Are Students Still Citizens?

High school cheerleader Brandi Levy was a freshman in May 2017, and therefore probably fifteen years old, when, wracked with frustration, she composed a vulgarity-laced Snapchat about student life. In response, her school district ejected her from the cheer squad. The resulting lawsuit has dragged on for nearly four years (Levy is now in college), and hits the Supreme Court this month. Her case will have First Amendment ramifications for years.

The same day I learned about Brandi Levy’s case, footage emerged from the school where I formerly taught, the University of Nebraska at Kearney, of a solo protestor. The individual was waving a succession of placards, including one reading “COVID Killed George Floyd,” and selling lapel buttons with antivax slogans off a folding table. Though some students tried shaming him into desisting, the school claimed powerlessness, calling it a free speech issue.

Discovering these two stories together, I descended into a doom-spiral of deliberation about free speech. I’ve previously called myself a “free speech absolutist,” though like most absolutists, I’m not that absolute. Some speech acts are clearly unacceptable, like inciting violence or proscribed obscenity, and the Supreme Court agrees with me. But students’ speech rights have always been lawfully circumscribed, and that creates moral paradoxes.

Legal scholars observing Brandi Levy’s case have agreed: the Tinker precedent asserts that any speech which doesn’t disrupt school functions is lawful and protected. Equally important, school authority has traditionally been construed to end at the campus perimeter. Yet the school raises an important counterpoint: if they can’t police speech taking place online, how can they combat cyberbullying? And where is the campus perimeter in this age of remote learning?

I remember school officials claiming complete powerlessness when bullies pursued, harangued, and even physically struck me off-campus. Didn’t happen here, they said, so it’s not our jurisdiction. But behavior originating on-campus carries into off-campus life, a tendency amplified by digital media reach. Since kids are legally compelled into school, surely schools have some responsibility when campus toxicity spills into the community.

Yet I reflexively flinch from giving schools sweeping authority over students’ non-scholastic behavior. People—bosses, pastors, bureaucrats—given unrestricted authority over others’ choices frequently, even consistently, abuse that power. Especially in today’s economy, where parents’ working hours have become painfully lengthy, the desire to hand in loco parentis authority to schools, which are often short-staffed and underfunded, courts moral disaster.

@UNKearney with all of the things happening in the world right now, ignorance on our campus should not be tolerated especially on a University Campus that has less than 20% of the population that are POC pic.twitter.com/q9UHgj8ZZP

— jeni.chez (@jeni_chez) April 13, 2021

The inability to concisely resolve this contradiction gets amplified by the numbskull at UNK. Universities, as bastions of knowledge and research, should surely have authority to prevent anyone peddling bullshit—literally peddling, since the protester was evidently selling his slogan buttons for money. Most college students are at least 18, and therefore nominal adults, so they have lawful adult liberties, but universities have a mission to teach something like reality.

If schools have authority to police students’ online behavior when they spout vulgarities about their extracurriculars, surely they have authority to silence people preaching balloon juice. But if free speech protects a frustrated teenager off-campus, surely it protects a nonviolent protester who isn’t disrupting campus activities. Even if what he says is flat damn wrong. (Retrogressive views like this are widespread on my former campus: UNK isn’t exactly UC-Berkeley.)

This contradiction highlights the problem with rules-based school governance. The Supreme Court will dispense a ruling in Levy’s case that either expands or contracts school authority, and their ruling will apply nationwide. But changing technology, and COVID, prove that the boundary between “school” and “life” isn’t circumscribed by physical campus. We’ve applauded people getting fired for participating in the January 6th insurrection, so adult lives aren’t insulated either.

The delineation between school and life, and between free speech and action, is decided not by rules, handed down by black-robed justices, but by deliberation, evidence, and language. Boundaries of acceptable speech are fundamentally moral decisions, and whatever ruling SCOTUS makes will enshrine their morality for at least two generations. A federal case, while sometimes necessary (Brown v. Board), also forecloses debate when circumstances change.

Which, beyond a doubt, they will, in ways we cannot predict. And sooner than later.

Maybe schools need some guidance. The University of Nebraska system, lacking clear guidelines, has a history of wildly inconsistent positions. Yet whatever position SCOTUS favors will have knock-on effects. Increased authority will put schools in competition with parents; circumscribed authority will make it difficult to eject bullies and professional liars. That’s the problem with moral precepts, I guess. Reality doesn’t conform itself to our rules.

