U.S. Education a Scam and a Rigged Game

Many years ago while I was a high school English teacher, I began to advocate strongly against the influence of the SAT, and all standardized testing. One of the few sources for that criticism was work by Alfie Kohn, whose publications received pretty harsh resistance from the testing industry.

One of my best friends and colleagues while teaching high school left for higher education before I did, and as I would several years later, found himself teaching at a selective liberal arts college. He taught education foundations, where he included some of my work and Kohn’s confronting the failures of testing and the SAT specifically.

What my friend and former colleague discovered is that students at a selective liberal arts college did not receive well his message or the evidence about the inequity in high-stakes standardized testing and college admission exams.

As the recent college admissions scandal, Operation Varsity Blues, is gradually unmasking, people with privilege are powerfully invested in proving their merit—even if that veneer has to be manufactured at great expense.

I have been very successful at every level of formal education, attaining what is ominously called a “terminal degree.” Along that journey, I worked very hard, and simultaneously, the journey was nearly effortless because it required skills that I have mostly been quite adept at completing.

As well, I have been a professional educator for 35-plus years, at both the K-12 and higher education levels, including public and private schools.

In those experiences, I have been afforded incredible privilege because I am white and male. But I also have been often at arm’s length from that privilege in some ways because of my working-class background and my ideological alienation from my personal and professional communities.

Most difficult has been that despite my educational accomplishments and career as an educator, I have witnessed and then argued that while formal education is often framed as powerful in terms of how it shapes society and people (the “great equalizer” and “game changer” mantras), the reality of K-12 and higher education in the U.S. is that they mostly reflect and reinforce our inequities along racial, economic, and gender lines.

With the so-called college admissions scandal before us, I hope we can have larger discussions of what the purpose of education is and how access to education must be as sacred as what happens once students enter school.

The scandal exposes that education is not a game changer, but a marker for privilege. The wealthy are always branding, always seeking ways to be associated with the aura of quality.

Wealthy celebrities needed a daughter to attend USC for the prestige that attending Arizona State did not offer. This is no outlier, but an extreme example of how the wealthy perpetuate and are drawn to “elite” institutions, whether it be selective pre-schools, private K-12 academies, or the Ivey League.

Some experiences I have noticed throughout my teaching career include a misunderstanding of teaching and learning compounded at selective (mislabeled as “elite”) colleges by a wish among faculty to take credit for the existing so-called excellence in students admitted.

Let me explain with some historical context first.

The concept of universal public education in the U.S. is expressed very well as an ideal by the deeply flawed elitist Thomas Jefferson in the following passages:

The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries. ([1817], pp. 275-276)

The less wealthy people, . .by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. (p. 50)

I… [proposed] three distinct grades of education, reaching all classes. 1. Elementary schools for all children generally, rich and poor. 2. Colleges for a middle degree of instruction, calculated for the common purposes of life and such as should be desirable for all who were in easy circumstances. And 3d. an ultimate grade for teaching the sciences generally and in their highest degree… The expenses of [the elementary] schools should be borne by the inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general tax-rate. This would throw on wealth the education of the poor. (p. 791)

To all of which is added a selection from the elementary schools of subjects of the most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further education, to be carried at the public expense through the colleges and university. (p. 275)

By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the Door, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought for and cultivated. But of all the views of this law none is more important none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. (p. 276)

The tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. (p. 278)

The recent college admissions scandal is but the tip of the iceberg of privilege that has already sunk the Titanic plan detailed above by Jefferson, himself an original elitist unable to make his ideal real.

So, since these lofty claims established formal education in the U.S., we have instead embraced a deficit ideology—framing students needing to learn as a flaw of the student and a burden on the teacher (misunderstanding teaching and learning)—and creating formal education as a mechanism of enculturation (institutions that either label and shame those deemed deficient or label and praise those deemed elite).

If we pull back from the scandal and how this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the wealthy gaming everything along a spectrum from inequitable and unethical to outright criminal, we must also interrogate that we have failed the ideals of not only universal public education (K-16), but also the potential of education to revolutionize society and individuals.

Many students who need that ideal education the most are disenfranchised from or disillusioned by formal schooling while many privileged students are deeply invested in the game of formal schooling even as the education itself mostly washing over and by them.

In both cases, education is a scam and a rigged game.

While we are hand wringing over the college admissions scam, my home state of South Carolina has rejected provisions in a new education bill calling to lower some student/teacher ratios, claiming such mandates are too expensive.

