Phil Griffin 1925-2008

My stepdad passed away on October 9th. He was 83 years old and in good health before a bypass surgery that was supposed to be fairly routine but turned out not to be after the fact. Phil had 5 kids, some of whom I met for the first time at my mom’s house earlier this month. They all knew him as a very different person than I did. They were raised by a rule-bound Quaker minister who graduated from Bob Jones University (yes, that one, though he did get kicked out at one point for arguing with a teacher about some minor point of interpretation) and who didn’t believe in spending money on Sundays or dancing, at least until the mid 1960s when he began to have a crisis of faith. We met in 1987. I knew a radical secular humanist retired philosophy professor (with a specialization in comparative religion) who fought the encroachment of creationism into Minnesota’s public schools. So you can imagine that there were stories to swap, since I’d only really ever spoken with one of his children at length.

As I write below, Phil was one of the least materialistic people I’ve ever known (I would say the same about my mom) and I worry that as the depression-era generation passes on, the living memory of a social world not oriented around things will gradually fade for many people, at least in the middle classes where I dwell. Sure, the New York Times is running stories on frugality now, but if and when the market is back up, it’ll be back to lampshades, pants, coffee, or whatever other luxury goods they can hawk. Consumerism is a given for my generation for so many reasons and in so many ways — from the personal to the political and to the intellectual. It is perhaps the part of myself that I like least even as I give in to it often enough. That’s as far as my thoughts go for now but I feel there is much more to say.

Here’s what Carrie and I wrote for the memorial service.

I’m going to speak for both Carrie and I today since it wasn’t too long after I met Phil that she met him, and that was just about 20 years ago now.

Phil–and I’d say my mom has done this as well– Phil solved a problem that occupied existentialist philosophers for most of the last century: how to be at peace with the finitude of one’s own life. He lived well and separated what matters in life from what does not. With a few important and sometimes spectacular exceptions–like hats, books and magazines–Phil was one of the least materialistic people I have ever known. His is an example some people of my generation might wish to emulate but most will ultimately fail to live up to. He cared much more about people and ideas than things, and when he did care about things, it was at least initially motivated by some higher purpose, like protecting himself from the sun, reminding himself of a moment or relationship with someone, or, more audaciously, trying to invent a new secular American religion.

Growing up, I thought my family read a lot, but after Phil moved in, the house was filled with more printed matter than I ever thought possible. As they covered an impossibly wide array of flat surfaces at our home, Phil’s books, magazines, newsletters and pamphlets also covered an impossibly wide array of topics: politics, history, religion, philosophy, psychology, human relationships, fiction.

You could discuss just about anything with Phil, so long as you were willing to listen for awhile. Both Carrie and I have experiences of talking with him about things we haven’t spoken about with anyone else; he was willing to ponder with us the gamut of human experience, from desire to grief and everything in-between. He was a tremendously empathic man. I’ve known Phil through every transition in my adult life, and he always had a kind word. He counseled confidence, patience and care, but also service to others. When at dinner a couple years ago I once worried out loud about assuming the chair of my department, he said that I should do it because that was the time of your career when you really got to nuture others. Every year when we saw him in Washington DC, he took special pleasure in his visits to lobby congresspeople on issues he cared about.

Phil really loved food, or at least certain kinds. We enjoyed finding new ways to satisfy his love for meatballs even if we could not quite comprehend it. Carrie shared in–enabled might be a better word–his love for hot sauce, crab cakes and baked goods.

More than anything, Carrie will always be thankful for the ways Phil and Muriel welcomed her into the family from the moment she started seeing Jonathan in 1990. Phil took Carrie aside at our wedding in 1999 to tell her how happy he was that she was now in the family, only he’d communicated that through thought and action many years prior. Both she and Phil communicated vicariously through books they read in common, particularly on topics of a feminist origin. We will miss sharing with him his passion for ideas, teaching and questioning. We will miss him as a person and a companion, but we will also miss his search for knowledge, understanding and social change, not the least because he helped us so often in our own.

Well there goes October . . .