The Cost of Being a Grown-Up During the Pandemic

Arclight Cinemas' flagship location, on Hollywood Boulevard, before the pandemic

When news broke this week that Decurion Corporation, owner of Pacific Theatres and Arclight Cinemas, would shutter its locations, I initially laughed. Corporations like Decurion have participated in the contracting entertainment market for decades, until just five companies now control most of Hollywood, and one company, Disney, controls a one-third share. Did another corporation get too massive to withstand economic setbacks? LOL, whose fault is that?

Almost immediately, though, testimonials began emerging from Decurion’s Southern California market base. People mourned, not the big-ticket Hollywood movies they watched at Pacific and Arclight, but the memories they shared of other people. First dates, chance encounters, and more: people love these cinemas because of the people there. The facilities and their products seem almost ancillary to people’s love of these cinemas, deriving from their human experiences.

Decurion’s closure removes another place we can meet people we don’t already know. As urban designer Jeff Speck writes, the suburbanization of America has narrowed the number of placed we’re allowed to enter without prior invitation. If you’re too old for school, your opportunities to meet new people are generally limited to shopping malls and houses of worship. But those places subdivide people according to shared faith or buying habits.

Cinemas, by contrast, opened new vistas. Sure, the movies were mass-manufactured by Hollywood dream factories, but consider the images of moviegoers from the 1940s and 1950s, the years when American religion was calcifying. People wore their finest to the cinemas, because moviegoing was an opportunity to be in public. It meant an ironically unscripted opportunity to participate in society. Until recently, opening-night lines were still a destination.

Multiplexes swallowed locally owned cinemas after the 1970s, just as malls swallowed locally owned department stores, and Barnes & Noble swallowed local bookstores. Yet even as the business dynamic became more concentrated and inflexible, the experience remained valuable. Cinemas weren’t just places people saw movies; people saw those movies together. I’m old enough to remember the 1990s Star Wars rerelease, so this communal experience still happened fairly recently.

Americans are losing places where we have freedom to be something other than our work. Market consolidation means narrowing other opportunities: without local businesses, we’re losing street theater and guerilla culture, arts and experiences that aren’t subsidized by corporations. We’re losing opportunities for grown-up spontaneity. And it’s happening because opportunities to be an unmediated adult are not profitable.

...she just held up her finger without making eye contact. “I’m not at a good stopping point,” she said. I stood there in silence for another two or three minutes as she finished her chapter, completely unbothered. It’s one of my favorite memories of her, six years later

— elan gale (@theyearofelan) April 13, 2021

Speaking purely anecdotally, I’ve lost count how often I see one question written on Internet discussion boards: “How do you make friends as an adult?” Sadly, the answer is widely documented, if not widely known. Your friends are the people you spend the most time with, so you make friends by spending time with other adults. Night classes, volunteer activities, and cultural events are where grown-ups go to make friends.

Closing cinemas are, therefore, symptomatic of a larger loss: places we can meet strangers, without being steered by algorithms. We can stream movies and TV digitally; we can’t stream humans. Multinational conglomerates absorbed local businesses, then digital marketing and the pandemic submarined the conglomerates. In their place, we’re left with Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, which are valuable in their place, but lack mass. We’re left with no place at all.

I mustn’t forget myself: Pacific and Arclight are for-profit corporations too, and they sell movies from for-profit Hollywood studios. Like other chain stores we've lost since 2008, Decurion is a brand, not a friend. Yet notwithstanding their flaws, they offered opportunities to meet people and have our own experiences, opportunities increasingly neglected when algorithms decide what options we even get to see. Decurion is imperfect, but serves a role.

After the pandemic, we’ll have choices to make. These include individual choices about how much of our personal money to spend locally, but also society-wide choices about how much consolidation we consider acceptable, how much wealth we permit CEOs to accumulate before they threaten society. As half of Earth’s internet ad revenue moves through two corporations, Facebook and Google, and one-third of digital commerce goes through Amazon, these questions matter.

Because when chain cinemas close, kicking more power to Jeff Bezos and Reed Hastings, we aren’t just losing companies. We’re losing opportunities to meet strangers, broaden our horizons, and have grown-up experiences. It sounds hyperbolic to say our worlds are getting smaller, but that’s the evidence we’re getting from the anecdotes around Arclight and Pacific. They aren’t places, they’re memories, which we’ll never get back.

Just as important, we’ll never have chances to make new memories.

Who Do the Police Really Serve?

