Trick Or Treat At Tenured Radical: What Will You Be Wearing?

Will you get candy -- or a rock?  Illustration hat tip.

We at Tenured Radical, normally so generous to the constituencies for whom this holiday is the apex of the year (little children, gay folk, college students) detest Halloween.  We feel foolish when we dress up.  We think candy is too expensive.  Despite the fact that we are known to consume it, we also think candy is unhealthy.  We resent the vast federal subsidies that go to an already fiscally plump sugar and corn syrup industry at a time when ordinary Americans are losing their houses and the basic requirements for living a healthy life are so difficult for the poor to access.  In 2007, the Cato Institute estimated that sugar subsidies alone would cost taxpayers $1.4 billion over a decade; and that consumers of the numerous products containing sugar would pay a $1.7 billion annual surcharge because of these price supports.  Corn, from which high fructose corn syrup is made, is the top recipient of federal subsidies, according to the Environmental Working Group, totaling almost $4 billion in 2009 alone.

And yet, despite thinking about what these dollars could accomplish for national health care, education or public transportation,  our self-righteousness falters.  We are unhappy when we think about the limits of our own politics as we turn our backs on people having fun.  We loathe ourselves as we avoid the children howling for candy on our doorstep -- children who have no health insurance, go to crappy schools and will probably have to enlist in the military to have a semi-decent life but who also just want to have a nice time one night out of the year.  Is that too friggin' much to ask?  And yes, we know that our annual Halloween donation to the American Diabetes Association is not what children consider an appropriate substitute for the pleasures of mainlining glucose that is packaged fifteen different ways.

On the other hand, we rarely stay blue for long at Tenured Radical, and we would also argue that building an entire child-centered holiday candy represents false consciousness of epic proportions.  We begin to understand why, during our over privileged suburban upbringing, cadres of stoned, vanguardist private school boys would roam the neighborhood tossing cherry bombs into pumpkins to indicate their disapproval for American capitalist investment in the sugar industry. Said pumpkins would explode in massive, pulpy orange carnage, a strategy intended to demoralize neighborhood families that would later be discovered and adopted by anti-American insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because we are a blog that stands firmly behind non-violent strategies for change, this year at Tenured Radical we are having a virtual Halloween, in which we are giving virtual treats and tricks to virtual folk who show up in costume at our blog.  If you recognize yourself, feel free to open your bag in the comments section, or alternatively, to egg our virtual car and toilet paper our virtual trees in the comments section.

If you come to our door dressed as an adjunct instructor, you will receive:  A treat, because unfortunately you have already been tricked into thinking that, if you followed the rules and kept your nose to the grindstone, that there was a job waiting for you as a full-time university professor.  Open your bag, and we will drop inside:  a law school application (complete with a letter of recommendation from Tenured Radical -- just fill in your name at the appropriate places); a free subscription to Adjunct Nation; and a two-year site pass to The Adjunct Advocate.




If you come to our door dressed as a Zenith student activist running an anti-affirmative action bake sale, you will receive: A treat, although we can't give you a copy of Zenith's affirmative action policy, because there isn't one.  Look in your bag after you leave our door and you will find a copy of Zenith's Diversity Policy and its policy on discrimination and harassment; and a personal introduction from Tenured Radical to Morton Blackwell, the former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, conservative youth organizer and the founder of the Leadership Institute, which runs your umbrella organization, Campus Reform. You will also receive a large bag of fresh popcorn, with all the nasty burned pieces that got into your bag unfairly having been removed by our staff in advance of your visit.

If you come to our door dressed as a graduate student in the humanities going on the job market this year, you will receive:  A trick.  Laughingly maniacally, we will drop a letter-sized envelope containing a copy of your student loan repayment schedule; a post card saying that we have received your application; a credit card statement in which you will see that you have already been billed for expenses attendant to attending the conference interviews that you may or may not receive; and a brief letter stating that of the 450 qualified applicants for all the jobs you applied for, you were not hired.  That letter will be dated July 15, 2011.

If you come to our door dressed as Historiann, you will receive:  A treat!  That's right, Halloween celebrants who show up in full cowgirl garb will receive a free copy of the winter number of the Journal of Women's History, containing a round table of feminist bloggers that includes Historiann's full account and analysis of what happens when you call a really famous and very sexist historian a tool.

If you come to our door dressed as Arne Duncan, you will receive:  A Michelle Rhee action figure.  As we go to press, we are not altogether sure whether this is a trick or a treat, but perhaps we will know more after the election next Tuesday.  In any case, this temporarily unemployed icon of neo-liberal school reform is sure to be a collectible item; as a bonus, she will do test prep for your children and may be willing to pay you off to give up your tenure.

If you come to our door dressed as GayProf, you will receive:  A treat!  Leaving our doorstep, you will find (to your great delight) a set of Wonder Woman bracelets in your bag which, according to our staff research assistant Wick E. Pedia, will "balance [your] Amazon strength with loving submission to the positive aims of civilization," and help you "deflect...all manner of attack."  The bracelets are a particularly critical item for women, queer faculty and faculty of color, but may be particularly useful for all of you planning to come up for tenure, or organizing your colleagues into a group capable of collective bargaining with the institution for which you work.

