For those of us who deal with various chronic illnesses, regular medical appointments become routine. For example, for 26 years now, I average spending somewhere around 10-20 days a year at the hospital (the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center) to have various tests and see various doctors. This amounts to a sizable amount of time. And they do say that M.D. Anderson means Most of the Day – which is true!

For years and years I found that I left these appointments depressed for a few days – especially when we had to be there from 7 or 8 am to sometime late in the afternoon or early evening! These appointments remind me in a very direct and scary way that I shouldn’t be alive. Our modern medicine and professional medical system have saved me again and again – through brain surgery, heart/lung/diaphragm surgery, pelvis surgery, etc. etc.

Its also stressful having various tests when you know they will show continued and new abnormalities.

In sum, seeing the doctor–when you see the doctor all the time for series medical problems–is stressful. And it is also stressful seeing so many people everywhere who are also very ill and very stressed

By accident, I found one solution that worked real well last time. We had a gap of about three hours between appointments. Instead of having a long lunch in the cafeteria (they do have delicious food!), going to various gift shops, and waiting around, we left! We had lunch at a fancy restaurant down the road and then came back. Paying parking twice wasn’t a bad price to pay!

Short, quick appointments that don’t involve a lot of waiting are ideal – but waiting is part of getting quality medical care. So when we can’t just leave for a while, I will continue getting distracted with something on my iPad or laptop, which has worked in the past. Reading doesn’t seem to work so much because of all the distractions. But also such depression seems to be a somewhat unavoidable reality. 

Do you have any suggestions to avoid medical-appointment-depression?

Andrew Joseph Pegoda

 

For my Introduction to Queer Studies class yesterday students read a variety of articles on the theme of White gay/queer men and how they are both privileged and oppressed (and these, of course, vary according to the relevant intersectionality). 

Student reading included the following, a mix of blogs and theoretical, academic works: 

“Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”
“Gay Men’s Sexism and Women’s Bodies”
“On heterosexual privilege”
“A Gay Guy’s Guide To Feminism – A Brief Introduction”
“30+ Examples of Heterosexual Privilege in the US”
“30+ Examples of Male Privilege”
“Don’t Hate Steve Grand because he’s White; Hate Him because he’s Clueless”
“Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism”

We focused on three questions – all discussed from insitutional, systemic perspectives:

1. How does society oppress White gay men?
2. How do White gay men oppress each other?
3. How do White gay men oppress others? 

The basic idea is that all men have male privilege, some of these men also have White privilege, Christian privilege, able-bodied privilege, class/economic privilege, cisgender privilege, etc. Identity is a complicated thing!

Too often people in privileged positions use their privilege to further their causes, whether this is fully realized or not. We don’t always know what we’re doing, especially when it involves privilege. Too often those who are oppressed could use this insight of knowing what it is like to be oppressed to challenge forces that priviegle them but don’t. 

Instead, as these articles articulate and as the students verified, (White) gay men are sometimes more sexist than heterosexual men. Marilyn Frye’s “Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement” makes a variety of important points, some of which can be summed up in the following points:

• Movements by gay men and gay women have been at odds because of gay men’s sexism and woman-hating behavior
• Most gay men are potentially more committed to patriarchy and related notions of power than their heterosexual male counterparts.
• Historically most gay men have claimed rights and recognition by appealing to their manhood. 
• Heterosexual men are typically very involved in a form of “homoeroticism” vis-a-vis their close emotional bonds with other men (football games, drinking, man caves, etc.), emotional bonds they don’t build with women. 

We also talked about how there is also a problematic trend where gay men oppress each other. Theoretically, as I learned Monday, this is termed as horizontal hostility. “Horizontal hostility occurs when members of a targeted group believe, act on, or enforce the dominant system of discrimination and oppression.” Take a look at the manifestation of this in the following image. This is a screenshot from the popular/controversial app Grinder that I found some time ago. 

This poster uses sexism (and male privilege) and notions of able-bodiedness to belittle other gay men, all of them really. Certainly, too, this is a less serious example as the horizontal hostility/oppression is limited to semi-anyonomus words in a place that is not taken seriously by most, but this served as a useful discussion artifact for my students. Of course, too, racism is the gay male community is rampant. 

Hope you enjoyed this brief look into a Queer Studies class!

