Violence against Women: Hate Crime or White Noise?

Melania told the media yesterday that Congress should hold a hearing with Epstein’s victims, of whom, she insists, she was not one.

The survivors were not impressed. Fifteen released a joint statement saying that they’ve already spoken, and it’s not their place to be called to testify again.

The right-wing chatterers were baffled that she put the issue back on the front page of the news. The president was just confused.

Violence against women is so pervasive that it’s often almost invisible. Treating Epstein as a monster helps to maintain the fiction that it’s anomalous.

From that perspective, Mrs. Trump’s press conference makes sense: point to Epstein to avoid pointing to everyone else. And it also makes Mr. Trump’s desperation to keep the files away from the public seem, well, weird.

Trump is on record as calling up Michael Reiter, then chief of the Palm Beach police department, to say “Thank goodness you’re stopping him [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this.” 

But it seems completely out of character.

DoJ investigators believe that Epstein sexually assaulted more than a thousand girls and women during nearly five decades on the prowl. (Students at the Dalton School, where he taught physics and math in 1975 — though he hadn’t graduated from college — said his behavior with female students was “weird” and inappropriate.)

It’s a horrifying number. Epstein is a monster.

But let’s put it in context. The US government estimates that more than 63,000 children are raped or sexually assaulted every year, as well as seven million women and 2.5 million men. Lifetime totals: 60 million women and 20 million men (pdf; pages 8 and 15). 

The perpetrators? 99 percent male. 

Who are they? A non-trivial fraction of the male population.

A review of 78 surveys of more than 25,000 men found that on average, almost 30 percent admitted to having committed sexual violence, and 6.5 percent said they’d ever raped someone. 

Caveat: when 34 men were given a written survey and then interviewed, 100 percent of them turned out to have checked off no on a question about sexual coercion, but later said, well actually, yes. (The article: there are “a significant number of false negatives.”)

Which gets me back to Mr. Melania Knavs,* more commonly known as President Donald Trump.

Despite the reported phone call, Trump has repeatedly claimed he knows nothing about Epstein’s crimes. But he has also admitted to sexual coercion, claiming “women let you” if you’re rich and famous.

Here’s his conversation with Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood. It’s been quoted, parodied, and memed so many times it’s almost white noise at this point … but I’m quoting it again anyway.

Trump: You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.
Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Asked about those comments, he doubled down: 

If you’re famous, rich or whatever, … if you’re a star … women let you. People who are rich, they tend to do well in a lot of different ways…. It’s been true approximately a million years.

It was true for a very long time that men, and especially wealthy men (by “people,” he means “men”) could rape (they used to call it “seduce”) their household staff with impunity. It remains true that teenage girls are assaulted by their coaches or offered good movie roles in exchange for sex. That some men force sex on their dates, with or without alcohol or roofies. 

Raping your spouse was legal in some states until 1993. (It was legal in all of them until 1975.) Loopholes remain: in several states, if she’s unconscious it doesn’t count as rape.

The data I quoted above about sexual violence? 

Trump ordered ordered it be removed from the US Government’s web sites.

It’s available again only because a judge ordered it restored after a lawsuit.

With a disclaimer:

The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.

Got that? Data about sexual violence is driven by gender ideology and isn’t real.

Back to the 2006 investigation. Palm Beach police talked to more than a dozen girls who said Epstein abused them and tried to file charges on multiple counts of sex with a minor. But Barry Krischer, the county prosecutor, didn’t believe any of it. Keep in mind, he’s the prosecutor, not a lawyer for the accused. But he thought the girls, as young as 14, were having illegal but consensual sex with Epstein because they wanted money for clothes. 

He didn’t bother actually talking to any of the girls, but he did call a grand jury — unprecedented in this kind of case. He assigned a prosecutor who called the victims prostitutes in front of the jurors, and told the girls testifying that *they* were guilty of crimes.

The jury came back with one count: solicitation of prostitution.

Chief Reiter took the case to the FBI. They investigated. When they brought the case to court in Miami, US District Attorney Alexander Acosta didn’t believe the girls either. He dragged his feet for a year, talking to Krischer and to Epstein’s lawyers, and then cut Epstein a deal — kept secret from the victims — before the feds had even finished their investigation.

Epstein served 13 months. Acosta’s plea deal allowed him to go home every day to work and gave him immunity from further prosecution.