If these items do not please you, head over to Legal History Blog, where Mary Dudziak is giving away copies of the Constitution.

And It Rhymes With Rich: New York Times Reports On Humiliating Mother Of The Week

As frequent readers of this blog know, the Radical occasionally takes an interest in secondary education when she is not kicking serious butt over the trials and trevails of the university world. I admit, I can take a sharp pen to people from time to time, and I have gotten into trouble over it. But occasionally I run into story that inspires real awe at the capacity of others to rip other people a new one.

This week's winner is a well-to-do Goody Two-Shoes in Upper Manhattan named MeMe Roth.

Yes, her name is really MeMe, and her children might as well transfer to a school in another state. At least, I would not return to P.S. 9 on the Upper West Side of New York after today if I were them. According to this story in today's New York Times Ms. Roth has a paying job at an organization called National Action Against Obesity, a non-profit organization for food fascists. The mission of this organization, other than stigmatizing fat people?

Through education, legislation, and most importantly—parental action—National Action Against Obesity works independently and as a consultancy to reverse the obesity epidemic by eliminating ‘fake foods’ from the food supply, barring junk food from schools and eradicating Secondhand Obesity™ (obesity handed down from one generation to the next, as well as from citizen to citizen), while encouraging exercise across all ages. Success relies upon wholly re-imagining what the U.S. population considers “normal” food consumption and “normal” exercise. When the majority is overweight, America cannot be normal.

And normal is what we want to be.

In service of this noble mission, MeMe Roth's volunteer activity is to purge junk food from P.S. 9 as well, and to ensure that her daughters are humiliated on an almost daily basis as they submit to their mother's surveillance rituals. In the process of ensuring that these poor children will spend a lifetime in therapy and acquire a serious eating disorder, MeMe has managed to make a number of people at P.S. 9 very angry. At least one parent, teacher or administrator seems to have a friend at the New York Times, which is how this hair-raising little tale ended up on my morning coffee tray. Ms. Roth, according to reporter Susan Dominus,

has no problem with the school lunches provided at the highly regarded elementary school on Columbus Avenue and 84th Street. What sets her off is the junk food served on special occasions: the cupcakes that come out for every birthday, the doughnuts her children were once given in gym, the sugary “Fun-Dip” packets that some parent provided the whole class on Valentine’s Day.

Those bastards!

“I thought I was sending my kid to P.S. 9, not Chuck E. Cheese,” Ms. Roth, a trim, impassioned 40-year-old from Atlanta, said in an interview. “Is there or is there not an obesity and diabetes epidemic in this country?”

When offered any food at school other than the school lunch, Ms. Roth’s children — who shall go nameless since it seems they have enough on, or off, their plates — are instructed to deposit the item into a piece of Tupperware their mother calls a “junk food collector.”

This solution seemed to be working pretty well until Ms. Roth’s daughter dutifully tried to stick a juice pop — a special class treat from her teacher on a hot day — into her plastic container. The teacher told Ms. Roth’s daughter to eat it or lose it, and according to the child pointed out that she had seen the young girl eating the corn chips served with school lunch — did that not count as junk food?

This prompted one of Ms. Roth’s infamous heated e-mail messages to the school. Which, in turn, prompted administrators to pull her daughter out of class to discuss the juice pop incident, which only further infuriated Ms. Roth, who said her daughter felt as if she’d been ambushed.

Of course, the teacher was right: putting a frozen juice pop in a plastic box, and putting the box in your book bag is a recipe for disaster. And she was wrong to argue with the poor, terrorized child about what was, and was not, junk food. But in case you think making her children collect all the junk food they did not eat to present at the end of the day - I suppose to prove that they did not eat it - is the strangest thing about MeMe Roth, read on:

Her extreme methods have earned her attention before: The police were called to a Y.M.C.A. in 2007 when she absconded with the sprinkles and syrups on a table where members were being served ice cream. That was Ms. Roth who called Santa Claus fat on television that Christmas, and she has a continuing campaign against the humble Girl Scout cookies, on the premise that no community activity should promote unhealthy eating.

Now I'm not against good nutrition, and I'm certainly not for feeding children endless amounts of sugar, although it is not generally the children of the well-to-do who seem to suffer most from sugar oppression. Anyone who has been to a Latin American country where there is no potable water but literally truckloads of Coca-Cola (not infrequently you see people in their twenties with a mouth full of rotted and discolored teeth happily downing an Orange Crush or two) has a few things to say about the destructive influence of the sugar industry. But unlike the underdeveloped world, where American agribusiness disposes of nutritionally worthless excess crops grown with federal subsidies, the overdeveloped Upper West Side is not really famous for being a victim of sugar dumping.

So I guess someone at P.S. 9 has fixed MeMe Roth's little wagon, haven't they? Tune in tomorrow as MeMe storms the Times newsroom and puts Susan Dominus in a little Tupperware box too.