring all of the time, all throughout human civilization. What’s more, they all were real human experiences, LIVED by their actors, unlike the heroes and villains of our fictions.

                

But I think I may have put the chicken before the egg here. I think the only reason that people care at all about history stems from the human brain’s desire, it’s NEED for stories. We start ingesting them almost compulsively from the moment we have the cognitive capacity to put them together. Children, unprompted, will create lavish fantasy worlds from scratch from even the slightest of stimuli—a stick on the ground? It’s a gun, I’m a cop, and you’re a robber. Or maybe it’s a wand, and I’m a witch, and you’re lost in the woods and I’m going to try to eat you. Look at me and my friends on a Sunday afternoon: I’m Darian Halfmoon, the Half-Elf Paladin, the Knight of Sapphires and Champion of the House Sephardim, and with the help of my friend Janjo Lampte and my frenemy Steris Hardplow, we will delve the depths of the Repository of Vecna beneath Greyhawk City! (yes, this was my actual D&D character and plot of the game I was in this summer). Who knows when stories became such an integral part of the human condition, but I’m willing to bet it plays a large part in mankind’s evolutionary success story.

Because stories, it turns out, are good for a lot of things. They expand our imaginations, help us classify and share our experiences, store our memories, and, through the timeless dichotomy of “good” versus “evil,” define our moral compass. The shared experience of a story can be something that binds us to our neighbors, or to justify our aversion to outsiders. The way we relate to the world around is largely defined by the lessons we take from the stories we’re told (and tell ourselves).

Many who know me have probably heard me rave at one point or another about the work of Neil Gaiman—the author behind the truly epic Sandman series of graphic novels, as well as many beloved fantasy books—American Gods, Coraline, and Stardust, just to name a few off the top of my head (all of which have been deemed worthy enough by the English pop culture machine to warrant film adaptations). Gaiman is the Sorceror Supreme of modern storytelling—every one of his works contains absurd depth and appreciation for the art form. He uses his stories to tell even more stories, creating a fractal fiction that spans well beyond the pages on which they are printed. In fact, one of the major themes that runs throughout his works is the power inherent in stories. It’s through our belief in their legends that gods draw their power, and only by consciously accepting the role of the hero that his characters triumph.

One of my favorite pages in all of Gaiman’s works comes from Sandman, when the titular character, Dream of the Endless, is talking with prodigal brother, Destruction, about the nature of their family. The scene is set as the two walking through a moonlit field above the sea, the two men merely dark silhouettes against a brilliant and beautiful night sky. The brothers talk as they walk, headed for an ancient gazebo overlooking the seemingly endless waters of the Mediterranean, the cool breeze from the East whipping against their clothes. Destruction, who has tried to leave behind the duties of the Endless (being the embodiments of Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium), is reflecting on what he has learned from his self-imposed exile. There is a need for Death, he explains, because without her there could be no appreciation of life—without Desire, there can be no contentment; without Despair, there can be no happiness. Destruction himself, though he had grown weary of being the embodiment of chaos and ruin, realized that he could not simply cease to be, as then there could be no creation. Dream, forever cynical, asks his younger brother what he must be the reverse of. Destruction, with the faintest hint of a smile, turns his gaze to the heavens and answers “Who knows? Reality?”

The idea that the very universe, that all matter and the laws the govern it, can only be defined by what it is not (fantasy), has always stuck with me. I hope that my crude rendering of the scene above, even if you don’t have the context of the greater story in which it is set, had a certain power to it as well. But I think more than just as a poignant device in the saga of the Lord of Dreams, Gaiman has pointed to something extremely crucial. As humans, our realities are invariably shaped by our fantasies. The world around us is meant to conform to the familiar forms of story, and we struggle, we REALLY STRUGGLE when it doesn’t. When we can’t make sense of our reality, our storytelling brains kick into overdrive until we land on something that makes sense.

                                                                                

While attending a wedding this year, held in a church. Because the liturgy long ago lost interest for me, I was instead passing the time gazing at the chapels’ stained glass windows. From a strictly historical perspective, beautiful art and churches go together hand and hand, because it was much easier to convince an illiterate peasantry of the glory of god through images rather than words. It occurred to me for the first time though, while gazing at these visual representations of stories from the gospel, that it is almost exclusively in stories in which we express contact with the divine. “The Divine” not as a specific entity (God, Allah, Christ, Vishnu, what have you), but the Divine in the sense of the spiritual, of the perfected reality that we assume exists beyond our world despite the fact that we will never see, hear, or feel it (at least in the conventional sense).[2] It occurred to me then that   the Divine can ONLY be conveyed in stories—weaved throughout texts, sermons, images, and even music. It is through stories that divinity is defined, understood, and passed on to us lowly mortals. It’s an impulse we as humans have developed in every society or human civilization that has ever existed, from Lightning=Zeus to Lenin=Socialist Jesus.

                

This was the connection that I started to allude to in last month’s post, and that I knew I would need this post to properly explain. If divinity can only exist and be experienced through story, I think it stands to reason that we start to look for the divine in stories, even when those stories are actually histories—real events, real people. The idea of the revolutionary value structure that places the defense of the revolution at the top of all priorities has linked the revolution to the divine, just as kings and queens and God-Emperors have done for centuries before. The revolution becomes paramount as only it can lead to the realization of paradise (again, a concept of the Divine) on Earth. Its stewards, like Lenin and later Stalin, become interpreters of the Divine will, and are therefore above reproach. This of course is not meant to be put forward as a universal interpretation accepted unquestioningly by all Soviet citizens, but for devotees of the party? Of the socialist ideal? Of the divine mission of the Bolshevik party? These connections hold weight. No matter how much a good Marxist can believe that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” as story-hungry human beings we are hard wired to look for a connection with the Divine, or at least a sense of purpose greater than ourselves, wherever we can find it…

Despite our belief that it could be otherwise, the world is still a confusing place, and the stimuli we’re forced to make sense of just won’t stop coming. Here’s the part of our program where I sneak in one last story from my days as a construction worker (which have thankfully now past). I put this here not to deride a person or their beliefs, but to prove a point—OK, I’m lying: this person was for a short time my supervisor who I harbor an extreme dislike for. I am most certainly going to gleefully poke fun at him on the internet, but please don’t let that detract from the point I’m trying to make.

                

While riding with this individual in awkward silence between job sites, I made a comment about the surprising amount of rain the KC area had gotten over the weekend, enough to flash flood the Westport bar district. I had hoped to find a common subject to make small talk about, as I knew he lived somewhere north of downtown.  My supervisor then replied “Oh yeah, that was crazy! And you know, my wife told me saw CHEM TRAILS in the sky above town before the rains hit.”

                

Queue my stunned silence, as I try to process the information that a seemingly rational and sane individual is actually a conspiracy theorist.

                

He continued: “Do you know about chem trails?” This is a difficult question to answer. It’s like a Jehovah’s Witness showing up at your door and asking “have you gotten to know Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior?”—how do you explain that yes I was raised in the church but no I do not under any circumstances want to continue this conversation with you because I know where it’s going. Instead of answering “why yes I am aware of the conspiracy theory known as chem trails!” I opted to get really interested in something on my phone. Not deterred, the person whose directions I am supposed to follow then filled me in on how the government has a machine that can control the weather (possibly connected to chem trails), and that FEMA death camps have been popping up all around the US in the last 10 years. Why, you ask? (I didn’t): because “they” are gearing up for a “massive population extermination.” There wasn’t the trace of doubt in his mind. These are all stories he actually believed.

                

“Really makes you think, right?” he asked. It did, but not in the way he intended. It got me thinking about just how powerful our belief in stories can become.