The (mostly) men who remained in touch with him claim they knew nothing of his crimes or, more plausible but still creepy, as Noam Chomsky put it, he’d done time for his crime and had “a clean slate.”

But plenty of people knew about his behavior, and objected to it.

In 2008, Tina Brown, then-editor of Vanity Fair, was invited to a party at Epstein’s place; other guests included the former prince Andrew and Woody Allen. Her response: “What the hell is this — the Predator’s Ball?” 

In 2017, Trump nominated Acosta as Secretary of Labor. His treatment of Epstein came back into the news. Nevertheless, several labor unions endorsed him and the Senate confirmed him. 

Trump’s claims that he knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes sound sketchier and sketchier.

In 2018, Julie K. Brown tracked down the victims, interviewed them, and wrote a series of searing articles for the Miami Herald. The feds reopened the case and arrested Epstein again. Acosta had to resign, finally.

In 2019, Melinda French Gates filed for divorce. Besides the fact that Bill kept chasing female staff members, French Gates objected to Bill’s relationship with Epstein.

In 2020, Trump ran for re-election and lost. It was a pretty decisive defeat, in terms of both the electoral college and the popular vote. But Trump claimed his victory was stolen and encouraged his supporters to storm the capital while electoral votes were being counted.

From here, I’m going to jump over Biden’s entire presidency to Trump’s second term. On his first day back in office, he pardoned everyone convicted of crimes as a result of the January 6 riot, and ordered all pending cases to be dismissed. (Even Vance said this was a bad idea.)

A full dozen of them are back in jail or face charges of child sex crimes or violence towards women: rape, sexual assault, stalking, strangling, and assault.

A couple dozen more are accused or convicted of killing by DUI, building a bomb, death threats, home invasion, forgery, and other violent crimes.

Meanwhile, the media. What they’re not saying: people knew Epstein was repugnant, called his plane the Lolita Express, but still wrote him friendly emails, asked for advice about women, “liked the torture video,” wanted him to help their kid get into college, or find a job or a place to live.

What they are saying: the files, not people’s actions, are causing fall-out, repercussions, chaos. Somehow the files are the monster, and letting them out into the world is the problem.

How would we think differently about violence against women and girls if it were classified as hate crime? Would it make it more visible? Or will it be possible to think about it as hate crime, only when perpetrators and their friends learn to see it and when everyone learns to see women as fully human?

The DOE Just Trumpeted Its True Colors

Here we go. The Trump Department of Education wants you to help it “end DEI” by informing (confidentially) on “illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning.”

This submission form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to … identify potential areas for investigation.

Students can snitch on their teachers, parents on their kids’ teachers, teachers on each other. And you don’t have to have any connection to a school: anyone else in the community is welcome to use the form. 

The DOE press release announcing the portal quotes Tiffany Justice: “Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

Justice, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, claims the group is bipartisan though it has ties to the Proud Boys, promoted Florida’s “don’t say gay” laws, seeks bans on books with LGBTQ+ or Black characters or themes (and sexy seahorses) and is closely linked with Republican leaders. M4L members have suggested that LGBTQ+ students should be taught in separate classrooms from straight kids and students with disabilities should be de-mainstreamed, and called a Pride event “perverse.”

If you’re a school librarian, a teacher, an assistant principal, if you’re gay or trans, Jewish or Muslim, a second-generation immigrant or a Black person with generations in the United States behind you — or not! — whether a report is even valid is not the point. 

Being investigated is exhausting and demoralizing. Being investigated alone will make some people think you’ve done something wrong. Targeting individuals, claiming they’ve violated the nation’s new speech laws, makes it harder for others to dissent. 

That is the point.

Gestapo. Securitate. KGB. Frumentarii. Stasi. Secret Police. Whatever you call it, encouraging people to rat on their neighbors is a key feature of authoritarianism. 

A Moms for Life chapter newsletter opened with a quote from Hitler (the writer then apologized). In an interview with Forbes, Justice said it was a mistake for a chapter leader to open a newsletter with Nazi propaganda. But at a M4L conference, Justice said, “One of our moms … quotes Hitler.” Someone in the audience whooped. “I stand with that mom,” she added, to many more cheers. 

It’s not just about trans people. By foregrounding Moms for Liberty in its call for informers, the Trump Department of Education just told us that, loud and clear.

