Christopher Schroeder

Author: Christopher Schroeder

  • Violence and Violations

    Political violence, which is wrong and isn’t new, seems more widespread after the recent shootings of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on a college campus and liberal legislators Melissa Hortman and her husband and John Hoffman and his wife in their Minnesotan homes as well as the current president while he was campaigning last year.

    The current media response however is bewildering, and borderline alarming. Too many seem to not just ignore but even deny the larger contexts. Ezra Klein for example argues that Kirk was “practicing politics in exactly the right way” as if Klein is incapable of acknowledging two truths in tension, or admiring a willingness to debate while condemning a disregard for basic facts and an escalation of political conflicts.

    Others have criticized these reactions in the context of Kirk’s efforts and life. Still others have criticized that this tragedy has been politicized by the president and also acknowledged that the most “lethal and persistent threat” in this country comes from white supremacists although some wonder if that is changing, or could change.

    I too admire Kirk’s willingness to engage college students on their campuses. I also know that he made mine less effective, and that he was part of a larger problem.

    I defined academic appropriateness more narrowly than some colleagues, and limited classroom comments to ones I could connect to my disciplinary domains. I expected, or at least hoped, that the university would defend me from attacks on anything I said about rhetoric, linguistics, or US American literature.

    I nevertheless imposed more restrictive limits, and began self-censoring much more, after learning about Kirk’s professor watchlist. This list, which his Turning Point USA organization launched in 2016, promised to “‘expose and document’” faculty who according to this organization “‘discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.’”

    I was generally confident that I encouraged students to share whatever perspectives they brought to classrooms, and was reassured by my own criticisms of professional and personal excesses within my union for example or among campus colleagues. At the same time, I was less inclined after students were encouraged to surveil and report their professors to challenge mine to think harder and better, and less convinced that my university would defend me, which I later learned were realistic.

    I’ve wanted to believe since before grad school in a model of democratic debate in which interlocutors argued about facts, definitions, values or norms, and relevance, or spaces where such deliberations should be resolved. I’ve assumed that emotions would appear but would with reasoned responses be properly placed within the larger debate.

    I never realized how much I had assumed such shared norms among participants, and good faith on their parts, until this era for example of alternative facts and other bad faith efforts. I’m not suggesting that reasonable people cannot debate facts, including their relevance in different debates, but I’m arguing that democratic debate at least as it has been understood in the West for thousands of years doesn’t work without some consensus that such facts exist.

    I see no reason why people cannot express sympathy to Kirk’s wife and young children and to others who experience his death as a loss, and even why everyone cannot condemn political violence, and yet do so without ignoring, or worse denying, the damage done by Kirk’s dishonest (and racist and sexist) demagoguery. This damage, which includes his contributions to the return of this destructive administration, was perhaps more widespread than some recognize, and even in the very spaces where some might otherwise admire his efforts.

  • Entertaining Enough

    Most top critics seem to like Caught Stealing, a dark comedy crime thriller written by Charlie Huston, directed by Darren Aronofsky, and set in the late 1990s New York City, but I expected, or wanted, more.

    Henry “Hank” Thompson, a functioning alcoholic bartender, and former high school baseball phenom, who relocated to NYC after losing his professional baseball dream and his high school friend in a drunk driving crash, is asked by his neighbor Russ Binder to watch his cat while he unexpectedly goes to London. Hank’s paramedic girlfriend Yvonne brings Russ’s cat and litter box, and unbeknownst to them a key to drug deal money, into Hank’s apartment.

    That key, and Russ’s disappearance, lead to confrontations with the Russian mob that costs him a kidney, a crooked detective Elise Roman who threatens his freedom, and some Hasidic drug-dealing brothers who later kill Yvonne to send Hank a message. Hank must avenge Yvonne’s murder, protect his West coast mother whom he daily calls, and extricate his remaining kidney and himself from this murderous mess, which he ultimately does by recreating the same kind of crash that killed his friend and his dream even though that was the first time he had driven since that tragic event so many years ago.

    This movie seems like a love letter to 1990s NYC, which has a certain amount of audience appeal. This ambience, which was still evident when we lived there in the 2000s, is a testament to the successful technical features, and especially the sets, costumes, and lighting, that suggest an affection for the city and its culture at that time.

