Monthly Archives: October 2022

The New Credentials.

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      “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in search of a good job, must be in want of a BA.”[1]  Partly this belief sprang from the rise of new industries after the Second World War, ones which assigned a premium to communication and analytical skills.  Partly this belief sprang from the propaganda of the too-many colleges left standing after the Baby Boom passed through.  Partly this belief sprang from the decision of many companies to enhance profits by spinning-off training to post-secondary education.[2] 

            Now the tide may be starting to run in the opposite direction.[3]  For one thing, most jobs never required a college degree and no one could pretend that they should.[4]  Two-thirds of American adults don’t have a BA.  For another thing, after state governments cut support for higher education during the “Great Recession,” colleges had to raise their tuition.  Students and their parents took on much more debt.[5]  Now that is being recognized as unsustainable, even if the Biden administration’s debt cancellation is problematic.  For yet another thing, the Covid pandemic triggered a labor shortage from which the country has not yet emerged.  For yet another other thing, we live an “era of racial reckoning,” even if it isn’t clear how long that era will last.  Requiring a BA for a job will tend to disproportionately exclude Black (76 percent) and Hispanic (83 percent) adults.[6] 

            What to put in place of the BA, both immediately and over the long-term?  One answer is a variant on the “accelerated degree completion” programs that flourished for a while among hard-pressed colleges.  Those programs started from the assumption that working adults had accumulated much applicable knowledge through experience.  All they really needed were some classes in what amounted to the theoretical constructs for making sense of that knowledge.  Now, a variety of organizations are pushing the idea of directly assessing the skills of workers without bothering about completing the BA.[7]  (Even this isn’t entirely new.  Look at the Army discharge papers of World War II GIs.[8])  Facilitative language is being coined: people are “skilled through alternative routes” and they have been held back by the “paper ceiling.” 

            So some businesses are starting to cut back on their previous requirement of the BA.[9]  This will likely create opportunities for some credentialing industry other than colleges. 

[1] Well, Jane Austen WOULD have said this if she had lived two hundred years later.  From 2010 to 2019, the percentage of people age 25 and older with a BA or higher rose from 29.9 to 36.0 percent (i.e. 20 percent). 

[2] Just my reading of developments.  I don’t have sources to cite.  Decide for yourself if it makes sense.  Still, how is it different from spinning-off pensions to 401(k)s? 

[3] Steve Lohr, “Seeing Promise, and a Model to Copy, in Job-Training Programs,” NYT, 3 October 2022.    

[4] Just try to say “Roofing 101” without laughing.  Although what I need right now is somebody who has passed “Roofing 501: Terracotta Tile Roofs.” 

[5] See: College costs: the old eat the young. | waroftheworldblog 

[6] In 2019, among those aged 25 and older, 58.1 percent of Asians; 40.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites; 26.1 percent of Blacks; and 18.8 percent of Hispanics had a bachelor’s degree or higher.  U.S. Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data

[7] According to one study, up to 30 million current workers have the skills needed to do higher level jobs than they presently hold.  Those jobs pay on average 70 percent more than their present job. 

[8] Still, see The Pacific part 10 Eugene Sledge – YouTube 

[9] Among them are reported to be Chevron, Google, IBM, Walmart, and LinkedIn. 

The Ukraine Missile Crisis.

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            As you age, anniversaries (birthdays, weddings) turn from fun to scary.[1]  In October 1962, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union had begun to place medium-range missiles equipped with nuclear warheads in Cuba.  This marked a dangerous turn in the Cold War.  If the Americans caught you doing it, they were likely to “blow your head clean off.”  The Cuban Missile Crisis followed.  Now, sixty years on, Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin has begun threatening to use nuclear weapons as his war of bad choice against Ukraine goes south. 

            In the view of Walter Russell Mead, Mr. Putin isn’t that hard to understand because he keeps explaining himself.[2]  Putin sees an “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony that has long dominated the rest of the world and which continues to do so today.[3]  Given centuries of unavailing grievances, criticisms, and the use of armed force by everyone from Napoleon to Osama bin Laden, there’s probably something to the idea of Anglo-Saxon hegemony.  Many people around the world, including those within the walls the hegemonic powers, share some version of Putin’s critique.[4]  China’s Zi Jinping may well be among the believers, even if he has a somewhat different plan than does Putin.  In any event, Putin sees Russia as the champion of the vast majority of the world.  He has hoped to turn Russia into the leader of a global coalition that could hold the Anglo-Saxons in check. 