Officer Joe Gutierrez draws his sidearm on Lt. Caron Nazario, Dec. 5 2020

In Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, she describes how frighteningly easy it is to get stopped by police. Traffic laws are so intricate and specific that many motorists can’t drive three blocks from home without violating some arcane regulation. It’s certainly illegal to stop drivers for being Black, but it’s completely legal to stop drivers for irregularly signaling a turn, stopping to far from the line, or having a nonconforming license plate frame.

Though Windsor, Virginia, police stopped Army Lt. Caron Nazario four months ago, his case achieved national status when body camera video emerged this weekend. Literally the next day, police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, shot and killed 20-year-old Daunte Wright on an outstanding warrant. Both men were stopped on flimsy traffic pretexts: Lt. Nazario had no license plates (because his SUV had transit tags), and Wright had an illegal air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror.

Americans aren’t supposed to be afraid of the police. White Americans have this nominal notion that police represent us, and strive to preserve our well-being. Yet the flimsy reasons these two Black men got stopped, and the rapid escalations into violence, bespeak an organization that deliberately wants to instill fear in citizens. “I’m honestly afraid to get out [of my vehicle],” Lt. Nazario says on camera. “Yeah dude, you should be,” an unidentified officer responds.

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud.

This Judge Dredd-level behavior has no place in advanced society. Daute Wright died barely ten miles from Minneapolis, where former officer Derek Chauvin currently stands trial for executing a civilian in broad daylight for a non-capital crime. The law becomes, not what legislatures ratify, but whatever police say. Consequences happen only when public outcry requires states to make the occasional blood sacrifice to appease the hoi polloi.

Importantly, when someone gets held responsible for actual transgressions, like Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis or Officer Joe Gutierrez in Virginia, it’s always individuals. Even though Chauvin killed George Floyd surrounded by three other police officers, and Gutierrez was only one of at least three officers to draw sidearms on Lt. Nazario, yet in each case, only the most egregious individual faces any repercussions; other officers, and the brass that supports them, continue on, wholly undeterred.

Protesters assemble following Daunte Wright's murder, April 11, 2021

Our justice system begins with a secularized Calvinist assumption that humans are wholly, unremittingly depraved. People supposedly do right only when compelled by threats of violence. And certainly, that describes some people accurately. Yet notice against whom that violence gets arrayed: until Sunday, I, a White man, had no conception that any jurisdiction had laws against hanging air fresheners from your mirror. Black Americans are regularly stopped for crimes White Americans don’t even know exist.

Police exist not to preserve justice—which they never could anyway, because we lack a meaningful definition of “justice”—but to serve the Calvinist power structure. Though religious Calvinism preaches that we can’t know who’s saved or damned until God’s Judgement Throne, secular Calvinism clearly knows the Elect: those who have property. Notice that, in police mentality, passing a counterfeit $20 bill is a capital offense, but wage theft isn’t. Money equals righteousness equals power.

Notice the sequence here. Where a religious moneybags like Joel Osteen might suggest that righteousness causes reward, the secular Calvinist believes reward causes righteousness. Rewards signal God’s favor in advance, even if “God” in this circumstance isn’t a literal deity. Indeed, to preserve this structure, God must remain entirely figurative and disinterested. We elect leaders based on wealth and worldly reward (the numerical majority of Representatives are millionaires), and assume they’ll handle public trust responsibly.

Then those leaders, already well rewarded, pass laws so arcane, nobody could possibly follow them all. And they authorize police to enforce these laws with remarkably wide discretion, through tools like “qualified immunity,” “probable cause,” and “pretext stops.” Because the rules, and the rule-keepers, exist to enforce secular Calvinist morality, under which the poor are bad people, specifically because they’re poor. They need punishment to direct them into moral wealth, especially if they aren’t White.

George Floyd, Caron Nazario, and Daunte Wright needed punishment for their own good, because punishment will cause moral correction. This is especially ironic, because two of them were punished for having cars, in one case a new car, while the third was punished for believing he had money. This reveals secular Calvinism’s moral vacuity: it punishes first, and hardest, those trying actively to comply. Because, to the secular Calvinist, some people naturally deserve punishment, regardless.

So sick of reading tweets telling Black people how to properly respond to police interactions.

Only one person in a police interaction has been trained (and is being paid) to deescalate the situation.