The power of stories can be so easily be used for ill as well as for good. Our willingness to believe in a compelling story can be a major crutch of the human condition. One thing I’ve learned from 2016 it’s that we as a society have a hard time dealing with obvious falsehoods, simply because the way our media strives to tell stories is through a tone that is perceived as “fair” or “balanced” or “objective.” When Donald Trump tells a blatant and abject falsehood, reporters have been all too complacent in disseminating his exact words, allowing his lies to spread openly (both with and without contention), through what we understand to be legitimate channels of information. The effect is viral, apparently, because the proto-fascist elements of American society are all too welcome to accept them as truth. Here’s a thought, news media: let’s just preface things with the fact that it is a lie. “Donald Trump then lied about the birther movement being started by the Clinton campaign.” Don’t let a story form. Just acknowledge the man is lying. Don’t let him tell a story that we then have to go back and undo. Stories have power. “His side of the story” has a lot more inherent power than “this is a lie deliberately told for personal gain.”[3]

Just to see this in action, I’m going to link a bit the Daily Show did this last week, asking questions to Donald Trump supporters to find out just what they actually believe. The results were, of course, horrifying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFQhw3VVToQ

So, we’ve established a few things: stories are inescapable, we as human beings cannot seem to live our lives without them. Stories also have a discernible effect on us, though usually not on a conscious level, and have the power to shape the way we view reality. They can inspire us to shape the world toward an ideal, Divine state or just as easily turn the world into a horrifying nightmare scenario. The language we use to describe the world as we see it is couched in stories, drawn from tales of good versus evil in which we set ourselves as the protagonist! What exactly does that mean for us to know these things, especially if there’s really very little we can do to stop it from happening?

                

For me, it means trying to think ever more critically, both of the stories I am are constantly being told to me by the news, by society, by advertisements, and perhaps most importantly, the stories I tell myself. It means being aware of the power inherent in the stories that I will tell, especially as I start teaching my class this quarter and as I write my dissertation, and being careful in how I try to wield that power. It also means keeping a close eye on the “good” I hope to do in the world, and realizing that the concept is subjective, and can therefore always be refined in relation to the “good” as it is understood by others.

                

Most simply though, it means that I’m going to keep rolling dice, developing complex characters, and constructing massively intricate fantasy worlds in my head in my free time, because D&D is extremely fun. Who knows? Maybe if telling histories doesn’t work out for me I can try my hand at fantasy…

Until next time, comrades.

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[1] Special thanks to friend and WSP reader Jordan Robbins for this recommendation during one of our weekly post-work happy hours. Redeem this footnote for one beer, if you remind me.

[3] Side note, this can obviously said about Hilary Clinton, and probably any politician worth their salt. I choose to single out Trump because I do not like fascists.

Revolutionary Value Structures

This week I wanted to finally come back around to a subject that’s been on my mind for quite some time, and would actually mean tackling one of the pieces I promised to write way back in January (but clearly haven’t yet). As a historian of the Soviet Union I work in relatively recent history, in fact it will be only a year and a few months from now the world will be able to look back and reflect on the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution. However, due to the intense politicization of the Soviet system in the West (and of course vice versa) during the Cold War, much of Soviet history today seems to the average observer something like peering onto an alien planet straight out of the futurist sci-fi of the 1920s—which was largely inspired by the revolution, it’s worth noting—or maybe an alternate dimension where people think and behave differently than the world we know. I expect this piece will one way or another be a fruitful exercise, if not for my dissertation than at least for my preparation to teach my Soviet history course this Fall. I want to make Soviet history accessible and engaging, and to do that I think it’s important to teach not just what people did, but how people thought; how they conceptualized the world around them and how that in turn led them to shape it.

This discussion will probably range a lot farther than between the strict confines of 1917 and 1991. After all, modern political revolutions were not invented in the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, nor were they confined there over the course of the tumultuous twentieth century and beyond. The intensity of commitment to or entrenchment of revolutionary value structures varies greatly from revolution to revolution, or even “revolution” (that is to say, a non-revolutionary revolution). In light of some recent events, I think we even have the opportunity to look at some very contemporary case studies to define a revolutionary value structure by what it is not. We’ll come back to this later, though. First, let’s see if we can’t lay out some boundaries so my dear readers can begin to imagine just what the hell it is I’m talking about.

I first began to conceptualize the idea of a “revolutionary value structure” as a response to one of my field exam questions, the beautifully succinct yet poignant “What was Stalinism?” This is probably the question out of all of my exams that I felt most prepared to answer: I spent 4 years trying to come to grips with the political phenomenon of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Still, though, to definitively answer the question, and not just talk about the myriad possible ways of understanding it, I felt I needed to make my own intervention, as many scholars have come close to capturing but not always defining the term. I admit, I have been heavily influenced by a number of scholars and feel particularly indebted to the works of Stephen Kotkin, Jochen Hellbeck, Shelia Fitzpatrick, and Miriam Dobson, just to name a few. Basically their main methodological innovations were that trying to separate Soviet life into spheres of culture, politics, the everyday, etc., we must try to understand the Soviet experience as a single whole. In this track of thinking, I applied of all things “an inquiry into values”—a philosophical endeavor of Robert Pirsig laid out in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and later expanded on in Lila). If you haven’t read Zen yet, let me first say this: YOU SHOULD. Second, if you haven’t, it can get a little jargonistic in the way he talks about thing like “quality” and “values.” I probably adopted a little too much of that in my analysis, and I’m going to do my best to cut it back and explain my terms when I can, but… yeah, sorry if this gets dense or hard to follow.

So, to begin, just what is a “revolutionary value structure?” If we consider cultural and political norms as regulated by a hierarchy of shared values—or perhaps more precisely, an interlocking, overlapping structure of values—then if we are able to identify those values we can track their rise or fall within the structure over time. I think this can be applied to any civilization—Americans operate under a value structure where “freedom” as a concept is given higher priority than say, I don’t know, “collective safety” or “responsible gun control.” It was the concept that the country was founded on, and in its day, it too was a revolutionary value structure (and I suppose one could even argue it still is, though I think that would be a challenging position to hold given the state of the world today). Myriad value structures exist, not only at state or national levels, but also among social groups, on down, if you care to imagine it, as the unspoken rules that unify a group of friends or even our families. They are by no means immutable, either, as value structures can flex, change, and even be forcibly overthrown (though of course this is no small task—it is typically a revolutionary endeavor).

What makes a value structure, then, revolutionary? My definition would be that a revolutionary value structure is one that puts the health and pursuit of the revolution at the top of the value hierarchy. A revolution in itself can be seen as an attempt to restructure the fundamental value hierarchies that define a society—for instance, to take values like “freedom” or “equality” or “social good” and reshuffle them to create a new model based on the prevailing revolutionary ideology. While these are of course more abstract values to think about, the abstract ones tend to be the values that rise to the top and from which the rest of the hierarchy can stem. 

To examine this, let’s take a look at the case that I have thought the most about: Soviet Russia. From 1917 onward, the Bolshevik Party of the Soviet Union acted according to two primary goals: the defense of the revolution, and the building of socialism. While these objectives invariably shaped Soviet governance during the Civil War and even the NEP, let’s focus here on the revolution as it became more concretely manifest in a system we now commonly refer to as “Stalinism.”

