#25 SILVER ANNIVERSARY POST

I posted this on Facebook yesterday, not to be alarmist, because if anything it understates the current danger, but to spell out the contingencies which I believe we have preferred not to think about, thus far. America is teeming with guns in private hands and the Constitution permits this precisely for the purpose of defending yourself and your family. But it was born in the age of single-shot flintlock muskets which took ages to re-load (or it must have seemed like ages, wondering if you were going to get shot yourself while you did it). Have you any idea how many rounds per minute an ordinary AK47 fires: would you believe 600? Orlando was terrible, but sometime there will be a much bigger massacre, just because these things always escalate. Black churches were bombed, crudely, in the early 60s, in Birmingham, Alabama. What would the white supremacists' target be today: a Pentecostalist rally in a football stadium, arriving by hijacked helicopter?

There was very little response to this post. Perhaps it was overstated: only time will tell; perhaps the situation is just too scary and people are in denial about the contingencies; perhaps it is just that it is hard to 'like' such a thing, even though that is not approval of what is described. Maybe this time next year it will be one of the 'memories' that Facebook plays back for us to revisit and perhaps replay for our friends. How will it seem then: redundant, inaccurate, exaggerated? or predictive, understated and almost nostalgic for its naivety about the speed and extent of escalation? We were shocked by 9/11, 7/7, Bataclan, Orlando and now Dallas, that these things could happen, committed by those who can pass among us unnoticed and strike us down in a heartbeat. I have always believed that white racism and brutality to black people, even murder, was a fuse which was much more dangerous to the American mainland than Islamisation and jihad. What I've argued may be a 'suicidal prediction' (this is a a prediction which is invalidated because it creates the motivation to change things in order that it does not actually happen).  

What will happen now: well a black militant group has claimed responsibility for the police shootings. The FBI will almost certainly have monitored them already and so they will be hunted down and in a series of raids on hideouts they will be shot. How do we know this? Because this is what happened to the Black Panthers in the late 60s. Their leadership took the precaution of sleeping in a different house every night, but eventually they were found and gunned down, with massive overkill. Now, however, citizens are much better armed, with automatic weapons, and better communications: we may expect more protracted gun battles in which the general public may not escape involvement as victims of crossfire, hostages or human shields. Better communications will assist flight and will enable live video broadcast of gun battles across the Net. In turn this will encourage disturbances and demonstrations in sympathy, across the nation, some of which will become violent and call down more violence from the police, and more casualties. And so on, and so on.

America is blessed with a President who has the possibility of bridging the races and starting to turn this issue around, but he's going. I wonder if he's thinking "Après moi, le déluge". He is not perfect, but he is a good man who could leave his fingerprints on history.

There are more black American men in prison than in college; 1 in 3 black American men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Out of a prison population of 2.3 million, 1 million are black; they have an incarceration rate which is nearly seven times that of whites.

Prisons are more about punishment than rehabilitation. They are universities of crime that steep the inmates in years of exposure to other criminals. They are humiliating and degrading and provoke a bitter resentment to society and often instil a determination to do it better next time, or not get caught.

There are alternatives. Trying to clear my desktop I came across some stills from a video on crime in the Netherlands:

  

CRIME................... 

They have a declining clime rate.  They do not tolerate degrading conditions for prisoners. Their emphasis is entirely on education and training to equip prisoners with the skills that will allow them to secure paid work on the outside and avoid recidivism.  Americans and Dutch are not a different species of human being, but they do have wide differences in their societies. It is inconceivable that The Netherlands could throw up a crass bigot like Trump to be its national leader, figurehead and representative.That is not the explanation but it is symptomatic of a decline in a society's values. The last few weeks has seen the UK veer noticeably in the direction of the US end of the spectrum. Our police used not to shoot black suspects, now they have done. We have narrowly avoided having a Prime Minister who was hardly less of a caricature than Trump. Theresa May is not Barack Obama.

Hold on, it's going to be a rough ride.

I took early retirement from the University of Westminster 10 years ago after almost 30 years there. What did I miss? Good colleagues, mostly lovely students, working in the West End near the BBC. What did I not miss at all? Working in the West End during IRA or ISIS terrorist campaigns, and even worse, writing references.

Writing references for students and colleagues is just part of the deal when you are an academic, it is a professional duty and someone has to do it. However, it was made monstrous by a number of factors:

·        Individuals made multiple applications for courses, jobs, promotions, loans, accommodation

·     We were a growing department (index: 2 members of staff when I joined, 32 when I left, 40+now) attracting huge numbers of students.

·     Students seemed to feel that letters before the referee’s name (Dr, Prof.) carried more weight than letters after. Those who had them attracted more customers.

·      People who get on to courses or get good jobs tend to remember the good reference you wrote them, show brand loyalty and become repeat customers for the rest of their lives. Nice…?

I would routinely write several per week; multiply that up over a 30-year career and it runs to thousands, a job in itself. Strategies had to be developed to cope. I tried everything from a standard skeleton letter in which I just filled in the adjectives and adverbs (but still had to write the biographical stuff which required interviewing the student – who I might hardly know): to a series of rating scales, but that made it look too automated; the most effective system (and deterrent to the supplicant – not such a bad thing…): getting them to write their own, giving the document to you in Word, and modifying it into something literate, realistic and fair: it got the donkey work done – by the beneficiary – covered the areas they wanted, but you had editorial control over the content – including beefing it up if they’d been too modest. Had I thought of this early in my career, I would have written more books, read more bedtime stories and developed several absorbing hobbies in the time freed up.

The other problem with references is the truth. You can’t baldly lie, and you pause before writing anything negative that you know will stand out from the laudatory stuff like a boil on the end of the nose. You develop a language of faint praise, ambiguity, and subtle nuance which communicates your reservations at a kind of subliminal level: there some examples  here which show that we are not above massaging things a little to help the student, sometimes by disguising the bad stuff.

How do you deal with a colleague or student who asks you for a reference, who you don’t like, don’t rate or the opposite case, don’t want to lose. I stress that I have only ever used this strategy once, on a colleague who turned out to be racist, and who we sacked: later,  for some bizarre reason he asked me for a job reference. This is not an original strategy, I think I may have picked it up from Laurie Taylor's column in the THES. What you do is this: you write a generally favourable, but not-too-glowing reference, but at the end you insert this sentence: “I must stress that he is completely trustworthy, in almost every situation”. Think about it.

'a tidy desk is the sign of a tidy mind.' Hmm. However recent studies show that an untidy desk(top?) correlates with creative thinking. Thank you, that'll do nicely:

I bought a 'marquee' as back-up for my party should it rain (there were too many people to accommodate indoors) intending to return it for a refund if it stayed in its box (it did); I forgot to take it back, so I now own it. It measures 6 metres x 3metres and has no guy ropes to take account of. If anyone wants to borrow it for a similar purpose they can do so for the delivery and return cost.

Contact me on FB chat.