Words Matter — Health Policy

The President says he wants to “make America healthy again.”

Who could argue with that? We lag behind other developed nations in life expectancy. The US maternal mortality rate is several times higher than in the European Union, and well over double Canada’s rate. On various other metrics, we live shorter, sicker lives than people in other high-income nations.

The causes are clear: inequities in access to health care and social services; government subsidies of sugar, grain, and seeds; food deserts and ultra-processed foods. Behind those: poverty, basically, enabled by a combination of government inaction and corporate greed.

But it turns out what really interests Trump’s handlers is that sick kids aren’t eligible for military service.

Take a minute with that. Trump has declared a “crisis” of chronic diseases in children because he is concerned about the drop in military recruitment rates. 

The three most common disqualifiers, per the Centers for Disease Control and the bipartisan Council for a Strong America: overweight, insufficient education, and a criminal record. 

Solutions? Spend more on pre-k programs. Good early childhood education gives kids cognitive and emotional resources that help them stay in school and ultimately reduces crime. Spend more money on K-12 education, especially in areas that have been underfunded since … forever. Spend more money to make sure kids get enough to eat: food insecurity is a significant driver of obesity in children (and adults). 

But Trumpist logic leaps past asthma and cancer to autism, ADHD, and mental health.

Executive Order, February 13, 2025

The cause of this crisis in youth mental health? “Over-utilization of medication” and the “threat” of SSRIs, antipsychotics, and stimulants, alongside electromagnetic radiation, corporate cronyism, Government policies, and corrupt science.

The proposed fix? Radical ideas. Things no one [in Trumplandia] has thought of before: nutritious food, “healthy lifestyles,” physical activity, “transparent data,” education.

Words have power. Promoting “lifestyle” and physical activity while simultaneously blaming childhood disease on medication is disingenous. 

In the context of Trump administration actions —sowing chaos by randomly firing civil servants, destroying social service agencies, deleting websites and databases, and hobbling scientific research — these words are empty.

Mendacious, misleading, meaningless: Trump’s words are dangerous.

On Not Endorsing a Presidential Candidate

Back in September, Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon, who also owns the Washington Post), told William Lewis (Post CEO and publisher) not to endorse anyone for president.

Lewis didn’t mention this to the paper’s Opinion editors, but when they sent him their endorsement of Kamala Harris, he killed it.

The Washington Post Guild, which represents journalists and other staff, asked readers to write a letter. So I did.

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I’ve subscribed to the Post for several years, and before that, I read as many of your articles that I could access. Your coverage of US and world news is solid, informative, and important.

I am writing today about Jeff Bezos’s terrible decision to stop the Post from endorsing a candidate for president. 

We are just days away from an election that will have grave consequences if Donald Trump wins. He has made it clear that he intends to weaponize the government against his personal enemies, deport legal and illegal immigrants, end protections for people who are not gender-conforming (many of whom were born that way), make health care more expensive and harder to access, cut abortion and birth control, limit the freedom of the press (ahem!), censor teachers, eliminate support for people who are disabled, increase defense spending, reduce taxes on billionaires while increasing them on lower-income people, and reduce voting rights. And more. For most Americans, life under his agenda would be poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in the words of Thomas Hobbes.

It’s hard to believe, but J. D. Vance is worse. Trump lies, acts on impulse, and rejects science, and is just plain mean, because he is a deeply insecure narcissist. Vance parrots and doubles down on Trump’s spite, malevolence, and vulgarity, knowingly and deliberately, in the pursuit of power. Vance knows he can manipulate Trump to advance his own agenda of making the US a theocracy governed by the ideas of ultra-conservative, patriarchal, white-supremacist Christianity.

Bezos’s interference in the editorial freedom of the people who produce the paper he owns sets a very dangerous precendent. We’ve seen the damage Elon Musk (the only person in the US wealthier than Bezos) has done in politicizing Twitter. Neither man serves in goverment, but their wealth affords them great power in national affairs. This is very worrisome. I hope you will be able to persuade Bezos that this was a terrible decision.

Thank you for your consideration.

The Guild suggests a (less inflammatory) sample letter, but if you’d like to use or adapt any portion of what I wrote, please feel free.

Visualizing Data, or Making it Muddier?

Back in August, the New York Times published a graphic that visualizes the experiences that Harris, Trump, Vance, and Walz would bring to the White House. 

