UVU and a New Saint

Utah Valley University and I have a close relationship. 

I walked its halls for twenty-two years as a professor. I appreciated my job and had great students. Nonetheless, it always felt strange: a hybrid that has learned to function. 

Though I am retired and live thousands of miles away, I could not help but be very moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk in a patio I often tread and in which I sat and read or just conversed.

UVU, formerly UVSC, was a technical school that became a university, an officially secular university in a highly religious county, a university of open enquiry in a dogmatic and extremely ultra-right wing count, an open enrollment school in a valley with strong academic elitism. 

Most of its students and maybe a majority of its faculty were conservatives, though that latter is hard to know. Its administration certainly tended to the right, though we saw little in the way of overt politics from them. 

We lived the various jeremiads that Kirk exemplified, created, and led against the main stream university in the US. His world of of struggle against entrenched supposed academic left-wing ideology imposed on students always seemed a fantasy and far removed from any reality we lived. 

Perhaps I and many of my colleagues were naive. We misunderstood the degree to which. most of mainstream humanities and social sciences were defined by Kirkians and allies as left wing in opposition to the new nationalist world of Trumpian-style patriotism. 

Their’s seemed a John Birch dream-verse.

Well, after Wednesday a family has been left fatherless and a school traumatized.  A new martyr has been born for what still seems to me a Taliban-style cause against foundational freedoms and intellectual rigor. 

As with most popular saints, as long as there is social value, St. Charlie, will continue to gather adepts. A myth, a sacred story, what we academics call a hagiography, will be created around him and the event whose point is less truth, than truthiness.

Pamphlets and books will appear. Devotional documentaries, reels, and Tik Toks will appear like flies and vultures near a cadaver.

While skeptics like me may wonder if the assassination wasn’t an action from within the factions of the Right, as long as there is Trump and Trumpism—or this strange American Right with international connections—St. Charlie will continue to grow. 

Pilgrimages will appear, as people come to participate in the sanctity of where he died. 

Ritual to expel the demon, envisaged as the assassin and all the mentally unbalanced leftists (demons) who enabled the murder, will abound. 

A cause will take greater form and expand. 

But I worry about those left behind. A university president who just lost her husband and who has spent body and soul working to make UVU a better and more successful place.   Deans and Department Chairs who have spent decades developing this University into the fine place it is / was. 

I worry about the students who were there or simply part of the community who have now had terror driven deep into their hearts with an image of blood spurting from an ivory neck. They are marked and will live with this forever. 

In whatever happens in this case, whether they find the assassin or not, I hope people can spare some time and effort to help a community and University heal and regain its quality, value, and aplomb.

They and it deserve your compassion and concern.  

Super Villains and Ultra-Right Protectors, a Nightmare

 

True confession:  I am in a tourist cafe owned by an American whose mother is Spanish eating bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and sausage. I just felt a need for traditional American heart attack food.  So sue me. 

I promise, Mediterranean for lunch at home, ‘cause I’ll make it. Lentil salad and merluza fish fillets.

As I was sipping my latté, six or so too-blond young women with perfect English and very pale skin sauntered in. If I heard right when they were speaking to each other, they were Scandinavian of some sort and looked for all the world like a set of coeds on the East sides of Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah. 

Of course, I was as blond—now gray, and am very pale, although the sun has probably left me tinted with a distinct shade of shrimp-over-a-hot-fire.

Foreigners in someone else’s country at a time when immigration, rising rents and supermarket inflation is all a theme, as is Putin’s and Trump’s meeting in the former Russian colony of Alaska tomorrow. I hear the ultra nationalist right in Russia is all a twitter, demanding that state, with its oil and minerals be returned to the once Tsarist State with its onion domes restored. 

Tourists and foreigners abound here.  Alicante may well be the large city with the highest relative parentage of foreign born residents in Spain, although we are next to the beer-sun-and doom British enclave of Benidorm, as well as just south of Russian and Dutch colonies. 

The conservative press reminds us that Franco, the brutal or great dictator of the mid twentieth century did all kinds of good things for Spain. In fact, according to them, everything good has its roots in Franco. In a fit of development he organized the Mediterranean coast for the massive building of hotels and beaches and then marketed it heavily to northern Europeans and the British for their holidays. 

Of course, that created a demand for labor—while Spaniards were working and sneaking chocolate and beer in Switzerland and in many other countries. 

To meet that new demand for hands, shoulders, and arms, Franco and then the later post-Franco governments coordinated the emptying of rural areas of men and women. In Alicante, they came from local areas, and then from La Mancha, Murcia and further away. 

One can hear their varied accents and dialects still in workers bars where they have their morning café con leche and have a morning smoke while laughing and arguing loudly. 

The city is tearing down Franco period public housing, which later government sold to people, since they are in desperate need of upkeep and modernization. Mid-rise towers are appearing like mushrooms in their place.

Immigrants from North Africa, Latin American and subSaharan Africa are filling the need for workers while we expats (sigh--a rant for another time) increase pricess and demand.

Spain is Spain and has its own ways. But it is also Europe and the rules of the European community have impacted urban design and government processes. Although not from the community’s governance per se, the European ultra right is also changing Spain while claiming to protect a vision of traditional Spain, you know bull fights and women in lace mantillas behind fans next to their adoring husband.

Without the bulls, lace, or mantillas similar things are appearing throughout Europe and even in the neo-Putin US. After all, the Russian Macho Maximus is a promoter of a Christian, nationalist, racist, Europe, and Euro-America. He has helped the existing, Ultra right, post WWII, groups of neo-Nazis, religious traditionalists and nationalists, anti feminists, and, God-knows, anti-Queers. 

To that list, I should add, anti-asylum seekers, anti-immigrants, and anti-Muslims.

Why this rant? First of all, I am in a café which in Spain they can call a bar and people often rant in bars. Maybe i shall take up the habit. 

Second, the Pumpkin clone who has become Maximus for a time—a painful multi-season reality show, has sent the Guard into the streets of Washington DC where they are using telescopes and sometimes magnifying glasses to find the relatively rare crime they are supposed to stop. Military guards, claiming to protect the people from enemies the right imagines and propagates  wide and far on screens large and tiny, like Lex Luthors and Jokers. 

There is more. The morning paper tells of Ultras in Iceland, many of them former criminals, who are patrolling their Island as vigilantes to stop a crime-wave by asylum seekers that no mainstream analyst can find, and to protect their social welfare system from the horrible drain these new-comers represent, though again, evidence of this must ride icebergs in the arctic sea. No one, outside of dreams of whaling or catching walruses and seals for the winter, can find it.

The article mentions that this is not simply an Icelandic phenomenon, but like Hollywood movies of super heroes (ok I added that), it is found throughout Europe including Spain. To that I add, including the US.

I wish I could just change the channel or even better cancel this survivalist nonsense, but alas, TikTok and X have not given me that super power.  

Done with my breakfast and my rant—for now—I’m gonna go out walking and look at gulls and pigeons as the day’s heat grows.  

Ciao.