. . . in a month where Wired pronounced blogging so over and several other bloggers wondered about the future of their blogs I said, well, a whole lot of nothing. It’s not for lack of words but for lack of time. As you’ll see in my next post, my stepdad passed away early in the month, necessitating a trip to Minnesota. I then went to New Jersey and then the crush of things here came down upon me when I returned. This weekend sees a bit of a return to “normal” if by “normal” we mean “on the eve of a world-historic election” and “at the beginning a very intense month of November where I deal with 2 searches and 2 classes at once.” So all apologies and that, but I suspect this blog will remain fairly slow and sporadic through November. At least I won’t be on the road, though.

Interface Design: Not Canadian Grant Organizations’ Strong Suit

It’s fellowship season up here in Canada, and more and more of Canada’s granting agencies have moved to an all-online system for their grant applications. While I am in favor of using less paper and streamlining the application process, I do wonder why Canadian granting organizations have such categorically bad web design. Montreal is full of outstanding web designers, but the FQRSC’s site is a maze whether in English or French. SSHRC has gone to an all-online system for postdocs. It is their first year, but when I couldn’t figure out how to register as a department chair (every applicant who wants to work with someone in our department also needs a letter from me, but when I registered the system appeared to think I was an applicant), I sent their tech support an email. They get points for clarity and speed, but really, 18 steps just to submit a letter of recommendation? And pop-ups? How about Ajax instead? I routinely sing the praises of Canada’s grant system for the social sciences and humanities to anyone who will listen, but this is one area where they could definitely use some help.

EAMS Postdoctoral Fellowship Supervisor Instructions:

1) Sign up for an account on the EAMS website at: https://eams-sego.gc.ca/eFormsWeb/faces/terms_of_use.jsp – you can use any email address to register.

2) Provide the applicant with the email address with which you registered on the website.

3) The applicant will then add your email address to their application and you will receive an email stating that you have been listed as a reviewer.

4) Log into the EAMS website.

5) Scroll down to the “Supervisor / Head of Department” section.

6) Click on the printer icon under “Print / Preview” to view the applicant’s form, a pop-up window will appear.

7) Click on the printer icon again under “Print / Preview”. This will launch Adobe and display the applicant’s form.

8 ) Return to the first page you see once logging into your EAMS account.

9) Click on the student’s name under the “Supervisor / Head of Department” section.

10) Click on “Research Appraisal” on the left-hand side. Found under “Research Appraisal”.

11) Fill in the form.

IMPORTANT — Use the “Search” button when choosing your discipline.

IMPORTANT – You are not able to upload documents into the form. The information must be typed or pasted into the form itself. The maximum number of characters is listed below the text box and includes spaces.

12) Click on “Save”.

13) Scroll to the top of the screen to view any error messages.

IMPORTANT — Information is NOT saved if there is an error message. If you change screens without fixing the errors on the page, your data will be lost.

14) Click on “Signature and Submission”.

15) Choose Yes if you declare and agree to the terms.

16) Click on “Save”.

17) Click on “Validate Submission”.

18) Click on “Submit”.

Two Debates

Last night we watched both debates with a stock in each. More than one Canadian joked to me about how boring the Canadian leaders’ debate would be, but it wasn’t that simple.

We watched Biden-Pallin in real time. Each performed more or less as expected. When Palin couldn’t answer a question–which was often–she dodged. But it was nothing out of the ordinary. I’d hoped for total self-destruction a la “I read all the newspapers,” but she was well-coached. Biden used a lot of numbers and repeated them, but I’m not sure what the cumulative effect was. I find these debates more spectacle anyway, since candidates routinely lie, distort the truth and talk around the subject.

Then we turned on the Canadian leaders’ English language debated when we’d recorded. I kid you not: for just a moment I felt a swell of something that might be called patriotism as I saw a very different spectacle. The candidates were directly challenging one another–sometimes it got silly–but the level of discussion was much higher and all of the parties were willing to go after one another where they disagreed. Of course, that was also the problem: Harper sat there representing a unified right against a completely fragmented “centre” and left. Dion was perfectly happy to red-bait the NDP (can “socialist” be an insult in a country with socialized medicine?). Layton was on fire and feeling his opportunity to become opposition leader, however slim that real opportunity is. The other thing that really took me is that after watching the Americans, Harper seems so utterly moderate. When the candidates were going after Harper on the economy, he pointed out that he didn’t utterly screw it up like the Bush administration did, and he’s actually right. It’s not that I support Harper’s policies; it’s that the center-of-gravity for political debate in this country is so noticeably to the left that a Canadian conservative looks very moderate when viewed immediately after an American one. Of course the Canadian debate is every bit as much political theater as the American debate, and Harper is trying to look moderate and reasonable so people don’t worry about the “hidden agenda,” but when staged in relief against Palin, there is a grain of truth to it.