It bothered me, and I’ve been looking at it again and again, changing the font size, the screen orientation and brightness, and trying to see how the candidates’ education, service, and work experience compare. But it seems impossible: even when I zoom down to tiny, swaths of it run off the edges of the screen.

I started wondering if the goal was not to compare the candidates, but to obfuscate the stark differences among them. So finally I took the data and made a new chart. You can see all of it at the same time, and instead of the Times’ beige, grayish pink, and light blue, I used some bolder colors, and linked public service, military service, and elected office with different shades of blue.

Data New York Times | Visualization 1greenblogger

Harris and Walz’s columns are dominated by state and national elected offices; Trump’s forty years as a businessman stand out in sharp contrast. But the real outlier is Vance, who served as a senator for only eighteen months before getting tapped as VP canditate.

Vance’s four-year stint as a Marine combat correspondent is by far his longest work commitment. From 2013 to 2023, he hopscotched across the country for jobs with seven different employers: clerkships, a job in corporate litigation, and posts at a biotech start-up, Mithril Capital, Revolution, and Narya, which he co-founded with funding from Peter Thiel. He also started two non-profit organizations, both of which fizzled, and published a mean-spirited memoir.

Vance’s lack of fitness for the presidency is proven by his inability or unwillingness to hold a job for any length of time, his inexperience in leadership, his caustic insults on those with whom he disagrees, and his proven failure in leading non-profit organizations. 

Is it possible that Trump has chosen a VP candidate even more dangerous than himself? Or is Vance proof of how dangerous Trump is?

***

The Times simplifies Walz’s timeline by placing him at Chadron State College from 1982 to 1989. But he left Nebraska in 1984, studied at the University of Houston, worked a factory job building tanning beds in Jonesboro, and went back to Chadron State in 1987, graduating two years later. I include these details for Walz rather than following the Times’ breakdown. 

Walz’s data is a little tricky: his years in the National Guard overlap with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, doctoral coursework, and his full-time job as a teacher ( and Gay-Straight Alliance advisor and football coach). I slightly compressed his years teaching and studying to incorporate his military service without lengthening his overall career. 

Biden’s Cognitive State: Stable

I decided I should run numbers for Biden, as I did yesterday for Trump. As in analyzing Trump’s language, I used a speech from the 1980s as a baseline before looking at more recent speeches.

In the absence of complete medical reports, the quality of their speech provides perhaps the best proxy for evaluating both men’s cognitive state. In transcripts of their speeches, sentence complexity drops with age for both. Trump averaged 20 words per sentence in a 1980 interview; Biden averaged 18.7 words per sentence in a presidental campaign speech in 1987. Biden’s baseline grade level is 12.9, Trump’s 10.5.

Jumping ahead several decades, both men’s speeech demonstrates decreased complexity, as measured by sentence length, vocabulary, and other metrics.

But unlike Trump’s, Biden’s speech patterns have remained stable in recent years.

In three randomly chosen speeches from the past five years, Biden’s data are comparable. Average sentence lengths of speeches from 2019, 2021, and 2024 are 13, 16.6, and 14.2, while grade-level calculations come in at 9.5, 9.2, and 9.6.

Right-wing Republicans have asserted since before his presidency that Biden is mentally unfit for the office. In 2021, Lauren Bobert tweeted that cognitive decline made him a security risk. Moderate Republicans, however, found him sharp, well prepared, and cogent in discussions of policy and legislation.

The contrast is clear: unlike Biden’s, the complexity of Trump’s speech continues to drop.

Trump’s confident pugnacity has not changed.

But his speeches, and the thought processes they reveal, indicate that he is increasingly unable to grapple with complicated ideas and delicate negotiations. Even in comparison to 2017, the idea of Trump representing the United States in interactions with global heads of state is … unsettling.

Democrats have focused, appropriately, on Trump’s policy proposals and his extremist rhetoric, rather than descending to personal attacks. 

But the evidence of dwindling cognitive capacity and agility afforded by Trump’s speeches is hard to ignore. Americans across the political spectrum should worry, a lot, about his ability to govern.

Trump’s Cognitive Decline is Obvious

Words. Words are what I know how to do things with. So I decided to do some things with words. And I have to tell you, I was really surprised and dismayed by what I learned.