— Chanel Ali (@chanel__ali) April 12, 2021

A Dollar For Your Soul, Please

What Lil Nas X Means to Me, Part Two

Max Barry’s 2003 satirical dystopia, Jennifer Government, utilizes a common Cyberpunk trick of name-dropping real-world corporations abusing quasi-governmental power. In the story MacGuffin, the Nike shoe corporation plans a “guerilla” marketing campaign. To create artificial demand for ordinary athletic shoes, the company orchestrates a series of murders, killing teenagers for their shoes. It works, and the unremarkable shoes become a hot commodity, too valuable to wear.

I remembered Barry last week, when Lil Nas X, the only rapper to ever top the Billboard country charts, released his new Satan shoe. Everything about this shoe appears unremarkable. It’s a repurposed Nike Air Max 97, a similarly quotidian shoe retailing, according to the Nike website, for about $170. In collaboration with a New York art collective, LNX alters the shoes with supposed satanic medallions, inflammatory logos, and one drop of human blood. Then he charges over $1000.

LNX’s Satan shoe channels previous pseudo-scandals created by professional media manipulators. The lightweight blasphemy recalls Madonna’s 1989 “Like a Prayer” video, or virtually everything Marilyn Manson has ever done. Marvel Comics and the band KISS released a 1970s comic book featuring, like the shoe, human blood in the ink. LNX seemingly designed this shoe to ask: How many times can the squares believe the same overhyped bullshit?

The squares responded: at least one more. Prominent Republicans, TV preachers, and conservative pundits flooded social media last Monday with condemnations and repudiations. Like clockwork, predictable sources claim a cheap publicity stunt means we’re engaged in a theological struggle for America’s shared soul, or something, and proof, proof I say, of the moral cesspool youth culture has become. It’s sadly, dishearteningly predictable.

And I say that as a Christian.

Importantly, while White cishet Christians throw theatrically public tantrums, they’re foregrounding LNX’s message: that, as a gay man raised in a conservative church, he spent years living with an internalized message that God hated him. It’s a dishearteningly familiar experience. Encouraged to consider themselves damned, children embrace that as their identity and, like millions of heavy metal meatheads everywhere, wave their anomie in everybody’s faces, because it’s all they have.

Because, don’t fool yourself, LNX’s demonstrations are every bit as ordinary as the conservative reactions against them. This banality has become an inevitable part of the performance. The headbanger, dungeon master, or walking virgin-whore dichotomy, behaves in some predictably provocative manner. Then the squares respond like puppets, moving mechanically through a standardized litany of performative outrage. The sequence is completely scripted, and has grown tiresome with repetition.

The market popularity of blasphemy results in commodified rebellion. Don’t forget, LNX is signed with Columbia Records, the label which previously gave us focus-tested teen rebellion like AC/DC, Rage Against the Machine, and Blue Öyster Cult. Like LNX, these acts promised to spit in the Establishment’s eye, while remaining ensconced within the womb-like security of one of Earth’s largest media conglomerates. Way to screw the system, guys.

Don’t misunderstand me. Lil Nas X’s accusations of traumatic treatment against the church require serious consideration. American Christianity has told outsiders “Jesus loves you,” but qualified that by endorsing racism, sexism, homosexism, and other us-vs-them behavior. (That’s in the aggregate, certainly.) Meanwhile, American church membership is falling precipitously. If Christians want meaningful explanations why, they should start seeking in their pulpits and pews.

But, failing that, let’s recognize that rebellion, like conformity, is a commodity token. Zondervan, the publisher which owns the New International Version translation of the Bible, is a subsidiary of media conglomerate HarperCollins. Anton LeVay’s The Satanic Bible is published by Avon Books, a subsidiary of… HarperCollins. The exact same company will sell you righteousness or blasphemy, whichever brings you comfort. They don’t care, they want to get paid.

Because both LNX’s blasphemy, and the resulting Christian retrenchment, follow a predictable script, neither will ultimately move the discussion meaningfully. The only beneficiaries of this conflict are the CEOs and marketeers. While individuals often see themselves as taking bold moral stands on these issues, the monetary transactions which result, ultimately redound to people like Kenneth Copeland, on the Christian side, or on LNX’s side, the shareholders of Sony Music Entertainment.

In Jennifer Government, the murders make ordinary shoes look valuable, and people pay literally thousands for ordinary joggers. But within a few months, the media landscape moves on, people forget, and the shoes get remaindered. Nike doesn’t care; they made their profit months ago. Max Barry’s point bears remembering, for LNX’s allies and enemies alike: brands aren’t your supporters. They’re here to get paid.