Andrew Joseph Pegoda 

This past few weeks my students and I have been discussing various sides of the so-called Texas Revolution in depth in both my Texas History class and Mexican American History I class.

One of my favorite things about teaching is that there is always so much to learn and things change every semester. Anything related to Texas History is especially interesting because there is so much “bad information” out there when it comes to anything related to Texas and its existence.

In particular, the past week I have been thinking about various issues of historiography connected with the so-called Texas Revolution. Too often, even otherwise very strong historical accounts, take the Texas Revolution at face value.

In far too many cases, people don’t know or don’t accept that Texas was Spanish and Mexican. Starting after the Louisiana Purchase, White “illegal immigrants” from the United States flooded into Texas and came with the intent of taking Texas for the United States. All of this was with the full backing and encouragement of the United States. (Some even claimed that the Louisiana Purchase included Texas.)

All except a few of those who fought against Mexico during the so-called Texas Revolution were from the United States, were White, and were recent arrivals to Mexico. Some had only been in Mexican Texas a few days or a few weeks. These were not people protecting their liberty or freedom. They wanted Texas to help spread and secure enslavement. And they had immediate plans and hopes to join the United States. They did not want to establish a “Republic of Texas.”

My students and I also always explore the all important questions: “How revolutionary was the Texas Revolution” and “Was Texas ever ‘really’ its own country?”

These questions are important. For our purposes here, the second one is most important. Mexico never officially recognized Texas and its independence until the end of the Mexican American War. If it hadn’t been for all of the problems elsewhere in Mexico, they would have retaken Texas very easily. The press in Mexico was especially unhappy with the behavior of the White rebellious, law-breaking illegal immigrants in Mexican Texas.

The Mexican American War starts as soon as the United States moves to officially annex Texas. The United States kind of wanted war to prove itself and to take even more of Mexico.

As a result of these thoughts (and others), I have come to realize even more than before that the Mexican American War actually goes back to the so-called Texas Revolution or even back to the Fredonian Rebellion in the late 1820s. The Alamo and other such battles are historically best understood when considered events in the long trajectory of hostility from the U.S. directed toward Mexico, events in the long Mexican American War – which is also known as the Mexican War, the War of the United States Against Mexico, and the Invasion of Mexico.

Historical accounts about the Texas Revolution discuss it and subsequent events as being inevitable. Essentialism, presentism, and “upstreaming” are the enemy of good historical accounts. By even calling it the “Texas Revolution” we give ahistorical credence to a White, anti-Mexican perspective of History, a perspective that suggests it was indisputably a revolution and that it was at that point an established, recognized, independent imagined political entity.

Classification, periodization, words, and point-of-view matter. The Texas Revolution was not just anti-revolutionary in that it further dehumanized everyone except White men, but it is also anti-revolutionary in that it ignores the destruction of Mexico, as partly indicated in the maps below. Imagine how rich Mexico would be today if it had the riches of Texas oil?  

Andrew Joseph Pegoda

Mexico in 1821:

Mexico in 1854:

 

Today at lunch I overheard a comment the greeter made to a customer as she seated him. She said something to the effect of so you’ve been in Lake Jackson for fifty years and then said, “so you know everybody and their dog, too.”

So-called “small towns” have a long habit of suggesting and believing that individuals with a certain amount of residency and/or visibility “know everybody.” While such is typically not meant to be taken completely seriously because how could any one know everybody?? (all kinds of different studies suggest a person can only know around 150 people), there are a number of problems.

This ideology is perpetuated in media, too. In the clip below from America’s Got Talent Daniel Joyner says that he lives in Alamo, Tennessee, a town with 5,000 people and that “every one of them knows your name.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Om01Q-M9gU

Lake Jackson, the town where the comment occurred, has a population of around 30,000 people, plus there are thousands of additional people in other “small towns” that are right next door. The collective area easily has 100,000 people.

The “you know everybody” rhetoric in addition to being an exaggeration/figure of speech is also embodied with White privilege, often accompanied by male privilege and heterosexual privilege, too. When we say a person “knows everybody” it doesn’t include and can’t include people who for some reason or another do not and cannot exist in public spaces. This includes people who are too sick whether because of age or physical or mental disability to live beyond their place of residence. People who are incarcerated, people who homeless, or people who lack the economic resources (cars, food, being in public is expensive) are also excluded from “you know everybody” by definition and beyond any personal choice. Children are also deleted. Because of privilege and discrimination, people who are non-cis-male, non-White, non-heterosexual are more likely to exist in positions that are beyond the seen and known everyday world of Whiteness and the privilege it brings. 

