Small and Monopoly Property

We saw Easy Rawlins get screwed out of locally-owned Freedom Plaza in Black Betty. We saw in Chinatown a syndicate of wealthy private interests buy farmlands that they could make a fortune turning into suburbs because of publicly-funded water projects (the bond issue).   Marx is one of our Noir Philosophers for saying why this concentrated power is a problem--for workers and for society.  Below I've posted the 5-point slide plus a second slide.  Below the slides, I've pasted in a story about a Manhattan hardware store that is closing.

In lecture, I suggested a solution that the course materials offer is small property plus democratic control over key aspects of the economy.  This latter issue is very much at issue in the 2020 election.  The "noir" take is that it's completely unrealistic--the strong always rule the weak, who conform to them.  So the critique of monopoly capitalism would need also to deal with those social and psychological issues.

And Happy Thanksgiving!

"The Life and Death of the Local Hardware Store"

Note that the author, a professor at Columbia Law School who writes about tech and internet law, is frustrated with the psychology of people who would rather shop on Amazon than in a hardware store even though Amazon means they often buy the wrong stuff.  Have we learned things in this course that might help explain this mystery?

You Must Read / Watch the Assigned Material BEFORE I Lecture on it, NOT AFTER!!

Here's why.  Once upon a time, there was a long period after World War II when the U.S. economy needed armies of employees to do routine white-collar jobs.  These were mostly "middle-skill" jobs.  They paid mid-level salaries that paid for for middle class lives.

Public universities expanded quickly to crank out large numbers of white-collar workers.  UCSB went from being a teacher's college to a research university in about 10 years.  Enrollments multipled by 5.  Passive learning was fine for most of the situations these graduates would face in their office jobs: take in information, process it accurately, reproduce it correctly.  The job would often be following instructions that other people write for you, like your bosses.  To simplify, higher-skill people would write the scripts for the mid-skill jobs.  High-skill people decided things, and mid-skill employees operationalized them.  Large lectures were pretty good formats for people learning to follow semi-complicated instruction sets in those large middle levels of big companies.   Other things being equal (they weren't but bear with me), learning to do this meant a decent salary, a pension, health benefits, two cars in the garage, a chicken in every pot, etc.

That world is gone.  Parts of it should and could come back--I don't at all condone precarious working conditions and uncertain job pathways. Nor do I think precarity helps make people smarter, more creative, and more competitive. (We're talking about the background economic issues in Chinatown.)   But whatever I think, it's my job to help prepare you for what comes after college.  The main thing I need to do is help you all be high cognitive skill people who have a chance to avoid the shrinking pool of (often boring) routine jobs and get into high-skill jobs that are more interesting and challenging.

Passive learning won't help you with this.  Active learning will.  (It's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for acquiring high-level cognitive skills.) 

Here's the slide I showed in lecture on November 7th.

Active learning requires bringing pre-existing knowledge to bear on the material being presented in lecture (or while you are reading or watching something) .  Active learning means making connections between things you already know (and are re-learning by recalling them) and things you are seeing for the first time.

In the case of a novel or film for this course, you can bring things you've learned in other courses (attachment theory from a psych course for example) to bear on what's happening in lecture.   Most importantly, you need to bring what you personally know about the work I'm discussing into contact with what you are hearing me saying.  If you're not making connections, you're not learning. You're just transcribing stuff on the theory that you'll learn it later by remembering it when you actually do watch the film or read the book.  Here's the problem: This destroys active learning in lecture.  It lowers your learning overall (you will learn less later on your own).  It reduces what you get out of the class, including ideas that you can use in other courses and later in life.

So that is why Requirement 1 for this course is "Read Texts On Time." Now more than ever.  

The Course's Claims in the Wider World

Detective Fiction has used an observation-inference process to make some claims.  The operating assumption of the course is that people's shouldn't trim their claims to fit their (incomplete or sloppy or limited or lazy or doctrinaire) evidence, but make strong, interesting claims and then search for the evidence to back them up.  (And if they can't find the evidence, then they are supposed to fix, drop, or replace the claim.)

For example, here's a slide prompted by the November 2018 elections, one year ago.

Note that we often have to fuss around to get the most accurate wording.  "Fuss around" means that recursive process of making an observation, describing it, and then checking to see if your description fits the observation, trying again, drawing an inference, checking it, etc.   We do this a lot, often in the space of 60 seconds without noticing it.

We also have to pick one issue rather than taking about a lot of things at once.  I pick B.

Then, we can find two kinds of evidence.  There are exit poll data.

 

And there's the classic finding of passages that your judgement (within a given frame) tells you are relevant and revealing of an important feature.

Then, a conclusion (II) derived from a claim from the course (I)

My summary statement is then that our third cause of noir culture is still operating in U.S. national life, with 2018 election patterns as one symptom.

Some Slides about the Walter Mosley Novel Last Week

Black Betty is helping us analyze noir culture's third source, "legacies of slavery."  Here's some material from lecture.  Mosley details element of a noir society.   A segregationist police force, the LAPD, is fairly straightforward.

Mosley also focuses on the active agency of folks within the Black community.  There's Easy Rawlins's old friend Mouse, the enforcer / destroyer who is also occasionally a savoir in moments of danger.

And there's the real estate dream of Black-owned retail for the Black community, doubled-crossed.

Mosley grew up in central LA and was there before, during, and after the Watts "riots" / rebellion in 1965.  Black Betty appeared in 1994, and he was either writing it or its immediate predecessor during the Rodney King uprising in 1992.  He is well-aware of the history of police-community relations, and as far as I can tell, in agreement with the argument of the next slides, taken from Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1991), that the 1990s escalation of gang violence resulted in part from law enforcement's suppression of gangs that were political.

Another context for Mosley is Blaxsploitation film, whose golden age was 1970-75.  Most of the films featured whites preying on a Black community that was weakened by traitors within--sometimes Black politicians spouting Black nationalist rhetoric.   A hero or heroine comes forward to confront the predators and drive them back, at least temporarily.  Here are two.

 

We'll see next time, when we watch the end of Coffy, that it these films generally assume force can only be beaten with force.  Easy Rawlins doesn't agree.  Force from below almost always loses to force from above.  It is weaker and badly funded.  Hence Easy's stress on alliances and of course detection-- along with his floundering community development scheme.

 On Thursday we ended with a discussion of Betty Eady.  I argued that she's a complex, multisided character who is both beaten down and free--and free, mostly threateningly, through her sexuality.  Here are the passages:

We'll look at chapter 33 carefully.  I'll go on to argue that Black Betty offers a strong ending if not a happy ending, and in strength there's hope.

Murder in Santa Barbara

This week's SB Independent has nice short accounts of historical murders in alleged paradise.  Minor compensation for the murder of I.V. Halloween.  "The Armenian Assassin" is particularly good.