However, in public schools across the state, mostly white and affluent students sit daily in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes with incredibly low student/teacher ratios, classes often next door to so-called regular classes at and above state maximums for student/teacher loads.

Inequity serving the wealthy and white and mis-serving everyone else—this is a feature of our systems and institutions, including schools, not a glitch—as some seem to suggest about the admissions scandal.

Today, in 2019, formal education in the U.S. is mostly a disturbing snapshot of how we are a people mostly using rhetoric to hide the power and momentum of privilege.

There is really nothing shocking about the admissions scandal, unless you want to pretend it is something other than the tip of a very old and very large iceberg of privilege that defines the good ol’ U.S. of A.

Operation Varsity Blues: One Corrupt Tree in the Forest of White Wealth Privilege

It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

—George Carlin

Andrew Lelling, the US attorney for Massachusetts, made a nearly laughable opening claim in his press conference about a college admissions scandal named “Operation Varsity Blues”:

“This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud,” Lelling said. “There can be no separate college admission system for the wealthy, and I’ll add that there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.”

He added, “For every student admitted through fraud, an honest, genuinely talented student was rejected.”

Nearly laughable, in part, because this grandstanding of justice wants to proceed from the position that discovering the wealthy gaming a system they already control is somehow shocking (it isn’t), and nearly laughable as well because Lelling offered as context and with a straight face the following:

We’re not talking about donating a building so that a school’s more likely to take your son or daughter.

We’re talking about deception and fraud – fake test scores, fake athletic credentials, fake photographs, bribed college officials.

The layers of bullshit in what is being called a “massive admissions scandal” are nearly as complicated as the story itself, an intricate web of complicit parents, college and athletics officials, SAT/ACT shenanigans, and a charlatan mastermind at the controls—as reported by Kirk Carapezza:

Here’s how Lelling says it worked. Between 2011 and 2018, wealthy parents paid Rick Singer, the head of a foundation and a for-profit admissions consulting service, more than $25 million. Singer would then use that money to pay a ringer to take the SAT or ACT for children or correct their answers. He’d also bribe Division 1 coaches.

Here’s one layer: Despite the very serious tone and facial expressions at the Department of Justice’s press conference, Lelling’s rhetoric remains complete bullshit. In the U.S., these has always been and continues to be two distinct admissions processes for college and two distinct justice systems.

In fact, in every way possible there are two Americas [1], neatly divided by wealth and race. Being wealthy and being white provide significant privileges and then those who enjoy those privileges routinely and without consequence leverage that privilege for even more advantages at the expense of everyone else.

The great irony of the so-called college admission scandal is that the wealthy in the U.S. promote false narratives about merit and rugged individualism while actively perpetuating their own privilege, which buoys mediocrity, at best, and a complete absence of merit or effort at worst.

The wealthy are driven to maintain the veneer of “well-educated” because it provides cover for that mediocrity and privilege.

To be white and wealthy allows them to skip college and still thrive while people of color and the poor scramble to gain more and more eduction even as the rewards remain beneath the truly lazy and undeserving rich:

[F]amilies headed by white high school dropouts have higher net worths than families headed by black college graduates.

…First, understand that blacks and Hispanics have lower incomes than whites up and down the educational spectrum.

On average, black families at a given level of educational attainment receive incomes that are just 66% of what white families at the same level of educational attainment receive. For Hispanic families, that figure is 79%. Naturally, when education-controlled income disparities like this exist, education-controlled wealth disparities will exist.

Second, understand that even blacks, Hispanics, and whites with the same incomes have dramatically different net worths.

On average, black wealth is 26% of white wealth, even controlling for income. For Hispanics, the figure is 31%. Peruse the studies above to try to tease out why. Note here though that, according to Gittelman and Wolff, this is not because blacks have lower savings rates. Inheritance and in-life wealth transfers also appear, in all of the studies, to play a non-trivial role. (Bruenig, 2014)

Lori Loughlin and her social media star daughter are not some sort of outlier evil geniuses who found a loop-hole in the system; they are the faces of the system.

This is how America works.

Ivanka Trump, also, is no evil genius, no outlier, and also not a deeply delusional woman. She believes the narrative that she has been taught even as her life completely contradicts those myths of meritocracy and bootstrapping.

I imagine those parents implicated—and the many more who will skirt by this time as wealthy people most often do—have convinced themselves they used their means for the good of their own children, as anyone would do if having those same means.