 

See also Part One

The Pagans Are Coming! Bar the Gates!

What Lil Nas X Means To Me, Part One

A still from Lil Nas X's “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” video

If I gather one important lesson from the controversy surrounding Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes, it’s how utterly predictable the faux controversy is. LNX says something photogenically blasphemous, flogs a product, and waits. Then hordes of televangelists and pundits, claiming to represent the public face of Christanity, express their crinkum-crankum outrage. It’s wholly inevitable to those of us who remember Madonna’s dullsville 1989 blasphemy video, “Like a Prayer.”

It’s so wholly predictable, in fact, that one suspects LNX probably engineered that outcome. His track “Montero,” with accompanying video of him engaging in sexual exploits with the Devil, has the same earworm quality as “Like a Prayer,” which had similar video imagery. LNX performed the same basic actions, producing the same basic outcome, with such precision, that he probably followed an Excel spreadsheet of how Madonna propelled a pleasant but undistinguished album to quadruple-platinum status.

LNX’s “Montero” and its marketing tie-in demonstrate the moral bankruptcy among Christianity’s public leadership. Christians, as an aggregate, have embraced recent trends toward militarism, sexual paranoia, and worship of mammon. The degree to which Christians embraced our two most recent Republican presidents, both of whom cut taxes on the rich and entangled America in overseas wars, demonstrates how American Christianity has strayed from its biblical roots.

Mainline Christian denominations have aggressively opposed recent trends toward militant nationalism in American politics. The Catholic, ELCA Lutheran, and United Methodist churches, among others, officially opposed Operation Iraqi Liberation, our decade-long entanglement in Levantine politics. The Roman Catholic Church’s recent declaration that it can’t bless same-sex unions shocked many people, despite being Catholic policy for literally centuries, because so many other churches have reversed position recently.

Yet despite this, you wouldn’t know it from most church actions. Many pulpit ministers flinch from expounding their churches’ policy positions from the congregational lectern, because they know their parishioners would exeunt en masse. When the ELCA Lutheran church reversed its longstanding position and agreed to ordain openly gay clargy, nearly 150,000 Lutherans walked out, organizing the North American Lutheran Church specifically around excluding gay Christians.

Meanwhile, as clergy representing the Christian center-left are reluctant to court controversy, right-wing clergy have no such objections. Paula White’s famous, highly public prayer ceremony to reverse the 2020 election outcomes for the former President, became a disgraceful spectacle of global proportions. Right-wing clergy have closed ranks around a form of nationalist conservatism that privileges the wealth, like the former President, often at the expense of “the least of these.”

A still from Madonna's “Like a Prayer” video

This communal prayer, not for victory over the forces of this world, but for dominion, results in Christianity expressing a fortress mentality. Religious leaders willing to express their political views assert that Christianity is under attack, despite over seventy percent of Americans identifying as Christian. Public Christians, despite reams of evidence, have rhetorically backed themselves into a fortress mentality, and preach faith as constantly under siege.

American history, of course, demonstrates that this isn’t new. The New England Puritans fled England because they thought they were under siege, then quickly provoked King Philip’s War because they thought they were still under siege. American Christians have historically been unified, not by a mission to serve the disadvantaged like Jesus commanded, but by a fear of a monolithic world of malign barbarity. Lock the gates, Pastor, the savages are coming.

I wouldn’t even mind this martyrdom mentality, if Christians were martyred for following the Gospel. Many American municipalities have laws against feeding the homeless or welcoming immigrants, things Jesus actually talked about. Yet many of the public Christians now whimpering about a hip-hop video on YouTube, are the ones enforcing laws against protecting the poor. Jesus separates the sheep from the goats, not by their doctrines, but by their actions.

LNX, like Madonna before him, has exposed public Christianity’s moral vacuity. Given the opportunity to repent of its sectarian, exclusionary history, the Church, or anyway its public face, has chosen to double down. Banshee-like screaming about American moral decay, which televangelists see everywhere, nets ratings and donations. And Christians in the pews, inundated with this messaging, believe that actually represents the preponderant Christian opinion.

Meanwhile, American church membership is falling precipitously. Especially following a Presidential administration that used Christian language to justify literal violence against minorities, this probably isn’t surprising. People aren’t walking away from Christ; they’re abandoning a Church that has forgotten its sacred roots. If Christians don’t take this opporunity to scrutinize ourselves (and so far, too few leaders have), we will see this is only the beginning.

 

See also Part Two