Claims are flying that Presiden Biden is incompetent, not fit to finish his term, much less serve for another four years. But what of former president Trump? He’s been called a danger to democracy, unfit to rule — but on account of his character, but not his cognitive state.

I got curious. I pulled an interview Trump gave in 1980 as a baseline, and I compared that with two speeches and an interview from the past decade: 

• October, 1980, interview with Rona Barrett
• October, 2017, speech at the Heritage Foundation
• April, 2023 interview with Time Magazine
• July, 2024 speech at the Republican National Convention

Speech analysis provides a good window into cognition. More sophisticated speakers use a wide vocabulary and complex sentence structures that reflect depth, breadth, and subtlety in thought. Cognitive decline is accompanied by a decrease in these metrics, pointing to shrinking capacity for attention to complicated issues. Like, for example, international politics.

For the purpose of this analysis, I used online text analysis tools that count the number of words in each sentence, as well as the number of unique words in each passage. As a proxy for word complexity, they calculate the average number letters and syllables per word, and compare words used against a list known to most fourth graders in a study done in 1984.

They crunch the numbers using several different formulas, whose results are usually expressed as a number corresponding to a grade level. If the text is assigned a 10, it means the average tenth grader will understand it easily.

I pasted excerpts from each of Trump’s speeches and interviews into two different online text analysis tools (in case programming details produced different results; they didn’t), and I averaged the results produced by four formulas.

In the 1980 interview, Trump spoke at a grade level of 10.5, averaging 20 words per sentence. In the 2017 speech, this went down to grade 9, and 12.5 words per sentence. Sentence length in the 2023 interview was comparable at 12.9, but the grade level slipped again, to 7.4.

In his convention speech this month, Trump averaged 9.4 words per sentence at a grade level of 5.9.

For context and comparison, in a 2023 speech at Fisk University, Vice President Harris averaged 23.5 words per sentence and spoke at a grade level of 11.3. In his comments on the RNC shooting, President Biden used 14 words per sentence on average, at a grade level of 10.8.

Given the evidence of Trump’s speech over the years, he is clearly unfit to serve another term as president, not only on grounds of the threat he and his associates pose to democracy, but also because of the decline in his cognitive abilities.

Living in Interesting Times: Now What?

I was born in Germany, nineteen years after the end of World War II. Growing up in the US, I often wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, to watch Hitler gain power, to see Jewish neighbors taken away by force.

The world I live in today feels eerily like what I imagined then, except it's 2018 in the United States. And I feel completely helpless.

The government grants "thoughts and prayers" to domestic terrorists white men who routinely shoot people at malls, movie theatres, dance clubs, schools but refuses to take any action that would limit their impact. The government incarcerates people of color, deports people born in other places. The president was elected with a minority of the vote under a system that, whether it was designed to do so or not, it must now be acknowledged that it deliberately disenfranchises people of color, immigrants, urban residents, and the poor. Washington's current crop of "elected" officials seems to be at war against women, poor people, trans and gay people, people of color, and the earth itself -- anyone, in short, other than heteronormative white men with economic security.

But as the president fires increasing numbers of public servants, the real goal seems to be to destroy democracy.

This is "my" government. If I don't actively resist, I believe that I am complicit.

Yet I have little power. I am not a scholar of political science and I don't feel sure I understand what Trump and his allies (or his puppetmasters?) are up to. In my classes, while I don't pontificate on the news, I do raise issues of power and justice as they relate to language, environmental issues, and medieval literature, and point out how those cultural formations influence the present.

And so I feel paralyzed to act on any scale that feels meaningful.

Also, I am busy, with work and family responsibilities, and I am tired.

My sense of disquiet about current events keeps growing, threatening to become real panic, yet meaningful resistance seems out of reach. Acts like chaining myself to the fence at the White House grounds or hunger striking don't seem like they'd have much more impact than blogging, bloviating on Facebook, or joining another march.

Now what?

Teaching After Trump: Digital Preservation

I wrote a post last week about how I walked into class with a lecture outline and the plans to talk about sustainability and preservation in digital humanities and found myself speechless as I realized the landscape was shifting under my feet.

The following class meeting was committed to a visit to our library's rare books room; we have a small collection, useful for teaching, of manuscript leaves and early printed books that really helpful to have in conjunction with digital reproductions on Early English Books on Line and the British Library.

But for the next week, I wrote a lecture. After 25 years in the classroom, I usually write an outline, not a lecture. But this one, I needed to get right. Here's a portion of my comments to the class.