I know every time I say this the Canadians [1] will say something like “but the conservatives here are really bad” and start listing all the things the Harper administration has done. And I agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. It’s simply a difference of expectations: Canadians can legitimately expect more from their government, and that is why Harper seems so bad.

All that said, as the debate wore on, it got to be a little bit of a bummer. The theatrical part didn’t work for the opposition parties as well as for Harper. There’s Harper looking prime-ministerial with his crooked smile, and four other people on the attack and bickering among one another. The right and centre-right are united in Canada. For now, the left is divided, a particularly unfortunate state of affairs since combined the parties represent a clear majority of Canadians. I am still learning my lessons in Canadian civics, but if I were in charge, there would be a left-liberal coalition that could take on the conservatives. As someone said to me yesterday, at least the choice in the US is clear. Here, sometimes it’s not.

One last thought on the election for today: it appears that voter registration is taken more seriously than south of the border. We’ve gotten letters reminding us to register to vote (they don’t know that the residents of apartment 2 are foreigners) and even had some people coming to our door to make sure we were registered. I promised them “pour la prochaine élection.”

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[1] I am hopeful that this will be the last Canadian federal election in which we cannot vote. Assuming this government stands for 12-18 months, we should be a dual citizens by the next election. That will raise all sorts of other momentous questions for this blog like, what to do instead of referring to Canadians as other people (as in locutions like “Canadians tell me”) and what the subtitle should be on my masthead.

Washington Mutual and “Too Big to Fail”

I first learned of Washington Mutual when our mortgage in Pittsburgh was sold to them in 2001 or so. We had originally signed with Cendant Mortgage (they had the best deal when we bought in 1999) and I remember some vague talk about the possibility of our mortgage being sold to another company. It didn’t make any sense to me. We’d locked in a fixed rate for 30 years and put 20% down. The rate of return on interest was going to be absolutely constant and predictable. Where’s the money in that? Of course, the answer must have been in some kind of risk economy as with mortgage derivatives (though the crash was from subprime derivatives, not from mortgages like ours), a concept of which I was totally unaware until the meltdown of recent weeks. As will all mortgages, we were a calculated risk — a relatively low risk (at $781 a month–housing was cheap, but then so was the University of Pittsburgh when it came to faculty salaries), but still a risk.

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The stock market, and indeed much market behavior, is about the management of risk. This kind of risk is easily quantified (even if that quantity is a fiction and ease of measurement does not translate into ease of prediction), since it is about money above all else. On the basis of that quantity, fortunes are made and lost. We call this activity an important part of a collective fiction called “the economy.” An economy, like a society or a culture, is a total concept–one that posits a closed system where no such closure exists. Such concepts are immensely useful, but they are abstractions, shorthand for a series of forces that we do not want to explain every time we talk about large scale phenomena. The American “economy” was booming for years while divisions between rich and poor grew, infrastructure crumbled, healthcare disintegrated, consumer debt ballooned, and high paying jobs were replaced by low paying jobs. The only possible conclusion that one can reach is that most objective measures of the economy have nothing to do with moral economy (the field from which political economy emerged), the well being of a polity, but rather the well being of the rich and extremely rich. Now, there are plenty of economic theories which suggest that welfare of the rich is the welfare of the citizenship as a whole, but it sure doesn’t look that way right now.

And so when I hear about a $700 billion bailout and the words “too big to fail” I have to ask: why aren’t America’s healthcare, transportation and education systems also “too big to fail?” Why aren’t old age benefits “too big to fail”? If we can spend $700 billion to prop up the interests of the very rich [1] because it is for the common good, why hasn’t a responsible government already spent the money necessary to replenish and refurbish other cornerstones of American society?

The answer, of course, lies in what you think constitutes a successful “economy.”

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1. I realize that lots of people would lose their homes if mortgage companies and banks started failing left and right, but I suspect it would cost considerably less than $700 billion to bail out homeowners instead of lenders, and to simply let the lenders hang. They are the ones paying the lobbyists to get more “free market” legislation after all. Why are the poor and the middle class the only ones who have to operate in market conditions?