            Part of Putin’s effort at Russian revival has been a sustained effort to reassemble much of the old Soviet Union.  Belarus is a puppet state; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization expresses—among other, competing forces—a Russian determination to build tight links with the Central Asian “stans” that one belonged to Russia; and Putin has repeatedly tried to curtail Ukraine’s independence.  Another part has been his effort to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) through energy policy and meddling in the domestic affairs of European countries. 

            For Putin, the war in Ukraine is going badly, but he could be interpreting the larger context of international relations as tilting in favor of Russia.  Global economic conditions are imposing widespread suffering.  Such suffering often produces political strains, conflict, instability, and second thoughts.[5]  Threatening the use of nuclear weapons could intensify discord in the West.  Still, if Putin was playing a long game then he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine in the first place. 

            Like Lenin and Hitler, Putin seems to feel a special personal urgency.  He may be “walking with Destiny” toward his vision of the Future, but he has to try to bring it into being in his own lifetime.  Observers might consider the possibility that he is determined to rush events to a conclusion without any regard for the consequences of failure. 

            The issue may not be the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.  It may be the use of the full array against the Anglo-Saxons.  I’d be happy to be wrong. 

[1] For my Mom’s birthday one year, my Dad had a jeweler make a heart-shaped locket surrounded by filigree out of white gold.  Inside was a photograph of their lost daughter.  Still makes me feel very inadequate. 

[2] Walter Russell Mead, “Putin’s Nuclear Threat Is Real,” WSJ, 4 October 2022. 

[3] Although France has joined the resistance to Russian aggression in Ukraine, Putin’s critique of the Anglo-Saxons resembles that of Charles de Gaulle. 

[4] See the litany of carping op-eds in the New York Times and elsewhere upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II. 

[5] To illustrate the availability bias, look at Liz Truss. 

High Noon.

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            There are a bunch of movies around about deadly men who have abandoned their previous lives to search for quiet, normality.  Then something happens.  Generally, it is some grave offense against innocents by super-predators.  The normal forces of Order prove impotent.  The Sleeper Awakens.[1]  “And Hell followed with him.”[2]  If I wanted to go all “cosmic,” I could argue—with a more or less straight face—that these movies are artifacts of the psychology of our time.  On the one hand, they’re instruments of vicarious “machismo” in an age when masculinity is often derided as “toxic.”[3]  On the other hand, they reflect the celebration of the prowess and heroism of America’s elite Special Forces troops during the “Forever Wars.”[4] 

            Basically, they are old wine in new bottles.  The old wine is, first, the idea of Righteous Violence.  Violence is terrible in its nature, but it may be the only way for Justice to triumph.[5]  Second, there is the idea of a society that can’t—or won’t—defend itself from danger.  These ideas come together in the basic story of the Second World War.  The bad guys over-estimated their strength, they kept bothering people who just wanted to be left alone, and they got destroyed.[6] 

            The new bottles are a very high kill-count, and the belief in powerful, occult forces that refuse to play by any civilized rules.  The high kill-count springs from lots of automatic weapons and improvised explosive devices combined with a theatrical athleticism.[7]  The occult forces are no longer either International Communism or the Mafia.  Now the occult forces are either Latin American drug cartels or Russian organized crime.  In either case, the villains are extreme in their savagery and, as a by-product, filthy rich.[8] 

            The Ur-story for this cultural theme is the Western “High Noon” (dir. Fred Zinneman, 1952).  Will Kane is a frontier marshal, once a “town-taming” killer who lived with the town’s madam.  Now he’s got a Quaker wife and plans for a peaceful life elsewhere.  Then he learns that an old enemy has been released from prison and is coming after him.  His one-time friends abandon him out of fear; his new wife insists on flight; he’ll have to face his enemy alone. 