For instance, let’s look at the First Five-Year plan as an assertion of certain values: such as that heavy industry was inherently more valuable important than light because it would produce arms that could be used in the inevitable upcoming conflict with capitalist states. In addition, we can see that collective farming was seen as more valuable than the peasant village. If we broaden our scope in this vein, we can see how these values effected other related concepts. Specialized knowledge of metallurgy would trump an individual’s class background, because for the success of heavy industry, specialists were required. However, in the collective farm, success was seen as dependent on the collective, rather than the individual, and opposition to the collective was then identified through class background (kulak-ism). The campaign against kulaks was also made possible by the high value placed on the security of the revolution, which dictated constant vigilance against reactionary elements of society and held that the possibility of internal enemies and saboteurs bent on the destruction of the world socialist movement. When combined with the high value placed on the development of a modernized industrial base, which meant that food allocation would heavily favor the industrialized cities rather than rural areas, this leads to mass starvation in one of the most agriculturally productive areas in the entire world.

If we are to only look at the values at play and not the results of their interplay, it’s becomes hard to point to a specific place where things went wrong. The emphasis placed on heavy industry is not an inherently immoral choice, and indeed it would eventually allow the Soviet Union to withstand and eventually overcome the onslaught of the highly-mechanized Nazi war machine. The collectivization of agriculture is not inherently less moral than small peasant farming (though the methods used to enforce this decision might be). Nor is the imperative to protect the revolution inherently immoral—the right of a body to defend itself from force is an agreed upon right of humankind, whether it be in the form of a state, nation, or a merchant caravan taking up arms to protect itself from roaming bandits. It is possible to now go back down the chain of events and point directly to instances of immorality and inhumanity. But in the subjective context of that value structure that existed under the First Five-Year Plan, these policies held a higher value, because they were to work toward the spread of socialism and the defense of the revolution. This value ultimately eclipsed the value of an individual human life, and that is where the paradox of Stalinism lies.

               

                This phenomenon is not confined just to the Soviet experience. While I don’t want to spread my scope too far or bore anyone with too specific details, I think it is worth pointing to the first real time a revolutionary value structure was erected in the modern age, and the parallels it has with the revolution of the Bolsheviks: the rule of the Jacobins during the French Revolution. Here was the first time where “defense of the revolution” was elevated as the highest spot within the value structure of the governing body. It inundated society, created a strict divide between allies of the revolution, and potential agents of counter revolution. This was seen as necessary to the revolution’s Jacobin caretakers, because they saw their role as rebuilding French civilization again from the ground up, sweeping away every aspect of the old order from aristocratic privilege to the very ordering of the calendars. In attempting to destroy the old world, many lives would be sacrificed upon the altar of the guillotine. Ultimately, it was this fervor that consumed the Jacobins themselves, and in doing so the long dormant forces of counterrevolution were able to slowly reassert control. 

                If we jump back in time a scant few years and cross the Atlantic Ocean, some would perhaps point to another case worth comparing. However, I actually want to point to the American “revolution” as an incomplete revolutionary model. While it touted the ideals of the Enlightenment and espoused the virtue of freedom from a (largely imagined) “tyranny” of the English, it also helped enshrine a doctrine of slavery and oppression based on a racial and social hierarchy that placed white men squarely on top. By in large, the independence movement of the 13 colonies was an affirmation of the status quo rather than a revolution. The society built in the Americas was already codified by the time they broke free of the label of “colony” had already developed its own value structure based around the core beliefs in private property, personal independence, protestant industry (and of course slavery) that made it a distinct civilization separate from that of its parent empire.[2] The whole “no taxation without representation” was a rather convenient myth—it’s not like the English Empire wasn’t at this time governed by Parliamentary system wherein the colonies did have representatives (albeit with limited powers). Regardless, this was the language used to justify their “revolution” affirming the rights of a select few individuals at the expense of the rest of American society. While we have as a polity made strides to undermine this principle (at least in its most egregious forms), one could reasonably argue that for many this is still the highest value of what they understand to be the once “great” American value hierarchy of which they hope to somehow revive.

                While we’re on the subject of incomplete American revolutions, I feel that we’ve finally reached a safe distance to look back and do an autopsy of the failure of the Sanders campaign to actually deliver on its revolutionary promise. Though I fully supported Sanders’ bid in the primary, there were still many concerns I had with the movement that he helped to form. Ultimately, looking back, it’s actually shockingly easy to see how doomed his campaign was from the start. Many people saw his entrance into the race as an attempt to drag Clinton farther to the left on economic issues.  What I think has become clear now, is that the reverse occurred: every step of the way, Sanders was driven more and more to the center.

                It’s relatively simple, with the power of hindsight, to point to the exact moment where it all went wrong: when Sanders decided to register as a democrat. Yes, he did so to be able to debate Clinton on a national stage and gain the name recognition that helped spread his movement beyond its original bounds of a small circle of independent progressives. In doing so he was able to make a serious challenge to Clinton in what had for years been thought to be an inevitable coronation. However, he also walked the “revolution” he hoped to lead straight into an established bastion of conservatism and counterrevolution.[3]

                We’ve seen it now. We’ve got the emails; we have the proof. Once inside the Democratic party machine, Sanders proposed revolution was cut off, forced to redirect its energies to play political games, all the while being undercut by party officials who ignored their own rules meant to provide an honest primary. We can see here an obvious corollary to my previous point about the revolutions in Russia and France. Since “defense of the revolution” was not the highest priority of Sanders campaign (or even, it seems, within the hierarchy at all), it was doomed to be picked apart by the practiced, steady hand of counterrevolution. (EDIT 8/25/16: further proof: http://www.npr.org/2016/08/24/491242694/bernie-sanders-to-announce-our-revolution-political-group)

                Without this priority of defending the revolution at all costs, really at best the lofty ideals espoused by the Sanders campaign--grassroots political organizing and financing, getting money out of politics, and instituting a basic progressive tax structure—became little more than suggestions for reform, and historically “refolutions” have proven rarely if ever successful in the long term. But long into the primary, before it was clear that Clinton would prevail and provide republicans with the perfect center-Right candidate they had always dreamed of, we still called it a revolution, even as what little trappings of a real revolution the campaign had continued to fall away. The revolution was a story that, for a time, we progressives could believe in. Sadly, in the immortal words of Laura Jane Grace Gable, “the revolution was a lie.”

I feel like this particular discussion actually transitions well into another philosophical venture I’ve been wanting to make: the value of--and the values contained in—stories. The more I think about story-telling and stories in general, the more I understand them as simply system for the transmission of values. This is of course an absurdly broad definition, but if we apply it across the broad spectrum of what constitutes as a “story,” I think it holds up. The fantasy epics of the immortal Hero’s Cycle convey the value of honesty, bravery, and self-sacrifice. The Brothers Grimm fairy-tale of misbehaving children being eaten by the witch of the woods or being snatched up by whatever horrid beast certainly strives to instill the traditional protestant patriarchy. Or a beaming friend telling you about the big ass fish he caught over the weekend attempting to convey the joy of victorious hunt, of a day’s fruitful labor done well. Or more cynically, perhaps it’s the story of an unarmed black man shot by police that becomes a vehicle for white power narratives when an unflattering image of said man is smattered across TV screens and is labeled a “thug” before being implicated (though he will never be convicted, mind you) of committing some petty crime. (A quick aside here: news stories, whatever their actual factual reporting of content, are told through a filter of cultural context where a subjective morality is inferred if not implicitly stated—even relatively objective reporting can’t escape this, though undoubtedly some sources are less objective than others.)

If stories are key then to the transmission of values, it should come as no surprise that revolutions tend to have a massive impact on storytelling and the stories that end up saturating our collective consciousness. Altogether, revolutionary stories help convey the core values that will serve as the building blocks for the new order.