And this is the myopia of white wealth privilege in the U.S., the blindness of rugged individualism that allows some to believe they are either above or somehow disconnected from everyone else.

As reported by Cydney Henderson, Loughlin’s daughter used her celebrity and a dorm room someone else more deserving did not have to promote her brand, and make money of course:

Olivia Jade moved into her college dorm in September 2018, documenting the milestone on Instagram through a paid partnership with Amazon’s Prime Student. It’s a standard practice for social media influencers to earn money from companies by advertising products to their followers.

“Officially a college student! It’s been a few weeks since I moved into my dorm and I absolutely love it,” she captioned the post. “I got everything I needed from Amazon with @primestudent and had it all shipped to me in just two-days.”

This is America, at least one of the Americas, the one we worship despite it being a gigantic lie, as Carlin says, the club we will not be allowed to join.

“Operation Varsity Blues” is not a surprise, then, but we must guard against it being yet another gear in the privilege machine, a distraction.

This so-called college admissions scandal is but one tree in the much larger and more powerful forest of white wealth privilege.

As we become fixated on Aunt Becky, we continue to ignore legacy admissions, a criminal justice system best understood as the New Jim Crow, the lingering racism and sexism in high-stakes standardized testing, the school-to-prison pipeline and schools as prisons, and a list far too long to include here.

Like whiteness itself, wealth must remain invisible in the ways it perpetuates privilege and inequity.

This college admissions scandal is an opportunity to pull back and take a long and critical look at the whole forest, a much uglier reality than we have been led to believe.

[1] See the following:

Centering Whiteness and “Green Book”: A Reader (Updated)

The Oscars as an event represents the failed obsession in the U.S. with celebrities, but it also has become a powerful and disturbing window into how too often those with the most power are unable to address race except in terms of centering whiteness.

Ruth and the Green Book

Once I challenged Green Book on social media, several white people rushed to support the film, often, they argued, because it includes excellent acting.

My essential claim, however, was expressed as the following:

Green Book centers whiteness to appear to care about blackness, as a condition of caring about blackness.

Black Panther centers blackness.

This isn’t about being perfect on race but about a fundamental difference.

I also must note that the same white people who rush to support Green Book also embraced equally racially flawed films such as The Help and The Blind Side (see also Radio and Driving Miss Daisy).

Embracing uncritically Green Book and rejecting criticism of the film are the result of “white fragility,” as Robin DiAngelo explains:

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium. Racial stress results from an interruption to what is racially familiar. These interruptions can take a variety of forms and come from a range of sources, including:…

Being presented with information about other racial groups through, for example, movies in which people of color drive the action but are not in stereotypical roles, or multicultural education (challenge to white centrality).

White savior narratives and framing the value in blackness only in relationship to whiteness are, disturbingly, the essence of Hollywood “diversity and inclusion.” [1]

How many white people claiming quality acting in Green Book also rushed to support the Netflix series Luke Cage, also well-acted, notably by Mahershala Ali?

Or Black Panther?

Luke Cage and Black Panther center blackness, mostly resisting to suggest these narratives mattered only in relationship to whiteness.

Blackness must not be rendered invisible or unspeakable, but allowing blackness to be seen and spoken only if and when whiteness acknowledges it is not the providence of celebration, not any real sort of advancement.

Green Book is essentially a film version of Columbus claiming he discovered a land already inhabited by native peoples, erasing them and their narratives, their history and destiny.

I offer here a reader, primarily for white readers of this blog, and ask that those of us who are white learn to listen and see (actually re-see) the world without centering our whiteness.

[1] Or as well the garbled cultural appropriation fetish, such as Whiplash.

Downloadable file

Some People Call Me Maurice

I’m a joker, I’m a smoker
I’m a midnight toker

“The Joker,” Steve Miller Band

I’m mixing weed with wine

“Walk It Back,” The National

The universe occasionally can be quite trippy.

Over coffee I was telling a friend about Don Nelson’s recent admission about what he has been doing lately: “I’ve been smoking some pot.”

Then, I realized the coffee shop was wafting over their music system Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker.” I sang quietly a bit of the lyrics because this song was ever-present during my adolescence spent in the 1970s.

“Man,” I said, joking a bit, “I should have been smoking pot when I was listening to this stuff in high school. I really wasted an opportunity.”