==============

I have long had a policy of not talking directly about politics in class. But right now, we're in a situation where what is going on is too important not to talk about. Also, I have tenure, so I can talk about politics. Therefore, it seems to me, in the current situation, I must.


The new administration has removed information on a wide variety of topics from the White House website. The presidential website of the previous administration (archived here, but no longer live) includes sections on civil rights, climate change, education, health care, immigration, disabilities, ethics, equal pay, veterans, and women's issues.

The current site has eliminated all of these sections, leaving references only to energy, foreign policy, jobs and trade, law enforcement, and a strong military (but not veterans).

Meanwhile, the new regime has instructed officials at the National Parks, the Department of Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health, and several other federal organizations to freeze communications: no press releases, no peer-reviewed publications, no tweets, no blog posts, until new policies governing the release of information can be put in place.

That has not happened yet.

Meanwhile, National Parks employees who tweeted climate data were forced to delete those tweets, leading to the creation of rogue accounts like @BadHombreNPS and @AltUSNatParkService. These might be run by parks employees; no one is sure.

The day after the inauguration, Trump’s press secretary went on the news and insisted that the crowds attending the inauguration were “the largest ever” despite aerial photos, Metro statistics about numbers of riders, and police estimates suggesting it wasn’t true. Trump has long been tweeting pretty much whatever he feels like, with little regard for the truth.

Most recently, Trump issued an executive order banning Muslim (but not Christian) people from certain countries from entering the US, even if they held green cards. The US Attorney General, Sally Q. Yates, called this unconstitutional and issued a stay of the order, and Trump fired her.

Trump’s attack on truth is comparable to what has been done under previous totalitarian regimes. A totalitarian government is centralized, controls the flow of information, allows no dissent or criticism of the people in power. Trump’s attempts to discredit legitimate journalism and science are comparable to efforts in other totalitarian regimes of the past to silence anyone with dissenting views.

Trump has appointed Steve Bannon to the National Security Council, a move without precedent but one that gives significant power to the head of Breitbart News, a corporation dedicated to expressing rage against women, people of color, and non-Christians.

Trump’s demands that National Parks employees delete tweets and stop communicating with the public recall book burnings that occurred across German cities in 1933.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January and appointed Joseph Goebbels to institute a massive propaganda campaign. In May, across the country, people went into bookstores and libraries and took out books deemed "un-German" -- written by foreigners, Jews, liberals, pacifists -- and burned them.

As I wrote in my last post, teaching just got a lot harder. And teaching students to be critical consumers of on-line information just got a lot more crucial.

Teaching After Trump: What Is A Book?

When I teach courses on medieval literature and the environment, I know that there are issues that are going to intersect with contemporary politics that I have to navigate with caution. But yesterday, when it dawned on me in the middle of a class meeting that "What Is A Book?" is political, I was pretty well blind-sided.

The course looks at the transitions from manuscript to print and from print to digital, and tries to throw codicology, history of the book, and digital humanities in the air together to see what kinds of configurations stuff drops into. I've taught the course only once before, four years ago, so I'm still in a very fluid period of making stuff up as I go along.

Yesterday we were looking at the Appendix to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. My students all know that technology is terrible because it makes us distracted, but Davidson engages with the prophets of doom and makes a good case that there are also things to value, and rather than rejecting it, we should engage with technology and figure out what it can do.

The Appendix turns out to be a good introduction to the book, and the course, because it lists "Twenty-First Century Literacies" like attention, collaboration, global consciousness, and ethics. It raises good topics for discussion and gets the students and me pretty quickly beyond the problems of how social media and mobile devices are distracting us into other issues involving the ethics and affordances of technology.

The night before class, I'd spent half an hour or so on Twitter following the new president's gag order on US scientific agencies and national parks, the scrubbing of anything that could be interpreted as related to climate science from government websites, the silencing of agencies like the USDA and the CDC. (Salmonella, anyone? Zika?)

Davidson lists sustainability and preservation near the end of the appendix. She uses "sustainability" to refer to environmental issues like the amounts of electricity needed to power computers and servers, but digital humanists use the same word to refer to the creation of digital texts and databases in forms that will outlast current hardware and software configurations and still be readable, decades or hopefully even centuries into the future.

The related issue of "preservation" has to do with keeping copies of things -- archiving materials created digitally, as well as figuring out how to keep copies of things that began their life as material objects. If something originally in book form is preserved in pdf, is that the same as the original? What if there are different copies owned by two different people who made notes in the margins? How important are those notes?

Cotton Vitellius A. xv. is the manuscript that contains the unique copy of Beowulf. It was put together, probably in the seventeenth century, out of two different collections written several hundred years before, but a couple hundred years apart from each other. It contains the Nowell Codex, a late tenth- or early eleventh-century copy manuscript of two poems, including Beowulf, and three prose texts. Is that a book? Or is a medieval collection of materials different than what we think of today as "a book"? Are photographs of the Beowulf manuscript the same as the actual manuscript? What if we could print a 3-dimensional copy, retaining the texture of every page?

People who deal with other media ask related questions. Is a CD version of a song the same as its 45 rpm vinyl original? Is a DVD copy of "Singin' in the Rain" the same as a print of the film on several reels of 35mm film?

Preservation also deals with avoiding loss of data, which was a big problem in the early days of computing but is less acute now, when storage is cheap and it's easy to store redundantly. The issue of data that lasts forever, like social media posts that haunt people hunting for a job, looms larger.

So there I was in class, talking about the relatively long life of manuscripts in comparison to things like punch cards and 5 1/4 inch floppy disks and suddenly I apprehended the enormity of the new administration's deliberate suppression and even destruction of information.

I don't know if this material is being mirrored or archived in some other country that's now freeer than the United States or if, horrifyingly, decades of data that the new regime considers to be "alternative facts" or even "a hoax" will simply be destroyed. I don't know what the consequences might be of stopping research in the sciences and humanities dead, and how quickly it might recover if (when?) we get ourselves back on a course of sanity, four years or more from now.

But there I was talking about issues that, six months ago, seemed to have nothing to do with politics in the United States. Yet even though they have nothing to do with hot-button issues like climate science or women's health care, issues of data preservation and sustainability are completely politicized.

It caught me completely by surprise. I hadn't prepared to teach a class that was politically charged, and I found myself floundering. I said that whatever anyone's politics, our classroom had to remain a space for civil discourse. I said that I grade on how persuasively students organize and present their research, not on what their opinions are, and I hoped that students would feel free to disagree, even with me.

I need to do better, though. I need to make it clear that scrubbing websites is comparable to burning books and neither has a place in democracy.

I'm thankful for tenure. I'm thankful that I teach in a university, and a state, that isn't moving to silence its faculty. And I'm deeply sobered and dismayed by the implications. Teaching with integrity used to mean not smoking or sleeping with the students. It's become far more difficult to navigate the environment of alternative realities, suppression of scientific fact, and abrogation of human rights.

I now feel a grave responsibility to step up and state clearly that these things are not right. But I have to do so in a way that maintains respect for students with different views and allows for an open classroom atmosphere, that keeps the classroom a place of inquiry and the development of critical thinking, not a lecture on the ills of the people currently in power.

Teaching just got a whole lot harder.

Be the Revolution. For My Mom

Last weekend, I went to the NYPL to a rally with Writers Resist and PEN America. PEN president Andrew Solomon commented that it has been, in the past, PEN's mission to protest restrictions on freedom of speech in other countries, that it's shocking that they're now working on that issue in the US. "We must pledge to remain shocked," he said.

Robert Pinsky read a poem written for the occasion, beginning "We choose our ancestors," and quoting from writers who fought for freedom. Michael Cunningham read from Ursula K. LeGuin's novel, The Dispossessed: "You can not buy the Revolution. You can not make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution."

We now have a new president. I'll be back on the streets tomorrow, marching from the UN to Trump Tower via 42nd Street and Grand Central, where people can go in and warm up. (Want to join in? Sign up here, information here.) I will march to protest the new regime's position on gay rights, women's rights, health care, climate change, voting rights, police violence, refugees ... pretty much the entire platform.

Last week, The Mate was worried about me going off to protest. This despite the fact that I marched often in the 80s, taking the bus from Philadelphia and, later, New York to Washington DC with the National Organization for Women. He joined me often enough.

Frankly, I was worried too. I now need twice-daily medication, I'm a parent, I'm just older and a little more fragile that I was 30 years ago.

Mate said, "This is your mother's fault."