I think for now I will leave off. The “revolutionary value structure” is still just a kernel of an idea that, now that it has taken root in my consciousness, I can’t help but see everywhere I look, especially when I start to think about my research question and how I hope to answer it. It’s a giddy and exciting feeling, and I regret having it taken me this long to put it down on paper. As with all big ideas, it’s going to need some serious refining. I’m already contemplating giving an optional project to my students this fall to try to flesh out what they see to be as pieces of the revolutionary value structure within Soviet civilization as an extra credit assignment. I want to see what fresh (and unbiased) eyes come up with when applying my model, just to see how well it holds water. If I do, I’ll be sure to report my findings here.

For my next installment, however, I want to really come back to the concept of stories and their importance to the human experience. I’ve finally got an idea burning a hole in my pocket, and with the interns finally gone from the jobsite, I’m back on extremely repetitive boring tasks that, while unglamorous, give me time to collect my thoughts. It’s my sincerest intention that there won’t be such a gap before you hear from me again!

Until then, comrades…

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[1] Thermidor was the name of the month in the new revolutionary calendar, during which Maximillian Robespierre’s political “reign of terror” was brought to an end, signaling a retreat away from radical revolutionary tactics and would subsequently lead to a return of aristocratic power at the heart of French politics and, ultimately, made the conditions perfect for a figure like Napoleon to seize power.

[2] Anthony Pagden makes this argument in Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France (1998) and points to it as one of the factors that would mark the end of the first “phase” of British colonial ideology, which would undergo a transformation to the more separated and exploitative model that it would use to dominate peoples across Asia and Africa.

[3] If you don’t believe me, even the Atlantic has made the connection: As of 2016, Democrats are now America’s conservative party. Republicans are against the status quo, insofar as they hope to transform the world’s oldest democracy into a fascist police state. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/democrats-conservative-party/496670/

Black Lives Matter

So here we are. July 7^th, 2016. Two black men dead at the hands of police in as many days. This is not a fluke, this is not an outlier, nor is this a rare, isolated occurrence. This is the country that we live in. These are our fellow citizens, and these are the people who are supposedly in charge of protecting us.

In Baton Rouge, Alton Sterling is shot dead while on the ground, already restrained by police. In Minneapolis, Philando Castile is shot dead in his car after being pulled over for a broken taillight. In both cases the incident is captured on video. In both cases we have a ringing indictment of police brutality and extrajudicial murder. Here they both are, you can see for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBZPCDqymyo

https://www.facebook.com/100007611243538/videos/1690073837922975/

Don’t you dare just scroll on by. Don't be complicit in silencing these voices, their truths. Click the links. Watch them for yourself. Experience the horror these men felt. Feel disgusted, feel helpless. Get angry, be outraged!

Picture yourself in their shoes. Try to imagine what possible wrongdoing could have been worthy of this fate.

Do you think the officers shown here have ever uttered the phrase “Black Lives Matter”? Do you think they truly believe it? Hell, do you really even think they believe that “All Lives Matter,” when clearly the lives of Alton and Philando held very little worth in their eyes.

Would you rather look away? Would you rather take comfort in the story the media will inevitably try to tell you, that these men were “thugs” because they had a different set of life experiences than you and came from a different cultural background than the one you’re familiar with? Are you ready to believe that this violence had anything other to do than with the perceptions these officers had about these men because of the color of their skin? Are you ready to play your part in the narrative that the police only do what they have to, that this is for our own good? Or will you get mad at the people who make excuses, who say that--for whatever bullshit reason--this is OK? Will you push back against what you know to be wrong in the name of what’s right?

 Can you possibly come to terms with that Alton and Philando had families, friends, people whom they loved and who loved them right back. People who needed them, who now mourn for them, and whom they will only have the chance to see them once more, dressed in black, seemingly at peace, before they are lowered six feet under the earth...

Can you come to terms with the fact that some murderers get to wear uniforms?

We’ve seen this story before, haven’t we? It’s become all too ingrained in our social consciousness. If I asked you to name right now the names of all the people of color who have died at the hands of police I would be genuinely surprised if you could keep track of the people, places, and ways their deaths occurred. That’s not even if you weren’t paying very close attention, because even for those who fight this struggle are limited by the capacities of human memory, and the data pool has simply become too large. And it will continue to grow, unless we stop it.

So here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to right now, wherever you are, to take a moment to think about what you just saw, what you just read.  Take a deep breath. Now, say it with me—say it aloud, even if it’s only a whisper, even if it's just to yourself—say these three simple words: “Black Lives Matter.”

There, you see? That wasn’t that difficult, was it? The world we live in was not destroyed; no one was harmed, no one was excluded. You have just affirmed the value of the lives of more than 40 million individuals living in this country alone, not to mention the untold millions more that live beyond our borders. You have taken one small part this dark day and made it slightly more beautiful, you have chosen an affirmation of love rather than hate. You have taken part in the grieving process for two lives that were taken from this world too soon.

So what now? You said the words, and while it might have in some small way helped, deep down we know it’s not enough. So now we will keep saying it. We say it to whoever will listen. We shout it at those who refuse to acknowledge it. Maybe, just maybe, if we all come together, and affirm that indeed Black Lives Matter enough, maybe someday all of us will start to believe it.

Because at the moment, it’s hard for me to believe that this country believes anything but otherwise.

-MDC

Life Update June 2016

It’s been a while, dear readers. I haven’t posted anything in nearly a month now, probably more, but it hasn’t been because I haven’t had anything worth writing about, or because I ran out of things to say. More than anything I’ve slipped in my writing discipline, the farther and farther I get from the outset of this project the harder it’s been to keep on top of self-imposed deadlines. I need J. J. Jameson as my editor to shout at me that I’m not giving him near enough stories about that dastardly Spiderman. Actually, I think it might be more accurate to say that life has taken it upon itself to beat any writing discipline I used to have straight out of me. I haven’t been a proper student for a few months now, and while the gears of critical analysis still turn from some unstoppable momentum set in motion long ago, the person who had papers and grades and deadlines is being slowly eroded away to be replaced with a man that gets up every morning at 6AM sharp, works 10 hour days, and then is in bed by 10:30PM like clockwork. If you count that up, subtract the hour in the morning before coffee kicks in, and account for nightly dinner and chores, that means I get effectively about 3-4 hours a day to be a real human person with interests and goals and ambitions outside next week’s paycheck. Too much of that time I find filled by TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a surprisingly good show nearly 2 decades later, you guys), but what can I say? I like my stories. I need to start reading more… but even then, if I read, I’m still not writing…

So anyway, while I sit here in my sweltering upstairs office on this 95 degree June day (happy palindrome week, everyone!) while Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger ekes out of my record player, I endeavor here just to write, with no more an express purpose than to update you guys on what’s going on around the offices of the Wheat State Pravda. There will probably be some politics and the usual ranting thrown in every here and there, but I don’t have my usual direction going in. Let’s just see what happens stream of consciousness Cormac McCarthy style no punctuation or nothing or OK probably not that last part.

Let’s see. Just what is new? Proletarian living has proven both dynamic and stagnant at the same time: I’ve shifted around to some different sites, and worked for a few different foremen; one of which I got along so poorly with that it drove me to look for new work. That search led to an interesting episode which I suppose I’ll come back to here shortly. Thankfully I shifted back to my old crew, and due to some personnel turnover, moved up a bit in the hierarchy. We have a bunch of interns on site now from various construction sciences programs from around the region, and having more guys to do the same amount of grunt work really helps. I also I guess proved myself competent enough to be trusted to do basic carpentry, which has led to me doing a bit more work that I actually genuinely enjoy—always a good thing.