Here’s the irony: It was during high school that I switched to contact lenses from my glasses, but these were some heavy-duty hard lenses of the time. As a result, my eyes were almost always bloodshot.

In the 1970s, this signaled pot smoker. So people were often convinced I was high—although I was never a pot smoker throughout high school or college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Many if not most of my friends smoked pot. I often was the designated driver for my high friends jonesing for munchies. Trips to Chick-fil-a were common with my red and white 1973 Gran Torino slammed full of giggling and stoned teenagers singing to the Ohio Players, Steve Miller Band, or Pink Floyd blaring over my stereo.

It wasn’t just my eyes signaling marijuana.

Deeply introverted and nearly paralyzed by undiagnosed anxiety (and likely ADHD/OCD), I was mostly terrified of pot as an illegal drug, a fear engrained by my working-class and conservative parents.

Another irony: My defense mechanisms for all this included a reputation for World-Class use of profanity (I was a devoted student of Richard Prior and George Carlin) and an elite tolerance for drinking alcohol.

Later in life I developed a joke about not being a pot smoker as a teen: I was too often drunk in high school and college and was afraid of holding something burning while intoxicated.

I first saw the Don Nelson clip on ESPN. The typical frat-culture of those sports shows included several mostly white men yucking it up about Nelson and smoking pot. In the clip, Nelson, approaching 80, has long hair, a beard, and gold chains around his neck; a couple black men beside him on the dais howl with laughter at his comment, and his smirk.

Also in the 1970s, I played basketball, loved basketball, and despite my initial disdain for the Boston Celtics (an urge grounded in the natural compulsion to reject anything our father likes), I became a Celtics fan. Over the years, I came to appreciate Celtics legends, notably Bill Russell.

Nelson was a Celtics player before he had a long career as an NBA coach.

Part of me wanted to say that Nelson has joined Russell as models of life goals for aging. I do, in fact, admire Russell for his career and his life in a way that is important to me.

And Nelson seems a happy man; I would never deny him that.

I can’t, however, ignore that as a very wealthy white man, Nelson has made his wealth with and on the backs of gifted black men in the NBA. I can’t, however, ignore that all this yucking up about smoking pot late in life because it is now plentiful and legal in some states takes place along side mass incarceration that disproportionately impacts black men.

How many people are unseen and unheard in our prisons or denied employment in their free lives because they too wanted to smoke some pot but got busted?

More than half of drug busts are for marijuana.

Marijuana usage is about the same for black and white people, but “Blacks Are 3.73 Times More Likely Than Whites to Be Arrested for Marijuana Possession” (ACLU).

I really wish the Nelson clip could be funny, but it isn’t.

The clip is yet another documentation of the fruits of privilege—some people have access to living that other people are denied.

The access and denial are arbitrary and have nothing to do with merit.

The Joker in the Steve Miller Band song is a toker and he swears, “I sure don’t want to hurt no one.”

He seems like the sort of guys I hung out with in high school and college, stoners, all white and mostly insulated from any real harm, especially any fear of the criminal justice system.

“I ain’t hurtin’ nobody, man,” I can hear in my memory’s ear because my pothead friends always wanted me to join in.

I was, however, irrationally terrified.

And a part of me find Nelson’s peaceful easy feeling very compelling.

But I am reminded of a sobering refrain as I watch Nelson:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. (E. V. Debs: Statement to the Court)

IUPUI Event: Wednesday, March 6, 2019, “I Don’t Belong Here: My Otherness, My Privilege”

The NFL and the Politics of Lies

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit –
Strong Hallelujahs roll –

“This World is not Conclusion” (373), Emily Dickinson

I taught throughout the 1980s and 1990s in my small rural hometown in Upstate South Carolina. That town literally had a railroad track separating the black and white sides of town.

The very small school district includes only four schools—primary, elementary, middle (junior, when I attended), and high—that encircled the largest church in town, Woodruff First Baptist, its steeple looming prominently over the schools and the town.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Many of my students attended that church, and for a time, virginity pledges became a thing. Sunday morning services included girls and young women coming forward to pledge their virginity until marriage.

These young women received praise and recognition throughout the town and at school. At one point when this trend was at a peak, a group of young women came to me upset that, as they explained, most of their peers taking the virginity pledge were far from virgins, before the pledge or after.

These young women taking the pledge were playing a powerful game of making public displays that gave them social capital but required in no way that they practice what they proclaimed.