And he's right, it is her fault. She was born in East Prussia in 1939, fled west with her pregnant mother and two younger siblings in late 1944, lived for a while in a refugee camp. Her father fought for the Germans in WWII. Some day I'll go into the archives and find out what he really did -- the stories vary. He died, according to one of the stories, from a sniper bullet on an otherwise quiet day in 1945.

She couldn't choose her ancestors. I can't choose mine. She gives time and money to libraries and schools, in her community in New Hampshire as well as in other countries. She's active in politics and conservation causes. And she raised me to speak up and speak out against injustice, anywhere, all the time.

She'll be marching tomorrow in New Hampshire, all 78 years and 115 pounds of her, feisty and unstoppable. I will march tomorrow in NYC. This one's for you, mom.

Now What?

Since the election, I've been trying to figure out where to put my energy to have the most impact on disrupting Trump's presidential program.

The bloggers at Savage Minds have pulled together a great list of suggestions and resources. Several Slate writers likewise came up with a good list of suggestions for action. Neither list includes gay and trans rights, and I've asked both groups if they might consider adding additional resources.

Yesterday, my family and my son's best friend's family went for a hike in Bear Mountain State Park. Both boys were born in New York City; three of the four parents, like so many New Yorkers, were born outside of the US. By the end of the day, up and down over Ramapo Mountain, the Timp, and West Mountain, I'd realized what I need to do moving forward is keep doing what I've been doing.

And to keep trying to do it better, with sharper analysis of how the Middle Ages shaped the modern, and how understanding the past can help us to understand where we are today.

I teach courses on environment and the humanities. I teach linguistics and history of the English language, and I include work on the relationship between social power and judgments about language. I teach medieval literature, and I look at how medieval cultural formulations about others continue to inform political discourse today.

On Monday, I spoke about the marginal monstrous semi-human figures drawn near the Nile River in Africa on the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a world map drawn in England in 1300, and argued that contemporary discourse about Mexicans, Muslims, and immigrants is in a direct line with medieval formulations of others. I pointed out that some humans treat other humans, and animals and landscapes, as "resources" in seeking profit and power, and that too ties medieval social structures with modern ones. I tried to ignore the Trump sticker one student had stuck to his laptop computer.

The difficulty I had on Wednesday morning, operating in a state of shock and grief with very little sleep, was that I had to go on teaching all of my students. What I said to them on that day, in between tears, is that our classroom must remain a space for civil discourse on difficult subjects and for respect for all.

Meanwhile, I've decided to return to blogging, with more regularity and more discipline. In the past year, I've averaged a post a month; I aim to return to posting once a week. I ask my students to blog and to think about how to write about academic subjects for a more general audience, but I haven't done enough of that myself lately.

Trump's Words Matter

I was minding my own business on the M14A bus yesterday afternoon when a man using a motorized wheelchair boarded. The bus driver asked the people in the disabled seats to get up so the new rider could turn his chair around. Except that's not what the driver said. What he actually said was, "You have to get up. He's going to keep us waiting for half an hour."

The driver didn't raise the seats for the rider, as drivers usually do; instead, he retreated into his seat area, and then followed the man toward the seating area, flicking his chin several times behind the man's back, in a clear gesture of contempt, if not profanity.  The rider raised the seats himself, reaching from his chair while bracing himself with one foot on the floor.

Several of the other riders started muttering. "Look, he can walk." "This is ridiculous." And so on. Finally I said, "You don't know how much pain it causes him, or how much exhaustion, to put weight on his feet." They shut up, thankfully. The man slumped over the handlebars of his chair: physical fatigue? emotional exhaustion? Who knows?

Back in November, Donald Trump mocked a New York Times reporter with a physical disability. "You ought to see the guy," he said, gyrating his arms in an apparent imitation of the reporter's stance. He said he was just gesturing, a claim few believed. And in defending himself, he dug a deeper hole, claiming political correctness is the problem: "a lot of us don't have time to be politically correct."

Trump has brought political discourse to new lows in his contempt for Mexicans, immigrants, Syrians, refugees, disabled people, Muslims, and women. Did this thing happen on the bus because of what Trump said? I don't know, but he's certainly cleared space for such disrespect to flourish.

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Update: When I wrote this post, I also reported the incident to the MTA. Today (Jan. 13), I received an email message from the MTA saying they're going to identify the employee and follow up with his supervisor.