We’ve also moved from doing the repetitive work of laying out a single massive concrete slab to building more complex structures, which has been a welcome change of pace. I’ve even helped pour some of the massive 20’ concrete walls that are going up: that was a trip of a day, standing around on a shaky catwalk for 5 hours pouring and vibrating something like 80 yards of ‘crete, surrounded by massive steel and wood forms that are held in place by massive bolts and steel beams. I’m supposed to be getting a harness soon that would allow me to help with the work where you go climb around on said structures, basically urban bouldering for money, but the date of harness training keeps getting pushed back. Either way, the rains of May have finally dried up, and we’re in full swing, so for the foreseeable future I’ll be averaging 45 hour weeks.

The personnel changeup hasn’t been all good. You may remember Little Chris and Mick from my earlier post, probably my two closest friends on site—Chris disappeared at some point when I was at the other jobsite, and Mick finally got in for his hip surgery, and now he’ll be out recuperating probably until I’ll have already left.  In their place there’s been an influx of people from another site that just finished work, as well as some new hires… very few of which I can stand to be around for very long. Some of them are just plain shitheels to work with (while Meth-Mouth Joe is gone, I’m now stuck with a new perpetual slacker named Zabie), while other guys are fine… until the conversation ever turns to women, race, or politics. Then I realize that I have absolutely nothing in common with these people. As Mick put it about one of our coworkers: “Oh yeah, he’s a nice enough guy! But if he has one flaw, it’s the racism. And the misogyny… Also, the bigotry…” Yeah, those turn out to be pretty big, noticeable flaws, and it makes me want to get the fuck away from them very quickly. I’ve taken to working almost solely with Anthony and my now sort-of boss Miguel, just because with them I don’t have to listen to white supremacist bullshit. This has had an interesting side effect, because now, even though I don’t speak a word of Spanish and my nationality, even if I did have Latino heritage would still be American, I have now been several times been mistaken as Mexican (even by Miguel, who I’ve had to correct on multiple occasions). That hadn’t happened in a while, though I do have my tan back so I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised.

As you can maybe tell, I’m still less than thrilled about where I’m working right now. This had led me to an impromptu job search a few weeks back, and actually got as far as an interview with, of all things, the Kansas Democratic Party. I had been approached about a summer fellowship position to help out with the campaign. I had been excited by the prospect of helping put a thumb in Brownback’s eye come November in local elections, but in terms of the national race I’m still pretty internally conflicted about the prospects of Hilary’s candidacy, so I was wary going in. Our correspondence to that point hadn’t indicated just what they would want me to do, so I decided to head to Topeka on a day where we had been rained out to hear about the offer. I met with the party’s field operations director, who I was surprised to find was about my age. She detailed the position for me, which was basically an shitty-paying internship to shadow how the inner workings of a campaign were ran to eventually groom me into either a candidate or future political operative. I gave a hard pass. I’ve had limited experience at small scale public service as part of the UW History GLC, and it taught me a very important lesson about myself—I want absolutely no part in career politics. In addition, the whole pay thing was a massive downgrade, so it wouldn’t have been feasible anyway. I gave her a very polite hard pass, but we actually had a very pleasant conversation about the state of politics in KS and the nation, and actually she got me in touch with someone who is the party’s liaison to Unions in the state… I was actually supposed to meet with him weeks ago, but time keeps on slipping… it probably won’t amount to much either, but it is nice to find some like-minded folks in this sea of nationalistic bullshit I’ve found myself in.

Since my last post, there’s been a few developments on the whole “I’m still trying to write a dissertation” front, but I’m afraid there isn’t a whole lot in the way of good news. I got passed over, pretty expectedly, for a travel grant from ASEEES that I had applied for that would have taken me to Russia this winter—competition was going to be incredibly steep, so I hadn’t banked much on this one. Still, it was a bit of a downer to get the rejection. This combined with learning that the history department is stretched extremely thin on its summer digital history fellowships, meaning that I would get no money to help do any sort of work other than construction this summer, kind of drove home the point that I simply wouldn’t be making progress on this dissertation for some time to come.

In addition, about 3 weeks ago, the funding situation in our department in general just got incredibly hairy, and here’s the part of the life update where Matt starts to get mad and political and shit. It was getting to be the time where everyone in the department was expecting to hear back about their funding packages for the 2016-17 school year. The process was taking longer than usual, and, as we’ve had trouble with in the past, the department was being very opaque as to just why that was. Turns out that just a few weeks before funding packages were to be announced, the College of Arts and Sciences hit their humanities departments (namely Political Science, Philosophy, Sociology, History, and Literature) were to receive 33%  cuts from their teaching assistantships. For those few of you who don’t know, this is the backbone of our guaranteed funding structure: graduate students work by helping full time professors manage their grading and discussion sections in exchange for tuition wager and a modest living stipend. The history department has had a long-standing policy that new incoming graduate students will get 5 years GUARENTEED funding, mostly in the form of TA-ships but we’re also available for fellowships and are of course encouraged to seek outside funding whenever possible. Still, TAships make up the most reliable way to ensure our students have the resources they need to complete their studies.

By making these cuts, the College has absolutely gutted these departments’ ability to look after their students. It is directly inimical to seeing graduate students graduate with degrees. It forces graduate students to compete for an ever-shrinking pot of financial stability. It’s entirely 0-sum: if I get a TA-ship now, that means I’m taking it from someone else in the department who needs it just as bad as I do, in most cases probably even more so. There are people I know in their fifth year who were offered no assistance for the entirety of the 2016-17 school year. They are in the middle of their dissertations, only quarters away from graduation. Their lives are now in limbo.

And even as our lifeblood, it’s hard to see TA-ships as really great thing to begin with, especially for the current rate that we are contracted to work. Many of my colleagues work second jobs on top of teaching just to make ends meet, because UW sits in one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the country and until last year, the university had refused to give TAs a cost of living increase (while of course the salary of the president swelled to a whopping $675K a year). This only changed last May when we went to the bargaining table as a pissed off and mobilized force, with TAs across the university ready to strike if wages remained flat and our fees were increased. I marched, I organized, and along with many friends and colleagues held the picket line until finally, in the 11^th hour of negotiations, the university did concede a modest raise for the people that are on the frontlines of providing its undergraduates with their education.

It’s hard not to see these 33% cuts to TA positions in the humanities as anything but retributive. The humanities departments listed above were on the front lines through the entire negotiations, and were some of the most vocal and critical critiques of university policy. It’s almost like these departments produce scholars capable of critical thought and analysis—pretty inimical to hand-waving away raising the salary of bureaucrats because of the need to “attract the top talent to the university” rather than to actually make sure the people teaching in your classrooms can afford things like basic room and board.

The College justified the cuts by saying that enrollments in humanities departments were not matching that of STEM fields. Rather than incentivizing enrollment into our fields as something crucial to a higher education, the university is content to run this non-profit, state funded university as it would a corporation, bending to the will of supply and demand. Here’s where I may start sounding preachy, but what the ever loving shit is the point of creating a bunch of “code-spewing Trumpites” (thanks for that one, B.T.) that are capable of a basic task but incapable of critical thought? There is a social good that comes from average people engaging with big ideas that stretch our minds and expose us to different viewpoints. I don’t think that’s debatable anymore, since apparently enough of those incapable of these things have come out of the wood work to support a fascist demagogue white supremacist as a major party candidate for the president of the fucking United States.

The other big problem here is that while the people making these decisions were probably once educators themselves, they simply aren’t anymore. They’re self-interested bureaucrats, and nothing more. Once you are elevated to the position of dean or provost or president, you simply don’t have the connection to actual students anymore. It’s the same problem the Soviet Union faced when it elevated the sons and daughters of the proletariat and the peasantry to run the mechanisms of power in the state and the factories—at some point, those roots get lost amid the bullshit and the self-interest. It’s harder still to see faculty within our department just roll over and accept this. They know how important this is to their own students graduating, and yet so many were willing to just roll over and accept that this was just the way it had to be. It’s not. It’s not and some of us are fighting it. We’re fighting for each other against those who are fighting for themselves.