When we say a person “knows everybody” we are erasing the humanity of those who can’t be known, people society has said can’t and shouldn’t be known in many cases.

“Knows everybody” rhetoric, additionally, tends to embody inaccurate notions about the supposed and imagined homogenous nature of society and “small towns.” When we label somebody as “knowing everybody” or someone says they “know everybody” they are typically not picturing people in the full spectrum of human diversity that is all around them even though they don’t and can’t see it.     

There is also a problem with the “and their dog” comment. Partly, this blindly perpetuates a notion of what it means to be a United Statesian and live the “dream.” Additionally and much more importantly, it perpetuates a problem of elevating cats and dogs above non-White people in part because non-White people are frequently omited from “everybody” (I got this particular idea in an article I read sometime this summer, but I don’t remember which one and can’t find it).

Words matter.

For my other blogs about the peculiar nature of the small town, see The Myth of the Small Town, Inescapable Problems, and Exercises in the Philosophy of History. 

Andrew Joseph Pegoda

 

I am certain I have the sweetest and smartest little four-legged friend in the entire world. Lately, I have been thinking about all of the phrases I know he knows. There’s a lot of them! And they are listed below for you to enjoy. And I say “know he knows” because I can tell by his response and behavior he understands, and there are certainly all kinds of things he knows that I am unaware of given my inferiority as a human. The more I get to know him (I adopted him in November 2010), the more I realize what a wonderful, intelligent being he truly is. 

• Kitty cat.
• Dr Trevor Lovejoy. 
• Trevor.
• Trev.
• Let me set you down.
• Can I pick you up? (Sometimes he looks up and waits for me to pick him up, sometimes he turns away.)
• You can stay there. I’ll be right back. 
• I’ll see you later. 
• I’ll see you real soon.
• Come say good bye. (I usually say this if I’m leaving to teach. He’ll jump on top of the washing machine.)
• Let’s go to my room. 
• Ready to go to bed?
• Go to sleep. 
• Ready to get up?
• Are you hungry?
• Do you want something to eat?
• Here’s your food. 
• Eat some more. You haven’t had enough. 
• Do you want a belly rub?
• Wanna sword fight? (He loves a game of my index finger against his arm!)
• Time for your medicine. (Mostly flea medicine – he hates it.)
• I’ll protect you.
• Come here. 
• Come on.
• Can I have a Trevor Lovejoy hug?
• Will you come sit by me?
• Want a kitty cat treat?
• I’m gonna get you! (He loves to be chased.)
• We gonna play follow the leader? (He loves following me and sometimes having me follow him around and around and around and around the house.)
• Get down! 
• No! (Although he likes to pretend he doesn’t know this one!)
• Want to go on a car ride? (He doesn’t care for them.)
• Let me move you over. 
• Let me write. 
• You’re a good kitty cat. 
• Do you want to get in your tray?
• Do you want your chair?
• We’re going to have company. (He requires notice when there are going to be strangers around.)
• I’m’ going to Chick-fil-A. (He gives me the “you’re-so-addicted-to-that-place” look.)

Oh the things I do for Dr. Trevor Lovejoy.

“All men are created equal” is, of course, one of the most essential doctrines of civil religion in the United States – a doctrine equally in sharp contrast with most human societies. 

While it is well-established that “men” did in fact initially only mean men, in particular wealthy White men, it is not so well-established how this imagined ideology actually harms sociopolitical progress and notions that might resemble states of equality and freedom.

If we were all “created” “equal” (i.e., the same), we would all be the same, if we extended this idea to its logical extents. The same.

The implications of this are gravely multitudinous:

Such a philosophy ignores science. Evolution, while certainly a more recent human actualization, allows us to see that nothing was simply “created.” All forms of life have evolved. Nothing about life was, is, or will be inevitable. Humans are, in many ways, an accident. If all humans were equal, in addition to a robot society, we probably would not have survived as a species, given that we have different genes and slightly different DNA where it matters. 

Additionally, widespread notions of innate sameness allow the status quo to justify itself and its many privileges. Rather than warranting concerns of greed, racism/sexism/etc, or illegal activities, such philosophies suggest the status quo really did simply “work harder” since every body is created equal. Additionally, the status quo can say, without understandings of history, “I’m healthy, I’m successful, you could be too; it’s your fault.”

And, sadly, people accept such lines of thinking as true and inevitable. As a result, they not only potentially suffer unnecessary depression, they also miss opportunities to reform society through participation in civil rights movements. Then still, civil rights movements are often “not radical enough” and ultimately less-than-successful over the long term because they aim for trying to actually achieve some kind of meaningful, legal equality–equality when equity would be a better goal and is actually the unrealized true goal. 

Clinging to notions that we are all “created” “equal” also contributes to an increasingly frustrating phenomenon exacerbated by social media where everybody is an “expert” and equally qualified to make an equally heard, equally accepted analysis. Additionally, such ideas ignore and silence those who are exceptionally talented in some given area.

Finally, when we promote “created” “equal” it becomes too easy to ignore diversity and/or to enforce strict conformity and assimilation, as we have seen again and again in United States History. We need to find boundaries between seeing the individual, homogenizing differences, and recognizing our common ancestry. 

 

Given that discrimination and anti-intellectualism is at least in ways perpetuated, disguised, and even justified with a “revolutionary” cloak promising anything and everything, do notions that we are all “created” “equal” do more harm than good?

This post is partially inspired by Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – an excellent book I’ve been listening to in the car for a few weeks.

Andrew Joseph Pegoda 

 

Have you ever heard of Lind, Adams County, Washington? Have you ever heard of Hawai’i? 

I’m guessing you have heard of the states Hawai’i and Washington but have not heard of the very small town, Lind.

But, how much do you actually know, do any of us actually know about Hawai’i or Washington?

Our collective historical, economic, political knowledge has generally retained an East-coast, big-city, White bias. 

While I have written that I really enjoy the history survey courses, these courses by design do not possibly cover anywhere near every event. And, I’m increasingly interested in exploring:

• to what degree does the shared “grand narrative” (or “metanarrative”) of United States History actually include anything about Hawai’i (besides its initial occupation by businessmen and then the military of the United States)?
• to what degree does the shared, general narrative actually apply to the 564 people of Lind? 
• to what degree do we miss valuable information by using and needing metanarratives? 
• to what degree are people alienated when and if they do not understand relevancy and feel included?  

(And by the way, relevancy and inclusion are important for learners of any age, especially adults.)

As a result, I’m beginning to reach the conclusion that we might have a responsibility to begin specific conversations with students about who and what our historical narratives leave out and maybe even to have mini-lessons that look at towns like Lind.

Additionally, I am rethinking how I teach Texas History. So far, one of the major themes has been “What is Texas History?” because I want them to see how that “Texas” is a geopolitical area. Events, peoples, and ideas do not begin or end with human-drawn boundaries. Now, I am planning to add a theme of regularly analyzing to what degree the metanarrative of United States History applies or does not apply to the people of Texas and to even take a look at some small towns in Texas and ask to what degree does the metanarrative of Texas apply or not.

To look at a specific example, I love the film Gold Diggers of 1933. This is an excellent film that easily lends itself to historical analysis, and I use two clips from it in my HIST1302 class. Film theory says that this film gives us a picture of the hopes and fears of society. I agree with this theory to a large extent and my research relies on it, but it is still important to ask how these hopes and fears actually apply and differ according to exact times, places, and peoples. Clearly, Gold Diggers of 1933 does not speak to the hopes and fears of Mexican Americans in the 1930s who faced an ever-growing amount of racism, but does it speak to the hopes and fears of people in Texas? in Lind? in the 1930s? 

On the other hand, cities around the nation are increasingly becoming homogenous. The picture below basically represents “Anywhere USA.” Once cities “look” like every other town and corporate offices know instantly everything that is happening at their locations hundreds and hundreds of miles from each other, do grand narratives become “truer”? more relevant?  

Historical exercises and questions are always important, help all of us understand the ways in which History is constructed, and illustrate why historians are not “history buffs.”

Andrew Joseph Pegoda

Please be sure and read my latest publication at Inside Higher Ed, “19 More Things I’ve Learned about Teaching Undergraduates (so far),” also known as 19 More Lessons About Teaching. Please sure your thoughts and comments. Thanks!