The young women who had not pledged, were mostly not sexually active, and felt a great deal of resentment also informed me that one of the young women who had recently been praised in front of the student body, and was also a very popular student and cheerleader, was among a secret group of young women who helped each other pay for and acquire abortions.

I have dozens and dozens of these stories, since I grew up in the deep South and am well acquainted with the power and hypocrisy of the Christian veneer.

While I have mostly stopped watching all organized sports, college or professional, I was wrangled last night into viewing the 2019 Super Bowl. What resonated with me above the lackluster game itself and the disappointment of another success story for the New England Patriots (with a coach and quarterback who personify all that is wrong with the NFL and the U.S.) was the clear drumbeat throughout the event by the NFL that the organization is deeply committed to social justice.

Over the past few years, the NFL has ostracized Colin Kaepernick for political protests and perpetuated the vapid notion that some of the athletes have sullied the game with their politics.

This same NFL began the most recent Super Bowl, as usual, with nothing except politics, the National Anthem and a military flyover. But most disgusting of all was the use of Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly since the game was played in Atlanta, GA, to associate billionaire owners and the league with social justice.

I have never seen anyone look more out of place than the images of Commissioner Roger Goodell touring Atlanta and marking great places and moments in civil rights.

The NFL is a master of the politics of lies, playing up its own brand while simultaneously beating down any millionaire worker who has the audacity to be anything other than a player-drone for the billionaires who own them.

I understand how many NFL players feel compelled to remain stooges for the corporation that pays many of them well, even as the evidence is mounting that almost all of them are being physically and mentally maimed, that virtually all of them are just cogs, expendable. None the less, I cringed when Marshawn Lynch showed up in one of the most popular feel-good spots portraying the NFL as all that is good and happy:

There is a world unlike this one in which I imagine Marshawn Lynch as the hero and not bent by the great burdening weight of the NFL.

But that is not this world.

Concurrent with the Super Bowl has been a brewing controversy about the governor of Virginia, which Chris Emdin confronts broadly:

Today, as everyone indicts the governor for his racism and everyone professes to stew in anger at how he has let down his constituents, I am most disturbed by the ways that we allow folks to construct progressive public personas that are allowed to mask a problematic past even as the country endorses the past and the masking. WE have allowed people to use buzzwords like equity and social justice to mask their racism. WE have allowed sitting next to the right people or hanging the right painting to erase things they have done that cause pain. WE have failed to allow folks to face their history and the part they play in what they profess to fight against. It is easy to advocate for something without acknowledging that you are part of what caused it. It is easy for the governor to denounce the hatred in Charlottesville without acknowledging that he is a branch of the tree that the hate there grew from.

Emdin unmasks the progressive veneer that works like the Christian veneer—for some. Mostly for the privileged who use that veneer to maintain a death-grip on their unearned power.

In this age of Trump politics, we must recognize that billionaire NFL owners are no more committed to social justice than Trump is to Christianity.

Billionaires have been afforded their billions because of inequity, and the only real threat to their egregious wealth is equity, the cleansing sunshine of social justice.

The NFL exists on lies, it needs lies. The NFL is a microcosm of U.S. capitalism that exists on poverty, that needs poverty.

Kaepernick was sacrificed exactly because he was the Truth, unadulterated because the banishment was swift and seemingly invisible, silent. Allowed to return to the NFL, like Lynch, Kapernick likely and excusably would have merged into the fold in some uncomfortable way—like Jim Brown’s face if the commercial above is paused just right.

The NFL’s lie is just another Great America Myth, another cultural lie. The Super Bowl was its crowning act of this year’s season of lies.

The perfect team, the Patriots, now sit on that throne of duplicity like an arrogant middle finger to all that is decent and humane.

Like the church steeple ringed by my home town’s only schools.

Mything Truth

A confrontation in Washington DC this past weekend has introduced yet another image certain to join a disturbing history of white America:

(CNN Newsource/Instagram/Kaya Taitano)

About a year and a half ago, we were asked to confront this:

(Getty)

As the Covington Catholic student controversy has been unfolding, I felt compelled to add this warning on social media:

Don’t be distracted. Regardless of exact details of the controversy around the private school students and the Native American veteran, stay focused on how this PROVES the ugly power of white/wealth privilege. Every. Time. White/wealthy insures a calvary will rush to protect you, to lie if necessary, but in the end, you will be insulated from your behavior regardless of your innocence or guilt.

And then the predictable occurred: White men inserting themselves into the comments, attacking me and offered the standard “white male privilege is a myth” response.