So there’s that rant. That story isn’t over, and I hope to engage more forcefully in the action against these cuts soon. But even then, life has moved on since this was the concern at the forefront of my mind…

I confess, I meant to post this a week ago. I was basically at this point last Saturday when I shut the laptop, figuring I would come back with some closing thoughts in the morning and post this whole shebang. That wasn’t to be the case though. Last Sunday I awoke to hear about the attack in Orlando, and my thoughts were immediately elsewhere.

At the time, I struggled to process it. I knew I couldn’t in good conscious not write about it, but at the same time, I just couldn’t write about it. The most disturbing thing that I’m still trying to come to grips with is just how numb I’ve become to news like this. There isn’t surprise anymore. There’s outrage but I’m not even always sure what against anymore. Mongolian Correspondent Eric Chase reported that he had been away from internet and hadn’t known about the incident for an entire week. It made me wonder if this instant inevitability of information is actually good for our mental health. Would we be better off not knowing just how mind-numbingly regular tragedy has become in this country? Would it help? I arrived eventually at a “no, of course not,” but by god… it might be easier. Ignorance is bliss, after all. Then again, ignorance is also terrible.

As I have in the past and will continue to do in the future, I tried my best this week to be a responsible ally of the LBGTQ community. I got into several fights at work over gun control and cultural culpability that I’m sure by now has fundamentally changed how my coworkers think of me, while unfortunately probably did little to change their thinking.  I posted what I thought was a thought provoking series of image macros to my facebook wall that, of course, sparked heated debate between some of my more enlightened friends and a former rowing teammate, culminating in a very powerful and brave moment that I sincerely hope will make him consider his perception of himself and the world. I tend to very much doubt it, but I guess it’s what I set out to do in the first place.

The idea that “this could have been our community” doesn’t hit me as hard as many of my friends, but at the same time maybe it should. Until a lunatic with military grade hardware decided to turn it into a warzone, Pulse was having a Saturday night just like any other. I’ve been to plenty of gay bars in the course of hanging out with friends in Seattle. I feel like many people don’t understand that a gay space doesn’t always mean flamboyant displays of homosexuality, or that I’ve spent plenty of nights in a gay bar in heated arguments over which team had the better defense, the 2014 Seahawks or the 2016 Broncos. Or that they’re just places like any other, where likeminded people go to have fun, relax, and escape the ever pressing onslaught of bullshit that life throws at us. I feel like I can try to educate them, but to really understand it’s something you just have to be willing to experience for yourself, to take that ever so scary step to try to empathize with another human being that you don’t immediately understand. We live in a world, unfortunately, dominated by cowards.

We’re still not done with the fallout from the massacre in Orlando, and hopefully for once the opportunity to change things won’t be washed out by the tide of “thoughts and prayers” from people willing to do literally the barest of minimums in order to sleep at night. I’m not terribly optimistic, though when am I ever?

It’s made for a hard week at work. Conversations I hear within earshot make me so disgusted that I simply have to withdraw from it all. It’s made things on site just a little more lonely and stressful, which, to top off, has been thrown in on top of the Gods putting Kansas in a pressure cooker and turning that bitch on high. Heat indexes topped out at 110 this week, and by the time 8 AM rolls around I’m usually already drenched in my own sweat. I’ve been working on putting in a white gravel rock bed, and the sun reflecting right back up off that has made me feel like one of those hot dogs spinning perpetually on the rollers at the Kwik Trip for 11 hours a day. I think my skin has the texture and the color to match at this point.

Not all was glum and sweaty in the Wheat State this week, though. Just as I was about to resign myself to another full year away from making any forward progress on my own career, someone pulled the lever on the slot machine and the line came up all cherries for yours truly. My wonderful amazing adviser Glennys was appointed to some committee that was going to be a big CV booster but a huge drain on time and energy (one of those “Congratulations, I’m sorry!” situations), leaving her with a quarter off from teaching, but with a course already on the books. That course is “The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union,” and it is going to be taught by Professor Cotton come Fall of 2016. I won’t be just a TA—I’ll be running the whole show. I’m going to be teaching the class from top to bottom, from reading assignments to daily lectures and discussions, from final paper topics to entering grades for the course, it’s all me. It’s the moment I’ve been waiting for basically since I started this whole grad school gig back in 2011. This is my Rudy moment.

So yeah, now while I’m cutting boards or shoveling rock or pounding nails I get to start thinking about lecture topics, reading assignments, course themes, group assignments… not to mention the D&D campaign I want to come back to with my Seattle group! It means I’ll be leaving the Wheat State for a short time, I should be able to push back my fellowship to a later quarter, which means I’ll be back by the New Year (the other TA-ship I was offered I plan to decline, hopefully under the provision that it will be given to one of my classmates who can benefit from it more than I). The future in that respect

Random side thought! Jocie and I went and saw the Lobster last night. It’s quirky and weird and cute and dark, everything you want in an indie film. It reminded me of something Wes Anderson might have made it he read a bit more Kafka. I found that I like films with completely arbitrary and unexplained rules. It makes me feel a little better that I live within a system sometimes just as equally baffling if not more so. Highly recommend if you’re into that sort of thing.

Dang it, I just realized I forgot to relay the story of my interview with an actual living, (mouth-)breathing Trump supporter! It went about as well as expected, you know, with threats of violence. I guess that's a tale for another time...

Hopefully I can come back with something more substantial and what I consider content soon. Who knows, maybe it will even have to do with my dissertation? I tend to doubt it! Eric mentioned something about a work vs. happiness piece that I would love to devote some time to, I feel like I have more insight into that than ever before! Anyway, that’s how it is with me, it is my sincerest hope that everything is well with the rest of you!

Until next time, comrades….

Why is Matt a Historian?

"So Matt, you’re getting a PhD in History… what are you going to do with that?” Whenever I hear that question—and as you can imagine, I’ve gotten that question an awful lot over the years—I kind of laugh it off. I’ve known for a long time that what I wanted to do was to build a career in the academy, even though for the last decade or so that has increasingly become a seemingly poor life choice. I want to find a spot at a state university where I can lecture, work with graduate students as they develop and pursue their own research interests, and, of course, to write. As I’m (ever so slowly) ramping up to this dissertation, I’m just now beginning to think about what kind of histories I want to write, and that’s a philosophical adventure all its own.  But what I want to write about today is the other question I hear every time someone asks “what are you going to do with your degree?”—“so just why do you even want to be a historian anyway?”

What’s funny is, despite all this time pursuing this path, it hasn’t necessarily been a question I’ve really tried to seriously answer until now. My idea for this blog post actually came from one of my middle school age students at Boys and Girls Club (yes, that’s how long ago I started this damn post) asking for help on her history homework. She was having trouble because, to paraphrase her, “History is boring and pointless.” Myself, taken aback, replied “I’m a historian, I do history for a living!” to which her completely candid response was “Gross!” This is not an entirely uncommon conversation, I have learned, to have with middle and high school students. I understand a bit that it’s a matter of perspective: when you’ve only lived 10 years, everything seems pretty static and unchanging. It’s hard to see yourself as a part of or a product of history. Also, if you’re a student living in the First World, history seems to have worked out pretty well for you up ‘til this point so why bother to ask how we got here, right?