            “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”  He does, then throws his badge in the dirt. 

[1] “Home Front” (dir. Gary Fleder, 2013); “John Wick” (dir. Chad Stahelski, 2014); “The Equalizer” (dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2014); and “Nobody” (dir. Ilya Naishuller, 2021).  Also the various sequels. 

[2] Revelation 6:8. 

[3] See: Tyler Durden’s soliloquies in “Fight Club” (dir. David Fincher, 1999).  The character of Walter White in “Breaking Bad” (2008-2013) seems inspired by a similar insight. 

[4] See: “Clear and Present Danger” (dir. Philip Noyce, 1994); “Tears of the Sun”’ (dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2003); “Zero Dark Thirty” (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2013); “Lone Survivor,” (dir. Peter Berg, 2014); “American Sniper” (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014).  Compare these with “Restrepo” (dir. Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, 2010); and “The Outpost” (dir. Rod Lurie, 2020).  Also, “The Spear,” a podcast from the Modern War Institute at USMA, makes it very clear that American soldiers in combat rely heavily upon indirect fires and close air support.  See: https://mwi.usma.edu/category/podcasts/the-spear/ 

[5] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory 

[6] Literally.  See, or listen to, Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia (2021). 

[7] At the root of this athleticism lies “The Transporter” (dir. Corey Yuen—but really Luc Besson, 2002); “Ong-Bak” (dir. Prachya Pinkaew, 2003); and “District B-13” (dir. Pierre Morel—but really Luc Besson, 2004).  “The Transporter” made good use of the former UK Olympic Team diver Jason Statham. 

[8] See, for examples of the Russians, “Eastern Promises” (dir. David Cronenberg, 2007), and the Ukrainian character Sergei Malatov in “The Wire,” Season Two et seq.   

It Takes a Village in Pakistan.

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            The countryside of Pakistan’s southeastern province of Sindh is dotted with little villages.  Walking into one of them, a historically-conscious American traveler could think that s/he is traveling back in time.  Several score families live in each village.  The houses are walled with mud brick and roofed with thatch.  There are few cattle.  Water comes from village hand-pumps, often very old.  There are no paved roads. 

The villagers live from farming of a very traditional kind.  There are two crops a year: wheat planted in the late Fall and harvested in the Spring; and cotton planted in the late spring and harvested in the Fall.  The wheat crop feeds the family for a year; the cotton pays for everything else.  From early in life, the children help with the work. 

The country’s farm system has existed for centuries, long before Pakistan either lost or regained its independence.  It looks a lot like post-Civil War sharecropping in the American South.  Landlords own vast tracts of farmland.  In 2013, an NGO reported that almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Pakistan’s farmland belonged to just 5 percent of the population.  In contrast, just over half of the rural population owns no land whatsoever.[1]  Well, not many American autoworkers own a car plant.  The answer to such a smart-alec remark comes in the nature of the land tenure system and the farming methods employed. 

The actual farm work is done by tenants on small plots of land.  The landlord loans the tenant the money to buy seed and fertilizer.  The tenant plants, raises, harvests, and sells the crop.  The landlord gets most of the harvest.  Much of that is sold for export.  Out of the meager share that the tenant receives, he pays part of it to the landlord for the loan.[2] 

            When the harvest is good, villagers can afford the debt payment and more.  They buy motorbikes, televisions, and refrigerators in addition to the basic requirements of vegetables and medicines.  When the harvest is bad, the tenant can’t repay the debt.  It gets carried over by the landlord.  Over the past few years, harvests have varied to an unusual degree. 

The tenants are stuck in the debt system, but their children are not.  Growing numbers have departed for cities.  They hope to find other kinds of work.  The departures alarm the landlords, who are accustomed to having a ready supply.   

Cultural representations of this world don’t often make it to Western audiences.  The movie “The Home and the World” (dir. Satyajit Ray, 1984) is set in Bengal and is about something else, but it offers glimpses of a ruthless land-manager and his thugs.  Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008) again is about India, but it leads off with a vivid description of the many abuses heaped on tenant farmers and landless laborers by the landlords.[3]  One of the story arcs in the British television series “Traffik” (1989) follows a Pakistani farmer who can only survive by planting opium poppies. 

“Reading by analogy” (HA, eez pun, yes?), one could read William Faulkner, The Hamlet (1940) or James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). 

[1] See: Give Me Land, Lots Of Land: Only 5% Of Pakistanis Own Two-Thirds of Farmlands; One-Half Of Farmers Are Landless (ibtimes.com)

[2] Christina Goldbaum and Zia ur-Rehman, “Floods Aggravate the Plight of Pakistan’s Farmworkers,” NYT, 2 October 2022. 

[3] The movie version (dir. Rahmin Barani, 2021) blows by this part of the book. 

My Weekly Reader 3 October 2022.

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            “News” is a commodity like any other.  There is a market for it, and the market is segmented by both price and consumer preference.  In the case of “news,” the term “price” bears two meanings.  On the one hand, there is the monetary cost.  On the other hand, there is the intellectual effort required to read and make sense of the “news.”  Thus, complexity is in itself a high price to pay.[1]  Simplicity makes for a mass market.  Historians of media have long understood that the early press of the Nineteenth Century aimed to be an elite press by sermonizing at length a small, well-off, highly-literate audience of “serious” people.  In contrast, the emergence of a mass press later in the century surfed the waves of sports, crime, scandal, and sex.  Reporters loved the combinations of these topics that drew broad readership.    

            The Reverend Edward W. Hall (1881-1922) married Frances Noel Stevens (1874-1942) in 1911.  She was a horse-faced battle-axe seven years his senior, but her family had money and respectability.  What more could an ambitious young Episcopalian priest desire?  By 1920, he was a priest at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  The “What more” sprang up before his eyes at choir practice in the form of Eleanor Mills.   

Eleanor Mills (1888-1922) was the wife of Jim Mills (1878–1965), the sexton[2] of the church.  The couple had married in 1905, had a daughter and a son (born in 1906 and 1910 respectively) and they lived in a two-decker across the street from the church.  By 1920, Eleanor had a lot of time on her hands: both children were in school and her husband was the janitor at a local elementary school.  She began singing in the church choir.  Not all of the photos of the time capture it, but Eleanor was a knock-out.  Her looks floored Ed Hall. 

The two began a secret affair.  They exchanged passionate letters.  They found a “lovers’ lane” outside New Brunswick.  It went on for two years.  It must have become apparent that it could not have a happy ending.  It isn’t hard to imagine the headlines in the New York Daily News, one of the “new” mass-circulation papers: “Episcopal Priest Dumps His Wife and Absconds with Wife of Another!”  Still, they kept on meeting and corresponding in secret. 

Jim Mills found out.  Perhaps he found the love letters from Hall.  He confronted his wife with her infidelity.  She responded with insults, rather than remorse.  Jim Mills may have taken his discovery to Mrs. Hall.  On 14 September 1922, Hall and Mills drove to the lovers’ lane in Somerset, NJ.  The next day, a passerby found them dead.  They were lying on the ground, fully-dressed and artfully arranged. Their love letters, rather than those of just one of them, were strewn about.  Reverend Hall had been shot once in the head.  Mrs. Mills had been much worse handled: shot three times in the head, her throat cut, and her tongue cut out.  It looks like the killer was madder at Mills than at Hall.  But would that be Jim Mills or Mrs. Hall? 

The police couldn’t (or wouldn’t[3]) solve the case.  In 1926, Mrs. Hall and her brothers were tried and acquitted.  The mass market papers had a field day with it.  It’s a “cold case” still, but journalists keep writing books about it.[4]  And readers keep snapping them up. 

[1] Perhaps because it is costly to produce thought in defiance of Ockham’s Razor.  Same goes for higher education. 

[2] A sexton is basically the groundskeeper, but also—cue the spine-tingling—digs the graves. 

[3] Somebody went a little crazy and killed a couple of hypocritical, unrepentant adulterers. 

[4] Joe Pompeo, Blood and Ink: The Scandalous Jazz Age Double Murder That Hooked America on True Crime (2022), reviewed by Tom Nolan, WSJ, 30 September 2022—something else artfully arranged.