    These establish a tone without compromising the pace, which is a credit to its director Aronofksy. At the same time, all the violence, as symbolized in the motif of pooling blood beneath dead characters, occasionally become distractions, and pull focus from the larger story.

    That could be one reason why it might work better as the 2004 book by Huston even though the adaptation was done by the original author. Novels obviously allow readers to modulate violence or any other features in ways that don’t unproductively distance them from the narrative.

    Nonetheless, the film intriguingly illustrates how authors establish crazy conditions for their characters and then enable them to escape these, which mostly work until they disruptively and distractingly don’t. For example, Hank, who has been mostly restrained, beats the crooked cop with his fists, and stabs her with a broken bat, but won’t shoot her, and doesn’t object with the Hasidic brothers do.

    My biggest problem was the confusing conclusion, which leaves an odd aftertaste. Hank sends half of the money Russ was holding to his mother, and then he steals Russ’s passport, Elise’s retirement dream, and absconds to Tulum where he refuses a bartender’s beer offer, and instead asks for a club soda. Who got caught stealing what?

    Many would agree that Hank murdered his neighbor and the two Hasidic drug dealers like he did his high school friend, and at least contributed to the murders of his girlfriend and the crooked cop. Some might also argue that he had his girlfriend and his current life, and perhaps even his professional baseball dream, stolen from him.

    Perhaps the more plausible interpretation is that all these characters were caught stealing, and had their lives, literally or figuratively, stolen from them, as a result of drug deal that goes wrong after its banker disappears to attend to an ailing father. Only Hank, and his mother he hopes, emerge alive, and yet he has had to relinquish his life as he knew it although he might regain some semblance of it (and in the subsequent novels presumably does).

    But why would he steal Elise’s retirement dream of relocating to Tulum? And what will he do there that he hadn’t done hundreds of miles from his high school tragedy in NYC?

    Time for Hank will tell, and presumably does in the subsequent Henry Thompson novels Six Bad Things and A Dangerous Man by Huston. For us, it ends with the rolling credits and the reilluminated theater, which left me wondering whether we were merely entertained or had experienced something more.

  • Encore or Expected?

    This week is my first week of retirement, and I’ve been wondering for the last nine months or so what comes next. I certainly understand the appeal of a leisure life. I also believe that I have ten or more potentially productive years.

    Some suggest that an inevitable professional decline starts sooner than most think (Brooks 2019). Others report that some people pursue other meaningful work in their later years (i.e., encore careers), and that older people can continue to create, learn, and grow throughout their lives (Brooks 2023, e.g., or Rauch 2024).

    I hadn’t expected to retire as an academic. I just needed a smart strategy for repaying substantial student loans, and then I assumed I would do something else.

    I had entered universities in 1988 as a student and have never left. I started teaching college courses in 1994, was offered my first professorship in 1999, and have been a tenured full English professor for the last fifteen years.

    I decided to stay after repaying those loans to help our recovery from the Great Recession, cover our kids’ college costs, and fill our retirement fund. Then I realized about a year ago that I finally had a choice: I could continue what I was doing, or I could do something else.

    I not only had stayed somewhat longer than expected but also had an unexpected crisis of academic faith. Its cause was unclear, but its existence was undeniable.

    Too many unstable students and uncourageous administrators. Too much professional excess that produced a social and political backlash, and contributed to the rise of a vindictive presidential administration. Too expensive dues for a union that wouldn’t always advocate for its members.

    For these and other reasons, a better life seemed to be one after academia, which again was something I had always assumed but never developed in any detail. Nothing in my professional training, or PD since then, had encouraged such aspirations.

    Perhaps we need to reimagine the career concept, and not just academic ones, and to encourage a second part, or something more to do with our working days. Such an approach would mean that workers do something now, and something else later, and perhaps even something after that.

    This approach might be easier if workers had purpose statements, and amended or revised these over the years (see, e.g., Stretcher 2016). Such statements could contextualize our current and future choices, including ones about work.

    That would mean that careers were constructed not to conform to traditional and conventional patterns but to reflect, and respond to, our personal values and goals. These “encore” careers in other words would become expected chapters in larger stories about working and living.