I’m a little loathe to admit that until my sophomore year of high school (2003-04?), I was largely the same. I was a good student, so I got good grades in history, but much of it didn’t particularly peak my interest. From what I can remember, I did a pretty fun diorama about the Battle of Bunker Hill when I was in 5^th grade, had a blast making a model cross-bow (non-working, obviously) with my dad and grandpa for a 6^th grade world history project on the medieval period, hated the Kansas history unit we were forced to do in 7^th grade (though I do have a distinct memory of this class discussing the 2000 election, where I learned that the electoral college was a thing and that everything I had been told about American politics up to that point was complete bullshit). I honestly can’t remember much from 8^th or 9^th grade, but around this time I was becoming invested in the other love of my life, the one that would ultimately lead me into History’s open arms: that’s right kids, I’m talking about communism.

“Just why in the world are you interested in Russia/the Soviet Union, Matt?” Because I get this question a lot too, I’m going to try to piece this together as best I can, well, historically. I really want to say that it all started with watching Enemy at the Gates (a film I later learned rankles the hackles of actual historians like no other, and I hope to return to this soon to illustrate just why that is) one fine afternoon with my good friends Derek Payne and Britt Dahlstrom.[1] Little did I know it, but this would be the start of a life-long love affair with the country, the city, and the history of the Soviet Union. Even with the still relatively uncritical mind of an 8^th grader, I was nonetheless captivated by the film’s aesthetic, of the story of the city’s heroic defenders, and the depiction of the struggle between these two political systems that, at the time, I still couldn’t really properly understand. I also thought that snipers were obviously super fucking cool and that a war movie was dope and there’s even that one sex scene even though you don’t see boobs and you know, 8^th grader stuff. That year I would even try to recreate battles from the movie using plastic army guys and 4^th of July fireworks in my driveway, using old textbooks from middle school and cardboard boxes as buildings (which were of course very historically-accurately burned to the ground). But this was just the start of obsession with the Soviet Union, because to understand it, I would need to figure out just what this “communism” thing was.

That same summer that I recreated the Battle of Stalingrad, I also went to the McPherson Public Library and checked out the only copy of Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. Now, I fully admit that I had no fucking clue what dialectical materialism actually meant, and I most certainly pronounced “bourgeoisie” in my head as “borg-ee-osey.” However, even though I had to chew through like, 80 super confusing pages to get to it, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains” still struck a chord. Engels really knew how to sell an idea, even to a 13 year old kid well over a century later. I had found a means of grappling with all my questions regarding the complexities of human nature, and I was pretty smug about it.

I think its worth noting here, too, that as a kid raised in a small Midwest town, brought up in a Methodist church, created some pretty stubborn paradoxes for my early political thinking. Upon learning what socialism was all about, combined with how derisively it was still talked about by nearly everyone around me, despite being pretty verbatim all the things we’re supposed to do anyway according to the Bible… I’ve never been one keen to tolerate hypocrisy well, I guess is what I’m saying. Even while away at church camp that summer I found myself talking about socialism with other kids at camp—there was one older kid named Karl (I shit you not) who had a similar obsession, and he and I bonded pretty quickly discussing the contradictions between the teachings of the church and actual American politics.

Really though, in the grand scheme of things, this was all a lead up to sophomore year of high school when, as a good student, I enrolled in AP World History with the man, the legend, John Lujano. How to explain Lujano to those of you who don’t already know him? He was a demanding teacher who taught a demanding class, but under his harsh demeanor, he really cared about his students learning history. He was genuinely fucking hilarious, but he could also be absolutely terrifying, both in controlling the room and in detailing his high expectations for us. For those of you who didn’t take AP Hist in high school, the class is designed to culminate in an exam that actually gave college credit. The test is graded on a scale of 1-5, and you have to get at least a 3 to “pass.” From the first day of class, we were told that if we didn’t focus, that if we didn’t take this shit seriously, we would not get a 3. We started writing practice exam questions in the first month of class, just to show us what it entailed.

I think one of the things that instantly made AP World my favorite class of my sophomore year was that it was so challenging. I was a student where most subjects came easily for me. This didn’t. It was a whole new way of compiling, processing, and making sense of information, not to mention really having to develop my skills as a writer. In addition, I’m so glad that the class focused on WORLD history. When so much of the history we’re fed as kids is so focused around American History or Western Civ… HEY GUYS GUESS WHAT? ASIA AND AFRICA HAVE INCREDIBLY DYNAMIC AND IMPORTANT HISTORIES, TOO! So many more stories were out there that I had never heard of before, so many incredible stories. Go look up Ibn Batuta (who was basically the first anthropologist who walked all over Africa just to observe its diverse cultures), or Xiang Hi (who was a eunuch, commanded a fleet of ships that would have made Colombus cry, and brought a fucking giraffe back to the court of the Emperor of China).  I still remember these stories so vividly, because Lujano put them front and center. We were critical of topics other history teachers would have rather have not talked about: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, European colonial practice, American internment camps… what have you. Not only that, but we talked about history not so much in terms of linear development to the present day, but rather an extended set of logical consequences stemming from broad scale human interaction over time. I learned more about the way human beings work that year more than my whole life prior. While I didn’t quite fully understand why just yet, I was definitely hooked on history. As a subject, at least. Still didn’t think of it as a career. That come’s much later in the story.

I made it through AP World and got a 4 on the exam. That meant that I could cash it in for college credit later, which was great I guess. At the time, I assumed I was knocking out one of my gen eds. Because until my freshman year of college, I thought I was going to be an architect. I loved drawing, and I was pretty handy with CAD (even if I spent most of that class in high school playing Unreal Tournament/NES games/Impossible Creatures/Halo). It wasn’t until I got to K-State and saw the sheer amount of math and physics and tedious time spent in a studio to get that degree that I began to have second thoughts. I ended up falling back toward the subject that I had been fond of in high school, for really no other reasons than it interested me and I was good at it. I started taking Arabic as well, because when people used to ask me “what will you do with a Bachelor’s in history?” I thought to myself “well… work for the state department? I guess?”

Arabic ended up being a bust, and so did Mandarin Chinese a year later. I don’t have a particular knack for languages, so maybe trying to pick of two of the hardest ones possible for no other reason than it might come in handy down the line if I try to work for the government wasn’t the best idea. Especially as it became apparent, the more political science that I took, that my personal input into state affairs would be valued less than game theory and real politick—observing U.S. foreign policy abroad both then and now has made it very apparent to me that there is no place for idealism in neoliberal practice. As my disillusion became more acute and I became more and more critical of the state and politics in general, the less I could reconcile the idea of being an imperialist stooge for a living. Every time I’ve gone to a professionalization talk and hear from an academic turned policy advisor, I give Past Matt a high-five for bailing on that when he did.

(It was late in my senior year of high-school that I got into Against Me! and the political punk music scene—the theme for this blog post might very well be Propagandhi’s “A People’s History of the World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OihwaWQOI54)

It was ultimately my junior year before I was able to take a class dedicated strictly to the study of Russian history, taught by none other than my former professor now friend David Stone, a military historian wunderkind with a passion for Russian history to match my own. I threw myself into the class, getting I think some of the only 4.0/A+s of my undergrad career. I chewed through our readings, had my hand up in every class discussion (where I got to debate and argue with the future friends Ashlyn Yarnell, Gloria Funcheon, and Ben Harkins), and devoted more time and effort to papers than I knew myself capable of. It was clear then that I had found my area of study, and beyond that, that there was still so much I needed to know. I would need to go on to grad school, that’s all there was to it. In Dr. Stone’s words: “when you get there, you’re going to feel like you know nothing. It will be absolutely true, but it’s OK. You just need to read more. And you will read… lots more.” And that has been exactly what I’ve done for the past 5 years, and I’m certainly not done yet!