As a white man with a great deal of social capital and economic slack, I am a first-hand witness to what people say and do when only whites are around, when only men are around. I am not speaking about hypotheticals, but about how this world absolutely functions.

Few lies are more flimsy or toxic than denying white male privilege (skim the evidence). But we must note how it is always white men who rush to deny, and attack.

Simultaneous with the shifting and expanding narrative around the Covington Catholic student confrontation, I watched the newest Coen brothers film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

the-ballad-of-buster-scruggs-final-poster

I have long been an admirer of the craft of the Coen films, but their work also presents a disturbing problem: While there is a high-level of art and craft in the work, we must also acknowledge that the work is very white, and possibly too often uncritically white.

Ballad has received the usual critical praise the Coens enjoy. Richard Brody is effusive:

The Western is the most inherently political genre, and, with “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” their two-hour-plus anthology of six short Westerns, Joel and Ethan Coen have made an exemplary political film. (It’s already in limited theatrical release and will launch on Netflix this Friday.) It is a movie put together from bits and pieces of cinematic tropes, conventions, and clichés, including ones borrowed from a range of genres, from ingenious physical comedy to romantic lyricism to Gothic horror. But all are united by a giddy Western revisionism centering upon a common theme: the relentless cruelty, wanton violence, deadly recklessness, and cavalier abuses of unchecked power that prevailed in the thinly and casually governed Wild West. Whether with outrageous antics or metaphysical mysteries, the Coen brothers fill the film with a subtle nose-thumbing; they’re laughing up their sleeve at the long-standing exaltation of the West as a primordial realm of titanic heroes, and at a society that even now consumes Western legends and spits them back in the form of historical verities and political pieties.

Brody gives the Coens one of the usual passes, in fact: “The movie sets up its action with the droll framework of an old, illustrated book of Western stories, further emphasizing that this movie is—like the Western stories that it parodies—a batch of back-constructed tall tales.”

Parody is among the safest refuge for those artists with privilege. “We are just depicting the world as it is, in all its flaws,” they shrug, “so that the audience can draw their own conclusions.”

And Matt Goldberg offers the ultimate stamp of approval by suggesting that this film rises to the level of universal in the final story, “The Mortal Remains,” a tour de force of Coenesque dark humor: excellent acting driven by loquacious characters, each representing a different philosophy:

What these kinds of conversations point out is that we struggle to put everything together, but we can only do the best through our own point of view. We’re extremely confident in that point of view, and as the Englishman notes, “We love hearing about ourselves. As long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially.” We’re all guilty of confirmation bias, and yet that will not save us. The Lady is just as dead as the Frenchman who is just as dead as the Trapper.

It is another story, however, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” that fits best into the real-world controversy involving private school boys, Black Israelites, and a Native American veteran.

“The Gal” involves some of the most enduring, and problematic, elements of the Western film: a wagon train and the ever-present threat of attacking Indians.

The climax of this story finds one of the wagon train leaders, Mr. Arthur, and the central woman, Alice Longabaugh, trapped in a gun fight with the standard image of Indians appearing menacingly atop a ridge.

Aided by prairie dog holes, the rugged (white male) individual, Mr. Arthur, poises himself against several waves of Indians on horseback; in the balance is Alice’s womanhood-as-assumed-virginity.

Among those of us with at least a modicum of experiences with Western films (John Wayne, spaghetti Westerns/Clint Eastwood), this story triggers thoughts of “circling the wagons” (used uncritically, this is packed with racist stereotypes and erases imbalances of power and Westward expansion as genocide)* and the calvary.

This brings me back to the confrontation in Washington DC, a confrontation among two marginalized groups—blacks and Native Americans—and the privileged white male students from an expensive private school.

Of those three groups, only one has hired a PR firm, and despite the apologists for the Covington Catholic students shouting that the whole picture absolves, somehow, these young men and the culture that spawned them, that whole story now includes video of the boys in their red MAGA hats taunting a young woman and truly incriminating evidence that the school has at least allowed a deeply antagonistic culture of white arrogance:

I suspect the apologists do not really want the whole story, no more so that America wants the whole and ugly story of our so-called Wild West.

Regardless of all the details, as I cautioned, we must be willing to see that the Covington Catholic students are examples of the power of privilege, the guarantee that privilege insures a white calvary will come.

For those interested in the truth and not mything truth, I offer here at the end some of the best full pictures of the confrontation: