serendipty and the odd pathways of former selves, former me’s
You can’t make this shit up. I am in Waldport, town of 2300, along the Pacific Coast, Oregon, and I am with a client, and he wants breakfast, so we sit at a tall table while he eats full-order of bisquits and gravey AND potatoes O’Brien and four sliced of bacon.
No shit, man, the couple next to us, well, fucking Haeder has to ALWAYS make communication and talk part of HIS-MY therapy. Small talk? Nah, because she was weating the black Crips headwrap, but she is white and her partner is white and she looks like someone in the middle of tailend of cancer treatment.
Hairless.
So we talk, and I ask where they are from, because they seemed like they weren’t here. Alas, man, Spokane.
SPOKANE, Washington.
Another heyday and trauma field in that crow stuck in my craw:
Well. Spokane. Haeder. KYRS radio. Inlander weekly. Spokane Living Magazine. Local Planet weekly. Spokesman Review daily. Spokane Falls Community College, Gonzaga, masters program at Eastern Washington, while teaching at SCC and SFCC and Gonzaga.
I’ll get to the heart of this Spokanite’s connection to me. Absolutely golden.
But, alas, I told her WHO I was, since that is always a fucking iceberg breaker.
For some reason teaching at Gonzaga is some fucking feather in the cap for some, but I rattled off some stuff. Her eyes were starting to show supreme awareness and deja vu.
First, the fucking firing from Gonzaga: V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart!
V-Day is not Just a Valentine for your Sweetheart
Okay, so this newspaper is almost down for the count, limited to a once-a-week hard copy publication. Therefore, I know my viewpoints better be good, hard hitting and relevant.
Not all topics are going to be warm and fuzzy. On this Valentine’s day, attempt to think about violence against women. The significance of V-Day is a response against violence toward women, girls and the planet. Here in Lincoln County women and girls face all levels of violence.
The V-Day movement is tied a 1996 one-woman play written by Eve Ensler, called the Vagina Monologues. She interviewed more than 200 women from a wide range of ages and cultural backgrounds, whereupon so many of them opened up, baring their souls tied to sexual violence.
One key question was, “What would your vagina say if it could talk?” Over the years, V-Day has become a catalyst promoting creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations.
The Monologues also generates broader attention to stop violence against women and girls.
So what’s a white male writer stepping his toes into these waters? First, let me say that if you read the police blotter in this county, or if you attend public criminal hearings at the courthouse, you will see the level of violence in the household in general is skyrocketing.
Police calls cover the gamut, but one ugly reality is the number of spousal violence calls, especially violence against wives and girlfriends. My own early roots as a reporter in Tucson were ensconced into the music scene and the police beat. That entailed covering a special rape squad set up by Linda Ronstadt’s brother Peter who was the Tucson police chief for more than 10 years.
I was 19 covering a lot of sexual violence against both students and young/old women living around the University of Arizona campus. I covered Take Back the Night rallies – started in the early 1970s in Belgium, but quickly spreading to college campuses and across global communities: from remote Canadian towns to bustling Calcutta streets, from Ivy Leagues to military bases.
While doing my judo and scuba diving thing, I also took a few feminist literature classes, volunteered with Rape Crisis organization, and assisted my sensei with grappling classes, as in self-defense for women.
Fast forward to Spokane, Washington: I was teaching at many venues as a composition and writing instructor, to include Gonzaga University. There, a Vagina Monologues rendition was being rehearsed by various students, including those in the Women’s Studies Club.
That was 21 years ago, and the president of the Jesuit University banned college sponsorship of the “Monologues,” citing Christian values and supposed pushback. One of my cohorts, philosophy professor Mark Alfino, argued against the banishment, telling a standing-room-only crowd of 200 people the ban was a threat to academic freedom.
“It’s a weak faith that doesn’t welcome challenges,” Alfino said. “Academic freedom is not an open-ended license to say anything without impunity. Academic freedom is an openness to the responsible expression of ideas.”
Here’s the deal – some of my students asked me to pen an opinion piece supporting the Vagina Monologues held on campus, as a way to bring in the Gonzaga community and public in by both attending the play but also opening up dialogue around campus rape.
That same semester one of my students (she told me in an office visit) had been the victim of campus rape, unfortunately, the type of violence seen on many campuses: fraternity parties, lots of booze and frequent spiking of women’s drinks with “roofies” (Rohypnol, a clear liquid 10 times stronger than Valium).
I also had a weekly hour-long radio show covering public affairs where I interviewed many heavy hitters in the sciences, publishing, arts, and social justice fields. I didn’t get Eve Ensler on the show, but I had two guests talking about sexual violence and the power of the Monologues, as well as one woman from Somalia who talked about her own forced female genital mutilation.
I discussed both in a written Op-Ed and on my radio show my own issues with the clergy. I had come from El Paso, and there as a reporter, I covered two cases of Catholic priests charged with child rape. These fellows from the Spokane Diocese were accused there, so both were sent south to the border; back then I didn’t know Spokane from Shinola.
I went on to discuss the Catholic Church’s “penis problem,” getting into some of the history (in the thousands) of priests around the US and Canada and world with multiple accusations each of sexual assault. I brought up the Indian Boarding Schools, too, where sexual assault was occurring.
I took the banishment of the Monologues on campus seriously, and I even questioned the president’s claim that “many boosters and supporters” had spoken to him about their concerns with the play being performed on campus.
Oh the irony: the Gonzaga students put on a wonderful performance, and the public, the GU community, including staff, faculty and some priests, were just a few hundred yards off campus at a hotel ballroom for these young women’s performances which helped as a fund-raiser for the V-Day nonprofit that works to stop rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation and other violence against women.
I am a better person for doing my little part – a published viewpoint and radio rant. Not so ironically, though, I was told (off the record) by my department chair I would not be hired to teach at GU, per the “upper administration’s orders.”
V-Day for me also means Cancel Culture Day.
+—+
The hell of it all, this Good Little German society, with those creeps at the curtains, just enough peeling back to peek out and start taking notes and speed dialing the “authorities”: pigs-cops, HMO’s, city and county code people, Child Protective Services, the dog pound, hell, the FBI and ICE and fucking Homeland Secuity.
It just happened to me this newest iteration of a community education class I teach:
Hi, Paul.
Received a note from one of your students this morning:
Can you issue a full refund for my registration to the “Writing As Gift Class” in Waldport which starts this afternoon? This class is not as described in the Catch the Wave. I write about nature and short stories of personal experiences. This class appears to be biased towards politics. Can you also let the instructor know to delete my email and contact information permanently? I do not give the instructor permission to forward my contact information or use it for any other purposes.
I’m going to ask that you not bulk email the students henceforth. Our team will send emails on your behalf about any announcements – assignments, presentations, date/time changes, etc. Just send those to us and we’ll distribute. (Of course, any student who wishes to hear from you directly can tell you so and provide their preferred email address; we have no interest in interfering with that.)
Time is short, but we’re forced to consider canceling the class this morning for two reasons: First, in your email, you introduce an experience far from what we advertised in our catalog. Second, in my estimation it doesn’t conform to our Academic Freedom policy. Based on your email, the class certainly does not appear to be an examination of issues, but presents a singular political agenda. (Note that I’m setting aside here the fact that you and I may share many viewpoints raised in your email to students; this isn’t about my personal beliefs and concerns.) If you wanted to present a workshop focused on your personal opinions, and your past writings, about the current or former administrations or other political issues, one alternative would have been to rent a room from the College or a Library and delivered the event without being tethered by the College’s commitment to freedom of expression of all viewpoints. That may be an option to consider in the future.
Our Academic Freedom policy reads as follows:
Approved by Board of Education: 01/21/2015 Institutions of higher education exist for the common good, and the unfettered search for truth and its free exploration is critical to the common good. The college seeks to educate its students in the democratic tradition, to foster recognition of individual freedoms and social responsibility, and to inspire meaningful awareness of and respect for a collaborative learning environment. Freedom of expression will be guaranteed to instructors to create a classroom atmosphere that allows students to raise questions and consider all sides of issues. OCCC instructors are responsible for exercising judgment in selecting topics of educational value for discussion and learning consistent with course requirements, goals, and desired outcomes. (Emphasis added, DP)
Finally, whether or not we wish to cancel, this drop brings us to near break-even for the course. If we lose another student today we’ll be forced to cancel for low enrollment, full stop. We don’t run Community Ed courses at a loss. The taxpayers don’t fund classes on chocolate enrobing of fruits, nor of sea-star wasting disease, nor of oil painting or writing. These courses must pay their own way. I will let you know if we hear from another student and are forced to cancel. In that case, we will post a sign on the door and email and call registrants so long as time permits.
I’m pasting the course description published in CTW below. It does not hint at the political focus that dominates your email to students.
Dave Price
Oh, the spinelessness of the American Psychotic Male, and this dude is a white male, and his shadow, well, that is one thing that scares the shit out of him, I suppose. And look at his condemnation and attempt to brow-beat me or warn me or scold me or pre-empt me.
… writing a time of family, community, societal estrangement.
Was my offense? An email, before the class met, BCC-ed:
Writing is about confronting our times, and if you have some nostalgia for the past, your family, some historical timeframe, that’s great, but in reality we have important ways to tackle who many in my fields — social work, higher education, journalism, environmental activism, the arts, k12 — are concerned about at this inflection point where the Rapist in Chief Trump and his team of misanthropes are turning this society into a slave society. The democrats? What fools and wasted air we breathe. It is serious with these pigs like Kushner, Miller, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Adelson, Thiel, Musk, and the lot attacking, well, guess what? Those areas I just listed above. What do you want to write about, and it always has been an attack on the arts and press and social services and our safety nets, but here we are in Nazi-Landia:
The humanities are about helping “preserve community history and identity,” said Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, a national umbrella organization supporting the humanities. Kidd said he’s heard from multiple recipients of Humanities grants who told him they received the letter late last night.
“We don’t know the full scope of the impact of last night’s actions,” Kidd said. “We do know that it is affecting the state humanities councils which are crucial to the vitality of humanities across the country. This is funding that was appropriated by Congress to the state affiliates of the NEH. This is funding that has been promised to the states that is now being withdrawn.”
This human stain: Vice President VD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.”
The Trump administration is slashing funds for museums and libraries, as a way to coerce these and other liberal arts institutions to bend to his movement’s will in a fashion reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Writing for MSNBC, sociologist Robyn Autry summed up the racism at play in a recent Trump recent executive order that targets the Smithsonian and expresses particular angst over an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that educated visitors about racist pseudoscience.
Autry wrote:
One of the things that has Trump angry is ‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,’ an exhibit at the American Art Museum that innovatively positions nearly 100 sculptures alongside statements about scientific racism. That’s the discredited belief that there are biologically distinct races of people, with some more superior than others. The exhibition examines how artists and art objects have assisted, reflected or challenged such racist thinking since the 18th century, but Trump, in his executive order, expresses disappointment that the show ‘promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.’
Now is as good a time as any to read my previous reporting on Trump’s promotion of racist pseudoscience. His attack on the National Museum of African American History and Culture is one way the Trump administration is trying to enforce a racial hierarchy based on bigoted myths. Politico recently reported on another way Trump is trying to bring humanities-focused institutions to heel. In mid-March Trump signed an executive order that gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds museums and libraries around the country.
An agency responsible for funding museums and libraries across the nation is the latest to be shrunk by President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal government, with its entire staff apparently put on administrative leave Monday. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides grants to ‘advance, support, and empower’ museums, libraries and similar institutions in the U.S. according to its website, was named in an executive order this month along with several other agencies. Trump’s order directed the Institute of Museum and Library Services ‘be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,’ shrinking it down to its statutory minimum.
A Trump official reportedly told Politico that the cuts to the institute are necessary to “ensure hard-earned tax dollars are not diverted to discriminatory DEI initiatives or divisive, anti-American programming in our cultural institutions.”
In a letter seeking a meeting with the institute’s acting director, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies said that money from IMLS accounts for “an average of one-third to over one-half of each State Library Agency’s annual budget.” And there’s been no suggestion from the Trump administration as to where else these libraries ought to get funding to account for the cuts the administration is making.
What Trump appears to be after with his crackdowns on libraries and museums has some parallel in the way Hitler and the Nazi regime attacked similar institutions in Germany in the 1930s. What the Nazis accomplished with brute force, Trump and MAGA are attempting to do with economic and financial coercion.
What the Nazis accomplished with brute force, Trump and MAGA are attempting to do with economic and financial coercion.
Beginning in 1933, Nazis raided libraries for supposedly “un-German” books, some of which were publicly burned and derided as inappropriate for German consumption due to their content. Much like with the MAGA movement’s book-banning efforts, some of the books targeted by Nazis were written by minority groups, like Jews, or about the LGBTQ experience. (Back in 2023, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted an eye-opening discussion about this with Debra Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.)
In 1937, the Nazis raided museums and seized artworks to place them in what they billed as a “degenerate” art exhibition, a propaganda effort meant to show the public that the Nazis would tolerate only the art that aligned with the party’s views. Defending this effort to suppress the arts, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, claimed, “German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.” Hitler himself denounced “degenerate” art pieces as those which “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum also explored the Nazis’ “degenerate art” exhibit in the short video below, noting that the point was for Hitler to wield power over non-governmental institutions to ensure they promoted “traditional German values” and the purported superiority of the “Aryan race.”
While the methods may be different, the purpose of the Nazi attacks on libraries and museums was no different than Trump’s now. Such institutions are known as sites of free thought, imagination and innovation. At best, their content and collections encourages visitors to understand the world around them and the perspectives that shape it — forces like racist and anti-LGBTQ bigotry — and to envision ways to build a better world. And these things are a threat to regimes intent on policing thought and ensuring the masses comply with their revanchist, bigoted agenda.
Writing is about confronting our times, and if you have some nostalgia for the past, your family, some historical timeframe, that’s great, but in reality we have important ways to tackle who many in my fields — social work, higher education, journalism, environmental activism, the arts, k12 — are concerned about at this inflection point where the Rapist in Chief Trump and his team of misanthropes are turning this society into a slave society. The democrats? What fools and wasted air we breathe. It is serious with these pigs like Kushner, Miller, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Adelson, Thiel, Musk, and the lot attacking, well, guess what? Those areas I just listed above. What do you want to write about, and it always has been an attack on the arts and press and social services and our safety nets, but here we are in Nazi-Landia:
The humanities are about helping “preserve community history and identity,” said Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance, a national umbrella organization supporting the humanities. Kidd said he’s heard from multiple recipients of Humanities grants who told him they received the letter late last night.
“We don’t know the full scope of the impact of last night’s actions,” Kidd said. “We do know that it is affecting the state humanities councils which are crucial to the vitality of humanities across the country. This is funding that was appropriated by Congress to the state affiliates of the NEH. This is funding that has been promised to the states that is now being withdrawn.”
This human stain: Vice President VD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.”
The Trump administration is slashing funds for museums and libraries, as a way to coerce these and other liberal arts institutions to bend to his movement’s will in a fashion reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Writing for MSNBC, sociologist Robyn Autry summed up the racism at play in a recent Trump recent executive order that targets the Smithsonian and expresses particular angst over an exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture that educated visitors about racist pseudoscience.
Autry wrote:
One of the things that has Trump angry is ‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,’ an exhibit at the American Art Museum that innovatively positions nearly 100 sculptures alongside statements about scientific racism. That’s the discredited belief that there are biologically distinct races of people, with some more superior than others. The exhibition examines how artists and art objects have assisted, reflected or challenged such racist thinking since the 18th century, but Trump, in his executive order, expresses disappointment that the show ‘promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.’
Now is as good a time as any to read my previous reporting on Trump’s promotion of racist pseudoscience. His attack on the National Museum of African American History and Culture is one way the Trump administration is trying to enforce a racial hierarchy based on bigoted myths. Politico recently reported on another way Trump is trying to bring humanities-focused institutions to heel. In mid-March Trump signed an executive order that gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds museums and libraries around the country.
An agency responsible for funding museums and libraries across the nation is the latest to be shrunk by President Donald Trump’s cuts to the federal government, with its entire staff apparently put on administrative leave Monday. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides grants to ‘advance, support, and empower’ museums, libraries and similar institutions in the U.S. according to its website, was named in an executive order this month along with several other agencies. Trump’s order directed the Institute of Museum and Library Services ‘be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,’ shrinking it down to its statutory minimum.
A Trump official reportedly told Politico that the cuts to the institute are necessary to “ensure hard-earned tax dollars are not diverted to discriminatory DEI initiatives or divisive, anti-American programming in our cultural institutions.”
In a letter seeking a meeting with the institute’s acting director, the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies said that money from IMLS accounts for “an average of one-third to over one-half of each State Library Agency’s annual budget.” And there’s been no suggestion from the Trump administration as to where else these libraries ought to get funding to account for the cuts the administration is making.
What Trump appears to be after with his crackdowns on libraries and museums has some parallel in the way Hitler and the Nazi regime attacked similar institutions in Germany in the 1930s. What the Nazis accomplished with brute force, Trump and MAGA are attempting to do with economic and financial coercion.
What the Nazis accomplished with brute force, Trump and MAGA are attempting to do with economic and financial coercion.
Beginning in 1933, Nazis raided libraries for supposedly “un-German” books, some of which were publicly burned and derided as inappropriate for German consumption due to their content. Much like with the MAGA movement’s book-banning efforts, some of the books targeted by Nazis were written by minority groups, like Jews, or about the LGBTQ experience. (Back in 2023, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted an eye-opening discussion about this with Debra Caldwell-Stone, the director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.)
In 1937, the Nazis raided museums and seized artworks to place them in what they billed as a “degenerate” art exhibition, a propaganda effort meant to show the public that the Nazis would tolerate only the art that aligned with the party’s views. Defending this effort to suppress the arts, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, claimed, “German art of the next decade will be heroic, it will be like steel, it will be romantic, non-sentimental, factual; it will be national with great pathos, and at once obligatory and binding, or it will be nothing.” Hitler himself denounced “degenerate” art pieces as those which “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill.”
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum also explored the Nazis’ “degenerate art” exhibit in the short video below, noting that the point was for Hitler to wield power over non-governmental institutions to ensure they promoted “traditional German values” and the purported superiority of the “Aryan race.”
While the methods may be different, the purpose of the Nazi attacks on libraries and museums was no different than Trump’s now. Such institutions are known as sites of free thought, imagination and innovation. At best, their content and collections encourages visitors to understand the world around them and the perspectives that shape it — forces like racist and anti-LGBTQ bigotry — and to envision ways to build a better world. And these things are a threat to regimes intent on policing thought and ensuring the masses comply with their revanchist, bigoted agenda.
And up is down, war is peace, lies are truth, and America is/was a Democracy. Orwell on Meth!
+—+
Do you get it yet, that the academia fearless careerists and Eichmann’s and fucking spineless and UNSUPPORTIVE c*nts are useless idiots but useful, indeed, to this dirty rotten society?
+—+
So back to the couple, the chemo therapy lady. She knew me. She remembered me. Her eyes were aglow, and then she recalls her first week or so at the Spokane Falls Community College. She remembered that those fucking creeps, or let’s say four of them, including a fucking dean of Arts and Humanities, sent an apology email because of ME.
You see, she was introducing herself as also the Latino/a club advisor, too, and telling us that there would be some event coming up. You know, folclorico or food event celebrating food and dance.
All I said was, in a nutshell: “Welcome aboard. Sounds like you have some things planned. Just as an FYI, we do have some deeply connected Latinos in Spokane, and maybe in the future you’ll be offering more politically-energized events, and if you need any contacts, let me know.”
So, these fucking Careerists, these Eichmanns and curtain peeking Good Little Germans apologized for my email?
I didn’t know about it at the time, and if I had, I would have just stated — “Ahh, everything was with good intentions.”
But alas, in her chemo-drenched brain, she remembered that some 15 years ago. She’s a counselor now, and she talks about retiring when she hits 60 in two years.
That, my friends, is why fucking Zebras do not get ulcers, whereas Homo Consumopethicus and Consumo Retail-Sapiens DO. Constant crashing and smashing of our souls.
Again, the sticks and stones do not hurt as much as the words, the constant fucking small-mindedness of the American.
America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life.
Here, another fucking Oppen-Monster-Heimer JEW:
Fucking Jews of the Jewish Raping Murdering Maiming Poisoning Killing Starving Occupying Palestine:
Unexpectedly, giving the order to press the key was enough to cause the effects, even when the keystroke led to no physical or financial harm.
“It seems like your sense of responsibility is reduced whenever someone orders you to do something — whatever it is they are telling you to do,” says Haggard.
The study might inform legal debate, but it also has wider relevance to other domains of society, says Sinnot-Armstrong. For example, companies that want to create — or avoid — a feeling of personal responsibility among their employees could take its lessons on board
+—+
Spring-time in Amerika — Bump those Adjuncts Until They Hurt!
How Many Professors Does it Take to Sink this Ship?
+—+
Miseducation and the Trail of Tears Daily Exacted
Paul Haeder: Substitute teacher, and today, halfway through third period as substitute for a high school language arts class, the burly, idiotic, uninitiated, reactionary, dense, illogical, broken, un-teacher of a vice principal stood out that door at Waldport High School and summarily told me to “grab your belongings and we want you to leave.” — Jan 19, 2020
Poem inspired by the sacking of Haeder:
Invisible Mists Holding Children Like Ghosts
empty vessel
ready for words and worlds
to flow into their hands
children of a lesser god
the child inside
finger painting and murals
real syncopation with eagle
king tide
children captured in retail
space yet blocks away
crashing waves, Seal Rock
Devil’s Churn, black eye
of gray whale
eagle couple over football
field, children held in gulag
four walls like moat
tables chairs lined up
DMV driver’s license test
unholy is imprisonment
unworldly is bumbling
teacher as police officer
dead time half the day
bells and announcements
medium security
old men at 39
women heavy with bulging
hips, hunched over at 50
you are what you eat
what you read
what you say
what you do
what you watch
what you hope
what you dream
what you think
what you don’t do
don’t eat don’t read
don’t say don’t dream of
don’t hope for
don’t watch don’t believe
you are that
the truncheon evil
enforcers of codes
rules regulations grades
assignments deadlines
do’s and don’ts
will they rise above
riptide of stupid
adults stale concepts
misanthropic ideas
mean patriotism
lunatic nationalism
fanatical Christianity?
Is this survival of
fittest dog eat
dog small fish
big pond follow
the crowd don’t
make waves stay
in box?
School.
+–+
Paul Haeder, Author 