There are so many people I need to properly thank somehow for pushing me to keep going with grad school even when the going got tough—Dave, for his sound advice of “what do you mean you haven’t taken Russian language yet?? Do that! Do that now!”; Sirs Ken Yohn and Peter “TheLibrarian,” who taught me how to ace an admissions process while we were all hungover on a sidewalk in front of a church in God knows where Iowa; Eve Levin, who’s infinite knowledge of the comings and goings of the Russian field not only pushed me to reach my full potential and even matched me with the perfect advisor at UW… So many others, not nearly enough time to do them all justice. I’m aready freaking out about how many books I’m going to need to write just to dedicate them to everyone possible (and the inevitable +1 I’ll have to do to devote to my patient wife and loving family… ughhhhhhhhh). Basically though, grad school has been a process of solid reinforcement and continual challenge, the environment where I thrive, and in pursuit of doing something I love. Looking back, it’s hard to see how anyone could have talked me into doing anything else.

Now though, as the realities of adult life press in on all sides, and my dissertation has all but come to a halt even before it could begin due to a lack of funding, I’m really pressed to answer the question. Would I have been better off learning a trade? Should I have sought out a job right out of college and put those skills to use, even if it’s not actually doing history? Who really is actually going to benefit from my work? Why even bother, when the average middle-schooler’s and, hell, the average adult’s first reaction to me talking about what I do will be “Gross!”

I’ve tried to look at this in two parts: the benefits of my being a historian to myself and then to society. They’re definitely somewhat interrelated concepts, obviously, because what I subjectively think is good for society might not always be what others (or society itself) thinks is good for it, but whatever. From my own standpoint, the decision to make history, and therefore academia, my career was a sort of process of omission. The more and more I looked at the world around me and the paths that I could take as I made my way through it, I came to see jobs that I simply couldn’t reconcile myself to do. I couldn’t work for a state that would regularly violate my own principles. I certainly couldn’t work in the private sector—to make a buck within the current system to me seems predicated on the exploitation of someone, somehow, somewhere down the line. Though this is no means the case, the onerous nature of the alternatives somehow made the academy seem like a bastion of neutrality, a port in the storm where I could nurture my own values and find a way to make them reach out into the world.

Beyond that—and this is something I’ve known for a long, long time—if there’s one thing in this world that I love and can appreciate, it’s the telling of a good story. Whether it be a funny anecdote, a powerful lived experience, or the unbridled imaginary creation of entire worlds for my D&D group, I have always been able to tell a story. (To put this further into nerd terms, revealed above by my Dungeons and Dragons confession, at heart I’m a Bard—CHA has always been my highest stat, no question). Not only do I love a good story, but I’ve come to appreciate now just how stories shape our selves, our ideas, our cultures, and our societies. Stories play such a central role in the way we form our worldview, that all of a sudden I feel that my calling as a storyteller is imbued with a power that is hard to access and few will appreciate, but nonetheless it’s still there. The one thing I want to do for the rest of my life is be a story teller, like the priests and shamans of old, a keeper of knowledge and wisdom who can, through my words, pass this gift on to others.

Which I guess brings me to the value of my work to the rest of you. Before I get to why I think my particular research is important, just in general, I’ll take a page from the idea of the “Life Boat Debate” (for those who haven’t heard me expound on this yet, I first heard about it from a fantastic This American Life story that aired back in 2010.[2] Basically undergrads pack a lecture hall, which is then sealed to form the “life boat” of all that remains of humanity after some disaster, while 9 representatives from various academic departments sit on stage and try to convince the students that theirs is the discipline that will be most important to human survival.) My argument to the kids would be “WELP history shows that odds are one of you is going to emerge as a despot after all this, and you know what really helps to have on your side? The people who write this history books.” This is of course, my joke answer, and in no way reflects what I would actually do, but it point to something I think is important: so much of the darkness that permeates American politics today is the subscription and cover of bad histories. Why would we need Black Lives Matter? (because 300+ years of slavery, oppression, and systematic targeting of minority groups by the United States government didn’t have that much of an impact, you see) We can’t have immigrants coming in and ruining the country! (Worked out really poorly in the past, clearly, we let in a whole lot of white supremacists who keep spouting jingoistic bigotry)  Japan would have never surrendered if we didn’t drop not one, but two atomic bombs on cities, not military targets or installations but civilian populations. We HAD to do it! So it’s totally not a war crime.[3]

The problem is, just as often as not, the bad history isn’t coming from outside the discipline. The call is coming from inside the house, so to speak. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading a lot on Soviet and Modern European history, produced for and by all corners of the political spectrum, it’s that there is a culture war going on in the pages of text books. The past itself is up for grabs, and historians are the foot soldiers trying to stake claim on not just the past, but the future. Because how we remember the past matters a whole lot, a lot more than probably you’ve been willing to think about up to this point if you haven’t devoted your entire career to it for the last 10 years. But I have.

I hate bad histories. I hate what subscribing to them might they engender in the future. The whole “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” is bullshit. We willingly wipe away the truth again and again so we don’t have to face it, and precisely so we can do the exact same horrible shit in the future. We practice selective amnesia so we can sleep at night. Those who preserve history make it less likely for the same kinds of people who did horrible things in the past won’t get away with it in the future. That is our job.

Still though, many of my readers living here in the States might yet be asking, “why the hell should we care what happened in Stalingrad after they beat the Nazi’s? What use can that possibly be to us?” My answer to that is fairly straightforward, though perhaps not entirely convincing. The experience of those Soviet men and women who survived the war was an entirely human one. These were people that looked into the open, waiting jaws of annihilation as they knew it, and only just pulled back from the brink. They had hopes and dreams for their future, their children and grandchildren’s futures, and they all had a past, one that you could both be proud of and conflicted about at the same time (and surely that’s relatable to some of us, right?). They struggled, together, to rebuild a community that was lost, and to in turn produce something entirely new. They strove to achieve socialism, whatever that might have meant to them individually, even while confronting some of the harsher realities of what the revolution had produced. Through their trials and tribulations, their joys and their sorrows, I hope to learn--as well as to show others--something about ourselves as human beings.

There’s definitely something this little hiatus from doing history has taught me: there is no other work in this world that I would rather be doing than doing research and telling stories. A combination of factors has been really wearing me down lately, and it doesn’t look like the funding situation is going to get any better anytime soon, so it’s hard to say when I’ll get to go back to the actual work I want to be doing. I’m trying to get things moving that direction, but… the process, in light of reality of circumstance, is going to be slow.

Anyway, thank the Gods for their rainy intervention this morning to finally give me the time to get this damn post done and posted. Hopefully I’ve answered my own question, and, finally, all of yours. Perhaps I’ve revealed a window into what it is that makes me tick, or if you know me well, maybe this is all old news. Either way, its good to finally get it all down on paper. Next time someone asks, “Hey Matt, so why are you a historian?” I can just push my imaginary glasses up my nose, geek snort, and say, “well, if you go on my blog…”

Until next time, comrades…

-MC

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[1] I would like to point out that, too this day, I still prefer the light, buttery taste of Nestle Town House Crackers over Keebler Club Crackers

[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/402/save-the-day (The Life Boat Debate is Act II, skip ahead to about the 42nd minute if you don't want to listen to the full episode).

[3] This is becoming an increasingly disturbing refrain from the American government, apparently you can only commit war crimes if you don’t have the backing of the world’s largest and most invasive military. See http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/29/476178817/pentagon-report-says-airstrikes-on-afghan-hospital-wasnt-a-war-crime, or https://consortiumnews.com/2014/08/06/the-enduring-myth-of-hiroshima/